Macron responded to the Gilets jaunes protests by announcing late Monday evening that he would raise the SMIC, or the French minimum wage, by one hundred euros a month and cut taxes for pensioners, but he would not reinstate the wealth tax. This is an attempt to quell the violence that has rocked the normally posh Elysees streets over the past month, as angry protesters mixed with police violence.

“We will respond to the economic and social urgency with strong measures, by cutting taxes more rapidly, by keeping our spending under control, but not with U-turns,” Macron said in an uncharacteristic TV address to the nation. He looked uncomfortable during the broadcast, reading his script from the teleprompter and doing what he can to reassert his footing as president.

The secretary general of CGT Phillip Martinez, considering the measures enacted by Macron insufficient, calls for the mobilization together with Gilets jaunes from Friday on.

Previously, CGT refused to join the Gilets jaunes protests sweeping the nation, saying, “It is impossible to imagine the CGT parading alongside the National Front.” He was referring to the rumours that the Gilets jaunes protesters were organized by France’s far-right party.

The Gilets jaunes movement is entering into its fifth week, having started on social media groups and holding no apparent leadership. There have been attempts by both Marine Le Pen, the leader of Front National, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise — the French Communist party — have attempted to appropriate the protests.

Many of the protesters organized at Champs-Elysees near the Arc de Triomphe rejected any political affiliation, with one man saying, “We are not Fascists. We are not Communists. We are French citizens.”

Police estimate about 31,000 people took part in the protests that spread throughout France on Saturday, with 8,000 marching in Paris and 2,000 in the cities of Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse. At 5pm on Saturday over 700 Gilets jaunes protestors had been arrested nationwide.

About 66% of French citizens currently support the protests, according to one poll. In contrast, Macron’s approval ratings were at 26% according to a survey compiled the week following the first protest.

“We are not going to continue our lives the same way as until now, without anything understood and changed,” Macron said. “We are at a historical moment for our country. By dialogue, respect, and through goals we will succeed.”

The squat at Saint-Denis is located in a small corner on the third floor, A-390. The building itself is huge, and hard to navigate if you are new, with many different wings and staircases. My first time in I was lucky enough to see two kids, one male and the other female, wearing street-clothes and carrying wooden crates of vegetables. Through pantomime, as they spoke poor English and my French is worse, we were able to communicate, as I asked the location of the squat. The male smiled and motioned to me to follow.

We walked around the network of the school, with my guide taking several wrong turns, until we came upon the squatted portion. It encompasses maybe a dozen to two dozen classrooms, with the top floor converted into bedrooms for refugees, both adults and minors. There are bathrooms on the top floor, and air mattresses and regular mattresses that line the floors of the bedrooms, sleeping about twenty in one room and twelve in another, smaller room. Downstairs is a classroom that has been converted into part storage facility for vegetables and part kitchen. Cooking is done in shifts with different groups, mostly aligned through countries, taking up different positions on different days. There is an older Afghani woman that wears a bright headscarf and acts as the fulcrum of the operation. Often frowning, she seems to be in one hundred places at once, first grabbing a towel to clean, then rearranging tables, lifting them like she was twenty years old again while barking in Arabic at the men loafing around, then here, then there, constantly on the move.

The squat is home to about one hundred and thirty people, and not everyone always sleeps there, so the numbers swell and abate. The refugees are mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, namely Sudan and Somalia. My contacts, due to age and language barriers, were two Sudanese men aged 25 and 26, a Nigerian man aged 28 and an Afghan man aged 27. They had all fled home due to war, citing the Sudanese Civil War and on-going conflict in the south, the Boko Haram insurgency, and, of course, the US invasion. They have all been on the road for multiple years now, with the newest, Ishmael the 26-year-old Sudanese man, having arrived in Europe two years on a smuggling route from Libya into Italy. The longest in Europe was the Amir, the man from Afghanistan who has been moving from camp to camp for close to five years now, having come from Turkey to Greece largely due to geography and country of origin, with the rest risking the current crisis state of Libya with human rights violations as bad as slave trafficking of migrants coming to Europe for a better life.

Through the five contacts, all agreed that the Paris VIII occupation was much better than anywhere they had previously been. I talked to both Abdullah, the 25-year-old Sudanese man, and Oluwademilade, the Nigerian man, together, outside in the sun, under a little awning covered space near the door. They were both smiling and laughing and having a good time. Speaking about the community of the squat, Abdullah said, “Everyone asks me about my family. Where is my family? Do I talk to them? Everyone wants to know where my family is. My family is right here, these are my brothers and my fathers. You are my brother [motioning towards Oluwademilade] and you are my father [motioning to an activist they call Professor]. And you are my brother [motioning to me].” They both start laughing.

