That's it. That's the question we will answer in this video. And I know that most of you are waiting for QFT Episode 2. And that episode is recorded and edited. But some of the explanations in that video need quality animations to make sense. And that part of the process is taking longer than expected, but it is going. Anyway, recently I was watching this podcast I like called Trash Taste. You should check it out. The three hosts are very likable. And one reason for this is their insanely bad opinions on everything. From food to anime to video games. It's called Trash Taste for a reason. But this time they discussed the nature of light. And well... Like shadow should be like an honor of things. Light is both a particle and a wave. Light is the only thing that acts like that.  Light doesn't exist. It's just something we made up to answer all the questions. Light is also affected by gravity, which waves are not. But light does not have mass. Yes it does. How is it affected by gravity? Basically the universe just doesn't make sense. They got a lot of things wrong, which is fine. I mean it's normal to be wrong because no one is born knowing science. But since this is a topic that they are clearly interested about, I thought that maybe I could help them out by clearing out a few misconceptions. Let's begin with the nature of light.  Is it like a particle? Or is it a wave? Or is it both? Or is it neither? For a long time scientists like Newton thought that light was made of tiny particles that our eyes could somehow detect. But this idea was destroyed. It was Isekai in 1807, when the double slit experiment was performed. And this started a new arc in the history of physics, the light wave arc. Conveniently I was working on an animation of this experiment for QFT Episode 2. It's not finished, but it'll do. Imagine this is water. As you can see, when the wave of water reaches this wall, it is mostly stopped. But there are these two slits in the wall. And so the water in those places begins oscillating. This creates two new waves that then interfere with each other, creating what we know as an interference pattern. But here's the thing. If you have the right tools, you can do the same with light. If you make light pass between two slits that are very, very close together, you will see an interference pattern proving that light is a wave. And if you want to see someone doing this experiment, I recommend this video by Looking Glass Universe. And also check out the rest of her channel. It's great. However, this begs the question. If light is a wave, what is waving? What is oscillating? If you think about what a wave is, it is usually just made of atoms bumping into other atoms who then bump into other atoms and so on. If this happens with a certain rhythm, with a certain frequency, then it will create a wave. For example, if I press this key on this machine, it makes the air molecules bump into each other 440 times every second, which we perceive as an A-flat. So in summary, a wave is just kinetic energy propagating through a medium. In this case, air. And now this brings us to some of your misconceptions, Joey, because you mentioned that only waves can move through the vacuum of space. Because people used to argue that, oh, it's a wave, right? Because it can pass through a vacuum like in space, right? And while it is true that light can move through the vacuum of space, now you can see that most waves cannot move through the vacuum. For example, sound cannot. In fact, famously in space, no one can hear you scream, because there are no air molecules that can bump into each other. At this point, scientists knew that light was a wave, and that it was moving through some medium, but they didn't know what it was. But they knew it had to be something really weird, because it filled the vacuum between the stars, but it was also mixed with the air, and the water, and inside transparent stones, like diamonds, and inside glass, and talking about glass, you could take a glass box and extract all the air from it using a vacuum pump, but light would still pass through it. To explain this, many scientists proposed that maybe the entire universe was full of some kind of substance which they called the ether, and that light was a wave propagating through this substance. But they also proposed that ether could sort of pass through matter, much like Mirio in My Hero Academia, although I guess you guys dropped the show before he was introduced. You guys get the idea. The point is that it was impossible to extract the ether with a vacuum pump. In fact, it was impossible to manipulate the ether with our tools because they are all made of matter. The ether also seemed to explain another unusual property of light. It always has the same speed. Scientists have noticed that the speed of a wave usually depends on the medium in which it is moving. For example, air can move faster through water than through air because the water molecules are much closer together than the air molecules. But if ether was made of some kind of particles, and the overall density of these particles was pretty much constant all over the universe, that would explain why the speed of light was always constant. At this point, scientists were in a real conundrum, because they had good reason to believe that ether existed, but it seemed impossible to do science with it because it passed through all their measuring devices made of matter. But people can be really clever sometimes, and so two guys, Michelson and Morley, figured out that if they wanted to detect the ether, they just needed to create a measuring device made of light. It would take me a while to explain this experiment in detail, but here's the gist of it. They took one beam of light and then they split it in two, sending it in two opposite directions, and then they recombined those two beams of light to create a single interference pattern, because remember that light is a wave. Okay, so now here's the thing. If at one point the light moving in one of these two directions moved faster than the light moving in the other direction, that would create changes in the interference pattern. And these changes would be really small, like millimeters shifted to one side or the other, but it would be measurable, it would be noticeable. But how could this happen? How could light move faster in one direction than the other? Imagine these blue dots were the ether particles. Light would be a wave moving through this medium, and in fact, here we can see a light wave. Well, if the medium itself was moving, then it would carry the light with it, making it move faster in one particular direction. This reminds me to the moving walkways you can find in airports. When you walk through these moving walkways, you move very fast as if you were running, but you are only walking. Well, if there was either wind, it would be like a moving walkway, but for light. And talking about moving walkways, they were very common in the legend of the galactic heroes. That's not relevant for this video, but I just wanted to mention it because I really like that show. But of course, the fact that the speed of light is constant means that if the ether particles exist, they must not be moving a whole lot. But you know who is moving? The earth. The earth is moving through the ether, and this should create ether wind. If this seems confusing, just move your hands very fast through the air. You will feel the air around your hands, even though the air is not moving a whole lot. Because when you think about it, there isn't much of a difference if you move towards the particles, or if the particles move towards you. They are different situations, but in both cases the result is wind, and wind is a moving walkway for light. Or well, ether wind, not just regular wind. Yeah, you know what I mean. But even better, earth moves in circles, which means that the direction of the ether wind should change over the course of the year. And this should create slight changes in the interference pattern that Michelson and Morley should have been able to measure. Michelson and Morley constructed this machine, and they measured the interference pattern every day, hoping to see anything that would reveal a change in the direction of the ether wind. But nothing happened. The interference pattern remained exactly the same every single day. Michelson and Morley were extremely disappointed, because they thought they had messed up the experiments somehow. But they didn't. They did everything right, and they had just proved that the ether didn't exist, and they didn't even realize it. This was a very interesting season finale in the history of physics, because it's all about the importance of being wrong. Michelson and Morley wrongly believed that the ether existed, and so they set out to prove it, and in doing so they did everything right, and they got the correct answer that it didn't exist. And yet they were so convinced that it did exist that they didn't realize they were right. The lesson for all of us in here is that sometimes, when the evidence contradicts everything we know, sometimes we should abandon what we know and accept what the evidence tells us. In the next season, it took scientists a couple of decades to understand what was happening, but today we know that light is an electromagnetic wave, and to understand this, first we need to understand the concept of a field. Take for example gravity. Here, near the surface of Earth, the value of gravity is roughly 9.81 meters per second square, and but then, if you start going away from Earth, you will feel weaker and weaker gravity, until at some point you will feel no gravity at all. But then, if you continue moving, and you get close to the Sun or Jupiter, you will feel gravity again and much stronger this time. So it's not like Earth has its own gravitational field, which is separate from the gravitational field of the Sun and Jupiter and the Moon. No, no, no, in a sense, there is a single gravitational field across all of space, and this field takes different values near certain objects. And well, the same happens with electromagnetism. All of space has a single electromagnetic field that just happens to be zero pretty much everywhere, except when you get close to objects with electric charge, like protons or neutrons. Near those objects, this field has a positive or negative value. This is important, because if you take an object with electric charge, and you make it oscillate at a certain frequency, these will create changes in the electromagnetic field that will propagate across space far away from the oscillating charge. Mathematically, this looks like taking Maxwell's equations and combining them in just the right way to get the equation for a wave. And this is what light is. The electrons in atoms are vibrating, and that creates the light we see. Instead of having atoms bumping into other atoms, we have the value of the electromagnetic force affecting the value at another point. The mechanism is different, but the result is the same. This also explains why light can move through the vacuum, because even if there are no atoms, the electromagnetic field is still there. That's the medium light is moving through. Except this is also wrong, because as Garnt correctly pointed out, light is treated like a particle which is called photons, which is what Einstein proved. Einstein discovered that light was made of particles, and he did this by studying the photoelectric effect. There are a ton of demonstrations of the photoelectric effect in YouTube, links in the description, but the summary of all of this is that Einstein discovered that the energy of light is transmitted by individual units, and these units are the particles we call photons. And in case you have any doubt that light is indeed a particle, Arthur Compton made an experiment in which he analyzed what happened when highly energetic photons interacted with electrons. And what he found was that the electrons were being launched away, they were being scattered in a way that could only be explained if they were being hit by individual particles. In fact, this is the experiment that finally convinced a ton of scientists that had been doubting Einstein's ideas for years. This brings us