Acting Out: When Millennial Achievements Matter More Than Themselves
New actors don’t know what to do with their hands. Acting is complicated, it’s basically having to learn several different skills and juggling them constantly, keeping all the balls in the air at the same time. There’s the acting, obviously, but there’s also physical choices, the use of diction, the presentational aspect, the sense of play, and if you’re singing and dancing you have to keep those things in the air as well. That’s hard, that’s complicated, that’s involved, but what does it have to do with hands? Why don’t we know what to do with our hands? This isn’t exclusive to acting; when we first kiss we wonder what to do with our teeth and our tongues, when we dance we wonder what to do with our feet, and when we speak we often find ourselves focusing once again on our hands. What condition of our experience suddenly makes us hyperaware of our extremities in these moments?
What part of the human experience makes us focus on the behaviors of parts of us that, at other times, are as natural as any other part. We don’t often wonder what to do with our left knee when we’re giving a speech, nor does the activity of our navel tend to absorb us when we kiss. Why do we suddenly become hyperaware of our body parts in these situations? Doubtless it is because we move in these moments from a living being, experiencing life as we do in the everyday, mundane machinations of existence, to a spectated being, a spectacle, an animal in a cage. We no longer experience our body as we do when we live, truly live in the sense that we experience life as it comes to us without much scrutiny or reflection. However once we move from a body in motion to an object of attention and expectation, we undergo some kind of change. Not simply being observed, which does seem to change us in its own way, but being observed and being expected to perform, and perform well. At least, that’s how we often conceptualize it; we think that it is crucial that we not only do what’s required or expected of it, but that we exceed expectations, that we do not just well but very well, exceptional even.
These expectations which we perceive as being present make these extremities transcend their normal purpose as a part of our selves, our bodies, into being the means by which we produce this excellence, and the surplus excellence we feel we must provide to our spectators. Our hands, our teeth and tongues, and our feet are no longer ours, they are the means by which we will prove ourselves, prove we are talented, prove we are worthwhile, prove we are valuable. Indeed, this is how we are producing value for ourselves and our society.
Doubtless we would not find ourselves very welcome within theatre society if we couldn’t act, or welcome within the dance community if we couldn’t dance, or be a very welcome or desirable romantic partner if we couldn’t kiss. We are not allowed within the communities we wish to be a part of, even need to be a part of, unless we meet the demands of production these groups ask of us. Furthermore, we are not allowed within society itself unless we meet its demands of production, unless we produce value which makes us “worthwhile” members of that society. This is what makes us wonder what to do with our hands; they are no longer our hands, which are a part of our body, indeed are a part of us. To wonder what to do with any part of your body is senseless, because your body is you, it is the entirety of your experience. However, once they become the means by which we produce value, value which we need to exist within society, they become alienated from us. This does not stop at our extremities, our entire bodies become alien to us in this structure, a society which values us only on our ability to produce, and just as the alienation does not stop there, its affects and consequences do not stop there either.
Modern American culture is two crises disproportionately affecting younger generations: an unprecedented spike in mental health issues like depression and anxiety and “millennial burnout.” In reality, both are a result of a culture of work. Demands of an inhumane level of work/labor and production from the individual are related to a commodification of the body under capitalism, and this commodification results in total alienation from oneself. The state or condition of self-destruction, which society encourages, is the price of the modern day’s excessive regime of production. The individual within society, especially the millennial individual, not only works but also submits to the ideology of self-commodification, and does so through various societally encouraged behaviors such as the creation and maintenance of a “personal brand” across social media and in interpersonal interactions. In order to be viable in the job market they subject their bodies to these demands in order to be seen as viable potential employees, or in some cases to even be seen as a human being of worth and value, as failing to adhere to these standards is seen as a moral failing.
