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I’m going to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: our culture has confused ironic detachment with intelligence. We’ve mistaken cynicism for sophistication, distance for depth, and the refusal to commit to anything for wisdom itself.
This is killing us.
Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract cultural sense. It is literally destroying our capacity to respond to the crises that define our moment. Because while we perfect our poses of detached cleverness, people with deadly serious intentions are reshaping the world according to their vision.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And ironic detachment is moral cowardice dressed up as intellectual superiority.
Let me be clear about what I mean. Ironic detachment isn’t genuine critique—it’s defensive armor. It’s the reflex that allows you to comment on everything while committing to nothing. It’s the stance that lets you mock both sides of every conflict while accepting responsibility for none of its outcomes.
You see it everywhere. The journalist who treats democratic collapse like entertainment, crafting clever observations about the “theater” of authoritarianism without ever stating plainly that democracy is worth defending. The intellectual who responds to moral clarity with knowing smirks, as if the ability to see complexity were the same as wisdom. The friend who greets every urgent concern with “well, it’s complicated” or “both sides have valid points” or “this is all just politics anyway.”
These people have convinced themselves that their detachment signals sophistication. That their refusal to take moral stands demonstrates superior understanding. That their immunity to “naive” concerns about right and wrong proves their intellectual maturity.
They’re wrong.
What it actually demonstrates is a profound failure of moral imagination. An inability to conceive of situations where clarity matters more than cleverness. A retreat from the responsibilities that come with living in a world where our choices have consequences.
Because here’s what ironic detachment really offers: the comfortable illusion that you’re above the fray while remaining safely within it. It lets you feel superior to those who “fall for” caring about things while never having to defend anything yourself. It’s the perfect stance for people who want to seem engaged without actually risking anything.
Moral seriousness is different. Moral seriousness forces you to face consequences. To choose clearly. To stake out positions that require genuine courage rather than performative intelligence. It demands that you say what you believe even when saying it costs you something.
And yes, this makes people uncomfortable. Because moral seriousness isn’t simplistic—it’s demanding. It isn’t arrogant—it’s responsible. It requires you to act as if your judgments matter, as if your choices have weight, as if the world depends on people like you making decisions about what’s worth defending and what isn’t.
The ironically detached hate this. They prefer the safety of eternal meta-commentary, the endless deferral of commitment, the pose that says “I’m too smart to be fooled by caring about anything.”
But here’s what they miss: intelligence without moral commitment is just sophisticated paralysis. Nuance without the capacity for judgment is just elaborate confusion. The ability to see complexity in everything is worthless if it never leads to clarity about anything.
So let me ask you directly: if moral seriousness bothers you—if you find yourself recoiling from people who speak with clarity about right and wrong—what does that say about you?
Does it say you’re sophisticated? Or does it say you’ve trained yourself to avoid the discomfort that comes with taking responsibility for your own moral judgments?
Does it say you understand nuance? Or does it say you’ve become so committed to seeing all sides that you’ve lost the capacity to choose any side?
Does it say you’re intellectually mature? Or does it say you’re using intelligence as a shield against the demands of living in a world where things actually matter?
I know this is uncomfortable. Good. It should be.
Because while you’ve been perfecting your ironic distance, people with no such hesitations have been busy. They don’t waste time wondering whether their convictions are sophisticated enough. They don’t apologize for moral clarity. They don’t treat their own beliefs as just another position in an endless debate.
They understand something the ironically detached have forgotten: that power goes to people who believe in something. That the world belongs to those willing to commit fully to their vision of what it should become. That democracy doesn’t survive on clever commentary but on citizens willing to say plainly what matters, what is true, and what is at stake.
The authoritarians aren’t ironic. They’re deadly serious about their goals. They don’t hedge their commitments or apologize for their clarity. They don’t treat their own power grabs as just another interesting development in the ongoing political show.
They understand that ironic detachment is the perfect ideology for people who want to feel important without actually mattering. For people who want to seem engaged without risking anything. For people who prefer the comfort of eternal spectatorship to the responsibility of actual participation.
This is why a culture built on irony will crumble in crisis. Because when everything is equally interesting, nothing is truly important. When all positions are equally valid subjects for commentary, no position becomes worth defending. When commitment itself becomes naive, only the uncommitted remain to watch the committed reshape the world.
We don’t need more cleverness. We need more clarity. We don’t need more sophisticated commentary on the complexity of our challenges. We need more people willing to name what threatens us and act accordingly.
We need citizens who understand that moral seriousness isn’t just stylistic—it’s existential. That democracy survives not on ironic detachment but on people willing to say what they believe and defend what they value.
