Seanth

(via Monastery | Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

by Jason Hickel, Arsalan Khan

When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake” it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100,000 copycat versions.

Critiques of the fad thus far have pointed out that it looks nothing at all like the real Harlem Shake, and that – as Harlem residents have been quick to assert – it appropriates black working-class style without due acknowledgment, leaving no room for the original.  These are important points, but there’s yet more to explore about the Harlem Shake craze. As by far the most popular meme of the year so far, it begs for analysis: Why is it so infectious? What does it tap into in our collective consciousness that makes it work so well?

Of course, one might reasonably ask why anyone should care about the meaning of such a flimsy, fleeting fad like the Harlem Shake, which in a matter of weeks will be eclipsed by yet another viral meme. What is there really to say about such a bizarre collective ritual?  It’s just a bunch of young people having fun, one might say – leave it alone and enjoy its entertainment value.

But there’s more to it than that.  We suggest that the Harlem Shake videos have become so popular because they dramatize aspirations for freedom that lie at the very center of Western culture.  But the particular notion of freedom at play here is one that has been thoroughly co-opted by consumer capitalism in a manner that undermines the possibility for emancipatory politics.

To get at this, let’s begin by considering the general formula of the meme itself.  Each video offers 30 seconds of footage divided evenly into two parts.  First we’re presented with a mundane setting, generally formal or regimented, with a single non-conformist doing a random dance to which no one pays any attention.  By far the most popular is the one with the Norwegian soldiers, which has well over 50 million views. It presents us with CCTV-like footage of uniformed cadets in rigid lines, their bodies stiffened to attention.  Other popular versions include office workers – again, sometimes in uniform – sitting behind rows of desks and staring like zombies into their computer screens.

Then the bass drops, the music shifts, and the scene cuts to total mayhem: everyone wears unique costumes, generally with masks, often scantily clad, and each person engages in their own completely idiosyncratic dance.  The costumes and dances are usually absurd: one might wear a sleeping bag while squirming on the ground, bash against a wall while wearing a Viking costume, or stand in the corner with a dinosaur mask doing pelvis thrusts.  It all seems totally random; indeed, the more random the better.

A theory of freedom

These videos are so compelling because they stage a simple and elegant contrast between the rigidity and monotony of everyday life and work, and an indomitable spirit that aims to escape, to transcend, to overcome stifling social norms. In doing so, the meme taps into a long tradition of classical liberal thought, resonances of which can be found in thinkers as diverse as Voltaire, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This tradition holds that liberation – the emancipation of the individual – requires separating the self from social norms, resisting mass conformity, and questioning the rules imposed by arbitrary authorities.

This Western conception of freedom assumes a fundamental tension between the individual and society: the former is considered to be authentic (and prior) while the latter is considered to be artifice (and imposed).  There is nothing natural or universal about this idea.  Ethnographers have pointed out that people in other cultures assume no such tension between the individual and society.  Furthermore, on an analytical level it makes no sense, for individuals cannot exist outside of social norms. As Clifford Geertz has so famously put it, “there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture”; people without culture would be “unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases.”

In an increasing number of the Harlem Shake videos, this individual-versus-society motif gets played out as a story of repressed libidinal energy. Polite, formal decorum in the first half turns suddenly into nakedness and overt sexual expression, suggesting that wild, chaotic desire always lies just below the surface of stable everyday life.  This plays up the Freudian version of individual freedom that is so popular in Western thought: the id, the source of authentic desire, always strives to rupture the artificial boundaries set for it by the ego (the rational, realistic self) and the super-ego (the moralizing force of church and parents).

The meme also has hints of a kind of anti-capitalist, or at least anti-bureaucratic, logic.  It recalls Max Weber’s famous assertion that capitalism is like an “iron cage,” typified by that distinctly modern institution: bureaucracy. Weber writes, “The bureaucratic organization, with its specialization of trained skills, its delineation of competencies, its rules and hierarchical relations of obedience… [is] in the process of erecting a cage of bondage which persons—lacking all powers of resistance—will perhaps one day be forced to inhabit.”

