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This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Kate Linebaugh: A quick note before we start. Today's episode contains descriptions of sex work, and might not be appropriate for all listeners.The pandemic changed a lot of people's jobs, including Ayla's. for the past 10 years, Ayla's made her living as a sex worker. How do you define sex?

Ayla: So a lot of people use sex work to refer to anybody who creates any sort of sexual content to sell. So, this includes prostitution, this includes pornography. Also live camming, stuff like that. Selling nudes.

Kate Linebaugh: In March 2020, Ayla was working as an escort.

Ayla: So you can't exactly have a social distancing when you're an escort. So I was laying off the escorting work a bit, and around that time OnlyFans was starting to pick up.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans. A social media site best known for adult content. Creators can post nude photos, videos, and other explicit material, and charge followers a monthly subscription. For Ayla, it was a chance to work from home. So she set up shop on the site and started posting.Can you describe one of your favorite videos? Something that would be okay to air on this family podcast?

Ayla: So one of the things I'm most proud of is I'm a pretty good mine. So I do a mime routine where I, it's hard to describe, but I place a jacket on one of my arms to make it look like the arm belongs to somebody else, and then we can get a little freaky. But it creates this really striking visual illusion that there's somebody else there through the jacket, which I really enjoy doing, and people respond very well to it.

Kate Linebaugh: People responded really well to a lot of Ayla's videos. She's become one of OnlyFans' top creators. When she's working regularly, she told us she can pull in a $100,000 a month. That's a lot.

Ayla: Yeah, it's a huge amount of money. It's really spectacular.

Kate Linebaugh: But last week, OnlyFans made an announcement that could threaten Ayla's business, and the future of the platform itself. OnlyFans, a website built on sex, said it was banning sexually explicit content.Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Linebaugh. It's Tuesday, August 24th.Coming up on the show, why OnlyFans is banning its most popular product, and what it could mean for the site and its creators.Our colleague, Georgia Wells covers social media, including OnlyFans. What is OnlyFans?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans is a subscription only social media site, with a twist. It allows adult entertainment. It's basically the X-rated Patreon, or the X-rated Substack.

Kate Linebaugh: How did this site begin? What's its origin story and where did it come from?

Georgia Wells: So, British entrepreneur, Tim Stokely, in 2016, he creates OnlyFans. And from the beginning, he had the idea that the adult entertainment market was underserved. So he starts reaching out to adult entertainers, individually.

Kate Linebaugh: Stokely would email these adult entertainers and ask them to come over to his new platform and bring their fans. He said he'd make it worth their while.

Georgia Wells: His pitch was, "On my platform, you can make 80% of the revenue that users pay." I've heard of other social media companies in the past brute forcing signups, but this is the most specific and direct I've ever heard of.

Kate Linebaugh: And do you have a sense of how popular OnlyFans was among creators?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans is huge among creators because it transformed, for many of them, their businesses. It's given them control over their content, over their career, in a way many of them didn't have control when they were working for porn studios. Or if there were sex workers, on the streets.

Kate Linebaugh: And OnlyFans' 80% cut for creators, a level that was unheard of in the adult entertainment industry, was a big draw, including for Ayla.

Ayla: It's the greatest cut I've seen on any sex work website. Any successful one, at least. Before OnlyFans, the industry standard was taking 50% or more. The very first website I started working for took 80%.

Kate Linebaugh: Over the past decade, Ayla says she's worked on several online platforms, and she's thought a lot about what makes each economic model pay off for workers like her. Take for example, Ayla's first foray into sex work, when she worked as a cam girl.What is a cam girl?

Ayla: A cam girl is similar to OnlyFans, but you provide a live stream. This live stream, it can vary on how accessible it is, but typically anybody can see it for free. Typically, the girl makes most of her money by accepting tips from people who are sending her money, live.

Kate Linebaugh: Ayla says she made good money camming, up to $10,000 a month. Though, it varied a lot. But camming had downsides. First, the camming platform took a hefty cut. Also, camming was labor-intensive. If Ayla wasn't live streaming, she wasn't making any money. And often, she says, her income dependent on a small number of high tippers, which she says has a lot to do with how camming works.

