The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 4

INSIDE: ONGOING COLONIALISM IN GREENLAND, RHODE ISLAND’S COYOTE ‘INFESTATION,’ AND A CENTERFOLD POSTER

A Brown/RISD Weekly / October 04, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 04

the

Indy Contents

From the Editors

Cover Untitled Brian Kim

Some of you may be familiar with that precious bagel store up Hope. On Monday morning, I watched an altercation there. It was the kind of back-and-forth that so distills our contemporary political shitpost that it made ‘politics’ as such seem, for a moment, not entirely divorced from lived reality.

News 02 Week in Civic Engagement Kion You & Noah Mlyn

One end of the counter served the usual fare (n.b., the lox bagel here is quite good). At the other end, the owner of the establishment posed with bagels for flash photos that will appear in the next issue of Rhode Island Monthly.

03 Not For Sale Emily Rust

Despite the paparazzo’s incursion, business as usual continued. A woman sat down for a while without ordering. The owner approached the would-be customer and asked if she’d ordered anything. The woman, who was Black and patronizing a mostly white establishment in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood Mount Hope, said she hadn’t and asked if there was something wrong with her sitting there. Within moments, the owner’s defenses were up, and we were off to the races. “I was just asking. There’s no problem. Can I get you anything?”

It was the owner’s defenses, her fear of appearing racist, that seemed to ignite the customer’s offense. Within moments she was on the phone: “You will not believe what just happened to me.” Moments later, I was also rendered speechless, as Speaker of the Rhode Island House (and famed Democratict Trumpsupporter), Nicholas Mattiello arrived on the scene and uttered that classic idiom of machismo. “Is there a problem here?”

Arts 05 Eat, Play, Sing Addy Schuetz Metro 07 Providence Is Where the Wild Things Are Roxanne Barnes 14 Plants and the City Alana Baer X + Ephemera 09 Band Aid Abandon Cam Collins

The scene escalated as quickly as it started, with Mattiello and the customer climbing into black SUVs and speeding away toward the statehouse.

To apologize for the disturbance, the owner began passing out complimentary cookies.

Features 11 iWork, uWork, WeWork Amelia Anthony

-EC

13 Phnom Penh, Cambodia Kion You Science + Tech 15 Making Cyber Space Bilal Memon

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

17 Literary Bunnies Lauren Lee

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

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Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan

VOL 39 ISSUE 04

Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Biesntock Pia Mileaf-Patel

MVP Emily Rust *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

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Alienstock Tour,” a party ostensibly held in “Milky Way Galaxy” (Las Vegas, upon closer inspection) on September 20. The mystery will endure for these unwitting users until they realize what the event used to be called: “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” Though the Independent cannot confirm any reliable timeline of the Facebook event’s evolution, one thing is clear: Following a predictable trajectory for bygone memes, the Area 51 Raid has transformed before our eyes from an ironic, transgressive, discursive symbol into a fossilized Facebook page which boasts a Bud Light sponsorship and links to an online store selling “I Clap Alien Cheeks” T-shirts.

But even with its origin point ruthlessly co-opted and defiled by some lucky advertising executive who had just enough 22-year-old interns to catch wind of the most overplayed joke on the internet, the Raid’s momentum could not be slowed. Although ultimately only 2,000 people—rather than the advertised two million—showed up in the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada on September 20, the Area 51 Raid was not entirely a failure. In the offline world, we have a small but hearty group of middling YouTube influencers and militant conspiracy theorists to thank for answering the age-old question of “Is this thing real?” with a resounding “I guess so.”

While the perimeter of the secretive governBY Kion You & Noah Mlyn ment facility was not successfully breached, at least ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll two visitors returned home with bona fide criminal DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt records for attempted trespassing, and many more doubtlessly left with new IRL (yet extremely-online) friends and the eternal knowledge that they had actually shown up. This small group apparently included those seeking everything from ‘Good Vibes’ (read: space drugs) to proof of a secret extraterrestrial world order, and were held together only by their brave defione has to already feel sympathy for him for having to ance of Matty Roberts, the Raid’s original visionary, deal with a real life iteration of a Ben Shapiro “FACTS who confirmed that he had sold out to Big Beer and the and LOGIC PREVAIL” video that should have never military-industrial complex by going on NPR to warn left YouTube. 40,000 Woonsocket residents pay listeners that taking his Raid idea seriously would be taxes to float the council's salaries, money that could “dangerous” and “a national security threat.” Finally, perhaps be better used to help solve Woonsocket’s while not apparently related to the Raid, the US Navy other issues, such as its high rates of poverty, its dete- did confirm last week that several classified videos riorating housing stock, or its lead poisoning problem. leaked by former Blink-182 front man Tom DeLonge After Councilman Cournoyer said a couple thou- are, in fact, real videos of Navy pilots encountering sand words, Councilman John Ward launched into a “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” and that the good tirade about how white nationalism is a non-issue and folks at the US military actually see UFOs all the time. brought up, almost like clockwork, Antifa. Approving Raid or not, we will now sound significantly less parathe resolution “would make us no better than Antifa,” noid when we admit what we’ve all been thinking: Ward said, deflecting the issue as far away from Kithes' aliens are real, and they’re probably here already. resolution as humanly possible. He then stated, “It The Raid’s semiotic legacy is somewhat more seems there’s more danger to youthful indiscretions complicated. In the weeks leading up to September 20, being promoted through modern music and video alien- and Raid-related content reached a level of ubiqgames and social media.” Ward listed as many things uity on Twitter and other platforms that is rare even for as he could to crowd out the possibility of actually the most viral internet jokes. Many users got carried thinking about the number of deaths induced by white away. The Department of Defense, for example, had nationalism, the professed ideology of domestic terror- to issue an official apology after one of their sub-deists who have caused everything from the Parkland to partments tweeted a picture of a fighter jet with the the Pittsburgh tragedies. He instead chose to rattle message that the warplane would be “the last thing off the fallacious notion of deaths caused by people #Millenials will see” if they got too close to Area 51. coming off Call of Duty highs and Instagram unfollows, Also among those who showed their true colors via a notion that even Antonin Scalia rejected in the 2011 Raid content were the posters who pivoted to joking Supreme Court case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants about “my alien” whom they would receive (kidnap?)

Association. upon entering the Area and, of course, become intiTo wrap things up, Councilman Cournoyer’s mate with. amended resolution denounced all “human As the small but determined group of red-pilled supremacy” as well as “the practice of identifying, adventurers, paranoid furries, and other national dividing, differentiating, and categorizing humans” press-corps members milled about in the Nevadan by things like race, religion, or gender. The amended desert dawn, “They Can’t Stop All of Us” seemed to resolution passed 5-2. echo through the dim, crowded halls of the internet, The council hearing turned into such a circus causing people to stir from their ironic slumbers and that Cranston's Epic Theatre Company reenacted almost wake up to the potential of an actual mass the meeting this past Sunday. Seven actors sat in the movement. By September, the joke format began to same arrangement as the council and did nothing else sour and stew in our timelines, but it persisted between but read the transcript of the meeting, word for word, news alerts about inhumane conditions in migrant as comedic theater. Epic’s Artistic Director, Kevin detention facilities, leading one Twitter user to muse: Broccoli, told UpriseRI, “I realized that what I was “I don’t see a way to interpret the Area 51 raid jokes other reading was actually a stunning piece of theater—and than a subliminal reaction to the camps.” Even as the I don’t mean that in a good way.”

Climate Strike was announced for the very same day The Independent wants to encourage Councilman as the supposed Raid and the meme finally lost steam, Kithes to keep fighting. Councilman Cournoyer, some- the idea of an action recklessly confrontational enough where in his monologues, said, “Do we come back next to capture the panic and urgency of our time seemed to week, two weeks from now and denounce murder? Do haunt our discourse. Of course, by any clear-eyed analwe denounce rape? Do we denounce incest?” Yes, we ysis, a little Pentagon-funded alien experimentation do. should be pretty far down on the list of targets for massbased organizing. But if a sarcastic Facebook event can -KY convince hundreds of Americans to drive across the country with vague plans to face down heavily armed VEGAS, WE HAVE A PROBLEM guards with nothing but camcorders and childlike curiosity, imagine what we could do if we put our irony Over two million Facebook users may have been at work in the service of humanity. surprised this week when they discovered that they supposedly attended an event called “Official -NM

WEEK IN CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

I ONLY SEE ONE RACE: THE HUMAN RACE To understand Woonsocket’s City Council meeting on Monday, September 16, we can begin by looking at the hearing's conclusion: “I had to look up white nationalism,” Council President Daniel Gendron said, “because until the most recent introduction, by certain people bringing it to the airwaves, I was not aware of white nationalism. That term was foreign to me. But then again, I’m colorblind.” This may be all the context we need: the Council President doesn't even need to point to a black friend, a Central American domestic worker, a vote for Obama, etc.—he just is colorblind, and that's that.

Earlier that night, newly minted Councilmember Alex Kithes introduced a resolution denouncing white nationalism. Kithes’ resolution was commonsensical, and almost comically harmless: “The City Council hereby strongly opposes the terrorism, xenophobia, and bigotry that are promoted by white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis, and calls on others in our community with public standing in government and media to do the same.” The members of the Council could raise their hands in agreement and completely forget about the resolution afterward, and no one would bat an eye.

However, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Kithes’ introduction led to a fiery debate with the old, white councilmen, specifically around the term “people of color,” which featured in the resolution.

From all sides of the council hall’s long table, Kithes received a brutal barrage of freshman hazing, “All Lives Matter” rhetoric, a lightly disguised veneer of disgust, and, most notably, a strong dose of white fragility.

“What am I?” Councilman James Cournoyer asked during the hearing after attempting to bait Kithes into pointing out the people of color on the council (there are none). “You see, the issue I have, Councilman, is it drives me crazy when people like yourself put labels out there and refer to people as people of color. Again.

What am I? Am I a person of color or not?” (He’s not.)

Cournoyer kept going, unfortunately: “And you refer to people as people of color. And you want to denounce white nationalism and white supremacy.

What about yellow supremacy? And green supremacy?

And black supremacy and brown supremacy and every other supremacy?” As a yellow person, I am honored that Cournoyer mentions us before the Greens and the Blacks and the Browns, but if I could speak for my people for just one second, I would rather remain invisible and marginalized rather than be in line for future supremacy. Or maybe I just need to adopt white children, live in Woonsocket, and try to see what it's like for myself.

Kithes won a special election for a council seat just two months ago, running on a progressive agenda, and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

BY Emily Rust DESIGN Christie Zhong

NOT FOR SALE

03

NEWS

Beyond Greenland's media moment “Essentially, it’s a large real estate deal.”

