Category Archives: New Utopia

Travis Scott released his fourth studio album, "Utopia," on Friday.Getty/Simone Joyner

Travis Scott released his fourth studio album, "Utopia," on Friday.

The album sounds like a rehash of Kanye West's 2013 album "Yeezus."

While its features are a high point, the album contains no discernible hit, unlike Scott's others.

After Kanye West, now known as Ye, dropped his soundscape-bending sixth studio album, "Yeezus," in 2013, he told "The Breakfast Club" that he felt he was "10 years ahead" but "trapped" in the present day.

At the time, Ye's assertion may have sounded farcical and arrogant, but fast-forward a decade to the release of Travis Scott's "Utopia," and he's not wrong.

Released on Friday, "Utopia," Scott's fourth studio album, was supposed to be the defining work of his career, an experimental, genre-defying record that he said would embody how people can "create energy that spews out magical things."

Instead, what Scott delivers is a poorly-paced, mostly unimaginative "Yeezus" rehash that feels stuck 10 years in the past.

It's not surprising that "Utopia" has a heavy Ye influence given that he is a longtime musical mentor of Scott's, and has previously been described by the "Sicko Mode" rapper as his "big bro."

Scott is also signed to Ye's GOOD Music record label under its production arm, Very Good Beats, and the pair have worked together on a number of projects over the years, including "Utopia." On this record, Ye serves as a cowriter on three songs: "Thank God," "God's Country," and "Telekinesis."

Whatissurprising, however, is just how deep the influences of Ye, and more specifically "Yeezus," run on "Utopia."

The album's third track, "Modern Jam," shares striking similarities to the opening track from "Yeezus," "On Sight." While generally less aggressive, "Modern Jam" features similar synths and vocal breaks to "On Sight," while Scott's cadence is also nearly identical to Ye's.

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Track 12, "Circus Maximus," featuring The Weeknd, is a near-carbon copy of "Black Skinhead." Again, Scott's flow matches Ye's perfectly over an all-too-familiar drum beat.

"Modern Jam" and "Circus Maximus" are the two songs most obviously influenced by "Yeezus," but other similarities are littered throughout "Utopia."

Scott screams like Ye does on "Yeezus," and relies heavily on the use of grainy, low-resolution synthesizers like Ye did. Justin Vernon, better known as the lead singer of Bon Iver, also features on "Utopia," just as he did on "Yeezus," featuring on both "My Eyes" and "Delresto (Echoes)."

While "Yeezus" was by no means universally acclaimed upon its release, the album drew praise for its drastic departure from Ye's previous efforts and its experimental sound design, which incorporated elements of punk, trap, and electronic music.

Ye was also praised for the album's lyrical content, which addressed everything from how the fashion industry views Black people ("New Slaves"), to the civil rights movement, and his own mental health ("Black Skinhead").

But while "Utopia" bears resemblances to "Yeezus," it misses the mark in terms of both sound and lyricism.

Where "Yeezus" sounded wild and unique, "Utopia" sounds tame and familiar. Where Ye used "Yeezus" to address real-world issues and offer fans a glimpse into his personal life ("Bound 2"), Scott uses "Utopia" to rap about, as he has done on all of his previous projects, partying and his affinity for sleeping with numerous women. It lacks the substance that "Yeezus" had in abundance.

"Yeezus" comparisons aside, on "Utopia," Scott also fails to deliver what he does best making club-ready, room-shaking anthems.

The erratic album, which switches between tempos and moods at every turn, features no discernible smash hit, unlike 2015's "Rodeo" ("Antidote"), 2016's "Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight" ("Goosebumps"), and 2018's "Astroworld" ("Sicko Mode").

There are some highlights, however, which come in the form of features.

Beyonc's angelic tones shine through on "Delresto (Echoes)," complimenting the track's stripped-back sound and Scott's own short verse.

Bad Bunny provides some Puerto Rican pizzazz on "K-pop," while "Looove," featuring Kid Cudi whom Scott has teamed up with before to great results stands out as "Utopia's" best song.

All in all, however, Scott's fourth studio album, for all its promise of offering something new, does anything but.

"I thought we were going to utopia?" an unidentified woman asks Scott at the end of "Sirens." Me too.

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The influence of Kanye West's 'Yeezus' is clear as day on Travis ... - Yahoo Lifestyle UK

Perhaps the most surprising reverberation of Mores utopia, though, was found in the towering figures of Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. Its a little-known fact that the Indian nationalist corresponded with the aristocratic Russian novelist. Tolstoy, an anarchist and a Christian, held that the state was responsible for most of the bad stuff: taxes, wars and general irresponsibility. Tolstoy counselled passive resistance and non-violence instead.

Communes based on Tolstoys version of Christianity sprang up in the UK. The familiar elements were there: a return to handicrafts and small-scale agriculture, partial rejection of the gewgaws of the modern world, communal dining and shared expenditure.

Two of these communes still exist today in the UK. One is the Brotherhood Church of Stapleton, which, according to a recent New Yorker piece, is home to four humans, a deaf cat, a few hens and an enormous cow. The other is the Whiteway Colony in the Cotswolds, formed in 1898. More village than commune, Whiteway is a collection of 68 houses loosely bound by a monthly meeting.

In 1909 a young Indian philosopher started to correspond with Tolstoy. He called himself the Counts humble follower; the two men discussed Indian home rule, pacifism, passive resistance, freedom from toil and other utopian issues. In 1910, the young man Gandhi launched a cooperative colony in South Africa which he named Tolstoy Farm. It was Gandhis utopian thinking, inspired by Tolstoy, that led to his doctrine of passive resistance and his campaign for Indian home rule.

Dark visions

One of my favourite 20th-Century utopian societies, however, is the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Here, from 1936 to the start of Francos reign in 1939, authority and rank were suspended, people called each other comrade and an anarchist system ruled. It is described without sentiment by George Orwell, who fought for the anarchists, in his account Homage to Catalonia.

