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Furiosa’s hard-won feminism Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa George Miller’s Fury Road prequel Furiosa has a lot riding on it — not just the titular character’s war rig, but also her entire feminist legacy. The main appeal of Miller’s Mad Max universe has always been its intense dieselpunk worldbuilding, but with 2015’s Fury Road, the series gained an infusion of new energy and new iconic characters. Thanks to a strong ensemble cast, incredible action scenes and production values, and a high-stakes, high-concept chase that lasted for most of the run time, the film gave depth and beauty to its brutal post-apocalyptic wasteland. It also delivered an empowered, women-centric reconfiguration of a story known for its intense violence and machismo. That framing came in large part thanks to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, a brusque but compassionate hero drawn in the tradition of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. With her metallic arm and husky-voiced butch competence, she immediately became a geek feminist icon. Anya Taylor-Joy, taking over the role to play a younger version of the character in the new film, had her work cut out for her trying to fill Theron’s shoes. She also had to overcome a lot of embedded brutality within the Mad Max universe, including what was originally a surprisingly sexist backstory, as articulated in a 2015 follow-up comic pegged to her character. Then there was the brutality of Miller’s production environment. The Mad Max Wasteland is exactly what it sounds like, a ravaged desert no-man’s land, but by all accounts, the Furiosa set in the sweltering Australian Outback wasn’t much better. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Taylor-Joy stated she’d “never been more alone” than during the production, and implied that she needed the full two years between the set and the film’s release to “deal with” the trauma of the filming process. Yet she also framed the role as a badge of honor, noting how “alive and purposeful” she felt during the filming process. Certainly, Taylor-Joy seems to have joined other actors in taking on psychologically complex roles that tiptoe the line between “method” acting and infliction of apparent trauma; she mentioned to interviewer Kyle Buchanan that she’d been unable to watch an early cut of the film without sobbing. But it also feels significant that Furiosa — a character who rarely talks and frequently speaks through actions rather than words — has now exacted this toll on two extremely talented actors. It isn’t a stretch to say she’s joined the ranks of larger-than-life fictional icons whose mythos looms over the actors who play them: a Joker or a Blanche Dubois. Has Furiosa herself led us down this thorny path? Or is Furiosa the film indicative of storytelling that, despite its best efforts, still limits what female action heroes are allowed to be? Furiosa’s — the film and the character — is a solitary journey (and very nearly a sexist one) Miller’s vision for Taylor-Joy in Furiosa seems to have been sparing and hardcore. Taylor-Joy told the Times that the role required her to do intense acting, often only with her eyes. The intricacy of the film’s elaborate action sequences also left her going for “months” without reciting a line of dialogue. She further told Variety that Miller would direct her to act scenes with her jaw tightly clenched. She also described clashes between her vision for the character and Miller’s vision, including one fight that eerily mirrored Theron’s on the set of Fury Road, with both women fighting for the right to let Furiosa erupt in anger. That’s interesting given that Furiosa’s backstory, as first mentioned in the highly incendiary, flagrantly misogynistic comic Furiosa, involves her having been a trafficked child singled out by Immortan Joe to become one of his wives — the same refugees she later breaks out of Joe’s Citadel at the beginning of Fury Road. In the comic, rather than being an ally to the women, Furiosa berates and even physically attacks them, at one point telling them they should be grateful for their life of sexual slavery because things are so much worse on the outside. Yikes. The comic implied strongly that Furiosa and all of Immortan Joe’s wives were beholden to him as a benevolent rapist who chose to treat them well and protect them. Not only that, but from a 2015 interview with Theron, we can see brief glimpses of the toxic mirrorverse that both Fury Road and Furiosa nearly fell into. In the interview, Theron mentions a backstory in which Joe discarded Furiosa and cast her out from the wives because she was infertile: “She couldn’t breed, and that was all that she was good for.” That grim statement implies that Furiosa’s character was originally intended to be the stereotypical “strong female character,” which is to say, one formed out of sexual trauma — and a character without much if any agency over her own life. The oft-repeated storyline implies that women are inevitably sexual objects who can only gain agency through their sexualization, or even their dehumanization. It’s a depressingly narrow vision of what could motivate a woman to act, and unnecessary in a world like Mad Max’s. She’s impacted by the sexist abuse in the universe around her, but there’s no accompanying subtle, sick fantasy of male violence to undermine her The other details Theron mentions as going into Furiosa’s backstory — her growing up in “the green place,” being sold to Joe as a child, her subsequent hiding out and disguising herself as a boy among the war pups, and her eventual escape — all play out onscreen in Furiosa. Fury Road thankfully erased any hint that Furiosa was ever a sexual pawn or a victim of sexual abuse and trauma, and Furiosa similarly jettisons this plot. Instead, the would-be child bride escapes her fate early on, and the rest of the film unfolds just as Theron hinted. Furiosa’s character is still deeply informed by trauma, loss, and abuse from childhood on, just never sexual abuse or infertility. She’s still impacted by the sexist abuse in the universe around her, but there’s no accompanying subtle, sick fantasy of male violence to undermine her. Still, the fact this detail was ever a part of Furiosa’s backstory at all leaves questions about how much Miller absorbed the feminism of the character, let alone intended her to be a reclamation of his nihilistic dystopia rather than a badass representative of it. Taylor-Joy implies that the 79-year-old filmmaker may have missed the importance of allowing Furiosa her expression of female rage after all the injustices she’s witnessed and abuse she’s survived. (Ironically, her informal audition for Miller for the role involved her performing the iconic “mad as hell” monologue from Network — one of the greatest expressions of male rage ever filmed.) For his part, in the Times profile, Miller compared Furiosa to other giant-statured heroes like those of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood — hardly a feminist vision, but certainly a potentially empowering one. It’s notable that this clashing vision of the character played out over two separate films in which the filming conditions seemed to mirror the character’s unforgiving psychology. Miller has stressed that filming conditions for Furiosa were by no means as conflict-heavy as the clashes between Theron and method-acting co-star Tom Hardy on the Fury Road set. But Taylor-Joy told Variety that Miller’s close-mouthed, eyes-only vision for her performance “create[d] a radiation off the character, because she is being suppressed continuously throughout the film.” Taylor-Joy gets at something fundamental about Furiosa here: This suppression isn’t just the foundation of her character. It might ultimately also be the key to Furiosa’s wild popularity. Sure, her grease-painted raccoon eyes, badass shaved pate, and glittering silver arm are all key ingredients as well. But audiences, especially female viewers, recognize the loss and hardship that echo in Furiosa’s thousand-yard stares and taciturn speech patterns, and we celebrate her for rising above it in whatever ways she can. In a post-Roe world, the thought that we nearly had a Furiosa whose worth was derived entirely from her ability to deliver children becomes a chilling what-if that thankfully we don’t have to confront. It all serves as a reminder that the life Furiosa was running from still nips at our own heels today. Perhaps saving her from that fate becomes an unspoken duty for whoever plays her — a combined joy and sorrow for the actor who steps into her shadow.vox.com
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Birth control is good, actually Hormonal contraception is getting a flood of bad buzz lately. One TikTok creator told viewers it took her six years to “fix her hormones” after stopping birth control. Another cut up a pack of birth control pills that she said “ruined me as a person.” A third called it “one of the most damaging things you can put in your body.” Hormonal contraception is getting a flood of bad buzz across social media, where posters are listing side effects like depression, anxiety, low sex drive, acne, unwanted weight changes, and more. While it’s hard to measure the size of the trend, it’s become visible enough to make its way into headlines, chats among friends, and conversations between patients and their doctors. The result is that if you’re an American of reproductive age, it can feel like the pill, ring, IUDs, and other hormonal methods are terrible medications that result in only bad outcomes. It’s important not to dismiss people’s bad experiences with birth control, especially since women’s medical concerns in general have too often been devalued by doctors and ignored by researchers. Indeed, the lack of public conversation around contraception and its side effects may be part of the reason for the recent wave of critical posts. Women also have good reason to be annoyed that their birth control options haven’t changed much in decades, while male birth control seems to remain perennially five years in the future. But the negative posts can mask a basic truth: Birth control is a very effective way to avoid an unplanned pregnancy, an experience that also has profound effects on people’s bodies, not to mention their lives. No contraceptive method is perfect, but experts say people who experience side effects with one can often find another that works for them. And for many people in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, “contraceptive access is becoming more and more important,” said Mengyang Sun, an OB-GYN in New York City and a fellow with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health. Now, that access may be in jeopardy, with former President Donald Trump stating in an interview this week that he is “looking at” restrictions on the medications (he later walked the statement back, saying he would “never advocate” restrictions). The side effects of birth control have also been cited by conservatives as a reason to oppose the medications. With their availability under threat, experts say it’s crucial to remember the good the medication does for the millions of people who use it. Hormonal birth control is very effective at preventing pregnancy People have been sharing negative experiences with birth control for many years, but critiques of contraception are receiving a new level of attention in recent months, with creators and influencers posting horror stories or tips for stopping the medication, sometimes including misleading information. Those stories may be honest, but some users also spread deliberate disinformation to further an anti-contraception agenda, said Deborah Bartz, an OB-GYN at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital who studies depictions of birth control on social media. In reality, hormonal contraceptives are a reliable way of preventing pregnancy: Birth control pills are about 91 percent effective with typical use, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, while long-acting reversible methods like IUDs and contraceptive implants are more than 99 percent effective. For comparison, condoms are about 82 percent effective (they can leak or come off), and fertility-based awareness methods, which rely on charting the menstrual cycle and avoiding sex or using condoms on the most fertile days, are around 76 percent effective. Reliable contraception has an enormous impact on people’s ability to plan their futures. Research has shown that access to birth control boosts women’s earnings, helps them achieve their educational goals, and makes them less likely to fall into poverty. “Every pregnancy-capable person should be able to decide if/when to have a pregnancy, and birth control really helps them to be able to plan that and make that decision for themselves,” Sun said. Hormonal