The Corsair
The New York Post Hacked! Is The Metaverse just a Fantasyland? Prince Harry's New Memoir.
The NYPost has been hacked …
The common refrain on media-saturated Twitter today is “The New York Post has been hacked with extremist, hate-filled, racist headlines! How can you tell?”
The hack itself, though, is not funny. The Post alleges it was a rogue employee. A rogue employee does not explain years of racially insensitive content, however:
This incident should give the editors at The Post pause. There is no question that the New York Post has engaged in racialized headlines and content over the decades. Actress Viola Davis called for a ban on the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid as recently as 2020 over their racially incendiary coverage of Trayvon Martin.
In 2006, The New York Post ran a headline on U.S. president George W. Bush's meeting with Hu Jintao, then-President of the People's Republic of China at The White House. The headline? “Wok This Way.” As you can imagine, many Asian-American groups were upset. And Steven Colbert did a pitch-perfect skit skewering the Murdoch tabloid.
In 2009 Sean Delonas, their controversial cartoonist, drew an image that may or may have not compared President Obama to a monkey. You … really can’t make this stuff up. In 2009! “I'm struggling to find an interpretation of this that doesn't odiously compare Obama, who just signed the stimulus bill yesterday, to a monkey, resorting to one of the most wretched racist stereotypes,” Julian Sancton wrote for Vanity Fair. “But in all fairness, I think Delonas may just be too stupid to have realized that, and his editors probably stopped actually looking at his amateurishly cross-hatched doodles years ago.” And so it goes …
Pat Buchanan was actually a columnist at the Post until 1991. “"Whatever (Nazi rocket scientist Rudolph Hess) did during World War II, his quarter century of service to the United States entitles the old man to a public hearing before he goes to his grave," Buchanan wrote, jovially, in the Post, July 14, 1990. Our guy Rudolph Hess! In December 1991, Bill Buckley, in a 40,000-word essay in the National Review examining anti-Semitism and the right, concluded, “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge of anti-Semitism.” Finally, the Post dropped him.
If ever there was a moment for the New York Post to reflect seriously upon its racialized content, the time is now. As the GOP continues to distort actual crime statistics to scare suburban voters with dog whistles the New York Post should not carry their water.
Do I believe that is going to happen? Probably not. But at least I tried to make the argument.
What better place to pioneer the Metaverse than Fantasyland? Dirt’s Terry Nguyen is bullish on “world-building,” and he makes many noteworthy points. Currently the concept of the metaverse drives Disney and Big Tech. There is serious conversation in serious spaces about cybercrime and the metaverse. Nguyen writes of the world-building urge:
This worldbuilding urge is reflected in the publicity strategy of musicians like Taylor Swift, who has created an experiential “virtual universe” for her latest album release; Travis Scott, whose one-day Astroworld festival was an ode to a shuttered amusement park of the same name; and Janelle Monae, whose Afrofuturistic Dirty Computer project consists of a music album, short story collection, and narrative film.
To no surprise, billionaire technologists have embraced worldbuilding with dystopic verve: Peter Thiel and Marc Lore harbor fantasies of constructing their own off-the-grid, techno-societies, and Elon Musk has a quest to colonize Mars by 2050. What are these if not fantasy worlds? NFT designers and game developers, too, have launched independent worldbuilding projects that depend on community participation. Luxury fashion houses like Louis Vuitton have launched spin-off clothing collections and shows set in different cities, which “reinforces and builds on the previous show” — a holistic, self-referential storytelling exercise.
But worldbuilding doesn’t always require money, power, or social buy-in for it to be successful or fulfilling. Anyone, in theory, can conjure up a fantasy world.
But there is room for meta-skepticism. It should be noted that Meta is losing, at present, billions. Their Q3 earnings show a company in deep crisis. Even Jim Cramer is crying about it. In a world of fake news, alternative facts, and post-truth is the metaverse just another fantasyland in the never-ending series of American Fantasylands? Or, in Phil Spencer of XBox’s hot take, “a poorly built video game.”
via Random House
Throwback Thursday: A Brief History of Donald Trump Spitefully Pouring Wine Down Women’s Backs. (WMagazine)
”(Disney CEO Bob) Chapek also responded to criticism from right-wing media figures that Disney is ‘too woke.’ He said, ‘The world is a rich, diverse place, and we want our content to reflect that.’” (Reliable Sources)
“(Ayatollah) Khomeini also recommended that girls be married off before puberty—or the onset of menstruation. ‘One of the blessings of man,’ he said, ‘is to have his daughter experience her first period not in her father’s house but in that of her husband.’” (Robin Wright/The New Yorker)
Kanye West’s anti-Semitism apparently goes back decades. (Ryder-Pipps.ETH)
“218 seats at least Lean Republican, while 195 at least Lean Democratic, and there are 22 Toss-ups. Splitting the Toss-ups evenly, 11-11, would give Republicans 229 seats, or a net gain of 16.” (Center for Politics/University of Virginia)
Twitter won’t become a grotty, Libertarian hellscape, Elon coos to Advertisers. (THR)
Zoe Saldana: The Pirates of the Carribean set was horrible. Jerry Bruckheimer apologized years later. (Variety)