Since this is the Emerald’s “year in review” issue, this is my “year in review” column. It’s also my last column as a UO student, so I feel obliged to put some sort of punctuation mark at the end of this chapter of my and my peers’ lives — whether that punctuation is a simple declarative period, an enthusiastic exclamation point, or a big question mark. Maybe a string of “?!?!?!” or a bunch of dot-dot-dots that just kinda trail off … into the post-grad future.

It feels somewhat forced to tie a narrative bow around my four years spent here. College seemed more like a collage of unrelated events and tangents and anecdotes. If my college life were a movie, it’d be one of those vignette movies, with a lot of fades and bad banter — more “Rules of Attraction” than “Animal House.”

Cut to a classroom. Cut to a party. Cut to all-nighters in the library. A montage of living arrangements: dorm, house, quad, house. A montage of dorm drinking; late nights at Common Grounds and Carson. Wandering up and down Hilyard as a freshman trying to get into house parties. Complaining about campus Wi-Fi. Long hours in Allen 2.0 working on Gateway projects. Wearing bow-ties and loudly listening to Ke$ha and Waka Flocka. Writing for Flux, Ethos, the Emerald. Football victories and the accompanying revelry. Failing a class in my very first term. Walking 20 minutes every day to and from campus for a year. Drifting away from old friends and toward new ones. Wishing I had done something with my time here, but realizing I had. Fade to black. Credits.

Four years is a strange amount of time: enough to change you in a way, for better or worse, but not really enough for you to learn anything meaningful about yourself or the world. It is easy to mistake the passage of time for progress. After four years at the University of Oregon, I am four years older but not wiser or whatever. I’m still rather uncertain about a lot of things even though I know more than I did four years ago. It can be hard to learn from your life story when you’re an unreliable narrator to yourself. Maybe this recognition is the thing I have learned.

I tend to dislike any kind of nostalgic impulse because nostalgia is dumb and dangerous. Also, it — the word itself — suggests a painful loss, something taken from you by time that you long to have back. Usually this stolen thing is innocence, the opposite of which is experience. The remedy for the ache of nostalgia is to learn from experience, rather than lose from it. Speaking for myself, and maybe for others in the Class of 2013, I don’t quite know what I learned over the past four wonderful, horrible, dizzying, clarifying years here, but I will soon.

A little over a year ago, when I was but a young and dumb columnist for this very media outlet, I wrote this: “If film was the art form of the 20th century, then the podcast is the art form of this century.”

That column is a rarity since it’s about something I like rather than something I dislike or don’t understand, and therefore fear, such as Macklemore or football. But there are people – accurately called patent trolls – operating in the darkest corners of the legal realm, actively trying to destroy one of the few things on this entire planet that I love, podcasts. This makes me so sad. AND MAD!

First, what is a patent troll?

Let us consult Wikipedia: “(A patent troll is) a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to manufacture or market the product.”

The troll relevant to my sadness is a company called Personal Audio, which in the ’90s tried to make an early digital audio player. That didn’t quite work out, but Personal Audio still retains its vaguely worded patents, and even though the company doesn’t make anything anymore (It’s a shell company), it uses those patents to file lawsuits that can be best described as legalized extortion — and they make millions of dollars.

Personal Audio is endangering the livelihoods of podcasters such as Jesse Thorn (who hosts “Bullseye!”), Marc Maron of “WTF” and even God himself, Ira Glass, whose “This American Life” program most recently investigated what happens “when patents attack.”

If the trolls win, we all lose. Artists will not be able to cross bridges and explore the limits of their creativity. The boundaries of the culture will be constricted and humanity will asphyxiate.

We live in a country with a government explicitly charged with protecting the intellectual and artistic property of creators. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution tells the Congress “(t)o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Since the people who wrote the Constitution capitalized all those words, it was obviously rather important to them. So, they’d be pleased that we’ve done a pretty good job protecting Writings and Discoveries from opportunistic trolls; however, while doing so, a legal system has developed preventing further Writings and Discoveries.