to something Conor mentioned, that light can push objects around. Like intense light can cause like small movements somehow. And this confused the boys because if light is an electromagnetic wave, then it has no mass, and if it has no mass, how can it push anything? And well, the answer is deceptively simple. A push is just a transfer of energy, and light has energy. So you don't need mass to transfer energy, all you need is the energy itself. Now Garnt, in case you're asking, but how can light have energy if it has no mass, the answer is simple. When you have an electron and you make it oscillate to generate light, creating this oscillation took energy, and that energy is carried away by the light. In a way, the process of creating light transforms this kinetic energy into light energy. And that light energy can be transformed into kinetic energy again if another electron absorbs that light. This explains why we can see. The sun makes its electrons vibrate a lot because they are very hot, and so they create a lot of photons. Some of those photons reach Earth, and they are absorbed by many different atoms and molecules. And then the electrons in those atoms and molecules vibrate again, creating new light. But because these electrons vibrate at different frequencies, they create the light of different colors that we can see. But anyway, let's look at what we've learned so far. We have evidence to believe that light is a wave, like interference patterns and Maxwell's equations. But we also have evidence to believe that light is a particle, like the photoelectric effect and Compton scattering. Now I ask you, should we be like Michelson and Morley and assume that our observations are wrong unless they match our worldview? Of course not, right? We should change our worldview to match our observations. That's what science is. The solution is that light is neither a particle nor a wave. It is a new kind of object with some of the properties of the two. This is what Joey correctly called the particle wave duality. Light is both a particle and a wave. It is called the particle wave duality.   No guard.  It might be confusing. It might be unexpected, but all the evidence indicate that this is how nature works. Or you know what?  But still, as far as we know, this is the truth. And in fact, scientists spent the last 100 years developing the mathematics to understand this. And this is what we know today as quantum mechanics. So Joey, you should give scientists a bit more credit instead of saying that we have no idea how this works. And scientists to this day do not know how that works. I have some understanding, but not quite the full picture. Thank you, Connor. Exactly. We have a fairly good understanding. It's not perfect, but it has been continuously improved for the past 100 years. In a sense, humanity has been going through a century-long training arc in quantum mechanics. Does that mean we are the strongest? Does that mean we can be dbaki? Of course not. We are not there yet. And perhaps we'll never be. But we are certainly much stronger than we were before. And in fact, I am on my own training arc because I'm trying to become self-sufficient with my YouTube channel. And if you want to help me, you can send me money through Wagner Coffee, or Kofi, or PayPal, or my Patreon. You can join for just one dollar per month, but then you can change the amount to whatever it is you want to give me each month. And if you cannot help me with money, you can still subscribe. You can like this video. You can share it with your friends. And if you cannot do any of that, you can still send me your energy so that I can do the Genki Dama. Yeah, yeah, I can feel it. It's working. Yeah, my power level is rising. We are almost there. But in the meantime, we should move on because there are still a few more misconceptions to clarify. Another thing you mentioned, Joey, is that only light presents the particle wave duality. Light is the only thing that acts like that. And to be fair to you, that's what Einstein thought. In fact, that's what most scientists thought for like 20 years, until a guy called Luis de Brugli came along. The story of de Brugli is very interesting. And I will review it more in depth in future episodes of Understanding QFT. Yes, I'm plugging my channel in my own channel.  But the most important part is this. People knew that when electrons orbit around the nucleus of atoms, they can only hold some very specific amounts of energy. And this creates the energy levels, which are very important in chemistry. But no one knew why these energy levels existed. Luis de Brugli mistakenly thought that photons had mass. And he was developing a theory around this when he suddenly had an idea that if photons could have mass and get the particles and waves, then maybe other particles with mass, like the electron, could also be waves. And this was right. And it's really interesting because de Brugli had to be wrong about photons having mass to arrive at the correct idea that electrons are also waves. And then de Brugli thought that if the electron was a wave, maybe the different energy levels were like different vibrations of this wave, like different musical notes. And then using this idea, he worked out the correct radios for the hydrogen atom. Later on, other scientists took de Brugli's ideas and improved upon them and tested them. And today we know that all the particles are both particles and waves. Photons, electrons, quarks and their combinations, all the protons, neutrons, and all the other variants and mesons. But this begs the question. If particles are waves, what is oscillating? You see the value of the electromagnetic force again? Well, that's what Schrodinger thought at first. But he was wrong. And it's really funny because he found the equation to describe these waves. And yet he was still wrong about what they were. And he needed the help from other scientists, like Max Born, to realize that what they really are is what was really is changing. Is the value of the probability of finding the particle at different points in the orbit? Particles are waves of probabilities. And once again, this is an idea that I'm gonna explore way more in depth in the second episode of Understanding QFT, as in two hours of in-depth explanation of how we reached that conclusion and what it means. Another topic the boys discussed was whether light was affected by gravity and how that relates to its lack of mass. Light does not have mass. Yes, it does. How is it affected by gravity? First of all, gravity is a distortion of space and time created by mass and energy. Because mass and energy are the same thing. In fact, a hot coffee waits more than a cold coffee. Anyway, the point is that mass and energy distort space and time, which are also the same thing. So we call them spacetime, not to be confused with PBS spacetime, which is the best educational YouTube science channel out there. What matters is that this distortion makes it so that if you are moving forwards in time, and you are, you are accelerated towards the center of this distortion. And sure, something can block you from moving in that direction, like the surface of the planet, but you are still being accelerated in that direction all the time, and you perceive this as a force pulling you down. But if there's nothing to stop you, you can also move fast enough to compensate for the strength of that force. And this is what being in orbit means. Now notice how we didn't mention the mass of the object being pulled down. That's because it doesn't matter. This is a distortion of space and time. If you exist, it will affect you. It doesn't matter if your mass is very large, or very small, or non-existent. There's another way to think about this. We often imagine that if you were in a spaceship and you wanted to move around the star, you would have to be constantly turning to one side, right? But no, if you moved perfectly straight, eventually you would reach the point where you started, because the mass of the star has distorted space so that a straight line is a circle. This sounds bizarre, but something similar already happens with air. If you move in a straight line in any direction in this planet, you will eventually reach the same spot again, because Earth is a sphere. In summary, gravity is a distortion of space and time, and if you exist, you will be affected by it, regardless of whether you are a wave, a particle, or something in between. However, I should mention that the mass of the object does matter for one thing. It changes the speed that you need in order to be in orbit around another object, and in the case of light, since it has a constant speed and no mass, it turns out that it is impossible for light to be in orbit around an object. And this is why you don't see rings of light around stars or very massive planets like Jupiter. And this brings me to my last point of confusion for the boys, specifically Gaurant. Shadows, how do they work? So what is a shadow? In my mind, like shadows should be like an on or off thing. There is either a shadow or not. What do you mean by that? And you know what? Too long scientists have been worrying about like the elements of nature or the fundamental laws of the universe. And no one has bothered, nay, no one has dared to ask the question how do shadows work until today? Today we fixed that historic mistake. Gaurant actually has a point. In fact, let's go back to the green screen and let me turn off some of my lights so that you can see. Okay, look, we have a shadow here. In fact, I don't know if you can notice that there's a shadow here and another here because I have two light bulbs. That's going to become relevant in a moment. But okay, I have a shadow here. And when we see a shadow, well, we can still see something, right? You can still see that this is green. It just looks darker than the green here. And so, yeah, shadows are not an absence of light. What they are is all about energy. When something is bright, it means that your eyes are detecting a lot of energy coming from that object. And when something is dim, it means your eyes are detecting a lot less light coming from that object. Now, here is important to distinguish between total energy and energy density. If you take a prism to make a rainbow and you put thermometers at every color, you will realize that the thermometer in blue light heats faster than the thermometer in red light. That's because blue photons have more energy than red photons. They have a higher energy density. And yet it is possible for a red object to be brighter than a blue object. All you need is to have enough red photons that their total energy is higher than the total energy of the blue photons. For this reason, we have the concept of light intensity, which refers to how much energy a beam of light is shining onto a surface every second. And it is measured in watts over a meter square. Now we can understand how shadows work. You are blocking most of the light reaching a certain surface, but you are not blocking all of it because light is bouncing all around us.  In the case of the shadow within a shadow you saw in your house garden, I assume it was something like this. In my room, I have two light bulbs. So when I sit here, my head blocks the light coming from one of the light bulbs, but Tabibito, the autobiography of Hideki Yukawa, blocks the light coming from the other light bulb. And so where these shadows meet, it creates a double shadow. The light reaching this surface is being blocked by two different objects in two different ways. And that's it. That should give you guys a decent amount of understanding of how light works. Thank you for watching. And thank you to all the people who have supported me so that I can continue making these videos, especially to Ivo Danihelka, Carlo Facioli, Manuel Marques, Lana Mantegasa, Otimo Tiosun, Valerie Hyde, T. Hyethil, Alec Luma, Daniel H. Manchilibrae, Robert Wigman, Richard Allen Park, Metarus 208, Ryan Roberts, Jadon Hansel, Azuria Salia, Edward Hof, Mattia Scherding, Cookies of Tea, Sinos Fan 2, Marlo Brown, Eds Dos, Matt Zweig, Ed Cossack, Martin Mait, Dan Babbage, Pedro Almeida, Josh Stein, and Tataker. All of you guys, thanks a thousand times, thanks a million times.


