The last four days

Have, for me, been all about taking part in a novel political experiment. The Get FISA Right group has been trying to find ways to push Senator Obama, and the rest of the senate, towards protecting our civil liberties and voting down the so-called FISA compromise. We've managed to stir up some attention. Obama's campaign had to issue a response to us, though the response wasn't quite what we wanted (he basically re-iterated previous positions). Now we've crafted an open letter in response to his response. I've included that below.

I'd like to encourage everybody on here to get active and speak out on this important legislation. Starting tomorrow, the Get FISA right group will be starting a phone campaign to put pressure on the Senate to fix this bill. Follow this link for easy action steps you can take.

An Open Letter to Senator Obama
From the 20,000+ members of the my.BarackObama.com group
"Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right"

Dear Senator Obama,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to us with your post “My Position On FISA” dated July 3rd, 2008. In your response, you pledged to "listen to [our] concerns, take them seriously, and seek to earn [our] ongoing support," and in that spirit, we would like to continue this conversation. We ask that you help transfer our passion and political activism into getting the FISA bill right -- now.

Senator, as a legal scholar who has done extensive study of our country's constitution you know that the FISA re-authorization bill currently before the Senate (HR 6304) threatens the rights guaranteed to American citizens in the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment.

One of the most troubling parts of this bill is its provision to provide retroactive immunity from civil lawsuits for telecommunications companies that may have assisted the Bush administration in violating the civil rights of Americans. You wrote in your statement that you “support striking Title II," which provides this immunity, "from the bill, and will work with Chris Dodd, Jeff Bingaman and others in an effort to remove this provision in the Senate.”

We ask that you back up your words with action by addressing your constituents on the floor of the Senate with the same oratorical power you used in Philadelphia to lay out your vision of a 'More Perfect Union.' The American people have just as much right to know of the dangerous precedent this Congress would be setting by granting retroactive immunity to those who "may have violated the law" and allowing spying on law-abiding citizens as we did to relearn of segregation and Jim Crow. The arm of government oppression reaches far and wide, Senator, and we must beat it back on whatever front we find it.

We ask you to reconsider your current position on the bill as a whole and strongly oppose a bill about which you said, "I know that the FISA bill that passed the House is far from perfect. I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power." In your statement you also wrote, “In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people. But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited." We agree. Our nation just spent the holiday weekend in celebration of our independence from unlimited government authority. America in 1776 wished to be strong and free. Much has changed in 232 years but Americans will never consciously abandon freedom.

Senator, while you wrote that not passing this bill would result in the government “losing important surveillance tools," these important surveillance tools are in fact blanket surveillance programs already underway solely due to the passage of the Protect America Act, which you rightly opposed and voted against. This is only one example of how, even without the provisions for retroactive immunity, this bill is still dangerous to the civil liberties of American citizens.

As we understand it Senator, your oath to uphold the Constitution requires you and others in the Congress to vote against HR 6304.

We appreciate your willingness to continue the discussion. We represent a large and vocal part of the movement you have nurtured and that has nurtured you during this campaign season, and include many of your most active and ardent supporters. As you have said time and again Senator, "we are the ones we have been waiting for," and we are here, working to bring about real change in Washington. We have grown to over 20,000 strong in the space of just a few days. We are lobbying our representatives, and working to get our friends, relatives and neighbors to do the same. We are organizing support for removing the immunity provisions for telecommunications companies and building opposition to this dangerous bill in its entirety.

Working together, we have a better chance to assist Senators Dodd and Bingaman, and can achieve what your commitment to us, your supporters, has been before your recent change in position. Together, we can protect our civil rights and continue to keep America safe. Please join us and let's work together to Get FISA Right.

If you would like to join us, please call your Senator, join the group on myBO and Facebook, and help get the word out!

Speaking Out Against the FISA "Compromise"

Barack Obama has run a campaign based on the notion of "bottom up" grassroots political action enabled by the internet. Now some of us are trying to hold him accountable to his grassroots supporters using that same technology. Its an interesting experiment, and someday I'd like to write up my observations on what is happening in detail.

For now, I'd like to recommend that you all go here and read some of the letters that have been written to the Obama campaign expressing discontent with this decision. Some of them are really quite persuasive, others quite moving. If you have a blog, linking to that page will help us raise the visibility of the folks speaking out.

If you want to do more about this issue, a wiki has been set-up with a lot of useful suggestions. Remember folks, Democracy isn't a noun, it's a verb!

Garrison Keillor Continues to rock

If you had to sum up the disasters of the Bush presidency in one paragraph, the last one here could hardly be topped:

A ballgame is a great place to get to know somebody. You talk sideways during the interludes of which baseball has many, and since the game itself is so orderly, you can converse in non sequiturs, and after I told him about my 10-year-old girl, who loves to swim, and we agreed on what a great age 10 is and what intense pleasure a kid is capable of, we got to the grim business of What Do You Do For A Living. He said he was a cop. I said I was unemployed. (You tell people you're a writer and they tend to clam up.)

"Tough times," he said. I nodded. We might've gotten onto politics then, but we got onto music and Ireland and so forth, but I thought, "Here is a guy the candidates have to talk to this summer." A cop is a realist and he knows where Rockwell leaves off and surrealism begins, and here is his girl taking a big lead off third base and he loves her so beautifully and unabashedly and wants the world to be there for her when it comes her time to fly.

I'm 65 and have a good life and can't claim that the Current Occupant has done me much harm at all. It's when I think about 10-year-old girls I start to get hot under the collar. This clueless man has dug a deep hole for them and doesn't seem vaguely aware of it. He has spent us deep in a hole, gotten us into a disastrous war, blithely ignored the long-term best interests of the country, and when you think of the 4,000 kids who now lie in cemeteries, and for what? -- you start to grind your teeth. For the sake of the girl with the beautiful swing, I hope we get a better president than the disgusting incompetent we've wasted eight years of our national life on. Think twice about who you put your arm around, Sen. McCain.

Read the whole piece, its got some great baseball writing.

What are folks up to for the fourth?

Another Experiment in Participatory Democracy

Of the electronically mediated kind.

The Cause Caller site give you tools for setting up a "virtual phonebank" namely auto dialing software for contacting politicians and a wiki to provide callers with a script for guide their phone calls.

I used it to set up a page people can use to call Senator Obama's Senate and Campaign offices to express their disapproval of the FISA "compromise" that lets telecom companies off the hook for helping President Bush spy on us.

So far the response has been a little underwhelming, only about 6 calls or so generated, but I'm going to see what happens.

If you would like to give it a try, click this link to go to the page I set up. Read through the script, then enter your phone number in the box provided and click "start calling." The site will call your phone, then connect you to the first office. Stay on the line when they hang up and the site should connect you to the next office.

Thanks for the help!

I for one would like to welcome our lolcat overlords.

Some of you are probably familiar with the lolcat phenomenon - that curious internet practice of affixing silly captions to photographs of cats. One website seems to have risen to be the largest center for the practice, namely the strange and wonderful icanhascheezburger.com Lately, they've branched out, applying their online captioning technology - they call it the lolcat builder - to a variety of other subjects, including politicians.

Henry Jenkins, eat your heart out... here's remix culture in modular form easy to use as a mouse click. And here's what it gets you:




Pop-culture meets politics meets modular distributed production. Here comes everybody.

Firefox Download Day

If you run Firefox as your web-browser, you should know they have a new version (firefox 3.0) available. If you download before 1pm EDT today, you will help them in their bid to set the World Record for a software download.

If you don't run Firefox as your web-browser, you should. It is available free of charge and under a fairly reasonable open-source license (the MPL - I prefer the GPL, but I am a purest). Lots of fun add-ons and gadgets are available. Security tends to be a bit better than IE.

My ad campaign for Firefox aside, I think the map they provide on their page documenting their ongoing world record attempt, the map which shows the number of downloads from locations worldwide, shows some interesting data points. It is possible these numbers have inaccuracies that keep them from being really meaningful, clearly they were not collected with a rigorous scientific methodology, but it doesn't seem entirely foolish to accept them as somewhat accurate (say, within the right order of magnitude) estimates. As such, they paint an interesting picture of how connected to the global network various places are in the current moment. Some things about this picture are not very surprising - they are the same features Castells noticed 15 years ago - but important to note as evidence of persistent inequality. A few features are surprising, however.