The family-like structure is apparent in the organization of the bedrooms and the task assignments. Divided almost entirely by country, the men all live in a shared space, with some sleeping two to a mattress. Cleaning duties in the room also fall on the group, as the mattresses all lie on the floor. Oluwademilade showed me his spot, near Abdullah, in a well-kept room with a solitary fly buzzing around. They both stressed the importance of cleanliness, saying that they have to be extra careful that they don’t allow bugs into the room, for once the bugs start nesting in the mattresses they can be almost impossible to get rid of, which would, in effect, begin a squat wide infestation. Later, when interviewing Ishmael, he expressed a similar view, talking about his time sleeping under the bridge at canal Saint-Denis.

“When I was sleeping outside we were sleeping with big mice and cockroaches and other things,” Ishmael said. “Babies were sleeping with the big mice. Women were. Women were having babies where the bugs were. Everyone remembers that. It is not the cleanest [here], but everyone remembers that.”

The bedrooms are quite well kept, especially for the situation they are in. The kitchen, too, probably largely in part thanks to the Afghan woman, is immaculate. The bathrooms, on the other hand, were quite wet, sticky and dirty. There were potted plants in Abdullah and Oluwademilade’s room window. There was a mint plant, basil, potatoes, and even a young hedge was growing with care. Abdullah said, sometimes, when he is nervous, he rubs the leaves of the plant to calm himself down. There is an obvious amount of pride that stems from the living quarters, and keeping them clean.

There is graffiti painted on the walls all over the kitchen and bedrooms, either abstract images or writings such as ‘No Nations, No Borders’. In the kitchen, which also serves as a recreation space, groups of people mostly play board games, like chess, connect four, and checkers, or look at their phones. The atmosphere is lively, and there is a lot of chatter, but it is not as noisy as when the rush comes for dinner and most of the residents all pile into the small classroom.

The cooking area is mobile and improvised. Tin foil covers the tables that were used a few months ago as desks, and big two burner stove tops run off of the school’s electricity to cook several pots of potatoes and carrots, the ingredients for a soup that is meant to feed everyone. When I tried to speak with the Afghan woman, she smiled at me and motioned towards the dishes, saying in broken english that I can help by washing.

The languages in the room are varied, and I would be hesitant to say that French is predominant. There is a mixture of Arabic and Urdu also, which can be hard to distinguish, and some Afghans talk in Pashto. The volunteers, from what I have seen, almost all speak French first and then, possibly, Arabic. Volunteers do not come into the kitchen often, from what I have seen, leaving the space as a recreational place for the refugees. When they do come in, it is to talk to people individually.

The refugees in the space seem bored, mostly, playing their thousandth game of connect four, but in good spirits. The noise from the talking is enough to drown out most attempts at concentration, so reading or studying in this room seems difficult for anyone prone to distraction, which could be trouble if a refugee wanted to further their education. If I understood multiple languages, I would have a better grasp on what the conversation centers around, but since I cannot hear directly, I will make the assumption that it is as any common conversation in any cafeteria in the world: a little bit of politics, a little bit of the situation, but mostly just easy speech of little weight. Oluwaidemilade talks like a philosopher, speaking about life and death and afterlife to anyone who will pay attention. He smiles with his arms making sweeping motions, saying, “When I die just bury me in the sand. I don’t need much, just bury my body so I can go on. I will fly away from here to another life.”

**The names in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of at-risk individuals. The pictures are minimal to also protect privacy.

Last month, Turkish forces invaded the independent city of Afrin, in the Kurdish held province of northern Syria. Titling the offensive Operation Olive Branch, Turkish state propaganda claimed that the use of the Syrian Free Army (SFA) is to stamp out terrorism, linking the Peoples Protection Unit (YPG) to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and Daesh.

By comparing the YPG to the PKK and Daesh, Turkey is commingling three groups that they are fightinginto one mass. It is the equivalent of saying they are fighting “the Middle East,” generalizing regional players, without accounting for the multiform differences between the groups. By lumping Daesh, or ISIS in the western colloquial, they are adding an extra dimension as a rallying point, figuring the West does not like ISIS, therefore the West will get behind their operation.

Objectives for the operation have been stated as securing the southern border, countering U.S. support for a terrorist organization, blocking the YPG from the eastern Mediterranean near where the US has set up operations, and supporting the Syrian opposition to maintain a land route to the Arab world.

Turkish state propaganda is operating a twitter account for the siege, labeling those killed as terrorists, ignoring the deaths of civilians. They run the usual slogans: liberated villages, neutralized terrorists. It is just another long and bloody invasion into a country that has experienced nothing but hell for seven years. The claims are written in an almost euphoric sense, with a heavy dose of exclamation marks. With a quick search of the casualties of the war, though, one can see videos of mutilated women and children being paraded through the streets, and men who are non-combatants being gunned down with laughter in the background.

