Everyone says Copenhagen and Amsterdam are bike cities, but what about Marrakesh?

London-based Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj tapped into the bike culture of Marrakesh in his latest series of photos, Kesh Angels, on display at the Taymour Grahne Gallery in New York until March 8. Hassan’s version of Hell’s Angels comes from a personal tale: He once worked on a photo shoot in Marrakesh in the 1990s. Everything about the shoot was foreign—the photographers, the clothes, the models. Nothing was actually Moroccan. The artist’s latest shoot can be interpreted as a response to whatshould have happened back in the 1990s: A super pop North African photo shoot with everything that nods to local tradition fused with a twist – from the polka dotted abayas to the camo djellabahs. The photos here capture Moroccan girl bike gangs with smug looks, intimidating sneers, and badassness short of a rock video. They’re not “real big gangs,” of course. The girls are the artist's friends, who usually paint henna tattoos on tourists in the main square; but you still wouldn’t want to run into them in a dark alley. These girls are tough, speak up to five languages, and are full-time moms who work ten-hour days. I spoke with Hassan about bike culture in Marrakesh and his definition of badass.

VICE: How did you come up with the idea to photograph your friends this way?
Hassan Hajjaj: I've been working in this way for years now. I want to show something particular to Marrakesh, and to show that even though we have different cultures and religions; we share a lot in common as people. There is a group of women who work painting henna in this main square in Morocco that is popular with tourists. One I know was an inspiration for this series, Karima, she wears a veil and these really amazing textile abayas and djabellas and also rides a bike to work and back, she's a normal woman who works eight or ten hours a day. She speaks about four or five languages, is a housewife to two kids, [and] built her own house. 

It feels like a North African fashion shoot, did you want to honor roots with style?
I was working on a fashion magazine photo shoot in Marrakesh in the 1990s when I realized everything—all the models, the photographer, the clothes—were from the west and Morocco was simply the backdrop. From then I said it'd be great to present my people in their environment in their kind of way of dressing, and play with it on a fashion level.

What is the bike culture like in Marrakech? Generally speaking, do bike gangs even exist there? How big are motorbikes?
Marrakech is really a bike city; everyone rides them. Women, kids, old men, families, everybody. It's transportation; it's really used for work. A few of the bikes in the photos are from friends of mine we borrowed, but most are their own bikes. There are no real bike gangs. 

Are your friends often dressed this way? Are these badass, colorful outfits easy to find? 
Moroccans have a strong sense of tradition and we are a very colorful nation. But I design the outfits: These traditional Moroccan djabellas and abayas and babouche with traditional prints and knock-off brand-name fabrics from markets in London and Marrakesh. I also build the frames for the photographs using products or objects I find in markets: cans of Fanta, tins, or boxes of chicken stock. This came from when I was growing up in Morocco as many things are recycled to be re-used, and this has somehow come into my work. I wanted to use the repetition of labels in a slightly humorous context, often directly relating to something happening in the photograph, but I also wanted to create a repeated pattern in the frame to evoke the mosaics of Morocco in a modern context.

What was the goal of this shoot and what was the best moment of shooting this series?
I'm impressed with their strength and really aim to show their independence as normal. If these photos were taken in Paris or Rome I imagine I wouldn't be asked what is so unique about women’s biker culture.

If you had a bike gang who would be in it?
My gang would include women like you see in this series; women who just naturally have this strength, swagger, freedom.

See all more of the photos below:

Industrial shrimp farming operation. Image via 

Despite what hackneyed reality shows like Big Shrimpin’ and Ragin’ Cajuns would have you believe, the majority of our shrimp aren’t caught in the wild by mono-toothed shrimpers with names like Blimp and Pecker Head. They’re farm-raised in big, boring aquaculture ponds. For better or worse—probably worse, considering the system’s brutal environmental impact—this type of industrial shrimp farming has managed to sustain our growing craving for crustaceans over the past quarter century. But there’s something in the water: A mysterious, untreatable disease is laying waste to shrimp farms around the world, driving up prices and threatening your next scampi.

Between Costco’s colossal cocktail platters, the Outback Steakhouse’s all-you-can-eat deals, and Red Lobster’s Shrimp Lover’s Tuesday, an average American consumes almost four pounds of shrimp a year—three times as much as they did 30 years ago and far more than any other seafood product. That translates into 1.2 billion pounds of delicious shrimp eaten in the United States every year, over 90 percent of which is imported. Increasingly, those shrimp are raised in aquaculture farms located in tropical parts of the world like Thailand, Indonesia, China, India, Mexico and Ecuador.

So what’s behind the prawn goodbye? The disease is called “acute hepatopancreatic necrosis syndrome,” though it’s commonly known as early mortality syndrome, or EMS. Here’s how EMS works: a bacteria enters the shrimp’s stomach. It kills the shrimp’s appetite, and causes the hepatopancreas—the shrimp’s two-in-one liver/pancreas wondergland—to release poisonous toxins. As the organ collapses, a secondary bacteria attacks. Within days, mortality rates in an aquaculture pond can reach 100 percent.

The juvenile Penaeus vannamei on the left shows gross signs of EMS/AHPNS, specifically a pale atrophied hepatopancreas and an empty stomach and midgut. The shrimp on the right is unaffected.

The disease first emerged in China in 2009. From there, it crept south to Vietnam and Malaysia before unleashing a shrimpocalypse in Thailand, the world’s largest supplier of shrimp, in 2013. Thailand lost 40 percent of its stock to EMS in 2013. Domestic Thai shrimp prices doubled and the cost here in the US—Thailand’s primary export market—jumped 20 percent. Landry’s Inc., the company that owns Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., announced that it was considering menu changes and raising prices.

Although the culprit bacteria have been identified, no one knows how to cure or completely prevent the spread of EMS. “If someone is saying they have a cure for EMS, they’re lying,” Fiona Robinson, the Associate Publisher and Editor of SeaFood Business magazine told me over the phone. “They’re only researching it now. It might take a year or more to figure out how to get rid of it, if you can get rid of it.”

But Professor Donald Lightner, who studies infectious diseases of farmed aquatic species at the University of Arizona, might be closer than the rest. Lightner started studying the disease in 2010. In March 2013, his team published a paper that identified the causes of the disease, and toward the end of 2013, they developed a test to detect it.

“The test we’ve developed could be used to identify stocks that are already infected,” Prof. Lightner said over the phone. But with no treatment available—“if we had one, we’d be marketing it intensely right now,” he said with a chuckle—the only recommendation is to slaughter entire stocks, similar to what we saw with cattle and swine during the UK’s foot-and-mouth outbreaks or Asia’s avian flu pandemics.

“We think it moves with live animals, from hatcheries to brood stock,” he said. “The only way it could’ve possibly gotten to Mexico is if somebody smuggled in some adult shrimp.” From Thailand, Lightner said, the disease could spread to Indonesia and India. From Mexico, it could scamper south to farms in neighboring countries Honduras, Guatemala, and Ecuador.

Though Dr. Lightner says EMS has no affect on humans—as far as we know—the disease is having secondary, unforeseen consequences.

Alfredo Quarto is the executive Director of Mangrove Action Project, an organization that advocates for the conservation and restoration of mangroves around the planet. Though they lack the celebrity appeal of rain forests, mangroves are critical forest ecosystems that protect coastlines from hurricanes and tsunamis, and sequester massive amounts of carbon. A UN report from 2006 indicates that between 1980 and 2005, 20 percent of the world’s mangroves were destroyed. With their easy access to clean water and tropical climates, mangroves occupy ideal shrimp farming territory. Quarto estimates that “over half the modern mangrove loss since the 1970s has been done by shrimp farming.”

Shrimp farm expansion in the Gult of Fonseca (Honduras/Nicaragua). Image courtesy UNEP

As shrimp farms collapse in Thailand and prices rise, other countries are scrambling to cash in on demand. In India, earnings from shrimp exports increased almost 90 percent during the last eight months of 2013. That boom means new farms, in new places. “[Shrimp farmers] move to a place free of disease with better water quality—a place that’s pristine, or at least healthy. But you’re spreading unsustainable systems to keep making your money. We call it rape and pillage—you move on from an area that’s been devastated to create new devastation elsewhere.”

Aaron McNevin, WWF’s director of aquaculture, says the industry is gradually coming around to the fact that mangrove exploitation isn’t sustainable from an environmental or even economic standpoint. (In time, the naturally occurring sulfur found in mangrove soil, once tilled up and exposed to rain, produces sulfuric acid. To fix the problem, farmers have to treat their ponds with copious amounts of agricultural limestone to up pH levels.) But that doesn’t mean mangrove destruction is no longer a threat. “There’s a lot of fear on WWF’s side, particularly in Myanmar and coastal Africa,” McNevin said. “We see those as the next frontiers of global shrimp farming.”

EMS isn’t the first disease to shock the industry: In 1993, white spot syndrome eradicated stocks in China practically overnight—and farmers from Saudi Arabia to Mexico are still fighting to keep it under control. And EMS won’t be the last pandemic disease either. “Disease is a major factor in aquaculture,” Alfredo Quarto. “When you go to a conference on seafood aquaculture, half of it will be about diseases: how to treat them and how to avoid them.” In big shrimp agriculture, disease has become endemic.

While it’s easy to blame big business, these problems stem as much from our bottomless appetite for shrimp’s tender pink flesh as they do from production practices. “When I was growing up in a middle class family,” McNevin said before we got off the phone, “shrimp was a delicacy. It was only purchased when high-class people came over, or people you really wanted to impress. Now, the constant availability of shrimp is something we have to look at carefully. It goes beyond shrimp for shrimp cocktails, or for scampis, or pastas. When you start to look at shrimp as a topping for burgers, or in these really cheap frozen meals, you have to ask: Are we really absorbing the cost of what it takes to grow these things?”

“We’re going to be increasing the demand for shrimp in the future. In a lot of places, people look to America to what wealth and what luxury can be. Does that mean going to a Golden Corral and getting a huge thing of shrimp that’s always there no matter what, eating half of it, and throwing it away? The notion of that picking up in countries that have way more people than we do is really scary.”

PHOTOS BY DAFY HAGAI
STYLIST: DAPHI ELBEE

Model: Sofi Abezgauz for Devotional MM
H&M: Neta Golan

All clothing stylist's own

Portrait by Kazumi Asamura Hayashi

In January 1972, David Bowie and his band set out on the Ziggy Stardust Tour, an 18-month, three-continent sojourn to support the albums The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane. As epoch-defining as the songs on those records were, it could be argued that Bowie’s persona, Ziggy Stardust, had a greater impact on sex, fashion, and the gender-bending pageantry of 70s glam rock that would eventually follow. Many of Ziggy’s most eye-popping outfits—avant-garde kimonos and billowing structural pantsuits—were made by Kansai Yamamoto, a Tokyo-based designer who had no idea that his creations would become such important visual markers in the history of rock ’n’ roll.

