Weekend Reads (October 5): WordPress Drama, Christian Rock, Pink Floyd, “God’s Not Dead”
Recommended weekend reading material for October 5, 2024.
WordPress is arguably the most popular and well-known website content management system around, powering over 40% of the world’s websites. However, it’s currently locked in a legal kerfuffle with WPEngine, a popular WordPress hosting service, that could have a major impact on millions of website users.
In mid-September, [WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg] wrote a blog post calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” He criticized the host for disabling the ability for users to see and track the revision history for every post. Mullenweg believes this feature is at the “core of the user promise of protecting your data” and said that WP Engine turns it off by default to save money.
[…]
Mullenweg then banned WP Engine from accessing the resources of WordPress.org. While elements like plug-ins and themes are under open source license, providers like WP Engine have to run a service to fetch them, which is not covered under the open source license.
This broke a lot of websites and prevented them from updating plug-ins and themes. It also left some of them open to security attacks. The community was not pleased with this approach of leaving small websites helpless.
A quick scan of social media will reveal a lot of confusion, frustration, and tribalism. The general consensus seems to be that WordPress has every right to defend their brand and call out WPEngine, but the way in which they’re doing it seems heavy-handed and is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
WP Engine has since filed a lawsuit against Mullenweg and his company Automattic (the owners of WordPress.com), alleging “libel and attempted extortion” and also accuses Mullenweg of “making false statements to the IRS.” In other words, this is going to get a lot messier before it’s over.
Migrating a website is never an easy process, but I do hope this situation encourages more people to check out other platforms like Craft and ExpressionEngine, two of my favorite content management systems. Unlike WordPress, they’re not free, but they do come with a host of features that make it really easy to build flexible and dynamic websites. (Opus currently runs on Craft, and I’m continually amazed at how it handles pretty much every content-related need that I throw at it.)
Related: WordPress has been piling on new features in order to better compete with website services like Squarespace and Wix. As a result, it’s grown increasingly complicated while steadily moving away from its blogging roots. Earlier this year, I highlighted several WordPress alternatives for bloggers.
Writing for Treble, Adam Newton delves into the rise of contemporary Christian music throughout the ’90s, and in particular, the rise of ‘90s Christian alternative (aka “Chrindie”) rock.
Right off the bat, the majority of Chrindie bands were just too aesthetically too left-field to cross the normal CCM divide. Most of them didn’t have a high enough Jesus-Per-Minute ratio, but even if they had been, there would have been no place for industrial, ska, metal, or shoegaze on your average CCM radio station. If you were lucky enough to live in a city with a large enough Christian radio station, you might have enjoyed three hours per week with Christian rock — but most of that would still have been the DC Talks and Newsboys type bands who were signed to major CCM labels.
Think of it this way: As proper Gen Xers, all ‘90s music fans desired authenticity, but the real difference between mainstream alternative and Chrindie was a reflection upon the style-less nature of CCM. With secular music, people found an underground band first, and if they blew up to become popular and crossover to being radio-friendly, you called them sell-outs and then found newer similar-sounding bands who stayed in the underground. You couldn’t lose your scene credibility. While a few popular radio bands had some underground cachet, they had to work extra-hard to placate the gatekeepers.
Nearly every Chrindie fan I’ve ever known took the opposite path. They went from the mainstream to the underground. They began by listening to a safe band pushed by one of the big CCM labels on your local Christian station, and usually stayed there because the Christian underground was so tiny in the pre-Internet era. Your journey into Chrindie only occurred if you were lucky enough to find someone to point you in the direction of the stuff that CCM radio stations didn’t dare play.
As a ’90s youth group kid who was raised on Steve Green, Larnelle Harris, The Gaither Vocal Band, and of course, Carman, and subsequently switched over to The Violet Burning, The Prayer Chain, and Mortal, articles like this are catnip. And I appreciate how Newton captures the sheer weirdness of “Chrindie” music, which was outré in Christian and secular spheres alike:
It felt subversive, even compared to the ’90s mainstream alternative acts I heard on the radio. I could talk to my friends in Boy Scouts about Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins, and I could talk to my friends at church about Point of Grace, Sandi Patty, and Wayne Watson, but I couldn’t talk to any of them about Five Iron Frenzy, Plankeye, and GRITS. I felt cool in spite of the fact that nerding out on underground Christian indie rock was definitely not cool. It was my first taste of indie rock snobbery, and it definitely wasn’t my last.
Singer, songwriter, and actor Kris Kristofferson died late last week at the age of 88.
Songwriting was merely one aspect to the Renaissance man, who was also a Golden Globe-winning actor, Golden Gloves boxer, Rhodes scholar, author, U.S. Army veteran, pilot, and onetime record-label janitor. But it was his penetrating lyricism that caused a seismic shift in the perception of country music by the late Sixties. Well-educated (with a military discipline) though he was, he quickly fell in with the freshman class of “outlaw” singer-songwriters that would buck the star system and influence generations to come.
In addition to his own albums, numerous other musicians performed Kristofferson’s material, including Gladys Knight & the Pips, Waylon Jennings, Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, and Ray Price.
Beyond his musical career, Kristofferson starred in a wide range of films and TV series such as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Convoy, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, A Star Is Born, Amerika, and the Blade films.
Related: Time explains Kristofferson’s impact on country music. “Kristofferson’s individualism, contrarianism, and dogged brilliance not only made him a star, but helped kick down genre walls, lighting a path for outlaw country and many other rebels to find a home in both country music’s edges and its mainstream over the past half-century.”
The members of Pink Floyd have sold the rights to their musical catalog, as well as to their names and likenesses, to Sony Music for $400 million.