Operation Olive Branch on Twitter

Breaking news! TAF: During Operation Olive Branch, 44 terrorists of PKK/KCK/PYD-YPG and DEASH were neutralized. Since the beginning of the operation the number of neutralized terrorists reached 1,873 #AfrinOperation #OperationOliveBranch

On Monday 19 February the Syrian government reached a deal with the Kurdish government to come to their aid in Afrin. Video evidence showed the Syrian flag waving as troops poured into the the areas under siege. They were met almost immediately by heavy shelling from the Turks.

The Americans, on the other hand, are nowhere in sight. During the civil war and the following war against ISIS, America armed the Kurds with the hopes of securing an ally in the region. Like the aftermath of the first Gulf war, when the United States promised to help the Kurdish population of Iraq gain the freedom and then abandoned them after the war, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is now claiming that they did not even supply arms to the YPG, leaving them to be massacred by foreign powers jostling for control of the region.

The results have been devastating on the local population. According to the Turkish news source, TRT World, 60 Free Syria Army fighters have been killed, while 1439 “terrorists” have been “neutralized.” The coarse language is indicative of Turkey’s long history of violence against Kurdish populations and twisting the words for state propaganda.

The human rights reports have been disturbing. Videos have circulated of female YPG fighters mutilated and dragged through the streets. Drone strikes and military assaults are directed with no regard for civilians. The north of Syria, already devastated by years of bloody civil war, is now dealing with the arrogant disregard of a major nation hellbent on bringing destruction.

Terror has recently become a key turn of phrase to signify a political opponent that needs eliminating. As with the engagements of the U.S. in the Middle East, the actions of Turkey against civilians are the true acts of terrorism. Howard Zinn, in his book Terrorism and War, once said “how can you have a war against terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”

The violence between Turkey and the Kurdish people has been happening for over 40 years now, as the Kurds see themselves as a separate ethnic group with distinct territorial boundaries in the south of Turkey, and the north of Syria and Iraq. When it is politically opportune, the United States arms and funds Kurdish groups to help their political agenda, initially supporting their right to self-determination, then, after their use is over, the Americans turn their back.

The whole world is currently standing with backs turned to Afrin. Boris Johnson tweeted that Turkey “is right to want to keep its borders secure,” even though Afrin is not a part of their territory. Other European leaders have been remarkably silent on the human rights abuses in an already war ravaged north.

Boris Johnson on Twitter

Watching developments in Afrin closely. Turkey is right to want to keep its borders secure. We share goal of reducing violence and keeping focus on most important task: a political process in Syria that leads to the end of the Asad regime.

‘Real News’ achieved another victory last night over the ‘Fake News’ phenomena when Roy Moore lost his candidacy for Alabama Governor. Not only did he lose despite Trump using the same tactics that got him the bid in the 2016 elections — that of calling his accusers fake — but it starts to poke holes in the notion that the hype around the power of Fake News is here to stay. Maybe Trump won, not because of any remarkable success on his part, but because Clinton was as unremarkable as people thought, and only had a thin veneer in a life-time of selling out on the ideas she claimed to champion. Maybe it was also a bit historical, as Americans have had a tendency to swing conservative, especially after a liberal president, and the Democrats have not held three consecutive terms since FDR. Maybe the Americans that showed up to the polls are really as Xenophobic as the man representing the final electoral count. And maybe, because of this, there can be a shift in party politics, with the old power of Clinton and Wasserman-Schultz and those that ran the DNC for Hillary being replaced by a new wave of politicians that more accurately represent what the next generations want from the political process as compared to the previous. Or maybe I am getting ahead of myself, but there is cause for hope after the downfall of Roy Moore.

Fake News is a real threat, but one that is hard to take seriously. How can anyone listen to the ravings of Alex Jones and believe he is anything short of a mad man? How can people take Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about jobs, immigration and the environment as reality? The problem lies in the artful manipulation and polarization that has been happening across the country since 9/11, and took off during the financial crisis. When the terror attacks happened, the country grew angry. There had to be something that we could do. Sadly, that anger became so misguided that we destabilized the Middle East and wrecked the economy through deregulation and tax breaks that started in the Reagan era and were continued by his predecessors. All of this has led to an extremely caustic political environment where personal conviction is held over reality, and the American mythos that greatness comes from heavy industry and deregulation, that wealth is a symbol of aptitude and not inheritance, reigns.

This outpouring of Fake News, while stemming from the campaign, has kept up steam by a seeming deep state revolt. If things had continued like normal, like in the Bush days, there’s a good chance that media companies like CNN would have started to normalize the presidency by framing it as something that is happening, not something that is to be fought against. Instead, we have Russiagate, Donald Trump’s insistent tweets, and a disturbed and disrupted news cycle. An optimistic leftist would not be slow to point out that this means that a script of dissent is being inculcated in their less radical political compatriots, which could lead to a major backswing of the pendulum in the 2020 elections.

