Search the archive.

But there is a problem with the public domain. Those who create and wish to market goods and art that reflect traditions that are older than the twentieth century tend to find no help in the standard and established modes of intellectual property protection. Their work, no matter how creative or labor intensive or important to their cultural identity, is considered part of the grand global cultural commons. So multinational corporations can produce similar goods (pottery, cloth, garments, sculptures, jewelry, etc.) at lower prices. And these companies can leverage their marketing power better than small producers and merchants in poorer countries can. Significantly for many of these cultural groups, replication of their traditional forms of cultural expression can be disrespectful of histories, identities, and religions as well. Intellectual property offers very little support for collective dignity. As several scholars of indigenous and traditional cultural production have argued in recent years, the cultural production of local communities is devalued not only because it is produced by marginal communities with no political power, but also because so much of that cultural production reflects traditions older than copyright. You cannot protect what has long been in the public domain without significantly revising the entire global intellectual property system. Intellectual property does not treat all cultural expression equally. The weavers of Adinkra and Kente cloth in Ghana face competition from weavers working in Korea, China, India, and other parts of the world that host members of the Ghanaian diaspora. The patterns have a growing market. So many wish to mimic them. To accept that only the "new" shall be protected by intellectual property accepts the view that new is better than old. To mark Kente and Adinkra cloth as "traditional" is hegemonic. Traditions must reside permanently in the past, and they must be inferior to the "innovations" of the present and future. Importantly, the government of Ghana deftly markets the past. It distinguishes its traditional cloth as "authentic." It is hand-woven, not mass-produced. Global market logic demands that Ghana invest value in protecting its weavers' work as "traditional" because that is what differentiates it from the hundreds of other similar expressive goods flowing across trade channels. Efforts to create new forms of intellectual property law to protect "traditional knowledge" could merely reaffirm the permanent inferiority of creative works that have older origins and deeper modes of production. These works would be stuck just outside of modernity in an effort to fully exploit the modern market. The very marginality of what has come to be known as the Traditional Cultural Expression movement-its reason for being-renders it peripheral to global discussions of cultural policy. Only when represented by a friendly and supportive nation-state such as Canada or Australia do Traditional Cultural Expression movement members find their claims considered by policymaking officials. But this is state-driven action. The role of the state in the potential protection of traditional cultural expression presents many problems. How shall the state determine who is and who is not a member of a group trying to protect such expressions? What if the group is in opposition to the state? What if the group is split among factions? Who will determine the terms of licensing for songs, styles, and designs? The potential for censorship is daunting. So efforts toward a sui generis traditional cultural expression regime have been halting and have faced strong criticism. These efforts have generated some of the most heated and philosophically complicated debates within intellectual property.

Language and culture are two things that cannot be separated because culture affects language and language affects culture. This makes the language in one area different from another. The difference in the cultural background of each language is a unique phenomenon that occurs in society and is a difference that must be respected, not to be disputed. Moreover, it affects many things, including the literary works in each part of the region. Literature is a work that is timeless and always has its audience. Often, it is the product of the thoughts, experiences, and imaginations of its authors. In addition, the socio-cultural background also affects the literary work. Many literary works were born from various parts of the world, and some are popular in the region and have become internationally popular literary works. This gives rise to the parties' efforts so that the literary work can be read by people outside who may speak a different language from the original language of the literary work. After being translated into foreign languages, literary writings written in various regions of the world reach a new audience [2]. The translation is an attempt to translate words from the source language to the target language. It plays an important role in the spread of information throughout the world, and there is no exception for literary works that are amazing for their audiences. Then, as is well known, language is closely related to culture. Translating a language with more or less cultural factors into a target language with a different culture and background is a challenge in itself. The differences in words and grammar are also very important things to consider in translating something. This is not to mention if the source language text contains the figure of speech and aspects of beauty. Equivalence between the source language and the target language is a must. The meaning that the author wants to convey is still conveyed to the readers even through different languages. The process of translating from a source language to a target language involves language and cultural considerations. The process of translating from the source language (and its culture) to the target language is known as translation (and its culture). We use the same term "equivalence" in this situation. In other words, there must be "equivalence" (equivalence) between SL and TL in translation. From this, we can say that translators transfer culture, not language. Language is not the main aspect (only the medium) in the translation process, but the main aspect is culture, which must be translated. Therefore, full attention in the translation process is on cultural procedures rather than linguistic procedures. Translating is the most challenging job because if the two cultures cannot correlate or give a clear idea about the aspect of the culture in question, it may be meaningless. The differences in socio-cultural, geographical conditions, and grammar that underlie a language as a medium in a literary work and its translation are interesting. This could be due to the equivalences taken by a translator in translating it from the source language to the target language and the adjustments made to the translation. Moreover, there will be culturally charged or common words in the source language that cannot be found in the source language or are not possible to translate without reducing much meaning of the word. In addition, grammatical differences between the source and target languages will lead to adjustments between words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and even paragraphs. Based on that problem, the researcher is interested in researching the phenomenon of language and cultural problems that can be found in translated literary works. This can help translators to add insight into literary translation and what problems might be found in translating literary works. Therefore, the researcher conducted a study that aims to find out the linguistic and cultural phenomena that appear in the novel entitled "Hobit atau Pergi dan Kembali" which was translated by A. Adiwiyoto from the novel entitled "The Hobbit or There and Back Again" by J.R.R. Tolkien.

We often hear of the Runaway Slave, or the Fugitive Slave. Runaway, fugitive, or escapee suggests something wrong is happening, and often evokes criminal imagery. This language was significant in establishing that the law was on the side of the enslavers – which it was. Rather than emphasizing the power of the enslavers, why not prioritize the bravery of the individual wanting a better life? What were they seeking? Freedom. Freedom to be the person they were meant to be. FREEDOM SEEKER captures the bold spirit of seizing control of one’s life and dictating one’s own path. Furthermore, FREEDOM SEEKER reminds us of the agency each of these individuals had. The courageous act of removing oneself from an enslaver was an intentional choice. They were brave. They were bold. They were heroes. They resisted. They sought freedom. By calling them FREEDOM SEEKERS, we acknowledge what was in the hearts of these individuals who took action to make liberty a reality.