The center cannot be held by people who refuse to acknowledge there’s a center worth holding. The flood cannot be pushed back by people who treat every rising tide as just another fascinating phenomenon. The wire cannot be walked by people who prefer watching others fall to taking the risk themselves.
Ironic detachment promises you safety through distance. But there is no safe distance from the collapse of the systems that make your detachment possible in the first place. There is no commentary booth elevated enough to escape the consequences of living in a world where serious people with serious intentions are making serious choices about the future.
The pose of sophisticated neutrality is itself a choice. The stance of ironic distance is itself a commitment. The refusal to take sides is itself taking a side—the side that benefits from your passivity, from your paralysis, from your conversion of moral clarity into epistemological complexity.
So choose. Not between simple answers to complex questions, but between engagement and evasion. Between responsibility and performance. Between the hard work of moral judgment and the easy comfort of ironic observation.
Choose to speak plainly about what matters. Choose to commit to what you believe. Choose to risk the discomfort of being wrong rather than the cowardice of never being anything.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the world belongs to people who take these simple truths seriously enough to build something real upon them.
The revolution is moral seriousness. The rebellion is choosing clarity over cleverness. The resistance is saying what you mean and meaning what you say.
Every minute of every day.
Remember what’s real.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Filed Under: ironic detachment, irony, morality, reality, truth, view from nowhere
Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, patents are not a measure of innovation, nor are they needed for companies to thrive — something even Elon Musk understands. But one aspect of patents that is rarely considered is their morality. The European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal wrestled with this issue in an interesting case involving the plant extract simalikalactone E and its use to treat malaria. As the patent admits: “simalikalactone E (SkE) was isolated from Quassia amara (Simaroubaceae), a medicinal plant widely used in the Amazon for the treatment of malaria.” In other words, the use of the plant extract to treat malaria was already known among Amazonian peoples, who naturally did not try to patent it. Related to this, an objection was raised to the patent, on the grounds that it was contrary to “morality”, as defined by Article 53 of the European Patent Convention:
European patents shall not be granted in respect of:
(a) inventions the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to “ordre public” or morality; such exploitation shall not be deemed to be so contrary merely because it is prohibited by law or regulation in some or all of the Contracting States;
The IPKat has a good explanation of the reasoning behind the objection:
the Opponent argued that the invention represented “biopiracy” on behalf of the patentee against the indigenous people involved in the original research. Specifically, the Opponent submitted that the interactions with the indigenous communities had been conducted in an immoral fashion, involving deception and an abuse of trust. According to the Opponent, the members of the communities involved had not been fully and transparently informed of the nature of the research project, its objectives, the filing of the patent, and other risks and benefits of the project to community members and their knowledge. As such, the Opponent argued, the IP rights of the communities over their traditional knowledge had been violated. The Opponent submitted that the deception and breach of trust displayed was contrary to ordre public and would jeopardize relations between indigenous and local communities and researchers.
However, the EPO’s Board of Appeal rejected this argument for an interesting reason:
The exclusion to patentability provided for in Article 53(a) EPC requires the stated offense to morality to reside in the “commercial exploitation” of the claimed invention. The claims of the patent were directed to the formula of the antimalarial, a process of manufacturing the antimalarial and its use in therapy. Given the dire need for effective antimalarial medication, the Board of Appeal found that the commercial exploitation of these inventions would not be contrary to public morality (on the contrary, they would be beneficial to society). Specifically, the Board of Appeal made a clear distinction between the morality of the commercial exploitation of an invention, and the morality of how the invention itself occurred (r.2.14).
That is, patents can be excluded if their commercial exploitation would be immoral, but it doesn’t matter if the way the invention claimed in the patent was made turned out to be immoral. European patent law simply doesn’t care about that aspect. Fortunately, that’s not the end of this particular story, as the IPKat post explains:
Questions over the morality of scientific discovery must therefore be dealt with in a different forum than the patent office. In this case, despite the decision of the Board of Appeal, the European patent in question appears to have lapsed on all member states due to failure to pay renewal fees. The US case has similarly been abandoned. It thus appears that the substantial political pressures on the [patent-holder, the French Institute for Development Research] outside the patent system have impacted their desire and/or ability to commercialise the invention.
It’s good that this kind of pressure works, but it would be better if the patent world cared more about the morality of inventors’ actions in the first place.
Follow me @glynmoody on Bluesky and on Mastodon.
Filed Under: antimalarial, biopiracy, elon musk, epo, european patent office, exploitation, france, innovation, inventors, malaria, morality, pressure
Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about The Oversight Board — which everyone refers to as the Facebook Oversight Board, because despite its plans to work with other social media companies, it was created by Facebook, and feels inevitably connected to Facebook by way of its umbilical cord. As we noted earlier this month, after the Oversight Board’s first decisions came down, everyone who had a strong opinion about the Oversight Board seemed to use the results to confirm their existing beliefs about it.
