Author: Sahar

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Misc

How to be a citizen in a time of Coronavirus

Beyond the Wuhan Handshake

What can we do in the present crisis? More interestingly, what can we do with it?

I’m not talking about purchasing a bidet and stockpiling pasta sauce and medicine. Instead: as citizens, how can we rise to the occasion? As organizers, how can we seize the moment to put in place some needed social change?

When life starts looking like a movie, the extraordinary becomes inevitable. Either for good, or for ill. Back in 2008, we on the left were a bit overconfident. The basic analysis was there: we cited Naomi Klein and talked about how we needed a “Reverse Shock Doctrine”. Even Rahm Emanuel was on TV saying “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste”

It didn’t go to waste — for the bad guys. The crisis helped the Tea Party rebrand the conservative coalition after Bush, it funneled trillions of dollars of free money into banks, and it raised the concentration of industry even higher.

So let’s not let the crisis go to waste, before the enemy does.

That’s the challenge. These next few days and weeks will be qualitatively different than normal. We have an opening to try things (and get people to sign on) that would be strange and hard to pull off before. That’s the challenge: What opportunities can we seize now, that might have important effects in the future?

1. Make a neighborhood group

This is an excellent time to make a Facebook group for your block. Maybe just the 40 or so homes in your street. In a few weeks, you might need to start babysitting each other’s kids, or sharing advil, or pooling risk to send exactly one person to the store to buy supplies. In a few weeks, you might be grateful that you dug this well before you drew from in. You might be saving lives by performing errands for your elderly neighbor.

And, in the months and perhaps years to come, you’ll reap the benefits of a tighter neighborhood network. You’ll be happier, more communal. And maybe when you’re trying to convince your neighbors to go to a meeting, to vote, or to consider your perspective, they’ll listen.

Tomorrow, I’ll put this in practice. I’ll knock on doors nearby, and leave a flier. I likely won’t use the term “mutual aid”, or “solidarity network”. Why bother using words that confuse people? But hopefully we will get the rudiments of a community network set up to start being generous, helpful, and kind to each other.

2. Be decisive

In times of crisis, the flailing defer to the decisive. Be decisive.

Delta flight attendants have gotten a huge boost to their union drive in the last few days:

“I have not seen interest this high. Not even after the merger with [Northwest] who was already represented by AFA at the time, or during the recession or the Ebola scare of 2014,” says Cheryl, who has worked at the airline for more than a decade. “The threat of involuntary furloughs and layoffs has been a big motivator. We are scared and freaking out because we don’t have any language in our policies for this.”

The Coronavirus Is Jump-Starting Union Organizing at Delta (by Mike Elk)

If months happen in days, then start grabbing that bounty of time and confusion to push your agenda.

You can start by small things. Advocate for this your neighbors to buy gift cards from local restaurants and cafes they’d normally go to every day. It’s a short term loan to businesses and a way to help them stay afloat. Can you do it through a Facebook page or Action Network petition? After the crisis, you can use that organization and credibility to start talking about other ways to help local businesses, like localist economics or raising the minimum wage or unionizing.

If you can, use the crisis as an excuse to cut out middlemen: can you pay service workers (instead of service businesses) directly? Can you convince your neighbors to do so as well? In the cloak of solidarity you can start laying the groundwork of a worker-owned business.

3. Be Local

Nationally, the Dems are gonna Dem. I’m sure they’ll disappoint us. But there’s a lot of ground you can seize locally.

Organize your neighbors around demands for your town or state. Ones that will save lives. Things like: Stop evicting people during a pandemic! Or “Free Broadband for everyone!”. Or “don’t cut off people’s access to utilities!” Or “give the prisoners free soap and water, for God’s sake“

“Jails and prisons are often dirty and have really very little in the way of infection control,” said Homer Venters, former chief medical officer at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex. “There are lots of people using a small number of bathrooms. Many of the sinks are broken or not in use. You may have access to water, but nothing to wipe your hands off with, or no access to soap.”

When Purell is Contraband, How Do You Contain Coronavirus? by The Marshall Project

You might very well save lives.

Also, I expect that when you start asking your friends to call their city councilmember, or to sign a petition, about these things, you’ll get a different response than you normally get. People who normally tune out politics will be suddenly paying attention to this large shock in their lives. Get them hooked on advocacy. Get them comfortable with the democratic process. This will yield dividends later.

