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Category Archives: current events

I saw on the news at the gym early last week that somebody had created a 3D-printable gun. What I didn’t realize (perhaps because gym news does not come with sound) until the story broke about the State Department ordering the firm to pull the plans off the internet (which came to me from Betabeat via @memories_child) that they had indiscriminately released the blueprints to said 3D-printable weapon to anybody and everybody.

The thing that got me worked up enough to blog (when my disgust wouldn’t fit in a tweet) was the statement in the article that: “Mr. Wilson believes that he is immune to the Department of State’s review procedures as Defense Distributed is a nonprofit and the blueprints are protected under the public domain.”

Being a nonprofit does not make you exempt from anything but taxes, and certainly not arms control statutes. Neither does not violating copyright. Let’s work through how bad of an idea it was to release those blueprints to the whole world:

Yes, Americans are allowed to have guns, but there are lots of countries where it’s either outright illegal or highly regulated. It seems to me that Defense Distributed just broke all those jurisdictions’ laws once for each time the file was made available to someone in any of those places. Clearly the US wouldn’t extradite, but good luck to the DD folks on visiting much of the wealthy part of the world on vacation ever.

And then, there may be no national law about background checks, but there are, as discussed in my post about the Boston bombings, many state ones, which it seems to me have been broken once for each time the file was made available to someone in those places. The same is true of laws regulating sale to minors.

More broadly, many Americans may be allowed to transfer their guns to each other without a background check (40% of sales happen that way, according to the statistic floating around the internet—one example–plus informal transfers among family/friends), but Americans can’t as blithely transfer weapons to people in certain countries under laws about arms control. Defense Distributed just broke those laws too, once for each time the file was made available to someone in any of those places.

There are also international treaties about arms transfer. Defense Distributed has also broken those once for each time the file was made available to someone in a location covered by those treaties. Adding these all up, with 100,000 downloads they’re looking at thousands of years in jail were they ever prosecuted. (I don’t think they ever would be, but if it happened-)

Releasing the file indiscriminately was, in short, a demonstration of profound ignorance about implications. (Children left behind! This is such a failure of basic “critical thinking to see the big picture” that everybody should learn.)

Also, not incidentally, it’s an impressive act of American-centrism, assuming either that what is okay in this nation can and should go for everyone else also or that everyone on the Internet is American like themselves. It is therefore perhaps an important moment to consider the fact that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.

Cody Wilson of DD noted that “the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it– to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about.” He’s right that this cat is out of the bag, which he terrifyingly describes as DD “winning”; now what is left for the consequences to come rolling in.

The first time someone commits a crime with a gun printed from DD’s plans, I would wager that they would potentially be liable, if not criminally than civilly—a person might not win that case, but it might not get tossed out of court immediately either.

Moreover, the ideology that sees complete, unfettered access to firearms as the divine right of Americans (and maybe humans generally) is often coupled with one that is ready to deny rights (including human rights) to anyone it classifies as “terrorist” (a term that gets thrown around quite loosely in this realm). I wonder, then, what people who hold such views will do the first time one of these shows up in the hands of a quote-unquote terrorist.

Will they advocate for the DD staff to be treated the same way as Bradley Manning, accused of treason for “aiding and abetting” the enemy (though I’ve seen no discussion of how the release of the WikiLeaks cables was anything more than diplomatically embarrassing)? I doubt it.

Likewise, if the legal system is going to hold the folks at Napster and Grokster financially liable for the infringement that occurs via their product even if they say that’s not what it was intended for, would those same people be ready to throw the book at the uncontrolled transfer of this intellectual property, since DD could reasonably be expected to know it would be used to shoot people? Again, I doubt it.

Both the Manning and filesharing cases are nonsensical, but one could apply their logics to the 3D gun and make some kind of sense. But I think it likely that no one will.

And finally, insult-to-injury, this is not about copyright. There’s a bit of “that word, I do not think it means what you think it means” with the use of “public domain” in the article.

I’m pretty sure that if someone picked up DD’s plans and started selling guns based on them, they’d be upset and maybe sue. I suspect, that is, that they haven’t relinquished their ownership of the blueprints (i.e. given the ownership to the public in the public domain) even if they have chosen to make them freely available. Plus, copyright has exactly nothing to do with gunshot wounds.