To some, the Oversight Board is just an attempt for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to avoid taking responsibility for societal-level impacts of its platform. For others it’s a cynical ploy/PR campaign to make it look like it’s giving up some of its power. To still others, it’s a weak attempt to avoid regulation. To many, it’s a combination of all three. And, then, to some, it’s an interesting experiment in content moderation that attempts to actually separate some final decision making ability from a website itself. And, again, it could still be some combination of all of those. As I’ve said since it launched, I find it to be an interesting experiment, and even if the cynical reasons are a driving force behind it, that may not matter if the Board actually turns into a sort of authority that creates change. As I recently talked about in a podcast episode, the norms may become important.
That is, even if the whole thing is a cynical marketing ploy by a finger-waving Mark Zuckerberg, that might not matter if the Board itself actually is able to create meaningful change within the company and how it handles both moderation decisions and content moderation policy. And it’s reasonable to point out that this has a high chance of failure and that there are a variety of structural problems in how the Board is setup, but that doesn’t mean failure is guaranteed. And there’s enough of a chance that the Board could make a difference that I think it’s worth paying close attention to what happens with it.
And, if you believe that it’s important to understand, then you owe it to yourself to read Prof. Kate Klonick’s brilliant, thorough and detailed account of the making of the Board with lots of behind-the-scenes tidbits. I can think of no one better to do this kind of reporting. Klonick, a former reporter who has a JD and a PhD and is now a law professor, wrote the seminal paper on social media content moderation, The New Governors, which is also required reading for anyone seeking to understand content moderation online.
Buried deep within the article is an important point that gets to what I say above, about how the norms around the Board might make it powerful, even if the Board is not initially imbued with actual power:
Harris likened the board to Tinkerbell: ?At the end of the day you can build all the things, but you just have to have enough people that believe in order to make it real.?
Some have been arguing that Klonick’s New Yorker article is, itself, Facebook PR or a puff piece, but claiming such is only evidence that either (a) you haven’t read it or (b) that your reading comprehension is so bad as to call into question pretty much anything else you write. Facebook does not come out of the article looking very good. Nor does the Oversight Board. But what the article does reveal is… just how fucking messy all of this is. It’s a keen distillation of my impossibility theorem as applied to the world’s largest collection of speech.
Indeed, the article includes this line that I’m sure will be repeated by critics of Facebook and the Board until the end of time itself:
At one point, a director of policy joked about ways to make the board seem independent, asking, ?How many decisions do we have to let the Oversight Board win to make it legit??
The article also makes clear the competing interests (some of which are seen in the opinions people hold about the Board) regarding how much power to give the Board, and the eventual decision to… well… give it very, very little. Facebook employees were worried that giving it too much power would give the Board the ability to literally kill Facebook. Though, on the flip side, the lack of power… makes the Board seem fairly hapless.
There’s also a fun section on how people wanted Board members to be selected:
One attendee suggested letting the first board members choose the rest, to preserve their independence from the company. Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern?s business school, cautioned against this approach: ?It?s empirically proven that when you have a group self-select, in the absence of any kind of guidance, they just pick more people that look like them.? The experts then began giving their own ideas. Journalists said that the board should be mostly journalists. International human-rights lawyers said that it should be all international human-rights lawyers. Information scientists said that it should be ?anyone but lawyers.? A white man at a think tank said that it should be populated with ?regular people.?
Even, it seems, picking the judges presents something of a content moderation challenge. Indeed, as you might predict, in a moment of heightened political polarization, that was felt in the process of setting up the Board:
People familiar with the process told me that some Republicans were upset about what they perceived to be the board?s liberal slant. In the months leading up to the appointments, conservative groups pushed the company to make the board more sympathetic to Trump. They suggested their own lists of candidates, which sometimes included members of the President?s family, most notably Ivanka and the President?s sons. ?The idea was, either fill this board with Trump-supporting conservatives or kill it,? one person familiar with the process said. In early May, shortly after the board members were announced, Trump personally called Zuckerberg to say that he was unhappy with the makeup of the board. He was especially angry about the selection of Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law professor who had testified against him during his first impeachment. ?He used Pam as an example of how the board was this deeply offensive thing to him,? the person familiar with the process said. Zuckerberg listened, and then told Trump that the members had been chosen based on their qualifications. Despite the pressure from Trump, Facebook did not change the composition of the board. (Trump declined to comment.)
That seems quite notable, of course, now that the Board is in the middle of deciding if Trump can get his account back.