In the middle of August, the world was witness to yet another media circus surrounding Donald Trump, after he acknowledged his long-standing interest in buying Greenland.

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal first brought light to Trump’s real estate fantasy, revealing that he has, for over a year, been asking aides about the feasibility of the United States acquiring Greenland.

Right away, Greenlandic and Danish politicians asserted the simple fact that the island is not for sale.

The president was disgruntled by this resounding rejection. Within a few days, he had taken to Twitter both to insult the newly appointed Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and to announce the cancellation of his upcoming trip to Denmark.

Where does this interest in Greenland stem from? For one, increasing climate change is opening the island up for mining and other forms of resource extraction. Greenland has an area of about 836,000 square miles—roughly three times the size of Texas— of which 81 percent is covered by ice. However, this percentage is diminishing, which means that a growing portion of the island is becoming accessible to the extraction of resources like iron ore, rare earth minerals, uranium, and oil. A few Chinese companies have already gotten involved in extraction projects on the island, making the US especially eager to secure a stake in similar activities. Additionally, the US sees Greenland’s location between the US and Russia as strategically important for countering Russia’s intensifying military activity in the Russian Arctic.

While this is not the first time the president has brought his real estate background into governance and diplomatic relations, this blatant yet nonchalant view of Greenland as property provoked widespread controversy. Greenlanders and Danes were particularly outraged. In the aftermath, however, some have suggested that the outcome was not all bad for the Arctic country.

Greenland, called Kalaallit Nunaat in Greenlandic, is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. The Naalakkersuisut (government) and the Inatsisartut (parliament) have total political autonomy in all matters outside of foreign policy and defense. In other words, the territory is self-governing.

Additionally, Greenland has had the right to self-determination since 2009, after the Greenlandic self-government referendum passed with 75 percent approval.

If the majority of the 56,000 people living there wished to fully detach Greenland from Denmark, they would have the authority to enact such a change. In short, Greenland is not Denmark’s to sell.

Despite these circumstances, much of the coverage of Trump’s statements and the aftermath framed the sale of Greenland as a bilateral issue between Denmark and the US. Bouncing between Trump quotes and Frederiksen quotes, articles from major European and US publications jumped from one side of the Atlantic to the other, overlooking the ice-covered mass in the middle—the alleged focus of their headlines.

This contradiction was not the fault of the Danes and Greenlanders being quoted, most of whom made efforts to emphasize the autonomy of Greenland in their statements. For example, Greenlandic Prime Minister Kim Kielsen stated, “Greenland is not for sale, but Greenland is open for trade and cooperation

with other countries.” Mette Frederiksen, who was in Greenland’s capital Nuuk at the time, made sure to articulate her technically absent authority over the matter: “Greenland is not Danish. Greenland is Greenlandic.”

Once Greenlanders got over the initial indignation, however, some pointed out that the spotlight given to their country by Trump’s unsolicited interest might in fact be advantageous. Thanks to the media flurry sparked by Trump’s comments, many hope that Greenland will obtain a greater level of bargaining power in its relationship with Denmark and the world.

What remains to be seen is whether this attention, and the power accompanying it, will last, or if it will fade away as Trump and his hounds move on to new fixations.

Greenland’s history as a colonized territory, as well as its path towards self-determination, are greatly relevant to the discourse postulating the country as real estate with measurable value. Although Greenland is essentially autonomous, there remains a postcolonial dependence that continues to bind the island to Denmark. +++ Judging by the statements of Danish politicians following the publication of The Wall Street Journal article, Copenhagen is wary of using a colonialist lens in its approach to Greenland. As is evident in the country’s significant political autonomy, Greenland does not retain colonial status today. This does not mean, however, that Greenland was not once the target of Danish state-making, nor does it mean that Danish colonialism has not created hardship for Inuit people and society.

The Greenlandic Inuit make up the majority of Greenland’s inhabitants today and are descendants of the Thule people, who arrived on the island before 1000 CE. Starting in the mid-thirteenth century, Greenland was a tributary colony under Norway. With the establishment of the Kalmar Union by Sweden, Denmark, and Norway in 1397, the three Scandinavian kingdoms agreed to share one single monarch, which was based in Denmark. Norway’s overseas dependencies, including Greenland, were also brought under this monarch. After the Kalmar Union fell apart in 1523, Norway and its overseas dependencies continued to remain under Danish rule.

Following a period of minimal contact, the Danish king sent a mission in 1721 to re-christen the Norse people who had formerly colonized southern Greenland. As it turned out that the Norse had died out, the Danes instead focused their efforts on converting the local Inuit to Christianity. While this period of Danish rule started out with a focus on conversion, Denmark’s colonial motives came to overlap with economic exploitation by the end of the eighteenth century. Danish traders were particularly focused on maintaining a trade monopoly on the island, competing with Dutch whalers and tradesmen. For over a century, economic exploitation of Inuit hunting products like seal and whale blubber was intertwined with governance, evidenced by the Royal Greenlandic Trade Department. Established in 1774, this trading company both oversaw trade and managed the government of Greenland until the early twentieth century.

A more recent instance of Danish colonialism

04 OCT 2019

in Greenland is Denmark’s use of education and language to assert dominance over the Inuit. This part of Greenlandic history is reminiscent of North American, Scandinavian, and Russian state efforts to ‘civilize’ the Indigenous people living along their northern borders—borders, of course, that appeared centuries after the targets of their civilizing efforts first settled there.

At the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, these circumpolar states forced native children to leave their families and attend distant boarding schools, combining the goal of assimilation with the calculated breakdown of native culture and language. This policy engendered a deep sense of alienation among Indigenous youth. As explained by a United Nations report called Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools, assimilation efforts involving boarding schools have been associated with “increased violence, increased suicide rates, increased substance abuse, and increased family disintegration” among Indigenous communities around the world.

Although educational practices in the Arctic have since changed, the individual and collective trauma that came out of the experience of being colonized and assimilated live on in older generations and still influence younger generations. Greenland, which has high levels of alcoholism and the world’s highest suicide rate, is an example of this phenomenon and its lasting effects.

In an article published by the Danish newspaper Politiken, a woman named Helene Thiesen revisits painful memories of being separated from her family as a seven-year-old. Along with 21 other Greenlandic children, Helene was selected to go to Denmark to learn Danish in 1951. The Danish government hoped that, upon returning home, these children would serve as role models for their Inuit peers. Instead, the major effect was that she lost her native language and became alienated from her culture. She told Politiken, “Even though it’s been a long time, my body still shakes when I talk about it.”

Experiences like Helene’s represent the severity of some of Greenland’s most pressing societal challenges today. According to the Danish newspaper Kristeligt, suicide victims are often young people who have grown up with abuse and alcoholism. Danish colonialism in Greenland shaped the relationships that individuals had with their families, culture, and language, by making Inuit youth lose contact with both their traditional culture and the dominant society.

This trauma lives on today, even as the Greenlandic people continue to take on a greater level of authority over their country’s future. +++ Looking deeper into the context of Greenland’s colonial history shows just how repulsive Trump’s real estate fantasy is. Since 1979, when the Danish government granted the island home rule, Greenland has gained a gradual level of autonomy. Home rule was replaced with self-government in 2009, as Greenland took control of the legal system, law enforcement, and the coast guard. Although there are differing opinions among Greenlanders on the best course toward full independence—some believe the country must first become more economically stable, while others argue that Greenland will not reach economic stability

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

until Denmark is out of the picture—all sides agree that the United States will not play a dominant role in Greenland’s future.

In spite of this, Trump’s interest in Greenland has been beneficial to the country. In an interview with The College Hill Independent, Marc Lanteigne, associate professor of political science at the University of Tromsø stated that positive outcomes of last month’s fiasco have already materialized. A concrete example is Greenland’s tourism sector, which the Greenlandic government has long been interested in developing, taking a cue from next-door Iceland. As the controversy surrounding Trump’s bid unfolded, the country’s official tourism website received so much traffic that it crashed. A boost in tourism would diversify Greenland’s economic base, allowing the country to rely less on seafood exports and Denmark’s financial aid.

Economic dependence is the main factor keeping Greenland in its political association with Denmark.

Over half of Greenland’s government revenue comes from the Danish government, in the form of an annual block grant. Most Greenlanders agree that the country’s economy would collapse without the 3.4 billion Danish Kroner it receives from Denmark per year.

More important than providing an increase in tourism, however, Lanteigne believes that the attention given to Greenland by Trump has placed the island in the international spotlight. This spotlight has provided the country, at least temporarily, with geopolitical momentum. Voicing similar sentiments, Denmark’s former foreign minister Martin Lidegaard believes that Trump’s interest in Greenland has served as a wake-up call for Copenhagen. In an interview with the Danish newspaper Berlingske, he stated, “One can safely say that we fell asleep at the wheel, when it comes to the Arctic.” While global superpowers like China and Russia have been fighting for sway in the Arctic in the last decade, Denmark has been too preoccupied with complaining about Greenland’s price tag to tune into the geopolitical rivalries playing out in the region.

Sofia Geisler, a member of Greenland’s Inatsisartut for the socialist party Inuit Ataqatigiit, expressed similar views. In an interview with The College Hill Independent, Geisler said that she had not been surprised to hear about Trump’s interest in buying Greenland. What did surprise her was the blatant disrespect on the part of a world leader for a country that has its own international law regime. In line with this, she was content to see that the Trump controversy forced the world to comprehend that there are actually people living in Greenland. Additionally, Geisler appreciated the focus that the media eventually placed on the question of Greenlandic independence.

In January of this year, a poll showed that 67.7 percent of all Greenlanders were in support of independence. Both Lanteigne and Geisler pointed out, however, that Greenland still has a ways to go before moving forward with this aspiration. According to Lanteigne, “full Greenlandic independence would under the right circumstances be a very positive step for the country,” as it would “allow Greenlanders to have a greater say in their domestic and foreign affairs at a time when the Arctic is under so much global scrutiny.” However, he states that there may be reason to wait until the country is more economically diversified and stable.

When asked how she feels about Greenlandic independence, Geisler stated firmly, “All peoples have the desire for an independent country. We are no exception.” In order to achieve this, however, Geisler believes that her country must first build up an economic sector that creates value for society and that is larger than the Danish block grant. While she acknowledges that the disconnect between her country’s large dimensions and small population will always generate the need for foreign labor, her biggest hope for Greenland moving into a new decade is to get more people through the education system. With a more educated local population, fewer Greenlandic jobs will go to foreigners.