I find myself unable to muster a blog post this week. Not because I’m busier than usual, but because events this week have worn me down too much to try to contextualize them or think any big smart thoughts in their general direction. As one tweet put it:

So instead of a blog post—since (as I learned recently) one’s arrangement of other people’s work is considered creative labor enough to copyright (West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, Inc., 1986), and I figure that also means it’s intellectual labor enough to be worth putting  up—a curated list of things I’ve found useful in making sense of the past week’s events. And yes, I could have (and maybe should have) used Storify, but I am making you visit my site instead.

via @j_l_r

(via @j_l_r)

On Boston and media:

 

Daren Brabham’s The Boston Marathon Bombings, 4Chan’s Think Tank, and a Modest Proposal for an Emergency Crowdsourced Investigation Platform at Culture Digitally, suggesting the benefits of crowdsourcing investigations.

And the rebuttal to such arguments:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, potential downsides to the constant flow of information:

 

 

 

 

 

Key Question: Has the sum of CNN’s terrible coverage decisions reached critical mass? (Or, as an alternative measure, New York Post level? The Apology the New York Post Should Have Issued, via @mikemonello and @kouredios)

First, CNN had Steubenville and only worrying about the boys’ ruined lives, then reporting an arrest inaccurately, and then:

 

 

On Boston in Post-9/11 context:

Stay the Hand of Vengeance: From Guantánamo to Boston, why Americans have a dangerous tendency to overreact to terrorism at Foreign Policy

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Bronx idiots beat up Bangladeshi man hours after Boston bombing for looking like an ‘Arab’  (via @willbrooker)

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(via @mikemonello https://twitter.com/mikemonello)

(via @mikemonello, though, as @kouredios pointed out, the state of Massachusetts has background checks regardless of any federal shenanigans)

 

 

 

 

 

And for the other event that left me disappointed in humanity this week, on the defeat of background check legislation in the Senate:

For the Love of God, Just Call It a Filibuster at The Atlantic

Curbing Filibuster Abuse policy paper from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

 

Next week, regular blog post, promise.

There has been a ton of writing about all the wildly awful things about the Steubenville sexual assault case: the slut-shaming and victim-blaming; marksdubbsthe focus on the boys’ “ruined lives” at the expense of any mention of the impact on the person who experienced the assault; CNNCNN’s bizarre coverage (which prompted petitions to land in my inbox from three separate progressive organizations); and all the awful things that got said on social media (brought to my attention by @AmandaAnnKlein). Also, there was a truly odd use of the word “alleged”–its purpose is for the perpetrator, to preserve “innocent until proven guilty,” not for the victim, to imply nothing ever happened, mmkay?

All of those things have been critiqued, I think, extraordinarily well, and I don’t think I can improve on that.

What I want to talk about is the ways this may be a turning point for electronically networked youth culture.

This is not to suggest, as some journalists have, that somehow the events are a product of electronic networks, as with Susanna Schrobsdorff’s statement in Time: “Joking about rape, referencing sexual acts and girls making fun of girls perceived as ‘sluts’ is just part of teen online culture now.”

This is not part of teen online culture. It’s part of teen culture, full stop. And it’s not “now”; as someone who presumably went to high school more recently than Schrobsdorff, I can vouch that saying these kinds of awful things is not new. What’s new is the visibility, the leaving of traces.

I’m a scholar of gender and sexuality and media; lots of people in my circle account themselves feminists. And as a result, an interesting juxtaposition occurred on my Twitter feed during the week of March 18: Veronica Mars and Steubenville. (I was late on Veronica Mars because of SCMS, and now I’m late on Steubenville because Veronica Mars broke first. A day may come when a news event will coincide with my blog production cycle, but it is not this day.)

But watching the last couple episodes of Season 1 of Veronica Mars the other weekend (in which, spoiler alert, Veronica finally pieces together what happened the night she was drugged and raped) in conjunction with the verdict in the Steubenville case coming down, there were both such similarities between the fictional case and the real one and such crucial differences that it got me thinking.

