Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Demonetizing, Deleting, and Disappearing David

YouTube has just informed me that my channel has been permanently demonetized — not just a 90-day suspension as I had previously been told. There is no possibility for redress, they say. It’s a lifetime ban on making any more income through this major streaming platform. I’m shaking involuntarily.

I posted the above paragraph on Facebook earlier today and a lot of people in the comments said very nice things and asked repeatedly why this happened, so given that there's now a fairly dramatic update to discuss, let's do it.

But first of all, for those of you who might not get to the end of this post, I am being deleted from the internet bit by bit, on all the sorts of platforms where this tends to happen to "controversial" people. There are alternative platforms that are, for now, less susceptible to this kind of thing, but they are akin to replacing the smooth highways with bumpy dirt roads. You can drive on them, but few people will be doing it with you. I am on those other platforms, and in this time when I'm being deleted from the big ones, I need your support more than ever in order to keep writing, recording, and touring. If you want to help me do that in this time of demonetization and deletion, and you're able to and not already doing it, you can sign up as a patron on Patreon, as a paid subscriber on Substack, or directly via my website at davidrovics.com/subscribe.

In the fall of 2023 I posted a Houthi Army press release after Yemen was bombed by the US and the UK, because I had written a song on the subject and was otherwise posting about this conflict. A week ago someone apparently flagged this video, and YouTube took it down and notified me that my account was demonetized for 90 days. They said the demonetization would end if I didn't commit any further violations, and if I took a short "training."

I took the "training," which was basically an explanation of what kinds of videos are acceptable and what kinds aren't, with regards to sharing videos, or clips of videos, put out by proscribed organizations. I had apparently violated this policy by not contextualizing the Houthi video in the video itself (rather than in the description), and by not condemning the Houthis in the process of contextualizing the video, if I understood the training correctly.

Then today I got another email from YouTube that my channel was permanently demonetized. I got in touch with them on chat, and a nice YouTube employee looked up my account and confirmed that there was nothing to be done, my account was permanently demonetized.

This is all happening the day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be ending their efforts at content moderation in the US. I just checked, and it does seem like my Facebook account may no longer be overtly restricted. At least, I just created a Facebook Event and successfully used the Invite function to invite people to it, twice in a row, with only one error message in the process.

It's the algorithms -- what "goes viral" and what doesn't -- that have approximately a million times more impact than anything any of their content moderation teams ever do, however, and the algorithms are never part of the debate.

If YouTube is planning on following Facebook's new "anything goes" approach to content moderation, my permanent demonetization from their platform might indicate they're not going that route yet.

This of course all comes in the wake of Spotify deleting my most popular album of 2024 from my discography, from anyone's playlists where any of the songs on the album, Notes from a Holocaust, were present, and from existence, generally, so that any mention of the album or the tens of thousands of streams it got were not part of my 2024 #SpotifyWrapped at all, as if it never was.

What I am talking about here are more or less the trifecta of platforms that are of paramount importance to any working musician today -- YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify. It would be impossible to overstate how crucial these platforms are for musicians to be heard in today's world, to develop or sustain an audience, to promote gigs, and to earn income.

What's especially alarming about the way all of these platforms seem to enforce rules is the way they are unaccountable, opaque, and completely ham-fisted in their approach. I committed one violation over a year ago, and so my whole YouTube account is demonetized for life. I recorded one song that perhaps violates their rules, and so Spotify deleted the entire album it's on, with no notification or explanation. I did whatever it was I did that bothered Facebook, and they restricted my account severely and blatantly for half a year at least, again with no notification or explanation.

It's hard to even imagine how severe the impact of the content rules these platforms are enforcing is having on any efforts anyone might want to have to engage in any kind of real discourse on important subjects of global significance, such as the war between the US, the UK, and the Houthi Army that is currently ongoing.

