My small city of Troy, New York is drawing up a new comprehensive plan. Lots of towns and even universities do this from time to time as a way of coordinating and re-aligning the institutions and organizations into some kind of general direction. These sorts of moments encourage individuals to be reflective as well as divisive. There’s a lot at stake (or at least it feels that way) and people feel the need to protect what they see as threatened by change, or go on the offensive and try to root out what they see as a long-standing problem. More than anything, these sorts of comprehensive planning efforts force us to confront our everyday lives as a set of conditions and decisions that exist outside of our control but are ultimately steerable if enough political will can be leveraged, if enough organizing around a particular issue gets done. Last night, a wide variety of people came together to discuss what they thought was working and what was needed attention in our city.

The person that led this meeting was cordial, professional, and did as good a job as can be expected in her position. There was, however, a moment where a huge oversight felt like it was being brushed under the rug. A friend of mine (who just started this great project) brought up a procedural problem that, from my own experience in urban planning, is pretty common: the team that was putting together the comprehensive plan had lots of plans to meet with established organizations and institutions but had no plan to reach out to unorganized people. That is, those people who are systematically and continually denied access to the time, resources, or cultural capital necessary to form or join organizations. People who are too busy making ends meet, or are overlooked by the majority of their fellow citizens are (unfortunately) in the optimal position to tell planners what the city has over-looked and even what needs to be done to fix what are certainly systemic problems. The meeting facilitator had nothing to say, except that people should encourage friends to attend the scheduled meetings.

This interaction left a really bad taste in my mouth and I don’t think I was alone in that sentiment. This morning, when I read that three young Muslim students were killed (they were so much more than that label, but we also can’t forget that it was that label that led to their killing) by a 40-something white atheist, I couldn’t help but see a distant but deep connection between the deafening silence in the national media, and that meeting facilitator. This silence, the illegibility of the pain and suffering of the disenfranchised, on the part of decision makers and media gatekeepers, creates and sustains injustice.

In comparison to shootings that leave white bodies on the ground, there was a palpable silence in social and print media about the tragic events in Chapel Hill. As I write this there is no #Iam hashtag, no national conversation. It is a blackout with a familiar form; a far too predictable collection of mumbles and qualifications that turn a definitive and calculated hate crime into senseless violence.

Last month Sarah Wanenchak explained,

the problem with Je suis Charlie is that I’m not, and to use that slogan – and to go no further with the conversation – obscures at least some of the extremely problematic and troubling things that accompany any ideals of free speech in a world in which some people are simply not free, and in which the speech of others produces and reproduces the cultures that keep them that way.

Today we are experiencing the inverse of this argument. Twitter’s trending hashtags suggests that Americans can bring themselves to talk about the #ChapelHIllShooting but they can’t utter their names. They can’t be these people. While it is clear that we don’t need another parade of hoodie-clad white people claiming #IamTrayvon it is striking that there isn’t even an attempt to do so. White America can immediately identify with a racist French satire magazine they’ve never heard of, but can’t possibly stand in solidarity with fellow Americans that also happen to be Muslim.

The straight-forward narrative that makes #JeSuisCharlie so legible to so many people is inaccessible to the marginal. The causes of violence perpetrated by white men is exploded by white supremacist patriarchy’s insistence that each instance of white terror is actually the confluence of psychological illness, the availability of guns, video games, or anything else that doesn’t threaten the racial order or patriarchy head-on.

When uprisings occur, when people that are systematically denied the preconditions of solidarity ––the ability to continually meet each-other unharassed, a common language, the material support to mobilize against one’s oppressors–– find them through perseverance and creativity, the invisible background radiation that maintains their oppression suddenly becomes opaque and solid. The sustained and largely invisible strategies of hegemony are temporarily traded in for the tactics of swift and immediate police violence. To those not paying attention it might seem to come out of nowhere, but for everyone else it is utterly predictable.