The question is, what do we do about it? Should we regulate social media and create a set of controls or should we let time and liberalism work out the problems? Can “truth and falsehood grapple?”

Personally I don’t believe that social media platforms should be regulated through the government, but I think the platforms should be transparent on the creation of their algorithm. When Google claims that it will begin to take into account the quality of sources in its search ranking, they should give a clear indication of what they mean by quality to show that they are not intentionally biasing some news over others. Since they are the current curator of vast archives of knowledge they hold tremendous power over what is found through keyword searches. A minor change in results is like a ‘minor’ change in high school history books, where at least in Pennsylvania, they teach that slavery had no effect on the Civil War, that Haymarket was the result of terror actions by anarchists and not police brutality on the workers assembled in the square, and more. A minor tweak on the information provided can have a ripple effect on the community reading it.

There is also the possibility that with the production of an algorithm that will determine the “quality” of a news article, it will lull people into a false sense of security, that what they have read is right because, well, look here is the explanation that proves that what I’m finding on Google is factual. There is still a strong probability that there will be a way to game the algorithm to rank certain articles over others, that could be exploited by sites that make more propaganda than they do news.

Personally I’m all for an anarchist internet. I’m pro-net neutrality and think that attempts by Facebook and Google and Twitter to look ‘clean’ and anti-fake news will, in the end, be a marketing stunt. The spread of fake information predates the internet to the beginning of civilization, and while it may have increased reach I do not want the platforms that host it to start working as the daily news editor. As long as people want to watch them, then figures like Alex Jones will get time in the spotlight. It’s not so much the Jones’ that worry me, but the censors that could remove the opposition or group it in the same category. Certainly chauvinists won’t disappear with a few expertly coded ones and zeros, and parties like Britain First that Trump is happy to retweet will keep plugging along with the same fervor they always have.

There won’t be any stopping the tide of history, and the world of Journalism is changing. The elites no longer hold all of the power, which should be a good thing for everyone involved. As Chomsky explains with his propaganda model, the media of the past century was largely run by those reflecting the consensus of the powered elites because they too were a part of that group. The barriers of entry were astronomical to starting a media corporation, now anyone with a twitter handle can break news immediately. There will, probably, be a balance that is found in the future, with power once again being concentrated in a few hands, but instead of decrying the “anarchy in the townsquare” we should embrace the competition of ideas. Yes, Neo-nazism is on the rise, but it lost before and it can lose again.

When I was growing up my mom had a two oak bookshelves in the living room filled with names like Steinbeck and Orwell and Hemingway. She would always tell me that it was books, something contained in the brittle yellow pages of text in front of me, that got her and the family away from Tahlequah. The other side of the family never read, she would say, referring to my grandfather’s relatives. Because we read, that’s why we got out.

So I would spend hours combing the bookshelf, an easy relief from a boring life in the suburbs of Pittsburgh where, on occasion, the most interesting thing we would see were the headlights of a neighbor’s car or a stranger who had gotten lost in our little annex of the world. My brother’s and I were not allowed to play on the computer or watch tv a lot of the time, so we would only really be able to escape through literature, consuming, at first, books like Goosebumps and Harry Potter and various forms of fantasy until we gradually moved on to the Orwell and the Steinbeck in middle school. I still remember the dolorous look of the man on the front cover of the trade market paperback edition of Of Mice and Men that I carried in my pocket in middle school.

At that time, and still today, books are a doorway into a foreign life. There is something comforting in the musty smell of the pages and the feel of a good book in your hand. The transition from paper to screen has me a bit nervous. Along with the grip of nostalgia that comes with print, not staring at a backlit screen for hours on end is a plus, and the ability to “disconnect,” to put aside access to social media or messaging systems and get engrossed in another world for an hour or so, come as reasons why I will probably hold onto my paperbacks for a while. Bookstores, too, have always been my favorite places to go and discover, and I’m not quite sure how I would find new authors and try new styles without stores like The Strand in New York or the Half-Price Books that sits on the main strip of highway on the road to Pittsburgh. Sure, Amazon has algorithms that has recommendations for you, but it can’t quite match the feel of nestling up in a corner with a grip of new books and browsing through them to see which one you really want.

In the article 5 Reasons Physical Books Might be Better than E-Books they back up my claim that there is something to the print industry that cannot be matched by the e-book industry. The propound the same idea I have about backlit screens by saying that they really wear your eyes out. College students polled also claimed that they prefer to work with print textbooks and not e-books, tying into their first claim that e-books reduce reading comprehension because of distractions. Print, when you do get absorbed into what you’re reading, offers no distraction except maybe jumping ahead during a dramatic turn of events.

