Everybody back here to the Martin E. Stiegel Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY at the City University of New York. It's week 18, I think if I'm not right. And as part of our talk to artists and writers and thinkers, theater artists around the world in New York City, the US. And today we have with us a very great guest, a philosopher from France. It is the great Jacques Ronsier who is with us here. So thank you so much for joining us in this unprecedented time. And yeah, it is still complicated here in America, numbers of cases are up over four million people are infected. The Center for Disease Controls things, it's up to 50 million. That's the real number. Over 40 million people, 45 million filed for unemployment at a certain time. It's actually running out by the end of the months. And they are now thinking should it be continued or not, it's a disastrous time. Also eviction, the protection for eviction is running out. People will be forced to leave homes and it is just a recipe for disaster. As someone said, a disaster movie we are perhaps living in and ourselves and there's a big distrust in government. There's no real security for jobs or distrust in the workplace. It is extremely hot confinement. So of course this is a dangerous, dangerous time. There's lots of civil unrest for good reasons in the streets and Seattle and Portland. And there's paramilitary force used against protesters and all of it is just a stunning development and missing leaderships of a president who still kind of refuses to wear a mask. So we don't really know where it all will going. New York, everything is closed in Midtown where our university is. Every second store is closed. Every restaurant is closed just on the sidewalks. People are sitting. And so it's a bleak outlook even so it's a sunny, wonderful summer day. We have with us Jacques Bonsier today and most people do know him, who know him. Just make some very brief remarks. He is born in Algeria and philosophy is his field. Political philosophy, philosophy of education, the aesthetics, many think of him as one of the most influential philosophers of the times. We live in and I agree. And he worked a lot on the history and thought from below, from the people, the workers. He thinks about radical equality and equal intelligence of people. And when it comes to art, which he also comments on and we think of him as an artist in his writing, he thinks that art is a radical action against hierarchies in society or it makes visible that existing hierarchies. And he wrote the significant piece for the theater world, the emancipated spectator, where he looked at who looks and who acts. And he said, if I say it right, that looking actually is the opposite of knowledge. And perhaps we do a transmission of ignorance that we don't do a real service. We don't take the spectators for serious and that perhaps there's something that could be changed. But like all of us, Jacques also is living through the time of Corona. So where are you right now, Jacques? What time is it? So I am in the French provinces in Brittany, in Brittany near the sea. It's now, so 6 PM, you know, in my place, you know. But it's not hot at all. You know, it's rather windy and rainy. It's a great day, but I'm fine. Yeah, yeah. And are we just right today? I think that also in the Britannia, some small towns, sea towns, they had to close down again, even so France opened a bit the restrictions. Yes, yes, you know, it's a bit ambiguous because yes, you know, so there was in France, you know, the end of the confinement, the end of the lockdowns, you know. But at the same time, you know, there are new cases, you know. So it seems that the pandemic is coming back, you know. And especially in some regions, like for instance, Brittany, you know, regions where, so it's difficult to know exactly why, you know, of course, because there are also regions, you know, near the sea, near the sea, so regions for vacation, you know.   So the fact is, you know, so that there is no more in the confinement, but at the same time, you know, I'm in the one region which is supposed to be a bit dangerous, you know. But not so much, not so much, you know. I'm not afraid. You're not afraid, that's good. I'm not afraid. And people are not afraid, but of course, they wear masks, you know. Of course, they take care. So well, it's rather, you know, peaceful situation, it's a region where there was absolutely nothing, you know, during the confinement, you know, you know, almost no case at all, you know, and it started just now. Really? Yeah. Hmm. So where were you when it all happened, when it started the confinement?  So it was impossible, of course, to do gardening during that moment, you know. But also it was impossible to go to the library. You know, of course, I used to go to the National Library almost every day, you know. And of course, I was at home so much.  And of course, all the more because, of course, there were no more seminars, no more talks, no more public events. So I was peacefully, you know, reading and writing at home. So in a way, a continuation of your normal days, except the teaching? I don't teach, I don't teach anymore, you know. I left university 20 years ago, you know. So I am a retired person, you know. But at the same time, of course, I was active.  And of course, in a way, the pandemic helped me, you know, of course, to do so. Well, so, but, well, no, the point is at the same time, you know, I'm sorry, I spend more much time at home, but I'm not a metaphysician, you know. I don't work just in my mind, you know, with concepts, you know.  And of course, it was a lack for me, you know. Because of course, most, there were many texts, many images that I couldn't see during that period. And of course, it's kind of restriction, kind of restriction, you know, of my activity. So how did it feel for you that experience of confinement, of a lockdown? Of course, it is a strange experience. Of course, it is the first time in my life, you know, and it's a long life, you know. I know this kind of thing, you know. Well, in a way, you know, I was prepared by my way of life, of course. But at the same time, I think it's, well, for me, it was a kind of time of suspension, you know.  But well, it was a time of suspension, meaning, you know, you are no more, you know, in the normal course of things, you know, in the normal course of time, you know. And for me, it's important, you know, also from an intellectual point of view, because there are many people, you know, who want to explain everything, you know. Something unexpected, you know, happens. But they can turn the things, you know, so that it was expected, you know. There are reasons for this. And of course, since the beginning of the pandemic, there were a lot of texts written by intellectuals saying, oh, well, of course, it was inevitable. It is the consequence of capitalism, of capitalism, of the anthropocene, et cetera, et cetera, of our way of dealing with nature, of the technical mastery of the world, et cetera, et cetera, you know.  So this could not have happened, you know. I think for me it's important because most of my thinking, you know, is about contingency, you know. So I decided, well, it happens. It happens.  I don't know what happens in the hospitals, you know. I know that there are people dying in France, you know. The fact is that most of them, you know, live in suburbs that are not, you know, the same place, you know. Of course, I cannot go into the hospital. So I'm far from everything.  We have no mastery. We don't know what happens. We don't see what happens, you know. So I think we should not try, you know, to explain what happens and to say this is the result of a long trend of civilization, et cetera, of a long history. Yes, so that's my way of thinking, which means that, you know, after a few days, you know, or I stopped reading anything of the pandemic.   And don't, and not, you know, not really get trapped in this kind of constant discussion and explanation and debate, you know, about things that you don't know. Yeah, I think that's quite a significant thought that we do not know. And so that's so many people try to explain or and may perhaps reflecting more their own thoughts and what reality is. So but for you, do you feel that this is a completely new time? If you say, I do not know, can you see connections to history, to times that were perhaps connected to the moment we live through now? Well, of course, it's true, but at the same time, it's a moment of suspension. This is a moment when people cannot really gather, gather and discuss and act together, you know. And of course, it is in this kind of moment, you know, what happens, I would say, is a kind of enforcement, you know, of consensus, because of what consensus means, you know, is the idea that there is only one reality and one way of thinking, of reality and dealing with that reality, you know. And it is of course, the ideology of our government, you know, there is only one reality, there is only one thing to do. And of course, you know, in normal times, we can say, no, no, there are a lot. We can perceive differently, we can name the things differently, the situations differently, we can put, we can really put the case differently. Well, in this case, it's quite difficult, but it's quite impossible, you know.   But at the same time, you know, there was no action against the government, you know. In fact, we agreed, you know, we agreed, in fact, you know. So I think it's a very interesting and of course, dangerous time, because it is a time when we are obliged, you know, to abide to the law of consensus, to the idea that, well, of course, and of course, we know that the government was wrong, we know, for instance, but in France, you know, in France, you know, the situation is a consequence, you know, of the shortage, you know, of shortage, you know, of course, of equipment, of research, et cetera, et cetera, you know, it's a result of a lot of cutbacks, you know, et cetera.  So we can say, of course, government is responsible for the situation, but we can do anything, you know.   But at the same time, you know, well, we obey, we obey, in a way, we obey not because the government is strong, but because it is weak. Yeah, I think a German director from the Volksmanit Frank Astor said, I don't like that. Our chancellor is telling me I have to wash my hands, you know, he said, I'm a grown-up person, but on the other hand, he has to, you know, so, and it is not an easy adjustment. For you in that time, as you said, also in your life, for instance, the first period of such a long confinement, did it produce some thoughts, some thinking, did something materialize or interest that you didn't have before?   So I think with multiplicity, you know, of articles, every day there were a lot of articles explaining the situation, and what, and I had, well, it's a feeling, but it's not the same as the first time in my life, but more than a feeling that there is a kind of complicity, you know, between those governments, you know, that are managing, you know, things, you know, on a day-by-day basis, you know, and those intellectuals, you know, trying to put everything, you know. Well, within the scope, you know, of history, of a long, of many centuries, the history of human kinds, history of capitalism, et cetera, et cetera. So I had really, well, there was a kind of, of course, of perception that was stronger than ever, you know, of, but it is really, it is really useless, you know, and there is a kind of illusion, you know, of people thinking that they are commenting, explaining, denouncing things, but at the same time, I think they're just a compiner, you know, what is done by our governments, you know. But of course, it's, well, it's a negative lesson, of course, but one, what I think understood better, you know, better than ever, you know, is that, well, there is a kind of normal order of things, you know, and those denounce this order of things also are part of this order of things, you know.  Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's true, that there are the limits and especially I think in America, where which has a view of exceptionalism, things will not happen here and everything is the best and the perfect, it is perhaps the first time that there are the feeling of insecurity, that the certain future is uncertain for really, really happen here. So you said you're looking at images and installations. What were you looking at in this time? What were the images you worked on?  And Alfredo Jarre spent a lot of time trying to make political images and especially, you know, of course, images of the slaughter in Rwanda, you know, in Rwanda, you know. And so there will be an exhibition.    But I wrote an article, you know, about a film by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa.   It worked with them, you know.  And of course, what interests me, you know, is this kind of image, this kind of image also, you know, is an interesting way of raising the whole issue, you know, of political art and political theme, especially, you know, because we all know that there is this old slogan that you should not aestheticize, you know, you know, people living in this, in those conditions.     But no, no, no. In fact, they lose their jobs. They don't build houses, except, you know, some kind of barracks in shanty towns, you know. And, well, and the women never come, they never come. You know, they stay at home. With the children, et cetera, et cetera.     How do you, how do you, we present, you know, the situation, and that simply has a situation, you know, of poor migrants, but also are testifying with a certain form of life, you know. So, this is the kind of things, you know, I did, you know, during both times. Yeah, it's interesting what you said about the photographer not showing the dead bodies, and we also had artists here, African American black artists who said the showing of the body of the killing of George Floyd, you know, the endless repeating of that video, you know, whether that is really the right choice, you know, of representing that reality.  Well, but yes, but certainly, you know, well, unfortunately, you know, you know, there is a time of massacres, you know, and it's not over, and this kind of issue, of course, is coming and coming again. From your experience in life, from your research, your writing, thinking and observing, the time that we in the U.S. are experiencing, do you feel from what you can tell, this is a moment of change in the history of a country? You mean in the U.S.? Yes.  But there has been so many steps backward, you know, since that time, you know. Well, and sometimes, but of course, I don't live in the United States, you know, I think the longest period, you know, was in the United States, because it was never more than two months, you know, so I cannot say, I know the country, you know.    But at the same time, you know, there was a time in the United States where even white lives, you know, did not matter when they were the lives of people struggling for their rights, you know. And of course, in this situation, I always remember, you know, those trade unionists who were killed, who were killed, you know, for a long time in the United States, it was a way of dealing with the social question, you know, just killing, you know, just killing, you know, those who rebelled.  And at the same time, it's also still, it still has something, you know, of a land of brutality, you know. And, well, but I see, I see, I see it from a far, but of course, certainly, of course, presidents like Trump, you know, of course, encourage, you know, of course, the revival, you know, of his atmosphere of violence in which, after all, life doesn't matter so much.  Well, so, that's why I go again, you know, I see it from a far. Of course, I feel very important, you know, the movement, you know, of course, against this state of things, at the same time. Well, there is something a bit terrifying, you know, in the idea of a history that is repeating, you know, and not moving forward. But I hope that, well, better days will come. But certainly they will come only because of the struggle of the struggle, you know, of movements like Black Lives Matter and the movement that happened today, you know, like in Portland, for instance. When it comes to art and in a way, of course, it's always political. What do you think from your, as a perspective, from your thinking in the time you live in? How should art, or what could art do? And how should it react? What is the effective way? Well, first, I would say that, right, from my point of view, you know, it's not a good way, you know, to raise the question, you know, to ask what art should do or must do, you know, because art really covers so many different, so many different things, you know. So I'd rather say this is the first point, you know. And the question is not to what art must do, art must not do anything special, you know.  And of course, for me, you know, the problem is not to what art, what they must do, but what they can do, you know. And what they can do first, I would say, I'm not at ease with the idea, you know, that you must, you know, really give an answer to an immediate situation.        And of course, if you are an artist, you know, interested in intelligence, you try, of course, to counter it, to counter, you know, the consensual way of describing the situation, of staging situations, and, well, so, which means to, to invent some kind of, I don't know if it's alternative or parallel words, but at the same time that are words for everybody, you know, and for me, really, when it comes to the idea of community, I think really, the thing really starts with the very way we put words, we put words in common, you know, we put words, and we put in common words, and images, words, and words, and movements, et cetera, et cetera.  And so, I think I'm also an artist in that sense, too, you know, and I would say artists have to, artists committed to greater intelligence, they have to go on, you know, they try to create something new, they try to counter the normal order of things, the normal way of explaining things, of describing them, and they go on, and for me, really, it's important, you know, because I think, I'm always trying to say there are two things that artists should not do, you know, the first thing, you know, is trying to anticipate the effects of their work, you know, and the second is trying to answer immediate claims to situations. No, no, I think, for me, art is a process, it's a process of research, and well, there are moments when we show to an audience, we show to people in various ways, you know, the results of our research, and after that, you know, one, they can grasp it in their way and polish it in their way, you know. So, of course, I think it's a kind of disappointing answer, saying there's nothing specific to do now, but just going on, just going on as researchers, it is very important, you know, because of course, we can imagine but perhaps, you know, of course, you live in the United States, I live in France, and of course in France there are more subsidies, you know, for art, you know, from the government, but I can imagine, you know, that there will be, there can be programs, you know, asking precisely artists, you know, to engage with the situation, to engage with the health, to engage with the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. Well, and I think that, well, artists, artists, as I think of them, as I like them, you know, precisely should avoid this kind of trouble. Yeah, no, no, no. I don't think it's disappointing answer at all. I think it's a very, very significant one and something we all have to really listen to and perhaps we don't do it enough. What you said to, that you share research, you share the experience of the research and that it is that struggle for equal intelligence. And I think theater and especially theater in the United States, a lot of it, is still, as you will say, done by the experts or by the elite, you know something, you teach something, you bring salvation, you pre-think everything, you do not leave it open. It is not distancing, as you would say, or it is not a neutral open space for reflection and interpretation. I think what your article said and your work is to say that theater artists have to take spectators as equals, that you share that moment but they are as important and it is no longer good enough to watch because looking itself is not knowledge, is not participating in knowledge but you have to find ways to also be engaged in that. And I do think our training in theater is that we are experts and we know more but you say no, you don't know more, right? You share or do I understand that right? Yes, but at the same time, I think there is something that I would correct. Precisely, I say there is not, there is not on the one side action and on the other side people looking and looking is not acting. What I try to say is looking is also acting but we must get rid of the old opposition. The idea that a spectator is passive. No, really spectators are not passive but spectators are passive. Nothing happens. I think that theater is not only made by people who are on the stage, they are in front of an audience. Theater is also made by people, people at any time make connections. I would say not simply receive what is said or what is shown but also translate it in their own experience. Connect what they see, what they hear. One, with their experience, with their souvenirs, et cetera, their memories, et cetera. This is the thing on which perhaps I may dive from you. But really, you know, we must try to suspend all the oppositions like ignorance, ignorance, knowledge, activity, activity, acting, looking. Precisely, I would say the egalitarian way of understanding intelligence and egalitarian common sense is based on such opposition. I always try to say, no, there is no knowledge on one side, ignorance on the other side. There are people going from one form of knowledge to another form of knowledge. There is no theory on one side, practice on another side. But there are different intellectual acts because practice is also made of intellectual acts, just as what is called a theory. In the same way, there is no activity and passivity and people being passive because they just sit in front of a spectacle. For me, it's very important to get trade of all of these oppositions. All of those oppositions are also forms of hierarchy. And of course, it's difficult, but really I think for people working in the theater, for me, it's the same as somebody like me who is supposed to work in the theater. We are researchers, but we try to know to make sense of situations, to understand what happens around us. And we are artists, but we try to create something, to create something solid, something resistant, something existing outside of us. Because what I think is important for me, this idea, what we say, what we say, what we stage, must really