Gradient II

VOLº2 · WINTER18/19

GRADIENT

A J OU RNA L FOR C R EAT I V E AND CR I T I CA L I N T E R PR E TAT I ON

GRAPHITE PUBLICATION

Welcome to the second edition of Graphite’s print magazine, Gradient.

Featuring a specially curated selection of both visual and written work, this publication joins the curiously eclectic content of our six sections together within its pages. Gradient offers its readers with fresh, pertinent, and creative themes and ideas, with which we hope everyone can engage.

Despite the flexibility of our digital platform, we believe that the world of print offers unique opportunities to share our work on a physical and less cognitively transient medium. With Gradient, we hope to advance our mission of connecting the Montreal community with the work of its young creators in a unique and aesthetically engaging manner.

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EXECUTIVE EDITOR Luca Kühn von Burgsdorff HEAD OF OPERATIONS Joseph Bouchard DESIGNER Ben Stern Amanda Lenko EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Flora Deverell CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Pauline Crepy Christopher Junn Sakeeb Rahman Info: Graphitepublications.com executive@graphitepublications.com Instagram: @graphitepublications Facebook: Graphite Publications

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C O N TENTS Arts & Culture

Opinion

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Muses to Ourselves

by Hannah Raine

Polically Correct Minds are Fragile, Fragmented Minds

by Shafkat Sakeebur Rahman

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Video Games as Art

by Alex Meyer

Creative 10

Instructions

by Jacob Goldber 12

Exotic

By Atusa Mehrasa 14

Politics & Economics 24

Is There Anything Money Can’t Buy?

by Will Hanna 28

Covering Uyghur: Whose Orient?

by Yolanda Zhang

Confluences

by Boris But

Music

Science & Tech

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Nina Simone, Le Pouvoir d’une Voix

by Alix Weil

Technocapitalism and the Moral Hazards of Impending Transhumanism

by Nicolas Botero

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The Future Faces of the Music Industry: Self-Made and Counter Cultural

by Jesse Gotfrit

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Prozac Planet: the Microbiome and our Mental Health

by Georgie Deverell

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Arts & Culture Dan Visconti

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Muses to Ourselves

by Hannah Raine Hannah Raine

In a beautifully written narrative essay, Raine takes an introspective and critical look at her relationship with portrayals of women as a muse.

F

or the duration of my teenage years, I was secretly consumed with being someone’s muse. That was how I approached the opposite sex: with a desire to invoke inspiration. Being an actress had been my dream since I was old enough to possess such dreams. Despite being painfully shy I needed to be seen.

I waited for the day that someone else would discover me and decide he must share his findings with the world. This idea was ingrained in my head; men were the artists and the best thing a woman could be was his living masterpiece.

Those feelings became even more real through the films I watched: the ones in which a girl shows up and causes a boy to rethink his entire life. She removes all the mundanity from his life. More than just a girl, she is a force of divine intervention, there to change his world. I ate all this shit up. Self-reflection was an out of body experience: I imagined myself from the perspective of the audience, watching a boy who was in turn watching me. This cinematic lens through which I perceived reality had me in a supporting role.

At 13 years of age, I was first exposed to these narratives while watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Adapted from Truman Capote’s novella, the 1961 film takes what was originally a tale of platonic fascination, and constructs a love story. Suddenly, Holly Golightly isn’t just the unnamed narrator’s exciting party girl neighbor, she becomes the enigmatic love interest of a boring writer named Paul. Boring Paul was in the depths of writer’s block, but meets Holly and is moved to write again. When professing his love, he goes as far saying she “belongs” to him. Capote wrote Golightly as a free spirited teenage girl, who seeks adventure wherever she can find it. On screen, she is played by a 30-year-old Audrey Hepburn as a sad, wild animal who needs to be tamed. Although Paul is the human equivalent of oatmeal, I

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wanted nothing more than to be his Holly Golightly. I wanted for someone to feel they must contain me – or risk losing me.

The first time a boy confessed his love to me, 500 Days of Summer was playing in the background. Regrettably, this film was the basis on which I measured all romantic encounters in high school. Much like Tom, the film’s protagonist, I couldn’t get over Zooey Deschanel’s Summer Finn. While I now consider Summer a poorly written, one-note character, my adolescent self mistook her lack of personality as mysterious. She was in the back of my mind, reminding me not to be too vulnerable or serious. I put on the facade of a carefree one-dimensional character. Every relationship was a “menage à trois”: him, my physical presence, and Summer. For short periods of time at least, this would work and I tricked my way into becoming her.

When women in film are not given the same opportunities as men, the impact goes beyond their personal careers. Our voices go unheard and our stories are seen as unimportant.

Eventually, we begin to see ourselves that way. Continuing this cycle does a disservice to us all and decreases the quality of movies. Without women there will not be anyone advocating for developed female characters and we will continue to be the creations of men.

“This idea was ingrained in my head; men were the artists and the best thing a woman could be was his living masterpiece.”

Both Holly Golightly and Summer Finn are fictionalized women born from the lives of their creators. I, on the other hand, was a real girl, molding myself into the likeness of these characters. They are merely women that were brought onto screen by men. They are muses, who, like mirrors, are objects which exist for the self-reflection of the beholder.

Sold to us as leading ladies, they are only glorified love interests. It’s rare that they exist beyond the lens of the male protagonists. Portraying muses on screen is to immortalize the dehumanization of real women. It strips women of our right to be multifaceted beings, reinforcing an entire history that saw us as possessions. Our power comes from being seen and respected as people. Because of these films, I willingly surrendered my own.

In the summer of 2017, I made my first short film. I played muse to myself, creating a female protagonist who saw the world through my lens. The crew was predominantly young women, who recognized the feelings I wrote, and brought them to life. Seeing my point of view recreated on screen helped legitimize it: a point of view that put the journey of a young woman at its focus and granted her power over her own narrative.

Elli Slavitch

“When women in film are not given the same opportunities as men, the impact goes beyond their personal careers.”

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Video Games as Art

by Alex Meyer

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Exploration of new forms of video games that transcend the commonly conceived, male-oriented stereotype. Makes the point the video games can and should be conceived of as art. takes an introspective and critical look at her relationship with portrayals of women as a muse.

he term “video game” conjures up for many the image of a testosterone-fueled digital arena, populated chiefly by teenage guys venting the unimaginable into a headset. This adverse stigma is not without truth – multiplayer video games have historically been male-dominated spaces. In recent years, however, games have risen to challenge conventional notions of the video game, bringing imagination, depth and emotion to the screen in a way not previously explored. The advent of indie games signals a change away from the traditional gamer to a more curious mainstream audience.

Following their emergence in the 1970s and despite technological limitations, home video games quickly grew in popularity and spawned a thriving business.

The 1980s marked the rise of classic video games – this was the great acceleration period for the industry.

With the expansion of the Internet in the early 2000s, indie video games saw a rise in popularity through increased ease of online sharing. In more recent years, crowdfunding and small-scale studios have allowed for the production of truly independent and unique games, unfettered by large-company regulations. Journey, Child of Light and Papers, Please are examples of memorable recent indie video games. They challenge notions of reality through a combination of engaging gameplay, immersive soundtracks and touching storylines – these are what truly set them apart and demonstrate the potential for video games as an art form.

Papers, Please follows the life of a lone border patrol agent in a fictional totalitarian state. Set in 1982 amidst postwar political tension, the player’s job is

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to vet and process potential entrants, migrants and refugees. Upon first seeing my roommate playing the game, it seemed dull and rather repetitive. This is far from the truth; the myriad characters, each with unique backstories, motivations and reactions that are themselves contingent on your choices, provide hours of intrigue as you peek into the lives of the people passing through your checkpoint. The seemingly tedious gameplay contrasts with the heavy moral quandaries that arise as the story plays out. Do you waive the rules and reunite a war-torn family? Ideally yes, but penalties for “mistakes” will cost you as well as the family you support – too many and they won’t survive the winter. The true artistic nature of this game lies not in graphics, but in the level of empathy it demands from the player. The player is asked to step into the emotional shoes of the protagonist, and forced to make choices that you, as a “good person,” would never make. The emotional pull from such simple game mechanics is what makes this a truly immersive experience. Ultimately, Papers, Please diverges from conventional espionage/war games and instead, draws focus to the human experience in the context of wartimes.

In Child of Light, you play as Aurora, a young girl who awakes in the fairytale land of Lemuria, only to learn that her step-mother has stolen the sun, moon and stars. To return home and restore balance to the world, she must recover them, all the while grappling with her own unfolding destiny. The dreamlike artwork of watercolor backdrops and fantastical scenery compliment the overall surreal atmosphere.

