The College Hill Independent Vol. 40 Issue 3

the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 3 28 FEBRUARY 2020

03 DETENTION, INCARCERATION Leela Berman The Wyatt and the national prison-industrial complex

06 RACE FOR WARD 1 Peder Schaefer

07 THREE STORIES Nicolaia Rips

The Independent’s guide to Ward 1 City Council elections

Mean things from a brain in a vat

Indy

the

Cover

From The Editors

Teething phase Nina Sinclaire Fletcher

Q: Help. I am sad. Can’t shake the feeling. Work is tough, unrelenting, etc. I know that I cannot live without work. But also I’m frigging tired of working: I want to live.

News

A: Cut past the furniture music. The biggest problem you’re facing right now is that you (and we) keep swimming through cardboard boxes that you (and we) can’t see. Take the polyethylene glycol from your standard 50-caliber eye drop vial and open your eyes.

02

Week in Bureaucracy Ben Bienstock & Alex Valenti

06

Race for Ward 1 Peder Schaefer

11

Keeping an Open Mind Will Allstetter

Q: Alright. Boxes, huh. Are you saying that I should–

Metro

A: Yes! The subjunctive. It’s all about imagining what could be. Already integrated in that one word––the tug of possibility and doubt, pulling at each other like two horses running in the opposite direction, tied together by a jumper cable. Don’t fry your horses, but remember to maintain an unflinching DC current.

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Detention, Incarceration Leela Berman

Features 05

Cavell’s Horse, Derrida’s Cat, and Other People Irina V. Wang

13

Tuning Out Reality Cecilia Barron

Literary 07

Three Stories Nicolaia Rips

Science+Tech 09

The Leadership Function Izzi Olive

Arts 15

Unmasking Artistry Anabelle Johnston

Ephemera 17

The Ephemera Coloring Page Liana Chaplain and Sindu Sriram

X 18

Excerpts from Soy Pollo, Soy Carne (y Otras Mujeres del Mercado) Miranda Villanueva

MISSION STATEMENT

STAFF

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.

WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana Baer Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel Navratil these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang | and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben Bienstock Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling process provides an internal structure for accountability, we Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang | MANAGING EDITORS Matt always welcome letters to the editor.

Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Daniel Navratil

28 FEBRUARY 2020

VOL 40 ISSUE 03

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week

in

bureaucracy

BY Alex Valenti & Ben Bienstock ILLUSTRATION Gemma Brand-Wolf DESIGN Amos Jackson

ANTIQUES RHODE SHOW From lawmakers’ struggles to understand Facebook during Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearings to Rudy Giuliani’s horizontally inserted AirPods, we often hear stories of older politicians fumbling with modern technology. Yet in Rhode Island government offices, quite the opposite is happening. According to a recent WPRI-TV report, some state departments are still using electric typewriters, microfiche, and other analog technologies of a bygone era. Here, millennial hires banking on their Microsoft Word proficiency are out of luck.

Seemingly frozen in the late 20th century, Rhode Island still relies on pre-digital methods to manage and store data about employees. Workers handwrite their hours on paper time cards, which are stored in mountains of boxes throughout state offices. All updates in employee information are tediously typed out on electric typewriters and inked onto five-ply paper with dot-matrix printers­—a type of printer which saw widespread use from the 1970s to the 1990s. The paper is then separated and marched over on foot to the necessary offices. On top of this, older, long-term personnel information is stored on microfiche—flat sheets of film on which scaled-down reproductions of documents are kept. At least the state has moved past papyrus scrolls.

In an interview with WPRI, Executive Director of Human Resources, Kyle Adamonis said of the current system: “It’s really old.” It’s also time-consuming, and repair technicians for these fossilized technologies are hard to find. Unsurprisingly, younger government employees are often confounded when encountering these antiquated machines. Human Resources Analyst Kelly-Durkin Murray told WPRI that new hires trained to use the devices have often asked, “What is that?” In this case, boomers have the technological upper hand.

The State of Rhode Island is not the only government that still places faith in the analog. Alongside hipsters and stubborn novelists, various local and federal authorities have been found using typewriters in recent years. The New York City Police Department was still filling out yet-to-be-digitized forms on the machines in 2015. Two years ago, the borough of Matanuska-Susitna in Alaska reenlisted its old typewriters after suffering a cyberattack that locked town administrators out of their computers. And after Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s extensive international surveillance program in 2013, members of both the Russian and German governments suggested that typewriters were being considered as a more secure alternative to digital documents.

Despite the apparent cybersecurity benefits, the Rhode Island government is hoping to pull the plug on its aging machines soon. Governor Gina Raimondo’s current budget proposal includes $93 million for a new

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, software that would modernize state HR, payroll, finance functions, and other tasks. The proposed project comes on the heels of the state’s disastrous 2016 launch of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), a $600 million computer system meant to streamline eligibility verification for social services. The system was dogged by technical failures and resulted in two federal class action lawsuits by the ACLU of Rhode Island.

Unlike UHIP, which was specially designed for Rhode Island, the ERP system is already widely used in both the private and public sector. Anxious state officials have thus assured the public that this transition will be smoother. We can only hope. Still, it seems that the days of typewriters and dot-matrix printers clattering away in the Rhode Island Statehouse may be numbered. After years of dutiful service, these old-timers are being kicked to the curb to make room for newfangled automation. A fable for our time, perhaps.

-AV

RHODE RAGE

the George Wiley Center. As for Steinhauer, while we would have preferred he keep his filth off the roads, he’s such a bastid he probably wouldn’t care what we think.

Regardless of this paper’s moral righteousness, the more freewheeling ProJo has noted that either of these scandals of state overreach could provide the ACLU of Rhode Island with the plaintiff it has long sought to challenge the state’s restrictions on free front-and-rear speech. The organization might have found divine intervention in its Kentucky counterpart, which won a landmark court case establishing the First Amendment rights of all beings earlier this month. For years, Ben Hart had driven with Ohio plates proclaiming “IM GOD,” but when He moved to neighboring Kentucky, the DMV rejected His request to keep His plates on grounds of offending “good taste.”

On Hart’s behalf, the ACLU of Kentucky sued the state, winning Hart not only the right to His sacred plates, but also $175,715.50 (enough to buy approximately one to two Teslas) to cover His legal fees.

Hart’s case may provide a path forward for Steinhauer and the Tesla owner, but His success will be difficult to replicate. Although news stories detailing Hart’s struggle tend to depict Him as an amusing atheist standing up for His non-beliefs, this is journalistic malpractice. The media has missed a much more important story: with His success at all levels of the judiciary, Hart has legally established that He is God. This raises significant theological quandaries, but perhaps spells doom for Rhode Island drivers. If the Lord Himself had to fight in the courts for years to win His beloved plates, then what chance does a bastid like David Steinhauer stand?

Barreling toward city halls across the great highways and backroads of the United States, brave motorists are bringing the crusade to defend free speech to new speeds. Here in Rhode Island, the Department of Motor Vehicles has tried to silence two drivers for their enactment of the unalienable right to pay 70 dollars for vanity license plates. In two stories on the plate beat last week, the Providence Journal reported that neither the unnamed owner of a Tesla electric car -BB bearing “FKGAS” plates (presumably suggesting the unprintable obscenity “f**k”) nor David Steinhauer, who had requested plates sporting his nickname, “BAASTD” (read with a heavy Ocean State accent), will be permitted to speak their truth on their bumpers.

The Independent cannot and will not condone the kind of language that the drivers used to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, the substance of their critiques—fossil fuels are a plague on humanity; David Steinhauer is a bastid—are right on the money. As a family-friendly publication, we would have preferred that the Tesla owner forgo their vulgar vehicular sloganeering and instead engage in a more wholesome approach to the climate crisis, such as engaging in revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle to overthrow the global militarized system of extraction that exploits workers and poisons the land, water, and air—or at least lobby their state senator to support the Percentage Income Payment Plan proposed by

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

DETENTION, INCARCERATION, DEPORTATION THE WYATT DETENTION CENTER AND THE NATIONAL PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

PLACING THE WYATT IN CENTRAL FALLS The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility is located across from a park. A wide expanse of grass—often filled with kids playing soccer or used for school graduations—stops inches from the road. On the other side of the grass is a concrete building, towering ominously, severed from the street by a giant barbed wire fence.

The Wyatt exists in a perilous in-between space: between a park and a river, between private and public, between the local and the federal. It is a testament to the fact that, in the United States, detention, incarceration, and deportation impact communities and national politics in a vicious cycle. Established in 1993, the Wyatt Detention Facility is publicly owned and privately operated: although owned and administered by the city of Central Falls, out-of-state corporations own shares in the Wyatt. It was one of the first prisons under private control in the United States.

Central Falls, the city where the Wyatt is located, is small, with a population of about 19,500. In the 1990s, like many small cities, Central Falls struggled with poverty and unemployment. According to Tal Friedman, an organizer for Never Again Action RI, in the 1990s, the Central Falls City Council was forced into choosing between a “garbage dump and prison” for job creation. It chose the prison. This decision ties into a larger trend of the 20th century where prison was seen as a “new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry [which] would jump-start local redevelopment,” writes geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Furthermore, the history of mass incarceration is inextricably tied to the history of racism and the legacy of slavery—the overpolicing and criminalizing of communities of color, especially Black communities, and the use of prison labor as allowed by the 13th Amendment—make prisons racist instutions.

At the Wyatt, profit and racial control go handin-hand. The Wyatt was supposed to bring jobs and prosperity to Central Falls, but in 2011, the city filed for bankruptcy. In January of 2019, in an attempt to gain some sort of profit, the Wyatt signed a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to incarcerate people who had been detained at the US border. This little prison, in a city of fewer than 20,000, became part of a project to control the racial demography of the nation.

A year after this contract, on January 22nd, 2020, Rhode Island State Treasurer Seth Magaziner announced that the Rhode Island Pension Fund would divest from private prisons. This is a disjointed narrative because the Wyatt is not a conventional “private prison.” Still, divestment is deeply connected to the

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discourse surrounding the Wyatt through years of activism and community organizing. When Central Falls announced the new ICE contract in March of 2019, Alianza para Movilizar Nuestra Resistencia (AMOR) began a months-long battle: one that started with trying to stop the contract with ICE, grew to #ShutDownWyatt, and then became a mission to ban private prisons in Rhode Island.

policing migration. Friedman, of Never Again Action RI, explained that one of the reasons that the Wyatt returned to ICE contracting after a 2009 abuse case is that criminalizing immigration has become “a source of revenue for prisons across the country, continuing the dual-mechanism of racism and profit that fuels prison decision-making.” A Justice Department report from last August notes that in 1998, 63 percent of federal arrests were of US citizens. 20 years later, however, 64 percent were non-citizens, largely due to THE PRIVATE PRISON MANTRA: PROFIT, an increase in arrests for “immigration offenses.” In PROFIT, PROFIT other words, the War on Drugs expanded prisons, and the War on Immigrants maintains them. Both leave The carceral history of Central Falls mirrors a national wreckage and despair in their wake in the hopes of profstory of prison expansion that started in the 1980s—a iting from mass incarceration and using mass incarcerhistory which is inextricably tied with the rise of ation to maintain a system of racialized control. private prisons. In 1993, the landscape of private prisons looked far different than it does today. The first corporation to engage in the “business of prison,” THE WYATT’S FINANCIAL AND RACIAL now known as CoreCivic, started operations in 1984, ORDER as a result of rapid mass incarceration in the wake of the Reagan administration’s racist “War on Drugs.” The Wyatt embodies the profit-hungry nature of Private prisons make money by expanding incarcer- the carceral complex. In its time, it has shifted ation and cutting down on the costs of prison mainte- between many forms of profit-maximization, despite nance. It is important to keep in mind that the problem continuing to rack up debt. A brief summary of these is not just with private prisons or with immigration many twists and turns to grapple with the Wyatt’s detention. It’s not about pitting private prisons against financial woes are essential to understanding its public prisons, either. Both private and public prisons current positioning: $106.7 million was invested in mistreat incarcerated people. Still, it is valuable to see 2005 by private bondholders, including national corpohow private prisons play a vital role in the incarceration rations like UMB Financial, a Kentucky-based bank, and deportation machine, which prospers from profit and INVESCO, an investment management company. and racial control. Furthermore, the abuse in private An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons is distinctive: a 2016 report by the Justice contract to house detained immigrants in 2006 ended Department found that private prisons were violent in an investigation of rampant abuse and a rapid shift and prisoners were deeply mistreated, even more so to supplying rooms for Navy personnel under General than in government-owned prisons. Immigration Court-Martial Convening Authority. Whether you see detention centers, private and public, have come under it as a failed venture or a failing one, the Wyatt remains fire in the last few years as a result of allegations of for two reasons: a desire by investors to turn prison into violence, harassment, and mistreatment of incarcer- profit and a system of using prison as a form of racial ated people by correctional officers. control.

The relationship between private prisons and Bondholders, who hold shares in the Wyatt from immigration detention is key. According to the the 2005 deal, continue to have power over the direcnonprofit The Sentencing Project, 73% of people in tion of the Wyatt. Once they had invested, they needed immigration detention were held in privately-owned the facility to make money—regardless of the human facilities in 2017. The United States border-to-prison cost. In 2006, the Wyatt began to contract with ICE to pipeline, where people are detained at the US border imprison people arrested for immigration offenses. In for and then forced into prisons all over the States, is 2008, this relationship ended when Hui Li “Jason” Ng, supported by a system of profit for private companies a computer engineer from Queens, NY, passed away which rely on locking people up for immigration viola- from undiagnosed liver cancer while detained inside tions. The growth in privatization goes hand-in-hand the Wyatt. An ICE investigation revealed that he had with “crimmigration,” the extensive criminalizing suffered gross abuse by correctional officers, including of migration—and reflects a larger shift in the pris- being refused a wheelchair and enduring constant on-industrial complex to fuel incarceration through harassment. After Ng’s death, 153 ICE prisoners were

28 FEB 2020

BY Leela Berman ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Amos Jackson

relocated, and a Prison Legal News article from 2009 explained that because “the jail relies heavily on government contracts...the removal of ICE prisoners seriously affected its profitability.”

