Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletter for the gamers, ravers and haters! As we write this, there’s a lot going on right now to distract us, what with the general election, the euros and the ever-approaching heat death of the universe, but even with all that our minds are focused on one thing and one thing only - Glastonbury 2024. Neither of us has made the pilgrimage to Worthy Farm this year, but that sure as hell hasn’t stopped it from stirring up some complicated emotions around one of the world's greatest benders.
We’ll be going deeper into these later, but the truth is no number of poorly thought-through Banksy stunts, celebrity cameos or clips of Dua Lipa being serenaded by a tosser with a ukulele can quench the FOMO. We know that Glastonbury is a hell of a lot more than what you might catch on iPlayer. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure of a weekend, many will never leave the sweaty walls of the NYC Downlow, and many more will be in bed early and proudly declare that Paul Heaton was the best set of the weekend.
When your boots are on the ground, unlike most other festivals of similar sizes, Glastonbury functions as a liminal space. That perfect blend of sleep deprivation, stimulatory overloads, overwhelming possibilities and a belly filled with the narcotics of their choosing means the crowd is barely able to tell you who they just saw, let alone what day they arrived. Attending Glastonbury is to create a wild narrative over 5 days. A few major moments are likely all that will remain in memories in the weeks to come.
In many ways, these weekends function in much the same way as dreams. Perhaps that’s why on Saturday morning, after far too much green-eyed social media scrolling, I woke up with the realisation that whenever I go out in my dreams, I go to the same nightclub. Sometimes it’s a new location for fabric, or Berghain, or some other superclub, but the club is always the same. It’s on the corner of an industrial block, and there is just a bouncer there with no queue.
If you’re allowed in, as I always am, the bouncer unlocks a door. You walk up some stairs and into a flat. Out the back of the flat is the club, a massive grey cement techno room with a huge wall of speakers. The ceiling is too high to see, but the walls are short somehow. Room two is down some stairs at the back, and is a garden. It’s always sunny and there are lots of trees.
The club is so established in my subconscious that some kid asked me what fabric was like in a dream and I described this club, the dream club in my brain, rather than the real thing. Truth be told, my memories of the venue are just as nebulous as my memories of any of my nights out. In the moment, we create meaningful narratives about the worlds we’d like to see, or perhaps the worlds we fear the most. But in the morning, as the sands of our memories slip through our fingers, we’re lucky to be holding on to a few rocks.
The same goes for many gaming experiences, especially for the ones that we replay again and again, ever so subtly changing our story each time. The “truth” of the experience twists with each decision made. The Rachni Queen in Mass Effect is trapped in Schrodinger's box, both saved and destroyed for all eternity. We can all agree on what happened in the closing moments of The Last Of Us, but did he use a pistol or a flamethrower?
This link was cemented for me when I dreamt of throwing the first-ever edition of Bangface Weekender in Revachol, the crumbling city in which Disco Elysium takes place. The layers of malleable memories all sat on top of each other, endlessly shifting until only one key fact remained: it was a great weekend, even if the Revacholians weren’t quite ready for it.
I’m forever chasing these half-forgotten narratives even now. There is so much beauty in ephemeral storytelling and in the experiences we communally create. Art and narrative create community, community creates art and narrative, and the cycle continues. Perhaps that’s partly why Dungeons and Dragons is seeing such a huge resurgence, at a time when even buying a festival ticket seems out of reach for many of us, let alone putting one on yourself. We are desperate for a new reality, no matter how vague it might be.
SKILL ISSUE is written by Hue Tailer and Christopher Watson. You can get in touch if you’d like to contribute, if you’ve got anything you think we’d be interested in, should be covered, or if you're just looking for an Overcooked squad - hit us up at skillissuecrew@gmail.com.
///NATIONAL SOCIALIST MEDIA
For a while, it seemed like if there was one term to describe the social media game of any of the major parties in the past year, it would be inept. In fact, both the Tory and Labour parties' meme games were so poor I often wondered if that was the point. Were our hate shares their plan all along? When the comms teams loaded up Canva and found the cheapest-looking font to throw on a decades-old meme or a picture of Angela Rayner, was their aim to goad us into mocking them, and inadvertently share their pathetic attempts at harvesting our votes?