Japanese photographer and editor Kazumi Asamura Hayashi caught up with Kansai—who in the decades since Ziggy has continued to push fashion in new directions—to talk about the first time he crossed paths with Bowie and how his interest in Central Asian fabrics led to a coat that can cause car accidents.

Photo by Masayoshi Sukita

VICE: I heard a rumor that David Bowie wanted you to design these costumes so badly that he flew out in his jet to ask you in person. What was it like meeting him for the first time?
Kansai Yamamoto: I actually had no idea who David Bowie was until I saw him wearing my clothes onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Yasuko Hayashi, my stylist, was doing work for David Bowie and gave him some of my clothes. This was the first time I had ever met an artist who was wearing my designs. Before then, I didn’t know how immensely talented he was. (A similar thing happened to me with Lady Gaga. I only found out how talented she was when I looked her up on the internet ten minutes before I met her.) At the time, David Bowie was all about transcending gender. I didn’t know anything about concepts like that, so I remember thinking whoa when I saw him wearing clothes I had designed for women. The clothes were influenced by hikinuki, the method of changing costumes quickly in kabuki. The audience in New York saw the costumes transform a few times during the show. I realized I had done something really cool when everyone in the audience got on their feet and clapped.

I met a lot of famous people in the Western music world through David, and the one thing I can say for sure is that the best people in the world have distinctive personalities that are completely out of the ordinary.

You’ve said your work has a “Japanese beauty.” What do you mean by that?
Why was Andy Warhol obsessed with canned food? It’s the same with me, but I’m going after Japanese themes. Every artist has his own thing going on. I often use Japanese motifs and sometimes wonder if I’m choosing them because I’m Japanese. Having been all over the world and to countries with various religious backgrounds as much as I have, I sometimes wonder where I’m really from. I’m Japanese, so of course I think of myself as Japanese, and I eat Japanese food most of the time. I hardly ever eat Western food. That said, my daughter Mirai’s homemade spaghetti is really tasty! But of course I eat it with chopsticks. It would be rude to try and act cool and eat it with a fork.

Are you planning any new projects?
I can’t mention any details just yet, but I’m thinking of doing a “super show” in Istanbul. There are so many “-stan” places in the world, from Afghanistan to Istanbul, but I have never taken any ideas from them. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the materials of India, China, and Tibet, sure, but I haven’t really looked into Central Asia much. The pants I’m wearing right now are made of fabric from one of the “-stan” countries, and I think it’s a pretty intense material to use for clothing. It’s a weave, so the fabric on the outside and the fabric on the inside are different. I made a coat using a “-stan” fabric as well, and it turned out great. Like, so great that if I wear it around town people will wreck their cars from staring too hard.

You’re thought of as being very strong-willed. Do you think that’s true?
I’ve done everything I ever said I would. Everything. And that’s not going to change until I die. I just want people to remember me as someone who lived up to all of his big words. Sometimes that means I demand too much of others, though. I’m picky about everything, all the way down to the smallest details. But I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist. If I were to aim for perfection, then even a tiny failure would make me droop my shoulders and everything would come apart at the seams. Just imagining that happening fills my head with sorrow!

Sometimes I ask myself, What were the times that were the worst for me? The answer is always when I didn’t have enough money to be stylish. My biggest wish is to keep on being the flashiest guy out there regardless of how old I am.

Photos by Tajima Kazunali

So this is completely insane. Right now, over at the gamer-oriented livestream site Twitch.tv, 68,000 players are participating collectively in a massive game of GameBoy's Pokémon Red.

You can watch and play by clicking right here.

According to the site, “TwitchPlaysPokemon is a social experiment, it is a stream of the GameBoy version of Pokémon Red (151 romhack) running on an emulator. An IRC bot translates buttons said in chat into keypresses Pokémon (simulated in software, no fancy typing robots).”

Instead of one person controlling the character, Red is being controlled by the hive—each “player” can input one of right actions, like up, down, A, and B. Each command is registered and moves the character.

Right now the hive is about halfway through the game, and the livestream has accrued over 5 million views.

The game was created by an anonymous Australian programmer. In a recent interview with the gaming website Polygon, he said he “put it up to see how people would respond.”

For those who haven’t played Pokémon Red, the action is fairly straightforward. The programmer chose the game for its “turn-based gameplay, forgiving nature, and its lack of reaction-based gameplay (which isn’t compatible with [the roughly 20 seconds] of Twitch lag).”

The experiment has had its share of problems, as thousands of jerks try to mess up the gameplay all at once. Spammers have been setting up scripts to throttle the start button, which made the game pretty annoying. This behavior jammed the system, which is now having problems with the start key—besides that, it’s operating fine.

So far, the response has been staggering. I don't play video games, but this raises a few interesting questions about collective online endeavor. It’s not hard to imagine a point in the future where a hive of players rig a game’s gameplay mechanics to operate by percentage, executing “perfect” game play.

As you can imagine, this early example is fairly primitive, and the gameplay is decidedly less than perfect. The character is generally sort of bumbling around, wandering left and right, attempting to use various items and usually failing. Even walking in the right direction can seem almost impossible, and the creator has gone on the record stating that he seriously doubts that the players will be able to complete the game. It might just be a massive argument against democracy. But they’re already halfway through the game, which is impressive enough for me to waste a little more time watching the stream.

@b_shap

The Presidential Palace in Sarajevo in flames on February 7, 2014. All Photos by Minel Abaz.

Anger erupted in the industrial Bosnian town of Tuzla two weeks ago after the closing of the Konjuh furniture factory, one of about a dozen companies that have shuttered after the government privatized many industries over the past few years. Coalitions of workers, students, retirees, and other citizens started marching, shouting-down politicians, clashing with police, and eventually trashing government buildings.

Bosnia and Herzogovina, BiH for short, has seen few economic booms inits short history. And with unemployment sitting at a staggering 44 percent for years (57 percent for young workers), disaffection has spread onto the streets.

As images of anger and police brutality emerged from Tuzla, protests began taking on momentum across the country. On February 7th hundreds of people surrounded the Presidential Palace in the capital Sarajevo and set it on fire. There were similar protesters of varying sizes and intensity in front of government offices in across the country—including one in Banja Luka and Republica Sprska—notable because of the usual political distance between BiH’s ethnic Serbian and Croat-Bosnian populations.

Last Saturday, Al Jazeera reported 300 protesters were injured—mostly in Sarajevo, where video surfaced of police officers pushing dozens of protesters over the ledge of an embankment and into a canal.

Informal protest groups formed, including UDAR and Revolt, helped further organize the protests and set up citizen’s councils known as plenums. Demands from these meetings are still to be determined, but most call for resignation of politicians, cuts to their salaries, and expanded funding of services for workers and the unemployed.

Several regional officials, including Sarajevo Canton’s Prime Minister, has resigned. Others have fled the country. A recent poll shows support for the uprising in the three territories at 88 percent—a surprising number considering supposed inter-ethnic tension that characterizes the divided nation since it was born out of the ashes of the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia.

Writing in the Guardian, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek not only sees the Bosnian Spring as potentially breaking the downward swing of the uprisings, but even imagines a Balkan rebirth of the General Tito’s slogan for the socialist Yugoslavian State—“Unity and Brotherhood.”

But are the protests really as anti-nationalist and class conscience as we might hope? Or are they merely an outlet to the rising frustration and narrowing options for BiH’s youth. I talk to Minel Abaz, a student activist and organizer from Sarajevo, to find out.

VICE: Tell us a bit about your perspective on the protests. How did they start, what were some decisive moments, and where are they heading?
Minel Abaz: They started like any other workers' protest which was held after the Bosnian war in the 90s, so no one expected it would grow to something so massive with the support of organized citizens.

And then there was the most crucial moment of all, when the government (primarily in Tuzla) sent to the workers and citizens the special units of the police which brutally attacked the protesters, which became the spark that still stirs protests in Tuzla, Sarajevo, Mostar, Zenica, and Bihać, which ended in violence, and burning of government institutions.

Now we see protests heading to more solidarity and overcoming ethnic factors in the lower class, and, I hope, to demands for more economical and social justice.

What’s the mood like in Sarajevo?
It’s been a quieter. It's been a few days since the violent confrontations, but people are still on the streets every day looking for a better life and more equal society. Some cities, like Tuzla, has already started a kind of people's government, outside of parliamentary political parties, made of workers, students, academics. They are having directly democratic plenum every day.

We are trying to do something similar in Sarajevo. The Prime minister and the entire Sarajevo Canton resigned, and it’s very important to provide an alternative to this. On February 12th, we had the first plenary session with between 500 and 1,000 people. but our demands have not yet been fully adopted.

I’ve seen videos of cops pushing protesters into a canal and government buildings on fire. Could you describe these events?
I have a friend [that was pushed over the embankment], I was with him a few hours ago. His leg is broken, but he is OK.

And yes of course i've seen buildings on fire, I was there. That was last Friday. Protests began at the president around 1 PM. Forty-five minutes later clashes with police started, and they managed to push us away from government buildings. After a while of waiting, people gathered together, and just rushed to the police. Skirmishes with the police lasted until 2:40 when protesters managed to get to get to the government building. At 2:50 the building was set to flames.

You mentioned you’re involved in antifascism. Is there a right-wing or fascist element to the protests?
I didn't see any fascists, but some patriots and nationalists were there. No one reacted to them, beacuse they were protesting like anyone else. They didn't shout any nationalist messages or something similar, only those against governement and police.

Would you describe what’s happening as a revolution?
Revolution? I don’t know. It started like that, because all the anger exploded in one day. But I think this won't be revolution, because workers and citizens are still unorganized, and still ideologically non-oriented.

Does to uprising in BiH relate to what's happening in the Ukraine? Or what happened in Turkey, Greece, Slovenia last year? Or even to what happened in the Middle East during the Arab Spring? How do you think it fits into a global context?
I wouldn't say it has to do with the protests in Ukraine, because that’s fracture between the EU and Russia. But it is related to protests and happenings in Turkey and Greece mostly, and even with protests in Slovenia and Egypt. But I would say, that protests in Bosnia are most similar to protest in Turkey, because a wide section of people—the lower class, workers, students, pensioners, war veterans—are against the injustices of the ruling paradigm. Although there are no demands yet, we see a deep stratification, social antagonisms.

As Žizek said, and as happened in Turkey—even if the protests gradually lost their intensity—there will remain a spark of hope, because people have lost all confidence in the system and the institutions of the system, and because these protests can be good opportunity for overcoming imposed, dominant ethno-national divisions, and strengthening class consciousness, and the needs of the self-organization of workers and workers' struggles.