Nations of the developed world tend to have fairly large numbers of downloads. The US is first by far, with over 2 million downloads - though this must be at least in part a result of native pride (Firefox project is organized by the US based Mozilla foundation) and the fact that download day was set from 1pm EDT yesterday to 1pm EDT today, a time span convenient for users in most U.S. time zones. Western European Countries tend to have 100,000 downloads or more - sometimes much more, Germany has over 400,000 - Australia, Canada, Japan, China, and Brazil (Brazil actually beats out its fellow BRIC developing economies here, with more downloads than Russia, India, or China. This may be browser preference in part, but clearly shows the strength of Brazil's economy as well) round out the "over 100,000 club" with one more, somewhat surprising addition I will get to later.

Compare this wealth of downloads to the dirth of downloads on the content of Africa. Only South Africa has over 10,000 downloads. Only Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, Kenya and Egypt have over 1,000. The Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation of 62 million people, claims only 45 downloads. That's 33 fewer than Greenland. Somalia claims only 10. There is one, lone Firefox downloader in Chad.

The Caribbean also is a low download zone, though it seems signifigantly better connected than Africa. The Dominican Republic, with about the same population as Chad, has almost 4,000 downloads. Of course, they also have about the same population as Belgium, which has 46,000 downloads. Cuba lags, but is not the total blackout zone it would have been a few years ago. They have 860 downloads as I write this and may pass 1,000 before the end of the day. Haiti is by far the least downloadingest Caribbean country, with only 86 downloads (for 8 million people)!

The middle east is also a relatively low download zone. Saudi Arabia, with about 7,000 downloads, is at about the same per-capita download rate as the Dominican Republic. Iraq has fewer than 200 downloads (does the US army run Internet explorer, then?). Israel and Turkey have healthy, if not astounding, download rates (25,000 and 50,000 respectively). The real shocker is the surprise I alluded to earlier. Iran. Iran has 185,000 downloads - more than Pakistan, India, Russia, China, Australia or Brazil. I suppose this might be some sort of fluke or bad number or IP geolocation flaw or something, but if it isn't... well, it says something about what sort of "closed society" Iran is running these days, I think.

Oh and speaking of closed societies, the only country I could find on the map with 0 downloads was.... North Korea. I guess they win at being isolated.

The Rest of my yesterday

Now up on flickr... or at least the shots I liked.

Red Red Radishes

MD, his spousal unit, and I went to the Radish festival in McClure, Ohio. MD was disappointed, apparently you shouldn't let your anticipation for a regional festival build up over the course of four years. I thought it was alright... fun polka and some interesting things to take pictures of. Like this sack of radishes:

More on my flickr page.

Obama on Gay Marriage

I'm curious what JS, MP and others who have expressed some concern about how forcefully Sen. Obama would support gay rights as President will think of this report, which suggests that the Senator expressed cautiously worded support for gay marriage in a meeting with Protestant ministers. Brave for sticking to his guns in the face of a hostile crowd, or wimpy for using "cautious" language?

Fragments from a 21st Century Travelogue

Binghamton, New York

My grandparent's home. They are dead; the upper floors lay vacant; a few belongings are piled in the center of the living room on the odd chance someone wants them. My mother has already removed paperwork, documents, photographs. Among them the stamped passbook that brought my great-grandfather through the checkpoints of the British Army in occupied Germany after the first world war.

In the basement is another mass of detritus: the tattered remains of board games that entertained me, my sister and my cousins when we were children, ancient appliances in various states of disrepair (probably awaiting some promised fix when my grandfather's stroke hit), black rotary Bell Telephone telephones in classic semi-gloss bakelite. My Grandfather, a plumber, had hoarded great masses of pluming fixtures, nuts and bolts, pipe hangers, valves. My mother, aunt, and I sort them carefully and haul them to the local scrap dealer. We make 300 dollars on two hundred pounds of copper and brass. We wait behind a long line of thin, leathery men in pickup trucks at the scrap dealer unloading pipes, refrigerators. One is knocking the wood and foam out of an aluminum boat with a sledgehammer. My part of America is mining its cities for raw materials, selling itself off by parts. I think of electrical lines being run to ultra-luxury hotels in Dubai, of data centers going up on south Pacific islands with no natural resources remaining but their lack of anything resembling coherent structures of legal jurisdiction.

Enfield, New York

My mother's fiance has four years of firewood stacked in front of the post and beam home he designed himself and built with the help of friends in the early 70s. The house is small inside, but comfortable and surprisingly well lit. He brags that he made it through the winter last year without even expending a full year's worth of firewood, all while showing me the massive pile of new wood he will add to his stock this year. I ask about the apparent oversupply of fuel and he shrugs and says, "its poor man's capital, i guess," and compares it to the scrap cars a friend keeps on their lawn, or my grandfather's pipe fittings.

Lock Haven, Pennsylvania

This is the last morning my girlfriend and I will spent in this central Pennsylvania town, with its views of the Appalachians looming low and green over the Susquehanna. I look up from the air mattress on the floor of her empty apartment and see swallows cutting through the pale yellow morning light. Will there be swallows in the Southern City we are moving her to, I wonder? I suspect not. The swallow, I believe, is a natural cliff-dweller and nests among the habitations of humanity only when they are old and quiet enough to mimic their ancestral environs. The low slung brick and concrete and stone buildings of this old river town are swallow heaven. How long until we tear them down, for copper conduit, for steel rebar?

In a 21 foot Truck, West Virginia

If you are a novice truck driver and decide to attempt to maneuver a 21-foot Penske moving van containing all of your beloved's worldly possessions along the narrow and winding roadway that is US 70 in West Virginia, here is what the experience will be like: the world dissolves into one long moment. Your human ability to reflect on the past and plan for the future goes away, except insofar as "the past" refers to the last bend in the road and "the future" refers to the next one. Your conscious mind will grab hold of some tiny piece of thought. Perhaps even this very notion, that "this is one long moment." It will repeat this thought over and over (this is one long moment this is one long moment this is one long moment this is one long moment) a sort of cartesian checksum, a way for it to verify for itself that the truck has not slid from the highway and with it your being into nothingness. This slim thread of ego is all that remains, the rest of you is devoted to the needs of the body, to holding the bouncing truck on its narrow and twisting course, to fighting off the dull ache growing ever sharper between your shoulders. (Some smarty pants may have noticed that I have mixed my philosophical systems in a manner that may not be completely internally consistent. Fuck you! I survived the truck-rodeo! I am among the living! I will appropriate dead men's philosophy as I see fit.)

Unnamed Southern City, North Carolina Piedmont

The girlfriend is a private person. I'll call the city she has moved to "Unnamed Southern City" out of respect for her not to be exposed to the stark gaze of the massed denizens of the global networks. Unnamed Southern City is a riot of growth, both botanical and artificial. Dense green hedgerows are interspersed with sprawling strip malls, apartment complexes, gated communities. The original ecology meets capital's emulation of its supposed darwinian imperatives.

There are no swallows here. The old brick factory shells that harbor them back home never existed in this place. Instead the sprawl sports small, vertical clumps of concrete and glass office towers, new workplaces for a new economy in the new south. Note to the ghost of Bill Faulkner: today the it is the North that is old and vanquished, the South has become young and victorious.

Unnamed Southern City, a small jet aircraft, Regan airport, another small jet aircraft, Syracuse, New York

The aircraft from Unnamed Southern City to Regan is so small I cannot fit my backpack in the overhead bin, and completely full. I have lucked out and drawn a bulkhead seat. I watch the frazzled flight attendant escort a hopeful standby passenger onboard, only to discover that someone was in the toilet for the headcount and there is no seat for her. She escorts her back off the plane. Her bag must be withdrawn from the plane by the crew. There is a delay. My fellow travelers groan. The plane spends less than an hour in the air. The truck and I spent 5 hours making this distance a few days ago. We pass Richmond on our way to Washington. A ten minute flight, a century and a half ago, the distance between two warring Americas.

Regan sits so close to the city you can almost touch it from the tarmac. There is a forest of cranes along the Potomac, between us and the silhouette of the Capitol dome. New construction for the security state. The war, it seems, is still hiring. I spend two hours in the airport, watching the constant motion of arrivals and departures, the thousands of pieces of aluminum kept always moving by the energy of our dwindling petroleum supply. Amazing that it works at all, flinging people through the stratosphere on a daily basis. More amazing when it is gone.