It certainly felt like it, and in the past month, I’ve restricted my snarky comments to a small handful of Whatsapp groups, lest I end up playing right into their blood-soaked hands. I thought there was no way their Social Media Managers were this out of touch. A recent video from the Conservatives may have indicated that I was right to be sceptical.
The content of the video is pretty normal, as far as right-wing political party broadcasts go. A promise to spend more on the military, set to a montage of Rishi Sunak meeting soldiers and slo-mo clips of tanks and aircraft carriers, handpicked to make the maddest nuke-loving bastards drool like a hentai character. If you weren’t chronically online, you’d probably see nothing wrong with it. But for those of us totally poisoned by the internet, the dog whistle was deafening - the soundtrack to the post, a pitched-down edit of the song Little Dark Age by indie synth legends MGMT.
The title track from the band's 2017 album failed to chart on release, but Little Dark Age found a new unwanted popularity in 2020 and became the go-to soundtrack for far-right creators on TikTok. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue said the song was "by far the most popular Sound among extremist creators on TikTok", favoured by all flavours of esoteric neo-Nazis.
If you’re at all aware of MGMT, but blissfully unaware of their surprising far-right fanbase, this may come as some surprise to you. Maybe you saw the video and thought it was a surprisingly cool choice from what are surely the least cool politicians in British history. Indeed, as Alexis Petridis wrote in The Guardian, “Certainly, its adoption doesn’t say much for your average neo-Nazi’s ability to understand English. Little Dark Age’s lyrics are, fairly obviously, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence.” Whether its usage is down to irony or media illiteracy is hard to truly nail down.
To give lack of credit where it’s due, I doubt anyone senior at Conservative HQ had any idea about the reference. Suella’s TikTok game is so bad it became news. This is the Tory Youth, waiting in the wings, ready to beat Reform at their own game and push the party even further to the right. These are the kids who, this same week, were filmed at Warwick Uni singing along to nazi marching anthems.
I’m writing this prior to the inevitable destruction of the party at the general election this week. I hope I don’t need to come back and edit this, but I feel like I can say with some confidence that Sunak et al are about to be hit with an orbital laser and left in ruins. But there’s a fascist phoenix waiting to rise from those ashes. Reform are hugely popular with young people, and all over TikTok themselves. Independence Day 2024 is a good reason to celebrate, but not to let our guard down.
///GLASTON BURRIED
Glastonbury – the *king* of festivals, or at least the Minor Viscount. A festival made up of about five farms, 60-100 stages of mostly unpaid musicians and DJs, and around 200,000 music fans. I say 200,000 – it’s more like 50,000 music fans and 150,000 third-party music affiliates…
I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting Glastonbury a few times now and one thing that always strikes me is considering how big the crowd is, it always seems very anonymous. Maybe that’s because everyone is on a permo comedown, or maybe it’s because since they ‘built the wall’ and neutered a lot of the free party folk the festival has spun out into a kind of hyper-capitalist version of itself. An English Coachella, the only difference is that most artists don’t get paid. Some don’t even get wristbands, but at least they’re not stranded in a desert.
The helicopters that fly the headliners in serve as a bleak reminder for the great unwashed of how the whole show actually works. I don’t think when Engels wrote about the conditions of the British working class, working a nepo job at his family-owned Manchester mill, that he ever envisioned a time where his hypocrisy was used to berate a popular music festival, but here we are…and where is the John Peel tent? Oh…I’m being told there was a thing…
Anyway, I’m not bitter about not going, promise. I started writing this after seeing the flurry of SZA-related tweets. NEWSFLASH! You saying SZA is empty reflects badly on YOU! She is one of the biggest pop artists in THE WORLD. The same thing happened with Kendrick's Sunday set in 2022, although he had a dedicated posse up front making up for the angling chairs and grumbling pot bellies in the rear. Headliners famously get paid a fraction of their asking price to play the festival, and swathes of the audience want to celebrate when one doesn’t draw the crowd they deserve. I wonder if there’s a common denominator? I’ll give you a clue, it’s not their streaming numbers!
