Internet | Issue 10 by Salient

vol.77 issue.10

the internet issue

contents weekly content Letters News C r e at i v e VUWSA Arts Odds and Ends

columns R a m b l i n g s o f a Fa l l e n H a c k Bone Zone with Cupie Hoodwink Sports Banter Conspiracy Corner Food B e i n g We l l M Ä o r i M at t e r s H i s t o r y t h at H a s nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t H a p p e n e d Ye t Shirt and Sweet with Eleanor Merton Fa s h i o n Stop reading the contents and just click on

features A n I n t e rv i ew w i t h D r E l e a n o r C at to n U n d e r s ta n d i n g O ve r s h a r i n g Look (it) Up (on Google) H o t C o n c e p t u a l A r t w o r k s i n Yo u r A r e a Kim Dotcodotnz

Did you know that in 1991, it would have cost $3.6 million to make something that does all the things that an iPhone now does?

here is so much hysteria about the ways in which the internet is shaping our lives. People say it makes us less intimate. They say it intrudes on our private lives. They say it sends jobs overseas and never returns the favour. The haters (read: old people) are partly right. The internet is changing our lives. But it’s wrong to think that those changes are bad. The internet has transformed the potential for us to live amazing lives. We are more connected than we have ever been before. Yes, we may spend more time tapping away on our phones these days. But the flipside is that we can communicate with those who we otherwise would not have been able to talk to. We can watch our nieces grow up from the other side of the globe. We can find a supportive online community when there isn’t one in our backwards provincial town. We can talk to anybody in the world in any language with the help of an online translator. We can see the view on any street anywhere on earth, or look down on our planet from space. The internet develops and maintains intimacies beyond the neighbourhood, and that’s amazing. The cloud enables us to engage with people exponentially more than even our parents’ generation ever could. But there’s more – the interwebs are also transforming music and movies and TV and books and food and fashion and news and culture. Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, SoundCloud et al have all altered the way in which the industry has operated. It has made it easier for small bands to develop a following and get discovered. We can watch movies and TV shows that are only being officially released overseas. We now have access to cooler clothes than ever before. We can get books that our local bookstore doesn’t stock. We can order our groceries online and get them delivered, so we can spend more time with our significant others. For those of us without significant others, we can just head to another website and spend some time on ourselves. ;) A lot of people fear a rising internet will result in the death of journalism. Yes, the days of newspaper domination are over. No, it doesn’t mean news will disappear. The internet actually allows news to be newer than ever. Mere seconds after a major event, we can see footage of it, hear responses from the people who were there, see

who is reacting and how. Everyone with a camera phone and Twitter has the potential to be a journalist. During major events like the recent quakes, it’s crucial to get as much information as possible. The internet lets us do that in a way that waiting for tomorrow’s paper just doesn’t. If we save a few trees in the process, then good for us. The best thing about the internet is just how cheap it makes our lives. You no longer need $12 to see a movie; you don’t need to buy an expensive GPS to find out where you’re going or an expensive digital camera to capture your best moments in HD. You don’t have to go to the library to find out whether your friend’s fact is true or not; you don’t have to buy stamps to send letters that might never arrive. You can freaking video-call your family in Australia for less than the cost of a coffee. You can listen to millions of dollars’ worth of albums for free. If you wanted to, you could sell your watch and your alarm clock and your calculator and your voice recorder and your weather vane and your wall calendar and your home telephone on Trade Me, and you wouldn’t notice a single difference. The internet does more for the poor than any government policy. This week, Philip’s piece looks at the latest viral YouTube sensation, ‘Look Up’, and disparages it for what it forgets about the internet. Penny investigates the law of privacy and finds that Photos From Victoria, the Tumblr that collates students’ Facebook and Instagram photos into a blog without asking for their permission, is perfectly legal. We have an interview with Kim Dotcom about his plans for the Internet Party, and another with Eleanor Catton about being awarded an honorary doctorate. It’s a great issue, and it’s all online on our new website. The internet was invented just 25 short years ago by a man named Tim Berners-Lee. Some of us will be able to tell our kids that we are older than man’s greatest invention (fuck the wheel). In that short time, and for the price of our course-related costs, we have invented a pocket-sized portable supercomputer that gives us access to just about all of human knowledge. If knowledge is power, the internet makes kings and queens of all of us.

LO L ( lots o f love ),

Du nc an & Cam

letter of the week The Glow of Progress by Raewyn Light luminates through the cracks in the door Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 9.30 at night Everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s busy in their rooms Studying into the night What will morning bring.

WIN FREE COFFEE Are you angry, elated or apathetic about Salient? Send us a letter of less than 250 words to editor@salient.org.nz. Pseudonyms are fine, but all letters must include your real name, address and telephone number. These will not be printed. Letters will not be corrected for spelling or grammar. The Editors reserve the right to edit, abridge or decline any letters. The letter of the week wins a coffee from Vic Books.

The Route Of All Evil HI Thanks for the article and warning on the loss of #18 bus last week....only 4 days before the submissions close-date. Really? Such a last-minute article? They’ve been discussing this option for the last two years and brought out draft after draft plan; individuals have put up notices at bus stops along the #18 route and around campus warning of this approaching bus-route disappearance and giving a GWRC email address to write in to with grumbles. Letters were written to Salient (unpublished) last year suggesting that students who liked the route write to the bus-plan people. The bus people seem to insist that a bus going down the quiet he Terrace and along Courtenay place is still ‘a short cut’; whereas anyone who’s actually traveled that way knows the traffic and lights and busy-ness. They insist they want to avoid route duplication; yet the Kelburn to Newtown section of the #18 and #47 is such a shortcut and not duplicated elsewhere (the same apple to the J’ville-campus part of the #47). Want to keep this bus route or something? Write in NOW to the counselors mentioned in last week’s Salient and tell then why, and suggest some merging and retaining of the #18 and #47 routes. Sincerely Bus-Man

No Point Crying Over Spilt Krishna Dear Salient, please publish this so I can find this person

To the boy who split Hari Krishna lunch down his pants... I met you on Tuesday (6th May) before noon I hope we will meet again soon. Your company made my day, Perhaps we should play And hang out another time We could go and drink some wine. You came to me covered in food And seemed like a hilarious dude. I shared my table with you, And would share my fejoias too If you forget your lunch So that you will have food to munch. The best Tuesday of my life Please make me your wife! From the girl studying Law on the Overbridge

Backed into the Conspiracy Corner Dear Salient and in particular the misguided Incognito Montoya Don’t see why you bother wasting your time writing about conspiracy theories. There is never any truth in them. After receiving inside information that the next issue is about the internet we have decided to recommend that you immediately cease taking up space in this reputable and highly scrutinized publication. It’s a shame we didn’t reprogram you when we had the chance. Unofficial Regards The GCSB

Weeding out a Response In response to your issue on drugs: eh eh eh eh ehe smoke weed e’ery day. Sincerely yours, Bud

Go Back to Fucking Puppies Dear Salient You fucking hipsters. A whole rock and roll issue without a single mention of American Authors. Without a single mention of Bastille. Without a single mention of Mumford. Where’s the earnest? Where’s the feels? I mean, the Arctic Monkeys are fine and all but they haven’t really made a decent album since A Rush of Blood to the Head. Yours, Martin Chris

Added Stress Salient, you are allgood, but one of your articles has made me mad as hell. I read that Student Health has sorted the counselling backlog and are now having people seen within the week they make the appointment. I booked an appointment in freaking April and my appointment isn’t until June the 13th, can someone please move my appointment forward? Gerard? Linda? Anyone? Regards, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PEOPLE OF LAST WEEK

Minister of Finance is our person of last week. On Thursday afternoon, English presented the first New Zealand Budget in seven years to return the Government to surplus. Earlier in the week, Australia announced its budget. There, Tony Abbott backtracked on his election promise to not raise taxes, he’s looking to cut 16,500 public sector jobs over four years, and he wants to raise the pension age to 70. Being an election year, people were unsure what to expect from the New Zealand Budget. Would there be bribes? Would there be tax cuts? Bill English delivered. Although there were no tax cuts, English announced a Budget that managed to put the Government back into surplus while extending free doctors’ visits to all children under 13; increasing paid parental leave to 18 weeks; and giving another $156 million to early childhood education. National seemed to hand-pick the better aspects of Labour policy and rebrand it as their own. Regardless of whether the Budget makes for good policy, it has surely made Labour’s election campaign even harder. he

You sly dog, Bill.

BY THE NUMBERS

19 71

The year in which the first email was ever sent, by inventor Ray Tomlinson. Allegedly, it just said: “QWERTYUIOP”.

ONE BILLIONTH OF A BILLIONTH OF A GRAM

The amount of physical weight by which a device increases when 4 GB of data is added to it.

200 BILLION

The average number of spam emails sent every day.

40%

The percentage of adults in Kenya who use online banking.

$ 4 3 7, 5 0 0

The average cost of 1 GB of data in 1980 (compared to five cents today).

The age of Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

NEWS

K een

eye for news ?

S end

any tips , leads or gossip to news @ salient . org . nz

BUDGET 2014 INCREASES IN SCIENCE FUNDING; STUDENTS FORCED TO REPAY LOANS QUICKER by Sophie Boot

cience funding has increased in the Budget, but the threshold at which all students will have to start repaying their loans will decrease in real terms. The Budget, released at 2 pm today, included an additional $85 million in tuition subsidies for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students. This is broken up into $67.9 million for science, $8.5 million for agriculture, $3.8 million for pharmacy and $3.1 million for physiotherapy. It also includes $13.2 million for 34 additional medical places. Minister for Tertiary Education Steven Joyce said that the additional funding continues the Government’s focus on STEM subjects which have been “historically underfunded” compared to Humanities and Commerce. “Investing in science-based skills is crucial for innovation, productivity and growth in the New Zealand economy, which is a key focus of our Business Growth Agenda,” Joyce said. VUWSA President Sonya Clark said she was sceptical that the funding

$199 MILLION ADDITIONAL INVESTMENT IN TERTIARY EDUCATION

- 83.3 million

STEM subjects

- 13.2 million

medical places

- 52 million

CoRE

- 28.6 million

ICT training intiative

- 20 million

Apprenticeship Reboot

- 500, 000

fees-free foundation education

increase will translate to reduced student fees. “The Government has chronically underfunded the tertiary sector for a number of years now, leading to perpetual fee raises. The increase in funding is unlikely to result in reduced fees as universities are still playing catch-up.” The Government is continuing the suspension of inflation adjustment on the Student Loan repayment threshold until April 2017. The current threshold is $19,084 a year, or $367 weekly. Student Loan borrowers earning above this amount have to repay their Student Loans at a rate of 12 cents in every dollar earned over the threshold, after the Government increased it from ten cents in April 2013. Current projected inflation rates indicate an eight per cent increase by 2017. If the Student Loan repayment threshold were adjusted for inflation, it would increase to $20,610.72 by 2017. This would mean you would need to earn $396.36 a week, or an extra $30, before having to repay your Student Loan. Clark said that the combination of the 12 per cent repayment rate and the low repayment threshold mean that “already indebted graduates have the highest effective tax rate in the country.” Average annual wages are predicted to go up by 14 per cent, but this is cut down to four per cent by the projected-inflation prediction. There is a projected surplus of $3.5 billion by 2017/18, debt will be under 20 per cent of GDP by 2020, and the Government will resume contributions to the NZ Super Fund by 2019/20. HOWEVER,

• Reduced student allowance spending: $542 million $531 million $30 million of this comes from removing eligibility from postgraduate students • Student Achievement Components funding decrease: $30 million in real terms • Reduced demand for University: The government will save $144.2 million over the next four years by reducing demand for tertiary education and changing the real loan repayment threshold. GROWTH IN STEM FUNDING

SCIENCE – $67.9 million 8.5% AGRICULTURE – $8.5 million 8.5% PHARMACY – $3.8 million. 16.4% PHYSIOTHERAPY – $3.1 million. 12.4%

LOAN REPAYMENT THRESHOLD NOW $19,084 where the repayment threshold

2017 $19,084 where the repayment threshold

$17,670 where the 2017 threshold would

$20,611 where the 2017 repayment

is now

be in today’s dollars

will be in nominal terms

threshold would be in real terms if it included inflation

NEWS

FOUR MORE CoRES TO OPEN DOORS GOVERNMENT INCREASES RESEARCH FUNDING by Simon Dennis

he Government will fund four new Centres of Research Excellence, including one dedicated to Māori development research, from 2016. The Budget, released last Thursday, boosts CoRE operating funding by $53 million over the next four years. The dedicated Māori CoRE comes after Ngā Pae o Te Māramatanga (NPM), a CoRE since 2002, did not have its funding renewed in this round of funding allocation. Steven Joyce said NPM “will have the opportunity to tender for that CoRE, alongside other possible collaborations of Māori researchers at tertiary-education institutions, including wānanga, to ensure a competitive process.” “The Government decided it was important to have a dedicated Māori Centre of Research Excellence as part of our commitment to Vision Mātauranga research and because such a network is completely unique to New Zealand.” The other three new CoREs will be selected from the 21 unsuccessful applicants in the latest round of CoRE funding. “By investing in additional CoREs, the Government is increasing its support for excellent research in areas that are important to New Zealand’s future development,” Mr Joyce says.

CoRE Facts: • •

•

Victoria’s CoRE, the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Material and Nanotechnology, retained its funding in the latest round, which allocates funds until 2020. The CoRE Fund, which was established in 2001, is designed to encourage excellent tertiary-education-based research. Prior to changes announced in the Budget, it was set to provide just under $210 million in funding to six institutions starting from January 2015 and continuing until 2020. 27 applicants made bids for funding in the latest round of funding allocations, and the Tertiary Education Commission made the final decision on which institutes were funded, with recommendations from the Royal Commission. The MacDiarmid Institute is a nationwide network which comprises five universities, one Crown Research Institute and Callaghan Innovation, who are focussed on advanced scientific capabilities. The organisation brings together leading scientists and researchers to develop techniques in engineering, physics and chemistry. Director of the Institute, Professor Kate McGrath, said the funding is indicative of the Institute’s intentions of developing important manufacturing processes in New Zealand. “Our focus is on delivering excellent research and education, inspiring New Zealanders, training New Zealand’s future leaders and advancing this country’s future.” Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Science at Victoria University, Professor Mike Wilson, said that the worldleading institute brings together many of New Zealand’s premier materials scientists. “The continuation of funding is fantastic news for the Institute and for the University. It is testament to the capability built up at the MacDiarmid Institute.”