Some commentators, including Lily Lynch and Slavoj Žižek, have excitedly noted an anti-nationalist and pro-worker character to the protest, shattering the ethnic divisions encouraged by leaders and the EU. Are these valid claims?
Yes, of course. That is the main cause of protest, a pro-worker ideal, which was recognized in other cities. As  professor Asim Mujkić noted, the uprsing began in a former industrial cities—first in Tuzla—because these areas feel the consequences of privatization.

Besides this pro-worker character of the protests, workers and other citizens are also united against police brutality, and therefore against elites who, under the guise of nationalism, are robbing and privatizing everything for 20 years.

So 20 years was that period, but now, the workers and other social categories are waking up, furiuous, and rising up against the nationalist and capitalist elite, and the entire system. 

Tel Aviv is a complicated place, warm, and unexpected. The most interesting things take place beneath the radar, in small spaces and narrow alleyways.

As a photographer, I'm always searching for that moment when things are about to change; in Tel Aviv, they are changing all the time.

All of these photos where taken between 2013 and 2014 in Tel Aviv. I shoot my friends, my family, the streets, and random people—mostly in the hours of the night.

See more of David Havrony's work here.

Illustration by Cei Willis

When Robert Orell was 13, he got really into Vikings. The young Swede even had a Viking-patterned T-shirt that he liked to wear around Stockholm. It was while wearing this T-shirt that, one day, Orell was approached by a group of people bearing pamphlets and a message that “I was special and was needed for the cause.”

The pamphlets carried an assortment of xenophobic missives. Orell, a young man with “a lot of frustration and anger,” found them instantly appealing. Within a year or two the boy was knee-deep in “the organized White Power environment,” listening to hardcore music and partying with bomber-jacket-clad skinheads (while himself preferring “more of a militarized style”). He saw everyone as an enemy, and sometimes he pursued them with brute force. Orell and his comrades spent weekends getting drunk and looking for trouble.

Twenty years later, Orell has a young son and a rather niche day job. He is a trained psychotherapist and head of EXIT Sweden: a nonprofit whose clients are “those who wish to leave nationalistic/racist/Nazi-oriented groups or movements.” EXIT Sweden works with (mostly) Swedish men as they disengage from their radical folds and transition back into the mainstream.

It’s a good time to be a former radical in the de-radicalization biz. Over the last two years, an international network of "formers"—industry speak for former violent extremists who have renounced their views and now work to rein in in others who hold similar ones—has been growing. Around the world, former-run organizations are taking hold, and governments are using them to boost domestic counterterrorism programs.

Since 2012, support has also come from the private sector. Gen Next is an invitation-only clique made up of San Fran start-up types, and Google is a co-sponsor of Against Violent Extremism (AVE), which is in part a social network and Who's Who centering around former radical hate. “Some of this is providing people with networking opportunities,” says Ross Frenett, who manages AVE on behalf of a London think tank with the jargon-ish title Institute for Strategic Dialog (ISD). “This work can be lonely.”

The idea of mobilizing and deploying formers to wage battle against extremism is partly based on the premise that Formers are best equipped to beat chinks into the armor of radical ideology. They also know what it feels like, on a personal level, to be drunk on radical hate.

But the scheme also makes broader assumptions—for instance that de-radicalizing radicals is a science, and an exportable one, such that former members of al Qaeda, an American fundamentalist cult, an LA street gang, and a clique of Swedish skinheads may be deprogrammed in similar ways. If this is true, then maybe radicalization has little do with the particular form of ideology offered, and more to do with a certain indefinable something that leaves individuals susceptible to the firm embrace of extreme groupthink.

As they mobilize, formers have also been working to build a brand. In a promotional Google video, one member enthused: “My goal is just to take the term former and make it cool!"

It started in 2011, in Dublin, at the Google-sponsored Summit Against Violent Extremism. Jared Cohen—a former aide to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then the newly minted head of Google Ideas, a self-described “think/do tank”—had turned the internet giant’s attention to the problem of internet radicalism. The web, read a company statement, is playing a growing role in extremist recruitment. (Apparently, “55 percent of gang members report posting gang-related videos online.”) By extension, the web should also seek to “provide solutions.”

The Against Violent Extremism (AVE) network, and an accompanying YouTube channel, was born of the Summit. It quickly began recruiting formers, including "a former Muslim extremist from Nigeria and the Christian pastor who once tried to kill him, a former violent Israeli settler, a former member of the Iranian militant Islamic group Ansar-e Hezbollah, a Latino street-gang leader, a former Tamil Tiger, the former founding members of a transnational Salvadoran gang, a former member of one of the world’s most popular skinhead bands, a former member of the Bloods, and a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.”

Nachum Pachenik (Photo by Mark Seliger)

One such former was Nachum Pachenik, the aforementioned “former violent Israeli settler.” Pachenik, son of a Holocaust survivor, was born in a Jewish settlement near Hebron; his family was among the first to settle conquered territory after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. In his early 20s, after leaving a special-forces unit in the Israeli military, Pachenik “became involved in violent activities.” Today, he is a writer and poet, and a founder of Eretz Shalom (Land of Peace)—an Israeli-Palestinian peace-building project.

Another was Usama Hasan who, while living in London at age 13, became involved in an extreme Salafi group. Later, when he was 19, Usama traveled to Afghanistan to train with the Arab mujahideen. After 9/11, Husan began to question his Islamist faith. He is now a physics PhD, as well as a Muslim imam, who works “to promote democratic and pluralistic visions of Islam.”

One of AVE’s goals is to develop best practices, a kind of manual for how to effectively de-radicalize people. Academic and government conferences have studied the effectiveness of one-on-one mentoring. “An important principle in mentoring people involved in extremism is to sow seeds of doubt, but not try to win arguments,” concluded one conference, co-sponsored by the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration. They have also considered specific policy questions, like "Should violent extremists who are arrested be jailed in isolation so that they won’t radicalize other inmates (this is the strategy in Holland)? Or should they be dispersed so that they are shaken out of their extreme element (this is the strategy in Denmark)?" Such is the art of extremist extrication.

ISD’s Frenett says that AVE is now working with University College London on a statistical evaluation framework for former-led projects—though research is in its early stages.

As the network has grown, some unlikely bedfellows have emerged. Building Bridges for Peace was started by a woman named Jo Berry, whose father was killed by an IRA bomb in 1984—and Pat McGee, the former IRA man who planted the bomb. Another former IRA volunteer, Henry Robinson, has teamed up with a man who lost his son in the 1998 Omagh bombing and traveled to Bogotá to help Colombians push the peace-building cause. People who lost relatives in a shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012 have paired with Arno Michaelis, the former white supremacist who sprayed the bullets.

My favorite project is Formers Anonymous, which is based on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, and which treats hateful street thuggery as an addiction rather than a character failing or an ideological predilection. Imagine a bunch of formers getting together over coffee and a pack of cigarettes to talk about how they resisted the urge to beat someone senseless that day—or instead succumbed to the temptation of odious thoughts. The formers keep each other in check, so they don’t revert. “We are a group of men and women who have identified a shared problem of attachment and/or addition to a grossly irresponsible, and/or criminal and/or drug (including alcohol) lifestyle,” the group’s Facebook profile reads. “Formers Anonymous recognizes the existence of addiction to street life as a primary addiction similar to other behavioral addictions such as gambling or eating disorders.”

Increasingly, formers are government partners. In the UK, formers have controversially been consulted by CONTEST, the Home Office’s counter-terrorism strategy. Continent-wide, they feature in initiatives like the European Commission–funded Terrorism and Radicalization (TerRa) network and Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN). Some of AVE’s research has also been supported by the US State Department.

Usama Hasan (Photo by Mark Seliger)

Private organizations are also in the game. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Frenett says that AVE has connected formers with YouTube. YouTube, he says, uses the formers as privileged “flaggers," who help the site to identify hate-inciting online material that should be nixed. “They’re allowing members to input into policy… on what should or shouldn’t be taken down.” Ghaffar Hussain of the London-based Quilliam Foundation says that he has been commissioned by Google to research “radicalization on the internet and how it can be countered.” The work involves interviewing formers about their internet use.

The work has not escaped the ire of critics. Some are skeptical that formers can ever be fully reformed. Others object to the method of delivery more than the message itself. In 2011, shortly after the Summit Against Violent Extremism, Jonathan Githens-Mazer of the European Muslim Research Centre wrote a biting takedown of the event:

“I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable as the true purpose of the summit became clear over the course of the first day. Different panels, organized chat-show style with a moderator and three or four speakers sat in cream white armchairs [and] talked about the fact that they didn’t get enough love from their fathers…”

In particular, critics object to AVE’s grouping of gang violence, neo-Nazism, Islamism, anti-apartheid-inspired terrorism, guerrilla war crimes, etc., into a single category. This strategy, critics claim, denies any validity to the formers’ ideas of national liberation and struggle against oppression. Extremism, in other words, is painted as a symptom of unloving fathers or unstable households rather than something political.

Moving forward, there are also some logistical difficulties. Vetting Formers is tricky, though this has become easier over time, since formers often refer other formers and vouch that they really are formers. There’s also the issue of lingering former-former tension. “There are people from the same backgrounds who won’t talk to each other,” ISD’s Frenett admits. “They take grudges formed from inside the movement and bring them out.”

For Orell, the former Swedish neo-Nazi, help from other formers was an important part of his exit process. At first, he says, “I was very afraid that people were going to judge, to say, you must be crazy or sick. To talk to someone who said, 'I’ve been there as well and it’s possible to get out…': It was such a relief, so healing.”

But the actual decision to leave his skinhead posse began as a personal sojourn. Military service, Orell says, inspired him to be “pure, body and mind, not drinking, being healthy, doing a lot of physical training.” In turn, “I realized that [my comrades] aren’t the elite of the white race.”

Follow Katie on Twitter: @katieengelhart

Poutine Week: A gift and a curse, if you do it like we did.

Seal sausage, lobster, butter chicken, and doughnuts aren’t the usual fare piled onto fries mingled with curd cheese. But then again, that’s likely why Poutine Week has become such a hit in Eastern Canada. For one week, restaurants have carte blanche to shove some of the craziest shit imaginable between a base of fries and a blanket of gravy. What started in Montreal two years ago as a one-week festival filled with fresh takes on the iconic Canadian dish, has since ballooned to four major cities with prospects to spread even further. For some reason, I thought it’d be a good idea to poutine-hop, going from one greasy spoon to another, to binge on five different dishes of poutine in a single day. Either my love for the dish defies all logic, or I want to test the efficacy of my organs under extreme durress.

To kick off my day, I sat down with the founders of Poutine Week, Na’eem Adam and Thierry Rassam, over a Butter Chicken Poutine aptly served at Poutine Centrale. The two men are young, bright and obviously resourceful as they’ve managed to quadruple the number of cities hosting their festival (Quebec City, Ottawa and Toronto) in just two years. They also seem to have a sincere interest in helping out restaurants during one of the worst times for dining out. If their numbers are correct, Poutine Week brings in $3.7 million to restaurants in just one week of winter munchies. They’ve avoided corporate sponsorships so far and the founders seem much more intent on building a poutine-lovers community than raking in sponsorship-dollars. I wish them luck on that goal, but this story isn’t so much about Poutine Week, as it is about outlandish poutines. So, let's get to it!

