In this 12-frame animated gif, pixel artist Kirokaze imagines a small sliver of a rainy day in a world of "thought vigilance" and random ID checks, where a mysterious woman sips coffee and watches the world rush by, twirling a knife idly in her hand. Check out more of Kirokaze's work on Deviantart, or follow them on Twitter.
Taylor SwiftI am so happy to have suggested this interview and I am so happy with how it came out.
My name is Mel Croucher. The history books say I'm the founder of the UK video games industry. My wife says I'm a benign idiot. I started out as a musician because you had to be in a band by law back then. Later I became an architect, but I wasn't very good, so I ran away to join the circus. I called the circus Automata, which was in November 1977, and began by broadcasting my games software over the radio.
I have done many things and experienced many wonders, but I seem to come back to videogames when I want to push the boundaries a bit. My current game features the last performance of Sir Christopher Lee, the old tart. It's called Eggbird and involves the creative uses of avian bodily wastes.
One of those big iMacs, one of those little iPads, one of those pocket-fondler iPhones, a giant Korg Music Workstation, a hollow-body cherry red Ibanez guitar with a weapons-grade tremolo arm.
Pages for writing books, Logic Pro for editing and mixing soundtracks, ScreenFlow for cobbling video. I also use an app called Paper for sketching graphics and animations, and of course GarageBand for sketching audio. And the most important software of all.. a warm, damp Irish Setter.
I have achieved my dream setup, right here in the future. When I was young and the world was monochrome, I imagined a setup where I could travel everywhere and anywhere I wanted, lugging some sort of transportable machine, that would allow me to create the stuff of my imagination. Well, it's even better than I thought.
When I'm not wandering the planet and working away, I work from my home base on the South coast of the amusingly-named United Kingdom. It's a very tall, very old house by the sea, with miles of beach and ancient ramparts to walk on, a co-op on the corner to shop in, and a micro-brewery across the road to drink in, the National Health Service to patch me up when I am broken, and the Welfare State that pays me a senior citizens pension once every four weeks. Truly, this is paradise.
Thank you for reading this. Now go and do something wonderful.
Taylor SwiftSo awesome
What our brains learn, they can also unlearn—including what makes us anxious. That's the idea behind Neurotic Neurons, an interactive work by Nicky Case that explores the neuroscience of anxiety, and particularly the theory of Hebbian learning, wherein "neurons that fire together, wire together" and create associations in the mind. (more…)
Taylor SwiftIt is always amazing when someone posts a song they made using gear you have that makes you realize you have no idea what your own gear is capable of
Taylor SwiftGun politics aside, I share this explicitly for the second footnote
So let me tell you about my day yesterday.
I am on one of my periodic trips to western Pennsylvania and I chose this day to do some exploring. If you are out here, most of the history is kind of depressing, although I did run across the Edward Abbey historical marker since he is actually from here. Anyway, among my destinations yesterday were the newly opened Flight 93 National Memorial visitor center (very minimalist, not sure what I think about it) and a visit to the the site where the wealthy Pittsburgh-based hunting club’s dam broke causing the Johnstown Flood. These are 2 of the 6 worst disasters in American history by death toll.* So I was feeling pretty great about our history, as you can imagine. Then while I was out, I heard about the shooting at Umpqua Community College. This hits a bit close to home, although not quite as close as in 1998 when my high school Spanish teacher was killed by her son who then went on to shoot up the other high school in town. It’s an hour south of my home town. In fact, in high school I was dragged to a hilariously awful Christian rock show in the auditorium at that school.**
So yesterday was a full embrace of the massive death that happens to the people of this nation. That it has become so common because people love their guns so much is even more depressing. There’s almost nothing to say at this point, except that I would like to see the Second Amendment repealed, the government to invade your homes and take all your guns, and those who resist should serve time in prison for breaking my new anti-gun laws. And yes, I would indeed like a pony.
But I notice that each of these three disasters have a particularly evil person behind them. So it’s time for an LGM readership poll. Who is the most evil? Is it Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of 9/11? Henry Clay Frick, the comically evil capitalist who was head of the club that did not maintain the dam that caused the Johnstown Flood? Or Wayne LaPierre, head of an organization that is the U.S. equivalent of the wealthy Saudis who fund terrorism?