become external. We are not the masters, not the masters of our plays, etc. For me, it is something very important. Try to work without mastery. Yeah, and I think it sounds easily, but it's a radical concept. It's a radical sharing, it's kind of a radical equality. And that he really says that the master director and the writer or the philosopher is the same level as the audience member. And they have shared knowledge and perhaps had different experiences and different opportunities, but we only will achieve, as you said, if I understand right, a sensory experience of the common world, together, if we find forms, that are not hierarchical. And I think we in the theater world forgot that perhaps the theater itself is already an institution, is already a hierarchy. We have this Black Lives Matter movement, and the D.L. White Theater, there's a big letter written by artists of color and indigenous artists that, you know, we are not part of it. Your institution is already not open. It's hierarchical. You don't even see it. You don't understand it. They are demanding an access, an inequality, and I think an art always has been on the right side of social progress, but I think what you could learn from you or what you said is that really that we have to understand that the way things are produced and the way things are artistically done already also represent a hierarchy. So the question is laws or changing an institution, does that change an aesthetic outcome or do you think it has to be an aesthetic practice that changes or creates a new experience? No, I think really it's a matter of practice, you know. But I don't know. I don't know, of course, the history of the theater in the United States, but of course I know better. I know better in France, you know, and in France there were several moments where there were attempts, you know, to create a new institution, a new institution really oriented, you know, to low people or common people or the people of the lower classes, the people of the suburbs, et cetera, et cetera. And of course it's important, but most of the time it failed, most of the time it failed, you know, and of course there are many reasons, but first you cannot oblige people to like theater.  Well, okay, I think the problem is, you know, we must try to think always only in sociological terms, you know, saying that there are people, there are people, you know, but excluded, you know, and we must try to include them. No, but there are people who simply don't want to be included. But of course that's the point, but we must respect this, you know, and not think, of course, we think that it would be wonderful if we better, you know, if everybody, you know, could enjoy theater, you know, enjoy art, do art, et cetera, but we cannot oblige people.  Well, obviously, people must go to the theater, but people must go to the libraries, et cetera, and that's fine, you know. But I think what we do, if I consider myself as an artist, you know, what we do is to make some proposals, some proposals, you know, and people may, well, people may get there, may adhere to them, or they, and well, and we try, you know, to, I would say to invent, you know, to invent our own way of practicing equality, you know, and it's really a job of everyday, I would say a job of, also of any gesture of any, of any words, you know, because at every moment, you know, you know, there is a question, there is a question, you know, of how we conceive of equality.  Well, but I think it is supposed to be, you know, kind of respect for people, but not to the contrary. In fact, in fact, it's a form, it's a form of despise, you know, when they say us, you know, no words to complicate, to complicate, to be simple, et cetera, no.  So, this is an example, but at every moment, you know, there is a conflict, not only simply a conflict, there is a conflict of equality and inequality, but a conflict, you know, but also what is played, you know, under the guise, you know, of a conflict between ways of understanding equality, you know, that's the problem, you know. And so, and so, well, yes, I think it's mostly, you know, a question of practice, and it is a question, really, that really reappears, you know, at every moment, you know. No, I, and I think it's, as you say, it's a practice, and one has to find ways to practice that equality in a radical and serious way. I mean, for your example, what you did when it was about the history of capitalism or communism, and instead of just looking, what you're also a master of theoretical text, if I understand right, you went and researched letters written by workers in the 19th century. It almost sounds, in our terms, it's almost like documentary theater or as Carol marked as the theater of the real, but so you went and said, I'll find an equality of thoughts if I understand that right, you know, of Marxist writing or writing of a French researcher in the Shabani, in the letters of a worker. He said, do I understand it right?  So this is the material and you have to explain the material, you know, to say, OK, they say this, but we have to understand, you know, to understand, you know, why they say this, you know, what is the reality, you know, which is behind what they say, et cetera.     Of course, this is what I try to say about theater, you know, the problem is not, you know, how can we speak to everybody in a simple language, right? No, it is how can we create our own form of practice, of equality. Yeah. And that we all share in a way a new perspective of the world, a new interpretation, or perhaps more just one, a more truthful one. I know that in that 68 time in France, that you were on the side of the people on the street, meanwhile, some people said, no, there needs to be a altruiserie, others said, no, there needs to be an elite that develops theories and then something happens.  They said, no, you know, we helped and saved your eastern Germany, but actually there were the people on the street who did it. But you said that it is actually, you have to be on the side of the movement, or you have to be on the side, not of theory. Do I see that right? Well, I think when we were trying, I think that we must try, you know, really to see, you know, every situation, I would say, from the angle of equality, from this angle, you know, and also in 1968, there was, of course, the altruiserie and ideologies, you know, we were equipped to be saying, whoa, these students, they are a petit bourgeois, you know, a petit bourgeois ideology for, of course, you know, serves the interests of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, et cetera, so it's bad. Well, so we had to learn from what happened, to learn from the practice, from the practices, from the words, from the kind of events and the kind of situations, the kind of links that were created at that moment. So, well, the point is trying to find what is new in the situation, at the same time in the situation, you know, what is the egalitarian, you know, the egalitarian aspect of the situation. That's why, well, I was interested by, well, all that happened, you know, during the last ten years, you know, from the Arab, from the Arab Spring, to occupy movements, et cetera, squares, squares, movements, and the yellow vests in France, et cetera, because, of course, many theorists say, but, well, that is just spontane, spontaneity, petit bourgeois, it has no future, et cetera. Well, I always say, you know, a future is not created by your kind of strategy.  That is significant, yeah, to also say that the black-like movement, what happens in the present, you know, if we would read the emails of the Black Lives Matter, perhaps we'll, you know, under years from now, or in five or in ten, to understand the moment, they will be the most significant, the most significant contribution in that the presence changes are not the theory. So you think a theory comes later? No, I'm not saying, you know, there should be no theory, et cetera, no.  Well, the knowledge of society is always a certain knowledge of society, a specific knowledge of society, you know, and what ever happens, the moment where the knowledge of society, even the critical knowledge of society is part of the normal life of the society, you know, it is the same kind of things, you know, I said at the beginning in terms of denunciation. So, well, we have a critical knowledge of our society, why it is bad, why, of course, there should be a revolution, you know, and, of course, but revolution needs an avant-garde and a strategy, et cetera. Okay, but, you know, I think we have really experienced, you know, but what it doesn't lead anywhere but it has no interest and what is interesting is there are so many moments when equality actually happens. Yeah, I remember from your talk on the archaeology of modernity where you said the great invention of 20th century art was the collage first by Russian filmmakers who put a street worker next to a pilot, next to farmers, next to people who connect telephone lines and then the idea of collaging would you say that perhaps now in that 21st century that they strive away from the center, from the master artist to turn towards what you might say the real, be no longer half religious structures in that sense, aristocratic structures, what art was concerned with a lot. The idea of the reality, the workers' letters, the filmmaker from Portugal, the photographs, do you think that the real concentration and research shared on the real about the people and not from experts is that a tendency of our new century? Well, I cannot really make any serious diagnosis about our century. I don't think that I said that the collage was a great invention of the 20th century but I try of course to think about the multiple encounters of art and life during that century which means for me encounter between various forms of art because in a way for me this idea of art meeting life means that artistic forms are specific forms specific activity well meets the artistic capacity that belongs to everybody so well when I spoke also about the films made by Pedro Costa with those migrant workers I think with this meeting between a filmmaker who is a great model of American filmmakers like John Ford and those migrants who have the ability to tell their story to re-stage it to replay it too so I think perhaps some very important moments in art was momentarily of meeting of forms of art that are supposed to be so far from each other the moment when people because what is interesting is not the fact that art gets into the streets art gets out of the museums out of the theaters that's not the most important the most important is this moment when really forms of canonical art meet this capacity of art that belongs to everybody for me this is what I think interesting I don't say this is what artists must do artists do just what they like they do what they like of course it's different but yes the same thing I think we must get out of this kind of voluntary conception that we must go there we must make this conjunction etc etc we must look everywhere and try to see what is interesting what is new and for me what is new is always a new way of staging equality yeah and I think this is a very serious reminder our motto a little bit is from the Brecht quote that new times need new forms of theater and I think your your thought that to stage equality to really intellectual equality artistic equality and should be at the very center and it was not in many forms especially the commercial the highly commercial