Hey CZ

Did I even listen to any new music in August? I know I did but I’d be hard pressed to tell what any of it was. No surprise: Melbourne in its hardest coronavirus lockdown yet and, yeah, time doesn’t really exist any more.

Still, The Beth’s dropped a new album, Jump rope gazers, and that’s cause for celebration.

I adore The Beths. Their second albums expands on their fantastic debut without losing all the charm and personality that made it such a rush. Frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes has a real gift for humour and deft phrasing; there’s something new to fall in love with on every listen.

Other highlights

Super natural by Jonnie. A solo EP from one of the members of HTRK. Can’t go wrong.

ENERGY by Disclosure. Want some bangers? Have some bangers.

1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues by 100 gecs. More bangers but now they’re angry.

Always was by Briggs. A deadly EP from Senator Briggs.

I’m obsessed with Palimpsest by Protest the Hero. I was a big fan of theirs in the mid-to-late 2000s. Keiza, Fortress, and Scurrilous (the band’s first and second albums respectively) slay: a perfect combination of energising metal riffs and captivating vocals.

But, after that, I fell off the band. Drifted away from metal as a genre. Now, nine years later, Protest the Hero have released Palimpsest (their fifth album) and I love it. It has everything I loved about their previous work and a great narrative hook: the songs are re-tellings of American history.

Take my favourite two tracks.

“The Fireside” presents a version of Pearl Harbor wherein the bombing provides a reason to go to war that US leaders wanted all along:

I’ve got a job for every able-bodied man
Munition factories for women and children
And all we needed was a reason
And you gave us one
You gave us one

“Soliloquy” is an infectious and dramatic story from the perspective of bank robber “Baby Face” Nelson:

You can reach for your service pistol
By the time you get it
I’m betting that this will be over and done with
Leave your badge and your gun
You won’t be coming home tonight

Well worth a spin if you’re into metal.

Other highlights

Expect the unexpected by 79rs Gang. Impossibly cool. The album looks to bring “New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian culture… to dance floors and block parties around the world” and it does. Just give it a spin.

The light pack by Joey Badass. Joey cannot be stopped.

Staying power by Emma Ruth Rundle. I love everything Rundle’s released and this is no different.

Drop 6 by Little Simz. Simz is on fire. One of my favourite rappers in the game right now.

Palimpsest by Protest the Hero. Protest the Hero are back with their fifth album (and their first in four years). It might be their best.

Joy as an act of resistance by IDLES. Rock music (don’t call it punk) at it’s most vibrant and vital.

A tech exec by the name of Chris Larsen wants to install high-def security cameras all around San Fransisco to help battle the city’s crime. He thinks that’s a good idea.

Nellie Bowles spoke to him for the New York Times:

In San Francisco, where many locals push for this kind of police reform, those same locals are tired of the break-ins. So how do they reconcile “defund the police” with “stop the smash and grabs”?

Mr. Larsen believes he has the answer: Put security cameras in the hands of neighborhood groups. Put them everywhere. He’s happy to pay for it.

There are countless reasons to have a problem with this. Pointing out that Nextdoor – a decentralised social media platform for communities – is a cesspit of racism, fear mongering, and profiling is the most glib.

There’s no reason to think that pervasive surveillance in the hands of “neighbourhood groups” won’t be the same.

Unfortunately, Bowles’s article doesn’t engage with any of the potential pitfalls in Larsen’s plan outside of privacy concerns. The whole thing reads more like a puff piece or an ad than a measured assessment of something that would affect the lives of everyone in the city, if Larsen follows through with his idea.

He argued that trust [with law enforcement] will come in the form of full city camera coverage, so police can play a smaller, more subtle role. Individual vigilantism will not work, he argued, but strong neighborhoods with continuous video feeds on every corner will.

“That’s the winning formula,” Mr. Larsen said. “Pure coverage.”

Police do need to play a smaller role in people’s lives. But they need to be replaced with well-funded support structures, like mental health facilities, safe injecting rooms and drug rehabilitation groups, and all the other things that make up a robust safety net. That’s how you restore trust in local communities.

Pervasive surveillance isn’t a sign of trust. Nor is it a path to it. We won’t build a healthy community by watching each other all of the time.

The Chinese Government has announced a sweeping new law for Hong Kong that aims to “crack down on opposition to Beijing”. It was drafted in “unusual secrecy” and “took effect immediately, even though the public was seeing it in full only for the first time”.

Part of the law affects what people say online:

The new law mandates police censorship and covert digital surveillance, rules that can be applied to online speech across the world.