In VM, as in Steubenville, lots of people witnessed sexual things happening to a drugged girl who everyone assumed was drunk and slutty.  All of those witnesses (with the exception of the ex-boyfriend in the VM case), did not act to stop the events from occurring, which makes them morally responsible even if legal codes often don’t have a way to make such bystanders criminally responsible. (Though, you know, bystander effect is a real thing that happens.)

When Veronica could not remember what happened, and knew only that something had, it took her a year of piecing together disparate sources to figure it out. In Steubenville, electronically networked youth culture recorded everything, and though the local authorities were not inclined to intervene until prodded by national outrage and Anonymous, those (prosecutable) traces made the difference. As Richard Oppel wrote in the New York Times, “because the victim did not remember what had happened, scores of text messages and cellphone pictures provided much of the evidence” in the trial.

The fictional bystanding and the subsequent harassment of Veronica as slutty took place in meatspace, was ephemeral, left no traces. The parallel with the real-life crime is that “the trial also exposed the behavior of other teenagers, who wasted no time spreading photos and text messages with what many in the community felt was callousness or cruelty” (Oppel).

At SCMS a few weeks ago, I attended a paper on bullying in Nickelodeon TV show iCarly, given by my colleague Martina Baldwin. One thing that came up in the Q&A after the session was that, while there’s a long tradition of young people being awful to each other, the difference is in the traces. Things that used to be said in hallways and heard by only a few people now last longer because they are written down; by comparison to the nasty note written on paper, the text message or Facebook posting is exponentially more transmissible and harder to destroy. (Of course, this is the paradox of the Internet: things you want to get rid of last forever; things you want to preserve disappear.)

Indeed, the moral panic around “cyberbullying,” while technologically deterministic in suggesting that such things never occurred before the Internet, may not be totally off base. First, there’s the increased nastiness that comes with not bullying someone in person (this is not just true of youth; see the comments on any news story with a controversial topic, many if not most of which are written by adults). Second, there’s the intensification that comes with the seeming permanence and “everybody knows” aspect of these modes of harassment.

But now, the people who did not assault the girl physically but did do so emotionally and socially may also face consequences. The Ohio attorney general has announced that he “might consider offenses thatsteubenville1 include obstruction of justice, failure to report a felony and failure to report child abuse” (Oppel). This is an interesting turn of events, and not for the reason suggested by what the judge apparently said:

(Which sounds a bit like “you would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”) While it may indeed serve as a lesson to kids to keep their torture of each other more private, it also has another potential:steubenville2

Youth culture is, more or less, what it has been—if not always, at least as long as I’ve been aware of it. It was already highly networked and skilled at the transmission of information, particularly in ways that harass and harm others.

But the fact that the youth network is now electronic made all the difference in securing justice for that girl in Steubenville. Even more broadly, the use of electronic media traces as evidence in prosecution raises the possibility that the unique ways that these technologies intensify the awfulness of teen culture may begin to recede. In this way, despite all the ridiculousness that has surrounded it (see again the first section of this blog), the verdict is an incredible step forward.

The media studies blogosphere blew up March 13-15 over the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to produce a movie based on 2004-7 TV show Veronica Mars. I’m a little late to the party because I had a March 18 blog post in the works already, but here I am now, with a hat tip once again to Suzanne Scott, who has a way with naming even in three-sentence blog prefaces and gave me “fan-ancing.”

I am, as many are, troubled by the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign. I will also, as many have done, preface the analysis of my concern with a statement that I really like the show. I am late on that as well, having just finished the first season via Netflix, but I get why people are willing to throw money at there being more of it.

The reward on movies has always been privatized—that’s what some people are pointing out as why the Kicksterter campaign is not a problem, as with Jason Mittell’s comment in his post Veronica Mars and Exchanges of Value Revisited that “we’re basically just pre-buying merchandise, DVDs, or experiences. How is that unethical?” However, socializing the risk of producing a large-scale film is new. And it’s symptomatic. And it’s probably not going away.