Great artists steal — that’s like basic Picasso wisdom or whatever. It’d be more accurate to say that great artists borrow, however. Painters rifle through the galleries of dead painters. Writers plunder the sentences of other, canonized writers. Filmmakers lift entire scenes first shot by their idols, who in turn lifted from their idols. This isn’t plagiarism; this is how art works.

In order to truly “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” we need a different copyright framework, one that gives more room for “stealing.” If we all indeed stand on the shoulders of giants, we must ensure that they are not toppled by trolls.

Upworthy is a website based on the cute and stupid idea that upvotes and shared links will somehow alchemize into tolerance and equality. Like most things that are cute and stupid, Upworthy is very popular. It serves as a kind of feel-good tonic for comfortable liberals who want to be comforted, which is fine — everyone should feel good and comfortable. That’s the point of progress and making the world a better place. However, if the people who run Upworthy truly believe that they are “enacting change” or whatever with their “irresistibly shareable stuff” then the whole enterprise is all the more cute and stupid.

Last month, one of the “curators” at Upworthy posted an article with the typically Upworthy-style headline: “How Does The Worst Human Being Of Retail Sleep At Night? After He Sees This, He Won’t.” The “worst human being of retail” is Mike Jeffries, the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, which might indeed be the worst retailer, the outfitter of teenage bros who consider Jeremy Piven from “Entourage” their role model. Anyway, Jeffries said some mean things about people — he doesn’t want larger women or “not so cool” kids sporting his brand — that he probably shouldn’t have said, especially with Upworthy on the case.

After all, Jeffries will be unable to sleep after he sees a video on Upworthy of an obnoxious guy (probably an Upworthy reader) giving Abercrombie & Fitch clothing to the homeless. Like everything these days, the campaign comes with a hashtag, #FitchTheHomeless, which sounds like some sort of bizarre sex tourism thing.

Note that Jeffries is the “worst human being of retail” just because he said some stuff. Yeah, his comments were rude and hurtful, but all this ire directed at the bleached-out weirdo and his anti-fetish for the overweight and unhip misses some of the truly horrendous things going on in retail, namely sweatshop labor, which Abercrombie & Fitch uses, along with dozens and dozens of other companies.

Then there’s the inanity and bankruptcy of the video itself: The image of a well-dressed white kid with a video camera giving “cool” clothes to a bunch of mostly black homeless people should make any viewer feel uneasy. There are just too many complexities and signifiers for one unwieldy Upworthy headline to handle! Also, by trying to give Abercrombie & Fitch a “brand readjustment” by giving the clothes to homeless people, the #FitchTheHomeless campaign, such as it is, basically agrees with the Jeffries worldview, that the world is divided between cool people and “not so cool” people.

This is but one video, one Upworthy item, but it demonstrates the core problem of this certain kind of liberalism. Such ideals and idealism looks nice on a Facebook newsfeed, but once these “Glee” fans emerge from the lukewarm syrup bath that is Upworthy and head out into the world, they get smacked by reality. It’s easy to sloganeer change — engineering it is a lot harder.

Binge watching is common these days, especially among people our age, that the phrase is somewhat redundant. How else does one watch television, besides in huge gulps and slurps? Unless you watch cable news for the Scooter Store ads, there is simply no other way. Now that each and every episode of the fourth season of the it-was-canceled-so-it-must-be-good TV program “Arrested Development” is finally on Netflix, millions will crawl onto their couches or into their beds – where, bathed in the bluish glow of their TV or computer screens, they will stay for hours, overdosing on hilarity. Well, since the season premiered last weekend, they all probably did that already, last weekend.

To see binge watching as anything other than a kind of media or narrative gluttony, one must either be deluded or a liar. The impulse to gobble up a TV series as fast as one can is both annoying and alarming. It’s alarming because it illustrates a lack of self-discipline: Those episodes of “Arrested Development” aren’t going to go anywhere, so calm down and go to sleep maybe.

It’s annoying because the narrative glutton is sure to boast (on Facebook, at the bars, in class) about being first to shove a series of scripted entertainment into his face, then demand that his friends finish their helpings of episodes so he can go on about what it meant when that one character said that one thing in that one episode or whatever. All of it is enough to long for the days of the pyramids or at least the days before Hulu and Netflix, when if you missed an episode of a show, you would never see it for the rest of your life. Or maybe you’d catch a rerun.