What conversation is there to be had around that? It is as if the mere existence of her identity inoculates her from any critique. How did we get here? — Freddie DeBoer makes a great point in his piece on what he calls “critique drift“: “This all largely descends from a related condition: many in the broad online left have adopted a norm where being an ally means that you never critique people who are presumed to be speaking from your side, and especially if they are seen as speaking from a position of greater oppression. I understand the need for solidarity, I understand the problem of undermining and derailing, and I recognize why people feel strongly that those who have traditionally been silenced should be given a position of privilege in our conversations. But critique drift demonstrates why a[n] [effective] healthy, functioning political movement can’t forbid tactical criticism of those with whom you largely agree. Because critical vocabulary and political arguments are common intellectual property which gain or lose power based on their communal use, never criticizing those who misuse them ultimately disarms [undermines] the left. Refusing to say ‘this is a real thing, but you are not being fair or helpful in making that accusation right now’ alienates potential allies, contributes to the burgeoning backlash against social justice politics, and prevents us from making the most accurate, cogent critique possible.” Look, I am Black. Also, sometimes, I can be wrong. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and yet we have gotten to a point where any critique of tactics used by oppressed communities can result in being deemed “sexist/racist/insert oppression here-ist” and cast out of the Social Justice Magic Circle. And listen, maybe that is cool with some folks. Maybe the revolution that so many of these types speak about will simply consist of everyone spontaneously coming to consciousness and there will be no need for coalitions, give-and-take, or contact with people who do not know every word or phrase that these groups use as some sort of litmus test for the unwashed. But for the rest of us who reside in a reality-based world, where every social interaction is not tailored for your idiosyncratic indignations, we know that casting folks out for the tiniest of offenses will lead to a Left that will forever be marginalized and ineffective. I have stated before that the kind of people who put out these lists and engage in the kind of identitarian caterwauling that has become rote copy on the Internet might actually want that, as a world where left-wing activism is made potent and transformative will be one where they cannot simply take comfort in their cocoon of self-righteousness. But damn them when I can turn on my computer and see one Black person after another being gunned down by police. Damn them when we have a president that can sit there with a straight face and speak the words of freedom and liberation while using the power at his disposal to deny those very concepts to others. And damn them when we can get thousands of words on Patricia Arquette drunk at a party or how it is privileged to not like the same musicians that they do, but we cannot seem to get any thoughts on how the biggest moment for communities of color since the 1960s is being squandered in a hail of intergenerational squabbling. And do not even get me started on people writing articles that malign long-standing activist organizations without a whiff of evidence that there has been any wrongdoing on their part.

Land is the prime concern of settler colonialism, contexts in which the colonizer comes to a “new” place not only to seize and exploit but to stay, making that “new” place his permanent home. Settler colonialism thus complicates the center–periphery model that was classically used to describe colonialism, wherein an imperial center, the “metropole,” dominates distant colonies, the “periphery.” Typically, one thinks of European colonization of Africa, India, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, in terms of external colonialism, also called exploitation colonialism, where land and human beings are recast as natural resources for primitive accumulation: coltan, petroleum, diamonds, water, salt, seeds, genetic material, chattel. Theories named as “settler colonial studies” had a resurgence beginning around 2006.[2] However, the analysis of settler colonialism is actually not new, only often ignored within Western critiques of empire.[3] The critical literatures of the colonized have long positioned the violence of settlement as a prime feature in colonial life as well as in global arrangements of power. We can see this in Franz Fanon’s foundational critiques of colonialism. Whereas Fanon’s work is often generalized for its diagnoses of anti/colonial violence and the racialized psychoses of colonization upon colonized and colonizer, Fanon is also talking about settlement as the particular feature of French colonization in Algeria. For Fanon, the violence of French colonization in Algeria arises from settlement as a spatial immediacy of empire: the geospatial collapse of metropole and colony into the same time and place. On the “selfsame land” are spatialized white immunity and racialized violation, non-Native desires for freedom, Black life, and Indigenous relations.[4] Settler colonialism is too often thought of as “what happened” to Indigenous people. This kind of thinking confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their critiques of settler colonialism, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism, as if settler colonialism were a past event that “happened to” Native peoples and not generalizable to non-Natives. Actually, settler colonialism is something that “happened for” settlers. Indeed, it is happening for them/us right now. Wa Thiong’o’s question of how instead of why directs us to think of land tenancy laws, debt, and the privatization of land as settler colonial technologies that enable the “eventful” history of plunder and disappearance. Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies, they evolve and spread. Recasting land as property means severing Indigenous peoples from land. This separation, what Hortense Spillers describes as “the loss of Indigenous name/land” for Africans-turned-chattel, recasts Black Indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal: who will be moved where, who will be murdered how, who will be machinery for what, and who will be made property for whom.[5] In the alienation of land from life, alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law (protection through legitimated violence), the right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness. Moreover, it is not just human beings who are refigured in the schism. Land and nonhumans become alienable properties, a move that first alienates land from its own sovereign life. Thus we can speak of the various technologies (are) required to create and maintain these separations, these alienations: Black from Indigenous, human from nonhuman, land from life.[6] “How?” is a question you ask if you are concerned with the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonization. Instead of settler colonialism as an ideology, or as a history, you might consider settler colonialism as a set of technologies—a frame that could help you to forecast colonial next operations and to plot decolonial directions. This chapter proceeds with the following insights. (1) The settler–native–slave triad does not describe identities. The triad—an analytic mainstay of settler colonial studies—digs a pitfall of identity that not only chills collaborations but also implies that the racial will be the solution. (2) Technologies are trafficked. Technologies generate patterns of social relations to land. Technologies mutate, and so do these relationships. Colonial technologies travel. In tracing technologies’ past and future trajectories, we can connect how settler colonial and antiblack technologies circulate in transnational arenas. (3) Land—not just people—is the biopolitical target.[7] The examples are many: fracking, biopiracy, damming of rivers and flooding of valleys, the carcasses of pigs that die from the feed additive ractopamine and are allowable for harvest by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support “human” life is a “biopolitics” well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the neoliberal disciplining of modern, bourgeois, “human” subject. (4) (Y)our task is to theorize in the break, that is, to refuse the master narrative that technology is loyal to the master, that (y)our theory has a Eurocentric origin. Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Other-ed studies have already made their breaks with Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over assemblages and machines), and with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation). (5) Even when they are dangerous, understanding technologies provides us some pathways for decolonizing work. We can identify projects of collaboration on decolonial technologies. Colonizing mechanisms are evolving into new forms, and they might be subverted toward decolonizing operations.