While Trump has not pushed Greenland closer to achieving independence, his unsolicited interest did unintentionally provide the country with a timely spotlight. What we can glean from the insight of Geisler, Lanteigne, and others is the shared hope that this attention will translate into better education, more jobs, and economic growth. Down the line, perhaps these factors will add up to independence. At the very least, Denmark has received a jolting reminder that Greenland has a lot more going for it than the block grant. +++ As Greenlanders strive for a firmer grip on their own futures, the Greenlandic identity is in a state of transition. Against this backdrop, President Trump’s real estate bid for the country could not have come at a worse time. Simultaneously, though, his timing was opportune. The Greenlandic Inuit are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, making this an important moment for the world to see the Arctic for more than its changing landscape and economic potential.

The treatment of Greenland as real estate by countries like China and the US highlights the ways in which colonialism lives on through resource extraction. The Arctic has traditionally been imagined as an empty, wild, and uninhabitable place. At the same time, it is seen from the outside as the center of current and future economic activity. Greenlanders are sitting on resources coveted by the rest of the world.

However, ironically enough, the key to Greenland’s independence might in fact lie in resource extraction. By allowing players other than Denmark into their country, Greenlanders can get closer to breaking the dependence that continues to tie them to their postcolonial overseer. Ultimately, there remains hope in knowing that this future and these decisions are up to none other than Greenland itself.

Last month’s media frenzy was disillusioning, as the common narrative focused more on Danish and US leaders than Greenland itself. Despite this, there is value to be found in newly-learned lessons in geography, history, and cultural respect. The Arctic is more than an empty sea of melting ice. Greenland is inhabited. Though it once was, it is no longer possible to buy a country without first consulting its people.

EMILY RUST B’22 hopes you enjoy her arcticle.

NEWS

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EAT,

PLAY,

SING

The Highlander Center and the practice of cultural organizing

Woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom Woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom Woke up this morning with my mind, set up freedom Hallelu-hallelu-hallelujah At the Highlander Center, a popular education center and driving force for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South since the 1930s, many meetings and gatherings begin with song. Often, these songs are freedom songs, legacies from the Civil Rights Movement. Sometimes they are children’s songs, or songs recently invented by a staff member or some friend of the organization. I visited Highlander this past summer as a short-term intern and student researcher. When I first arrived, my supervisor and I sat on a bench overlooking the hazy striations of the distant Smoky Mountains and sang a harmonized duet. To begin an all-staff meeting on a Wednesday morning, Highlander staff gathered in a circle of rocking chairs and sang a protest hymn. At group meals, there was song. Walking on the gravel path from one building to another, I would periodically hear someone's voice, unseen but nearby, singing to themselves. “Woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom…”

It was there, at Highlander, that I first heard the term “cultural organizing.” (I never admitted this fact to my supervisor, feeling it an embarrassing lack in my knowledge of activist strategies and histories.)

Highlander defines cultural organizing as “the strategic use of art and culture to shift and move more progressive policies and practices within marginalized communities.” For the cultural organizer, “culture” has dual meaning, as both tool and consequence of political action. “Cultural” refers to the language and practices of culture—art, music, dance, oral traditions, food, religion, ritual—used to carry out political change. The word cultural also recognizes that in order for transformative political change to occur, culture—people’s ideologies, actions, and ways of being together—must be transformed in the process;

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ARTS

cultural organizing thus seeks to change culture simultaneously as it enacts it.

Regular song is an example of a cultural organizing ethos that integrates cultural practices into community organizing. For Highlander, singing does not happen only at protests or rallies when it’s time to mobilize the masses. Singing is practiced as greeting, as gathering, as celebration, as grace, and as solitude.

Singing is in the daily work. Gather, sing, talk. Greet, sing, eat. Walk, sing, think. Mobilize, sing, act. +++ In 1997, the national nonprofit United for a Fair Economy published The Activist Cookbook: A Hands-On Manual for Organizers, Artists, and Educators Who Want to Get Their Message Across in Powerful, Creative Ways. I uncovered this document in Highlander’s library and archives, tucked away in a metal file cabinet. I quickly made a copy of my own. To be clear, this book is not a cookbook. Its “recipes” are ideas and recommendations for how to incorporate creative action into political organizing. The Activist Cookbook demonstrates another approach to cultural organizing, one that more directly incorporates art into strategic political action. I find the publication humorous, practical, and provocative. I love its core message, that anyone—you!—can scrounge up the quotidian tools at your disposal to creatively organize for justice and change.

Ebony Noelle Golden, an artist and cultural strategist who helped design and implement a cultural organizing curriculum at Highlander, spends her career promoting the political and spiritual power of cultural organizing strategies. In a 2014 interview, she argues that art and culture is necessary for ensuring the wellness and transformation of people as they work towards shifting policies and practices. She describes this relationship as a triad: wellness and transformation as the base, art and culture as one side, and policies and practices as the other. Each side can only exist

with the other two. “Any movement for liberation, any movement for progressive social change, cannot happen if the people aren’t well,” Golden says. Cultural organizing is a way to attend holistically to both community wellness and to political change. “The legacy of Highlander is that you can’t build a campaign if you don’t attend to culture,” she continues. “It’s just not possible.”

I may not have previously heard of cultural organizing, but I have certainly encountered the term “activist art” in the academic and institutional waters through which I more frequently swim. Activist art, protest art, resistance art, community-engaged art, participatory art; the list goes on. In its glossary of art terms, the Tate Museum describes activist art as art “grounded in the act of ‘doing’” and that responds to social and political issues. “Activist art is about empowering individuals and communities,” the entry continues, “and is generally situated in the public arena with artists working closely with a community to generate the art.”

Activist art gets a lot of buzz, especially within traditional arts institutions; maybe in the Trump era, we’re in a particular milieu. The Brooklyn Museum is currently exhibiting “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. In 2017, the Whitney Museum presented the exhibition “An Incomplete History of Protest,” that aimed to “look at how artists from the 1940s to the present have confronted the political and social issues of their day.” The exhibition included material from the Whitney’s archives that recounted artist-led opposition to the museum’s practice—a move of institutional critique that felt self-aggrandizing to me. This is the same institution that was barraged for months earlier this year by protesters demanding the removal of Warren B. Kanders from its board. Last year, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University curated a show titled “On Protest, Art and Activism,” which is, notably, an affiliated program of the Warren

04 OCT 2019

BY Addy Schuetz ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

and Allison Kanders Lecture Series. Students have been publicly campaigning for Brown to cut all ties with Warren and Alison Kanders since last January.

There is endless historicization, theorization, and curation about activist art. So why had I never heard of cultural organizing? What’s the difference?

At its core, cultural organizing embraces the consonance of artist and community. Unlike activist art which, by the Tate glossary definition, distinguishes between the (implied) skilled, trained, and empowered artist and the (disempowered) community with whom they work, cultural organizing recognizes all community members as practitioners of their culture and thus as having the capacity to enact change. People collectively empower themselves. “Cultural organizing is not necessarily related to making art, because culture is bigger than art,” Golden reminds us. Most glaringly, the Tate definition does not consider direct action to be a requirement of activist art. Direct action means the shifting and transformation of tangible policies and practices, such as governance structures, voting laws, and environmental policies. Cultural organizing requires direct action; think back to Golden’s triad, which diagrams “policies and practices” as a key part of the cultural organizing geometry.

Cultural organizing is, of course, not immune to theorization or co-option (take this article as a tenuous example). Golden, a Black woman from the American South, offers context: “Cultural organizing is a buzzword, like ‘social practice’ or ‘community-based arts.’

The actual doing of the thing is much older than the words that describe it. When I go into communities in rural Tennessee, rural Mississippi, even places in the Bronx, nobody on the ground uses the term cultural organizing—unless they are funded by several of the major cultural organizing funders in the country.

Funding agencies oftentimes drive the language and the conversation for non-profit arts and cultural organizations…In the communities I come from, these things have always been a part of the way we’ve organized. There is no effort in my communities that does

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not involve culture, that does not involve healing, that does not involve food, that does not involve attending to the whole person. This idea that organizing happens in meetings and workshops and conventions and conferences it is very antithetical to where I come from.”

I recently had a conversation with a mentor about the shift in organizing and community spaces towards prioritizing affect, feeling, and emotional well-being.

Transformative justice, healing justice and emotional justice are all terms gaining traction and recognition within liberal, progressive, and radical spaces alike.

But my mentor and I agreed that those things aren’t really new, only the increased discourse and articulation of them is. Cultural organizing is primarily grounded in Black, brown, and Indigenous communities, whose cultures, embodied practices, and ways of knowing are underrepresented, misrepresented, co-opted, and violated by white supremacist institutions and hegemonic knowledge systems. Activist art is a designation most relevant to white people. What is art that is not “doing,” that is not recalling cultural and spiritual practices, that does not address political or social issues, that does not empower? “Activist art,” broadly conceived, seeks to raise consciousnesses— an important and necessary act, but one relevant to certain privileged spaces. In poor, rural, marginalized communities, do consciousnesses need to be raised?

Or does the community need clean water and air?

Do individuals need equitable jobs and safe working conditions? Do people need to eat? Do they need to express and fulfill their spiritual wellness? Do they need to play, create, celebrate?

someone had removed their funny bones and stolen their creative caps. If we want to touch the hearts and minds of America (and we do) we need to unleash our imaginations, take creative risks, and explore new forms of communicating besides the lecture and press release. Our events should feed the soul as well as the brain, and we should laugh and celebrate even as we speak the truth. As an old Yugoslavian proverb puts it: ‘You can fight the gods and still have fun.’”

Singing is cultural. Singing also invites in. I am not Black, Southern, Appalachian, or from a rural area, and I was not brought up Christian. But at the Highlander Center, singing provoked in me feelings of familiarity, echoes of my own home and upbringing.

So I offer to you—hypocritically, perhaps—not the term, but the practice. Gather, sing, talk. Greet, paint, eat. Walk, play, think. Mobilize, dance, act.

ADDY SCHUETZ B‘19.5 sings in the shower every day.

+++ In the foreword to The Activist Cookbook, political activist Jim Hightower writes, “I’ve been to many rallies and way too many conferences in my day convened by well-meaning, terribly serious folks truly trying to make a difference. But bless their hearts,

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RHODE ISLAND IS WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE Coyote culture in New England sparks fear of infestation

Before announcing its plans to close all its US locations, Shiru Café severely limited its free options. This fact has nothing to do with coyotes, but it has everything to do with how I first saw the newly painted ‘Greetings from Rhode Island’ mural facing the Thayer Street Blue State Coffee when I went to get my market-priced coffee there. The words are made of iconic Rhode Island mini-tableaus, like the Superman building and Newport Beach: the Cooler & Warmer state in all its visual glory. Sitting next to the words, as if confident that viewers consider it a Rhode Island state emblem, is a giant, triumphantly howling coyote.