Hashtags, civil society organizations, third places, and all the other intangibles that make up a “community” are privileges for the disenfranchised. We typically think of the local bar or a knitting circle as places of repose and entertainment but they are actually deeply important organizational forces that connect individuals to mechanisms of power. They are the places where shared challenges are identified, and proposed solutions are crafted. They also provide space for mental health and stability. Even the most dedicated and vigilant activist needs a home to come back to, a place where they don’t need to defend their beliefs or even their own identity.

How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of “just so” arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.

Confronting hegemonic violence requires organizing and broad-based solidarity. That seems beyond debate, but what that looks like and how it behaves is still unclear. We are going to have more of the awkward, infuriating, and contentious problems like the ones Jenny Davis experienced on her own campus last week. Attention needs to be paid to who is speaking, what their standpoint is, and whether or not the same old people are looking for attention or if they are willing to step back and let others take the stage. How do movements negotiate uneasy alliances like the ones forged last December between liberal anti-consumerist activists and the more radical #BlackLivesMatter insurgents. How do social media actors like livestreamers scale up and navigate attention topographies without inadvertently stealing the spotlight? For now it is enough to keep these questions and concerns in the back of our minds but the answers need to come sooner rather than later.

David is on Twitter

I thought for reruns week I would re-post something I wrote back in February that fits with our ongoing CFP on Small Town Internet. Problems of governance, especially of small, geographically defined groups, is surprisingingly understudied especially when it comes to our present state of augmented reality. 

It is certainly good news that the Obama Administration has come out strong for net neutrality. The President recently made an announcement that his office would help promote local broadband competition as part of a broader effort to improve the country’s data infrastructure. More specifically, the federal government plans to help municipalities develop their own data networks, fight state laws that prevent municipal governments from offering public broadband options, and help small businesses compete in local markets with companies like Verizon and Time Warner. The chairman of the FCC followed suit by announcing (in WIRED Magazine…?) yesterday that he would be circulating a proposal to apply Title II to telecom companies and mobile phone carriers, effectively making it illegal to throttle connections based on what sorts of services you are connecting to. This is all good news but I’m also hesitant to trust local authorities with my internet connection. Aren’t these the same governments that defend murderous police forces and cooperated with the federal government to shut down political dissent? Why should these organizations control the network? While I am definitely not a fan of huge telecom corporations, I don’t trust my local government either. 

I don’t mean to rain on the parade of those (many of which I know personally) who have fought long and hard for this victory. The people at the forefront of the net neutrality debate generally see these recent events as a good thing and, for the most part, I tend to agree. Having the option to choose from multiple Internet Service Providers, including public ones that do not have to turn a profit, will most certainly bring down the cost and maybe even increase the quality of service. And, if there were something seriously wrong with the quality of my connection, I would much rather try to fight city hall than spend a day lost in a Time Warner phone tree.

When local governments decide to invest in infrastructure they not only increase the standard of living for their residents, they also tend to save lots of money. I grew up in Broward County Florida where they just recently completed their own fiber optic backbone which cost $2.5 million to build but will save them nearly $800,000 a year in leasing fees they used to pay to a private company. This is actually a fairly old strategy. The city I live in now (Troy, New York) decided decades ago that it would build a reservoir for municipal water. It works so well that the city actually turns a profit by selling their water to nearby municipalities who never bothered to think that far ahead. Another nearby town has a small hydroelectric dam that supplies the town with cheap and clean electricity. And of course there’s the United States Postal Service, something that would be making a healthy profit if Congress didn’t sabotage them. This stuff isn’t hard and it isn’t new, but there are some unique aspects of broadband that deserve attention, especially now.

Entrusting the Internet to municipalities seems particularly nerve-wracking given their outright hostile response to protests against their police departments. If public officials are willing to make excuses for murder, it stands to reason they might be willing to shut down the network that helps organize the public’s response. In 2011 BART officials shut down cell phone service in their stations during a protest and, in so doing, inadvertently gave us a preview of what municipally owned internet could look like. Even Troy has had its own share of systematic police terror. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that city officials in my town or yours, would take it upon themselves to shut down the network in the face of protest.