theater in America it is not a good production 2000 runs something in Berlin after 20 shows artists are already tired but do you go to this theater do you enjoy going to the theater well I enjoyed when I was younger for personal reasons it became harder for me to go to the theater and unfortunately now most of art most of art I see on the screen but perhaps there will be there will be a new time when I am able to go back to the theater so well also at certain moments I was a bit perhaps a bit angry against people in the theaters because precisely they always wanted they wanted too much they wanted too much to to achieve some kind of a sense of a sense of theater a sense of theater as a ritual as a religion I don't know exactly but as I told I live in France it is a country where there are some subsidies for theater artists have to show that they are concerned concerned with real life concerned with the community etc of course it creates some kind of attitudes of people telling but theater is so important people cannot live without theaters so please give us money because people will not live will not live anymore if you don't give us money of course it's a caricature it's not it's just a joke but at the same time there is a kind of tradition of friends of considering a theater a public theater or something what's so important as being religious in itself or political in itself no I think I don't want to repeat you to myself too many well we have to invent we have not to think what is the essence of theater of the theater what is the kind of service the theater gives to society and how can we can we achieve it we have the idea of how we can combine we can combine words and images and movements and sounds et cetera to create a line of equality and let us try to create those lines of equality what's theater did you like is there a theater when you saw something what did you like did you well it's it's very it's very difficult you know I cannot say I like this or that form of theater you know well I like I like theater when it surprises me when it surprises me and of course many many times I think okay I know this is a kind of new version of the art of theater of western theater or theater of cruelty okay or theater of death I don't know yes I cannot say really I like well I'm very often asked what artists do you like what theater do you like what usually I say no I don't like to give awards to give crisis it's really it's really you know the surprise and the emotion of the events you know that counts sometimes I see something I was not I was not expecting I was not expecting you know something was not predictable and I'm happy so I can say yeah so is there like a question did you see the question plays or what you say these are no I think now but that way I don't want to pronounce judgments about this or that this or that play your theater or or play write drama no but I have always a sense that there are some there are some models and people trying more more or less you know to mix so little little coming from the art tradition little coming little coming from from the brechen tradition little coming from the great tradition of theater or coming from the theater some other some other lines so I as I said I don't want to say I like this I like this I hate that so we are also coming closer to the end of the talk and I remember you also said traditional art form meets new technology you know and I think you spoke about Louis Fuller who was the dancer and then she had invented the lighting system and the patterns right now we have what we use now the zoom there is Facebook there is the internet and all of it do you do you think this is going to be there will be a new digital art or is it already there or will it is it it's it's very it's very difficult you know because by I'm not of course I know there are many artists you know seeing and I'm doing digital art and etc but at the same time you know also you know well you know the internet you know in fact it also serves as a kind of surface on which art is not digital art it's shown so and of course now you know in this situation you know so many things that normally happen you know in in theaters or in universities or in museums just happen screens you know I don't think that this is the beginning of a new form of art of course there is digital art I would say which works as a kind of specific form of art I would say but I don't think you know that the future of art you know is is possible a new digital art I don't think so did you watch digital performances or do you right now in the time of the well so sometimes yes sometimes you know but well for me I would say but it is still still art we only to really adhere to this kind of distancing you know if I take my own case you know when I am alone of course I write when I speak I like to speak with people who are really present in the same space and so we have these forms of speaking you know well it's for me it's it's a kind of I don't think for me it is a communication of the future it is the way we are of course I think there are people who think but it is the future especially in education because of course if you can do this kind of teaching from afar of course education would cost much less and certainly I think our government thought that it was really nice you know teaching from afar and certainly they will try of course to increase this kind of thing as for me as I said you know if you are alone but or you are with other people you know I'm not really happy in situations like the situations today I'm speaking with very nice people certainly but at the same time it's not my normal way of speaking and so for me I hope it is not the communication of the future well that is interesting and I think the research on equality most probably within communities and will be within people by definition and maybe towards the end is the last question that I wanted to send also Amanda Gan who is with us who is here to help me in case I don't find the right words and she had to translate it into French DM in Boston at Harvard so thank you for being with us but Jack for that time and you are also an artist you say you know how do you use the time now the time that perhaps is even more confinement than ever for you and for young artists or viewers what do you think is of importance to keep in mind or what is important to focus on I don't understand there is a question you ask me what a young artist what do you think as an artist is of importance for this time of the confinement or corona how do you use it you say perhaps later on something will come out but for our viewers or for artists in general how do you think this time of this catastrophe we are going through what can one do to use it I think one can use it to go on doing art I said I am an artist too but I have a son who is a musician and of course the concerts were cancelled but at the same time the musicians went on working they worked of course trying to better their own performances they try to communicate they try to make projects so you cannot make a concert but you can try to record you can try to invent a new program to make a record you can make research research find new works I said my son you know he is mostly playing music from the 16th 17th century so you can always find new works experiment with new instruments so I think there is a possibility a possibility to try to to go on and of course it should be different certainly for a theater of course you can play you can play the violin at home ok it's more difficult for an actor stage designer etc but it's also a time for them to invent and of course what is lacking now is a moment of verification so we are so you can be a researcher all the time but sure and certainly there is a lack from the point of view of verification well it's very difficult but there are ways perhaps not the same at this moment in the United States but artists try to make some little meetings and of course with less of course less people etc but it's also an opportunity to try to find new things new ways of doing yeah there is also a significant significant direction who you wrote about schoolmaster who basically found out that you don't need to know anything to teach something and then in order to learn something also you don't need to know what you normally are taught by someone who is a master so it's a significant mostly really important book especially for our field and that he said you can teach anything you can teach painting but you're not a painter you can teach language if you know two parts of it that famous book part was famous you could learn from each other so I think it is a time where you said if I understand right one could try out things because the verification it also doesn't matter I did not say you can teach you can teach what you don't know I said it with very specific meaning but you don't know what you teach it is not simply the fact you can teach everything even not knowing it even when you know you know when you know I know philosophy you know art but you don't know the effect but you create which is very very important for me which is one thing the other thing is you are always an ignorant in some sense it's not the fact that if anybody can teach anything anybody can learn anything it is that the master is always at the same time an ignorant at the same time somebody who knows a lot of things and the meeting happens precisely at this point of conjunction that's a very important correction, thank you but still it's a time perhaps to reflect Jacques thank you so much for joining us and I know it is not your favorite way of communicating but for us of real importance also to hear from you and see you and see that we share as human beings the same the moment of existence right now and it really gives us an insight in your experience and how you connect it and we at the Siegel Center will have tomorrow here with us Morgan Jeunesse who is a dramaturg who early on worked with Joel Pap and the public theater and talk about her work and her thoughts and I think she's out now the double-edged sword we have an artist from Indonesia, Heli Minardi will be with us and talk about her work in Jakarta and how it feels for her at the moment to be making art, create art and to create networks or communities there and Dima Matta from Lebanon artist openly or for queer artists we'll talk what it means to be an artist in Lebanon at the moment in Beirut where things seem to be collapsing they already were very difficult after civil war and so we will get an update from her and then the great Richard Schekner will come back and he is also preparing his special issue for TDR for the magazine and so many contributors also brought pieces with him so he will also try to connect for us theater performance and the current moment and the unrest so this is another week where we try to get some ideas and know even more how ignorant we really are and how very very very little we do know so Chuck really thank you for joining us and contributing to us Amanda for being there in case we needed you and so this is very very good so any what are you going to do now you're going to have dinner not yet I don't know it will be the time just for going to see the sea but now there is a mist I think I will stay home perhaps have a drink with my wife because it's not really the right time to go outside unfortunately so I hope again really thank you for taking the time and I hope we didn't disturb your day too much it was a pleasure it was really important to hear from you and inspiring and also to underline that your research is of real significance and is inspiring and really gave us a new perspective of the world and it is much much needed so thank you all and I hope to see our listeners again or hear from them again and thanks to Halraum for hosting us and thank you all for joining and goodbye and thank you and have a good drink goodbye