That feeling — one of a constant lack of control and always missing out on something — is experienced beyond the domain concerning television, obviously. Especially for college students and young people, the feeling of being at the station and just missing the train, whether that train is a new TV series or a new Kendrick Lamar single or a cool party you didn’t attend, can be nauseating.

By grabbing onto an entire TV season, even series, and devouring it whole in one sitting, it feels like you’re forcing the train — and time — to slow down and wait for you to get aboard. It lets you feel like you’re reclaiming the culture as your own. You can proudly emerge from the darkness of your binge-watching cave, now with a full understanding and appreciation of “The Wire.”

This doesn’t make such binge watching any less gluttonous and lame, however. Be a grown human and be content with missing trains. Otherwise, such binging impulses may very well lead to a sort of generational arrested development.

On May 21, shortly after 4 p.m., an elderly man — balding, bookish, bespectacled — called Dominique Venner walked into the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and up to the altar, on which he left a sealed envelope. In front of 1,500 tourists and worshippers, Venner then pulled out a handgun and shot himself in the mouth. The 78 year old was a journalist, historian and essayist; he was also a venomous and near-psychopathic bigot, someone who fought for neo-fascist groups in the 1960s and sought to keep France French, to borrow from his American counterparts.

He committed suicide just days after same-sex marriage was legalized in France, a homeland he no longer recognized.

If one feels somewhat oddly sympathetic toward the man, it is only because he was so pathetic. To feel this way is to grant him the humanity he refused to see in those who didn’t look or act exactly as he did. It sucks to feel such sympathy for the devil, but it is necessary.

The gay rights movement in the United States has done remarkably, miraculously well, especially over the past couple of years. Consider: President Barack Obama is at least a vocal supporter of marriage equality; same-sex marriage is legal in 12 states including Minnesota, which has elected Michele Bachmann four times; the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has been repealed; the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 will probably be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court sometime this year; and most recently, you can be both openly gay and a Boy Scout.

To someone like you and me, all of these developments are fantastic achievements, representative of the ideal that history is a narrative of moral progression. They show that the self-evident truths outlined in the Declaration of Independence will only become more self-evident over time. A long time to be sure, but we are watching the universe bend toward justice.

It is bewildering and disturbing, then, when we are confronted by people who do not see the moral virtue of marriage equality as a self-evident truth. How do these provincial bigots live in the same universe as us, let alone the same country?

Let’s consider the homophobe — an honest bigot, not one of these hucksters of hate like Bryan Fischer, James Dobson or anyone else who runs an organization with the word “family” in its name and appears on Fox News. The kind of homophobe I’m talking about lives a normal life, with a normal job, a normal house, normal family and friends, a normal appreciation for “Fast & Furious 6,” yet is profoundly devout, informed by a lifetime of religious upbringing. In other words, they were born this way. If you have lived a certain way and believed in certain things for your entire life, it’s rather difficult to reprogram yourself once society has changed and left you behind. For many, homophobia is not a choice.

Contrary to the lazy and syrupy thinking of Upworthy, most homophobes are not stupid, repellent, obtuse or whatever else you can think to call them. Like everyone else, they can be all these things, but — like everyone else — they’re also morally serious, introspective, compassionate, respectful and human. Most importantly, though, is that they are afraid, as the term “homophobia” suggests. They are freaking out and sick to their stomachs as they watch their country and culture be destroyed by “the enemy.” It’s an absurd fear, of course, but so is triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13. We shouldn’t mock or scorn homophobes for their intolerance. It is all they have left.

Imagine how it must feel to live in this world as a homophobe. Of course, you’re terrified — you’re also lonely, confused, anxious, more than slightly paranoid. You feel absolutely hopeless and adrift and you would rather blow your brains out in a church than continue to watch everything quite literally go to hell. At least for those who are in or out of the closet, it gets better.

Like all things, the We Are Oregon ASUO administration is soon coming to an end, to be replaced by the United Oregon administration on May 25. So, plus ça change or whatever, I suppose. President Laura Hinman, Vice President Nick McCain and the rest of the ASUO gave us a solid year of school-yard drama, and it’s doubtful that with Sam Dotters-Katz and his two vice presidents at the helm, anything will be any different.