People use the term “symphony” to explain and put a positive spin on data analytics so frequently that it’s on the fast track to becoming a cliché. Symphony and Symphony Solutions are software companies focused on digital communication and data analytics. Symphony Health and Symphony Corporation are data analytics forms serving the healthcare industry. Symphony Retail uses artificial intelligence for retail applications like marketing and logistics. Data scientists working at these (and other) companies commonly use ideas of symphonia (συμφωνία)—the ancient Greek word for pleasing harmony—to describe the nuts and bolts of what they do. On data science form dunnhumby’s corporate blog, David Castro- Gavino’s post titled “Creating a Symphony from the Noise of Customer Data” uses the idea of symphony to explain how data scientists discover useful, meaningful relationships among individual data points: patterns in the frequency of consumer behaviors interact to form actionable information just as patterns in the frequency of sound waves interact to form pleasing resonances.1 Capitalizing on mathematical similarities between the physics of sound and the metaphysics of predictive analytics, this comparison appeals to laypeople’s musical understanding of sound to translate the complex math behind data analytics into familiar and accessible nonquantitative terms.2 As the epigraph suggests, Western culture commonly uses music to translate math into qualitative terms. But in the late twentieth and early twenty- ¢rst centuries, the neoliberal, biopolitical push to quantify every last bit of reality has elevated a specific kind of math—probabilistic statistics—from a As the epigraph suÇests, Western culture commonly uses music to trans late math into qualitative terms. But in the late twentieth and early twenty- Introduction 2 mere tool for describing things to the fundamental structure of reality and knowledge themselves. As philosopher Mary Beth Mader explains, the use of probabilistic statistics to study and govern people has led to “a radical shift in ontological register” from the social to the mathematical. Statistics do not describe relations among people but “a relation between numbers or quantities alone.”3 For example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the suicide rate in North Carolina from 2014 to 2016 was 15.3 out of 100,000 people. …is ¢gure expresses the frequency of one average number (suicides) in relation to another average number (population); it does not represent a count of actual suicides or living people.4 In addition to showing how this statistic expresses a relation among numbers rather than people, this example highlights that probabilistic statistics reimagine the world as a speci¢c type of mathematical relationship: a frequency ratio. In the “ontological shift” from people to frequency ratios, the rules and principles behind this math come to be taken as the basic rules and principles behind reality itself. Because sound is commonly understood to be a kind of frequency, it is easy to use people’s practical knowledge and experience of music to translate that math into down- to earth terms. …ese appeals to music and sound don’t just dumb down math for nonexperts; they also capture aspects of reality mathematics cannot. As much as states, corporations, and even artistic and academic practices try to quantify everything, people will continue to experience things in qualitative ways, like with their senses or their emotions.5 And as processes of quantification surpass the grasp of both nonexperts and individual human brains, these qualitative registers of experience may be the most efficient medium in which to perform the ontological shift from people to frequencies in a way that people can easily understand and adapt to. This is where the old music/math trope comes in handy, except here sound isn’t just a metaphor for math. Metaphors draw ¢gurative, counterfactual relationships between things that aren’t actually the same. However, the introductory examples use “symphony” to translate the same structure or relationship from a quantitative medium into a qualitative one. Acoustic resonance (i.e., sound as a frequency or oscillating pattern of variable intensity) and neoliberal, biopolitical statistics are different ways of expressing relationships among frequency ratios: one quantitatively, as a rate; the other qualitatively, as resonant sound. In these cases, acoustically resonant sound and math are two different ways of expressing the same kinds of relationships, two sides of the same coin. Scholars refer to the quantitative side of this coin as a “neoliberal epis Introduction cases, acoustically resonant sound and math are two different ways of express Scholars refer to the quantitative side of this coin as a “neoliberal episteme.”6 For example, philosopher Shannon Winnubst argues that “neoliberalism repeats the themes of liberalism in a different voice”7 because it articulates liberalism’s basic commitments—such as individualism and white supremacy—in terms that are “calculative” rather than “juridical.”8 …is rearticulation sets in motion “the fundamental changes in rationality itself that come to dominate the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme.”9 …ough it preserves classical liberalism’s fundamental values, it uses diµerent tools and techniques to act on and realize those values—calculative rather than juridical ones. …at’s why it forms a new type or subtype of episteme. Episteme is Michel Foucault’s term for a group of intellectual, economic, and political practices that are tied together by common behind- the- scenes methods, logics, and values. As he explains, “unknown to themselves,” the practitioners of a particular episteme “employed the same rules to de¢ne the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories.”10 …ese “rules” are methods of abstraction, parameters for translating or compressing rich sensory data into words, numbers, images, and other kinds of information. In the neoliberal episteme, probabilistic statistics are the rules used to decline objects of knowledge, form concepts, and build theories. That’s why Winnubst describes the neoliberal episteme as a calculative rationality.

There has been an influx of social media-driven discussions pertaining to the Uprisings of 2020 in solidarity with Black Lives. Some of these posts and discussions are education-based, with people providing accessible and aesthetically pleasing information related to abolishment politics. However, this tendency to synthesize information in an aesthetically pleasing way has also led to an increase in people consuming resistance as an aesthetic. There has become a market, driven by social media aesthetics, for the radical slogan, a marketing of leftist politics, and therefore, a market for continued oppression. Though graphics elevate and increase the share-ability of messaging, this practice has translated into consumer goods with trendy, relevant, and co-optive messaging. Type “FTP” in the google search bar, then toggle over to the shopping tab, and you’ll see what I mean. Or “ACAB”, or “Land back”, or “decolonize”, etc. Terms that were meant to be calls to action are now plastered on t-shirts and sold for profit. Or go to Etsy and do the same thing. Even Amazon! Three products from Amazon with FTP lettered in white on black. The products are a face mask, a flag, and a beanie hat. Now, why is this bad? Because aesthetic does not trump oppression. Yes, flagging your political ideology with fashion choices is not a new endeavor, and arguably, is the crux of self-expression through dress. Nonetheless, the lack of critique of this practice is what is causing this irresponsible influx. Colonialism and capitalism are linked; they exist in cacophonous harmony, parasitically living off one another. Capitalism is a part of colonialism, as is continued police violence, and the connection between police violence and racism is obvious to most (I hope). But there is also a connection between capitalism and policing; property and wealth are protected over people’s lives. And that distinction is most grotesquely exercised against Black and Indigenous people, who experience police violence at a higher rate than any other racial groups in the occupied United States. Therefore, the misuse of calls to action commodified into slogans for profit participates in the very systems the product means to destabilize. Products cannot destabilize systems based on profit; these ideas and materials inherently challenge one another. This is the contradiction so many of us are participating in. We are in fact fiscally and spiritually supporting the continued oppression of people by deadening calls to actions through consumable goods. Not only does this flatten the labor of radical people, these commodities of resistance aesthetic lose their potency when they are ascribed financial value. We devalue community work and organizing when we create for individual or corporate profit. Calls to action that intend to invite people to unify against continued state violence and the oppression of BIPOC peoples should not be available to commodify for profit, especially under the guise of “allyship”, No matter how aesthetically pleasing they may be. It is sheer disrespect to the work of organizers for designers, companies, or artists, who do not participate in community organizing against the issues they so aptly appropriate, to co-opt oppression into a trendy design. This is how market analysis of supply and demand works, and therefore, how capitalism maintains relevance within leftist artistic circles. I see it, I relate to it, I consume it, and I am no longer focusing on what needs to be done to topple these systems. And I am also guilty of this too; I have an “ACAB” face mask! And yes, my mask flags my political ideologies to particular people, but where was my mask made? Who designed it? Did proceeds go to incarcerated folx? No. None of that. In fact, like many of these trend driven products, it was made in China, bulk purchased, and screen printed by an unknown person, financially benefiting off the labor of police abolishment activists and agitators. It is time that we no longer put our money where our mouth is; rather, we put action into the things we loosely advocate for with our purchases. Annihilating settler colonialism and capitalism cannot be done by purchasing a hoodie, a mask, or a shirt with “Land back” scrawled across it. No matter how ‘cool’ it is, these purchases will not end oppression; in fact, I am arguing that they perpetuate it. These consumables are not about community organizing for empowerment, but about the trend of resistance. It is trendy to be a leftist. And trend requires that we purchase into it; trend requires capitalism to keep itself relevant for someone’s PROFIT. Often, we advocate for people to ‘shop local’ and support designers, but at what point do we also hold folx accountable for mining trauma for personal gain? It seems that oppression consumption is excusable, as long as it can be made consumable. Let’s look at an example: Consider LookHuman, a website that, “features over 100,000 unique and fun designs so you can express your unique identity. Whether you are a nerd, science geek, feminista, gamer, punster, fitness nut, or just want to show off your quirky self with our RBG, winosaur, introvert, or LGBT classics.” At LookHuman, “we believe that every printed object can be a mechanism to declare identity and belonging.” A web store page from LookHuman selling a long-sleeved ACAB sweatshirt. The ACAB is in bubble letters, and a rainbow is above the text. The shirt can be bought in a number of different styles and colors. It is this exact capitalist mentality that encourages social media toward mass-produced co-optable graphics which are then available for purchase. Instagram educator, @anarchist.environmentalist, unpacks this phenomena in a thread entitled “Commodifying Resistance” in which they state that, “Liberals co-opt revolutionary social movements by manipulating revolutionary language”; a movement is killed through neoliberal placation by “marketing the purchase of products as revolutionary acts”. These purchases do not actually fight the hierarchies and oppressions being experienced and exercised. Symbolic representation REPLACES the call to action, the FTP shirt replaces actual organizing against the police state. These calls to action become metaphorical, when their intention was to inspire resistance. I will take this accurate critique by @anarchist.environmentalist further and say that this commodification of resistance aesthetic is done purposefully by ‘leftists’ to avoid actualizing change; I believe it is done on purpose to remain complicit to the colonial lifeways they benefit from. Capitalism truly corrupts, and that is not a coincidence; it is a strategy, and why so many social movements are bastardized and flattened onto mugs and t-shirts rather than acted upon. In response to this co-option of resistance through trend driven aesthetics, Black Lives Matter: Inland Empire announced their departure from the BLM global network on February 4, 2020. In their open letter, they cited that they were in complete opposition to, “the BLM name…being used to sell products, acquire book deals, TV deals, and speaking engagements”, and that they were opposed to the “movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism.” This open letter poignantly explains the disappointment organizers, especially those of color, are experiencing under the guise of social justice. Movements being co-opted for capitalism is a larger issue than t-shirts and mugs, but this is how and why co-option is so successful when driven by the beast of social-media and clout chasing. A tidal wave of commodification has left people seeking the apex rather than searching for the root of how and why the wave began. For those who need a reminder, our calls to action are for the abolition of settler colonialism, not for clout. The seriousness of the call to action is quickly drained by an Urban Outfitters-driven aesthetic. It no longer is about acting against oppression, but rather embracing the trend of resistance as marketable. There should be no market for this!