Na'eem and Thierry, the architects of my gastric ruin.

When it comes to poutine, I tend to be a purist. But for the sake of Poutine Week, I set myself to trying the weirdest interpretations of the dish, and as far as they go—the butter chicken poutine is pretty fucking tasty. They ditched the gravy altogether and went with a butter chicken sauce. In case you’ve never had butter chicken before, it’s a creamy Indian dish full of curry and, well, butter. It tastes great. I love my curry and when you load it with butter and cream, it pushes a special button deep inside my brain that tells me to keep shoveling it down like the world is about to end. There’s a spicy warmth to this dish, which is especially satisfying when it's snowing like a motherfucker outside. With my first dish done, it’s time for me to move on to my next plate. I wish I could say I’m still optimistic about my plan, but halfway through this first one I start to realize how completely screwed I am. Poutine Week doesn’t mess around. These plates aren’t little taste-testers or fancy art gallery nibblin's. This shit is dense. It’s full on pub-fare size and fit for the hoards of maenadic club rats looking to line their stomachs with grease to fight off alcohol poisoning.

Butter chicken poutine from Poutine Centrale.

Because of the horrendous weather, it takes me just short of two hours to finally arrive at my next destination. Chez Boris is a warm little cafe that specializes in freshly baked doughnuts. They welcome me in with a big ass plate of Doughnut Poutine slathered in duck gravy. The ‘fries’ are made fresh on the spot—a flour dusted young man assiduously rolls and cuts the doughnut dough into fries by hand. Knowing I came from VICE, the chef loaded my plate with fist fulls of cheese curds and lathered the gravy on thick. I’m honoured… and a bit nauseous at the idea I’m going to thrust all this into me. Maybe he’s just trying to fuck with me. I don’t know. This plate of fried dough and fowl gravy tests my limits but it also demands me to keep going. Each thick doughnut fry I eat is like a small, curled finger inching me closer to my goal. The gravy is insanely rich, and honestly, it’s a little too much combined with the doughnut fries. It's like the two were fighting it out inside my mouth and the victor will have the honour of killing me with heart disease. I’m forcing my way through a dish I’d normally relish, and all the while the threat of painting the cafe in a vomitus reimagining of a Jackson Pollock painting looms over me.

Doughnut Poutine from Chez Boris.

On the way to the next spot, I begin to re-evaluate some of my life choices. How could something so delicious inflict such pain? How could I have thought this poutine-crawl to be remotely feasible, much less a good idea? I’m not usually down with over eating. I mean, who hasn’t had to loosen a button or two after Thanksgiving and whatever. But this? This is grotesque. Bite after bite, poutine after poutine, I’m cramming so much food down my throat that it’s becoming immoral.

But, then again, to hell with excuses! I’ve only just begun, and there’s no amount of self inflicted guilt that can undo my decision to go balls deep into Poutine Week. It is time to man-up and head to Au Cinquième Péché.

Seal poutine Au Cinquième Péché.

I have arrived and it is time for some Poutine au Phoque. If I felt gluttonous before, I’ve reached a new level now. It’s much smaller than any of the other plates I dined on today, which, at this point, I welcome whole-heartedly. There’s gnocchi instead of fries. Thick lengths of seal merguez hide just below the surface. Brussel sprout leaves and other greens mingle with the cheese curds and a light dousing of Au Jus completes the fanciest of my poutines so far. It doesn’t feel like tapas but it certainly doesn’t strike me as poutine. I guess they’ve decided to meet halfway: some balance between gastronomic pretension and gutter-palate hedonism.

And yeah, I was about to eat seal. I wonder what it would take to successfully rebrand seals as the “pigs of the ocean”; delicious and plentiful and a crucial economic driver in Atlantic Canada. Maybe pictures of the seal hunt have forever taken that possibility off the table. For all the moral niggling my friends had raised about eating cute, big-eyed sea mammals, this sausage doesn’t really look like much. In fact, it tastes like regular sausage. It’s hard to reconcile seal meat when your first thought goes straight to images of adorable, small, furry animals having their skulls bashed in, and a growing puddle of red stains on the otherwise pristine snow. Yeah, maybe seal meat is just unmarketable, tastes ok though.

The Poutine au Phoque was the smallest and most manageable dish of the night, but I still had to take a break from cramming my face, and ended up in a two-hour food coma splayed across my couch. Coming out of my gravy nap I steeled myself for my journey to Frites Alors to sample their Lobster Mobster poutine.

Lobster poutine at Frites Alors.

Sitting here at the restaurant, I can’t even look at my food as I eat it. While I had nothing but good feelings toward all of my previous dishes, this is rough and I’m worried about spewing all over the boozed up college students and low rent decor. I feel a shudder roll down my back every time I stare at my fork and I have to go blurry eyed and act on muscle memory to guide it into my mouth. I force every bite down through sheer will power. Horrible choices. I’ve just made such horrible life choices. This poutine, on a normal day, wouldn’t be so painful. It’s standard; thin and crispy fast food fries with some sort of lobster cream sauce dolloped on top. It’s exactly what all these McGill students want, and I’ve gone for it many times before. When you’re drunk and broke, what’s better than fries, cheese and gravy? But I can’t. I just can’t. Fuck this whole thing in the gravy hole: I give up. I guess it’s Poutine Week for a reason.

Empty, like my soul right now.

Before all of you haters chime in, I’m well aware that I’m falling one plate short of my original goal of five poutines in day, but eating ‘only’ four poutines could potentially save me one very unwelcome trip to whatever room hospitals reserve for pumping stomachs—which I imagine has a very large sink or tub, and almost certainly a drain in the middle of the floor into which they use to hose the stray chunks.

Na’eem and Thierry, I salute you, but for now I’m going to slowly make my way home and try to never think of poutine again. My poor stomach has endured so much. I don’t know for sure if I’ll manage to keep it all down. I do know, however, that this food-baby I’m nursing is so big that I’m going to have stretch marks when I’ve finished birthing it.

Screencapture from the official Nova Scotia CyberScan brochure.

On February 11^th, Justice Heather Robertson made a ruling in favour of Chief Andrea Paul of Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia, enforcing the province’s Cyber Safety Act for the first time in a court of law. Although it seems like a step in the right direction, enacting this new legislation may have just screwed up the definition of cyberbullying.

The internet is anarchical, plain and simple. It’s as close you get to the land of do-as-you-please depicted in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. Online, people do, say and take what they want with little accountability for their actions, giving way to both fantastic and terrible demonstrations of human nature. One of the unfortunate results of this is an incredibly interconnected society with a cyberbullying epidemic, a clear sign that the internet’s legal limbo needs some kind of framework. In Nova Scotia, it took the tragic death of a teenager, brought about by particularly hateful and persistent cyberbullying, for concrete legislation to be enacted. In November 2011 Rehtaeh Parsons was allegedly a victim of sexual abuse, documented via supposed-bystanders’ phones. The photos were later circulated across her school and town. She attempted suicide in April last year, which landed her in a coma, and her family chose to pull the plug a few days later. Although it’s absolutely mind-boggling how the authorities failed to protect her in any way while she was alive, and struggled to bring any kind of justice to her after she passed, one seemingly good thing did come out of the devastating incident.

The provincial government took action and came up with the Cyber Safety Act (CSA), passed on April 25^th 2013. Only 18 days after Rehtaeh was taken off life support, this was the Nova Scotian authorities’ direct response to what happened. This act is supposedly proof that the province is “taking action to better protect victims and hold cyber bullies accountable for their harmful behaviour.” The problem lies in the definition that comes with the notion of cyberbullying: "any electronic communication through the use of technology […] that is intended or ought reasonably be expected to cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other damage or harm to another person's health, emotional wellbeing, self-esteem or reputation, and includes assisting or encouraging such communication in any way." According to David Fraser, one of Canada’s leading internet, technology and privacy lawyers, practicing in Nova Scotia, this is a potential flaw in the hastily written legislation that just might make it unconstitutional. While the section in the Canadian Charter that allows and promotes freedom of expression has its limitations, the idea of bringing in vague concepts like self-esteem and emotional wellbeing into the mix is problematic. The case of Andrea Paul is particularly relevant to this point, as it illustrates the dilemma between political accountability and respect for personal feelings.

On November 4^th 2013, Chief Paul filed a complaint with the CyberSCAN unit created alongside the CSA, which is responsible for its enforcement. According to her statements, the accused, Christopher Prosper, was posting negative, hurtful comments about her and her family on various Facebook pages, including one called “Chief Andrea Paul of I.R.#24 Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia. A year in Review!” On those, he posted a bunch of fun stuff like “Sorry to say your [deceased] mom did not want you as chief!! She probably knew you were evil or not a good leader…” and “Do vote for Andrea Paul, she will back-stab you regardless if your [sic] are an elder… want names, I will produce!!”. He eventually went so far as contacting her teenage daughter after Chief Paul had told him to stop reaching out multiple times. When presented with the evidence, Justice Robertson granted a Cyberbully Prevention Order against Prosper, prohibiting him from contacting Chief Paul or any member of her family, and forcing him to delete his offensive posts. He was also ordered to repay Andrea Paul $750 she spent in legal fees. While his language (and grammar) were wildly inappropriate, one thing that the judgement failed to acknowledge, according to Fraser, is that the root of Prosper’s issue with Chief Paul had to do with how she operated as an elected official. For example, one of his earlier posts went something like: “Fuck sake’s Chief Andrea Paul why are you not having another financial information session? What are you hiding! An increase in your deficit!” They later got more personal: “Hey Chief Andrea […] when do we get our next financial information session!!!!! […] You crook, backstabbing bitch, two-faced to our elders. Your fake smile needs a punch in the face…” Essentially, he had a problem with her politics, and amongst the numerous personal attacks lay genuine concerns about the band’s finances and accountability to its members.

Convicting Prosper by labelling his actions as cyberbullying has the potential to severely limit political discourse on social media forums. Really, where do we draw the line between statements from a concerned citizen and personal attacks when they are so often intertwined in the wonderful world of politics and the notion of self-esteem? By presenting themselves out there, politicians are putting a face on decisions that affect entire communities, some of which will have negative reactions. Social media becomes the ideal platform to directly reach these people and debate over what should and shouldn’t be done. Of course, in the spirit of keyboard courage many constituents cross the line, but immediately labelling their concerns as cyberbullying has the potential to take us back to the times when one could not possibly be in disagreement with the Authority, so to speak. Social media has streamlined interactions between politicians and their people; it seems naïve to not have anticipated the few overzealous citizens who would take it to the next level.

