Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.05.2016, Page 8

Forget tourism. Ice-
land’s next giant
boom is going to be
bananas. Literally.
A fungal infection
is currently decimating the planet’s
commercial banana supply, as it did
in the 1950s. Every banana planta-
tion in the world as at risk—with the
exception of Iceland, which has an
unblemished banana plantation in
Hveragerði. If global banana supplies
plummet, Iceland could find itself on
the golden end of a seller’s market.
Gives whole new meaning to “banana
republic,” n’est pas?
The entire nation is recovering from a
case of whiplash suffered as the sur-
prising news that Iceland didn’t make
the Eurovision finals hit home. Liter-
ally no one saw this coming, as this
was the first time in the history of the
republic that they did not—sorry. It’s
actually entirely to be expected that
Iceland didn’t make the finals, and it
might very well be a law of physics that
Iceland can never win the competition.
Not that you’d want to. Have you seen
Eurovision?
The villain of the issue this issue is ex-
pats. “But hang on,” you ask, “What’s
the difference between an immigrant
and an expat?” The answer is nothing.
It’s the word itself that’s the villain here,
because more often than not, “expat” is
a dog whistle for “one of the good kinds,”
which is itself a dog whistle for “white.”
Expats (or people who call themselves
that) do not see themselves as a part of
the huddled masses yearning to breathe
free. And they don’t want to be seen that
way, either. Calling yourself or anyone
else an “expat” instead of just using “im-
migrant” is elitist, arguably classist, and
reinforces the rhetoric that immigrants
are a societal drain; self-described ex-
pats tend to be professionals or academ-
ics. This word drives yet another wedge
into the immigrant community—and
we have more than often wedges already.
If there were a hospice for words that
need to die, expat would be on the next
bus out of town. It’s a snooty, meaning-
less, self-aggrandizing label, and it’s for
these reasons that expats are this issue’s
Villain of the Issue.
The hero of the issue this issue is immi-
grants. We live with the many benefits
of immigrants every single day. They do
the jobs no one else wants to do, which
more often than not means gruelling
physical labour, thankless social wel-
fare posts or, worst of all, food service,
and Iceland literally could not function
if they picked up and left tomorrow. But
apart from the economics, it is a blessing
to live in a multicultural society, where
you can meet different kinds of people,
hear different languages, and learn
from experiences and backgrounds
vastly different than your own. Dismiss
the paranoid hysteria from the far right
about the supposed dangers of different
cultures living together, especially on
this continent—the history of Europe
is the history of multiculturalism, and
Europe as a whole would be far poorer
in every sense if cultures were kept
strictly separate from one another. Im-
migrants work harder, try harder, and
make all kinds of crazy sacrifices just so
their kids can grow up in a better place.
Their crucial yet often overlooked role in
Icelandic society is why immigrants are
this issue’s Hero of the Issue.
HERO OF
THE ISSUE
VILLAIN OF
THE ISSUEImmigrants Expats
InterNations Expat communityJói Kjartans
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 6 — 2016
8
NEWS IN
BRIEF
STRANGE
BREW
Demanding
Your
Privacy
The murky
waters of
Facebook
Words
JÓHANNA
PÉTURSDÓTTIR
Photo
ALÍSA
KALYANOVA
Everyone knows social media—espe-
cially Facebook—and uses it so fre-
quently that it reflects a big part of
our lives. Deleting it is not an option
anymore because, to put it drastical-
ly, you would delete a part of yourself.
I kept denying the impact of so-
cial media until I saw the docu-
mentary ‘Facebookistan’, which I
highly recommend. This impact has
been pointed out many times, but
it doesn’t seem to have entered into
the thinking of the masses—myself
included—who use Facebook. We
have created a certain position for
ourselves through all kinds of social
media, and that is how we identify
parts of who we are. There is no way
out.
For social media to have this kind
of runaway success, it should claim
some virtues: connecting people, and
giving everyone a voice. But is this re-
ally the case?
After all, the image we want to
present is rarely fully aligned with
who we really are. A Russian photog-
rapher demonstrated as much when
he photographed random strangers
on the subway and then used a face
finder app to locate his subjects on
a social network. Not only is it dis-
turbing, in a privacy sense, how easily
he found these people online, but it
is also strange how most of them do
not look on their profiles as they seem
in real life.
We all want to position ourselves
in a different way (some more obvi-
ously than others), hiding behind our
computers, phones and tablets, mak-
ing it so easy for these companies to
compile all the data we are so happy
to provide them.
What Facebook
doesn't know
Through these images and posts ev-
eryone is supposed to exercise their
freedom of expression. But Facebook
never states clearly what users can
and cannot publish. And how could
it? Facebook does not even know what
is and what is not allowed.
This social medium uses modera-
tors—a fancy word for people in de-
veloping nations working night shifts
for $1 an hour, deciding what is and
what is not allowed. It is a subjective
process with little to no regulation,
entirely left up to the discernment of
a particular individual.
If you do anything that is not ac-
cording to their inconsistent rules,
you are out. Individuals cannot ques-
tion Facebook’s rulings because there
is no means of directly contacting the
company.
There is no transparency what-
soever in this organisation, which
claims they want people to be trans-
parent while invading their privacy.
Being considered a part of the
“Facebook generation”—remarkable
how this one social medium can cover
a whole generation and more—I feel
inclined to say, I do not think social
media succeeds in connecting people
or giving them an honest voice. It
merely gives people these illusions,
while they actually become more self-
obsessed and isolated.
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OPINION