Ayla: When men tip you, they're not just trying to make you happy. They're also trying to demonstrate their high status in the eyes of other men. This is why very successful cam girls tend to use very masculine, competitive language like, "Oh, you're my king. You're my hero. Wow, you just beat everybody here." This language that's designed to foster this environment of competition between the viewers. That is what webcamming feeds off of, is the status play, which ends up resulting in the vast majority of your tips coming from the small percentage of men who can afford it. I think 80-90% of my income came from two to three people throughout the duration of my cam career.

Kate Linebaugh: Wow.

Ayla: This is very extreme, and it can be very stressful because your rent can depend on making like one or two people happy.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans solved a lot of those problems. Because Ayla didn't have to stream performances live, her OnlyFans content was less labor-intensive and could stay posted on the site for longer. And because OnlyFans is based on subscriptions, she could earn money from a wider audience.

Ayla: On OnlyFans, my top tippers, my richest top five tippers, probably make maybe 1% of my income. The difference in distribution is extremely stark.

Kate Linebaugh: You've talked about your work camming and your work as an escort. Did your work on OnlyFans feel more empowering, or how was it different from the others?

Ayla: It's so much better than camming. It's so much. It's more relaxing. You have more freedom, you get more money. You are less beholden to the three people who pay you the most and maybe they're angry at you one day and you have to text them frantically to make them not mad. There's a lot more emotional abuse that goes on in the camming livestream worlds because of just the way that the payments are structured. In OnlyFans, you're totally free of that. I'm free to tell even my high tippers, to be like, "... off" if I don't like this. I don't have to tout to their whims, and it just really distributes my income of much wider range of people, so that I'm much more flexible.

Kate Linebaugh: When you got this very successful business going on OnlyFans, what did it feel like?

Ayla: Absolutely fantastic. It was life-changing. Before that, I had been slowly growing a retirement account, but really worried because with sex work, you have an expiration date. A very slow, sad expiration date. And that was really stressful for me because it's like, I've committed my whole life to doing sex work and it's not like I have clear job options otherwise. I'm sure I could make something work, but it's still this strong not knowing.But with OnlyFans, I started finally making enough money that I realized, "Hey, I could probably retire in a few years if I kept this up." And that was a huge relief. I stopped worrying about my expiration date quite so much because I figured I probably could make it before I started showing visible signs of aging. I was really thrilled that it allowed me to move into a larger house. It allowed me to build up my savings quite a bit, to help my sister, for example. It was really wonderful.

Kate Linebaugh: Ayla had started on OnlyFans at just the right time. In the past year and a half, the platform's experienced massive growth. Here's Georgia again.

Ayla: OnlyFans was bobbing along, and during the pandemic, it caught fire. Everyone is stuck at home with nothing to do. They turn to their devices for entertainment.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans also got a boost from some key celebrities. Last summer, Cardi B announced she'd be sharing non-explicit behind the scenes footage from a music video exclusively on OnlyFans. And Beyonc name-dropped OnlyFans in the remix of the hit song, "Savage".

Beyonc: (singing).

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans has ballooned to 130 million users, and 2 million creators.

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans was riding this hockey stick of growth, and they've suddenly become a household name. I don't think we've ever seen an adult entertainment platform brand ever become a household name so quickly like that.

Kate Linebaugh: And then last week, OnlyFans made an announcement that could threaten all of that. Why the company did it? That's after the break.So, tell us what happened last week. What was the news?

Georgia Wells: Last week, OnlyFans announced it was banning sex.

Speaker 4: And OnlyFans getting out of the pornography business.

Georgia Wells: It said it would allow nudity, but sexually explicit content would be verboten.

Speaker 4: The company will prohibit sexually explicit conduct on its website.

Kate Linebaugh: Was this surprising?

Georgia Wells: Yeah, it's a company saying they're going to ban the thing they're known for. I'm struggling to come up with an analogy here, but it's...

Kate Linebaugh: It's like Burger King banning the burger.

Georgia Wells: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Kate Linebaugh: Okay. So what has the company said about why it is making this move?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans has said that it's doing it because of pressure from banking partners and payment processors.

Kate Linebaugh: Payment processors. These firms facilitate the flow of money into and out of businesses. Whenever you buy something online or an online business pays a vendor, payment processors are involved.Why wouldn't a payment processor want to work with an adult business? Is it legal or is it moral?