No statement better encapsulates this profit incentive then a comment made by the Wyatt’s director in 2009, Daniel Cooney, who said in an interview to a Providence Journal reporter: “[I’m] looking at it like I’m running a Motel 6 ... I don’t care if it’s Guantanamo Bay. We want to fill the beds.” We want to fill the beds. The Mayor of Central Falls promptly fired Cooney, multiple organizations held protests outside the jail, and the ACLU of RI sued dozens of officials and employees at the Wyatt and lobbied for the state to reject all contracts with ICE. Of course, due to the profit motive, the ICE contract murkily returned, 10 years later, in no small part due to pressure from private companies which are stakeholders in the Wyatt.

Although the Wyatt isn’t strictly private, it needs to make money to pay back the private bonds it took out in 2005 and to fund its private operation. Now, the Wyatt is used partially to imprison people awaiting trial or serving sentences in Rhode Island, but largely imprisons people arrested for immigration offenses across the nation, especially people detained at the border who cannot pay bail. The corporate project to profit off prison and the state project to control racial demography transcend state borders. Profit determines the direction of the prison-industrial complex, and the pattern of increased racist federal arrests related to immigration is represented in the Wyatt’s turn back to the ICE contract. This time, though, organizers across Rhode Island were ready to make their protests heard.

SHAPING THE COMMUNITY DISCOURSE ON THE WYATT On a phone call, Arely Díaz, one of the lead organizers of AMOR, explained: “AMOR wasn’t created to make political campaigns, but the ICE contract was just so atrocious that...we had to do something.” Although AMOR wanted to provide direct support to those personally affected by state violence, giving emotional, financial, and legal support to community members, they still participated in protest. As Díaz details, “We held a march from City Hall to the Wyatt, that was the first action/demonstration against the Wyatt and their new ICE contract.” Since then, AMOR has been a key organization in the grassroots mobilization around the Wyatt, shaping the discourse around its closure by emphasizing the fundamental injustice of the ICE contract and the absolute harm the Wyatt has done in the Central Falls community. This discourse, which equates prison to harm, is in direct conflict with the original rationale behind the Wyatt and the ideology of its bondholders: prison is profit.

Díaz highlighted the complexity of trying to shut down the Wyatt amid these two competing visions for the prison. The Mayor of Central Falls, James Diossa, made a statement advocating for the Wyatt’s closure and, as a result of immense public protest and political pressure, the Wyatt’s mayor-appointed board suspended the contract with ICE on April 5th

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of last year. Soon after, the bondholders of the Wyatt, including UMB Bank, filed a lawsuit demanding that the Wyatt continue to receive ICE detainees. The lawsuit also tried to get a restraining order against the city’s board, alleging that it should stop interfering with the Wyatt’s decision-making. Now, the Wyatt is in lawsuit limbo, but continues to house around 120 ICE detainees, whose lives have been put on hold as this case continues. AMOR, Never Again RI, and other community organizations have continued to organize around shutting down the Wyatt. AMOR not only operates their #ShutDownWyatt campaign by putting political pressure on RI and investors in the Wyatt to divest, but also raises bail for people detained inside.

Díaz noted that one of the most emotional parts of organizing was seeing how it mattered to the people on the inside—and how those people shaped their own discourse connecting detention and incarceration.

None of the people who are detained in the Wyatt can see the public protests that AMOR holds in front of it from their cells, but other incarcerated people can, and they bang on the windows, cheer, and write “Shut down the Wyatt” on pieces of paper. Díaz emphasized: “Detention and incarceration, it’s the same thing. We’re fighting for the end of incarceration and detention as a whole.” The discourse connecting incarceration and detention was also present in AMOR’s community gathering on February 14th.

endure its harm. Prison and detention are two sides of the same cruel capitalist coin.

AMOR recognizes this. Díaz concluded the interview by saying that she “just want[ed] to emphasize that this fight is about the ICE contract, but it’s also about the facility itself.” AMOR wants not just to change the conditions of the Wyatt but to shut it down.

One suggestion made in a 2012 report about the Wyatt’s debt was that it could be sold in order to remove the burden of management from the Central Falls government, thereby becoming fully private. Given current tensions and the abusive profit-maximizing nature of private prisons, it is important for AMOR to prevent that from happening.

CARCERAL CAPITALISM AND DIVESTMENT

It was in no small part because of AMOR’s organizing, including multiple meetings with State Treasurer Seth Magaziner, that Rhode Island will divest from private prisons. In his January 25th announcement, Magaziner called divestment the “moral and responsible thing to do.” As Díaz stated, “We want to know that Rhode Island wasn’t doing anything to support private prisons,” and added that on January 29th, Magaziner wrote a letter to Martin Flanagan, the CEO of Invesco, the largest investor in the Wyatt, asking that Invesco “work with relevant stakeholders to take any measures available to address the concerns of community CELEBRATING COMMUNITY DESPITE THE members in the Wyatt dispute.” This centers the WYATT Central Falls community itself in protesting against the Wyatt—the very community the Wyatt was supposAMOR’s community gathering, ¡Celebrando Nuestra edly established to help. Díaz noted, of course, that Comunidad y Resistencia! (“Celebrating Our the announcement of divestment didn’t end AMOR’s Community and Resistance”), was filled with food: dedication to support those detained within the Wyatt, Olive bread, dumplings, empanadas, a vegan cake especially because the Wyatt continues to hold its with “Fuck ICE” written in frosting, mac’n’cheese, rice contract with ICE. Friedman stated that it was a great and beans decorated with the Puerto Rican flag. Signs step in the “direction of ethical investing,” but echoed decorated the space, the headquarters of Providence Díaz’s claim that there is always more to be done.

Youth Student Movement: “migration is beautiful;” Friedman also emphasized that the system of “no human being is illegal;” “keep families together: incarceration relies on violence. In August of 2019, stop deportation.”

Never Again RI organized a protest blocking the Above the main dishes, a sign from a previous Wyatt’s entrance. There, correctional officers pepperprotest at the Wyatt asked, “What would you like to see sprayed protestors and drove a truck into peaceful replace the Wyatt?” Answers ranged from “a commu- demonstrators. Despite injuries to protesters, later nity garden” to an “amphitheater” to “affordable that year, the officer was not charged. “If the system is housing” to a “centro de communidad” (community willing to enact so much violence in plain sight...all of center). Another sign asked what amor, communidad, the violence that goes on behind bars must be so much y justicia (love, community, and justice) meant to the bigger,” Friedman explained. people who entered. Some of the answers includes “a Violence, especially racialized violence, is omniworld liberated,” “no incarceration,” and “no borders.” present in the system of carceral capitalism. This is, Although AMOR was only founded in 2017, it has perhaps, the crux of the danger of the “prison is profit” already launched a support line. In just a few years, it mentality. A garbage dump or a prison. We have to fill has supported community members hurt by immigra- the beds. Within the carceral logic, incarceration is an tion policy and grown a sense of community imagina- economic motor and the Wyatt is simply an attempt to tion: envisioning a world without the Wyatt, and more deal with unemployment in Central Falls. It is through specifically, a Central Falls that takes community community organizing, the questioning of the Wyatt’s needs and desires into consideration. purpose, and sketching better uses of community Near the desserts, a sign near the window resources, that this logic erodes. proclaimed “Migra. Policia: la misma porqueria” (Immigration enforcement, police: the same crap), LEELA BERMAN B’23 agrees with Angela Davis and echoing on a very local level the historical relation- thinks prisons are obsolete. ship between incarceration and detention that exists in plain sight, well known to the communities that

METRO

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Cavell’s Horse, Derrida’s Cat, and Other People The challenge and reward of interspecies negotiations

My first galvanizing career goal was to become an Olympic equestrian, which was not unusual among my prepubescent peer group. It was short (though intensely) lived. My explanation for why I stopped riding always came down to the cross-species relationship: I never felt that we were quite able to get each other. I expected the kind of reciprocity promised by Steinbeck, Sewell, and the countless Young Adult equine adventure serials chronicling that elusive yet legendary bond between humans and horses. Whenever I groomed Miranda’s coat with a stiff-bristled brush, I spoke at her in my head and imagined she could understand. But she never seemed to get the hint when I telepathically urged her to speed our trot into a canter. Old Dusty was interested in the carrots I brought him, but didn’t seem to sense that I was having a bad day… or worse, he didn’t even care?

Many years later, I realize that bond is more likely the result of embracing and negotiating within the equine-hominid gap rather than bridging it with some genetic predisposition for “horse-whispering.” Proud, impatient, going for gold, I dismissed the career path as unfulfillable when no special connection clicked into place; I thought the magic would feel like impossible knowledge being made possible. But maybe the magic happens precisely when the possibility of knowing is surrendered after earnest pursuit, then navigated with newfound reverence, co-learning, and joyful humility.

I never bothered pushing past the point of surrender, but perhaps I had the right idea. I couldn’t have possibly fostered what animal trainer Vicki Herne and ecofeminist scholar Donna Haraway describe as companion species happiness, which results “from striving, from work, from fulfillment of possibility… [discovering] happiness together in the labor of training.” All the limited ways a girl of my time and place could experience a horse—riding lessons one hour per week, expensive summer camps, long drives to the nearest stable—felt misaligned with my sense of the creatures themselves, and all the lore and literature surrounding them. I continued to draw horses feverishly, trying to capture their kinesthetic grace and power on paper long after I stopped trying to trot them in circles around the corral.

What degree of dissonance could cause a headstrong little girl to give up? Biologist Jakob von Uexküll influenced the field of semiotics by introducing the German term umwelt, which translates to environment. The term describes a lens of environmental perception specific to a species’ biological capabilities and relevant needs. A narrow slice of visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum drives most human understanding of reality, while a tick’s sensemaking revolves around 37° Celsius—the temperature of all mammalian blood. Markers of spatio-temporal significance across umwelten are often as self-evident as they are distinct.

This severely limits interspecies comprehension.

To meaningfully transcend the barriers of umwelten requires an understanding that these barriers need not be dissolved or crossed, but rather accepted and celebrated. Philosopher Stanley Cavell describes it as a readiness to surrender total comprehension of the other. The discontinuity between human and animal consciousness is not a problem of impenetrable umwelten, he suggests, but rather a “skeptical terror of the independent existence of other minds.” Cavell reminds us that a horse is capable of sensing, interpreting, and extrapolating from every shift and micro-twitch of its rider’s muscles. There is skepticism in imagining such foreign kinesthetic points of view (the phrase itself betrays humans’ sensory bias). Moreover, there is terror in suspecting that what we assume is invisible could be inherently exposed to the discerning other. A good rider can embrace this new nakedness, signalling humility and collaboration rather than fear and desire to conquer. It turns out that horse-whispering is more like horse-listening.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida describes something similar as he recounts the peculiar feeling of “shame that is ashamed of itself” whenever his cat saw him naked. Why is it staring like that? Why do I even feel embarrassed? Maybe I should be? Just as Cavell’s horse is “a rebuke to our unreadiness to be understood, our will to remain obscure,” the cat’s lingering gaze is unnerving because it suggests the existence of an independent mind, creating friction against the Anthropocentric umwelt. In this case, our uneasiness stems not from a feeling of physical insignificance and powerlessness, but a disruption of

BY Irina V. Wang ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Daniel Navratil

existential exceptionalism and the intellectual vulnerability that follows. Questioning who is seeing whom, we are confronted with what Derrida calls “the abyssal limit of the human... the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself.” +++ Results vary when I find myself keenly aware of the consciousness of an unfathomable other. Faced with horses, I stopped riding; faced with cats, I find quiet affinity; faced with humans—well, the messiness and dreadfulness and loveliness of life ensues. Although it’s psychologically strenuous to really reckon with the gaze of an absolute other, our alternative is lonely living under the delusion of human hubris: seeing without ever being seen. The ethical choice, it seems, is to move deliberately through the world in this suspended awkwardness, this constant collision of umwelten. For Derrida, the only interesting question is: “What are the edges of a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on an abyss?” While I won’t be seeking answers on horseback, humans and cats keep drawing me back to that inter-umwelt space of necessary negotiation.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought this much about horses, and the only evidence of that childhood fixation is tucked away somewhere in an old sketchbook and disposable camera. As I recall and revisit the feelings that ushered me away from the corral, I’m (dis) arming myself with the readiness to under-know the beings that surround me now. Last weekend, I moved into a new home with a good friend and his feline companion. The three of us will continue to temper Cavell’s skeptical terror and Derrida’s shameful shame in order to live alongside each other with integrity and delight. To see and love a non-human is exactly what it is to see and love another human—existentially challenging, emotionally rewarding, requiring relentless self-and-other-awareness. It’s the active co-creation of understanding, gazing intently across the abyssal edges of significant otherness.

IRINA V. WANG R’20 is 37°C.

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FEATURES

28 FEB 2020

RACE FOR WARD 1 The Independent's guide to the candidates Blue, yellow, and white campaign signs mark homes and businesses up and down Wickenden Street in the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence, where three Democratic candidates are running in a special election to fill the Ward 1 City Council seat vacated by Councilman Seth Yurdin in the beginning of January.

Ward 1 includes parts of Downtown, the Jewelry District, and the Fox Point neighborhood. The winner of the Democratic primary on March 3 will go onto the City Council, as no Republican candidates filed to run.