The main stage (literally the place you want to spend the least time) takes up so much of the news cycle surrounding the festival, yet they’ve booked literally everyone willing to take a pay cut now. They are regularly hit with accusations of booking too many white indie blokes, which really is hard to argue with. Emily Eavis talks about a ‘pipeline’ problem which, while true, doesn’t really excuse a festival that takes pride in its liberal exceptionalism. So now they’re happy to give lowly award-winning number-one artists a shot at wooing the tough Glastonbury crowd as if they deserve anything more than lukewarm cider and ostrich burgers.
Honestly, really, truly, I love Glastonbury. It’s such a special place – a whole municipality created out of love and perseverance on ancient (kind of made-up) leylines, made to showcase music and expression of all kinds. Yet every time I’ve been, it's not too long until you pass a conversation that makes you question why you’re there in the first place. In London you’re never far from a rat, and as Manc poet and friend of the ‘stack Thick Richard says, in Manchester you’re never far from a dick head. At Glastonbury you are never too far from an aristocrat or the illegitimate love child of a minor BBC personality.
IDLES have taken up a lot of AWS bandwidth since their performance, and rightly so. The lads went and did it! I didn’t watch the show but the gist from what I’ve seen is they said that Thatcher was dead and sent some puppets out to crowdsurf with Banksy to make some kind of point. I wish they’d told everyone to spoil their ballot or say that Jude Bellingham has been playing like arse apart from that bicycle kick, really stick it to ‘em.
Glastonbury doesn’t deserve SZA, it didn’t even deserve Jay Z! When he headlined, we had weeks of ‘is this the right booking??’ chat, clear shorthand for ‘THIS GUY IS BLACK! WHAT ARE WE DOING?’ Before Jay Z in 2008, the last black (fronted) headliner was Skunk Anansie in 1999, and prior to that we had Lenny Kravitz in ’93. 123 headliners playing music of black origin in 41 active years and only 12 headliners are actually black? Maybe the crowd needs to look at itself.
But I guess Glastonbury as it is has morphed from a free party with crazy infrastructure to a lib-dem controlled council, with a few ravers in one corner. There are people in the Green Fields who still call Shangri-la Babylon unironically. No matter what the BBC coverage tells you, it is not a unifying field, it is wholly segregated via multiple wristbands, most of which were divvy’d out weeks before in a management office. I wonder, if they halved the number of comp tickets, would that lower prices for everyone else? Could be worth a go!
Unsurprisingly, the electronic elements of Glastonbury are undoubtedly the most diverse, both in crowd and in artists, and this year’s snippets looked as mega as ever – the IICON big ol’ head is still one of the most impressive and best-sounding dance setups I’ve witnessed. Tasteful Tomorrowland done by serious serious crews with very nice rigs. The expansion of the Silver Hayes field to a full-day schedule has worked wonders, meaning fewer awkward rave casualties creeping out towards the families watching Corinne Bailey Ray. Rancho Eavis should lean into Gideon et al’s vision, the bandy bits need more of that spirit.
Still, it remains the best party on earth, and every party needs a decent venue. Not everyone needs to read Roland Barthes tripping in their tent for it to be a good time. Maybe, as a person of colour, it was being told by a prominent white London DJ that Stormzy headlining was a ‘watershed moment for the UK’ instead of the weak gesture I saw it to be. Maybe it was losing my phone and wallet at Mala, or maaaaaybe it’s cos I just didn’t get to go this time that these uneasy feelings crystalised into enough words to ship to inboxes.