The environmental impact of the publishing industry cannot be denied though. A reduction of the our carbon footprint is a good thing, and the chance for traditionally farmed patches of wood to turn into old growth forests are a net positive for the e-book industry. The rare earth metal mining for computers and high-tech like Kindle’s has led to deplorable conditions for workers, but one could look at that as much easier to change than the carbon footprint of the traditional print industry.

Also the ease of travel with an e-book is something that cannot be underrated. Textbooks are heavy and can lead to back problems if you have to lug a bunch around for a long period of time. When you are backpacking for a long period of time you don’t want to lug around heavy tomes, and you can run out of pages quite fast even if you do. With an e-reader, as long as you can connect and charge it every now and then, the weight is minimal, which is everything when you try and trim down under 40 pounds, and the content available is near limitless.

Price will also factor into how the market shifts in the future. While textbooks have an absurd markup, especially when you consider that most are used for a single semester and then are resigned to collect dust. The constant re-editioning of textbooks so that more can be printed drives the price higher too, and destroys the used book market. The most expensive parts of the E-book industry is usually, or should be, the platform that books are represented on, and with a kindle running roughly $100 that is about the cost of a single text book. With the integration of free media sharing, the prices of e-textbooks should be driven lower to compete with pirated information. Since the reproduction cost of a media file is virtually zero, the cost of the digital file should, and an emphasis on should as compared to will, be as inexpensive as purchasing songs compared to hard copies of albums.

The nostalgia factor will only last so long. As new generations come into the fold the power of print will begin to fade until it is as forgotten as vellum scrolls and wax tablets. My generation will probably look at the next, as the generation before us looks at us, and think, “do they even read? What are they doing?” But to the next, it will be normal. The optimistic side says that, at best, we will have a modern library of Alexandria with open sourced, free information for anyone within reach of a computer, which should be pretty prolific within the next hundred years. At worst, we will simply stop reading in favor of games and movies. As Ray Bradbury said in Fahrenheit 451, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” In reality, the world will probably continue the way it always had, where the people who want access to information will use whatever tools are readily accessible, and cost of production will determine what can be made for mass consumption.

In 1947, with the terror of Bolshevism still frightening wealthy upper class in America and the war against Germany at an end, McCarthy stood on the floor of the Senate with a grocery list that he claimed carried the names of all the senators that are card carrying Marxists. McCarthyism cost many people their livelihoods, and came about from his knowledge of how to game the system of the day. McCarthy would simply stand in front of journalists, spout whatever nonsense propaganda would further his aims, and then be whisked away to some important meeting without answering any questions.

It is hard to not see the obvious parallels between McCarthy and Trump, and by extension, how the media has morphed to accommodate such phenomena. They both ran on easily manipulable fears and cultural biases, and both promised broad, impossible goals to achieve the witch hunts they were purporting. To McCarthy, the answer was simple; get rid of the Reds and America will live in peace. For Trump it is the same thing; deport immigrants and America will be a wealthy and prosperous nation again.

But what took down McCarthyism is, hopefully, the same thing that will take down Trumpism. As the Great Moon Hoax and similar stories were followed historically by the muckrakers, so too canwe hope that the age of sensationalized click-bait will be followed by a golden age of investigative journalism, where we realize how important it is to dig up the unhappy truths. The abuses of fact made manifest by the explosion of social media and the internet age should merely need a little more patience and time to be brought to heel.

Like McCarthy’s abuse of wire services during the Red Scare, the current era of Fake News is a result of inadequate filtering. The internet community is already engaged in debates on the topic. As we get a stronger grasp on the methods of filtering via social media algorithms, and how to not necessarily control but ease the biases they create for individual news feeds, then we can begin to learn what the remedies might be. Unless we are willing to accept the demise of factual reporting and welcome an age of the echo chamber where we never have to grapple with something that we disagree with, then it would be really hard to not be optimistic about what we could accomplish in the end with the technology currently available to us.

It is not like the whole world of factual and investigative reporting has upended itself and accepted the Trump age as a death knell for an honest but Quixotic attempt at real reporting. The Associated Press is still winning Pulitzers for exposing the slave trade in Southeast Asia. The New York Daily News and ProPublica are pushing back against the Trump agenda and exposing illegal evictions of poor minorities. As Winston Churchill once said, “this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The state of news industries right now is only temporary. As The New York Times recovery has shown, this is not the end of traditional media, but an extension of the power they had before to new, burgeoning sources. Now, more niche publications like The Intercept can have a wider circulation because manufacturing costs are virtually zero in the digital age. The rise of personal blogs can help shed light on issues that would go virtually unaddressed fifty years ago. “Fake News” is merely the easiest sell and only a passing phenomenon during a time when nearly any question or connection is a few keystrokes away. Personally, I would rather have the power of the press in the hands of the inchoate mass than solely under the whip of Bezos and Amazon.