This is not to say that nothing should have been done to stop Prosper, he was, in fact, becoming increasingly threatening in his posts. The CSA however, might not have been the ideal tool with which justice should have been administered in this case. True, the incidents did happen online, but the new act cannot become an umbrella law for everyone who is offended on the Web. This just means that there is an urgent need for more online safety laws with specific mandates that allow for free speech without automatic reprisal. Let us all be reminded that the CSA was enacted in response to what happened to Rehtaeh and others who have lost their lives as a result of legitimate, persistent cyberbullying, not to go after every lunatic behind a keyboard that pisses someone off.

@martcte

Okinawa is a stronghold for car enthusiasts, and our friend Nagayoshi has been drift- and drag-racing for decades. Recently, most of Okinawa's racetracks have been shut down, which leaves Nagayoshi and his pals just one option—to race on the streets of Okinawa. Nagayoshi's car is taken directly from the racetrack to the streets. In the spirit of Paul Walker and not Justin Bieber's pathetic attempt at racing, VICE presents Okinawa's illegal street racers.

Aiud prison in Transylvania, Romania (photo via)

The first time I saw the inside of a prison in my home country was two years ago, while working as an intern with the Romanian justice department. Besides an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach, the thing I remember most from that trip is the realization that anyone can get caught. In fact, at the Aiud penitentiary in Transylvania, I met plenty of people who prove that justice is just another word for dumb luck.

I recently went back to Aiud and spoke to eight inmates who were weeks away from the parole board. They told me about their time inside and what they hope to do once they're released.

Dura George, 24

Sentence: Five years and six months for human trafficking. He's served three years and four months.

VICE: How do you think you'll feel when you walk out of here?
Dura: Like a newborn. You’re born for a second time. I'll get the feeling that everybody is looking at me, but nobody will be.

Complete this sentence: This cell is…
A living hell. It keeps you locked up. You can’t do anything.

What is freedom?
When you can do what you want—when I'm on my motorbike and there’s nothing else, nothing ahead of me, and I just push it to the limit. [Closes his eyes and stretches his arms out like he's holding handlebars.]

What was the most difficult thing to get used to in here?
The fact that I'm locked up all the time. It’s been hard to get used to that—impossible.

What do you want to be when you get out of here?
What do I want to be? I’d like to be a totally different person. I’d like to work so that I can support myself and my family.

Zoltan Gheorghe, 30

Sentence: Five years for violent robbery. He's served three years and four months.

What do you think you'll feel when you're released?
Zoltan: Joy that I’m getting out, that I’m going home to my family, and that all this torment is done. The main torment I've had while locked up is that I don’t have freedom and don't have my family with me.

Do you keep in touch with your family?
Yes, they've visited me. They’re looking out for me and send me money every month. The children are quite young. My son is only four, and my daughter is ten. Only my daughter knows I’m in here. My son keeps asking that I come home. I’m almost there.

What is freedom?
It’s happiness. If you’re free, you have everything you wish—you can do anything you want.

What does friendship mean?
Having enemies. Friends always land you in a bad place. It’s because of them that I’m here.

Tell me a joke you've heard in prison.
When we have our daily walks, the others always say, "We’re going home—we’re going home tomorrow." That’s the biggest joke among the inmates.

What do you want to do when you get out?
To be good, to go to work, to not repeat my mistakes—not do the things that got me here. And I want to work, for my family.

Boldijan Florin Constantin, 24

Sentence: Six years for violent robbery. He's served three years and nine months.

Complete this sentence: This cell is...
Florin: A nightmare. My days go like this: close the door, get out, and then I'm told, "Stop slamming the door, stop knocking on the wall, don’t do this, don’t do that." It gets on my nerves.

Who do you miss the most from the outside world?
My little girl and my mother. My little girl visits me, but she’s young. She doesn’t fully understand, but she knows. She sometimes tells my mother, "He’s in jail. Florin is in jail."

What food do you miss?
Cabbage meat rolls... what else? Yeah, just cabbage meat rolls!

Have you learned anything while you've been behind bars?
I learned to participate in the rehabilitation and reintegration programs they put on here. And that it's important to not have anything on my record—to mind my own business, to get in front of the parole board and go home.

What currency do you use around here?
Cigarettes and coffee; you can’t live without them.

What do you think has changed on the outside since you've been locked up?
Too many things. Where to begin? There is a lot more pickpockets.

What do you want to do when you get out?
To have my wife next to me. I miss her. I miss being next to her. I want to make love until I die. That’s the only thing I'm living for now: making love. You can’t live otherwise.

Stoica Ioan, 27

Sentence: Two years and four months for drug trafficking and consumption. He's served one year and four months.

VICE: Where will you go once you're released?
Stoica: I'm not very good at orientation. What direction is home? I'll go toward there. I don’t even know where I am right now.

How do you imagine you'll feel when you step out of jail?
I can only guess, as I’ve never been through this before. Maybe I'll feel like I've been reborn.

Complete this sentence: This cell is...
My enemy. It holds me back from all my habits. I was used to a life that was way more… totally different from the one here.

How does prison smell?
I can’t find a word that bad. When I came up here just now I smelled cabbage.

Tell me a joke you heard in here.
I don’t know what you were hoping for, but there aren't really any jokes here. We just make fun of people. Just meaningless nonsense.

Did you get a nickname when you arrived?
I had one from home: "Ursu" [the bear]. My parents gave it to me when I was a kid because I was short, fat, and had a swaying walk.

What nice parents you have. What is friendship?
For me, that word had a meaning until I got here. I used to think that friends were like family. But now I don’t. Friends are actually acquaintances and people who are after something. So, someone is your friend until they get what they want. I've acted like that that, too—I admit it. So did everyone around me. Here, you realize there is no such thing as a friend—or at least a real friend.

As time goes by, do things get easier or harder?
Every day is hard for me. It’s hard that you have to wait. My sentence is quite short compared to other people's, but for me it still feels like I’m never getting out.

Coca Antoniu, 29

Sentence: Three years for theft. He has a few more days left.

Complete this sentence: This cell is…
Antoniu: A nightmare. I can’t explain it better than that. I don’t know—it’s a sort of terror. I could kill myself, just commit suicide. It’s ugly in here. I want to get out as soon as possible.

Did you learn any bad habits in here?
They always tell you that when you get out you’re going to come back—that you’re going to steal again. They all say that, the thieves and the prison officers.

What was the hardest thing to get used to here?
That you only have the right to go outside for two hours. But a lot of things are hard to swallow here.

Have you kept in touch with your family?
They’ve only visited me once since I’ve been here. They can’t afford to come—they don’t have an income.

What are you going to do once you're out?
I want to get rid of my friends and my relatives. It's because of them that I'm here. 

Varga C Nicolae, 23

Sentence: Five years and six months for violent robbery. He's served four years and nine months so far.

What’s the hardest thing here?
Nicolae: That they keep you locked up, that they don’t let you go out.

What do you miss the most?
My parents. They haven’t visited me at all. They can't afford to come.

What was the hardest thing to get used to in here?
My cell mates. When they see that you have food or cigarettes they become friendly, but after that they push you away. And when they have stuff, they don’t share.

Did you get a nickname?
Yeah, Coco. It comes from my name.

What does prison smell like?
Misery; what else?

What kind of food do you miss the most?
Food isn't that important, but let me think... roast chicken!

What are you going to do differently after getting out?
I’ll try to find a job, to mind my own business. To be another man, basically.

What does having a criminal record mean?
It reminds you of jail. Maybe you can’t get employed because you have a criminal record. Maybe you’re not given a chance.

Bandulea Roberto Tonini, 31

Sentence: Three years and nine months for theft. He's served two years and one month.

Complete this sentence: This cell is...
A closed room with some bars and four walls. That’s it.

What does prison smell like?
It’s a different smell than the one outside. You know you’re in jail.

Do you have any keepsakes?
The only thing I keep is a little icon that I bought for my mother before she died and never gave to her. And some letters from my wife. This is a place where one keeps one's letters.

Can you get rid of your vices in prison?
It depends on the situation that you’re in. You can do it, but you might not.

What are you going to do differently after getting out?
I'll leave all the gang stuff aside and listen to my wife more. She taught me a lot of good things, and I never listened to her.

Are there any good things you've learned behind bars?
Nothing.

What about bad things?
I learned what bad means—learned about everything we’ve done that got us in here.

Did you get any nicknames?
No, thank God!

What do you think has changed outside?
Not much. It’s just our idea of outside that has changed.

What do you want to be when you get out?
Could I say a pilot? I want to be an ordinary man. A family guy. I haven’t been that so far because I liked my gang too much.

Popa Claudiu, 45

Sentence: Seven years for theft. He's served four years and seven months.

What's the first thing you think of when I say "outside"?
Claudiu: That from now on I have to look when I cross the street, to make sure I don't get hit by a car. The first time I got out, I got stumped at the zebra crossing. I was looking to my right, to my left—I couldn’t cross the street. I'd forgotten cars even existed.

How do you think you'll feel when you walk out of jail?
Like I can do whatever I want without asking permission.

Complete this sentence: This cell is...
Miserable. That’s the first thought that comes to my mind.

What do you miss the most?
My children. I have a 22-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy. I’ve kept in touch with them. I’m from Galaţi in Moldova, and they visited me when I was in jail there. Here, I’m too far away; the last time they came to see me was two and a half years ago.

What kind of food do you miss?
Food isn't that important—we eat to survive. Freedom and not being compelled by rules are more important. Man was born free; it's just that people have invented all sorts of rules to tame him.

So you don't think much of rules?
Rules are made to be broken. They’re not good! Instead of rules, man needs to be educated to not do anything bad—to not hurt anyone.

What does prison smell like?
Like mold. Humidity.

How do you get rid of bad habits in prison?
You’re forced to; you don’t have the means to support them.

Have you learned anything positive behind bars?
No, nothing.

Tell me a joke you heard here.  
Here, you only hear bad jokes. I can’t give you any examples—it's like they're from the Stone Age.

What is friendship?
Friendship doesn’t exist.

Anatoly and other EuroMaidan warriors. All photos by Giles Clarke

The EuroMaidan camp is a sprawling tent city in central Kiev that winds its way up Khreschatyk Street through Independence Square and onward to the former entrance to the Dynamo Kiev football stadium. “Maidan” is an arcane English word that means parade ground or square. For weeks, at the burnt-out entrance of the stadium, violence between the anti-government protestors and national security forces has been the most intense—and deadly. Tuesday’s clashes outside the Ukrainian parliament building punctuated the weeks-long standoff between anti-government protesters and security forces. At least three people have been killed by security forces, and some reports indicate as many as seven people are dead, some by government-paid thugs. At this moment, eyewitnesses report that EuroMaidan is under assault—police are trying to clear the camp out with snipers and grenades. Kiev is on fire again.