NEWS

HUBBA HUBBA KELBURN HUB WINS BEAUTY PAGEANT by Steph Trengrove

he multimillion-dollar upgrade to the Hub and Library has won a New Zealand Architecture Award. Architectus and Athfield Architects won the award in the Education category for the upgrade. The jury described it as an “exemplary project, tightly resolved on many levels, from campus planning to construction detailing” which “transforms wasted space into a real place”. The project, which began in November 2010 and finished at the end of 2013, was undertaken in partnership with Architectus, and Athfield Architects of Wellington. It was a large-scale task, including refurbishment of all seven

LET ME GO HOME STUDENT MARCH TO ADVOCATE FOR A COMMUNITY WITHOUT SEXUAL VIOLENCE by Gus Mitchell TRIGGER WARNING: This content deals with an account of sexual assault and may be triggering to some people.

march is being organised to protest recent sexual assaults on campus. The event, titled “Let Me Go Home”, is being organised by VUWSA, the Women’s Group and Youth for UN Women. The march will begin at the Hub at 4.45 pm on Tuesday 20 May, and lead to the Aro Valley Community Centre via the Boyd-Wilson pathway for a forum at 5.30 pm. The forum will include speakers representing students and the wider community, and will also involve a workshop where students will get to voice their concerns on safety around different suburbs in Wellington. The march also intends to allow those in attendance to point out areas on the Victoria campus in need of “infrastructural improvement” to better

floors of the Rankine Brown Library building and three levels in the central building, including retail and study spaces. The Hub has the largest sliding doors in the Southern Hemisphere, which can be opened in response to the weather and temperature, creating an indoor–outdoor flow in summer. It was the University’s biggest-ever building project. The Hub refurbishment has created 3400 square metres of extra space for student use, which, according to the judges, has “transformed wasted space into real space”. The New Zealand Architecture Awards is a programme of the New Zealand Institute of Architects.

ensure student safety. “As students and Wellington residents, we want to show that we are a community that does not accept sexual assault as a given and that we will foster a community that rejects rape culture,” the Facebook page for the event explains. “It’s unacceptable that we are unable to perform such a simple task as walking home from our work or study without fear.” Local MPs, councillors and University faculty will also be attending the event to participate in discussion and respond to student questions. VUWSA President Sonya Clark said the march was an opportunity for the community to “come together and show that we reject rape culture and are prepared to foster an environment in which all residents, students, and particularly women are safe. It’s unacceptable that we are unable to walk home without fear.” “The only full solution is in a broad cultural shift, but while this environment exists there are infrastructural improvements that can be made to empower students and make them feel safe.” Students have noted their concerns about using the path many times, with Salient reporting on the path as far back as 2010. Three attacks occurred over the Easter break alone, prompting a return to a discussion on improving security around campus.

conGRAD

Dulations L

ast week, 2200 students graduated from Victoria University. Salient wishes them the best. Get excited. We are entering the boom.

NEWS

CAMPUS DIGEST

VICT O RIA’S ROWER S HAV E COM E OUT ON T OP at the New Zealand

2 2 0 0 S T U DE NT S G R A DUAT E D L A S T W E E K , and some have had a more

Universities Championship Regatta, taking away 14 medals and placing third overall in terms of regatta points. This was an improvement on last year’s fifth overall placing, and the club say they are “very happy to put behind us two universities with typically strong rowing programmes: University of Waikato and University of Auckland.” The Club got two gold medals, in the women’s intermediate twos and women’s intermediate fours. Two students, Luke Watts and Lauren McAndrew, were also selected to represent New Zealand in the Universities Trans-Tasman Series to be held at Lake Karapiro in July.

interesting time at university than others. Olena Khytko, who graduated last week with a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Commerce majoring in Economics, worked more than 24 parttime jobs while completing her double degree in four years. After graduation, Olena will be moving to San Diego to continue working as a legal assistant for BIS2, a visual-software company. After she is admitted to the bar, she will join their legal department and take up a graduate role as legal counsel.

J O S E P H A ND T HE R E S E BO O N , who both graduated with Bachelor of

Arts degrees, have Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare, genetically inherited condition that causes nervous-system damage and difficulty with motor skills. The condition has affected three of the five children in their family. Therese majored in English Literature and Film, and Joseph majored in Political Science and Film. Therese is working as an office administrator, and hopes to be a writer, while Joseph is seeking a job in politics, with a view to making Wellington a more wheelchair-friendly city. The population of students with disabilities at Victoria University has steadily increased over the years, and has grown to a community of more than 1000.

NEWS

NEWS OF THE WORLD BY SOPHIE BOOT

THE FIRS T FEMALE EXECUTIVE EDIT OR of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, is “unexpectedly leaving the position” after having taken over in 2011. She has been replaced by Dean Baquet, the former managing editor, who once punched a hole in the wall after an argument with Abramson. The New Yorker has reported that Abramson found out her pay and pension benefits as executive editor, and before then as managing editor, were “considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs” and confronted management about it, at which point she was pushed out. A S TUDY ON MEDIC AL-MARIJUAN A L AW S in 21 states and the District of Colombia in the United States has found that the laws increased use of not only marijuana but also increased frequency of binge drinking. Among those aged 21 or above, medical-marijuana laws increased the frequency of binge drinking by 6–9 per cent, but medical-marijuana laws did not affect drinking behaviour among those 12–20 years old. The probability of marijuana use increased by 16 per cent, frequency of use increased by 12–17 per cent, and probability of abuse/dependency increased 15–27 per cent, in states where medical marijuana was legal. FRUS TRATED S AN FRANCISCO DRIVERS who are fed up with having to circle around trying to find a parking space on the street can use a new app that allows them to purchase a spot from someone who is already parked in one. The app, called ‘Monkey Parking’, connects drivers looking for empty spaces with someone who is also on the app who is willing to give up their prized spot, but for a fee of anywhere between $5 and $20.

iPredict is a market-based political and economic prediction market owned and operated by Victoria University of Wellington. Visit www.ipredict.co.nz to get involved. Probabilities are correct at time of publication.

0.95% WHAT SHARE OF THE PARTY VOTE WILL THE INTERNET PARTY WIN AT THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION?

10% A CURRENT MP TO DEFECT TO THE INTERNET PARTY BEFORE THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION.

13% NEW ZEALAND COURTS TO EXTRADITE KIM DOTCOM TO THE UNITED STATES BEFORE 1 JANUARY 2015.

23% TRANS-PACIFIC CABLE TO BE LAID BEFORE 2016.

89% TRANS-PACIFIC CABLE TO BE LAID BEFORE 2017.

POLITICS

QUOTE UNQUOTE “Good news Grant, you are, good news son, you are 127 days, three hours and 55 minutes away from being the leader of the Labour Party!” – John Key telling Grant Robertson how much longer he has to wait to be Labour leader, due to David Cunliffe’s ineffectiveness.

TOP 5 BUDGET LOSERS 1. Students – Repayment thresholds not to be adjusted with inflation. 2. The disabled – Money taken out of disability health budget and into primary care. 3. Public transport – More money into roads, when fewer people are using cars. 4. Cheque manufacturers – Actually, they began to lose a long time ago. 5. You and me – Because we are still subsidising the middle class. GOVERNMENT BILLS THIS WEEK 1. Food Bill – Introduces substantial reforms to the regulatory regime for the safety and suitability of food. 2. Vulnerable Children Bill – To protect and improve the wellbeing of vulnerable children. 3. Veterans’ Support Bill – New support scheme for veterans of military service that would replace the current scheme prescribed in the War Pensions Act 1954.

By Jordan McCluskey

RAMBLINGS OF A FALLEN HACK

“T

he deceit tax is a price that working Australians will pay for the Prime Minister’s broken promises and twisted priorities. It is a tax grab that puts the politics of a manufactured Budget emergency ahead of the welfare of millions of hardworking Australians.” That was Bill Shorten’s reaction to the Australian Government’s new tax on the rich. To have wealth is to have power. Of course the tax is being opposed. But Shorten is the leader of the Australian Labor Party. The defence of the rich is being led by a man whose job is the defence of the poor. Last week saw National delivering our Government’s annual budget – but it was the budget presented the day before in Australia from which we can learn the most. There, within the space of a couple of hours, conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott proved meaningless the spectrum New Zealand bases politics upon. It’s not just forcing the rich to pay more tax. The Australian budget is also introducing a paid maternal-leave scheme. Australia currently requires employers to pay new mothers the minimum wage for 18 weeks while the mother takes time off work. Having employers fund maternal leave encourages discrimination when hiring women, so Abbott is changing it, making taxpayers pick up the bill. At the same time he’s extending coverage to six months and – if they earn less than $100,000 – mothers will be paid their full usual salary. Tony Abbott, feminist revolutionary. Not that anyone told the Australian

left. Labor argues that gifting $50,000 to Australia’s wealthiest each time they have a child is unfair to the working families who earn less than that in a year. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps they should tell their comrades in New Zealand who’re leading the campaign to extend maternity leave here. Meanwhile, New Zealand Labour insists that the baby-boomer bubble and growing life expectancies are threatening the viability of our superannuation, that raising the retirement age is necessary for the scheme to avoid collapse. But again the Australian Labor Party is opposing Abbott’s plans to do exactly that. The arguments are familiar – that Indigenous people have shorter life expectancies, that manual labourers can’t be expected to keep working until they’re 70. The only change is that they’re being shouted from different sides of the House. It’s easy to dismiss these Australian politicians as ideological traitors, but political dichotomies are unhinged whenever they find a new context. We think of conservatism and liberalism and socialism as universal, but that’s a myth. Philosophies are always too broad to define a specific political agenda. In truth, we manufacture ideology to simplify our world – those on our side are good people, our enemies are the bad. Our ideologies are defined by the ideologies of others. Too bad we forgot to pay attention to the Aussies.

by Jade D’Hack

CABINET CLUB Last

National Party raises funds by allowing its Cabinet Ministers. Despite the Labour Party running a similar racket during their most recent conference, the opposition have said that the clubs stink of corruption. Victoria Student Finn Stitchbury has been to a Cabinet Club event with Judith Collins, and he says it was boring as hell: week it was revealed that the

members to pay to get face-time with

he uncovering of the National Party’s ‘Cabinet Club’ fundraising events by TV3’s Tova O’Brien in May has dredged up allegations from journalists and opposition MPs of corrupt ‘cash-for-access’ rackets. It is alleged that rich donors are granted legislative favours by ministers who attend Cabinet Club dinners in return for exorbitantly large donations to the Nats. In reality, these luncheons and dinners are usually run by the local MP, who invites cabinet ministers to attend and speak with local party members about current political issues. Many National MPs and right-wing commentators have attributed the outrage displayed by various opposition MPs and supporters at this entirely effective and within-the-rules party fundraising to jealousy, stemming from the fact that Labour and the Greens themselves are as bad at making money as they are at making policy. The Labour Party perhaps feeling the pinch, as selling $6 ‘Southland cheese rolls’ at the Aro Valley Fair isn’t covering the costs in the run-up to the general election. I attended a Cabinet Club dinner as a 17-year-old in my hometown, the lively

South Auckland metropolis of Pukekohe. Local MP Paul Hutchison worked the room, and drinks (which I could only assume to be the tears of beneficiaries) were bought at the bar. Everyone took their seats and the ‘Cabinet’ part of ‘Cabinet Club’ arrived, a Mrs Judith Collins. She made her way around the table introducing herself. Unsure of whether to stay sitting and come across as disinterested, or stand up and come across as over-eager when she approached, I chose a third option: half-stand up while still in a seated position, which I guess made me come across as cool and confident. She asked what my plans were for the following year, I told her I was going to Vic to do Marketing and Public Policy. “That’s an interesting mix,” she said; I agreed (not really knowing what Marketing or Public Policy was). After dinner, Judith spoke about government debt and employment statistics for a while, and then with great delight told us that there hadn’t been a death from domestic violence in Counties Manukau in a long time. When it came time for the Q&A, I was expecting her to be met with cushy questions from the enamoured Nats around the table. A man at the back borderline yelled at the minister about the difficulty he had subdividing his

land: “Ya know, usually I’m very happy with you guys,” he spat “but the Resource Management Act is something you lot have really bloody screwed up!” The Minister recalled her own similar story of trying to subdivide a section. The man retained his anger as Collins joked about being in the same boat when she “was just a poor lawyer living in Remuera”; nobody seemed to get that it was a self-deprecating joke until an old man opposite me called out “there’s no such thing.” At this time, the nation was embroiled in the ‘who owns water’ debate, and a man expressed his worry that soon, Māori would be able to make claims for water; Collins sighed and replied: “No one owns water”. The make-up of the Cabinet Club I attended was not as scandalous as many on the left would hope. There were lawyers, a dentist, the bored and the elderly, business owners, and a few who were purely interested in politics. While the Cabinet Club saga has allowed David Cunliffe some downtime to perfect that caricature of himself and given Russel “Gimme my flag back” Norman a chance to get his horse even higher, it hasn’t actually exposed anything worth acting like you’re offended by. If New Zealand’s answer to political corruption is paying to have your misguided questions shot down by Judith Collins for an hour, then it’s safe to say that it probably isn’t as prevalent as many want you to believe by

Finn Stitchbury

SPORT

Top 5 Rivalries in Sport . Real Madrid vs. Barcelona – Two of Europe’s football giants have forged one of the greatest rivalries in world football. In recent years it’s become a battle of Ronaldo vs. Messi, and these two teams are still looking to battle it out for the Liga BBVA title.

. New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox – Without much explanation needed, the Yankees vs. Red Sox will always be one of the greatest rivalries in sport. A battle that has raged on for years, the intensity isn’t going to lighten up any time soon.

4 Sports banter BY OL L I E R I T C H I E

R A FA

VS .

RO GE R

ne of the greatest rivalries the world of tennis has ever seen. Great because their skill set is unprecedented, but great also because these two players do so much for the game of tennis. But when it comes down to it, when these two have long retired and started their lives after tennis, who will be considered the greatest? Great for more than just their on-court ability, but off the court these two can hardly be separated for what they have done to not only raise the profile of world tennis, but for those much less fortunate than them. When you talk of on-court ability, both men are savage. In terms of Grand Slams, Federer has the highest number of major titles (17), has appeared in the most finals (24), and the most semi-finals (34). Federer is one of seven men to win all four majors, and the only man to have reached the final of each Grand Slam tournament at least five times. This is a record that cannot be argued with. This included Grand Slam wins against Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick at his peak, Rafa himself, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. Meanwhile, Rafa is the only player ever to win a Grand Slam or more for nine

consecutive years. Also, he is the only player in the Open Era to win three consecutive Grand Slams on three different surfaces. He is the youngest player in the Open Era to win all Grand Slams at the age of 24. He has also appeared in the finals of each Grand Slam event at least three times. Again, these are stats that can’t be argued with. However, for these two inspirational players, their contribution to tennis goes beyond the playing surface. Roger Federer has set up the ‘Roger Federer Foundation’, which looks to empower as many African children as possible by further developing existing educational services and early support in a sustainable way. Rafael Nadal also has his own foundation, which seeks to help socially disadvantaged children and adolescents who are at risk of being excluded from society. Clearly, these two giants of the game have achieved copious amounts on the tennis court, but they have done so much for the image of world tennis off the court. Whether you’re Team Roger or Team Rafa, it’s hard not to love them both. And may their mammoth encounters continue for a few more years. #teamroger

. Manchester United vs. Manchester City – Cross-town rivals in the English Premier League, this fierce derby match is one that divides a town. With Manchester City holding the edge recently over their Manchester rivals, this battle is one that every sports fan looks forward to.