The Democratic candidates running to replace Kurdin—John Goncalves, Nick Cicchitelli, and Anthony Santurri—care about local issues unique to their backgrounds, such as schools, development, and small business, but the most controversial topic of debate is a progressive tiered property tax plan that was proposed by members of the Providence City Council last summer. That proposal, which called for an increased property tax rate on real estate valued above $350,000, was proposed at the last minute and shot down after facing strong opposition from East Siders who thought it placed an unfair tax burden on their area. Still, it started a conversation—that continues to engage all the candidates—about whether the East Side, the wealthiest part of the city, has a responsibility to pay their fair share. The positions of all the candidates are shaped by the reality that Ward 1 is full of wealthy residents, most of whom don’t want their taxes raised, period.

Here’s the Independent’s guide to the candidates.

Nick Cicchitelli

Nick Cicchitelli grew up in Johnston, Rhode Island.

He’s a nine-year resident of the Fox Point neighborhood, where he owns real estate that he rents out to young professionals and graduate students. In his interview with the Independent, Cicchitelli stressed his experience working within Ward 1 and with the Fox Point Neighborhood Association, as well as his broader political experience. He’s in the second year of the presidency of his neighborhood association and has sat on its board since 2016. Cicchitelli also has masters degrees in political science and public administration from the University of Rhode Island and has worked on state Democratic campaigns in the past. He claims that these experiences strengthen his candidacy for City Council.

“There’s a lot of institutional knowledge and memory coming off the City Council at once,” said Cichitelli, referring to the fact that half of the City Council seats will be open in 2022 due to term limits.

“We want to make sure the person going there is qualified, a person who knows the history and depth of the issues facing Fox Point and the Ward.”

Cicchitelli strongly opposes the council’s prior attempt at a progressive tiered property tax. The tax plan proposed by the council, he said, targets the East Side unfairly, using a “false logic” that all the residents of the ward are capable of paying a higher tax regardless of their individual circumstance.

“This is not something we can do with lip service and platitudes,” said Cicchitelli, who added that the city needs to consult with more experts on municipal tax reform. “We need to continue to take a look at other cities and see what’s worked elsewhere.”

On the relationship between Brown University and the city of Providence, Cicchitelli was adamant that he wanted greater financial contribution from the University to the city. He believes Brown should be taxed on all its property that is not fundamental to its academic mission, such as off-campus housing.

“It’s pathetic that you have a wealthy university three blocks away from a crumbling school,” said Cicchetelli, referring to the struggling Providence

Public School District. “I don’t want to downplay Brown’s contribution to the city, but the problem is that what they’re actually paying in the budget, the $6.3 million they are paying now, just pales in comparison to what it could or ought to be.”

As for changes that could be made to the Providence Public School District, Cicchitelli said that the current teachers union contract needed to go, but any improvements would have to be followed by a raft of other changes.

He also stressed that he would like to see biking play a larger role in Providence’s future in conjunction with the city’s proposed Great Streets plan in order to combat climate change and move the city away from relying only on cars. Affordable housing was also a priority for Cicchitelli; he said that the city needed to incentivize private developers to build more housing via Tax Stabilization Agreements and tax credits, as well as providing better funding for the Providence Redevelopment Agency, which refurbishes derelict homes.

Asked where he stands on the progressive-moderate spectrum that is captivating national Democratic politics, Cicchitelli said he’s not as progressive as Sanders or Warren, but more progressive than the moderates in the national race, such as Biden.

John Goncalves Of all the candidates, John Goncalves has the deepest roots in Ward 1. He grew up in Fox Point and attended public school in Providence, and later the Wheeler School and Brown University. After spending a few years working as an educator and being involved in Democratic politics in Minneapolis, he has returned to his hometown of Providence. Now he works as a fourth grade teacher at the Wheeler School and is involved in organizing around neighborhood issues, such as opposing the progressive tiered property tax. He also serves on the board of the Fox Point Neighborhood Association and is one of the founders of the Providence Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, a coalition of 30 different neighborhood associations throughout the city. As an educator and the only former Providence Public School student in the race, addressing the struggles of the Providence Public School district is a priority for Goncalves.

Goncalves is also against the progessive property tax issue that's been a concern of all the residents.

He was involved in organizing East Siders against the tax proposal last summer, and after that fight, he was appointed to a city council special commission studying the issue. On most other issues, however, Goncalves is unabashedly progressive. He said that affordable housing was deeply personal to him, after his family was forced to move out of the Fox Point neighborhood due to gentrification, the expansion of the I-95 highway corridor, rising living costs, and the “expansion of local institutions.”

“When we think about development, how can we encourage smart development that doesn’t push people out of their neighborhoods?” said Goncalves. To this end, he’d like to see a bill passed outlawing Source of Income discrimination by landlords, and that the city should develop smart zoning practices and fund more affordable housing oppourtunities. Goncalves has been endorsed by Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE), a Brown University student group that advocates on behalf of people experiencing homelessness. Like Cicchitelli, Goncalves also wants non-profits like Brown University to play a bigger role in Providence’s financial well-being. Goncalves sits on the Brown Alumni Association Board of Governors.

When asked how he squared his progressive values on housing, schools, and smart development with his opposition to the progressive tiered property tax policy, Goncalves said, “It wasn’t about not trying to help the most vulnerable amongst us, it was about how this was introduced at the 11th hour.” The progressive tiered tax plan was introduced by the City Council last summer only a month before property tax bills were to be sent out.

Goncalves is also the only candidate to have signed the Green New Deal pledge and he has been endorsed

BY Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN Daniel Navratil

by the current mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey.

Anthony Santurri Anthony Santurri is a local nightclub and bar owner who says he can use his experience with his small business on the City Council. He has lived in Providence for over 30 years and in the Downtown section of Ward 1 for the past eight. Santurri was a founding member of the Downtown Neighborhood Association and currently serves on the Jewelry District Association. Along with Goncalves, he helped organize the Providence Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. He owns the Coliseum Nightclub and the Free Play Bar and Arcade downtown. When asked by the Independent what makes him a contender for the council, Santurri maintained that his ability to control his own schedule, his small-business acumen, and his ability to build partnerships are unique amongst the candidates. “I don’t over promise,” said Santurri. “I’m not promising that I can do this or that. What I am promising is because I own my own business, I have control over my time….

This is not a part-time job, this is a full-time job.”

Santurri is also against the progressive tiered property tax because “it’s unfair to assume that someone who has a home for $500,000 should be paying more in taxes because we assume that they have the money.”

Santurri said that while he is not for the plan in its current form, he is open to further discussion about it. He said that there are other revenue streams that the city could look toward, but that the city’s whole tax burden shouldn’t be “laid on the backs” of East Side residents. He also said that he’d like to see Brown and other non-profits begin to pay incremental tax increases on new property they buy in order to make the real estate market between non-profits and private developers more competitive.

On the issue of affordable housing, Santurri makes a similar pitch, saying that the city needs to look at a number of different routes to try and build more affordable housing. “If we only throw money at it, that can only go so far. If we do TSAs that can only do so much,” said Santurri, referring to Tax Stabilization Agreements that can be used to incentivize developers to build in Providence. “I want someone who lives in the city to tell me: this is what I can really afford, and then work from that.” Santurri stressed the role that he thinks charitable individuals can make through donations of time or money to causes like affordable housing and the development of the Providence Public School District.

When asked about whether he was a progressive or moderate, Santurri was clear. “I’m not a progressive,” he said. “In my life, I’m a centrist. I’m moderate.

I believe that we need a strong financial base in order to execute all the social programs we would need to ensure quality of life. One reason I think we’re in a bad position with schools and housing and infrastructure is because we haven’t had that strong financial base.”

Santurri stressed his commitment to public safety and the relationship he’s developed with the police from working at his nightclub and bar. He said that the Providence Police Department should be expanded to 450 officers from the current 415 so residents can feel safe in their community.

“I have learned more about what my city and my community wants in the six weeks of running for office than in 10 years of being on neighborhood boards,” said Santurri. “I thought I knew a lot, but now I really, really am understanding things. That’s going to stay with me, win or lose.”

The Democratic primary for Ward 1 will take place on Tuesday, March 3rd.

Sometimes PEDER SCHAEFER B’22 likes to pretend he’s a regular newspaper reporter.

METRO

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BY Nicolaia Rips ILLUSTRATION Katrina Wardhana DESIGN Kathryn Li

Economists have some number for how much money it takes to make a person happy. Money can buy happiness, up until like $75,000. Then it plateaus. From that point, your quality of life does not increase constantly with the more money you earn. Once you’re a millionaire, the difference in happiness escalates by degrees.

Candles, Please “Exhale.”

The crowd—upwards of forty years old and clad in a variety of branded spandex—sighs.

“Tighten your left buttock.”

My knee creaks. Stupid willful knee. Have I not done enough for you.

I use as coasters. They are scattered in my apartment, unopened but mottled with round stains. Set reminder: buy coasters.

“And, bending your knee, tuck your heel under it. “So, the camera crew’s arriving at eleven. We’re going Lengthen from the base of your spine, not the middle. to start outside and follow you through the house on a Breathe. In. Out.” handheld. I’m going to be next to the camera the whole time, but you’re going to direct your answers straight The woman I’m shadowing has her face in her vagina. into the lens. Your agent should have sent you the list While impressive, it’s also disquieting. I look around of questions?” and everyone, all the spandex yoga women, have their faces between their legs. Missed the self-fel- She nods. latio commandment. I bend my head down and the instructor comes up behind me, knees into the small of “Fantastic!” I say. “If you want to freshen up before they my back, willing me forward. I don’t want to do this. I arrive, now’s your chance.” want to be inflexible. There’s real skill, power even, in inflexibility. In a WWE fight who wins, the rod or the As she goes, I readjust on the couch. There’s a candle blade of grass? on the glass table. I sniff it. Smells like orange blossoms.

I feel completely transported to a place I have never Back at her house/apartment/compound (walls been and probably doesn’t exist. It’s the scent of Eat, covered in ivy can’t disguise that there are walls every- Pray, Love, of Armie Hammer’s gently sweaty shirts where) she nestles into a white couch, a coffee table in Call Me by Your Name. This candle promises eternal book of Weimaraner photography open between us. I summer without the bacne, roasting a whole suckling have a dab of blue ink on my index finger and I have pig on a log fire, forgetting the moral dubiousness of somehow managed to smudge it on the otherwise eating meat under these environmental conditions. Its pristine couch. To compensate, I am now sitting at an label is egg shell and says something angle to cover the blue speck. There is no lumbar in Cyrillic; under it, the scent: support in this couch and I struggle not to be Lavender and Orange. I swoon. completely enveloped.

Google tells me the candle is Anna has offered me a glass of water on a $80. coaster. I have a stack of books that

Similarly, once past $30, candle quality evens out. Up until that, the difference in “candle quality” is huge.

The $5 scented candle is a throwaway gift. My friend in high school would get me vanilla candles from Bath and Body Works for every birthday, Christmas, Hanukkah gift exchange, and I would never ever light them. To light such a candle was to be enveloped in a noxious saccharine shroud, fumigating your own connection to nature.

What they sell you is the lifestyle behind the candle, the $80 candle lifestyle. A lifestyle of pseudo-minimalism and faux-efficiency, streamlining everything you consume to create one whole persona. They sell you the candle promising the compound and the white couch I’m sitting on. A Swell bottle is not a vessel but a sip of icy water on the beach. Every item says something about who you are, you as the individual, you as unique, that is different from everyone else’s unique.

I watch all of us antagonistic agnostics believing not in divinity but ultimate determination, in wellness and acquisition, in the most holy of things: branding.

Ultimately though, this is all a sham, you will not be happier, you will not have the lifestyle, you will still have your roommates, and your underbed storage from IKEA, and your bacne in the summertime.

Candles cannot fix your creative block or your armpit rash or the stash of contact lenses your ex left under your bed. Things cannot fix things. More things are simply more things.

Instead you will be left with an $80 lump of beeswax and a wick, burnt sparingly in an act of preservation, for the candle, yes, but more for yourself. I want it so bad. I want it all so bad.

Anna is now dressed in a white sheath dress.

I am still contorting on the couch to cover up the ink stain. I look up at her, radiant in eyelet. Restless misshapen thing I am, repentant, readily reshaped, squeeze me, reteach me, I have the capacity but not the time.

“Are we ready to start?”

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LITERARY

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proven by the lack of perceived interest in the Being.

Beauty and agreeability are not the same thing. In fact, beauty and agreeability are opposing principles.

A thing cannot be both because agreeability implies use and beauty is pure. Because the Being is not found desirable for any utilitarian or pleasure-oriented reasons (i.e. a powdered sugar-covered donut) but rather as an entity outside of usefulness, the Being is unquestionably beautiful.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt the Being is beautiful. However, because of the same qualities that make it unquestionably beautiful, (that the object is utterly without use and nobody wants to obtain, possess, consume), nobody ever wants to hang out with the Being.

End of the Empire The climate is hot these days; as well as the spot in my bed where I lie, as well as butchers and people who work with their hands and are connected to things normal people like me buy in plastic. Raw chicken feels too explicit to look at sometimes. Puffy but slick, the flesh so shiny it looks liquid and shrink-wrapped to oblivion. It’s so pink and nakey. I’m like, cover up please.

On Instagram, a girl from a sorority posts the Dolly Parton challenge. You can tell it was a breakout year for her. She really came into herself. How humble of her to post unflattering photographs.

