The Tracfone Kiada: The Threequel

Over my sixty-nine years of life I have dealt with a lot of craptatasic crapitalist craperations. None of these, whether Target, Blue Cross Blue Shield, or Amazon, however, has been more craptastic than the King, Queen, Duke, and Marquis of the land of crapitalist crap, Trafone. Tracfone stands alone atop the pile of crapitaiist shite.

I don't recall when I first signed up with Tracfone. Perhaps sometime in 2019. I did it because I needed a phone, something I did not have at the time because, generally speaking, I detest telephones thanks to years of experience with them in that dark age after the breakup of Ma Bell by the US government, the golden age of telephones in my book. I prefer, and still do, communication via email, something that, in my experience, is much better than communicating via telephones because in the latter case you have to deal with a labyrinth of incompetent telephone companies let loose by the moronic American government decision to break up Ma Bell because it was a monopoly. Of course, all this has given Americans in the long run is a cartel of incompetent craperations instead of the competent Ma Bell. What I do know, though I don't know the precise dates, is that I have had problems with Tracfone since they sent me a 4G replacement phone (or should I say fone) for my 2G or 3G phone around 2020 or 2021. 

That somewhat imprecise date of 2020 or 2021 is important because in one of those years the Tracfone craperation sent me a "smart phone" I will concede that the phone they sent me is a a phone. I will not concede that it is "smart", however. In fact, I think "smart phones" have made the masses more moronic and dumber than they already are and made those of us who are not addicted to "smart phones" and don't carry them around with us as though they are attached at our hips have to not only drive even more defensively than we already do but have to also walk defensively given the fact that those who are addicted to "smart phones" walk without looking mesmerised as they are by the dumb and dumber cell phones they carry around with them as though they were new borns. But back to my tale: Before I received the new phone my minutes, the time I had before I needed to refill my phone minutes, was noted on my phone. When Tracfone sent me their latest technological marvel, however, I could no longer ascertain how many minutes I had on my phone. 

So--you know these craperations love to make out lives more complex and full of crisis than they need to be--I was forced to create an account on the Tracfone web page in 2020 or 2021--something I did not want to do given what I knew and had experienced about the craptastic craperation of these account pages--and guess what? Though I accurately put in all the pertinent information the craptastic Tracfone account page asked for  including my phone number, my minutes were nowhere to be seen. So I contacted them and though they did the typical new digital age phone call runaround and finally got me, after much time had passed, to someone who was supposed to know how to fix account pages, he could not. So I contacted the New York Attorney General's office and they called Tracfone and a Tracfone rep was able to, after a week or so of merry-go-round communication, post my minutes, as they are required to, on my account page.

The "honeymoon"--which it never really was, of course, given the craptasticness of Tracfone--did not last long. In October of 2023 I closed my Google email account--Google clearly does only harm--and set up an alternative email account. I tried to change my email on my Tracfone account page but was prohibited from doing so. So, I called Tracfone again, this time to change my email address. And lo and behold the customer service operator was able to change my email address but unfortunately she changed it incorrectly. So I had to call yet again in order to try to change my email address to the correct one. Initially I was unable to do this because not only does Tracfone have my PIN wrong--something I wrote down in a document at the time I created it and so know what I have is accurate--but they also had the phone numbers I called or received recently wrong despite me giving them to them in full something I can't do while talking on my dumb "smart phone" since I can't do this and talk to a customer service clerk at the same time given that this is technological impossible and I have arthritis. I am shocked, shocked. Only after utilising Facebook was I able to get my email address corrected.