But there you have it - a review of this year’s Glastonbury from last year's perspective, without really seeing any clips longer than 30 seconds and an added slice of bitter FOMO. If any Eavis’s see this, if you give us that sweet sweet press accreditation, we promise to stay right to the end, won’t mention any appropriation we see, and will only reference k-punk in the kicker 😊
///MY PARALLEL UNIVERSE OR YOURS? 👽👽
A guest feature by Alice McCool. This is an extract from a new newsletter from The People, which tackles a different Big Tech issue every two weeks. You can sign up here.
You may have already seen this video from TikTok user elieli0000 on your social feeds. Taking a break from her usual (pretty great) Princess Diana impression videos, Eli posted about “the most insane example of how everyone is experiencing completely different social medias at the exact same time.” and it gave me a whole other level of algorithm ick.
In the video Eli compares the comments under an Instagram Reel she's seen with how they appear on her boyfriend’s device. The Reel shows a woman complaining that her boyfriend said he would be back hours ago from golf but hasn’t shown up. On Eli’s account, the top comments are supportive of the woman and are critical of her partner. On Eli’s boyfriend’s account, the opposite was true.
So Eli and her boyfriend - despite presumably leading similar lives and having shared interests - have been living in parallel universes. But in a scary rather than a cool way.
Eli suggests that the only real difference between her and her boyfriend’s interactions on Instagram is that “he’s a guy and I’m a girl”. Are Big Tech algorithms really reducing us all to such binary, stereotypical examples of gender?
Eli also points out that most of us now refer to comments for reassurance. She’s not wrong. We trust the wisdom of the crowd online - even if we do so subconsciously - but should we, when that collective wisdom is apparently being curated based on what the algorithm assumes we will agree with?
Over the past few months, a flurry of surveys and analyses have found that men and women’s attitudes* towards masculinity and women’s equality are becoming increasingly polarised. It’s part of a broader political divide globally between women, who typically see themselves as more liberal, and men who typically see themselves as more conservative, as you can see in analysis from The Economist here:
*These studies didn’t specify if they included trans people, or feature data on non-binary folk or other gender diverse people, so excuse me while I do get a bit binary here 🙈
And check out this analysis from the Financial Times suggesting that younger men, in particular, believe women seek to gain power by controlling them. Cool!
While we know factors like economic stagnation and backlash against the #MeToo movement will have likely contributed to this divide, Big Tech has definitely played a starring role.
But what evidence is there that our pal the algo and its Big Tech overlords are actually responsible for dividing our societies? Let’s start with what we know: the algo loves sensationalist content. The more extreme or emotionally charged a story is, the more clicks it’s going to get. And clicks mean $$$. Could this be why social media platforms have failed to identify, moderate or remove hate speech targeting women - from Dalit women in India to female journalists in South Africa?
We also know it likes to feed us stories it thinks will appeal to us. This keeps us glued to our phones and increasingly trapped in our own echo chambers. Once the algo knows we are interested in something, it will show us more and more of the same.
It’s not hard to see how this results in harmful content being ‘gamified’ and presented as entertainment, as research from UCL and The University of Kent published earlier this year found. Boys and young men can get seduced by misogynistic content, even if they start out researching topics which are not necessarily harmful - such as dating and relationship advice. Even worse is that according to their research on TikTok, the Safer Scrolling report found that the app's algorithm targeted "different vulnerabilities of neurodiversity, loneliness, and mental health."
It's an issue on YouTube too, as a 2022 study in Australia by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found. They created 10 YouTube accounts for boys and young men, and found that every account was recommended videos antagonistic towards women and feminism. This included 2 'blank accounts' which didn't even seek out any particular content, instead just following videos recommended by the app.
This has a polarising effect, but in theory, with the help of artificial intelligence, social media companies could change how they surface content - leading to more positive interactions. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam found that highlighting posts liked by people with opposing political views “promotes more constructive, non-toxic, conversation across political divides.”
If you’re still here and I haven’t lost you in all the doom, congrats! I feel like you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to be sent to parallel universes without your consent, or become fuelled with hate based on the distorted version of reality the algo is serving you.