The Internet is equal parts public utility infrastructure, postal service, and free press. It can’t be governed like water, but it certainly shouldn’t be privately sold like cable television either. The old offices and bureaucracies of the 20th century are ill equipped to democratically manage something like the Internet. For-profit companies will inevitably look to give you the least amount of service for the most money, and have no interest in the sort of redistributive justice that public services should provide. That is a straightforward inevitability that does not change with the size of the company. Governments should be the institutions that manage our public goods but, at least right now, they have not proven themselves to be worthy of our trust. What is desperately needed now, and it must be sooner rather than later, is creative approaches to governance. There has to be a firewall (pun intended) between governing bodies and the stewards of the network.

There already exist a myriad of public-private partnerships and community-led broadband initiatives but as far as I know, none of them have really thought deeply about making network administration a democratic process. We need citizen oversight boards and very clear laws about who can and cannot give orders to the people that run and maintain the network. There could even be citizen-run broadband networks where decisions about everything from pay rates to capped speeds are debated and decided upon through an online decision-making system. There has got to be as many ways of governing networks, as there are networks to be governed.

Whatever institution ends up holding the keys to the DNS server cabinets, lets at least try to make them organizations that foster exciting and interesting debate and media creation. At present, too many cities and towns don’t have public access media, Public access television is usually laughed at as hokey or poor quality but the future of public media doesn’t have to be that way. Every city in the United States could have well-appointed production studios open to the public and probably for less money than it cost to establish public libraries a hundred years ago.

I want better broadband, and I want the network to be democratically owned and operated.  I’m happy about the direction we’re going in, but we need to be careful we don’t run from one problem to another. We need to think about the state of our democratic institutions and how much we can really trust them to be the stewards of our digital commons. It is a false dichotomy to assume that we have to either stick with our present oligarchy or hand over that power to municipal governments and smaller for-profit enterprises. There has got to be more participatory and democratic organizational forms out there and now is exactly the time to start building them.

David is on Twitter: @da_banks

NPR launched a new show this month called Invisibilia that “explores the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions.” The show’s hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller are great personalities and the show is beautifully edited in a way that doesn’t reach the Reggie Watts-esque soundscape of Radiolab nor does it stick closely to the dry public radio persona that has been lampooned countless times. I was, however, really disappointed when I learned that the huge topics under investigation in this show would only be understood through “psychological and brain science.” There are a lot of different disciplines that can be brought to bear on huge topics like “ideas” so why are we getting another show that confuses humans for brains? Also, the education and support families need. Millions of people in the US have a loved one living with Alzheimer’s disease or another type of dementia. For many, understanding the disease, knowing how to best support the loved one living with dementia and navigating the increasingly complex healthcare system are overwhelming. Many care partners find themselves frustrated, confused and exhausted. Internet searches leave many families more lost than they were as they struggle to find answers to basic questions like “What things should I be planning for at this time?”,

There’s no doubt in my mind that psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology have a lot to teach us about ourselves, but these disciplines are over-represented in our popular science media landscape. Wasn’t Radiolab, The TED Radio Hour, and the typical selection of science news coverage enough? Not to mention the growing number of TV shows that filter psychology through the genre filters of crime dramas and medical procedurals? Sociologists, anthropologists, and… hell even political scientists have equally important and empirically valid interpretations of the world but I can’t seem to find any of them represented in my podcast queue.

The blame does not rest solely on the shoulders of Spegel, Miller, or any other reporter. The “softer” social sciences, admittedly, do a crappy job of conveying our discoveries in a publicly accessible way. I really enjoy the topics in my subfield of Science and Technology Studies but I’ll admit that the New Books in STS podcast is pretty dry. In general, our books appeal to each-other and rarely help people outside of the discipline. There’s lots of unnecessary jargon and intentional obfuscation in social theory literature, but that’s starting to change. There are tons of really smart people who can give unique and cogent insights that go beyond how our brains are “wired” and what we’re “instinctually” meant to say, do, and (yes, even) think.

This might all sound self-serving, coming from an editor of a website that runs social science commentary and analysis for a public audience, but I also wouldn’t have chosen the field that I’m in if I didn’t think it had something immediately relevant to everyone else in the world. I wouldn’t choose a discipline that ranks 145 out of 232 for “highest paying advanced degree” if I didn’t think the work was important. (For example, sociology might help explain why 232 out of 232 is  a master’s degree in “early childhood education.”)