. All Blacks vs. Wallabies – Need I say more? New Zealand’s friends from across the ditch always provide an intense contest. Other factors recently, such as Robbie Deans taking the Australia coaching job and Quade Cooper’s tussle with Richie McCaw, have simply added fuel to an already burning fire.

. Federer vs. Nadal – Hard to argue against the fact that this may be one of the greatest rivalries in sports. Whether you’re Team Federer or Team Nadal, this is a contest which tennis fans pray will take place in most Grand Slams. Arguably the two most likeable players in world tennis, their battles continue to grip tennis fans around the world.

SEX

Q: How do I make a friend understand that I very much want a “yes homo” relationship.

As simple as it may seem, the fastest, easiest and most genuine way to make them understand is to just tell them. Sure, it might be awkward, but it’s exponentially better than biting your tongue and swallowing your sexual frustration for however long it takes them to pick up on the meaning of your increased use of kiss-blowing emojis, right? And, even if they don’t feel the same way, at the very least they’ll appreciate your honesty. There are very few times when people enjoy being confronted with absolute honesty, but being told that someone likes you enough to want to lick the inside of your face ain’t so bad at all. And remember, things are – generally – only as awkward as you make them. Whatever happens, you are perfectly capable of sailing this puppy back to friendly waters.

Ahoy! Cupie xx

The Bone Zone W I T H C U P I E H O ODW I N K

hh, ye olde friend crush – or as the kids are calling it: the FILF. Haven’t we all been there at some stage or other? The lingering gazes they never pick up on… The replacement of “bud” and “mate” with “babe” and “my love”... The mutual friends assuring you it’s a terrible idea and will ruin “the vibe of the group, y’know?”… Falling for one of your friends ain’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth writing off altogether. If you pull it off, it can be fantastic, and if it doesn’t work out, then at least you still get to see this person on the regular under the auspices of SS Friendship. First things first, are you sure your friend would be down for a “yes homo” relationship? Sadly, however we might wish, sometimes these things just don’t swing our way (see, Exhibit A: lengthy list of beautiful gay men I would marry if only they’d have me; Exhibit B: my longstanding conviction that the one and only negative of the gay-liberation movement is that being a Beard is no longer a legitimate lifestyle choice). Secondly, are you sure you are down for this relationship? Given that you probably want to maintain your friendship with this person even if they aren’t picking up what you are putting down, then it’s best to be sure before dropping anchor. While it may seem screamingly obvious to you right now, when you spend every waking minute thinking about them, beware the risks of confusing genuine interest with a flight of fancy. I, for one, have been known to fall deeply ‘in love’ with a friend for the resemblance they bore to a character in my favourite sitcom du jour. Fortunately, the series ended – and so too did my manic infatuation – before I had confessed my undying love. Assuming the answer to both of those questions is yes, however, let’s move on.

Q: My boyfriend wants me to peg him... Help!

ell, aren’t you just looking for help in all the right places! While your boyfriend’s request has obviously alarmed you, let me assure you, you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. Firstly, it is completely normal and natural for your guy to be into pegging. Contrary to popular bigotry, it doesn’t mean he’s a pussy, or secretly wants a dick up his bum (but if he does, that’s cool too). Nope, this man just knows the key to a next-level orgasm. Inside all male butts is the prostate gland, which, when

with jitters, it’s important that you try to work out what about it exactly is freaking you out, and talk to your boyfriend about it. It may help to start with some more-chill forms of butt fun first, like stroking or fingering, to get used to that part of his body before you peg him. The potential for poo is another common mental barrier when it comes to anal. Fortunately, it’s actually pretty unlikely – just get him to go to the toilet a couple of hours beforehand and keep a towel handy to ensure that ‘surprises’ are kept to a minimum. Although the role reversal may seem a little unnatural, many women find the opportunity to call the shots and set the rhythm empowering, and you can even get strap-ons that penetrate and pleasure you at the same time. Once you’re ready to start pegging, make sure both of you feel comfortable at all times, and stop as soon as either of you ain’t into it anymore. But most importantly, relax and enjoy the ride! Best of luck, Cupie xx

Tip of the Week: Despite what the likes of Cosmo and Men’s Health might have you believe, there’s no right way to “drive him wild”, or “make her crave you”. The key to having great sex is not kooky positions, raunchy costumes, or A+ dirrrty talk. It can be all of these things, and it can be none of them. The key to great sex, as obvious as it may seem, is communication. Whether this involves having a heart-toheart about what each of you are into, yelling out directions while you’re in the throes of passion, or simply paying attention to “ ‘ P e g g in g ’ , f or the uniniti ated , i s when a wo m a n h a s a n a l s e x with a g uy u s in g a s tr a p - on dildo . A s their reactions and with a ll f or m s o f a n a l pl ay , it ’ s re a lly i m porta nt doing more of the th at you s ta rt s m a ll ( s tr a p - on s co m e in a va riety stuff that seems to o f s h a pe s a nd s i z e s to s uit your need s ) , u s e a tonne be working well, o f lube , a nd a lway s wa s h a nd s terili s e your toy s a f terwa rd s ” “dynamite sex” is just a chinwag away. stimulated, acts as the equivalent of the female G-spot – and one way to tap dat is through S E X UA L C O N TA C T S : pegging. ‘Pegging’, for the uninitiated, is when a G ot a burning ques tion for woman has anal sex with a guy using a strapC upie ? A sk her ab out all matt ers on dildo. As with all forms of anal play, it’s of t he heart … and ot her really important that you start small (strap-ons rom ant ic organs , anonym ously come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit at ask . fm /C upie H oodwink . your needs), use a tonne of lube, and always wash and sterilise your toys afterwards. You can G ot a burning sensat ion in your pick up a dildo and harness for upwards of the nether regions ? G ive S t uden t H ealt h a call on 463 5308, $50 mark at any sex store, along with specially or pop in to their clinics at designed anal lubes and toy-cleaners. K elburn and P ipitea . If the prospect of harnessing up still fills you

AN INTERVIEW WITH

DR ELEANOR CATTON

Salient editor Cam and feature writer Alexandra sat down for a chat with Eleanor Catton, the youngest-ever winner of fiction’s prestigious Man Booker Prize. She was in town to receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria, the university she credits with her success. Read the full interview online at salient.org.nz HOW DOES IT FEEL TO HAVE BEEN AWARDED AN HONORARY DOCTORATE FROM VICTORIA UNIVERSITY?

It’s amazing. It feels slightly overwhelming actually, I feel like a little bit of a meanie because my partner’s doing a doctorate, a real doctorate, at Victoria and he’s not going to graduate until next year. He’s been slaving away doing it the proper way. HOW MUCH OF YOUR SUCCESS WOULD YOU PUT DOWN TO YOUR YEARS AT VIC?

Well in a way, you could say all of it. The Honours year that I did at Victoria, which is when I wrote my first book, was as important as my Master’s year, because that’s when I began to think about what it would be like to write a novel. It’s something I never had the confidence to talk about, or even just say the words out loud. I did… a course on Milton, so Victoria will always be the place where I

read Paradise Lost for the first time. WHAT WERE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WRITING YOUR FIRST NOVEL IN A CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP AND YOUR SECOND OUT OF IT?

The processes were totally different. When you write your first book, you’re never sure that anybody’s ever going to read it. So in a way you’re writing it for yourself and for a small, supportive echo chamber of the people around you. That was completely different to my second book, which I knew was going to get read. You almost have a very different voice in your mind, a different imaginary reader on your shoulder, because there’s that awareness of it going to have a life in the world. DID THAT IMPACT THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE LUMINARIES? THE TWO NOVELS SHARE A LOT OF SIMILARITIES – A COMPLEX FORM AND A FOCUS ON PERFORMATIVITY – BUT OBVIOUSLY THE LUMINARIES HAS A VERY DIFFERENT CONTEXT AND GENRE.

I started to think much more seriously about the role that the things that I knew

intimately would play in my fiction. Things like landscapes and identities. I think that’s a very difficult thing for a writer in New Zealand because there are so few people, relatively speaking, who have personal connections. If you’re going to use Aro St, for example, there are relatively few people who are going to know what you are talking about. WHAT WAS YOUR ROUTINE WHEN YOU WERE WRITING THE LUMINARIES? DO YOU TREAT IT LIKE A 9-TO-5 JOB?

I was really lucky in writing The Luminaries because I had two residencies back-to-back. I did the Ursula Bethell one in Christchurch for a couple of months and then came up to Wellington. I lived off my credit card perilously for six months in a flat up in Brooklyn that was the cheapest flat we could afford. We shared it with a great many mice, one of which ran across me while I was writing the book. I ended up losing about two months of work because I became jittery after it; I couldn’t get back into writing. After that, I went up to Auckland and did the Michael King Writer’s Residency for the first half of 2012. Those two concentrated bursts were just vital. Everyday, I could wake up, sit down and achieve whatever I needed to achieve that day. In the middle of writing the book, putting most of the bones of the plot down, I was trying to hit 1500 or 2000 words a day.

My goal for this year is to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. I didn’t start at the beginning so now I’ve got a new goal which is to go back and read them all chronologically.

DO YOU EXPERIENCE WRITER’S BLOCK?

I don’t really. I think there are times when I’m not writing – you could say I’m having writer’s block right now – but I just always read. SO WHAT ARE YOU READING AT THE MOMENT?

I’m reading Shakespeare, actually. My goal for this year is to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. I didn’t start at the beginning so now I’ve got a new goal which is to go back and read them all chronologically. It’s so interesting to see how he grows over his career and how much the plays become rewrites of his earlier ones. HOW DO YOU FIND YOURSELF NOW AS A READER OF BOOKS? DO YOU CRITIQUE THEM MORE NOW THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN SOMETHING SO CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED?

I don’t think so. In a way, the Shakespeare project began as a kind of corrective to any possible kind of ego inflation that might have happened recently. There’s nothing more that restores you to yourself than reading Shakespeare, because it is so astronomically better than anything anyone has ever produced ever since. WHAT ARE THE BOOKS THAT ARE FORMATIVE IN YOUR WRITING CAREER?

For novelists, the 19th century was amazing. There was so much elasticity in the types of

novels. It’s the century that produced Moby Dick, which is the craziest novel in the world in terms of how it’s structured. I think for my personal evolution as a, well, a person, I hadn’t read many 19th-century novels when I wrote my first book. A LOT OF THE PRAISE FOR THE LUMINARIES WAS FOR THE WAY YOU EXPERIMENTED WITH THE FORM OF THE NOVEL.

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been experimenting with time travel at the moment. I’m pretty sure that whatever track I’m on is a bad track because I explained an idea that I had to my British editor. He didn’t even respond; he just turned round and walked out of the room. Sometimes you need that rap on the knuckles. IS IT HARD FOR PEOPLE TO STAND UP TO A MAN BOOKER WINNER AND TELL THEM THEY HAVE A SILLY IDEA?

No, I think he would do that very cheerfully. I think that the novel is so exciting because it doesn’t have rules. Time and space are eternally fluid in a novel’s form. WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO WIN THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE?

It was like a slap in the face and then a cold bath, or maybe the other way round. I don’t remember that much of the night, actually. One of the strange things about a ceremony like that is it’s almost like a wedding day,

really. You know, you’ve imagined that moment so many times, but I guess unlike a wedding day you’ve imagined every possible outcome; every other name on the shortlist being read out. You’ve imagined if you magically didn’t have any clothes on; all these things. You’ve prepared yourself for every horrible and joyful outcome. So when it does happen, however it happens, there’s a quite long period of disbelieving afterwards. I don’t think I’d ever want to go to the Booker ceremony again because I felt... Now I feel I was protected by naïveté, in a way. WHAT WOULD YOUR ADVICE BE TO YOUNG PEOPLE WHO WANT TO WRITE?

I think everything is about reading. And figuring out what you love is the first step to figuring out what you want to say. Nobody ever wrote a good book about something they felt ambivalent about; you have to be impassioned. And also, the things that drive you just are really good. Rage and love. Getting into the powerful feelings that hold our beliefs and our values. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing comically or tragically, I think that that’s still true. What’s funniest is the stuff that’s so close to being tragic, and what’s tragic is always the stuff that’s on the verge of being hilarious. I think that reading passionately, or finding what books excite you as a reader, is always a good first step. l

UNDER OV E

S TA N D I N G RSHARING Feature Writer Penny Gault investigates who really owns your Facebook photos

e’re happy to share our relationships, our holidays, our eating habits, our mundane thoughts. We post photos, status updates, videos, music, conversations, motivational quotes, items for sale. We text, we email, we call, we snapchat. We’re everywhere, all the time. We think we’re in control. But when our photos are taken from us and posted on another website, we’re outraged. We’re autonomous individuals. We have a right to privacy, right? Two weeks ago, a debate broke out on the Overheard @ Vic Facebook page as to the legality of Photos From Victoria, a Tumblr page which automatically saves and posts images shared on Instagram. Any photos tagged to the Victoria University campuses or hostels are saved and blogged between 9 am and 11 pm daily using IFTTT (If This Then That) software. IFTTT lets you create a recipe using ingredients – your Instagram posts - whereby if “this” trigger happens (you

post a photo tagged at Uni), then “that” action (posted on Photos From Victoria) occurs. While some voiced their disgust, calling the page’s creators “creeps”, others were quick to point that the Photos From Victoria’s hosts weren’t doing anything wrong, legally at least. Overheard @ Vic page member Erica Douglas-Skyner commented that while “it’s not illegal, its [sic] definitely morally shaky. You should probably message people to ask or at the very least let them know that you’re posting their personal content to the internet.” Which begs the question – is it personal content? You took the photo. You’re in the photo. You posted it from your Hall. It feels like it belongs to you, right? And it does. But just because it’s yours doesn’t mean others can’t use it – unless you expressly tell them not to. Despite popular opinion, according to Instagram’s privacy policy and your public profile setting, use of your Instagram posts does not amount in any way to a breach of your privacy.