Cut to late November early December 2023. Tracfone, of course--they are the very essence of incompetence--is still sending crap to my old and no longer used email account on Gmail. I tried to go into my online account but can't change anything in that account. I got one of those standard operating crapcedures to call the craperation but I am not going to do because I have already called this incompetent craperation far too many times already. I tried to contact Tracfone via Facebook but all I got when I tried to do this is one of those canned bot messages that are the weapon of the brave new digital craperation. So, I contacted the New York AG once again. I have asked them to mandate that Tracfone return the monies I paid for an unlimited use account in October because I have no interest in remaining with the craperation. I will go with Consumer Cellular instead, a company I have heard good things about. I have had it with the craptasitic crapitalistic craperation Tracfone, a craperation that is so craptastic that they aren't even allowing me to unsubscribe my dead email account. They want me to call them in order to do this. And that fact alone should tell you how craptastic Tracfone, the, shout out to Jefferson Airplane, father and mother of crapitalist craptatic anti-lovers--truly is.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Reactors that Ate Their Own Tails

 The human species, as those with even a degree of self-awareness and reflexivity know, is an arrogant "race". This arrogance may or may not be a problem. I have no problem, for instance, with human "arrogance", a word often used as a term of abuse by intellectual anti-intellectuals, that is grounded in empirical knowledge, an arrogance often tempered by that old proverb that the more you know you know and the more you know the more you also know that there is still much to be known. That is enlightenment.The arrogance grounded in ignorance, an arrogance characteristic of, I suspect, around 99 percent of those who post videos and comments on that lowest common denominator of media forms, social media, is not a a valid form of arrogance. Rather it is an act of intentional or unintentional social lobotomisation. It is the arrogance of moronicity. It is the arrogance of those who prefer the Kingdom of Bliss and the Kingdom of Idiocracy to the critically examined life (socialisation for reality challenged  yes sir no sir conformity).

I have been studying "reactors" to movies and television shows on the social media platform YouTube for several years now. A number of things have struck me about these "reactors" as I have noted in previous entries in my online ethnographic notebook. The one I want to briefly talk about in this blog post is, as I have already hinted, the arrogance of the know nothings on YouTube, the arrogant ignorance of those who intentionally or unintentionally know little to nothing about what they are reacting to. One caveat, however, before I get into my discussion, In my ethnographic sojourn on YouTube movie reactors, many of whom have clearly have studied film in university, are, as a general rule, much more knowledgeable as a rule about the classic they are reacting to than those reacting to television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Doctor Who and contemporary popcorn movies with little in the way of plot and narrative sophistication. That most of the moves that come out of Hollywood these days are narratively and intellectually challenged is, paradoxically, something the pop top "reactors" on YouTube code in normative fashion, as a positive, as a good. They see, in other words, the simplistic manichean melodrama that undergirds most Follywood films as "evidence" of their quality since for them the new is always superior to the old and those films are new. Apparently these "reators" don't realise that such a teleological ideology dooms their own radiant era in ouroboros tail eating fashion. but hey, such is "intellectual" the norm in the brave new digital era of ever and ever better social media.

Not all of this our films and television shows are better than those of the stone age ideology can be attributed to the unshock of the new, this our era is superior to yours because our technology is better than yours teleology. This progressivist ideology has been around since ancient times with ithat era's belief that the apocalypse would bring about a world that was better than the present one. This eschatological ideology, an ideology that was tied to a restoration of paradise, Eden, was eventually, in the Renaissance and after, allied to a chronological teleology that saw each epoch as better and more utopian than the last. You can see this ideology expressed in the notion that the films and TV programmes of the past are technologically inferior to those of the present. The talkies are better than silent films ideology, for instance. Realism, whether mise-in-scene or acting style, is better than artsy fartsy surrealism and expressive acting style, for example  You can also see it in the normative notion that as film and later television moved further and futther away from theatre, films and television became better. Such an apologetics and polemics disdains the the "talkative" films of Joseph Mankiewicz such as his All About Eve, the "talkative" films of John Sayles (for my money one of the best of contemporary directors, which means he is not working much these days), and "talkative" televised electronic theatre television programmes like the original Upstairs Downstairs because they supposedly are too gabby--an odd criticism from those who claim that silents are inherently inferior to talking films) and hence aren't cinematic nor attentive to mise-en-scene. The fact that it can be shown empirically that these supposedly inferior films are well written and actually attentive to mise-en-scene, is not even on the radar of these holier than thou "reactors". They seem to be blissfully unaware that theatre was one of the first of the art forms to reflect on mise-en-scene and put it into practise. That such moralising disdain is ideological rather than empirical is pointed up by the fact that many enjoy the films of Mankiewicz, the films of Sayles, and Upstairs Downstairs and can and have successfully and intelligently analysed the mise-en-scene of each. Socialised eyes of the beholder man.