Any praise of the Houthis I make in a song or in any other form is illegal, let's be very clear about that. It is illegal to say, write, or sing anything positive about this group that is trying to stop Israel's genocide of the Palestinians by sanctioning trade on Israel, by force of arms when necessary. Yes, really, this is illegal. Not necessarily in the US, but in the UK -- it violates the Terrorism Act of 2000 and could result in me getting a 14-year prison sentence there at some point, theoretically.

Though praising the Houthi Army isn't illegal in the US, to my knowledge, as far as the speech of it goes, profiting from a song praising the Houthi Army may be another matter altogether, or at least that may be what people at YouTube who decided to permanently demonetize my channel were thinking -- who knows. I'm just guessing that this may be why they demonetized the channel, rather than deleting it altogether.

It's already a gigantic problem for all of us that lies and slander and disinformation tend to get seen so much more than anything else on these platforms, because of the way the platforms work, the way "virality" works on such platforms, and the way their algorithms work. But if we can't even attempt to have a conversation without some of us having albums deleted and channels demonetized, the whole thing is skewed even more in the direction of a social media landscape in which only those who hold sufficiently establishment views on proscribed organizations may speak, or be heard.

If it's true that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter -- and it is, including in the particular case of Ansar Allah, aka the Houthi Army -- then you're increasingly unlikely to discover this truth on YouTube.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Lao Tzu, the Syrian Revolution, and Anti-Social Media

Talking about critical analysis of history and current events (or not), and some ancient Chinese philosophy.

Thousands of years before Karl Marx was writing about dialectical materialism, Lao Tzu was also approaching the subject of how best to navigate the real world, armed with a deep understanding of the kinds of changes that take place in the world, and how best to relate to these changes.

In the ancient Chinese text, The Book of Changes, the I Ching, we get a very good lesson in the ins and outs of applying nuanced thought to real life.

The idea is basically if you take the metaphor of the world as the banks of a river, and the people as the water, if the goal in life is to navigate the riverbanks as gracefully as the river does, then we must know how to act like the water does.  We have to know, as the water does, when to be calm, when to surge ahead, when to slowly work away at smoothing surfaces, when to smash through them, when to flood.

In the old translations of the I Ching that I read when I was young, there was much talk of "the superior man" and "the inferior man."  In a given situation, the superior man does this, while the inferior man does that.

When traveling, for example, the superior man keeps a low profile, observes, and learns from his new surroundings.  The inferior man makes a spectacle of himself, even though he doesn't yet understand the society he's traveling in.

The book is full of lots more advice along these lines.  Sometimes it's a good time to take the initiative, other times it's a good time to keep preparing to do that.  Time to build alliances and network, time to go forward and fight.  At some point your ally can become your enemy, and vice versa.  The united front may be the way to go in many instances, in others, striking out on your own.

For people who maybe think there's only one correct way to behave in every circumstance you might encounter in life, the advice within the pages of the I Ching may seem devious, or Machiavellian (which is the term we use for "devious" when it's on a grand scale).

Rather than devious, I would suggest that the I Ching represents the idea of nuanced thinking, and having an appropriately complex, nuanced approach to complex, nuanced realities.  It's an approach to nuanced thinking and action that also holds much in common with Marx's dialectical materialism, and Mao Zedong's talk of primary, secondary, and tertiary contradictions, and how the revolution or the revolutionary needs to reorient depending on how the lines of the contradictions may be changing.

It seems to me that the world has not gotten any less complex in recent years, compared with how it was in Mao's, Marx's, or Lao Tzu's times.  No less complex, and no fewer reasons to abandon nuanced thought or critical analysis.

Black-and-white thinking today, however, seems to be more prevalent than at any time in my life, and I see few signs of this situation improving, given the basic reasons for the worsening of the trend further and further away from critical analysis or complex thought.

The revolution in Syria is the most recent major case I'd put out there to illustrate some of what goes on, and why modern systems of communication make real communication harder.

For people who might benefit from a little backgrounder, though:

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, the victorious colonial powers did what colonial powers had already been doing in other parts of the world, and drew borders between countries they now ruled, in such a way as to exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions, and to give the colonial powers a more compliant group within the country in question that would do the work of ruling the country on their behalf, and that would benefit slightly from the arrangement as a group.