One double take later, during which I began to wonder why the cheerful canine would be featured in any capacity as a symbol for Rhode Island, the mural’s painters made their organization known with a small line at the top directing curious Blue Staters to ‘coyotesmarts.org.’ Further research determined that the mural was painted by the Wheeler School in order to educate passersby.

Describing themselves as “a public information initiative,” CoyoteSmarts has convened to “address the growing presence of coyotes on Aquidneck and Conanicut Islands.” Its website answers some frequently asked questions about coyotes; the fact that,

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all this time, the presence of coyotes has been growing into what some consider an infestation was a question I didn’t even know to ask. Exploring the resources on their site gave just a hint of what I’d discover to be a truly dizzying world of wildlife coexistence culture.

The first thing I noticed scrolling through the site was the lingo that the Coyote Smarts founders use when describing good coyote safety protocol.

Mid-latte, I learned how best to ‘haze’ a coyote, meaning frighten them away from pets with loud noises and frantic movement. The best way to make a coyote ‘scatter,’ according to this website, is to create one’s own ‘coyote shaker,’ which is a tin can filled with small rocks. I learned, too, how I might be contributing to the problem by leaving out ‘easy pickins,’ the term for easily accessible food scraps like open trash cans and outdoor dog food bowls.

Rhode Island coyotes had their 15 minutes of fame without me even noticing, however, with the whimsical story of Cliff the Coyote. Cliff was captured in 2016 near the Newport Cliff Walk. He became something of an unofficial tourist attraction in Newport, gaining notoriety for frequenting public areas and being comfortable around humans. He was featured in a video about urbanized coyotes distributed by the

Narragansett Bay Coyote Study, a scientific survey funded in part by the Rhode Island Department of Fish and Wildlife. In the video, set to cheerful acoustic guitar, Cliff ambles along the road while the narrator describes how coyotes can lose their natural eating habits when fed by humans, and how “once habituated to people, fed coyotes are inevitably euthanized in the interest of public safety.” Cliff, however, became a minor viral “phenom,” as Brown puts it, garnering more than 40,000 national and international signatures on a petition to save his life. Allegedly, after a meeting with Mayor Jorge Elorza, the RIDFW decided to relocate Cliff to another part of New England.

All this new information absolutely delighted me, but I had hardly scratched the surface. I had not yet met the coywolf. +++ In 2018, PBS produced a documentary that introduced the New England public to the idea of a coywolf, and in local publications and broadcasting, it was the threat of the year. A Providence Journal article reports that Eastern coyotes are about 25-percent wolf, which is a good illustration of the controversy over whether coyotes are currently evolving. Multiple articles describe the problem of coywolves in Rhode Island as “increasing,” without explicitly saying how the coyotes are getting to be more like wolves. They hint at the idea that the animals might currently be breeding with wolves without making that claim, which has created a rift in the wolf-interested community, outright. Some in the community insist that the coyotes are getting wolfier by the year, among them professional pet tracker Jamie Genereux.

In an interview with Turn to 10, Genereux warned of cases he’d seen where “they come right out of the woods and grab the dog while the people are standing right there in the yard.” The animals he is referencing are classified as Eastern coyotes, the dominant species in Rhode Island, but are colloquially known as coywolves. He goes on to claim that “ten years ago, the only dogs getting eaten by coyotes would be 10 to 15 pounds,” but more recently, “we've had them kill a German shepherd, which is a big dog.” I called Genereux to understand the scope of the threat, and the picture he painted was bleak. He explained why Westerly now has signs warning beachgoers of coyotes, referencing a horrible story where a tourist from New York watched a coyote eat his dog. As a pet tracker, Genereux is called to relocate missing animals, and he has found that coyotes are often to blame. He is blunt about the danger, warning, “They can kill five in one night.” Genereux claims that the coyotes are breeding with wolves in Canada and travelling down to New England. He cites color as proof: “When I was a kid,” he says, “They were red. Now they’re all gray and black.”

The idea that coyotes are actively growing more wolflike, hunting in packs and taking down larger domestic animals, as Genereux described, is dark.

04 OCT 2019

BY Roxanne Barnes ILLUSTRATION Charlotte Silverman DESIGN Kathryn Li

Literally, their fur is growing darker. A wildlife biologist named Charles Brown also spoke on Turn to 10, however, and he described a drastically different scenario than the scourge of wolf-like coyotes I pictured.

Charles Brown, from the Rhode Island Department of Fish and Wildlife, says that coyotes first arrived in Rhode Island around 1965. They did in fact migrate from Canada, but over a period of several hundred years. When I asked him if it was possible for coyotes to still be breeding with wolves, he responded that the “interaction that occurred happened a century or more ago.” At present, Rhode Island coyotes are a quarter wolf on average, which makes them physically larger than West Coast coyotes, but there is no large-scale coyote-wolf breeding. Brown also noted that the color of the coyotes has remained the same for the past hundred years, coming in variants of “your basic tan-brown, to black, to pale, to a red, cinnamon color.” The coyotes’ recent behavior has been aggressive, perhaps increasingly so, but this is because of human food activity, not because they are generation by generation morphing into wolves.

After thoroughly disproving the threat of coywolves, Brown went on to describe the coyote world in further detail. The first thing he said was that his official job description is “overseeing furbearer related programs,” because, apparently the technical way of classifying coyotes is ‘furbearer.’ He further explained that coyotes are a public trust resource, meaning that, if coyotes are on someone’s private land, they can be shooed away or shot legally. This also explains why Rhode Island is obliged to observe their behavior.

He described a study currently being conducted

by Dr. Numi Mitchell, who has studied coyote behavior on Aquidneck Island for 12 years. The RIDFW recently granted her funding to conduct a five-year expansion of that project to put expensive monitoring collars on a handful of coyotes and manipulate various food sources around Rhode Island to see how behavior is affected. I pulled up a picture of the collars being used while Charles Brown was talking and found that they are gigantic. Running around wearing the collars in Youtube videos, the coyotes look like they have giant fanny packs hanging limply from their necks, which I imagine must inhibit their behavior or, at the very least, make them less popular. Apparently, however, they are effective enough that Dr. Mitchell can accurately locate food hotspots to help communities alleviate the presence of coyotes in their neigborhoods.

While Brown is confident that humans and coyotes can coexist, he takes issue with efforts to artificially

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control the coyote population. Brown says that in the past, citizens have embarked on coyote crusades when they lose their pets. They ask the state to do a mass relocation, or culling, in which a service is hired to kill all the coyotes in an area. Brown feels that these people are misguided. Relocation is a challenge because other states don’t necessarily want to deal with the issue, and culling is difficult because coyotes are wily. As Brown poetically said, “There is a constant stream of transient coyotes floating around the landscape, forming a pair bond and having offspring,” which means around every corner there will be more, and any sudden vacuum will correct itself. Though it’s horrible to lose a beloved pet, Brown offers the reminder that according to the coyote, “It’s just another prey item, whether it’s got a collar on it or not.” Anyone who leaves food outside, or their dog out at night, or feeds animals behind their house, as Brown calls them, “feral cat fanciers,” are the real reason for coyote-human tension in the state.

akin to jumping into a painting. The minute I stepped through the coyote mural I was introduced to a whole new wildlife language and history, and everyone is coy here. As the coyote population in Rhode Island filled out during the past several decades, the mythology around them grew in tandem. It feels as though at several points within their history with Rhode Island, the spectre of the coyote has eclipsed the coyote itself.

Misinformation and strong territoriality have pack humans acting as irresponsibly with their resources as the pack coyotes. Being careful with food scraps and giving coyotes the respect and distance they require is really all that Rhode Islanders need to do. There is something about the rumors and confusion that is as compelling as the furbearers themselves. If coyotes are a protected, valuable resource for the public, then mythologies about coyotes should be valued too, because it would appear you cannot have one without the other in coyote-riddled Rhode Island.

+++

ROXANNE BARNES B’21 is a coywolf sun, easy pickins moon, and prey item rising. According to the The few days I spent in my Google spiral have felt ProJo, she’s also a quarter wolf.

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iWORK, uWORK, WeWORK

BY Amelia Anthony ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

I was one of 500,000 coworking Americans in 2017 when I had a summer job at a small coworking space in Pasadena, California. One day, I accidentally backed my car out of a parking spot straight into another car.

Luckily, no damage was done to either car, but the guy was still pissed. For the rest of the summer, he glowered at me from across the open floor plan while I tried to do my work. Coworking taught me to be much more careful in parking lots, especially when your office, designed to foster communication and collaboration, doesn’t have walls.

WeWork is the biggest name in coworking, the practice of sharing workplaces with other people who are self-employed or work for other small companies. Just last week, the We company made several headlines as the multibillion-dollar corporation withdrew its plan to go public and billionaire CEO Adam Neumann stepped down. Pushback was plentiful when it came to WeWork’s self-identification as a tech company and not real-estate, despite their main product being office space. Soon after WeWork released its IPO, Vox ran an article with the sharply critical tagline, “‘Space as a service’ does not a software company make.” For people as obsessed with the Bad Blood saga of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes as I am, the story sounds familiar: “tech” startup, charismatic leader, billions of dollars from investors raised and more or less flushed down the drain.

Coworking is a rapidly growing enterprise.

Between 2007 and 2017, the number of coworking spaces globally grew from 14 to over 14,000. The amount of office space afforded to coworking is massive as well; WeWork is now the largest private tenant in Manhattan. (The company, and other similar businesses don’t actually own any real estate. Instead, they rent out spaces with long-term leases, and chop them up into offices they essentially sublet on the short term.) WeWork and similar companies offer basically the same thing: rent out an office or desk, come in any time of day, and work, work, work.

The gig economy umbrella is wide, and the workers who fall under it are diverse. The term “freelancer”

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could be opened up to contain the seemingly disparate professions—from creative professionals to rideshare and food delivery drivers—that the gig economy produces. Understandably, the nature of the gig economy is highly unstable for workers, who are often underpaid and underworked. Many freelancers have to take up extra jobs in order to make ends meet in a world where rents rise and wages stagnate. As Annie Lowry writes in the Atlantic, “The gig economy in particular provides plenty of late-capitalist fodder, with investors showering cash on platforms to create cheap services for the rich and lazy and no-benefit jobs for the eager and poor.”