I’m not the only one to speak the language of risk. Bethan Jones, in her Fan Exploitation, Kickstarter and Veronica Mars, noted that this is a situation where “the risk and reward seem reversed, with all the risk — i.e., the initial investment — falling on the fans, and all the reward going to Warner Bros.”

Luke Pebler’s post My Gigantic Issue With the Veronica Mars Kickstarter similarly objected to risk being shifted off of industry: “They’re large, for-profit companies with access to vast capital.  On a certain level the studio’s raison d’etre is to bear financial risk, to float millions of dollars of this year’s box office money to make next year’s movies.”

But I want to make a larger argument about what the VM Kickstarter gestures toward. The socialization of risk in conjunction with private reward has become increasingly visible after the burst of the housing bubble. While I am not an expert in economics to say when risk actually started to be broadly socialized, the recent economic downturn produced a conversation about it, at least in the circles I run in.

During the bubble, some people made money hand-over-fist doing risky things, and when it fell apart large institutions were dubbed “too big to fail” (and, as petitions from progressive organizations in my inbox have complained recently, “too big to jail”) and bailed out. Now, I understand that just letting the economy implode and not taking action would have been worse, but why not bail out regular people instead? I am not aware of any non-activist conversations about spending the same money at the bottom instead, and I know it would have been a political nonstarter.

So, big financial institutions got bailed out, and that was expensive, and lots of people lost jobs and homes and the tax base shrank, such that the federal government is short on cash (well, shorter than usual since the Bush tax cuts and unfunded wars), which has, predictably, led to calls for cutting spending, by which the financial conservatives mean the social safety net. Bailouts at the top, but austerity at the bottom.

And the VM Kickstarter, as an example where average people are asked to take responsibility to pay for large institutions’ tabs, absolutely participates in this austerity logic of socialized risk and private reward. It is symptomatic of the way we have come to think about financial relationships between regular people and the structures of capital.

Interestingly, it’s also indicative of the logic of financialization. As Pebler points out, “huge conglomerates ought to be able to take small risks with lower-budget stuff, because they’re so rich they don’t care.  What’s $2mil to Time-Warner’s bottom line?  But, of course, they don’t.  Instead we’re getting the opposite: the studio exploiting a loophole in order to shift (some part of) these risks onto their fans.” Why is that? Because no amount of profit is ever enough in a financialized system and any cost that can be cut must be to keep shareholders happy.

And because of the Kickstarter campaign’s participation in the hegemonic economic thinking of the contemporary moment, I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I agree with Pebler’s assessment that “this campaign has stepped boldly over a line that established content creators have been edging towards on Kickstarter for some time, and I predict it will end up being a tipping point.”

On the other hand, though I do tend to be pessimistic, there is some tiny chance that this will open up a conversation about how it is we want our media to be produced. Richard Lawson of The Atlantic Wire wrote, “I guess my ire is really directed at the famous and semi-famous people who, rather than hustle around town drumming up the money from proper backers and investors and then hoping money from their fans will roll in, just make some cutesy video instead and figure their work done,” and it got me thinking: Who says that large-scale capital is the only “proper” backing structure for media production? Why can’t regular people become proper backers? monello

As Mike Monello tweeted:

The potential to cut out the middleman and let fans and creative workers come together to make things they both love is very appealing for everyone (except studios). As Jones notes, “donating towards the funding of a film instead of buying a ticket after its release also raises interesting [questions] about the extent to which the film will be moulded by what fans want,” and I’d wager that hope of having shaping power is part of the motivation for donation.

The problem, of course, is that shifting the definition of proper funding isn’t really what’s on offer here. It is, as Bertha Chin wrote in her The Veronica Mars Movie: crowdfunding – or fan-funding – at its best?, “a studio film that Warner Bros is essentially too cheap to finance.” Or, in Lawson’s lively prose:

What annoys me is that the campaign’s success might embolden other essentially corporate interests to do the same thing. It’s free money and they pocket all the profit! It’s a great arrangement for them, so why wouldn’t they try it? As charming as the Veronica Mars crew is, some darkness lies behind their big idea. Which is why it might ultimately be better if it fails. There, I said it. Corporate opportunism posing as empowerment of the masses is not something we should encourage.