In Iraq this group was the Sunni minority.  In Lebanon it was the Maronite minority.  In Syria it was the Alawite minority.  (It's always a minority, by design, with this kind of colonial arrangement.)

In the century since the borders were drawn by the colonial powers, obviously a lot has happened.  But despite all kinds of wars, coups, revolutions and other notable developments that have taken place in the interim, the comparative privilege of the Alawite minority in Syria has persisted.  It's been much the same with the Maronites in Lebanon and the Sunnis in Iraq.

Under the rule of the secular nationalists in countries like Egypt, Iraq, and Syria for more than a half century there has been a lot of industrial development, development of institutions of higher learning, health care, etc.  But class divisions based on ethnic and religious lines continued to be a problem, as did political corruption, with family members of political leaders benefitting from their positions in obvious ways.

Given the many fundamental issues with the setup that a lot of folks in these societies had with various forms of inequality, the perception of a lack of political representation for many groups, and various forms of repression people experienced coming from the authorities, the past half century has featured a fair bit of violent instability.  

There have been other reasons for the violent instability, too, such as massive interference in the national affairs of all of these countries by regional and global powers with different agendas.  Generally this meant exacerbating pre-existing divisions, rather than creating entirely new ones, however.

Without understating the role of outside interference in destabilizing everything in Syria over the past many decades and in particular since 2011, or the role outside powers had in setting in motion events that led to violent crackdowns against popular movements, what can be said regardless is the regime was corrupt and used a lot of violence against its citizens, including torturing huge numbers of them in prison.

Long before 2011, and especially since 2011, the nations of Iran, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, the US, Israel, and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement have been the countries or groups most active in funding, training, arming, bombing, and/or protecting various elements involved with the Syrian Civil War.  (Obviously the use of the term "civil war" does not imply that outside forces are not involved, since outside forces being involved with civil wars is not the exception historically, but the norm.  If most of the people fighting on both sides are from the same country, it's a civil war.)

When there's an actual war going on, this is the classic example of the point at which a lot of people in a country and beyond the borders of the country have to take sides, in one way or another, or in many different ways.

Whatever anyone may think of a corrupt secular dictatorship, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy, Islamic State, or the coalition of rebel groups that weren't Islamic State or the Kurds, these have basically been the main poles in the conflict for the past decade or so, along with fighters or armies and others involved from outside of Syria aligned with all of these different sides, including troops, tanks, and planes from Turkiye, the US, and Russia.

Individuals, movements, and other countries that got involved did so for lots of reasons.  Sometimes to protect a community that was under attack, and often to oppose the side whose potential victory seemed most threatening.  The way to do that is generally to pick a side to support that isn't the one you oppose.

Naturally, the relevant PR departments are going to lionize the leaders of every faction.  In reality, the leadership of the different factions vary wildly, from principled supporters of feminism and democracy to those who would prefer to cut off the heads of the feminists, from grassroots movements engaging in widespread solidarity to those seeking power and control.

A long time ago, when Russia was part of the Soviet Union, the Syrian government was less corrupt and more believable in laying claim to having a socialist orientation, and it was viewed by many leftists around the world as being part of the pan-Arabist wing of global socialism, which was a phenomenon seen to be led by central committees in Moscow or Beijing by many people.

Even way back when, when it was still possible to be back in the USSR, a lot of people, movements, and national leaders around the world were very critical of domestic and/or international Soviet policies, but they critically supported or sought help from or otherwise aligned themselves with the Soviet Union or with China, because having a strong relationship with them was often considered far better than the alternative of domination by the US.

There's your backgrounder.

Now, there's been another revolution in Syria.

I'm not there, and I'm entirely dependent on what I hear from the various journalists that are over there covering events to know what's really going on.  But certainly what's coming through certain major pipelines on anti-social media among the English-language commentariat is a whole lot of outrage, of a sort which I think deserves some examination.