Along the way you meet various characters, whose tragic backstories are revealed as they join Aurora on

Christine Luc

“They challenge notions of reality through a combination of engaging gameplay, immersive soundtracks and touching storylines.”

her journey. The endearing rhythmic dialogue and fantasy landscapes provide a beautiful medium for the story to unfold, further complimented by a soundtrack that is both serene and poignant. Combat and puzzle mechanics, while not challenging, are unique enough to keep the player interested. The warm atmosphere draws players into an experience that feels like a combination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and your favorite Studio Ghibli movie. Ultimately, the greatest appeal of the game is its beautiful artwork and touching story, which plays on the nostalgia of familiar fairy tales to enchant and intrigue.

In Journey, players encounter an altogether unique experience. You begin as a robed figure dwarfed amidst sprawling sand dunes in every direction. There is neither dialogue nor linear guidance; the only item of note is a distant mountain. As you begin to head towards it, slow strings of the breathtaking original soundtrack fade in.

The Grammy-nominated score is merely one-third of the game’s incredible appeal. Throughout the game, you traverse through ancient ruins, finding art and slowly understanding what happened to the civilization there.

The scenery and color scheme are majestic, and the ruins encourage exploration into the fringes, beyond just progressing the story forward. Journey refuses to impose a singular story or narrative throughout the entire adventure, allowing players to make of it what they will. Players grapple with complex situations in the face of multi-faceted themes, like death and rebirth,

hubris, ascension, and solitude. It lacks the in-yourface style of other games, leaving you instead to ponder events and scenes as you play. It stands as my favorite game of all time; each of my friends who have played were equally captivated, though had entirely unique thoughts during their play-throughs. Each element – music, graphics, story and theme – blends together to create a masterful and unforgettable experience. If nothing else, the trailer offers a glimpse into what I have tried to convey.

The games explored above represent a small sample of the unique and inspiring creations that we can encounter today. They have been used to demonstrate the potential for video games as art forms, and attempt to dispel knee-jerk reactions toward conventional ideas of video games. Though mainstream competitive “gaming” will continue to thrive, and while nothing is inherently wrong with this, there is an emerging sphere of unique, creative games that seek to explore diverse themes and provide a different kind of experience.

With originality, imagination and a desire to push boundaries, the video games discussed above truly offer an interactive medium like no other. Why does the rise of indie games matter? Not only does it signal a shift away from formulaic and over-milked franchises, but it also allows games to engage with social issues that large corporations are hesitant to touch, such as child abuse, environmentalism and mental health.

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Creative

Jacob Goldberg

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Instructions

by Jacob Goldberg

I’ve grown up and so have you And life’s been fast like a clock is fast When it runs on time But today it hasn’t.

So I’m wondering two things: One is when you decided To become my mother if You first bought a crib or a handbook

But I grew up and so did you And life was fast like a clock is fast When it runs on time until I asked if our souls would touch after death.

And I remember kissing you Goodbye at school and just wanting You to promise me that you’d See me at the end of the day;

And two is simply if I showed you – Amid the excitement of my kicks And the pain Autumn brought – If I showed you you had ankles?

Is that what drove you to the drawer For a pen and a prayer of love On the napkins I’d use to wipe The peanut butter from my lips at lunch?

But I grew up and so did you And life was fast like a clock is fast When it runs on time until I learned to speak.

But I grew up and so did you And life was fast like a clock is fast When it runs on time until I told you I was sad

What’d you think about that – That I was smart?

That I was special?

Yes, special, it must have been Special, that forgotten synonym of “unusual” Because finding life in the universe Is like finding a quarter in the pavement That usually only opens for dust and weeds.

Flora Deverell

Clockwork like heartrates Ticking and tocking And beating and thumping Knowing only to keep going Yet knowing nothing About what they’re doing And why they’re doing it – EKGs like sheet music, not music itself.

And for a moment I didn’t exist And you hadn’t yet become a mom And you prayed that questions lacking Answers was a temporary nuisance

But I’ve grown up and so have you And life’s been fast like a clock is fast When it runs on time which I guess is why I’m good at dancing.

Just as I did when I asked you if Our souls would touch; I was more curious Than I was concerned.

But I wish I were better Because I think that’s where the Answers might be So I signed up for a swing class.

But I grew up and so did you And life was fast like a clock is fast When it runs on time but now I’m concerned and I want to know.

For now, though, I’m still lost And have questions like if Being a mother is taxing or uplifting Or if you’d rather a hug

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Exotic

by Atusa Mehrasa Atusa Mehrasa

you thought i was exotic.

my sister dated one of you,

thought it was erotic

none of the stereotypes were true!”

that you could never quite pin

well, no shit, fuckface,

the colour of my skin

what did you expect?

to a specific origin

that we’re all terrorists,

this ambiguity is a turn-on for you,

running around unchecked?

and just another displacement for me.

i’ve got too much self-respect

there is nothing i can do

to sit here, and keep you erect

to change this view

while i, myself, am being bent over,

that i am more attractive

fucked not by your boner,

when this integral part of me is subtracted, inactive.

but more by your tone, or,

why is it that every plaid-wearing lad

more precisely,

named chad or brad

my desire to voice my frustrations

that i happen to meet

nicely and concisely

greets me in the same way

so maybe it was graceless

with the same goddamn things to say?

when i ran out of patience

iran, to you, is a spot on the map, you said: “eye-ran-ians get such a bad rep…

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and instead just said “go fuck yourself, racist.”

i never think i’m a popular person

stop fucking comparing me to food,

until i admit that i’m Persian

this is the most unappetizing way to be pursued.

‘cause then i’m told all the people “i must know,”

my eyes are not coffee, chocolate, or almonds,

“hello?? because they’re Persian too!

they are nothing short of two brown diamonds.

and i’m sure they’d love you!”

iran, to you, is a spot on the map,

so come here, dear white boys, let me sit you down,

you said: “eye-ran-ians get such a bad rep…

give you a little taste of what it is to be brown.

my sister dated one of you,

i’m saying this for all my sisters and brothers,

none of the stereotypes were true!”

who are continually made out to be the Other.

well, no shit, fuckface,

their ethnicities little mysteries for you to uncover,

what did you expect?

a series of hurdles before being your lover.

that we’re all terrorists,

first of all –

running around unchecked? i’ve got too much self-respect

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Confluences

by Boris But

My feet trail the rustle of bathwater: chamomile and ylang ylang.

For nights when I could not sleep my mother rose to run a bath and sat by the tub beside me.

The ceiling dappled with a liminal light, half-submerged, floating in her gentle floes.

The night spoke no words.

And out on the pebbled camps of Lesbos, they pass tales like kidney stones.

Makeshift serrated sheets scalp trusses of sea, naked feet speak in ink-froth, frail spokes flail in mirrored silver. The packed dinghy spills its contents: up to 146 asylum-seekers drown.

Among them - a pregnant woman treads water overnight.

Water breaks among water, the closing meets the opening, while others have learned to swim and drown, you decline, salt-bosomed child, you are small as a grain of sand spun with nacre pearling in the womb, still silent as your mother screams for you in a yet unlearned language.

Georgie Deverell

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Music

Emma Mickelberg

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Nina Simone, le Pouvoir d’une Voix Time Magazine

by Alix Weil

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ashington, 1963. Martin Luther King appelle à l’égalité pour son pays divisé par les luttes raciales. I have a dream. Quatre mots qui motiveront beaucoup à s’engager dans le combat pour la liberté. Pourtant, un an plus tard, dans les locaux des groupes d’activistes, c’est une toute autre voix qui résonne.

Pure, puissante, rauque par instant. Un timbre aux sonorités de jazz et de gospel. La voix d’une femme. Celle de Nina Simone.

La chanteuse n’est pas une inconnue. Sur la scène musicale, voilà près de dix ans que ses accords audacieux et ses envolées au piano séduisent autant les amateurs de Louis Armstrong que ceux de Bach. Nina Simone maîtrise à la perfection le ton, rythme et mélodie. Sous ses mains, le piano, devenu instrument roi, prend vie. Une virtuosité qui découle de la pratique intensive, dès son plus jeune âge, des gammes de la musique…classique. Car Nina Simone, de son vrai nom Eunice Waymon, se destinait avant tout à une carrière d’interprète et a fait ses classes en suivant les partitions de Chopin et Brahms. Pourtant, malgré elle, son répertoire évoluera vers le jazz, le blues, La déception est telle, que la pianiste délaisse son instrument. Mais la nécessité de

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gagner sa vie pousse très vite Nina Simone à renouer avec la musique. Elle donne des leçons à de jeunes enfants et, pour la première fois, utilise sa voix en accompagnement. Bientôt, elle reprend son propre apprentissage sous la forme de cours de piano privés. Leur coût élevé l’incite à se produire dans un bar d’Atlantic City. Eunice Waymon prend alors le surnom de Nina Simone et adapte son répertoire classique pour une audience populaire. Elle s’inspire de librement de Bach, Brel et Sinatra. Le gérant du bar insiste pour que sa prestation allie voix et piano. L’interprète est forcée d’accepter.

