The Fall of the British Empire –

‘At the twilight of the British Empire, bankers, lawyers and accountants from the City of London set up a spiders web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions (power to make legal decisions) that captured wealth from across the globe and funnelled it to London.’

Britain’s transformation from a colonial power to a modern financial power, was due to the empires collapse, and its multiple colonies claiming their independence. This lead to many ‘British elites’ losing a lot of their wealth, power and status. However, the finance sector offered a solution; with the value of the pound decreasing (due to finances withdrawing their money from Britain due to the crisis), Britain limited its banks overseas lending and created the ‘London Euro Market’.

The Bank of England (the UK regulator) declared that the LondonEuro Market accounts were not in London and were ‘elsewhere’, it therefore had no responsibility for regulating them.

There are 14 remaining (‘remnants of the british empire’) overseas territories, 7 of which (including Jersey) are Tax Havens, ultimately they are independant, which the UK Government/ Bank of England can use as an excuse for not being able to change this fact, however many decisions and choices that are made in these territories are heavily influenced by UK officials.

With access to large amounts of offshore money, the Euro Market was able to grow rapidly.

The City of London – The state within a State

The City of London – ‘The governor of the Imperial Engine’ – London’s Financial district. Along with the British Empire, the city of London also saw a rapid decline.

A district within London that has its OWN Mayor and police force.

In 1066, William the Conqueror failed to claim the City of London, therefore allowing them to continue functioning without interference which still has an impact today as the City is exempt from some laws that govern the rest of the UK.

For example, The City of London Corporation has quite a lot of power, separate from the rest of London and the UK. The council isn’t elected by the ‘general’ public but mostly elected by powerful businesses based in the area. So it could allow banks to avoid financial regulations, and transfer money into tax havens.

The Bank of England is located at the heart of the city of London and is also a financial regulator.

Financial Regulator – Its main purpose is to supervise, regulate and provide charters to banks in the surrounding area.

At the collapse of the Empire the bank used its regulation powers in order to attract international banks to London. (Which is why there are more banks here than any other financial capital)

The ‘Trust’ –

Trusts play with the concept of ownership. Most of the time, trustees are lawyers, in these offshore jurisdictions no qualifications are needed to be a trustee. With the trustee in possession of the assets, legally you are separated from those assets and they technically are no longer yours. There is no obligation to report of these trusts – ‘invisible arrangements’. These trusts can oversee not just financial assets but anything of value such as paintings.

‘A trust is a legal arrangement created when one person (The settlor) gives legal ownership of an asset (The Trust Property) to another person (The Trustee).

An offshore structure will usually have a Trust at the top of it, The trust will control and manage assets, underneath this, the trust will own some ‘shell companies’ or trustees in another area, who beneficiaries are also in another area. This secrecy structure allows for the identity of owners of the offshore assets to be hidden as well as the wealth to be recycled back into global markets.

Jersey –

Multiple times the British government have denied claims that they have any regulatory control or powers over the financial relations occurring in jersey.

John Christensen – Jersey Economic Adviser

Traditionally, the UK governments tries to limit its input in its offshore jurisdictions (Jerseys) domestic affairs and regulations. Although this ‘input’ still does take place privately, not on paper so that it isn’t conveyed overtly, hides their input.

By keeping this power and influence over its offshore jurisdictions hidden, Britain is able to remove itself from any political affairs and state that they have no control over these areas as they are in theory ‘Independant’.

“Jersey is one of the top worldwide Offshore financial centers It is described by some as a tax haven. It attracts deposits from customers outside of the island, seeking the advantages such places offer, like reduced tax burdens.”

(Jersey’s Economy)

Deals are often agreed in London but then registered offshore for tax transparency and regulatory purposes. When scandals hit, the UK are able to separate themselves by stating that overseas territories are independent.

Deloitte – The majority of their clients offshore were involved in a legal activity with many being traced back to bribery and tax evasion.

Senator Stuart Syvret –

States of Jersey Report

” At approximately 9.00 a.m., on Monday 6th April 2009, Senator Stuart Syvret, the senior Senator of the States Assembly, was arrested by the States of Jersey Police as he stepped from the door of his home. The arrest took place in the presence of approximately 8 police officers who were on the scene in 4 police vehicles. Senator Syvret was told he was under arrest for alleged breaches of the Data Protection Law, and was, more specifically, later told that the alleged offences related to material published on his Internet blog. The Senator’s home was then searched, although no search warrant was issued for the alleged offence under Schedule 9, Article 50, Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.”