Personally, I’d say it’s a tie. Wayne LaPierre and his henchmen are as evil as Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen. And Frick and his fellow Gilded Age capitalists are as evil as the other two. But maybe we can lighten up our morning by discussing who is actually the most evil.
Good times America. Good times.
*In order, it’s the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1928 Florida hurricane, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Johnstown Flood. Hurricane Katrina is 8th.
** The music was, of course, atrocious. But the real comedy came when the drummer for this band, who, even obvious to my 1990 very unhip self, was not very far in the closet for a Christian rock band, got upset that his electric drum kit was having some problems. He had to switch to real drums. He then told us how he asked God for His forgiveness over his anger and frustration over the electric drums and that it was a lesson for all of us. Truly a classic moment.
Taylor SwiftWhoa this is great
We haven’t had a thread about the nation’s best band of the last decade lately, so it’s worth noting that “Little Miami” might be the best song Wussy has ever recorded. Chuck Cleaver thinks so anyway. I can’t really argue, although there are 5 or 6 others that I think have a claim to the title.
"a rambunctious, riot grrrl, Katamari-meets-Grand Theft Auto physics game" - Author's description
Download on itch.io (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Much of this analysis is obvious, but it reminds me of how terrible Hillary Clinton is explaining what she started believing in yesterday. No wonder her husband loves George H.W. Bush — Poppy wanted to be president because, well, because.
Obama claimed an evolution on the issue that had always been transparently political hogwash, but he got a pass on it because Obama never labored as poorly as Clinton to convey his identity. His books and his best speeches played off — and celebrated — the difficulty of coming to understand who he was in this world. Obama put himself through the trials of identity before anyone else could. Like the comic who can vivisect himself with sharper words than any heckler, he’d already endured the most reflective scrutiny through his own self-appraisal: If you were going to pull apart Barack Obama and his race and heritage and experience and put him back together into not only a person but a purpose, you’d have to do a better job than he did. Ultimately, that surer sense of self bought him a lot of indulgence from people who felt political sympathy with him. It’s a lot easier to pick and choose when to be partially full of shit when people can walk away still convinced of who you are.Hillary is not so lucky. Even if we were to stipulate that Hillary Clinton is merely an awkward candidate who keeps accidentally obscuring a wonderful human being yearning to be a great statesman, who cares? We will never know for sure. A few weeks ago, in New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister suggested an intriguing idea: “Barring the possibility that more serious breaches are turned up, these emails may do the work a thousand soft magazine profiles never could have: letting us in on the fact that after all these years, we do know Hillary Clinton. And she’s not half bad.” Traister focused on emails in which Clinton seems down to earth. Struggling to get a fax machine to work properly. Or eager to call it a day. (“Now, let’s wrap this up in the Senate and go drink something unhealthy!”)
The other obvious point — “understanding and careful consideration are much higher-order functions than succumbing to fear, nurturing resentment and rejoicing in punishment” — deserves mention in another column that omits careerism as a lower order function.
Taylor Swift10/10 Perfect Looks
We met Miro – a 21-year-old student with short blonde hair – on the street in Harajuku near the famous LaForet department store.
Miro’s fuzzy crop top sweater is by MinkPink, worn with Unif ripped skinny jeans and Pameo Pose “Pogo Dance Shoes” platform loafers with giant safety pin buckles. Accessories include several stud earrings and a small Fig&Viper shoulder purse.
Miro told us that Unif is her favorite fashion brand.
Click on any photo to enlarge it.
"Getting coffee, making copies, tampering with powers beyond your control. You know, normal intern things. Now if only you were getting paid for it..." - Author's description
Download it on the 2015 IF Comp site
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Deanna Van Buren, the architect who collaborated with Jonathan Blow on The Witness, explains how her art could contribute to games that feel and look more real and compelling. ...