Son succès est fulgurant. Une foule d’amateurs se rend à ses représentations dans les petits pubs de la ville. I Love You, Porgy, reprise de Billie Holliday, est enregistrée et retransmise à la radio. Les salles de concerts s’agrandissent, dans le public se mêlent habitués et connaisseurs. Des collaborations artistiques lui sont proposées. Un premier album est publié et bientôt Nina Simone est entraînée dans une carrière qu’elle n’aurait jamais considérée envisageable.

La musicienne afro-américaine évolue dans un milieu masculin et majoritairement blanc. Les discriminations, comme partout aux Etats-Unis, sont omniprésentes. Mais la

Je me sentais plus vivante à cette époque qu’à présent car on avait besoin de moi, et je pouvais chanter pour aider mon peuple

puissance de sa voix, sa présence sur scène et sa renommée lui confèrent un pouvoir sur ses audiences. Lorsque Nina s’assoit au piano, le public se tait. Cette ascendance la pianiste n’en fait usage que dans son art. Dans tout le pays, la lutte pour les droits de l’Homme est engagée. Mais Nina Simone est avant tout une artiste. Si elle partage l’opinion de Dr.King, elle ne rallie pas sa musique à sa cause. Elle ne veut se servir ni de sa renommée ni de sa voix charismatique pour défendre un idéal.

15 septembre 1963. Quatre jeunes filles perdent la vie dans un attentat raciste qui vise une église baptiste de Birmingham, en Alabama. Pour Nina Simone, c’est l’élément déclencheur.

En réponse, elle écrit Mississippi Goddam. On retrouve le même chant puissant et rythmé, la mélodie rapide et entraînante au piano, les percussions discrètes. Mais les paroles sont à présent incisives, troublantes d’assertions.

“You don’t have to live next to me / Just give me my equality”.

La chanteuse prend finalement position et se fait la voix du mouvement.Mississippi Goddam tourne en boucle dans les lieux de réunion des révolutionnaires. Nina Simone se lie avec de nombreux représentants des groupes de résistance : Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes. La chanteuse reprend Strange Fruit de Billie Holliday qui dénonce les violences faites aux Afro-Américains dans les Etats du Sud. Elle enregistre Old Jim Crow, Backlash Blues, Young Gifted and Black: des textes forts, fédérateurs et engagés. L’artiste prône la lutte proactive et violente au détriment de la résistance passive défendue par Martin Luther King. Autant

par sa renommée que par son charisme, Nina subjugue les foules. Ses discours sont écoutés, son avis respecté. La voix grave et puissante qui a convaincue les musiciens entraîne à présent les activistes. “Je me sentais plus vivante à cette époque qu’à présent car on avait besoin de moi, et je pouvais chanter pour aider mon peuple” déclarera ultérieurement la pianiste.

Mais Nina Simone défend ses valeurs d’égalité dans d’autres sphères que celles des droits civiques. Avec Four Women, la chanteuse aborde le thème de la place, parfois difficile, que la femme occupe en société. Fière de ce qu’elle est, de son corps, elle n’hésite pas à s’opposer aux conventions imposées aux femmes. Elle revendique fièrement sa liberté, autant dans des choix vestimentaires osés qu’avec sa présence dans un monde essentiellement masculin. Avec aisance, elle fréquente politiciens, penseurs et hommes de renom.

La prestance conférée par sa voix sur scène irradie sur son personnage public.

Nina Simone n’est pas seulement un emblème du mouvement des droits civiques. C’est un symbole de la réussite d’une femme dans un milieu très masculin, celui de la musique et du jazz. C’est le symbole d’une femme qui a su faire entendre sa voix en politique. C’est le symbole d’une femme qui a su aller au-delà des conventions sociales pour être ce qu’elle voulait être. Son engagement et ses morceaux resteront intemporels. Et par le pouvoir de son timbre unique et de son caractère hors-norme, Nina Simone restera une icône.

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The Future Faces of the Music Industry: Self-Made and Counter-Cultural

by Jesse Gotfrit Travis Yewell

Jesse explores the future of music artists and record labels in the face of online streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple

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ith the advent of streaming services, the traditional landscape of the music industry and its initial role as the supplier of revenue to artists, has completely transformed. This change first took hold in the early 2000s, and since then, has had a dual effect. On the one hand, modes of recognition and promotion have been increasingly placed in the hands of artists, who are now less reliant on large media outlets and record companies to build their brands. On the other, it can be argued that the rise of streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify merely represent a mutation in the phenomena of traditional record companies: musicians are still underpaid and dependent on large companies.

Independent musicians ‒ Chance the Rapper to name a prominent example ‒ have built industries based on selfpromotion, achieved by means of giving out free music and building fan communities on social media. Chance, incidentally, is an imperfect example, because although he is not under contract with any major labels, he released his last two albums exclusively through Apple ‒ a choice which speaks to newly fluid frameworks of music promotion as much as it implies some degree of mainstream backing.

Chance’s situation points to a larger contradiction currently underway in the industry: can an artist be truly independent if they remain reliant on (often corporatized) streaming companies? Some artists, like Frank Ocean, remain independent by forming their own labels. Ocean released his sophomore album Blonde through his label Boys Don’t

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Cry, but only after fulfilling his contractual obligations to Def Jam via the visual album Endless. Others like Run the Jewels have made their music entirely free, thereby anticipating and embracing the trend in the music industry away from album sales towards other forms of revenue.

In an interview with GQ, Chance the Rapper explained that he makes most of his money off of touring and merchandise, which means he is dependent on a loyal fanbase for continued support and attendance. Though the decreasing viability of album sales is unfortunate for emerging artists, prominent artists are able to supplement their recorded material with merchandise and performance. The domain has changed, but if an artist is able to create compelling performances or commercial material, a satisfactory level of success may be within reach. In many ways, it comes down to the consumers and their willingness to support, financially or otherwise, the artists that we love.

Indeed, for better or worse, commodification has always been tied to the recording industry, dating back to the turn of the 20th century. In his seminal book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, social theorist Jacques Attali writes that music, “as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society.” “The artist was born,”

“(...) musicians are still underpaid and dependent on large companies.”

Carrie Schechter

says Attali, “at the same time that his work went on sale.”

In the face of seemingly universal economic circumstances for artists, the task of the musician has changed: instead of opposing commodification, artists must discover new, creative ways to commodify their work.

Along with changing the way musicians make a living, streaming services have also allowed artists to deconstruct the idea of a release ‒ especially the release of an album.

After the release of his latest album on Jay-Z’s streaming service TIDAL, Kanye West uploaded slightly different versions of several tracks long after its official release.

“These artists are challenging the industry to be increasingly self-conscious and critical as empowered artists pressure commercial musicians to analyze themselves.”

But the fall of the label industry has not only changed the kind of art we consume; it has also changed the kind of artists we see and hear. Queer and minority artists with a multitude of engaging messages and backgrounds have increasingly emerged from the DIY and independent landscapes, occupying space previously reserved for l abel-sanctioned artists.

Amaliah

Both Le1f and Mykki Blanco, two queer hip-hop artists, are subverting our perception of the genre and are giving viewership to alternate lifestyles and modes of expression that have until now been underappreciated. Mona Haydar, a Muslim spoken word poet-turned-rapper, who made headlines when her two videos “Wrap my Hijab” and “Dog” went viral, is another relevant example. These artists are challenging the industry to be increasingly self-conscious and critical as empowered artists pressure commercial musicians to analyze themselves. Though Kendrick Lamar has become a globally appreciated artist, he has done so releasing albums that not only offer staple rap but also carry content that is skeptical of narratives, particularly those surrounding community violence.

It is hard to predict what kind of protest music will emerge from minority artists as North America’s socio-political environment evolves. Social and cultural events have always been tied to music, in the same way that music has always been tied to the economy. These factors will always be at work. What has changed, however, is that capital (the cultural kind, at least) is, to some extent, back in the hands of the artist. And while the links between music and commerce are still robust, the future of the industry seems rife with possibilities for artists to take commercialism into their own hands and pushing the socio-political boundaries in an inclusive direction.

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Elli Slavitch

Opinion

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Politically Correct Minds are Fragile, Fragmented Minds

by Shafkat Sakeebur Rahman Explores the roots and true meaning of what we coin as “PC”, emphasizing that society needs to stop creating safe spaces and instead teach people how to be resilient to negative opinions.