What's up everybody, I'm TheMangoose, you are awesome and recently Undyne Games has been having impromptu community corners where the founders and several members of the development team will hang out in their Discord voice chat and answer questions from the community. I was able to record most of the first ones so I'm going to go ahead and summarize many of the questions and answers. Be sure to join their Discord and keep an eye out for people dogpiling the voice chat if you have some questions of your own. So let's get to this Q&A. The question, how will the item system work? Item system will be open so you can build what you want on whomever you want. I think this is probably for the best. While I thought Paragon's item system was unique and forced decisions from the player, it was an overall turn off to people coming into Paragon from other games. It's the main reason it never gained traction with many of the more popular content creators which led Paragon to gain a little less attention than it probably deserved. The question, when will all of the class passives be released? The answer was a bit cryptic. They said the upcoming months will be very exciting. They did however confirm that the plan for each myth is to have a passive as well as having the individual class passive. Question, who did the voice lines? Answer, Tricolorstar uses voice actors outside of the company. The voice lines that have been released are just a sample of what they have. Each myth will have a little over 200 voice lines which will make for like a half an hour video. They just wanted to provide enough voice lines to show that there will be interactions between the myths as well as lines for many of the actions. They also don't want to give away too much information as many of the lines contain spoilers. Question, Golden question here, will the game be on PS4? Answer, it is definitely planned for console. There is still debate whether they want to have crossplay or not. It could be an option where people can choose to make crossplay available. I personally have my fingers crossed for crossplay. Question, was the schedule for the alpha? Answer, the alpha will be available for a certain amount of time and then it will go down for updates. They will repeat this while adding more myths to the alpha. This is the test not only the game but also the patch system. If everything goes well with the servers they will be increasing slots as they go. They will start with 2000 slots. Question, will there be lore related skins? Answer, yes, Noxus, the lore lead pushes for that a lot. Question, are there going to be founder benefits? Answer, yes, they can't reveal what's all involved but they will be selling more than just the key. There will be more than just the basic $20 buy-in for the pre-alpha. There will be other tiers of founder packs that will include other perks. Question, in the future will you have event skins in cosmetics? For instance like Halloween? And will you allow those cosmetics to be earnable or will you have to purchase them? The answer, short answer absolutely there will be things that you can earn in the game. They are very big on having stuff in the game that is not just earned by buying stuff with money. They want people to earn things by enjoying the game. Question, will there be loot boxes? Answer, absolutely not. They feel it's just a way to rip people off and they don't want to do that. Question, how will you monetize your heroes in-game currency or with real money? Answer is both. They will not lock any myths behind real money transactions. If you can buy it with real money you can buy it with in-game currency acquired through playing. They don't want to do like Genesis did and lock somebody behind money. They also have a free hero rotation like many of the other games. Question, will player progress be reset during or after the alpha? Answer, they don't want to reset a player's progression but if it's something that needs to happen due to issues with the game they will do it. Question, how many ranks in the ranking system and where are they going to be called? The answer this is not something they can reveal at this time but they do plan for eventual ranked mode when the number of available myths allow for it. Question, how do they plan to release skins by popularity of the myth or on a schedule? Answer, they will do their best not to leave any myths behind. They know how it is when your favorite hero never gets any skins while others seem to get them all the time. They also plan for each skin to be a true cosmetic change not just a color variation. Question, is there going to be blood in the game? Answer, it depends on what region you play in. If your region allows for it then yes. Question, will there be auto lock abilities? The answer is maybe. They don't want to have any auto lock abilities but if it's something that makes sense then you know they're going to do it. Question, will there be AOE stuns? Answer, yes. Question, how many game modes will there be? Answer, there's only going to be one game mode in the alpha but if the game proves to be very popular then they will add more. Question, will there be custom lobbies? Answer, yes. Question, is there a sign up for pre-alpha? Answer, not yet. They will be sure to give everyone advanced notice before alpha sign ups go live. Question, will there be training grounds on release? Answer, no. The sandbox requires too many tools of program and right now they are focused on creating the game. It's something they plan for the future. Question, what has been happening with fan created myths that are posted in discord? Answer, they do look at them from time to time but they haven't been officially reviewed. Question, will all of the myths be humanoid or will there be beast type myths? Answer, they plan to have a variety of body types for their myths. This is already evidence in Nikolai who is very small and Grognark who is large and quadrupedal. Question, will the initial myths be easy to play in order to gather alpha data? No, a few of the myths will be difficult to play, they want to have some time to think about it. Question, will the initial myths be easy to play in order to gather alpha data? No, a few of the myths will be difficult to play, they want to have some high risk high reward myths. Question, will the initial myths be easy to play, they want to have some high risk high reward myths? So this was some of the questions that came out during that little impromptu community corner. As I said, just hang out in their discord and you can ask them questions at any time. It's not like you have to reserve your questions specifically for when they're all hanging out in chat.  So I encourage all of you to do so but for now, this is the mangueu signing off. You guys have a good one.


The 2023 Olojo Festival Chess ended with fun, fair and excitement as International Master Femi Balogun won the Olojo Festival Chess for the second consecutive year. The Olojo Festival Chess Tournament is aimed to bring the game of chess to the people of Osho State and promote tourism and culture alongside the Olojo Festival. After the tournament, stakeholders explained the importance of chess and how it promotes tourism and culture. Chess has been growing in Nigeria and so far in places that no one would have thought it would get to and if it is one of the exciting places chess has reached and it has been much, many, many lives over the years and brought more people into chess. What better way than to host the Olojo Festival than to host the Olojo Festival Chess at the Ikebe Grand Resort which has been a lovely fantastic place so far. So one gets to relax and enjoy the game of chess that has been played so far. I feel happy and excited because in the end I have become into chess and I have never been in a tournament especially in that system so I feel happy and excited about it. Chess has taught me how to calculate things and especially my maths subjects that help me a lot through my calculations so I'm happy about that. Intercept them tremendously, one in the academics especially in the mathematical aspect. It helps them think faster and to go with the glory of their performance this year even in the school. It was tremendous. Like the younger one, the excellent god got a word as the best third person generally in the school. The younger sister too likewise too in our school she performed very well. We wish most of them we are more appraised. I thank God for God for meeting their coach Mr. D.C. and for believing in these children because if we hadn't believed in them it would have put them together and to go with the glory they didn't suffer until now.