Now, the Hong Kong government is crafting web controls to appease the most prolific censor on the planet, the Chinese Communist Party.

It functionally turns any criticism about the Chinese and Hong Kong governments into “national security data”, as

Based on the law, the Hong Kong authorities have the remit to dictate the way people around the world talk about the city’s contested politics.

Battle lines are being drawn:

Many big tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zoom and LinkedIn, have said in the past two days that they would temporarily stop complying with requests for user data from the Hong Kong authorities. The Hong Kong government, in turn, has made it clear that the penalty for noncompliance with the law could include jail time for company employees.

Meanwhile, TikTok is pulling their app from the App and Play Store rather than get into a fight – both with the Chinese Government and with public opinion – they know they can’t win:

The move comes as TikTok parent ByteDance has looked to more clearly separate TikTok, which operates outside of China, from a similar app used within mainland China. The company has said that TikTok has not shared data with the Chinese government nor would it, a position that would be difficult — if not impossible — to maintain under the new law.

This is another stage in the tech Cold War between China and the US but it feels like a big one. It’s a lot more ideological than whether or not Huawei can build 5G capabilities in your country.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have built their platforms on the importance of free speech. It sometimes feels like a fig leaf for an unwillingness or inability to monitor their sites but it nonetheless appears sincere.

This law is a significant attack against that and it’s magnified by the streak of libertarianism that runs through Silicon Valley.

Combine all of that with the US Government’s commitment to free speech (in the abstract, if not the practical, given the President’s view of the media) and their antipathy towards the Chinese Government and you have a situation.

Meanwhile, China is a sizeable market for all US tech and internet companies. How much of that are they willing to risk?

China isn’t doing anything new or surprising. They’re a world power with an authoritarian government. More than that, they’re a world power that’s reclaiming it’s previous status on the global stage – one that they feel they lost because of Western powers (which isn’t altogether incorrect). And they have the economic power to back that up.

Every company and government that’s dependent on China for economic reasons is constantly weighing that against the actions of the Chinese Government in other areas. There are undeniable moral and ideological differences between the two groups.

Eventually, we’ll reach a moment when the former no longer trumps the latter and decision makers in the West will have to decide what they stand for.

Maybe I’m just biased to the importance of the internet, but it feels like we’ve taken a pretty big step towards that moment.

Looks like Apple Arcade may not be going as planned. They’re cutting some games in development and moving to more addictive games, according to a report from Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier in Bloomberg:

On calls in mid-April, an Apple Arcade creative producer told some developers that their upcoming games didn’t have the level of “engagement” Apple is seeking, the people said. Apple is increasingly interested in titles that will keep users hooked, so subscribers stay beyond the free trial of the service, according to the people. They asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

[…]

On the calls with developers in April, the Apple Arcade representative cited a specific example of the type of game the company wants: Grindstone, an engaging puzzle-action game by Capybara Games that has many levels.

Grindstone is great. But it’s a refined, well-polished version of all the mobile games that hook you in with moreish, one-more-round puzzles as a way of getting you to pay for in-game currency or extra lives via microtransactions. That’s not a criticism of Grindstone: it’s a fantastic version of that kind of game and it’s all the better because Apple Arcade’s model means it doesn’t need those in-app purchases. So it’s no surprise that it has some of the highest levels of “engagement” among Arcade’s offerings.

But Apple Arcade was pitched as an antidote to those kinds of games. And focusing solely on “engagement” misses the point of what makes games valuable in the first place.

I spent most of my time in Apple Arcade in Grindstone but it’s not the most memorable experience . I certainly wouldn’t recommend people subscribe to the service to play it. It’s not even the best version of the one-more-round puzzler on offer, in my opinion: Card of Darkness has a lot more going for it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts, meanwhile, is straight-up one of the coolest games I’ve ever played. It was the reason I tried Apple Arcade in the first place. Give me one of them every few months and I’ll sub for a while. I think about it all the time; I listened to the soundtrack on Apple Music non-stop for almost three months. It’s amazing.

But it’s also a play-through-once-and-never touch-it-again game. And that’s okay. I don’t need mobile games I go to again and again and again. And trying to provide that via a subscription kind of misses the point of those games anyway. A mobile game subscription makes sense if you’re offering a slew of great games that’ll occupy you for a little while before you move onto something else. That makes sense for the model.

My partner is currently obsesses with a Candy-Crush-like game were you solve a bunch of symbol-match puzzles in order to refurbish a mansion. She’s been playing it nightly for the last little while. Before that, it was a word game. Before that, it was a different word game. She’s the model mobile game player: get into a game for a little while, play it exclusively, move onto something else.