This sentiment is expressed most poignantly in the videos that show nameless workers performing mundane tasks in a drab, boring environment.  The image here is one of pure alienation and the dehumanizing force of modern labor, which is then transcended through the indomitable spirit of the individual.  This explains why the video of Norwegian soldiers has become so popular: it sets up arbitrary authority, rigid rules, and mass conformity for attack, and explodes against them with a veritable orgy of craziness.

Resistance without politics

Now, what’s interesting about the Harlem Shake videos is that the program of resistance and freedom that they espouse has no substantive political referent.  The meme taps into a deep and pervasive urge for a more egalitarian and equitable political-economic system but then offers absurdist fantasy as the best solution.  Resistance is focused solely on non-conformist individual self-expression, to the point where pelvis-thrusting octopuses and light sabre-wielding Yoshis become icons of liberation.  Wild desire and absurdist behaviour come to substitute for political activism, suggesting a rather grim outlook on the possibility of emancipatory politics in our age.

The concept of resistance that these videos perform is not really resistance at all.  In fact, it participates in wider discourses about libidinal desire and individualism that are central to our contemporary capitalist moment (as we argue here). A quick survey of billboards, television commercials, and magazine ads would be enough to reveal that libidinal desire and individualism have become stock-in-trade for corporate marketers.  Companies make a great deal of money by setting up the idea of conformist alienation and then selling products that promise to help consumers express their real, authentic selves.

Rebellion, in this sense, is no longer a threat to the establishment; rather, since at least the 1970s onward, it has become a commodity that is openly bought and sold on the market.  The cultural critic Thomas Frank has aptly referred to this process of co-optation as “the conquest of cool.”

Along these lines, we can see the form of resistance that the Harlem Shake meme dramatizes as deeply complicit with the logic of consumer capitalism. It is a form of resistance that operates as capitalism’s own recuperative frame: its logic (namely, the imperative to desire against all constraints and to give full rein to individual self-expression) offers an avenue for rebellion that loops back to support the goals of capital accumulation. 

This meme has such global appeal because it embodies the great promise of capitalism. It juxtaposes two extremes: the extreme of mindless, monotonous work with the extreme of libidinal freedom. This is the great promise that capitalism extends to youth around the world: if you spend your days and nights doing the menial, repetitive tasks that corporations depend upon, then your reward will be an orgy of unlimited freedom in the form of consumptive power.

Absurdism and class privilege

But there’s yet another element of the Harlem Shake that is worth drawing out, namely, the absurdism that it promotes.  Absurdism has gained widespread social currency over the past decade, particularly among upper middle class youth and college students.  In addition to the Harlem Shake videos, consider the recent “planking” craze, where individuals place their bodies in a rigidly horizontal pose in random public spaces, take pictures, and then post them on Facebook.  Facebook is increasingly littered with absurdist photographs along these lines.

One might read this fascination with absurdism as an expression of political nihilism or even escapism: young people who have worked hard in pursuit of success realize that the old certainties that their parents enjoyed are no longer guaranteed.  Given the realities of climate change, financial crisis, economic decline, and the capture of the political system by corporate elites, students graduating from college may not be able to find stable careers, command secure salaries, save money, buy houses, start families, and participate meaningfully in the democratic process.  Absurdist behaviour reflects these anxieties.  It says: “the world is riddled with chaotic uncertainties; there’s not much hope, so we might as well have some fun.”

There is some value to this perspective.  After all, anxieties about one’s place in a rapidly changing economic landscape run deep.  But the people who deploy absurdist symbols –primarily middle and upper middle class youth – are not the ones who are really being screwed by the system.  In light of this, a more accurate reading might be that absurdism becomes a means with which to signal privilege, a way of saying: “I am so certain of success that I don’t need to take myself too seriously.”  Working or lower-class youth aspiring to middle class status are much less likely to violate norms of decorum in the face of authority; they know what’s at stake, and they have too much to lose.  They literally cannot afford to be absurd.  