There is perhaps nothing more late-capitalist than paying to go to work. Clever marketing strategies for WeWork and other coworking spaces make the practice seem like much more than just renting a desk; when you buy into coworking, you’re purchasing a subscription to a lifestyle. Their lifestyle is attractive to many—WeWork markets the opportunity to work in a beautiful, comfortable office, surrounded by other cool, innovative people, in major cities. WeWork provides the semblance of an office job without the aggravations of the office. No boss breathing down your neck. No rules against napping, spending your whole day in the kitchenette drinking coffee, or coming in late.

The “father” of coworking, San Franciscoan Brad Neuward, put it simply: Coworking offered “the freedom and independence of working for myself along with the structure and community of working with others.” This sounds like a sweet setup for most freelancers. However, Harvard Business Review estimates the average rent of a coworking space in the US at $350 per month. This isn’t cheap at all, especially when you could theoretically cowork at a café all day for the price of a small black coffee. Ex-CEO Neumann claimed WeWork was a company that wanted to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” The absurdity of this statement signifies just how out-of-touch WeWork is to the daily life of freelancers, part of its target clientele.

WeWork’s “elevation” just looks like giving someone a pretend nine-to-five and a kitchenette rather than the

security of a guaranteed salary and benefits package.

The truth is, WeWork has never turned a profit.

Neither have Uber or Lyft, other companies whose success depends on freelancers. The unprofitability of these companies piques the question: is turning a profit off of the highly unstable gig economy realistic? If fulltime gig workers are struggling, maybe it makes sense that companies built on them would too. +++ In Providence, six different locations are listed on coworker.com. Most are some smaller iterations of the generic WeWork-ish coworking business. This aligns with the city’s recent attempts to cater to a younger, wealthier demographic; in the past year, Providence has seen the establishment of luxury apartments and high-end vegan restaurants.

What Cheer Writer’s Club, however, is a coworking space with an alternative model. First, it’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Second, it serves a niche, bookish clientele: Rhode Island’s creative industry. Writers, illustrators, podcasters, translators, editors, and indie publishers are just some who call its location on Westminster St “the office.” People from other industries can cowork at The Club, but they have to pay twice as much.

“Writers often work in isolation, and we don’t know each other, we don’t see each other because we’re all holed away in our home offices,” Program Manager Jodie Vinson told the College Hill Independent.

Her business card proclaimed that the Club offered “coworking for introverts.” The Club has cozy “stacks” like a library, sit/stand desks, comfortable couches and meeting rooms, and a state-of-the-art podcast recording studio. Writers can meet with editors in private meeting rooms. A wall of published literature by members gives them a publicity boost.

“Our goal was always to make [our space] affordable to these writers who were suffering in the gig economy because of low pay and no benefits,” said Vinson.

What Cheer Writer’s Club is much more affordable:

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How the coworking industry is failing freelancers nine-to-five coworking access is only $100/month for content creators. Largely writers themselves, the staff at the Club took into account both their own experiences as freelancers as well as feedback from early members. Their programming is empathetic as well. For example, the Club is hosting a workshop this month on how to get health insurance as a freelancer.

Instead of ignoring the unique struggles freelancers face, What Cheer caters to them—an ethos other coworking companies could learn from. +++ Today, all people need to “go to work” is a laptop and WiFi. The definition of work is changing, as the 21st century economy forces workers to move away from traditional nine-to-five office jobs and into more amorphous freelance gig work. According to Forbes, 36 percent of the U.S. workforce freelanced in 2017, a number projected to grow to over 50 percent by 2027.

Since work today is highly digital and therefore more mobile, there is less need for a concrete workspace.

Coworking spaces allow freelancers—those who can afford it, that is—an “office job” without any of the corporate strings or long-term agreements traditional employment comes with.

However, coworking memberships do not offer any of the benefits that traditional, long-term employment does. A WeWork membership (or driving for Uber or Lyft) won’t guarantee you a paycheck, health insurance, or paid vacation days. These are things that all workers need in order to survive.

WeWork’s FAQ happily proclaims that a membership ensures “your location is accessible by keycard 24/7.” By permitting workers to access the office at

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any time, they imply that work can and should be done around the clock. The nature of freelancing blends this line already: you can’t “leave work at the office” when you’re sans office, or if you’re constantly hustling for gigs because you lack job security and a steady paycheck. The lack of work-life balance usually is out of economic necessity for freelancers, and companies shouldn’t encourage this behavior. People in pressure-cooker industries like startups and tech work alongside freelancers at coworking offices. Even though only one out of every five coworker reports “irregular” hours, according to coworking magazine deskmag.com, people are at coworking spaces for an average of 8.8 hours a day—longer than the typical 8 hour workday.

One major perk of joining a coworking space is the networking opportunities. Many companies host events to foster cross- and inter-industry collaboration. These events can also take the form of socializing; weekly happy hours and bigger events are commonplace. These types of connections would be most valuable to a struggling freelancer, or someone without a degree or social network to leverage for employment.

In this way, WeWork uplifts only the freelancer who is already doing well enough to afford the expensive desk—further stratifying the gig economy. Freelancers who don’t have the financial capacity to buy into coworking get left behind.

The coworking office I worked out of had a neon sign spelling out “coffee,” actual free coffee, a mix of couches and wood tables, and a fridge stocked with not-free organic stacks. These are typical design elements catered to the image of the creative/tech millennial: string lights, leafy plants, and exposed brick. One coworking space I’ve visited in Downtown Los Angeles even had kombucha on tap. Long gone are

the office’s classic harsh fluorescent light, grey carpet, and rolling chairs with mysterious stains. As Ilana Glazer of Broad City put it eloquently: “What a hysterical business model….You're storing people in what are essentially closets after luring them in with these, like, seemingly high-end perks, but it's also, like, a bag of beer in a trash can under a counter.” Freelancers in all industries would benefit more from forming a union than paying into the gig economy for little more than a desk. No amount of free libations, sit/stand desks, or ping-pong tables can substitute for real benefits that workers need and deserve.

AMELIA ANTHONY B’22 didn’t pay a cent to write this article from her bed.

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PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA Seeing Korean and American in neither Korea nor America

BY Kion You ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

“Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self imposed exile was just another of Late Empire's packaged tours.”

-Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station Until the end of my two week stay in Phnom Penh, I do not know what the “K” in K-City Hotel stands for, nor do I deign to guess.

In the first week of June, 2018, I arrive in Phnom Penh with a group of university nursing students from Hong Kong, who themselves are completing an overseas service project to fulfill a graduation requirement. My role, as university staff, is to document their goings-on and interview various affiliates, and so I talk to the students as they visit homes on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, performing door-to-door health check-ups with residents. I watch as they tell families to stretch everyday, take walks, eat less fried food, cut down on the sodium. I sit down with some local residents, who offer me iced coffee and seem to enjoy these soft suggestions, laughing as they stretch alongside the students. I cram this ‘journalistic’ work into a few sweltering days.

For the rest of my time, I lie in bed and watch the Indian Wells tennis tournament announced in French, read all four of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, and drink lots of beer because it is cheaper than bottled water.

The third floor of K-City remains quiet throughout, aside from the continuous hum of motorcycle traffic, and there is no WiFi. On the third day, I, along with some other students, press the elevator button to go up to the fifth floor to eat breakfast. The light above the elevator comes on, but it is going down, so we stand still. As the door opens, I see a Korean man, a lanky, tan ahjussi dressed in an ill-fitting polo and jeans. I see that he is holding onto a young Cambodian woman. He sees me seeing him, and temporarily loses his grasp on the woman, who tries to walk out of the elevator. 여기 안이야, it's not the right floor, he says gruffly, yoking the woman back into the elevator and rapidly pressings its buttons, clearly embarrassed at what has transpired in front of a group of students. In three seconds he is gone, and in a few more seconds we are on the elevator going up, quiet.

No one around me understands Korean. He reminds me of my father. +++ Of all countries, South Korea has the second highest FDI (foreign direct investment) flowing into Cambodia, spending $4.5 billion in the last 25 years, specifically in the food, cosmetics, and energy industries. There are

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fighting on the side of the United States. I wonder if Prime Minister Moon thinks about this at all.

300 Korean firms currently operating in the country, presumably in an effort to tap into Cambodia's 7% annual GDP growth. Or perhaps to stave off the impending hegemony of China's Belts and Roads being laid down across the world. Or perhaps just to get into the game that is the ostensibly Rising Southeast Asia.

The Hong Kong students and I are shuttled around Phnom Penh, shown this place and that, and I notice that the swankier neighborhoods bear signs reminiscent of my childhood in Southern California: Tours les Jours, Paris Baguette, La Boulangerie. No one else recognizes the absurdity of seeing these Korean, fauxFrench bakeries in Cambodia, which means that their French names, their French pastries, and their workers in berets and breton shirts have done their jobs. I wonder how self-aware the irony of this all is… something something resuscitation of French Indochina… something something reification of colonialism.

Neo-this, neo-that. What are the Koreans doing.

After around ten days, the Hong Kong students leave for a village a few hundred kilometers to the west, but I stay a few days longer, having done all the necessary reportage. The first morning I appear at the hotel breakfast alone, the sole waiter speaks to me after serving me a fried egg. “Do you want sexy time?” he asks, and without giving me time to respond, shoves his phone screen into my face and begins swiping, swiping, swiping through pictures of skinny, young, and naked Cambodian women. Flustered, I blush and say no thank you but he continues to swipe, perhaps unwilling to stop, or maybe just unable to believe that I am not a sex tourist. I wonder if he has forgotten that he has served me the same, single fried egg sunny side up for the past ten days, and that I have always eaten with a group of students in bright purple university shirts, eager to continue our voluntourism.

I still do not know what K-City stands for, but I do see on my phone that according to a 2013 survey done by the Korean Institute of Criminology, Korean sex tourists are the number one source of demand for sex with minors in Southeast Asia. Growing up, when people asked me if I felt more Korean or more American, I did not answer them, but in this moment I also do not want to answer them, preferring to remain somewhere else.

The next morning, I see the waiter, but do not ask for an egg. +++

Later on that first day, after the Hong Kong students have left, I swipe around on Google Maps for food. I discover, first, several churches with English names, like Children of Life Church, or the Way of Life Church.

I am curious, and when I tap these locations for more information, I see smiling Korean faces surrounded by smiling Cambodian faces. Soon after, I find two Korean restaurants mere blocks away, literally sitting across the street from each other: Mekong Korean Restaurant to the west, and 사랑체 (Sarangchae, or in English, love) to the east. K-City is to the south of both, geographically forming an acute triangle with the two restaurants.

I exclusively eat at these restaurants for the next four days, alternating between the two for lunch and dinner.