Hey everyone, welcome to figure fantasy. So as we wind down our Existing collaboration, we do have another announcement. So update announcement of figure fantasy This was actually Located in the official Facebook page of figure fantasy. So you may check the official page out But these are the contents of the update. So the usual basketball league basketball league Basketball league to zoomies express project. So another series of events where we could save a Lot for the next banner baseball league daily sign-in all new packs logistics and All new combination limited rate up, which is a trap Banner, please don't go through this, but we have here some good news guys My thumbnail mentioned cross server arena dungeon final showdown coming soon This is going to be tomorrow, July 15 up to July 21 So unlock condition you have to clear the main story 16-1 event info the cross server arena dungeon final showdown is coming so I hope this is going to be a bit unique from our existing PvP experience because a lot of players are not really participating in PvP because it's It's a bit No, it doesn't provide the hype of other, you know PvP games. So I hope this is going to be unique So this is going to be A battle of a cross server dungeon something Masters from different servers will gather here for the Ford of here to to fight For the highest glory among Figuring owners who will become the strongest master in of the new generation. Let's see So I'm not sure how this format is going to play out, but definitely this is a good This is a good addition to PvP, which has been kind of semi-dead. I haven't I must confess I haven't been playing PvP that much It's just today that I was able to play it again Masters from different servers will be assigned to a designated competition zone According to their main story progress. So it depends on How far you are in the main in the main story win battles and get great rewards Noble plums earned in the final showdown can be used in sunny store to purchase Items such as special edition figures and furniture. All masters are welcome to browse sunny store. Well Update all kinds of rare items regularly. So let's Let's defer to sunny store and let's go to the other updates. So exclusive special edition Rico holiday candy heart version There's another Skin of Rico, but I'm most of you guys I'm not gonna get this because this is going to be purchased I'm sure but for the collab. This is interesting event collab disciplinary inspection side story Coming soon. So this is an extension of the collab, which is running from June 15 to 21 Probably a week to run. So event info complete the figures figurines world adventure tasks and get great rewards Okay, so we have a little bit of a new event for PvP We also have a new event for the collab. This is going to be a I think a mini event Just to round out the collab, but general reminder guys the event schedules mentioned are based on These times so if you're in another region aside from Southeast Asia or Asia your update is going to come at the later time Especially if you're in North America or in Europe. Okay guys, so that is it So a small update which gives us time to prepare for the next Probably next banner and I'm thinking not a collab for the next one So they're gonna be scaling down the collab and release the other figures that haven't been released for global So, thank you guys for staying this far. Take care. Stay safe. This is the warden and I'm out of here


Did you see Marjorie Taylor Greene's tweet today? She tweeted out that Joe Biden is a socialist Like I actually want to find the tweet to read it to you because it like I just woke up in the morning And I saw this and it almost made my head explode.  She's been kicked off all the committees, right? She does have a lot of free time Okay, so This is what she says. Joe Biden is a socialist. Dem voters don't fully realize it yet. Oh, okay The Democratic Party are socialists, but they are all a little different in varying degrees They think it's good for society as a whole, but it's a fantasy and all Marxism socialism is always socialism. What does that even mean?  Socialism it's like if I say socialism enough Then at some point, I don't I don't even have to make sense because they're already going to be thrown into a frothy rage They're gonna have like this, you know What is it that nom like flashback or vision of like? You know eating your dog or you know eating out of a dumpster and and in Venezuela Vavuzela And that's that's what it's designed to do Because they just they repeat this these things without knowing what they're talking about now What's funny is I actually do kind of identify as a socialist now.  Let's do this Work her own businesses and understand that the definition of socialism that they use isn't a real definition of socialism I think we all know that you know, they use this weird like Definition of it that doesn't make any sense. It's not actually what it what it really is I would just like to hear them define it like I've never heard a single person who uses Socialist as a synonym for bad define it like if you were to ask Marjorie Taylor Greene Define socialism What would she say?  It's oh, that's socialism.  And let me let me just add socialism.   Gay-space communist luxury luxury gay-space communism. Yes.      I swear like 10 years ago Would have been like muttering themselves in the subway All right, or or in a subway a lot like space lasers Are you okay miss? Are you gonna be all right? Do you need some help? Socialism marxism everywhere Okay, I'm glad they okay. I have to ask you this question Jeff and you might not have the perfect answer to it How long do you think it's gonna take if this is gonna make you probably hate? Humanity or lose more faith in humanity How long will it take until we see marjorie taylor green as one of the more sane republicans? Like how long because we all remember back in 2008. I was thinking. Oh my god, sarah paleon Like there's no way I can get any more crazier than this then came donald trump then came marjorie taylor green So i'm like okay in 10 years Is there gonna be like someone who's like frothing at the mouth? Like eating like literal feces talking about like communist democrats I just I don't know there's no floor like when I think okay, they're not gonna get lower than this It they take that as a challenge So like how long do you think if ever until we see her as like one of the more reasonable republicans? And we think oh remember when we thought marjorie taylor green was the most craziest Do you think that day is coming? so first thing Something that you never had Yeah, faith in humanity. That's no Not at all not anymore No, um, so we've already rehabilitated george w bush. Yeah, right. I thought that was bad enough. All right uh First rehabilitation of donald trump. That's gotta come first Yeah, I see that you know before marjorie taylor green Like somebody you know is going to be hugging donald trump and saying it's okay Yeah, he's one of us now. He's all right. He's one of the same republicans Not like that guy over there. Oh The feces eater That guy over there's a little nuts.   There you go um It's so it's gotten so bad and it keeps getting Worse and it's almost as if like we're the only ones that notice like on the On the progressive life for the only ones that notice And it's driven half of us mad Right What do we do? Yeah It makes you feel crazy Like makes you feel like hang on like I shouldn't Not think much of like marjorie taylor green Doing this crazy thing where she like is Trying to yell at aoc through like the the little mail slot But I see that and i'm like Yeah, that's marjorie green i'm not even it doesn't even phase me anymore like i'm completely numb From this shock. It's what what is it going to take to shock us now?  What is this world that we're in mic?  Mike is the worst progressive on youtube. Please don't subscribe to him or become a patron David dole is so much better. Trust me folks. He's doing a great job He really is okay


Everybody forced here ripping a box of 2022 leaf stitches and slabs basketball for John H Thanks, John. Good luck. Go buddy Maybe this I'll cheer you up from all that horrible weather you're getting in Maui right now Sunny every day in breezy with like 82 degrees. Yeah for John. Good luck, John Slab first Griffey signs a good amount. He's in a lot of products his auto still does well though. All right The slab is a 2018 Panini prism Luca Donchich rookie PSA 9 so base Luca prism rookie 9 There we go solid card Just one more for this one Zenyatta by the way, Zenyatta's the goat goat character and Jersey is Jalen Green There we go Big time Yes So someone though goes that way, I think I don't even know man I can't think of it right now Jalen Green JSA authentic auto on the jersey. Thank you again. John. Congrats buddy We'll get it right out to you


Here's the beginning of a program that asks for a rating from 1 to 5, and then prints a message according to that rating. We could use a multi-way IF-ELSE to print the message. Note that the last ELSE clause handles any rating that doesn't match our desired input. When you're testing a set of integers, instead of using a multi-way IF-ELSE, you can use a switch statement. Java evaluates the expression following the switch, in this case the rating, and then goes through the cases from beginning to end until it finds a matching one. Let's say we entered a rating of 3. The first case doesn't match, rating isn't 1. The second case doesn't match, rating isn't 2. The third case does match, and Java executes the statement corresponding to the case. The break statement then takes us out of the switch, and Java proceeds with the next statement after the switch. By the way, the default case is the one that Java uses if none of the preceding cases matches. You always put the default case last, so it doesn't need a break after it. You can have more than one statement as the result of a case, and you don't need to put them in braces because of the way case is structured. It's very important to put a break after each of the other cases. If you don't, Java will fall through to the next case. If you were to enter a rating of 2, this incorrect code would print disagree, and then proceed to print neutral before the break took it out of the switch. Some people take advantage of this fall through behavior. In this code, for example, a rating of 1 will match case 1 and print the word strongly, but not a new line, then fall through and print disagree on a new line and then break out of the switch. Case 1 would therefore print strongly disagree. We also have to reverse case 5 and 4 in order to get strongly agreed to print out properly. Isn't that clever? No, this is the exact opposite of clever. This code is difficult to read and update. What if we needed to translate this program into a language where the adverb follows the verb? We'd have to redo everything because our clever approach wouldn't work at all. Don't sacrifice readability for the sake of a couple of fewer lines of code. Take a direct approach that uses switch in the normal manner.