contraceptives are also used to treat a variety of medical conditions, including endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. The medications have “a lot of medical benefits,” Sun said. What doctors say about side effects Birth control does come with side effects, the most common of which are menstrual changes such as lighter or absent periods. Some people take birth control to reduce or stop their periods, but for others, the changes can be unwelcome, said Christine Dehlendorf, director of the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the University of California San Francisco. A lot of social media posts about birth control mention weight gain, though only a few methods, like the Depo-Provera shot and contraceptive implant, have been conclusively linked with weight changes, Sun said. Other top concerns are impacts on mood and libido, which can vary by method and by patient. For some people, IUDs can be extremely painful to insert. Anesthesia and other pain relief methods can help, but, troublingly, doctors often underestimate the pain of the procedure and do not offer pain control, the Washington Post reported. Some critics of birth control are also concerned more broadly about the impact of taking hormones like estrogen and progestin, the active ingredients in many methods. The medications are associated with a small increase in breast cancer risk, and some carry a small risk of blood clots. However, doctors say any risk with birth control needs to be balanced against pregnancy, which carries health risks of its own. “Whenever my patients ask me about the hormones in the birth control, I do tell them, when you’re pregnant, your body secretes similar hormones in way larger quantities,” Sun said. It’s important for doctors to honor people’s concerns about birth control, listening to them without being paternalistic or dismissive, Dehlendorf said. “There needs to be repair and restoration of trust between health care providers and communities and patients about people’s experience of birth control methods if we are going to be able to give people information.” But experts also say that it’s especially crucial now to protect birth control access for people who want it. “Contraception is a valuable tool for people who do not want to get pregnant, one that it is absolutely essential to have access to in the context of the post-Dobbs era,” Dehlendorf said.vox.com
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Actually, you should say something if you hate your friend’s partner Arrogant selfish person in crown making group of people annoyed and angry. Lonely girl having behavior problems. Vector illustration for aggressive society, bad communication concept It’s not that Sammy didn’t like Natalie at first. She was nice enough. It was only after Natalie started dating Sammy’s best guy friend and roommate, Dan, that things got tense. Sammy, Natalie, and Dan were part of the same grad school cohort when Natalie and Dan got together. Sammy, now 33, got the sense that Natalie and Dan were on different pages. Dan was a few years older and tended to pursue more casual romances; Natalie had never been in a relationship before. (All names in this story have been changed to allow people to discuss their friendships candidly.) Natalie and Dan were on-again, off-again for a few months, and when they were back on, Sammy noticed the normally social Dan would leave hangouts early at Natalie’s behest. When Natalie did come around their larger group of friends, she wouldn’t interact with anyone but Dan, Sammy says. Sammy was afraid she was losing one of her closest connections. Things came to a head after a Halloween party when Natalie erupted on Sammy. “She goes on this weird, 20-something girl tangent about ‘We’re dating, deal with it,’” Sammy says. Dan overheard the entire exchange. After that, Sammy couldn’t hold her tongue anymore. She told Dan about how he’d changed after he started dating Natalie and how her behavior at the Halloween party was inappropriate. Dan took the conversation in stride, addressing Sammy’s concerns but not committing to ending things. They continued to date for another year and a half, but Dan no longer brought Natalie around his friends. The unspoken compromise, Sammy says, was Dan making time for their friendship while still dating Natalie. “I still feel good about the way I approached it,” Sammy says. “It was not like, ‘She’s boring and dumb and sucks.’ But I was like, ‘I don’t think you were the best version of yourself, and as your friend I want better for you.’ I painted it as not a personal attack, but rather I don’t think that this relationship is serving you to the fullest.” Sammy and Dan now live in different cities but are still long-distance friends. It’s one of the most common and deeply felt friendship conundrums that we have very little control over who our closest confidantes date. Ideally, our pals would partner up with someone as wonderful as they are, but real duds can worm their way into the mix. As a friend, of course we want to support our bud’s romance, but what if we think they’re wasting their time with an overly opinionated blabbermouth? Or dating someone who isn’t a good fit? Worst of all, what if they’re with someone who’s just not a great person? “It was not like, ‘She’s boring and dumb and sucks’” It’s our responsibility to let our friends know when we think their romantic relationship is bringing them down. “It’s my job as her friend,” says friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships, “to let her know why I feel this is not good for her from the vantage point of being a person in her life intimately familiar with who she is, what her goals are, what might be a good partner.” These discussions don’t need to be friendship-killers either. As with any difficult conversation, there are ways to express concerns so a friend can accept them (even if they don’t agree) rather than feel attacked. The goal for the conversation, Bayard Jackson says, is to tell your friend what you see, show them your support, and manage your expectations around how they react to that information. (If you believe your friend is in an abusive relationship, this advice will vary. More on that later.) When to share your concerns (and when to keep them to yourself) While it’s true that you owe it to a friend to tell them when something feels off about their relationship, there are limits to what counts as reasonable concerns. Only broach a conversation if the noxious partner in question (and their behavior) is impacting your friend, you, or your friendship, says therapist Israa Nasir. For example, maybe you notice that your friend’s significant other constantly criticizes them or puts them down. Or perhaps your friend confides in you about how their spouse dismisses their feelings every time they try to have a serious conversation. Think twice before commenting on aspects of someone’s personality “because for your friend, they might enjoy those parts of their partner,” says therapist Shade Adekunle. If you find your friend’s new boyfriend’s jokes incredibly annoying but inoffensive, you may need to figure out how to manage your irritation (or limit the amount of time you spend with him when he’s feeling full of jokes). If you do decide to discuss an issue about a friend’s partner, make sure you’ve actually spent some time with them, Adekunle says. It’s possible their significant other was nervous or shy the first time you met them; don’t let one interaction color your entire view of them. However, don’t let years pass where you amass a mental dossier of your friend’s fiancé’s past infractions. “Giving that to somebody will make them feel defensive,” Adekunle says. Your friend might think, “You’re just judging me. You’ve hated them all along and you just didn’t say anything.” Comment on the behavior, not the person Once you’ve determined there’s something to be gained from voicing your concerns, be specific about what worries or upsets you. Simply saying “he’s annoying,” “she’s shady,” or “they’re untrustworthy” doesn’t explain how it impacts your friend or your friendship. You should also avoid giving your friend an ultimatum or asking them to choose between you and their partner. “That’s just not your place,” Nasir says, “even as a friend.” Maybe you’ve noticed your friend shrink away because their significant other always has to be the center of attention. Make an observation rather than a judgment, Nasir says. Try saying, “I noticed that when you’re with your partner, you tend to become very quiet.” Be honest about how the partner’s actions made you feel, Nasir suggests. You can also invite your friend into the conversation and ask them if they’ve clocked similar observations. Again, you might say, “I love how happy you are with Mark, but I’ve noticed he has a regular habit of interrupting everyone, even you. Is that something you’ve ever brought up with him before?” Simply saying “he’s annoying,” “she’s shady,” or “they’re untrustworthy” doesn’t explain how it impacts your friend or your friendship When her friends vent about their significant others, Julie sees an opening to gently push back. Instead of urging a friend to break up with their partner, Julie, 31, says something along the lines of, “That doesn’t sound like a great situation. Is this someone you want to continue to spend your time with?” The hope, Julie says, is “that they see themselves in the way that you see them. You’re like, ‘I know you’re not like this. I know you’re not a person that goes in your shell. Or you seem upset a lot of the times that we talk about it.’ I’m hoping that they see this is not normal.” Be prepared for pushback Broaching your concerns with empathy and curiosity gives your friend space to confide in you about problems in their relationship. But regardless of your approach, they may also respond defensively — and you should be prepared. Your friend may feel judged or that their decisions are being questioned, Adekunle says. It’s not unreasonable to expect some unkind words from your friend, who may feel caught off guard. Give your friend some time to cool off and don’t take what they say too personally, Nasir says. Should a friend have a negative reaction, Bayard Jackson finds it helpful to say, “I totally get that. If things were reversed, I’d feel the same way. But I also have to be honest.” That way you’re acknowledging their feelings while not trying to force your friend to see things your way. Let them know you trust them when they say everything is peachy in their relationship and that you’re always open to talk if anything changes, Adekunle says. It’s also true that you’re only privy to so much of the dynamic in your friend’s relationship. “This is tough to swallow, but he offers her something that you don’t and he offers her something that maybe you don’t understand,” Bayard Jackson says. “They have moments that you’re not a part of.” Set boundaries when you need to You probably won’t be able to completely avoid spending time with a friend’s partner, but you do have control over the duration and frequency of those hangouts. Be discerning when making and accepting plans, Bayard Jackson says. You might politely decline an invitation to join the two of them for dinner or suggest one-on-one hangouts, but you probably won’t be able to duck out of bigger events, like a birthday party. If you know you’ll be spending time with a friend’s partner who you don’t like, make a plan for how you’ll interact with them, Bayard Jackson suggests. Say hello and make small talk, but don’t spend more than a few minutes chatting. It’s better not to roll your eyes when they say something irritating. The goal is to continue to support your friend without undermining their relationship. Sometimes setting boundaries can grow into creating space. Andrew and Jacklyn were a few months into their friendship when Jacklyn started dating John. The romance was quickly intense, with Jacklyn discussing marriage after a few weeks. Andrew describes it as co-dependent. Andrew noticed Jacklyn would cancel plans at John’s behest. Throughout the entire relationship, Andrew questioned Jacklyn about John’s behaviors: “Why do you think he’s doing that?” or “How did that make you feel?” even “Why do you think you’re still in the relationship?” “I was like a broken record in what I was saying to her,” Andrew, 35, says. After less than a year, Jacklyn and John split. “She did say to me, ‘I appreciate you pointing out about John being this way and that way,’” Andrew says. But Andrew quickly found himself in a similar role when Jacklyn started dating another man Andrew saw as volatile. One night after a fight with her new boyfriend, Jacklyn was venting to Andrew. He tried to be validating, he says, but thought, “I can’t be invested in this again.” So he started spending less time with Jacklyn. They’re no longer friends, he says. What to say when you really don’t have