Taylor SwiftI AM SO HAPPY FOR CONTEXT FOR ONE OF MY FAVORITE YOUTUBE VIDEOS EVER
Chad Goldwasser, owner of downtown Austin’s opening-soon monument to douchebaggery, Teller’s, was interviewed by the Chronicle’s Kevin Curtin, and the former credits his “massively powerful positive energy and an incredible fuckin’ attitude” for his ascent in the fields of real estate and motivational speaking. If you’re wondering how that skill set might translate to world of live music entertainment, well, I have no idea whatsoever. But if this clip is anything to go, the city’s newest impresario seems to be a totally stable, centered individual who should never be compared to a TICKING TIME BOMB.
Taylor SwiftI cannot stop reading about automated click fraud
Taylor SwiftLook, you aren't NOT going to see this during Trash Night eventually
"Pick your favorite Twin Peaks character and Dance Dance with Leland Palmer" - Author's description
Play / download on itch.io (Browser, Windows)
Taylor SwiftLove love love love her
We smolder…
Jonathan Bogart: Of course soft-focus flanged snyths are going to get me; but Sullivan’s Bligean authority is what makes this more than just an exercise in empty ’80s nostalgia.
[8]
David Sheffieck: That synth sample is fantastic, but it’s Sullivan’s delivery that makes the song. Graceful and throaty, she sells every emotion: the spoken interlude might be my favorite, but her feather-light skip of the “Call me crazy…” refrain and the gospel elevation on the bridge are nearly as strong. It’s moving and commanding work, easy to get swept up in.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: Interpolating After 7’s “Ready or Not” this well will pretty automatically get you at least a 6 from me, especially doing so with those plush 1985 keys. But then on top of it, you get those warm, slightly eerie massed backing vocals on the chorus. You get the “Call me crazy but I think I found the love of my love” refrain. You get Sullivan reminding you that her voice is Blige-ian perfection. And you get a single even better than “Mascara.”
[9]
Alfred Soto: The year’s best album sounds less impressive carved into radio singles, but Jazmine Sullivan’s quiet commitment to her libretto should persuade anyone who misses Mary J. Blige and Toni Braxton on hot R&B area. But I hear differences. In the first place, Sullivan’s a better writer than either. Secondly, she thinks pleading is beneath her — instead she revels. In “Let It Burn,” she lets the chorus top line do the reveling and the call and response harmonies the blunt stating of fact.
[9]
Maxwell Cavaseno: This is just… not fuego. It’s a lot of good singing, which is fine — Jazmine Sullivan could make the most tedious indexes of my biggest book sound tremendous. But as per usual the song is disconnected and vague to the point of inanity, and the production here sounds like a Maze Opening Act 4th Single’s B-Side level of boring. I just get no joy out of slagging Sullivan’s output, but I still want to know where it’s going because the returns diminish with time.
[4]
Brad Shoup: The bass knocks, the synth crawls at you like a mist: this is love for horror-movie survivors. Can you feel it tearing you apart? Feel it creepin’ in your heart? Dare you make it through the double feature?
[8]
Taylor SwiftYou really gotta watch the Game Center CX voyage through this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JkiEOLh7SY
Mutant Sounds reborn as a radio show
The crate digging blog Mutant Sounds has been reborn – again – but this time as a monthly radio show. Founded in 2007 by Jim, the file sharing website made a name for itself sharing obscure, esoteric records. Under legal pressure it first closed down in 2013. A few days later it came back as a net label, releasing rare, unreleased or out-of-print music via a drop box account with help from the Free Music Archive.
In its new radio show format, Mutant Sounds is a two hour broadcast hosted by Matt Castille and Eric Lumbleau on the online radio station Dublab. Called Mutant Sounds Radio with Vas Deferens Organization, the show is scheduled to run between 8–10pm on the second Friday of the month. The first broadcast happened on 11 September. Check it out here.
In his later writings, the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno is constantly fixated on the question of what it is to ‘philosophise after Auschwitz’: how can we, that is, think philosophically in a way that does not do violence to the historical fact of the Holocaust, the immense human suffering of those who died in the camps?