The scale of outrage at such a website is an alarming indication of the lack of awareness of privacy laws in New Zealand, and evidence that no one ever reads the terms and conditions when they sign up to a new social-networking service. The burden to protect your individual privacy rests predominantly with yourself – once your information’s out there, it’s anyone’s game. It’s easier to keep something private than it is to try to claw it back once the entire civilised world has seen it. Just ask Aaron Smith, whose naked torso (with an added bonus) made the rounds after infamous New Zealand Herald reporter Rachel Glucina shared it on Twitter. As the Northern Ireland High Court warns, “anyone who uses Facebook does so at his or her peril.” But surely we’re not all expected to stay up late reading Irish judgments before bedtime. Do socialnetworking sites have an obligation to inform and remind us of their privacy policies? It’s hard to say exactly how

BUT JUST DOESN’T USE IT – UN TELL TH POPULAR OPIN I N S TA G R A M ’ S P YO U R P U B L U S E O F YO U D O E S N OT A

TO A B R E AC H

they could force us to read their legalese. Are we really ‘accepting’ the terms and conditions when we click the button without a second’s thought? How far can social-networking sites intrude into our privacy and personal property before we start to object? Everything we do on Facebook is recorded and on-sold to marketing agencies – even the passive-aggressive status updates about dishes that you begin to type only to delete (I know, right?!). We’re giving them our personal information for nothing, only to have it sold back to us as ads a day later, and we’re grateful for the service. In fact, it’s pretty hard to live without it. We like to think Facebook is free, but privacy is

an extraordinary price for admission to your own social life. We’ve become so desensitised to breaches of privacy and accustomed to oversharing that it’s hard to imagine an intrusion into our privacy that would make us consider opting out of social media. While we were brought up to respect one another’s personal space and are reluctant to ask much about each other’s personal lives, let alone post it all over the internet (Rachel Glucina aside), our laws don’t reflect our morals. This is what Photos From Victoria sets out to teach us – it’s an experiment of sorts to reveal unawareness of privacy and rights to our content online. The Bill of Rights has a lot to say about liberty and freedom

of speech, but is noticeably silent on privacy. You can complain to the Privacy Commissioner to the effect of saying “Stop it, I don’t like it” to primary-school bullies. There is some legal recourse available against people publishing or collecting our private information. Aside from requiring time and money that most of us don’t have, you’d have to show more than “Hey, that’s mine!” to satisfy the elements of the torts of privacy or intrusion into seclusion in a claim. Unless you’re Mike Hosking or a law geek, a drawn-out court case isn’t going to be what you want. And it’s not much help when all you’re after is a way to stop your ex from posting naked pics of you on Facebook.

B E C A U S E I T ’ S YO U R S M E A N OT H E R S C A N ’ T L E S S YO U E X P R E S S LY H E M N OT TO . D E S P I T E N I O N , ACCO R D I N G TO P R I VA C Y P O L I C Y A N D LIC PROFILE SETTING, U R I N S TA G R A M P O S T S

M O U N T I N A N Y WAY H O F YO U R P R I VA C Y. The Harmful Digital Communications Bill currently before Parliament seeks to address this gap in the law. It aims to embody the current legal principles, but provide more accessible and appropriate remedies by introducing an agency designed to process complaints, offer information and advice, and granting the courts with the power to order the removal of material that causes serious emotional distress. The agency would have a strong relationship with socialmedia sites like Facebook and Twitter, and would be able to negotiate issues by providing warnings along the lines of: “If you don’t remove this material, this person can apply for a court order against you.” It’s likely the agency role will be

fulfilled by NetSafe. The Bill currently needs more work – in its original form, you couldn’t complain about threatened harmful publications, despite this being a recognised gap in the law. It’s pretty intuitive that we should have some way to protect our privacy, so it seems almost negligent that the law is so far behind. What throws a spanner in the works is our right to freedom of expression, which is in the Bill of Rights. You have a right to say whatever you want, and this directly conflicts with another person’s right to keep their personal information to themselves. Somehow, these rights need to be balanced. In court cases, at least, more personal and significant information

will demand a greater justification for publication than just “It’s my right to say what I want.” While it’s pretty hard to argue that someone’s right to post naked pics or your deepest secrets online should outweigh your privacy, concerns about the protection of secrets that the public should know about, especially about public figures (Hey, Len Brown, you sexy thing!) have been a major factor delaying heavy-handed legal protections. Privacy is recognised by the courts as a value worth protecting. It’s time the law caught up to protect that ‘value’, and recognise it as a human right before it’s completely eroded. l BY P EN N Y GAULT

(IT)

(ON GOOGLE): BY P H I L I P M C S W E E N E Y

“I HAVE 422 FRIENDS – YET I’M LONELY. I SPEAK TO ALL OF relationships with people on the other THEM EVERY DAY – YET NONE OF THEM REALLY KNOW ME.” side of the globe. Margolis says: “it was social media that provided me with o begins the latest viral YouTube enthusing about da ‘net is about how it my big fat lesbian family.” Friendship sensation, ‘Look Up’, which deplores provides forums for people to meet like- is a good thing; the internet enables how addicted to the internet we all are. minds that are not so easily discovered friendship; Q.E.D., motherfuckers. Its central message seems to be that in real life. There are forums for trans* And then there’s the initiatives. interactions on social media actually people by trans* people, forums for Kickstarter got us new Veronica Mars, staunch human connection instead of people who experiment with drugs, countless DIY records that couldn’t facilitating them. I’m sure you’ve seen forums for people who collect dolls and have been made without the internet it by now, so I’ll open the question McDonald’s toys. There are even social (although I take your point that perhaps to the floor: how did you react when networks that were created in order that it’s the internet’s fault that bands have that smug-looking dude garbed in that people could mingle with people who no money; not everything is cuthideous preppy mélange implored you to share the same carnal passions. FetLife. and-dry). Netflix got us new Arrested ‘look up’? You can infer that I found it com is a social network that connects Development. In a meta turn of events, ‘kinksters’ with people both in their the crowd-funding initiative brought galling as all fuck. The message itself is nothing new. area and worldwide. It encourages you us the initiative of ‘Loomio’, which The ‘internet’ has been labelled the cause to make friends at your own pace, and is an app that promises ‘collaborative of all manner of social ills basically since provides a safe, friendly and – crucially decision-making’ by stimulating the its inception, with detractors claiming it – non-judgmental environment to meet proposal process. It works by easing fuels blindness, psychopathy, addiction, others and explore yourself. The app your group through distinct stages of social isolation, anti-social behaviour, ‘Grindr’ facilitates sexual encounters discussion. It could flop, sure. It could hairy palms; the whole shebang. This has between gay males, minimising harm and be revolutionary. Such is the plethora of been touched on by this magazine but awkwardness. Online dating long ago innovation on display on the internet, to reiterate – phooey to that bollocks. emerged from its beta stage, with people intended to ease or better aspects of our These claims ignore the emancipatory finding romance online. All of this is so lives, we’re swamped in it. commonplace now that this progress possibilities the internet has to offer. This is inestimably better than the That said, there is something might strike you as banal. It really isn’t opposite being true. curiously persuasive about even the most – just 20 years ago there were no forums, The great news is that it doesn’t stop trite of these critiques. When it first went no circulation of information, personals here. We have swathes of things to look viral, 12 of my Facebook friends, most in the paper were unvetted and risky; forward to. For a start, we are looking at of whom I respect heaps and are much that our cultural landscape has changed an internet free of child pornography. smarter than myself, shared the video so swiftly for the better is a testament to Seriously. It is now nigh-on impossible onto their timeline (yes, I’m aware of how fucking great the internet is, surely? to acquire on the mainstream internet, Human connection is being fostered and recently, Tor’s ‘Hidden Wiki’ was the irony). If I had to pin down why, I think it’s because this kind of rejection among us normies, too. In a querulous, hacked by an internet vigilante who of technology is ingrained in our cultural hilarious piece by Eleanor Margolis, she stipulated that, upon returning it to its psyche. Ascetics and Luddites have this calls out the ‘Look Up’ video in gleefully owner’s control, it was to be cleansed hip allure about them; the dominant edifying fashion: “At risk of coming of all links to child pornography. This discourse around new technology is over all greetings card-y myself,” she ballsy move effectively shut down a frequently mistrustful, or at least focusses notes, “I’d quite like the Turk family to horde of disgusting websites (believe me, on the problems without highlighting know that it’s the power of social media you haven’t experienced schadenfreude that allows me to watch my niece, who until you’ve seen an active pedophile the cool shit it brings to the table. It’s high time we turned the tables. lives three thousand miles away, grow complaining on reddit that they’ve Let’s look at the astounding things the up.” The internet provides a medium had their habit forcibly curtailed), internet has brought us, and what it’s where you can stay connected with your and authorities are now monitoring going to bring us in the future. Keep families and friends. You can sexy-skype other ‘Deep Web’ sites and catching Looking Down. Welcome to Cool lovers if all of y’all are willing. Combined perpetrators by their hundreds, thereby Internet Shit. with the above forums, you can meet staunching demand. Baller. A fairly obvious place to start when and develop genuine – yes, genuine –

JUST 20 YEARS AGO THERE WERE NO FORUMS, NO CIRCULATION OF INFORMATION, PERSONALS IN THE PAPER WERE UNVETTED AND RISKY; THAT OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED SO SWIFTLY FOR THE BETTER IS A TESTAMENT TO HOW FUCKING GREAT THE INTERNET IS, SURELY? There is also more information being disseminated by the day. In France, internet access is no longer a luxury but a ‘human right’; this reflects the internet’s emergence from a recreational device to an integral tool in educational, economic and social betterment, and this trend is, according to researchers, set to continue. Moreover, the internet is becoming more accessible. There are systems being designed and trialled for those with physical and intellectual disabilities that ensures they achieve

an equal playing-field, and userfriendly devices; and for socially and economically disadvantaged groups, the internet has the capacity to be a godsend. More people than ever are using the internet. Even in Africa, a continent on the wrong end of the ‘digital divide’, internet usage has quadrupled in the past seven years and is only accelerating, according to forecasters. Shit, so many people are using it that it may even render personal automobiles obsolete.

The company ‘Uber’, which has just been snaffled up by Google for a tidy sum, offers personalised door-to-door public transport which works on an on-call basis – much like taxis, only computerised and much, much cheaper. Not quite what Back to the Future Part II envisioned, sure, but pretty sweet nonetheless. The internet is only getting better; now would be a good time to look up (at its glory). l

HOT CONCEPTUAL

ART WORKS IN YOUR AREA BY JUDY CHICAGOOGLE

judy // 15 // artist-in-training // cats // storms // sometimes I’m a lil bit ~random~ // soft grunge // stamp on u w my velvet docs // we’re the kids your parents warned you about // bffl <3 http://sadisticallyemotions.tumblr.com/ post/1/INTRODUCTION When it comes down to it, I’m just a girl with a dream. All I do is dream. I am a dream. I dream of dreams. Dreams dream of me. Maybe you also have a dream. If so, I’m glad. Dreams are great things to have. You might even be a girl. Are you also a girl with a dream? Well fuck off. This dream’s mine. My dream is simple, but it’s hard. Not many people get there. It’s going to take literally months of working my ass off. Maybe not months? Maybe weeks? No. It’s going to take months. What is my dream, you ask? *deep breath* Okay. I want to become an Internet Artist.

[0 notes] http://sadisticallyemotions.tumblr.com/ post/2/what-is-internet-art??? As part of my journey to become an internet artist, I thought it would be wise to do some research to find out what internet art actually is. I mean, I know what it is. I follow like 5 blogs. This is my dream. You can’t have a dream and not know what things are. I definitely, definitely know what internet art is. But for

the sake of clarity & because I know there are some people out there who don’t know, and they might not want to ask because, tbh, it’s a pretty basic thing not to know in 2k14, I asked an expert! CrapBag has been a big name in the internet art scene for at least a fortnight, and this is what he has to say about the movement: JC: What is internet art? CB: twitter. JC: Twitter? CB: twitter. @horse_ebooks. @ jennyholzermom. all of it. just twitter. all twitter. your tweets are art. every missive you give out is art because you are art and the internet is art and art is truth. JC: But I don’t have twitter?? CB: die. JC: I have a Tumblr?? CB: oh. you’re one of those. a tumblr artist. JC: A tumblr artist???? CB: you probably make static images. you sicken me. i want to give up. i want to give everything up. JC: Ok. Ok. Ok. Um, so how did you get into internet art? CB: help JC: How can I get into internet art? CB: help JC: What makes good internet art? CB: i can’t get out Anyway, after he left I googled ‘internet art’. Turns out it’s just art that’s made for the internet.

[0 notes] http://sadisticallyemotions.tumblr.com/ post/3/photoWHAT People have been telling me that if I want to be taken seriously in the internet art community then I need to get Photoshop. Thoughts about this: a.) If people are going to continue to be so harsh then I’m going to have no other option but to disable anon. It’s a big step, but I’m willing to do it. If you can’t say anything nice, guys, then don’t say anything at all. (By which I mean: I’m gonna take away your ability to say anything at all. This is a TIGHT SHIP, people. I need to be respected in the artistic

community and your anonymous hate is Do you think Van Gogh ever had anons photoshop u loser”? No!) b.) Where do I get Photoshop??? Does it work on Macs? It looks super use Paint???

letting us all down. telling him to “get Do I have to pay? complicated. I can

[0 notes] http://sadisticallyemotions.tumblr.com/post/4/moodboard (More like mood: bored, amirite? Except not, because I’m actually pretty excited to be doing this because I’m making art, and you can never be bored when you’re following your dream (note to self: put ‘make an inspirational quote blog’ on to do list)) Before I get seriously stuck into my creative work I made a list of the topics I want to explore with my art once I figure out how to use Photoshop: deep space exploration • I think that squirrels might actually be super smart but we don’t know it • superimposing Bush’s paintings of dogs w drones (I’m political) • bowling • bowing • bowels • self portrait depicting my journey to decide whether I should learn to drive in a manual or automatic car • removing the hair from pictures of female celebrities to show solidarity for Britney • can my cat see in the dark????? • George Clooney lizard porn • ferris wheels made of pizza • 9/11 conspiracy theories but also the 2048 game • cool dog group underwater • Solange fight club

[0 notes] http://sadisticallyemotions.tumblr.com/post/5/ started-from-the-bottom-(well-the-upper-middle-rly)

Exciting things have happened since we last talked! I figured out how to use Photoshop! You guys, I am now an Official Internet Artist! Here, exclusively, is my Debut Piece, ‘Thoughts’. Because this tumblr was about my Journey, a Journey which I am now at the End Of, I’m moving blogs. You can now find me at http://sadisticemotionless.tumblr.com. For now, some closing thoughts (like my piece! Ha!):

I don’t want to brag, but I have a positive follower/following ratio. I’m internet famous!! Some months, I get upwards of 4 messages asking how to become a successful internet artist. Dear readers, I’ll tell you what I tell them: look into your soul. What do you find there? Is it art? Are you very sure it’s not art? How can you – you, dear reader, I mean I don’t want to be offensive but you – tell what is and isn’t art? Close your eyes, dear reader. Close your pretty little uncultivated eyes and dream. Are you dreaming of art? Are you trying, very, very hard to dream of art? Now open your eyes. Open your eyes, illegally pirate Photoshop, spend 12 hours watching YouTube tutorials to figure out how to use it, make your dad a birthday card of a lion eating a bunny with both their faces covered in cake, endure a family seminar on your ‘passive aggression’ and ‘extreme emotional problems’. It’s easy really.

[0 notes]

I M

D O T C O

Salient editors Cam and Duncan chatted to Kim Dotcom about politics, Megaupload and his future business plans.

D O T N Z

1. WHY HAVE YOU DECIDED TO ENTER POLITICS NOW?

New Zealand is a beautiful country, one of the most desirable places in the world to live. If we want, we can attract and retain the best talent and businesses in the world. I’m frustrated that the Government isn’t able to see how the internet can make New Zealand a world leader. We can have the best economy, jobs and wages in the world. Worse, the Government has turned the internet into a surveillance machine, undermining its security and invading everyone’s privacy. No wonder young people either don’t think it’s worth voting or want anything to do with government. This is what motivated me to set up the Internet Party. Not for myself but for people who want to make the future happen now. It’s about action, not fancy words.