” The reputation of Jersey as a democracy It is difficult to describe the damage to Jersey’s reputation – even its very appearance as a functioning democracy – if Laws are used against members of the legislature and their constituents, in ways that appear to be disproportionate and of dubious validity. The arrest and detention of a member of the legislature, and the searching of his home – without a search warrant – can only make Jersey appear as some kind of democratically bankrupt republic like Zimbabwe.”

Theoretically, Jersey is a democracy. But in reality a lot of criticisms can be put forward in order to contrast this. To begin, Tax Avoidance and Tax Havens – Jersey – undermy the very meaning of a democracy. Yes, we have free and ‘fair’ elections and therefore a ‘representative’ government. However, we are not all deemed equal before the law; contacts, status and wealth are far too important. In reality, Jersey, just like the UK and the US are ‘Electoral Oligarchies’ where political power is frequently tied in with status and wealth. The corruption in the government/ democracy and even the police force is clearly represented in this documentary, especially during Stuart Syvrets interview. Stuart Syvry ,even after providing a legitimate defence, was prosecuted even without a legitimate case and ended up being imprisoned 3 times. Those who speak out against the establishment are frequently suppressed and harassed such as Stuart Syvrys case and John Christensen who was continuously followed upon his arrival.

***

Uk + Offshore Jurisdictions = 25% of the (financial) Global Market.

US = 19% of the Global Market

Although the Empire collapsed, Britain still maintained a significant amount of control in the financial sectors of some of its previous colonies.

Financialisation – the process by which financial institutions, markets, etc., increase in size and influence.

Up to half of overall offshore wealth can be traced back to Britain’s offshore havens.

Above all, Britain serves the interests of its elites.

The end of the documentary suggests 5 steps in which Tax Havens and Financial Secrecey Jurisdictions can be stopped –

• Stop Public Councils from Issuing public contracts to companies companies operating out of tax havens.
• Create public Registries of beneficial owners of companies, trusts and foundations.
• Introduce full transparency of eals and secret agreements between companies and governments.
• Introduce public country by country reporting by multinational companies
• Introduce automatic information exchange between all countries.

Judith butler suggests that human gender is leant through nature. ‘Gender as performativity.’ This means that we learn gender stereotypes and adapt them to our sex (genetalia) and it’s not how we are born, which is known as nature. As we grow older we begin to ‘act out’ the social gender norms and are more likely to conform to others of our gender which builds friendships. However there can be exceptions where other stereotypes are then made such as sexuality. An example of this is where a young boy conforms with young girls and acts like they do which makes people assume he will grow up to be gay. This is now adapted into modern day feminism, which can be represented in many media forms, especially music videos. She suggests that gender is fluid ‘Gender fluidity’, changeable and plural, meaning society can have the ability to alter the way genders are looked at by society and break gender normativity.

‘Blurred Lines’ which is a music video created by Robin Thicke was published in 2013. It was a massive controversy, opposing the third wave of feminisms ideology in the mid 1990s. The music video portrays women as highly sexualised passive sex objects to serve the needs of men. The music video was constructed to get a message across about how they think women should be represented, the modern day feminist society was outraged by this attempt to push back the feminist movement. They knew that this ideology of ‘women’ needed to change, to accomplish this they had to alter societies view on culture of racism and sexism.

Barker and Jane, who were english fiction writers, realized that the third wave feminism is a rebellion of women from younger generations that are against what was perceived, by older generations, as the dominant ideology of that time which was ‘obedient to men’ and was ‘sex negative’. Feminists of an older generation took the approach to enhance characteristics of ‘sex positive’ and the reappropriation of derogatory terms like ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory uses.

Forth wave feminism began in 2012. A difference between third and fourth was feminism is that the forth wave of feminism had more support as there were multiple charities. An example of a charity is ‘Fawcett society’ which fought for equality and women’s rights.