anything nice to say For people like Andrew who are constantly on the receiving end of their friend’s gripes about their partner, you do have permission to point out the pattern, Adekunle says. You could say, “The last few times we’ve hung out, I’ve noticed you bring up Alex a lot. What’s going on there?” Or if your friend is constantly rehashing the same issues — they complain about their spouse’s poor communication skills — you might ask them whether they’ve brought up their concerns with their partner. “We want to be honest with them,” Adekunle says, “and say, ‘Was there something about this that you contributed to in some way? Could that go differently? Could that be better?’” Keeping the conversation focused on your friend can also help you avoid saying anything negative about their significant other. Maybe your pal says they’re so excited for a comedy show their partner bought tickets to, but you think the comedian is lame and their seats are cheap. Express your genuine interest in your friend’s excitement: “I love that you guys are doing that!” or “I’ve never been to that venue before, let me know how it is.” Avoid any sarcasm or passive aggressive language. What to do if you suspect abuse If you believe your friend is experiencing physical or emotional abuse, you’ll need to take a different approach. According to Adekunle, signs of abuse include a change in your friend’s demeanor, marks on their body, low self-esteem, or if they disclose how their arguments with their partner have intensified or become physical. You’ll want to be more direct. Adekunle suggests saying, “I’ve known you for 10 years and over the last six months I’ve seen a big change. I love you and want to know what’s going on.” Should they deflect or brush off your concern, let them know you’re worried about them: “I hear that you’re saying it’s fine, but from my perspective, it’s not looking that way. So can we try to talk about it?” Adekunle suggests. Once your friend feels comfortable opening up to you, try creating a larger support network if they’re comfortable. You might loop in another friend or a parent or sibling. This way you can collectively offer your friend resources and a plan to exit the relationship when they’re ready. “Maybe you talk about how could you let us know if things are escalating and you need help?” Adekunle says. “What would that look like?” Regardless of the relationship dynamic, the bottom line is you want to ensure your friend knows that you love and support them. You can’t control who your friends choose to be with, but you can control how you continue to show up for those you care about.vox.com
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3 theories for America’s anti-immigrant shift Six years ago, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border went into effect. Thousands of immigrant families were split up; migrant children were taken and kept separately while their parents awaited prosecution. The images and sounds of caged children stunned the nation, and the outcry was swift: Democrats rallied against then-President Donald Trump, protests swept the country, and public opinion was sharply against Trump’s policy. Immigration soared to become a top concern again, and the share of Americans saying immigration was a good thing for the country jumped. That sentiment continued to grow during the rest of Trump’s presidency. Now, things look much different. Americans once again view immigration as the country’s single most important problem, but public sentiment appears to have taken a turn to the negative. Recent polling seems to suggest that a significant share of American voters — not just Republicans — are warming up to the idea of tough-on-immigration policy proposals and rhetoric. Inside this story Numerous polls suggest the American public is souring on immigration, with even Democratic voters showing more interest in Donald Trump’s policy proposals for mass deportations. It’s a reversal of the public’s several-decades-long trend of increasing sympathy and appreciation for immigrants. This piece lays out three reasons for this surprising trend in public opinion. A recent poll suggested 42 percent of Democrats would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Other polls have also found an anti-immigrant shift in the public’s mood. Gallup’s long-term tracking poll, which has been running since the 1960s, shows a more general decline in the share of Americans who want to increase rates of immigration or keep them the same. Conversely, the portion of Americans who want to decrease immigration has grown: 41 percent of Americans feel this way, up from a low point of 28 percent in 2020. This shift against immigration is happening even as the general American consensus has been moving in favor of immigrants over the last few decades. In 1994, for example, 63 percent of Americans believed that immigrants were a “burden” to the country; only 31 percent said immigrants strengthen the country, according to Pew Research Center data. By 2019, those dynamics had flipped: 62 percent of Americans believed immigrants were an asset to the nation; only 28 percent thought they were a burden. Now, with the public seemingly lurching to the right on immigration, politicians are moving accordingly. There’s been a rightward pivot by Biden and congressional Democrats, and Trump — who built his first campaign on demonizing immigrants (and particularly immigrants of color) — has stepped up his constant attacks on the Biden administration’s immigration policy. So what explains the American public’s souring mood on immigrants and immigration? Though there are no simple answers, pollsters and immigration researchers offer a few explanations that can be roughly sorted into three theories. The first theory centers the role of elected officials — specifically Republicans, and more specifically Trump. As Republicans left power and shifted into opposition mode, they’ve refocused attention on immigration as a threat to American identity. Other experts argue the economy — particularly inflation and the public’s “scarcity mindset” — has made more Americans critical of immigration. When the public feels as though the economy is booming and there’s plenty to go around, they feel more open to sharing that wealth. But when people perceive the economy to be tenuous, like after the pandemic when inflation took off, Americans feel more hesitant to share with outsiders. A third group argues that the anti-immigrant turn is being driven by concerns about the rule of law and social disorder. This theory posits that the post-pandemic surge in crime, combined with heightened media coverage of disorder in public, prompted greater concerns from Americans about security and quality of life — concerns that were then also applied to the border and people trying to cross it without documentation. Theory 1: It’s the politicians Trump’s first presidential campaign — starting quite literally with his announcement speech — was built on demonizing immigrants and claiming that open borders were destroying America. But that created a rhetorical tension once he took office, as he had to claim that the problem was rapidly improving thanks to his new anti-immigration measures. Since Joe Biden took office, he has pledged a more open, humanitarian approach to immigration and border politics. He paused construction on a border wall; he issued new protections for DACA recipients, and sent a new immigration bill to Congress. He essentially sought to create the sharpest contrast possible with Donald Trump’s legacy. That shift, however, created the perfect opportunity for Republicans, led by Trump, to once again cast immigration and immigrants as a threat to American identity. The surge in illegal border crossings and legal asylum seekers that followed the pandemic — as well as this liberalizing of migration policy — were fodder for the fear-mongering and exploitation of racial and social fears. And right-wing politicians and commentators have routinely played up this threat, unifying immigrant-skeptical Americans. The lead-up to the 2022 midterms and the 2024 campaign so far provide evidence of this shift. While the 2020 campaign centered on the pandemic and the economy, once Biden took over, Republican candidates across the country shifted into talk about “open borders.” For example, the pro-immigration groups America’s Voice and Immigration Hub in 2021 tracked an increase in mentions of the terms “Biden-Harris border crisis” and “mass amnesty” in paid advertising, as well as increased anti-immigrant discourse online. Once the midterm season picked up, more Republican campaign ads began to mention immigration negatively — about one in five ads in March 2022, for example. And in 2024, Republican candidates (most visibly Donald Trump) have also stepped up talk of immigrant “invasions.” Trump’s more recent framing of illegal immigration as “poisoning the blood of our country” is a key example of this more vitriolic talk of immigrants. And it fits into a longstanding history of American xenophobia; immigration scholars consider this kind of discourse a direct appeal to “in-groups”: existing communities that define themselves against “out-groups” like immigrants, and exploit suspicion and bigotry. Still, this theory can’t fully explain the shift in negative sentiment since the pandemic. Republican politicians (including, famously, Trump) and right-wing media have previously led other cycles of outrage and panic over migration, “caravans,” and the southern border. Immigration was a key campaign point for Republicans during the 2018 midterms, but support for immigration continued to rise. Theory 2: It’s the economy When Americans feel good about their financial security and the health of the national economy, they also feel good about immigrants and immigration. That’s the lesson from the last few decades of Gallup polling, according to Jeff Jones, one of Gallup’s data and public opinion experts. “We saw some declines around the Great Recession — favorable percentages were in the 50s — and then in 2018 and 2019, opinions were quite positive,” Jones told me. In fact, both Republicans and Democrats were more positive about immigration during that time. But after the pandemic and its ensuing inflation and interest rate hikes, economic sentiment took a nosedive, and anti-immigrant sentiment began to pick up as well. These more recent swings also show up in a few of Gallup’s other tracking polls. When asked whether immigrants have a positive or negative effect on job opportunities, taxes, or the economy in general, negative sentiment tended to increase in the lead-up to the Great Recession but recovered after. A similar dynamic emerged before and after the pandemic: 43 percent of respondents said immigrants had a positive effect on the economy, while 31 percent said it had a negative effect. By 2023, respondents were nearly evenly divided: 39 percent to 38 percent. But economics alone don’t explain recent twists. Both economic conditions and sentiment about the economy have been improving more markedly over the last year, but the public’s anti-immigrant shift has been accelerating. Clearly, something else is happening here. Theory 3: It’s the “law-and-order” mindset Matthew Wright, a University of British Columbia political scientist who studies immigration, suggests a third complementary explanation: a renewed public desire for “law-and-order” policies prompted by the pandemic-era rise in crime and the Biden-era increase in border-crossing attempts. Compared to the lull in rates of immigration during the pandemic, the surge in border crossings in the last three years was unprecedented, overwhelming what federal and local officials have been able to manage. That volume has resulted in dramatic scenes at the border, in border communities, and in big cities, where many asylum seekers have been moved. Wright suggests that a good chunk of Americans feel conflicting emotions that conflate illegal immigration, asylum seekers, and immigration in general with a sense of public disorder. They are torn between having sympathy for immigrants in general and feeling worried about public safety, order, and the rule of law. And they combine their feelings about the border with their attitudes about crime and governance. “In terms of what people are concerned about, the way I read these figures and these trends is that they’re mainly concerned about illegal immigration, and they’re mainly concerned about the border,” Wright said. “There’s something to be said for people being seriously uncomfortable with the idea that their country doesn’t have a border, that the border is not something we can enforce.” Gallup polling also provides some clues of shifting sentiment here: In 2023, 47 percent of Americans said they believed immigrants had a worsening effect on crime in the US, up from 42 percent in 2019. And the share of Americans who say they personally worry a “great deal” specifically about illegal immigration has steadily increased since 2020 — from 32 percent in March 2020 to 48 percent in March of this year. To Wright, these findings complement other polling that shows a confounding mix of opinions on immigration. A not insignificant number of voters hold both these more critical views of immigration as well as generally open views: positive toward refugees, favoring reform of legal migration, and supporting pathways to citizenship for those already here. This law-and-order theory suggests that these voters can hold competing ideas in their minds: not opposing migration, but wanting it done in an orderly manner. This theory also explains why Trump and Republicans may have a unique opening this year — to activate both nativist and bigoted attitudes in some voters, as well as to exploit fear of “chaos” and bad management. “They can use a very simple message to capture different kinds of people: They can capture both the prejudicially motivated person and the pure law-and-order guy — that person is not expressly racist, necessarily, but values order in society,” Wright said.vox.com