On 20th September 2015, the news broke that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, had had sexual intercourse with the head of a dead pig while at university. This historical fact leaves us with an analogous, but opposite problem to Adorno’s. How can we think philosophically in a way that does sufficient violence to the existence of a world in which the head of our government has had sex with a pig?
At this point, over 24 hours since the allegations first surfaced, it no longer matters if they are true. Apparently there is photographic evidence somewhere of the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, performing the act he is said to have performed on the pig. If it appears, we’ll know. But really, it’s not all that important that we are ever given this sort of evidence for the claim. We know. To look at the face of David Cameron is now, and always has been, to look into the face of a pigfucker: his face, is the face of a man who fucks pigs. I think probably we always secretly suspected he was a pigfucker: there was always something a bit off about his face, that previously would have been attributed, I think, to a sort of posh-guy phoniness, like he was trying to convince us he was just a regular bloke whilst constantly struggling against the urge to smash a bottle of champagne over a tramp. But now we know, now we know what it really was: the fact is that David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was always secretly trying to suppress the memory of the time that he fucked a pig.
And this fact, the fact of what the Prime Minister has done to a pig, with his penis, makes complete and total sense: indeed, at this point, now we’ve had time enough to start to digest the news, I’m tempted to say that it is the only thing that makes sense any more. And this is why we no longer need any evidence for it: asking someone to offer a proof of the proposition that the Prime Minister fucks pigs, would be a bit like asking them to provide a proof of the external world. If anything is true, then this is. All other propositions now must be evaluated in the light of the overwhelming truth of the fact that the Prime Minister has had sex with a pig.
On the one hand, this might be considered an incredibly depressing realisation. For us today, the most true thing is that the Prime Minister has had sex with a pig. What does this say about the universe? There is no God, effectively, except for the Prime Minister, David Cameron, sticking his cock, whether flaccid or erect (that is actually an interesting question, for the interpreters of this event to consider as schools of thought develop around it, over the coming millennia) into the head of a dead pig during an initiation into some weird Oxford sex club for poshos as a teenager. What grounds all meaning in the universe, is effectively something utterly pointless, meaningless, and disgusting. Why bother to exist at all, in a world where the only truth is the Prime Minister fucking a pig?
On the other hand though, the realisation that the only really true thing is the Prime Minister having had full sexual intercourse (to completion? Again, a question for the scholars) with the dead head of a pig must be felt to be incredibly liberating. The Prime Minister fucked a pig: this is the truth of all reality, so reality doesn’t matter! We’re free to do what we like with it! The Prime Minister fucked a pig: that’s it. Beyond this nothing is true, and everything is permitted.
Reality typically manifests as a demand to obey it, to bow to it in our thinking or our action. This might involve a demand to do justice to it ethically, as Adorno was compelled to do by the fact of Auschwitz; or it might, more familiarly, just involve the demand that we bend ourselves to its laws (the laws of physics, of the marketplace, or of our governmental institutions). With #pigfuckgate, all of that is thrown out of the window. Why the fuck should I obey anything about reality? Reality has installed a pigfucker as Prime Minister. In so doing it has, as far as I see things, voided all claims it has over me. No longer do I need to attempt to think sensibly, or realistically. Doing so would only be to capitulate, on some level, to the pigfuckers. Now I must think wildly, recklessly, violently. It is imperative that my imagination soars as far away from this wretched, tiny, pigfucking world as it dares.
I think this is why, ever since I found out that the Prime Minister has fucked a pig, I’ve felt calmer, happier. The world seems, I think, more like a home. Just walking down the street yesterday, even in the pouring rain, I felt elevated, like I was somehow beyond the streets, like there was happiness waiting for me out there, wherever I went. The Prime Minister fucks pigs. Orienting ourselves to this fact, humanity can finally be free. There are no limits, any more, except for one, completely absurd truth. With this move, a better world is possible: indeed, a better world will always be possible. Like Jesus dying on the cross, David Cameron sticking his nob into a dead pig’s mouth has offered us, as a species, the possibility of redemption.