I order quietly, hesitant in my broken Korean, and leave quickly, unable to remain the resting point of every other diner’s gaze for very long. Nevertheless, it feels good to take advantage of how cheap the food is here, and I enjoy the ambient Korean spoken by those around me.

Looking around, Mekong Restaurant has many wooden crosses, wall calendars with church logos, and small children. Sarangchae has small groups of men huddled around bottles of soju. Ironically, it is reassuring to see 보신탕, or dog stew (boshintang), carried out frequently from both kitchens, even though they largely do not serve it in Seoul anymore due to societal pressures. I think of my grandfather eating the stew every single day (the dish is widely believed to enhance virility), sitting at the head of the table, hushing the family into an austere, Presbyterian silence. I think of my grandmother, who wordlessly slips between kitchen and dining room, filling up my grandfather's bowl when needed. On Sarangchae’s menu, the stew is described in English as “Soup of low fat meat with various Korean herbs as a wholesome food for summer season” (individual-size bowl), and “elaborated nourishing stew consisted of healthy low fat meat with various vegetables and ingredients” (group-size bowl).

I order everything else on the menus.

During my last lunch at Mekong, my last day in Cambodia, I am the only customer. The Cambodian waitresses line the restaurant's walls and sulk, while the Korean owner sits behind the counter and fans himself. While eating, I read one Google review of the restaurant which states, “한국서 먹는것 같아 좋아 요.” It feels like I am eating in Korea, so I like it. I slip away silently, saying thank you in Korean just loud enough for me to hear. +++ When I check out of K-City, due to fly back to Hong Kong, I see a Korean man talking to two young children behind the hotel counter, presumably the owner and his kids. The younger child plays with a plastic train set, tip-toeing to scoot it along the front desk. Then I am on the bus.

About a year after I leave, South Korean Prime Minister Moon Jae-In will visit Cambodia as part of his “New Southern Policy” to visit all ten members of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) by the end of his first term. His consolidated slogan is the 3 P's: “People, Prosperity, and Peace.” Fifty years Annyeonghaseyo, in all directions. ago, Korean President Park Chung Hee sent 300,000 troops into Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, KION YOU B’20 would like to go home, eventually.

04 OCT 2019

PLANTS AND THE CITY A new vegan restaurant’s place on College Hill

BY Muskaan Garg ILLUSTRATION Charlotte Silverman DESIGN Christie Zhong

Approach the new pedestrian bridge on the Providence River on a weekend night and you might quickly be distracted by crowds, fairy lights, and trendy music from across the street. Patrons of all ages are spending one of their last warm nights on Plant City’s chic, illuminated patios. Enter the giant brickface building and you’re met with clean white walls, plenty of decorative plants, a marketplace of vegan groceries, and a giant white neon sign that says “EVERYDAY PLANTFOOD.” Looking out of the floor-to-ceiling windows, you feel the buzzing energy of this new, luxurious spot in Providence.

The modern interior consists of four plant-based eateries. The first floor, with a casual food court vibe, features a sign for “Make Out,” a café for take-out.

Provocative, maybe.

Up the stairs on the second floor you’ll find a formal dining experience, with Bar Verde for Latin-inspired cuisine and the Double Zero pizzeria. These restaurants began in New York City, where chef Matthew Kenney earned a Michelin star for Double Zero. This glamour—a Michelin star from New York!—perhaps dazzles and awes.

The opening of Plant City this summer was “a dream come true,” said assistant manager Justin Denning. He told the College Hill Independent that within the first three days, the giant business had served more than 15,000 people. “We opened with a staff of around 95, and that number has grown to more than 200.”

Plant City, which has quickly taken hold of Providence residents’ attention, is not a restaurant, as Denning explained; it is a “food hall.” Reminiscent of the famous Eataly in New York City, the two-story building is a curated experience. “The palette, the materials, it’s all part of an aesthetic vision that the owners have developed,” Denning told the Independent.

All four restaurants are the conceptions of Matthew Kenney, a world-renowned vegan chef. The owner and creator is Kim Anderson, a Rhode Island local who frequently dined in Kenney’s restaurants in New York City. Her family, which has been vegan for four years, liked Kenney’s cuisine so much that they reached out to him with their ideas for Plant City.

Anderson is an investor with Everhope Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in social enterprises that are hoping to make a positive impact on the climate. She is passionate about the ecological benefits of a plant based diet. “We can do all we want about fossil fuels and changing the system...and whatever, but the fastest way to reduce these numbers is to move from an animal to a plant-based diet,” she told the Independent. She showed me numbers on the website “The Vegan Calculator” to demonstrate the impact of a single person going plant-based, to demonstrate the environmental impact of the 130,000 customers who had come to Plant City. The calculator roughly estimates the impact of a single person’s plant-based

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

diet. “All the customers so far, it’s like one person being vegan for 105 years,” she explained. The numbers are staggering: 44,165,000 gallons of water, 1.6 million pounds of grain, and 1.2 million square feet of forest saved. Anderson is clearly proud of these numbers, and hopes the impact goes beyond her business. “I want to show people that they can go plant based if they want to, and really enjoy it,” she said.

The business employs responsible practices wherever possible. Food is mostly made completely from scratch, according to Denning, and whatever isn’t is sourced from local businesses. Ice cream at Plant City, for example, is from the Providence vegan creamery, “Like No Udder.” Every container handed to customers is compostable. “We make more compost than trash,” Denning told the Independent, with pride. A sign above the recycling, compost, and trash bins informs customers that everything that has been handed to them is compostable.

Plant City’s environmental efforts are impressive and will make a global impact. But ultimately, Plant City is a restaurant in Providence, and its effects will be felt on a local, concrete level. And the ways in which Plant City’s effects will manifest in Providence aren’t accounted for in Anderson’s environmental mission.

It’s clear that Plant City is offering an alternative to an animal product-based diet. The question is who these alternatives are for. Plant City caters to an audience with more disposable income. “We are equally priced to many other restaurants [in Providence], serving similar foods,” Anderson claimed. “Most people say we’re incredibly economical for what we do.” A pizza pie for two or three people ranges from $17-21, pre-made sandwiches are around $11, and a burrito from Bar Verde comes out to $16. While not overwhelmingly expensive, these prices are standard for the types of customers who come to restaurants like those on College Hill. In comparison, a meatless sandwich at Geoff’s Superlative Sandwiches on South Main Street will come out to around nine dollars. A burrito from Tallulah’s Taqueria on Ives Street comes out to $10. Though Plant City’s prices are slightly higher, none of these College Hill restaurants are particularly cheap; they cater to young professionals rather than the larger Providence population.

With the approval of the Fane Tower and new developments in the Jewelry District, Providence seems to be trending toward a shiny new landscape that is meant to attract this same demographic. The 46-story Fane Tower has been at the center of contentious debates in Providence between residents, developers, and city government for three years, and was approved this past weekend. Many Providence locals have been strongly against the tower, which will literally transform the Providence skyline and continue to raise already increasing prices of living. These developments are neither the beginning nor the end of gentrification in Providence. New establishments

such as Plant City, which presents itself as almost a one-stop shop for a vegan lifestyle, continue to shape Providene’s shifting landscape.

It’s too early to predict exactly what role Plant City will play in the shifting socioeconomic atmosphere in Providence; as a new business, Anderson and Kenney’s vision still creating its impact on the community.

Anderson and Plant City’s mission of raising awareness for the benefits of a plant-based diet are clear. Her vision is for eating plant-based to feel accessible and enjoyable. One can hope that the vision feels accessible to all members of the community. When asked what kind of customers Anderson sees coming into her restaurant, she replied, “Everyone.”

But when Anderson says, “Everyone,” she means everyone who has financial access to Plant City’s product. Expanding on her answer, she told the Independent that most people who come into her food hall are not vegan. Omnivores come to Plant City too.

But, in reality, Providence is not divided into vegans and omnivores. Providence, rather, is a place in which longtime locals feel the encroachment of a gentrifying city in which the Fane Tower will fill with residents who can afford a $16 burrito.

But, on this warm night, it’s hard not to be captivated by the invitation Plant City extends. The music is loud, the walls are very white, and there’s an endless variety of non-dairy ice cream to choose from. To complete your Plant City experience, descend to the cellar level for classes in meditation, vegan cooking, or reiki. Or perhaps pick up a bag of “Hippeas”­—vegan cheese puffs—on your way out. But, taking in the décor, the music, and the cuisine, remember you’re in Providence. Enjoy the new pedestrian bridge, look out at the river, and be grateful you don’t have to go all the way to New York to enjoy a decent slice of vegan margherita anymore.

MUSKAAN GARG B‘21 thinks vegans deserve cheap food.

METRO

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BY Bilal Memon ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Christie Zhong

MAKING CYBER SPACE Antitrust and Big Tech Before he was the face of billionaire philanthropy, Bill Gates sat in the deposition chair of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The case, United States v. Microsoft Corp., concerned Microsoft’s illegal use of monopoly power. The Department of Justice argued that Microsoft was preventing PC manufacturers, who all used Microsoft’s operating system, from uninstalling Internet Explorer, a Microsoft product, in favor of other competing web browsers. Microsoft was attempting to leverage its dominance over the operating system market to shape and control the nascent internet ecosystem. The case was settled in 2001, and Microsoft agreed to substantial restrictions. Had Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior gone unchecked, the internet would have grown up very differently: much less competitive and innovative. In the early days, the internet looked very much like the Wild West—fortunes made and lost in a single day, entrepreneurs constantly jockeying for position in the ever-changing hierarchy of power and popularity. As the binary-encoded dust has settled and the internet has entered its adolescence, a few established giants have emerged—Amazon, Google, and Facebook chief among them. These companies have used their power unfairly and to uncompetitive ends.

It is time, once again, to regulate big tech in order to reestablish the competition that enabled the growth of these companies in the first place. +++

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Contemporary legal theorists and politicians need not imagine potential regulation from scratch. America has a rich history of antitrust law, which stretches back over a hundred years and intersects with some of the most transformative developments in twentieth-century American life. Understanding this history is crucial to understanding how we got to where we are and, more importantly, how to get out of it.

During much of the Gilded Age, a period of heightened inequality from the 1870s to about 1900, monopolies were not only tolerated but celebrated as examples of economic progress, efficiency, and to some, divine providence. As John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, put it, “Growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest … the working out of a law of nature, and a law of God.” An all-encompassing firm, run by great men and free from government intervention, was the antidote to the ruinous competition that many blamed for the spiraling prices and subsequent economic downturn of the 1890s.

Big business, with its economies of scale, was the most efficient mode of production, they argued. But facts on the ground—rising inequality, poor working conditions, nonexistent consumer protections and increased prices—often betrayed a very different story: monopoly power allowed firms to exploit both workers and consumers with impunity.