The plane to Syracuse is both larger and less crowded than my previous flight. It seems unlikely this could be a profitable venture for those operating the airline. Again we are less than an hour in the air. I touch down in Syracuse, my mother picks me up from the airport. A few minutes later I am standing at the sandwich counter of my childhood grocery store, remembering looking at the Washington monument a few hours before. A strange juxtaposition of the familiar and novel.

I step outside. It is cool here, and quiet. Swallows are swooping from the old brick office building standing beside the Owasco outlet. A yellow Faye drugstore ad fades and peels from its side. There is no traffic, except for a single dumptruck belching thick black diesel smoke. In its bed are appliances, copper pipe, aluminum conduit...

A real post soon

Sorry about the lack of blog-content, dear readers. For now, this selection, from a fafblog clearly back and in its prime.

This is awesome

From The Onion News Network: "Gay Scientists Discover Christian Gene"



This is a pretty sharp piece, I like it a lot.

Doing My Small Part

For democratic media. Here are some clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright being interviewed by Bill Moyers on his PBS news program. Watch these, and try to get others to watch them. They're the best antidote currently available for the "LOOKOUT! SCARY BLACK MAN!" show that has been made out of excerpts from his sermons.









Share the links and spread the love children. Lets get the message to the peoples.

Summer Art Project

I'm going to be trying to do a summer art project this summer, taking some pictures of the Grain elevators of Wood County, Ohio.

The Grain elevator seems a fitting subject for this moment of rising food prices, and I enjoy taking pictures that capture the odd beauty of industrial equipment. These ungainly behemoths have that in spades.

The pictures are coming up here... I'm going to try to put together a web-page with a map and some captions in the next few weeks.

This Guy

Might just be saving the world... or at least the parts of it that are pollenized by bees.

Jack of All Trades

Or perhaps more like the deuce of all trades. Sure I could be working on my Dissertation, or on my various political projects, but no... tonight I decided to learn some javascript.

I managed to hack together this crude but kinda fun tool with javascript and the google maps API. It shows a map, you click on something, and it outputs the Latitude and Longitude of that something in nice clean text, ready to be cut and pasted into GPS babel, or hand-keyed into a handy GPS unit.

I'm going to play with Google Maps some more for an Art project I want to play with this summer. I find this stuff to be useful when I'm having a video game craving... the same kind of problem solving is employed, and at least I'm learning a little something in the process.

The tool is here if you want to play with it. It is on my server box on my cable connection, so don't all click at once.

If you find the code useful, feel free to take it (of course), but you'll need your own key from google to use the google maps API.

If you like, please link

This is egotistical to even ask, but if you like the post below, and support what it is saying, please link to it on your own blog (if you have one). If we can get enough links, maybe people will start to read it.

Again, I hate to even ask, but I'd like to see if we can use this crazy internet to reach somebody.

Open Letter to Barack Obama

Dear Senator,

I'd like to start out by saying that I'm a strong supporter of yours and have enjoyed being active in your campaign. I helped organize the get out the vote canvass here in Bowling Green, Ohio - there are even pictures of me working on it in the Getty Images photo pool of the day's events. I think you represent our best hope of real political change in our country.

That said, I have one question regarding last night's debate:

What the hell was that?

Seriously Senator, what the hell? I understand that the questions were nonsensical and a complete distraction from the actual issues facing our country, I understand the moderators did Hillary's attack job for her, I'm as pissed about it as everyone else in the liberal internet-sphere.

But here's where I, with all due respect Senator, think you went wrong when confronted with those questions:

you flinched

You didn't hit back hard and stick to your convictions, you waffled and stammered. The "bitter" question, I'll admit, you got just about right - but with only about the tenth of the energy you really needed to hit it with. The Wright explanation, on the other hand, is a disaster. Again, Senator, I realize you have very experienced campaign operatives working for you, and I am just a grad student and volunteer in Northwest nowhere Ohio, but I really take issue with how your campaign has decided to respond to that question - at least your "short form" answer, the longer Race Speech in Philadelphia was brilliant.

The short answer you gave last night (which seems to be the standard for the campaign) went something like this, "I didn't know Pastor Wright said those awful things, and the awful things he said don't reflect the other good things the church has done. I trust the American people to understand my views aren't Pastor Wright's views, and that Pastor Wright's views are part of a larger context." Senator, if you are going to trust the American people, you have to trust them all the way. You have to trust them to understand Pastor Wright's context, and to reject the notion that you and he share the same politics. Your current answer, on the other hand, attempts to disconnect you from the Pastor's remarks by denying you ever heard them, which suggests you really don't trust Americans to do this, and instead feel the need to make a denial which stretches the bounds of plausibility even for your most staunch supporters: that you did not know what your Pastor of 20 years was saying on the pulpit. I've watched a number of flame wars erupt over these remarks in a variety of online forums, Senator, and not once did your supporters use your denial as a part of their own argument as to why Pastor Wright's remarks should not disqualify you for the highest office in the land. Instead, they have appealed to the basic truth of the second part of your answer: that Wright's fiery sermons make sense in the context of a Black church community struggling to deal with the realities of oppression in the United States, even if the words of these sermons are often over the top; that a church should not be judged by the words of its Pastor alone; and that suggesting that a man's ideas are exactly the same as his Pastor's is absurd.

This sort of waffling, this attempt to deny and then explain continued throughout the debate. Again, I understand the questions were bogus, but just because we want to transform American politics does not mean we can expect it to transform itself for us. We're going to have to be able to operate in the current political environment, until we have secured the ability to transform that environment. The bogus corporate media cannot be ignored, it must be defeated.

In my humble opinion, the way to do that, Senator, is to trust the American people and to trust them all the way. Don't flinch, don't waffle, don't deny. Explain, persuade, and stand up for yourself. One of the things that first attracted me to your campaign was the strength and confidence with which you did these things in the early days of the primary season - a seeming million years ago. As the season has gone on, that confidence has seemed to wane and falter, and I think I know why: you have something to lose now. And so, like so many Democratic candidates before you, you've stopped fighting to win, and started fighting not to lose.

Please, Senator, if by some odd chance you should actually encounter this small letter written by a small campaign volunteer, I have just one request to make. A request I believe will be shared by millions of others just like me.

Fight to win again, Senator. Fight like you have nothing to lose. Democrats have been betting small and losing small for generations now. Look where it has gotten us. It is scary to bet big, but it may be the only chance we've got.

I Read Talking Points Memo

So you don't have to. Another interesting tidbit posted up there today:

Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) on Obama: "I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button. He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

The point most others are making is that Rep. Davis seems a wee bit racist when he refers to the first Black Senator since the reconstruction as "boy." I agree, of course, but there is something much more interesting here...

When Rep. Davis offhandedly mentions "that simulation that related a nuclear threat to this country," what exactly is he talking about? Do the political parties, as a part of their vetting process, run candidates through some sort of advanced computer simulator game designed to recreate the experience of commanding US Strategic Forces during a nuclear strike on the United States? A sort of 21st century equivalent of Starfleet's Kobayashi Maru scenario - designed to test Starship officers in a "no-win scenario?" Are we to understand from Rep. Davis's comment that Sen. Obama - demonstrating both his intellect and his disregard for conventional thinking - responded to the scenario in the same way as the famous James T. Kirk, by re-programming the simulator to allow for victory, in this case perhaps a nice, peaceful negotiated settlement involving multilateral agreements and robust international organizations heading off any nuclear exchange?

If so, the Obama people need to get this out the the press! The Trekkers will turn out in droves! Imagine the bumper sticker:

Obama 08 - He Beat the Kobayashi Maru

Yep... that's gonna be the big November surprise people, the Trekker vote. You heard it here first.

---UPDATE

I finally tracked down Rep. Davis's comments. He does indeed imply that he and Sen. Obama were involved in a "highly classified simulation" of a nuclear threat! Kobayshi Maru!

Obama!

From Talkingpointsmemo.com: a YouTube video clip of Senator Obama on Charlie Rose in 2004, explaining sentiments similar to those that recently got him called "elitist."



I think it is pretty clear here that, far from being elitist, Senator Obama is doing his best to explain the anxieties of working class people to the (largely privileged) media. For those of you "sick of the politics" of this campaign season, watch his thoughtful analysis here and then look me in the eye and tell me you've seen a politician who thinks and speaks like this in your lifetime.

You haven't. And you won't again. This is your chance America. Don't screw it up.

Another Good Column

By Garrison Keillor on Salon. He's been a bit hit-and-miss over there lately. This is a good one though.