Oh

, what a world we live in! Everyone’s obsessed with labeling everyone else. In the 1980s, eminent physicist David Bohm addressed this particular fragmentation of our consciousness in which we, humans, have a natural proclivity to create distinctions among ourselves in terms of race, gender, nation, etc. Bohm argues that these kinds of classifications lead to instabilities within political systems an result in conflict. Recently, Justin Trudeau was criticized for mansplaining to a woman in the audience during a town hall in Edmonton. On the other side of the social divide, an esteemed professor from the University of Toronto, Dr Jordan Peterson came under fire for refusing to use legislated gender neutral pronouns under Bill C-16; a bill that has now passed second reading in the House of Commons, which adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of attributes protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.

So what is actually happening?

These days everyone is so afraid of being called “sexist”, “racist”, “anti-Semitic”, “transphobic” or some other label that can end your career, that we are all treading too carefully around issues of diversity, avoiding them altogether if we possibly can. Such is the idea of political correctness (PC) and it has gained traction over the past decade. The term is usually associated with the censorship of policies, actions, and language seen to disadvantage or offend a particular group of people in society, and with the development of ways to fix such social injustices.

So what is the big idea?

Critical Theory and the PC Culture The present counter-revolution against liberty has several battlegrounds in North American society. The most graphic account of this can be seen on college and university campuses across the country, where the ideology of “political correctness” is suppressing freedom of speech, intellectual controversy, and debate. The most essential ingredient to this campaign is the apprehension and regulation of language.

A major contributor to the PC movement is the doctrine put forward by postmodernist academics such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse. Derrida criticized the psychological process of categorization, suggesting that making any divisions is itself an act of motivated exclusion, serving the interests of maintaining power, an idea that got popular in the humanities departments of universities.

Indeed, the central tenet of postmodernist philosophy is that there is no single description of reality - there infinitely many.

However, before Derrida, postmodern philosophy drew its foundations from Marxism. Enter critical theory, also known as cultural Marxism: both terms hold important historical origins.

After World War I, intellectuals, like Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, argued that Marxist class theory was not realized because Western values were too religiously bound by Christianity and placed more emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the collective.

These values had to be destroyed in order for the communist utopia to be achieved. A derivative thought structure of this

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philosophy was cultivated by a number of intellectuals to create the Frankfurt School: the first institutional stronghold of cultural marxism.

The members of the Frankfurt School - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name a few - reorientated the locus of struggle from class to culture. In other words, the traditional Marxist Klassenkampf (class struggle) was to be entirely repackaged with a new set of Marxist values of the Kulturkampf (culture struggle). With the rise of Nazism and the intellectual migration that followed, cultural marxism was transplanted into the American context - the Frankfurt School found a new home in New York.

Marxism was intellectually rebranded and repackaged as Critical Theory and the foundations of Critical Theory were thematically morphed from socialism to liberalism and progressivism. The bourgeoisie-proletariat binary was replaced by the oppressor-oppressed binary. Taking this historical context into account, it can be argued that modern progressives hold their ideological roots in the ideas of the aforementioned socialists. Once socialism got a bad rap for the central direction and command under the Soviet Union, it quickly transformed itself into “progressive liberalism” with a linguistic sleight-of-hand commonly known as “postmodernism”.

The followers of modern progressivism have learned to harness this philosophy and reclothe it as proper etiquette and good manners. Indeed, a cynic would argue that good manners have been weaponized to silence and condemn anyone or anything not consistent with their worldview and political agenda. However, the point of this article transcends a cynical interpretation of political correctness.

PC culture represents a new form of progressivism, but without adequate debate around the progressive ideas, they may never become social norms.

Networks, Beliefs and Antifragility Our brains are complex systems that are made of neurons that network together and give emergence to conscious experiences. Just as our neurons form networks in order to give us a conscious experience, our T-cells form networks to keep our immune systems working and our organs form networks to keep the body working. All complex systems have this inherent need to form networks with other complex systems to achieve a higher level of organization. Since humans are complex systems they have social networks

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“These days everyone is so afraid of being called “sexist”, “racist”, “anti-Semitic”, “transphobic” or some other label that can end your career.” between themselves that give rise to an organizational structure we call society.

It is of immense importance to understand that our beliefs are an emergent phenomenon of networked perceptual experiences. The perceptual experiences we communicate reproduce themselves within certain recognizable patterns: this is what we call beliefs. All complex systems are subject to certain rules and one of them is anti-fragility.

Anti-fragility is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe a system that gets stronger when subject to disruptions. Our beliefs are antifragile systems because they grow stronger when faced with examples that counter it. One such example is the belief in God for religious people. When faced with hardships or situations that are difficult, their belief in God increases. The same goes for our immune systems, which are also characterized by antifragility. When one is given a flu shot, a tiny amount of virus is introduced in the body which allows the immune system to develop a more comprehensive defense against the flu.

In my opinion, the West has a tremendous disgust towards discomfort. That goes for every aspect of life - from eating habits to child rearing. In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt of the Atlantic argues that overprotective parents shielding their children from adversity are also shielding them from hardships that help them mature, giving rise to hypersensitive adults.To once again draw a comparison to our immune systems, doctors prescribe Prozac like candy: one in ten Americans are antidepressants. If one looks at the statistics, in Africa, where healthcare is almost next to nothing, people are more resistant to diseases. However, in North America you will see that excessive germ-sensitivity has given rise to a phenomena in which their own immune system attacks the body resulting in autoimmune diseases.

The same goes for our sociocultural position right now.

Certain groups of people have become so hypersensitive (because of their upbringing) that they have an overemphasized reaction towards anything that does not match their current state of beliefs. Their beliefs are not

prone to antifragility. Now and then, it is okay to eat out of a hand that has not been properly washed.

We do not need “safe spaces” in universities. Instead, we need the humanities departments to be humane and critical enough to empower students intellectually in order for them to foster in themselves the right kind of antifragility required to protect their belief systems from viral thoughts that result in negative ideologies. Let us move beyond fragility and face negative ideologies as they should be faced: with a stable mind.

“Once socialism got a bad rap (...), it quickly transformed itself into “progressive liberalism” with a linguistic sleightof-hand commonly known as “postmodernism.”

Elli Slavitch

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Politics & Economics

Yolanda Zhang

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Is There Anything Money Can’t Buy?

by Will Hanna

Explores the consequences of living in a market society. What does it mean to apply market rationality to all facets of society?

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such that each is set to benefit. The market economy has without a doubt been an important tool in creating material prosperity for the masses.

The initial reaction of most would be to say, ‘Well yes, of course we have. This way we’ve made ourselves richer than ever before in history, lifted billions out of poverty, and secured a greater quality of life for future generations.’

Many of these points are indeed valid. The triumph of capitalism has allowed for vast portions of the world to access previously inaccessible levels of wealth. The post-war system of international relations has led to seventy years of relative peace between countries with enough arms to destroy the world hundreds of times over. We’ve also created medical technology which is pushing the average lifespan of an individual from a developed country towards 100 years.

So, what’s to worry about?

The cost-benefit analysis has become our standard for interpreting what is good and what is not. When we turn to history, one sees that this was not always the case. Karl Polanyi, the economic historian who penned The Great Transformation, a seminal text in economic history, argued in favour of a concept he called embeddedness.

Embeddedness, for Polanyi, is that our economic decisions rely on numerous social facts, which are also determinants of our activity. Prior to the development of industrial capitalism, economic decisions were not based on principles of market exchange, but instead on long-term relationships of reciprocal trust, as well as arbitration from the social institutions that determined the standards of morality and cultural value. It might be said that the project of neoclassical economics is to secularize the study of the economy from these social factors: to make economic decisions seen as a product of individual choice rather than social determination. This project has been about the development of a certain type of person: the homo economicus.

fficiency is our God. The triumph of neoliberalism over its ideological competitors in the latter half of the 20th century means that we, as a global society, have all but submitted ourselves to a modus operandi of governance, based on maximizing the proverbial cost-benefit equation. To challenge economic growth is sacrilegious, and to impede business is a sin. A powerful faith has been developed on the basis of theories postulated only 50 years ago. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom is revered in spheres of power as something of a theological masterpiece. Consumption is the new opium of the people.

As Harvard Philosopher Michael Sandel emphasizes , we have transitioned from using the market economy as a valuable tool to becoming a society dominated by market rationality.

There are certain characteristics of a market society that we should question before adopting so wholeheartedly.

A market economy is a system whereby our material transactions are governed by market principles: free and rational agents agree on an exchange of goods or services

A market society, on the other hand, is one where market rationality permeates all spheres of social life – where market rationality is no longer reserved to just the market.