Auckland Uni produced a ‘parody’ version of the “Blurred Lines” music video as a response. This was to provoke/enhance the message of how women were poorly represented in the media. The creator reversed the roles of the music video. This was to show men how it feels when women are oppressed by objectifying them. To do this, women acted like the men whilst the men acted like the women from the original music video. This was able to portray the use of new media and how technologies have been adapted to be able to show and help carry the feminist agenda further.

‘Today’s economy responds to yesterday’s problems’.

Nick Srnicek

• Google has around 60,000 direct employees, facebook has 12,000, while WhatsApp had 55 employees when it was sold to facebook for $19 billion and instagram had 13 when it was sold for $1 billion.
• The digital economy can be defined as/ refers to businesses that are increasingly more reliant upon information technology, data and the internet for their business models.
• This sector is becoming essential to much of todays economy
• Data has become increasingly central to firms and their relations with workers, customers and other capitalists
• The platform has emerged as a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling large amounts of data , and with this an increase of large monopolistic firms.

Platform Capitalism – refers to the activities of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb and others to operate as platforms. In this business model both hardware and software are used as a foundation (platform) for other actors to conduct their own business.

In 1980 the level of annual investment in computers and peripheral equpiment was $50.1 billion; by 1990 it had reached $154.6 billion, and in 2000 it reached a peak of $412.8 billion.

Tax Havens- A tax haven is a country or place with very low “effective” rates of taxation for foreign investors. In some traditional definitions, a tax haven also offers financial secrecy. 

Proletarianisation – (Proletarian = Lower class) – The ever growing size of the working class.

‘In Marxism, proletarianization is the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer.’

“Capitalism, when a crisis hits, tends to be restructured. New technologies, new organisational forms, new modes of exploitation, new types of jobs and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital”

The internet as a whole is responsible for about 9.2% of the worlds electricity consumption.

Older business models were not well designed to use and manipulate and extract data. A new Business model would be needed if capitalist firms were to take advantage of dwindling recording costs. This new business model can now be recognised as a powerful firm known as the ‘Platform’

‘Platforms’ became an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded.

Intermediary – a person who acts as a link between people in order to try and bring about an agreement; a mediator.

Platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They can be seen as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers and even physical objects.

In addition, these platforms also come with a series of tools that enable their users to build their own products, services and marketplaces. For example, Microsoft’s Windows OS (Operating System) allows software developers to create apps for it and sell them to consumers.

A platform provides the basic tools needed to mediate between different groups. For example the (CSP) Vogue can be linked in with this as the vogue website acts as a platform to mediate different stories, trends and ideas to consumers (Those who read/ subscribe to the articles). A modern solution as their magazines were losing profit and views when they were previously being printed, since switching their brand to online (teen vogue) many more people have started to follow it as more people read using online platforms that actual physical books/ papers now.

Network Effect – (See Democracy Hacked post) – The more numerous the users who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else. For example when the internet became publicly available on August 6th 1991; with its growing popularity the ‘network’ effect took place as previously it was only available to a handful of scientists and members of government. Another example of the ‘Network Effect’ taking place would be Facebook, is only ‘the’ default social networking platform due to the large amount of people who use it, if only one person had facebook then it wouldn’t be valuable. However, the more numerous the people who use a specific platform the more accurate its algorithm may get and the more data on those people it will collect. Therefore, platforms must manipulate and use constantly change their tactics in order to keep their number of users high.

5 Different types of platforms –

• Advertising Platforms – Google/ Facebook – extract information on users, undertake a labour of analysis, and then use the products of that process to sell ad space.
• Cloud Platforms – AWS/ SalesForce – Own the hardware and Software of digital-dependant businesses, renting them out as needed.
• Industrial Platforms – Siemens/ FE – Build the hardware and the software necessary to transform traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes that lower the costs of production and transform goods into services.
• Product Platforms – Rolls Royce/ Spotify – Generate revenue by using other platforms to transform a traditional good into a service and by collecting rent/ subscription fees from them.
• Lean Platforms – Uber/ Airbnb – Attempt to reduce their ownership of assets to a minimum and to profit by reducing costs as much as possible. Lean platforms appear to be the product of a few tendencies and moments.