that's recording? No. Okay, so this is what I... I'm already off. Yeah, so this is what I want to get through today. I'll quickly go through who I am, my Drupal journey. What I was wrong about with backdrop, what it was wrong about with Drupal, and what I'm excited about with Drupal, and but why I'm still promoting backdrop over Drupal. And so if you want to find me, the easiest way is to Google Kevin Drupal Beard. My full name is Kevin Reinen. I know my last name is hard to pronounce and spell. That's kind of a marketing faux pas on my parent's part. But I'm currently a senior developer in the web apps team at the University of Colorado System Level University Information Systems Group, and that's a very long way of saying I'm a Drupal developer above the campus level. We serve four campuses for the University of Colorado, but a lot of what I'm going to talk about is from my time at the University of Colorado Boulder campus, and there I was the manager of product development for our CMS as a service solution called WebExpress. And that was a no-code self-service model for colleges, departments, academic programs, labs, faculty, and even student groups to build their own sites for free. So pretty common model and higher ed now, but fairly unique at the time we started that project. And so as I'm giving this talk, it's important to understand that I now build solutions that solve problems for all four campuses, and the types of sites I build now are different from most of the sites I've been involved in at the University. So I'm not this person who unfortunately competes with me for the name Kevin Beard. So why should you listen to me when the title of this session is that we did things wrong. We made the wrong choices. So I'm going to share the slides and try to summarize some of this stuff in blog posts, but in the presentation you'll notice there's a lot of footnotes to previous presentations at Drupal camps, Drupal cons. I've been talking about the same things for a very long time, as have several people on the teams I've worked on. They're very smart, talented people. We've done big Drupal sites, lots of Drupal sites, and I think we do them relatively well, as shown by WebExpress. The Express Insult profile is the fourth most popular distribution on Drupal.org with more than 2,500 reported installs. I know reported installs isn't a completely accurate measure, and most of these installs are coming from the University of Colorado, but it's far more popular than open social, open atrium, lightning, open EDU distributions that are a lot better known. And then every once in a while we run into sites like this, where even though all over the distribution it says this is for inspiration only, the University of Colorado does not intend for people to use this outside of our campuses. There are people, all the codes available, there are people that will do that. And it's frustrating because if you look in the source code, they don't actually do it well. So I really wish as a group we were able to support this, and I could reach out to them and ask them why they have debugging on, why they aren't optimizing their CSS. But that's not what our group does. We're only interested in selling Drupal to our university. We're not pitching this as a solution outside of CU. So most of you know the Drupal learning curve diagram. In here I actually tweeted about this earlier in the week. Somebody tracked down the origin of this, and it's actually like a video game meme from even before Drupal. So you can read about that if you're interested. But I built my first Drupal site in 2004. That was just a intranet for a computer lab where documentation about the lab was stored. And then in 2006 I had been promoted to the Director of Instructional Technology at this college. And so as part of my job managing computer labs, because I knew computers, I also managed the website. And so I launched five sites for the college, one for the college and four departments. Then I left to do some work for the Knight Foundation and worked on a couple different projects, one for the University of Nevada, teaching Drupal to journalists, and we built a lot of Drupal solutions and taught Drupal. There ended up hearing about a conference in Sunnyvale, California that was going to be talking about Drupal. Submitted a session there, got accepted, didn't really know what I was going to. Turned out it was the open source CMS summit, which is technically the first North American Drupal con where Drupal and WordPress were both so unpopular that they were at the same conference at the same time. So kind of fell into this at that point. And so part of what we were doing with the Knight Foundation was building solutions for journalism organizations. And there were two different projects, one for community television, one for community radio, that took some of our funding, and the Drupal Association matched that. And we helped fund package distributions on Drupal.org. And so I've been building distributions since distributions were a thing and built distributions for a lot of different organizations, both big and small, National Social Realtors, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Pearson Education. But I also work for a lot of small nonprofits doing Civi CRM starter kits for them, and hosting those on Pantheon to do more of a self service model. So at CU, I worked there at CU Boulder campus from 2015 to 2019. We thought we had a team of seasoned Drupal developers, we had gotten to the top of the Drupal learning curve, we cleared off all the dead bodies. And we had built this train of a large number of Drupal sites based on the same install profile. So when I got there, there were 200 sites, only about half of them were actually using the install profile, like many other groups, they started with an agency model where each site was inspired by the site before it. But we never had time to go back and update the previous sites. So 100 of them were using a modern approach to Drupal 100 required a developer to log in and manually update every time. And so we got serious about DevOps, wrote our own DevOps solution, everything was hosted on prem. And we were able to scale that service to 1000 sites once we started treating every site exactly the same way. So there are a number of presentations we've done at Drupal cons and Drupal camps about this. I'm not going to talk much more about it. Other than in 2018, we were we were sure that we had nailed this. And this train was just going to keep right on running. And then we started looking at Drupal 8. And we had basically been ignoring Drupal 8, because we were so focused on solving Drupal 7 problems. We thought, well, you know, Drupal 8 is coming, Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 was fine. Surely, everyone will consider our use case when developing Drupal 8. And it'll it'll all work fine. Obviously, there were a lot of challenges getting a large number of sites upgraded to Drupal 8. And so we had the option of getting this train these 1000 sites up to the top of the next Drupal learning curve, which wasn't wasn't that appealing. And so we we were unfaithful. We started dating other CMSs. And so we tried WordPress with Gutenberg. That was kind of cool. New something new. We tried backdrop. We did Nova, October strappy, contentful API platform, basically any CMS that someone said, Hey, you should check this out. It's a great solution. Other than Drupal, we would install and spend some time with it. But we really kind of landed on on backdrop as a potential upgrade path. And what we pitched to our leadership was well backdrop wouldn't get us to the level of ambitious sites that Drupal 8 was marketing itself to be able to build. It would be an improvement over what we were currently offering faculty and staff. And so we kind of sold it as you know backdrop being the shortcut instead of having to get this train of 1000 sites all the way to the top of this hill by rebuilding them all both the code and then going back and rebuilding the sites, we're just going to go through this tunnel and end up on the other side and it's going to be going to be great. I was actually like super excited about this. We had Nate and Jen out before to the Boulder campus before Drupal Camp Colorado, and worked with them on some of the things we thought were sticking points, we ported a bunch of modules, we launched a site on this. And then I met with my boss and other leaders in the group, and they shot it down. And I'll talk more about why, but rejecting this option with the pending end of life because this is 2018 2019 now, which the end of life was going to be in two years 2021. I just couldn't get motivated about migrating all these sites. Like it wasn't exciting for me to work on this problem anymore. So I quit. I quit Drupal. I went and did Salesforce development for two years. I just ignored everything that was happening in Drupal. And I honestly am much better for it. I don't think I would have survived the frustration of trying to tackle this problem. So I still do a lot of Salesforce development. And I'm not going to try to convince you all to give up Drupal and become Salesforce developers. But Salesforce has an open source component to it. I'm going to be back in San Francisco next month for the community commons sprint. And they're even lightning web components themselves are open source. So you can build those those are the UI building blocks within Salesforce, but you can also build solutions with lightning web components that inherit the Salesforce look and feel outside of outside of that. So that's a lot of what I do now I do very tightly coupled marketing solutions for CU, where I do both Salesforce development and Drupal development part of marketing cloud, all of those types of things. So I want to be clear about this because I'm going to say some things that are going to sound contradictory. And I'm really two minds about the about modern Drupal and the future of CMS is what I want to work on personally, it is not always aligned with what I think we should be doing as an organization. And so I titled this that the University of Colorado chose Drupal over backdrop, but I really want to own this. I chose Drupal over backdrop. And I was wrong. I pushed for backdrop. But ultimately, instead of continuing to push for what I thought was the right direction technology, I quit. I just I gave up and went and did something else. So Zach Chandler, who said the same thing at the backdrop summit. The main reason that CU didn't go with with backdrop is because no one gets fired for buying IBM. We made a decision to use Drupal a decade ago. We had been upgrading Drupal. We had a huge investment in Drupal. But going with backdrop was was really an unknown. And so it was an unproven fork. And our leadership wasn't confident that that it would it would last. Ha, I guess they proved us wrong. So it really made sense from their perspective, because they were being deluged with marketing material from from aquia, and every agency we'd ever work with who wanted the work of upgrading our sites to to Drupal eight. And so everyone was hyping the advantages of Drupal eight. As a development team, we weren't really seeing those advantages. We didn't understand why we would we would upgrade why we would spend so much money. And so the shirt I'm wearing today is what I wore every day at Drupal Con Nashville. On the back, it asked people to change my view and convinced me that upgrading 1000 sites to D8 was was the right path. And what I was really hoping is that someone would pull me aside and be like, Kevin, this is the thing this is the killer app that will make all of the effort worthwhile. And it it just didn't happen. And so we we weren't able to go with backdrop. The team was told that we needed to focus on upgrading Drupal eight. I quit and my entire team quit. None of the developers that built that solution continue to work at at CU Boulder. Most of us continue to work in Drupal. We're just not interested in upgrading all of those sites. So another thing that we hear outside of CU's leadership, and I've heard it here this week as well, is that backdrop is only for people who who don't want to change. It's for people who don't like the command line.  