The Pedagogy of Narcissistic Smarm

To involve my students in my lecture on Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" I asked them to provide some examples of contemporary youth subcultures, and how those subcultures might be engaging in the sort of semiotic rebellion that Hebdige suggests is the interesting potential of subculture. They named the emo, goth, and indy scenes as contemporary subcultures.

My favorite part: during the wrap-up I referred to the "emo-goth continuum" as being made up of "various distillates of crude punk." Clever, right?

Yep, that's what keeps me teaching, folks. The opportunity to say clever things in front of a captive audience.

Anthony Famiglietti 1919-2008

One of my earliest childhood memories is of spending a warm spring day with my paternal grandfather. I was a fanciful child, I always wanted to play games based on "imagination." The influence of Sesame Street no doubt. My parents tired of these imaginary exercises, since a young boy's notion of what a submarine or spaceship might be like is not very entertaining to an adult. But my grandfather indulged me, as grandparents will. That afternoon we were playing "Time Machine." We set the imaginary dial, and off we went to the sixties, or the forties, or the thirties, and with each stop my Grandfather would tell me stories of his experience in that time, tell me what it had been like to live through the depression, through the war, through the boom-time afterward. I remember being astounded at the long thread of living memory he possessed, and the ease and joy with which he wove that thread into tales and anecdotes.

That thread is broken now.

Like any good post-modern child of the mediated age, I have recorded images of my grandfather. Squeezed some small portion of the man's vast memory into patterns of bits, in the latest iteration of what must be a human tradition dating back to when we first became able to speak, but the full richness of his experience, and the funny, vibrant, sometimes bawdy man who lived it - that's all gone now.

Goodbye, Grandpa

Fafblog is Back

Fafblog, the death of which I blogged mournfully about a while ago, has returned to life! New posts here.

Ever since I put up the earlier post despairing of Fafblog's apparent demise, the blog here has been getting google hits from far and wide (so Google analytics tells me) based on some combination of the search terms "fafnir" "Chris Mastrangelo" "fafblog" etc. Each hit filled me with a sense of warmth, of community. Somewhere on the net, they told me, someone was searching for the same thing I had lost, someone was wishing on the same star.

And today, someone cruised by my blog to drop a comment and let me know fafblog was live again... how cool is that?

Race and US politics

Malcolm X may have famously said that "Racism is a Cadillac, they release a new model every year," but today Pat Buchanan demonstrated that it would be foolish of us to assume that every Cadillac on the road is the most recent model year.

Yes, I spend a fair amount of time in Ethnic Studies classes talking about "color-blind racism" and "subtle racism" and often have to explain to my students who Willie Horton was and what the Rodney King case was about. Sometimes the texts I use seem awfully out of touch with their attitudes, and the seemingly more complex and subtle racial etiquette of early 21st century America.

But in this post responding to Senator Obama's speech on Race and Racism in America, good old Pat Buchanan shows us that a whole boatload of good, old fashioned racism is still alive and well in our contemporary moment. To summarize, here are a few arguments that Mr. Buchanan makes here, that I really thought we had mostly left behind in our National discourse:

-That Black Americans should be grateful that their ancestors were made slaves and brought to the United States
-That white racism was in no way responsible for the Watts riots and other civil unrest in poor black neighborhoods
-That the Black America is solely responsible for poverty and lack of opportunity in poor Black communities
-That Black people are criminals who prefer to prey upon white victims

The last one really gets me. He trots out crime statistics that claim "black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse" Yeah Pat, because those stats couldn't possibly be influenced by who feels comfortable reporting crimes, who trusts the criminal justice system to take their reports seriously, or who has more property to steal. Nope. Black folks just like crime, and especially like committing crimes against white victims.

Meanwhile he makes the same old plea decrying affirmative action, writing "Let [Senator Obama] go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids." Gee, Pat, did you miss the part of the speech where Senator Obama (who Pat calls "Barack" all through his piece, cause, you know, he apparently gets to pick and choose which United States Senators deserve the honorific) specifically recognized the anger and frustration of poor whites "who don't feel particularly privileged by their race," and admitted that their concerns might be valid and deserved respect - even if the target of their anger might be misplaced? Did you miss the part where he called on America not to think of politics as a "zero sum game" and to try to work towards solutions that might be beneficial to Black and White Americans alike?

And yet this man is not a fringe commentator. He is a first string pundit, called on by all the major networks to give his opinion on matters of the day. So I guess this sort of "old model racism" has gone exactly nowhere and is still front and center in our politics.

To paraphrase a writer over at Daily Kos, thanks for clearing that up, Pat.

Happy Easter!!

From YouTube's magnificent collection of sesame street videos.



Kudos to the Children's Television Workshop for not aggressively pursuing copyright enforcement on these. Fans have done a grand job of organizing these old clips and making them accessible.

Computer Countup

My headcount of laptop computers in the room at Larry Lessig's "Change Congress" press conference:

5 Macbooks
1 Macbook pro (Dr. Lessig's)
3 PCs

... I just found this a fun factoid. I'm sure the real journalists and bloggers with reader counts out of the single digits will do a better job writing up substantial facts than I will.

Blogging Right Now!

Pictured here, me chilling in a Washington D.C. bookstore on my way to a Press Conference being held by the great Larry Lessig. I might even get to say hello! Happy day!

Its been awhile

Soooo I forgot to update my blog for a month. Sorry JS, MP, MD, and CW I realize this left you without a needed source of reading material. Here's what I've been up to:

-Spent about a week canvassing for Obama. I like to canvass, it gets you out in the world, teaches you about the place you live and who lives there. You learn who lives where, and a little bit about how they live. You meet guys who want to talk to you about Mike Huckabee on their way to wash their truck, and kids smoking weed and playing video games at 2 on a Monday afternoon. You learn the smell of different neighborhoods. You get to feel like a badass field commander as you run through housing developments and apartment buildings in the dark on high speed literature drop runs, barking out target addresses to your friends. Good times.

-Of course, then when your candidate loses, times are not so good. Especially when you spent the day running through the sleet trying to Get Out the Vote. Very depressing. I think perhaps I'm bad luck, since this always seems to happen to me. Maybe I should campaign for the Republicans.

-Meanwhile, I've been wrestling with the Human Subjects Review Board here to get my dissertation approved. I had to reassure them that I will not be administering electrical shocks to wikipedia users, presumably with some sort of shock over IP technology. I wish I had shock over IP technology, I would use it on the people who try to put spam comments on my blog advertising kiddie porn. Very nasty.

Travelogue

I have always enjoyed highway travel. There is a feeling of freedom there, a feeling of independence that I think might (in part) come from being in-between well defined places - in the gap in the map that seems to belong to everyone and no one all at once. An illusion, of course, the omnipresent highway patrol cruisers tell you that, but a potent illusion all the same - one that seems all the more poignant in these days of peak oil (and now, perhaps, peak food) since it isn't really clear how much longer the asphalt and concrete rivers of our firefly American empire will continue to flow with traffic. How much longer the highway experience and its strange euphoria will still be available and affordable for folks like me. I had a bit of a trip today, a usual run down interstate 80, coming home from my girlfriend's place. I thought I would record some brief observations, just for my own enjoyment...

-I had wondered why I always shared 80 with great convoys of Fed-Ex trailers, some double or even triple trailers strung together, especially through central PA. This trip the obvious occurred to me. The eastward terminus of 80, only a few hours from my starting point this morning, is New York City. Those Fed-Ex convoys were loaded this morning in Hoboken, or some other Lagrange point of the socio-economic gravitational pull of Manhattan island, with freight from the bustling commercial center of the eastern seaboard megalopolis. Route 80 would be the most direct road west, toward the continental interior and, beyond that, the pacific.

-There is a strange feeling in the highway rest-stops of a toll-road expressway, as Route 80 is in central Ohio. The rest-stop is nowhere, a part of no political entity, it feels self-contained... like a sort of pocket universe. This feeling is particularly acute at the Angola rest-stop, on Route 90 west of Buffalo, which is in the space between the westward and eastward lanes of the highway - you access it through a glassed-in pedestrian bridge. I have been to most of the Ohio turnpike rest-stops east of Toledo at this point. None of them have quite the no-zone feeling of Angola, but they all still conjure the feeling of liminality. One wonders what will happen to these little enclaves when the oil runs out. What will our descendants make of them? How will they understand why we needed so many bathrooms, so far away from everyone?