For almost twenty years, I couldn’t think of a time when I didn’t hear “Let The Music Play” on a local radio station: remixed, as intro music, as part of ’80s block programming. In 1983 Miami burst out of the head out of this song, fully grown and clutching a Benjamin. Vivian Host reconstructs the recording of the eighties’ greatest, most enduring dance track.
CHRIS BARBOSA
We added Jimi Tunnell just for color and backup, but he sounded great on the hook so we left it alone and had Shannon ad lib over it. Part of the “Shannon sound” was the sound of Jimi Tunnell, who is a man, singing on the chorus of “Let the Music Play” and “Give Me Tonight.”The drum sound on “Let the Music Play” came from “Looking for the Perfect Beat” by Arthur Baker. The part that says “Beat this. Boom!” where it gets real heavy – I wanted to have this ambience through the whole record. Rod [Hui] was the engineer and he was an integral part of getting that sound. Mark and Rod were using the 808 with the plate [reverb], and they started thinking, “We can’t keep the ambiance low like the tape. Let’s start gating it.”
ARTHUR BAKER, PRODUCER
They used gated reverb on the kick and the snare throughout the record. Of course, when I heard “Let the Music Play,” I went “God, I want drums like that,” when they had, basically, taken the idea from one of my records. We were all listening to each other.
I should point out that “Give Me Tonight” got almost as much play in South Florida as “Let the Music Play” and these days I might prefer it, but I’m not one of those finks who chooses favorites among his children. For us, Shannon was no one hit wonder. At a family friend’s house in August 1984, our teenaged babysitters danced to “My Heart’s Divided”. A year later “Do You Wanna Get Away” anticipated the Stock-Aiken-Waterman sound by several months and got play around Wham!s “Wham Rap” and another Chris Barbosa-produced jam called “Yo Little Brother” that hasn’t even qualified as a footnote (New Order listened carefully when recording “Shellshock” with Arthur Baker assistant John Robie). The sound mutated. A Eurotrash ensemble called Magazine 60 created “Don Quichotte.” Arthur Baker himself thought he go one better; for The Goonies soundtrack under the Goon Squad moniker, he released “Eight Arms to Hold You.” Sly Fox, best known for “Let’s Go All the Way, recorded an obscure followup called “Como Tu Te Llama” in 1986. The Italo-disco of Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” overdubbed tribal chants over a sequencer. The beat went on.
But Shannon herself passed into history, the singer whose frightened vocal embodied the erotic excitement and danger of the dance floor when love puts us into a groove.
Since discovering it in the early ’00s, Hearsay has been one of my ten favorite albums. The other entries may change, but I’ll find a place for the album recorded by the best singer that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis ever wrote and produced for. Also the only concept album whose concept I’ll cotton to — “mini-musicals in which the singer hears affirmations, doubts, and resolutions,” I wrote in the Stylus appraisal published as part of our Jam-Lewis Hall of Fame coverage. On a dare too: an editor bet I couldn’t file a piece on spec before 5 p.m. Intimate with the Jam-Lewis oeuvre as I wasn’t beyond the obvious a decade ago, I can hear the self-imitations. But when “Tender Love” and “Human” mutate into “Sunshine,” I’ll go easier on “Can You Stand the Rain,” “Come Back to Me,” and “Sensitivity.” O’Neal’s ballad is my favorite example of the reverie, a contemplation of the beloved, featuring a singer so enraptured that the melodies vibrate at subatomic speed.
And I haven’t even gotten to “The Lovers” or “Criticize.”
PS: The usual caveats apply: I don’t stand behind every fuzzy point.
———
Alexander O’Neal
Hearsay
4-19-2006
I first heard of Alexander O’Neal in a Tribe Called Quest song. In 1991’s “Butter,” an affectionate remembrance-to-girls-past, Phife refers to himself as “all true man, like Alexander O’Neal.” Since “Butter” shows the extent to which we model ourselves on the poses struck by our heroes, the irony of the simile redressed the loutishness Phife borrowed from the likes of Babyface, Heavy D, and Bell Biv Devoe.