Absurdism communicates a certain willingness to play with symbols that suggests a familiar ease with the world, with meaning, and with authority. This is the domain of elite class privilege, and particularly of white male privilege. We can go further still: absurdism not only reflects acquired status, it also enables access to that status.  Mastering absurdism signals one’s ability to speak a certain class language; it flags participation in a distinctly white-collar world of college educated youth.

If this is true, then we can circle back to add another element to the common critique that we raised in the beginning.  In the process of appropriating black working-class symbols, the Harlem Shake meme transforms them through absurdism to be totally inaccessible to working-class people and then – in a twist of cruel irony – uses them as markers of privilege.  This further underscores our point that the meme not only peddles an apolitical concept of resistance, it does so in a manner that bolsters the very system that it seeks to overthrow.

This should not be surprising to us, for, as Marx argued so eloquently in the Grundrisse, capital cannot abide limits to profitability; it always converts them to its favor.  This is particularly true when it comes to political resistance, which can so easily be neutralized or appropriated.  The take-home point here is that we have to guard against this tendency with vigilance, to ensure that our deepest urges for social change – our cries against alienation and domination – don’t get plundered of their true potential.  

It is not often spoken about, but it's an unsettling fact that the military had some trouble keeping those precious nuclear bombs in the air during transport at wartime, as well as throughout the Cold War when the Soviet threat had everyone on their toes.

Some were lost and never recovered, sometimes the aircraft carrying them would crash, and on two occasions, the bombs were accidentally dropped on unsuspecting U.S. soil. Walter Gregg knew about the willy-nilly bomb handling all too well, because he had one dropped on his house

Clearly, if a nuclear bomb was dropped in a populated area of South Carolina and actually detonated, it would have been catastrophic, and impossible for the military to keep relatively quiet. Luckily for Gregg, his family, and the rest of Horry County, the bomb wasn't armed with its devastating nuclear rod. Despite the absence of that major component, it was not exactly a holiday to have a Mark 6 bomb dropped on your head from 15,000 ft. 

In 1958, the Cold War was in paranoidal full swing, and the B-47 Stratojet flying over South Carolina that fine Spring day was required to carry the nuclear weapon, in the likelihood that all hell could break loose at any moment. On its way to the United Kingdom to take part in "Operation Snow Flurry", the crew was just getting comfortable for their transatlantic trip when a fault light began to glimmer, indicating that the bomb's harness locking pin had not engaged.

Navigator Captain Bruce Kulka went to investigate, and in a colossal act of carelessness combined with a disturbing lack of safety features, accidentally hit the emergency release pin as he reached around the bomb to pull himself up. The 8,500 lb. device hit the bomb bay doors, forcing them open, and as Kulka watched in horror, screamed into the wooded rural area of Mars Bluff.

Walter Gregg was enjoying the day with his family that March 11th. Mucking about in his shop with his son while his daughters and a friend played in the yard, Gregg paid no mind to the bomber flying overhead, a common sight in those days. His wife was working in the house, and Gregg's cousin piddled about elsewhere on the property--all in all it was a peaceful day like any other. What happened next caught his full attention, and shattered the productive buzz of contentment--a tremendous blast that seemed to come from directly above shook the ground, filling the air with smoke and dust.

Gregg, stunned and with ears ringing, frantically searched through the chaos for his family, following the sounds of their screams through the smoke. Assuming the plane had crashed, his mind tried to wrap itself around the crater that now existed where his garden was just moments before, the hole stretching across 75 ft., and 30 ft. deep. The pieces of ground that had been where the empty void was now began crashing back to earth around him, some of them weighing hundreds of pounds.

Miraculously, as the dust settled and each family member was accounted for, the Gregg family was found battered and bruised, but intact. Everyone had survived with only minor injuries, Mrs. Gregg suffering the worst of it with a gash to her head. The house and several outbuildings were destroyed, the garden pulverized, and several nearby homes were damaged by the debris but everyone walked away, survivors of 7,600 lbs. of explosives dropped directly on their heads by the U.S. Air Force.