The outrage rhetoric might be confusing, even to people who are closely following developments in Syria in the past few decades, because in order to understand the basis of it, we really have to go further back in time, to when the struggle, for many, was characterized as one between socialism and capitalism, between solidarity and imperialism, between humanity and barbarism.

Most countries in the world in the twentieth century were part of the Nonaligned Movement, attempting to carve out a neutral position in between what the western media referred to as the superpower rivalry.  Other countries, especially those that were being bombed, sanctioned, or threatened by American, British or French imperialism, tended to abandon the whole neutrality gig and aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, in the hope of having a trade relationship with a country that grew wheat and made steel and other essential things for the survival of a people and the development of a country.

Most sensible people on the planet may have opposed US imperialism, but in so doing, they didn't necessarily embrace Soviet socialism.  They had different orientations towards that, and a wide variety of ideas about how a country can best organize itself economically, politically, and in other ways.  They might recognize that the US was playing an obviously villainous role in engaging in genocidal warfare against the population of one country after another, and in supporting so many dictatorships in the name of "fighting communism."  But this rejection of US villainy didn't automatically translate into a blanket support for anyone who opposed it.

Well, for some it did, for others it didn't.  For some, whichever political camp they aligned with, and the leaders of it, could do no wrong, or if they could, it was counter-revolutionary to publicly admit that they had any flaws.

This same socialism vs. capitalism mindset continues, confusingly, to be the framework through which certain people with an outsized presence on anti-social media view reality.

Of course it's not just on the platforms where they're waging their information wars, but that's mainly where it's visible to anyone who isn't attending one of the small gatherings of people who turn out for a protest organized by PSL or a similar group, so they can stand around and get yelled at.

The framework being pushed involves the idea that the leadership of Russia, China, and Iran represent socialism and solidarity in the world today, while the US and NATO represent capitalism and empire.  And any country that sees fit for one reason or another to align themselves politically with either of these poles is then seen entirely through this lens, with their leadership either becoming paragons of good or paragons of evil.

Reality is so much more complex, however, than what the crowd that is lamenting the fall of the house of Assad and condemning the crimes committed by various participants in the Syrian Civil War/revolution would have us believe.

What I find especially terrifying is how, at least in progressive/left circles in the US, this kind of black-and-white thinking used to be more or less relegated to certain small, cultish parties such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation or Worker's World, but with the help of the platforms that reward anyone who's good at creating drama and stirring up controversy within the confines of 240 characters, the weight of the opinions of the black-and-white thinkers represented by such parties seems massive, and tends to relegate any more nuanced conversations anyone might be trying to have to the internet's dustbin.

On anti-social media today, the attacks against people involved with the Syrian Revolution that are coming from Zionists and the attacks that are coming from American or British pro-Assad leftists are completely indistinguishable from each other -- incidentally in exactly the same way as attacks on me on social media coming from Zionists or from self-styled leftists are impossible to distinguish from each other.

In reality, today, as in the twentieth century, the countries that align themselves in one way or another with what we could increasingly call "the east" vs. "the west" not only do this for different reasons, but these countries vary tremendously in terms of how they function, and how they treat their citizens.

Within the US/NATO/capitalist orbit you have some of the most egalitarian countries in the world represented by some of NATO's newest Scandinavian members, you have corrupt dictatorships that engage in widespread torture of their many prisoners, such as Egypt, and you have countries currently engaged in genocide, such as Israel.  You also have nominally democratic countries that imprison the highest numbers of their citizens and engage in widespread torture of them, such as the US.

Within the Russia/China/Iran orbit you also have astounding numbers of prisoners.  You have countries like Cuba within this orbit, which is one of the most egalitarian countries on Earth in terms of wealth distribution, and you have countries like Syria, which was run for decades by a corrupt family dynasty of one-time billionaires siphoning off the country's wealth.  And when the corrupt billionaires in Syria or Ukraine can't get along at home anymore, they flee to Russia, just as the deposed US-sponsored dictators flee to Saudi Arabia -- or Florida, depending.