None of that is true. And if you take a look at backdrop, and earlier today, I learned that you can install backdrop with composer, which is just one less thing that that I have to worry about. So in a 45 minute presentation, I don't have enough time to do backdrop justice as to how awesome it is. And sitting through that summit, it's even better than than I thought it was. But I will say this that the backdrop community more than any other open source project I've ever worked in lives their values and principles. And how many of how many of you are still running Drupal seven somewhere? Okay, and how many of you are running backdrop? Okay, so yeah, you if you're not the same person, then you should talk to those people, because I I'm already sold on backdrop, but I'm I'm not currently running, running backdrop sites. And while I'm focused on the things I did wrong, and got wrong about both Drupal and backdrop, I do want to talk about the things I'm excited about as far as the future of Drupal and the type of solutions I want to build with with Drupal 10. So backdrop, obviously, is still around still gaining popularity. They do three features releases a year and have never never missed one. So the pace of change with backdrop is is slower. While at the same time, their road map and features are kind of like mind blowing how much better than Drupal seven. It is. And again, I'm not going to try to sell you on it. You can install it on pantheon or your own land or D dev instance. It is truly a much better Drupal seven experience. So the other thing that's happened, and I love looking at this because, you know, backdrop is a fork of Drupal, but they kept all of the commit history intact. So when you look at the project, you can see all of this activity until the fork and then it gets less active. And some people will look at that and be like, Well, look, it's not as popular. But it also doesn't change as much, which for the type of sites that we run at our university is a really good thing. Our sites haven't gotten spontaneously more ambitious in the last decade. They're basic sites with basic needs run and administered by people that aren't technologists and don't want to keep up with every change of every dependency off the island doing the most innovative things imaginable. But what I really like about this is that there's a whole new list of people that are contributing to backdrop core that are not were never core maintainers in Drupal. And so the community has changed its its focus changed its leadership changed its project management approach. And I really think it's all for the better. So backdrop continues to evolve. And I'll just use one example. But if you take a look at backdrop and the number of Drupal contrived modules that they've imported, it's it is really shocking how much better things are when when they get unblocked by legacy decision making. But here's a project that I'm involved in CSS injector. I haven't touched this project in five or six years. Somehow there's still 25,000 sites reportedly using it. Seven months ago after running a call for new co maintainers for over a year, I decided to post an issue saying that if no one was going to step up, we're going to market as unsupported. No one no one stepped up, no one responded 25,000 sites are going to see a notice if I click the unsupported button in the release manager. And on the last one of all the people that have contributed to this project, I'm the only one still active. And I have no interest in fixing PHP eight problems, rolling new security releases, answering any support requests for this project. But over in backdrop, not only are they actively maintaining it, they're adding new features to it. So it's it, there's life beyond Drupal for a lot of the tools that we developed over the last decade. So back drop doesn't have the same level of security as Drupal. That was somewhat true at the time. backdrop was piggybacking on the Drupal security team. But now the project is really coming to its own. It files CVE issues the same way that most open source projects do. So if you're using if you're an enterprise user using a tool like a rack knife to scan your servers for code that has potential issues, that's where services like CVE or where they get that information. And now backdrop shows up there, just like Drupal. So this is one that I have some some issues with and we've talked about this in the backdrop community that backdrop describes itself as being for small to medium sized businesses. CU is an enterprise. Okay, that's true. I mean, you can look at the backdrop about page and it literally says that's that's who it's for. But the question I keep coming back to is if Drupal seven was good enough for for this site, and this is the University of Colorado Boulder campus homepage, it's our highest traffic site of all the CU campuses. And the first releases of backdrop did nothing but improve the performance of Drupal seven. And it's a fork of what we are already using. Then how can backdrop not be better for the enterprise than what we what we're using right now. And so Stanford went forward where the University of Colorado would not and they've launched two sites. Zach Chandler talked about this earlier today. There's plenty of screencasts about this. They worked with Atten Design, Denver, Colorado, shop that is well known for doing Drupal sites. And they host this on Pantheon service that's well known for hosting Drupal sites. So the idea that backdrop isn't for enterprise is kind of, you know, misleading. If Drupal seven met your needs, and you happen to be an enterprise, backdrop is going to meet your needs just as well. So we've talked about the backdrop side of things.  Obviously, none of that is true. So let's talk about the Drupal side of things. So before Drupal con Nashville, I made a blog post, there was a very active Reddit discussion about the things that I were have our team was having issues with with Drupal eight. And I'm just going to run through them here and how these have been fixed. You know, composer one worked fine for core. It as you built larger projects, you almost inevitably had to give it all of the memory in order for it to scan the the dependency trees. Composer two has solved most of those problems and really allows a lot of things that were never possible before. And then auto update is something that's coming with composer two three. So composer, I love composer now, I would never build PHP solutions without it. And now the fact that I know that you can build backdrop sites using composer is even better. But that was something that, you know, a lot of people struggled with early on. So the no longer supporting sim links, this may be an issue that was specific to our hosting environment. Again, we hosted everything on Prem. We use sim links to sim link all of the 1000 Drupal sites. So that from an APC opcode level, they were only being cached once. If those words don't mean anything to you, that's fine. It just know that we were doing we were trying to run Drupal in a very cost effective way. We only have three PHP servers in our environment, which we've now traded for 1000 pantheon instances, which doesn't even mean 1000 containers, it's 1000 PHP containers times the number you need for the performance package you're on, plus your database container. But what that allows us to do is run different solutions with different parts of our stack site structure. So when you look at Colorado DTU, if you go to slash engineering, that is a separate Drupal site from dub dub dub. And that's part of the architecture that got us to 1000 sites, because we built it as if to look as if it's one gigantic site, but it's a bunch of individual Drupal instances. And now on pantheon with advanced global CDN, we can actually reproduce that stack site. But slash engineering doesn't have to be Drupal seven. It could be Drupal nine. It could be WordPress. It can be backdrop. It really doesn't matter as long as it adheres to our accessibility security and branding standards. So Drupal eight was slower than Drupal seven. This was really frustrating. It took more memory to run and it responded slower, not only just in page render, but with editing experience as well. And so users had to do more clicks and use more steps to achieve the same look on the page. And so obviously, symphony and PHP continue to improve Drupal 10 on PHP 81 will probably be the fastest version of Drupal ever. And modules and services have evolved to improve the editor experience as well. We use Atten's layout paragraphs at CU at Drupalcon Portland, the sessions for drop solids rocket ship and paragraph layouts were just packed. So there's obviously an appetite to improve the out of the box editing experience beyond just us. And obviously, Acquia has their cohesion purchase that they rebranded as site studio. So all of these things kind of improve that issue of solve that problem. So install profile inheritance. This is one that that I was I was very wrong about for a very long time. So if you're not aware of this issue, it's over a decade old, it was still active until recently, we had to create a be continued version of it because it was actually breaking Drupal.org. So every distribution maintainer of a popular distribution at one point or another has been involved in trying to get install profile inheritance to work. And the concept is really easy to explain now because starter kit themes in Drupal work the same way where the idea is that instead of developing an install profile for the University of Colorado Boulder, and then forking that for the University of Colorado Denver, we create a University of Colorado install profile, and then we have sub profiles that handle the individual campus configuration. And it sounds great in theory. But the reality of anyone that worked with this and Acquia's lightning distribution included this patch to make this work knows that this was just a bad time and a bad idea. And so we went so far before Unami was added into Drupal core, we showed how it could be used as a as a sub profile because Unami doesn't add any additional contrib modules. It does everything with core. It could just be a sub profile of standard. This went nowhere slowly. And so we kind of gave up on that. But this is a case where where I really had had blinders on from a decade of Drupal experience, where everything was a module. I it made sense to me that install profiles were just another type of module that you discover during during the install process process and that themes could be just another type of module that happened to have PHP template support. I like to think of my blinders as being these modern Panasonic blinders. This is a real thing. I don't understand why it exists. But Panasonic will will gladly sell you one of these. So I'll talk more about about install profiles in a bit and how that is solved. But critical contrib projects weren't mature enough. We did some presentations about web form specifically and how we struggled to get that to work in Drupal 8. And core was only getting bigger. And so like I was a big advocate to get a WYSIWYG editor in core, but adding demo content to core that was only like would only be used on a fraction of the sites that existed in every production environment on the planet seemed like the wrong direction. So core is getting smaller. So I drippled on Portland. Dries didn't say small core. But he did say smaller core, which is which is progress. So all of these things are going away. So yeah, so we talked about the backdrop problems, the issues we had with with Drupal 8. All of these things are are now resolved. So so what's the problem? What why am I why am I putting together presentations and still still talking about this? So back in 2018 2019, I was saying that there were no way that the Drupal 8 problems that we were facing were going to be solved before the Drupal 7 end of life. Ha, you got me there. Like, while Drupal 7 is still hugely popular, we just keep pushing that end of life out. So when faced with having to recreate something that took four years to write the first time in a completely new stack that would require a completely new hosting environment, with only two years to do it. That was daunting. And then we had three years and now we have four. And who knows how long we'll actually go here. But the CSS Injector conversation is one that I can't stop going back to that just because Drupal and the Drupal Association are saying that Drupal 7 is supported does not mean it is and we're going to see a lot of pain from organizations that are going to try to get contrived modules to run on PHP 8 in supported releases. You'll be able to do it with patching or forking. But the number of projects they're going to have to change hands for that to happen is going to be, it's going to be a lot. So CU leadership wouldn't do this. We didn't fall off a cliff. The Drupal 7 track just kept going. One of the other things I said about Drupal 8 is that it was going to be remembered as Drupal's Lisa, a product so expensive it didn't have a market. Now, you could argue that Lisa needed to happen in order for the Macintosh to happen in order for the iPhone to happen. And it might be right there. But I was definitely wrong about this. I thought the learning curve was just going to be too steep. And the project would completely