But perhaps the most notable part of the article is Klonick’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg himself. As Klonick notes, Zuckerberg has more or less accidentally put himself in the position of being the arbiter of what is and what is not allowed on the biggest platform for communication ever created. And he seems to be struggling with that, because figuring out how to deal with the societal-level problems that it creates is not nearly as interesting as just building products, which appears to be much more of his passion.
He looked tired. He seemed more at ease talking about ?product? or ?building tools? than he did discussing ethics or politics. It struck me that he was essentially a coder who had found himself managing the world?s marketplace of ideas. ?The core job of what we do is building products that help people connect and communicate,? he said. ?It?s actually quite different from the work of governing a community.? He hoped to separate these jobs: there would be groups of people who built apps and products, and others?including Facebook?s policy team and now the board?who deliberated the thorny questions that came along with them. I brought up a speech he gave at Georgetown, in 2019, in which he noted that the board was personally important to him, because it helped him feel that, when he eventually left, he would be leaving the company in safe hands. ?One day, I?m not going to be running the company,? he told me. ?I would like to not be in the position, long term, of choosing between someone who either is more aligned with my moral view and values, or actually is more aligned with being able to build high-quality products.?
I asked what kinds of cases he hopes the board will take. ?If I was them, I?d be wary of choosing something that was so charged right off the bat that it was immediately going to polarize the whole board, and people?s perception of the board, and society,? he told me. He knew that critics wished the board had more power: ?This is certainly a big experiment. It?s certainly not as broad as everyone would like it to be, upfront, but I think there?s a path for getting there.? But he rejected the notion that it was a fig leaf. ?I?m not setting this up to take pressure off me or the company in the near term,? he said. ?The reason that I?m doing this is that I think, over the long term, if we build up a structure that people can trust, then that can help create legitimacy and create real oversight. But I think there is a real risk, if it gets too polarized too quickly, that it will never be able to blossom into that.?
These statements are, at the same time, obviously true, obviously predictable… and just not very insightful. I don’t envy anyone being in a position where much of the world’s ills are blamed on what was your college coding side hustle, but Zuckerberg has now had a good 15 years to consider that all of these things are connected. You can’t separate the policy and the product building. You can’t have “the builders” and “the thinkers” as if they’re two separate camps. They kind of all need to be combined.
In some sense, this reminds me (on a much different scale) of the rush in the early aughts to have companies appoint “Chief Digital Officers” in all sorts of old school companies. As we discussed at the time, thinking digitally isn’t a separate job function. For most companies, digital thinking has to be a part of everything — and that applies to understanding the policy and ethical implications of product design as well.
It’s disappointing — though not surprising — that Zuckerberg hasn’t quite grasped this yet.
But that doesn’t make the Board itself any less of an interesting experiment. Indeed, if enough people actually believe in this Tinker Bell, it might not even matter that Zuckerberg himself misunderstands how the Board itself could be useful. It might just make itself useful by accident.
Filed Under: content moderation, kate klonick, mark zuckerberg, morality, oversight, regulation
Companies: facebook, oversight board
Two years ago, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which the morality police who work for Google’s AdSense team threatened to kill our account because they saw that their ads were being displayed on this page, which has a story (from 2012) about a publicity rights claim involving a music video using footage of a porn star without her permission. The story was quite clearly about the intellectual property issues at play, but the AdSense team insisted that since the still image displayed from the embedded video showed a (clothed) woman pole dancing, it violated their policies on “adult or mature content.” We protested and AdSense rejected our protest, insisting that the still image of the pole dancing violated their policies. Never mind the fact that the same exact video was hosted on Google-owned YouTube where it had Google’s ads enabled…
For what it’s worth, this happened just months after we had started using Google AdSense, after representatives from that team put together a big effort to get us switch from the other ad provider we’d been using at the time.
We had hoped that after that incident the AdSense team would have, perhaps, rethought some of its practices. No such luck. Last year we wrote about another case, not involving us, but where Google started threatening the site Antiwar.com for posting the infamous photos of US soldiers mistreating prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. After that story started going viral, Google’s AdSense team backed down — but apparently they’ve done little to fix their processes.
In the last two weeks we’ve received two notices of violations from AdSense, each of which seems more ridiculous than the other in some way, and which has us reconsidering our use of AdSense as a media property, as Google fails at distinguishing between reporting on bad things and celebrating those same things. In both cases, the “violation” involved a post that was many years old, so it’s unclear why Google suddenly discovered them. In both cases, the posts were basic reporting on something that had happened, and no rational and reasonable person would conclude they violated any policy that AdSense has. And, yet, in both cases, Google claimed they violated its policies, and threatened that if we were unable to sort through the 64,000 other posts on Techdirt to weed out the ones that somehow violate Googles bizarre and arbitrary morality police policies, we risk losing our account.