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Hacks shows cancel culture is a joke Jean Smart as Deborah Vance in Season 3 of Hacks The worst thing to happen to very good television shows is when they run out of things to say. Telling a good story and what fans and network executives want (more show) are forces often at odds with one another, and I’ve watched more than a few of my favorite shows crumble under the pressure to give it one more go. That’s why I was a little worried about Hacks, which stuck its landing in season two. The second season finale had Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) firing Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), telling Ava that it was time for her to succeed on her own. The move came from love, and perhaps from Deborah, a little bit selfishly, wanting to enjoy her success alone. As a conclusion for these characters, it was well played and well earned — good for fans, extremely tricky for the writing team. The show relies on the friction created by the strange, begrudging love these two have for one another. Without the turbulence, there is no show here, and at the same time, more of the same rocky road antics between the two could feel repetitive. But it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. Hacks still has plenty to say. The show continues to be a consistent delight. This third chapter focuses on Deborah’s ambitions of becoming a late-night network TV talk show host. Through her journey, the show asks questions — both cynical and earnest — about what the future of commercial comedy looks like and which comedians actually get to take risks. The answer to the latter is usually the very rich and very famous. These themes collide in “Yes, And,” the eighth and penultimate episode of the season, in which Hacks’s antihero finally gets “canceled.” This was inevitable — cancellation is one of the most omnipresent conversations in modern comedy. There are few things less enjoyable than an allegedly funny boomer unable to see how unfunny they’ve become. And as the show establishes, Deborah Vance has always been a boomer (derogatory). But as the show makes clear, she’s not quite the worst boomer. Hacks is deeply self-aware, with its sharpness balancing its optimistic sitcom underpinnings. We’ve followed along as Deborah has learned how to navigate the modern world with a terminally millennial woman as her guide, and both of the main characters’ fumbles are framed more as miscommunications than personal failings. Still, below the slapstick of a “woke mob” coming for Deborah Vance, Hacks has canny observations about who gets canceled, who holds power, and what actually means anything in an industry that revolves around the rich and powerful. “Yes, And” opens with a seemingly innocuous mistake: Deborah Vance has been double-booked at both a UC Berkeley ceremony where she’ll be awarded with an honorary degree and an appearance at Palm Springs Pride. It’s a tough call, but Deborah has to go to Berkeley because she’s trying to build some momentum and buzz for the late-night hosting gig. A fancy event at a prestigious college will do that, and it turns out that a vaunted New Yorker writer profiling Deborah will also be there to finish up the article. Knock this out of the park and that late-night show is hers. But unfortunately for Team Deborah Vance, that plan quickly goes south — enough to make double-booking the least of their concerns. While at Berkeley, a supercut of Deborah telling racist and ableist “jokes” emerges and goes viral. Calling them jokes is generous because they’re just blobs of bigotry without anything resembling a punchline (e.g., cars shouldn’t be made by Asian people because Asian people aren’t good drivers). As Deborah tells Ava, the clips are stitched from material she did decades ago and she obviously doesn’t feel that way today. More importantly, though, Deborah needs the New Yorker and network executives to know she’s not problematic because she really wants this job. As the clip circulates, Deborah and Ava have to figure out what to do. Ignore it and hope it goes away? Admit she said those things, but don’t apologize? Acknowledge the clip and apologize? Deborah complains about being picked on, and that it isn’t fair that she’s being targeted. Ava thinks Deborah’s completely lost the plot. “You get to be rich and famous for making jokes,” Ava replies, urging Deborah to just say sorry. “People are allowed to have their reactions to them.” As Ava delivers this very astute observation Deborah (at a frat party no less), it’s not difficult to connect her point to the contemporary discourse surrounding real–life comedians getting critiqued for their jokes or behavior and then calling themselves victims of cancel culture. Whether it’s Dave Chappelle trying to defend his anti-trans humor, Amy Schumer talking about Middle East politics, Jerry Seinfeld talking about the state of modern-day comedy, or Ellen DeGeneres talking about getting “kicked out” of the business — it all revolves around not being able to handle critique. As Ava points out, there are no victims of cancel culture. No one is ever canceled. No one’s success is ever taken away. No one’s actually being censored. It’s simply a personal misreading of the power dynamic. All of the comics I listed above continue to have some combination of robust deals with streaming services, accolades for speaking out, and huge stadium shows. Fame inverts the comedy landscape. Famous comedians will always have more power than a non-famous person they’re targeting, which means they can’t help but punch down, a comedy no-no. Now that social media platforms and the internet have democratized fame and visibility, said famous comedians are being held accountable. Accountability can feel a lot like some kind of injustice to very famous, rich people. But at the end of the day they’re still very rich and famous. “No one’s actually canceled,” Ava says. The show putting these words in Ava’s mouth is important because she also lost a job over a joke. In the first season, Ava fires off a tweet about an anti-gay senator that gets her fired and kicks off the events of the show. Unlike famous comedians, she had to suffer consequences for what she did (i.e., moving to Las Vegas and working for Deborah Vance). She has firsthand experience about what being professionally “canceled” is actually like. At the same time, her trials and tribulations — becoming a landlord and not having much of a social life — were extremely privileged problems to have. Ava keeps reminding Deborah that she could end the kerfuffle by apologizing. Deborah, so stubborn, would rather go through the fresh hell of college improv and bribing frat brothers with wine than say sorry. She insists comedians don’t apologize for their comedy. It isn’t until a dean pulls the plug on her ceremony, and ostensibly damages the New Yorker profile, that Deborah finally agrees to attend an on-campus town hall and listen to the students offended by her old material. The ending of the episode is indistinguishable from a fairy tale. After Deborah’s apology, her New Yorker profile is glowing. It’s all about her humanity and how she’s a difficult, but daring comedian for wanting to learn and grow. With this newly demonstrated ability to listen, the writer surmises that Deborah would be the perfect late-night host. Right after Ava reads her the article, Deborah gets word that she clinched the gig and snagged her dream job. But while Deborah Vance got her happy ending, there’s a sly wryness to it that comes back to the show’s bigger point about famous people complaining about cancel culture: It’s all a joke. Of course, we’re happy when Deborah’s past doesn’t derail her future because she’s the show’s protagonist, and we know her story and who she is. (It doesn’t hurt that her transgressions are much less severe than real-life parallels.) She also apologizes because she seems to have some semblance of regret and wants to be better. And because she listens to the students tell her how wrong she was and shows remorse, she gets a glowing profile in a fancy magazine. The barest minimum gets a handsome reward because the bar is on the floor. While that’s a satisfying story for our fictional hero, it’s a little less enjoyable to think about how the episode underlines that Deborah’s job was never really in question. The viral clip and online rage were never going to ruin her chances. The network would likely always have given her the hosting gig. Between the second and third seasons of Hacks, Deborah has reached that tier of Seinfeld and DeGeneres, the level of prestige where any consequence can be met with complaint, and that’s just as good as an apology. It ultimately doesn’t matter whether Deborah was actually sorry about the offensive stuff she said or if she just wanted to appear sorry because her dream gig was being threatened. “Yes, And” gets at the idea that we all want to believe that people, especially famous rich ones, can be held accountable. We want our personal judgments to have some kind of bearing on an industry run by rich and powerful people. But that’s all a setup, something we fall for because it feels a little better than being the punchline.vox.com
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The Supreme Court’s new voting rights decision is a love letter to gerrymandering An abortion rights activist flies an upside down US flag, the international sign of distress, outside of the US Supreme Court during a protest in Washington, DC, on June 26, 2022, two days after the US Supreme Court scrapped half-century constitutional protections for the procedure. Elected leaders across the US political divide rallied on June 26 for a long fight ahead on abortion -- state by state and in Congress -- with total bans in force or expected soon in half of the vast country. (Photo by Samuel Corum / AFP) (Photo by SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images) The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines on Thursday, which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date. In the past, legal restrictions on racial gerrymandering — maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party — had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from “repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.” Along the way, Alito’s opinion gives the Court’s explicit blessing to maps that are drawn for the very purpose of maximizing one political party’s power. In the very first paragraph of his Alexander opinion, Alito states that “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.” This is a significant statement, as it endorses a practice — partisan gerrymandering — that the Court has previously treated as unseemly. The Court’s most significant previous opinion on partisan gerrymandering, Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), held that federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear cases challenging partisan maps, but it stopped short of saying that such maps are actually permissible under the Constitution. Rucho even declared that partisan gerrymandering “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust” and called it “incompatible with democratic principles.” The Court just concluded that the solution to this anti-democratic practice is “beyond the reach of the federal courts.” Alexander, by contrast, contains none of these caveats. Rigged maps now enjoy the Supreme Court’s unambiguous support. On top of all of this, Alexander achieves another one of Alito’s longtime goals. Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a white lawmaker might have been motivated by racism, and he’s long sought to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion. “When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning conduct,’” Alito writes, before proclaiming that “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.” So Alexander is a very significant decision, and a very significant loss for proponents of fair legislative maps. The case is likely to cause partisan gerrymandering to proliferate in the United States even more than it already has. The big question in Alexander: What happens when a legislature engages in both racial and partisan gerrymandering? For many years prior to Rucho, the Supreme Court at least held open the possibility that it might strike down maps drawn to benefit one political party or the other. Rucho, which, like Alexander, was decided along party lines with the Court’s Republicans in the majority, cut off any possibility that a partisan gerrymandering case could move forward in federal court. Yet while the Court no longer allows challenges to partisan gerrymanders, it has long allowed civil rights plaintiffs to challenge racial gerrymanders: maps drawn to increase the power of voters of one race, or to diminish the power of voters of a different race. The South Carolina map at issue in Alexander, however, was both a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander. In 2018, former Rep. Joe Cunningham, a Democrat, won a narrow victory in South Carolina’s First Congressional District. In 2020, he got over 49 percent of the vote but lost that seat to Republican Rep. Nancy Mace. Everyone, including Alito, acknowledges that South Carolina’s Republican legislature redrew its congressional maps after the 2020 census to shore up Republican control of the First District. The lower court that heard this case determined, however, that the legislature did so by using race as a proxy to identify voters who were likely to vote for Democrats. In 2020, 90 percent of Black voters in South Carolina voted for President Joe Biden, so mapmakers knew that if they moved large numbers of Black voters out of the First District, that would make the district more Republican. And so the lower court found that South Carolina’s mapmakers chopped up Charleston County, including many white voters from that county in the First District, while excluding nearly 80 percent of Charleston’s Black population. Before Alexander, using race in this way was illegal. The Supreme Court held in Cooper v. Harris (2017) that “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.” Though Alito’s Alexander opinion does not explicitly overrule this holding from Cooper, it effectively achieves that goal. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent, Alito’s latest opinion closely tracks his dissent in Cooper. “Today, for all practical purposes,” Kagan writes, “the Cooper dissent becomes the law.” Alito writes a strong presumption of white racial innocence into the law Much of the case turns on a factual dispute about whether South Carolina Republicans actually did use race to identify which voters to move out of the First District. Alito’s opinion argues that the lower court reached the wrong factual conclusion when it determined that they did; Kagan’s opinion takes the opposite position. Ordinarily, appellate courts are not supposed to second-guess a trial court’s factual findings. Trial judges hear witness testimony and develop the intimate familiarity with a case that comes from hearing both parties’ full presentation of their factual arguments; the Supreme Court does not. As the Supreme Court held in Cooper, a lower court’s “findings of fact — most notably, as to whether racial considerations predominated in drawing district lines — are subject to review only for clear error.” Alito’s Alexander opinion pays lip service to this clear error standard, but it effectively eliminates it in redistricting cases. The new rule is that state lawmakers enjoy a “presumption of legislative good faith” when they are accused of racial gerrymandering. Alito writes that “nothing rules out the possibility” that movement of Black voters out of the First District “was simply a side effect of the legislature’s partisan goal.” And given the presumption that legislatures can do what they want, “that possibility is dispositive.” Later in his opinion, Alito goes even further. The lower court, he claims, “critically erred by failing to draw an adverse inference against the Challengers for not providing a substitute map that shows how the State ‘could have achieved its legitimate political objectives’ in District 1 while producing ‘significantly greater racial balance.’” What Alito is saying here is that, when a state draws a partisan gerrymander, anyone who wants to challenge it as an illegal racial gerrymander should show that there is some way to draw more racially equitable maps that still achieve the same partisan goals. And if the challengers can’t do that, courts generally must rule against those challengers. So Alexander is a significant victory for gerrymandering, for lawmakers who wish to use race to draw legislative districts, and for Alito’s Republican Party.vox.com
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You searched Google. The AI hallucinated an answer. Who’s legally responsible? 14 May 2024, USA, Mountain View: Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at Google I/O. At the developer conference, everything revolved around the topic of artificial intelligence (AI). Photo: Christoph Dernbach/dpa (Photo by Christoph Dernbach/picture alliance via Getty Images) Google’s shift toward using AI to generate a written answer to user searches instead of providing a list of links ranked algorithmically by relevance was inevitable. Before AI Overview — introduced last week for US users — Google had Knowledge Panels, those information boxes that appear toward the top of some searches, incentivizing users to get their answers directly from Google, rather than clicking through to a result. AI Overview summarizes search results for a portion of queries, right at the top of the page. The results draw from multiple sources, which are cited in a drop-down gallery under the summary. As with any AI-generated response, these answers vary in quality and reliability. Overview has told users to change their blinker fluid — which does not exist — seemingly because it picked up on joke responses from forums where users seek car advice from their peers. In a test I ran on Wednesday, Google was able to correctly generate instructions for doing a pushup, drawing heavily from the instructions in a New York Times article. Less than a week after launching this feature, Google announced that they are trying out ways to incorporate ads into their generative responses. I’ve been writing about Bad Stuff online for years now, so it’s not a huge surprise that, upon gaining access to AI Overview, I started googling a bunch of things that might cause the generative search tool to pull from unreliable sources. The results were mixed, and they seemed to rely a lot on the exact phrasing of my question. When I typed in queries asking for information on two different people who are widely associated with dubious natural “cures” for cancer, I received one generated answer that simply repeated the claims of this person uncritically. For the other name, the Google engine declined to create generative responses. Results on basic first aid queries — such as how to clean a wound — pulled from reliable sources to generate an answer when I tried it. Queries about “detoxes” repeated unproven claims and were missing important context. But rather than try to get a handle on how reliable these results are overall, there’s another question to ask here: If Google’s AI Overview gets something wrong, who is responsible if that answer ends up hurting someone? Who’s responsible for AI? The answer to that question may not be simple, according to Samir Jain, the vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act largely protects companies like Google from liability over the third-party content posted on its platforms because Google is not treated as a publisher of the information it hosts. It’s “less clear” how the law would apply to AI-generated search answers, Jain said. AI Overview makes Section 230 protections a little messier because it’s harder to tell whether the content was created by Google or simply surfaced by it. “If you have an AI overview that contains a hallucination, it’s a little difficult to see how that hallucination wouldn’t have at least in part been created or developed by Google,” Jain said. But a hallucination is different from surfacing bad information. If Google’s AI Overview quotes a third party that is itself providing inaccurate information, the protections would still likely apply. A bunch of other scenarios are stuck in a gray area for now: Google’s generated answers are drawing from third parties but not necessarily directly quoting them. So is that original content, or is it more like the snippets that appear under search results? While generative search tools like AI Overview represent new territory in terms of Section 230 protections, the risks are not hypothetical. Apps that say they can use AI to identify mushrooms for would-be foragers are already available in app stores, despite evidence that these tools aren’t super accurate. Even in Google’s demo of their new video search, a factual error was generated, as The Verge noticed. Eating the source code of the internet There’s another question here beyond when Section 230 may or may not apply to AI-generated answers: the incentives that AI Overview does or does not contain for the creation of reliable information in the first place. AI Overview relies on the web continuing to contain plenty of researched, factual information. But the tool also seems to make it harder for users to click through to those sources. “Our main concern is about the potential impact on human motivation,” Jacob Rogers, associate general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, said in an email. “Generative AI tools must include recognition and reciprocity for the human contributions that they are built on, through clear and consistent attribution.” The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t seen a major drop in traffic to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects as a direct result of AI chatbots and tools to date, but Rogers said that the foundation was monitoring the situation. Google has, in the past, relied on Wikipedia to populate its Knowledge Panels, and draws from its work to provide fact-check pop-up boxes on, for instance, YouTube videos on controversial topics. There’s a central tension here that’s worth watching as this technology becomes more prevalent. Google has an incentive to present its AI-generated answers as authoritative. Otherwise, why would you use them? “On the other hand,” Jain said, “particularly in sensitive areas like health, it will probably want to have some kind of disclaimer or at least some cautionary language.” Google’s AI Overview contains a small note at the bottom of each result clarifying that it is an experimental tool. And, based on my unscientific poking around, I’d guess that Google has opted for now to avoid generating answers on some controversial topics. The Overview will, with some tweaking, generate a response to questions about its own potential liability. After a couple dead ends, I asked Google, “Is Google a publisher.” “Google is not a publisher because it doesn’t create content,” begins the reply. I copied that sentence and pasted it into another search, surrounded by quotes. The search engine found 0 results for the exact phrase.vox.com