Georgia Wells: There are two reasons. Payment processors, many don't want to handle content that can be, culturally, a hot potato. So many payments processors don't want contact with drugs, sex. But there's also legal issues around child exploitation that can happen on them sites.

Kate Linebaugh: And in recent months, reporting from the BBC has raised questions about how OnlyFans polices child pornography.

Georgia Wells: Last week, before OnlyFans said they were banning sex, the BBC released a report that OnlyFans has a strike system in which creators will get reprimanded before OnlyFans shuts down their account, demonstrating a degree of tolerance for certain legal content, including child exploitation. After that report, OnlyFans says, "Okay, you know what, no more sex."

Kate Linebaugh: When we reached out to OnlyFans for comment, the company referred us to an interview Stokely gave to The Financial Times. In that interview, Stokely blamed OnlyFans' banks for imposing obstacles that made it hard for the site to pay creators. Last week, OnlyFans also released its first ever transparency report. It said in July, the company had deactivated 15 accounts after finding images of child exploitation.Do you have any sense of why the payment processors acted now?

Georgia Wells: No, I do not know. But according to people familiar with the payments processors, it's their investors are the ones who were saying, "We want out of this business." There's a challenge around child exploitation and how seriously OnlyFans takes that challenge. And I think it's safe to assume that unless the investors or the payment processors are convinced that OnlyFans takes that risk very seriously, their motivation to not want to do business with OnlyFans checks out.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans' ban on sexually explicit content will take effect October 1st, which means Ayla is thinking about her options.

Ayla: I'm stressed in maybe a different way than you might expect. In some way, I don't feel worried, because sex work will always continue. I still have in person work to return to. The problem is that I don't know how much this problem will follow us. OnlyFans solved a lot of problems for sex workers, but now it's subject to issues working with payment processors. And I'm like, "Okay, so if we move to a different platform and then that gets big, they're subject to the same exact problems with these payment processors." The issue is much deeper and much more systemic than OnlyFans. And so that's the thing that really stresses me out.

Kate Linebaugh: What could OnlyFans move mean for you and your business?

Ayla: I anticipate I'm going to make a lot less money now. I anticipate everybody who is working on OnlyFans who was relying at all on explicit content is going to see their income drop. I think even people who aren't relying on explicit content are going to see their income job because total traffic to OnlyFans is going to drop. And I'm not looking forward to that. I'm going to have to look at alternatives. I'm likely going to get back into in-person sex work after this. And I'm going to focus much more on distributing my platforms and my income, and not relying so wholly on one website.

Kate Linebaugh: Over the weekend, OnlyFans tweeted a message to sex workers, saying, "The OnlyFans community would not be what it is today without you." "We are working around the clock to come up with solutions."So Georgia, what do you see as the wider significance of this moment?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans became mainstream in a way other adult sites haven't before, and it also pushed up against the limits of how our financial system works. And so, we're approaching this moment where we're going to get to see if it's possible for a site like OnlyFans to exist in the way that it has. So, I really want to see what happens there.

Kate Linebaugh: That's all for today, Tuesday, August 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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Why OnlyFans Banned Sexual Content - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts - The Wall Street Journal

Nine Entertainment has surged back into profit after last years coronavirus slump and is expecting an increase in revenue next year as deals with Google and Facebook kick in.

But the result disappointed the market, with shares falling 7.7% on Wednesday morning after Nine failed to hit profit expectations.

The company declared a profit after tax of $184m for the 12 months to the end of June, compared with a loss of $574m in the previous year.

This compares with market forecasts of about $260m, based on CommSec data.

Earnings from TV and streaming service Stan, which benefited from Covid lockdowns, drove the turnaround.

Revenue at Nines news mastheads, which includes the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, fell as print circulation and advertising continued their long-term decline, but the fall was more than offset by increasing digital subscriptions and $35m in costs the company ripped out of the division.

The company also did well out of its 60% stake in real estate advertising group Domain, which delivered good results as the Australian obsession with home buying persisted despite the pandemic.

However, radio, which includes rightwing Sydney station 2GB, was a black spot. Brands such as 2GB are now worthless after the company slashed $62m from the value of its the business to $129m and said its only radio assets were its broadcast licences.