These facts are, of course, are immaterial to the self-righteous crowd, to those who conflate ideology, apologetics and polemics with the reality they so claim to prize, at least in film and television if not in real life. And this amnesia, dear reader, is an act of arrogant ignorance and ignorant arrogance, an act one finds so prevalent among so many "reactors" on the YoobTube, an act one finds throughout the history of anti-intellectualism. Praise Yah and pass the spamunition.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: In Unliving Colour

 

Humans are, to use a word  commonly used by many Gens today on social media, "weird". There is, for example, the fact that humans, despite being the only race on this planet, divide themselves into a variety of groupings such as clans, tribes, cliques, "ethnic" groups, and nations, each of which think they are the greatest thing to have ever appeared on the face of the globe since the beginning of time. There is the fact that individual humans, particularly in the core nation West, think that they and they alone have within them a kind of authoritative aesthetic holy spirit which allows them to discern what is and what is not great in literature, film, and television. And those endowed with this holy aesthetic spirit will gladly tell you in godlike declarative sentences what books, films, and TV programmes are great on social media. That these authoritative declarative sentences are absent any comprehension of the fact that empirical data has conclusively shown that humans do not and can not agree on precisely which books, films, and TV programmes are great doesn't seem to bother them in the least let alone cross their minds. There is the fact that humans have created weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction that have largely been held by a cartel of great Western powers for most of atomic bomb history. These weapons of mass destruction, of course, can kill millions of humans alone, not to mention the fact that if MAD ever comes to pass it will negatively impact the planet humans live on and depend on for sustenance and life. And then there is the fact that significant numbers of social media "reactors"--I can't call them commentators since they don't generally rise to that level--have an unreasonable and irrational fear of black and white films, black and white television, and, one assumes, by extension, black and white photography. Apparently, black and white photography isn't trendy enough to allow "reactors" to make money from by "reacting" to such photos. Money, of course, is the real reason, after all, that most "reactors" are on YouTube, the social media site I have been observing over the last several years, in the first place.

Generally speaking, this unreasonable and irrational fear of black and white films and television is grounded in the same ideology of progress that has undergirded and continues to undergird so much Western cultural and "intellectual" life. Beginning, particularly in the nineteenth century, many in the West conflated political, economic, cultural, and technological change with progress. They had faith in the notion that Western society was progressing towards an inevitable utopian radiant future where the faux democracy fetishised by most in the West would result in the end history, where the oligarchic capitalism fetishised by most in the West would triumph and end history, and whether the ever greater quest for "realism" or "naturalism" fetishised by many in the West would lead to history's end, and where. 

This ideology of progress also impacted perceptions of and notions of the media. Many though not all Westerners--there are almost always countercultures and subcultures in complex societies and cultures-- for example, believed that talking pictures were more "realistic" than silent films because they were more modern and as a consequence were inherently superior. Many believed that colour films and  colour TV programmes were and are better than black and white films and television programmes because they were more "realistic","naturalistic", "modern", and technologically "sophisticated".

This technological utopianism, which like all culture and ideology was and is socialised into human beings throughout the course of their life turning them, in the process, into virtual knee jerk autonomic actors rather than a critical thinking reflectors, have blinded many if not most "reactors" to the aesthetic qualities of black and white cinematography, an aesthetic that developed between the advent of filmmaking in the early twentieth century and the mid-twentieth century. This lack of understanding about media history and aesthetic history has been and is exacerbated by the fact that most of those who watch film and television know little about the history of mise-en-scene, that which is in the frame, or the aesthetics associated with mise-en-scene whether of black and white or colour films and television. As a consequence they often aren't attentive to what is right before their eyes and concentrate instead on that which is the easiest thing to grasp in cinema and television lands, the plot. Even here there are problems, however. While doing their standard what I read or saw on my summer vacation plot summaries, many do not explore the more complex forms of narrative associated with plot such as tone (comedy, drama, tragedy, melodrama, satire, parody), metaphor, allegory and world building. 