Volatile demonstrations in Ukraine’s capital first began on the night of November 21, 2013, after the Ukrainian government signaled that it would not sign an Association Agreement and a Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. Instead, the country’s political leadership would forge closer economic ties to Russia. That night, huge crowds gathered in Independence Square and took over government buildings that have been occupied ever since. Occupiers created an elaborate communication network and a string of action groups responsible for the day-to-day operations of the occupation.

In the ten weeks since, people have arrived from all over the country and erected scores of large ex-military tents, many of them complete with fire stoves and kitchens. This closed-off portion of the city, housing an army of men and women who provide support and numbers, is now globally recognized as the EuroMaidan.

I went to Kiev in early February, weeks after the world’s attention had strayed from Ukraine’s protests to Thailand’s elections and the folly that led up to the beginning of the Sochi Winter Olympics. As I walked from the busy Independence Square toward the frontline for the very first time, I was greeted by a landscape of destruction. Protestors have faced off against a static police line for more than two months now at this wreckage-strewn ice field, demanding the resignation of President Yanukovych and closer economic ties to the European Union. Although protestors won much publicity for their remarkably calculated and efficient takeovers of government buildings in early January, the frontline that I witnessed—hardened by the frigid Ukrainian winter—was the most visually compelling resistance to encroaching authoritarian power I’ve seen in years.

It was a brutal and scarred-looking vista—at a chilly negative four degrees, it seemed like a miniature modern-day Battle of Stalingrad, the World War II clash between Soviet and Axis forces that lasted more than five months. As I walked around this still-smoldering battlefield, I caught glimpses of the civil soldiers (called the "warriors" by other EuroMaidan protestors) all caked in soot and dirt and dressed in various makeshift suits of body armor. Many huddled and talked quietly among themselves while sipping hot tea or standing by the tire walls that face the enemy. About 75 yards away waits a line of police officers in riot gear. They stand by smoldering fires holding shields and batons; behind them are the Berkut—Ukraine's Special Police forces—the legendarily nasty motherfuckers who have already killed four protestors and injured many hundreds more since the uprising began.

As I stood behind these frontline warriors in the piercing late-afternoon cold, I was dumbstruck by it all. This is 2014, yet it feels like another era.

When the protesters built these crude but very effective 15-foot-high barricades, they filled sandbags with snow and piled them on twisted cars and mangled buses, along with other riot debris, to form their lines of resistance.

Many of the men at this frontline hail from places all over Kiev and aren't paid in any way to be there. They come from the dozens of Ukrainian towns that were choked and overrun for decades by badly-corrupted governance.

“We will not move till the president goes—and we will fight with our lives if they attack again,” said a man named Anatoly, who was born in Kiev but had lived for ten years in Lithuania. "I left ten years ago to be a merchant seaman—I couldn’t stand it here, but now I want to come back and live with my young family. This is why I'm here fighting in this place. I will die here If I have to."

There’s a steely look to these men. A few days before, special police snipers took out two of their own. Tension was high here at this final point of resistance.

In the meantime, to keep the police from getting bored, the protestors have placed a huge flat-screen TV on top of one barricade wall and are playing them cartoons and independent news programs.

As I stood between the imposing barricade walls in this smoke-filled junkyard encampment, I thought of the other protest hotspots I had visited over the past few years and realized that I had never seen anything resembling what I was witnessing here. This was truly a protest war zone. I felt uneasy knowing that, at any moment, things could get even worse.

One night, I spoke to a large man who called himself Roman. He was a commander of the Splina, a security group in a tent inside the barricades. Over hot tea and energy bars, we talked about the role and presence of the Splina. He told me that the Splina guards the EuroMaidan resistance with a volunteer force numbering 3,000, who are based in and around Kiev. Rumors swirl about their origins and political ties, but for the time being they have only one thing in mind.

The commander was frank in explaining his mission: “We are here to protect people from the government forces. It was the Bertuk who were responsible for the deaths of our people last week—if they try that again, they will pay. Yes, we are armed. Yes, we have the numbers. And yes, we are prepared to die.” I asked him about reports of attacks on other protestors. “They are lies—created and spread by our corrupt government press.”

"We are really only interested in fighting against Bertuk, and they number about 4,000 here in Kiev and another 1,000 scattered in outlying areas. The civil police are not a problem for us, and it’s Bertuk that will be targeted if we are told to mobilize."

While the Bertuk might lead an official crackdown on the EuroMaidan, government-paid thugs known as titushkis were the first to strike protesters early in the occupation. The titushki are paid on sliding scales. To simply turn up at a pro-govenrment protest they receive about ten dollars, but, for staging and taking part in violence, they are reputed to earn around $90 a day. But Roman almost shrugs them off. “Some are dangerous, but we believe they are falling apart—the government cannot sustain paying the police and Berkut overtime as well as fund a large civilian army,” the leader of the Splina told me.

I also asked about oligarchs who might consider stepping in to help finance opposition against the protestors. To this he replied, “The big businesses are now beginning to understand that this government cannot live much longer, and they are not going to back a losing horse. The longer this unrest goes on, the more difficult it is for business to grow.”

Ukraine’s financial system has begun to feel the effects of this turmoil and political uncertainty. In the first week of February,the country’s currency, the hryvnia, plunged to a five-year low against the US dollar, and the Fitch credit agency downgraded the nation’s credit worthiness amid “weakening confidence.”

Anatoly, my new frontline friend, didn’t think that economic pressure alone would cast Ukraine’s future in the protesters’ favor. “It depends now on what the US and Russia decide,” he said. “It’s not about Ukraine anymore, but more about the superpower struggle. We're just pawns in their games.”

On my way to the airport on my last day in Kiev, my taxi sped by 15 buses, filled with men, parked on the side of the highway near the outskirts of town. My cab driver pointed to the buses and the men and fatalistically said, "Tituskhis.”

Whether they were coming, going, or just waiting—it was impossible to tell from the speeding taxi—I thought of Roman, his Splina group, and the rest of the protesters I had met. So much of the EuroMaidan occupation is about waiting through the frigid winter. Would the spring thaw bring government concessions or more violence?

I wasn't going to hang around to find out.

You know that feeling you get when you stare at a word for so long it becomes uncomfortable and unfamiliar? You know, when the word starts to jiggle and the individual letters float off into space, losing all their meaning in the process? I'm not sure if there's a word for it, but this mini dementia morsel—similar to other mindfucks like déjà vu and ASMR—is in my opinion, one of the last things that makes me feel human. 

At the risk of sounding like the dork from Garden State whose life is passing him by in fast-forward, that's how I feel at fashion week every year. If you take a moment to see past the PR bullshit, media circuses, and coke enemas, the same humdrum hustle and bustle is humbled—leaving you with humorous and sometimes beautiful results.

In the photos above, photographer Nick Sethi gets too close for comfort. Playing with tight crops and candid compositions, his photos offer an unadulterated backstage view at Hood by Air's fall/winter 2014 collection. Enjoy.

More photos from this series can be found here. 

Illustration by Craig "Questions" Scott

Gaby Breitenbach has seen and heard some awful things. The German psychotherapist is telling me about how sometimes, from a very young age, women are systematically tortured by people seeking to split their minds into multiple identities. The desire is to control the victims, of course, but also to leave them with an identity that seems perfectly normal to strangers. While the victim's everyday identity will have no "memory" of the trauma they've experienced, Breitenbach says the abusers are able to "summon" the other identities with various triggers. This can be something as simple as a ringtone, for example.

This method of mind control is known as "ritual abuse." Most of the time the abuse is sexual in nature. Sometimes the abusers crave power; sometimes they're just being cruel. Sometimes they're pseudo-religious nutjobs, sometimes they're fascists, and oftentimes they are organized crime networks. Sometimes the abusers use their victims to gain membership to a secret society; sometimes they flick a switch in their minds to make them commit suicide. The world can be an incredibly shitty place.

Last month, Breitenbach opened a safehouse to treat victims of ritual abuse in Germany. Vielseits, which translates to versatility, is the first of its kind in Europe and offers trauma therapy to anyone who walks through its doors. I gave Gaby a call to find out more.   

A drawing by the child identity of an adult ritual abuse victim

VICE: Hi, Gaby. First off, why are projects like Vielseits necessary?
Gaby Breitenbach: Because without a project like Vielseits there is no way for victims to leave the cycle of abuse. The people abusing them are connected, but the victims are not. Vielseits connects, protects, and offers space to heal.

Can you tell me about the kind of women who seek help at Vielseits?
All the women who end up with us are victims of organized, sadistic, and sexual violence, who have been subjected to mind control. There are also organizations practicing ritual abuse with a kind of spiritual superstructure where certain ideologies come into play, such as neo-fascist mindsets or different pseudo-religious groups, like Scientology or satanic cults.

From an outsider's perspective, these are women who appear to have led seemingly normal lives—their everyday persona wouldn't have been aware of the abuse they were subjected to at night, weekends, or on school holidays. These traumatic experiences are contained in different parts of the identity, so they're kept away from the conscious, and the person has no knowledge of the trauma they've experienced.

How are these personas created?
The victims are subjected to near-death situations—with the help of electric shocks, waterboarding, or other forms of torture—from an early age, and then they're "rescued" by their tormentors. At some point the victim’s psyche will develop an automated response—it will split, in a bid to survive. As a consequence of the systematic torture, the victims can develop a range of different identities throughout their lifetimes. Offenders perpetrating the abuse hold the key to this system of split identities and have the power to evoke a specific set of behaviors using triggers—which can be hand signs or certain smells or sounds, like a ringtone.

And why would people want to instill these triggers in their victims?
In general, there are two different reasons. There are perpetrators practicing ritual abuse for personal satisfaction. They place their victims in near-death situations by extreme violence just for the sake of it. Others enjoy the power aspect to it, have enormous salaries, and also secure themselves entry and membership into exclusive circles this way. A side effect of this is that the victim has no other option than to run away on the inside, emotionally and mentally, and create separate identities.

On the other hand, there are groups of abusers with elaborate plans to create split personalities and summon one at the flick of a switch. They want to sell the "programs" they use to control their victims to customers and to show off that they were able to create separate identities in one person.

What types of identities might they create with these programs?
Young ritual-abuse victims are most often used as child prostitutes and trained to take part in sadistic child-abuse imagery and films. These women will be prostituted for most of their lives, used for sadistic violence and sometimes for espionage. Many of the identities put through this abuse can't feel pain.

So how do clients spend their days at Vielseits?
They have strict daily routines in small supervised groups. The content of their days depends on current issues and opportunities: sport, self-defense, different kinds of creative activities, skill training, risk assessment, cooking, management of day-to-day life, dealing with authorities, etc. In addition to that, the women also need one-on-one contact with therapists and a lot of support.