From then on, all flights were required to ensure bombs were locked down properly before takeoff, a rule that you'd think would be instituted before accidentally dropping a bomb on someone's house. The military eventually paid Gregg off, giving him $54,000 to start over with. Gregg became friends with the crew of the aircraft that accidentally blew up his property, and remained pen pals with them for many years, long after moving away from Mars Bluff. The crater is an a heavily wooded area and is becoming harder and harder to see but can still be spotted, at least for now.

arquerio:

Arnside by TeaCake90 on Flickr.

kilwirra:

moebius in space planet by planettreasures on Flickr.

Apparition (by Mike Falkner)

KiaOra culvert (by Camera Shy - uk)

Just a few years after the “Anatomy Murderers” Burke and Hare were apprehended in Edinburgh, two boys discovered these tiny dolls, each nested into a miniature coffin hidden away in the city park.

At first theories on the dolls significance ranged from witchcraft to child’s toys, but eventually it began to seem that the 17 tiny figures could be effigies for the 17 murder victims a decade earlier.

Between 1827-1828 William Burke and William Hare lured in and murdered their lodgers in a scheme to provide fresh bodies to the local anatomy school. Dr. Robert Knox, a brilliant and well known local anatomy lecturer purchased the bodies, and most likely knew that something was a bit suspicious about his supply chain.

The crimes were exposed when another lodger discovered the body of a previous tenant, and reported it to the police. Burke and Hare were apprehended along with Burke's mistress, Helen McDougal, and Hare's wife, Margaret Laird. Despite finding the body of this last lodger in Knox’s classroom, ready for dissection, the evidence was not truly damning until Hare turned on Burke, and gave a full confession. William Burke was hanged in Jan, 1829. His body was handed over for dissection, and his skeleton and a book bound from his skin remain in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh.

The four inch long dolls were in the hands of a private collector until 1901, when eight of them were handed over to the the National Museum Scotland, where they can be visited today. Although it is generally agreed that the mysterious little dolls are associated with the crimes of Burke & Hare, no one is certain who among the killers created them. DNA studies conducted in 2005 using DNA extracted from Burke’s skeleton attempted to prove that they had been created to assuage the guilty conscience of William Burke, but the test proved inconclusive, so the truth of their creation may never be known.

Burke's death mask, skeleton, and a book bound in his skin are across town at the Surgeon's Hall Museum.

Deep within Chicago’s infamous Graceland Cemetery is an eerie and unsettling monument known as Inez Clark.

Although hoisted on a stone pedestal and completely encased in glass, this haunting statue of a little girl and her parasol is easy to miss, particularly since legend holds that she regularly comes to life and explores the cemetery. Since the 1980’s, security guards and tour bus drivers have attested to the statue’s unexplained disappearance during the night and reappearance the next morning.

Another mystery surrounding the monument is who is actually buried beneath it. Although the plaque reads “Inez Clark 1873-1880,” Chicago cemetery authority Helen Sclair claims the occupant of the grave is actually a little boy named Amos Briggs.

According to Sclair, the statue was designed and built by sculptor A. Gagel, creator of another statue similar to Inez Clarke’s in nearby Rosehill Cemetery. Sclair believes these statues were merely for advertisement purposes and is unable to say where Inez is actually buried or if the little girl even existed.   

Obviously, there is plenty of intrigue surrounding Inez Clark whether or not one is inclined to believe in the paranormal, and no tour of Graceland Cemetery can be complete without visiting her statue, or the place where her statue ought to be.

 

Conolly’s Folly located in County Kildare, Ireland, is unique for a variety of reasons. It is not every day that you come across a large stone structure of no particular religious association comprised of interlocking arches and obelisks in the green Irish countryside.

What's more, the Folly's physical characteristics are not the only ingredient that makes it unique. It was constructed in 1740 at the height of the Irish famine of 1740-1741. In was built so that the local farmers might make some money working on its construction and not starve. In this way it is a centuries-old precursor to some of the projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Katherine Conolly commissioned the structure. Conolly was the widow of William Conolly who had been a prominent member of the Irish House of Commons and died the richest man in Ireland. The arches and obelisks are decorated with stone eagles and pineapples, and the central obelisk reaches a height of 140 feet.