Whether this absence and silence is due to a lack of schooling and education, limited schooling and education, a lack of interest in schooling and education--far too many are going to college in places like the US where schooling has become a rite of passage associated with boozing and wenching and getting a job rather than a ritual associated with increased knowledge and theoretical and methodological training--is, I suppose, an open question. It is a question, however, that social media platforms like YouTube may help us address. What is clear already, however, is that for many of the amateurs "reacting" to films and television on social media in their typical stream of limited consciousness way have an irrational fear and lack of understanding of the history of cinema and television and the aesthetics of each tells us something interesting and intriguing about human beings particularly in the West.

Aren't we just so blessed to have millions and millions of gods living amongst us carrying the authoritative holy spirit within them? And aren't we so blessed to be able to hear the logos of these millions and millions amongst us who can tell us authoritatively what god's political system is, what god's economic system is, what god's cultural system is, what the best books, films, and television are and why they should always be in colour becausre god is a "realist"? And finally shouldn't we give thanks that these gods can also tell what is "normal", what is "weird", and what is "deviant"? Halleluyah!

 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cult of the Plastic Fantastic

 

Once upon a time authenticity meant authenticity in the core nation world. I, for instance, grew up in an era when more people in the West and in North America than the usual handful of bohemians and dissidents were questioning the supposed verities and nostrums of Victorianism and striving for authenticity in their questioning. Scholars have attributed this rise in scepticism and the movements undergirded by this scepticism in the post WWII world to a host of economic, political, and cultural factors including the defeat of fascism in World War II, liberal utopianism, the post-war economic boom that lasted into the 70s, the post war baby boom, the optimistic rhetoric of youthful politicians like President John F. Kennedy in the United States and Pierre Trudeau in Canada, the post war expansion of higher education and the increase in the numbers of students matriculating at universities, suburbanisation, the civil rights movement, anti-imperialisms movements such as the opposition to the French and American imperial war in Vietnam, and the sense that one could actually change the world that undergirded many of the social movements of the era.

This questioning of "traditional" verities and nostrums had an impact on a variety of things in the West including economics, politics, and culture. In popular music in the United States, for instance, it led to a revived and increasingly popular, if only in relative terms, socially conscious folk musics in places like the Village in New York City, in Los Angeles at places like the Troubadour, and in San Francisco, places that made artists like Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and others into countercultural celebrities. The post-war folk movement in the US with its emphasis on authenticity and the social criticism of racism, war, and mutual assured destruction, would eventually have an impact on rock and roll bands such as the Jefferson Airplane, Love, the Byrds, and even in the Beatles as evidenced by the Dylanesque and melancholy John Lennon song "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" on their 1965 album Help.

The US, of course, was not the only place which saw a revival of folk music performance, interest in folk musics, and notions of authenticity in the post WWII era. Folk music revivals of a somewhat different character than that in the US arose in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Ireland, England, and Scotland. This Canadian, Irish, English, and Scottish folk revival and its accompanying ideology of authenticity can be heard in the music of bands like Figgy Duff, Steeleye Span, and Planxty. As was the case in the US the Canadian, Irish, English, and Scottish folk music revivals also these bands had an impact on the rock and roll, something one can hear in the music of bands like Great Big Sea, the electrictrified folk of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, several Thin Lizzy songs including "Emerald", and in the folk influenced albums of Jethro Tull and the Strawbs.

Another genre of pop and rock music that was impacted by the folk rock revival was the singer-songwriter movement of the era, a genre that included artists like Joni Mitchell, Carol King, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, and even, if briefly, Elton John, whose first four albums clearly fall outside the singer-songwriter fold, artists many listened to with great attentiveness rather that the shake your booty approach of many concert goers of today. Like the folkies and the folk rockers, pop rock's singer-songwriters placed an emphasis on authenticity. Those who privileged authenticity, or so they believed, were in a revolt, in part, against what the Jefferson Airplane called the plastic fantastic, that smiley faced happy happy joy joy organisation suburban man we are the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen were socialised or propagandised for conformity into in the years after WWII.