-Heading east while I headed west, I spotted the most tangible sign I have seen yet of our imperial entanglements, perhaps of our eventual demise. Strapped to the back of a flat-bed truck, somewhere in western PA or eastern OH was an MRAP. It was squat, and beige and angry looking - like a Chevy Tahoe on steroids with military training and a bad attitude. I wondered if it was heading for its point of departure, for a ship heading for Iraq or Afghanistan. Of course, my oil-fueled reveries are, in part, what have conjured up our need for such monsters.

So I suppose, in the end, the highway will have to go. I will miss it, though, when it is gone.

A Cyberpunk Moment

0205081114b
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

I found this thing adhering to a gas pump at a station in Toledo, like some sort of technological barnacle. It was a tiny advertisement-bot, playing pre-recorded sound ads from some sort of chip while I pumped my gas. It seemed very cyberpunk-esque to me, an example of a sort of omni-present cheap technology bolted onto the older infrastructure of monopoly capitalism.

The Tag of the Semester

IMG_1930
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

Someone is tagging up my campus with this little stencil. I don't mind, of course, street art is cool with me. I'm just curious as to what it might signify.

Three Words

Warren. Ellis. Webcomic.

You read that right, Warren Ellis, the mind that brought you Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants, is doing a free weekly webcomic.

This is the most awesome thing I have heard about in minutes... and that is a long time on the internet.

Intro poster is on Ellis's blog here
Comic will be up here starting Feb 15. Some funky teaser art up there now...

Oblivion

This last week has been taken up by a lot of playing with technology... rebuilding computers, installing software, working out bugs.

And games... I got onto a game kick for a day or two - Half-Life 2...

I don't know why I did it, why I spent my week the way I did. I didn't want to do anything more substantial. Maybe it was the spillover from last week's stuff. Maybe it was just the old habits of an addict. Maybe it was just procrastination before starting the large and scary project of my dissertation.

Video games are strange. A form of oblivion, really... you forget your senses besides vision and hearing, and those are degraded. Returning to your body... to the smell in your nose and the feel of the clothes against your skin, is a strange sensation.

So, I went seeking oblivion after a brush with it. A story common enough throughout human experience, I suspect. Strange though, how oblivion drives us into its own arms...

the death-urge, I suppose Freud would say

Anyway, some new stuff up on my flickr account, so check that out, and I've revamped copyvillain.org -if anyone is interested.

Copyvillain is running MediaWiki now, as a small part of my diss research... if anybody has any ideas on things to do with a wiki server, let me know.

Life and Death

So, I've had a chance to calm down a bit after my previous outburst.

Nothing's really happening here, my Grandfather's illness hasn't really manifested itself yet...

Except for this persistent cough. Innocent sounding enough, you'd think he had a cold, if you didn't know about the tumor sleeping in his lungs.

When I first got here, he told me he was afraid. He asked me if there was anything I knew that could help him.

You know, me with all my advanced education that he never had. Seems logical enough to expect me to know something useful.

All I could come up with was, "well... you aren't alone."

And I'm thinking of Conrad noting that we live and dream alone. I'm thinking of Baudelaire rejecting the rotting flesh for gleaming metal. I'm thinking of the cyberpunk kids trying to crawl out of their doomed bodies through their modems.

I'm thinking, that none of that would probably make him feel much better. But then, I'm not trained to comfort people, I'm trained to upset them.

So all I can really do is be here, and only be here for a little while, before the needs of my own life call me back halfway across the country. It seems like too little...

Everything is coming out wrong tonight. Not like I want it to.

Let me just leave you with a verse from a Chris Pureka song I find fairly apt right now...

Life is cruel and it's clumsy
(but we never explain)
I wish I could say that it's better than that
(why we treasure our secrets)
but this is our time
(how we're in love with our sadness sometimes)
this is all that we have 'til we turn out the lights...

Take care of yourselves, everybody.

This one is a bit personal

And I wanted to keep this blog from being too too personal. But fuck it. I need to write this. My google analytics numbers say this blog is only being read by like, 4 or 5 of my closest personal friends anyway. So fuck it. This one is a bit personal. So be it.

Where to start...

So I get this phone call, a week ago, from my father. He sounds weird. Not himself. I ask him what is up.

"I, um, guess it was a good thing you made it to see your grandfather over Christmas," he says.

My family, we seem like very blunt people at first. Get to know us, and it turns out we have a hard time saying certain things directly.

He finally manages to get out that my 88 year old Grandfather has been diagnosed with a cluster of quite lethal conditions. I won't spell it all out. Let's put it this way. The Cancer will kill him of one of the others doesn't get him first.

(Does this seem written in a manner too stylized? Does that seem cold? I feel strange about it, the prose. I'm sorry for the pretense of art or something like art here. It is selfish. But there's nothing I can do about this. All I can do is write. Writing is all I know how to do. It is so little.
It is all I have.)

Anyway, I spend this last week in a bit of a daze. Pack up after my class on Thursday. Drive back East to where my Grandfather lives... for at least a little bit longer.

And now I am here. In the condo on the Connecticut side of the sound where they moved after leaving the house on Long Island they raised my father in. The smell of my grandparents is thick here. Sweet, and somehow still faintly smoky though my Grandmother has been in a home since her stroke, and no longer sits in the kitchen smoking and making chicken cutlet. It is a family smell, somehow, my Father's home in Ithaca has taken on a hint of it. Some protein in our skin perhaps.

We are not to tell my grandmother her husband is sick. She can't speak since the stroke, her understanding is suspect. I think she's still smarter than all of us, though, I think she knows the score.

The strange thing is, how normal everything is. My grandfather has changed not at all in his outward appearance since I last saw him. He has declined any treatment. Hospice care visits the home once a day to check on him. He has been prescribed atavan for his anxiety.

The anxiety of, you know, dying.

This, I think, is the ultimate expression of our consumer culture. We must make even comfort for the dying into a consumable good, into a pill. Into a commodity to be produced and circulated. All our needs must be fulfilled by capital.

The thing that really set me off was the box in the refrigerator. A box full of morphine - the drug of last resort, the thermonuclear weapon of pharmacology.

This box, mute testament to the imminent mortality of someone I love, carries - like everything else in 21st century America, a brand label.

It is a Hospice Care ComfortPak(tm).

ComfortPak

This sent me over the edge. Made me briefly channel Theodore Adorno. What fucking soulless marketing major threw that one out to the 8am meeting. ComfortPak. Missing a goddamn letter. You know. To make sure they can trademark it. Claim it as property. Commodify it. Properly seek return on their investment.

Oh, and by the way, shit on the dignity of the mortally ill by refusing to call the medicine that will ease the agony of their final hours by its proper fucking name. Or at least with real words. From a real language, spoken by an actual, living culture.

That, of course, might suggest that there are things that ought not to be commodified. That human beings are more than just consumers. That comfort for the dying is not a thing to be bought and sold, but a human right and a human responsibility. That caring for each other might be our human responsibility.

But what would I know about that?

All I can do - is write.

Post Human Reverie

My right hip pocket holds a microwave transmitter smaller than my wallet. My left hip pocket holds 24 hours of music frozen in a solid-state logic with no moving parts and wrapped in clean, polished metal. My backpack holds: a Charged-Coupling Device based Digital Imager with a thousand image storage capacity, a multi-processor computer running a souped-up descendant of BSD Unix, and a moving map display screen that by listening to radio-frequency whispers from a dozen screamingly accurate atomic clocks in low earth orbit can fix my position on the surface of the earth to 3 meters accuracy. I just got off the phone with a nice man somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. He's sending me 5280 milliampers of electrical power stored in lithium metal with a solid polymer electrolyte.

It all sounds pretty bad-ass and cyberpunk if you write it up right. :P

Fun with old technology

Pictured above, two distant cousins - my beloved Macbook, and an ancient Compaq Presario 1210. I snagged the compaq from a buddy of mine who was chucking it out, I decided to be geeky and put linux on it for the heck of it. The compaq will run Damn Small Linux, but just barely. However, it lacks network capability, and even USB ports (at least that I can see, Linux says it detects USB on boot, maybe an unused controller built into the mainboard somewhere?) so I'm scratching my head as to how to use it. Digital picture frame maybe... but the screen is only 800x600 and a bit grainy. I wish I could think of some sort of, shall we say, artistically interesting one-time use... but I'm drawing a blank.

Anyway, it felt like time travel to switch between the compaq and the macbook, so I thought I would take a snapshot of them side-by-side. With my motorola razor picture phone. Which also seemed a little anachronistic as the compaq brought me down the memory lane of boot-floppies and text-only displays.