It is apparent something must be done to the ASUO, however, lest we be forced to bear another year of bickering and intrigue among the young adults to whom we have given our votes and money. Normally, I’m not much of a “solutions person,” but today I shall offer three, decidedly modest proposals for how to fix the ASUO.

Monarchize it!

As the blunderous election last month illustrates, the democratic process is clearly too important to be left in the hands of the people or aspiring career politicians. What this campus needs is a monarch, a king or a queen — a Duke or Duchess of the Ducks, in fact. If you have a preference for small government, you can’t get much smaller than a government of one. And a monarch would never ask you to sign a petition or try to bribe you with a T-shirt.

If this sounds appallingly antithetical to the founding principles of this country, keep in mind that it was the English Parliament — an elected, representative body — that enacted the “intolerable” laws that caused our forefathers to revolt, not King George. He was too crazy and (probably) inbred to care about the colonies, and that’s exactly the type of leadership we need. Give the royal responsibility to someone who doesn’t really want the gig and watch as such careful policies are crafted by a Duke/Duchess who couldn’t care less. Huzzah.

Abolish it!

Occasionally, I see signs or slogans written in street chalk that endorse this proposal. Abolishing the ASUO seems a bit radical — if only because we haven’t tried it yet. The ASUO’s primary function is to dole out incidental-fee money to the various student programs. Without an ASUO, perhaps there would be no incidental fee, which would make attending the university (slightly) more affordable. The student programs would then have to become self-sustaining if they wanted to continue — maybe we’d see a thousand Kickstarter projects bloom. No ASUO: free campus, free markets. Or something.

Compete against it!

Speaking of free markets, nothing encourages competence quite like competition. Instead of getting rid of the ASUO, make it do better by creating an alternative student government to compete against it. This alternative ASUO — the AASUO, if you will — would promise students it would more effectively represent their interests and administer their incidental fees than the regular ASUO, what with its earnest and mediocre “West Wing” re-enactments. Such a dual system could lead to the following: Spurred by the competition, the ASUO starts doing its job better, meaning the AASUO would have done its job; the ASUO falters and fails, and the AASUO replaces it, dropping the first A; or, a campus split between two student government becomes even more an arena of desperate pettiness and confusion and drama, and we have not one ASUO to hate on and complain about, but two.

With that in mind, let’s get that throneroom ready.

We take it for granted that the path to a lifetime of employment and prosperity after college is through internships. It is now understood that you simply must do your time, as it were, as an under or unpaid skilled laborer before you are truly ready to join the workforce. However, suppose that path leads to decades of debt and a kind of spiritual bankruptcy. What then? That would either mean something is enormously wrong with the system in which we have been living and working for the past half century or we have been fooled.

Back in the 1990s, The Baffler, a left-wing journal of criticism and snark, declared that “interns built the Pyramids.” This is, of course, wildly inaccurate since the workers of ancient Egypt were much better paid than the interns of modern America. Also, the Egyptians weren’t so fraught with anxiety about building their resumes (they were busy building pyramids after all) or getting their foot in the door or up the ladder or whatever internships promise.

And that promise is also the problem of internships. Beyond some buzzy rhetoric — internships are “win-win,” “career-boosting” opportunities for “go-getters” interested in “networking” and “gaining relevant experience” — the practice is mostly undefined. As Ross Perlin writes in his 2011 book “Intern Nation,” “What defines an internship depends largely on who’s doing the defining,” i.e. employers, and, Perlin suggests, it is in the interest of employers to define internships as broadly as possible. 

In the United States and most other societies, it is generally frowned upon to have people work without any sort of payment. Thanks to the structure of internships, employers have found a way around compensation laws, having millions of college students and graduates work for nothing, doing things that used to come with a paycheck. Instead of money, most of them receive college credit, which just means that they are paying to work. Other employers insist that unpaid internships are worthwhile because they offer “real world” experience. Perhaps, but that would mean that our nation’s universities aren’t doing their job to prepare and train the next generation. Alas, maybe they aren’t.