This has been a breakout year for me too. Every part The 2:00 AM Manifesto of my body has broken out in cystic acne. Additionally, I’ve been broken up with in many ways, by some people Thesis: I Am Aimless and That Is Purposeful who I didn’t even realize I was dating. I am allergic to my own sweat; it has started producing histamine. All To have purposiveness without purpose, is to reside at of my jeans are too tight, dammit. A big old breakdown the salty core of humanity, to understand what exactly year for me. we all share. I went to the store the other week and stood there looking around.

I greased the top of my head with oil, not the bottom.

In my haste I put my hands on the top and then moved I went to the store the other week and instead of them to the bottom. In the mirror, I scold myself. I am purchasing, instead of using the spatiality of the place here to provide for you. I glare at my reflection. Shape for its intended purpose, I left and returned home up, asshole. Tell yourself to follow your dreams and with nothing. To return with nothing from an outing other platitudes. Don’t shit around. My reflection’s like, intended to procure something, to ameliorate the lack up yours, you don’t have dreams. of something and fill it with a nothing is to decide to lean into the purposiveness without purpose, and to do Time to get a coffee and banish thoughts. On the way, that is to obtain, to store, purpose.

I pick up a lost girl on the highway. I knew she was lost because I found her, as I often find lost things, pencils and wallets and bugs in sinks. Her thumb is up and Thesis: I am a Child of Time it’s weirdly long, bordering on tentacle-y except her nail is cut short, way too close to her nailbed. It was so The singularity of universality of the Being (me) is incidental, she asked to be dropped off on the side up found within. To be a child of time slowed is to live ahead. There was nothing but swamp. outside of the temporal plane that others exist on, to not just be a product of time but also to exist in a way At Starbucks, there is a waxiness to the breads in the that is both elongated and separate. The Being is a display case. Madame Tussaud's for baked goods. I child of time in that the Being (me again) resides in buy two brioches. They appear to be sweating. No time but often in the negative space outside of it, the histimine there. I eat one because everyone knows negative space being one created when focusing in if you don’t enjoy something the calories time on the reflection of time. don’t apply, like mayo, and jack cheese and Thousand Island dressing.

The To be in time but out of time and without purpose and other I squirrel away, tuck living in a negative to obtain purpose and time times it in my coat in its brown sometimes. Sometimes time just times. bag.

Thesis: Everybody Is Out to Get Me Beings (not just me) are inherently selfish. Beings (collectively) are conniving and stinky and vicious.

They hog things, always, taking seconds, and they lie, grabby, grabby Beings. Because I am a Being, I am all of those things. Because of this, conflict often arises.

In these situations it is important to remember that all Beings are selfish, not just a singular Being being selfish.

Thesis: I Am Grotesque It is of no importance that the viewer finds the beautiful Being (me) agreeable. Should I be found agreeable, there is an implication that the viewer wishes to obtain, possess or consume the Being (i.e. a powdered sugarcovered donut). There is no risk of this as the Being (me) is fundamentally disagreeable. This is

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Brother calls me up asking where I am, am I coming home for the holiday, and I scream at him because my hair is bad and I can’t help it. I scream at him in the Starbucks, which feels right. How guilty does he think I am? Does he understand how bad my hair looks? Really, it looks like I washed it in a cow’s mouth. He knows I can’t do anything right.

I felt good running, greens, sleep but now alcohol, hormones and more sleep, I love myself a little less, full choked up of pitted

things, can’t hide from myself. I can’t hide what I am steeped in.

There’s a pause on the other end and I can tell he’s smoking something. I am too anxious for recreational drug use, for throwing large parties, for not thinking about dying brain cells (I need every single damn one) every time I smoke weed or black tar when I share a cigarette with a pretty girl.

Brother is a musician. Pretty good at it too, passionate about guitar, constantly sending me the best playlists.

At some point in the last year though he’s slipped from cool rock man to sad rock man. He’s got a job playing at a fajita joint in Jersey. Plays happy birthday to bratty kids in little league shirts to the white noise of endless sizzling. Play music fuck the man, man, until you grow beer large.

He asks how my friends are and I say wow they’re great, they’re so cool and hot and fun. He pauses and I know he wonders if I’m being ironic but doesn’t want to say anything. What was I supposed to say? That they are anxious sexed-up sexless fucks trying to construct selves from refusing things left behind at parties, things seeded away, collect offs and ends, animated stacks of junk, Tetris detritus in puffy coats?

Drove past where I dropped the girl off but the swamp was all dried up. Maybe I misjudged the spot. A podcast plays and the host yells about the end of the empire this, the end of the days that. Every century suddenly is the end. Honestly, valid.

I wonder what I would do if this was actually the end of days. There are so many options. Eat my roommate’s yogurt. He’s so insane about his yogurt, pretty sure he monitors it every day. Take a bath in his good greek yogurt. Break the glass case in the Starbucks, free all those waxy pastries. Record a podcast about podcasts.

Have sex with someone I love, I guess. Or better, fuck someone random. Cry with my family. Tell my brother I love him. Smoke a pack of cigarettes. Walk around full Winnie the Pooh. Roll around in the dried-up swamp and scare kids. Find that girl and ask what’s wrong with her thumb. Read the second and third books in the Twilight series. Yeah, I’d do it all.

When I get home, it’s getting dark. Past daylight savings, the earth is penny-pinching sunlight, squeezing us. It is the end of day, the end of days. I grab my mail from the porch, an Amazon package of paper towels. I fiddle with the brioche in my pocket. I get back in bed.

My hair looks so bad.

THE LEADERSHIP FUNCTION SYSTEMATIZING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE UNIVERSITY Meritocracy is perhaps the most embedded of our various apologies for capitalism, and so its logic is familiar enough. With it, success in market society can be explained away as a natural occurrence. The titan of industry—the paradigmatic capitalist—embodies this fantasy of just desert: they followed the rules, and it paid off.

If we understand this as the mythology of the meritocrat, the mythology of the entrepreneur offers a subtle, lawless variant. The entrepreneur is disruption embodied. Unlike the traditional capitalist, who’s in the business of producing what society already knows it needs, the archetypal entrepreneur trammels the old ways and revolutionizes the economy by force of will. This, at least, is the most glorified articulation of the entrepreneurial mythology, and we can note that in this particular formulation, the entrepreneur’s charisma derives precisely from their breaking the rules to which meritocrats subscribe, and then proceeding to succeed in even greater proportion.

Bezos, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, Jobs: the mythology about these guys is that they dropped out of college, led heterodox upstarts, and delivered something society hadn’t known it needed. These details may not be true, exactly, in each of these cases, but in the world of myth, this is hardly important. What is unquestionably true is that when these men are celebrated, it is for their audacity, for impressing their will upon the fabric of society.

The entrepreneur, then, offers an alternative to the meritocratic apology for capitalism. Alex Gourevitch, professor of Political Science at Brown University, prompts us to consider what these fantasies reflect about political economy today. If the entrepreneur's meteoric rise rivals the meritocrat’s measured advance as the preeminent fantasy of capitalist success, it might seem that the meritocratic path appears increasingly untenable—that the traditional structures of success are simply unpromising. But beyond offering a liberatory fantasy in the face of systemic disillusionment, the entrepreneur seems to give us something more fundamental. As Gourevitch remarked on leftist global politics podcast Aufebunga Bunga in 2019, “when entrepreneurs truly are entrepreneurial, they remind us of the human potential to exceed the normal and natural of everyday life. To reach beyond where you normally have to find yourself." This is to say that entrepreneurs, on the public stage that is the economy, serve as inspirational spectacle. But if we look to the entrepreneur as a model of human potential, we must ask for whom, and how, entrepreneurial feats are made possible. +++ In certain discourses, entrepreneurship serves as an ‘everything good’ catch-all. Entrepreneurship is dynamic, creative, nimble; its purview is not limited to the traditional ‘business world.’ Through the category of ‘social entrepreneurship,’ in particular, entrepreneurship is invoked as the silver bullet by which social ills might be transcended. These capacious definitions of the entrepreneur are conspicuously expressed in the university. In 2016, Jacobin reported that despite the decline in the absolute number of start-ups in the US over the past 30 years, entrepreneurship has ballooned in higher education—the number of entrepreneurship courses offered in colleges and universities has increased more than five-fold over this time period, with over 400,000 US college students taking courses in entrepreneurship in 2013. Brown University proclaims itself to be at the vanguard of institutionalized entrepreneurship. Prior to the 2019-2020 academic year, the University had offered an undergraduate concentration that included entrepreneurship since 2007. This year, the University subsumed the latest iteration—the concentration in Business, Entrepreneurship, and Organization (BEO)—into two existing academic departments. Brown now offers an undergraduate ‘certificate’ in entrepreneurship, to be administered by the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, established in 2016.

The Nelson Center, like other university programs intended to cultivate entrepreneurship, rests on the

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premise that entrepreneurship can be taught. The very concept of entrepreneurship pedagogy is somewhat arresting in light of the conventional mythology of the entrepreneur: Is not the entrepreneur a charismatic, disruptive figure whose defining traits lie beyond the reach of pedagogy? The Nelson Center’s signature three-step “entrepreneurial process” seems diametrically and self-consciously opposed to these conceptions. This process, which has structured Nelson Center Director Danny Warshay’s private consultancy since before the Center’s opening, is schematized as follows: 1. Find & validate an unmet need 2. Develop a value proposition 3. Create a sustainability model In this methodology, entrepreneurship emerges as something entirely different from how we might know it from well-worn cultural myths—apparently requiring none of the entrepreneur’s ineffable characteristics.

When asked by the Independent why he holds the view that entrepreneurship is now more socially necessary than ever before, Warshay stated simply that there are more global problems today than ever before. This view of entrepreneurship carries within it a long history of theorizing the entrepreneur, arguably founded on the theorizing of the market as the forum for the expression of elite will. At the same time, Warshay’s remark also captures a fundamental reality of capitalist society: that progression occurs through innovative acts of entrepreneurship. In this sense, the “entrepreneurship racket” (in the words of Jacobin’s Avery Wiscomb) that consumes universities today feels both old and new. On the one hand, it’s just the latest rendition of the old model of the entrepreneur—still a vessel to impose the will of the few on the lives of the many. Yet the new notion that entrepreneurship can, and should, be taught—especially at what Gourevitch calls “ruling class colleges and universities”—as well as the new ubiquity of the concept, gesture towards new forms of capitalist enclosure necessitating new fantastical strategies of ‘escape.’

The roots of the concept In his forthcoming article, “Capital Personified,” Gourevitch traces foundational theories of the entrepreneur’s role in political economy, beginning with early 18th-century theoretician Richard Cantillon and culminating with 20th-century Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter. This genealogy highlights the important divergence of Schumpeter’s notion of the entrepreneurial “leadership function” from previous theories in which the entrepreneur’s acts were crucial in the economic system, but held little cultural meaning. Because Schumpeter conceived of the economy as a forum for the production of culture, values, and civilization, he imbued entrepreneurial acts with moral significance. Schumpeter’s entrepreneur makes history; his interventions into the otherwise static state of the economy effect economic growth, but more significantly, they are acts of leadership which renovate civilization.

Such acts of history-making are fundamentally coercive for Schumpeter because they divert some portion of the fixed amount of capital in the economy away from the pre-existing projects and towards the entrepreneur’s own innovative project. Gourevitch notes that Schumpeter’s language conveys the aggressive quality of these acts: capital confronts, the entrepreneur forces. But since the entrepreneur heralds civilizational advance, this coercive act is seen as a social good.

Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is not a creative figure.

He is exceptional not for his ability to invent, but his ability to innovate in a way that can catch on in the market. By recombining existing technologies or services, the entrepreneur offers something new. And insofar as society had not previously expressed its value for this new thing, which did not previously exist, the entrepreneur’s innovation transforms societal

BY Izzi Olive ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Amos Jackson

values. Schumpeter thus offers a working definition of actual economic entrepreneurship which is conceptually useful to distinguish it from the many colloquial uses of the term—for example, to refer to small business owners, or to a certain plucky resourcefulness. His definition is also useful as a historical referent because select concepts of Schumpeter’s are enthusiastically invoked in entrepreneurial discourse today, while others—namely his view of the economy as a space for the expression of elite will—have been left behind.

Schumpeter’s acknowledgement of the force involved in entrepreneurship did not amount to a condemnation of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur’s exercise of power within the economy was natural and necessary — a view predicated on Schumpeter’s vision of inexorable civilizational progress, with the forceful entrepreneur showing the way. By contrast, today’s notional entrepreneur represents anything but coercion, despite the fact that successful entrepreneurship still entails control over immense amounts of labor and capital.

Schumpeter to Drucker and back again With Schumpeter’s entrepreneur as our working definition, the idea that we can all be entrepreneurs is hardly intuitive. Yet this notion has taken root in popular discourse, largely due to the contributions of mid-20th century management theory, particularly that of consultant and author Peter Drucker. Historian Angus Burgin has argued that Drucker’s intellectual trajectory, from his early writings of the 1940s to his most influential work, The Principles of Management, first published in 1954, reveal an underlying shift in attitudes towards automation during that time. Taking stock of the mechanical nature of factory labor in the 1940s, and doubtful of the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial organization, Drucker initially proposed management and organization as a means to combat the alienation of worklife. By granting the worker leeway to integrate tasks with “executive function”—requiring thought and judgement—Drucker proposed to reimagine industrial worklife in the model of unalienated craftsmanship. But the contributions for which Drucker is best remembered today bear little trace of these early concerns regarding the “social pathologies of industrial civilization,” in Burgin’s words. This, Burgin argues, is the result of Drucker’s adoption of a euphoric attitude towards new technologies, reflected in his theorizing of a new type of worker altogether: the knowledge worker.

Like many of his contemporaries, Drucker became seduced by the liberatory potential of automation.