The deal, one of the largest of many in recent years, apparently has finally concluded despite decades of ongoing infighting and bitter words between the bandmembers, notably chief songwriters Roger Waters and David Gilmour; also involved are drummer Nick Mason and the estates of keyboardist Richard Wright and founding singer-songwriter Roger “Syd” Barrett. The deal comprises recorded-music rights but not songwriting, which is held by the individual writers, as well as name-and-likeness, which includes merchandise, theatrical and similar rights. While Pink Floyd was famously anonymous as personalities, presumably most if not all of the iconic artwork on their albums, which was largely designed by the British firm Hipgnosis, is included.
Via 1440.
In a separate interview, frontman David Gilmour had this to say about the current state of the music industry: “[It’s] a tough one these days, and for people who are recording in it, the rewards are not justifiable. The rich and the powerful have siphoned off the majority of this money… It’s not the greatest era that the world has been through, as gradually all the work moves to robots and AI, and the amount of people creaming off the money gets smaller and smaller and they get richer and richer.”
In last week’s newsletter, I noted the dark side of more artist catalogs being snapped up by private equity and investment firms hoping to make a quick buck on licensing deals.
Speaking of licensing, you might’ve noticed that some of your favorite songs were no longer streamable on YouTube. But YouTube has now reached a deal with SESAC, which oversees the rights to music by Adele, Nirvana, Bob Dylan, Green Day, R.E.M., and Rush (to name a few).
It’s all a bit overwhelming, and reveals the danger of so much of our art and culture being on streaming services that must regularly negotiate deals to ensure said art is accessible. On the one hand, artists absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work. On the other hand, it’s frustrating to keep track of everything, and feels like our access to artistic experiences is increasingly at the whims of faceless corporations.
All of which is yet another reason to buy physical copies of the stuff you really love and enjoy.
Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn laments the “sinister” effect that social media has had on fans.
The rise of the selfie now means that anyone who does recognise you wants a photo. That brings with it the knowledge that a photo of you at the shops, wearing track pants and no make-up, will be on the internet forever. It also brings the feeling that you are being turned into “content” for the person photographing you; something they can use to pep up their Instagram account. All of this is fine up to a point, but what seems to be vanishing is the point at which a famous person is allowed to say no.
South Korea has the dubious reputation of being the country “most targeted by deepfake pornography,” which highlights its growing divide between men and women.
“The number of male juveniles consuming deepfake porn for fun has increased because authorities have overlooked the voices of women” demanding stronger punishment for digital sex crimes, the monitoring group ReSET said in comments sent to AP.
South Korea has no official records on the extent of deepfake online porn. But ReSET said a recent random search of an online chatroom found more than 4,000 sexually exploitive images, videos and other items.
Reviews of district court rulings showed less than a third of the 87 people indicted by prosecutors for deepfake crimes since 2021 were sent to prison. Nearly 60% avoided jail by receiving suspended terms, fines or not-guilty verdicts, according to lawmaker Kim’s office. Judges tended to lighten sentences when those convicted repented for their crimes or were first time offenders.
Via Techmeme.
Related: The US currently has no federal legislation regulating deepfakes, though Congress is currently considering legislation to “regulate the creation, disclosure, and dissemination of deepfakes.” Several states, including Florida, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Texas, have all passed deepfake legislation. My own state of Nebraska has not yet enacted any sort of AI-related regulations.
Joseph Holmes reviews the God’s Not Dead movie franchise, in which beleaguered Christians are seen standing up for their faith.
Ten years after its inception, it’s hard not to see the God’s Not Dead franchise as a wasted opportunity. The movies emerged at a time when Christians needed a way to wrestle with our decline in numbers and cultural influence. We needed stories about how to stand up for ourselves in the world as it really is without becoming what we’re fighting against. We still need those stories. Here’s to praying that in the next ten years, other storytellers come along who can do better.
I’m really enjoying Reactor’s “Science Fiction Film Club,” which offers deep dives into some of the greatest and most beloved genre movies of all time. Recently, Kali Wallace reviewed Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, one of the most significant works in the cyberpunk genre.
Philosophers have been arguing about the theory of mind for a long time, and they’ll keep arguing about it well into the future, because that’s what philosophers do. And science fiction writers have always been around to turn those arguments into stories, because that’s what science fiction writers do. The nature of sci fi — specifically how it imagines to be real what is not real, but could be — makes it a powerful way to tackle questions such as “What is a mind?” and “What is consciousness?” and “What is life?”
Even better, sci fi lets us do it all within the context of cyborgs engaging in a violent shootout with giant crab-shaped armored tanks in an abandoned building, which is, of course, the best way to have any serious philosophical discussion.
Kristen Panthagani considers the impact that shaming anti-vaxxers and vaccine skeptics has had on the rollout and acceptance of the COVID vaccines.
The rejection of carefully collected, peer-reviewed data in favor of rumors and memes is understandably infuriating. If universally adopted, this would make our society collapse. For people who have devoted their lives to science, medicine, and public health, it makes sense that this gets under our skin and infuriates us.
But in the irony of ironies, reacting out of anger to defend evidence-based medicine is, itself, very much not evidence-based. Unfortunately, it will only make things worse, furthering the very problem we are trying to fix.
Although Panthagani’s writing specifically about vaccines, the same principles apply to other topics including climate change, the 2020 election results, and even conspiracy theories like the flat Earth movement.
Several years ago, I watched a fascinating flat Earth documentary titled Behind the Curve — which can be watched for free on Tubi — that didn’t ridicule flat Earthers but rather, let them speak for themselves. While some criticized the film for giving flat Earthers a platform, Behind the Curve contained plenty of information that debunked flat Earth beliefs and even included instances of flat Earthers debunking themselves. It just never mocked or attacked them.
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