But I learned this much later. As a Janet fan since Rhythm Nation 1814 enlivened a moribund Top 40 my sophomore year, I thought producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis could do no wrong; even boilerplate work like Karyn White’s forgotten number-one “Romantic” possessed more muscle than anything on the college charts pre-Nirvana. Helming the third album by the wispy-voiced little sister of one Michael Jackson they saw this album, Control, change the face of contemporary R&B as surely as Thriller did three years earlier, using updated sonic tricks they learned from a mysterious elfin man named Prince, for whom Jam & Lewis served as henchmen in The Time. This band, designed as yet another outlet for Prince’s protean fecundity, instead proved that three’s a crowd and sometimes better than two. O’ Neal served, briefly, as The Time’s lead singer. Hearsay, his second collaboration with Jam & Lewis, proved that God exists: he assembled a phalanx of black musicians who played/composed/produced the hardest, softest music of its time.
Thanks to a deluxe veneer which conceives of a black middle-class ethos with a verisimilitude that puts The Cosby Show to shame, Hearsay has a gestalt that Jam & Lewis would not approach until the dubious social commentary of Rhythm Nation 1814. To wit: vocals and synth-strings interludes that become songs later. Spoken-word bits set in nightclubs. Real bass lines: thumbed, plucked, galvanic. These compositions are mini-musicals in which the singer hears affirmations, doubts, and resolutions seconded by a chorus of backing singers. This is an album about rumors (“Hearsay”) and innuendo (“Criticize”), about love-as-an-abstract (“The Lovers”), and succumbing to the real thing (“Sunshine”). Only after surviving these tests does he earn the complacency into which all lovers must sink (“Never Knew Love Like This,” the weakest song, of course). Hearsay provides every pleasure we expect from music, including a few we take for granted. It is a record with a surface as gleaming as parquet.
Hearsay foregrounds the dense, clattering backing tracks that would be a Jam & Lewis trademark until 1993’s janet., but, with apologies to Karyn White and Miss Jackson, it’s got what no money could buy: a frontman who can sing. O’Neal does it all: he groans, he slips into a deliciously unexpected falsetto, he coats his sincerity with a gritty lower register that’s like a fine layer of silt. Luther Vandross’ voice may have been the last quarter-century’s purest signifier of joy, but it lacked O’Neal’s demotic flexibility; O’Neal had the common touch, borne perhaps of hanging out with men of earthier pursuits like Jam & Lewis. When, on “Fake,” he needs to be hurt and nasty—a trick Janet would trade her cooch for—the results are, quite simply, show-stopping.
In addition, O’Neal-Jam-Lewis’ talent for rumination-in-crisis gives Hearsay a tonal complexity decidedly at odds with most of its peers; it’s almost, dare I say it, Continental. Only the Prince of Sign ‘O’ the Times came close—his “Forever in My Life” is a sort of second cousin to O’Neal’s “The Lovers.” Backup singers repeat the bromides (“the lovers win every time”) that O’Neal’s yearning plea (“In this world of mass confusion!”) is too pained to acknowledge. O’Neal is above all a fair man; he’s constantly responding to accusations. How ingenious to follow “Fake”—a tune so malevolent that one would think no hope could be salvaged—with “Criticize,” in which that awful jezebel he’s so hung up on is allowed her say! Jam & Lewis absorbed the best advice George Martin ever gave the Beatles (“Think symphonically”) and composed their own urban opera, with a big-hearted actor at its core.
Paul McCartney might have been proud of “Sunshine,” a song so—what exactly? Write it: the loveliest ballad in existence. As a rhythm track it’s another slow jam like “Human” (the anything-but-Human League’s comeback) and Janet’s subsequent “Come Back to Me,” but, oh, that O’Neal. This entry in the noble tradition of contemplating the beloved—a series which includes Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful,” New Order’s “Temptation,” and Roxy Music’s “To Turn You On”—is also buoyant enough to end the series for all I care. “Sunshine” is a delicate thing whose generosity and warmth encapsulates what we want from both singer and song: a symbiosis no less earned for being salvaged from kitsch. It was Jam & Lewis’ fortune to offer “Sunshine” to a singer that needed little stage direction.