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Why AI art will always kind of suck Millie von Platen/Vox Artificial intelligence has long been hailed as a great “equalizer” of creativity, finally putting the ability to create art in all of its myriad forms into the hands of the tech-savvy. Not a creative person? Not an issue. “The reason we built this tool is to really democratize image generation for a bunch of people who wouldn’t necessarily classify themselves as artists,” said the lead researcher for DALL-E, which turns text prompts into images. Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, wrote in his book that generative AI will one day account for 95 percent of the work that companies hire creative professionals to do: “All free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.” Or, as another AI startup founder put it: “So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows.” But it is a problem for actual artists, and for anybody who cares and thinks deeply about the words, images, and sounds we consume every day. With any promise of disruption comes the reasonable fear that its replacement will be worse, both for the creative professionals who rely on artmaking for their livelihoods and for people who enjoy reading well-written works, who take pleasure in thoughtful visual art, who watch movies not solely to be entertained but because of the surprising, life-affirming, or otherwise meaningful directions a good film might go. Should we take seriously the artistic vision of someone who considers “pooping rainbows” the pinnacle of creativity? The wrinkle in AI executives’ plot to supplant human creativity is that so far, consumer AI tools are not very good at making art. Generative AI creates content based on recognizing patterns within the data it was trained on, using statistics to determine what the prompter is hoping to get out of it. But if art is more meaningful beyond the images or words that comprise it or the money that it makes, what good is an amalgam of its metadata, divorced from the original context? Text generators like ChatGPT, image creators like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Lensa, and DALL-E, the song-making tool Suno, and text-to-video generators like Runway and Sora, can produce content that looks like human-made writing, music, or visuals by virtue of having been trained on a great many human-made works. Yet any further examination reveals them to be mostly hollow, boring, and disposable. As one former journalist who now works at Meta remarked, “There hasn’t been a single AI-generated creative work that has really stuck with me … it all just glides right past and disappears.” What happens when and if the AI tools of the future can someday produce novels that people actually want to read, songs that listeners can’t stop blasting, or films that audiences will pay movie theater prices to see? Or, perhaps the better question is: Is that even possible if the owners of these technologies fundamentally misunderstand why people make and enjoy art? Why AI art looks cheap Visual artists have used machine learning for decades, but they’ve often done so in ways that reflect the artist’s process and ideas rather than the machine’s. Anna Ridler is a conceptual artist who uses a type of machine learning called a generative adversarial network, or GAN, that can be trained solely on the images she feeds it. That isn’t what the current generation of simple text-to-image generators — which are trained on hundreds of millions of images scraped from all over the internet — like Midjourney and DALL-E do. “Conceptually, it’s hard to do interesting things with [them], because [they’re] hidden behind APIs. It’s a black box,” she says of the proprietary (as opposed to open-source) software these companies use that discourages true experimentation. Instead, the work these generators churn out look uncanny, smooth, and generally off in ways that are both obvious and not: Generative AI’s reliance on data make it famously unable to accurately depict human hands, and as psychologist and AI commentator Gary Marcus noted, it also struggles with statistically improbable prompts like “a horse riding an astronaut,” which still seem exclusively the province of human imagination (even the latest AI models will invariably give you a picture of an astronaut riding a horse). “There’s this weird slickness to the images that will become a temporal marker that ‘this was a mid-2020s image,’” Ridler says. “The more you play with these things, the more you realize how hard it is to actually get something interesting and original out of them.” What AI is good at doing, however, is flooding the internet with mediocre, instantaneous art. “You know what I realized about AI images in your marketing? It sends out the message that you’ve got no budget. It’s the digital equivalent of wearing an obviously fake Chanel bag. Your whole brand immediately appears feeble and impoverished,” wrote artist Del Walker on X. It’s the same story with text generators. Last year Neil Clarke, the founder of the sci-fi and fantasy literary magazine Clarkesworld, shut down submissions after ChatGPT-generated works accounted for nearly half of what was submitted. “When this hit us last year, I told people they’re worse than any human author we’ve ever seen. And after one update, they’re equal to the worst authors we’ve seen,” he says. “Being a statistical model, it’s predicting the next most likely word, so it doesn’t really understand what it’s writing. And understanding is somewhat essential to telling a good story.” Great works of storytelling tend to work not just on one level but on multiple — they contain subtext and meaning that a statistical model likely couldn’t grasp with data alone. Instead, Clarke says, the AI-generated stories were flat and unsophisticated, even if they were grammatically perfect. “Right now, you could have GPT-4 generate something that looks like a full screenplay: It’d be 120 pages, it would have characters, they would have consistent names throughout and the dialogue would resemble things you might find in a movie,” says John August, a screenwriter on the WGA bargaining committee, which gained huge protections against AI last September. “Would it really make sense? I don’t know. It might be better than the worst screenplay you’ve ever read, but that’s a very low bar to cross. I think we’re quite a ways away from being a thing you’re going to want to read or watch.” AI is already being used in film in a few ways, sometimes to make it appear as though actors’ mouths match up with dubbed foreign languages, for example, or in creating backdrops and background characters. More controversially, AI has also been used in documentary projects: 2021’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain used AI to make a fake Bourdain speak three lines, a similar tactic was used in 2022’s The Andy Warhol Diaries. In April, the leaders of the Archival Producers Alliance drafted a proposed list of best practices for AI in journalistic film, including allowing for the use of AI to touch up or restore images, but warning that using generative AI to create new material should be done with careful consideration. This future is far — although nobody can agree on how long — from the one that AI boosters have preached is just around the corner, one of endless hyper-personalized entertainment with the click of a button. “Imagine being able to request an AI to generate a movie with specific actors, plot, and location, all customized to your personal preferences. Such a scenario would allow individuals to create their own movies from scratch for personal viewing, completely eliminating the need for actors and the entire industry around filming,” teased one AI industry group. Marvel filmmaker Joe Russo echoed this vision in an interview, positing, “You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. ‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a romcom because I’ve had a rough day,’ and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a romcom starring you that’s 90 minutes long.” It’s certainly possible that the next generation of AI tools makes such a leap that this fantasy could conceivably become a reality. Still, it inevitably begs the question of whether a “very competent” hyper-personalized romcom is what most people want, or will ever want, from the art they consume. That doesn’t mean AI won’t transform the creative industries However dystopian this might sound (not least because, as any woman on the internet is well aware, this technology is being used to make nonconsensual sexual images and videos), we actually already have a decent corollary for it. Just as AI is meant to “democratize” artmaking, the creator industry, which was built on the back of social media, was designed to do the same thing: circumvent the traditional gatekeepers of media by “empowering” individuals to produce their own content and in return, offering them a place where their work might actually get seen. There are clear pros and cons here. While AI is useful in giving emerging creators new tools to make, say, visual and sound effects they might not otherwise have the money or skill to produce, it is equally or perhaps more useful for fraud, in the form of unthinkably enormous amounts of phone scams, deepfakes, and phishing attacks. Ryan Broderick, who often discusses the cultural impact of AI on his newsletter Garbage Day, points out another comparison between social media and generative AI. “My fear is that we’re hurtling really quickly towards a world where rich people can read the words written by humans and people who can’t afford it read words written by machines,” he tells me. Broderick likens it to what’s already happening on the internet in many parts of the world, where the wealthy can afford subscriptions to newspapers and magazines written by professionals while the working classes consume news on social media, where lowest-common-denominator content is often what gets the most attention. Crucially, social media may have disrupted media gatekeepers and given more people to platforms to showcase their art, but it didn’t expand the number of creatives able to make a living doing those things — in many ways it did the opposite. The real winners were and continue to be the owners of these platforms, just as the real winners of AI will be the founders who pitch their products to C-suite executives as replacements for human workers. Because even if AI can’t create good art without a talented human being telling it what to do, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pose an existential threat to the people working in creative industries. For the last few years, artists have watched in horror as their work has been stolen and used to train AI models, feeling as though they’re being replaced in real time. “It starts to make you wonder, do I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?” said a fiction writer who used the writing AI tool Sudowrite. Young people are reconsidering whether or not to enter artistic fields at all. In an FTC roundtable on generative AI’s impact on creative industries last October, illustrator Steven Zapata said, “The negative market implications of a potential client encountering a freely downloadable AI copycat of us when searching our names online could be devastating to individual careers and our industry as a whole.” Cory Doctorow, known for both his science fiction and tech criticism, argues that, in any discussion of AI art, the crucial question should be: “How do we minimize the likelihood that an artist somewhere gets $1 less because some tech bro somewhere gets $1 more?” How to think about the artistic “threat” of AI Even as we should take seriously the labor implications of AI — not to mention the considerable ethical and environmental effects — Doctorow argues that it’s essential to stop overhyping its capabilities. “In the same way that pretending ‘Facebook advertising is so good that it can brainwash you into QAnon’ is a good way to help Facebook sell ads, the same thing happens when AI salespeople say, ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard my critics, but it turns out I have the most powerful tool ever made, and it’s going to end the planet. Wouldn’t you like me to sell you some of it?’” This is how AI salespeople view art: as commodities to be bought and sold, not as something to do or enjoy. In a 2010 essay on The Social Network, Zadie Smith made the case that the experience of using Facebook was in fact the experience of existing inside Mark Zuckerberg’s mind. Everything was made just so because it suited him: “Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind … Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what ‘friendship’ is,” she writes. Why should millions (now billions) of people choose to live their lives in this format over any others? Just as we should ask whether using a tool created by a college sophomore preoccupied with control and stoicism is perhaps the best way to connect with our friends, we should also be asking why we should trust AI executives and their supporters to decide anything related to creativity. One of the more asinine things published last year was Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which the billionaire venture capitalist whined about the supposed lack of cultural power he and people exactly like him wield in comparison to “ivory tower, know-it-all credentialed expert[s].” These ideological enemies, it is relatively safe to infer, are the sorts of people — ethicists, academics, union leaders — who might concern themselves with the well-being of normal people under his particular view of “progress”: free markets, zero regulation, unlimited investment in technological advancement regardless of what these technologies are actually being used to do. A slightly funny element of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is how clearly its author’s interest in art fails to extend beyond an average ninth-grader’s familiarity with literature (references include the “hero’s journey,” Orwell, and Harry Potter); in a list of “patron saints of techno-optimism,” Andreesen names a few dozen people, mostly