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How Utopia shaped the world - BBC Culture

Community or society that is undesirable or frightening

A dystopia (from Ancient Greek - "bad, hard" and "place"; alternatively cacotopia[2] or simply anti-utopia) is a speculated community or society that is undesirable or frightening.[3][4] It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality not one simple opposition, as many utopian elements and components are found in dystopias as well, and vice versa.[5][6][7]

Dystopias are often characterized by rampant fear or distress,[3] tyrannical governments, environmental disaster,[4] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Distinct themes typical of a Dystopian Society include: complete control over the people in a society through the usage of propaganda, heavy censoring of information or denial of free thought, worshiping an unattainable goal, the complete loss of individuality, and heavy enforcement of conformity.[8] Despite certain overlaps, dystopian fiction is distinct from post-apocalyptic fiction, and an undesirable society is not necessarily dystopian. Dystopian societies appear in many fictional works and artistic representations, particularly in stories set in the future. The best known by far is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Other famous examples are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, or technology. Some authors use the term to refer to existing societies, many of which are, or have been, totalitarian states or societies in an advanced state of collapse. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, often make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system.[9]

The entire substantial sub-genre of alternative history works depicting a world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War can be considered as dystopias. So can other works of Alternative History, in which a historical turning point led to a manifestly repressive world. For example, the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, and Ben Winters' Underground Airlines, in which slavery in the United States continues to the present, with "electronic slave auctions" carried out via the Internet and slaves controlled by electronic devices implanted in their spines, or Keith Roberts Pavane in which 20th Century Britain is ruled by a Catholic theocracy and the Inquisition is actively torturing and burning "heretics".[citation needed]

Some scholars, such as Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, make certain distinctions between typical synonyms of dystopias. For example, Claeys and Sargent define literary dystopias as societies imagined as substantially worse than the society in which the author writes. Some of these are anti-utopias, which criticise attempts to implement various concepts of utopia.[10] In the most comprehensive treatment of the literary and real expressions of the concept, Dystopia: A Natural History, Claeys offers a historical approach to these definitions.[11] Here the tradition is traced from early reactions to the French Revolution. Its commonly anti-collectivist character is stressed, and the addition of other themesthe dangers of science and technology, of social inequality, of corporate dictatorship, of nuclear warare also traced. A psychological approach is also favored here, with the principle of fear being identified with despotic forms of rule, carried forward from the history of political thought, and group psychology introduced as a means of understanding the relationship between utopia and dystopia. Andrew Norton-Schwartzbard noted that "written many centuries before the concept "dystopia" existed, Dante's Inferno in fact includes most of the typical characteristics associated with this genre even if placed in a religious framework rather than in the future of the mundane world, as modern dystopias tend to be".[12] In the same vein, Vicente Angeloti remarked that "George Orwell's emblematic phrase, a boot stamping on a human face forever, would aptly describe the situation of the denizens in Dante's Hell. Conversely, Dante's famous inscription Abandon all hope, ye who enter here would have been equally appropriate if placed at the entrance to Orwell's "Ministry of Love" and its notorious "Room 101".[13]

Dustopia being the original spelling for Dystopia first appeared in Lewis Henry Younge's, Utopia: or Apollos Golden Days in 1747.[14] Additionally, dystopia was used as an antonym for utopia by John Stuart Mill in one of his 1868 Parliamentary Speeches (Hansard Commons) by adding the prefix "dys" (Ancient Greek: - "bad") to "topia", reinterpreting the initial "u" as the prefix "eu" (Ancient Greek: - "good") instead of "ou" (Ancient Greek: "not").[15][16] It was used to denounce the government's Irish land policy: "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable".[17][18][19][20]

Decades before the first documented use of the word "dystopia" was "cacotopia"/"kakotopia" (using Ancient Greek: s, "bad, wicked") originally proposed in 1818 by Jeremy Bentham, "As a match for utopia (or the imagined seat of the best government) suppose a cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government) discovered and described".[21][22] Though dystopia became the more popular term, cacotopia finds occasional use; Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, said it was a better fit for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four because "it sounds worse than dystopia".[23]

Dystopias typically reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and extrapolate worst-case scenarios as warnings for necessary social change or caution.[24] Dystopian fictions invariably reflect the concerns and fears of their creators' contemporaneous culture.[25] Due to this, they can be considered a subject of social studies.[citation needed] In dystopias, citizens may live in a dehumanized state, be under constant surveillance, or have a fear of the outside world.[26] In the film What Happened to Monday the protagonists risk their lives by taking turns onto the outside world because of a one-child policy place in this futuristic dystopian society.[citation needed]

In a 1967 study, Frank Kermode suggests that the failure of religious prophecies led to a shift in how society apprehends this ancient mode. Christopher Schmidt notes that, while the world goes to waste for future generations, people distract themselves from disaster by passively watching it as entertainment.[27]

In the 2010s, there was a surge of popular dystopian young adult literature and blockbuster films.[28][27] Some have commented on this trend, saying that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism".[29][30][31][32][33] Cultural theorist and critic Mark Fisher identified the phrase as encompassing the theory of capitalist realism the perceived "widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it" and used the above quote as the title to the opening chapter of his book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. In the book, he also refers to dystopian film such as Children of Men (originally a novel by P. D. James) to illustrate what he describes as the "slow cancellation of the future".[33][34] Theo James, an actor in Divergent (originally a novel by Veronica Roth), explains that "young people in particular have such a fascination with this kind of story [...] It's becoming part of the consciousness. You grow up in a world where it's part of the conversation all the time the statistics of our planet warming up. The environment is changing. The weather is different. There are things that are very visceral and very obvious, and they make you question the future and how we will survive. It's so much a part of everyday life that young people inevitably consciously or not are questioning their futures and how the Earth will be. I certainly do. I wonder what kind of world my children's kids will live in."[28]

In When the Sleeper Wakes, H.G.Wells depicted the governing class as hedonistic and shallow.[35] George Orwell contrasted Wells's world to that depicted in Jack London's The Iron Heel, where the dystopian rulers are brutal and dedicated to the point of fanaticism, which Orwell considered more plausible.[36]

The political principles at the root of fictional utopias (or "perfect worlds") are idealistic in principle and result in positive consequences for the inhabitants; the political principles on which fictional dystopias are based, while often based on utopian ideals, result in negative consequences for inhabitants because of at least one fatal flaw.[37][38]

Dystopias are often filled with pessimistic views of the ruling class or a government that is brutal or uncaring, ruling with an "iron fist".[citation needed] Dystopian governments are sometimes ruled by a fascist or communist regime or dictator. These dystopian government establishments often have protagonists or groups that lead a "resistance" to enact change within their society, as is seen in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.[39]

Dystopian political situations are depicted in novels such as We, Parable of the Sower, Darkness at Noon, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, The Hunger Games, Divergent and Fahrenheit 451 and such films as Metropolis, Brazil (1985), Battle Royale, FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, and The Running Man (1987).[citation needed]

The economic structures of dystopian societies in literature and other media have many variations, as the economy often relates directly to the elements that the writer is depicting as the source of the oppression. There are several archetypes that such societies tend to follow. A theme is the dichotomy of planned economies versus free market economies, a conflict which is found in such works as Ayn Rand's Anthem and Henry Kuttner's short story "The Iron Standard". Another example of this is reflected in Norman Jewison's 1975 film Rollerball (1975).[citation needed]