Radio earnings fell from $9.8m to just $8.4m after revenue fell due to the sale of two businesses within the division and a lower share of the ad market.

The company also endured a cyberattack during the year that left staff scrambling to get bulletins to air and newspapers to bed after key systems were locked up.

No sensitive data was compromised in relation to this attempted breach and the financial impact on the business was not material, the company said in its annual report.

Former chief executive Hugh Marks, who left Nine in March after controversy over his personal life, was rewarded with a package worth $7.9m. About $4m of that will be paid this year, including a termination benefit of $2.9m.

This compares with the $2.3m package he received the previous year, which was his last full year as CEO.

Mike Sneesby, who replaced Marks as CEO, painted a rosy picture of the future.

We will continue to focus on expanding our ownership and control of content, doubling the volume of Stan originals in FY22, combined with continued growth in live streaming, and Stan Sport, he said.

In publishing, further growth in reader revenue and more particularly digital subscription and licensing revenue is key.

This will be achieved by focusing on the content that resonates most strongly with our current and potential subscriber base as well as ensuring an optimal consumer experience through continued enhancement and features available in our apps.

The company is expecting strong growth in the short term in revenue at its mastheads as a result of the Google and Facebook deals, it said in its annual report.

However, Sneesby said revenue from the deals, which were obtained after the government threatened the tech giants with an enforceable code, would not be booked until next year.

He thanked staff for their efforts in recent weeks during the ongoing lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne.

Time and again, you have all found ways around these challenges and ensured we meet the needs of our of readers, listeners and viewers every day, he said in an all-staff email.

Originally posted here:
Nine surges back with $184m profit on back of TV and Stan earnings - The Guardian

Asuncion, Paraguay Paraguayan emergency services are battling fierce wildfires for a third consecutive year as a severe drought and a winter heatwave hit the South American country.

Vast areas of Paraguay have been affected, with blazes concentrated in the northeastern administrative departments of Concepcion and Amambay. Thick smoke has reached the capital Asuncion, leaving the sky yellow and severely reducing air quality.

Fires have been seen in at least five protected forested areas with 70 percent of the Cerro Cora National Park, a 5,836-hectare (14,420-acre) area of immense ecological and historical importance, consumed by flames, according to official figures.

High temperatures, strong winds, and low humidity, combined with an ongoing drought, were creating ideal conditions for wildfires Dario Perez, a specialist in forest fires with Paraguays volunteer fire service, told Al Jazeera.

The regional drought has seen the Parana River South Americas second-longest waterway, which flows through Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina drop to its lowest level in 77 years.

The current severe drought conditions may have links to broader environmental issues, said Roger Monte Domecq, professor of hydrology at the National University of Asuncion.

We know that droughts are natural, theyve always happened, but theyre now getting worse due to land-use change and deforestation in the region, and climate change.

In 2019, devastating wildfires burned 320,000 hectares (790,720 acres) of forested areas in Paraguay. In 2020, another 150,000 hectares (370,650 acres) of forest were affected according to INFONA.

I must emphasise that 90 to 95 percent of the wildfires in Paraguay are started by humans, said Perez. They are fires that get out of control: accidentally or perhaps deliberately.

He said while burning rubbish was the principal cause of blazes in urban areas, fires in rural Paraguay were mostly produced by agricultural burning practices used to renew pastureland for cattle ranching.

Fires have also been linked to the vast illegal cannabis plantations that dot Paraguays national parks.

Recent investigations by Paraguayan media outlet El Surtidor put into question the efficiency of the Paraguayan states actions to investigate and prosecute parties provoking wildfires, with figures linked to politics escaping charges. State representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Indigenous peoples have been some of the main victims of the blazes. The PaiTavytera people in Paraguays northeast live at continual risk.

My community has never been affected this severely by wildfires, Silvino Mendoza, leader of the Cerro Akangue community, told Al Jazeera. Multiple houses were destroyed in Cerro Akangue by the flames in recent days.

The Pay Tavyteras most sacred site, the forested hill of Jasuka Venda, is also at risk with several fires breaking out there. Community leaders have petitioned the state to support their efforts to protect their territory, but have not received a concrete response.

Perez said the volunteer firefighters were working collaboratively with public institutions, but work was stymied because there are few resources.