free-market economists, and a single visual artist: Warhol. On X, a platform run by a different out-of-touch tech billionaire, AI boosters cheer on a world finally rid of human creators, even human beings at all. “This is it. The days of OnlyFans is over,” posted one tech commentator over a video of AI-animated people dancing. “Seems sorta obvious AI will replace the online simp/thot model,” said another. “Cash in on OnlyFans while you can I guess.” In the same way that people who believe human influencers will be replaced by AI simulacra fail to understand what is compelling about influencers, those who believe AI will somehow “replace Hollywood” or the music and publishing industries betray a lack of curiosity about why we consume art in the first place. Try asking Google’s new AI Overview feature why people love art, for instance, and it will tell you that “watching art can release dopamine.” People love great art not for the chemicals it releases but because it challenges us, comforts us, confuses us, probes us, attacks us, excites us, inspires us. Because great art is a miracle, because to witness it is to feel the presence of something like God and the human condition, and to remind us that they are perhaps the same thing. It’s no coincidence that AI has widely been compared to a cult; there is almost a religious zeal to its adherents’ beliefs that one day AI will become omnipotent. But if you look at art and all you see is content, or if you look at a picture of a hot girl and all you see are JPGs in the shape of a sexual object, that’s all you’ll get out of it. People love great art not for the chemicals it releases but because it challenges us, comforts us, confuses us, probes us, attacks us, excites us, inspires us. Doctorow is willing to stipulate that works created by AI generators might one day be considered an art form, in the same way that sampling went from being looked down upon but is now a common and celebrated practice in music. Media theorist Ignas Kalpokas has written that AI art “has a revelatory quality, making visible the layers of the collective unconscious of today’s societies — that is, data patterns — in a way that is in line with the psychoanalytic capacities that [Walter] Benjamin saw in photography and film.” But the more content AI creates, he argues, the more likely that audiences will experience it “in a state of distraction.” The future of art and entertainment could very well be individuals asking their personal AIs to feed them music, movies, or books created with a single prompt and the press of a button, although the point at which this sort of entertainment will be good enough to hold our attention feels much farther out of reach. If there is a day where this becomes the norm, the creative industries would, as they have for more than a century, adapt. “The history of the professional creative industry is competition — TV competing with film competing with radio,” explains Lev Manovich, an AI artist and digital culture theorist. “Maybe [the industry] becomes more about live events, maybe human performance will become even more valuable. If machines can create Hollywood-level media, the industry will have to offer something else. Maybe some people will lose jobs, but then new jobs will be created.” I wondered what, if anything, could entice someone like Clarke, the editor of the science fiction literary magazine, to actually publish AI-generated fiction right now, with the technology as it exists. His answer articulated every qualm that I and many in the creative industries take with the notion that AI can do the same work as an artist. “I am willing to accept an AI story when an AI decides to write a story of its own free will and picks me as the place that it wants to send it to. It’d be no different if an alien showed up on the planet: I wouldn’t say no. At that point, it’s a new life,” he said. “But that’s a science fiction scenario. It’d be kind of neat if I get to see it during my lifetime, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.”vox.com
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Your home insurance company dumped you. Now what? It's getting harder for insurance companies to balance their risks as average temperatures rise. It’s one the bitterest messages you can get: A sterile form letter telling you that you’re getting dumped. And when it’s from your insurance company, it’s clear that it’s not them — it’s you. Even if you’ve always picked up the check, never made a claim, and kept your home in order, they think you’ve become too much trouble to handle. There might be some cold comfort in knowing you’re not alone: The US is bursting at the seams with insurance relationship drama. In California, thousands of residents this year have already received notices that their insurers don’t want them as customers. Major companies like State Farm and Allstate have stopped signing new policies in California, while others have left the state entirely. Progressive Insurance dropped 100,000 homeowners in Florida from their rolls in April. Legislators in Louisiana voted to make it easier for insurance companies to drop their customers, even as companies there have already cut off tens of thousands. And if you still have a policy, it’s getting more expensive. Across the United States, home insurance rates rose an average of almost 20 percent between 2021 and 2023. Without this insurance, homeowners are on the hook for losses when a hurricane bears down or a wildfire tears through. And if they’re still paying off the house, the lender could foreclose on the property if coverage lapses. That’s making a lot of people pack up and leave. In Florida, one in three residents dropped by their insurer have moved or are planning to move, according to data released last month by Redfin. The core of all this discontent is that insurers are struggling to stay afloat because the risks they have to protect against are mounting, driven in part by climate change. As average temperatures rise and disasters reach greater extremes, the magnitude of losses mounts, rendering parts of the US uninsurable. “We can’t stabilize insurance markets without dramatically reducing our climate risk,” said Carolyn Kousky, who studies insurance as the associate vice president for economics and policy analysis at the Environmental Defense Fund. There are ways to navigate through these rough patches, but getting through an insurance breakup is a bit different from, you know, a normal breakup. Here’s what you need to know. What you can do if you’re not in good hands or your good neighbor isn’t there One option, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) guide to home insurance cancellations: Ask your insurer to reconsider. You don’t even have to hold up a boombox outside your insurance agent’s office — just call and ask why you were dropped and whether there’s anything you can do to make them reconsider, like installing fire alarms or upgrading fixtures. For the most part — federal flood insurance being the main exception — insurance companies are regulated at the state level, and state insurance commissioners establish what their policies must cover and limit how much they can charge customers. But insurers are for-profit businesses, and if they pay out more than they make, can’t increase premiums to cover the difference, or reduce their coverage, then they have few options besides pushing their highest-risk customers off of their rolls. If your insurance company won’t take you back, you can shop around for alternatives. Many states have also set up public companies to provide coverage. They’re intended to be insurers of last resort, offering much more expensive policies that cover less. But in states like Florida, they’ve become the biggest property insurer, and even they’re struggling to stay solvent. If you’re in a state where even some of the second-rate prospects are disappearing, there are also some emerging alternatives to the traditional model. One is parametric insurance, which can quickly disburse money to people hit by a specific predefined disaster like a wildfire or a wind storm. Unlike traditional indemnity insurance policies that pay out with the scale of a loss, parametric insurance pays a fixed amount regardless of the damages. You don’t submit receipts and an adjuster doesn’t come to look at your roof; instead, a homeowner can claim a fixed amount of money based on objective data around the disaster. The upside is a quick payment that you can use as you see fit right after a bout of severe weather. The downside is that disaster damages can easily exceed the fixed payouts, so you’re on the hook for what’s left — which is why parametric policies don’t fulfill mortgage insurance requirements. If you don’t get an insurance policy that satisfies your bank, the lender might take one out and make you pay for it. This is called forced-place insurance. It protects the bank’s stake in the mortgage, not your investment, and it’s usually more expensive than a policy that you could get on your own. The unavoidable result with all of these measures is that you’ll end up paying more to protect your home and often get less. It’s the bleak reality of the current insurance landscape: If you can’t afford it, you’re on your own. Solving insurance drama requires solving the underlying problems The core issue with the US insurance crisis here is not with insurers or customers per se but the fact that, due to a number of factors, losses are mounting and overall risks are increasing. “When you have more storms, more fires, more of any of those things that cause insurance companies to pay out, that increases the cost,” according to a CFPB spokesperson. “But on top of that, there’s also the effect of inflation and the fact that if you have a house, if it’s destroyed today, it’s more expensive to rebuild than it was five years ago.” More people are moving to cities that are vulnerable to coastal flooding or regions prone to wildfires, so when the water rises and the flames creep closer, more property is in harm’s way. The value of many of these properties is growing too, creating a recipe for surging insured losses. The insurance industry’s struggles are an unmistakable symptom of a warming planet, but the effects go far beyond whether you can afford a home to whether a place is livable at all. And while they may not experience the biggest financial losses, impoverished and historically marginalized communities stand to suffer the most enduring scars of a disaster. “You can’t financially engineer your way out of very high risk levels; you have to just reduce the risk,” Kousky said. That’s not something an individual can do on their own. Reducing climate risk demands global efforts to curb the emissions of greenhouse gasses as well as large-scale work to adapt to the shifts already underway. It requires actions on the part of governments and the largest companies in the world. For an individual shopping for a home, the CFPB says it’s time to add climate risk to the list of factors influencing your decision on where to buy alongside school districts, recessed lighting, and granite countertops. Pay attention to flood zones and wildfire hazard maps. It’s not a guarantee, but it might be the best way to reduce the chances that an insurance company will break your heart.vox.com