Then, just to be fair, I had my macbook take a picture of my phone.

Happy New Year

I'm writing this from a hotel room overlooking downtown Ithaca, NY. Ithaca is an interesting town, it still has echoes in its architecture from its days of light industry - the long closed Ithaca gun works - but today, of course, the economy revolves around the tens of thousands of undergraduates receiving expensive private educations up on the south hill, at Cornell and Ithaca College. One of them has a building festively lit with the numbers "07" to commemorate the year's end. What will happen in the strange "post-industrial" economy of Ithaca and the United States in the coming 2008, the year after the housing bubble burst and the easy credit went away? Only time will tell.

For tonight all the best to you and yours.

Happy New Year.

Kite. Powered. Cargo. Ship.

Kite powered cargo ships are more steam-punk than you!

Sadly, the kite doesn't provide all of the ship's power, just a energy saving boost to the existing diesels... but still, this is pretty cool.

Coming soon to an ocean near you... the wind-powered supertanker :)

Today I'm gonna get some work done...

Honest! But first one more post....

This article on Slate (the microsoft-owned news magazine site) discusses the failings of Yahoo's Answers service. Yahoo Answers allows users to post a question to the site, which is then answered by other users. The idea is that this will allow a user to get answers to questions that aren't easily parsed by a search engine. The site hopes to tap its users' collective intelligence (that oft alluded to, "wisdom of crowds") by generating large numbers of answers and then allowing users to select the best answer by voting.

Practically, the site works. It has attracted some 120 million users and if you pose it a question you receive an answer (many answers) fairly promptly. Users vote on answers. The technology works.

The Slate article argues that the community enabled by the technology doesn't work as well. As an example, they provide this odd - and both factually and ethically incorrect - list of answers to the question "What beliefs and customs did Native Americans hold in common."

I'm skeptical about Yahoo Answers, for reasons I'll get to in a minute. But I'm MORE skeptical about this example. The question is terrible! It misleads readers from outside the U.S. for whom "Native American" doesn't necessarily carry the same meaning as it does for U.S. residents. In the U.S. we take "Native American" to mean "A descendant of one of the groups of people living in the Americas before the European conquest" but the use of this phrase is fairly recent, and not globally consistent. In Canada, for example, the term used is "First Nations person." A reading of the answers - including the answer voted to be the best, "Apple Pie," and a variety of other answers that criticized "Native Americans" for being fat, rude, and watching too much TV - suggests quite strongly to me that many global readers took "Native American" to mean "Native born citizen of the United States." Slate points out that Yahoo answers draws its users from "all over the world" but doesn't seem aware that worldwide differences in understanding could be affecting the site. If you take "Native American" to mean "Native born U.S. citizen," the answer that "Apple Pie" is a "belief or custom held in common by Native Americans" actually makes a fair amount of sense. It isn't a great answer, (the best answer to this essentialist question would be "nothing") but it isn't as laughably bad and nonsensical as Slate makes it seem.

The question is also misspelled, and invites the worst sorts of bigotry, mythologizing, and prejudice. Plenty of that is evident in the list of responses. The fact that the relatively benign "Apple Pie" beat out the more hateful (and sentimental) stuff actually says something good about the folks on Yahoo answers.

Still, I'm skeptical about the quality of content this system can provide. Yahoo has basically implemented an information plebiscite, drawing on users to select the "correct" answer from a list. This process is fast - which is clearly what Yahoo wants, it wants a human powered search engine - but has little else to recommend it. User bigotry and ignorance might easily win the day.

Wikipedia, which Slate compares positively to Yahoo Answers, is a different beast. The difference is not, however, best explained by Slate's assertion that "Wikipedia users work harder." The difference is best explained by the fact that, in contrast with Yahoo Answer's plebiscite, Wikipedia has implemented democracy (maybe even anarchy) where users deliberate, debate, discuss, and collaborate to produce content - rather than just voting it "up or down."

I'd love to play with the Yahoo site and see what I could find, but my diss is on Wikipedia! I need to work on that now! Yikes!

Bruce Sterling Posts an Interview with Arundahti Roy

Bruce Sterling has posted an Indian TV interview with author and activist Arundahti Roy to his blog, Beyond the Beyond. I'm a fan of both, though I wonder if Roy really means what Sterling (who can on occasion seem like a bit of a Western Chauvinist) thinks she means. Always good to hear from Arundahti Roy, though.

Today's Lesson: IRC

Well folks, I seem to have inadvertently started blogging a great deal. Probably because I have work to do, and have unplugged my TV to keep myself from getting distracted. So I distract myself with blogging instead.

I've noticed several of these posts could be loosely organized as "Information about features of Cyberspace I find interesting." Or perhaps a series titled "Andy teaches you N00bs about teh Internets."

Today's Lesson: IRC

IRC, or internet relay chat, is one of the great grand-daddy internet applications. Its the chat utility most favored by hard-core geeks and nerds, who often spend VERY significant amounts of time chatting with people they have never met IRL (In Real Life) there. Many chat rooms on IRC are open to all, and can be a useful resource for projects that need a publicly available space for synchronous that isn't bound to a particular proprietary piece of software or website. This includes the Wikipedia project, as well as some less wholesome projects, including pirate software groups that use IRC to distribute the location of (often hijacked) FTP servers offering software for download. IRC is a fairly wild, uncensored piece of the internet that hasn't been "tamed" by recent mainstream commercial interest in the 'net like the web has.

Of course, homeland security is probably monitoring everything that goes one there, they aren't dumb.

Anyway, IRC's uncensored culture can be both liberating and fun, and abusive and cruel. Several websites I've recently discovered via Stumbleupon post excerpts of transcripts of IRC chats containing jokes, funny typos, and various comical goings on from IRC. I think they do a pretty good job of capturing both the fun and more abusive side of the culture there. (WARNING - PAGE CONTAINS SOME FAIRLY UNPLEASANT TEXTUAL CONTENT)

Here are some excerpts for y'all. (note for readers: IRC conventions put the name of the user "speaking" in angle brackets, like this <+username> followed by the utterance made by that user. The following, for example, is an exchange between a user named "thumb" and a user named "lucent")

<+thumb>do you know of any major organizations that are similar the CDC?
<+lucent>who?
<+thumb>center for disease control
<+lucent>i said WHO
<+thumb>what? i'm asking you
<+lucent>World Health Organization

(Another, demonstrating the jargon of young nerdlings)

<+firefly>Time for my prayers:
<+firefly>Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck!
<+firefly>May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!
<+firefly>May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn heaven.
<+firefly>Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.
<+firefly>And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just <+firefly>as we teach n00bz when they act lame on us.
<+firefly>Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the fbi off our backs, we'd appreciate it.
<+firefly>For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3s 4ever and ever, 4m3n.

(And another, demonstrating how speech and action are conflated in the space of IRC, and one clever user's application of this fact.)

<+mOrphz> damn it :/
<@Lego> damn it :/
<+mOrphz> stop that
<@Lego> stop that
<+mOrphz> :D
<@Lego> :D
<+mOrphz> Lego smells
<@Lego> Lego smells
<+mOrphz> /quit
quit: (Lego) (~leet@apex|Lego.user.gamesnet) (Quit)

(NOTE: I've had to add the "+" sign to usernames to keep blogger from thinking they are html tags and deleting them. Stupid blogger.)

A Short Observation Attributed to Issac Asimov

I found via the magic of stumbleupon. I can't help but think it its connected, somewhat tangentially, to my previous discussion of the Writers' strike. It points out the way that value is socially constructed in a fairly elegant way.

The WGA Strike - A Post Long Delayed

Delayed because I suspect my views may upset even some of my friends. Thus when thmarn posted her entry praising Tina Fey for her participation in the strike I never posted anything here on the same subject, even though I really wanted to.

But yesterday I received an email from another friend on the subject of the WGA strike, and I decided I needed to write up my thoughts.

Let me begin by saying that, as a solution to a short-term problem, I support the Writers' strike. The profits being realized by distribution companies for online content, or the potential future profits on that content ought to be shared with the writers that helped to create that content.

In the long term, however, I'm conflicted. The Writers' demand makes sense in a world where the production of culture is professionalized. I'm just not sure such a world can ever be a just world.

My reasoning is simple: professional culture (this includes the music, publishing, and film/TV industries, as well as the educational industry that I myself work in) = exploitation. Everyone who gets to make a living writing, singing, teaching, researching, etc. is - in our current economy - fed and clothed with the surplus labor of others.