The current state of fake news and post-truth and Trumpism is only a swing of the pendulum; maybe it is idealism, but I think once the growing pains of the current media culture have subsided and people with the knowledge and skills to fully harness the power of the internet age come onto the scene, we can have a new golden age of media journalism. Imagine H.L. Menken and Ida Tarbell with the power of Twitter and Facebook.

Streaming has already begun to change the music industry, and barring any unforeseen advancements, will be the major player in the years to come. It’s simple logistics: the power of a nearly unlimited library accessible both online and offline is available for the same price that one would pay to purchase an album a month. Would you rather have that one Dylan album that you really like but have listened to more times than you can count, risk your monthly music allowance on an unknown that you could either love or hate, or be able to listen to both and more, picking and choosing from a vast allotment of songs that you can later collate into a playlist and share with friends? I think the answer is easy.

There are plenty of streaming services to choose from, all offering slightly different platforms. Pandora, for example, saves the hassle of having to choose each individual song or constraining yourself by a particular album or artist by having an algorithm that stores your likes and dislikes and creates a playlist based on the artist or song that you enter into their search. In 2014 Pandora was the most widely used streaming service, and seems to still hold the title despite Apple’s entrance into the market and Spotify’s incremental rise in users over the last year. Services like it, most notably Songza, another playlist offering service that was free of charge in 2016 until it was purchased by Google, are often bought out by the competition or picked up by companies looking to make a venture into the music market.

Apple has attempted to keep up with the competition by launching iTunes radio, which serves as a near carbon copy of Pandora for those who like to maintain their brand loyalty. The interesting foray that they have recently made is iTunes Match, which is probably their attempt to subvert the album downloading capabilities of Spotify by allowing users to upload their illegally downloaded music to their iCloud and matching it up with a legal version that is streamable on any connected Apple device. Addressing the piracy problem now not with fines but with appeasement is a symbolic step away from the traditional, single-album, single-song market of days of yore.

Spotify, my personal choice of music streaming for the breadth of choice offered and the offline streaming capabilities, is different than the radio model by letting users choose each song manually, download whole albums and playlists, and keep files stored on multiple platforms for the same account. They also compete with the radio based apps by offering their own radio services based on the music you listen to most, or the genre of music you are searching. Don’t know much about Hip-Hop but looking to expand your knowledge? Just search up the song or artist you know and look for playlists that they are included in. It also allows for music suggestions for your friends by letting you create playlists and share them with others.

The problem with Spotify, however, is that they might be trying to grow too big too fast. Spotify posted a net-loss of over $600 million in 2016 despite it’s 50 percent revenue growth to $3.3 billion because of the massive amounts of money that they have to pay to record labels — something to the tune of $2 billion to just Universal Music Group — that only increases as they get more users. Because of their friendly approach to account sharing — a single account can be on an unlimited number of devices which allows for nearly endless downloading and offline listening with the caveat that only one device can be online at a time — new users does not necessarily mean new subscribers, but always means more royalties. Their business model is definitely much less stable compared to that of Apple music and Pandora, so in a few years they may bankrupt or disappear off the market, but they are unrivaled in accessibility so it is hard to picture a streaming world without at least a similar platform.

The fact of the matter is that streaming is here to stay and the old model of individual purchases is as obsolete now as Blockbuster and other brick and mortar stores. How long it will maintain a dominance on the industry is yet to be seen, as they are, like everything in the entertainment industry, one great innovation away from being forced into similar obsolescence, but currently it is hard to envision a model of style of music provider that can compete with near instant access for a small fee. Maybe something that allows for a similarly vast compendium of choice with the added bonus of actual ownership once you stop paying the fee will crop up, but the logistics on that make it seem fantastical. For now, people will keep streaming the new songs and the old because of the volume of options and cheap price to do so.

Yesterday 22 September 2017 French President Emmanuel Macron signed the bill for his controversial changes to the labor laws. Today a protest was organised Les Insoumis, a coalition of unions and labor activists that represent the opposition to Macron. Led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Far-Left candidate in last year’s election, the protesters marched from Place de la Bastille to Place de la Republique. Crowd sized was estimated to be between 30,000 and 100,000 people.

Macron claims the reforms give flexibility to companies to ease the process of hiring and firing. Much has been made about the 3,000 plus page Code du Travail and it’s connection to the stagnant 10% unemployment. The reforms attempt to both bypass and subvert a lot of the rights that the unions have earned for their workers, like capping the compensation to workers who were fired and easing the restrictions on dismissing workers.