Invisibilia, like most NPR shows, has a theme for each episode. Its second episode was on fear but opted to focus on snakes and rejection instead of the sorts of fears that seem much more relevant to the the current political climate. To spend an hour talking about fear, but not once consider how it might intersect with race and institutional authority, comes off as agonizingly apolitical.

I was hopeful at the beginning of the episode when they spoke to Roger Hart, an environmental psychologist who discovered that even in places where crime rates and the built environment did not change, children were given far less areas to play due to increased perceptions of danger. They started talking about media’s ability to amplify and distort the presence or likelihood of certain dangers ––over-covering dramatic tragedies like school shootings at the expense of stories about historically low crime rates–– but this was only the ten minute lead-up to nearly 50 minutes of stories featuring interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, the guy that invented “rejection therapy”, and even a herpetologists that studies snakes.

Certainly there’s no guarantee that if you bring sociologists and anthropologists onto your program you’ll get a rich discussion of intersectional politics. They will however, challenge the widely held notion that brain chemistry holds all of the secrets to the human condition. Society is more than the sum of its human actors. There are phenomena that are only observable across time or in large groups. There are seemingly universal properties of human existence that are actually just a few decades old and aren’t true across all people all of the time. There are even hidden assumptions within the often-cited hard sciences that are worth exploring and questioning.

And perhaps it is this attention to hidden assumptions that make it more difficult to invite sociologists and anthropologists onto shows like Invisibilia. As clickbait headlines seem to indicate, audiences think they love having their “minds blown” by things that they “would never see coming” but the truth of the matter is that we like to have our hopes and assumptions validated by external authority. A lot of social science is about confirming hard truths about the pervasiveness of white supremacy or the small degree to which one’s life is really of their own making. If we ever do end up on the phone or in the studio, what we have to say will complicate the narrative. That’s sort of our job.

Ever since humans descended from the trees and formed bands, something other than evolution and brain science has been at play. The stuff that makes cultures, societies, friendships, one night stands, wars, music, and tweets are not simple replacements for the lions that used to be our predators or the fellow proto-humans that looks healthy enough to reproduce with. There is something so much more than that going on. We ignore this at our peril because the moment we think the world as it is, is the world that always has been, is the moment we lose our imagination to create a vastly better world than the one we have now.

David is on Twitter: @da_banks

On January 9th, people donning the symbols of Anonymous promised a “massive reaction” to the shooting deaths of over a dozen people in Paris. Posted to YouTube and Pastebin under the hashtag #OpCharlieHebdo, Anonymous proclaimed, “It’s obvious that some people don’t want, in a free world, this sacrosanct right to express in any way one’s opinions. Anonymous has always fought for the freedom of speech, and will never let this right besmirched [sic] by obscurantism and mysticism.” Obviously what happened in Paris was a despicable act and I have little sympathy for the perpetrators but their actions weren’t random. What happened in Paris is the beginning of a fight between fanatics who hold polar opposite views on free speech and the battle lines being drawn are dangerously close to the ones that outline the War on Terror. 

Fanaticism isn’t inherently a bad thing. Slavery abolitionists, according to the late Joel Olson, readily self-identified as extremists and fanatics. He defines fanaticism as,

the unconventional, extraordinary political mobilization of the refusal to compromise.  Fanaticism is an approach to politics, driven by an ardent devotion to a cause, that seeks to draw clear lines between friends and enemies in order to mobilize friends and moderates in the service of that cause.  It is willing to use direct action or other unconventional means to achieve this.

The world would probably be a better place if we had more people willing to claim fanatical beliefs over things like restorative justice, a universal basic income, or ending rape culture. Unfortunately, the far right has used fanaticism to a much greater effect, having achieving tangible goals like the closure of abortion clinics and austerity.

I don’t know what’s in individual Anon’s hearts but I think it is safe to say, without putting a large group of people into too small of a box, that people who are attracted to Anonymous are deeply committed to a radically strong interpretation of the right to free speech. It is probably the only thing that both favorable and critical accounts of the hacker collective agree on: that above all things Anons respect the ability of individuals to say whatever they want and hold nothing sacred.