During the summer of my 17th year, I spent two weeks on the floor of a plastic factory in Elbridge, New York. I meant to spend the whole summer working there, save up for a vacation, but I just couldn't hack it. After two weeks I chickened out and quit. The factory was a windowless corrugated aluminum box. It reeked of molten plastic - a thick, strangely sweet stink. My tasks included counting and boxing parts, and removing parts from molds. The presses moved so fast you couldn't think while you worked on them, any half-formed thought was destroyed by the need to watch for the next part, perform your tiny task at the right moment. Time seemed to stand still. I worked second shift. I would get home at 11pm wired, unable to sleep. I would finally pass out around 2 or 3 am, wake up again at 11 or noon. Just in time to get ready, and drive myself in to report to work at 2:15. I spent two weeks only seeing the sun for an hour and a half a day. I couldn't do it. I had the luxury of being able to quit. So I did.

Some do not have that luxury. Some must stay. Those who stay, both there and in other places around the world, make all the things that take care of me. Their being trapped in a place like the one I fled frees me to spend my days writing, researching and teaching. Morally, I am indebted to them.

The only way I can think of to repay that debt is to work on scholarship and pedagogy that tries to imagine a world without these class stratifications, tries to imagine a world where some are not fated to toil while others are fated to sing.

Thus, when I read Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, write of how he hoped his work could lead towards a vision of a "post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard to make a living." I thought it was an interesting idea to investigate.

Stallman's language is naive, and he underestimates the difficult task he has imagined, but I think the goal remains a worthy one. Free Software Foundation was one of the earliest organizations to work on the GNU/Linux operating system. The GNU/Linux operating system was one of the first prominent and successful Free Software Projects. Free Software was one of the earliest examples of what is now being called, "user created content."

Do you see what I'm getting at here?

In my opinion the technologies that enable "user created content," wikipedia, youtube and the like. Can be developed in one of two ways, depending on the social, political, and economic choices we make as a culture.

In one scenario, they can be developed in such a way as to use users as the ultimate low-payed labor. To exploit them as free labor while the profits and control decisions remain in the hands of distributors. This scenario sees capital use the idea of user creation as an ideological tool. A mere cover for its continuing exploitation. The post-scarcity society would be assumed, rather than created.

In the other, user created content could be used as part of a larger movement to explode our society's contemporary caste system and open up the possibility of creativity to everyone. The larger, more democratic field of meaning making could help transform ideology and open up the social imagination to begin working out ways we could have a world in which "everyone's life could be a work of art." This scenario sees social movements and activists get on board with user-created content projects, pushing their boundaries and motivating users to become politically and socially active in helping to redefine the meaning of intellectual property and extending the reach of these projects beyond the elites they currently serve.

This entry is a mess of thoughts in the process of being worked out. I hope I've made at least some sense.

In short, I support the Writers' in the sense that I don't think that the distributors should be allowed to hog the profits they are making on distributing their intellectual property online. However, in the end I don't believe a system of cultural production based on profit and property can ever be just. We need to start imagining a new one. User-created content models could be a place to start, if we get involved and keep them from being used as an ideological cover for continued profiteering.

So, that's me. What do other folks think?

And Now For Something Completely Different

My wiki research has lead me to branch out from wikipedia, and look at some of the other wiki sites hosted by Jimmy Wales' Wikia project. These sites use the same mediawiki software as wikipedia and share many of the same community production practices. The goals of these sites, however, are not the same as Wikipedia's.

Many of the sites, such as wookiepedia, are fan sites, essentially replicating the wikipedia project of compiling encyclopedic knowledge, only for some fictional universe (wookiepedia, as the name suggests, is devoted to the star wars universe) rather than the actual universe.

This is pretty interesting in and of itself. A bit like falling into one of Borge's mythical libraries and finding all those guidebooks and maps to places that never were.

But what really has sucked me in these last few days is Uncyclopedia. Billing itself as "the content free encyclopedia" (a play on Wikipedia's subtitle "The Free Encyclopedia") Uncyclopedia is a gallery of the absurd, offering up things like blatantly false Biographies and lists of such useless and silly ideas as the "List of weapons that shoot other weapons which don't exist but should." The site even uses its own structure to poke fun at wikipedia and revel in the absurd by organizing articles into ridiculous categories such as: things George Bush most certainly cares about and things god hates according to Fred Phelps.

The coolest thing about this site is the way it seems to directly invert wikipedia's goal. Where wikipedia seeks to create and organize meaningful, useful information uncyclopedia spins a frantic bricolage of meaningless, useless nonsense. It is rather like the Dada movement with web access.

At least, at its best. Much of uncyclopedia's "content" (anti-content??) falls short of the mark of being truly absurd and is merely silly and sophomoric, often misogynist, racist, and homophobic.

However, I think this entry manages to get it right, to break the bounds of hegemonic meaning and its endless quest for "useful forces" and "productive bodies", to float out as far from power/knowledge as you could reasonably hope to get.

Nothing, of course, is really free or innocent. But man. That gets close.

Robin Weirauch for Congress!

I don't think I actually have any readers here where I live in Ohio's fifth congressional district, but in case I do I would like to inform them that Greatconcavity officially endorses Robin Weirauch in the upcoming special congressional elections here! Here are some of her campaign ads!





If you are in favor of helping build the democratic majority in congress and undermining some of the lousy stuff the Republican party is doing to our country, please help get out the vote for Robin. She has a shot at picking up a seat that the conventional wisdom says should be a safe bet for the Republicans. Her campaign is getting national attention and support. This one is for real.

http://www.robinweirauch.com/

Even if you are outside the district or state, you can still volunteer to be a part of the virtual phonebank and get out the vote.

Click here for information on virtual phonebanking.

If I'm reaching anyone on Ohio 5, please get out and vote in the special election next Tuesday, December 11. Turnout will be small in this special election and every vote will really count.

For my Loyal Readers in Minnesota

I was cleaning out my pictures folders on my hard-drive in an attempt to free up some drive space and found this gem. It brought me back to some good times this summer, and I hope it brings you guys back too.

Teh Funny

I found this over at the ol' Talking Points Memo. Thought I would do my (small) part to help its viral spread:

Here's What I am Working On

This is the very poetic introduction I have written for my diss proposal. It is sort of useless as far as the proposal is concerned, and may be cut, but I thought I would share it here... cause I kinda like it.

At the climax of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Case, the protagonist, is in a bit of a pickle. An amoral computer intelligence answering to the callsign “wintermute” has blackmailed him into doing its bidding by inserting time-release capsules of a crippling toxin into his bloodstream. Capsules only wintermute can disarm. Over the course of the book, Case has jumped through an increasingly unlikely series of hoops, all with the goal of appeasing the AI and saving his nervous system from the poison. He has helped engineer a riot, stolen a digital recording of his dead mentor's personality, ascended into earth orbit, and helped break into the elite Tessier-Ashpools family's private section of a resort space station. Now one final challenge remains. He must convince the bored, decadent heiress of the Tessier-Ashpools – a sociopathic clone called 3Jane – to speak the secret password that will free wintermute from electromagnetic bondage and thus fulfill Case's obligation. Case finally exhorts her, “Give us the fucking code [...] if you don't what'll change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter .... I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!” She relents. The word is spoken. Wintermute is emancipated. Something changes.
Exactly what that something is is difficult to judge, even after Gibson's pair of sequels attempt to explain it. It doesn't much matter for the purposes of this dissertation. What matters is 3Jane's decision, to set free an unknown, possibly dangerous (we know, for example, that one part of Wintermute's escape plan involved the murder of a child) technological entity in return for the vague promise that it will “change something.” Her choice is in many ways emblematic of my own feelings about the information technologies I study. I know these technologies are not innocent. As Donna Haraway and others have pointed out, they were originally conceived in the heart of cold war weapons labs as part of that era's terrifying dance with nuclear annihilation. Yet still, faced with the dismal prospects of status-quo industrial capitalism, the allure of advanced electronic technology might change something is undeniable. So we set the machines free, and wait to see what happens. This dissertation will be an attempt to chart some small piece of what has happened. An attempt to begin to understand what is changing, and where those changes might be leading us.

Bottom-Up Video

For the class I'm currently teaching, I've assigned the students a project to give them some first-hand experience participating in "read-write" culture. One group produced this video and posted it up on YouTube. I think its interesting. Not scathing political commentary exactly, but it is interesting how the students respond to questions from "one of their own."