There are conclusions to be drawn from reading Lao Tzu, and from Syrian politics, the Syrian Civil War, and the Syrian revolution.  Also from what countries or groups align themselves in different ways with which outside powers.

One of them is that reality is complex, and the ability to understand in which ways this is the case, and how you want to try to move forward under the circumstances, whoever "you" may be, is probably the most relevant question.  Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy probably isn't.

There are conclusions to be drawn from the way the anti-social media platforms dominate our communications, and from the way they are organized to promote conflict and suppress reasonable discourse, regardless of whether posts are being censored or not.  One of them is that if you allow a bunch of billionaires to hijack your means of communication, reasonable discourse and any kind of nuanced understanding of reality will suffer.

And we can be absolutely certain that whatever forms of sectarian goading, disinformation, and algorithm-boosted, incendiary lies that can be found on X or on Facebook or on VK in English can be found on those very platforms on a far more pernicious scale in Arabic.

Thursday, January 2, 2025

Four Things That Happened on January 1st

2025 began with several massacres, the demonetization of my YouTube channel, and other notable developments.

It's all very repetitive, and I often think I really have nothing more to say about that, whatever that may be.  And then there are days like the first day of 2025, when the coincidences line up too neatly not to comment on.

There are four things that happened on January 1st that I'd like to highlight.

  1. I spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day celebrating the occasion at home with small groups of friends and family
  2. There was a terrorist attack in New Orleans
  3. In between the small New Year's gatherings, I wrote, recorded, and posted a song about the siege and destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza
  4. By evening, I received an email and other notifications informing me that my YouTube channel had been demonetized

These things are all intimately related in various ways, though they're probably not all directly related in the causal sense.  But in case it's not all obvious -- or even if it is -- I'll expand on these occurrences a bit. 

There are a lot of different reasons for having a small gathering of friends and family for the New Year holiday.  For me, a gathering of twelve adults and children is just a perfect size.  Like any other performer, I'm always happy to sing for large audiences at every possible opportunity, but on a social level if it's not a gig, I tend to find larger gatherings overwhelming.

But also I live in the United States, where there's a massacre somewhere in the country about every day on average, and an outrageously high overall homicide rate to go along with it.  Some of the favorite targets of the people who want to randomly kill members of the public are big events where large crowds are gathering, such as holiday celebrations.  I think about this reflexively whenever I'm in a large crowd somewhere in North America or Europe, and I often wonder how many other people around me are thinking the same thing.

More often I wonder who's not thinking the same thing.  Most people in the western world out partying to welcome the New Year don't seem like they're particularly concerned about what might happen.  They also usually don't seem to be particularly preoccupied with the babies freezing to death with no blankets in their flooded tents on the beach in Gaza.

I know the people who prepare the messages they send out to citizens for the Japanese consulate in Portland think about the holiday-time massacres in Europe and North America.  Sometime in December we got an email from the consulate reminding us that throughout the US and Europe, terrorists like to target the types of large gatherings that tend to happen during the holiday season.

This is probably a particularly important reminder to send to people with Japanese nationals in their families, because as a general rule, Japanese people love holidays, and celebrating holidays collectively, as do lots of other people.

To underscore the warnings from the consulate, there was the vehicular attack at another Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, followed by an identical effort in New Orleans -- both modeled after still other vehicular attacks on the public that have been carried out with terrible results in New York, Berlin, France, Spain and elsewhere.

Between the vehicular attacks on the Christmas Market and the one on Bourbon Street, the Israeli military has been systematically starving and freezing the remaining population of the Gaza Strip, preventing people from having food, water, medicine, shelter, or even blankets.  In between these two vehicular attacks on innocent civilians in the western world, the Israeli military has been systematically  killing Palestinian children for daring to leave their tents to look for food or water, often assassinating them by drone strike.  In between Christmas and New Year's, the Israeli military completely destroyed the last remaining hospital in the north of Gaza, physically kicking out critically ill patients and arresting the staff who were caring for them.