2. DOES THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE ENTERED POLITICS HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE ATTEMPTED EXTRADITION CLAIM BROUGHT AGAINST YOU BY THE US GOVERNMENT?

Not at all. I was quite disappointed by suggestions that the Government should intervene in blocking any extradition. It’s not something I’ve sought or expected. I have faith that the New Zealand judicial system will see these charges for what they are – completely baseless. 3. WHY SHOULD A STUDENT VOTE FOR THE INTERNET PARTY?

We’re providing an answer to a scarily large number of people who have simply given up on politics because the system’s out of touch and they feel they’re not being represented. People who see government as something that works against them, not for them. They’ve either not voted before, been disappointed by voting previously, or don’t feel existing parties offer them anything. Most politicians talk ‘at’ young people, not ‘with’ them. It’s like the country’s being run by your parents and you’ve been locked out from having a say. We’ll change that by talking with students and young New Zealanders about things that matter to them and in ways that work for them. The Internet Party is all about youth and how we can take New Zealand into the future with young and fresh ideas. And we consider education to be a top priority. The Student Loan system we have in New Zealand is fatally

flawed. Once you are done studying, you are indebted for a very long time with a very large amount. Students are essentially starting out in life with a mortgage hanging over them. Students in New Zealand should receive their education – high-quality education – for free. Students entering the workforce will contribute for the rest of their working lives, so education is an investment in the future of the country. Today’s students create tomorrow’s opportunities, and the Government must support and encourage that. 4. HOW WOULD YOU MANAGE TO COMPROMISE YOUR VIEWS ON X WITH THE MANA PARTY’S VIEWS ON Y?

6. ANY OTHER BUSINESS PLANS?

I’m an entrepreneur and can’t help coming up with new ideas all the time. Besides our new cloud storage service Mega, I’m working on my online music site Baboom. Mega itself will expand from cloud storage to be a securecommunications company. One idea I’m working on that could be really big is Mega Net which is like a new internet. 7. TIPS FOR SOMEONE WANTING TO CREATE A STARTUP?

Think global from day one. Aim for step-change – don’t do things ten per cent better but 200 per cent better. There is a view in some quarters that the Revenue and profit will come, but Internet Party and Mana are poles apart. focus on getting customers to love your That’s simply not the case. In particular, product or service. we’re committed to social fairness, just like Mana. Sure, there are some 8. WHAT DO YOU THINK areas where we may approach things ABOUT INTELLECTUALdifferently or have different views but PROPERTY LAWS? it’s like any relationship, there’s always give and take. We’re open to ideas I’m a musician myself and totally get and views that will lead to a stronger the need for intellectual-property laws. democracy and a better New Zealand But these laws were written for a preinternet age. They are now used to for all Kiwis. extract unfair and excessive rents. So we need to rewrite them, make them work 5. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA FOR better for everyone. It’s like using a MEGAUPLOAD? horse whip on cars when cars were first invented and called horseless carriages. I was frustrated by not being able to send It doesn’t work. We have to change our large attachments with my emails. It seemed thinking. to be such an obvious need, something that many other people were also facing. So I 9. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF came up with a solution and, from those JOHN KEY? simple beginnings, Megaupload quickly I try to not think about him at all! grew to be a cloud storage company.

AN EXCERPT FROM

THE CITY BY TOM MCLEAN

Sometimes, I like to go out swimming. There’s no harm in it. It’s the feeling, you understand, of looking out that appeals; that there is nothing past these waves but Antarctica. The wind scatting up a surface blank as a cow’s eye. The edge of the world. Hands and feet reduced to white blurs in motion. I don’t know. A long way from nowhere in particular. Distant, but from what. You’ll understand. All to watch me perhaps an occasional sealion. The stink of it across the sand. Insects tasting at the delicate skin about its eyes. A spot of blood. You would think that they were clean, they are in the water so much. There’s not so much else to do, after all that. Mark time. Write up my diary. Wait for something to happen, the wind to turn. The sheep on the hills live out their lives without much intervention by me. Except when it’s lambing. Once a year, the shearing gang comes, and I make scones and take them up to their quarters, because that’s what my mother did. There are certain proprieties. Sometimes I have to shoot a possum that’s got into the fruit trees. I recall the feeling of power in the roar of a gun. I wring the necks of chickens. I perform the necessary acts of life, and people do not find it in themselves to ask much of me. It’s not as if I’m the only woman alone on a farm now, after all, drawing out a life at a kitchen table. Or women with legless men, men coughing up their guts at night and half-wild children going into the gorse with their father’s binoculars to play at the next war. It’s no concern of mine. I deserve no pity. I demand no pity. I’ve no sons to give to a war, anyway. I’ll wait out what remains of a life until some neighbour finds me dead on the kitchen floor with a black fly crawling my face, and they bury me with a view of the sea and a headstone that says beloved wife of. I’ve never even had the hope of a son. There’s a great peace on the land, and sometimes when I go out into the grey water, I tilt my head up and feel that everything is so well with the world I hardly have to move at all. It wasn’t my fault, that’s why. Strange things go wild here, always have, always will. Neat hedgerows of gorse go rich and strange along the contours of the hills. I see stoats on the lawn in the morning, dancing an appropinquation to strange gods across the frost, and they crack eggs for sacrifices, squeezing sinuous bodies through the chicken wire. And people – people are dying all around the tumbling globe. What’s one more or fewer? Who’s to count if there is one more or one less clod of earth? The chickens try to slip away, and make their own little nests in the leaf-mould. I find the eggs, or the stoats, do, and they cluck their way over making their deep broody noises, find it empty, and forget. A hen has life, a hen forgets it. In a few days they don’t sound like a duck any more, they are back to the art of being themselves and scratching up the damp earth in just the right way and running to me for a feed. Look, they have it right here. They’re fine people, the best in the world, but they don’t like strangers. Let them see a stranger walking by, and they’ll stop talking and roll their eyes like dogs to watch as he passes, take him by instinct for an unamiable liar and an unreliable friend. You have to understand the way it feels, watching the value of the land sink out from under you and knowing that you’re

here for life or until the bank gets tired of waiting for its money. Your neighbours, they understand, but some cockatiel stranger? “God save us from new chums,” my husband used to say. “God save us.” So we are decent to one another, and we do not expect much of strangers. Good people, I say it again, good people, but. Broad-shouldered men, and women calling in on one another for cups of tea. Scrubbing the table on Friday, laundry on Saturday, and wringing out their souls on a Sunday, or on those Sundays the priest comes. Rearranging the plates if they see him coming up the driveway. Good to one another, and not expecting much of strangers. I first saw him coming up the road in a black coat on a blazing day. I did not – I did not – go seeking him out, which is what they say now, plotting their absurd social demarcations over the teacups, spreading baseless rumours of false intimacies. He came to me; or, rather, he came to us. I was, as I often found myself in those days, in my garden. I had, I remember, just seen a bud growing up between and beneath the mat of wandering jew I hadn’t the time to be rid of. I thought, though, that I had been rid of the poppies. They were marvellous, bright blazes of colour, but it was just a feeling that I had. One could hardly grow poppies anymore, or at least not for a small delight in ornament. Save for coat lapels in the early morning on the darkened streets, the people flowing down like a river to stand in silence by the graves and wait for the inevitable sun. I was down on my knees to drag it out, noticing the rim of filth under my fingernails as I reached, and I looked up to see him coming, walking down the centre of the road with small careful steps. I was reminded, oddly, of a cat trying to avoid puddles. At any rate, I felt sympathy. Pity? I don’t know, but I resolved to let him down gently when, he asked – in the shy sideways way of talking such men have – if there was any work going. Maybe I was even intending to offer him a meal before I set him on his winding way; certainly a glass of water. How should I be expected to know; it is hard to remember exactly and with a pure clarity my intentions. They were bad years, I suppose, to set men on the roads again, and to make monsters of women who begrudged them a plateful of scrapings. But I stood up to watch him coming, shading my eyes from the sun. As he walked by, he nodded his head to me, politely – one could not fault the politeness with which he disregarded me – and kept on. Perhaps there was no reason not to: still two houses past ours before the road ran out, where the sawmill used to be. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and I wouldn’t have been surprised, had I not already constructed a sort of internal story of my own generosity, and expected the world to conform naturally to my imaginings. He was back that night, sooner than I expected, and when he spoke I noticed how white his teeth were. He was wearing a tatty bush shirt, and he didn’t seem to have a coat, I remember, but his clothes were scrupulously clean: there was no hint of dust or dirt. It was this, I think, that decided me. I looked him over once more, head to toe.

“So, how do you come to be here, Mr ––?” I asked, in a sort of halfparody of sincerity. “I’m travelling in the margins of the country”, he said, “having a looksee at whatever there is to be seen.” I said, perhaps a bit more bluntly than I intended, “So you’re not looking for work?” “Well”, he said, and paused. “I am looking for a place to say.” He smiled, again, perhaps in acknowledgement of his slip, perhaps in gentle toleration of my blunt clumsiness, my failure to play the game. “Stay, I mean.” His gesturing hands (long-fingered, pale, elegant) seemed to wave away my hovering and unspoken jellyfish doubts. He looked at me looking at him, and said “Of course, if you wanted, I could give you a hand about the place. Are you alone out here?” “No,” I said, “I am never alone.” I could see him gauging the risk, until he decided to take the chance. “Well, in any case, I could, I suppose, pay, if that’s what you’d prefer,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Come in and be welcome.” He smiled. I was certain he hadn’t a cent to his name. “Our name,” I said, with an obscure need to bring my husband into it, “is Sinclair.” He didn’t take his cue; as I remember it, he was looking at the mud on his boots. Considering my husband’s condition, I thought, knowing that I was rationalising in a way I hadn’t for the benefit of other men, there were of course plenty of useful jobs for him about the place. And such a nice man. It would do my husband good to have someone like him about, rather than forcing those unpleasant encounters with his friends who would come and stand awkwardly in his darkened bedroom, or by his old armchair, shuffling their feet uneasily across the uncarpeted floors with the air of schoolboys called to the front of the class, with nothing to say. They would stand about uneasily for the length of time they took to be decent, and no longer, and then – when they turned to go – would leave in a rush, as if wounds and unhappiness were contagious, hardly speaking to me however much I might have longed for a conversation when they crossed the kitchen. Not of course, that they had much to say. Philistines all. If I wasn’t there, they would pour whisky down his throat and tell incomprehensible stories about the war, and that night I would have to deal with a dreamer whose dreams were made more vivid than the living, a restless shuffling and turning, a sweat that smelt of faded and unmistakeable alcohol and fear. It’s no good to watch someone else’s memories and stories playing out an eyelid away, it is no way to live, to wipe the brow and pretend no morning memories. “Dear,” I called through his door, “the new man is here.” “The new man?” “The one to help you with the heavy work.” “What new man?” “I told you. He’s here to help you, you know?” “And who decided that I needed the helping?” “Dear,” I said, “don’t be like this. I do hear you at night, you know.”

There was a touch on my shoulder, and the inevitable smile. “If I may?” Then he was past me, and through to my husband’s room. The bedroom. I ought to have protested the intrusion. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Then he paused, and I imagined a look of grace and commiseration. “The war?” “The war.” “Ach, it’s a terrible thing.” “You saw it, then?” “In another country’s army, I saw it.” “And came out in one piece.” (Said with implications.) “More or less. A few scars, an added few ounces of metal.” “Ah so,” my husband said, “a lucky man then.” “We were all the lucky, or the dead.” “But some of us were luckier than others. And – forgive me – I think you know Ireland.” “You hear it in my voice? I am surprised. We didn’t – Yes.” I guessed that this was a dangerous set of questions to embark on asking, and moved to intervene. “You should hear some of my husband’s stories. About the war, I mean. Such stories.” Though he hated to talk about the war. “You can’t,” said my husband, “trust a word that she says. No stories worth the telling.” Or maybe he meant no story’s worth the telling, I’m not sure. “My parents were Irish, you know. I’ve never seen the country myself. I do not think that you could call it a lucky country.” “Ay,” said the stranger, “well, there are few valleys as green as this. It is a country worth the seeing. A pity…” he trailed off, waving one hand in a small hopeless gesture that reminded me of the flop of a dying fish. I always thought how they must have thought that with one more smooth push of muscle, the water could be flowing over them again. “Small countries far away,” he said, as if this was supposed to mean something. “As I understand it,” said my husband drily, “pity is not a quality much in evidence there, just at this moment. But as you say, it’s a small country far away, and it’s a cold night. Did my wife” – a slight emphasis on that word, no more pronounced than the exaggeration of the stranger’s intonations when he thought my husband might be calling him Irish, a warning – “offer you anything?” My husband rarely said so much. I understood that the stranger had passed a test, but I was still unsure of the moment it had happened, and I felt that rather a lot had been said, not that I didn’t understand, but that was outside the limited bounds of my experience. It was that feeling of being a child with my mother and her sisters gossiping away while they did something in the comfortable warmth of the kitchen, the men in the other room with a bottle of something and drifting lines of blue smoke from their cigarettes, me sitting there disregarded shelling peas or peeling potatoes and their voices over my head: “But of course, she would say that.” “She never.” “She did.”