This extreme concentration on maintaining outward appearances causes individuals to invalidate the actual lived reality of the body in favor of the appearance of that body and its ability to produce commodities and to be consumed as one by others. They therefore begin to literally see their physical bodies as commodities to be consumed and fetishized and bought and sold. They only have a financial or capital investment in those bodies, and no personal or emotional investment in them, to the point where mental illness becomes commonplace, because the demand for and level of production required from the commodified body often outstrips human capabilities, and due to the thorough self-alienation encouraged by a production oriented society prevents individuals from recognizing that their body and its health is the same as them and their health. We believe that living with sickness and pain is acceptable and somehow subordinate to a personal need, because our society demands we produce whether we are unwell or not. Individuals never consider taking the time off or the time needed to care for the body because they feel little personal attachment to it outside of its ability to produce or be consumed. We thereby foster the dysfunction created by our overproduction and consumption by ignoring it.
This need for constant production doesn’t come to us out of a dream, nor is it revealed to us as some sort of an epiphany in a dream or a similar revelatory event. This outlook is ideology, which comes to us from the society we live in. Louis Pierre Althusser, a French philosopher active in mid to late 20th century, explores the idea of ideology extensively in his career, especially how it affects not only our worldview but how we see the world existing. In his essay Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus he describes ideology as Ideology is the imaginary representation of the world which people project onto the real world in order to interpret it. We create ideology, which manifests in the behaviors we perform, as a way to cope with our actual lived conditions. We project the conditions which we consider necessary to exist within our actual lived experience onto our actual reality, and consider these conditions to be the same as reality, when in fact they are often rather arbitrary. This process makes these conditions seem natural to us; ideology does not come from a vacuum, it is created by the dominant social group and is enforced by society itself. Because we all live in these conditions, believe in them, and enforce them they become so routine that we are blind to them. We don’t see the systems that shape our lives and furthermore we don’t realize that they are arbitrary, and therefore optional, systems. There doesn’t seem to be any alternative to the lives we are living, because our ideology subsumes any actual reality we may experience and become our new lived reality.
Capitalism is an economic system which subverts and transcends simpler forms of trade, where either goods are traded for other goods or goods are traded for currency which is then traded for other goods by literally inverting this economic equation. Instead of commodity for money for commodity capitalism begins with money and its end is money, money is traded for goods in order to obtain more money. Such a system in abstract doesn’t seem bad, and perhaps it would have no adverse consequences in a different or better world. In the world we live in, however, it seems to invariably lead to exploitation. With the object of trade moving from commodity to currency, the value of currency becomes inherent to the currency, and an end in and of itself. Before capitalism, the value of currency was only in how many goods or services it could get you; within capitalism the value of goods and services is only in how much money they are worth. Therefore the value of anything and everything becomes less than the value of money, which is value.
This economic system does not end with trade, it becomes a part of the culture of any system which follows this system of economics. Trade is central to human life as it exists, as it is the only way we can exist within a society; one person cannot be hunter and baker and tanner and apothecary. We have become reliant on specialization within a community in order to have comfortable and safe lives. That means that we have to trade with other people to survive, and the values which make trade possible become our values. Because of this money has become synonymous with value even outside of trade, which can be seen in an ostensible way through our language. Phrases like “you look like a million bucks,” “that’s just my two cents,” and “pay the piper” show that money has come to stand in for the abstract concept of value within Western society at the very least.
This reality is made even more plain through human action; time and time again the value of money has been stacked up against human life and money has won out. Western society decided that you could buy and sell human beings in the slave trade, that you could buy the labor of children and force them to work long hours of hard work for little pay at the turn of the century, and that it was completely acceptable to start wars in third world countries for resources which could turn a profit, from Chiquita (formerly United Fruit Co.) instigating war in Central America to secure commercial interests (Barkham) to the United States and Russia starting war in the middle east to secure control of oil prices (Washington’s Blog) to cell phone companies maintaining a state of constant civil war in Congo to this day (Zax). From here we can see that money does more than simply determine value, it acts as value, society as a whole cares more about money than it does about human life in many cases, if not most cases.