This fact of our investment in and by advertising, the conversion of the sign to what I call the “advertising,” poses a genuine problem for theory— indeed an unprecedented one. This problem is particularly evident considering the material conditions (class, nationality, education, race, language, etc.) of the participants in the would-be counterhegemonic theoretical discussions of culture and policy that presuppose the books, computers, schools, and institutions that sustain these. Those within the circuit of these discussions have already passed through a homogenization process which programs them in compatible systems languages. Without submitting ourselves and our own aspirations to radical critique, without conducting a Gramscian inventory of our ostensibly internal constitutions, we run the risk of merely trying to set up a competing corporation with a new business model. The revolution will not be televised; decolonization will not be a brand. Any would-be anticapitalist “we” runs this risk of coopting and cooptation from the get-go, particularly if it does not think about the materiality of social production from top to bottom: class, yes, but also race, nation, gender, sexuality, ability, geolocation, historical stratification. The world’s postmodern poor, the two billion–plus living on two dollars a day, also labor to survive in the material landscape organized by the post-Fordist social factory its anti-Blackness, its Islamophobia, its endless and mutating racism and imperialism. However, from the standpoint of capital, the role of those at the bottom is to serve as substrate for image-production and semiosis; not only in factories, cottageindustries, subsistence farming, and informal economies, but also as starving hordes; “irrational,” criminalized or surplused populations; subject-objects for policing, encampment, and bombing; desperate refugees; and even as voids in the idea of the world—as sites of social death. Forgive me, but I’d wager that no one capable of understanding these words can claim full exemption from the indictment they issue regarding structural complicity with the production and reproduction of everyday life. Humans are troped (via discourse and the screen) to organize military production, national policy, internment camps and prisons, bourgeois imaginations, museum shows, corporate strategy, and market projections. Let us clearly state here that any program that does not admit this excluded planet into dialogues that vitiate the monologues imposed by capitalist informatics and advertisigns is still floating in the realm of the ruling ideas and therefore participant in murder. These ruling ideas are the ones whose density and weight, whose material support and very machinery, threaten to further crush the late-capitalist poor out of not just representation but out of existence. This erasure and disposability, imposed by systems of informatic inscription designed to absorb every output of sense, is the achievement of the advertisarial relations endemic to computational racial capitalism. When information is an advertisement for itself that presupposes the operating system of the world computer as virtual machine, banning what we recognize as advertising on the internet, even if an excellent beginning, is just not adequate to address these issues of representation, social justice, planetary and climate racism, and emancipation. To summarize: the forms of sociality which are the conditions of possibility for the online, informatically organized relations—best characterized as advertisarial—run through every sector and register of planetary life. The internet, while recognizable as an effect and a cause of the current form of planetary production and reproduction, cannot be considered in isolation as a merely technical platform or set of platforms if its historical role is to be properly understood. To take the internet as an autonomous technological force results in a species of platform fetishism that disavows both the histories and material conditions of its emergence, conditions that are, in short, those of screen culture and racial capitalism; this is to say that it, the internet, is the very means by which the capitalist suppression of global democracy (which is emphatically, economic democracy as well) has been accomplished and continues. If the internet is autonomous, it is because it expresses the autonomization of the value form. As noted previously, with the hijacking of communications and semiotic infrastructures by racial capitalism, the medium is the message and the message is murder. To ban advertising on the internet would be a good start—but what if the whole thing is advertising? One reading of what I have said thus far might suggest that, given the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic, our volition is overtaken by capital logic; and given our inability to cogitate in any way that is genuinely resistant to capitalist expropriation, coercion, strictly speaking, is no longer necessary to impose cooperation for capitalist production. We “want” to cooperate productively, our desire—which, from the dispossession of even language and mind constitutes ourselves as subjects in the media ecology of the capitalist technical image, that is, in and through the organization of digital information—is itself an iteration of capital, a script of becoming predestined to become capital. The old language scored by the new image machines and their extractive algorithms locally organizes cooperative subjects who want to cooperate with vectoral capitalization. We want to provide content in order to derive currency and survive. Our solidarity on the internet produces more internet. Thus, in a certain way—and particularly since we no longer properly have any thoughts of our own—we all collaborate in a world organized by images and screens, thereby participating more or less mindlessly in the seamless realization and triumphant apotheosis of the programming business. However, I am sorry to have to report that the dystopian vision here is not quite as bucolic as even this already dreary picture of unwitting and irredeemable pulverization and servitude. While I do see that representation and semiotics have been increasingly flattened à la Orwell and Marcuse by a vast internalization of the apparatuses of oppression (in which “thought” is the [productive] thought of the [capitalist] Party and “repressive desublimation” is an engine of capitalist-fascist production) the “old problems” like the hierarchy of class have not gone away; neither have racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and fascist nationalisms ceased playing their roles to create vectors of privilege for white male–identifying aspiration. Indeed, most thought today, such that it is, is all about maintaining hierarchical society. The thinking runs thus: capital is nature, capital is eternal, capital is information is nature. Or, in a more pedestrian mode: human beings are naturally acquisitive and competitive, economic growth and technological advancement mean progress, this tech provides, or almost provides, a color-, gender-, and religion-blind society, and so on—and one must advance one’s place in it by any (crypto- or not-so-cryptofascist) means necessary. Of course, there exists better thinking out there. Mia Mingus: “As organizers, we need to think of access with an understanding of disability justice, moving away from an equality based model of sameness and ‘we are just like you’ to a model of disability that embraces difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered ‘normal’ on every front. We don’t want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them” (Mingus 2011, cited in Puar 2017: 16). However, there is broad-band, ambient programming that facilitates assuming neo-liberal and full-on fascist subjective sovereignty. This programming seeks triumphant brushes with plenitude (communion with the big Other, as distinct from the racial or otherwise other, becomes the ego-ideal), and this same programming is violent, competitive, hateful, meanspirited, and alienating when embraced—at the same time that it is also cooperative, simpering, and abject. Servitude, even when automatic and mostly unconscious, is unhappy and, as we can see any day from the daily news, utterly pathological and sick. Of course, this diagnosis represents a huge generalization, but despite its broad-brushing lack of subtlety we may find that such a schizoid oscillation between entitled adjudicator and abject supplicant sums up the contours of your average reality television show or comments section on YouTube. It is Bateson’s (2000) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977) schizophrenic, caught in the double-bind, who has become the capitalist norm—the one who struggles to negotiate in the form of contradictory signals the aporias of hierarchical society, while reproducing it, and all the while experiencing their own psychic dissolution as an injunction to create.3