We have highly trained people, but the problem is that they need resources to travel, for logistics, they need tools, he said.

State institutions have acted to reinforce firefighting capacity on Paraguays remote border with Bolivia. Fires in the neighbouring country have already affected 280,000 hectares (691,880 acres) of forest according to Bolivian authorities. On Monday, flames from those wildfires crossed into Paraguay.

These outbreaks threaten Paraguays section of the Pantanal, the worlds largest wetland and home to enormous biodiversity. Fires in 2019 burned 61,000 hectares (150,731 acres) of the delicate ecosystem, according to NGO Guyra Paraguay.

Fires in this area also threaten the Paraguayan section of the Gran Chaco, South Americas second-largest forest. This represents a grave danger for the Ayoreo Totogosobie, the continents last Indigenous people living in voluntary isolation outside the Amazon. These tribes must already contend with the highest levels of deforestation in the world according to NGO Earthsight.

The long-term effects of the widespread blazes are of grave concern. The Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MADES) stated in a press release that areas such as the Cerro Cora National Park could take 20 years to recover.

A recent report published by the National University of Colombia showed that Paraguay is one of the countries in Latin America where most forest is permanently lost after wildfires, with native forest not managing to re-establish itself or land being converted for agricultural use.

Although incoming cooler weather promises to ease the current situation, firefighter Perez said Paraguays fire season is not near its end.

The outlook is for these adverse conditions to continue, he said. It will rain in a couple of days time, which will reduce intensity. But that will only last two or three days. After that, well be back in a critical situation.

The rest is here:
Paraguay wildfires threaten Indigenous land and protected forests - Al Jazeera English

SACRAMENTO Governor Gavin Newsom today announcedthe following appointments:

Virginia Wimmer, 55, of Vacaville, has been appointed Deputy Secretary of Women Veterans at the California Department of Veterans Affairs. Wimmer has been Deputy Director of Veterans Services and County Veterans Service Officer at the San Joaquin County Health Care Services Agency since 2014. She was Veterans Benefit Counselor at the Solano County Veterans Services Office from 2012 to 2014. She was Senior Master Sergeant in the U.S. Air Force from 1986 to 2012. Wimmer earned a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Southern California. She has been education and training chair at the California Association of County Veterans Services Officers. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $142,404. Wimmer is a Democrat.

Lisa Lien-Mager, 55, of Davis, has been appointed Senior Advisor for Strategic Communications at the California Natural Resources Agency. Lien-Mager has served as Deputy Secretary for Communications at the California Natural Resources Agency since 2017. She held multiple positions at the Association of California Water Agencies from 2008 to 2017 and from 1990 to 1999, including Director of Communications, Communications Supervisor, Legislative Analyst and Communications Specialist. She was a Communications Consultant from 2004 to 2008, a Public Affairs Specialist at the California Bay-Delta Authority from 2001 to 2005 and a Reporter at the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1987 to 1990. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $172,512. Lien-Mager is a Democrat.

Amy Chatfield Cameron, 49, of West Sacramento, has been appointed Assistant Deputy Director in the Division of Recycling at the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery. Cameron has been Chief Deputy Director of the California Conservation Corps since 2015. She was Education Administrator for the California Department of Education from 2013 to 2015 and Senior Administrative Analyst for the City of West Sacramento, Port of Sacramento from 2007 to 2012. She was Education Programs Assistant and Special Programs Coordinator at the California Department of Education from 2003 to 2007. Cameron was Associate Governmental Program Analyst at the California Department of Education from 2001 to 2003. She was Aide to Yolo County Supervisor Mike McGowan from 1999 to 2001. Cameron was Office Manager at Sacramento Loaves and Fishes from 1994 to 1996. She earned a Master of Arts degree in Organizational Management from the University of Phoenix. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $169,200. Cameron is registered without party preference.

Kevin Chan, 48, of Elk Grove, has been reappointed Special Assistant to the State Fire Marshal at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, where he has served since 2017. Chan was Associate Governmental Program Analyst in the Office of the State Fire Marshal from 2016 to 2017. He held multiple positions in the Office of the California Secretary of State from 1998 to 2016, including Staff Services Analyst, Program Technician and Office Assistant. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $84,612. Chan is registered without party preference.