Some dystopias, such as that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, feature black markets with goods that are dangerous and difficult to obtain or the characters may be at the mercy of the state-controlled economy. Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano depicts a dystopia in which the centrally controlled economic system has indeed made material abundance plentiful but deprived the mass of humanity of meaningful labor; virtually all work is menial, unsatisfying and only a small number of the small group that achieves education is admitted to the elite and its work.[40] In Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun, there is no want of any kind only unabashed consumption and hedonism, leading the protagonist to begin looking for a deeper meaning to existence.[41] Even in dystopias where the economic system is not the source of the society's flaws, as in Brave New World, the state often controls the economy; a character, reacting with horror to the suggestion of not being part of the social body, cites as a reason that works for everyone else.[42]

Other works feature extensive privatization and corporatism; both consequences of capitalism, where privately owned and unaccountable large corporations have replaced the government in setting policy and making decisions. They manipulate, infiltrate, control, bribe, are contracted by and function as government. This is seen in the novels Jennifer Government and Oryx and Crake and the movies Alien, Avatar, RoboCop, Visioneers, Idiocracy, Soylent Green, WALL-E and Rollerball. Corporate republics are common in the cyberpunk genre, as in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (as well as the film Blade Runner, influenced by and based upon Dick's novel).[citation needed]

Dystopian fiction frequently draws stark contrasts between the privileges of the ruling class and the dreary existence of the working class.[citation needed] In the 1931 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, a class system is prenatally determined with Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, with the lower classes having reduced brain-function and special conditioning to make them satisfied with their position in life.[43] Outside of this society there also exist several human settlements that exist in the conventional way but which the class system describe as "savages".[citation needed]

In Ypsilon Minus by Herbert W. Franke, people are divided into numerous alphabetically ranked groups.[citation needed]

In the film Elysium, the majority of Earth's population on the surface lives in poverty with little access to health care and are subject to worker exploitation and police brutality, while the wealthy live above the Earth in luxury with access to technologies that cure all diseases, reverse aging, and regenerate body parts.[citation needed]

Written a century earlier, the future society depicted in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine had started in a similar way to Elysium the workers consigned to living and working in underground tunnels while the wealthy live on a surface made into an enormous beautiful garden. But over a long time period the roles were eventually reversed the rich degenerated and became a decadent "livestock" regularly caught and eaten by the underground cannibal Morlocks.[citation needed]

Some fictional dystopias, such as Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, have eradicated the family and keep it from re-establishing itself as a social institution. In Brave New World, where children are reproduced artificially, the concepts of "mother" and "father" are considered obscene. In some novels, such as We, the state is hostile to motherhood, as a pregnant woman from One State is in revolt.[44]

Religious groups play the role of the oppressed and oppressors. In Brave New World the establishment of the state included lopping off the tops of all crosses (as symbols of Christianity) to make them "T"s, (as symbols of Henry Ford's Model T).[45] Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a future United States under a Christian-based theocratic regime.[46] One of the earliest examples of this theme is Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, about a futuristic world where Marxists and Freemasons led by the Antichrist have taken over the world and the only remaining source of dissent is a tiny and persecuted Catholic minority.[47]

In the Russian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, first published in 1921, people are permitted to live out of public view twice a week for one hour and are only referred to by numbers instead of names. The latter feature also appears in the later, unrelated film THX 1138. In some dystopian works, such as Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, society forces individuals to conform to radical egalitarian social norms that discourage or suppress accomplishment or even competence as forms of inequality.[citation needed]

Violence is prevalent in many dystopias, often in the form of war, but also in urban crimes led by (predominately teenage) gangs (e.g. A Clockwork Orange), or rampant crime met by blood sports (e.g. Battle Royale, The Running Man, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Purge). It is also explained in Suzanne Berne's essay "Ground Zero", where she explains her experience of the aftermath of 11 September 2001.[48]

Fictional dystopias are commonly urban and frequently isolate their characters from all contact with the natural world.[49] Sometimes they require their characters to avoid nature, as when walks are regarded as dangerously anti-social in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, as well as within Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian".[citation needed] In C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, science coordinated by government is directed toward the control of nature and the elimination of natural human instincts. In Brave New World, the lower class is conditioned to be afraid of nature but also to visit the countryside and consume transport and games to promote economic activity.[50] Lois Lowry's "The Giver" shows a society where technology and the desire to create a utopia has led humanity to enforce climate control on the environment, as well as to eliminate many undomesticated species and to provide psychological and pharmaceutical repellent against human instincts. E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" depicts a highly changed global environment which forces people to live underground due to an atmospheric contamination.[51] As Angel Galdon-Rodriguez points out, this sort of isolation caused by external toxic hazard is later used by Hugh Howey in his series of dystopias of the Silo Series.[52]

Excessive pollution that destroys nature is common in many dystopian films, such as The Matrix, RoboCop, WALL-E, April and the Extraordinary World and Soylent Green, as well as in videogames like Half-Life 2. A few "green" fictional dystopias do exist, such as in Michael Carson's short story "The Punishment of Luxury", and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. The latter is set in the aftermath of nuclear war, "a post-nuclear holocaust Kent, where technology has reduced to the level of the Iron Age".[53][citation needed]

Contrary to the technologically utopian claims, which view technology as a beneficial addition to all aspects of humanity, technological dystopia concerns itself with and focuses largely (but not always) on the negative effects caused by new technology.[54]

1. Technologies reflect and encourage the worst aspects of human nature.[54]Jaron Lanier, a digital pioneer, has become a technological dystopian: "I think its a way of interpreting technology in which people forgot taking responsibility."[citation needed]

'Oh, its the computer that did it, not me.' 'Theres no more middle class? Oh, its not me. The computer did it'" (Lanier). This quote explains that people begin to not only blame the technology for the changes in lifestyle but also believe that technology is an omnipotence. It also points to a technological determinist perspective in terms of reification.[55]

2. Technologies harm our interpersonal communication, relationships, and communities.[56]

3. Technologies reinforce hierarchies concentrate knowledge and skills; increase surveillance and erode privacy; widen inequalities of power and wealth; giving up control to machines. Douglas Rushkoff, a technological utopian, states in his article that the professional designers "re-mystified" the computer so it wasn't so readable anymore; users had to depend on the special programs built into the software that was incomprehensible for normal users.[54]

4. New technologies are sometimes regressive (worse than previous technologies).[54]

5. The unforeseen impacts of technology are negative.[54] 'The most common way is that theres some magic artificial intelligence in the sky or in the cloud or something that knows how to translate, and what a wonderful thing that this is available for free. But theres another way to look at it, which is the technically true way: You gather a ton of information from real live translators who have translated phrases Its huge but very much like Facebook, its selling people back to themselves [With translation] youre producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators arent paid for their work Youre actually shrinking the economy.'"[56]

6. More efficiency and choices can harm our quality of life (by causing stress, destroying jobs, making us more materialistic).[57]In his article "Prest-o! Change-o!, technological dystopian James Gleick mentions the remote control being the classic example of technology that does not solve the problem "it is meant to solve". Gleick quotes Edward Tenner, a historian of technology, that the ability and ease of switching channels by the remote control serves to increase distraction for the viewer. Then it is only expected that people will become more dissatisfied with the channel they are watching.[57]