This line of thinking is not new, and it does not end there. This examination and critique of capitalism is derived from the works of Karl Marx, German philosopher, political theorist, and historian and writer of the landmark text Das Kapital. Marx wrote on how capitalism affected the worker in his essay Wage Labor and Capital when he describes alienation. Alienation describes the way the working class is estranged from their self, their work, and the product of their labor. The workings of the capitalist divorce them from the time they spend working, the capital produced by their work, and even their means of living. The self is made into a commodity, and one also commodifies others. Workers are divorced from the actual product they create and from the origins of the products of their labor. In the text he describes this by saying, “wages are … not the worker’s share in the commodity produced by him. Wages are the part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys for himself a specific amount of labor power. Labor power is, therefore, a commodity which its possession, the worker, sells to capital … in order to live.” Because of this “he wants in order to live. He does not even reckon labor as part of his life, rather it is a sacrifice of his life … Hence, also, the product of his activity is not the object of his activity … What he produces for himself is wages … And the worker … does he consider [his labor] a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where [his labor] ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed” (Marx 660).
Here we can see how money can come to mean more to individuals than human being, because the human being can and almost fundamentally is a commodity within the capitalist system. Under capitalist thought it is not only feasible that one could assign value to human life, it is necessary to assign a value to a human life in order to operate within that society. We must decide that the work, and therefore the public life, of a doctor is worth more than that of a janitor in order to purchase the time each for their respective labor. This value attached to their labor becomes the value of the actual human being, it becomes the thing that we care about for other human beings. We don’t consider a person’s hopes and aspirations or their hobbies and interests as meaningful parts of a person’s life, we consider the core of who they are to be found in the way they provide value to the society in which they live. This calculation of value is not necessarily absolute, and not immutable, but it is normative; it is the default state of members within this society, and as functional members of this society we do not question it, and we do not often consider that there are alternatives to this way of thinking. This ideology makes up our entire world, and what is outside of us, what makes our environment, does not stay outside. We take it in, and hold it as a belief, and believe it is natural, just as Althusser theorized. Therefore we do not simply evaluate the value of others by their ability to produce value, we evaluate our own value based on our ability to produce value.
So we come to a head here; we as a society seek value from ourselves and others, and we do not accept those who do not produce value. This value exists macrocosmically as money, but microcosmically, on a personal and interpersonal level, it exists as human capital and its ability to turn into money. However, because of the dynamic nature of civilization and the ephemeral nature of what society as a whole considers either good or bad, we must constantly adapt in order to possess whatever society currently deems to be valuable human capital, because all human capital is not created equal.
For clarification, human capital is the knowledge, skills, and personal and social qualities which assist one in performing labor that produces monetary value. This concept maintains that not all labor is equally valuable, meaning that some qualities and skills which constitute an individual’s human capital are considered worthless (Kenton). For the sake of example, the ability to resolve conflict gained from a very argumentative friend group would be very valuable within the modern job marketplace, but the ability to solve a Rubik’s cube in fifteen seconds would be essentially worthless in most places within modern Western society. Here is the starting point for the problem posed at the start of this essay.
Let us imagine that the two examples of human capital stated previously are two skills that one human being possesses, which isn’t unreasonable. Let us imagine this person, let’s call them Dana, absolutely adores Rubik’s cubes; Dana’s played with them since they were a child and they delight in nothing more than when they can shave a few seconds off their solve time. Let’s imagine at the same time that Dana absolutely hates conflict. It makes them break out into nervous sweats, it makes them queasy, they would rather do almost anything else than step in between two disagreeing people and mediate. There is, according to society, no value whatsoever in the thing that brings Dana the most joy in life. They may be made happy by it, but society does not believe that anything can be got from it. On the other hand, society at large and Dana’s friend group are very invested in their ability to resolve conflict. Dana’s friends feel like they couldn’t get anything done or even really get along without Dana’s mediating, and society needs people to resolve conflict between people, and capitalists need employees that can resolve customer complaints. This is clearly the more valuable skill, the thing that Dana should invest all of their time and energy in.