We recognize that, for some, this self-serving asceticism which makes ego, masculinity, and whiteness disappear in the very medium of its fabulations produces comforting thoughts. The scientist, who insists that his biology, chemistry, or physics contains truths that exceed “man” and exist before and after, addresses himself to man. With his grandiose statements, he humiliates man—at times not without provocation and often not without dire results. Nonetheless and despite their seeming indifference to an Other, the ontological pronouncements, the ontological claims, are always triangulated; they are speech acts—a something for someone, a signifier for another signifier. They are also fetishistic, ways of knowing and not knowing, ways of preserving the phallus man in the face of his castration. The child-man killing the traditional father-man to marry mother nature and consummate truth: this becomes science the universal man whose power is now expressed in sublime technologies that in the next generation threaten man with further castration. Such hand wringing about “technology itself” becomes a mansplaining complex as deadly as it is schematic and even absurd—though one nonetheless dangerous for its libidinal-economic logic, its pathologic. Among the stakes in the analysis of computational racial capital, therefore, is a critique of this very sense of disembodied mind, of the “us” that is supposedly without us. The imperial, Oedipal “us,” to be sure, the psychotic, the sociopath, the fascist. One clearly grasps the problem: god or cyborg—and, in this, Donna Haraway’s materialist answer still resonates: “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” Cybernetics as the now unavoidable ontology of ontologies must become the ground for anarchocommunist becomings, sociocybernetic becomings. Information as physical process bound to alienated, deracinated labor, is itself a cyborg formation. Janelle Monáe, as if building on the Fanonian analysis of the impossibility of Black ontology, makes answer to both the prohibition of all but cyborg ontologies and the violence of abstraction. With her brilliant musical and video work, most recently, the song “Screwed” and the “emotion picture” Dirty Computer, embodied and desirous, dynamic, assertive, affecting, sexual and creative dirty computing becomes a kind of answer embracing queer, Black, and non-normative alternatives to being constituted and commanded to perform by the deracinated abstractions that colonize bodies. And the emotion picture changes the way we are screwed (together): “You fucked the world up, now we’ll fuck it all back down.” This détournement of the activity machine that is the body, dancing, musical, thinking suggests that we can and perhaps must occupy computation differently, using the resources of our bodies, of our musics, and of our histories. Since everything runs on us, since we are the substrate at the bottom of the stack, Monáe proposes and actualizes a creative utilization of the immense reserves of capacity in music, dance, movement, song, experience, and embodied knowledge. Such an embarkation is not a total answer but a strategy that suggests alternative kinesthetic ways to process information. One thinks also here of Erin Manning’s (2018) work on neurodiversity and Black life, the living taking place beyond the confines and perceptions of institutions: “The urgency of these undercommons cannot be ignored. We are moving through them, but are we proliferating enough? Are we inventing at the speed, in the duration, of the movements of thought that move us to ask what else it can mean to know?” (5). As societies move from cultural hegemony to computational hegemony machine-instituted forms of abstraction and computing become colonial enclosures, worksites, and camps—lived, embodied experience. Computers and their programs are thought to be technical deployments of mathematical concepts and mechanisms that up until now have most often been perceived as value-neutral, that is, as technical or scientific or objective. This misunderstanding provides those vested by the current technocracy with an alibi. An additional purpose of this book is to permanently disrupt the very notion that concepts and machines occupy or could ever occupy such a neutral zone, a kind of degree zero of technicity, untouched by histories of social difference and the practices of inequality. It is as foolish to think that machines are neutral as it is to think neutrality is neutral. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” (Marx, 1978: 172–3). Thus, today we might say that the ruling thinking machines are nothing more than the informatic expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as technologies and therefore the machines of their dominance. As opposed to the various quasi-ontological instantiations of dominant informatics (e.g., “the self,” “greed,” “human, “white”), we glean that consciousness is at once material and distributed, relying upon a whole set of substrates, machines, images, and codes as well as upon the visible living beings—and, what’s more (much more), the beings disappeared among them.14 In view of such distributed systems, therefore, you are not the locus of your thought, even if the functionality of “your” thought simulates you as such; the locus of your thought is the world computer and its material implantation in the bios, what Benjamin Bratton (2016) poetically and indeed accurately conceives as “the stack.” You is a node. Nodes of the world, remake your networks! The only thing you have to lose is your algorithms of oppression (Noble 2018). Despite not being able to write in the key of Marx any longer, it is possible to politicize social relations that are naturalized, technologized, or buried in abstraction, in machinery, and in the unthought. Social difference, the profitable maintenance and elaboration of social differentiation fundamentally but not exclusively along “racial” and monetary lines is inherent in information itself. Learning from Hortense Spillers, this critique of information extends itself to the grammar of social differentiation and to the increasing granularity of that grammar. It is impossible to write in the key of Marx because of the historical materialist recognition that both the writer and the reader are distributed cybernetic agents who are themselves caught up and constituted in the traffic of information and must therefore decolonize themselves as they work to decolonize the world. No single perspective is adequate to such a task. We observe that the situation of difference and differentiation, inseparable as it is from histories of violence, is, in fact, the deeper meaning of what is called “the world market.” The world market is the real-time computational processing of the evaluation of everything—and from which today (next to) nothing escapes—by the relentless calculus of the value-form endemic to profit under the historical system of racial capitalism. By looking at specific machine histories and processes of grammartization we shall demonstrate that modern machines themselves are racial formations. They are formed by actual practices of racialization and are informed by them as these relentless and for the most part remorseless activities crunch money into more money. But how could they not be? Indeed how could we not be? Machine-mediated hegemony continues to posit (if less and less convincingly) autonomous individuality and value-neutral machines, while at the same time facilitating a disavowal of the fact that “we” think what we think because of our cybernetic relation to machines and to objectified bodies (ours or others) consigned to what in Get Out, Jordan Peele (2017) brilliantly configures as “the sunken place.” It is these sunken places that provision liquidity for those who put folks in them, and if they run dry, if we die, more have to be created. When we consider the social totality in this way, when the integrated information machines of social mediation are designed to confer life to some and social death, debility, or disposability on others, it should really be no surprise that racist encodings sedimented into institutions and machines organized for value extraction reencode racism. But for some it is, and for some, no matter how clear the argument—this singular fact in an instrumentally postfactual world, namely, that capitalist technology is a racial formation, will remain unintelligible.