Drucker came to believe that machines would enable the industrial worker to act as an entrepreneur at every level of the corporation. Working in tandem with intelligently-designed machines, the knowledge worker would be able to exercise executive function. This embrace of automation all but supplanted Drucker’s earlier concerns. Corporations and business schools alike soon integrated management theorists’ cybernetic techno-futurism, which remains distinctly visible in contemporary philosophies of corporate organization and business school curricula. As new technologies made old concerns seem obsolete, Burgin writes, “Schumpeter's chiliastic vision thereby began to evolve into the relentlessly optimistic discourse of entrepreneurship that has pervaded business education ever since.”

As Gourevitch notes, however, the experience of the vast majority of workers today is a far cry from entrepreneurial. At the Amazon fulfillment center, or the call center, or in any number of other occupations, the worker is more machine than ‘self-author,’ contrary to the entrepreneurial mandate of creative license to be borne from the liberatory force of automation. Automation no longer carries the techno-utopian sheen that swept up Peter Drucker half a century ago.

Instead, automation is now often invoked as a threat to the worker. But the indelible mark of management theory is that corporate organization is now offered as a corrective to such ambivalence towards automation and other forms of industrial malaise. This equation of

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entrepreneurship with industrial freedom at all levels more intensive advising by “a deep and knowledgeable of the corporate structure underlies the vast array roster of mentors, industry contacts, and experienced of institutions dedicated to the theory and practice entrepreneurs,” as well as meetings with venture of entrepreneurship which have taken hold since capitalists.

Drucker’s time.

The Nelson Center describes itself as an “equiManagement theory reimagined entrepreneurship ty-free zone,” meaning that none of its grant offeras a way of operating within business contexts which ings are tied to a stake in student ventures. However, organization could facilitate. No longer defined in the Center’s existence and continuation does depend strictly economic terms, the concept became increas- on the success and support of Brown alumni. On its ingly diffuse, to the extent that entrepreneurship could website, the Center addresses student entrepreneurs be understood as an assimilable attitude. Observing with the following: “If (when?) you go on to great the growth in organizational approaches to entrepre- success our hope is that you’ll help pay it forward by neurship that gained steam in the 1990s, for example, supporting the next generation of Brown entreprein Brown University's Business, Entrepreneurship, neurs!” ‘Paying it forward’ can mean financial donaand Organizations undergraduate concentration, it’s tions, but non-financial ‘philanthropy’ is perhaps tempting to say that the institutionalization of entre- more significant to the Center’s model. By offering preneurship has amounted to its ‘meritocratization.’ If mentorship, sharing contacts, and facilitating access entrepreneurship is governed by rules and structures, to venture capital, alumni constitute the Center’s then it would seem that becoming an entrepreneur is “networks of support”: webs of human, social, and no different from becoming a typical capitalist. But in sometimes literal capital. important ways, the Schumpeterian logic of the entreSince entrepreneurship no longer falls under any preneur has been preserved, even as a vast body of of Brown’s academic departments, the model for its theoretical work has reimagined the entrepreneur as perpetuation at the University is necessarily unlike the everyman, rather than the ubermensch. While the that of academic concentrations. Though the certifrhetoric of entrepreneurship may now be ubiquitous, icate program receives university funding, without the model of entrepreneurship most likely to produce a designated concentration, the revenue stream for actual entrepreneurs, in the sense of individuals who entrepreneurship is divorced from the departmental begin and expand their own ventures, continues to be model, and now relies to a greater degree on the entrestructured around individual vision that is, crucially, preneurs it produces. There are certain advantages to situated within elite institutions. this model—for instance, some might say that funding of business ventures, or the development thereof, is a Institutional history at Brown misplaced use of university resources. Such criticisms revive old debates over the ultimate pursuit of the That Brown University has placed itself at the university, with blatant support of the world of busivanguard of the general turn towards institutional- ness and profit seeming to cheapen the classical vision izing the mythological naturalism of entrepreneur- of the university as a space for the pursuit of knowledge ship is written across its entrepreneurship programs. and excellence. Nevertheless, one result of distinThe "Mission" page of the Nelson Center’s website guishing entrepreneurship from the pursuits Brown features a banner reading: “Entrepreneurship: An enshrines in academic concentrations is to make the Essential Part of the Brown Experience.” The text University’s status as entrepreneurial all the more which follows tells us how this is so: “With centuries explicitly self-reinforcing. In the Center’s “sustainof innovative research, teaching, and learning, Brown ability model,” to borrow its term, entrepreneurship has always been fertile ground for entrepreneurial is intended to breed entrepreneurship—establishing thinking.” Entrepreneurship, in the Center’s lexicon, is Brown as an ever-more influential architect of the synonymous with problem-solving, and this definition world through the broadening of its networks of capital. allows for “entrepreneurial thinking” to be read into The Center’s model of entrepreneurship is also the university’s ‘institutional tradition.’ The Center unmistakably individualistic. As one student particfurther elaborates its usage of the term as it outlines ipant in the Nelson Center’s summer accelerator its pedagogy: “While we love the optimism and can-do program remarked in a promotional video, “Getting spirit that is the hallmark of most entrepreneurs, what to do something that’s for me and not for someone else we teach is something altogether different: entrepre- is really special. It gives me the ultimate freedom to neurship as a structured process.” me and to make the impact I want to make.” ‘Making In sum, entrepreneurship is problem-solving, and an impact’ is familiar language in public interest problem-solving is a process which can be system- discourse, but in the context of entrepreneurship, atized and learned. The three-step process at the heart ‘impact’ seems to refer less to the magnitude of social of the Center’s pedagogy, is framed as the Center’s key change than to the individual’s mark. divergence from “most entrepreneurs.” Juxtaposed The Nelson Center does promote social entreprewith the purportedly characteristic optimism of most neurship, but first and foremost, it promotes successful entrepreneurs, we get an intimation of the figure of the entrepreneurship. Funding allocation is “agnostic Nelson Center entrepreneur as calculated and sober, a with respect to what sectors or industries ventures trustworthy realist. are working in, or even whether they are commerThe Center’s funding of student ventures loosely cial, social, or have blended approaches.” Instead, corresponds to its staged model for entrepreneur- funds are awarded to the projects deemed most viable ship. The lowest level is the ‘Explore Grant,’ which at according to the rubric of the Center’s three-step $250 is designed to help students “find and validate an process of entrepreneurship. In this practice, entrepreunmet need.” From there, students may apply for the neurship becomes an end unto itself. No one “opportu$2,500 ‘Expand Grant’ — intended for “developing nity or challenge” is seen as more significant than any a value proposition,” or a salable solution to the need other; the mere existence of latent demand justifies its they have found. The $25,000 ‘Venture Prize,’ and fulfilment. the $50,000 ‘Venture Founders’ award, specifically for students founding startups in Rhode Island, are +++ meant to get ventures "off the ground." In addition to funding, this top tier of programming also confers

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As Alex Gourevitch explains, the particular political importance of the entrepreneur is that under capitalist society, “it really is the case that [...] this is how creativity and innovation takes place.” In other words, it’s not only that we look to entrepreneurs as models of human potential. It’s also that materially speaking, entrepreneurs drive economic innovation, and therefore social change. So long as the traditional individualistic model of entrepreneurial creativity continues, entrepreneurial acts will continue to reflect the entrepreneur’s desires, or, in the most socially-conscious scenario, the entrepreneur’s diagnosis of others’ desires.

The narratives surrounding entrepreneurship work to conceal this reality. By the logic of Brown’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, the recognition of a market opportunity amounts to a justification to exploit it. Much like Schumpeter’s entrepreneur, this entrepreneur need not be creative. Instead, this entrepreneur needs only a discerning perspective on society, and the access to capital to act upon their diagnoses of its latent desires—tools at the disposal of only a few.

In rejecting the personalistic mythology of the entrepreneur, the Nelson Center proposes that we are all capable of the human act of entrepreneurship.

This is ‘human’ in the Schumepeterian sense of history-making—human in leaving one’s mark on the world.

This fantasy, of making an impact, is as legible today as it was when Schumpeter wrote a century ago. But what has been left behind—fallen out of fashion, perhaps—is recognition of the force necessary to make an impact.

For Schumpeter, the entrepreneur’s ability to marshal such force was intimately tied to the entrepreneur’s right to disrupt the status quo, to nudge civilization onward. Schumpeter did not shy away from the reality that only a select subset of society has the power to innovate in the economy—the entrepreneurial class, while not benevolent, worked for the benefit of all— even if the masses would not recognize the situation as such. The suggestion that entrepreneurship is about the imposition of elite will to the supposed greater benefit would likely discomfort most contemporary institutions that teach and promote entrepreneurship, yet individualized creativity seems to inevitably point in this direction.

The problem we are left with is, in Gourevitch’s words, that of taking seriously the problem of thinking about creativity. Gourevitch explained to Aufebunga Bunga that this problem is more specifically one of “thinking about creativity not as a semi-conscious process by which a few so-called geniuses impose their will on people who don’t realize what’s happening, but instead as something much more conscious and collective that could in principle happen through collective political activity rather than through the market.”

Society is rife with problems, but the fact that an entrepreneur can turn a profit does not amount to a solution.

IZZI OLIVE B‘20.5 believes that anyone can be an entrepreneur, herself excepted.

SCIENCE + TECHNOLOGY

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police can still make arrests. Even after decriminalization, the Denver Police Department arrested two minors (for whom possession was not decriminalized under the ballot measure) for psychedelic mushrooms and the Drug Enforcement Agency searched another man’s home who they suspected of growing and dealing.

What this decriminalization amounts to is more a symbolic message than a concrete change in the legal landscape. When asked about the impact of decriminalization, the Denver Police Department’s Media Relations Unit admitted that “psilocybin mushroom-related crime was not a big issue prior to the passage of the ordinance and has not been a big issue since.” Between 2016 and 2019, just over one tenth of a percent of filed drug cases in Denver involved psilocybin. So what’s the point of decriminalization if the psychedelics are still illegal and laws were already rarely enforced? A lot, actually, because it opens doors to future research and utilization of the drugs by a broader community. +++

KEEPING AN

OPEN

A glimpse at the fight to decriminalize psychedelics

MIND

BY Will Allstetter ILLUSTRATION David Gonzalez DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

For most, magic mushrooms carry connotations of hippies, music festivals, and perhaps a previous roommate. But, in recent years, there has been a concerted effort by psychedelic believers to change their bohemian image and bring magic mushrooms (among other psychedelics) into the mainstream. Proponents cite the spiritual and mental benefits the drugs can provide—including treatment for addiction, depression, and anxiety—as a central argument for legalizing and normalizing their usage.

The decriminalization efforts seem to be working.

Almost a year ago, Denver became the first city in the United States to decriminalize mushrooms containing psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in “magic” mushrooms. Since then, two other cities—Oakland and Santa Cruz—have followed suit by decriminalizing

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mushrooms as well as other “natural” psychedelics such as ayahuasca and peyote. But what does it mean to decriminalize a drug? Contrary to popular belief, the legislative actions have not included legalization, but they will have strong impacts on the future of psychedelics.

Once a substance is decriminalized, city funds are no longer directed toward prosecuting and enforcing possession charges for those over 21 and psilocybin mushroom possession becomes the lowest possible priority for law enforcement. Cities do not have the ability to make psychedelics legal—that’s up to state and federal authorities—but they can effectively un-enforce the law through their police department.

However, decriminalization does not extend to those involved in the selling of the drug and state and federal

If we look back at the history of psychedelics in the United States, the recent decriminalization marks an important turning point in a fraught history. In the 1950s and 60s, psychedelics were brought into the forefront of American consciousness by R. Gordon Wasson when he detailed his experience with psilocybin mushrooms in Life Magazine. Investigated for their mind-altering uses, psychedelics were seen as a miracle drug by both the scientific and general population, with over 1,000 studies on the drugs published before 1965. Before that, indigenous cultures have been utilizing psychedelics for thousands of years, a fact often ignored by the Western scientific community despite indigenous knowledge being used to inform Western practice. The Aztecs, for example, believed that psilocybin could be used to receive divine knowledge, Amazonian tribes used and continue to use ayahuasca to help identify and treat illnesses, and many others incorporate psychedelics into both their medicinal and spiritual practices.

As knowledge surrounding psychedelics spread throughout the 60s, these drugs made their way into the general American population, quickly becoming associated with the growing hippie counterculture.

This association became a death sentence for the future of psychedelic research. As the face of anti-government and anti-war protest, anything associated with hippie culture became suspicious in the eyes of the mainstream and the government, psychedelics included. In an interview with John Ehrlichman, counsel to Nixon, he stated that their administration intentionally associated hippies (among other groups, specifically Black Americans) with drugs as an excuse to “break up their communities. . . [and] vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

Unsparingly, Nixon began the War on Drugs in conjunction with this vilification. In 1970, he signed the Controlled Substances Act, banning the use, sale, and transport of psychedelics by making them a Schedule I drug, designating them as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse and tightly controlling research. Nixon’s decision greatly derailed promising research into psychedelics as a treatment for depression, addiction, and anxiety, among other mental health problems. Researching psychedelics became both a bureaucratic nightmare and a social taboo. Up until the mid to late 2000s, research was effectively halted. Through decriminalization, however, cities are bucking this restriction.

Dr. Jeffrey Bratberg, a clinical professor at the University of Rhode Island, acknowledges the taboo still surrounding the medicalization and research of psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics, “but [the government] is coming around to this group of drugs.” Nonetheless, psychedelics remain Schedule I drugs. What research has been done, however, shows encouraging results.