Politics, law, healthcare and even family life are governed by principles of value maximization and efficiency. The legacy of the free-market ideology ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s has left a significant mark on our psyches.

While the successful economization of man may result in a capitalist utopia – where freedom is all-pervading

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and exploitation is absent – as in other utopian visions of society, we know this is not possible. How we are raised, what we are taught in school and the moral perspectives we’ve inherited from our parents have substantial effects on how we interact with the external world. Sociology has

“Consumption is the new opium of the people” spent its time reflecting on our social habits, looking at human behaviour as more socially deterministic than not.

While implications of such a claim may seem disturbing, challenging our traditional views of agency and moral responsibility, it should be recognized that this is, to some degree, true. We are not in fact computational machines looking to maximize utility at each step, but irrational beings who make decisions based on socially imposed values and norms which may even go against our own interests in a strictly economic sense. To pretend otherwise is to adopt a conceited view on how well we understand human nature.

The logic of a market society ignores all of this.

Sandel claims that the pervasion of market rationality into our social lives creates a number of potentially harmful effects, the first of which relates to inequality. If living in a world where unequal distribution of wealth means only that some have access to fancy cars and vacations, and others do not, this world would not be so bad. Inequality is not bad in itself – a world where everyone has 10 dollars is no better than a world where everyone has 10 except for one, who has 100. Though, the consequences inequality brings about can indeed be judged. When inequality implies that the rich also have control over the poor, that is where wealth buys governance, and when inequality begins to matter much more. Pervasion of market principles into our civic life corrodes the integrity of our substantive civic equality.

In our market society, education, healthcare and equality in the eyes of the law are commodities available for purchase and sale more than ever before.

Secondly, in a market society, the market is the supreme arbiter of value. Efficiency and economic performance

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‘crowd out’ cultural norms and practices, which we may in fact value. It’s true that market mechanisms allow us to achieve favourable outcomes in society: taxes on cigarettes prolong lives and subsidies on health foods enhance the quality of diets. But when non-material, or ‘cultural goods’ become subject to market forces, market transactions alter the characteristics of those goods transacted. Take, for example, money incentives for children to read books, paid tours to hunt majestic animals (see Cecil the lion), or companies offering payments to market their product on someone’s skin (human billboards). When market ideals begin to pervade what we deem as intrinsically valuable, i.e. motivation to learn, our affinity with the natural world and the integrity of one’s body, those social norms become subject to alteration by means of the market.

Finally, market rationality is beginning to take a toll on the democratic project which society has spent decades attempting to cultivate. Money in politics has created a sense that only the elite have access to shaping policy. Protection of meritocratic ideals has led to the empirical collapse of the American Dream, and rampant inequality leaves a cleavage between those with influence and those without. One of the effects of submitting our shared values to the power of the market is a corrosion in our sense of commonality. Those things that our nations and communities were founded upon – principles of freedom, justice, equality and shared history – mean increasingly different things to different people. Living in different social spheres, with different social values, undermines the common life that individuals in a democracy rely upon to determine the common good.

One of the more insidious characteristics of the institution of a market society is its discreteness. The argument of efficiency in our political and economic deliberation seems to take eminence over all others, but to what end? If the goal of our political life is indeed to brazenly maximize output in all matters, then it is true that efficiency should be prioritized over all else. Though if our aim is to create a sustainable, just and culturally imbued society, mere efficiency will not suffice. It will take serious collective consideration to determine where market principles belong and where they do not. Let us begin with the following question: is everything up for sale?

Sharon McCutcheon

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Covering Uyghur: Whose Orient?

by Yolanda Zhang

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China’s recent mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang should be contextualized in the century-old rhetoric of Han Chinese chauvinism and neoliberal reform under Deng. At the mean time, Western media’s Orientalist tendencies in curating “an authoritarian China” or “a vulnerable Muslim group” might do the opposite of alleviating the tension.

ast week, Rap of China, a streamed competition show known for making hip-hop music popular across Mainland China, awarded its first- and second-prizes to two Uyghur rappers from Xinjiang. Nawukere (featured in the streaming box on the front page of the official site shown above), gaining a national fandom immediately at his first round tryout, showcased and rustled with multiple dimensions of regional identities expressed into dialects and slangs in his stage performance, “I am from Xinjiang”. Drawing on a series of references to masculinity, dream-chaser, and energy, the song ended in the rapper’s unexpected final line: “... and I am made in China.”

Uyghur: as news, as nation, as subaltern In January 2018, a news coverage by The Guardian brought China’s repression of the Uyghurs to the world’s attention again. Citing a report from US-backed Radio Free Asia, the article reveals the alleged confinement of tens of thousands of Uyghurs into political “re-education camps”.

In response, China defended the camps as part of its fight in its northwest borderlands against the “three forces” [san gu shili]: terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Beijing’s counterterrorist discourse, despite its nature of policy coalition with the US after 9/11 and its intensification following the return of Uyghur militants from Syria in 2017, speaks to the underlying history of ethnic tension between the Uyghurs and the Chinese Han majority.

A glimpse into the complexity within the identities and cultures at the heart of Eurasian crossroads might require entering a historical terrain untraveled by most followers of international politics. Having participated in the state-

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building of Soviet Union and in the movements of reformist jadidism, pan-Turkism, and pan-Asianism, the Uyghurs are most commonly known today simply as a Turkic people residing in Xinjiang and constituting one of the fifty-five ethnic minorities [shaoshu minzu], unified in one Chinese nation [zhonghua minzu].

Xinjiang, hailed as the “Pivot of Asia” by Owen Lattimore, with its trade routes extending to the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Europe, has fallen prey to geopolitical ambitions of global powers in the modern times. Beijing, having built pipelines from Karamay and nuclear testing base at Lop Nur in the past, is most recently developing Kashgar into a crucial station for the New Silk Road (aka Belt and Road Initiative). Moscow, during the course of the 20th century, has cast political penetration on the region, most prominently marked by its attempt of invasion in 1934. The US, having assigned over 10-year Guantanamo Bay imprisonment to 22 innocent Uyghurs soon after 9/11, listed East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organization. But the violence doesn’t stop there.

In May 2016, the Beijing branch of the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV interviewed Anar Pishti, a Uyghur comedy show crew regionally famous in Xinjiang. Oriented to promote culture learning and tackle stereotypes, the hostess unknowingly presented sober questions that seemed completely normal to her Han audience but triggered unease with the Uyghur interviewees. Her approach, no doubt, was based strictly on a series of incomplete images schematized and normalized in the Han consciousness: na’an bread, talent in dancing [nengge shanwu], engagement in fighting, and even the very “fierce-looking” [hen xiong] physique.

Similar xenophobic sentiments can be observed from the Internet outrage to Meituan take-out company’s special respect paid to protecting Halal food, Beijing city bureau’s evacuation of Uyghur cut cake vendors in Weigongcun district, and the likes. At the same time, Uyghur food is popularized and fetishized through the 2012 cuisine documentary A Bite of China, and the indigenous art and music continue to attract Mainland tourists’ Nikon lenses to Xinjiang from the Mainland and beyond. Any instinctual attempt of applying the Western race and ethnicity discourses to those tensions would require a contextualization of the case of China.

The Middle Kingdom and Han chauvinism: locating an “oriental orientalism” Dru C. Gladney, in his Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects, invokes the term “oriental orientalism” to describe how the representation of minorities and the majority in Chinese art, literature, and media have drawn surprising parallels to the now well-known portrayals of the East by the Western orientalist. Testifying to Partha Chatterjee’s “derivative discourse”, the value system of Western imperialism experienced by China in the past is now adopted by the China’s Han majority onto the minorities. After all, a nonWestern entity, despite being traditionally subjugated to the consciousness of the West, is also capable of exerting hegemonic powers on another reimagined Orient.

If the Western knowledge and representation of the East is only made possible within the frameworks of colonialism, then one is prompted to attribute China’s reimagination of the Uyghurs and other non-Han subjects to the ancient discourse, “Sino-Barbarian distinction” [hua-yi zhi bian].

Baogang He explains that Confucianism requires a mentordisciple relation which induces minority groups to conform to Confucian moral orthodoxy and an epistemological system. Instead of direct discrimination on the racial line, the xenophobic psyche of Imperial China inferiorizes its other on the line of civility and cultural development.

Therefore, when Xinjiang became China’s province in 1884, Chinese elements were incorporated into the Inner Asian region’s Islamic culture, most notably in the pedagogical setting, enforced by the building of xuetang - schools in the Chinese tradition. Entering the twentieth century, China’s Social Darwinist elites like Liang Qichao officially nurtured and consolidated a strong Han identity in resistance to the increased Western spheres of influences since the First Opium War in 1840. The Han anti-imperialist nationalism, however, manifested in Xinjiang in the form of strengthening of the colonizer-colonized/Han-Uyghur relations that

Yolanda Zhang

eventually culminated to the self-determination of the Uyghurs in the 1920s.