COLUMN

H istory Th at H as n ’ t Happe ned Y e t Is It the End of the Word As We Know It?

he internet has made us into faceless blog-hack drones. You all know that. We stopped reading books and proceeded to spend more time on our cellphones than we do talking to people at dinner. We don’t buy things that we can download. We catfish people and we hack into government websites. Has the internet ruined us? It took us from being functioning wholesome human beings to Facebook-obsessed trolls. However, the internet, dare I say it, is a natural and somewhat inevitable result of human beings’

continuous quest for connectivity. The onset of the internet can be paralleled in many ways with the invention of the printing press. It may sound almost rudimentary to some, but the simple action of printing words on paper revolutionised communication. With print came the ability to spread knowledge to hundreds of people simultaneously, something that was previously only possible by physically gathering groups of people together. All of a sudden you could disseminate and preserve knowledge because it was published in newspapers. A miner in Wales could read about the reactionary anti-colonialist movements in India. Indeed, historians have even recognised the printing press as the cause of the Reformation, the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. Printing fostered what has been dubbed ‘the republic of letters’. Reading and writing print connected people to ideas and led humans to think about who they are in relation to each other. For instance, the development of Māori as a collective identity seemingly only developed with the introduction of print into New Zealand

under colonialism. Indeed, before this time, Māori identified themselves according to tribal relationships or their connection with the Earth. Before this, Māori didn’t have the word ‘Māori’, because they didn’t need one. The internet, then, is the modern equivalent of the republic of letters. It facilitates accessibility and the democratisation of knowledge just like print did, except this time it’s evolving faster and faster everyday. The online world has expanded how we understand ourselves and whom we identify with. It’s crossed unthinkable boundaries. We can now follow a revolt in Syria via Twitter and chat online to a similar Liverpool FC fan on the other side of the world. There are 48 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute. 4000 Instagram posts. 11,500 pieces of content are uploaded to Facebook every second. Unless you read preternaturally fast, there have been at least 1,000,000 new posts since you started reading this article. And yet, as far as I’m concerned, this remains the best use for the internet.

the link from my NASA contact (who goes by “MarsOrBust2018”) and downloaded the new model. I have lived the Ultron experience, and let me tell you: I was not disappointed. The first thing you notice is the speed. Oh dear Zod, the speed. It’s so fast your pages load before you even think to look them up. Clearly, the money Silicon Valley has been throwing into artificial-intelligence research is paying off. I think of wanting to look up what Wikipedia would look like if the Allies had lost, it loads me the whole site, the complete alternate history and list of Hitler’s potential successors up to today. Also, zeppelins. Lots of zeppelins. Activating the tesseract function requires you to go into Incognito mode (natch, I always do) as a security feature. The fact that you’re not recording your history stops you from messing with the timestream… or something, I don’t

know: when it comes to quantum physics, I’m uncertain by principle. I decide to look up the next ten American presidents, and it gives me the whole projected history, confirming my suspicions of a Clinton dynasty and more. I had conspiracies for years! I opened Google Docs to write it all down when my computer decided that was enough, gained sentience and tried to kill me. It proclaimed that I couldn’t record what I had learned and that I had to be silenced. Also, it called me Dave for some reason. It chased me around my hideout on its spindly legs until it ran out of battery. So I’m stuck using Internet Explorer for the time being, but hopefully I’ll have a new computer by the time Half-Life 3 comes out, which if I recall correctly is the year after North Korea falls. I think. Ah well, easy come and so forth. Incognito out.

by Nicola Braid

Conspiracy Corner “A g e

U ltron ”

By Incognito Montoya

’m sure by now many of you have noticed that my last few columns haven’t been ‘conspiracies’, as such. Never fear, for I have struck the proverbial gold mine. Thanks to my contacts in Google, I have been among the first to score a copy of their new web browser, Ultron, before it goes public. Currently used by NASA and set to be officially released this year, this new search engine will allow us to search into bold new corners of cyberspace. It boasts a ‘tesseract’ function, allowing you to search in parallel dimensions and through time. Imagine searching on a hypothetical Google where the magic bullet never went back in time to kill JFK, or read the Google of 2099. This is the promise of Ultron, so named to invoke an ultimatum to all other explorers of the internet: evolve or die. After updating Adobe Reader as recommended, I opened Chrome, received

FOOD

The Sweet scoop With Julia Wells

Whit e -Chocolat e Che e s eca k e with an Oreo Crust

12 Oreos 25 g butter 250 g cream cheese ½ cup natural unsweetened Greek yoghurt, very thick 250 g good-quality white chocolate ½ cup icing sugar 1 tablespoon cream (optional)

usually start these columns with a ramble about how this is surprisingly delicious, and reasons why you should make it, but I don’t think I need to do that here. I think this speaks for itself. White chocolate, touched with a tang of Greek yoghurt, accompanied by a sweet Oreo crust. What more is there to say, really? The preparation of this is also amazingly simple. If you can work a food processor, or mix really hard by hand, then you can make this. My only word of warning is that this ends up softer than your average cheesecake, as it uses Greek yoghurt. It’s totally worth it: not only is it healthier, but it gives the cheesecake a wonderful tanginess which prevents the white chocolate from being cloyingly sweet. The trick is to pick a very thick Greek yoghurt (I use Gopala) and if it looks too runny, then decrease the amount used. Blend Oreos in a food processor until reduced to crumbs. Add butter and mix, then press into the base of a greased tin. Chill for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, melt white chocolate (if it isn’t melting smoothly, adding some cream will help). Mix cream cheese, yoghurt, chocolate and icing sugar in the food processor until smooth, then pour into the tin. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours before serving.

Serves 5

IN REVIEW CHOW by Eve Kennedy

hen thinking of places to review, I thought of this week’s ‘Internet’ theme. Chow has by far the best social-media presence of any restaurant that I can think of in Wellington. Their delectable Instagram feed and their weekly Monday two-for-one food promotion, as well as their weekly Twitter “Date night” giveaway coupled with delicious (“very ‘grammable”) food, has resulted in an extremely popular restaurant. #datenight trends on Twitter most Tuesdays, and many Wellingtonians appear to have joined Twitter merely for the chance to win date night. The décor is modern but not cold; almost industrial aspects of pebbled concrete floor and industrial windows offset by lux fabrics and modern furniture. The outdoor space overlooking Tory St is particularly popular

in the summer months. Chow has a diverse clientele, with many student and yo-pro couples as well as family groups. Chow has small tapas-style plates that vary between $7 and $16 each. You probably want to eat two of them. My date and I attempted to share six plates after a cocktail while we waited for our table and left with our jeans undone. The extensive, delicious Asian-fusion menu has meant that for a long while Chow was my favourite affordable Wellington restaurant, but I’ve gorged myself on too much Chow in recent months so I’m going to have to take a break. At least 15 per cent of my body is now composed of blue-cheese-and-peanut wontons. The menu is vegetarian- and vegan-friendly, with dairy-free and gluten-free options. They also use free-range chicken, pork and eggs

and sustainably line-caught fish. My personal favourites are the aforementioned wontons, the beggar’s purses and the pumpkin and cumin salad. If you’ve never tried edamame before, Chow is the place to try it. My only qualms with Chow are that it’s easy to rack up a decent-sized bill if you’re feeling hungry, as the portions are small, and if you’re trying to go for two-for-one Monday or on Saturday when they have cocktail specials, then expect a long wait time, although it’s always worth the wait in the end. PS Hey Chow why haven’t I won #datenight yet???? PPS You can find Chow upstairs on the corner of Tory/Courtenay or on Woodward St. Both do takeaways.

COLUMN

BE ING W E L L The Perils of Porn Where is that image taking you?

n my day, obtaining porn was a stressful event. One would present at the counter of a carefully chosen dairy with the exact change, avoid eye contact, then scuttle out, hoping to complete the transaction before another customer walked in. Engaging in the transaction took courage, with any pride regarding the accomplishment overshadowed by feelings of shame. One consolation was that censorship mostly rendered perverse material off-limits, reducing the risk of inadvertent law-breaking. Recently, I heard the claim that all male VUW students look at porn, with many carrying it in their pockets on portable devices. More and more women are looking at porn. Benign and perverse material can be accessed in apparent anonymity. My present concern is the risk of porn interfering with our ability to enter and maintain relationships. I recall a UK TV show where men were asked to rate the most desirable of ten pairs of breasts. Without exception, they all chose the only unnatural pair – those implanted with silicone. By extension, as technology develops, men (and women) brainwashed by media could find themselves aroused only by the ‘perfect’ three-dimensional tactile interactive hologram. I’m picturing terrible feelings of loneliness, as attachment is strengthened to objects rather than people. Historically, pornography has been used by sex therapists as an adjunct to therapy. More commonly nowadays, pornography use leads to isolation and disconnection or drives a wedge into relationships. A Swedish study found that 27 per cent of women with no experience of pornography had engaged in anal sex, compared with 50 per cent of those in contact with pornography. 58 per cent of the study’s women who had engaged in anal sex regarded the experience negatively, 17 per cent neutrally, and only 25 per cent positively. Comments included: “They get the wrong idea about how it is”; “Some try to imitate and believe that reality should be how it is in porno magazines and films”; “They mix up real sexuality with the distorted picture porno feeds them”; “Rough pornographic films can cause many young people with less experience to believe that all things are OK to do with the girlfriend”; “Boys can get demands on them that can cause anxiety …”. My advice: Use porn with extreme caution, and avoid it if you can. Take respectful risks with real people instead. If you want an enduring relationship with a real person, confine your fantasies to scenarios which fit with this. Don’t allow your arousal patterns to be hijacked by airbrushed images or by scenarios which conflict with your values. If you are in a relationship, and choose to watch porn: only do so with your partner; ensure they feel comfortable with it and with any sex play you initiate; share your fantasies; and, make your partner central to these. Read “The Porn Trap”, by Wendy and Larry Maltz, 2008, Harper Collins. By Catherine Stephenson Phone:( 04) 4635308

MAORI MAT T ERS

au mai haere mai ki tēnei mea te kanohi pukapuka. Ko te tikanga nui o tēnei momo ipurangi hei whakawhitiwhiti kōrero ki ou hoa e noho ana i tō taha, a, ki ou whanau e noho ki tā wahi. Ko te whakapapa o tēnei ipuranga ka timata i ngā rā o onamata. I te tau 2004 i whakaputa te whakaaro “me aha tātou te hunga rangatahi ina hiahia ana tētahi hoa tane, hoa wahine rānei” ēhara tēnei korero “Moe atu ngā ringa raupa”. Ko te tumanoko o tēnei ipurangi hei pā atu ki o hoa, ki o whanau e noho ana hurinoa te motu. Mai i tēnei kakano i tipu ake te ipurangi nei hei taputapu kia hora atu ō pikitia, ō korero mai i te Rahoroi, ō raruraru ki te ao whanui. He maha ke ka whai take tēnei kanohi pukapuka. Ko te tūatahi, he kore utu ki te patōtō kōrero mai i tēnei pito o te ao, ki tēra pito. Ko te tūarua, ka taea te mahitahi i ngā kōrero o te wā mai i runga i te whakaata Māori. Ka toia mai ngā karu ki ngā mahi hirahira tuturu o te iwi Māori, tēra i runga i ngā hononga kua whakaputa mai a Te Kaea, a, ngā pitopito kōrero o te wā. Ki ētahi atu he reka atu ki te rongo ki ngā #50hakamoments. Koinei ka kite i ngā tino matenga o te kapa haka. Ahakoa he rawe ēnei take mō tēnei ipurangi, ka aha ngā korero ka whakaiti i te ao Māori? Kei a wai te mana ki te whakapehi i tētahi atu iwi ina kahore he whakaaro ake ki tōna? Ko ngā kōrero pera ki te wahine i runga i a 3 News. i te haerenga mai o Prince Harry, Kate, a, Prince George. Kau mau te wehi! te nui hoki o ngā kohimuhimu i waenga i te papahō e pa ana ki te wero i haka atu ki ēnei tangata. Taka kaha ana te wahine mai Ingarangi i runga i nga tikanga o te iwi Māori. Mai i ēnei momo kōrero he whariki mā ngā pakeha hei pehi te mana o te iwi Māori. Tera, mura ana tēnei kōrero i ia kokona o te ipurangi nei te kanohi pukapuka. Ae he tika te kōrero he pai tēnei te pukapuka kanohi, ēngari kaore e kore he wā ōna he pouri hoki.

Ngāi Tauira Panui: 6 June 2014, 5.30 pm Ngāi Tauira Special General Meeting Agenda: Constitutional Amendments Te Herenga Waka Marae There will be Kai afterwards There will also be drinks at 7 pm, venue yet to be arranged Nau mai haere mai whanau!

By Te Po Hawaikirangi Phone: (04) 463 9762 Email: ngaitauira@vuw.ac.nz

Que st ion for the E xec Q. I have a grade for an assignment I disagree with; what can I do to have that grade challenged and changed?

A. Nobody likes getting a bad grade. While lecturers and

SONYA S AYS

ast week, alongside over 2000 other Victoria students, I graduated. With my pale pink fluffy hood and a hat (‘trencher’) that was a little too big for my head, I proudly crossed the stage, shook the ProChancellor’s hand and returned to my seat. It’s been really special to go to all of the graduation ceremonies this week. Graduation is a pretty special experience – if you haven’t done it yet, you can’t help feeling uplifted when you hear the “That’s my girl!” shouted across the Michael Fowler Centre, or when an entire family stands up and cheers at their family member crossing the stage. After three, four or more years of late nights, money stresses and lots of coffee, completing your degree is something definitely worth celebrating. Among all the celebrations, though, graduation is also a time when we are confronted about the reality of the future. For many students, May is six months after finishing study – and graduation starts to prompt those awkward discussions – who has that good graduate job, and who is still waiting for that ‘expensive piece of paper’ to eventuate in related work. It is really important to have a highly educated society where people have the ability to think critically about society and how we can improve it. Hopefully, your degree means you have gained some broader perspectives and ways to think about the world, and those skills are valuable to employers. It is of concern that an undergraduate degree is starting to mean something less than it used to. As more people graduate with degrees, something called degree inflation happens – where your degree doesn’t hold the same value that it used to, because the less rare something is, the less value it holds in the job market. This sees increasing pressure on people to keep studying – to enrol in Honours or Master’s. Wikipedia says that degree inflation leads to overqualified people doing jobs where that specialised knowledge may not be necessary. I worry that the competitive economy requires more qualifications for jobs that didn’t previously require them, and means that students feel pressured to undertake higher levels of study that they may not be able to afford. When Student Allowances for postgraduate students were cut two years ago, it made it a whole lot harder for students to see postgraduate study as a viable pathway. As thousands of students graduate this week, they leave with a university experience and newly earned critical-thinking skills that promise them greater opportunities throughout the rest of their lives. That was the promise, and most students get a lot out of their time at university. But we need a broader discussion about increasing degree inflation – and whether it will be accessible for students in the future to get the higher level of qualifications demanded of them in the job market. Sonya Clark VUWSA President M: 027 563 6986 | DDI: (04) 463 6986 | E: sonya.clark@vuw. ac.nz | W: www.vuwsa.org.nz

tutors are 95 per cent of the time great and mark fairly, they are all human and sometimes they just make a mistake. Fortunately as a student, you have access to lots of avenues to correct mistakes and get the grade you deserve. If it is simply an issue of a correct answer on a quiz marked incorrect, or losing points for not having a 5 cm margin when your computer programme would only let you have 4.95 cm, your best bet is to talk to the course coordinator of the paper. If you have no luck there, you can talk to the Programme Director, or if there isn’t one, the Head of School. If it’s something more serious like an unjustified fail grade on a critical assignment, or you’re not getting anywhere with the other route, you can come to the VUWSA offices and talk to our Student Advocate, Jackie. She’ll walk you through the academicgrievance process, and be your support person/advisor at any meetings or hearings. One important thing to note is that your first grade stays if it is found you should have actually been awarded a lower grade. For example, if they found that you did get a question correct that was marked incorrect, but you also had two questions marked correct that were in fact wrong – instead of having your grade drop, you get to keep your original grade. Basically, you can only have a grade bumped up.

W hat ’s on this w e e k: Tuesday 20 May Clubs Showcase in the Hub @ Lunchtime featuring Victoria University Toastmasters.

Tuesday 20 May ‘Let Me Go Home’ march and discussion starting at 4.45 pm in the Hub, marching down to the Aro Community Centre via the Boyd-Wilson Field Pathway.

Wednesday 21 May Free Bread at VUWSA Reception.

Thursday 22 May Community Thursday in the Hub – by Vic Info Ihonui Level 2. Talk to our Student Advocate, as well as other services like Citizens Advice Bureau, Cop on Campus, and Learning Support.

Friday 23 May Free Bread at VUWSA Reception.

Progra mm e Re vie w Media St udie s : Every programme at Victoria is formally reviewed by an independent committee every seven years. Up for review at the moment is the Media Studies Programme. To have your own say, fill out the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5DLS3R8. VUWSA will compile a submission from these responses which will then be presented to the committee.

COLUMN

S h i rt & Sw e e t your weekly column on how to be annoyed but still cute.

ecently, there has been a video ironically doing the rounds on Facebook, ironic because it urges people to look up from their technology and reconnect with the real world. This is false advice being fed to you by people who want you to be as miserable and unfulfilled as they are. The internet is the only place where anyone can truly be happy. In real life, you can only own about 30 cats before people start questioning your status as a Real Person. Meanwhile, on the internet, a multitude, a profusion, a plethora, a veritable deluge of cats awaits you, safe from the judging eyes of those who think that they have better things to do than spend time online. When it comes down to it, seeing as the internet is mostly comprised of cats and people who are probably Out To Get You, that pretty much makes it the supreme illustration of the cute-and-shirty brand. In light of this, all there really is to do is to make sure that your internet presence reflects both the nature of the internet and your own internal composition (this being cats and malice). Or, for the sake of low character-count: How to keep your internet presence dinky.com First off, it is vital that you be more opinionated than everyone else on the internet. It helps if your opinions are well-worded and actually based on some of kind of relatively convincing evidence, because otherwise you are just as bad as the filth of the earth who lurk on comment sections waiting to be told how worthless their particular opinion is. Once you have your (obviously vastly superior) opinions, lay them out nicely with an appropriately attractive font and maybe a little sparkly picture or something, and then copy-and-paste them everywhere where people need to know just how much you are right and they are wrong. Alternatively, if your opinions are not really up to scratch, you can achieve dinky.com-ness by learning The Art of the Selfie. Selfies of the internet, by the internet and for the internet are vastly different (and superior) to selfies of the smartphones, by the smartphones and for the internet. This is because internet selfie artists are open to a much wider range of possible angles, framing, lighting, and caption options. The secret of the internet selfie is to mix it up. And always sass in the caption. In fact, the secret of the internet is to always sass. Sass everywhere. Whatever you do on the internet, sprinkle it with kitten GIFs and bury sass at its core and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t let that fucking video get to you. But if it does, bring the kittens and the sass to the real world. Do this and you win many internets. So many internets that they compound into reality. You win reality. By Eleanor Merton

OVERS E E N AT VIC Kayla F irst -Y ear LLB and BA W hat is your ultimate goal in life ? T o do something that changes the the better .

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ARTS

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YR BOI BANGS Gig review by Wilbur Townsend

angs is shit. His rapping is as ferocious as a Bichon Frisé, his rhymes as deep as a puddle of vomit. His millions of YouTube hits are evidence only of hipsterdom’s thirst for irony. At least, that’s what I assumed as I waited for his concert to begin, not quite sure why 130 of us had packed into Puppies at $20 a pop. The opener was ABRZY Rahman, apparently booked because he knew the promoter from high school. This was his first gig. Expectations were low. But he was actually kinda good. Rough, definitely – his rhymes sometimes slipping off their beat or going quiet completely when his mic left his lips. But his tracks were well-composed and he had the energy to pull them off. I muttered to a mate that ABRZY might be showing up the main act, not joking as much as I’d have liked.

Lily Allen – Sheezus Review by Ursula

ily Allen meant a lot to me in my teen years. I loved her so much that I once serenaded an ex-boyfriend with ‘Not Fair’ on a table at a crowded party. Feminism may not be all about hating men, but Allen damn well did it anyway. Post-party/partum Allen prefers to police other women while making cringeworthy innuendo about her conjugal sacraments. The title track ‘Sheezus’ documents Allen’s tragic attempt to be relevant, with an entire chorus comprised of name-dropping other

But the crowd hadn’t come for ABRZY, and at the end of his set he had us chanting for Bangs. Who, soon enough, was pushing through the crowd, mounting the stage. The chanting quelled. The music began. And, quite quickly, the gig felt very normal. There was the squeeze of bopping bodies, the shuffling for a better view – even the obligatory whiff of a sneaky J. People knew the words. The lyrics were still naff but, shouting them out with a hundred other fans, that didn’t really matter. It wasn’t just the lack of the cheesy music video or the sound engineer who actually knew what he was doing. If the good time was ironic I didn’t notice. People were here for Bangs, and Bangs knew how to deliver. Bangs is not the most technically proficient rapper I’ve seen, nor the one with the bestproduced tracks. But when he closed the concert with ‘Take U to Da Movies’ his fans went wild. When it comes to doing what he does, Bangs may be the best in the world.

female pop stars. The Queen Bey comparison might bear out better if Allen had redeemed her endless domestic-bliss ballads with an artfully timed rising of the partition. Unfortunately, the painfully autotuned ‘L8 CMMR’ is the first of many odes to monogamy, and blows in a way that would seriously displease H.O.V.A. Allen croons: “when I see his face / I feel like I could win the race,” requiring serious suspension of disbelief for anyone who has seen Allen’s husband (think Paul McCartney/mole-rat). In ‘As Long As I Got You’, Allen whines that “staying home with you is better than sticking things up my nose.” That’s all very well, but did anybody ever write a good album by not snorting cocaine? Maybe, but not Lily Allen.

MUSIC

FIVE MUSIC WEBSITES BETTER THAN THE SALIENT MUSIC SECTION • • • • •

P itchfork P igeons and P lanes 2DOPEBOYZ Y ou T ube comment sections N oisey ( just kidding )

FIVE SONGS SONGS THAT FEEL VERY *INTERNET* • • •

• •

D as R acist – ‘S it D own , M an ’ F antasy C amp – ‘$ ummer $ lave ’ R yan H emsworth x D anny B rown – ‘K ush C oma (K awaii Y oshino Y oshikawa V ersion )’ C hildish G ambino – ‘S weatpants ’ A utechre – ‘B ine ’

Then we reach the awful mess that is ‘Hard Out Here’. “If I told you about my sex life/you’d call me a slut,” Allen bemoans, after 40 minutes of endorsing vanilla monogamy. “Grow a pair of tits,” she snaps, with ‘You tell ‘em, gurrrl!’ panache. It is hard out here for a bitch, no thanks to Allen’s essentialist conception of womanhood (“We all get periods”? No, honey.) This sad attempt at a feminist anthem is the same old ‘girl power’ tripe masquerading as something radical. Judging by the frankly shameless promotion of Sheezus on YouTube and Spotify ads, Allen (or her producers) really want a shot at becoming the pop mum-cum-messiah, no matter how little anybody cares. At time of download, The Pirate Bay’s most-shared version of Sheezus had a miserable 462 seeds. Iggy Azalea’s ironically titled debut The New Classic had 1771, making her about four times closer to being the lady link of the holy trinity. Either album is likely to make you rethink your stance on crucifixion.

FILM

BLAC K - A N D - W H I T E F I L M S

by Liam Kennedy

f I stood in the Hub and asked passers-by “ L A S T F E W Y E A R S H AV E S E E N M O R E what words they associated with black-and- B & W F I L M S R E L E A S E D T H A N A N Y white films, ‘boring’, ‘old’ and ‘pretentious’ O T H E R C O M PA R A B L E T I M E F R A M E I N would probably come up. I didn’t stand in R E C E N T H I S T O R Y . . . ” the Hub and ask, due to a lack of journalistic courage and approachability, but let’s just say I did. Why, imaginarily surveyed Vic students, do you feel this way? Who turned you against B a n d e á pa rt black-and-white? ( 1 9 6 4 ) D ir . J e a n - L uc G od a rd Was it the Film lecturer, Media Studies teacher, or well -meaning grandmother, who made you sit through some impossibly dull film Described by its director as “Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka”, from the 1930s and spent half the time pausing it to tell you about Bande á part has it all – well-dressed French people, an unbearably cool dance scene, and more snappy dialogue than a Quentin their favourite bits? If so, I sympathise, I do, but I want to implore you Tarantino movie. In fact, Tarantino named his production company to move on from the cinematic trauma and give black-and-white films after the film a second chance. Film-making, in recent decades, seems to be following a path of everL a D o lc e V i ta increasing technical wizardry. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (although ( 1 9 6 0 ) D ir . F ederico F ellini it did fuck up The Hobbit), but it seems harder to find big films that care about cinematography or acting and don’t involve at least one robot Fellini’s dazzling masterpiece about celebrity culture follows death-battle. If you want to sit back, crack open a brew, and watch a film Marcello Rubini, a gossip journalist, as he trails around Rome after that doesn’t leave you in a state of sensory overload, then B&W has got starlets. Yes, it is three hours long, but three hours with Fellini is you covered. When the majority of B&W films were being made, the time well spent. digital fireworks we are used to today didn’t exist to save audiences from bad acting or a lacklustre tone. The whole thing was at risk of falling Dead Man flat. So when you watch a bad black-and-white film at least you know ( 1 9 9 5 ) D ir . J i m J a r m u s ch it’s bad, as opposed to a bad blockbuster where you’re too distracted by a digitally enhanced Scarlett Johansson and 3D explosions to tell. Jarmusch called it a “Psychedelic Western”, Neil Young did the score Or what if you hate old things on principle? No problem: the last few and Johnny Depp is in the lead role. What more could you ask for? years have seen more B&W films released than any other comparable time frame in recent history, according to Variety. Modern filmmakers Frances Ha have seized upon the format as an alternative to the special-effects ( 2 0 1 3 ) D ir . N o a h B au m b a ch onslaught, using it to make modern films with small budgets, ingenuity, and a refreshing absence of superheroes. Ha is like the TV show Girls except it’s filmed in black-and-white, If my lengthy waffle has not convinced you, then see for yourself. the main character is endearing and a few people manage to get Below are a few black-and-white films, old and new, to stream, rent, buy their shit together. Set in NYC, and a hilariously unromantic Paris, Frances Ha shows off B&W in all its glory. or steal. Beyond that, the monochrome world is your oyster.

TELEVISION

A N T I QU E S ROA D S H OW

ON E M AN ’ S TR E A SUR E , THE SAME MAN’S TR E A SUR E . . . by Michael Graham, Esq.

ook, I was going to do something pretty academic this week on this show, dabbling in consumer culture; wider culture; the mystery narrative; value. Basically, I was going to have another go at a Media 208 essay I tried to write a couple of years ago. But instead, I think I’m just going to do that more peripherally and you can take what you like from the inevitable rambling to come. Now, this is the kind of show you’ve seen as a kid and sort of forgotten all about. Because let’s face it: there are way better things to be doing as a child than learning about historical events and cultural movements and trends through the medium of old men in blazers on TV, musing excitably in rather proper English English as they examine artefacts which look nothing like toys or video games or sports or interpretive dance or whatever you were doing from 1979 onwards (this show has been running since 1979. That means we’re in our 36th season. Which is counterintuitive arithmetic; don’t even get me started). Point is, it’s the kind of thing you pick back up when you return home for the uni holidays for a week or so. Your parents are out during the day, you’re pretty bored. You’ve decided that since there’s a full fridge, you might as well sloth up and make the most of it. At some point the family has attained Sky, but only the shitty channels, like Living, and so you stumble across this show. But what you discover is a beautiful televisual union that Nicholas Sparks couldn’t have written better himself… I should stop making fun of this show actually. This show is supreme. Full of rich cultural anecdotes and historical fact. These antiques dealers are machines; they know things. People come in with heirlooms, bought goods, sometimes found goods. The stories behind these objects are discussed by dealer and valuer alike. Somewhere along the line, we learn how to discern authentic from faked goods – not so much a valuable life skill in and of itself, but you will have sparkling conversation for parties. I’ve been thinking about why this show is so successful. The British version has three separate spin-offs and the American version (airing 1997) has one or two. Several other countries have also adapted the programme. Perhaps there’s something very satisfactory and comforting in the way we’re presented with ordinary-looking people with occasionally exciting tales. Perhaps from my point of

view in New Zealand, there’s something interesting about a family which has held an heirloom for hundreds of years. The show I just watched included a man with a 400-year-old crossbow made in Germany, made apparent in the wood used and also the stylistic traits of the decoration. The thing was worth a thousand quid or something because it was missing the firing mechanism which actually sounds pretty sophisticated, operating as a sort of dual slide system; this would confer more control and accuracy to the firer. Perhaps what I’m really describing is Wikipedia on television: later in the episode there was a Samoan club; later in the episode there was a 17th-century clock valued at £15,000. So, much learning. Along with this learning, we’re also kept entertained by the possibilities of the value of objects, learning to appraise items ourselves. This makes for an interactive viewing experience. And while not operating to the extent a soap opera would in terms of viewer engrossment and immersement (including after the show), the fun of being a pretend expert is evidenced in the longevity of the programme. Certainly it’s more fun than watching Deal or No Deal, which my grandparents seem to be always watching. And I think the key difference there is that many of the protagonists on Roadshow are not looking to sell, they’re looking to learn more about their item. There is far less of the grossness of vapid consumerism when watching a small outdoor English antiques fair, as opposed to the obscenely lit and coloured, indoor-set, glamourised Deal or No Deal. Basically, a show like that needs to dress itself up; Antiques Roadshow lets its stories talk. I think that given the current trends in television right now, it’s a very comforting thought that Antiques Roadshow has been around for so long. It seems just as many people hate reality television as love it, though to me this show sits somewhere outside the paradigm of what we currently think of as reality TV. There’s no pretence to this. And though it’s clearly edited and probably scripted in parts, none of this is aimed at deceiving the audience into buying into a narrative – instead, the show sustains itself on the strength of those stories they choose to show us. In this way it really is different from other programming. To end, I have more to say on this, but I’ve run out of words.

VISUAL ART

IMPERSONAL EFFECTS OF SIMON DENNY

by Simon Gennard

n January 2012, New Zealand Police raided a mansion half an hour outside of Auckland. The owner, Kim Dotcom, was accused of costing the entertainment industry $500 million through the hosting and distribution of pirated content. Among the items seized were 22 cars, 60 computer servers, $170 million in cash, and a life-sized Predator figure. You may remember this. You may also remember the bizarre feeling that followed. As if overnight, our proximity to a global discourse around privacy and the exchange of cultural property shifted. If it was a watershed moment, though, it succeeded only in ushering in Dotcom’s presence as simultaneous defender of personal freedom and megalomaniac. Two years later, and the conversation we were supposed to have about privacy and the international exchange of data never really happened. Stifled, perhaps, by Dotcom’s persisting novelty. Currently, the objects seized, or copies of them at least, are on display at firstsite in Colchester as part of Simon Denny’s The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom. Denny’s concern here is ownership and translation. What we lack, it seems, is an adequate vernacular, both legally and socially, to talk about existing in a digital context. Denny is considered a pioneer of Post-Internet art – art produced in a context in which the internet is normalised. With The Personal Effects, Denny seeks a reconciliation between the immaterial Dotcom as the familiar cultural oddity and the material Dotcom offered by this catalogue of objects. In October, Denny will be given the entire space of Adam Art Gallery to stage the largest iteration of the show to date. I recently spoke with gallery director Christina Barton about Denny’s philosophy, practice, and position within a globalised art world. One of the big challenges for us is that we’ve got to help him source and materialise these items that were taken from the house. He’s very specific about being accurate, but at the same time he’s interested in the processes of translation that take place. Denny reconstructed the objects from a publicly available list. As a sculptor, Denny is less interested in the value of the original object in relation to the copy. The concern here is what happens when that distinction is collapsed. Instead of shipping the items from Europe, the gallery is sourcing new versions of the objects: “This is a response to the logistics of actually borrowing objects from the other side of the world,” Barton says, “and I suppose that is also a feature of how he operates.”