implode. And it is too steep for sites that aren't ambitious, that have basic needs. And I really like the release cycle of backdrop as compared to modern Drupal. But I want to, I mean, everyone's familiar with this Venn diagram. And, you know, the joke is that you can only have two of these. But one of the things that working in Salesforce allowed me is to get some perspective, like step back, get out of the module, everything's a module blinders, and start seeing things for what it is. Just spoiler. If you do switch from Drupal to Salesforce, the grass is a greeter. It's the same same problems, the same chaos, just different, different cults, different chants, different t-shirts. So I'm gonna argue that if you just ignore the 10 years that took us to get up the first Drupal learning curve, and you discount that, that you can have fast, good and cheap. If you take the tunnel, if you if you instead of going and rebuilding everything and relearning everything you do, if you just use an incremental improvement that is designed for lower cost hosting and less ambitious sites, you do get all three. What you can't have is ambitious, stable and cheap. If you're going to do ambitious sites, if you're going to cater to ambitious site builders, if you're going to keep up with the off the island pace of your dependencies, it's going to be expensive. The infrastructure you need to do Drupal, modern Drupal well is not trivial. So for those of you are as old as me, if you think back to when you were still using a page building tool like Dreamweaver or the front page, if someone from the future had come back and talked to you about the DevOps and automated testing solutions you were going to need to run a modern CSS or modern CMS environment, the fact that you couldn't even just run it on your own a single web server in a second server for a database and then another server for a reverse proxy in front of all of that, would you have done it? Would you have gone down that road? Or would you still be using Dreamweaver today? So I struggle with this because most of the sites that we gave away for free are less than 20 pages. It benefits us as far as training people to teach them one way of doing things and then allow them to work on any of our sites. But the reality is that most of these sites, if front page or Dreamweaver were still well supported, could easily be managed with those solutions for far less than we're paying to do it with a modern CMS. So Drupal 10 is expensive to build. It's expensive to do well. But man, is it a lot of effort to maintain? The updates are coming so often and are so critical that all we do is deploy updates anymore. So I feel like a boiled frog that I've been doing this so long. And the temperature just kept getting higher. And we just kept doing the same thing. But we didn't really notice and we never questioned. And I know some people jumped out. Brian Olandyke from Penn State is a good friend. And he presented at DrupalCon Nashville as well as a number of other Drupal cons and kind of railed against Drupal and WordPress and the CMS way of doing things. And for whatever reason, we kept inviting him back and doing that. But he eventually quit. He said, you know, the PHP based CMS approach is just crazy. We don't have it doesn't have to be this complicated. And so the Hacks project went off and instead of just being a headless authoring solution for Drupal or WordPress, they now have the Hacks CMS, which is a completely web component based solution. So this is a an issue that we're dealing with right now. Simple SAML PHP does not work with Symphony 6. So we started evaluating Drupal 10, and what our pain points are going to be for the sites where we're currently running on it. And in that thread, this guy said, Symphony five is the current long term support version of Symphony and support until 2025. Well, that's great. Except we skipped that. So we're going from four to six. And that was only released in November. And with the current rate, they're farting out new releases, no one can keep up unless it's your day job. So why do we care what what Tim says? Well, Tim's the lead developer of the simple SAML PHP project. So if he's not going to support Symphony six, our options are to fork the thing we depend on for single sign on authentication to all of our sites. So are the goals of these sites actually more ambitious today? Does our organization have more money to spend on web DevOps, web ops? Can our organization keep up with the ambitious pace of innovation? Well, there's a simple solution for the simple SAML PHP problem. Atten and Stanford already ported it to backdrop, which doesn't depend on Symphony six and doesn't have these problems. There are other solutions to the single sign on problem. That's not going to be our Achilles heel here. But the pace of change in a project impacts the cost. And ignoring that is is putting on blinders again to to the module situation. Just because we've done Drupal doesn't mean everything has to be that said, I'm super excited about some of these things. So I personally can't wait for Drupal 10. And so I want to show you some of these. So this is the app exchange in Salesforce. This is the project browser in Salesforce. So in Salesforce, most of these are very expensive packages, but they're searchable and can be installed within within your Salesforce instance. This is incredibly popular way to find things. This is the profile module manager in our install profile. This is a solution we wrote in Drupal seven to allow site owners who could not actually install modules to install additional functionality. We needed to do this because of support. So we broke our install profile up into a core offering of features. And then I don't have the right screenshot, but we have bundles that add additional functionality because we wanted to boil our users. We wanted them to start simple and be tricked into using Drupal to the point it got more and more complicated. schema.org blueprints. This is the educational data architecture in Salesforce. Those of you that work in Salesforce and higher ed have heard of Eda and Heta for the last decade. But what this does is it allows common objects to be used across Salesforce instances. So it adds courses, enrollments, terms, program plans, requirements, facilities to your existing objects and extends the content object for students with things like application, education, history, and academic certification. Okay, blah, blah, blah. Well, what that allows you to do is, well, on the Salesforce side, it allows us to find solutions in the marketplace that are built for the educational data architecture to begin with. But the what Jacob Rockowitz has been working on with the blueprint module is a way to do something similar with schema.org. So schema.org supports organizations, supports people, supports places, creative works. But where Salesforce has an advantage is that those standards have been adopted by that community. And so schema.org and sales, what Jacob's working on is still experimental. He's been doing a lot of talks and creating YouTube videos about this. I'm super excited about it, because it doesn't end with those objects, every object I use in a site frequently asked questions. The events, everything I've done on an academic site is already covered in schema.org. The solution I'd like to see are projects within Drupal.org that are tied to those common objects, similar to what what Salesforce offers. And then distribution. And now recipes, and I know recipes is a very overused term. But rather than spend the next year bike shedding what that should be called and try to find a new word when there aren't any, we just settled on recipes. So it's recipes, but it's not the recipes that we've used before. But recipes solve some of the problems with install profiles being modules. But they were difficult to keep updated.  So and they can't be even be removed. So you adopted a install profile. And then that maintainer ghosts. Guess what, your updates are tied to that on on Drupal.org. And they can't be mixed. So you have a new site and you want to add commerce functionality, there's no way to do that. So recipes is going to solve a lot of these problems. There's functional demos out there for 94. This is a official Drupal initiative. So it will end up in core at some point. So at the University of Colorado, we're moving to GitLab. Drupal is also moving to GitLab. How how kismet? So what we're doing, though, is we're moving to it at the system level. And this is the first time that we've actually been able to collaborate with our campus development partners in the same version control system. And I know for people that work in agencies, that's like really crazy. But we have every version control system under the sun. And they don't all talk to each other. So this is huge for us. But it's huge for a number of reasons. Beyond that, because GitLab allows push rules, where the documentation talks about preventing exes. What I'm super excited about is applying push rules to a group of collaborators, ambitious site builders and limiting them to only editing twig and CSS. Why I can't trust these people to just go crazy and PHP or modify composer files. We've had to exclude them from being able to participate in maintaining their site at all, because we didn't have tools like this. This is another project that allows for config management to be done within Drupal. If you haven't checked this out, it requires a premium plan on GitLab to be able to do project tokens. But it is another way to engage with ambitious site builders without them ever having to use the command line, Irina. This is this is how I'm dealing with people like you. So yeah, so this is designed to leverage modern DevOps, but hide the fact from our users, but engage them in a way we weren't able to do with Drupal 7 because twig is not the same as PHP template. These are not PHP files. We can trust people to make design edits. And then autopilot. This is I'm not going to talk about this too much. Pantheon will be more than happy to talk your ear off and sell you on this. But we've actually reversed our whole DevOps deployment process to allow site builders access to this tool. Because it doesn't really make any sense for us to run behavioral testing on the functional aspects of code. If when we go to deploy it, it results in visual errors. And this is an error in the most recent update to bootstrap Barrio. It's a base theme we use on some of our sites. It was a security update that also included the last year and a half of feature development because Drupal is a contrived project and everyone not everyone does semantic versioning correctly. So this failed the visual regression test, you can see well, maybe you can't see but there's an additional white box around the request info button, because someone added additional web form styling to the bootstrap Barrio theme. And the result was we didn't move forward with this. But we've completely re architected what we're doing so that we're involving site owners in this process. So again, Drupal backdrop, both great solutions. The current plan at CU is to rebuild these 1000 sites on triple eight triple nine. Oh, wait, no, we're Yeah, we we can't get the the code done fast enough to actually start the migration project before the code is already end of life. So I'm going to make the same pitch that I made three years ago about maybe using backdrop for some of these sites. And now that Stanford has proved that they can be hosted on Pantheon. And Stanford did it. So it must be great for everyone, right? Everyone loves Stanford. So So I feel like we're at this this kind of breaking point where we've had just like the triple seven, everything's a module phase. We're looking at every site we build as if Drupal is the is the answer for it. And there are groups out there that balance between Drupal and WordPress. But I'd like to add backdrop to that mix and kind of take the blinders off and evaluate sites based on their needs and how ambitious they are and the total cost of maintaining them. And I'm not going to have to make the decision about which sites go where because I read has already written up a great chart that walks you through this process. So I don't know if we're going to be able to do backdrop. It's definitely going to be an easier argument to make now than it it was several years ago. But part of the reason for putting this together is that I am going to be making this pitch to our leadership in a few weeks. So that's really all I have. I'd be happy to stick around and answer whatever questions anyone has. Or if you think I'm completely wrong again, please speak up because I would like to avoid spending the next decade of my life trying to push something up a hill that shouldn't be on top of it. That's it.