The first was about a post from 2010, involving a lawsuit concerning assisted suicide. As we noted in our short post on it, there was a legal question about whether or not its illegal to tell people how to commit suicide online. Because while there are laws against assisted suicide, the guy was basically arrested for merely telling people over the internet they should commit suicide, and that seems like protected First Amendment speech. Thus it was an interesting legal question worthy of debate (our post received 60 comments, suggesting many folks agreed). So what could possibly be wrong with that? Well, according to the AdSense team:
Google does not allow the monetization of content that may be sensitive, tragic, or hurtful. While we believe strongly in the freedom of expression and offer broad access to content across the Web without censoring search results, we reserve the right to exercise discretion when reviewing sites and determining whether or not we are able to provide a positive user experience delivering contextually targeted ads to a site with this type of content.
In short, Google AdSense requires some sort of special trigger warning setup, whereby we need to turn it off on any article that someone might consider “sensitive, tragic or hurtful”? Does that mean no AdSense ads are allowed on stories about the shooting in Orlando this weekend? Is that really the official policy of Google’s morality police? Sure, I could see that Google might not want to have its ads on a site associated with telling people how to commit suicide — but obviously that’s not what our story was about at all. The fact that the morality police working for AdSense can’t seem to tell a journalistic blog post about a legal dispute from a site advocating for assisted suicide (which really doesn’t seem that tragic or hurtful in the first place) is fairly ridiculous.
The second complaint, received over the weekend, is about a post from 2012 concerning the band Death Grips’ decision to just give away its album after its label, Epic, had tried to shelve the album. It’s an interesting story highlighting an all too standard dispute between musicians and a record label, with a somewhat unique solution by the band. So, what could Google possibly be complaining about here? Are you ready for this?
Google ads may not be placed on pages with adult or mature content. This includes, but is not limited to, pages that contain:
- erotic stories or descriptions of sexual acts
- sexual jokes
- erotic or sexual forums
- sexual or profane terms in the URL
- crude language or excessive amounts of profanity
Going through the article, there doesn’t seem to be anything like that in our post. What it almost certainly refers to, however, is that we discussed one of the reasons why Epic may have decided to shelve the album release, which is that the band wanted an album cover that was a photograph of an erect penis. We did not post this image, but we did link to it — along with a clear “NSFW” warning. We didn’t even describe what was in the photo, other than implying obliquely that it may have something to do with male genitals. Other than that, the post contains no profanity or sexual language (there are some curses in the comments, but I don’t see how that could count).
Once again, any normal, living, thinking human being should be able to look at such a post and recognize that it’s a blog post/news story about a newsworthy event, rather than some sort of sexual forum with crude language. But, alas, no such luck — we’re told that we violate AdSense’s apparently random policies, and we’re at risk of losing our account.
Oddly, on the first notification, we were told that Google automatically turned off ads on that page on their own (though telling us we should explore the rest of our pages to see if there were similar “violations.”) On the latter one, Google was not as proactive, instead demanding that we figure out a way to disable ads on that specific page ourselves.
Now, Google is a private company that obviously has the right to choose who it wants to do business with and how it does business, but this seems particularly ridiculous. This does raise questions for us as a media property and whether AdSense is compatible with news reporting. We shouldn’t have to worry if the Google morality police might randomly show up at any time to insist we’re violating its rules by actually reporting on newsworthy stories.
Filed Under: ads, adsense, google ads, journalism, morality, morality police
Companies: google, techdirt
Apple has a long and annoying history of trying to keep the content within its app store as pure as the driven snow. To do this, Apple employs an arbitrary and downright stupid sense of morality. That’s how you end up with Apple banning a VR representation of the Ferguson shooting, for instance, despite the fact that it was non-graphic. Or that time the company killed off a Civil War simulation because the game contained historically accurate representations of the Confederate flag. Or when it removed an image-searching app from the store because, hey, somebody somewhere might use it to see naughty-bits.
But to really see Apple’s morality turned on its head, we can now point to its rejection of a mobile version of the popular game The Binding of Isaac because it contains violence towards children. And, on the face of it, you can see Apple’s point. The game, after all, does indeed have some themes that would normally raise eyebrows over at Apple.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’s console and platform editions are rated M by the ESRB. Promotional images for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth have frequently shown cartoon representations of children, including the protagonist, naked and weeping, curled up on the floor in a dungeon, or otherwise mistreated.
The game itself is a procedurally generated dungeon crawler that does feature violence, but only in the sense of basic gameplay where combat is an option. Some of the dungeon’s inhabitants are deformed, but again, they’re rendered in a stylized, cartoonish way.