7. New technologies can solve problems of old technologies or just create new problems.[54]The remote control example explains this claim as well, for the increase in laziness and dissatisfaction levels was clearly not a problem in times without the remote control. He also takes social psychologist Robert Levine's example of Indonesians "'whose main entertainment consists of watching the same few plays and dances, month after month, year after year, and with Nepalese Sherpas who eat the same meals of potatoes and tea through their entire lives. The Indonesians and Sherpas are perfectly satisfied". Because of the invention of the remote control, it merely created more problems.[57]

8. Technologies destroy nature (harming human health and the environment). The need for business replaced community and the "story online" replaced people as the "soul of the Net". Because information was now able to be bought and sold, there was not as much communication taking place.[54]

"An imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible; opp. UTOPIA (cf. CACOTOPIA). So dystopian n., one who advocates or describes a dystopia; dystopian a., of or pertaining to a dystopia; dystopianism, dystopian quality or characteristics."

The example of first usage given in the OED (1989 ed.) refers to the 1868 speech by John Stuart Mill quoted above. Other examples given in the OED include:

1952 Negley & Patrick Quest for Utopia xvii. 298 The Mundus Alter et Idem [of Joseph Hall] is...the opposite of eutopia, the ideal society: it is a dystopia, if it is permissible to coin a word. 1962 C.WALSH From Utopia to Nightmare11 The 'dystopia' or 'inverted utopia'. Ibid. 12 Stories...that seemed in their dystopian way to be saying something important. Ibid. ii. 27 A strand of utopianism or dystopianism. 1967 Listener 5 Jan. 22 The modern classics Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four are dystopias. They describe not a world we should like to live in, but one we must be sure to avoid. 1968 New Scientist 11 July 96/3 It is a pleasant change to read some hope for our future is trevor ingram ... I fear that our real future is more likely to be dystopian.

See also Gregory Claeys. "When Does Utopianism Produce Dystopia?" in: Zsolt Czignyik, ed.

Utopian Horizons. Utopia and Ideology - The Interaction of Political and Utopian Thought (Budapest: CEU Press, 2016), pp.4161.

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Dystopia - Wikipedia

As we head toward the 2022 elections, it is a safe bet that few Americans can identify the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, even though its one of the most significant amendments. Ratified on April 8, 1913, it completely changed the balance of power in our federal system.

The amendment provided for the direct popular election of U.S. senators. That sounds non-controversial now, but it meant taking the power away from state legislatures that were originally given the authority to choose the senators representing their state in Section 3 of Article I of the Constitution.

If you took civics in high school or you look up the definition of checks and balances, it is always referred to as the system that provides our three branches of the federal governmentthe legislative, judicial and executivewith separate powers that can be used to check the power of the other branches, ensuring that no one branch becomes too powerful. This is a horizontal balance of power that applies within the federal government.

But what civics teachers and others seem to have forgotten in the more than 100 years that the 17th Amendment has been in place is that the original design of the Constitution in Article I gave state governments an essential, second vertical check on the power of the federal governmentthe authority of state legislatures to pick the senators representing their states.

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As the Heritage Guide to the Constitution explains, the Framers intended to protect the interests of states as states and the mode of election impelled senators to preserve the original federal design and to protect the interests not only of their own states, but, concomitantly, of the states as political and legal entities within the federal system.

Alexander Hamilton emphasized this at the New York ratifying convention in 1788 when he said that senators will constantly look up to the state governments with an eye of dependance and, if they wanted to be reelected by state legislators, they, would have a uniform attachment to the interests of their several states. In other words, they would be wary of imposing unfunded mandates on state governments or taking other actions that extended the power of the federal government into areas traditionally within the authority of the states.

As Mark Levin succinctly explained in The Liberty Amendments, the original method of electing U.S. senators that provided state governments with direct input in the national government was not only an essential check on the new federal governments power, but also a means by which the states could influence congressional lawmaking.

Despite all of this, the amendment was ratified in fewer than 11 months and in overwhelming numbersin the 36 states that ratified it, only 191 opposing votes were cast.

The 17th Amendment was the result of the rise of Progressivism, pushed by intellectuals and social reformers who believed that our constitutional system of government was outdated and needed to be reformed. It was designed to enhance the authority of the central government and expand the size and power of a federal bureaucracy that could orchestrate the changes they believed would lead to a new utopia, while diminishing the power of state governments to contest those changes.

When the 17th Amendment was combined with the 16th Amendment, which gave Congress the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, and which was ratified earlier that same year, the federal government had the ability to drastically increase its spending and power without considering the interests of the states or the effects on the sovereign authority of the states.

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The 17th Amendment critically altered the balance of power between state governments and the federal government, to the detriment of the states. States no longer had a legislative venue, or any venue, to influence directly the course of the federal government, Mr. Levin says.

It is impossible to conceive that the Constitution would have been ratified without this essential feature preserving the balance of power between the states and the federal government. With direct elections, senators have no incentive to protect state governments and state budgets at the expense of the enormous, bloated volume of federal programs and spending that is leading us down the road to financial insolvency.

Could this be changed? Should it be changed back? These are questions that prompt vigorous debate. But the likelihood that American voters would support going back to the original system and losing their ability to directly elect U.S. senators seems very slim. So, while we can recognize the structural damage this amendment has caused, what happened more than a century ago will probably remain unaltered.

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17th Amendment Weakened Balance of Power Between States, Federal Government - Heritage.org

Frank Doelger is helming a surveillance drama set that counts broadcastersZDF, MBC andFrance Tlvisions and streamer Hulu Japan as partners.

TheGame of Thronesexecutive producer is showrunner and executive producer on the six-partConcordia, which has gone into production, with shooting taking place in various locations in Rome, northern Italy and Leipzig, Germany. His Beta Film- and ZDF Studios-owned joint venture production house Intaglio Films is producing.

Barbara Eder, who is attached to Doelgers Mipcom launch dramaThe Swarm, whichwe wrote about last weekahead of the market, is directing the show, which is shooting in English.Ute Leonhardt, Rafferty Thwaites, Jan Wnschmann and Robert Franke are also exec producers, withNicholas Racz (The Burial Society, The Real Thing) and Mike Walden (The Frankenstein Chronicles,U Want Me 2 Kill Him) the series co-creators. They are writing alongside Isla van Tricht and theproducers are Tobias Gerginov, Jacob Glass, and Sergio Ercolessi.

The drama is set in a worldpowered by an AI to ensure a freer, fairer and more humane society. However, as the community approaches its twentieth anniversary and cities around the world line up to replicate it, the secret behind its creation threatens to destroy it.