All of this is a result of a society and economy growing more and more complex (often just for complexity’s own sake) and mere jobs or gigs becoming professions. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad if we had the appropriate tools and policies at hand to deal with such complexity and professionalization. But we don’t. Modernity is nice and all, what with its iPods and sophisticated dentistry, but it has its drawbacks. Sometimes, it’s enough to long for the days of the pyramids.

Like a series of ill-considered tattoos, hashtags blemish the new Allen Hall, embarrassing tokens of our digital age. On the front door, one sees #GoAllenGo, along with the SOJC’s Twitter handle, @UOsojc. Elsewhere, in classrooms and hallways, one can find #Ethics #Innovation #Action, #LifeAsAJStudent and, uh, #JSwag. This hashtagging of Allen is certainly obnoxious and pointless, but unlike most things I write about — like, say, people’s adoration of Macklemore — I do not think it’s an indication of civilization’s inexorable descent into infantile barbarism. However, somebody does.

Evgeny Morozov is a man to take very seriously, namely because he is a very serious man. He possesses the dour authority of a Belarusian scholar, which is precisely what he is. Along with thousands and thousands of words published in numerous places and numerous languages, Morozov has written two books that explore and critique our relationship with “the Internet” (he would insist on the scare quotes): “The Net Delusion,” which dared to assert that perhaps, despite utopian claims, the Internet isn’t a liberating force against authoritarianism after all, and, most recently, “To Save Everything, Click Here,” a polemic against “solutionism” (the idea that the world can be saved one app at a time) and “Internet-centrism,” a worldview that sees the Internet as a totalizing, inherently progressive institution from which nothing in politics and culture can escape.

On Tuesday, Morozov spoke at the university’s Turnbull Center in Portland, mostly to an audience of people born before computers, let alone “the Internet.” And now is probably a good time to address those quotation marks. According to Morozov, the notion that there is a singular Internet out there, one somehow imbibed with a sense of self or purpose, is a falsehood, a myth upon which gadget-geek solutionists have built a technocratic religion.

“There is something almost sacred about the Internet,” Morozov said at a Future Tense discussion earlier this year. “I’m trying to secularize it.”

His task is a considerably difficult one — the alluring promise of iSalvation is hard to argue against — but it is necessary. Not because belief itself is a bad thing, (people believe things all the time; I believe Ke$ha is great!) but because this particular belief distorts our understanding of what it means to be a good citizen in society and reconfigures our relationship with each other in a way that should be worrying.

Solutionist fixes require “nudges” or incentives in order to work. If we’re ever going to reach the computerized promised land, we will have to be automatons.

“Some people would say that we shouldn’t just get people to do the right thing,” said Morozov. “We should get people to do the right thing for the right reason.”

Otherwise, Morozov warns, we will become nothing more than robotic clusters of data, consuming and responding without self-awareness or reflection. The solutionist vision of utopia demands that we destroy what it means to be a human being.

This kind of thinking also distorts our understanding of the corporations that help foster the myth of “the Internet.” Google is here to make money, not save our souls. “Don’t be evil” is a slogan, not an ethos. Alas, though they’re not spiritual shepherds, we still may be sheep.

Foodie-ism is the kind of bizarre seizure of enthusiasm that can only happen once civilization hits a dead end. Everything sucks, but at least our food is photogenic, “has something to say” and, as a bonus, tastes good.

The foodie — a close cousin of the hipster — craves and fetishizes the “authentic” in cuisine and has purported to find it while attending food raves, ogling over food presentation and stuffing their faces with the most expensive and exotic dishes they can find. They insist food can be art, and they allege to possess a critical eye (or palate) toward the art they consume — but really it’s all just adulation toward their great god, Food.

It is too bad because this grotesque and gluttonous foodie-ism is easily confused with foodism, which may turn out to be the most important ideological movement of our time. In the past, ideologies have viewed the world through political, economical, cultural or religious lenses — ideologies of the mind and the self. Foodism, on the other hand, examines the world as it really is, populated by bodies, which require energy to run (though, even that distinction between the body and the mind is faulty).

“We can’t so easily separate the mind and the body, as much as a couple of thousand years of Western philosophy would have us believe,” said Jennifer Burns Levin, an adjunct instructor of literature at the Clark Honors College  and head of a research interest group in food studies. She also blogs about food in Eugene at Culinaria Eugenius.