Perhaps this example seems ridiculous. “Of course,” you may think, “Dana should, spend time building skills that will get them a job. Why would they focus on something pointless as Rubik’s cubes as much as something that could get them a job to support themselves like interpersonal skills? In fact, Dana should work on having some more skills than Rubik’s cubes and conflict resolution. Let the Rubik’s cube be a hobby, and leave it at that.” Practically speaking, this thinking is correct. Without a job, Dana quite literally cannot live. Dana would starve in the streets if they focused only on Rubik’s cubes and didn’t stomach their discomfort with conflict resolution to get themselves a decent job. But is this the natural state of life? Is this sensible? Dana absolutely loves Rubik’s cubes, and truly despises conflict resolution. To the point where one wonders why Dana even learned conflict resolution at all, and why they continue to do it? And why Dana doesn’t attempt to make a career out of Rubik’s cubes? Surely it isn’t impossible? It might be unlikely, but with hard work and determination, maybe a bit of side hustle, surely it could be done. Here is where other factors complicate the issue; let us restructure our paradigm.
Dana’s experience is not exclusive to her, it is an experience common to many young actors entering the industry. Millennials in general face a similar issue, but partly because I am a young actor who has done some professional work, and because acting is perhaps the best physical manifestation of the gig economy that I have any experience with, I will speak more directly to that experience. According to John Frazer, a writer for Forbes, a gig economy refers to “the concept of creating an income from short-term tasks,” which includes “full-time independent contractors … small business owner[s], and … freelancers” (Frazer). This became a significant part of the job market after the financial crisis of 2008, and has only become an increasingly larger part of the market since it ended.
Nowadays a steady job with long-term security is becoming rarer for those entering or re-entering the job market, and there is so much competition for so few jobs that the culture, which already had a precedent of a person’s value being equal to their ability to produce became a culture where more energy and effort had to be put into finding a job, and thus finding value, than there was previously. Furthermore, the pressure put upon finding a job became so much higher. This is partly because they were raised by parents who likely had a relatively easy time finding a job and didn’t adequately prepare them for the new job market, because of a predatory student loan system, and because of the advent of social media, and how it presented a new aspect to job hunting which hadn’t existed previously: self-marketing and the formation of the “personal brand.” In the past obtaining a job was relatively simple: you got a job that your class or qualifications or family history had prepared for you, and there was likely a job ready for you when you got there, especially if you got a degree. In the modern job market jobs are not guaranteed and they have to be sought after at a level they simply have never had to be sought after before.
The gig economy rather nicely replicates what the industry has always been for actors; there are not enough jobs for all the actors out there. This guarantees a lot of failure, which aspiring actors are told to expect. Being an actor in the modern day requires working constantly to simply get into the market, and that doesn’t guarantee success. A modern actor should expect to go to hundreds of auditions, should maintain an active and curated social media presence which reflects their personal brand, be constantly networking and going to shows in their area to establish a presence in the industry, be constantly taking every opportunity to attend relevant classes and masterclasses to build their “actor’s toolbox” of relevant skills and to network (again), and to coordinate their resumes, headshots, and business cards with not only their personal brand, but the specific job they’re going after. All of this while maintaining either a side hustle to make sure their bills are paid or searching for a new job while still in their current job. There’s a lot of rejection in this line of work, a lot of frustration and not making any headway, and it takes a toll on actors.
It isn’t uncommon for actors to suffer from depression in my experience, from a combination of factors. I believe the rejection alone isn’t solely responsible, but the manifestation of this rejection as a feeling of failure, not just as an actor but as a human being. Actors get a lot of flack from society at large for being actors. Society does not deem the work actors do as valuable work, and actors are often barraged with questions about how they plan to “make a living” doing acting work, how they’re going to support themselves, what their “backup plan” for acting is. This is because acting is a manifestation of the gig economy, of going for job after job and never settling in one place. This clashes with societal views of one’s work equaling one’s value, because there is no clear established value of acting work. Society considers big name actors like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as successes, because they know that they make upwards of millions of dollars and live somewhat permanently in one socioeconomic class, they have “financial stability,” which is a clear sign of success or failure within capitalism. In this understanding, “financial stability” refers to a relatively stable, unchanging economic position which marks one’s “success” or “failure” within capitalism. Being below the poverty line would be “financial stability” in this sense, as it is stable and relatively unchanging, and is a clear marker of “failure” within capitalism.