“Data extraction is becoming a key method of building a monopolistic platform and of siphoning off revenue from advertisers”

Great Platform Wars –

With network effects, a tendency towards monopolisation is built into the DNA of platforms: the more numerous the users who interact on a platform, the more valuable the entire platform becomes for each one of them. Which, in a way, could also be linked to Habermas’s theory of a ‘Public Sphere’ as the networking effect only works once the platform brings different/ numerous people together, and habermas’s idea of ‘access being guaranteed to all’.

Platforms can turn into monopolies based on the amount of data they collect from their users. For example Google gives you the option to share multiple things such as your location, your calendar dates, reminders, email, video/ search history, giving ‘us’, the users a better service if agreed. Furthermore, monopolies can also be created by platforms though their subsidiaries and the data collected by them, increased through the network effect. For example Googles subsidiary ‘Youtube’ giving them further data on us, allowing them to know what we watch and what we may like/ find interesting, their algorithm therefore generating more videos similar to our liked ones, almost forcing people to start or continue using the app. (Revenue and profits can be made through advertisements and the selling of user data, as well as through subscriptions such as YouTube Premium)

“If these platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data and they must invest in the fixed capital (  fixed capital is any kind of real, physical asset that is used repeatedly in the production of a product.) to do so.

Usually for these platforms, the quantity and diversity of data exceeds the quality.

Judith butler describes “a gender as identity instituted through a stylised repetition of acts”. In other words it is something learnt through repeated performance.

how useful is this idea in understanding how gender is represented in Music Videos? refer in detail to your chosen style model.

( draft ) the statement that Judith butler claims, is known as “gender as performativity.” rather gender being part of our nature we “act it out” and the gender is constructed, which is represented in music videos. she suggests that gender is fluid, changeable and plural, meaning society can have the ability t change the way genders should be preserved.

the music video “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, published in 2013, was a massive controversy, around the third wave of feminism in the mid 1990s. The music video portrays women as highly sexualised passive sex objects. They have constructed a music video in order to get a message across about how women are represented, Society was not happy with this, and decided that this idea of women needed to change, by not taking the video down, but changing its culture of racism and sexism.

According to Barker and Jane, english fiction writers, the third wave feminism is the ‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex negative’ approach of older feminists.’ and enhance to characteristics of “sex positive” and the “reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes”.

The forth wave feminism began around 2012. The only difference compared to the 3rd wave feminism, is that the forth wave feminism was more active, as there were multiple foundations to suport it, such as the “free the nipple” campaign, where miley cyrus got involved and gave her surport.

In response to the “blurred Lines” music video, Auckland Uni produced a “parody” version, in order to provoke/enhance the message of how women were represented. The video is a role reversal, where the women act like the men and the men act like the women from the original music video. The aim of the parody was to show how bizarre it is to see men portrayed as women in music videos. This was able to show that the use of new media technologies have been a clear demarcation for broadening out the discussion and arguments that are played out within feminism.

LETTERS TO THE FREE:

How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?

• The way the west characterise the black and oriental cultures.
• The video uses western stereotypes about different cultures such as the location is a prison, linking to crime and slavery.
• Links between culture, imperial power & colonialism is seen through the modern music video, with messages such as anti-racism and equality, linking to slavery and colonialism.
• The way in which imperial cultures have the power to create ideologies and stereotypes through portrayal.

How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

• The audience are included by the use of direct address, ‘Letters to the free’, addressing the free and in particular those in power to end racism and create equality.
• The audience are also drawn in through the use of explicit lyrics ‘hung from’, to create emotional responses and the desire for equality.
• Drawn in by the use of colour, black and white, representing simplicity and truth as well as division between races and cultures.

GHOST TOWN:

Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?

Hybridity – seen through the two-toned music style of pop and ska and the mixture of races within the band members.   

Ambiguity – the deeper meanings behind the song such as unity and equality between races and culture and how the hybridity of music has positive impacts on society etc.  

Cultural Polyvalency – the music is a blend of two different popular music styles for multiple cultures which joined together and created a new joined style, embraced by multiple, combined cultures.

How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

• The audience are drawn due to the two-tone music, which was a popular style at the time and the cultural significance and messages it conveys such as equality.
• The audience are addressed by the use of local London scenes, which the audience can relate to and understand the current troubles that are occurring such as the recession and racism.
• Drawn in by lyrics, such as ‘No jobs to be found in the country’, which again conveys the struggles of unemployment and racism of the time.