According to her, foodists are “transform(ing) society at a grass roots level” through education — and, apparently, they are succeeding: “In documenting and supporting markets for better food and cooking and farming skills, we’re changing American foodways,” she said. By understanding and critiquing what and how we eat, we are better able to know who we are.

Our knowledge is clouded by frivolous, foolish foodies, however, whose approach to what we eat isn’t ideological, but pornographic. They are to foodism what the “radical chic” was to the leftism of the 1960s: an appropriated, commodified, safe version of the real thing. As Levin notes, foodies exemplify “neoliberal privilege and obnoxious righteousness.”

Looking around, it isn’t hard to come away with the impression we live in a gastrocracy, a society governed by food. The issues most perilous — over-population, over-consumption and scarcity — are issues of resources, especially those that nourish and energize us.

Forget peak oil. We need to worry about peak food. Our gastrocratic society is evident in other, less alarming ways. Cooking shows seem to be everywhere on television, and books about food dominate the bestsellers’ lists. The writers of these books — Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and Mark Bittman, along with chefs such as Alice Waters — are the prominent social and moral voices of the modern day. They, and the foodist movement in general, stand testament to the idea that the way to society’s heart is through its stomach.

Procrastination seems to be a force beyond our control, beyond ourselves — the gremlin of sloth ambling on the wings of our productivity, messing with the machinery that makes us stay on task. It is different from mere laziness: You want to be lazy because laziness is fun. You don’t want to procrastinate. Procrastination is painful, a gnawing dread. If laziness is a delightful stroll up and down some Sound of Music hills, then procrastination is a desperate clinging to the side of a cliff, legs dangling in the air, knowing that you will slip eventually, but just … not … yet …

We live in a time and place where the famed Protestant work ethic is a virtue held above almost all others, yet it seems less and less people care to practice it. A major corporate presence on this campus implores us to Just Do It, though many would rather not. We tend to look down on the person who prefers bathrobes to business suits and reading volumes of prose to Excel spreadsheets, or, to be less sophisticated but more realistic, smoking pot and playing video games. Of course, it must be said that not a single lazy person has ever triggered a global financial calamity or plunged whole societies into bloody vortexes of violence. Only busybodies do that.

In our work-obsessed culture, procrastination is a kind of moral deficiency, one that must be dealt with at any cost. Doctors assign mental disorders to millions of college students and prescribe them drugs like Adderall, which then get sold as performance-enhancing study drugs to other students who aren’t mentally ill. One wonders how college students managed to get anything done before Adderall. Surely attention-deficit disorder existed a hundred years ago, unless, of course, it’s a recent creation.

When something is said to be construct, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real or shouldn’t be taken seriously. Buildings are constructions, after all, and we take them seriously by not driving into them. By calling something construct, it makes it easier to define and analyze and, if necessary, criticize it. All disorders are constructs of a given social order, and this realization serves to help diagnose the diagnosis. ADD is a symptom of a society in which there are numerous things competing for our attention and working is the default mode. An essayist and epistemologist named Nassim Nicholas Taleb once said, “Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.” It is natural to feel trapped by what you don’t want to do, especially when it’s a term paper due in eight hours.

To squash this rebellion against entrapment, we enlist the services of drugs that keep us focused but also might sap our humanity. “It’s not life-or-death,” said Cat Marnell, a writer and noted prescription-drugs enthusiast. “But it is a very quiet soul-murder.” Or very tragic self-murder. In 2011, a college graduate named Richard Fee killed himself after his Adderall prescription ran out. He’d been using the drugs for a couple of years after being diagnosed with ADHD. In his initial evaluation, Fee’s doctor observed: “(H)e has been an A-B student until mid-college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading. He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”

If we understood procrastination differently (and correctly), Fee would still be alive. Procrastination is not a retreat from work. Procrastination is work. The process of making or doing something requires idleness. We cannot innovate or explore or achieve incredible things if we don’t let dreamers dream. Until we realize this and reconfigure our notions of procrastination, work and play, there will be more Richard Fees to come. This is not something to put off for later.