Lawson picks up on several key points: it’s “essentially corporate interests” who are benefiting even though the face of it is the creator (Rob Thomas) and actor (Kristen Bell) we all so love; ultimately, Warner Brothers “pockets all the profits.” So we need to look hard at “corporate opportunism posing as empowerment of the masses.”

This is not, of course, to paint the contributing VM fans as victims. I am sensitive to Chin’s critique that:

Frustratingly, fan agency always gets left out in arguments which purport concern that fans are being duped by studios and networks. Perhaps, rather than assuming that fans are being duped into donating towards a studio film, thought should be given to implications the success of this campaign might bring to Hollywood’s system; or more importantly, the power fans can wield if they decide a Veronica Mars movie is deserving to be made.

Or Joss Whedon, interviewed in Buzzfeed: “people clearly understood what was happening and just wanted to see more of the thing they love. To give them that opportunity doesn’t feel wrong. If it was a truly wrong move, I don’t think it would have worked. I feel like people would have said, ‘Hey, that’s not fair! That doesn’t count!’”

As Mittell points out, “while I’m giving my money to Warner Bros., I do the same every time I pay my cable bill or buy a ticket to one of their films. But this time I’m getting something more palpable: I’m entering into a commercially-facilitated, serialized one-way relationship with a mass media text and its production crew – which is a pretty good definition of fandom in general.”

These folks have a point. We can’t assume fans are blindly throwing money. This does have structural similarities to other forms of fan activity. Fans aren’t duped.

Or, at least, they aren’t uniquely duped. I do think that the pervasiveness of the logic of socialized risk and privatized reward in the world at large has everything to do with why Kickstarting a large corporation’s product makes any sense at all. It’s why fans participate, but it’s also why the people involved with Veronica Mars are doing it. By and large, this is not something anyone is questioning, about any of the things to which it is applied. But we need to look at the Veronica Mars Kickstarter in exactly that context.

As Selma, Alabama hosted a commemoration this weekend of the 1965 marches for voting rights, the first of which is known as Bloody Sunday for the violence protesters endured, the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority is probably about to gut the Voting Rights Act and fundamentally undermine the right to vote for lots of people.

The case centers on Section 5 of the Act, which mandates that certain jurisdictions have to clear any changes in their voting laws with the Department of Justice. As The Daily Beast put it, “Section 5’s innovation was to stop the discrimination before it occurs. By forcing jurisdictions—mostly, though not exclusively, in the South—to gain preclearance, the Voting Rights Act stops potentially discriminatory laws from being put into place to begin with.”

The complaint is about singling out those particular places, and as the Washington Post explained, “The Supreme Court’s conservative majority strongly suggested Wednesday that a key portion of the landmark legislation protecting minority voting rights is no longer justified and that the time has come for Southern states to be freed from special federal oversight.” (Incidentally, it’s not just the South: also covered are the states of Alaska and Arizona and counties in South Dakota, New York, Florida, and California, including the one across the river from where I grew up. Full list.)

The way the issue was addressed included some particularly appalling soundbites, as when “Justice Antonin Scalia said Congress’s decision in 2006 to reauthorize the law was a result not of a studied decision but of a ‘phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement,’” because apparently the desire to be able to vote makes one “entitled” rather than exercising a guaranteed right (WaPo).

But it’s not totally off-base to argue against it. Just not in the same way.

I think about Section 5 the way I think about a lot of things—affirmative action, hate crime laws, etc—it doesn’t solve the problem it’s supposed to, and in fact defines the problem in a way that makes it harder to solve . . . but we can’t afford not to do anything at all.

I do think that singling those jurisdictions out is a problem. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Chief Justice John Roberts, a vocal skeptic of the use of race in all areas of public life, cited a variety of statistics that showed starker racial disparities in some aspects of voting in Massachusetts than in Mississippi.” Though those statistics are probably cherry-picked, he’s right that the South isn’t the only place with an institutional discrimination problem.

I mean, clearly these particular jurisdictions have ended up on the list because they do have a history of obvious institutional racist action that weighs on the present. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in the proceedings, “it was a recent violation by a town in Shelby County that led to the current case. ‘Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?’ she asked” (WaPo).