The other changes include:

• Removal of barriers for companies with 50 employees or more. The nomination of a works council and a health and safety committee will be streamlined so that only one such committee will be created, removing separate spaces for worker organization.
• A power transfer from national level to the industry level for the negotiation of short term contracts. This opens workers up to exploitation through the constant renewal of short term contracts which comes with no job security, and lets companies avoid negotiating a long term contract.
• being able to directly negotiate with workers on pay and working conditions, shedding the collective agreements fought for by the unions that reside in the lengthy code.

Macron has labeled himself a “Jupiterian figure” and claims that the labor revision is a “Copernican Revolution.” Because of his Authoritarian tone and removal of worker protection’s, Macron’s approval rating has dropped to 30 percent in September.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Twitter

C'est un coup d'État social que prépare Emmanuel #Macron ! #JLMMarseille https://t.co/slNk1CdjO4

Stephanie Martineu, a union activist at the protest, said, “We are worried about the destruction of the social balance of France and everything that France has stood on… All of the protections will be replaced by rules that favor companies acting the way they want to act.

People are afraid that they are moving towards a German-style system that cuts worker protection and promotes part-time low-wage work.”

Situated in the midst of a marble quarry under the shadow of Mount Olympus, Koutsochero camp is home to 1,063 refugees. Like camp Moria, Koutsochero is managed by the Hellenic Army which prevents anyone from entering without proper validation as a volunteer.

The camp is 18 kilometers from the nearest city, Larissa, with no public transportation to take you from the surrounding countryside. It lacks basic amenities such as gender separate toilets or kitchens. There are 40 toilets total for over 1,000 people, all chemical toilets and many of them covered in garbage.

Outside the camp with the heat of the Greek sun reflecting off of the white rocks, I met Mohammad, a man that I had interviewed in Moria. He was wearing a big smile and a black hoodie bearing a Hunter S. Thompson quote, telling me that he was happy to see me again. He said that Koutoschero is not much better than Moria camp, but it is run by Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization from the United Arab Emirates that provides much better food.

He smiled uncomprehendingly at me when I asked him some basic questions about housing, and told me he had been here for two months, right after the snowfall on Lesbos. His friend, a shorter man with a crew cut wearing a black polo that read ‘I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell,’ fidgeted nervously while we were talking, and hurried him away the moment he had a chance.

The hours go by slowly outside the camp, with few people walking to and from the road since there is no where to go. A group of children played in the fields near the highway and on the quarry side, but most people stuck to their business inside the chainlink fences.

George, a physicist living in Athens working for International Organization of Migration (IOM) for the last six months, is in charge of enrolling children into school. He gave me a lift on the dusty road heading out of the camp, past the green plains of the Mediterranean highlands to the outskirts of the city of Larissa in his cobalt blue Renault, moving the scattered paperwork from the front seat to the back after I waved him down. He told me that there has been a lot of success getting children to school, with over 70 percent attendance, partially because of the lack of activities that surround the camp and partially because of the will of the parents to provide their children with a higher education.

The biggest problem with the schools he says, aside from the fact that the Greek government was caught off-guard and really was not ready to take on such a task, was the lack of classes being taught in Arabic and Farsi. Most schools conduct classes in either Greek or English, forcing many students and many parents to learn in a new language.

When I asked him if there were any special circumstances facing the camp he laughed, saying, “no, no special circumstances.”

Koutsochero camp is in the same position as the other camps dotting the countryside: There are few but the most essential amenities and difficulty with transportation. Education is a daily struggle, and the future uncertain.

“My friends, welcome to Lesbos — now you are going to Moria.”

The blue bus sits perched on a patch of dirt next to the UNHCR staging area for newly landed refugees. The view of the clear sea, sleepy village and palm fronds would be akin to paradise given different circumstances. But now, as a group of exhausted volunteers from the few NGOs left on the island watch on in the early morning sun, refugees from Africa and the Middle East are loaded onto the bus with the few possessions they still have — most still sopping wet — to be taken to the permanent holding camp on the island.

The tumult is over at this point. The boat has been guided safely to shore, the medical cases have been treated — sometimes only a hurt wrist, sometimes gangrene or frostbite; the variation in urgency can be extreme. Tea has been distributed, and those soaked through have been, hopefully, given a change of clothes. The long wait has started. After a treacherous four mile crossing from Izmir or Avylik to Skala Sikimineas, these people escaping war and terror are about to be spend months in the process for asylum.

Moria is situated an hour away from the north shore, and seven kilometers from the main port of Mytilene. The road is bumpy and mountainous, passing through scrub-brush, goat pastures and ever-present olive trees, over hills as old as civilization. Brick edifices covered by moss hang around the cliff-sides without the sterile plaques of museums to classify their age, leaving you wondering who built them, and how long they have been standing. Are they from the century, or were they uncovered in a storm, a remnant of long ago?