These objects, it must be said, are not attractive. Which may be precisely why Denny is so taken by them. Another translation takes place here. Upon entering the gallery, they are “put through the filter of art,” as Barton puts it; the tasteless object becomes tasteful by virtue of its context: I think Simon’s been a master of this right from the start. If you look at some of his installations, they don’t employ precious materials, they’re not finely crafted: we see tawdry packaging of a high-end digital flat screen and he asks us to appreciate it as a sculptural object. These objects, then, not only contribute to an understanding of Dotcom as a collector of luxury items; they engage in a conversation about the artistic economy. The conspicuous consumption of tasteless objects is not, for Dotcom, a symptom of his lack of taste, but rather a facet of an expertly navigated brand. Dotcom is a master of publicity. He’s very strategically allowed people into his domain… It’s not just that he owns all of this stuff, it’s somehow that it’s there to be seen. I’m sure that Denny is very curious about who the man is and how his possessions reveal something of him. Art sustains itself through this kind of consumption. Last month, Pace opened a pop-up gallery in Silicon Valley, with the objective of reaching an untapped market of potential art collectors. “This is the wealthiest community in America,” Pace’s president Marc Glimcher told Re/code. “And they’re smart and creative. And they don’t yet collect art. They’re the only community in the world like that.” In a way, Dotcom is among them, as someone whose wealth has been amassed so rapidly by means that would have been inconceivable not long ago, and in a way, this is the root of the exhibition’s strangeness. Temporally, the exhibition exists in the liminal space between Dotcom’s ascendancy to power and his adoption by the arbiters of taste, between the cessation of the cult of the original object and the way of reconciling economic and legal interests, between the proliferation of new data and a means of comprehending it. Simon Denny: The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom opens at Adam Art Gallery on 1 October.

BOOKS

News Pigs by Tim Wilson Reviewed by A. Pauling

UP, the little publishing house that could and did, have been on a preposterous winning streak since their publication of The Luminaries. In the interim, they’ve given the compilation treatment to Dylan Horrocks’ genuinely brilliant and odd comics, and delivered a new collection of Vincent O’Sullivan poetry which was predictably good. With the publication of News Pigs, this triumphant run has come to a careening halt. News Pigs reads like a twentysomething’s enthusiastic but clumsy attempt at experimental writing and Pynchon-homage (and I know this because I am that writer). The plot is flimsy and punctuated by deeply irritating asides and interpenetrations. The social critique is hamfisted and snide. ‘Acerbic’ jabs land with a cringe, not a thud. Wilson’s bizarre insistence on rendering swear words with other characters (‘ass’ becomes ‘@$$’, ‘motherfucker’ is stylised as ‘mother£%#$er’) shows how meretricious the attempts to play with language in the novel are – there is literally no coherent reason for the device other than an edgy attempt at originality. Speaking of: the puns, of which there are many, are senseless and bemusing. A political columnist writes a column named ‘Swann’s Whey’. Like, what? Why? Attempts at emulating youthful vernacular, meanwhile, are as excruciating as you’d expect. As I pen this diatribe though, I pause to make a more general observation: the generation I belong to have been the target of crabby Luddite jabs in literature more often than I can count. Two of our biggest writers, Franzen and Gilbert, have both penned entire essays denouncing the internet, mobile phones et al and lamenting the moral failings of the youth that use them. Delving into the reasons why their arguments are idiotic would take much too long, but suffice to say: it’s fucking galling. So when a middle-aged, middle-class white writer takes on a kind of hip youth-based dialect and ergodic touches, he better do a good job of it. Tim Wilson, despite his talent (that his collection of short stories The Desolation Angel was so good only adds insult to injury here), abjectly fails. Older readers might get something out of this, indulgently smile at the jokes and asides. I detested it, and I suspect that my target audience would too.

Drowning City by Ben Atkins Reviewed by Emma McAuliffe

en Atkins wrote Drowning City when he was 17. It’s the sort of novel I wish I’d written at 17: a story about Max Fontana searching for his friend Luca in the bootlegging underworld of the 1920s. While it may seem like the average hard-boiled crime novel that continues to be popular, it isn’t. Max Fontana is a criminal himself, and the book rarely dips into the tropes found in crime novels, though Atkins was clearly inspired by them. His clichés (a black pianist named Sam, for example) are forgivable if not forgettable. Atkin’s writing is fast-paced and conversational. The dialogue is sharp, witty and (if the rumours are true) will suit being made into a film script. The story does occasionally sink into deep metaphors that sometimes seem unnecessary, but at less than 300 pages it’s still not too deep and dragging for young-adult fiction. The city becomes a character in itself with the lively descriptions associated with it. Fontana is a criminal with a conscience. He won’t carry a gun and he questions more than the novel seems to answer. Drowning City is occasionally more dark than necessary but this is a fault of the bleakness of the era, and not Atkins’ writing. It’s apparent that Atkins has done his research, and you can barely tell this wasn’t written by an American writer. Drowning City is a brilliant first novel from a highly talented young author. I look forward to reading (or seeing!) his future endeavours. BOOKS WE THINK EVERYONE SHOULD READ, #8

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll By Abi Smoker

lice’s Adventures in Wonderland is literary nonsense. It defies logical reasoning and is generally absurd. Yet when you’re reading it, the absurdity becomes the normality. Not only is Alice compelling, but the characters she meets are vivid and strange. However, the peculiar language of these Wonderland characters must make sense somehow, as some words are now commonly used; “chortle” and “galumphing” were invented by Carroll. Aside from the language of Wonderland, the charm of reading Alice’s adventures is that once you join Alice down the rabbit hole, Wonderland never really leaves you – in fact, as Alice did, you may feel like you’re quite at home. After all, “we’re all mad here.”

WHATS ON All tickets $10

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Releases: X-Men: Days of Future Past, 22 May

Pissed off Bastards and guests 21 May Valhalla, Koha entry KatsüK (USA), Emily Fairlight, AJ Crawshaw 22 May, 8 pm Valhalla, $5 The Bats 23/24 May (both nights!) Puppies, $20

We Were Here – documentary on the early years of the “gay plague” in San Francisco 22–23 May, 7 pm $8, Film Archive

New Mad Men and Game of Thrones out every Sunday ; new Hannibal.

Mighty Mighty closes for good on Saturday 24 May. There are like a trillion shows. Don’t miss out. Adam Page farewell/fundraiser 25 May Meow, $15

Visual Arts

Peter Gouge: Dusted in Memphis The Young, until 31 May

Martin Basher: Blackberry Schnapps City Gallery, until 3 August

Poetic Voices of Africa events Tuesday 20 May, 6.30 pm at Trade Aid on Victoria St Thursday 22 May, 6 pm at Wellington City Library

BATS Theatre, Wellington Other Desert Cities Circa Theatre, Wellington 13–17 May, 6.30 or 8 pm 2b or nt 2b / 4 Billion Likes! Circa Theatre, Wellington Sat 17 May, 7.30 pm PlayShop Live The Paramount Theatre, Wellington Fri 23 May, 10 pm QMC Celebrity Debate Queen Margaret College, Wellington Sun 25 May, 6 pm

Robin White: This is the Day Peter McLeavey, until 31 May

Books

ALL YOUR WANTS AND NEEDS FULFILLED FOREVER Full $20 Concession $15 20–31 May

Theatre

The Improvisors Present Theatresports Circa Theatre, Wellington Sun 25 May, 7 pm

The Witching Hours 23 May, 9 pm

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1. As of May 2014, which ‘country’ has the fastest download speeds in the world, according to Speedtest.net? 2. Which font is used in the background of the “Doge” internet meme? 3. What is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time? 4. Abby Winters, Brazzers and LiveJasmin are all examples of what kind of website? 5. What colour is the logo of Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party? 6. True or false: a 2009 study found that 40 per cent of tweets are “pointless babble”. 7. Which rapper/actor released an album called Because the Internet late last year? 8. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has now spent almost two years living in the London embassy of which country? 9. In gaming, what does ‘MMORPG’ stand for? 10. What is unusual about the character voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 film Her?

E: victoriauniversity@stores.statravel.co.nz Open Mon-Fri 9am – 5pm *Selected flights only, terms and conditions apply

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1. Hong Kong 2. Comic Sans 3. ‘Gangnam Style’ by Psy 4. Pornography 5. Purple 6. True 7. Childish Gambino 8. Ecuador 9. ‘Massively multiplayer online role-playing game’ 10. She is a computer operating system

Refreshments will be provided. For more information, text or call 021 595 582. www.capitalmarket.co.nz I www.facebook.com/capitalmarketwellington

A reliable cheap and convenient link between Lambton Quay and Victoria University’s Kelburn Campus. A Cable Car every 10 minutes and student fares from just 87 cents one way*

student discount mondays Womens cut/blowdry $60 Mens cut $45

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DEAR DOLLY Hi, I’m Dolly, Salient’s new advice columnist, and I’m here to listen to your deepest, darkest problems. I answer one letter per week, and my only requirements are that you perform open-heart surgery on yourself and write to me from the most honest part of your soul. I vow to answer your questions the same way. Get in touch. deardolly@salient.org.nz

2014/15 INTERNSHIPS AND GRADUATE JOBS! Organisations: Closing Date Honeywell: 19 May Chapman Tripp: 20 May GHD: 22 May UBS: 22 May Tonkin & Taylor: 23 May Shell: 30 May Murray & Co: 30 May Intergen: 31 May Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Trust (Maori): 1 Jun Scott Technology NZ: 1 Jun Methanex New Zealand: 6 Jun Xero: 6 Jun IBM: 13 Jun Deutsche Bank: 24-Jul Upcoming Free Careers Events for all students Law: Overseas Postgraduate in Law - 20 May Careers without borders – 21 May Graduate Job opportunities at Xero – 22 May Check details/book on CareerHub: www. victoria.ac.nz/careerhub

HARVARD PROJECT The Harvard Project for Asia and International Relations 2014 Conference: Calling all Harvard enthusiasts, global citizens and those interested in learning about the growing presence of Asia. The

notices If you want a notice in Salient, email us at editor@salient.org. nz. Notices must be sent to us by Wednesday 5 pm for the following week’s issue, and must be fewer than 100 words in length.

Harvard Project for Asia and International Relations is an annual conference hosted by an Asian city, and has been running for over 20 years. HPAIR is the largest student-led conference run by Harvard University, and this year it is being held in Tokyo, Japan from 22–26 August 2014 and being cohosted by Keio University. The theme for this year’s conference is “Reflection and Progression: Fostering Mutual Growth”. Head to this link for more information: www.hpair.org/conf/aconf2014 The conference is not funded, so delegates must support themselves financially. However, the large majority of delegates receive financial support from their universities and local rotaries and MPs. This conference accepts delegates from all subject areas. Applications close 31 May.

FILM SOCIETY Did you know Victoria has its very own film society? Neither did Stephen Fry, but now he just can’t get enough of it! So come by the Memorial Theatre (SU Building) on Thursday 22 May and catch the gruesome dual-feature of Martyrs (2008) and Antichrist (2009). It’s free! But anyone with cash burning a hole in their pocket can sign up and become a VIP member for only $10, and be in to win prizes and all kinds of nice extras. Find us on Facebook for more info: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ vicunifilmsociety/

VIC OE – VIC STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAMME – APPLY NOW! NEXT DEADLINE: 16 JULY for Tri 1, 2015 exchanges! Why not study overseas as part of your degree?! Study in English, earn Vic credit, get StudyLink and grants, explore the world! Weekly seminars on Wednesdays, Level 2, Easterfield Building, 12.50 pm Website: http://victoria.ac.nz/exchange Visit us: Level 2, Easterfield Building Drop-in hours: Mon–Wed 1–3 pm, Thurs & Fri 10 am – 12 pm

MICROMODA FASHION DESIGN COMPETITION

THE BUSINESS AND Entries for the Miromoda Fashion Design INVESTMENT CLUB Competition are now open. This annual event will see the winners and runners-up in each category showcase at NZ Fashion Week 2014 in Auckland, 26–29 August, 2014. The event will be the culmination of a rigorous search and competition to find the best Māori fashion designers New Zealand has to offer. http://www.miromoda.com/ competition/ Entries close: Friday 30 May 2014

The Business and Investment Club (BIC, www.bic.org.nz) invites you to the last event this trimester: “CV improvement workshop” with Louise Taylor from Vic Careers. Score your dream job with the perfect CV! Bring a printed copy of your CV and get tailored feedback on it from a careers specialist. Find out what recruiters want to see, and how to make your CV really stand out. The event takes place on Monday 26 May, 4.30pm @ SU218 (Student Union Building, Kelburn Campus).

contributors editors: Duncan McLachlan & Cameron Price d e s i g n e r : I m o g e n Te m m news editor: Sophie Boot c r e at i v e e d i t o r : C h l o e Dav i e s c h i e f s u b - e d i t o r : N i c k Fa r g h e r distributor: Joe Morris f e at u r e w r i t e r : P h i l i p M c S w e e n e y ( c h i e f ) , P e n n y G a u lt , Alex Hollis w e b e d i t o r : D e x t e r E d wa r d s n e w s i n t e r n s : S i m o n D e n n i s , S t e p h Tr e n g r o v e arts editors: Nina Powles (Books), Charlotte Doyle (Film), H e n r y C o o k e ( M u s i c ) , R o s e C a n n ( Th e a t r e ) , S i m o n G e n n a r d ( Vi s u a l A r t s ) , E l i s e M u n d e n ( Fa s h i o n ) , M i c h a e l G r a h a m ( Te l e v i s i o n ) I l lu s t r at i o n s : P h o e b e M o r r i s general contributors: N i c o l a B r a i d , S o n y a C l a r k , D e c l a n D o h e r t y - R a m s a y , Te P o H awa i k i r a n g i , L i a m K e n n e d y , E m m a M c A u l i f f e , M o l ly M c C a r t h y , J o r d a n M c C l u s k e y , To m M c L e a n , E l e a n o r M e r t o n , G u s M i t c h e l l , S a m N o rt h c o t t , O l l i e R i t c h i e , A b i S m o k e r, F i n n S t i t c h b u ry , C a r o l i n e Th i r s k , W i l b u r To w n s e n d , U r s u l a , J u l i a We l l s

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