The reason the player is crawling through those dungeons is because the mother in the story is attempting to capture him and sacrifice him as an offering to the God she is hearing in her head. And, if that particular bit sounds incredibly familiar to you, it’s because it’s a variance on the age-old biblical story on which the game is based.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is inspired by the Old Testament story of Isaac, the son of Abraham, whom God had asked to sacrifice on Mount Moriah. He is stopped at the last moment by an angel. Interpretations of it among the Abrahamic faiths vary but it is, broadly speaking, a test-of-faith story that in the United States has been taught in Sunday school for decades.
Truth be told, it’s a horrible story that I’m not and never was particularly fond of, even when I was in Sunday School. Still, Apple’s rejection of the app on the grounds that it contains “violence against children” would be on much more solid ground if the god damn source material, known as the various iterations of the Bible, didn’t have an entire section on Apple’s book store dedicated to it. Anyone really want to suggest that those holy books don’t also contain violence against children?
The point, of course, isn’t that Apple should also take down the bible from the app store. That would be stupid. As stupid as, say, Apple’s arbitrary application of Apple Morality in a way that is equally ham-fisted and incoherent. It would be better if Apple tempted fate by taking down Eden’s walls to let the public apply its own morality, whatever serpents might be found in wait.
Filed Under: app store, bible story, binding of isaac, itunes, morality, morality police, the bible
Companies: apple
In our recent discussion about the delightfully vulgar filing by the Washington Redskins in an effort to point out the arbitrary application of morality by the government to trademark law, the point in the filing was driven home by just how many similarly vulgar and offensive terms the USPTO has been happy to sanctify with a valid trademark. Perhaps some of you out there thought that this was a uniquely American problem, something resulting from our overabundance of political correctness. It’s not. A case in Canada over the trademark application for “Lucky Bastard Vodka” shows this quite well. It also shows the inherent problem in trying to have a government institution apply morality to business in this way.
In 2011, LB Distillers applied to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) to register “Lucky Bastard vodka” as a trademark. About eight months later, the agency responsible for trademarks, patents and copyright replied.
“The examiner came back and said it was immoral, scandalous and obscene, and that the general population of Canada would agree that it was an immoral name,” LB Distillers co-owner Cary Bowman said.
The micro-distillery’s appeal was rejected in 2012, but the company persisted, filing a separate application to register “Lucky Bastard.” On Oct. 8, CIPO sent a letter to LB Distillers stating that it “does not appear registrable” because it violates the Canadian Trade-marks Act, which prohibits trademarks that include “any scandalous, obscene or immoral word or device.”
So, here, as with the Redskins, we have a trademark office refusing a business a trademark because of the offensive nature of a word — “bastard,” in this case. Now, we could have a giant discussion over whether or not that word is truly offensive, as LB Distillers indeed tried to do with the government. Or, on the other hand, as LB Distillers also did, it could instead simply point out the blatant and glaring hypocrisy of the government’s position.
A search of the trademark database reveals several containing the word “bastard” — including Fat Bastard wine, he noted. The situation amounts to one examiner applying his or her views to the process, he said.
“When it’s one person who’s deciding the fate of something like that, and they’re basing it maybe on their own morals as opposed to anybody else’s, and yet calling it everybody else’s, that’s quite unfair.”
And, really, that’s the problem with these cases. We may think of trademark offices or government more generally as a sort of singular entity within our minds, but they’re all just ultimately made up of people. People with differing views, different sensibilities, and different tolerances for different words. With both the American and Canadian trademark provisions around offensive langauge being so open to interpretation, what ends up happening is that these examiners are left to apply their own morality to these cases, which of course means that such morality will be applied inconsistently across all applications. That’s how you get “bastard” being rejected by one examiner while it’s already been approved by others. And that’s partly why an appeals court found the part of trademark law that allows this in the US unconstitutional last week.
There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to harmonize the morality standards across all examiners in a trademark office so that they all apply government morality consistently. If that sounds impossible to you, it’s because it is impossible. The only workable solution is to get trademark examiners out of the morality business entirely and judge these things purely on business and commerce grounds.
Filed Under: canada, disparaging, free speech, lucky bastard, morality, offensive, redskins, trademark
I won’t pretend to know every in and out of the Dead or Alive series. That’s partially because I gave up fighting games once I hit junior high, and partially because my gaming habits tend to cleave to particular franchises generally and DoA wasn’t amongst those I patronized. But I gather the series has been mostly about offering up characters, and setting them to beat the hell out of one another for fun and amusement. I can see where there might be fun in that.
What I can’t see is why the creator of such a game series would want to make the kinds of moral arguments against modders that DoA producer Yosuke Hayashi made in conjunction with Koei Tecmo going all DMCA crazy on mods that removed the wardrobes of the fairer characters of DoA 5: Last Round.