It’s high engagement. But it doesn’t make sense for a subscription. Why pay a monthly fee when you can get more-or-less the same experience for free? People may end up spending more in micro-transactions but no-one ever goes into one of those games thinking they’ll buy the in-game currency.

Apple Arcade was a chance to do something different in the mobile game space. And it delivered some cool, interesting, and fun stuff. It was always going to be a tough sell: their hasn’t been a consistent flow of fantastic, single-hit games on the App Store to built a real, vibrant audience for this kind of stuff. There have been a lot of amazing games, of course, but they pale into comparison to the addictive, “high engagement” games on the platform. Part of that is because of the business model Apple promoted in the App Store. Hard to build a high quality, standalone game when you can only charge a few dollars a pop.

Apple never gave the kinds of games Apple Arcade promoted a chance to thrive on their own. That’s why the service was so appealing – maybe they’d finally have one – but that makes it hard to get people who aren’t already into those kinds games a reason to subscribe. They’ve got their games already and they’re the games the App Store has always prioritised, thank you very much.

I’m reading a lot into their statements here but it looks like they could be sacrificing that to do a slightly more polished version of what’s already out there. I’m sure it’s a wise business decision and I’m sure they know what they’re doing –it’d be remiss of me to assume they don’t understand why people play the mobile games they do. But it’s still a disappointing move.

Hopefully the Sayonara Wild Hearts of Apple Arcade still get made. And I’m sure they will. After all, Netflix pump out mediocre show after mediocre show and fall onto greatness occasionally. No reason that won’t happen with games here.

June needs to be a month of change. The Black Lives Matter movement reverberated around the world and reminded everyone, again, that the USA, Australia, and elsewhere have systematically destroyed the lives of black people. And that needs to change. And that change involves the structures that govern every day life and it involves us, as individuals.

kites can’t jive is a music column. It’s narrow in its focus. But part of June’s changes, for me, was to listen to more black musicians. Sometimes it was rediscovering an old favourite, sometimes it was looking for new voices. It was always about listening to the stories of talented artists.

This isn’t activism. It’s not a replacement for the work we all need to do to tear down systemic racism or address the history of injustice our societies have perpetuated. Education is important, yeah, and listening to and supporting the work of black artists can be part of that.

But you don’t get to listen to a few tracks and read a book or two and say “I’m done”. This is step one. This is a soundtrack. There’s a lot more work to do.

Listen to this

Nyaaringu by Miiesha

Mieesha’s Nyaaringu is incredible. Just take a moment to go listen to album opener “Caged bird”. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the album: the moving spoken word, provided by Miiesha’s late grandmother, Miiesha’s voice, and an exploration of her experience as a young Indigenous woman.

The second song on the album, “Black privilege“ continues the theme:

Funny, when I lose, you keep on complaining Then write the new rules, just to be bent on breaking Told me that I choose the noose that you’ve been making Then I need to prove I’m worthy of saving

Nyaaringu would be great if it was just the songs. But the spoken word interludes from Miiesha’s grandmother are peppered throughout the album. Her story, her advice, and recollections mirror, extend, and contextualise Miiesha’s lyrics.

It’s a reminder of an important truth: the struggles Miiesha’s singing about have been here for a long time. And, as she says on “Black privilege“ they’re a result of deliberate choices by white Australia.

Other highlights

Black thoughts by Ziggy Ramo. A stunning debut album that explores Australia’s history of racism, colonialism, and trauma.

Rosetta - EP by Dua Salah. Soulful, hypnotic hip-hop about everything from race, to gender, to identity, and more.

Dead like me by Danny Denial. Heartfelt, raw, catchy rock that mixes bits of indie and grunge. “Suck my Jesus” has a perfectly infectious hook you’ll feel weird about singing around the house.

Pleasure venom – EP by Pleasure Venom. Everything you want in a banger of a post-punk record.

ALL-AMERIKKKAN BADASS by Joey Badass. Badass takes his golden-age-of-hip-hop sound, pushes it forward, and uses it tell listeners what it’s like to live in the US as a young black man.

The return by Sampa The Great. Fantastic storytelling, tight flows, and a real statement of intent in Sampa The Great’s fantastic debut album.

RTJ4 by Run The Jewels. If there was ever a time for RTJ to come out swinging, it’s now.

Abandoned language by dälek. “Turn that page muthafucka cause our story’s all scripted. 600 years, ain’t a fuckin' thing different. Don’t speak to us about strength and upliftment. The closest thing to paradise is mad distant.”