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The real reason it costs so much to go to a concert You’re in a crowd of tens of thousands of fellow fans. The band starts playing your favorite song. Everyone screams. You will never, ever forget this moment. Seeing a musician you adore live can be a transcendent experience. But getting to that moment has become a nightmare because getting tickets that won’t completely bankrupt you now requires weaving through an obstacle course. Tickets to a popular show dropping means pandemonium. You might get errors when you try to purchase tickets, and can spend hours waiting in a virtual line to grab any available tickets you can. Then the entire ticketing site crashes, apparently due to too many bots trying to access the site. On resale sites, tickets are already exponentially costlier than what you were prepared to pay. But you’ve been waiting years for the chance to see them up close — so you shell out the money. In 2024, that can mean hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for the best available seats. The very best tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, as of last year, were sold on resale sites for as much as $200,000 — enough to pay for a four-year private college with no financial aid. It’s no wonder music fans are disheartened and furious. But while it’s easy to blame just one party for the chaos and the cost, the reality is that there’s a complicated concoction of reasons why obtaining tickets to a major concert has gotten so dire. The fact that the biggest music promoter and ticketing service is one single, giant company that has a lot of control over how tickets are bought and sold definitely doesn’t help matters — but dealing with so much demand isn’t easy, either. Millions of fans want to attend a Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Harry Styles concert — and there are only so many shows and seats. Who should get to go? How concerts got so pricey The fact is, concerts have steadily gotten more expensive even on the primary market — the place where someone can originally buy tickets, like Ticketmaster — before any scalper upcharge is added. According to the live music trade publication Pollstar, the average ticket price of the top 100 music tours last year was $122.84. In 2019 it was $91.86 — a rise that outpaced inflation by a good margin. Back in 2000, it was $40.74. For the top 10 grossing tours in 2023, the average price was even higher: $152.97. Though there are a number of factors involved in this price creep (including high fees, which a 2018 Government Accountability Office report says make up an average of 27 percent of the ticket’s total cost), the heart of the matter is simple: demand. People all over the world are clamoring to go to just a handful of the most popular artists’ concerts. Live Nation — the dominant player in the live events industry, which promotes and manages artists as well as owns the much-maligned ticket sales platform Ticketmaster — reported that 145 million people attended one of its shows in 2023, compared to 98 million in 2019. The momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing, with ticket sales in the first quarter of 2024 higher than they were this time last year. Just 1,591 tickets for a Taylor Swift show were on sale to the public for a venue that could hold 13,330 people One big thing that artists and promoters could do is open up more tickets to their fans. A significant chunk of a venue’s capacity is often held back for presales that only a certain exclusive group may even get access to — VIP guests, music industry managers and agents, corporate sponsors, the media, and more. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that between 10 to 30 percent of tickets for big concerts were sold through presales rather than general sales; for major artists at huge venues, that number could rise as high as 65 percent. In 2009, an investigation by Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 found that, after presales and other holds, just 1,591 tickets for a Taylor Swift show were on sale to the public for a venue that could hold 13,330 people. In 2019, Live Nation even admitted that it kept tens of thousands of tickets for a Metallica tour from being sold at face value by putting them directly on resale sites. Pascal Courty, an economist at the University of Victoria, contends that lack of transparency is a huge issue. “It’s very rare that the public knows how many tickets are actually sold,” he tells Vox. While it’s true that there’s stratospheric demand for pop superstars, the practice of withholding so many tickets from the public — gating them behind credit cards, for example — certainly doesn’t help. Elizabeth Alume, 27, spent several thousand dollars flying from Seattle to Las Vegas and Los Angeles to see the K-pop group BTS (she’s far from alone in traveling to see a favorite act; a Stubhub report last year revealed an 80 percent rise in 2023 of US-based customers buying tickets to international events on the platform). While the travel and tickets were onerous, she knew the clock was ticking on the band’s compulsory service in the South Korean military. But while the flights and hotels were several hundred dollars each, the main expense was buying resale tickets to see them over multiple days — $2,200 in Vegas, $1,600 in LA. The ticket resale market — where hoarded supply meets unprecedented demand — might be the biggest issue facing fans today. How resellers beat out the fans These days, buying a ticket for a major concert takes preparation. At a minimum, you need a calendar alert with the ticketing site ready on both your phone and laptop. For the most popular shows, it might mean signing up for the sale ahead of time — like with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, which requires users to register before the sale begins with a phone number and email address. The company then “uses algorithms and unique data analysis” to separate the bots from the real people. (Proving that you’re human is no guarantee you’ll get the chance to buy tickets, though. For the hottest shows, Verified Fans are placed in a lottery, and only those who are selected receive an access code for the sale; others are shunted to a waitlist.) Ticketmaster places all these hurdles on the way to a purchase with an eye toward stopping professional resellers — the networks of scalpers who snap up tickets with the goal of reselling for a profit. The precise metrics Ticketmaster uses to check that someone isn’t a professional reseller are a secret, but there are some clues. “It seems like if you’ve seen the artists in the past, you have a better chance of being selected,” says Jason Koebler, a co-founder of the tech site 404 Media who has reported extensively on ticket scalping. “If your credit card and your registered address with Ticketmaster is near the city that you’re trying to see the show in, you have a better chance. If your Ticketmaster account is older, you have a better chance.” The problem is that determined professionals can still jump these hurdles. Today, according to Koebler, there exists an entire black market where people sell Ticketmaster accounts, including ones that have been “aged” to look more legit. Ticket brokering — what disgruntled fans often call “scalping” — is a longstanding, professionalized industry. (In Ancient Rome, scalpers would hawk tickets to the best seats in the Colosseum for gladiator fights.) They hold conventions and lobby for favorable legislation. The amateur reseller might not have the money to buy up heaps of Ticketmaster accounts, but what Koebler calls “industrial-scale” resellers certainly do. “Let’s say I want to see Taylor Swift in LA,” he explains. “As a normal fan, I enter the lottery one time with my one Ticketmaster account. Then you have a ticket broker who enters the Verified Fan lottery 20,000 times with 20,000 Ticketmaster accounts.” This same unevenness of resources and dedication is true of pretty much any method of buying hot concert tickets. A presale offered as part of a credit card’s reward program? Serious brokers won’t just have one card with such entertainment perks, as a fan might, but all of them. A presale intended for an artist’s official fan club? Trivial for scalpers to pay the membership fee and also join. There are also places online where scalpers can buy presale access codes, skipping credit card sign-ups. Ticketmaster has made attempts to tamp down on bots, but the software sophisticated resellers use continues to evolve. Scalpers invest a pretty penny into buying professional-grade tools that make them faster and allow them to buy more tickets than one sluggish human could, like subscription-based web browsers where each tab acts like a brand-new user waiting in a virtual line. They have troves of burner phones and credit cards on hand. Stopping these resellers is a constant cat-and-mouse game. While ticket resale isn’t illegal — only a few states have restrictions capping resale prices — using bots is. But enforcement against the resellers who use them has been lax. This means that, in practice, attempts to crack down on scalpers have made it a lot more cumbersome for everyone — including real fans — to buy tickets. The disastrous initial rollout of tickets to Swift’s tour last year left many fans unable to buy tickets at all. Going head-to-head against a scalper, you’re not likely to win out. “You’re competing against people whose livelihoods depend on being able to buy and sell these tickets,” says Koebler. Flipping concert tickets is basically a way to print money for the adroit reseller, which is why the scalping industry is a thing in the first place. Non-VIP tickets for Swift’s North American tour stops last year ranged from $49 to $449, while resale tickets for these shows sold at an average of $3,801, according to a Pitchfork analysis. Tickets to her shows were so valuable that even regular people got in on the game: Stubhub noted that the overwhelming majority of Eras Tour tickets for sale on its site last year were from new accounts — which indicated that they weren’t professional ticket brokers, but fans who decided they’d rather make a small fortune than attend. Scalpers are a big problem making the concert-going experience worse — but at the root of the chaos is unmanageable, roof-shattering demand that has warped beyond recognition what people are willing to pay for a show. Could the solution to soaring resale prices be … higher ticket prices? To deal with white-hot demand, artists can try to play more shows at the biggest venues. If that’s still not enough, artists and Ticketmaster often opt to hold a lottery where at least everyone has a fair shot at attending. Unfortunately, “fair” lotteries for popular tickets don’t have a great track record because the profit motive is too heady. Courty, the University of Victoria economist, calls this the “fair price ticketing curse.” If you don’t want scalpers to take advantage of lotteries, there needs to be follow-through on ensuring they don’t end up grabbing a bunch of tickets. But Courty says that’s complicated. “You have to start to audit all the sales accounts, you have to look at who the buyers were, who the resellers were — and they could often be out of jurisdiction,” he says. The secret third option to pour some water on fiery demand is not exactly popular, but it is simple: Make the tickets more expensive on the primary market. It’s easy to see why artists are reluctant to set their prices to what a ticket would sell for on, say, StubHub. Fans would rightfully complain, and many musicians do want to give all fans the chance to come to their shows. But one surefire way to deter scalpers would be to raise prices and narrow the margin that a reseller could make by flipping a ticket. (Theoretically, there’s a ceiling on what people would pay for concert tickets, and surpassing it would quench demand.) There’s a logic to doing so for artists: If a ticket sells for $100 on the resale market compared to $50 on the primary market, “the scalper’s making more than you are from your art and your labor,” notes Koebler. One surprising thing Believe it or not, economists say that one way to stabilize some of the extremely high resale prices for popular concert tickets is to raise the price at which they’re originally sold. You can attack the supply-and-demand problem from two sides: boost the supply (artists could play a bunch more shows at the biggest stadiums in the world) or tamp down demand (charge high prices that turn a lot of consumers away). Courty’s proposed solution for an actually fair concert lottery is making the experience more like booking flights. The ticket is tied to your name, and if you have to cancel, the ticket is returned to the original issuer, who then offers it to the next person in line. The problem is that, obviously, resellers would likely fight any such measure, and there’s a bigger operational cost for ticket providers and venues since they would have to confirm that the initial buyer’s identity matched the person who shows up at the venue. As long as there isn’t legislation making scalping impossible, and there remains a huge gulf between what artists are charging and what people are willing to pay, resellers are going to be very motivated to ruin the concert ticket-buying experience. The race to snag a spot is so cutthroat that some fans advocate for a system based on merit — well, what they consider merit — rather than luck. The most devoted fans, who have streamed the most hours of someone’s music, who have bought the most albums, vinyls, and merch, should be given priority. But it’s not clear that this is more fair. Time is also a luxury, as is having the financial means to buy merch. The discourse points to the level of resentment generated by lopsided supply and demand: Who truly deserves to be front row at a Taylor Swift concert? If you have the most money to spend? The most time to dedicate? If you’re busy with work when a concert sale drops, do you just resign yourself to missing the show? Huge pop stars are already trying their best to book the highest-capacity stadiums, or adding extra shows to ease some of the demand. But for a select few, like Taylor Swift, fans’ desire to see them feels insatiable, and there’s a physical limit to the number of shows we can expect an artist to perform. “What we’re talking about is access to a human being, more or less,” says Koebler. “The space is limited. The time is limited.”vox.com