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World News Page 6 February 20, 2015 The Rise of Streaming By Maya Tenzer O n January 7, 2015, gunshots rang out in the 11th Arrondissement of Paris. Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, Algerian brothers who resided in the suburb of Gennevilliers, stormed the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo wearing black masks and armed with AK-47 rifles. They opened fire at people in the lobby before making their way to the second floor, where they fired at cartoonists and journalists in the middle of a staff meeting, shouting "Allahu Akbar" as they killed twelve and non-fatally injured eleven others. In the ensuing days of chaos in Paris, the Kouachi brothers' friend and fellow former inmate Armedy Coulibaly took fifteen people hostage in a kosher supermarket in the 20th Arrondissement two days later, killing four before the police stormed the store and killed him. He and the Kouachi brothers are now dead, but they have left the deadliest terrorist incident in France in over fifty years and a divisive tension in the debate on the country's future in their wake. The recent shootings in France seem to Americans both distinctly foreign and somehow all too familiar, to the French both jarring and, at the same time, not entirely without cause. Americans have witnessed far too many acts of terrorism, including the feared homegrown sort that has turned France upside-down in the past few weeks, not to understand the political forces currently at play. However, while we have been steeped in the effect the institutions of slavery and segregation have had on our own present- day race relations, we are, for the most part, unaware of the complex nature of oppression embedded in other countries. An understanding of France's history of imperialism, which starts and ends with the country directly south of it across the Mediterranean, Algeria, may prove integral to an understanding of the Charlie Hebdo shootings that goes beyond the formulaic platitudes about tolerance and religious fundamentalism we see today. The French first invaded Algeria in 1830, and in the cultural hegemony and virtual apartheid that followed, the colonial regime converted mosques into churches and allowed the indigenous population to apply for French citizenship only if they renounced their Muslim faith. In the French decolonization period that followed World War II, Franco- Algerian relations came to a head when the French police repressed a revolt by killing up to 40,000 Algerians in the Sétif Massacre of 1945 and with the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, a conflict that would take the lives of thousands of French soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Algerians. Tensions from the war reached a boiling point in 1961 when 30,000 Franco-Algerians, who had long made up the majority of France's Muslim population, staged a banned independence rally in Paris–less than a mile from the present-day Charlie Hebdo offices–only to be gunned down by the French police, who killed as many as 600 protestors. Algeria won back its independence in 1962, but resentment of the Muslim population in France festered and has continued to do so since. Add to France's problems with race the lingering specter of Vichy France, a state that nearly outdid Nazi Germany in the zeal with which it persecuted "undesirables" during World War II, and it makes for a nation that is rather awkward in dealing with or even examining the proverbial skeletons in its closet. Today, nearly five of the six and a half million Muslims in France are of Algerian descent. Though Muslims make up 30 to 40% of Paris, most of them live in the banlieues, the poor, all-Muslim suburbs on the outskirts of the city. These isolated communities can serve as breeding grounds for lone wolves who feel increasingly disenfranchised by mainstream French society and end up committing acts of homegrown terrorism; French officials estimate that as many as 1,000 French Muslims have left to join extremist groups in recent years. However, the banlieues are not the only source of growing insulation. In recent years, France, along with the rest of Europe, has seen the insidious return of nativism in the form of Marine Le Pen's far-right, anti- immigration National Front Party, a group that has gained an alarming amount of traction at the national level. This movement is by no means on the fringe: the European Network Against Racism has warned that racism in Europe is at its worst since the 1980s. A 2014 poll revealed that 27% of French respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Muslims in their own country, and another poll conducted in 2013 found that three-quarters of respondents believed Islam to be incompatible with the values of French society. Worst of all, in 2013 there were 1,274 attacks on religious and racial minorities in France, part of a disturbing upward trend. The rise of xenophobic sentiment has also become part of mainstream French culture: Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission, released on the same day that the Charlie Hebdo shootings occurred, imagines a Muslim becoming president of France in 2022, a scenario Le Pen called "a fiction that could one day become a reality." Submission became the No. 1 seller on Amazon in France a day after its release, joining on the bestseller list French journalist Éric Zenmour's essay The French Suicide, in which he argues that immigration, feminism, and the student uprisings of 1968 set the country on the path to ruin, concluding, "the final prognosis is civil war. One day there will be a clash between the French who aren't Muslim and the French who