4. Don’t wait for Republican Party to collapse on its own

The conservative movement survived stealing a presidency, lying us into Iraq, failing into Katrina, looting the public after the 2008 crash, gutting the voting rights act, lying to the Supreme court about gerrymandering, and nominating a sexual assaulter to the presidency. It can survive this.

For the last two months, Trump, Fox News, etc have been downplaying the crisis at best, actively sabotaging efforts to handle it at worst. Starting in about a day or so, they’ll try to pretend that never happened. Don’t let them get away with it.

(I wrote a whole thing about it here)

5. Further reading and examples

Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville

COVID-19 Full List of Actions You Can Take Right Now

How To Start A Social Street

BRANDEIS mutual aid for first-generation and low-income students affected by COVID-19 updates

Categories
Misc

Don’t wait for the Republican Party to collapse on its own

Photo by Saul Loeb

The Republican Party didn’t collapse after Katrina. It didn’t curl up and die in shame after lying about the Iraq War. The conservative movement wasn’t saddled with the shame of Bush for a generation. Instead, they rebranded as “The Tea Party” in two short years and went on as they always have, only more so.

Lovingly, patiently, try to convince your parents and older friends to take this seriously, to stay safe, to change their habits. You’ll do this already, of course. You love them and care about them.

At the same time as you do this: make sure to point out again and again that the republicans and right wing media (not just Trump) are lying to them and getting them in danger of death. We can’t rely on them to figure it out on their own.

It’s inevitable that at some point the R’s are going to try to turn this crisis into an opportunity to do ugly ugly stuff. Will it be camps? Border shutdowns? Sweeping surveillance powers? Bailouts for crony industries? It’s going to get dark.

If (if! Not when. IF!) the faction of the country that accepted lies, corruption, venality, more lies, racism, incompetence, illegality, and lies from Trump finally leaves the death cult cocoon — it won’t be over.

The conservative media movement will turn on Trump just like they turned on Bush. They’ll pretend that he never was the beloved head of their movement. It might take them an election or two, but they’ll create some new brand name (just like the Tea Party), and start over again.

Don’t let them get away with it. Mark down, out loud, what the Fox News position is right now. What it was last week. The horrific blithe comments from their local generic Republican elected official. The warnings of death and absolute incompetence from experts. The timeline of responses by the White House. The callousness of it all.

And it’ll get worse. They’ll actively interfere with normal ways of helping people as a cover for them to cut taxes / deregulate / hand over cash to their favorite corrupt industries.

Examples: Trump administration blocks states from using Medicaid to respond to coronavirus crisis and The Trump Administration Will Move Ahead With Its Plan To Kick People Off Of Food Stamps Despite The Coronavirus Outbreak

Already, as I write this, the right wing is changing its position. It’s going to pretend that it didn’t spend months claiming this was a hoax. It’s going to hope you forget that Fox News claimed that the hysteria was the real problem.It’s going to hope your parents forget everything that happened, because they weren’t really paying attention in January and February, were they?

Make sure your parents remember. Make sure everyone remembers.

Categories
Misc

Letter to a young leftist re:failure

Howard Dean
We've lost a lot -- and gotten a lot stronger -- over time

Failure.

The thing you have to understand is simple: I’m used to failure. Failure, and, I suppose, betrayal.

Howard Dean didn’t win. In the end, he didn’t come close. He had a growing, internet-fueled movement of people (young and old but mostly young) doing crazy new innovative things for his campaign. He called out the cowardice, the infuriating (or was it chillingly) dystopian way that the democratic party was rubber stamping surveillance, the police state, the war. He lost.

The netroots didn’t win in 2008. Obama did. He grabbed the loyalty of the members of “the bloggers movement” away from the bloggers themselves. And even before he got elected, he reversed himself on FISA, on spying, and on the banks. His ads were about “tax cuts to corporations who ship jobs overseas”. He never really explained what that was about. His presidency, at least at first, was a weird disaster. All the organizations that clearly called out Bush-era corruption just stopped doing it when Obama ran the show. Directors told me in confidence that their funders threatened to quit if they even mildly opposed Obama. The federal government had an explicit policy of allowing millions of people to get their houses foreclosed on, as long as the banks were okay. After a bailout overseen on insanely generous terms, the Federal Reserve pumped money into any bank, hedge fund, holding company, even McDonalds it could find.

And the “normies” around me, the people who admirably opposed Bush and his excess, were silent.

And the NSA grew.

Nancy Pelosi wants to jail Edward Snowden. MIT and Eric Holder threw Aaron Swartz to the wolves. Zephyr Teachout lost to Andrew Cuomo. SEIU backed Andrew Cuomo. Tish James backed Andrew Cuomo.

And still the surveillance state grows.

Google and Facebook were meant to be foils to the corrupt venality of the Verizons and Comcasts of the world. VoteVets ended up endorsing Pete Buttigieg. Pete, who Mark Zuckerberg tried to steer engineering talent to. Pete, who vied with Kamala Harris to be America’s first red diaper baby president.

And Amazon shares Ring data with cops. And license plate readers are everywhere. And Facebook will comply with “all local laws and regulations”. And the surveillance state grows.

I remember Chris Dodd’s campaign in 2008. I remember Tim Tagaris, an early internet politics hotshot, running an honorable campaign about “restoring the constitution” post-Bush. Chris Dodd was the man behind the SOPA push that tried to shut down free speech on the internet to protect the MAFIAA.

Meanwhile, our man Howard Dean quietly became a corporate lobbyist. (And, weirdly, a shill for literal terrorists.)

Bernie didn’t win. Shahid didn’t win. Most Brand New Congress candidates didn’t win. Tom Geohegan didn’t win. Carl Sciortino didn’t win. Paul Wellstone died. Tom Periello didn’t win. Zephyr Teachout didn’t win over and over again. Eric Massa won, then … got weird. Russ Feingold lost twice.

And today Nancy Pelosi is trying to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

So, you see, Bernie (and Warren) losing now feels bad, but not a gut punch. I expected it.

Sam Adler Bell, darling human that he is, knows that feeling is dangerous. The feeling of “I expected this to happen, we always lose”, can easily turn into “let’s not try to win” or “we lost because we are good”. Let’s remember instead that we lost because we are weak.

There is comfort in this sense of fated doom. We lost not because we did something wrong, but because we did something right in a world that’s wrong. When we acknowledge the awesome might and baleful intentions of our enemies, when we point our fingers at the traitors in our midst, what we seek is not a clear-eyed reckoning of the battlefield, but freedom from guilt for failing to win. Lurking behind our dour pessimism is, at times, a desire to evade accountability for our own mistakes.

Let’s talk about mistakes. But let’s not do it from the perspective of a candidate in a race, because we are not candidates and we are not bound to only think about specific contests for power via a presidential primary system. If we do it right, candidates (politicians) are pawns on our chessboard, not the other way around.

I love your passion, and your energy, and your way of seeing how the world is just so disconcertingly bad. I love it, and sometimes I worry that I’m smothering it with my world-weariness, with my “hey, actually this thing you’re mad at is fine and normal”, or my “you’re mad at the wrong institution”. I wanted you to know why.

There’s a particular feeling you get when you start politics. Little respect for everyone in the field already: after all, they’re part of a failed system. A sense of camaraderie with other people who start at the same time as you: after all, you’re all fighting the same enemies! And then as time goes on, you see your heroes fail you. You lose respect for people you started out with (both institutions and elected officials). And you celebrate the victories you have, because if you don’t, you burn out.

So when we talk about how bad it was, and how far we’ve gone, and how certain people you don’t like are Actually Good, and have street cred, that’s why.

We thought we found One Weird Trick to fixing politics, and we were wrong.

I hope the same doesn’t happen to you.

(And one more thing — read Sam’s full piece: Beautiful Losers)

Categories
Misc

Love in a time of Coronavirus: March 11, 2020

Give Sarah almond croissants

The prisoners are going to die. All those packed inmates in prisons across the country. The people in concentration camps at the border. The victims of ICE raids housed in crowded conditions in cities across the country: when the virus hits, they’re going to fall like dominoes. But daily life continues.

Daily life continues, with small changes: people take up the “Wuhan handshake” of feet taps instead of handclasps. Fist bumps are replaced by elbow bumps. The supermarket puts eggs, milk, cereal on sale: but only if you buy 5+ cartons at once.

Things have started to escalate. The concert sends an email saying “we aren’t going to cancel, but if you want a refund, we’re thinking about giving you one”. Two days later, they just straight up cancel. The grocery store is decidedly out of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and most pasta. A few bags of frozen vegetables make a valiant stand to cover shelves and shelves of otherwise empty space. Classes cancel. Students are told to get out of their dorms. So much for the last quarter of senior year, class of 2020. Get your last-minute crush revelations and awkward hormonal goodbyes done before you fly home in 5 days.

My partner worries about graduating into a recession. My mom starts coughing. I retreat into clearing my email inbox, buying almond croissants for the former and calling the latter every day.

The house starts getting messier. I make a pilgrimage or two at the supermarket every day. I document the shelves that start getting bare. So far milk, eggs, bread, and snacks are holding up fine.

Links start getting passed around. Long medium articles about how bad things are going to be. Lion tamers of data whipping it into terrorizing shape. People joke about how we can’t trust government, how they’re denying or classifying everything, that it’s just like the Soviet responses to crises we read about in our textbooks. Haha.

On my todo list, I make a recurring daily item: breathe deeply for five minutes. Kiss your Sarah.

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Misc

Hello 2018

It didn’t start with a party. It didn’t start with thinking about grabbing a friend, thinking about kissing them, thinking about how to turn a room full of strangers into something fun. 

It started with family. With one sister transformed into an owl, the other casting spells left and right. A fiance, a muggle, tackling the evil witch to the ground as she summoned a dread portal. My cousin, asleep, muttering “burn them all”, while his boo throw force field after force field around to shield them all from harm. 

That’s right, I rang in the new year playing impromptu stripped-down Dungeons and Dragons (in the Harry Potter Universe) with my family for the first time. 

We had awkward flirting. Wizard speakeasies. A cigar chomping, bigoted boss who was possibly working for the wrong side of the law. A werewolf (but maybe not?) auror. Magic bakeries. Street urchins with guns. 

Loved it. 

What else did we find in 2018? 

Dad learning to selfie. Hot showers in an airbnb. Five layers of clothing. Discovering a gem of a coffeeshop in the frozen plains of astoria. So many words with friends. Romance in the air. A row of family members, all on their laptops. 

We are going to make it through this year, if it kills us. 

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Misc

The Howard Zinn Book Fair

Yesterday I spend a few hours at the Howard Zinn Book Fair. It was a fascinating experience.

The first thing you notice is that the book fair is Right There. The tables are set up in a big room right next to the entrance to the college.  

The second thing you notice is your own bright-eyed, slightly glassy response to all the stimulation around you. See a friend. Talk to him? Yes, but also while browsing a table full of 1$ books on sale.

Have you heard of Bolerium Books? (Their motto: “Fighting commodity fetishism with commodity fetishism since 1981″) It’s a rare and antique book store run by a couple of communists. Mostly left wing historical pamphlets, posters, books, periodicals, etc.

I remember visiting the physical bookstore about a year ago. It felt … still. A memorial to a world gone by, a portal to understanding the stories behind the stories they teach you in history class. Rooted, as it were, in the past. The two high priests who run it a dying breed.

One might find a very different scene at the book fair. Chatting with Alexander Akin, a proprietor (and friend), I got his help rooting through his 1$ book pile. Argued about Eurocommunism with a former volunteer with the PKK, who was browsing for books on Lenin. Found a compilation of key articles from the jewish wing of the communist party of the 1950s. Exclaimed as I found another copy of Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, perhaps the best and most exciting account of labor organizing in America I have ever found.

Then, whisked away to the Jacobin Magazine booth, I talked shop about the business of magazine publishing with Bhaskar Sukara, the founder. Spent some time learning about the history of the founding of Itsgoingdown Magazine. Picked up some more posters from the justseeds artists collective.

Not to mention all the juicy conversations I must have missed between different groups. For example: Indivisible SF had a booth across from the Democratic Socialists of America.  

I started the day with strict orders to myself that I didn’t need any new books. After all, I have a library full of ones I have yet to read, including from this very event last year.

So I only left with 10 or so.

What conclusions or observations can we take from the whole experience?

  1. The big left wing upsurge of November 2016 might be receding. Or at least isn’t compounding. There weren’t noticeably more tables this year, maybe less.
  2. The DSA presence, year of year, has vastly improved (last year, five of us on the organizing committee wandered around the book fair, this year, DSA members were running and speaking on panels).
  3. Things feel less… fringey. There were fewer tiny ultra-revolutionary sects than last year. But there was a booth from Rainbow Grocery Cooperative.

Maybe that old time religion of american radicalism isn’t dead after all. Maybe those priests keeping the flame alive will have a new generation to light a new torch off from it, after all.

Categories
Misc

How I chose my Orthodontist.

As many of you know, I have friendship cards that I like to hand out. As you might remember, on one side, they say “Let’s be friends. Every day is an adventure.”

Often, when I meet someone and give them that token of friendship, they might say “Oh, that’s so cute!”

Yes. Cute is exactly what I was going for. :-/

Adventures really do happen, folks. Let me give you two examples.

On Wednesday, I hopped on the Caltrain and went to the orthodontists in Burlingame. (It’s one of those cities south of San Francisco but still far away from Palo Alto). The dentist looked at my teeth, solemnly told me that I was indeed a candidate for Invisalign, and plopped me not a very nice room with the receptionist to talk logistics.

“Hey,” I said. “This place is kind of in the middle of nowhere for me. And I don’t have a car. What’s a way of getting enough work done here to be polite and say thank you, but get the bulk of my visits and treatment from a dentist who lives near my new pad?”

Cathy (that was her name) then launched into a quiet and impassioned speech about how great Dr. Lee is, how he really cares for his patients, how their practice charges sliding scale fees for those that can afford them, and how the old orthodontist waited years for someone worth to take over his practice.

“Okay! On the strength of your recommendation, I’m convinced!”

Cathy walks away. Comes back. “Okay, you have to go to the lab. Bad news is they’re closing in 30 minutes, and they say they’ll only take you if you show up in the next 10 minutes. I know you don’t want to make an extra trip some other day, and it’ll take too long for you to get a taxi. So here are keys to my car. Drive to the lab, get x-rays, then drive back and we’ll take molds of your teeth. It’s fully insured, so don’t worry, just go!” :-)

Story 2: I’m moving soon, and worried about how I might move all my stuff, etc. (Thanks Derek Friend, Alexander Micklewright, and Sam Peters for volunteering to help!)

There’s a team at my work who help with this sort of thing. So I asked their advice. Izzy says: “well, here’s a nonprofit that will get you movers from people who need the work.”

Awesome!

“But you need a truck. You can rent a uhaul here for $X. Or just borrow my pickup, man. I’ll charge a nominal fee.”

What a world. People just trust me with their cars, I suppose. I wonder why.

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Misc

Oops

As I’m walking down the street in San Francisco, expertly using a different phone in each hand (one for maps, one for texting), I suddenly realize.

Oh my God. I’ve become that guy. Silicon Valley, what have you done to me!?!?!?

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Misc

Sahar has Thoughts on music

Band of Horses was never my favorite band, but they are consistently great for many an occasion
Great Lake Swimmers is folky and sweet, but NOT sad. Rare combo. Their first album is great to fall asleep to.
Sufjan Stevens is the best
Cloud cult is pretty fun, but repetitive. Not amazing
Death cab for cutie is a great band if you are 16 and sad about girls
LCD Soundsystem is the best thing that libertarian capitalists ever gave the world. Two huge thumbs up
Bob Dylan songs often have great melodies. Tangled up in blue is a particular favorite. And then it so happens they they have nice lyrics too
Leonard Cohen is the thinking man’s Bob Dylan.
Of Montreal are great for walking down busy urban streets and giving yourself a spring in your step
The Velvet Undergrounds first album is phenomenal for sitting on a train going through the countryside looking out the window
The violent femmes are underrated
Gnarls Barkelry is great and every knows it, but they’re often overlooked for some reason
Robyn is the killingest pop star
Sigur Røs is great music to convince a date to kiss you for the first time
I’ve been getting into fugal I. Half their stuff is great and half is pretentious crap
The Mountaon Goats have way too much crap in their catalogue. But the good stuff is golden. Get Lonely is the best breakup album I’ve ever heard
Radiohead whatever
Daft punk yes we get it they’re amazing. Did you know they have an album length music video which is awesome? (Look up interstella 5555)
Arcade fires first two albums are the purest expression of the rage and terror of living in the early bush years
Strokes are overrated
Janelle Monae is so fun
The Decemberists stopped being interesting 8 years ago
Jeans Lekman will never be the center of anyone’s musical universe, but he’s always welcome as a nice addition
Alt-J’s breezeblocks is just catchy as hell
I can and have listened to CAKE on repeat for days.
Billy Bragg has some good stuff, and a lot of misses. His Red Flag and Internationale are killer, though
Wilco’s live album will blow the mind of moody freshmen minoring in philosophy
Hercules and Love affair had one really good song (Hercules theme) and milked that into two mediocrely albums
Justice is good for dance music if you’ve got less than five minutes to prepare before drunk people knock on your door demanding a party
Bikini Kill is great for when you’re an angry feminist and unbearable screaming the other 95% of your life
Frank orange has one great album. Get it.
Animal collective is music that won’t distract you from more important things, ht then when you decide to finally pay it attention you’ll be well rewarded.
The xx is for being generally sad about the world but not sad enough to go play games or eat ice cream about it
Iron and Wine is like the god fare of sad folky music. Put him in Pandora and you’ll get a selection of a ton of good stuff by other people
I hear Grimes is great. Honestly I don’t get it
Björk is terrible. Burn her albums in a fire
The freelance whales are fun and poppy and you should. Check out their first album
DJ /rupture is awesome and interesting
Nettle is obscure and fun and exotic!
Explosions in the sky is like better classical music. Play it whenever you want great background music to whatever you’re doing. (Boring Skype calls?)
Ratatat fills the seem need as explosions in the sky but it’s much faster and more aggressive
Fleet Foxes are solid
Cat power deserves our money and attention
Beck is a genius, but not as much as he thinks he is
Neutral Milk Hotel is the Pixies of new folk music. In a good way
Pete Seeger is an American treasure. <3 <3 <3
Johnny Cash is the best and only country music you need to hear
Remember Kings of Leon? Me neither. Same for Hot Chip.
Sleigh Bells does one thing, and they do it well!
The Whitest Boy Alive is great background music as you stroll across a campus, or stroll anywhere actually. Someone needs to use it in a film soundtrack asap.
Purity Ring is actually pretty nice. Just getting into them. I like Shrines
Simon and Garfunkel had a good thing going. “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls” – be still my heart!
Did I mention that sufjan is the very bae of bae’s?