A lot has changed between the 1960s and today. Rock, including the singer-songwriters of the 1960s and after, isn't what it used to be. Postmodernism--economic, political, and cultural--is increasingly hegemonic in the core nation world. Selective and situational globalism is the name of the economic game in the rich parts of the globe. Californication and Disneyfornication increasingly dominate global popular culture where plastic fantastic fakeness and simulations dominate the lowest common denominator brave new digital media just as it did the old, if in a more populist way. The new digital media just spread the fakeness and commodification around more.The art cinema which was once significant in the West has been pushed to the margins. Commodification continues apace and has even broadened. Anti-intellectualism has regained its dominant hegemonic position in the wake of the counterculture particularly era in the West and even more particularly in the English settler societies.

One of the things that is or should be quite obvious to even the casual observer of social media like YouTube is how inauthentic YouTube is. Most "reactors", for instance, seem to be reality star Kardashianista wanna bes. They post images of themselves on social media which mimic fashion magazines and Hollywood red carpet poses. Most of them mrror the anti-intellectualism which has often dominated the West. They revel in their intentional ignorance of what they are reacting to whether a movie, a television show, or a song. They reflect a frowning correct puritanical culture dominated by happy faced conformist Pollyannaisms. Most YouTube reactors are clueless about how parody and satire work. In a postmodernist world core nation world, in other words, inauthenticity with its deep acting and surface acting reactors, the plastic fantastic, has become the measure of the "authentic" for so many of the post baby boom generations, the gens, who have built an online world where virtually every poster is a commodity not only for YouTube but for themselves, and where almost every potential viewer is a latter day voyeur.

YouTube and its monopolistic owner Google doesn't, of course, care about the fakeness they commodify and help sell because they make money off of the anti-intellectual tripe that dominates a social media world that is narcissistic, paranoid, conspiracy theory ridden, and amateurish (every person their own reactor regardless of their expertise). Many who post this stuff often appear to want to live out their dreams of becoming celebrities in a world where fake deep acting and cynical surface acting is the golden rule. Many, in other words, want to be a star but hardly anybody is a star in this brave new digital world of mediocrity, hubris, ignorance, and banality. And, of course, many of them also want to sell their brand. In many ways, the new digital media is nothing more than one infinite and continuous commercial dominated by that newest of human devolutionary forms, Homo Geekonomicus.

The Books of My Life: Shooting the Hippo

 

The story of the rise and dominance of laissez faire liberalism, the rise of credit practises and institutions, periodic capitalist booms and busts (my favourite remains the exemplary and exceptionally looney tulip boom and bust) and recessions, Keynesan and social liberal responses to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the dominance of Keynesian or variations of Keynesianism until the 1970s, and the revival and dominance of laissez-faire liberalism in the form of neo-iiberalism in economic and political policy in Canada, the United States, and Great Britian after the oil crisis of the 1970s has been told before. No one, however, has told aspects of this tale more approachably and more succesfully than Canadian journalist and scholar Linda McQuaig.

In a profession and discipline that tends to be abstract and ahistorical in the same way that dogmatics with its polemics and apologetics and systematic theology are abstract and ahistorical, McQuaig brings a much welcome historical and humanistic sensiblity to the study of post-World War II economic theory and practise. McQuaig explores the history of credit in Great Britain, Keynesian critiques of free market ideologies, Keynesian economic and poltical policy, the impact of the oil crisis of the 1970s on Canada, the resulting Canadian recession, and the religious like revival of laissez-faire ideology and its triumph in certain economic and political circles but with an important purpose, to show empirically how neoliberal ideology has privileged fighting inflation over fighting unemployment and decreasing tax revenues, both consequences along with recession of Canadian neoliberal economic anti-inflation theology and dogma.