A very good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to another session of the RSM Spring Speaker Series. Today we're very excited to host Revan Marat-Loyd talking about Black Network Resistance Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age. Before we introduce our speaker of the day, I would love to introduce our moderator of the day and also RSM Rebooting Social Media Visiting Scholar, Dr. Meredith D. Clark, who is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Department of Communication Studies and Director of the Center for Communication, Media, Innovation, and Social Change at North Eastern University. Dr. D. Clark's research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power and has been published in top communication journals and publications, including New Media and Society and Communication in the Public. Her first book, we tried to tell you all, Black Teeth Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counter Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Meredith, Dr. Meredith, happy to have you here and let's start the call. This is on? Yeah, it's on. Okay, so I can sit down and do it, actually, I can't, so I have to go ahead, okay, I'm so sorry, and I'm going to tell you why I have to do it this way. So I'm a graduate of an HBCU, Historically Black College or University, and we have very specific approaches to education. And when you stand up before a group and you're presenting, we're talking, we were required to stand. So even in forums where we're just asking questions, unless I really feel like I'm among friends or I'm frankly just too tired to do it, I will stand up and introduce myself. But this is not about me. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Raven Mara Lloyd. And in addition to being just an outstanding scholar, I want you to know that she's a wonderful person, a wonderful human being. And I trust colleagues that you will give her your attention and your friendly faces because I have told her that we are a friendly bunch of folks, that we are enthusiastic about the research and looking forward to hearing about it. So a little bit about Dr. Mara Lloyd. Raven Mara Lloyd studies the intersections between race, gender, and digital media culture. Her first book, Black Networked Resistance, was published in January by UC Press. She explores the shifting nature of Black resistance strategies like humor, care, and archiving online. Where broadly her work makes central the ways that Black and African American folks tap into long existing channels of communication toward the goals of community, survival, and visibility. Dr. Mara Lloyd holds a PhD from the University of Iowa and she is currently an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and the program in Film and Media Studies at St. Louis, or excuse me, the University of Washington in St. Louis. One of Dr. Mara Lloyd's most recent publications is Digital Pleasure and Danger, a roundtable discussion. And if I read this correctly, I believe this came from a forum that she hosted at Wash U last year, which brought together feminist, Black feminists working in this area to have a discussion about what it's like to engage in online spaces in terms of building community and protecting the communities that you love. In addition to her book, she's working on a couple of projects, or she's published the book but is working on a couple of projects that I hope she'll talk to us about today. But we had the opportunity to fellowship over breakfast this morning and I saw that in addition to the work that she does as a researcher, she is a mom of two, she is a wife, she is a dog mom, and as I said, an all-together wonderful human being. So colleagues, please join me in welcoming Dr. Raven Mara Lloyd. Thank you so much, Dr. Clark, for that introduction. Okay, you know I'm sensitive, thank you. I am thrilled to be here today. Thank you all so much for being here, to Dr. Clark for hosting and the RSM team and the whole Berkeley clientee has been wonderful to work with, so thank you for hosting me. I am here today to talk about Black Networked Resistance and forgive the postcards I passed out. We have a new Office of Public Scholarship and they're very excited to print things for us. I don't know what to do with that, I don't know what to do with that, but like, hand them out, I don't know, and have fun with beans. Okay, so I will talk about a chapter of the book today, the Karen chapter, but I'll broadly introduce the book and a little bit of the projects I'm working on. So Black Networked Resistance is about Black online users engaging in activities that are often passed off as insignificant or unworthy of internet inquiry. For me, the book came out of questions I had around 2014 and again in 2017, 2017 after the murder of Michael Brown, I was seeing a lot of discussions online related to hashtag Black Lives Matter, of course, and lots of protests, right, related to the hashtag, but what I wasn't seeing was conversations about how people live and resist that weren't like official activist narratives, right? Like my friends and I were sharing memes with each other and that was our way to stay upright, right? And so that's sort of where this project came from. So for me, that meant taking seriously Karen memes as pushing back against centuries of white supremacy and vitriol, wrapped in the form of protecting white femininity and thus the nation. The book meant taking seriously the ways that Black women show up for each other online, even when their needs are not prioritized or worse, erased, right, through loyalty to the race narratives. The book was also an opportunity for me to wrestle with this idea of resistance as over determined. So as one of my students said recently actually, okay, as one of my students said recently in class, we're talking about resistance again, right? So like I'm thinking through these ideas of resistance. And while I agree that Black folks and other marginalized groups should be able to be ratchet or mad or sad, just for the sake of being, I don't necessarily think that resistance and joy are antithetical to each other and I'm happy to have further conversation about that and hopefully we do. I want to start by defining the theoretical grounding of the book. So bear with me for two slides on some theory stuff. I use the cultural studies conceptual framework of rearticulation, which is a mouthful and shout out to Dr. Rebecca Wanzo who was like, take that out of the title in terms of the before the colon. She was like, you need something snappier, right? To signal the reorganization or reshaping of ideological themes to advance an alternative agenda. So in the talk today, I'm thinking through the strategic reshaping of Black humor specifically across time periods and media platforms, such that Black humor responds to differently response to the changing faces of domination. In this case, white femininity and its historical ties with the police state. Okay. And then for network resistance, the definition is made up in the book of three integral pieces. First, I'm framing digital resistance historically in order to place the roots of contemporary advancements of racial justice with our forebears, especially when we're doing work on digital media. We know this, right? It's really important to historicize and contextualize whatever inquiry we're doing in my case, Black histories. So advancements of racial justice with our forebears, many of whom were Black women who experimented with and laid the foundation for successful strategies from economic divestments to care networks. These languages help us to understand not only what worked or not in the past, but also how Black publics have crafted and reshaped resistance strategies towards specific ends. Second, I'm focusing on resistance itself as connective and iterative, centralizing the agency and brilliance of Black folks past and present who create and reshape resistance networks not only for our current needs, but for generations to come. So like this conversation is also thinking through Twitter and X and like the movement of platforms which Black publics are not beholden to, right? And then third, an intervention in and outside of digital spaces prioritizes racial justice as diverse and unobligated to specific platforms or online versus offline debates. Given that so many media technologies from pamphlets to the Black press to Twitter or X are imbued with their own sets of power-related inequalities, I focus on interventions across the milieu in hopes of rescuing resistance narratives from a reliance on any particular media tool or even a space of impact. I'll briefly mention another project I'm a part of and we can talk more about it during Q&A if you're interested. My approach here of historicizing digital media and the approach of historically lived experiences as they deeply impact the technological world around us helps me think through other projects. So another one I'm a part of with a research team is we're working on identifying global misinformation campaigns across three continents, the US, Kenya and country, Kenya and the Ukraine and uncovering what the sociocultural factors are that make certain users perhaps more vulnerable to misinformation campaigns than others. So this is a multi-year mixed method approach. We're running focus groups, survey data and then pulse data so like user data online. And what we're trying to figure out is again like what makes people vulnerable to online strategic information operation campaigns. So you'll sort of see this thread through my talk today about offline variables, sociocultural variables as they impact online movements. I've mentioned this project too because I know some folks here are working on algorithms right in half for a while. So if that sparks your interest I'm happy to talk more. Okay so let's get to the juice, the good stuff. I'm going to play a quick video of Permit Patty. Let me give you some background information if you're unaware but hashtag Permit Patty first appeared online in June 2018 after a white woman Alison Edel in California called the police on a young black girl Jordan Rogers for selling bottled water without a permit. Black users then extended the alliterative name Permit Patty to several cases involving white women who align themselves with the police state to try to keep black folks in their place. In the chapter I also engage with a broader internet character of a Karen who at least within the last four years refers to a white woman unnecessarily calling the authorities on black individuals. I'll talk about earlier aesthetics of the Karen to the Bob cut the scowling face it's a whole character right. These two cases reveal existential dangers for black individuals existing particularly in public spaces. I have to raise the volume a little bit. Hi I'm having someone that does not have a vendor permit that's selling water across from the ballpark The woman Permit Patty reportedly said she didn't actually call the police on a child who was selling water on a San Francisco sidewalk but phone recordings obtained by a local news station prove otherwise. Okay one second let me transfer you over to the police department hang on. Great thank you. Her name is Alison Edel and she resigned from her job after getting backlash when this video spread of her claiming to call police on an eight-year-old girl who was trying to raise money for a trip to Disneyland.  