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Misc

Letter to a conversation on white privilege

A friend of mine has a typewriter in her apartment. When another
friend and I visited, they ended up having a conversation about
whiteness. And how around the mid century “white” became a boring
signifier, and how people in their position have this need to fill the
holes in their lives with other identities to find community and
purpose. And how hard it was to do that without cultural appropriation,
etc.

It was bleak, dear reader. A conversation of two madly
well-intentioned friends, both groping at a way to be a flowering human
being while adhering to this strange ethical code.

So I
thought about Robert Moses. And capitalism. And how some old men
dreamers decided to set up the suburbs, make Christmas a consumerist
idolatry, and tore asunder the old affirming bonds of community.

So I wrote this in one take while listening to their conversation:

(text edited a bit for clarity):

your bones are bleached  white.
the calcium leaches out into the warm bath
– of driving to work
– of living in a studio
– of a high holiday dedicated to worshiping the god of veils around objects (Christmas!)
you can purchase some colour at the cost of your marrow.

coca-cola dissolves teeth.
we’ve all done that same experiment in school.

you think you are a canvass waiting to be painted.
I think you are a princess,
ill. the leeches draw away your blood,
balancing your humours.
the old wizards built delicate castles
in their minds. of leechcraft,
erring.
their imaginary constitutions will destroy yours.

there is inside you a dancing star.
kill the wizards. salt the leeches.
never apologize for being.

throw a prism on your light and become
the
R A I N B O W

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Misc

A critical read of H&M’s clothing line

H&M has a feminism t-shirt.

Okay, great. Let’s look at the other articles of women’s clothing they have with words. What sort of feminist ideology does H&M hold?

1. “Can’t Touch This” in camouflage.

The modern woman needs to hide from the male aggressor and his unconsensual ways.

2. “Youth Tribe”, colors and patterns on gray.

The modern feminist, while intersectional, doesn’t hold with the excesses of online feminist word policing. See “tribe”. The modern feminist’s generation might be an even bigger hold on her self conception than her gender.

(Note to self – did H&M predict the Iowa caucus months in advance?)

3. “Unavailable” – white band on black dress

The modern young lady knows she’s hot, knows she’s wanted, and wants you to know that she knows it. Perhaps not.

4. “Unavailable” – white text engulfing black shirt

The modern feminist knows that callow youth see her as an an object of desire. To combat this, she sets up a test for all would-be suitors. Do these men (and yes, they’re almost always men) still talk to her when they perceive sex is off the table? Either way, she wins.

5. “don’t steal my wifi” [sic]

One might see this as a bold declaration of extreme selfish libertarianism. Rather than allow neighbors to access even humble radio waves, the straw man feminist encloses a bountiful common resource and sets up a sign. “No trespassing on my land” the shirt says.

But a sophisticated observer knows that the modern feminist is a very different animal. Following in the footsteps of Shulamith Firestone and her opus “The Dialectic of Sex”, the modern feminist is down with all struggles for liberation. This shirt is a not-so-veiled critique of the modern surveillance state. “Don’t ruin my internet”, she declares. “No NSA allowed”. The government is literally trying to steal away her WiFi experience, and she’s taking to wearing even garishly ugly shirts as constant messaging of her democratic discontent.

6. “Ain’t got time for that”, caps on white shirt

The modern intersectional feminist knows that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. But she has no time for your turgid marxist pontification. No, she has a class war to win. If you’re here to organize, welcome. But if you’re here to quote whatever mangled interpretation of the latest issue of Jacobin you managed to remember – back off! Ain’t nobody got time for that.

7. “Dance, sleep, repeat”. booty shorts.

This item is a wry satire on the limits of the famous cry of “8 hours for work, 8 hours for living, 8 hours for rest” of the early 1920′s. The modern feminist appreciates the struggle for a 40-hour work week and the freedom it posed. Though she is aware of the erosion of those gains, she also undermines the materialist unpinning of the whole enterprise.

“If I can’t dance”, this modern Rosa Luxembourg says, “then I want no part of your revolution.”

8. “Wake Up, Bring it, Work it” shirt

This is a more straightforward version of the allusion to the historic fight for a 40-hour work week already discussed in our section covering the booty shorts.

9. “I Love” heart sweater

The modern feminist loves. But what does she love? There’s no object to her verb, no target of her emotion. And yet, she loves holistically. As Ernesto Guevara put it, “at the risk of sounding ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”. And so the modern feminist is stockpiling ak-47s and forming cells of comrades, ready to lead a trotskyist revolution to overturn bourgeois and patriarchal society. Just as soon as she gets something cute and leather.

Categories
Misc

Questions about tech and society

As you might know, I have the honor of serving as the Tech Editor for Current Affairs. 

Today, I took some time with Jessica McKenzie. We thought about what the editorial stance of the tech criticism wing of Current Affairs should look like, and what sample pitches might look like.

That really got me thinking. What are the questions about tech and society that I’d dearly love answered?

Here’s a partial list:

  • Is Gabriella Coleman awesome, or is she too trusting / too manipulative?
  • What happened to the Free Software movement? Is it dead? Why did Richard Stallman have no real heirs? Why is the Free Software Foundation so marginal?
  • “Activism” in tech was done by writing software in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Specifically, free software. Now it might be done by making specific web apps. How else do people in tech do activism by creation?
  • Cryptography is an extremely important part of liberatory technology. Yet understanding cryptography is a really rare skill. Are our freedoms bounded by the energy of just 10-20 pro-social cryptographers?
  • Americans presumably would not stand for policemen following them everywhere, recording everything they do in a notepad. Yet they seem surprisingly sanguine to even more surveillance when done over the internet. Why is that? What does that analysis miss?
  • Say you’re a talented developer in your early 20s. What exactly should you be doing with yourself to be most useful to society?
  • Is big data inherently oppressive? Does that make Data Science as a profession suspect? What about organizations like Data Kind?
  • Can we disentangle the effect that facebook the app has on society vs Facebook the company? Is that even wise?
  • Open source efforts are governed in many different styles. What does the success or failure of different open source initiatives say about the viability of the benevolent dictatorship, democracy, etc, in our modern lives?
  • Is open source software development an example of libertarian organization or socialist organization? Is there a difference?
  • Is it possible for a consumer tech review site to be both popular and trustworthy?
  • Is “liberation technology” a real thing?
  • Platform Cooperativism seems awesome. Is it really?
  • What happened to Anonymous?
  • Why do people forgive the Obama administration for its “war on hackers”?
  • If programmers are so difficult to hire, so hard to replace, and directly control the means of production – why aren’t they unionizing in droves?
  • Software developers – are they workers? Where do they stand in the class struggle?
  • Why did the glorious mashable internet of Web 2.0 – the one with RSS feeds, interoperable APIs, and mashups – die?
Categories
Misc

Why I now have an acting reel

About a week ago, I went and did a shoot for a commercial. It was my first time doing so for pay. After everything I did, I’m not sure I’ll be asked to do it again.

Here’s how it went:

I show up. There are a variety of people sitting around the lobby of one of those corporate offices that makes a token nod to startup culture, but just barely. An office that has the same faint whiff of despair that you’d expect from a white-collar workplace, but with maybe a bowl of warheads by the reception desk and one or two slightly more colorful chairs. 

There are two young white women who already have their makeup ready. A distinguished-looking older man. A latina, a notably mild-mannered black man, and me.

The makeup artist gets me ready. We chat about her child, and skiing. We have very little of substance to say to each other.