Joel Ledesma, 53, of Sacramento, has been appointed Deputy Director for Statewide Water and Energy at the California Department of Water Resources. Ledesma has been Assistant General Manager at Northern California Power Agency since 2019. He held several positions at the California Department of Water Resources from 1991 to 2019, including Deputy Director of the State Water Project, Assistant Division Chief in the Operations and Maintenance Division, Chief of Plant Asset Management Office, Chief of Delta Field Division, Principal Hydroelectric Power Utility Engineer, Supervising Control Engineer and Electrical Engineer for the Project Operating Center. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $205,896. Ledesma is a Democrat.

Clair Whitmer, 54, of Vallejo, has been appointed Northern California Regional Director for the Office of the Small Business Advocate at the Governors Office of Business and Economic Development. Whitmer has been Chief Executive Officer for Upbay LLC since 2020 and a FUSE Corps Executive Fellow since 2019, serving the City of Fresno on theEconomic Development Team. She wasHead of Consumer Experience for Maker Media from 2014 to 2019. Whitmer was Senior Director of Media Operations for Slashdot Media for Dice Holdings from 2012 to 2014 and Director of User Interface and Content Strategy forDice.com from 2011 to 2012. She was Director of Voter Outreach for the Overseas Vote Foundation from 2009 to 2010 and a Freelance Editor and Consultant from 2000 to 2011. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $109,812. Whitmer is a Democrat.

Sandy Reynoso, 29, of Sacramento, has been appointed Executive Project Manager for the Governors Office of Business and Economic Development. Reynoso has been a Legal Secretary and Administrative Assistant for the Pioneer Law Group LLP since 2014. She was Reception and Resettlement Intern for the International Rescue Committee in 2014. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $84,612. Reynoso is a Democrat.

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Governor Newsom Announces Appointments 8.24.21 | California Governor - Office of Governor Gavin Newsom

For every stoner who has been overcome with profound insight and drawled, Reality is a construct, maaan, here is the astonishing affirmation. Reality or, at least, our perception of it is a controlled hallucination, according to the neuroscientist Anil Seth. Everything we see, hear and perceive around us, our whole beautiful world, is a big lie created by our deceptive brains, like a forever version of The Truman Show, to placate us into living our lives.

Our minds invent for us a universe of colours, sounds, shapes and feelings through which we interact with our world and relate to each other, Seth argues. We even invent ourselves. Our reality, then, is an illusion, and understanding this involves tackling the thorny issue of consciousness: what it means to, well, be.

Consciousness has long been the preserve of philosophers and priests, poets and artists; now neuroscientists are investigating the mysterious quality and trying to answer the hard question of how consciousness arises in the first place. If this all sounds a bit hard going, its actually not at all in the masterly hands of Seth, who deftly weaves the philosophical, biological and personal with a lucid clarity and coherence that is thrilling to read.

Consciousness, which Seth defines as any kind of subjective experience whatsoever, is central to our being and identity as animate sentient creatures. What does it mean for you to be you, as opposed to being a stone or a bat? And how does this feeling of being you emerge from the squishy conglomeration of cells we keep in our skulls? Science has shied away from these sorts of intrinsically experiential questions, partly because its not obvious how sciences tools could explore them. Scientists are fond of pursuing objective truths and realities, not probing the perspectival realms of subjectivity to seek the truth of nostalgia, joy or the perfect blueness of an Yves Klein canvas. Also, its hard. Seth might use other words, but essentially, he is exploring the science of peoples souls a daunting task.

All of this, of course, makes consciousness one of the most exciting scientific frontiers, and nobody is better placed to guide us there. Seth has been researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and is an established leader in the field. He has pioneered new ways of analysing the inscrutable and measuring the incalculable in his quest to deduce the constituents of our feelings down to their atomic basis. This much-anticipated book lays out his radical theory of our invented reality with accessible and compelling writing.

We take for granted the idea that we journey through life, inhabiting a world thats really out there, as the starring character in our own biopic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains. The brain is a prediction machine that is constantly generating best-guess causes of its sensory inputs. The mind generates our reality based on the predictions it makes from visual, auditory and other sensory information, and then constantly verifies and modulates it through sensory information updates. Perception happens through a continual process of prediction error minimisation, he writes.