Luckily for you, I spoke to Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, Associate Professor at University College London and author of Safer Scrolling about where we should go from here, and her response was so much more wholesome than I was expecting 😌
“We need to educate ourselves as much as possible, and then share that education with young people - but also ask them to share with us. I've spoken to young people who help their parents fact check videos that they're watching about the Middle Eastern War because they say their parents are consuming misinformation. So I think it’s a two way street where as a family, you work on that together.”
“I also think that mentorship around issues like online misogyny that is led by young people is a really powerful tool - for example older students mentoring younger students."
"There's this false narrative that young people are just completely consumed by social media and I think what’s often missed out is that young people are actually really critical digital citizens... elieli0000 is really pointing out this deep discomfort that she has with the algorithm, and I take so much hope in her fantastic critical analysis.”
Ultimately we need governments and Big Tech to act on this, but I also love that one way to join the fight against online misogyny is to spend more time with our friends and family.
///WHAT WE’VE BEEN PLAYING
Where we will shout out anything that's been resonating lately, regardless of format or release date. Because there's not enough time in the world to keep up with everything.
1000xResist
sunset visitor 斜陽過客, Steam & Nintendo Switch, May 24
As the development process becomes increasingly unwieldy, it can be hard for a game to feel truly thematically modern. That is not a problem for sunset visitor 斜陽過客, the team behind 1000xResist. Their debut project is one hell of a mission statement, a direct commentary on what was going on when it was made, and perhaps one of the most moving, and, at times, uncomfortable narratives in recent years.
The studio is made up of majority Asian-Canadian diaspora creators across a range of artistic endeavours - dance, theatre, music, film, visual arts, and more. With their usual workflow interrupted by the COVID pandemic, they started work on a video game, an interactive work of speculative fiction, set far enough in the future to allow for some truly wild worldbuilding, but with alot of the story set in a world recognisable enough for the heavy beats to hit home.
And hit home they do. Without giving the plot away, 1000xResist spends time asking us to relive our experiences living through a pandemic, but there’s much more in this than a COVID tale. Nature versus nurture, the immigrant experience, anti-Asian racism, the notion of identity and inherited trauma are all part of the tapestry. Certain parts of 1000xResist will likely hit more heavily depending on your lived experience, but it’s well-written enough that it should resonate with you throughout.
The game begins in media res, and the foreshadowing within the non-linear narrative really heightens the intrigue. You scry through the memories of a central character, sometimes as her, sometimes as an observer. The truth of any given situation is rarely obvious, but they are always revealing. It’s plenty funny too, with excellent voice acting. Its closest comparison in that department might be Disco Elysium, but 1000xResist tells its story in a much more muted fashion - huge moments aren't shouted, they slowly dawn on you, playing out over long, tense chunks of time.
The gameplay is almost non-existent, and sometimes even a hindrance. You walk from character to character, sometimes solving the mildest of puzzles to progress. You make dialogue choices, but it’s never clear if they will even change the response you might receive. There’s some fiddly platforming too - not challenging, but never really fun, despite taking place in some rather cool locations.
I would recommend playing on Steam if possible. I’m playing on the Switch, and whilst the visuals have some great design, it’s missing a lot of the graphical flourish that I’ve seen on other videos. But any negatives here are really minor quibbles: what 1000xResist sets out to do, it excels at, and there is no way this story could be told in any other format. A video game through and through, even if you never really feel like you’re playing it.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller, Warner Bros, 2024
WOW. George Miller has done it again. He’s made a bevvy of famous people (and about four hundred motorbikes) cook in the Australian outback all for us to not show up to the cinema. It’s one of the biggest releases this year and yet in Hollywood terms, it’s a massive flop. What does this mean?
Well first off, let’s talk about the film. It’s wholeheartedly a Mad Max film, capital M. Apparently the outline was made as supporting material in the making of Fury Road, written to flesh out Furiosa’s character for Charlize Theron to work off. It’s been nine years since Fury Road and some hotshot producer plucks this skeleton story up and decides we, as an audience, need to know how Furiosa lost her arm and got to Immortan Joe and how she brushed her teeth and what cereal was her favourite and who her best mate was before Fury Road.