The problem with Section 5 is that it defines the problem in a way that makes it harder to solve: It implies that election laws other places don’t need scrutiny for how they disenfranchise people of color. But they do. They desperately do.

The recent spate of Voter ID laws, for example, make voting harder for poor people, and people of color are disproportionately poor. Unimaginable as it may be for the middle class, lots of people live without state-issued ID, because they don’t drive, don’t use checks, don’t have a bank account, etc. Demanding that people get an ID in order to vote is a de facto poll tax.

It may be “just a few dollars,” but for people truly on the edge every penny counts; as eloquently described by John Scalzi, “being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.” That person can’t afford the 20 bucks an ID costs here in Illinois. And the actual fee doesn’t account for work time lost to go to the DMV, since the working poor tend not to have jobs where they have paid time off.

On top of that, the kinds of documents one needs to prove one’s identity aren’t always readily available if your parents were also poor or if you were ever homeless. Not to mention the ways the requirements for replacing documents are self-referential: generally, all of the forms of ID you need to get a Social Security card require a Social Security card to get. So good luck with that.

Moreover, navigating bureaucracy to get any of these forms of ID—or to apply for a hardship exemption on the fee, say—is a middle-class skill that poor folks often don’t have. And even if they do, getting overworked, underpaid, badly treated and generally grumpy bureaucrats to help, well, Scalzi again: “Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid. Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.” (Read the whole thing. And the additions to the list in the comments. It’s amazing and wrenching.)

This is just one requirement, voter ID, but we can see how it fundamentally undermines the supposedly guaranteed right to vote. Middle-class people of color won’t have problems, which then opponents of laws like Section 5 can then point to as evidence that protections aren’t needed, but they clearly are. Just because suppressing the right to vote doesn’t look like this picture on the right anymore, people argue that it no longer exists, but I’ve just shown how the same problem has taken new form.

The challenge here is that the discrimination is most immediately and clearly on the basis of class, which is currently not a protected category (even though it really should be, but what can you do when the law is fundamentally an essentialist enterprise?). Again, the problem gets defined in a way that makes it harder to solve.

Of course, due to histories of discrimination people of color are disproportionately poor, which means that this has a disproportionate impact on them. There’s a reason that things like poll taxes and literacy tests worked as a way to keep black folks from voting in the South. (And, the history is less well known, but probably Native folks in Alaska and Latinos in Arizona were subject to similar obstacles to land those states on the list.)

Voter ID has both a financial and educational component, so it’s even more efficient. It also seems reasonable and uncontestable because it plays into post-9/11 paranoia and surveillance culture.

But it’s not just being implemented in the South, and neither are any of the other ways voting is being restricted. And again, legally confining the problem to those jurisdictions might make the rest of the country feel better, but it doesn’t improve people’s capacity to vote.

The Washington Post says that

“The symbolic significance of Section 5 could make the court reluctant to strike it down entirely. Instead, the justices could keep the section but declare that the formula used in selecting the covered states is outdated and must be revisited. Proponents of the law say that would effectively doom Section 5, because it would be hard to get a new formula through a partisan and polarized Congress.”

What’s important to realize, though the law doesn’t and can’t, is that the symbolism, the encoding in law of the idea that you can’t change your laws if it’s going to disenfranchise people, acts as a levee against change even in jurisdictions that aren’t directly subject to it. If it goes away, the dam is open for everyone. (Even more than it clearly is now.) This is the same reason that I see a silver lining in hate crime legislation.

Killing Section 5 by asking for a reworking isn’t acceptable to me, obviously, but in a perfect world I would indeed want a reworking, to take into account precisely the ways that the problem of disenfranchisement looks different now and our old modes of protection just don’t work. In fact, though clearly it’s incompatible with judicial and political reality, I’d advocate for extending it to every voting rights change instead.

We hardly know voting rights in any meaningful sense already—the promise of the universal franchise is persistently undermined by an apathetic and uneducated populace, massive advertising expenditures, the talking head class, and the modes of disenfranchisement already built in—but we need this one. Even if it can’t be expanded, we need the line to hold.