This is only seen, of course, by the ones who survived the crossing. In the UNHCR report Desperate Journeys they state that the refugees crossing the sea have dropped by 99 percent since the EU-Turkey deal, but the rate of deaths has gone up to one in 393 people.

The camp which greets the refugees is stark, surrounded by heavy chain-link fences and covered in barbed wire that looks more like a prison or a World War II internment camp than a home. Up until this February, when four people died from the storms that hit in the winter, the men and women were living in tents, sometimes four or five men to a space. Now they are living in ISO-boxes, semi-permanent structures made out of plastic siding. Only a few tents still dot the hillside next to the road. In order to move on from the camp situated next to the small island village, first you must process your asylum paperwork, and then the EU has to deem your story credible enough to warrant paperwork. You just have to wait months before you can think about moving on to Athens.

A hazy future awaits them in their next port of call. Athens is still grappling with unemployment, a figure reported at 23 percent, and a massive debt that has led to equally massive austerity measures by the EU. The lucky ones integrate into squats, and get the chance to thrive in a new community. The rest are relegated to different camps, or forced to survive on the streets.

Some family members are separated for an interminable period of time. Ameer, a tall, slender Syrian man that used to operate a food cart outside of the camp, told me he had wait six months for his paperwork to be processed to get the okay before move onto Athens. But when he found his brother in the camp he decided to stay longer and wait so they could travel together. They had been apart for over two years after his brother was caught by ISIS, and he had feared his brother had died. When they met again in the mud-streaked camp by accident, they were crying tears of joy.

Moria is one of the last standing camps on Lesbos, and, like the ruins of brick that dot the hillside, is but a remnant of a more chaotic time. The newspapers, and the numbers, tell us that the refugee crisis is over. Despite Turkey’s posturing while using the deal for leverage, and despite Greece’s overburdened state forced to find housing for hundreds of thousands of people, the hundreds of thousands that had crossed in the previous year has been reduced to a sparse tens of thousands. No more are the screaming women and children washing ashore on beaches dominating headlines.

In a few years, tourism will return to the island. Rich pensioners and young college kids will now share the hotels housing the last of the men and women who survived the major surge in 2015. They will never know each other’s names, or the names and the faces of those who landed next to the bronze hills of Eftalou, or climbed the craggy rocks near Tsonia and Klio looking for warmth and safety. The tracers are disappearing. Lighthouse Relief’s eco-project has done a fine job removing the unsightly black rubber from the busted dinghies off the shoreline, and the fiber glass vessels that once housed a hundred souls blend in with the innumerable fishing boats of the natives.

The huge nomadic mass of volunteers will slowly forget too. People will return to their countries, and find stable jobs. Most will take back simple lessons in kindness and humanity, and might use the experience to find a more fulfilling life, understanding the peace of a backyard garden and the quietude of a suburban park. They will forget the chiding words that were used for people who could only give a week or two to the crisis — voluntourists — and move on. Some might use their stories and the skills they’ve gained to continue helping people, working with advocacy groups or charities, but for a large portion it will be a story to share at a barbeque, or over a few beers.

But for the men and women that crossed the sea, the children who lost friends, brothers, mothers, and neighbors will not. Those who were pushed to the fringes of society, called terrorists and parasites, those who will have to grapple with survivor’s guilt for a lifetime, those who will never receive formal education and grow up in fields littered with trash and debris, those that will be forced to haunt the street corners of a foreign land thousands of miles from the memory of home, will not. Their eyes will speak of the tragedy they have survived, how they were received, and what has been done to them.

How could you forget watching your mother torn apart by shrapnel, or the dismembered limbs from the victim of a barrel bomb? How could you forget fleeing your village at night in the midst of someone else’s war, possibly damning your family, and hiking for days through the snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan into Turkey and being forced to work in textile mills and clothes factories at 16?

We will go on, us lucky volunteers who can taste the minor-key of tragedy and arrive at the other end with the pride of having helped. Heaped up with the sad, there will be happy memories of bandied political debates at two in the morning under a full moon in summer, drinking the thousandth cup of instant coffee that tastes like cacao and battery acid. There will be reminiscence of the people we met along the way, of strangers we grew close to for a short period, but slowly, as in the movements of a clock effacing the past with the forthcoming hours, we will forget the names and the faces, and the stories we have heard will blend together until a morning in the fall when they will come back intensely and vividly for a moment, unbeckoned, as we watch the boats take off from the point and cruise gently around the river. Then, slowly once more, they will fade.

Leo Tolstoy once said that all of history is the migration of people from East to West and then back again; if you trace the line back far enough it is not the individual but the mass of humanity that changes things. Can the things that have had to be endured in the last decade be shown properly? Will we as a people listen to the words of the women who have lost children at birth due to lack of adequate healthcare, or daughters due to a lack of heating, or sons to a vicious war? Or will it all be played out again? How could we forget?