In order to understand the populist backlash against monopolies, it is important to distinguish between two interrelated but distinct strands of criticism. First, there are arguments concerning the

material welfare of all participants in the economy, though analysis usually focuses on consumer welfare in particular. For example, if a monopoly jacks up prices or prevents competition such that innovation is stifled, material welfare is negatively affected. Second, critics also argue that monopolies pose dangers to the more abstract and less quantifiable notions of liberty and democracy. In the US, such responses can trace their lineage to Louis Brandeis, the early twentiethcentury Supreme Court judge and critic of “excessive bigness.” Brandeis argued that decentralized marketplaces, which operate on a human scale, are more sensitive to the wants and needs of people as opposed to big business, which tends toward consumer and worker exploitation. Brandeis envisioned a democratic economy in which no one individual had disproportionate access to capital or production, and could thus autocratically dictate the rules of the marketplace. Brandeis also argued that, because the economy touches every aspect of social life, the concentration of economic power among a handful of CEOs broadly threatens individual liberty.

Concerns for both material welfare and liberty informed the populist discontent that grew in reaction to the abuses of monopoly power. Organized labor, the rural “Granger movement,” and even a short-lived Anti-Monopoly Party all contested the dominance of the laissez-faire policies that characterized the Gilded Age. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was one of the prime achievements of this coalition. The Act broadly prohibits both anticompetitive collusion

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between firms and unilateral attempts to monopolize a certain industry. The law was not guided by any particular doctrine, but is rather a synthesis of interrelated concerns: among them, the damaging effects of concentrated business power on democracy. The law’s namesake, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, proclaimed on the Senate floor that no problem “is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity … [and that] if the concerted powers of this combination are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government.” Echoing Brandeis, Sherman understood that monopoly power not only affects economic prosperity, but also vitiates the spirit and character of the nation.

The Sherman Act was not enforced under the presidency of William McKinley, a staunch libertarian, whose campaign slogan, “Let well enough alone,” neatly summarized his economic agenda. It was not until McKinley’s assignation and the subsequent inauguration of his vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt, that the Sherman Act was applied with any seriousness.

Upon hearing of Roosevelt’s inauguration, J. P. Morgan reportedly slumped into his armchair, exclaiming, “This is sad, sad, very sad news.” Morgan’s initial fears proved far more prescient than even he could have predicted. During his term, Roosevelt, nicknamed “the trust-buster,” brought 44 antitrust suits; broke up the Northern Securities Company, the largest railroad monopoly; and enacted harsh regulations on Standard Oil, which would be broken up after his presidency.

With Roosevelt began a half century of aggressive antitrust enforcement focused on protecting competition in order to maintain fair market conditions. Through the 1960s, strong antitrust enforcement was seen as necessary for a functioning democracy. +++ The 1970s marked an important turning point for antitrust thought. A group of legal scholars and economists associated with the University of Chicago formed the Chicago School, which championed laissez-faire policies and the self-correcting power of the market. A subset of this group, primarily from the Law School, developed an approach to antitrust that pivoted concerns away from preserving competition and toward increasing consumer welfare, narrowly defined by short-term price analysis.

Before the influence of the Chicago School, antitrust analysis focused on market structure.

Structuralists believe that because concentrated markets lead to anticompetitive behavior, the government should attempt to mitigate activity that would further concentrate markets in order to preserve competition. The Chicago School, on the other hand, cared little about structure or competition. In fact, Aaron Director, one of the leaders of the Chicago School, argued that a focus on preserving competition might protect less efficient companies from more efficient companies. Instead of structure, according to the prominent Chicago jurist and economist Richard Posner, “The proper lens for viewing antitrust problems is price theory.” The Chicago School maintained, contrary to even a cursory attention towards legislative intent, that consumer welfare, as measured by shortterm price changes, was the only legitimate criteria through which to pursue antitrust enforcement; only price hikes, according to them, warranted antitrust scrutiny.

The effect of the Chicago argument is two-fold.

First, the Chicago School immediately discarded any value placed on the role of antitrust in preserving liberty or democracy; these concepts hold no meaning in the Chicago mode of analysis. Second, they ignored long-term consumer effects or other material consequences that do not immediately materialize in price changes. For example, consolidated markets might increase the barrier of entry for new firms, stifle innovation, and hurt consumers, but such harms slip through the gaps of the Chicago School's argument.

Although the Chicago School initially stood on the fringes of legal thought, by the late 1970s and early ’80s, their view had become orthodox. Many prominent jurists were either members of the Chicago School

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themselves, such as Richard Posner, or students of the movement. The Supreme Court also began explicitly citing works by the Chicago School in decisions. Moreover, the emergence of the Chicago School paralleled the rise of neoconservatism more broadly.

With the election of Ronald Reagan, members of the Chicago School had a sympathetic ear at the highest level of government. +++

by the railroad trust, the Digital Age is defined by the tech trust.

One of the many social harms produced by Facebook’s size is the mismanagement of personal data and its distorting effects on the democratic process. With its exponential growth, Facebook has gained unprecedented levels of access to consumer data; simultaneously, Facebook has replaced traditional media outlets as major platform for both news and advertisements. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested personal data of Facebook users without their consent and used it for political advertising, highlights the danger of Facebook’s monopoly power. Although it remains unclear the extent to which Cambridge Analytica influenced election outcomes, the scandal illustrates the potential risks of consolidating so much information in a single firm.

Like vertical integration, attempts at horizontal integration—the acquisition of competitors—were highly scrutinized throughout much of the twentieth century. However, such regulations slackened after the influence of the Chicago School. The Chicago School argued that competition or the threat of competition prevented dominant firms from abusing their power.

If Facebook abuses privacy rights, new companies will emerge which offer consumers better privacy conditions, or so the argument goes. However, such approaches fail to account for the high barriers to entry for social media companies. Since the value of social media to a user depends on the number of users already on the platform, known as networking effects, it is difficult for new social networking companies to compete with the giants. In an interview with the College Hill Independent, David Packman, an early-stage venture capitalist at Venrock, said, “As a venture investor, we invest in little to no companies who are going to compete directly with the internet giants.” As a result, market consolidation and monopoly abuses will continue unless the government protects competition by preventing acquisitions. If the social media industry were more competitive, not only would personal data be decentralized among a myriad of companies, but the competitive process the Chicago School imagined, in which companies lured consumers with better and better privacy conditions, would be allowed to unfold.

These instances of anticompetitive behavior are just two of many, but they illustrate important characteristics of monopolistic conduct in the internet age. Platform products, like Amazon, allow dominant players to dictate the rules of exchange while maintaining vested interests in the outcomes of the marketplace; tech companies re-entrench their power through exclusive control over consumer data; network effects create significant barriers to entry; and the stakes of continued monopolistic exercise are no lower than democracy itself. Too often, complex economics equations and stacks of case books distract our political and intellectual leaders. To prevent history from repeating itself, antitrust law must refocus its attention on the human cost of monopoly power.

The dominance of the Chicago School explains the unregulated growth of big tech, the case against Microsoft being a notable exception. Considering the scope of internet companies, whose primary markets span from transportation to retail to data collection, it is impossible to categorically list the range of anti-competitive behavior, especially as the dynamics of such behavior are often market-specific. That said, two instances of anticompetitive behavior, by Amazon and Facebook, exemplify general trends in the industry.

Because it both owns a platform over which goods are sold and has vested interests in certain goods sold over that platform, Amazon holds an unfair advantage over its competitors. Amazon dominates US online retail, hosting almost half of all domestic e-commerce sales, seven and a half times more than its largest competitor, eBay. As a result, smaller merchants put their goods on Amazon in order to attract the largest number of potential buyers. As of 2017, there were 1.8 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the platform where third-party retailers can sell their goods.

Marketplace allows Amazon to expand offerings and increase profits – sellers face fees up to 50% of their sale – without maintaining additional inventory or taking on substantial risk. Amazon then uses data from buying habits to compete with these third parties. If Amazon notices a product is particularly profitable, it will create its own version of the product. These Amazon-branded products have priority in customer search. Through substantial data analysis, Amazon purposely rigs the system in its favor. Such behavior reduces competition, hurts small producers, and increases the barriers of entry for future merchants—all of which substantially decrease consumer welfare in the long run.

Amazon’s dual business as marketplace-provider and producer is an example of vertical integration, a process in which multiple stages of production and/ or distribution are combined. For the first half of the twentieth century, any attempt at vertical integration that substantially lessened competition was prevented.

However, the Chicago School argued that vertical integration created efficiency that the government should support, not prevent. As vertical integration does not, strictly speaking, increase market share, the Chicago School was convinced that prices and output would remain unaffected. Reagan’s Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, influenced by the Chicago School, issued new guidelines that narrowed the criteria for reviewing vertical integration. Reagan and the Chicago School failed to comprehend the extent to which businesses could leverage their dominance in one industry to reap unfair advantages in another industry. Amazon Marketplace is case in point. BILAL MEMON ’22 is always the top hat in Monopoly.

Another form of anticompetitive behavior practiced by technology companies is the frequent acquisition of competitors. Facebook is a particularly notorious and deft culprit. As the story goes, Facebook was born in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room and went on to quickly become the dominant general use social media platform. In the early 2010s, Facebook began to face stiff competition from a new start-up, Instagram. Instagram quickly gained traction with a younger cohort, who Facebook faced difficulty attracting. Recognizing its precarity, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, maintaining its control over the social media industry. Since then Facebook has purchased 75 other competitors, including WhatsApp, whose one and a half billion users have given Facebook a footing in highly-sought after international markets. Unregulated acquisitions allow companies like Facebook to balloon to unthinkable sizes that pose a threat to both the industry and society as a whole. Much as the Gilded Age was marked

SCIENCE + TECH

16

BUNNIES

BY Lauren Lee ILLUSTRATION Nicolaia Rips DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Valentine and I moved in together at the start of a Rooster year—the kind that, decades ago, my mother was born into, the same day that the first human stepped onto the moon.

shoulders and head over him, sucking in the cucumber shampoo scent of the blond whirling over his skull, I smothered him first. I imagined him inside me, not just partly, but his whole body somehow contorted into my stomach, sucking at my organs—soft red heart, liver, The year Valentine and I moved in together was The crease between his eyebrows deepening into a kidney pumping to nourish him, all of him sustained by America’s first full year under the new administration. trench, my father asked Mom, “Did we bring an ingrate the innards of me, so that from the most rudimentary It was another year of California drought that turned into the world?” tendrils of our consciousness, we would be attached. into fire. It was my twenty-sixth year of existence on Planet Earth, Valentine’s twenty-third, our second +++ In my mind, I devoured him. He never knew. It’s my together. The year that I went vegan.

heady secret: capacity to consume. And I felt queasy.