International Emmy-winner Christiane Paul (Counterpart, In July)stars as Juliane, the visionary behind the new utopia.Steven Sowah (For Jojo, Before We Grow Old) plays her son Noah, the ambassador in charge of expanding the experiment; Ruth Bradley (Ted Lasso, Humans) is Thea, an external investigator, who joins up with Isabelle, played by Nanna Blondell (Black Widow, House of the Dragon), to uncover how the utopia was created. Kento Nakajima (Detective Novice,She was Pretty) plats A.J., a 27-year-old Japanese wunderkind and head of the AI system, while Jonas Nay (Line of Separation,Deutschland 83) plays Moritz, part of an anti-surveillance group called The Faceless. Ahd Kamel (Collateral, Honour), Hugo Becker (Baron Noir, Leonardo) and Josphine Jobert (Death in Paradise, Summer Crush) also star.

Throughout history, blueprints for the reimagining of society along religious, political, economic, and environmental lines have been put forward particularly in periods marked by a sense of tumult, cultural and financial dislocation, and a rise in violence, like our own, said Doelger. The visionaries behindConcordiathink they finally have the technology to realize such a brave new world, only to discover that there is no way to keep evil out as it comes from the inside.

Support for the series comes fromGermanys Mitteldeutsche Medienfrderung, Schsische Staatskanzlei andMedienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, with ZDF Studios and Beta Film jointly the same sales structure as eco-thriller dramaThe Swarm. Theseries is Intaglio Films latest production following the eight-part eco-thrillerThe Swarm, which is co-produced with ndF International, and counts ZDF, France Tlvisions, RAI, ORF, SRF, Viaplay and Hulu Japan as pre-buyers and partners. Its currently in post-production.

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Games Of Thrones EP Frank Doelger To Helm Surveillance Thriller Series Concordia For ZDF, MBC, France Tlvisions and Hulu Japan - Deadline

The following is an excerpt from the authors new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

When Jung Chang went on her first house raid as a member of Mao Zedongs Red Guard, she was not prepared to see a middle-aged, disheveled, half-naked woman kneeling in a dimly lit ransacked room, shrieking Red Guard masters! I do not have a portrait of Chiang Kai-shek! I swear I do not!

The victims back was filled with bloody cuts from beating, and she banged her head so hard on the floor that blood oozed from her forehead. Jung further reported: When she lifted her bottom in a kowtow, murky patches were visible and the smell of excrement filled the air.

Jung feebly asked the womans torturer why they were using violent struggle instead of the verbal struggle Chairman Mao was said to prescribe. Others in the room agreed with her, but the tormentor immediately shut them down as potential class enemies: Mercy to the enemy is cruelty to the people! If you are afraid of blood, dont be Red Guards!

The struggle session is a feature of totalitarianism widely practiced during Mao Zedongs Cultural Revolution in China (19661976.) It is a public exercise in ritual humiliation that serves to break down a persons sense of self. Struggle sessions are intended to enforce compliance in a persons thought processes as well as in speech and are therefore a weapon in the war against independent thought. They typically involve forced confessions, mob persecution, and violence. The Red Guards were Maos shock troops to enforce purity of thought and rid society of class enemies.

Mao was a founding member of the Chinese communist party in 1921. From then until the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, he played all the roles that led to his rise through the ranks: local party agitator, insurrection leader at the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927, founding member of the Red Army, and guerrilla fighter and strategist. By 1934, while he led the 5,600-mile Long March to escape and regroup after being outmaneuvered by Kuomintang forces during the Chinese Civil War, Mao was chosen to lead both the Party and the Red Army. His fortitude during the march became legendary.

Like so many totalitarian leaders before and after him, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party diligently cultivated a cult of personality around him. During the 1930s, the world communist movement hailed Mao as a standard bearer of the movement. Portraits of him were everywhere in China by his conquest in 1949. By the time he mobilized millions of young Red Guards in 1966, he was a virtual god.

Perhaps the utopian vision of the Chinese Communist revolution can be best described as a utopia of pure Maoist thought. It culminated in the Little Red Book of Maos quotations. His sayings were committed to memory throughout society the way Bible verses might be memorized by Sunday school children, but with the fanaticism of the most destructive religious inquisitions.

However, by the time Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, his star was fading. A power struggle was brewing within the Chinese Communist Party because of the utter failure of Maos push to industrialize the countryside and increase grain production. His Great Leap Forward program (195862) was so riddled with short-sightedness and fake science that it caused the largest famine in human history. The estimated death toll is upwards of forty million.*

Some scholars believe Mao also launched the Cultural Revolution because he was unprepared for the level of honest criticism that came out of his Hundred Flowers Campaign during 195657. He had invited intellectuals to freely air any grievances by famously announcing: Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend! Many quickly took him up on that offer. He cracked down on them mercilessly and said later that he intentionally used the program to entice the snakes out of their dens.

But that experience also clarified to Mao that the more intense fight was on the cultural front, not economic. He came to believe that the enemy of the revolution was found within each individual. He saw independent thought as the enemy, as a threat to his hold on power. So, the goal was to get inside of each person, to break down their defenses and their individuality in order to enforce conformity. The struggle session was the perfect instrument for doing so.

Mao kicked off the Great Cultural Revolution in August 1966 with the first of several mass rallies in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Over a million frenzied Red Guards were at the ready to answer his call. These energetic youthled by students from elite collegeshad already been indoctrinated and swept up in the hype of Maos cult of personality. They were eager to prove their mettle and win their heros favor.

As with all mobs, Red Guards came to look and act just like one another: waving the recently published Little Red Book, wearing signature Red Guard armbands and Mao jackets, and chanting all the approved slogans that served as shibboleths to prove their revolutionary credentials.

Mao unleashed their destructive passions and gave them free rein to confront anyone they perceived to be a counterrevolutionary or simply born into the wrong class. Their mission was to destroy any sign of the four olds: old habits, old customs, old ideas, and old culture they could detect among neighbors, associates, families, or passersby. Red Guards ransacked homes, burned books, toppled monuments of the old order, and desecrated graves, including the tomb of the 16th-century Ming emperor. They used dynamite to blow up the gravesite of the Chinese philosopher Confucius.

The idea was to wipe the slate clean for Maos new utopian order. His battle cry was to rebel is justified! He ordered police to stand down on arresting Red Guards for any activities, no matter how violent. So, throughout China, Red Guard youth spread a reign of terror meant to suppress any disloyalty to Mao, not only in the general population but also within the highest ranks of the Communist Party, where doubts about Maos policies had been looming.

The central weapon was the struggle session. It would begin when the mobs hunted down and surrounded a suspect, shouting slogans at him or her for being bourgeois, a rightist, running dog of capitalism, counterrevolutionary, or any other slur. They handled victims roughly, often placing on them a placard of denunciation or a dunce cap indicating stupidity and backwardness. Meanwhile, the mob spat at the victim, often beating and tormenting him. Sometimes theyd tie people up like animals and smear foul substances on their bodies and faces. Well-known victims were often paraded in stadiums so that larger crowds could jeer.

Bystanders were not safe. Any witness who did not join in denouncing the person was also at risk of being accused of counterrevolutionary thought and thus isolated and shamed. The psychological pressure was intense for friends, neighbors, and families of victims to participate in these rituals of shaming.

Maos first targets were teachers. At the outset, he warned of counterrevolutionary elements in education. He egged on the Red Guards to confront their teachers, guaranteeing them immunity and excusing them from attending classes. The first victim of that Red August of 1966 was an assistant high school principal in Beijing. When Red Guards mobbed Bian Zhongyun, they tortured and beat her to death while accusing her of being an enemy of the revolution. Teachers were victimized in droves by students who subjected them to struggle sessions and wrote character posters that defamed them publicly.

Official sources put the death toll of that first month at 1,772, but its likely higher. These were not official executions but deaths due to Red Guard killing sprees. The Cultural Revolution era overall accounted for 7.731 million deaths in China, according to professor of political science R.J. Rummel. We dont know the portion related to struggle sessions, though there are estimates of about a million killed due to such mob activity.

Many victims committed suicide after the degradations. Some killed themselves if they merely anticipated a struggle session was imminent. Much of the terror was due to the arbitrary nature of the accusations. The violence was random, and the victim need not be guilty of anything. A simple suspicion uttered by a mob member would do.

Mao adapted the idea of struggle sessions from the Soviet Union. Known initially as sessions of criticism and self-criticism, they were used to test the commitment of communists. According to Oxford historian David Priestland, academics were worked over or subjected to aggressive questioning in public meetings; if they were discovered to be in error, they had to confess their sins.

A lot of the ground was laid for struggle sessions prior to the Cultural Revolution during a previous campaign called Fulfillment of the New Marriage Law, unveiled in 1950. Some women welcomed its ban on polygamy. However, communist cadres destroyed millions of families by inciting wives to complain against their husbands, instilling enormous tensions among family members and in-laws. Children were also compelled to report on their parents. Neighbor surveillance was also a factor. Public struggle meetings would follow and exaggerate family squabbles.

The stated goal was to eliminate the class character of marriage. But the real goal was to break up family cohesion and abolish any relationship that might compete with the government. This was done retroactively by breaking up and annulling millions of marriages that had been arranged or that involved dowries prior to the Communist revolution in China. And if spouses came from two different class backgrounds, the lower-class spouse was pressured to divorce.

One report stated that many wives hanged themselves after coming back from struggle meetings where they were forced to complain against their husbands. Others who sought divorce came back and were killed by their husbands. According to Rummel, a conservative estimate of deaths from the enforcement of the new marriage law in the 1950s and the struggle sessions associated with it is from five hundred thousand to a million.

Mao emphasized the process of the struggle session in a chapter of the Little Red Book of his quotations titled Criticism and Self-Criticism. He stated that such struggles are a never-ending process because communists must continuously purify their thoughts and demand purity in the thoughts of their comrades. Minds need regular sweeping and washing in order to prevent inroads of germs and other organisms.

This process is a critical part of what Mao referred to as molding the revolutionary by subjecting the individual personality to the collectivist framework. The purpose was to expose mistakes of the past without sparing anyones sensibilities, according to Mao. He compared thought-policing to a surgeon who saves a patient by removing an infected appendix. This spin on the struggle session is that its simply medicine to strengthen comrades and unify the Party. But the effect is to induce compliance by breaking down a victims sense of self and to induce conformity in bystanders who witness the process.

We can reasonably ask if the cancel culture of the early 21st century is much different from Maoist struggle sessions. Today we have high-tech lynchings, to borrow an apt phrase applied in 1991 by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The core features are the same: public smears, ridicule, along with a mob chorus intended to force the victim to recant the sin of dissenting against the enforced narrative.

We may not see the same level of beatings and street thuggery to give the same picture of barbarity that the Red Guard presented. But social media mobs swarm to the tune of the current propaganda, calling for the deplatforming of those who dont comply. One neednt be in the streets to get the message: comply, or you will lose your livelihood and your status in society.

In addition, the appearance of growing disregard for due process by American government officials compounds the chilling effect of media-led smear campaigns. For example, several average Americans who thought they were peacefully protesting election fraud at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 ended up imprisoned without a trial date, some even placed indefinitely in solitary confinement.

Nothing really has changed in terms of the methods and the effects of struggle sessions enforced by mobs. What has changed is their global reach and technological scope, which, in effect, amplifies the sameness of the methods.

*The Chinese Communist Partys adoption of the pseudoscientific theories of Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko was in large part responsible for the famine. Other fake science practices, such as plowing ten feet down and Maos war on sparrows, as well as a demand that peasants engage in manufacturing steel, also led to the massive famine, causing tens of millions of deaths from starvation. For more on the fallout of the Great Leap Forward, see Rummel, R.J. Chinas Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. For more on Lysenkoism, see Medvedev, Zhores A. The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

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How Mao's Cultural Revolution Made War On The Private Mind - The Federalist

In 1904, Halford John Mackinder submitted his theory on The Geographical Pivot of History. Therein, he would essentially spell out the ingredients a nation needs in its pantry to become a superpower. Inadvertently his recipe for world domination has proved to be an underpinning factor of politics in the modern reckoning ever since, and it includes pop culture.

Aside from a large army, plentiful food supplies, and economic prowess, there is a rather more fiddly element to ruling the world that boils down to how favourably your cultural tenets are viewed. This soft-power seasoning is essential because, in short, it has your enemies munching McDonalds, listening to Elvis Presley and eyeballing Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate rags-to-riches heroine who bedded a rather cool president no less, thinking, Can these really be the baddies? This is known as cultural hegemony.

America were the kings of this global extension of influence during the Cold War and its long-drawn preamble. The notion of freedom, fast food, fast cars, fast fun, and a fast track to the American Dream for anyone who had the cajones to clutch it was a romantic ideal that the shrinking globe bought into. However, the sort of bougie, classical lifestyle of Russia didnt really catch on as a cultural boom. Simply put, stoicism and stark winters have never really beguiled the imagination with the same joyous immediacy of The Beach Boys.

Russia rolled out literary masterpieces aplenty and was brimming with wonderful absurdism and oddities but stifled by censors and served up in a rapidly changing zeitgeist that didnt seem to suit it, it stalled and seemed stilted while American culture was dropping Golden arches all over the globe. The Russians struggled to spread hegemony beyond its sizeable borders, but the Red, White and Blue of the Land of the Free was cropping up in every fridge, on every high street, and in the dreamy minds of millions as progress dawned.

However, it is not without irony that technological progress and ingenuity were where the Soviet Union excelled. In the 1920s, as powers vied from prominence, they invented the worlds first electronic instrument purely by chance. They might not seem like the masters of modern pop music, but without one obscure instrument, the notion of swinging in the nuddy on a wrecking ball or songs written on laptops about the latest TikTok trend might never have happened. Welcome to the wonderful, weird world of the Theremin.

The Theremin might not have had the sex appeal of a crooning Ol Blue Eyes, but making music magically appear from thin air is always going to titillate the inner nerd in all of us. The 1920s were a time when we were interested in anything alien. Europe had just suffered the bloody scourge of a war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Technology was paradoxically behind this death toll, but surely it could also illuminate a brighter future. In other words, technology was a curse if it was used badly, but if it was applied with ethics, then it could propel us to a bright new utopia. A ground-breaking musical contraption was surely a harmless sign of the latter.

It was invented by Lev Sergeyevich Termen, or as he is known, your friend and mine, Lon Theremin. In the early 1920s, this young engineer was hoping to measure the properties of gasses. However, when his two antennas were up and running, he found that his machine made a peculiar sound. As a trained cellist, this sound startled his ear, and suddenly the idea of gasses went out of the window. The first electronic instrument was born, and it would escape the boundaries of our mechanical way of life.

He proudly toured his invention around Europe. After a show at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Musical Standard wrote: The human voice, the violin, viola, cello, bass and double-bass, the cornet, horn, trombone, saxophone, organ, and almost every instrument you can think of, are all beaten at their own game by this one simple little apparatus. The Russians had won the musical space racea huge boost to their cultural stock. They were geniuses rendering the dastardly trombone old hat.

The Americans simply couldnt keep it at baythat would be, frankly, very un-American. Thus, it made its way to New York City, where musicians and scientists alike marvelled at its magic and the master behind it. It was a perfect example of the progressive technological age that they aimed to bring to the world. Art and electronics had collidedoh, the joys!

However, like all pioneering technologies, the Theremin had teething problems. In fact, its Achilles heel is the same one it still suffers from: its exceptionally hard to play well. For Theremin himself, this meant that, sadly, his great post-modernist moment before the fact was never going to prove overly profitable. This left him open to advances of alternative income. His creations place in the USA was no longer just a show of Soviet technology and a tool of cultural hegemony, but seeing as though it was a marvel among great and good of art and science, it was the perfect weapon for espionage.

During his time in the States alongside his machine, Theremin would report on other pending industrial patents. He spent 11 years and reportedly unofficially informed soft knowledge throughout. However, he was never fully behind the cause, and eventually, the Soviets recalled Theremin, imprisoned him for being a counterrevolutionary, and sent him off to a special scientific camp where he was instructed to come up with a bugging device.

Thus, he came up with another way to work with radio waves. U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman was gifted a beautiful ornate carving of the Great Seal of the United States. He hung it proudly on his wall without knowing that Theremin had bugged it with another of his magical antenna. The Americans never uncovered The Thing until seven years later. It had been eavesdropping the whole time. Proving that even harmless signs of progressive advancement can oft go awry. You never know what intent lies beneath an innocuous pop song; the first electronic instrument heralded that from the very start.

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On The Handmaids Tale, Commander Lawrence has been talking a lot about New Bethlehem. Heres what we know about it so far, along with top theories from fans about what it means and a closer look at that New Bethlehem map they showed briefly.

Its not entirely clear what New Bethlehem is, but we do know that Commander Putnam was strongly opposed to it. Which means that its likely a good thing in some way!

One Handmaids Twitter account describes New Bethlehem this way: [it] will allow a haven for refugees and Gilead escapees to safely return to and reside within Gilead

But why would theywantto safely return?

This is obviously a different plan than the fertility center type of situation that Aunt Lydia had proposed for the Handmaids. Instead, New Bethlehem is somehow going to open up Gilead more to the world, which Putnam thought was a bad idea. He argued that it would allow terrorists and others back into Gilead. So is it an amnesty program of some sort?

Which once again, leads me to wonder why anyone who escaped would evenwantto come back.

Heres a closer look at that map that was in the scene while they were talking about New Bethlehem.

Its fascinating, but its also tough to make heads or tails out of it.

Heres what fans are theorizing that New Bethlehem will be.

On Twitter, Mellie wrote in reply to the tweet in the section above: It seems to me like it might be some kind of DMZ within Gilead borders perhaps people can come back and somehow contribute to Gilead economy without as much persecution or as harsh treatment of women. I dunno just a wild guess on my part.

Utopia #1 suggested: this will relocate those of like gilead mind into one area and not scattered around in the free worldthey will be able to gilead togetherbonus points its easier to extinguish ..js

On Reddit, u/DeepDownUnderground asked brought up that Bethlehem is the location where Jesus was born. So the idea of a New Bethlehem must be connected with fertility and births.

OrganizationLower286 replied, suggesting that this will be some kind of gentler looking Gilead to fool people into thinking Gilead is something nicer than it is. They wrote, I think New Bethlehem is going to be a tourist destination. Opening up the rogue state of Gilead to the world and spreading their message. Only happy Handmaids and Marthas.

Others think that Serenas baby will somehow be central to New Bethlehem, but at this point, Im kind of doubting that theory.

In a different discussion, FictionLover21 suggested: I think New Bethlehem is meant to be Gilead 2.0, like a reform. Lawrence can see (like many others) that Gilead works as far as producing children but because its so inhumane people & more importantly, governments dont want to support them. This is keeping them from being a bigger player on the world stage. So, they need government reform.

But in a different discussion, Tersaldi had a completely different theory that I kind of like. They wrote: The actual city of Bethlehem was destroyed by Emperor Hadrian during the Bar Kokhba revolt, where the Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire. Two centuries later, Empress Helena, mother of Constantine I (first Christian emperor), had the entire city rebuilt. So Im guessing the New Bethlehem idea is to rebuild the cities that were destroyed during the US/Gilead civil war and have American refugees move back into the country.

Whatever it is, its an idea for helping Gilead sustain itself better, and perhaps gain better PR worldwide.

The big question, I think, is Lawrences involvement. Hes trying to either reform Gilead from the inside or take Gilead down from the inside, Im not really sure which. So either New Bethlehem is a way to get the world more involved, which he hopes will be detrimental to Gilead Or its a way to try to create a gentler Gilead with more freedoms, by starting a slightly different reformed version that might ultimately expand into all of Gilead. Those are my two guesses, but either could be wrong.

What do you think?

Want to chat about all things post-apocalyptic? Join our Discord serverhere. You can also follow us by emailhere, onFacebook, orTwitter. Oh, andTikTok, too! (And dont forget ourHandmaids Tale FB pagefor show-only news.)

Stephanie Dwilson started Post Apocalyptic Media with her husband Derek. Her favorite shows of all-time are Attack on Titan, Battlestar Galactica and Lost, and she's always happy to talk about her cats. She's a licensed attorney (currently not-practicing) and has a master's in science and technology journalism.

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The Handmaid's Tale: What Is New Bethlehem? Map & Theories - Post Apocalyptic Media

What makes this market-beating engine so efficient? What innovations help it slash operational costs and emissions? Let's take a peek under the hood of the Wrtsil 46TS-DF to discover what makes it tick so many boxes.

Decarbonisation means cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and the two most effective ways to achieve this are to reduce fuel consumption and to use low-carbon fuels. The Wrtsil 46TS-DF is bursting with innovations that support decarbonisation and deliver many more benefits besides.

Here are five innovations in Wrtsil 46TS-DF that help save fuel and cut emissions:

A critical feature of the engine is the two-stage turbocharger. A turbocharger is nothing new for a large-bore medium-speed engine - it's what helps increase power and minimise fuel consumption and emissions. But single-stage turbochargers have essentially reached their limit when it comes to improving performance. By including both a low-pressure and a high-pressure turbocharger, Wrtsil has taken engine performance to new heights, cutting fuel consumption and therefore emissions.

The Wrtsil 46TS-DF has a fully electronic fuel injection system, controlled cylinder by cylinder. This means that, from start-up to shut-down, diesel operations are smoke-free. It's also highly efficient at partial loads and smoke-free at heavy loads.

The timing of the valves in a reciprocating engine has a huge impact on performance, but engines have different air intake needs at different loads. This is why the Wrtsil 46TS-DF has Variable Inlet Valve Closing (VIC), which can change the timing based on the load. Performance is further optimised with a variable exhaust valve. Both innovations help to reduce the vessel's fuel consumption and, of course, emissions.

Even the most innovative engine in the world won't perform as expected without proper automation control. The Wrtsil 46TS-DF uses Wrtsil's automation system, which monitors and optimises every cylinder cycle in real time to get the best out of the engine.

Another important way the Wrtsil 46TS-DF promotes decarbonisation is its modular design, which means every part of the engine is a module that can be replaced as needed. This approach also makes it more cost-effective and straightforward to upgrade to run on carbon-neutral fuels like green methanol in the future.

"Our target was to raise the bar in terms of performance in order to help our customers achieve the highest possible efficiency and the lowest operational costs and emissions," says Federico Bottos, Product Manager, Large Bore Marine Engines at Wrtsil. "This meant completely redesigning the engine to introduce new technology and create a modular design."

The design process began in 2016, and by 2017 the first demo engine was in the lab with new technologies integrated to boost performance and reduce emissions. In 2019 the first test engine was ready, and soon after two more test engines were added, allowing the team to really finetune the performance. "This approach means we can guarantee a reliable and proven engine from the beginning," says Bottos.

Our target was to raise the bar in terms of performance in order to help our customers achieve the highest possible efficiency and the lowest operational costs and emissions

The first customer to take delivery of a Wrtsil 46TS-DF is US cruise company Royal Caribbean Cruises. The engine will be installed onboard its new vessel, Utopia of the Seas.

The Wrtsil 46TS-DF is an engine that's far greater than the sum of its parts. Its innovations work together to create an engine with high power and low emissions in a compact design, perfect for cruise ships and ferries, as well as other applications like gas carriers and merchant vessels. "The Wrtsil 46TS-DF can reach 52% efficiency, which is the highest on the market for an engine of this size," says Bottos. "This is the best solution out there for guaranteeing both low greenhouse gas emissions and low local emissions."

The Wrtsil 46TS-DF can reach 52% efficiency - the highest on the market for an engine of this size.

Game-changing features like the five mentioned in this article will be used more widely on Wrtsil engines in the future and can already be seen on the Wrtsil 25 and the Wrtsil 31.

Learn more: download the Wrtsil 46TS-DF brochure now

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Wrtsil Oyj : Five ways the Wrtsil 46TS-DF helps you decarbonise now and in the future - Marketscreener.com

Way back in June, something crystallized for me as we covered the Colombian elections: Tech alone is never enough. Candidate Rodolfo Hernndez bet everything on an innovative system of social media campaigning; it got him past the first round, but he got crushed in the second. There are many factors behind his loss, but I am still astounded that the man would not go out and press the flesh shake hands, kiss babies or whatever politicians do as they knock on doors. The same is true of companies that have prioritized tech over the human touch.

Ever since, Ive been slightly obsessed with solutions that shun tech or rather, the standard practices associated with the industry over the past decade. Practices that go from cringeworthy, company-sinking gimmicks to the received wisdom of tech bros and VCs that some of the worlds greatest startups have ignored, and thrived without.

Start with the tech ecosystems received knowledge.

In 2019, a panel of Latin American fintech gurus, there to extol the virtues of all-digital finance, sat alongside a top official from the Bank of Mexico. The fintech mantra of cash is the competition was already beginning to get clichd, so the panel and audience were duly unsettled when the official argued that his priority was to facilitate the installation of ATMs in the more rural parts of the country. To be openly supporting the continuation and shock expansion of cash solutions was seen as a step away from the digitalized utopia that fintech fans had in mind.

Years later, adoption of fintech solutions, payment options, and digital banking has been spotty at best (including the Mexican governments own digital payments solution, CoDi). I hope those cash points were actually installed in those remote towns in the meantime.

I always harken back to this story because it so clearly illustrates the obsession with the high-level ideology of capital-f Fintech, which gets in the way of entrepreneurs pondering what people actually want or need.

The issue can be solved by going out and talking to the people youre meant to be serving in person. Unfortunately, the Latin American tech bubble is a pretty closed affair, so I worry when its members use language like democratize or revolutionize, since it often reveals companies and investors who are more interested in speaking to their in-crowd than their customers.

This obsession with in-group approval can lead down some dark roads. The most infamous case in Latin America was that of disgraced Mexican edtech startup, Yogome, whose founder was accused of inflating user numbers to entice further investments, but less catastrophic examples also abound. A closed-off tech community also results in the gimmick-loving herd mentality that gave us the rise and fall of dozens of scooter companies that, ultimately, made little economic sense.

Meanwhile, people dissatisfied with gimmicky tech offerings have started to skip over slick revolutionary new apps for tried-and-tested digital services. Community-led solutions like Venezuelan WhatsApp-run taxis and neighborhood last-mile delivery group chats in Mexico have sprung up across the region, each being eyed lustfully by entrepreneurs keen on turning them into monetizable products. Some, like Brazils neighborhood produce-delivery service, have succeeded at this, but only after others did the hard bit: building up a community of real people and thoroughly testing the product on the ground.

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