Marxism and “Affirmative Actions”: beyond national and ethnic identities “In so far as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against.”

Vladimir I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to SelfDetermination The adoption of a Marxist discourse led China to denounce Han chauvinism and redeem the Uyghur subalternity by incorporating minorities into the narrative of the Chinese state structure. Inspired by Lenin’s self-determination theory, Mao’s 1949 communist regime promised Xinjiang the right of secession and initiated anti-bourgeois religion, land reforms, and women’s liberation. Emulating the Soviet Union, communist China granted official recognition of ethno-nationality to minorities. Ethnic differences were emphasized, and ethnic-friendly preferential policies (much like affirmative actions in the West) were implemented. This remains an influential legacy to this date, characterized by adoption of multilingual language policies in primary and secondary education, exemption from One Child Policy, and prioritization in university entrance exams.

As testifying as it might be, to Will Kymlicka and other liberal scholars’ concerns with the communist regime’s subordination of hereditary human identities to fundamental class struggle, Mao’s enforcement of native identities through ethnic profiling took an abrupt twist as the revolution reached a radical apex in the ‘60s. While the rest of China faced mass-mobilized liquidation of traditional Chinese artifacts and the intelligentsia class, Xinjiang witnessed degree of demolishment of many non-

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Han cultures, viewed as a sign of “backwardness” and thus an element of the “remnant capitalism”.

However, despite its pragmatist component, the Maoist ethnic discourse describes a process of “intermingling” [ronghe], instead of “assimilation” [tonghua]. One (hegemonic) group doesn’t really destroy another, but both are equally modified in advancing towards one’s prosperity.

The land reforms and anti-federalist campaigns served as a unifying platform to cultivate a sense of class identification amongst the agrarian proletariat of all ethnicities.

Capitalism and stratification: ethnicity as commodity “The market can do little to transform an economy without a parallel shift in class relations, private property, and all the other institutional arrangements that typically ground a thriving capitalist economy.”

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism Mao’s progressive policy of ethno-nationality went awry in Deng Xiaoping’s “new era” of mixed economy, backfiring as an outmoded barrier toward the upcoming tides of an ethnic melting pot required by capitalism. Deng’s 1978 introduction of market economy was geared towards unleashing individual and local initiatives required to foster productivity and economic growth; but the subsequent devolution of power to regions and localities culminated to geographical and ethnic-based disparities. Market reforms concentrated mainly on the coastal regions and large metropolises, largely marginalizing the Uyghurs and other minorities who concentrated in the inland and the northwest on the line of spatial and linguistic disadvantages (even today, more than 70% of the Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang do not speak Mandarin).Gustafsson and Li reported that the minority-majority gap in average per-capita income were doubled in 1988 - 1995.

The first immediate consequence of this was the passive creation of ethnic industries. Minorities were forced to look to their cultural assets as a last-resort commercial leverage and developed “symbolic economy” and “experience economy”, such as tourism. Jiaping Wu stresses that such economically driven cultural establishments reconfigured the Maoist narrative of cultural differences in a context devoid of ideological content. What resulted was the reinforcement of the Han’s perception of the minorities as the exotic other.

A second consequence, the creation of a class of migrant workers, shortly followed Deng’s loosening of residential

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control. While stratification across the country unfolded already vertically between farmers, industrial workers, and bureaucrats, it also simultaneously played out horizontally between minority migrants and coastal natives (dominantly Han). The idea of urban labor markets, essentially nonexistent under the previous state-planned economy, became a key site for the reconstruction of ethnic identities. Heightened majority-minority contacts, in turn, fermented conflicts put into an insider-outsider dichotomy, which on the policy level alone was characterized by the institutionalized restriction on the migrant workers’ access to urban social services.

Ethnic status emerged to be a determinant of job attainment that is even more significant than gender; meanwhile, in residential areas, ethnic identities were strengthened, giving birth to developments of ethnic enclaves, such as Beijing’s Wegongcun, the “Xinjiang Village”.

It is against this ambivalent historical backdrop that the global War on Terror narrative entered the contemporary Chinese psyche. The Uyghur “other” perceived by the rest of post-911 China increasingly became tainted with the flattened image that the world has assigned to Islam. The Sino-Barbarian discourse, originated from the era prior to the entire century of progress and liberation, has resurfaced today among the Chinese elites.

The “West” and Media Industry: an orientalist master plot “The activities of covering and covering up Islam have almost eliminated consideration of predicament of which they are symptoms: the general problem of knowing and living in a world that has become far too complex and various for easy and instant generalizations.”

Edward Said, Covering Islam A problem inherent in the media industry today is a tendency to oversimplify China’s discourse of nation and ethnicity, and with that, a perpetual orientalist gesture that resonates with what Said strived to critique in 1981. Even though the dominant tone adopted by the leftist and liberal authorship of the recent political crimes - of the Rohingyas, the Kurds, and now the Uyghurs - conveys empathy, if not full solidarity, the existing literature is nonetheless packed with repetitions and affirmations to the same patches of images that the West has designated to its Orient since the age of colonialism. With the particular kind of master plot at hand, the mainstream media industry is able to mass codify a series of timeless images of the villain (China, Russia, and other “Asiatic despots”) and the victim (minority and

underprivileged groups deprived of agency of expression).

The violence simulated by such tension elicits from the West an impulse of taking the moral responsibility and supplant as the Messianic and masculine positive hero himself.

Covering a “monolithic” Islam “Muslim” is once again used as a blanket term to provoke preconceived notions and paint a reductionist picture of Islam. In a country with a Muslim population rounding up to 23 million, tantamount to that of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the Uyghurs represent less than half of the believers in China. The other major Muslim ethnic group, the Hui, are largely unaffected by Beijing’s actions. Through their entrepreneurialism (as opposed to the Han and the Uyghur agriculturalism), Hui merchants gained economic leverages almost disproportionally since the market reform of the ‘80s. Major Muslim holiday celebrations such as Eid al-Adha and al-Fitr are being observed both in Huidominated cities like Lanzhou and in metropolitan places like Beijing or Guangzhou.

China’s anti-extremist program only targets a certain Muslim sub-group: those who are both of Xinjiang hukouand of Turkic ethnicities. This is, unfortunately, not the type of information that the historiographical authority of the media industry would want to winnow out and emphasize.

Covering an “impotent” Uyghur “Uyghur”, too, is portrayed with generalizations, whose complex historical account and individual dimensions are bracketed from most of the discussion. According to Chen Yu-wen, the international Uyghur lobby communities, spearheaded by World Uyghur Congress (WUC), commonly consist of former Uyghur business and ruling elites who seek to ally with Western democracies to retaliate China in revenge for their exile and loss of prestige. Rebiya Kadeer, the spokesperson of WUC, was known previously as the billionaire operating trading companies all over Central Asia. Ilham Mahmut, the Japan-based coordinate of the organization, allegedly gained his support from rightwing anti-communist groups. As Ernest Gellner and later Paul R. Brass suggest, the elites’ leading role in the process of the construction of nations by “drawing upon, distorting, and sometimes fabricating materials from the cultures of the groups they wish to represent in order to protect their well-being or to gain political economic advantage for their groups as well as for themselves.”

Contrary to popular belief, ordinary Uyghur citizens residing in Xinjiang express resentment towards Uyghur diaspora activists, contending that the situation would have

been better off had those leaders not cultivated separatist sentiments retaliated by Beijing’s tightening of security measures. Reed and Raschke’s report characterizes presentday Uyghur ethno-political thought in four categories, among which separatism by no means represents the vast majority. Many modern Uyghurs remain apathists, focusing on the personal concerns of their daily existence no different from Han commoners. Before 9/11 and Beijing’s subsequent tightening of security measures, lower-middle class Uyghurs were optimistic about Beijing’s progresses made towards prioritization of regional socioeconomic parity embodied by the 2000 initiative of Western Development.

Some Uyghur youth [minkaohan], typically having received urban education in Xinjiang and in the China Proper, prefer assimilationism and modern education. Embracing the idea of their full absorption into a multiethnic Chinese state, those Uyghur intellectuals at home disdain the Maoist legacy of preferential policies on the ground of double standard just as much as they detest the international Uyghur lobby movement whose separatist agenda has nurtured a Uyghur nationalism and exceptionalism.

Covering an “authoritarian” China To what extent is the Uyghur cause only a proxy image to elicit the impression of an authoritarian China? New York Times and Washington Post were able to expand their market share simply by masturbating with a wet flow of essentially empty, yet profound and morally charged phrases - “regime at war with the human soul will eventually lose”, amongst others - to feed into exactly what the Western-educated audience desired to confirm.