There has been an influx of social media-driven discussions pertaining to the Uprisings of 2020 in solidarity with Black Lives. Some of these posts and discussions are education-based, with people providing accessible and aesthetically pleasing information related to abolishment politics. However, this tendency to synthesize information in an aesthetically pleasing way has also led to an increase in people consuming resistance as an aesthetic. There has become a market, driven by social media aesthetics, for the radical slogan, a marketing of leftist politics, and therefore, a market for continued oppression. Though graphics elevate and increase the share-ability of messaging, this practice has translated into consumer goods with trendy, relevant, and co-optive messaging. Type “FTP” in the google search bar, then toggle over to the shopping tab, and you’ll see what I mean. Or “ACAB”, or “Land back”, or “decolonize”, etc. Terms that were meant to be calls to action are now plastered on t-shirts and sold for profit. Or go to Etsy and do the same thing. Even Amazon! Three products from Amazon with FTP lettered in white on black. The products are a face mask, a flag, and a beanie hat. Now, why is this bad? Because aesthetic does not trump oppression. Yes, flagging your political ideology with fashion choices is not a new endeavor, and arguably, is the crux of self-expression through dress. Nonetheless, the lack of critique of this practice is what is causing this irresponsible influx. Colonialism and capitalism are linked; they exist in cacophonous harmony, parasitically living off one another. Capitalism is a part of colonialism, as is continued police violence, and the connection between police violence and racism is obvious to most (I hope). But there is also a connection between capitalism and policing; property and wealth are protected over people’s lives. And that distinction is most grotesquely exercised against Black and Indigenous people, who experience police violence at a higher rate than any other racial groups in the occupied United States. Therefore, the misuse of calls to action commodified into slogans for profit participates in the very systems the product means to destabilize. Products cannot destabilize systems based on profit; these ideas and materials inherently challenge one another. This is the contradiction so many of us are participating in. We are in fact fiscally and spiritually supporting the continued oppression of people by deadening calls to actions through consumable goods. Not only does this flatten the labor of radical people, these commodities of resistance aesthetic lose their potency when they are ascribed financial value. We devalue community work and organizing when we create for individual or corporate profit. Calls to action that intend to invite people to unify against continued state violence and the oppression of BIPOC peoples should not be available to commodify for profit, especially under the guise of “allyship”, No matter how aesthetically pleasing they may be. It is sheer disrespect to the work of organizers for designers, companies, or artists, who do not participate in community organizing against the issues they so aptly appropriate, to co-opt oppression into a trendy design. This is how market analysis of supply and demand works, and therefore, how capitalism maintains relevance within leftist artistic circles. I see it, I relate to it, I consume it, and I am no longer focusing on what needs to be done to topple these systems. And I am also guilty of this too; I have an “ACAB” face mask! And yes, my mask flags my political ideologies to particular people, but where was my mask made? Who designed it? Did proceeds go to incarcerated folx? No. None of that. In fact, like many of these trend driven products, it was made in China, bulk purchased, and screen printed by an unknown person, financially benefiting off the labor of police abolishment activists and agitators. It is time that we no longer put our money where our mouth is; rather, we put action into the things we loosely advocate for with our purchases. Annihilating settler colonialism and capitalism cannot be done by purchasing a hoodie, a mask, or a shirt with “Land back” scrawled across it. No matter how ‘cool’ it is, these purchases will not end oppression; in fact, I am arguing that they perpetuate it. These consumables are not about community organizing for empowerment, but about the trend of resistance. It is trendy to be a leftist. And trend requires that we purchase into it; trend requires capitalism to keep itself relevant for someone’s PROFIT. Often, we advocate for people to ‘shop local’ and support designers, but at what point do we also hold folx accountable for mining trauma for personal gain? It seems that oppression consumption is excusable, as long as it can be made consumable. Let’s look at an example: Consider LookHuman, a website that, “features over 100,000 unique and fun designs so you can express your unique identity. Whether you are a nerd, science geek, feminista, gamer, punster, fitness nut, or just want to show off your quirky self with our RBG, winosaur, introvert, or LGBT classics.” At LookHuman, “we believe that every printed object can be a mechanism to declare identity and belonging.” A web store page from LookHuman selling a long-sleeved ACAB sweatshirt. The ACAB is in bubble letters, and a rainbow is above the text. The shirt can be bought in a number of different styles and colors. It is this exact capitalist mentality that encourages social media toward mass-produced co-optable graphics which are then available for purchase. Instagram educator, @anarchist.environmentalist, unpacks this phenomena in a thread entitled “Commodifying Resistance” in which they state that, “Liberals co-opt revolutionary social movements by manipulating revolutionary language”; a movement is killed through neoliberal placation by “marketing the purchase of products as revolutionary acts”. These purchases do not actually fight the hierarchies and oppressions being experienced and exercised. Symbolic representation REPLACES the call to action, the FTP shirt replaces actual organizing against the police state. These calls to action become metaphorical, when their intention was to inspire resistance. I will take this accurate critique by @anarchist.environmentalist further and say that this commodification of resistance aesthetic is done purposefully by ‘leftists’ to avoid actualizing change; I believe it is done on purpose to remain complicit to the colonial lifeways they benefit from. Capitalism truly corrupts, and that is not a coincidence; it is a strategy, and why so many social movements are bastardized and flattened onto mugs and t-shirts rather than acted upon. In response to this co-option of resistance through trend driven aesthetics, Black Lives Matter: Inland Empire announced their departure from the BLM global network on February 4, 2020. In their open letter, they cited that they were in complete opposition to, “the BLM name…being used to sell products, acquire book deals, TV deals, and speaking engagements”, and that they were opposed to the “movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism.” This open letter poignantly explains the disappointment organizers, especially those of color, are experiencing under the guise of social justice. Movements being co-opted for capitalism is a larger issue than t-shirts and mugs, but this is how and why co-option is so successful when driven by the beast of social-media and clout chasing. A tidal wave of commodification has left people seeking the apex rather than searching for the root of how and why the wave began. For those who need a reminder, our calls to action are for the abolition of settler colonialism, not for clout. The seriousness of the call to action is quickly drained by an Urban Outfitters-driven aesthetic. It no longer is about acting against oppression, but rather embracing the trend of resistance as marketable. There should be no market for this!