In a 2014 study by Johns Hopkins, over a third of smokers treated with psilocybin did not pick up a cigarette for 12 months following their trip. Other studies have shown promising results when exploring psilocybin as a treatment for otherwise treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and OCD. A 2017 psychological study at the University of Adelaide confirmed what many already believed: the medical benefits are commonly attributed to psychedelics’ ability for one to “step back” from themselves, changing the

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way participants view themselves and the issues plaguing them through a process dubbed “ego-death.”

“Ego-death” is understood as a complete loss of self-identity—an experience common in mushroom trips. Users are able to step outside “the self” to look at the world and their issues more holistically. Even if a user doesn’t experience “ego-death,” professionals have compared taking mushrooms to shaking a psychological snowglobe, disrupting the worn-in patterns your brain has fallen into and helping you to break out of possibly harmful routines.

But these studies have been small-scale and many in the medical community believe more research needs to be done before we can confidently utilize mushrooms as a medical tool. Due to the crackdown in the 70s, “We’re 50 years behind on research,” notes Dr. Bratberg. In his opinion, and in the opinion of many other experts, the route to a future where mushrooms can be effectively used is one where psilocybin can be standardized. He notes that “with two mushrooms that look exactly the same, one could have much more psilocybin than the other, making it hard to effectively use.” To start regulating these drugs, the FDA needs to relabel psychedelics as drugs with medical benefits, which means “convincing the government or private companies to fund it… We have to resurrect and redo some of the trials [done in the 50s and 60s]. And if the trials show a significant enough effect, we can get it approved,” says Dr. Bratberg. This process has already begun. The US Food and Drug Administration has granted studies of both psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, a “breakthrough therapy” status, fast-tracking their future research through close collaboration with the FDA. As one might expect, visual hallucinations and euphoric feelings are common when tripping on psilocybin. The experience is different for everyone, but one mushroom user I spoke with said that “it felt like

the purest form of existence. The voice in my head was muted and my understanding felt objective and so powerful.” Another described their closeness with nature while tripping: “I could feel plants breathing. I also sensed waves of energy from large rocks.” Another user I spoke with microdosed (or, consumed an unnoticeable amount of mushrooms) often over the period of a couple of months, stating that afterward, she was able to “step back from” sensations like being too hot or cold thanks to greater control of their mind.

Despite promising research, psychedelics like psilocybin can have potentially harmful effects. Bad trips do happen, which can lead to serious psychological damage. Eight percent of users who reported bad trips sought psychological help afterward. In some very rare instances, those with increased risk of serious mental health issues, such as schizophrenia, can have psychological breaks triggered by the drugs.

These concerns are not reflected in clinical trials, as researchers screen potential users to minimize the risk.

And, like any mind-altering substance, mushrooms must be taken carefully and users must recognize that their judgment is compromised when high.

+++

While many see medicalization and standardization as the best path towards effective use of psychedelics, some worry about the effects this could have on the long term future of the drugs. Decriminalize Nature, an activist group that helped decriminalize natural psychedelics in Oakland and Santa Cruz, is against medicalization as the sole route for the future of psychedelics. When speaking with Larry Norris, a co-founder and board member of the organization, he explained that he recognizes the medical benefits that drugs like psilocybin can have but remains wary: “at the end of the day, medicalization isn’t going to help 90

percent of the people out there, since they might not fit the criteria for use. There’s also hesitation around the medicalization and the clinical aspect, considering Big Pharma.” Instead of solely therapeutic purposes, the group’s rationale behind the decriminalization of natural psychedelics stems from the “inalienable human right to develop our own relationship with nature.”

By making psilocybin a medicalized, scheduled drug, some also worry about increased cost. As Norris explains, “We want to make sure people can grow it on their own. The danger with the other way comes from corporatization and capitalism.” If mushrooms were to be legalized and medicalized before decriminalization, drug companies could inflate prices and make mushrooms less accessible.

Possessing or producing other legalized, scheduled, drugs like Xanax or Adderall without a prescription is illegal for good reason. Counterfeit production of prescription pills is infamously subject to dangerous impurities, such fentanyl added to Xanax. However, because the growth of natural psychedelics is relatively safe and easy for everyday users, the monopolization of production with Big Pharma isn’t as much of a worry.

If you’re looking for the standardized forms that Dr. Bratberg support, however, you might see some price hikes. According to researchers at Johns Hopkins, the psilocybin currently being used in their medical research is about 13 times more expensive than the market price of homegrown varieties. This difference is due to the high standards the FDA sets in their Good Manufacturing Practices. At each step in synthesizing psilocybin, certain standards must be met to ensure safety and standardization, as opposed to homegrown varieties which can be treated like a slightly more involved houseplant.

A similar phenomenon can be seen with the legalisation of marijuana. Due to taxes accrued at multiple steps of the supply chain and governmental regulations, illegal marijuana is almost always less expensive than its legal counterpart. Even post-legalization, nearly 90 percent of marijuana sold in Massachusetts and 78 percent in California was illegal, thanks in large part to these price discrepancies. Once the price hikes drug companies are notorious for are factored in, the cost could reach even higher. In the first six months of 2019,the prices of 3,400 drugs have raised an average of 10.5 percent.

Others, such as Norris, cite another worry: the potential for medicalization to arbitrarily designate a user as “good” or “bad.” One might not fit the clinical criteria for psychedelic treatment but could still benefit from the perspective the drugs can offer. In a different Johns Hopkins study of psilocybin mushrooms, 94 percent of the fully-healthy adults studied cited their experience as one of the top five most meaningful in their lives. 39 percent claimed it was the most meaningful. That’s why Decriminalize Nature sees decriminalization as such an important step in psychedelics’ integration into the mainstream. Whether medicalized or not, they want to ensure that one cannot get in trouble for possessing these drugs.

The message seems to be sticking. Norris says that Decriminalize Nature is currently helping to organize similar movements in over 100 cities. Chicago’s City Council has introduced a resolution to explore the decriminalization of organic psychedelics; Washington, DC’s Board of Elections has approved the first steps towards getting decriminalization on the ballot; Vermont lawmakers are filing a bill to decriminalize; and many others across the country are organizing to do the same. We probably won’t see mushroom dispensaries any time soon, but cultural and governmental momentum is building around the usage of this promising group of drugs. Soon, you might be able to fill a prescription for psychedelics at your local pharmacy.

WILL ALLSTETTER B’22.5 believes in magic.

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NEWS

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TUNING OUT REALITY A FAREWELL TO THE REAL HOUSEWIVES

BY Cecelia Barron ILLUSTRATION Leslie Benavides DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

I was 10 when I witnessed a physical fight for the first time. It occurred at a country club. Upset by rumors disputing her wealth, one woman, Teresa, chased her ex-friend Danielle around the grounds of the estate, screaming expletives as she cut around banquet rooms.

Danielle hid in the bushes while crowds swarmed the screaming women. As Danielle was being led away from the chaos, a friend of Teresa’s yanked Danielle’s hair, leaving a pile of brown extensions on the floor. I still remember this moment, my pounding heart, my anxiety about these perils of adulthood. It all occurred on The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

After a decade under its influence, I’m quitting The Real Housewives and its brethren. Housewives—​and, more broadly, reality TV—has been as central to my coming of age as Harry Potter or Hannah Montana. I can’t remember the first time I watched an episode of Housewives not because the moment was insignificant, but simply because I was too young to recollect the exact timing of my fall into Bravo’s vortex. It has existed as a throughline, connecting the years of my life and dictating the seasons, without ever really starting.

However, the anxiety I felt about the world I could be entering as I watched the New Jersey “Country Clubbed” episode in 2010 was justified: the depraved universe of the Housewives wasn’t just contained to the TV. But as I am now actually an adult, I can no longer bemoan the effects of Housewives without action. My participation in the dastardly franchise ends here. +++ Let us start at the beginning. Inspired by the success of ABC series Desperate Housewives—a drama which followed the surprisingly thrilling lives of four otherwise average suburban women—Andy Cohen, the CEO of the Housewives franchise, wanted to capitalize on the public’s curiosity about what happens behind the white picket fence. While Desperate Housewives was scripted—complete with murder and more murder—the Real Housewives began as a documentary-style inquiry into the same American fascination: what do these housewives do all day? While ABC positioned its characters from the show’s title as hopelessly flawed, Bravo offered a more honest lens through which to view modern women. Perhaps these housewives would turn out to be as devious and corrupt as the Desperate Housewives were written to be, but these real women were (at least, in theory) as perceptible to

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these lapses in morality as any viewer.

Real Housewives ​ first aired in 2006 with ​ the premiere of The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Noticeable in its grainy footage and mundanity, the show’s first season contained few of the brawls and blowouts so closely tied to the franchise today. Most of the first season’s issues were inconsequential. In one episode, a Housewife hires another Housewife’s son to shoot the rabbits invading her yard. Any moments of tension were entirely personal, like the ongoing plot line dealing with the troubled engagement of Housewife Jo De La Rosa and her husband Slade Smiley (they would break up during the second season).

Though monotonous, the realistic element of the new show, the seemingly absolute intrusion into these women's lives, was not only intriguing but cathartic for watchers. The women—rich women—were mired in the same petty problems we all were: rabbit invasions, a floundering relationship. All these women claimed to want was what all American women were assumed to desire from life: the perfect husband, the perfect kids, and a multi-million dollar home. Naturally, many American women had dismissed these lofty, patriarchal ideals long ago. And yet these shows thrived, for while we could sympathize with these women chasing some unrealistic model of womanhood, we could also judge them for it.

The pilot episode of RHOC debuted on the same day when the first tweet ever was sent: March 21st, 2006. The show now had a medium for which all opinions about the Wives could be shared. Intriguing and cathartic, Housewives were now also uniting. The distribution of viewers breaking up approximately evenly between California and New York, Florida and Nevada, viewers states apart could now both ridicule a Housewife’s new breast implants (“Fake boobs. Fake tan. No hips. No booty,” @bougieknitter tweeted, “I don’t wanna look like none of them! #RHOC”). Friends separated by oceans could unite over their hatred for a particular husband (“Slade is back?!?” @DavidAtlanta complains, “*puke*”). Only eight episodes, the first season of RHOC laid out the blueprint for all of Housewives to follow: a complete dismissal of privacy and an invitation for the audience to judge without consequences.

Following Orange County came New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey, all within three years. Each expansion followed the same structure: several women, some of whom are married, many of whom

are divorced, living their wealthy lives and lamenting their wealthy woes. But, as the episodes inched on, the plotlines became remarkably less real and all the more desperate. Though (allegedly) unscripted, the shows began to have the same thrilling edge that the high drama of Desperate Housewives had provided.

The catalyzing moment which defined the franchise as dramatic spectacle rather than an earnest exploration was in the first season finale of RHONJ. Cast member Teresa Giudice flips a table in outrage over her fellow castmate Danielle Staub’s refusal to admit she was a “prostitution whore.” From then on, viewers expected more from Housewives. The show could no longer survive as an inside look into the lives of rich women; it had to be an expositor of the evils that existed between these characters.

Desperate Housewives faded into obscurity once the same dramatic effect could be reached by featuring real women rather than actors. There was something enticing about the realness of Housewives fights: these women wouldn’t walk off set and hug each other. The stakes of their fights were higher and the consequences were more permanent.

Two years after the famous table-flipping and seven Real Housewives expansions later, Desperate Housewives announced its end. Cohen had noticed that the unbelievably dramatic lives of real people were more entertaining than the manufactured conflicts spun out in scripted dialogue on Universal backlots, and he capitalized on it. What began as a mini-series about five women living outside of LA became an international franchise with over a dozen cities and spin-offs, a viewership in the millions, and a cultural phenomenon. +++ A show about wealthy, sheltered, (mostly) white women is destined to produce endless examples of ignorance and unchecked privilege. More surprising, however, is that the audience for Housewives is so quiet about these issues, even while they publicly advocate against them. The creator himself, Andy Cohen, is a self-proclaimed “total liberal” who frequently calls out transphobia and homophobia on his own latenight talk show, Watch What Happens Live. On Twitter, he has expressed his strong opposition to his homestate senator, Josh Hawley, a pro-life Republican who supports President Trump’s policy of child separation

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at the Mexican border. He’s also voiced support for movements like #BlackLivesMatter. His shows like Housewives, however, propagate the various modes of discrimination that he publicly denounces.

While the franchise is most often criticized for its stereotypical portrayals of women, Housewives is as problematic when it comes to race. When the cast for the upcoming season of Beverly Hills was announced, the Housewives fandom praised Bravo for including the first Black Beverly Hills cast member, Garcelle Beauvais, rather than questioning why the network had segregated these casts for so long: each franchise is almost always entirely white, besides Atlanta and Potomac, which are almost all Black. On the latest season of New York, white cast member Luann de Lesseps dressed up as Diana Ross, lead singer of the Supremes, for Halloween. Complete with a towering, twelve-inch afro and a dark spray tan bordering on blackface, her fellow Housewives whispered about her costume’s racism but did little to stop it. De Lesseps later apologized “if she offended anyone” and remained on the show. In Dallas, Housewife LeAnn Locken made several offensive comments relating to another cast member’s Mexican heritage. Both De Lesseps and Locken were grilled by Cohen in interviews, but these confrontations were heavily teased and sensationally edited. Bravo’s obsessed with the idea of racism—its victims and perpetrators, its relevance in today’s society, its ability to shock witnesses. The network is much less interested in counteracting racism, whether that’s the hate spewed by a Housewife or the discrimination inherent in the show’s structure. With an audience that’s 80 percent white, this sensationalization spins racism into a topic of intrigue, rather than a topic to be addressed.

And while Housewives has a large queer following— Cohen himself is a gay man and vocal about many LGBTQ+ issues—the shows invoke and perpetuate homophobia. On the past season of Potomac, a cast member’s husband, Michael Darby, was alleged to have drunkenly stated that he would fellate a fellow Househusband. The event was not recorded, but the rumor spread like wildfire between the women.