Rhetoric as such directly corresponds to the US-China political, economic and ideological tensions. The orientalist gaze seems to have found its “safe space” in a Hobbesian realist discourse of international relations where a “balancing” of the self and the other is required by necessity of survival. US Republican Senator Marco Rubio recently spoke against Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang only to warn the American corporations and tech companies against trading surveillance and DNA technologies to China. The “clash of civilizations” reached a record high as the US-China relation kicked off a game of chicken since the embarkment of the trade war in March.

This explains why the term “Western media” has grown to adopt a well-deserved connotation of a swearing word in Mainland China. The phenomenon functions not only as a rational retaliation to the master plot, but also as a noble, martyr-like resistance to the ever-familiar Western imperialism. Not until the Xinjiang issue can be fully

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decoupled from the pursuit of Western interests in Asia will the Western media’s adoption of a “universal” language that speaks under an anti-racism and de-marginalization discourse be at least partially justified.

An East-West Empire and a Muted Subaltern “Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule - in short, a new form of sovereignty.”

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire The orientalist discourse unfolded before us is no longer the one originated under the European pretext of colonialism as defined by Said; or that of imperialism, the particular stage in the history of the capitalist mode of production per orthodox Marxists. We see, on the horizon of the East arose a form of power that seems to stand for “nationalist in form and neoliberalist in content”, and on that of the West, a perhaps unintended coalition between the right-based Liberals and profit-oriented Neocons. Both are driven by the same engine of globalization that treats the universal, planetary sphere as a single, systemic set.

As Vivek Chibber suggests, the Slave and the Orient in the past are, after all, capable of participating in the win-win “joint venture” with the Master and the West, the traditional hegemon. “When the Subalternist theories put up the giant

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walls separating East from West, and when they insist that Eastern agents are not driven by the same kinds of concerns as Western agents, what they’re doing is endorsing the kind of essentialism and colonial authorities used to justify their depredations in the nineteenth century. It’s the same kind of essentialism that American military apologists used when they were bombing Vietnam or when they were going into the Middle East.”

In the case of the recent international reaction to China’s Uyghur problem, such joint-venture has been put together by elitist individuals, institutions, industries, and states without the traditional boundaries drawn on the lines of their national, ethnic, and cultural identities. Therefore, any justifications for China made by the international Left based on Mao’s egalitarian treatment to the minority proletarians is to turn a blind eye on today’s socioeconomic disparities overlapped on the line of ethnicity. Similarly, any callings for humanitarian intervention stemming from the Liberal’s value in universal minority rights is to commit to both an ideological imperialism and indirect support for the US political interest in Central Asia. The voice of the subaltern is yet to be liberated from the confinement of the current convoluted layers of representation into a single potentiality for presentation unadulterated by interests of the global exploitative class.

Science & Tech

Antimodular Research

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Technocapitalism and the Moral Hazards of Impending Transhumanism

by Nicolas Botero Intersection of technological advancement (AI), economic adjustments, and ethical considerations

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iscourse on futurology often takes on quixotic airs; within the context of seemingly exponential technological growth, it becomes easy to view future technology as an unyielding force for engineering social and industrial change. With the greater productive efficiency that technology brings, it is said that we can all get more things at lesser costs. What tends to be omitted from the most idealistic of these projections are the structural reverberations their realisation may send across the relevant sectors’ attendant labor markets. When poverty and unemployment do enter the equation, the problems they represent are framed as problems of distribution, themselves something to be remedied by technological and social innovation.

For every job destroyed by increases in efficiency, it is often assumed that a new, better job will appear to take its place.

After all, if humans do not need to do menial tasks, they can be free to pursue other, more creative, more “fulfilling” goals. Fearing that this may not be the case seems a sure way to be called a luddite. Indeed, economists even use the term “luddite fallacy” to denigrate the notion that unemployment in specific job markets affected by technological growth (technological unemployment) can lead to overall unemployment in the labor market as a whole (structural unemployment).

The Industrial Revolution provides a textbook example of massive technological advancement that caused widespread shifts in employment from some fields to others, leaving overall employment rates relatively intact. By creating machines that augmented the physical capabilities of human

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labor, fewer people were required to do the same jobs, and the increased production brought down prices for goods, thus allowing people to purchase more items, which in turn drove demand up, created more jobs, and so on. The service industry, as well, was made possible by an expanded middle class that could spend money on things beyond food and shelter. Today, a new revolution looms. Brought upon by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and robotics, computers are rapidly improving their cognitive capacities and are threatening to transform the labor market as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution did. But are there any grounds to heed the luddites’ worries?

This possibility is worth considering for two principle reasons. First, because this revolution deals with the cognition of machines, there will be permanent losses in low-skill labor options, precipitating the possibility of entry level jobs requiring qualifications that are unachievable for many people. Secondly, the global capitalist economic system currently in place would concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those least inclined to distribute the benefits of technological growth: the owners of the technology itself.

The first of these problems would obviously be directly allayed by increasing the average intelligence of the labor pool to match the requirements of this new generation of jobs. Assuming that better schooling and childcare

“(...) the problems they represent are framed as problems of distribution (...)”

isn’t enough to do this, there are two remaining options, enabled by the futurist context of the problem at hand: eugenics, and artificial cognitive improvement. The former of these is marred by the obvious, concomitant moral considerations, but finding ways to improve the way we think through technology seems a poetic way to address technologically-caused unemployment. The most prominent futurological avenue to carry this out would be the brain-implanted, physical “add-ons” of transhumanism.

Unfortunately, the very economic problems that this option is meant to address are what make it so hard to implement.

Complicated, cutting-edge medical procedures of the kind that would be necessary to actually implement transhuman modifications, were they to ever be realised in the first place, would almost certainly be restrictively expensive. As such, it would seem likely to further exacerbate inequality, as the rich and powerful within a transhumanist reality would be able to directly leverage economic inequality into intellectual and genetic inequality.

Further complicating the matter is that the technology that could potentially cause permanent structural unemployment may come before the technology or legalization of transhumanism. Indeed, self driving cars, automated fast food service, and robotic manufacturing are all on the brink of automating millions of jobs, while the genetic basis underlying intelligence is nowhere close to being understood. Human intelligence itself, to be frank, is poorly understood by both cognitive and computer scientists, despite the fact that both fields are in their “golden ages”, while, as previously mentioned, AI research has been making particularly fast progress in creating intelligent systems.

The big leaps AI research has made, however, are generally still within the frameworks of specific tasks, not the generalized – and flexible – intelligence characteristic of human beings. Contemporary machine learning is most predominantly implemented via methods within the domain of “supervised learning” – a set of techniques in which machines learning a given task are shown examples of successful completions of the task, and given feedback (in the form of “error signals”) to correct their performance. In human learning, things like the laws of physics and object segmentation are innately understood through exploration and exposure in the real world; you do not need to be Isaac Newton to heuristically infer certain physical realities from viewing an apple fall from a tree. Because research is so much more advanced regarding the aforementioned, narrower forms of

intelligence, applications that rely on intelligent behavior for specific tasks are going to come much earlier than those that rely on general intelligence. Since jobs by and large require limited sets of behavior, and transhuman modifications would require holistic understandings of the human mind – not to mention ways to deal with the complex psychological impact of actually being implemented – it is almost certain that large swathes of the job market will be automated before there is any significant adoption of transhuman modifications.

What we still have not established, however, is exactly why this upcoming revolution would cause unemployment that is structural in nature, rather than just technological, as in the Industrial Revolution. The short-term reason is that we can’t think about automation in a vacuum: it’s effects are being filtered through the modern capitalist economy. Blue collar labor in North America is already rapidly disappearing, and unemployment rates for those without a college education are significantly higher than average.

“Human intelligence itself, to be frank, is poorly understood by both cognitive and computer scientists (...)”

While this in itself is not a terrible thing – after all, college education should provide better working opportunities – it is concerning when one considers the prohibitive and ballooning costs of college education. With no job market, and no money to move into a different one, blue collar workers replaced by automation will be faced with largescale unemployment and poverty. This will lead to ever growing inequality as the wages that would have once been paid to workers are now turned into investments for the hardware and software created by the smaller technocratic class.

Let us assume for a moment that AI-based automation goes beyond self-driving taxis, and takes a larger role in the economy, eliminating many skilled jobs, as well as unskilled ones. In fact, it seems likely that only when AI is advanced enough to automate these skilled jobs, will the technology necessary for transhuman modifications be available. In this environment, there may be a class of “unemployables” who lack the necessary abilities to maintain a job that has not been automated, and who would require transhuman modification to obtain those abilities.