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of information; the individual bit appears as its elementary form. Or so it appears to the machines that count, the machines of account.

Moreover, the rise of information meant—in fact is—the ability to write a derivative contract on any phenomenon whatever. Its emergence is one with the calculus of probability and thus of risk. What price information? We will show here how information becomes a derivative on reality whose importance comes to exceed that of reality, at least for those bound by the materiality of information’s risk profiles. Furthermore, the algorithm becomes the management strategy for the social differentiation introduced by and as information—a heuristic, becoming bureaucratic, becoming apparatus for the profitable integration of difference and, significantly, for any “us” worthy of that name, of that which and those who could be differentiated. The algorithm’s calculative execution on information, its “procedural” problem solving, was called forth and derived from the market optimization of the socially meaningful metrics (things somehow or other worth measuring) of difference. Recursively, the algorithm and its avatars multiplied its capacities of differentiation.

How can we measure geopolitical risks and what does this tell us?

Measuring geopolitical risks is an important but arduous task. One method is the geopolitical risk index (GPR), which is constructed using the frequency of articles in leading newspapers that discuss adverse geopolitical events such as wars, terrorism and tensions among political organisations (Caldara and Iacoviello, 2022).

Additionally, there’s evidence to suggest recessions are becoming less protracted over time. Since 1854, the United States has weathered 34 recessionary cycles, with an average duration of 17.5 months. Post-1945, however, that average has decreased to just 11 months. This trend is a testament to the adaptive capacity of the economy, learning from each downturn to forge a more robust foundation for future prosperity.

In conclusion, while recessions are undoubtedly challenging, they also offer opportunities for recalibration and growth, both for individuals and the economy as a whole. As history shows, the economic pain is often followed by remarkable recovery, suggesting that even in the darkest financial times, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Yet I cannot think of any country in similar circumstances today. Now is hardly the time for Russia to try to grab more of Ukraine—if it even wanted to—or for China to make a play for Taiwan, because the costs of doing so would clearly outweigh the economic benefits. Even conquering an oil-rich country—the sort of greedy acquisitiveness that Trump occasionally hints at—doesn’t look attractive when there’s a vast glut on the market. I might be worried if some weak and defenseless country somehow came to possess the entire global stock of a successful coronavirus vaccine, but that scenario is not even remotely possible. If one takes a longer-term perspective, however, a sustained economic depression could make war more likely by strengthening fascist or xenophobic political movements, fueling protectionism and hypernationalism, and making it more difficult for countries to reach mutually acceptable bargains with each other. The history of the 1930s shows where such trends can lead, although the economic effects of the Depression are hardly the only reason world politics took such a deadly turn in the 1930s. Nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian rule were making a comeback well before COVID-19 struck, but the economic misery now occurring in every corner of the world could intensify these trends and leave us in a more war-prone condition when fear of the virus has diminished. On balance, however, I do not think that even the extraordinary economic conditions we are witnessing today are going to have much impact on the likelihood of war. Why? First of all, if depressions were a powerful cause of war, there would be a lot more of the latter. To take one example, the United States has suffered 40 or more recessions since the country was founded, yet it has fought perhaps 20 interstate wars, most of them unrelated to the state of the economy. To paraphrase the economist Paul Samuelson’s famous quip about the stock market, if recessions were a powerful cause of war, they would have predicted “nine out of the last five (or fewer).” Second, states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory. As John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it will be long, bloody, costly, and uncertain. To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself. The fact that each of these leaders miscalculated badly does not alter the main point: No matter what a country’s economic condition might be, its leaders will not go to war unless they think they can do so quickly, cheaply, and with a reasonable probability of success. Third, and most important, the primary motivation for most wars is the desire for security, not economic gain. For this reason, the odds of war increase when states believe the long-term balance of power may be shifting against them, when they are convinced that adversaries are unalterably hostile and cannot be accommodated, and when they are confident they can reverse the unfavorable trends and establish a secure position if they act now. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed that “every war between Great Powers [between 1848 and 1918] … started as a preventive war, not as a war of conquest,” and that remains true of most wars fought since then. The bottom line: Economic conditions (i.e., a depression) may affect the broader political environment in which decisions for war or peace are made, but they are only one factor among many and rarely the most significant. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic has large, lasting, and negative effects on the world economy—as seems quite likely—it is not likely to affect the probability of war very much, especially in the short term.

Diversionary wars can happen, but they are not terribly common. It would be extremely unlikely for any government to initiate a major conflict because it wants to distract its people from domestic problems. For one thing, a major conflict would almost certainly exacerbate their country’s economic and social problems by putting the country under intense strain. Unless the war is a minor campaign against a much weaker state, there is no reason to assume that the war will be either quick or successful. In most cases, it is unlikely that starting a war would benefit the leadership or the regime. Even a successful minor war might not be very useful for the leadership because the stakes are so insignificant.

If the war goes badly, it could lead to much deeper discontent and opposition to the regime. As Fravel says, diversionary wars are “dangerous gambits because if leaders initiate a diversionary crisis or war that fails to produce the desired results, they risk expediting the collapse of their government.” Many governments gamble by starting a war when they feel confident and secure in their position. That gamble may be the result of poor judgment and based on bad information, but it is one that leaders tend to make when they assume they are acting from a position of strength.