Additionally, Darby was sued for allegedly groping a cameraman on set, though the case was later dropped.

Ashley Darby, Darby’s wife, was condescendingly pitied by the other Housewives who wanted to make sure she was “ok” while they joked behind her back about her husband’s sexuality. This sort of emasculation via homophobia has been a trend on other shows as well. Bisexuality is also a constant punchline: Housewives will often kiss each other to the shock of the other castmates who either laugh about how drunk they must be or who cast their kiss off as “classlessness.” For shows with such large queer followings, these repeated accounts of homophobia seem counterintuitive. But key to understanding The Real Housewives is understanding its ability to minimize ignorance into a harmless joke or obscure discrimination into an enticing plotline. It then becomes easy to brush off the franchise’s problematicness: it’s all just a part of the show!

The same technique of minimization is what has allowed the show’s misogyny to quietly prosper. Since the primary casts are entirely female-identifying, the idea that Housewives could be an intentionally sexist show seems hard to grasp. Any men featured—from husbands to fathers to friends—are accessories to the women’s plotlines, and if they make an offensive comment, their wives often call them out on it. And the women themselves, though prone to conflict, are independent and strong-minded. Some are entrepreneurs and lawyers, retired actresses or fashion designers, and many have managed to spin their Housewives fame into their own personal money-making entity. But though the show’s model relies on the outdated idea of the American wife, its portrayal of women shouldn’t be judged by those old-fashioned, highly economic terms. To still view sexism through that dated lens— the providing husband, the submissive wife—ignores the changing nature of this prejudice.

Erika Jayne, a cast member on Beverly Hills, is the archetype of the modern woman. 48 years old with a second identity as a catsuit-wearing popstar, she’s far from the typical American wife. Known to reappropriate misogynistic slurs, she’s loved for her quotable phrases like “Being poor sucks. And being rich is a lot better.” It’s easy to see Jayne and think the show

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is embarking upon a new frontier of feminism, away from the tropes which inspired its conception. But, in a matter of episodes, Jayne, too, falls victim to the conflict necessitated by the show’s form: “I’m tired of being nice to you,” she says to a fellow wife.

Despite all of this, I continued to watch The Real Housewives. What started as a one episode curiosity became a weekly obsession. I couldn’t get enough. I added city after city, spin-off after spin-off, until all of my weeknights were consumed between 8 and 10 pm. I knew, however, that all of this—the racism, the homophobia, the sexism—was ingrained within these shows. And I still watched. +++ Essential to my excusing of Housewives was the notion of choice. I was choosing to subject myself to such stereotypes; society wasn’t forcing my hand. Choice today is everything. We choose what to post, what to comment, who to swipe right on, and who to leave on read. We have so much control, it’s impossible to imagine that someone else is holding the ropes, telling us what to do or swipe or watch. But that’s exactly what Bravo and large corporations are counting on.

Choice requires agency, and agency is freedom. But our choices being made “freely” doesn’t free them from their ties to oppressive structures. Modern society’s fetishization with choice cannot cloud the unjust systems our agency endorses.

I chose to watch these shows as a form of escapism.

Like The Bachelor or Jersey Shore and just about every other reality TV show, they provide an alternate reality: one we can mock and laugh about, one we can be grateful we’re not in, one we might even secretly envy. That’s what I loved about reality TV, and that’s why, for so long, I ignored how terrible these shows and their effects were. Since I was choosing to watch them, I thought I could also choose to ignore their nefarity. I could overlook their implications and enter their reality, however harmful it may have been. But this is the false choice Housewives presents us with. We may choose to enter, but we can’t choose to remain unaffected.

These shows are harmful past their hourlong slots. The constant excusals of racism send a comforting message to an audience that is predominantly white. The portrayals of bisexuality—as either a drunken female escapade or an example of a man’s reduced masculinity—only reaffirm existing, internalized prejudices towards queer people. And though the shows may feature women and are largely supported by a female fan base, H ​ ousewives has commodified and sensationalized internalized misogyny.

If our form of relaxation and escape has become watching women compete for a rose from a man, watching women brawl at a christening, and watching women mock each other’s weights, then we must be returning to our own realities with the notion that sexism might be bad in the real world but it’s certainly fun to watch on TV. Yet if we’ve stopped excusing the stereotypes about catty female friendships, the emotionality of women being an example for their inability to lead, and men talking about sex in terms of conquest and numbers in our lives, why should we excuse it on TV? And by choosing to popularize it in the media, aren’t we increasing its possible vitality in real life?

While it may be easy to dismiss reality TV as a ridiculous but insignificant problem, Bravo is the top cable network for female viewers. One episode of Atlanta pulled in nearly four million viewers three years ago.

Other franchises average well over a million watchers per episode. To contextualize this, Anderson Cooper’s 8pm show on CNN broke records by hitting one million viewers—per month. The narrative that these shows are occasional indulgences protects the franchise from the proper criticism it deserves. These shows are remarkably popular. These shows have influence.

One very real impact of The Real Housewives is its control over the narrative of female friendship. The “guy’s girl” trope—the notion that some women believe that they’re better suited to the friendship of men who don’t engage in the now-gendered terms “drama” and “gossip”—has existed for decades, perhaps centuries. Shows like Housewives, though, have certainly strengthened the appeal of this internalized misogyny.

On TV, through fights like those of the Wives, female friendships seem to entirely consist of backstabbing

and trash-talking. On Orange County, an otherwise average bus ride to the airport ended with castmate Vicki Dodd telling Shannon Beador to “shave her chin off” with all that “freakin’ hair.” On Atlanta, Phaedra Parks spread a rumor that Kandi Burruss wanted to drug and sexually assault a fellow castmate. On New York, a girls' trip to the Berkshires culminated in cast member Bethenny Frankel yelling at De Lesseps that she “f***s everyone.”

This narrative about spiteful female friendships is pervasive in society. Men often joke about how easy male friendship is. Mothers will comfort their daughters with the notion that “girls can just be mean.” Implicit in the emphasis on sisterhood in sororities is an attempt to prove that women can exist in a contained space peacefully. I’ve heard middle school teachers employ this trope in classes about puberty.

But most female friendships don’t assume—or at least don’t want to assume—this catty archetype American culture has laid out for them. Yet the narrative persists, and reality TV is largely to blame.

Beyond perpetuating this dangerous stereotype, Real Housewives has also recruited many watchers—of all genders—into their vortex of meaningless drama.

The “clap back” culture so pervasive in social media today is full of Housewife lingo and attitudes. “Girl, bye,” “who gon’ check me boo,” and (to a degree) the profuse use of “b*tch” is all attributable to the Bravo empire. (The appropriation of Black vernacular that often comes with these meme-able Housewives quotes can be traced back to Cohen’s empire, too.) “Clapping back” is not always bad: some of it is innocuous and some of it is necessary. But much of it, like most things on social media, is just mean. +++ Our culture has become an offshoot of The Real Housewives. The stereotypes depicted on Housewives are not only reflections of the worst -isms; they are also powerful influences on our own behavior. Women have to actively counter the narratives the shows present about female interactions. Our interactions with each other online employ the same sensationalist tactics. And I’d be mistaken to think that after a decade of ingesting its content, my own behavior hasn’t been impacted by its evils: I crave the glamour and pointless materialism of the Wives, with their Birkin bags and extravagant parties; I often find myself retweeting spiteful “clap backs” just because they seem funny; I will suspect the worst of my female friends—they’re excluding me, they’re talking trash about me—while I never do the same for my friends of other genders. I externally reject everything that franchise emits, while I internally crave and emulate its most misogynistic aspects.

Every season of Housewives ends with an all-cast reunion where the cast members can confront each other one last time. Andy Cohen sits between two couches of extravagantly-clothed Housewives and brings up drama from the past season in hopes that there will be enough conflict to keep watchers hooked for another two or three episodes. As my decade-long season with the franchise comes to a close, I want to think I’ve had it out with every conflict these shows present, but I’m not naive. Turning off the TV won’t end the harmful narratives Housewives perpetuates; obliterating reality TV entirely wouldn’t do that either.

But just as there’s power in our choice to watch, there’s power in our choice to disengage. So I end my run with The Real Housewives here. And I’m taking my choices with me.

CECILIA BARRON B’23 is looking for a new, morally acceptable TV show to binge.

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of Mask Singer the American under gaze

I have spent many afternoons with my grandfather watching K-dramas I cannot understand, appreciating the joy he derives from listening to his own language from the comfort of his own couch. He loves to point to the scenic unidiscovered mountain ranges that young women in hanboks run through, wistfully stating, “I know that place. That is home.” While my mother values silver-screen representation and cheered at Parasite’s Oscar victories, my grandparents always appreciate the accessibility of Korean media designed specifically for a Korean audience, wherever in the world that audience may be. Although I can never fully understand this longing for a home located in both a different time and place, I enjoy South Korean TV shows that seemingly subvert Hollywood altogether by speaking directly to issues of Seoul outside of the confines of Western cinema and structure.

As a retired fan of The X Factor, my favorite show to watch with my grandparents is always The King of Mask Singer (미스터리 음악쇼 복면가왕). Though I lack the linguistic abilities to fully comprehend each song and the exclamations of the judges, I’m drawn to the saturated colors and premise of celebrating unidiscovered talent. The program first debuted in 2015 in Seoul on MBC channel and has run 242 episodes to date. Each competition lasts two episodes, as masked singers compete one-on-one for three elimination rounds, the outcome of each decided live by a panel of judges and studio audience members. When the loser’s identity is revealed, the winner goes on to challenge the reigning Mask King, a title applied to all victors regardless of gender identity.

My favorite episode from 2016 pits two characters against one another, a costumed Hodori, the official mascot of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and Vinicus, the official mascot of the 2016 Rio de Janiero Olympics.

To counter the phenomenon of celebrity culture and idols in South Korean media, all contestants wear masks designed by artist Hwang Jae-geun and perform without revealing their faces. But before the cloaked artists set foot on stage, the host introduces a 12-person judging panel comprised of celebrity-idols, past-victors, and comedians. I’m overwhelmed listening to his hurried exclamations that mirror the frantic comedy of the overlaid graphics and sound effects. And yet, I can’t look away. The audience’s laughter at an embarrassed panelist is accompanied by a reverberating boing and a bright blue tear, the editing augmenting the action.

The onomatopoeic animations explicitly outline what the show’s creators intend, utilizing hyperbolic humor to elicit nostalgia and develop a sense of community.

From my grandparents’ couch, I feel the pull towards manufactured familiarity, as I laugh both with and at everyone on stage. As returning performers stand to greet their fans, the frame freezes in an anime-style sequence to display an image of their most distinct costumes from their time as contestants. The constant and sometimes contradictory stimulus—both sights and sounds—demands complete attention, calling back to past episodes while reversing roles and unsettling previously-established power dynamics. Even formerly disgraced contestants can sit on the opposite side of the stage as members of the panel and vote in the current competition, quickly moving beyond old failures.

A quick pan of the room reveals a young, attractive audience enthralled by the distorted voice of the current Mask King. She sits in a throne clad in a dark robe with gold embroidery and crown designed to resemble fire, responding to the host in an altered highpitched frequency. The competition structure is not unlike that of an intense wrestling competition (or at least, my imagined version of WWE), beginning with the Round One: the duet song match. Text that mirrors the audience’s anxiety—누가 이길 것인가, 그들은 우리 에게 무엇을 보여줄 것인가 (who will win, what will they show us)—and repeats the judges statements—this is the most nerve wracking moment, 노래가 시작되기를 기 다리는 중 (waiting for the song to start)—flashes along the bottom of the screen in bright orange and yellow as the disguised contestants prepare to sing. Like in

taekwondo matches, both artists bow to each other as the track for “Love Leaves Its Scent” by Tei begins to play. In the same direct present tense used to describe action in comic books and video games, a small red bubble appears next to a well-known judge reading: 그 는 귀를 기른다 (he perks up his ears). The viewer experience at home is contingent upon these edited interjections that serve to create an immersive experience I can’t possibly visit outside of my grandparents’ television set, as the saturated animations contribute to a sense of belonging in the world The King of Mask Singer operates within. I am not only invested in the outcome for each contestant but also the impact on a community that the audience is somehow implicated in. This style is not unique to this show, though it is distinctly not-Western; yet, instead of feeling foreign, I feel right at home.

With a simple spotlight and pastoral imagery projected on an LED screen behind the artists, the set design is similar to many slow-song productions in American singing competitions with a simple spotlight. The text and whispers of the panelists analyze the performance as it occurs, stating that “Hodori has a mature voice” and that “His understanding of frustration proves that he’s experienced.” Commentary from the judges revolve around talent and ability in

the world. This mass viewership occurs in the wake of strict censorship during the 1980s, the terminations of which opened the country for importation of media at astounding rates. Perhaps because of this, so much of the art consumed and created as a reaction is often infringed upon by Western subjectivity, as monolithic institutions such as Disney and Marvel Studios continue to produce popular American content that is internalized by South Korean youth.

South Korea has developed its own brand in recent years, both in film through auteurs like Park Chanwook (Old Boy, 2003) and Bong Joon-Ho (Parasite, 2019), and in music through K-Pop groups like BTS and EXO. In many ways, the long-standing popularity of The King of Mask Singer in South Korea reflects this distinctly un-American brand since it hinges upon un-American values of private identity and uninhibited expression. The use of masks stands staunchly against the pervasive fandom culture that has afflicted much of South Korea with the rise of national idols, as PR executives and the general public constantly examine young celebrities for signs of “improper conduct” such as unsanctioned dating and unmoderated diets. This close inspection of celebrity bodies and personas necessitates programs like The King of Mask Singer, positioning its existence entirely out of the Western paradigm.