One early morning as I watched Valentine drift into The year began with legume-induced constipation, sleep after we had stayed up through the night, I +++ which Valentine assured me would go away soon. At had the thought that if he knew the extent to which I the dinner table, he offered me more three bean salad. needed him, how much I starved for his affection and We were confused when we stepped onto the shore, but “It hurts,” I said, hand to gurgling stomach. How could assurance, he’d be disgusted. then vaguely we remembered having been taught ages this be good?” ago that the sun rises in the east. Of course. Our West I massaged his temples and suggested that we go Coast intelligence. Behind the new apartments facing He grinned. “Soon, you’ll even crave it.” He raised a outside to watch the sun rise. the pier, the sunlight was barely visible. We sat in the spoon to my mouth. sand to stare at litter, ashen ocean, and a pathetic slice He opened his eyes. “Mmm,” he said, pushing my of moon. +++ fingers away. “We could drive to the beach and have a picnic. But what time does the sun rise?”

“Get up! Let’s go swimming.” Valentine nudged me. I I remember my mother’s telling of my first solid food. didn’t want to move, so he stayed beside me. We split a This must have been when we lived in Taiwan, because “What time does the sun rise?” I asked Siri. tofu sandwich. she told it to the aunties from church. According to her, at lunch one day, before either of my parents could Valentine rose to make sandwiches while I threw my Like some miracle as we sat digesting, a bright round prevent me from doing it, I reached with fat hands into phone to the side and burrowed further into the bed. soaring thing propelled against the gray sky, streaming a steaming basket of xialong bao. I picked up a dump- I waved my limbs around in our new sheets the way ribbons of clouds behind it as it lept. ling, bit off a little of the skin, slurped the soup inside, people in snowy climates make angels. and popped the rest of it—slimy ball of aspic and pork “A shooting star,” I exclaimed. “What’s your wish?” with the remainder of the glutinous rind—into my I felt sticky between the legs as I swished and rocked mouth, chewed, and gulped— clean. against the mattress. When I got up to go to the kitchen, “I think that’s Elon Musk’s rocket,” he said, but he made I noticed that I’d bled through my underwear onto the a wish anyway.

“Bunny didn’t get a drop of soup on herself,” my mom sheets. I remembered then that I hadn’t been taking giggled. my pills. On our new sheets, the spot was the size and +++ color of a kidney bean.

At this story of immaculate consumption, the church

On a January evening, I had a huge craving for pork, aunties cackled. +++ maroon and smothered in liquory hoisin, dripping slow-seductive with each cut. I rummaged through the +++ When our small family first moved to this country, I goddamn nut butter, spinach, rice, and bean salad in had diarrhea constantly. Dad said it was my toddler the fridge. It was all pale.

He was right about the beans; my stomach calmed stomach acclimating to mass-produced American after a few weeks. The bloating decreased. I was no meat.

Valentine was out. I opened UberEats. longer farting constantly.

If the urge came in the middle of the night, I would I pressed “Empty Cart” three times before going Being vegan was easier than I expected, especially wake up Mom so I wouldn’t have to face my stinky, through with it, fingers stiff. in a city where all the valued customers were giving raging mudslide alone, on the cold toilet, under the up meat. At Fatburger, I paid a dollar extra for an drone of the fluorescent light. Instead, Mom, groggy I splayed across our bed. By then, after a year of daily Impossible Burger. It really tasted and bled like a cow, I from sleep, would hum made-up Chinese opera melo- use, the sheets were frayed at the edges and speckled told Valentine, and he laughed, kissing me. dies over my poop-brimmed farts. She’d hold my hands with obscure stains. I closed my eyes and opened my while I squeezed her thin, beautiful fingers, grateful. limbs as if waiting for someone to emerge from the “I’m so proud. Doesn’t it make you feel better to know bathroom and enter me. that you’re not harming animals?”

“Where does this go when I flush?” I asked her once.

After the deliveryman came, I went to get a plate but I leaned closer and nibbled his ear.

“Into the sea,” she said. lost focus midway into the kitchen, unfolding the paper bag and yanking out the hot plastic box. Bag, napkins, +++ “Poor fish,” I frowned. utensils clattered onto our tiles. “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” a college boyfriend once said to Vegetarianism wasn’t totally new to me. I remember “Yes, and poor sea…” me. I pawed the fuschia-coated pork into my mouth. sheepishly asking, after having read Charlotte’s Web Tore it with fangs so the juice spurted, and the box in my second-grade class, if I could abstain from the +++ fell. My tongue strained to keep pace with the quaking bronze suckling pig my parents had purchased in celeof its house. Then I began to think of all the pigs I had bration of Dad’s promotion. Dad didn’t hear me at first, Head in my lap one humid afternoon, he clung to my consumed by that point. but Mom glared and shook her head. torso like an urchin, and I felt as if he was trying to swallow me with his heavy limbs. But by bending my I pictured the celebratory sucklings, pepperoni on

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The fatty slice was too pale, though glazed bright orange on the edges. I stared at it, imagining a rosy creature of jiggling alive flesh nuzzling me and oinking into my nose. My tears fell onto the slab.

4 OCT 2019

pizza, public-school-lunch ham, bacon, Canadian bacon, canned minced stuff with onions, the expensive loin that the boyfriend before Valentine had taken me to try on my birthday. Of course, the innards of xialong bao. I thanked them, these pigs, including ones I couldn’t recall but who had passed through me all the same. Nothing dirt-grown or laboratory-made could match the certain taste of death.

Still—I was eating the meat from my childhood again.

It was the Year of the Dog. And eight months into this +++ Dog, far before February could pass us into Pig, our phones started buzzing with alerts of machine-gun When I moved back home, Mom and Dad said, “Bunny, sightings in neighborhoods around us. The remaining you can’t be so foolish. We won’t be here forever.” I said forests began burning up. And while fire (afterward, I knew. They didn’t ask anything else of me. diarrhea-like mudslides) swept our city, a scientist over in China announced that he had successfully modified My belly grew huge while I consumed voraciously the DNA of some unborn twins to save them from a Valentine was opening the front door. “Bunny?” he whatever Mom served, especially meat. lethal disease. called. I had the last bit in my mouth and let it hang out while he walked through the living room and the +++ The next month, under a full moon that I spotted from bedroom toward the kitchen. the freeway as Dad sped us to the hospital, I gave birth After the Year of the Rooster passed, people hosted to my own twins—fat and half-not-Chinese boys— +++ parties on the dirty beach to watch a mannequin carved from flesh past their due date, looking like the named Starman jump into orbit far beyond the asteroid slimy meat inside bao.

A few weeks after the incident and twelve months belt. Several months later, we sent a Twitter-famous after I moved in with him, in mid-February, shortly robot dog to poke around Mars. By then, our hunger But they screamed with a fury only alive things possess. before the next Lunar Year, I walked in on Valentine had long surpassed the poor moon, and going out of my bunched up in the bed with another girl. She was also way to track time through animals and moons seemed Asian (though I’m not sure what import that has, if any). too patently irrelevant.

Neither I nor Valentine spoke; there was nothing to say.

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The girl blushed into our grimy sheets.

LITERARY

18

Fri 10.4 Bradley Eros Screening Columbus Theatre - Doors at 7, show at 8 Bradley Eros is an experimental film director, collage-maker, photographer, performance artist, curator—the list could go ON. The Columbus Theatre is screening his films and tickets are $10. If you’re tryna get a feel for his stuff, watch his film “burn (or, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics” in which a filmstrip of 1970s bondage porn burns to the soundtrack of Taxi Driver. King shit.

Sat 10.5 Providence Mob Tours Garbaldi Square - 1PM Al Pacino (and then Steven Van Zandt) said it best: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Indeed, I thought my days of romanticizing the Famiglia were over, but this tour is too good to pass up. It has everything: a tour guide who describes himself as “Don Rocco” despite claiming to be a descendant of the Mayflower, graphic descriptions of crimes that are “not suitable for children,” and generally ambiguous legitimacy. Come for the perils of public history, stay for the gabagool. $30/adult ticket.

Sun 10.6

Canvass for Monica Huertas in Ward 10 (Hosted by Sunrise Providence) 216 Ohio Ave - 2-5PM Monica Huertas, social worker and longtime PVD resident, has been advocating for economic, racial, and environmental justice in the city for as long as the Indy can remember. (She led the fight to oppose a Liquified Natural Gas facility in the Port of Providence.) Huertas is now running for City Council in a special election for the Ward 10 (Lower South Prov and Washington Park) seat.

The primary is on Oct. 10, so join Sunrise PVD in getting out the vote in advance of the critical election that, we think, could shake City Council.

Mon 10.7 Know Your Rights: Immigration and Healthcare Panel/Workshop 222 Richmond Street; Lecture Hall 160 - 6-8PM Brown’s medical school organizations and student groups are hosting a panel aimed at future healthcare providers + anyone who’s interested in the intersections of healthcare and immigrant rights! Among the discussion topics are immigration resources in RI, recent changes in immigration policies and their implications for immigrant patients, and the rights of healthcare providers who serve immigrant communities. Folks from the RI Center for Justice and the Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance will be speaking, so don’t skip this!

Tues 10.8 Challenging Stigma, Healing Addiction Workshop 134 Mathewson Street - 6-8 PM Ana Bess Moyer Bell is leading a workshop this Tuesday to explore how drama therapy can act as a form of addiction support. She is the founder of COAAST (Creating Outreach about Addiction Support Together) and does arts-based, educational, and community-driven work to help folks who are in recovery for opioid addiction. Come through to hear more from Bell and to participate in a drama therapy exercise.

Weds 10.9 Teaching Old Bacteria New Tricks Salomon Hall at Brown University - 5:30-6:30PM I have never bought the schoolyard contention that science is ‘fun’ because it involves experiments. This event—the sort of grown up equivalent of the Mentos volcano—does, believing biology to be “an exquisite chemist.” Kristala L. J. Prather, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, will explain how bacteria can be used in unusual ways...if that’s your thing.

Thurs 10.10 Politics & The Media The Providence Atheneum, 5-7PM So this is supposed to be a “lively” discussion of “politics” and “the media.” If you’re looking for a cool commie event, this is like… not it. Gabriella Domenzain, who was head of the Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University and has done incredible work in immigrant rights organizing and advocacy, will be speaking and is literally the only reason you’d wanna come. The other dudes on the panel are snoozers and honestly not worth Googling—trust me on this one, pretties.