There are however, lots of people who hold particular images and ideas to be very sacred. Most of those people probably saw that Charlie Hebdo published and chalked it up to the rest of the background racism and Islamaphobia that has become their everyday life. A small minority of that minority did not and thought those people should be severely punished. Nothing excuses mass murder but we should also recognize that so-called terrorists and the free speech fanaticism of Anonymous are the opposite poles of the same spectrum. Just because our secular sensibilities might make one end of the spectrum feel familiar, doesn’t mean one is more benevolent than the other.

I am not optimistic about the decision to use Anonymous tactics in this scenario. The people that are gearing up for #OpCharlieHebdo might not be affiliated in any way with past campaigns against Scientology or Steubenville rapists, so looking to the past for indications of what they will do in the future is, admittedly, a shaky proposition. On the other hand,  there is enough commonality and overlap between operations  that something approaching a modus operandi becomes visible. I don’t think anyone takes up the Guy Fawkes mask so they can have a reasonable conversation with someone they disagree with. Internal conversations within the group are probably made in good faith but an Anonymous operation is an adversarial process with a defined outsider.

Unlike previous battles that defined western governments as enemies to free speech, this operation seems to jibe nicely with powerful state actors. It certainly seems like an inviting environment for people that equate the Islamic faith with violence. It is a fanaticism that is willingly blind to the ways Charlie Hebdo has contributed to real, present, and deadly Islamophobia. By design Anonymous’ free speech fanaticism has to reject arguments like the one Sarah Wanenchak made on Sunday: “The problem with Je suis Charlie is that not everyone can be Charlie. “

Now you might say, “yeah but Jihadists murder people and Anons just bring down websites.” Certainly Jihad is more militant than Anonymous, but that distinction is fuzzy for as long as Anonymous’ attention and U.S. foreign policy are pointed in the same direction. Anonymous tactics have been used against western intelligence agencies with great effect in the past, so one is left to imagine what kind of hurt they could put on less powerful organizations. If hackers started fighting under the cover of, or to make way for, C.I.A drones, how much moral high ground can they take?

Regardless of how you answer that question one thing is unmistakably clear: radical free speech activists who don’t seem to understand or care about the ways structural oppression intersects with the right to publish or say whatever you want, think they have found their ideological opposite in so-called islamic extremists. Anonymous is an international movement but that doesn’t mean you automatically get a wide variety of opinions on the subject of free speech. In this particular battle, where the friends and enemies of Anonymous line up a little too neatly with western states’ foreign policy, there’s just too much potential for collateral damage.

David is on Twitter.

Just seven days in and 2015 has already given us two tough events to deal with: the bombing of an NAACP office in Colorado Springs, Colorado and a shooting in Paris that seems to have targeted the satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. Out of what seems to be sheer luck, no one was killed in Colorado but 12 people are reported dead from the shooting in Paris. Both events are tragic, scary, and infuriating, but only one seems to be getting front page mainstream news attention.

The contours and character of the media coverage are depressingly predictable. The 40-something white man that set off the bomb is not immediately connected to any kind of organization bigger than himself. The shooter is a terrorist. The explosion was “small.”

Then there are the things that are a few scrolls down, if they’re there at all. Like the vigil in Iran for the slain writers, or the fact that the police officer that was shot to death was muslim. (Thanks to Ayesha Siddiqi for culling those two facts from twitter and retweeting them.)

There’s so much to be said, and perhaps now is more a time of mourning and anger,  but let’s also keep focus on how these stories are constructed and how they are placed within larger stories about “the clash of civilizations” and “racial tensions.” Just because the aspiring killer failed in the construction of his bomb does not make his actions any less hate-filled, dangerous, or worthy of our concern. And, as Laci Green tweeted, “though nobody was physically hurt, bombs are threatening & inflict psychological destruction/fear on communities.