However, when looking the show up in English, the first link always directs to a Ryan Reynolds cameo made in May 2018, singing “Tomorrow” from Annie while donning a unicorn mask and glittery silver cape. Reynolds epitomizes the condescending approach maintained by many white male actors that choose to appear on Asian game shows during overseas film promotion, as if the childish mask and pastel colors of the stage were something to be tried on, then taken off, before returning to statutes of masculinity. As a montage of clips taken from Deadpool (and Deadpool 2) played for screaming women and viewers at home, Reynolds stood sheepishly and allowed himself to be the subject of adoration.

His subdued reactions juxtaposed with the animated responses of the audience and panel members reinforced a Western self-identification as serious in the face of hysteria.

Perhaps it is the success of the Reynolds cameo that helped propel the American launch of the show in January 2019. Creator Craig Plestis was originally mesmerized by the Thai version of the show after seeing it in a restaurant and quickly moved to acquire the rights for US adaptation. This process and the subsequent audience approval was abetted by Reynolds’s viral performance, a moment still referenced by critics and culture writers looking to analyze The Masked Singer today, myself included. Although many American singing competitions travel overseas— the structures of The Voice (its origins in The Voice of Holland) and American Idol (its origins in Pop Idol UK) were purchased from Europe—The Masked Singer is most notably rooted in something exotic.

The King of Mask Singer suffers from its own Western influences, as contestants sing a mix of contemporary Korean and American music. An episode featuring a golden pig (The Masked Singer’s own Ken Jeong) singing “Creep” by Radiohead has been heralded as one of the best performances of the whole show in a YouTube compilation made by MBC itself; a duel performance of contestants singing “Billie Jean” in Michael Jackson masks wearing different suits not only emulates Jackson’s voice but also body language. Unlike in the American version, contestants on The King of Mask Singer have mobility in their costumes, which more closely resemble clothing than elaborate dressings of The Masked Singer, allowing for the incorporation of intricate dance routines to more upbeat songs. This falls in line with involved K-Pop performances in which the artists are required to provide constant entertainment, and is a stylistic hybrid utilizing Korean structures and American raw materials.

In the third episode of the second season of The Masked Singer, a contestant dressed in an elaborate flower costume performed “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton, limited in motion by the heavy dress and headpiece.

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their most unadulterated forms, distinct from the identity of the performer. Despite its flashy colors and cartoonish stylization, The King of Mask Singer stands powerfully against the performative nature of identity and allows for artistic expression unfiltered through biased scrutiny.

Because of the idiosyncratic editing style and premise of the show, I was shocked to find the American adaptation, The Masked Singer, on FOX. The tagline of this version, “Can you guess the celebrity behind the mask?” contradicts the foundational intent of the MBC original and speaks to the Western values of stripping down and unveiling. Through the lens of critic Craig Owens’ belief that “Visibility is always on the side of the male,” this often-nonsensical reality program operates, then, in an Orientalized adaptation of an inherently feminized Other. The Masked Singer equates unmasking with truth, and this masculine act of interrogation undermines the use of the mask-as-protection in The King of Mask Singer.

The first episode I saw of FOX’s competition features a singer in an elaborate butterfly costume performing an intricate number with background dancers before a panel of four celebrity judges: Robin Thicke, Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg, Ken Jeong and Nicole Scherzinger. The host, Nick Cannon, introduced this haphazard conglomeration as the lead team of “investigators,” immediately positioning members of this “elite” group as inquisitors and not participants in the action. Unlike its Korean counterpart, The Masked Singer performances are less about musical integrity and instead center on spectacle and reveal. Instead of superimposed digital stickers and bouncing exclamations, the adaptation relies on Jeong’s comic interjections, Cannon’s vivacity, and Thicke’s frequently inappropriate comments in order to sustain audience engagement. Although it is fun to see Korean media in Western contexts and revel in the influence of Seoul over Hollywood, I can’t help but ache for the integrity of the original and notice what is lost in translation. +++ Long before The King of Mask Singer came to the United States, America came to Seoul. Despite being the 28th most populous nation, South Korea is the fourth largest movie market by box office revenue in

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BY Annabelle Johnston ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Daniel Navratil

tranquility of a pure feminine past and the brutality and violence of a masculine hypermodern future that ultimately is resolved as simply Other.

The appearance of Ryan Reynolds on The King of Mask Singer and the audience’s over-animated response to his mediocre performance after uncovering his identity raises the question of self-imposed Orientalism, and if that can be a means of reclaiming agency. For years, films created in South Korea rejected orientalist tropes, perhaps due to centuries of imperialism and domination by Japan. This inter-orient imperialism further degraded South Korea in the unjust hierarchy of states, contributing to the modern South Korean desire to create its own brand in the form of K-dramas, K-pop, and Hallyu (Korean wave)-wood.

As this media rises in global popularity, self-Orientalizing—casting oneself as an exotic commodifiable Other—can allow those who have been traditionally intellectually imperialized to resist that imposition and instead gain power and recognition by Western oversight. By partially conforming to the exaggerated American imaginations of Korean game shows, The King of Mask Singer became a global phenomenon increasing profit and popularity in the West. The United Kingdom also purchased the rights to the show and has run seven episodes beginning in January 2020.

If Orientalism can be construed as intellectual imperialism, then The King of Mask Singer is both a victim and masterful manipulator of this blind superiority. As the Fox on The Masked Singer sang in season two, “Hey Look Ma, I made It” is not only an anthem for Panic! At the Disco fans but also for South Korean media that has become the epicenter of the Oscars and Wednesday television at 8/7C on FOX. +++

Her only movement during the entire set was in the first ten seconds as she walked towards the center of the stage; she was subsequently accompanied by dancers in orange tracksuits and rotating industrial sheets of metal, providing no sense of place or setting. The singer resembled a character from Alice in Wonderland, and stood stoically amidst chaos, as if reveling in the insanity. After she sang (1 minute 46 seconds) worth of music), the four judges proceeded to bow down theatrically, Scherzinger loudly proclaiming “we’re not worthy.” The panel continued to guess the identity of the artist—later revealed as Patti Labelle—offering actresses like Taraji P. Hanson and artists like Mariah Carey. As they continued to audibly ponder, Ken Jeong stood proudly and pointed at the masked performer, shouting “YOU ARE BJÖRK” in the most nonsensical fashion. This comically accusatory nature underscores the layers of performance specific to this adaptation, and reinforces American viewership as an act of unveiling who the creator is rather than what they are creating. +++ Much of the language utilized by critics and fans to discuss The Masked Singer and its Korean counterpart is rooted in the idea of an inherently absurd Other. In many cases, the childish use of weird to denote 'bad' instead of 'different' places the grotesque American adaptation on a pedestal while casting off its originator.

This, coupled with the feminized costumes and the infantilization of the Korean premise, mirrors Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism, defined as the distinct philosophical separation of the “Orient” from the “Occident,” which is centered around Western values and superiority. Although this study primarily focuses on differences between the Arab-Islamic and European worlds, it has been co-opted by American academics with reference to the “Far East” of China, Japan, and Korea, as both forces rise in world relevance.

In his introduction, Said describes Orientalism “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

My experience of watching The King of Mask Singer was not quite what its creators intended, as I had no prior knowledge of the idols nor did I care about the true identity of the hidden celebrities. The cultural context for the show can only be truly appreciated by those immersed in it who understand the turmoil of K-Pop PR and the lack of privacy stemming from the architectural compression of Seoul. These experiences are the necessary backstory to The King of Mask Singer and even as a Korean-American, I lack the pieces necessary to fully grasp the significance of this performance.

By establishing my own roots in Western thought in a university setting, I am aware that even part of the sanctity of watching K-Dramas with my grandfather is compromised, as I inflict my theoretical jargon upon our shared sense of home. The resistance against the act of viewership is at the core of the Korean program and is missing from both the American adaptation and intention of the American audience member. Perhaps that is part of what makes The Masked Singer so flawed— the aim is not to protect the contestants from a standard of scrutiny but instead allow for a different type of in-person analysis and unveiling. Throughout the show, Robin Thicke continuously calls costumed women sexy, telling a lioness to “work your mane” after stating he was mesmerized by her hip movements.

This objectification of the artist is the exact opposite of what The King of Mask Singer was designed for. It’s a figure for the cycle of Western male subjectivity (in a contained context) gazing upon the Eastern female landscape.

As I renounce the absurdity and revel in the weirdness of my favorite Korean game show, I am acutely aware of the role I play as a viewer and how I unwittingly impose my beliefs upon the object being viewed.

Identity is inherently performative and yet we are all active audience members. I understand the impulse to cover up and wear a mask; the limited control we have over how we are viewed comes from what we choose not to share.

having authority over the Orient.” This domination is a longstanding tradition in the West’s conception of itself, as it regards Asia as a stagnant force and culture to be co-opted by the West as they please, a place for cultural tourism without its own interiority. Oriental splendor, sensuality, and violence are simultaneously regarded as the acts of brutal masculine individuals and infantile feminized societies, a contradiction that ultimately regards the Other as inferior. This mentality is exemplified by many American critics of the show such as Kathryn VanArendonk for Vulture, who compares it to other televised talent competitions stating, “The Masked Singer is weirder, sillier, and stupider than those shows.” Her comparison stakes The Masked Singer as an American entity that can then be viewed through a western subjectivity, continuing to state that “somewhere buried in their cores, the idea of judging a singer on a reality show is often about a slew of powerful American myths.” VanArendonk calls the show “a reality TV fever dream,” situating it as the disgusting cousin to the otherwise valiant pursuit of truth undertaken by The Voice or American Idol.

Faulting The Masked Singer for incompletely capturing the American version of Truth ignores the fact that The King of Mask Singer is after something else entirely.

Conventional approaches to Orientalism place countries like South Korea in a distant past, utilizing pastoral imagery that, when juxtaposed with Western industrialization, serves to emphasize American modernity. However, the advent of hypermodern representation of Asia in films like Blade Runner and Alien place imagined cities in a video-game adjacent, techno-Orientalist future state. Of The Masked Singer, Emily Todd VanDerWerf of Vox states, “The new reality show feels like something that would be on in ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 does not like the idea of the background of a dystopian movie.” The implication being perceived. is not that Asia is a media pioneer, but that the seeds of America’s worst nightmare can be found in contemporary South Korea. This version of Orientalism still relies on the same initial discomfort with the East and West existing in the same temporal reality. It presents both sides of the contradiction between the beauty and

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The market is the woman’s domain; women tend to not only be the vendors, but the shoppers as well. The markets are where I felt most at home in Oaxaca, probably because the strong presence of women made me feel protected from the wandering eyes of men.

These photos revolve around women, raw meat, and the sale of raw meat; they’re intended to provoke thoughts of gender roles and machismo, as well as to highlight something women often experience existing in such a society (be it the US or Mexico): feeling like a piece of meat.

FRI 2.28 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in conversation with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa WaterFire Arts Center 6:30 PM

SAT 2.29 Leap Year Boogie: DEYO and Friends AS220 8 PM

Ariella Azoulay will discuss Potential History, her new book on the imperial foundations of knowledge, with writer and photographer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Come hear Azoulay and Wolukau-Wanambwa speak about anti-imperialist archival and artistic practices.

On Leap Day, Amy Adams is allowed to propose to a man, being born sucks, and Yllwblly and and Charm will be opening for DEYO at AS220! It’s your last chance before 2024 to dance this particular night away, so make some memories. If you post something embarrassing on Facebook, you have a buffer of several years before it reminds you what happened!

SUN 3.1 2020 PPS Winter Bash: Studio 54 Bucklin Plaza 7:30 PM Your two problematic faves are teaming up! Join the Providence Preservation Society—perhaps the only remaining nonprofit in Providence with a serif typeface logo—for a Studio 54-themed bash. Andy Warhol’s leveling of high and low art offers a potentially antithetical backdrop to the PPS, which itself has a reputation for preserving cornices and red brick more so than the discarded bagels and sex manuals that populate the Warhol archive. Tickets start at $45 for the benefit, which supports the PPS’s efforts (including advocating for the reuse of the vacant Superman Building, among other pursuits).

MONDAY 3.2 PVDFest Battle of the Bands Alchemy, 71 Richmond St. 7:30 PM At the first of three Battles of the Bands leading up to PVDFest, Guess Method, Fathercard, and Jesse Ramos of Tree People will face off at Alchemy. This LW has never attended a Battle of the Bands, but judging from the ending of School of Rock, this oughta be good.

WEDNESDAY 3.4 WTF Night Recycle-A-Bike 6-9PM

TUESDAY 3.3 of Montreal, Lily's Band, Ravi Shavi Columbus Theatre 8 PM Last time the List advertised a concert at the Columbus, this LW noted that the audience was sure to include every middle-school social studies teacher in RI. This time, the West End’s entire population of former MySpace hipsters who now wear their geometric tattoos with great ambivalence will be present.

It’s time to haul your bike out of the basement and bring it over to Eagle Square to get a spring tune up. “We're gonna be cleaning, tuning up brakes, lubing chains, filling up tires,” says Recycle-A-Bike. The best part is that the whole thing is free! We can’t recommend a spring ride in PVD enough, so tune your sh*t up!!!

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THURSDAY 3.5 Trial Support for Sherrie New Bedford District Court 8:30 AM-5 PM Come out to support Sherrie Andre, co-founder of the FANG Collective. They are going to trial as a result of an August 2018 action at the Bristol County House of Corrections held in solidarity with people in I.C.E. detention who launched a hunger strike to demand better conditions at the facility. Email support@shutdownicenow.org to submit a letter of support.