The bans are flowing.

Reddit banned r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and 2,000+ other subreddits:

Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech.

“I have to admit that I’ve struggled with balancing my values as an American, and around free speech and free expression, with my values and the company’s values around common human decency,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a call with reporters.

It’s almost as if people are realising that no one platform has an obligation to house abusive, degrading discussion.

That’s not incompatible with free speech.

Every discussion reaches an end point, for a time. That means platform holders do, at some point, get to say “Hey, you’ve been talking about this for a while now and we’ve decided that people shouldn’t be vilified or denigrated on the basis of their race. That’s the decision we’ve reached after your voluminous arguments here”.

That’s how the entirely fictional “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. People agitate for a point of view and, if they’re convincing, that point of view is codified in the policies and laws and moral code of a society. In the case of online chatter, those policies manifest as bans or community guidelines.

These things are never definitive and permanent. People will keep arguing that, hey, maybe people should be attacked on the basis of their race and those people may successfully convince major online platforms that those arguments should be allowed. They’ve certainly done a good job of it at the highest levels of government for a long, long time.

But, for now, the pendulum seems to be swinging ever-so-slightly away from that POV. It’s only taken years to get here.

Back to the bans.

Twitch has “temporarily” banned Donald Trump’s account:

Twitch has temporarily banned President Donald Trump, in the latest surprise and high-profile suspension from the streaming service. Trump’s account was banned for “hateful conduct” that was aired on stream, and Twitch says the offending content has now been removed.

This comes after Twitch permanently banned the massively popular Dr Disrespect for as-yet unknown reasons and swathes of other streamers over sexual abuse allegations. (There’s nothing to suggest that Disrespect’s ban falls into that category, though.

Meanwhile, the Indian Government has shut down a long list of Chinese-based apps:

The government of India has decided to ban 59 apps of Chinese origin as border tensions simmer in Ladakh after a violent, fatal face-off between the Indian and Chinese armies. The list of apps banned by the government includes TikTok, which is extremely popular.

A government press release announcing the ban stated: “The Ministry of Information Technology, invoking it’s power under section 69A of the Information Technology Act read with the relevant provisions of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009 and in view of the emergent nature of threats has decided to block 59 apps since in view of information available they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order”.

Others include ShareIt, Clash of Kings, WeChat, and UC Browser. Here’s a full list.

This is what it looks like when a government is really trying to limit what people say and where they say it.

Update

YouTube has removed five channels used by high-profile white nationalists in the US:

The removed accounts include those ​owned by far-right political entertainer Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist outlets American Renaissance and Radix Journal, as well as longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. YouTube also removed two associated channels: one belonging to alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer and another hosting American Renaissance podcasts.

Microsoft shuttered their streaming service Mixer without warning. That extends to people streaming on the platform – most of them found out at the same time we did. Here’s Alex Walker, reporting for Kotaku:

Some Mixer streamers discovered the news during the middle of their stream, while they were processing the shock of racial allegations the company. “Mixer just tweeted, let’s go Mixer,” streamer PrincessCourt told her chat, resulting in a long, quiet stare at the screen while she processed the news.

This must be devastating for people who have built an audience on Mixer. Especially since Mixer presented the shutdown and the shift to Facebook Gaming as a good thing.

That’s, ah, a failure of communications right there.

The headline on Walker’s article, itself a quote from PrincessCourt, is right: “They clearly don’t give a shit.” And, really, services like Mixer (and Twitch, and YouTube) don’t care about most of the people streaming on their platform.

A lot of people within those companies care about streamers, of course. But, organisationally, most creators don’t matter. The big ones – the people who pull in massive numbers – matter because they’re the people who provide scale. And scale is how outfits like Mixer make money and gain any semblance of cultural cache.

YouTube celebrated small, indie creators for a time because that’s how they built scale. Once the company was big enough and, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly, those smaller creators were less important. A whole lot of other things – like massively popular creators and music labels and movie studios – were driving millions of views and, thus, millions of dollars in revenue.

That matters more, to YouTube and to Mixer and to Twitch, than fostering a familial relationship with small-fry makers.

And that’s the tragedy, really. Services like Mixer and all the rest push this cultural line of “You matter, we’re a community, we’re a family” to hide the fact that, when you publish videos on these services, you’re working for them. You’re finding views and giving them something to run ads against.

You’re an employee, but you’re not. So you don’t deserve the same treatment or protections.

And, unless you’re someone they need to make a whole lot of money, you don’t matter. They don’t give a shit.