Conolly’s Folly stands on the grounds of Castletown House. One of largest and most imposing private homes in all of Ireland, it was built for William Conolly and was where his widow lived after his death in 1729. Saved from demolition in the 1960s by Desmond Guinness, the house has been restored, and parts are now open to the public.

These days, both the house and Folly itself are part of the Irish Georgian Society, which looks after historical landmarks in Ireland. It is currently being restored through the Office of Public Works, as over the years it has fallen into disrepair.

[Source: Changizi News]

With a new pair of stylish shades, people with colorblindness are beginning to see the world just as the rest of us do. The corrective glasses were actually created as tools to detect blood oxygenation and flow beneath the surface of the skin. But then colorblind people started trying them on, and they began to see the world in a whole new way.

The glasses were created by 2AI Labs, a company co-founded by evolutionary biologist Mark Changizi when he left Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute in New York. At 2AI, Changizi continues to conduct research, investigating how the brain processes visual information and searching for the answers to questions such as why we see color and what sort of tricks occur in the brain to create optical illusions.

Last summer the Boise, Idaho-based company developed three pairs of glasses called O2Amps. Special filters in the lenses either amplify the perception of blood oxygenation beneath the skin, blood concentration, or both. In this way the glasses allow users to detect emotions more clearly. Hospitals are already conducting trials with the glasses that can help nurses spot veins – many of us know firsthand how difficult, and painful, locating veins can be. They could also serve as a kind of frontline lie detector for police officers and security guards.

2AI then got the idea that the O2Amps might help people with red-green deficiency, a genetic condition affecting 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women that renders them incapable of distinguishing between red and green. Last November 2AI began trials testing their O2Amp Oxy-Iso to see if it could correct red-green deficiency. The Oxy-Iso enhances the perception of blood oxygenation while eliminating the perception of blood concentration. The user testimonials for the $297 eyewear have thus far been promising.

With O2Amps, red-green colorblind people were able to pass the Ishihara Color Test for the first time. [Source: Wikipedia]

After taking the Ishihara Color Test, those graphics in which numbers are hidden in a sea of reddish and greenish dots, one reviewer posted on the company website, “…the Oxy-Iso lens blew me away. All of a sudden, the numbers just appeared on the screen!”

There are some drawbacks to the glasses, however. One consequence of boosting reds and greens is that detection of blues and yellows is compromised. Daniel Bor, a neuroscience professor at the University of Sussex described that while he could now score perfect on the Ishihara Test, he could no longer see the yellow-green light on his daughter’s baby monitor (and thinking it was off when it was actually on). Also, yellow street lights will essentially become invisible. For this reason 2AI warns users that the glasses should not be worn driving. So users will have to make a calculated decision about how much blue-yellow perception they’re willing to sacrifice to regain red-green perception. Changizi believes that overall the corrective eyewear are exactly that, saying the “Oxy-Iso spreads the color confusion more evenly around the color-wheel, rather than having it concentrated only on red-green.”

In a book released in 2010 entitled “Vision Revolution,” Changizi argues that humans are better than other mammals at perceiving color and we evolved this heightened capacity specifically to detect oxygenation variations beneath the skin of those around us. This allows us, according to Changizi, the valuable ability to perceive the emotional state of our friends and foes – when they blush or blanche – just by looking at them.

But rather than giving us a more precise fight-or-flight trigger, the O2Amps could help caregivers and police officers do their jobs better, help the colorblind to see reds and greens, maybe even make poker players better at calling someone’s bluff. Keeping their own hand close to their vest, 2AI doesn’t offer details about the technology. Nor, as far as I could find, has there been any scientific documentation about how well the glasses actually work. But based on the growing number of testimonials, it seems as though red-green colorblind people already consider the O2Amps a beautiful sight to behold.

New research has revealed key features in proteins needed for life to function on Mars and other extreme environments. Scientists found subtle but significant differences between the core proteins in