Luckily George Miller took the suggestion and decided he’d just make Beyond The Thunderdome again. This film is FUN, as much as it’s pretty GRIM. It’s a mix that hardly ever works, but with Furiosa, you have the perfect mix of a fully realised world, tight scripts with no scraps and some of the best practical stunts committed to screen.
Furiosa goes on a lame-ass journey and it really makes sense why Charlise Theron was so pissed off in Fury Road. The Australian wasteland is full of knuckle-dragging pricks, even pre-apocalypse, and Furiosa deals with all of them in fine style. Anya Taylor-Joy looks at the end of her tether throughout, somehow looking more like Theron by the end, either through intense Stanislavski method or just all the sand she was covered in filming. Either way, she does a great job being stoic in the whirlwind.
It's worth remembering Fury Road was hardly a Mad Max film, our hero being strapped to a car in a mask for a lot of the journey, largely just along for Furiosa’s ride. Which makes it strange that there was nagging online bollocks about this not being a Mad Max film. Well, sorry, but the guy who created Mad Max has made a new Mad Max, what more do you want? Mel Gibson quoting the bible strapped to a homebrew V8? (okay, that does sound quite good)
The cinema was empty for our showing. Barely a month after it’s release and it’s crickets. This is a film in love with the cinema, Technicolour, Panavision, all of it. Some of the vista shots are truly stunning, and scenes are constructed with the precision of the Hollywood golden age. It’s got tight performances, amazing set pieces and not a moment of filler. What else must filmmakers do? Don’t worry, it will be available to rent on your favourite, or least-hated, streaming platform very soon – relegating it to just another of the several thousand thumbnails you spend two hours not choosing to view
“The creator of “Squid Game,” he pitched that show as a movie for 10 years. He had almost completely given up on it, and our team in Korea had the foresight to advise him that this is a great story, but it’s a much bigger world. Have you ever thought about going out and trying to break down that world a little more and giving us a little more exposition? And he went off and wrote those scripts and made “Squid Game," and it became the most-watched show in the history of Netflix around the world, including in the United States.” (NY Times)
That is a quote from a recent NYT Podcast interview with Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix and I think it’s very illuminating. The current climate is one of ravenous consumption. It Is needed for us all to consume a market-alloted amount of stuff now, for the wheels of the world to be greased. We do not deal with tangible shit anymore, as we have said before here, time is the real currency and films just aren’t bingeable enough.
You know the feeling. You’re walking out of a good film, a bit wobbly, dazed and trying to reacclimatise to the real world, thinking of the themes and resolution and wondering what that line meant or whether they got away with it or not. That’s great and everything but, truly, the world needs you to put on another fucking film right the fuck now. This is the weakness of film! Unless we’re talking about Event Horizon, it’s really hard to watch the same film back-to-back
Hopefully, the cinema can be saved. The big screen does something to us when a good story is told, and we’ve also actually got really quite good at making films now. I don’t want the next generation of filmmakers to be worrying about which bit-part character can have a mid-series arc about how they found their favourite pair of shoes. I want filmmakers to do their shoe film! The film about the magic shoes they always wanted to do. I don’t want them to have to decide whether or not the chase scene they planned for the third act would work better as a meditative dialogue-heavy flashback episode with really whispery vocals and deafening cuts to screeching wheels. But sadly this is the world we paid for and this is the world we are subscribed to, and it's only just getting started.
"We’re not just competing with linear TV or cable, we’re now competing with sleep. We are at the very beginning of what on-demand Internet video will be." said Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, so either expect a new Nightmare On Elm Street or something far, far worse…
That’s it for SKILL ISSUE #9! No previews this time round, if you’re itching for something to look forward to might we suggest the roughly 250 games we previewed in our last issue! Do get in touch at skillissuecrew@gmail.com with any thoughts and please, if you’re into it, tell your similarly-minded mates and help get the word out.
Thanks, friends. Always check behind waterfalls, start with a half and remember: