A suddenly warm day, after a week of frigid rainy October, and I’m at work on a Saturday, and there’s Mister Softee, with his music off, as if he knows it’s past his time and he doesn’t want to push his luck.
My new handheld orange squeezer is pretty amazing, but even if it wasn’t, it’d be worth buying for the sake of this hilarious spelling error.
Riding back on the Staten Island Ferry, late at night, from a wedding, we see the Towers of Light coming up from lower Manhattan… and it’s a lovely sight, in its own eerie ghostly way, and makes us feel suitably somber and remembrance-y…
… but as the boat approaches, we start to notice little flecks of light, moving through the beams. Paper, I think, but the closer we get the more strangely they move, until we realize they must be alive, intelligent, birds, probably.
And there’s something very disturbing about it, watching hundreds of tiny white blips fly and circle and collide and move and rise through the air, almost like we’re watching souls, ascending or descending or staying put to keep an eye on us.
(Incidentally, when we got off the ferry we wanted to get a closer look, so we walked to the source… turns out it’s not at Ground Zero at all, but on top of a parking deck four blocks away!)
Interactive mapping is about more than just fun and games and Grindr-style hookups and helping me find the best subway line to take to get to a morning meeting on time.
Crowd-sourced mapping has the potential to impact people’s lives in truly transformative ways. Ushahidi was developed as a way to help people document and keep themselves safe from ethnic violence in Kenya, in the wake of a disputed election. In the Bay Area, when a police officer was convicted of manslaughter even though he shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed Black man named Oscar Grant who was lying on the ground on his stomach, and the police prepared a riot squad response in anticipation of an uprising, protesters developed an open map at OscarGrantProtests.com, so that peaceful demonstrators could avoid the violence of overzealous cops.
Picture the Homeless is betting that the power of crowd-sourced mapping can go deeper than that. We think it can get progressive legislation passed, and forever change New York City housing policy. We recently deployed an Ushahidi-based open map called VACANT NYC that will help us get an accurate count of vacant property citywide.
For years, homeless people have been demanding action from city government around the massive numbers of vacant buildings and lots in New York City. While the city spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on providing shelter to the homeless, perfectly good property languishes in the hands of private landlords and city agencies. That’s why homeless folks drafted Intro 48, a city council bill that would empower the city to conduct an annual count of vacant buildings and lots.
But government officials say vacant property is not a problem… and even if it was, there’s no money to count these properties. To prove that vacant property is still a huge problem in this city, and that a census of these buildings and lots can be accomplished without breaking the bank, we’re turning this project over to the public. VACANT NYC lets New Yorkers send a text message or an email or fill out an online form, every time they see a vacant building or lot anywhere in the five boroughs.
Our little map is already getting big buzz. It was featured prominently in a recent article documenting the fight for Intro 48. This was subsequently picked-up as a featured story in the Housing and Land Use News Digest of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
Other allies in the housing struggle have covered the map, including the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights: http://restorehousingrights.org/?p=1093
If VACANT NYC can prove that this is still a major problem, and that an accurate census of under-utilized property can be cost-effectively accomplished through participatory mapping, it’ll be a major revolution in the way that open-source technology impacts public policy.
So please - help us out! If you see something, say something. Tell us about vacant property in New York City. Publicize VACANT NYC on your own blog/website/Facebook/Twitter/Whatever. We are re-making the world as we map it; let’s make sure we map the kind of world we want to live in.
The ever-thought-provoking Jim Johnson has an interesting analysis of some of the rhetoric surrounding war photography, which does a good job at getting at some of what makes me uncomfortable around the way journalism and media discourse frames and discusses the war and the folks wrapped up in it.
Jim asks: “If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn’t it possible to see the ‘human interest’ approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?”
So much war photography serves to suck us up in the human drama, the pathos of real people in intense situations, that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We forget about the policies and the greed and the politics and the land-mine manufacturer executives and the babies buried in the rubble.
He uses the phrase “visual euphemism,” to link war images with the way we understand war journalism - as something with a fundamental underlying dishonesty, as something built up out of deliberate obfuscation and the parroting of lies - with the end result that we walk away from each piece understanding the conflict a little less.
I see an unmistakable eroticism to the way soldiers are depicted in war photography. Young, strong, brutal men, occupying a weird moral space where the normal rules do not apply. The exhibit under discussion in this post includes a series of photos of “Soldiers Sleeping,” their shirtless tattooed bodies and open guileless mouths bespeaking simultaneous innocence and heroism. This follows a long tradition in representational art, going back to The Dying Gaul and beyond (at the time of that sculpture’s creation, nudity connoted heroism, and his representation in the nude in a Roman sculpture was an uncharacteristic “memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries”).
We respond to stories. Stories help us understand otherwise unimaginable things - the unthinkable suffering of war, for example, becomes real to us through our relationship to Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. And we respond to sex, to desire. To fear. To quote a poem I quote way too often:
The boot in the face, the brute
My theory is that we are socialized to respond to these images, to men who exemplify strength and violence and brutality. That we fetishize these men who are, depending on where you stand, heroes or hooligans or cannon fodder. That we start from fear and eventually reach a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thrall to these men whose sacrifice and slaughter help keep the game going, the wealth and the poverty and the profit and loss.
Community organizers obsess over power. Not “how do we get it?” but “how do we destroy it?” Destroy, break, fracture, re-distribute, re-invent. We do this work because we believe that directly-affected communities DO have the power to fix the systemic imbalances that result in oppression and poverty… but we also do it, especially after a couple of years, with a certain degree of cynicism about whether the institutions by which the status quo maintains itself can ever be made just. Maybe we can imagine a criminal justice system that doesn’t screw over people of color so obscenely… but years of experience have made it hard for us to imagine the existing mechanisms of power (elected officials, agency administrators, facility operators) making any of the changes we want to see. Or when change does happen it’s at a glacial pace, with every step forward taking literally years - the victory of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, after six hard years of brilliant organizing, is a great example of that.
Which isn’t to say we should stop - just that community organizing is ONE OF many strategies that’s needed. More and more I’m wondering: what role can technological direct action play in creating systemic change?
I’m not talking about MoveOn.org-style online organizing. I’m talking about code interference intended to disrupt the function and administration of oppressive systems.
Looking at it from that perspective, this new article becomes particularly intriguing - from The Technology Review, Moore’s Outlaws, by David Talbot:
“Code is more complex, and that means more opportunity to exploit the code. There is more money to be made in exploiting the code, and that means there are more and more sophisticated people looking to exploit vulnerabilities.”
The article talks mostly about criminal interference - hackers, etc. And when he does discuss political cyber-interference, it’s generally carried out by some big scary players: the Chinese government, the Russian government (or, at the very least, the hacking advances the interests of those players, and punishes their enemies, even if it’s not at all clear if the attacks were carried out by the governments themselves or by zealous and patriotic computer geniuses…. but if suddenly the Dalai Lama’s email account is hacked and all his contacts find their computers wiped clean, I don’t imagine he sees much of a difference whether it was Beijing or just an enterprising lone cyber-gunman).
Looking Talbot’s outlaws, it’s fascinating to think about how direct action shaped by the demands of low-income people and backed up by solid technicians, carried out in cyberspace, could mess with business as usual… disruptions that could be carried out against BP and Monsanto as much as the U.S. Government; Scientology as much as terrorist networks. Wikileaks is a brilliant example, but the potential is so much wider. Think about how much of the work of governments is carried out through software - and therefore mediated by code: emails, logistics, distribution, coordination of massive amounts of resources. Think about how code can flip the script, so that “a small, committed group of people,” instead of distributing flyers outside a government agency office, can shut the office down for the day. Think about all the delicious new openings for subversion from below.
Everything is code. So let’s get to work.
Santa Claus came early, and he brought unmanned aerial drones.
These flying robots, semi-autonomous and semi-remote-controlled, pumped out by aerospace/defense contractor Northrop Grumman, are bringing joy and happiness to the American heartland.
Over at Alternet, the brilliant Laura Flanders is reporting on recent mega-million-dollar contracts to create “drone base controls”; it’s hyped as a sure-fire job creator, and local communities in Wisconsin and Missouri and South Dakota are rejoicing. It’s nice that folks can get jobs, but it would also be nice if there was money to create jobs that didn’t in turn create “the charred flesh of children killed by accident, by remote.”
Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security “will deploy additional Border Patrol agents, ICE investigators, two drone aircraft and other technologies to its border with Mexico as part of a new effort to combat organized crime and illegal immigration…. In the Texas-Mexico border, two additional Predator drones will patrol the area and nearby areas in the Gulf of Mexico region, once Congress approves the 500 million dollars President Barack Obama has requested for such purpose.”
500 million dollars for two Predator drones? Those are some expensive robots!
These border deployments amount to a proxy war between defense contractors and drug cartels, with the government handing out massive wads of cash. Corporations and organized crime - these are the new epicenters of power. Fiscal insolvency is leading to the “erosion of the nation-state’s power to protect/advance the well being of its citizens;” an abandonment of political power for the sake of financial power. That’s the point of the Bush tax cuts and Reaganite policies in general; to take away the power of government to help people (de-funding and demolishing public education, housing, health care, unemployment, etc), and turn government into a funnel for money - out of taxpayers’ pockets and into the hands of businesses and foreign militaries and the “right kind” of global insurgents, the ones resisting governments we don’t like, the ones who probably hate us but will take the cash and weapons we throw at them and then use them on us ten or twenty years down the line.
At the U.S. Social Forum there’s a workshop on “Challenging Robotic Empire.” I’m sad I’m not in Detroit to check it out, but it’s good to see that anti-militarism folks in the US are already thinking through the ways in which military robotics will change the nature of warfare, and therefore the nature of our response to it. I’m hopeful that as we learn how to respond to the new challenges posed by soldier-robots, we take it as an opportunity to take radical anti-militarism work in a new direction…
In case anyone needed any additional proof of my nerdiness, I give you… me, wearing this gorgeous/ridiculous Great Gatsby t-shirt i got for cheap at Urban Outfitters.
Sometimes youre rushing for the train or the train is hustling past the local stops and you’re late but not ridiculously late and life feels like Nintendo, you’ve stepped into Castlevania 3, and the music’s pulsing fast, that urgent simple music when you’re so close to the end but everything’s moving too fast, gears are grinding and skeletons throw their bones and bats fly in their elliptical deceptively simple lines, even the slightest mistake will kill you, you’ve spent weeks and months crouched down on the cold carpeted basement floor fighting your way past endless monsters and over dizzying precipices and booby trapped bridges, to arrive here, in this place, and you belong here, you are equal to this world, its horrors will not overwhelm you and its herculean challenges won’t stop you, and now you’re back on the train, and the city is dirty and your apartment is too expensive, and miserable people are all around you, and bombs are going off in gaza, but you are not overwhelmed, you will not be crushed, you’ve spent a long time practicing for this moment and the music thrumming in your head says you can master this world just like that other one, the 8-bit brightly colored digital one, the place you started from.
There’s a lot of excellent actors on Battlestar Galactica, but one of the very best is Michael Hogan’s left eye. The little bugger can emote better than the combined casts of every Fox drama ever.
Today’s question: who would win in a celebrity death match between Saul Tigh’s eye and the Smoke Monster from LOST?