Vielseits founder and psychotherapist Gaby Breitenbach

What do you know about the abusers?
Clients report that people from all different walks of life and from all occupation groups are part of the networks. They range from the police to the judiciary, people in public administration, university lecturers, medical workers, psychologists, hypnotists, politicians.... Certain names come up repeatedly. In exchange with other clients and colleagues across Germany, we are able to cross-validate these names. Some are renowned, award-winning people.

Can you tell me one of those names?
Well, I'd be on shaky legal ground if I did.

Yeah, I guess you would. Have you and your team come into contact with any abusers?
Offenders do put pressure on our team at Vielseits, the institute, and the practitioner's office. The pressure ranges from verbal threats to incidents that have almost led to car accidents. Abusers also put pressure on the clients—for example, sometimes they will convince one of their identities that they've murdered a member of our staff who is actually away on vacation. This is only one example of the many techniques abusers use to regain control over their victims. More than half of our clients still voluntarily get driven off in their abusers' cars at the end of the day, presumably to endure further abuse.

How close do you come to the victims' experiences?
We see fresh wounds and scars on the bodies of victims daily. We have an abundance of abuser names, crime scenes, and documented experiences. A few women here have photos and other things documenting the abuse.

Why don’t they go to the police?
These women are under severe pressure and know they will pay with their lives if they do that. There are automated programs [in their minds] that can be triggered to make them commit suicide. Over the years, experience with the police has proved only mildly successful. Dealing with women with split personalities, whose thought processes are still in the control of the abusers, can be frustrating for the police.

Do you have any examples?
Often an identity that is still loyal to the network will purposefully mislead officers so that police investigate, only to find that none of the claims are true. Victims with dissociative identity disorder also have limited credibility in court, just like children under five years old and disabled people. It’s a process we don’t usually advise our patients to go through, as the chances of success are slim. Our patients are most interested in leaving the circle of abuse and surviving.

How does the staff deal with those identities that are still loyal to the abuse networks?
Mostly by understanding why they are loyal. By explaining to them that the circle of abuse can be stopped, and by building up their self-worth. We also work out the triggers and bait that are used to get them to come back. Are there children left in the group? Are there others in the group who will supposedly be harmed if that particular person does not return? Are the clients being told that the therapist at Vielseits will only be protected from death if they return?

In general, it's a matter of examining the tricks and methods of deceit used by the abusers. To shut down the programs that have been installed in their brains, clients need to work through the trauma with therapists. This inevitably means living it again, which is also physically draining and very painful for the women.

Finally, is it conceivable that Vielseits could be infiltrated by an active member of an organized crime network?
Certainly. This is why there's a lot of networking within the team, at least one hour of supervision daily, and crisis interventions with clients when needed. In general, our work requires a lot of information examining, testing, and checking as a team.

Cops in Brooklyn, 1990. Photo via Flickr user Cristee Dickson

On October 11, 2011, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Donna Jane Watts saw someone driving a Miami police cruiser way over the speed limit, so she attempted to stop them. The driver reportedly took seven minutes to pull over the cop car, making Watts even more antsy over whether she was dealing with someone who was taking a cruiser for a joyride at 120 miles per hour. It turned out that the driver was a uniformed, on-duty officer named Fausto Lopez, who apologized to Watts and said he was late for an off-duty job. Watts arrest him anyway. He was breaking the law.

Lopez was later fired, but according to the Associated Press, Watts was subjected to a campaign of harassment, prank calls, and anonymous threats from people she suspects were fellow officers. Police vehicles and unmarked cars idled near her house. Freaking out, she even did a public records request to confirm that yes, the police were accessing information from her driver’s license—88 officers from 25 agencies had looked her up more than 200 times in one three-month period. She’s now suing the cops and departments involved for improperly accessing her info, though many of the cops who looked at her license have been reprimanded and the agencies involved say such searches are only illegal if the information gets sold. No matter what happens in court, this is a disturbing picture of the “thin blue line” of cops who don’t look kindly on an officer who goes after another officer.

There are no statistics available to describe how often cops cover up for one another, but former cops have described participating in illegal searches, perjuring themselves, and all kinds of other shady dealings since at least the days of NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico in the 60s.

Officers who attempt to break away from this system can get into trouble. Consider what happened to former NYPD cop Adrian Schoolcraft after he began taping conversations with his superiors back in 2009 in order to prove they were pressuring cops to make specific numbers of arrests and downplay serious crimes. After he began to speak out, Schoolcraft was restricted to desk duty and was told to talk to a psychologist.

On Halloween night 2009, Schoolcraft left work a little early, feeling ill and stressed. He woke up a few hours later to 12 officers, including the Deputy Chief Michael Marino, entering his apartment. Schoolcraft taped the encounter, some of which can be heard on a 2010 episode of NPR’s This American Life. After some back and forth arguing, Schoolcraft was involuntarily committed to a local psych ward and handcuffed to the bed. After six days, his father, a former police officer, finally found his son and got him out. Schoolcraft later took his story to The Village Voice, and it was written up in a series called the NYPD Tapes that generally confirmed his allegations about his precinct. Some of his tapes were also used in the 2010 federal lawsuit against stop and frisk. In going against his fellow officers, Schoolcraft was doing more for the cause of justice than anyone who attempted to quiet him. We could use more people like Schoolcraft and Watts, who are willing to occasionally cross that stupid thin blue line.

On to the bad cops of the week:

-Shawn Musgrave of the transparency-focused blog Muckrock wrote on Friday that the NYPD had rejected his request through the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL, the state’s public records access law) for information on how the NYPD handles FOIL requests for various documents. The cops’ official excuse for denying this somewhat meta request is that that info is that an attorney-client privilege exists between NYPD officers and the lawyers who create their training handbooks, but Musgrave thinks this is ridiculous, and just one more example of the department finding ways to deny FOIL requests for flimsy reasons.

-A deaf advocacy group in California just filed a lawsuit on behalf of a man who was allegedly beaten, Tasered, and arrested by police when he tried to use sign language to communicate. According to Jonathan Meister, on the evening of February 13, 2013 he was picking up some of his belongings from a friend’s house in Hawthorne, California. Four local cops, called by a worried neighbor, approached him, assuming a robbery was taking place. They yelled at him to stop loading his car, and when he didn’t respond, one officer grabbed his wrist. Meister then attempted to sign that he was deaf, but this was seen as resistance, and Meister was punched, Tasered, and knocked unconscious. Since this is so obviously terrifying and fucked, Meister, with help from the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, is suing the four officers for violating his rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

-On Valentine's Day, police in Moore, Oklahoma, were involved in an altercation with a man named Luis Rodriguez that left the man dead outside of a movie theater around midnight. Luis, who had been trying to mediate a fight between his wife and daughter, was trying to stop his wife Nair from leaving when two on-duty officers, an off-duty cop, and (strangely enough), two game wardens stopped him and asked for ID. Luis apparently struggled, still trying to reach his wife. Nair and her daughter Lunahi said that police then began beating Luis until his face was bloody. According to Nair, her husband seemed to be dead when he was taken away on a stretcher. She also filmed the encounter, but police took her phone. (An autopsy has not yet determined the cause of Luis's death.)

-On Thursday, 27-year-old Kayla Finley went to the Pickens, South Carolina, police department to make a report. But she soon found herself jailed for the night over the late fees she owed for a nine-years-overdue Jennifer Lopez movie. Finley says she never received the letters that told her to return the movie, nor the follow-up that specified there was now a warrant out for her arrest. The video store she rented it from, by the way, is no longer in business, probably because they failed to collect late fees.

-Our Good Cop of the Week Award goes to NYPD officer Matthew Hartnett, who on Tuesday rescued a 74-year-old man from his burning vehicle. The man had suffered a seizure, then crashed his car into a concrete divider. With help from a bystander, Harnett blocked traffic with his car, then broke the glass and pulled out the unconscious man, who is now in stable condition.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

(Photo by Nicolas Nova)

Sweden's first ever internet emergency room opened its doors in Stockholm last month. I guess it was about time, considering Sweden is one of the most connected countries in the world. That said, various scientists, experts, and journalists have spent the past few years debating whether internet addiction is even a real thing that needs legitimate treatment centers, or just a modern urban legend. 

Patrik Wincent, licensed therapist and founder of the internet ER, would argue the former. And you can understand why, considering his center receives between ten to 15 phone calls a day from those worried their internet intake is verging on unhealthy.

Prior to setting up the rehab program, Patrik spent a decade helping video game addicts break free from their controllers, and used to be addicted to games himself. So considering I—like most of my friends—spend the majority of my time online, he seemed like the perfect person to speak with about how I can avoid checking myself in to his internet ER.

Patrik Wincent

VICE: Hey Patrik, do you have time for a chat?
Patrik Wincent: I do. I'm walking and talking, so unless that's a problem for you, let's do it.

Were you using your phone before I called? Are you suffering from digital addiction?
No, I actually have rules for how I manage things. Also, I don't consider that talking on the phone and walking is the same thing as walking and looking at a screen. That's usually what's considered to be a danger, you know—to exclude a fifth of what you see and bend your neck like a hawk. We had a case last week where a guy fell off the metro platform because he was so focused on his cell phone. He managed to get away from the tracks in time, but it was certainly a warning sign for him.

Wow. So it's considered dangerous behavior to walk and look at a screen at the same time?
Yes, I think so. We see people today who are colliding into each other and walking into trees—things that can cause damage for life. But aside from the physical consequences, it's not very sexy to be staring at a screen the whole time, and it shows a lack of respect for other people. We've become stimulant addicts in many ways, which can cause psychological as well as physical side effects. Today, a lot of people are great at multi-tasking. But research shows that, due to this multi-tasking, people are developing learning difficulties. It gets more difficult to take in information and focus on one thing for a long period of time. We see a lot of people showing ADHD-like symptoms.

Looking at your phone when you're hanging out with someone is pretty much the norm, though—at least in Sweden.
Yes. We are addicted to external information coming our way, so we don't know how to just spend time with ourselves—to enjoy our meals and allow ourselves to be bored. A cell phone has power and control over our lives. A phone can be psychoactive; it can change your emotions and temper. You can go from being bored or feeling low to suddenly feeling a lot better, just from reading the news, or using social media. It gives you the stimulant you need.

It sounds like the abuse you're talking about is a social addiction, rather than the internet itself.
It's both of them. I'd rather say stimulant addiction, but there are different categories. Some people are primarily stuck to one specific social media site, such as Facebook. There are 12-step programs available for compulsive Facebook users. But the smartphone has power, control, everything.

Do you think people in Western societies are afraid of loneliness?
I think that a lot of people have difficulties being alone because they suffer from bad habits. But not everyone suffers from this. You can't look at society and say, "Oh my, everyone is looking at their phones." Some people want to do that and don't have a problem with it. And that's all fine and dandy. However, those who seek help with us are those who suffer and see the side effects from it all. Compulsive behaviors develop, and we offer treatments to break that state of mind. Some of the symptoms we've seen are sleeping difficulties, depression, feeling generally low, and having difficulty concentrating and memorizing things. The brain never gets time to rest when we're connected in this way. We need more time for ourselves.