Most importantly, we have to insist that people recognize the criss-crossing lines of power and force that connect these two events. They happened on different continents, to people that have probably never met one-another, but they are still the latest instantiations of interconnected oppression and structural violence that manifests itself in disturbing and strange ways.

David is on Twitter.

There are lots of posts that start but often go unwritten. Some don’t even make it past the first sentence. They just sit in the posts list in WordPress or in a Google Doc until I pronounce them trash. Here, in order from phoning it in to most profound (in memoriam of David Letterman’s Tonight Show, or is it the Late Show I don’t even care enough to Google it), are my best false blog post starts of the year.

10. My iPhone home screen changed forever today.

9.  The Google Doodle might be the most-viewed piece of Post-Internet Art in existence.

8. It is a moment where the Hot Take becomes an icy stare. You never know when public apologies can

7. OpenOffice crashed for the last time today and Zotero never remembers my settings.

6. The X-Files is still the best TV show streaming on Netflix and possibly in the entire world. (Star Trek doesn’t count because it is a religion.)

5. [Say something about being wrong about Ello. Something about no GIFs in the profile banner.]

4. I found myself alone together today.

3. 

2. Were late night shows the first Internet?

1. There are lots of posts that start but often go unwritten.

I am on Twitter: da_banks

Every year my little city of Troy, New York holds a kind of Dickensonian Renaissance festival called The Victorian Stroll. The Stroll has been going strong for over 30 years and it affords an opportunity for lots of white people to dress up in period clothing that matches the surrounding buildings and ––as some have recently demonstrated–– their retrograde race politics. Even police officers don those funny dome-shaped hats and long wool coats that make it seem as though they’re ready to beat someone up over taking too much gruel. A few really great activists in the area organized a #Shutitdown solidarity event at The Stroll and I was there to capture video. The video above is a nice summary of what we were able to accomplish.

Something that didn’t go into that final video (for obvious reasons) was an angry old white man that started yelling at us towards the end of the march. I was able to get him on camera and I’ve uploaded the clip. At about the 11 second mark you can hear him yell “Where’s Al?!”

It is pretty clear that this guy is asking about Al Sharpton, the American Baptist minister, long time civil rights activist, and stand-in boogey man for racists over the age of 50. Sharpton is a controversial figure for lots of different reasons, but a consistent criticism that has followed him for decades is that he uses tragedy to draw attention to himself and his organization, the National Action Network (NAN), rather than the cause he claims to be supporting.

Yesterday Sharpton and NAN organized an event in Washington DC to coincide with marches all across the country protesting continued police brutality. What happened at that event, as a clickbait site might say, was unbelievable. Activists, many of which have directed attention to protests through faithful live streaming and tweeting, were asked to move away from the stage unless they had a VIP badge. A full collection of tweets, photos, and vines of that injustice can be found here, which also contains an important passage from another blog post by Margaret Kimberly over at the Black Agenda Report. Kimberley writes:

The real reason he is leading this march is to contain black anger and to keep it from spilling outside of proscribed channels of official authority. That is Sharpton’s hustle in a nutshell. His job is to keep black people in line while making it appear that he is leading a popular movement. The subterfuge makes this march in particular a grotesque mockery.

Political wheeling and dealing are inherently incompatible with movement politics. Just two months ago, Sharpton held a lavish birthday party replete with testimonials from politicians and sponsorships from AT&T, Forest City Ratner realty, GE Asset Management, and Walmart among others. The gentrifiers, displacers and political crooks all kissed Sharpton’s ring and that is bad news indeed.’

It makes sense then, that during our action, Sharpton was invoked by an angry old white man. Not just because Sharpton’s protest is one of bad faith corporate grandstanding, but because even that sort of hollow and shallow protest is too much for wide swaths of White America. Even an insubstantial but well-attended demand for justice is grotesque. More saliently though, I think the old white man asking for Al Sharpton says something about the contours and character of protest outside of major metropolitan areas. In a place where 100 people marching is a huge turnout, there is something essentially violent about invoking the name of someone that will naturally and obviously hold an event in the nation’s capital. It at once demands an impossible level of attention that goes beyond the physical bodies located in that geographic area (the marches in DC and New York City combined far outnumber the entire population of Troy) while also accusing us of being the local instantiation of an inhumane capital vector. His utterance not only says activism against institutional racism is the sole province of dupes, it also says something about our inability to even attain that level of seemingly meaningless protest.

There is, indeed a kind of (productive?) tension between small town activism and big city demonstration. While the former may be just as righteous and capable of local change, the latter produces images that are imminently more shareable and self-evidently impressive. In some respects this is nothing new: large metropolitan regions have a long history of being the sites of collective memory generation. Massive civil unrest happens elsewhere, but recorded history generally tells the tales of big population centers. When the very existence of protest outside of global cities is acknowledged, it is mostly to demonstrate just how far the movement has extended from the metropolitan center. It may not be an accurate causal inference but it becomes true through time. They protested in New York City and the energy spread as far as Troy, New York.

Even the locus of this latest round of civil unrest, the St. Louis metro area, is too small to contain its own political energy. Or perhaps “contain” is too mechanical of a metaphor because just as Sharpton appears in Troy through the mouth of an angry old white man, so too do our eyes and cameras instantaneously re-arrange attention such that what might have began in Ferguson is ultimately fought for in New York City. Perhaps it is better to borrow a term from mathematics: Big cities form basins of attraction for attention. Basins of attraction are regions within a system that pull the rest of the network toward a defined attractor. Over time, in some cases, the system evolves to reinforce the central attractor such that it comes to define the entire topography of the network. Just as the old man looking for Sharpton ever-so-slightly nudges attention towards DC, so too does DC attract Sharpton with its readily available attention-paying bodies and attendant capital.

I see the attention parasitism of Sharpton and the sharability of big city protest as different instantiations of the same essential attention economy. Which is not to say that big city activists (that don’t command million-dollar corporate action networks) are vindictive eyeball thieves. Millions of people enthusiastically watching video of thousands of people in the streets fighting injustice is a good thing. But we must also recognize the tensions that exist between this spectacle and its media hinterland. Do we implore live streamers to stay in their home towns? Do we ask activists living in big cities to visit smaller towns at the invitation of local activists? Do we dare subvert this attention topography or do we recognize it and use it to justice’s advantage?

At present I feel unqualified and ill-equipped to suggest positive interventions within this scenario. My only hope is that these observations do a fair job of summarizing the task at hand and offers up purchase points for further analysis and action. It is distinctly possible that nothing need change except our awareness of how attention is still primarily paid to big cities despite the seeming ubiquity of networked cameras.

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Earlier this week the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, more commonly known as just “The Torture Report” was declassified and made public and like many people I downloaded it. But given that it is a 525-page behemoth of documented state violence, most people are going to understandably look for summaries and analyses, letting other people do the hard work of pulling out important passages from the heaping pile of passive voice and bureaucratic jargon. While the report is deeply disturbing, the mainstream attention it has been getting is somewhat heartening. What might have dominated, but ultimately fallen out of, a couple of rapidly shifting news cycles has exploded over my Tumblr dashboard and Twitter feed in a constant stream of tiny, comprehensible bites of war crimes. Consuming national disgrace in small pieces isn’t necessarily new, it is the primary way the public learns about abuses of power.

I have a mostly unread 9/11 report on my shelf (should have bought the graphic novel adaptation), and I grew up in a house that had a handsomely bounded copy of the Warren Commission Report that details the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Government documents that cover national tragedy are peculiar documents: they are both truth-defining documents and somber, paper memorials that sit in your home. But the torture report is more akin to The Church Committee reports on COINTELPRO, or the Senate Watergate Committee. Confessionals told by and to bureaucracies that, on the surface, claim to act as immune system responses that will prevent future corruption, but really act more like public relations memos to politicos. It strikes off one form of violence and demands that lawyers and deep state apparatchiks find a new way to maintain order. Use signature strikes from drones instead of rendition and torture; vacuum up and duplicate the entire internet instead of spying on a select few leftists; and make spying on the other party’s campaign obsolete by colluding on which issues you’ll talk about and which ones you’ll ignore completely.