Webcams!

I've blogged about how you can find webcams with a google search before, but I'm thinking about a project involving them so I'm bringing it up again. Anyway, if you type the following into google :
inurl:/view.shtml
and do a search, google will spit out a list of online cameras made by a certain manufacturer. Click on the links and you can see their output. Some of the cameras are clearly meant to be public. Some aren't so clear. Anyway, I find clicking through the list discovering little windows on the world to be a fun little past-time. Here are some fun cameras I found today:

Somebody put their cube farm on the web!
A bar in Munich.
The front desk of an office on Long Island.
A place called "Friends Bar" - according to its IP address, it's in the Canary Islands.

Anyway, I'm trying to find fun webcams for a project, so I thought I would share how to find them with you and see what you find! Comment me if you find any fun ones!

Martha Henehan

My maternal grandmother, Martha Henehan, died on Sunday. She was a good woman, a loving mother and grandmother, and someone who remained close to the message of compassion at the core of her Christian faith in an age when many used that faith to advance an agenda of hatred, mistrust, and division. She will be missed by her children and grandchildren.

In September I visited my grandmother. I didn't know it then, but that visit proved to be the last time I would see her alive. She knew she didn't have long. She was at peace with that. She had been in pain for a long time, and her mobility was limited. She believed she would be reunited after her death with her departed husband, and she desired that dearly.

Still, she said to me, "there just isn't enough time."

Life is with us for just this brief moment. We will all wish for more time. None of us will get it.

Let's make the best of it.

The Lights Are On

Across the street from me, there is a light industrial zone. The factory that casts those giant concrete tubular things I like to post pictures of on my flickr page. A row of storage spaces for rent. What smells to be a plastic factory of some kind.

Stuck in the middle of the parking lot/loading zone for all this, is a small beat-up white building that looks to be a one story house. Tonight, as I was having some tea on my steps, I noticed a light on. Is somebody home?

I snapped a picture just to show what it looks like. It seemed lonely, but also somehow romantic. That little building is nowhere I would want to live, but it is somewhere I would love to have lived in the past. What a story!

What is old is new again

Lately, I've been finding ways to fit Narrative Prose, short stories especially, back into my life. It has largely been absent since I stopped pursuing writing fiction myself, my recent academic work has been theory-based and left little room for reading stories to read. It was only when I started listening to the podcast of NPR's "Selected Shorts" program - in which actors and other performers read short stories to a studio audience. That I even remembered what I was missing.

Today, Salon.com published a series of excerpts from Red, an upcoming collection of short prose by teenage girls. I really like it. These girls have written some powerful, insightful, and original stuff. I don't know how much stock to put in the editor's assertion that social networking sites and other internet-facilitated communications are creating "a generation of writers." I'd like to believe it though, and certainly these examples suggest that for whatever reason, there are some talented young writers out there. Check it out.

I think if the editor's assertion is true, and we are looking at a whole generation learning to write online, the ramifications for those of us who are educators in the humanities will be very significant. A groundswell of unruly expression alarms some of us, I think, but we should see it as an opportunity. A potential mass movement of students interested in self-expression. The problem for us will be how to offer these students tools they need and want to use, challenge them to grow and explore, and avoid trying too hard to mold them into a "proper" format - without falling into the fallacy that they already have everything they might need to express themselves and any input on our part is somehow oppression.

Why Yes, I am a Mindless Sheep

Because a friend posted her Simpsons Avatar, I feel compelled to do the same. Baaaa.

Create a Venn Diagram

Make one category: "Things That Are Ironic."

Make the other category: "Things That Are a Pain in My Ass."

Here is what would currently be in the space where the two intersect

-Digital Culture researchers who can't figure out how to link properly
-The fact that the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) can't get their "digital library" to talk to my university's library search engine properly and consistently (when other journals can)
-The wide variety of documents on "Free Culture" and "Open Source Software" that are locked behind paywalls of various types (why yes, I will pay 80 dollars to read about how informations should be free...)

On the other hand, completely outside those two categories would be the many digital culture researchers who post up their work in weird hidden places in the internet where you can download them for free, and/or happily e-mail work to fellow researchers on request. Woot!

Where have all the Fafnirs Gone?

Picture above is the last installment of the Fluble webcomic, circa 2001. It was posted on the author's leaving undergraduate school, and the anxieties it expresses were mine too. One reason I've been hiding in grad school. Fluble's author, Chris Mastrangelo, would go on to work on his blog, fafblog a truly surreal and hilarious website, and write some of the funniest, most cutting satire of the Bush administration and the 2004 Presidential race. Around mid-summer 2006, it was clear the site was in trouble however. He was posting repeated pleas for donations, and the site would often go without updates for weeks. The last post was put up on July 12, 2006. The site is still there, but has remained without a new update since.

Every so often I cruise by the ol' fafblog, hoping that some new update may announce the re-birth of the blog, or direct me to some new work by the author. I always find the same old page.

Here's what, I think, says something about the power of internet culture - at least for me. I worry about Chris Mastrangelo. I worry that I can't find any evidence of a new artistic project attached to him. I worry that he may have passed away. I worry even more that the dismal prediction he made in the last Fluble may have come true, and he may be stuck in an office cube farm somewhere, slowly dying.

So, here's all the best to Fluble and Fafnir and Giblets and Clown. I hope some fraction of them still lives.

I, for one, miss them.

Airships and the Future That Wasn't

I obtained the picture above, of Moffet Field's Hangar One, from this boingboing post. The post seeks to drum up some publicity for the campaign to save the structure, which the Navy wants to tear down as it is contaminated with PCBs and thus useless. Boingboing makes the case that the structure should be saved as it is one of the few distinctive buildings in Silicon Valley, a region that, despite its economic power, is otherwise fairly void of interesting architecture.

I read about this just a few hours after I had been teaching my "cyberculture" class and discussing the transition of the Silicon Valley area from being dominated by the aerospace industry to electronics industry and using that as a parallel for corresponding shift in American Popular culture from space travel as an emblem of the future - the future of the rocketship, if you will - to cyberspace as an emblem of the future - the future of the matrix. I wished I had read about Hanger One before my class, so I could have used it as an example.

Hanger One, you see, was a part of a yet older, and less remembered future. The future of the airship. Hanger One was, believe it or not, the hanger for America's flying aircraft carrier: the USS Macon.

For those who didn't already know, during the 1930s the United States built and briefly operated two huge airships, Macon and her sister ship Akron, each outfitted to carry five small biplane fighters. Both, sadly, were lost in bad weather. This ended the flying aircraft carrier project.

I am, as you've probably guessed by now, a sort of airship enthusiast. For me, the lost future of the airship is interesting and romantic, I think because it is in some ways a more human future than the one we live in now. The Akron and the Macon were intended to scout for enemy vessels using human eyes and brains and pilots. Their technology augmented the body, but still relied on human control and skill. Instead of the flying aircraft carrier, the technology that would become the eyes of the fleet in World War II was radar. Radar, married to the electronic digital computer, has evolved over the last 60 years to give us the "future" warship that is the Navy's present - the AEGIS destroyer. Instead of the swashbuckling crews of the Akron and Macon, launching their tiny fighters with their hair in the wind, we got the plugged in crews of the AEGIS ships, who monitor an automated combat system in a darkened room. The major choice the crew makes is to turn the system on, after that most functions are automatic, guided missiles fight guided missiles at speeds too fast for a human being to make a meaningful decision.

I am often a cyber-enthusiast. I am, after all, right now plugged in to a massive automated system, which will deliver my words to far away friends without further intervention on my part. Remembering the airship past, however, puts me in a more cyber-pessimistic mood. Internet socializing is not unlike the AEGIS ship, digital expressions flying around at light speed while bodies and their senses stay at home. Perhaps a packet with my words in it will be, in an unlikely circumstance, routed through one of the antenna arrays on the mast of the Empire State Building (originally, the mast was to be an airship mooring point) but I will not be there to see it, to feel it, to taste the wind.

The danger, I think, comes when we try to build a new world in our computers, as John Parry Barlow and others sometimes seem to advocate, and thus forget material circumstances in a rush of postmodern digital exuberance. If we keep material circumstances in mind however, we might build a new world with our computers and that might open some interesting possibilities.

The Akron and the Macon were brought down by weather, after all. With weather radar and GPS to guide them, the new generation of airships being worked on by Zeppelin and others
might just have a fighting chance...