“We have to deal with mod issues from an IP holder perspective,” Koei Tecmo producer Yosuke Hayashi said in an interview with trade publication MCV. “We would like to ask PC users to play our game in good moral and manner. Otherwise, we won’t be able to release a title for PC again.”
Now, is the dedication some modders show to making sure that female characters are disrobed a level 20 on the creepy scale? Sure, I think that’s fair. But, from a business perspective, why is Tecmo interested in going the DMCA route on the modding community? Whatever you think of the mods themselves, it’s difficult to mount a logical argument for going to war with the modding community, which is typically made up of either a game’s fan-base or talented modders serving some portion of the fan-base. Either way, mods are strictly for the interested, meaning they can only make a product more desirable, not less. What good comes from the company trying to hide these mods using intellectual property law?
As for the moral argument, please let me just type “haha” here and imagine I kept repeating those two letters infinitely, because, seriously, c’mon. The DoA series only strayed form its chief thematic vehicle of human beings beating the ever-loving shit out of one another in order to tantalize dumb teenage boys by creating spinoff series in which the female DoA characters play volleyball in laughably small bikinis, spinoffs in which the female characters are photographed in laughably small bikinis, and spinoffs in which the female characters can play almost-strip-poker with the player. Let me see if I can draw you a picture of morality using DoA imagery.
The point is that there seems to be little sense in any of this from Tecmo’s perspective. Moral arguments are for those with moral authority, and good gaming business is to let modders have-at-it, as it were.
Filed Under: dmca, doa, modders, mods, morality, yosuke hayashi
Companies: koei tecmo
Nearly a year ago, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous situation in which Google AdSense threatened to cut off all of our ads (which they had just spent months begging us to use) because the ads showed up on this page, which has a story about a publicity rights dispute concerning a music video that includes someone dancing suggestively around a pole. The morality police at AdSense argued that this news story — which was about a legal dispute concerning the video — somehow violated AdSense’s terms against putting the ads on content including “strategically covered nudity” and “lewd or provocative poses.” Apparently, the AdSense team has no “newsworthy” exception to these idiotic policies.
After that story was posted, we heard from people inside Google who insisted that they were pushing the AdSense team to deal with similar situations in a much smarter way: such as simply turning off the ads on those individual pages rather than killing entire accounts. But, frankly, even that is pretty pointless. Why not fix AdSense’s terms so that having ads appear on a news story about such content doesn’t trigger the threat to shut down AdSense altogether?
It appears that the AdSense morality police still haven’t figured this out. Last week a similar kerfuffle arose when the AdSense team threatened antiwar.com because it had an article (from a while back) that posted the infamous photos of US soldiers mistreating prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those photos are famous for their newsworthiness, and yet Google AdSense said they were a terms of service violation for being “violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or images.”
After that story started to get some press attention, Google backed down… but only for a few hours, before coming back and complaining about another article on Antiwar’s site, showing images of people killed in Ukraine.
As with the threat to kill our own AdSense account, this is simply idiotic. Yes, Google can set whatever terms and conditions it wants for sites to use AdSense, but acting as morality police — especially over newsworthy content on news websites — is profoundly stupid and shortsighted. We had hoped that our experience with a similarly ridiculous policy decision by Google last year would convince the company to fix its policies. Unfortunately, it appears that Google is still playing morality police and trying to dictate editorial choices.
Filed Under: abu ghraib, adsense, editorial, journalism, morality, news, violence
Companies: antiwar, google
Iran continues to battle the Internet, recognizing the fact that an unfiltered exchange of ideas (some of them admittedly often horrifically bad) tends to undermine repressive regimes. While the President and the Minister of Communications have stressed that higher-speed connections (and less censorship) are useful to Iran’s citizens, many others in the government feel that increasing speeds means giving up lots and lots of control. (via @visions_studios)
[C]onservative, religious, and security organizations and officials fear the loss of control that a faster Internet will bring, and as such resist the administration’s efforts to provide the faster services.
These government officials would prefer the President push everyone onto Iran’s version of the Internet: the National Information Network. Whenever it’s finally fully implemented, it will function like a countrywide Intranet, giving government control over access as well as opening users up to significant amounts of surveillance.
Since President Rouhani seems reluctant to throttle the nation’s internet users, others have pressed forward on the issue. Cue the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, who has arbitrarily determined that high-speed connections are an affront to [this particular] God.
A Grand Ayatollah in Iran has determined that access to high-speed and 3G Internet is “against Sharia” and “against moral standards.” In answer to a question published on his website, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, one of the country’s highest clerical authorities, issued a fatwa, stating “All third generation [3G] and high-speed internet services, prior to realization of the required conditions for the National Information Network [Iran’s government-controlled and censored Internet which is under development], is against Sharia [and] against moral and human standards.”