All six of us actors are arrayed in a board room. We get laptops. I make sure to switch for one that actually works, and start googling furiously and surreptitiously. The director explains that we’ll be acting out a meeting between a marketing team and a PR agency. They’ll dub out any words we use, so feel free to say whatever we want. This will be mostly b-roll footage, no worries. Okay, the cameras are rolling. Go!

One of the women starts timidly talking about the cactus on the desk, and how it should be included in the meeting. Aha. A joke. I nod along, and still surreptitiously Google.

Okay, I’m ready. I clear my throat, prepare my hands for natural gesturing, and say, conversationally:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord
and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition
to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established
new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place
of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct
feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more
and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. 

Stunned silence. 

Then – the floodgates! We talk about class struggle. We talk about why americans have yet to take to revolution.

One person ventures that the working classes are content. I remark that, rather, they’ve given up.

We talk about a job my girlfriend had once, and how all the managers at a golf course were white, all the staff were black, and almost none of the staff hoped for a better life than calling snotty 14-year old brats “sir”.

The older man (a conservative, I suspect) detours to a talk about golf. And how those jobs might actually be the best jobs around in that rural area.

We go back to joking about the cactus.

When it comes time for me to speak again, I try and redirect the conversation by paraphrasing Anatole France:

How wonderful the law is! In its majestic equality, both the rich and poor alike are equally
prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and
stealing bread!

The older (conservative?) man quickly rejoinders that peeing in the streets should be allowed. But should breastfeeding?

We consider the matter. All the while gesturing and nodding as if an important business meeting is going on. The cameras roll.

I point out that we have free public restrooms in America because of an activist campaign by a teenager in the 1970s.

No one seems as impressed as I am. They talk about sports. They talk about work. Someone mentions their union. I am excited. They don’t like their union. I am disappointed.

Finally, the shoot is almost done. The director asks each of us to speak uninterrupted for a minute or two in case that’s needed for B-Roll footage later. I go last.

This is my chance. My last, best chance. It’s time to bust out Mario Savio:

There comes a time when the operation
of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that
you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve
got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the
levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve got to make it stop!
And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people
who own it – that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented
from working at all!!

(All this while gesturing and pointing as if I was presenting a proposal for increasing CTR through better targeting google ads or somesuch nonsense.)

The shoot ends. Each of us will be getting a check. Each of us is eligible to get our acting reel.

Did I end up radicalizing a whole room full of actors, cameramen, and crew? Probably not.

Did we have a good conversation based on socialist frames? Yes.

Did I help garner sympathy with a labor/radical agenda? I hope so.

But I tell you this – I had a hell of a time.

Categories
Misc

Habits, Task Diaries, and APIs

Habitica is awesome. The service, which until recently went by HabitRPG, is one of those gamified “as you do good things in life, you gain level up” sort of lifehackery services. Here’s why I like it so much:

  • It’s smart enough to sort different tasks into 3 different buckets: habits (which you can do/not do at will), dailies (which you must do every day) and todos (which you do once)
  • It doesn’t take itself too seriously
  • It has a team aspect that really does help, but doesn’t overwhelm you with features.

Here’s the problem – I have two other todo list type things I already use.

iDoneThis, which is a delightful early Web2.0 holdover, emails me every day and asks, simply, what I’ve accomplished. I’ve got 3 years worth of diaries on that thing – it’s the most consistent diary-style service or habit I’ve ever used.

EngMatchingLogs, a newer service by Hakka Labs, does something similar, then uses machine learning to match me up with a new friend every week. It’s quite delightful!

There are also small apps on my mac that interface with iDoneThis for easy todo list integration.

Wouldn’t it be nice to create a tool that syncs between all those services? Checking off something on Habitica could add an entry in my iDoneThis as well write to my EngMatchingLog.

Someone should make that.

Categories
Misc

Idea — Communist Loren Ipsum Generator

There should be a webapp where one specifies the amount of text they want. And instead of Loren Ipsum text, it should return a selection of particularly noteworthy or well-regarded socialist, communist, or radical text, speeches, etc.

Example use case:

I have to be an actor for stock footage. They want me to speak lines (but the audio will be cut in editing) so that it looks like a real meeting is happening in the background. Ahead of time, I know that I’ll have about 30 seconds worth of speaking, so I look up 30 seconds on the Communist Loren Ipsum app. During the shoot, I recite the killer graph from Mario Savio’s speech about throwing oneself upon the gears.

Another example use case:

I am creating a web app and need some sample fake tweets. I use Communist Loren Ipsum generator’s API to dynamically fetch tiny socialist slogans for use in those sample tweets on an as-needed basis.