As McQuaig notes, contemporary neoliberal theology has become popular in the wake of the oil crisis with Canadians in general who, though they are not privy to the deep structural mysteries of economic theory and practise that only the high priesthood of neoliberal economics seem to be able to penetrate, trust that the economic priesthood when it stresses the need to bring down the deficit through anti-inflationary manipulations of interest rates and cuts in social programmes, which they blame, in large part, for balooning deficits. Many Canadians have become convinced of the need to deal with deficits thanks to institutes, like the C.D. Howe Institute with its carefully cultivated simulation of a non-partisan academic institute despite the fact that it is funded, in large part, by economic elites and corporations with a vested interest in maintaining high interest rates since the bondholders they polemicise for and who often pay their salaries want the bonds they hold to maintain value. 

As McQuaig notes these neoliberal theologians see the economy in such abstract terms that they no longer, if they ever did--I guess Ebenezer Scrooge eventually saw the light though Mister Potter did not--recognise the harm that their economic policies have on real people, the economy, and the much needed community social safety net. They are also inconsistent, as McQuaig notes. While the cheerleaders of austerity pontificate about the need to bring down the deficit they favour tax cuts, tax cuts that ultimately benefit the elites. In terms of apologetics and polemics and pied pipping the masses the high priests of high finance appear to have been more skillful and much more successful at getting people to buy their situational dogmatics than were the situational ethicists of the 1960s.

The media, as McQuaig notes, also plays a major role in the dissemination of neoliberal rhetoric. Apart from the fact that most of the media is corporate owned they tend to rely on think tanks like the Howe for information about economic theory and the economy without investigating whether these institutes have a vested interest in polemicising for particular economic policies. Journalists often, particularly when it comes to the abstractions of economic policy (not to mention foreign policy), simply ignore whether something is true or not in favour of the need to get both sides of the story, something that became prominent in journalistic practise after the countercultural 1960s and Ralph Nader's campaigns against dangerous consumer goods, a practise that many trace back to corporate strategies in the wake of Nader. They also tend to limit the range of discourse on economic theory and practise in the media by selecting, based on specific ideologically correct criteria, who does and does not appear on media news and public affairs programmes.

By controlling the discourse neoliberals have successfully manufactred moral panics around the issue of the deficit using it to inculcate an apocalyptic sky is falling fear among the masses who apparently never wonder if it is more Chicken Little than reality. Moral panics, of course, have long been a tried and true method of manipulation used by fear mongering demagogues to pursue their interests while hiding these vested interests in the shade of a the rhetoric of the common good.

The problem with neoliberal anti-inflationary economic theory and policies are several as McQuaig notes. McQuaig convicingly points out that zero-inflation anti-recessionary policies put into practise by the Bank of Canada in the 1980s and 1990s have not only raised unemployment, not only cut tax revenues because of unemployment and underemployment, not only led to cuts in social programmes, not only caused problems for some businesses, not only impacted Canadian and American trade, and not only affected cross border shopping, but that they didn't work. Inflation remained a problem even after years of anti-infationary policies, and the deficit and the interest paid on it by the state have increased, leading, of course, in that wonderful Alice in Wonderland style logic that is so common in our increasingly Orwelian world, to further calls for anti-inflation campaigns and even more cuts in social programmes.

McQuaig advocates for another, and I would argue saner mainstream approach to the inflation versus unemployment issue. McQuaid urges an acceptance of a low rate of inflation, say around 4%, in order to keep unemployment down, economic growth up, and tax revenues coming in to pay for social programmes which, as she notes, aren't the main reason for the deficit in the first place, and the deficit itself. The main culprit is, as McQuaig points out, recession.

Though McQuaig's book at the time was, as the cover of the paperback tells us, a national bestseller, it seems to have had limited long term impacts on Canadian perceptions of economic theory and practise and the polemical and apologetic campaign to fight inflation. In late January (or was it early February?), for instance, I saw an article in the Toronto Star referencing poll data showing that Canadians were most concerned, as they began the New Year, with inflation and the deficit. Ironically, the very next day The Star had an article on how inflation benefits CEO's, particularly the best paid CEO's who saw their salaries increase by 26%. And so it goes...