Sure Martin Shkreli is human scum. But as a capitalist, isn’t he doing what he is supposed to be doing? The goal is to make money. Anything getting in the way of that is irresponsible to that singular goal. So why shouldn’t he force people to die in order to make profit? After all, as I have blogged about here almost daily for over 4 years, capitalists force people to their deaths in order to profit every day. They do so in the chemical industry, in apparel, in steel, in oil, in coal, in timber, in agriculture, in industry after industry, sometimes in this country, more often outsourced or contracted factories overseas. We ignore this, largely because, unlikely pricey pills, it doesn’t affect us. Such unregulated capitalism is at the core of American mythology, if not Shkreli’s arrogance.
Really, Shkreli is an honest breath of fresh air. Now everyone has an opportunity to know how evil capitalism is at its core.
Of course, we don’t have to allow capitalism to control the medical system. But we do.
The story of Daraprim’s giant price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America’s unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drug makers set their own prices — maximizing profits the same way that sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other seller of manufactured goods would.
In Europe, Canada, and Australia, governments view the market for cures as essentially uncompetitive and set the price as part of a bureaucratic process — similar to how electricity or water are priced in regulated US utility markets.
Other countries do this for drugs and medical care — but not other products, like phones or cars — because of something fundamentally unique about medication: If consumers can’t afford the product they could have worse odds of living. In some cases, they face quite certain odds of dying. So most governments have decided that keeping these products affordable is a good reason to introduce more government regulation.
When drug companies set their American prices, they don’t focus on the price of making the pills. Instead, they look at what their competitors already charge for similar products — and try to land their price somewhere in that same range, regardless of production costs or how good the drug actually is. Since most drugs are already expensive, new drugs keep matching those prices.
And, if you’re a drug company that produces the best cure for a disease (as Turing does for toxoplasmosis), this makes a ton of sense: you have consumers whose life, quite literally, depends on buying your product. This is what Shkreli talked about, quite bluntly, in his Bloomberg interview.
“We know these days that modern pharmaceuticals and cancer drugs can cost $100,000 or more,” he said. “Daraprim is still underpriced compared to its peers.”
The real question at the heart of the Daraprim outrage isn’t why one pharmaceutical company decided to hike a drug price. The real question is why other companies aren’t taking advantage of the pick-your-price nature of American pharmaceutical policy — and whether they will ultimately follow in Turing’s steps.
The cure for this particular problem is of course socialized medicine and government price controls. But I’ll note again that people die all the time making phones and cars and clothing around the world for these same nations that have made the decision to regulate medicine. If Bangladeshi workers die making clothing, they don’t care much. But if their own consumers die because of high priced medicine, that’s worth state intervention. I agree on the latter obviously, but there’s a lot of hypocrisy from these nations, as well as the same divide we see in this country, where consumer-based activism can sometimes have fast results, but worker-based activism is ignored. If our vegetables have chemical residue on them, that can (and has) to a major consumer movement. But if to avoid this, as was the solution, new generation of pesticides were developed that worked hard and fast but also massively exposed workers, consumers couldn’t care less.
There is one thing that makes Shkreli a less than perfect capitalist. His own hubris brought attention to himself and created the rare public pressure that forces a price down. Had he raised the price slowly but consistently, he could have sacrificed some short-term profits in favor of longer-term success. So he is flawed. But it’s also almost refreshing to have someone so evil that they are willing to strip away all the concealment that allows us to escape the daily knowledge of the human costs of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism, because he just doesn’t care what we think about it (until it starts costing him money). It’d be nice if we recognized that capitalists kill people every day and do something about it.
We often see 20-year-old Kurumi around the streets of Harajuku. She works in architecture.
In addition to her great bob hairstyle, Kurumi’s all black street style features a jacket by the legendary Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto over a crop top, sheer panel pants from Nadia Harajuku and platform heels. Accessories include round sunglasses and a leather box purse by the Japanese brand Moussy.
Kurumi’s favorite designer is Yohji and she likes the music of Lady Gaga. Find her on Instagram or Twitter for more pictures.
Click on any photo to enlarge it.
