The Totoro Tax

I have beef with anyone who messes with my freedom.

And few things are more emblematic of freedom than the right to read what I want, and watch what I want.  Freedom of speech is kind of a nontrivial part of the First Amendment, and without it, our Constitutional liberties wouldn't exist.

I also love movies.  I love the depth and richness of visual storytelling, love sitting back with family and sharing in a movie night, or going out to see something in theater.

Only now, well, now that's being threatened.  A one hundred percent tariff has been decreed on all films made outside of the United States.  How's this going to work?  Who knows?   There are no plans.  More thought goes into the average bowel movement than goes into American policy statements these days, and at least bowel movements accomplish something.

If it ever became real, though?  It would be a terrible, terrible thing.

First, it attacks some really great storytelling.  The other day, I watched an astoundingly excellent sci flick.  MARS EXPRESS is a gorgeous, handcrafted tale of a robot uprising on Mars, smart and elegant and grim.  It's not the sort of preprocessed dullness that often comes out of corporate Hollywood, because it was freakin' French.  So. Very.  French.   Am I to be charged double for that?  

Or what about Studio Ghibli films, magical and charming and deeply traditional?  Are we really imposing a punitive tax on Totoro?  

And not every American story happens in America.  Are you going to penalize the making of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN if they don't film it in the swimming pool at Mar A Lago?  

That brings me to the next infringement on our freedom.

It penalizes Americans who want to hear the heritage and stories of their ancestors.  I have the right to take pride in and honor my history.  As someone with Irish blood, I loved loved loved THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN.  It's an IRISH FREAKIN' MOVIE.  Where else are they gonna make it besides Ireland?   If you want to watch a Korean film made in Korea because you're an American who came from there, or a Bollywood film because you have Indian heritage, are we all now having to pay a penalty?  

Why is this misbegotten brainfart diktat even a thing?  It seems to have come from one conversation Trump had with John Voight, who noted in passing that the film industry is really struggling in America right now.  There's a truth to that, one worth exploring.  Why are films being made elsewhere?

Because films here are too danged expensive to make.  MARS EXPRESS was brilliant, and it got made on a $9 million dollar budget.  GODZILLA MINUS ONE, a nearly-perfect recent Japanese monster flick?  That got made for under $15 million.  Movies here are often ten times more expensive.  Costs are just too danged high, because...why?  You know why.  Everything in America is more expensive than it needs to be.  Health care.  Groceries.  Cars.  Homes.  Everything.  Our bloated, inefficient, profit-maximizing corporations have created the least efficient, most parasitic economic system in human history.

That's the problem.  

Well, that and a president who hasn't got a single advisor who dares suggest that maybe he needs to occasionally think before speaking.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.

Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.

Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.

It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  

Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  

They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  

Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  

The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."

To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  

The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.

Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.

Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.

Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.

Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

On Living in an Oligarchy

Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, I was reminded of the limitations of social media.

Those reminders have been present throughout this election season.  In 2016 and in 2020, posts containing my reflections on the state of the election were places of extended conversation.  They were shared, and shared often.  

This year?  Crickets.  Part of me got to thinking, you know, perhaps it's just that I'm boring.  And, honestly, it also felt a little repetitious.  A little dull.  Why just say things over and over and over?  I stuck to pictures of my garden, and limited my posting to my blog and the twelve people who read it.

But it wasn't just that.  Meta has changed.  Facebook was once all about friends, about leveraging the human pleasure of interacting with familiar faces.  That was their whole business model.  I'd scroll, and it'd be people I knew from every phase of my life, intermingled with the occasional ad.  That was the point.  

Now, it's not about faces.  It's primarily content pages and advertising.  The shift has been slow, but it's a completely different landscape today.

In the Meta media ecosystem...Instagram, FaceBook, and Threads...we also know that political posts have this season been suppressed by redesigned algorithms.  For major influencers, with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, that following's baked in, but for normies like myself with just a few hundred souls tagging along, the potential for a post to go viral has been muted.  This is by design.

Among my friends and colleagues who skew progressive, there were increasing reports of community standard violations, for infractions that seemed picayune or absurd.  Posts about the climate crisis.  Posts critical of far right-wing foolishness, entirely legitimate as political discourse.  Posts about nothing political at all.  Posts that would once have been utterly par for the course.  All of it, suddenly taken down.

At the same time, in the weeks before the election, my FaceBook feed was suddenly dominated by posts from a single person pitching Trumpy talking points.  He wasn't someone I know, or am close to, or have ever meaningfully interacted with, just a fraternity brother who'd graduated a few years before I entered undergrad.  He was all Trump, all the time, and if you'd read my feed, you'd have thought he was my best friend in the whole wide world.  He was delighting in being a troll, in being provocative.

It was odd.

Then, yesterday, I was hit with my first Facebook community standard violation.  

Six months ago, I'd created a FaceBook page for a work of satire I self pubbed back in 2022.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, because what else are you going to say about a politician who has most of the American church in his thrall, while at the same time being precisely and in every way the opposite of Jesus?  To make it clear that it was satire, the book is written in the voice of Satan himself, and it calls out both the decadence and falsehood of Trumpism and...at the same time...challenges Christians who allow hatred for Trump and his followers to consume their souls.  Love your enemies, as a command, isn't contingent on your enemies being the ones that are easy to love, eh?

I'd posted on that page for most of last year, dropping relevant writings from theologians and commentators.  And then yesterday, two days after the election, the page was suddenly suspended.  Why?  It was in violation of newly revised community standards, for "impersonating another person."  

So...you write a book that is clearly satire, and clearly mark your media as a page promoting a book written IN THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF...and you're "impersonating another person?"  What, people might think I'm actually Satan?  I mean, ok, fine, some might, but...what and the what?

I asked that the decision be reviewed, a process that required checking one of four prewritten replies, each of which was written to subtly suggest I might be in the wrong.  The response came seconds later.  Denied, all content removed, all by an "admin," which clearly it wasn't.  This was a machine at work.  The corporate algorithms had spoken.

Here, were I ignorant, I suppose I'd whinge about First Amendment rights.  Mah Rights!  Mah Rights!  

But I wasn't speaking in America.  I was on Facebook, and Facebook isn't America.  

Meta pages or groups or profiles reside in a corporate media ecosystem.  They're not our property, nor are they the public sphere.  We are in a space controlled and managed by a global conglomerate, run by and for profit, one whose interests are engagement and eyeballs for the purposes of selling our data and advertising to us.  That's the whole business model.  Freedom of speech isn't relevant.  If, like X, Meta wants to suppress political or religious discourse that they feel does not benefit them, they can.

Constitutional protections do not apply in oligarchic systems.  I have no right to a Facebook page, or a Facebook profile.  None of us do.  There are no freedoms when our every interaction is owned by corporations.

It's something we need to remember.