think that a Muslim should be president of the republic." Both books have struck a chord with a France longing to return to the Trentes Glorieuses, the thirty years of widespread prosperity it enjoyed after World War II, and troubled by its decline and current state of disarray. The growing Muslim population is one of many factors that have exacerbated France's feelings of inquietude. A stagnant economy and unemployment above 10% have plagued the country. Aggravating the national identity crisis are fears that France, a country that has historically prided itself on a strong republic, has ceded too much power to the European Union. "I think this anxiety is the idea of seeing France give up on itself, of changing to the point of no longer being recognizable," said philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, whose 2013 book The Unhappy Identity discussed the problems immigration poses for French identity and cultural integration. The French psyche seems to be one of categorical defeatism at this point, one that the far right is all too willing to exploit to implement its anti- immigration agenda. Marx and his statement that history repeats itself "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" may very well have the last laugh if France, along with the rest of Europe, becomes increasingly aggressive toward its ethnic and religious minorities in a fashion not too dissimilar from that of interwar Europe. The country now finds itself at a crossroads: it can choose to perpetuate a vicious cycle of distrust and enmity that can only result in more acts of extremism and more security measures that further alienate a marginalized minority, or it can confront its own sinister nativist sentiment and take the arduous path to cultural integration. For now, the world watches, anxious to see what move France will make. Charlie Hebdo By Taylor Bachelis I n 1927, Philo Farnsworth invented the first electronic television. Now, 88 years later, the game has changed completely. 96.7% of American households have at least one television set, and as a result, television programming has become a multibillion dollar industry and surpassed the film industry in profit. However, though cable and satellite television have become incredibly profitable over the past 60 years, there is a new player in the world of entertainment: Netflix. Founded in 1997, Netflix started out as an online DVD rental service with a pay-per-rental model similar to other DVD stores of the time. In the following years, Netflix would change its model to a subscription service and make streaming content available in addition to their DVD service. Now, only 12.5% of Netflix users subscribe to their DVD service, and Netflix has stopped advertising that side of the business completely. In 2011, the company even tried to separate the two businesses and create a new company, Qwikster, to fulfill their DVD rentals, though they ultimately decided not to go through with the plan and kept the two services under one name. Regardless of this momentary identity confusion, Netflix continues to prosper, with a growing subscriber base of 50 million and counting. In a survey of Trevor students and faculty, 83% of responders had Netflix, while only 78% had cable subscriptions. This is a thin margin, but one would have thought it impossible five years ago. Netflix has grown rapidly in the past decade and particularly in the past few years. Last year alone, the company reported a profit of 1.29 billion dollars, raising the question: what is the secret to Netflix's success? One component of Netflix's progress may be the fact that they give users the ability to watch sequential episodes back to back, or to "binge watch". A survey of Trevor students and faculty showed that the number of people who watch 0-10 hours a week of cable was almost equal to the number of people who watch 0-10 hours a week of Netflix; when it comes to the number of people who watch 10 or more hours of media content, Netflix takes a clear lead over cable. Actor Laura Prepon agrees with this method of media consumption, and responded to the question of binge watching vs traditional cable at a press day, "personally, I watch pretty much everything on Netflix, and I watch all the episodes in a row, if I can." Aside from her work on That 70's Show, which is available for viewing on Netflix, Prepon also plays Alex Voss on Orange is the New Black, an innovative series available exclusively on Netflix, which leads to the second factor in Netflix's newfound growth: original content. In 2012, Netflix released its first original program, Lilyhammer. The show follows a fictional New York gangster trying to start a new life in Norway, and is currently in its third season. Since 2012, a number of original programs have been added, including the aforementioned hit Orange is the New Black, which follows Piper Chapman, a bisexual inmate serving time at a prison for her involvement with a drug cartel. The show has been a major success for Netflix and is popular among the Trevor community as well; 52% of responders have watched it, which is almost equivalent to the viewership of runner-ups Arrested Development, originally a Fox sitcom revived by Netflix for a fourth season, and House of Cards combined. Original titles like these have shifted Netflix to a TV service more than a movie service. In the Trevor community, 44% of respondents use Netflix for TV shows more than movies, and only 13% use Netflix primarily for movies. The move towards streaming TV shows has inspired other services to try similar techniques. Hulu was conceived in 2007, and launched Photo courtesy of petevoelker.com

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