The diversionary theory of war is one of the best-known conflict initiation theories focusing on democratic leaders’ incentives. According to the theory, democratic leaders who face greater electoral challenges, either due to political scandals or an economic downturn, are more likely to choose provocative foreign policies and seek to lead the country into diplomatic crises, in hopes of inciting nationalistic sentiments that will boost their approval ratings via the so-called “rally around the flag” effect (e.g. Gaines 2002;Hetherington and Nelson 2003; Mueller 1973). Despite the intuitive appeal of this theory, empirical studies have been largely unable to find consistent evidence to corroborate the purported theoretical mechanisms. Findings from observational studies have been quite mixed. The fact that a diverse set of findings have been reported from observational studies suggests that unobservable confounders arising from INTERNATIONAL INTERACTIONS 1057 strategic interactions greatly hinder our ability to tease out the causal effect of electoral hardship on conflict behaviors. In this research note, we claim that the key assumption of the theory does not work as expected. That is, a political leader cannot divert attention from [their]his/her political scandals by emphasizing a foreign threat and alerting the general public that the country may go to war against an enemy. Although the assumptions that the threat or use of force is salient and that an acute enemy threat would create a rally-around-the-flag effect are common, they have rarely been tested at a micro-level in an experimental setting. Our team conducted a cross-national experiment to find out whether and how political leaders could divert the public’s attention away from their political scandals. We selected Japan and Israel as fields of the experiment. Both are com-parable parliamentary democracies that have witnessed a series of serious political scandals. Moreover, the general Japanese and Israeli public could plausibly expect a hawkish national security policy against the potentially nuclear-armed enemy states of North Korea and Iran, respectively, both of which are widely represented as “evil” and “mad” enemies.1 While we acknowledge that Japan and Israel have significantly different military cultures and distinct records of militarized interstate disputes, we consider them to be interesting, important, and comparable cases that could generate significant findings in testing the above-mentioned assumptions of diversionary war theory. Our contribution is twofold. First, we confirm that, in both Japan and Israel, diverting public attention from salient political scandals would fail even if a political leader emphasizes the enemy threat or alerts the public to potential escalatory moves against the enemy. In particular, the most escalatory hawkish policy—a preemptive move—would not help the government hide its political scandals from the general public.

Table 8 shows that the mean and median values of the adjustedR2of the risk-free rate RF are 0.52% and0.17%, respectively. These values are close to those of the BW index. As for the lagged explanatory power, the adjustedR2of RF goes up steadily from 1 lag to 3lags. However, the lagged explanatory power of RF is significantly lower than that of the BW index. This result shows that the BW index is an improved sentiment indicator of the stock returns. On the other hand, the UMI exhibits no explanatory power to either the contemporaneous or lagged stock returns. The adjustedR2of the UMI is all negative. I also tested the explanatory power of the OECD consumer confidence index and the OECD business confidence index. Neither of them has a positive adjusted R2 on the contemporary or lagged stock returns. From Table 8, I can infer that the explanatory power of the indirect sentiment measures on stock returns is relatively stable. The difference across different measures mainly lies in the level of the explanatory power. On the other hand, the direct sentiment measures exhibit a different pattern. Compared with the AAII indexes, the other direct sentiment measures do not display any explanatory power. This indicates that the survey sample and the survey questions are essential to successfully reflect the financial market sentiment. Currently, The AAII indexes and the BW index are the best direct and indirect sentiment measures in explaining stock returns. Further research is needed to shed more light on this topic.

The good news is that business confidence is hopeless as an economic indicator. The correlation with economic growth is poor and I largely ignore business confidence readings. Changes in direction can provide some insightful information – whether things are picking up or slowing down, but not the levels. Businesses tend to be more upbeat regarding general confidence about the economy under a blue flag as opposed to a red one. Business confidence averaged minus 18 between 2000 and 2007. The economy (measured by real gross domestic product) grew on average by more than 3.5% per year. Yep, confidence was negative, but growth was positive. So, we ignore business confidence as an economic indicator. This is nothing new. It’s surprising headline business confidence figures receive so much attention.

Alibaba spearheads a new model for intellectual property protection The protection of intellectual property (IP) rights in today’s innovation-driven and increasingly knowledge-based global economy is an important consideration for policymakers and businesses around the world. IP protection has also become a central concern for online retailers, including the Alibaba Group which has had IP protection in its sights since it began operating. In an attempt to tackle the proliferation of counterfeit products more effectively, and the growing number of related complaints, many on-line retailers have set about building user-friendly, internal governance systems that support the protection of IP and their reputation as socially responsible corporate citizens. The Alibaba Group, for example, has, through experimentation, pioneered the development of an ever-more sophisticated and effective IP protection system. Using advanced computing technologies and big data, Alibaba’s Platform Governance Department has crafted and rolled out an effective system for spotting and disciplining offers involving counterfeit goods on its platforms. Alibaba’s governance model is built around proactive monitoring and an effective IP rights infringement notification system. The so-called Alibaba Model for IPR protection in e-commerce is governed by technology, innovative business practice and the law. Using technology to improve online governance Alibaba is harnessing various advanced technologies to tackle online counterfeiting and piracy. To identify counterfeit goods it uses fake product identification modelling, image recognition techniques, semantic recognition algorithms, product information databases, real-time interception systems and data collaboration platforms. Thanks to its algorithms, every day Alibaba identifies up to 600 million product images with an accuracy rate of 97.6 percent. Using these sophisticated technologies, over 97 percent of suspected infringing goods are removed from Alibaba platforms as soon as they are posted online. In 2017, twenty-seven times more goods were removed from Alibaba platforms using these technologies than were removed with takedown notices issued by IP rights holders.

The INFORM Act requires marketplaces to verify only those sellers who qualify as "high volume" sellers, those who enter into at least 200 sales transactions in a 12-month period with a minimum total of $5,000.157 To ensure that consumers do not fall victim to sellers with new accounts or who have yet to meet the [*234] minimum sale requirements, marketplaces should require all third-party sellers (not just "high volume" sellers) to provide some proof of identification when the seller creates their marketplace account. To ensure legitimacy, marketplaces should require sellers to provide a business tax ID or business license number as part of the seller registration process.158 Requiring a business license or business tax ID would add an extra step easily met by current, legitimate business owners, and registering a new business is relatively simple and inexpensive.159 Opponents of this requirement argue that the beauty of the online marketplace is that it allows any enterprising individual to participate and sell their wares, and by requiring a business license, the government is limiting who can sell.160 This argument ignores the fact that both brick-and-mortar retailers, as well as online store retailers, must possess a valid business license. Why should a seller on a virtual marketplace be held to a different standard? Admittedly, there is still a risk of sellers creating a false business and disguising themselves as a new, valid business entity to "circumvent [the] vetting process."161 Assuring that seller accounts are accurate and trustworthy requires ongoing verification and auditing of seller accounts to ensure compliance.162 This is a best practice that many marketplaces currently implement and the INFORM Act now requires.163 Requiring a business license or business tax ID for all sellers would ensure an extra layer of identity verification during the licensing process and add an extra deterrent to those who are looking for an easy way to access the market to sell fake goods.