Unless the operations are free, these are the same people that would not be able to afford those modifications to function.

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Furthermore, even if they are free, there is something morally problematic about forcing people to undergo a radical operation just to be functional in society. In either case, the possibility of transhuman modifications would create a class difference between those that attain them and those who do

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not. The ethical questions surrounding transhumanism and automation would become as important as the technological ones, and careful consideration in how these technologies are implemented would be needed, should we have any hope of resolving the immense attendant power imbalances.

Prozac Planet: The Microbiome and our Mental Health

by Georgie Deverell

O

Georgie Deverell

ver the past 18 months, ten students killed themselves at my undergraduate university. Today, one in ten people in the West are prescribed antidepressants. Mental health is clearly in crisis. It’s time we received alternative approaches with an open mind. Allow me to put forward a case: microbes in our gut, which are determined by what we eat, can affect the way we feel.

Descartes’ dualism could be viewed as the single most detrimental axiom in the world of healthcare: the notion that the mind-body divide is not traversable. In a postCartesian world, it would seem strange that so many of our emotions are felt in the gut. We experience ‘butterflies’ when we’re in love; our tummies do ‘flips’ when we’re nervous; pain can be ‘gut-wrenching’; we lose our appetite during periods of heartbreak; and we tend to navigate intuition via ‘gut feelings’.

Rather than these being mysterious phenomena, however, it turns out that the gut exists as something akin to a ‘second brain’, playing a vital role in the body. The brain is isolated from the rest of the body, residing in a hard skull and protected from the dangers of the outside world. Despite its proximity to the elements, the skin pales in comparison to the data gathered by the gut, as the skin contains a thick layer of protective keratin. Since the gut receives a constant stream of bacteria and pathogens from the outside world, the brain relies hugely on the gut as a way of discerning the state of our environment. Through the nine meters of gastrointestinal tract, the brain can get a pretty good sense of what’s going on.

Explores the fascinating and incredibly important link between the gut and mental health.

This is where the microbiome comes in. The microbiome (“little lives”) is a community of 100 trillion bacteria living in our gut, which offer a helping hand in inoculation against pathogens and help with the breakdown of food. They are so tiny and so multitudinous that one teaspoon of faeces contains more bacteria than there are people on earth – and more genetic data than we would be able to store on a metric ton of DVDs. Weighing in heavier than the brain at 2kg we each have a unique community, constituting our own microbial fingerprint. It is apt to describe the microbiome as additional genetic data, because, like the tangle of DNA in each of our cells, we literally inherit it from our mothers: we are coated in a cocktail of microbiota as we emerge, kickstarting our “second genome.”

Interestingly, studies have shown that babies that don’t exit their mothers through the vaginal tract, but are instead born

by Caesarean section, tend to have issues with immunology later in life, such as asthma and allergies. There are clear links between our microbiome and immune system functioning, since our gut-microbes give our immune system hard data with which to ‘learn’. This is much like our brain needing external information to develop. But let us take this a step further: the microbiome influences the way we feel.

John Cryan, an Irish neuroscientist, noticed that animals raised in sterile (totally germ-free) conditions exhibited social behavioural deficits and heightened anxiety and fear behaviour. There seems to be a connection between mental well-being and the state of one’s gut flora.

So, what is the link between the two? How do we map one system of reference (mental states) on to the other (microbial states)? We make an alteration in the former and see if there’s a change in the latter. We fiddle with the biology at the lower level and see if the mental (or behavioural) state at the higher level is affected. This ought to help eliminate the problem of the ‘common cause’ misdiagnosis, i.e. that

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patterns between the microbiome and mental health are only observed because they are both caused by a third factor, like an overabundance of a certain hormone – or simply correlation between the two.

In 2011, gut microbiota of normal mice were transferred to ‘germ-free’ mice and were assessed by tests used to discern behavioural tendencies that point to anxiety. The ‘germfree’ mice whose bowels were colonised with microbes showed “reduced anxiety-related behaviour… suggesting a direct role for microbiota composition in behaviour.”

There are endless trials on bacterial effects on animals’

“The only way we will solve any problem is via interdisciplinary communication.” behaviour and mood, but how about results in humans?

Benton ascertained that a strain of the Shirota microbe lowered the anxiety in chronic fatigue syndrome patients and ameliorated the mood of depressed people. A 2015 experiment showed that a probiotic formula of lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species “decreased aggressive feelings.”

These findings are nothing short of staggering. Not only can one alter behavioural states in animals with microbes, but one seems to be able to adjust a specific mood in a person when adding a certain species to the microbiome.

How, though, can it be possible that these ‘non-self ’ organisms have any direct influence on the way we feel?

Three ideas spring to mind: it could be any, all or none of them.

One of the most common neurological symptoms of depression, eating disorders, ADHD, addiction, Bipolar Affective Disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, or Alzheimer’s is low levels of neuroplasticity – meaning that communication and adaptability within the brain is depleted. Black-andwhite thinking is common in mental illness, especially depressive disorders. What studies have found, however, is that gut microbes can directly regulate the myelination of the prefrontal cortex – the area of the brain associated with personality and social behaviour. In other words, the host’s microbiome is involved with insulating neurones by secreting a fatty acid, which ameliorates conduction and connection in the brain. Perhaps, microbes could be used instead of SSRIs – anti-depressants that (crudely) increase the amount of neurotransmitter in the brain.

The second plausible link that could facilitate communication between the gut and the brain is the vagus nerve: a high-speed railway linking the gut to the brain stem,

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thus directly affecting the limbic system, which deals with emotional regulation. John Cryan showed in 2011 that mice with healthy and diverse gut flora exhibited better memory, more motivation and had less stress hormone in their blood, compared with the mice that weren’t fed this nurturing bacteria. That is, until their vagus nerves were severed, whereupon the mice exhibited no difference. Interestingly, this is the same nerve that people stimulate when rubbing their earlobes in order to calm themselves down or to ease indigestion. Sending electronic pulses down the vagus nerve (VNS) has been proven to alleviate treatment-resistant depression – thus reinforcing the intimacy of the connection that this nerve provides.

A final proposition for how our microbiome and the brain are linked is via inflammation. Inflammation is a crucial part of our body’s immune response. When it encounters a breach in its defences (perhaps a bacteria-coated dagger pierces the skin) the surrounding tissue becomes swollen as blood flow is increased to the wound, so that immune cells can swarm in and eat the noxious bacteria. The gut, on the other hand, is kept in a permanent state of inflammation as it is perpetually exposed to pathogens from the outside world. But chronic stress and certain microbial populations, exacerbated by the consumption of unhealthy foods, can lead to an over-inflammation of the intestinal walls.

The damaging warning signals (cytokines) fired out by the immune cells are spread all over the body, and, most importantly, can traverse the blood-brain barrier. Once in the brain, these proinflammatory cytokines cause collateral damage to the brain and can induce depression and anxiety.

I think we can agree that Descartes’ framework of dualism is not only useless in the face of modern-day neuroscience, but that it is outright dangerous. We can no longer solely prescribe psychiatry for emotional treatment and physicians for bodily health: as with most things, we would benefit from a holistic approach. The only way we will solve any problem – not only in the world of healthcare – is via interdisciplinary communication. Mental health is a multifactorial issue that relies on a number of variables: amongst other things, a lack of severe stress; early developmental security and attention; a healthy diet and exercise. So, I’m not saying that gutbacterial-manipulation is the cure for mental illness, but there is an undeniable symbiosis between the microbiome and our mental states, which we would do well to nurture.

We are stuck with our DNA from conception, but, luckily, we are able to alter our ‘second genome’: we can make our microbiome as healthy and diverse as possible for mental wellbeing. Perhaps, we could even wean a planet off Prozac. r

About Graphite & Gradient Graphite is a Montreal-based publication and global community of thinkers and artists. Through our articles, special issues, and community gatherings, we have worked to provide a digital platform for the voices of the younger generation since 2013. Our mission is twofold: to promote local culture and innovation while presenting perspectives that cut across both geography and discipline. Actively benefiting from our city’s cosmopolitan demography, we have roots and networks stretching across the world.

Our existence is a complex and nuanced one, and truth often lies at the intersection of numerous interconnected viewpoints and forms of expression. Having come of age in a globalized digital era, our generation has been exposed to a volume of information and discourse unprecedented in human history. We believe the dialectical power of discourse and critique to be a necessary solution.

By participating in this dynamic cycle, Graphite aims to provide a meeting point for inspired creation and intellectual exploration.

We reject no opinion or creative form as long as it is thoughtful and original. All interested are encouraged to pitch us their ideas at graphitesubmissions@gmail.com. Join us as we connect the dots and make sense of the madness.

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