Now, we can be sure that the Israelis are torturing their prisoners, because that's what Israel does with Palestinian prisoners, of whatever age or gender -- with the torture frequently including rape, of prisoners of whatever gender, and confinement in tiny cages, just like the Syrians used to do.  We don't have to wonder whether the Israelis are torturing the doctors, nurses, and administrators of the Kamal Adwan hospital, because we know for a fact that this is what they did to the other hospital staff they detained, after destroying other hospitals in the Gaza Strip, because destroying hospitals, torturing doctors, and assassinating children out looking for water is the daily practice of the Israeli military in Gaza right now, this week, this minute.

Civil society groups around the world have been mobilizing to try to highlight the arrest of the medical staff after the hospital's invasion and destruction by the IDF.  In trying to play my part in this effort, I wrote a song about it, which I posted on YouTube and elsewhere in the morning of January 1st, Portland time.

Twelve hours later, my YouTube channel was demonetized, supposedly, I was told, for a Houthi Army press release I posted on my YouTube channel over a year ago, now deleted by YouTube.  I had put it up after the US and the UK bombed Yemen, in the interest of providing a little context, for whichever of my fellow Americans or Brits might see it, about the motivations of the people our air forces were attacking this time around.

The mass murderer in Louisiana apparently did a little broadcast from his truck en route to the French Quarter, where the police say he pledged allegiance to Islamic State.  The video was deleted, so I don't know what else he said.

If whatever he said was anything like the words of other people who have engaged in similar acts of mass murder, like, oh, Osama Bin Laden, then he might have made reference to the constant slaughter of innocent civilians in places like Gaza right now, and he might have said something about wanting to make westerners understand what their tax dollars are doing in other, far-away parts of the world.

Whether or not we'll ever find out what the terrorist from Texas said in his truck on the way to the scene of the crime, who knows.  It's against Facebook's policies, and against YouTube's as well, to post anything sympathetic with a proscribed organization.  So they'll take down your videos and otherwise punish you for your transgressions, even if your only transgression was expressing a bit of sympathy with those who are resisting genocide.  So of course if you pledged your allegiance to Islamic State, that's coming down right away.

Israel, on the other hand, is not a proscribed organization.  So videos praising the brave soldiers of the IDF and their efforts to cleanse Gaza of the evil terrorists that they claim are using schools and hospitals as their hubs of operation, regardless of how outrageously detached from reality the claims may be, are perfectly fine.  Songs praising the Israeli military's high moral standing are also fine, regardless of how many children they assassinate per day.

No wonder, again and again, we have to listen to everyone from national leaders to your man on the street talk about "senseless killing."

They're either never told, or they actively hide from us in as many ways as they can, depending, the fact that these acts of senseless killing are in so many cases retaliatory.  In so many cases, their actions are very consciously and intentionally meant to replicate, in a comparatively tiny way, what the people they identify with or empathize with or seek to represent are going through every day.

No wonder, again and again, we have to listen either to the imperial elite vilify those crazy Muslims and their violent ways, or to the clueless followers of the imperial elite, who have no idea why anyone would be upset, because they've been kept in the dark.  Most of whatever they might encounter in the form of any kind of media that does a decent job of contextualizing these violent times is actively suppressed.  Contextualizing the "friendly" state violence, and what are so often retaliatory acts of mass murder in response to it, is apparently a bad thing to do.  History always began with the latest act of terrorism, and terrorism is, by definition, something Muslims do to westerners.

Context is actively suppressed in so many different ways, from the top to the bottom.  From the agendas of the billionaires and energy companies that own so much of the world's mass media to the suppression of content, by algorithm or by censorship, on the corporate-controlled online platforms that are our primary means of communication today.

It's a new reality where the already very powerful, brainwashing influence of the corporate media is joined by the various forms of control over our communications exerted on us on social media, that happens in so many ways that are completely invisible to the vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time.

And it's a new reality that was eloquently, and mostly quite violently, underscored on the very first day of 2025.

Demonetizing, Deleting, and Disappearing David

YouTube has just informed me that my channel has been permanently demonetized — not just a 90-day suspension as I had previously been told. ...