Yeah and um illegally selling water without a permit on my property it's not your property. Edel told the Huffington Post she didn't actually call 911 she was just pretending to because the girl and her mother were being loud she also said she regretted her actions Hi I'm having someone that um does that have a vendor permit that's selling water across from the ballpark. The call later cuts off and it's not clear if Edel hung up or got disconnected but the police reportedly did not show up. For InsideEdition.com I'm Mara Montalbano. Alright so after the 2018 instance right of Alison Edel purportedly calling the police Jordan Rogers aunt then put up this tweet that's on the far right with the hashtag permit petty and the character was born. We see from there block users started to use permit petty using humor right like we got a new meme y'all and then you see other sorts of memes with humor interspersed to the left. Since the permit petty incident San Francisco has passed the Karen Act which many of you may or may not have heard of or the Caution Against Racial and Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act this points then to the connections between online block humor and policymaking. For the chapter I scraped about a thousand Instagram posts and Twitter posts related to the hashtags permit petty and Karen. I scraped the keywords with and without the hashtags to get posts where people were talking about my Karen's without the hashtag as well. I chose Twitter as the platform of analysis or X I'm gonna keep calling the Twitter okay. Given its material and social allowances that map on to existing black linguistic and cultural practices such as call and response and humor as resistance of which I relied on folks like Dr. Clark's work right who wrote a whole book on black Twitter although less studied Instagram also offers an additional layer of analysis as the platforms image centered affordances allow for levels of creativity and imagination regarding storytelling and resistance for black publics means as we probably know also thrive on both platforms right and then I connected a historical comparative analysis of black humor which I'll talk about here so embedded in many of the means that you saw earlier reference there were references of heinous and dangerous behavior of these white women but there was a unifying piece that I saw and that was humor specifically black humor so in the chapter I'm not only interested in connecting the historical threads of black humor but I saw users doing that work of placing contemporary iterations of white violence in historical context we see that here with memes of placing permit petty and then the other woman is Becky Becky on the bus with Rosa Parks right okay so what I did then was try to understand the historical roots of black humor so humor specifically allows black users to draw critiques of white womanhood in ways we have historically not been able to given the well documented and deadly consequences historian Mel Watkins writes of humor as it stitches together the ways black folks have had to navigate between their public engagements and their private selves he writes in an interaction with whites humor eased tensions that might otherwise have exploded into violence in the privacy of completely black settings black humor was more a survey and quote another tension of black humor is that of grief and grievance I'm thinking through public private and also grief and grievance as Glenda Carpio writes writing about African-American expressive culture and the tragic comic mode Carpio describes the grief and grievance that black humor activates through both a cathartic release and political critique I'm also thinking of baby Bambi Hagan's work where she talks about unclenching the jaw right so like you're walking around with a clenched jaw your whole life and humor is the thing for black folks where you can just like relax and unclench for a minute black comedians have long lived in this space between the privacy and a cervix black humor and between privacy of a cervix black humor and public perhaps more palatable forms of humor I'm thinking about Richard Pryor mom's Mably right as some of the most famous so in the chapter I talk more specifically about the Chitlin circuit which is known for black performers like singers but actually a lot of comedians travel telling jokes okay and then so again I'm thinking through public private sort of that tension with black humor as a type of that black public's online are able to navigate given like the public affordances of social network sites right okay so if black humor isn't new and has seen various iterations in terms of black humor I'm going to talk about the white women hood be set in public I also have to contend with white womanhood is the undergirding mode of power that Karen and permit Patty means are responding to I want to be clear that I'm not talking about individual white women right I say this is my class I teach a Karen class I say that in my classes all the time we're talking about like the structural innocence particularly during the Victorian age such access has placed white middle-class women at the center of the nation which is to be protected at all costs I'm writing a conversation with folks like Rafa shawms there have been a wiser Richard Dyer and others who theorize white womanhood as ideologically tied to imperialism modernity and civilization white women have historically then been positioned in contrast to the uncivil and pathologized other white women in art cinema poetry and more situate them in a position of moral superiority that Richard Dyer writes required deference to their needs thinking about Karen's requiring deference right the ideal white woman further positions white imperial discourses by ensuring that the home as a microcosm of the nation produces civilized subjects for the future so to critique a white woman then is to critique an entire nation so when block users create and reproduce photos from captured videos of white women yelling running away and calling the police representations of the angelic virtuous white woman are directly called into question I think about what it would look like to create a meme of Hazel Brian in 1957 here famously photographed screaming at Elizabeth Eckford who was 15 in Little Rock, Arkansas during desegregation we know the Little Rock 9 right one of the first schools to be desegregated and many of you might know this but the high school put the two women in conversation to there was an event held years later where Hazel Brian was invited with Elizabeth Eckford and the high school made friends and had a whole they had a whole conversation Elizabeth Eckford and came out years later and said like I don't know her like we are not friends right it was this post-racial moment that the high school was trying to position so the affordances of means and perhaps aggregation of humor online situate critiques of white womanhood though a little differently for the sake of time I'm not going to go through both arguments of the chapter I'll focus on one so I'm saying then that black online publics use humor as resistance I'll talk about the second thing here by using storytelling to create an inverse of stereotypes exposing white womanhood's long standing relationship with the police state so inversion or incongruity I'm thinking through theories of humor here inversion or incongruity is central to the makings of a comic scene black users deployed this humor technique with and circulate the name Karen inversion is why we laugh at Michael Che who's the NSL he's on a Saturday Night Live 2018 stand-up where he details being in an elevator with a white woman the occurrence he says happened not on purpose though he says the white woman grabbed her purse real tight in the elevator and he said I got scared the inversion here is that Che a black man is a terrified one in a situation that often paints white women because of their connection to vulnerability right and innocence as fragile and threatened particularly by black men so we I in the post that I we're scraping I saw a lot of this inversion right like here you see this example of it took me a second but I got it I'm going to use it without the hard and Karen or care right so we're inverting to sort of point to how ridiculous it is for Karen to claim innocence or vulnerability Karen posts online function as humor precisely because of this classic inversion technique what's more black people and specifically black women have long had to contend with stereotypes of their names from school to professional setting so I'm thinking through like the naming of Karen's and the naming of permit had his first names and many black folks were crafting a new generation of familial heritage particularly when we haven't had control over our names right still the jokes and stereotypes of black names are found Crystal Brent Zook writes about the actor and comedian Martin Lawrence though a black man himself as he builds on and perpetuates these stereotypes and his problematic on and off screen relationships with black women so sorry to my Martin fans I love myself but it is it's super problematic right okay so black women specifically the deliberately named character Shanae Jankins Shanae play by Lawrence and drag is almost always seen with exaggerated buttocks large earrings and colored hair extensions though she owns her own salon and is in a relationship she often is shown as lusting after other men the details that make up the Shanae character are important about the that's my time it's important in thinking about the intentional choice of a name and the importance of black users reversal of names through the deployment of Karen so Karen can't become a stereotype in the same way that Shanae does right and stereotyping black women based on the power dynamics of each group but the name inversion serves its purpose and critiquing and creating a monolith of white woman right all of a sudden the stereotype I'll end here so through inversion black users take control of the narrative of white women being able to call the police so easily by deploying in this instance the reverse racism frame right in this example black folks become the dominant group that complains about being discriminated against the Karen examples here serve as rearticulations of humor this is the inversion technique users reshape to weave together an incisive critique about white womanhood and its complicity with domination whereas traditionally the most assertive kinds of critique are reserved for private spaces where protection can be guaranteed black folks use the affordances of online media to their advantage to achieve both protection and public facing critique so the first theme that I didn't get a chance to get to is this idea that like we all add to a larger story about a Karen which in essence like protects us so you can't come from me personally talking about a Karen because there's thousands of us talking about Karen's online protection and indeed credibility appears in the form of networked traction that is the sheer volume of black users who add to the Karen conversation makes it both difficult to attack just one user and difficult to ignore the broader resistive narrative so we can't attack one person in theory and also it makes a super visible conversation right okay so neither black humor nor its utility is a tool of resistance I was playing the audio here neither black humor nor its utility is a tool of resistance is born of digital culture yet black publics rearticulate the storytelling and inversion techniques by dispersing a resistance narrative among ourselves so we also rearticulate past uses of the misanthrope to disrupt the assumptions of innocence ideologically attached to white womanhood so I'm looking forward to a conversation Thank you Jess stop sharing Thank you so much this was delightful I had the opportunity to see this recently in New Orleans and I just love having the opportunity to talk about things like Karen means to show people that it's a lot deeper than the fun and the jokes so you briefly touched on this and before I get fully into the conversation piece I'll say I think we have until 1.30 so I have a couple of questions just to warm things up as you're thinking about the questions that you may have and I'll turn it over to the audience for those questions in just a moment but I like to get into a couple of things I'm going to let these folks do the technical questions I like to get into the methodologies and the rationale and really the impetus for the research so take me back to the moment when you realized that what you were seeing in terms of these means was a