Those sound like typical stress symptoms.
Most definitely.

Would you say that smartphones and the internet cause stress?
It's the multi-tasking. We're super efficient, doing everything at once. This produces cortisol and adrenaline in your body. These are stress hormones, so the brain gets overstrained. Scientists have seen that the front part of the brain collapses due to multi-tasking. This part of the brain is also responsible for motivation, so we meet a lot of kids—and adults—who get a short-term kick out of taking in huge amounts of information, but they're unable to think in the long-term.

When did you figure out that it was about time to set up an internet ER?
We've had a video games ER for two years. We've been helping families with kids who play too much, for instance, or who are in front of the computer all the time. It soon became obvious to us that it's not only about video games. That's just one thing. A lot of people are addicted to the internet or mobile phones; it's generally people who feel the need to always be connected and online. So, as a natural part of the expansion of our business, we set up the internet ER. We're also collaborating with treatment centers in the US. We've seen what kind of treatments they're doing over there, and tried them out here.

How do you treat this kind of addiction?
We have the "mobile detox program," for instance. Another program is the "stimulant fast" and the "white month." These are different programs worked out for you to find a balance. These are like any other programs when it comes to abuse and addiction. But we're not looking for complete abstinence. I mean, if you're abusing food, you still have to eat food. It's about finding the right approach so that you can create a good balance and allow your brain to rest and learn how to focus on one thing at a time.

What kind of people come to you for help?
It's a wide range of people. But it's mostly girls calling us. They suffer from internet abuse and mobile phone abuse.

Why girls?
Girls are more into social media. Boys are, too, of course, but girls seem to be communicating online in a different way. We now have Instagram and selfies, etc. That could be one reason.

Why are you guys the only ones offering this service?
That's a good question. The reason is that these are issues that haven't been brought up on a political level and you can't get help with your addiction via social services. No one is highlighting these problems. So it’s about time that we make sure we research this here in the same way they're doing it in the US. There's some research on this, but we need more and it needs to be taken more seriously than it currently is; I mean, we get ten to 15 phone calls a day.

Finally, what do you tell people who feel that they have an internet addiction?  
One thing you can do is to set some rules and limits for when you should and when you shouldn’t use your phone. Say you won't check your phone between 9 PM and 7 AM on weekdays, for example. Another thing you can do is to make sure you don’t have your phone in your bedroom. A lot of people use their phones as an alarm in the morning, but then there's a risk that they'll check emails and social media. So get a proper alarm clock with batteries instead!

Good tip. Thanks, Patrik!

@caisasoze

When one thinks of AOL, the phrase "tireless supporter of women's rights" doesn't immediately come to mind. And yet, in a romantically lit ballroom on a Monday night, I found myself in the midst of an applause break for all the conglomerate had done to push the feminist agenda. It was day one of the MAKERS Conference, an invitation-only event at the luxuriously sprawling Terranea Resort in the la-di-da beachside suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes, CA (median household income: $120,000 a year). A promotional clip, the first of dozens I would see throughout the week, showed off the jewel in MAKERS’ crown: a three-hour PBS documentary about the "Women Who Make America," sponsored by AOL and Simple® Skincare. Enormous screens, projecting the faces and voices of countless women who had persevered over the patriarchy, commanded the attention of the ballroom; Beyoncé, with her impassioned reminder that girls "run this mother," acted as the soundtrack. "For the first time on television," it said, we were about to witness "the story of how women changed America." 

The MAKERS Conference’s first loftily stated goal, for which its organizers were suitably mocked, was to "reset the agenda for women in the workplace in the 21st century." Given that the plausibility of this being accomplishable in three days was nonexistent, the goal then changed to "gather[ing] prominent leaders and innovators from corporations, not-for-profits, and government organizations committed to women's and working family issues for a 48-hour action plan to help defined [sic] the agenda for women in the 21st century." The brain trust charged with this unenviable goal, a gaggle of well-heeled AOL-approved folks from said fields, was there to be inspired, eat artichoke-crusted black cod, and learn from master classes like "Brand Maker: Living IN Your Brand” and “Fear Means Go: Learning to Embrace Change and Challenges.” Horrifically underdressed and unable to give a satisfying response to the query “Who are you with?”, the only way I could have possibly been more out of place among them would be if I were a misogynist. 

A beautifully shambolic interview between occasional actress/professional tabloid subject Jennifer Aniston and Ms. founder Gloria Steinem kicked off the festivities. Aniston, tank-topped and bob-coiffed, dazzled the crowd with her gold accent jewelry and borderline enviable lack of cogency. In the interest of imparting academic respect for her subject, she sported aviator glasses with clear lenses. Clutching index cards filled with questions she publicly acknowledged she had no hand in writing, she struggled with her duties as a moderator; after each question was asked, her face, both revealing and retaining nothing, reset and blankly moved on to the next. When Steinem lamented the fact that female actresses still had to be much younger than their male costars, Aniston responded, "What do you mean?" in a manner that suggested she had never seen a film which did not star herself. Feminist ally US Weekly perfectly summed up the interview’s highlights: "The We're the Millers actress,” they dished, “who has been engaged to Justin Theroux since August 2012, wore her gigantic engagement ring and a necklace with the letter ‘T’ on it, a probable nod to her soon-to-be last name."

As the most branded feminist of the bunch, Steinem was the belle of this particular ball. Post-interview, dozens flocked to pick her brain during the Q&A. A sage on a stage, they wanted–nay, needed–her pearls of wisdom. At Tuesday's dinner, an unofficial celebration of her 80th birthday, a video montage of notable MAKERS like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah, Beyoncé, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Ellen DeGeneres expressed shock and delight over how great she looked for her age. Jane Fonda, flanked by Marlo Thomas and grasping a champagne flute for dear life, oversaw the wheeling-out of an enormous, ostentatious gold cake; at her urging, the room cheered and warbled “Happy Birthday” en masse. 

After the cake wheeling, the room’s alpha feminists assembled for a seemingly endless photo op in front of the stage. The co-founder of MAKERS, Dylan McGee, saddled up to Steinem. "We need [AOL CMO] Maureen [Sullivan]! We need Maureen!" she despondently yelled to no one in particular. Complimentary shirts and party hats, which posed the question "WWGD?" ("What Would Gloria Do"?) were dispersed throughout the crowd. As the swarm surrounding the alpha feminists grew bigger, a disembodied male voice came over the loudspeakers requesting that attendees use the hashtag #WWGD when Instagramming the festivities. "Ladies,” the voice reminded us, “there are photo booths on both sides of the stage." Well-dressed women with wine glasses loudly discussed career issues as a disco song about the futility of stopping them now played overhead. No one, I’m sure, had any interest in stopping them from patting themselves on their backs. Well, no one capable of doing anything about it, anyway.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say the primary reason I attended the conference was because I was promised face time with Steinem. As a high school feminist so into Ms. that I was published by Ms., I found the opportunity to meet one of my childhood idols impossible to pass up. Inspired by the overwhelming corporateness of my environment (my fellow attendees used the phrase “Lean In” as a noun, verb, and adjective), I spent hours crafting what I thought were the perfect questions–queries about capitalism, America’s class dichotomy, and the use of feminism to market beauty products. As I awaited my interview, I overheard the conversation of the woman who was to sit down with her before me. After talking about her “favorite brands” with a colleague, she said, "OK. I gotta get ready to interview Gloria. She's such a badass." The fact that Steinem wore sunglasses indoors, not that she was a former Playboy Bunny who worked her way to winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was cited as proof of her badassness. She interviewed Steinem. Due to a scheduling snafu, I was only able to email my questions to the queen.

Said questions were petulant and bratty, the deranged ramblings of an infant socialist. My surroundings had, apparently, rubbed off on me. Steinem, in her infinite and even-handed wisdom, responded to them days later like a heat-seeking missile, striking down my anger with reason and logic. When asked about the intersectionality of ageism, classism, and sexism, she mused, “I don't think there's any such thing as being an effective feminist—or effectively anti-racist, etc.—without recognizing this interdependence and opposing them all." When asked if she viewed feminism as a luxury, she typed, “Feminist ethics and values are not a luxury because they are about mutual support." When I expressed displeasure over Sheryl Sandberg’s public celebration of an “empowering” Pantene ad, Steinem acknowledged that "marketing aesthetics as empowerment doesn't work" but maintained that, "as for ads, I would rather them with feminist values than with anti-woman values, just as I would rather see egalitarian ads than those that are racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic." God, she was good. Dispensing wisdom was her job.

Wednesday morning, as I ate one of the best (complimentary!) omelets of my life, I read all about AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who had made an appearance at the conference the day before and in doing so avoided a discussion of the whole "distressed babies" fracas he was currently entangled in. (Armstrong recently blamed cuts in his company’s 401k program on the premature birth of the children of two employees. Non-incidentally, his compensation rose from $3.22 to $12.07 million last year. But I digress.)

Scheduled to speak on his own, he had instead skipped his own presentation to use 10-year-old female football phenom Sam Gordon as a human shield. An adorable, inspiring shield, to be sure, but a shield nonetheless. At the conference, surrounded by friends and associates, he was was miles away from "haters" in the press—he was the recipient of laughs, hoots, and applause, both when he pitched softballs at the magnanimous prepubescent jock and when he introduced Marlo Thomas as presidential material. In the inspirational Twitter photo of Gordon MAKERS posted before her interview, her flawless skin, rouge, and pink lip gloss stood in the forefront. The photograph was of a makeup artist prepping her. 

Sheryl Sandberg, when talking about the Pantene ad campaign that excited her so, described it as "an amazing example of what can happen with marketing." After all, she said, "One of the most active ways women get messages is marketing." Her brows looked great. Her skin, luminescent. The fact that Pantene was owned by Procter & Gamble, a major supporter of Republican candidates and therefore a threat to the rights of women, was irrelevant. 

Waiting for the ballroom to open before Steinem’s party, I had a long-winded and intolerable discussion with a woman who said she worked "in recruitment," which was rendered easier with complimentary flutes of champagne. Another woman reminisced about her attendance at other conferences; she was impressed by the production values of this one. She could tell they were trying to make “a big splash.” She was exactly right. This was, indeed, a big splash. In a small pool. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. To me, at least. 

Steinem’s thoughtful, evenhanded response to my mean-spirited line of questioning was signed "With Friendship." Reading it, I remembered Sandberg's take on Steinem: "She doesn't actually agree with everything we all do. But she stands by us. She is the best example of women helping women." As our queen, of course, one would expect a certain regality. She is our ruler, but a benevolent one. I am not the queen. I am but a plebe. Who, once the conference wrapped up, crammed 17 complimentary Luna Bars in my bag, got into my shitty car, drove back to my one-room apartment, and stewed over what I had just witnessed.

@bornferal