Left undiscussed is how incremental increases in speed are incremental increases in sin or how exactly an Iran-only internet would redeem “immoral” high-speed connections. These sorts of questions are better left unasked, especially in a nation filled with religious leaders that can impose and carry out death penalties with impunity.
The bottom line is that a clunky internet is a mostly-useless internet, even for non-subversive reasons like seeking jobs or performing research. Shirazi’s declaration is mostly noise-making, but it does serve a purpose — to give the conservatives pushing for the Iranternet more ammo to use against political opponents. Nothing brings the froth to the surface faster than blending politics and religion, especially when the subject matter is the world wide web.
The former Minister of Communications had this to say in support of strangling the web.
“If the Ministry of Communications does not pay attention to the sensitivities of the people and the ulama [high-ranking clerics], [the Ministry] will have no choice but to prepare itself for significant developments at the Parliament and in society.”
Note that the “sensitivities of the people” are somehow exactly the same as the “sensitivities of high-ranking clerics,” even when the people are actively seeking better connection speed.
Mahmoud Khosravi, Chairman of the Board and Managing Director of the Ertebatat-e Zirsakht (Communications Infrastructure) Company, stated recently that three million new requests for high-speed Internet services had been filed.
Iran’s citizens want one thing. Parts of the government want another. And religious leaders just want control of both the people and the government. In between lies the internet. “Knowledge is power” as they say, and the internet contains a wealth of it. And Iran’s power structure — the part of it that relies on stupidity like “2G good, 3G bad” fatwas — would like this threat neutralized, and it’s willing to further harm the future of the nation to do it.
Filed Under: 3g, broadband, fatwa, grand ayatollah, internet connections, iran, morality
As the evolution of video games as a major entertainment medium marches on, you would expect to see more and more studies done as to their effects. And, since the chief topic among those having this conversation seems to center around the effect of violence in games, that’s where much of the focus of these studies is going to go. Now, we’ve already discussed one study that linked violent video games and the so-called Macbeth Effect, in which the gamer feels the need to cleanse themselves of the wrong-doing with a conversely benevolent action. That study was important because it demonstrated that the effect of violent games might have the opposite effect of the all-to-prevalent theory that virtual violence begets real-life violence.
A recent study appears to boil this down even further, indicating that instead of feeling any kind of desensitizing effect, immoral actions taken in video games produce a more sensitive, compassionate person.
A study led by Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor in the department of communication at the University at Buffalo, reaffirmed previous research saying that committing immoral acts in games can cause players to feel guilt. Moreover, the study found that players would become more sensitive to the specific moral codes that they violated while playing — and according to Grizzard and his co-authors, that may eventually lead players to practice prosocial behavior (that is, voluntary behavior for the benefit of other people).
The study was done at an unnamed Midwestern university, sampling nearly 200 individuals for testing purposes. The game used was Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, an older game that was previously used in a study that first tried to measure guilt in the gaming population. The methodology used by several researchers from major universities is interesting, to say the least.
First, the researchers randomly assigned the participants to play a game or perform a memory recall task. They randomly assigned the gaming segment to play Cold War Crisis in two ways: Either they would play as terrorists (the “guilt condition”), or as U.N. peacekeepers in the “control condition.” The researchers also split the memory recall participants into two groups: They asked the guilt condition people to write about a time in which they felt particularly guilty, while they requested the control condition folks to write about a normal day.
What they found is that feelings of guilt were more profound in those gamers who played as terrorists compared with those that played as peacekeepers. The rationale at work is that terrorists are unjustified in killing the U.N. characters, but not vice versa. What that demonstrates is that players taking what they deem to be immoral actions within a virtual environment are emotionally stimulated in thinking about those actions and develop thoughts and opinions based on those actions, building generally towards empathy through guilt. Coupled with other research, this is important.
Research has shown that guilt and increased moral sensitivity in real life often lead to prosocial behavior. Thus, the study’s authors concluded, there’s some likelihood that the same could be true for guilt resulting from immoral virtual behavior. In other words, playing violent games can make you feel guilty, which may cause you to do nice things for other people.
It’s important to note that still other research has shown that with increased play at relatively high rates, these feelings of guilt tend to lessen over time. That likely has more to do with the player’s comfort level in accepting that their actions are all just part of a game and having already settled their feelings on those actions. In the meantime, for the vast majority of gamers who play games at what we’d consider normal intervals, violence in games may actually lead to pro-social behavior rather than the stereotype result that’s blasted around our media.
Filed Under: morality, video games, violence
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