thing worthy of study and how you have made that argument not only in your own research but really for the field that's a good question I think first how I saw Karen means being a thing honestly had to do with I was lucky in that when I was going through grad school black digital studies really started taking off publicly like in journals and so because of the folks like you I was able to do the research in a rigorous way and people took it seriously even though like you still get told you're going to be pigeonholed or like it's just a meme books were starting to come out journal articles were starting to come out and not books yet but like journal articles were people started to take us seriously in my own networks like on black twitter there was never question it was never a question that I was able to do back then there were things where we made fun of certain situations like things we would DM each other about because it wasn't appropriate to share more publicly when because they were funny but this isn't a funny situation my friends and I knew there's this public and private tension of tension of like how serious something is and how we use humor that not everybody understands and that's what I wanted to get to with the research. Right? Like making fun of something doesn't mean you're taking it less seriously. It means you're tapping into a long historical tradition. And it's a survival tactic. Yeah. It's absolutely a survival tactic. One of the projects that you touched on and I did want to get a little bit more into it because I think it's important specifically for this audience talking about applied social media research. You mentioned that you're doing archival work and this project required archival work. And I think the digital archives are often an afterthought. And I'm curious about based on the experience that you've had attempting to retrieve some of these digital materials what sort of things do researchers doing work in this area need from technologists when it comes to preserving digital archives and making them available? Yeah. Skill sets. So we know that sites like X make it harder now to download and archive content especially like having to pay for said content. So I love going to workshops that are accessible to humanities folks. So we have computer science folks and humanities folks working together to like gain the skill of how to scrape data and sort of make scraping data less intimidating but also listening to humanities folks. Like there's a history of whatever topic that like we should probably know before you just scrape data and make assumptions or conclusions about. So like I love a good workshop. I don't know if that answers it. Yeah, absolutely. It absolutely does. One of the follow up question to that is about if there were something that you could reshape about the corpus that you used is there an access point or is there a means of access that you might change or want to see designed differently? Ooh, that's what's hard about the book is like when it's done, it's done, right? And it's out, which is gray, I think, but also definitely there are certain things that I'm like, oh, I wish I would have added that. I was lucky in that when I was pulling data from Twitter, this is before X. So like I had sort of access to full keywords fairly simply. I have some, like there's some platforms I barely get into like TikTok because it was newer as the book was coming out. So maybe I could have spent more time with newer platforms, but the beautiful thing about doing historical, like media history is I centralize black folks history and not the platform itself, right? Right. So less of a technological determination is needed. Yeah, that's the place, the spot for the inquiry to be centered. Makes sense. One of the things that I'm gonna bring up something that you did in New Orleans and I loved it because especially for scholars who are just entering the field or scholars who are working on their early book projects, I thought it was really artfully done. You said that there were questions that you presented in the book that you plan to take up later in your work. Could you tell us a little bit about some of those questions that you're pursuing? The last chapter, I follow the hashtag The Black Delegation. Do y'all know about The Black Delegation? It's a Chappelle Show skit, Chappelle Show, Dave Chappelle. This was 2006, I think. And he has the racial draft skit where he like uses humor to have a whole racial draft. We can pull up the episode later if you want. It's pretty funny. But I saw folks on Twitter using hashtag Black Delegation and sort of using the hashtag as a way to talk back to power in terms of Clarence Thomas and other folks. And then I saw it again on TikTok. So I'm like, what is happening with this hashtag over the course of like decades, right? That we are not forgetting. Not at all. Maybe some folks don't know about its origin but we're not forgetting the conversation. So the last chapter, I'm thinking through this idea of Black Evergreen Network. So I have a journalism background and I'm thinking through Evergreen content as content that never goes stale. You write a story and they shelve it for until they have a free moment to publish, right? So that's what I'm thinking with Black Evergreen Networks, not necessarily content, but these networks of Black users that sort of like tap into these conversations at any point, decades later, which I think predates the internet, right? Like this is sort of intergenerational knowledge. And so that's something I left in the chapter that I'm interested to pick up again as I go on. Makes sense. My last question and then I'll turn it over to our colleagues here. Raven is incredibly humble and doesn't promote herself the way I am about to promote her in this moment, but she mentioned the digital Black studies, critical digital Black studies being sort of coming into its own as she was doing her early doctoral work and she is a certified part of this canon. If you're not citing her work and you're working in this space, it's a hole that people are going to call out if they are equipped to read the work. I want to ask you, for people who want to be well oriented to digital Black studies, studies of culture within Black digital spaces, who else should they be reading? Ashley Greenway has a book, Black Girl Autopoetics, out right now. And I love the way she works with method in that book too. So like centralizing Black women and also like listening to their stories as serious research. So Black Girl Autopoetics is out right now Chamiah Sutherland's work. The Black Resurrected Body is out. Of course Meredith D. Clarke, we know this. We know Andre Brock's work. We know Catherine Knight-Steel's work. That's a good list. That's a good list. You're reading there, you will definitely find the pathways that you're looking for. I believe we have about 15 minutes for questions from the audience. I'm going to leave it to you to get out people. Yeah. Sure. Hi. Thank you for coming. Certainly. And I'm going to ask you to do us a favor and introduce yourself so we know who you are. Hello, my name's Gianna. I'm a CS Ph.D. at Northeastern studying algorithmic folk theories. Yeah. Algorithmic folk theories and like optimization on TikTok. Specifically within the context of like Black and Brown folks and like non-binary folks. And I was wondering, one, how do you particularly like, both of you guys, like I guess find joy within your work. My advisor is kind of like, okay, if we're going to go down this research path, just know that it's going to be a lot. And then two is when it comes to like specifically in CS, that there's a huge like jump for like, what is the technical contribution? And like for me, I'm still in the phase of like trying to figure out what that is, or how I want to like kind of like bring that on. Because like for me personally, I'm more interested in the critical piece. So yeah, I guess I have two questions. Joy. Okay, I made the decision early on, I'm going to focus on Black folks and Black publics and counter public, you know, and all their iterations. So although white supremacy comes up inevitably, that's not my lane, right? So I'm going to leave it to, I gave a talk recently, someone was asking about like white conservative women and how they're using Karens. And I was like, that's great, you do that, right? So like, I'll talk about Karens, I'll research Karens, but I'm interested, you saw it in this chapter in Black humor, right? And so for me, that brings me Joy to focus on us. And is there a specific technical contribution that you're seeing? Well, it was the second part, technical, just like technical, like when an HCI or so, you have someone that's like, an HCI will have someone that's like, oh, okay, but like what can this bring to the field? Like a design or like what type of methods do you think? Which is not always necessary. However, within CS like publication is currency. So like finding like forms that is like contributing to the space is helpful. In my collaborative work, so I like to work with like, so you're in computer scientists or in computer science, I find it useful to like keep those spaces diverse. So even as I'm working with computer scientists, I want to bring humanities folks along in the conversation, so I'm not the only one. And so I'll point to research, like I'm saying publish, like have your area, but publish widely, itch, you know what I mean? So like I'll point to the technical narratives of algorithms that I do, and also write the book on critical space. Does that make sense? So like, okay, you sort of have to have both. Absolutely, if I could pick up just a little bit of that. The course I teach at Northeastern this semester on race and technology, we just talked about this last night. And Dr. Sarita Emrute has an essay about attunements and how we can use corporeal attunements, the attunement of the glitch. And there's one more that she has as a way of rethinking the approach to technologies that instead of focusing on dominant approaches and dominant narratives of what technology is and how it should be studied, how it should be developed, we take the narratives of those people on the margins, their experiences and use those as the starting point for our design cues. And I think as Dr. Mariloy is saying, what is so important about publishing interdisciplinary work is that those folks who are in the fields that you're in need that sort of literature to be able to make the case to their advisors, to their colleagues. And so this is why it's critical that that publication happens throughout and across the borders. By the time I encountered the Karen meme, it seemed like it had been stripped of its racial content and it meant somebody, an overly demanding customer who was some of the manager over trivial things. So it seems like the meme started the black community and by the time white people encountered it, it didn't have that content anymore. Does this often happen? Yes, right? We're talking about mainstreaming of content. What's interesting is the Karen starter pack of the call your manager meme actually predates what we know in 2020, right? So if folks are familiar with Kate and John plus eight, remember that reality show on TLC? I can show you a picture, but she's blonde. She has the Bob, right? This is my blonde Robert. I think the Bob, she has a scowling face and early internet folks in the early 2000s were using the call your manager meme. So yes, to being stripped of like black humor, but I would say it's black humor is not meant to be foregrounded for everybody. Maybe it's just for us, right? And Karen's can still sort of their purpose in making visible white womanhood and its vitriol and some instances, right? Hi, I'm Bailey Fiddler, I'm a law professor and an affiliate here at Berkman Klein. These are comments which I know are sometimes the worst, but I'm gonna reframe those invitations since one thing that we do here is interdisciplinary conversations. So I'll do the boring one first. You might already be a part of this, but I'm part of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which helps folks doing exactly the work that you're doing if you face legal barriers to getting data, that kind of thing, especially as we look ahead at what might happen in the big election, that might be a good thing for y'all to get plugged in with. Happy to talk more. My second comment was the thing that struck me, the most coming from the legal side of things was that phrase that you use that online black humor allows black folks to get the protection that they usually have in private and public. That is something that I think is missing from conversations about regulating social media. So to the extent that you're interested in that conversation, I think that would be a really cool point to bring forward. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, okay. I actually have one. Hi, my name's Adam Holland. I'm a project manager here at Berkman Klein. And this is gonna be, I think, trying to bridge the gap between the technical question and your experiences with, I guess, the repercussion. So I manage a database of requests to take things down from online. And what I'm curious, and if this is too deep, feel free to find me later, but as you began to examine a broader corpus of social media posts and other participation online in this humorous, resistant space, I wonder if you also saw, when I'll just sort of simplify this pushback, using digital affordances, which is you have a constituency that's claiming these new tools to continue what you've artfully framed as a long historical pattern. I'm wondering if you saw people sort of saying, oh man, I can't allow this. And I'm gonna use digital tools to try to censor, suppress, and otherwise defang this newly effective modality. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I'd like to leave, but that didn't defang. Yes, it wasn't my focus. But yes, so in the case of almost all the women, perm, at Patty, there's Barbara Hubecki and others, what's interesting is they mostly used official channels to counter what was happening to them online. So we mostly saw them on the Today Show or other news channels trying to like PR the situation. Probably rightly so, like going online and creating an anti-Karen campaign just would sort of feed into the, it would just like help write the original means. So there's this like mainstream and online thing that's happening. Like to censor the conversations. The censor's probably too loaded a word, I apologize. Yeah, if I could take that up for a second, I would say that arguably that's exactly what Elon Musk has done with what he has done in dismantling different departments and part of Twitter in specific. And you're also seeing sort of the offline application of this as well. So in the case of Twitter with Elon Musk firing so many engineers and changing the affordances of the site itself, it makes it difficult for people to circulate the information and for even the jokes to have the traction that they once had. In the offline application, one of the ones that I've seen most recently, and it was honestly kind of alarming to me, I went to one of, I'm trying to remember which health, I went to urgent treatment here recently over in Boston, and there is a sign at the check-in desk that says that clients are prohibited from filming interactions within the office. And what they really mean is the interactions with the staff. And so it's like, if we cannot stop you from circulating and protesting in this way, if we can't get you to go through the official channels for raising complaint, then we're going to silence you by saying you can't use the technology at all. And that was something that I never anticipated. It's one thing for the affordances to be changed. It's another thing to ban a certain account, but to say that people can't even use the hardware to capture the video, upload the video and circulate that narrative is a completely different level of silencing that I for long was not ready for. There are also claims of harassment, right? So like, to be sure, some of the women here probably did get, you know, like uncalled for parts of harassment, but when we see conversations about doxing and harassment has like the top of conversation when it comes to Karen, it shifts the conversation differently. And it's a 1% conversation that starts getting like most of the online traction when maybe that's not always the case. Time for one more question. One more question. Yeah, my question is related to I think online humor in the system or the infrastructure that circulating images and even producing images affords anyone from any ethnicity or background or country of origin or whatever. And I wonder what would you respond to a person that puts these faces of people in these individualities that are not necessarily doxed but sometimes exposed online in the same, how to say, level of, for instance, I've seen some cases of white nationalists interviewing protesters and catching them off guard, using humor out of it and then also exposing them. And what's that take of humor or what's that infrastructure doing in terms of humor? And I mean, beyond to judge what type of humor that is, but how can you face fate a little bit better? The one that I have is the importance of disambiguation. Like what are we talking about when we're talking about the application of humor, the use of humor, what is interpreted as humor and what is the intent of the individual who is creating the meme and the individuals who are circulating the meme. There are definitely bad faith actors whose intent is too hard. What I see, and of course I've got an insider perspective with a number of these memes, what I see is this protective measure that you haven't had the opportunity, it could cost you your life to confront someone in one of these situations. So one of the only areas of recourse that you might have if you're being harassed by someone who has the ability to invoke the police, to invoke the power of the state in that moment, if one of your only avenues is to make it public and for people to take that up and to have fun with it and to use it as a shield, if you will, from I know that this was harmful treatment, I know that it hurt you, you are seen and at the best we're gonna make fun of it, then that's one thing.  And I see those as completely different things. I think Joe Walther's work on hate that he's doing right now and social approval and hate is really going to bear that out. That's what I was gonna say. I think it has to do with positions of power, right? So Black folks making fun of an instance is different than tapping into centuries of white supremacy, right? Like in terms of material effects of who is the power in the situation there, you know? Is that one more hit? I saw that.  Since we're on the topic of white supremacy, for those of us who do study white supremacy from a critical side and see white woman head as part of this natalist, ethno-nationalist thing at the core of so much right-wing movement, what are you kind of frustrating about us using that white supremacy lens all the time? Like I've taken note of some of these Black digital studies people that you've just given us, but from your perspective and your work, I'm a sociologist who also looks at like meaning-making, et cetera. What would you say to those of us who are on this sort of more visible camp? I don't know if that makes sense. Like what could we be looking at or looking for in addition to what the great help that you've given us today? In terms of studying white supremacy online?  Like, and there's so much too right-wing movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, I don't know, but we often focus, you know, with this white lens. I don't know, not being very articulate, but- I think I get it. I can talk to you more after, too, if you want. Yeah, definitely. Okay. Personally, I would say I'm relieved and keep going. Right, right. Because it's necessary. If you think about the timeline of history and what we're up against, I argue all the time that everything, particularly in the West and particularly in the US, I'm an Americanist and in my work, our work generally focuses in the States. We're built on a broken foundation of genocidal attempts against Native Americans and the imposition of African child slavery. There's no getting that territory back. So the best thing that can be done is to place this intense attention on these historical imbalances and the historical imbalances of power and the people who have the most powerful ability, the resonant ability to do this, are white folks. Our research gets ghetto-ized. We're told it's not rigorous enough. It's, you know, we're not, we're studying ourselves. It's me-search, it's too personal. That's, to me, what allyship is, to continue in this and to agitate and to be able to bring these narratives together. And so that is why I would never say that the imposition of a lens of let's look at this as an outgrowth of white supremacy, it never gets tired because that history doesn't go away. I would say, too, like, studying all of that and studying the different faces of white supremacy or iterations of, because it's not gonna show up and hasn't showed up in the same way, right? It's been re-articulated online and other, in other spaces differently. And so, like, tracking and following discord and truth social and all these other spaces. It's like, it's where it would kill your spirit to go. I'm not going there. I'm not going there. I'm not going there. 100%. Yeah. So we all have marching orders. Excellent. Are there any other questions, comments, offerings? Oh, there is a Wi-Fi. Hi. Well, thank you very much for this. It just occurred to me that one could perhaps talk about other positive movements, like a little-known one from the Central Park encounter. There's an ornithologist here at Harvard who, during the pandemic, took a cross-country bicycle ride, spoke about that and had a Black Lives Matter sign on his bicycle and stayed with somebody who was a Black birdwatcher. There's an organization of Black birdwatchers. And he didn't know about that. But then he came back and talked about this cross-country trip and also talked about a fundraiser for Black scientists for graduate students and for people who could contribute to that. So these are two possible, very positive reactions to the Central Park incident. I don't know if you have any response or- I didn't know the detail with which that person did the cross-country thing. That's cool. I mentioned the Karinak, too. I think I don't know about the positive, negative, like what is positive exactly, right? Because positive might be I made it through today and the Karin means helped, right? At least to make me feel less isolated when these instances happen. But things like the Karinak also happened after many of these instances. It wasn't just Parmapatti or just, like these aren't isolated instances. So like, I agree, other things are happening positively. I think the redemption narratives, there's often a pressure on researchers who do critical work to uplift the redemption narratives. And I don't necessarily see that as the work of those scholars, particularly those scholars whose lived experiences place them in a position to be on the opposite end, to be potentially harmed, to see their family members or people who are like them face that harm. I again, see that as the work of folks who wanna position themselves as allies, that is an excellent space for them to take up. But if I'm asked the question about why not the positive things, I say the positive things are resilience and resistance within the community. And so those are the narratives that I'm lifting up, that Raven is lifting up through that work. And we are happy to see those contributions come from our colleagues in the field. Because it's resilience and doing everything else, right? And still finishing graduate school or a book or two, right? Like it's making it through the day and doing all the things. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much.