These perceptual expectations shape our conscious experience. When we agree with each other about our hallucinations we call it reality; when we dont were described as delusional.

Sometimes these disagreements can help us to peek past what William Blake called the doors of perception. One of these discombobulating events that you may have experienced was #TheDress: an overexposed photo posted on social media in 2015, in which a striped dress looked blue and black to some people, and white and gold to others. The version that people saw depended on whether their brain had taken into account an adjustment for ambient lighting when generating their reality. People who spent more time indoors were more likely to see the dress as blue and black, because their prediction machine was primed to factor in yellowish lighting when preparing the hallucination. Those who spend more time outside have brains primed to adjust for the bluer spectrum of sunlight.

The dress phenomenon, Seth argues, is compelling evidence that our perceptual experiences of the world are internal constructions, shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our personal biology and history. In objective, non-hallucinated reality, though, the dress doesnt have physical properties of blueness, blackness, whiteness or goldness. Colour is not a physical property of things in the way that mass is. Rather, objects have particular ways that they reflect light that our brains include in their complex Technicolor production of reality.

We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us, Seth writes. In other words, we evolved this generated reality because operating through our hallucinated world improves our survival, by helping us avoid danger and recognise food, for example.

This is still an emerging science and Seth is generous to his fellow navigators, including those with competing theories, as he gently and persuasively walks us through the optical illusions, magic tricks and fascinating experiments that build his case.

We are, his research shows, much more likely to perceive things we expect. In a study in which people were shown brief flashes of different images in their left and right eyes, hearing a cue for an image meant they were much more likely to see that image yet be unconscious of the competing image shown to the other eye. Sometimes, our hallucinated world is wildly out of sync with everyone elses we lose our grip on reality. What we call a hallucination is what happens when perceptual priors are unusually strong, overwhelming the sensory data so that the brains grip on their causes in the world starts to slide.

Seth has experimented with shifting his own reality he describes using virtual reality headsets and taking LSD. I learn to my surprise that hallucinogens really do take you to a higher level of consciousness your amount of consciousness can now be measured independently from wakefulness. This has had life-changing consequences, Seth explains, enabling locked-in patients to be recognised as conscious, despite their apparently inert state.

What then is the ground zero of consciousness in a living being or indeed, an artificial one? At its most fundamental, its an awareness of self, knowing where you end and the rest of the worlds matter begins, and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from parrots to octopuses whose suckers attach to almost everything but their own skin, because they can taste themselves. He interrogates self-knowledge from inside out, dismantling the idea that our emotions produce bodily expressions, such as tears. Instead, Seth argues, our emotions are a response to the minds perception of our bodily reactions: we are sad because we perceive ourselves to be crying. Likewise, we are fearful because we perceive our heart is beating faster a survival mechanism to ready us to respond to a threat picked up by the visual cortex, for instance. Our feelings, even much of our experience of free will, are also hallucinations issued by the mind to control ourselves.

The self, then, is another perception, a controlled hallucination built up from an assemblage of perceptual best-guesses, prior beliefs and memories. Seth writes movingly of his mothers episodes of hospital-induced delirium and delusions, and recounts the story of a talented musicologist who suffered catastrophic memory loss. The loss of memory, Seth explains, disrupted the continuity of his self perception his narrative self eroding his personal identity.

We perceive ourselves to control ourselves, is Seths often counterintuitive but nevertheless convincing argument in this meticulously researched book. However, we are just as importantly the perception of others. Seth mentions just briefly that we modulate our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what others may be thinking about us, but the social context of our self is far more important than that. We are to a great extent the invention of others minds.

Being you, after all, is not just about the sentience you experience, but also the youness of you. By the time my beloved grandfather died of a stroke in 2012, Id already grieved for him for two years. Dementia had taken a smart, funny, gentle man and left us with a stranger, who lashed out or spoke inappropriately and unkindly. He was clearly somebody he was fully conscious but he was not himself. It is we who, bereft of his advice and conversation, knew who wed lost and with it, something of ourselves.

That said, Being You is an exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text.

Gaia Vince is the author of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time (Allen Lane)

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Being You by Professor Anil Seth review the exhilarating new science of consciousness - The Guardian