{"id":659,"date":"2016-07-02T12:20:02","date_gmt":"2016-07-02T12:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=659"},"modified":"2016-07-02T12:20:02","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T12:20:02","slug":"beyonce-black-mirror-pokemon-go-arrival-global-warming-amitav-ghosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=659","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon vs Aliens: 2016\u2019s Cultural Milestones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"container page-content\"><p><span class=\"dropcap\">T<\/span><\/p><\/div><p>he year 2016 in cultural milestones has been the year that lived out the double-edged Chinese adage, \u201cMay you live in interesting times.\u201d These \u201cinteresting times\u201d have been captured in the film and literature of this year. Our selection of these cultural events shines a light on the moments that brought home an uncomfortable awareness of who we are and the world we live in.\n\n<strong>Black-Mirrored Lives\n<\/strong>It\u2019s an age of dual personas, where the reality of our humdrum lives is nipped and tucked into pretty-looking updates on social media. We deserve the best, not because we worked to earn it but because the world seems to be tailored around providing it to us. If anything, from our cabs to our food to the hotels we stay in, is less than optimal we rate it as such. What could possibly go wrong, right?\n\nAs the first episode of <em>Black Mirror<\/em> Season 3 exhibits: Everything.\n\n\u201cNosedive\u201d is set in a filter-friendly world where every human being gets a rating out of five. That rating is sacrosanct and affects the minutiae of everyone\u2019s existence, from your job to your apartment. The protagonist\u2019s anxieties of how she\u2019s perceived, overtakes who she is. As we uncomfortably watch her affirm to the pastel-hued confines of her ecosystem, we find our own insecurities reflected.\n\nNow you might be tempted to dismiss this as <em>Twilight Zone<\/em>-esque paranoia porn, but you should look up Peeple, an app that lets you rate everyone you know and give them recommendations based on professional, personal, and romantic interactions you\u2019ve had with them. You should also consider why you won\u2019t take Uber drivers with a rating lower than 4.5 or why you won\u2019t order food from a restaurant with a bad order streak on Zomato. This episode is not a hyperbolic warning story of where we\u2019re headed. It\u2019s an honest assessment of where we already are.\n\n<em>\u2013 Nimisha Misra<\/em><em>\u00a0<\/em>\n\n<strong>Our Great Derangement\n<\/strong>Earlier this year, author Naomi Klein spoke of how \u201cenvironmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground\u201d once in her stunning <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v38\/n11\/naomi-klein\/let-them-drown\">essay<\/a>, \u201cLet Them Drown\u201d. The essay examines the world\u2019s geopolitical order as we intensify our steady tumble downhill, laughing at or snubbing all signs of climate change unless Leonardo DiCaprio serves them on a plate to us. Klein\u2019s thought found an echo closer home in Amitav Ghosh\u2019s <em>The Great Derangement<\/em>. Ghosh\u2019s slim volume dwells on the near-absence of the subject of climate change in literature and the arts. In a particularly chilling sequence in the book, Ghosh imagines a hurricane in the Arabian Sea that would put paid to Mumbai. Yes, the complete flattening of that bourgeois playground Klein spoke of. The book and the essay together served as an urgent truthbomb in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/feature\/goddard\/2016\/climate-trends-continue-to-break-records\">warmest year<\/a> on the planet. We can no longer afford to think of what happens in Canada or Israel or India or the Niger Delta as isolated events. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand.\n\n<em>\u2013 Karanjeet Kaur <\/em>\n\n<strong>Come Together\n<\/strong>They arrive. What happens now? \u201cThey\u201d in this case, are a bunch of aliens who suddenly descend on Earth with an unknown purpose, causing the world to lose their collective shit. While the USA, saviours of the world, debates the best course of action, the perpetual bad guys, Russia and China, attempt to wage war and eradicate these foreign devils.<em> Arrival<\/em> is based on the award-winning novella <em>Story of Your Life<\/em> by Ted Chiang that was published nearly 20 years ago, but its contents are germane to the world we currently live in.\n\n<em>Arrival<\/em> shows us that anyone who speaks a different language could be an alien, that they needn\u2019t always have popping eyes or bright green acidic blood. It also held up a mirror to how we stigmatise anyone whose culture we don\u2019t have the tools to understand.\n\nI can\u2019t stress enough the relevance of a film like <em>Arrival<\/em> in our times, as first-world countries confront large-scale migration, the result of wars that they have overtly or covertly supported. The degree of suspicion with which the film\u2019s characters treat their tentacled visitors is eerily reminiscent of the current wave of xenophobia and racism we\u2019re witnessing around the world.\n\n<em>Arrival<\/em> allows you a glimpse into the future. As the film\u2019s main plot reveals, language shapes our perception of time and reality. The ability to speak different languages directly affects our empathy \u2013 but for that we need to talk to each other first. It matters little then if our aliens descend from the heavens or land on our shores by boat.\n\n<em>\u2013 Damian D\u2019souza<\/em>\n\n<strong>Pok\u00e9mon Gone\n<\/strong>Remember Pok\u00e9mon Go? Whatever the hell was up with that? Was it the world\u2019s greatest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/annaborges\/pokemon-go-exercise\">fitness app<\/a> or was it the perfect foil for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2016\/jul\/10\/pokemon-go-armed-robbers-dead-body\">robbers<\/a>? Was it the greatest mobile phone game ever made or was it an app designed to steal <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/can-pokemon-go-really-read-all-your-emails-1783479136\">user information<\/a>?\n\nWhat we do know is that in one month, it spread like an epidemic around the world, added <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2016\/07\/22\/nintendos-stock-sees-massive-jump-in-short-interest-despite-pokemon-go-craze.html\">billions<\/a> to its makers\u2019 stock value, and turned millennials and Gen-Yers into zombies. Perfectly sane adults, capable of functioning well, surrendered their senses to a smartphone game. They hunted for little monsters on roads, in the middle of traffic, in forests, even in temples, and at Beyonc\u00e9 concerts. Pok\u00e9mon Go had more downloads than Tinder in the US in a week, and more stay time than Instagram, WhatsApp, and definitely more <a href=\"https:\/\/theringer.com\/mapping-the-mayhem-caused-by-pokemon-go-ed3bcc996c87\">injuries<\/a> than all of those platforms combined. It forged a community out of strangers walking on the road, looking at their phones \u2013 thousands came together for Pok\u00e9mon Go marches and met up at hotspots. It quickly became a lifestyle.\n\nAnd then, just as suddenly, it ceased to be a lifestyle. As is the nature of these things, the rise of Pok\u00e9mon Go was swiftly followed by its downfall. It reminded you that with all things social media, what engrosses does not always endure.\n\n<em>\u2013 Parthshri Arora<\/em>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our selection of 2016\u2019s cultural moments brings home an uncomfortable awareness of who we are and the world we live in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":660,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Pok\u00e9mon vs Aliens: 2016\u2019s Cultural Milestones<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Our selection of 2016\u2019s cultural moments brings home an uncomfortable awareness of who we are and the world we 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