From the director of Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct comes Showgirls, a cinematic achievement on par with the likes of Tommy Wiseau's The Room. In 1995, a NC17 movie would shake up the industry like no other, release in theaters to the admiration of a bunch of young, prepubescent boys and elderly men looking to get the rocks off. Showgirls was a film that said, we're throwing caution to the wind and our clothes. In this two hour and eight minute tour day force, you will see Elizabeth Berkeley do things Jesse Spana wouldn't approve of. But why now, Adam? Why, after all this time, bring up showgirls? Well, it's because Matt Sklarow over on Patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies said, I want you to review this, dammit, and you don't have a choice because I have a mithril membership. And for $30, you have to watch what I say and give me a shout out on top of it.  To make me sit there with my wife in bed watching this. Best case scenario when the film's done, she's a little frisky and we can maybe have some 50 Shades of Adam.  Less titillated than she was when we went in. Well, it was a worst case scenario. Cox on the table, I can tell you that right now.  It's quite an achievement. Elizabeth Berkeley plays Nomi Malone, the most unlikable character I've ever seen in a movie. She's getting away from a mysterious past hoping to make it big in Las Vegas. In one of her very first scenes, we're greeted to her pulling a knife on a complete stranger who's really not even being that rude to her.  What's he getting return? Possibly shivved. A small stabbing to the jugular maybe? Who knows? Well, he's gonna find out when this movie's done, I can assure you. We are gonna spoil showgirls, just... Again, it's a thousand years old now. I'm gonna be Frank. You can be Mike if you want. It doesn't really matter to me. This film ruined Elizabeth Berkeley's career. Now, how much of a career she was gonna have after Saved by the Bell, Saved by the Bell, the college years, it was yet to be determined. She did come back for that Peacock Saved by the Bell for a couple of seasons before it was inevitably canceled. So check it out on the cock if you haven't already. We've had a couple of penis references so far. This is going very well. Anyway, she is a trainwreck in this movie. Her body is constantly convulsing, flailing, flying, pushing, shoving, tripping, stumbling. She is full blown bipolar in this thing. People will go out of their way to help her and she will thank them by throwing fits, temper tantrums. There's a scene where she just starts throwing fries all over the place, just like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna. I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I'm so scared. Subscribe for Saved by the Bell references. Her number one goal is to become a dancer, but not the stripping kind. She wants to be classy. She wants to be a celebrity, famous. Kinda like Crystal Connors, played by Gina Grishan. Gina Grishan makes it out of this movie pretty unscathed, to be fair. She's fine in it. She's caddy. She's a little bit intriguing.  Every single minute of the movie that went by, I kept thinking to myself, how did this get greenlit?  Nomi's just a terrible individual. And of course, she does end up stripping. Now, I mentioned earlier how she wanted to stab a guy for giving her a ride. I guess to her credit, that guy did end up stealing from her and leaving her out in a parking lot, abandoning her in the middle of a new city. So he is kind of a douche. But who knows if he would have done that she would have been nice to him, you know? It's like chicken or the egg, which came first sort of situation. Luckily for her, she stumbles upon a kind young woman in the parking lot named Gina, who sees her having a freak out and is like, yeah, this is the person I want to get involved with. That's the lady I want to hitch my way into.  We then fast forward many months and it turns out Nomi's a stripper. She didn't become that Cinderella ballerina dancer that she wanted yet. But this black swan is ready to shed those feathers and become the white dove she was meant to be or something, I don't know why the swan turned into a dove in this scenario. Anyway, she's working at the CD Strip Club and in comes, you guessed it, Crystal. Crystal's got her eye on her and she's gonna give her the opportunity of a lifetime and that's to dance in her special Showgirls Performance Act, where it's basically Cirque du Soleil with a lot of nudity. A lot of pageantry going on, a lot of flips, a lot of twirls, a lot of spins and a whole lot of Nomi. Nomi thinks she can dance. No me, no how, that's true. I don't know why but every person that comes into contact with her is like, this is the girl, she's got the moves. With a little bit of training, she could be great and then they show her dance. Thank you, this is dancing. And then it's back to the person that's just enthralled, like, this is it. This is the girl. Show me what you got. How about this? I feel good. Nomi will eventually join the showgirls and that's where things will go from bad to worse. I'm talking about the story. Well, the story's bad but I'm talking about everything. Everything just spirals out of control in this film. There's also a young gentleman named James Smith played by Glenn Plummer and he's got his eye on Nomi. He wants her to be in his special dance group. He's gonna change the game. He's gonna show people, pervy men, that there's more to strip clubs than just taking off your clothes.   What was he thinking?  Then again, nothing really goes anywhere. No one learns anything in this whole film and for some reason it's over two hours long. The bottom line is Crystal Connors has it all. Nomi wants to take it from her and as the movie progresses, that's exactly what happens.  And then she has the audacity to go see her and kind of put it in her face. But Crystal, having the experience, have the reputation she does, kind of looks at her like, yeah, I know.  How do you think I got where I'm at?  I did the same thing. Game recognizing game is really what it comes down to. I didn't want to gloss over the greatest scene in the entire film though. We're gonna get to it. And I remember it as a young child watching that one scene on Showtime late when my parents were in bed and that's the pool moment. She gets in the backyard pool with a gentleman who starts banging her like he just won first prize at the Macy Day Parade drum line. Just boom, boom, boom and she is convulsing.  She's back in the water seizing while a fountain is spraying her in the face so she can't breathe. She's getting rammed beyond all belief and she's having a seizure. Just like. She's like Marv from Home Alone when he's getting electrocuted. Anyway, I love this scene. It's very tastefully done, well executed.  She then goes to the hospital, says goodbye to Crystal and takes off for California for an inevitable sequel that will inevitably never come out because this movie bombed. I should point out that she meets up with that truck driver from the beginning one more time as she does another Hulk. She puts out the finger hitchhikes and conveniently the same exact guy is driving by at that exact same time on that same exact road. It's remarkable. And so is this film. Showgirls, what a treat to watch. I wanted to kill myself. It was miserable. Some have said over the years that this movie was meant to be tongue in cheek. It was meant to be satirical. It was supposed to be funny over the top. Over the top, I understand. Funny? No. Satirical? No. Satirical of what? What is it making fun of? What is it mocking? What's the joke here? Because the joke I see on display is the movie, the actors that signed up for it. Now, I don't blame Elizabeth Berkeley. This seems like, imagine, this seems like such a great opportunity on paper. You're gonna have to get nude. It's NC 17. So it's edgy. It's taking risks. But look who's attached.  Basic instinct.  Sharon Stone's career was basically made from basic instinct. It's gonna do the same for you. Wrong. Dead wrong. Bad movie. Bad meme. For having to sit through it. But especially Bad Matt Sklarow for recommending it. I'm joking. I appreciate all Patreons. Thank you very much Matt for the recommendation. It was a fun watch. Mainly so I could do the review afterwards. He also has me next month for Howard the Duck. So stick around for that. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't. Like the video if I had some fun. Make sure to comment below if you've seen showgirls. Maybe even defend it if you think it's brilliant somehow. Misunderstood. Or if you're like me, feel free to just go off on this thing. Maybe you saw it in theaters when it came out and you were very disappointed with the end result. Anyway, thanks again for watching. If you excuse me, I have some Howard the Duck to view for the first time. I heard there's nudity in that one too. Duck nipples. Can't wait.