Society values this stability because it paves the way for the creation of traditional family units, which propagates said society and allows it to continue on into the future. Acting is discouraged because it does not guarantee stability, which makes the creation of family units and the continuation of society at risk in the mind of a traditional capitalist, despite the fact that actors do in fact buy homes and get married and have children. There is an expectation of failure often leading to a lack of support from family or friends, combined with the present reality of failure when you don’t get a job, combined with the strain of doing so many different tasks in pursuit of a job you aren’t sure you’ll get. Then, once you have the job, you keep looking for more; another side hustle, the next project when this one falls through. All of this is combined with a need to keep working in order to be of value. This need is created by the expectations of family and society, which act as an ideological state apparatus, a coercive means of encouraging subjects within society to follow societal norms. This creates stress, stress which is at the heart of reality for a young actor. Anne Helen Petersen, a journalist/news reporter for Buzzfeed, takes a look at this phenomenon and its effects on her own life in her article “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” saying,
In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris lays out the myriad ways in which our generation has been trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace — first in school, then through secondary education — starting as very young children. “Risk management used to be a business practice,” Harris writes, “now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.” Depending on your age, this idea applies to what our parents did or didn’t allow us to do (play on “dangerous” playground structures, go out without cellphones, drive without an adult in the car) and how they allowed us to do the things we did do (learn, explore, eat, play). Harris points to practices that we now see as standard as a means of “optimizing” children’s play, an attitude often described as “intensive parenting.” Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined (Petersen).
Increasingly, the job market at large is beginning to resemble the actor’s job market. People like Dana are having to send out a seemingly endless chain of resumes and business cards, maintain a social media presence and create a strong “personal brand,” network endlessly, and try to get as many certifications, classes, and degrees as they can to be more competitive for the limited supply of jobs they’re up for in the market. Increasing numbers of millennials entering the workforce have to have a side hustle like driving for Lyft or Uber or freelancing or subletting their apartments on Craigslist or AirBnB. Their parents are equally unsupportive of their feelings of failure in the job market because they did not have to contend with the same level of competitiveness when they entered the job market, so they don’t receive support there, and millennials are feeling stressed. However, they may have it worse than actors.
An actor is told to expect these things from the job market by everyone they speak to, even their instructors. Actors know what they’re getting into, and they know that success isn’t going to come easy. They also have a supportive group of fellow actors who are encouraged to communicate, network, and commiserate with them, forming a natural support group of friends. Besides that, an actor is pursuing their passion. I’ve had an almost endless amount of professionals tell me what they were told themselves: “don’t get into this industry unless you love it – there are too many better jobs with better pay you can get much easier to struggle here if you don’t have to.” It is very likely actors act because they couldn’t imagine themselves doing anything else, because there is so little money in it at most levels and so much work goes into it. For these reasons, actors often adjust, an while new actors may overwork themselves and have a rough go of it, older actors have a tradition of people who learned how to balance that came before them, and know how to maintain healthy lifestyles while doing what they love, and are happy to pass this information down to younger actors, at least in the theatre industry. Millennials entering the job market at large have a bit of a different story.
Think back to Dana, our paradigm from earlier. They love Rubik’s cubes, and they hate their main source of human capital. Were Dana wishing to become an actor, they would likely be encouraged to not go after or not accept jobs they weren’t comfortable with, or that didn’t suit them, because the mindset of the actor is to follow one’s passion, and there’s no purpose in pursuing something that isn’t your passion. That is because despite the fact that society frowns upon it, acting is indeed considered a job by society at large, and they know what success in that job looks like, be it Broadway or Hollywood. Dana’s passion is solving Rubik’s cubes, which society does not consider a job and has no idea what success in that industry looks like. Without the connections to the few professional Rubik’s cubers that exist, if they even do exist in the modern day, Dana might not even know how to begin doing Rubik’s cubes professionally. Dana doesn’t have the option of pursuing their passion, in their mind and in society’s mind. So what is Dana to do?
Dana pursues customer service, and does something they hate for their foreseeable future because it’s their only skill. Dana can’t just apply for a job and call it a day, though, Dana has to market themself as someone who excels at customer service, which makes them excruciatingly uncomfortable, or else elect to starve on the streets. Dana gets a job, and keeps on the lookout for something else, maintaining a squeaky clean online presence which reflects her “personal brand,” and seeks certifications which help them be more competitive in the job market, maybe finding a job they don’t quite hate one day if possible. Unfortunately, getting a degree or certification is expensive, and is perhaps out of Dana’s means. Furthermore, the longer Dana spends in their industry the more qualified and hirable they become for customer service and the less qualified they become for anything else. At some point they would be guaranteeing themselves a giant pay cut if they tried to break into another industry. The hours at their job are pretty long, and they become longer because millennial employees tend to not take vacation days and to work overtime in order to look more competitive and hopefully be more successful in the job market. All this tires them out, stresses them out, which leads to a strain on their mental health and their ability to function within society. This leads to a thing called “millennial burnout.” Petersen also details her experience with this phenomenon in her article, saying,
Millennials love to complain about other millennials giving them a bad name. But as I fumed about this 27-year-old’s post office anxiety, I was deep in a cycle of a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.” I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months. None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.” It’s not as if I were slacking in the rest of my life. I was publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis. But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it (Petersen).
Petersen characterizes this burnout as an inability to function on a microcosmic scale, which is a result of the millennial tendency to overstretch themselves and not take necessary breaks in pursuit of a sense of success they feel they’re lacking. She sources it in an internalized need to be constantly working, always striving to get to this nebulous sense of success, or satisfaction. It makes it so menial tasks seem more difficult and causes weight gain, and in Petersen’s (and in my own) experience, “it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives” (Petersen).
This description of burnout is extremely reminiscent of the experiences myself and friends of mine have had with depression. An inability to complete mundane tasks like cleaning your room or completing assignments or going to class or even showering, gaining weight, and a constant feeling of never having the energy or bandwidth to complete even the simplest of tasks. Now, I would here clarify that Petersen and the people she is interviewing likely do not suffer from depression, but I believe the similarity between millennial burnout and depression paired with actual increased rates of depression and anxiety in millennials (Curley).
This drive, this need which resides within millennials and young actors is a result of the ideology in which they were raised, the conditions they think they need to maintain in order to survive within society. Millennials put their bodies at risk when they work to point of burnout, incurring damages to their mental health and wellbeing as well as putting themselves at risk for injury or sickness from lack of much needed rest. I myself am guilty of this, and see it in my peers and compatriots. We become so committed to an ideal of constant work, of creating value for ourselves in order to be valuable, that we lose sight of our actual selves, our bodies. Just as Marx described the worker being alienated from his work and himself, we are alienated from ourselves, because just as society at large values money, the physical embodiment of value, over human beings, we do the same; this does not stop at ourselves. Time and time again, day after day, millennials stack the values of their very selves against the almighty dollar and come up lacking. Perhaps one day that may change.
Works Cited
Barkham, Patrick. “The Banana Wars Explained.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 5 Mar. 1999, www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/05/eu.wto3.
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Frazer, John. “How The Gig Economy Is Reshaping Careers For The Next Generation.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 16 Feb. 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/johnfrazer1/2019/02/15/how-the-gig-economy-is-reshaping-careers-for-the-next-generation/.
Kenton, Will. “Human Capital.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 19 Apr. 2019, www.investopedia.com/terms/h/humancapital.asp.
Petersen, Anne Helen. “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation.” BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News, 6 Mar. 2019, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory An Anthology. Second ed., Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.
Zax, David. “Is Your Cell Phone Helping to Fund a Civil War?” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 Oct. 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/is-your-cell-phone-helping-to-fund-a-civil-war-7654/.