The left has a print culture of dissecting big and complicated abuses of power and making them readily understandable to the lay public. Immediately after the Haymarket Affair, in which anarchist were blamed for setting off a bomb that killed and injured police officers who were advancing on a labor demonstration in Chicago. Historians cite this as one of the first globally-covered news stories, most of which was done by small-circulation partisan newspapers that had a keen awareness of how their audiences consumed information. The subsequent arrests and hangings of anarchists in connection to the bombing were depicted in eye-catching images and easy-to-read prose.

The Haymarket Martyrs as they came to be called, had to be introduced to the world through highly partisan papers that either romanticized their deaths or exaggerated their influence (think Benghazi, but 19^th century). Today, mainstream news outlets like The Daily Dot and Gawker are compiling and curating pieces of the Torture Report and sending them out in highly shareable photo memes. Adam Weinstein has collected tweets that reference specific passages into what he calls a “Guide to CIA Torture and Its Sick, Sad American Apologists” (warning: a particularly gruesome image is at the top of this pos). The Daily Dot‘s Aaron Sankin has put together a more sardonic post where facts gleamed from the Torture Report are written across images of George W. Bush. (The image at the top of this post is one of eleven such memes.)

I think it is actually a triumph that mainstream news outlets have started to do what only marginal radical newspapers have been doing for over a hundred years. This is the way lots of people have learned about abuses of power and injustice for a very long time and the more of it, in my opinion, the better.

Both of these pieces, which are just two prominent examples of fairly wide-spread media coverage, are best understood as a continuation of those Haymarket cartoons. While they don’t romanticize the victims of torture like some of the partisan newspapers did, they do offer tangible fodder for sharing and raising awareness of a terrible miscarriage of justice. While some of them may be crude, and there will be the inevitable partisan spinning of what is ultimately a bipartisan war crime, we should be looking for more and better memes to sit alongside the well-researched essays and reporting that is also sure to come. We should remember that both long-form original reporting and shareable memes serve complimentary purposes. The latter shouldn’t be thought of as making light of the issue or dumbing it down. This is a common instantiation of the vox populi and it as old as mass media itself.

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This one time I got to meet Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Choir. They’re fun people with a knack for spectacle. The Reverend dresses up in all white to match his brilliant, platinum pompadour, and leads people into a mall or a busy street corner to preach and sing about the evils of consumer society. A small group of us exorcised a Bank of America ATM which was a great diversion for reaching around and unplugging it. All in all it was a lovely afternoon but today I’m nervous about the way people who look like me (white) are organizing around this topic. Given that it is prime time for shopping, it also means it is an excellent opportunity to protest the intricate tapestry of social norms and institutions that make up present-day consumerism. It is certainly true that lots of people should probably consume less than they do, but the activism around consumerism is often tin-eared and tone deaf when it comes to issues of class and, as we are seeing this year, race.

The waste associated with consumer capitalism is probably as overdetermined as anything gets: activists have the unenviable task of intervening and disrupting an intricate and contradictory system that is responsible for supplying most people’s daily needs and suffering. Describing exactly how this happens could fill volumes but for now let’s leave it at this: lots of stuff sold at Wal-Mart is awesome but it is also the product of incomprehensible suffering and waste. The latter does not negate the former for most people, and a great deal of activism seeks to convince those people otherwise through a diversity of tactics and arguments.

Some activists keep focus on the fact that over-consumption is fed by oppressive forces that subjugate and marginalize many non-white people. Others might romanticize handicrafts and ask that shoppers engage in a kinder, gentler capitalism made up of expensive local boutiques instead of discount stores.  Sometimes anti-consumerism can be the basis for a broad coalition, other times it can be a trojan horse that lets well-meaning but un-self aware white protestors take over a movement.

Enter #notonedime: A campaign coming from a coalition of black-led organizations like the New Black Panther Party and the Michael Brown Leadership Coalition calling for a boycott of major retailers, in favor of black-owned businesses, to last from Thanksgiving to December 2nd. It is a tried-and true tactic of civil rights organizations that, in the words of Aya de Leon, “reach[es] into our legacies of using our economic power: the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the Civil Rights Movement, the grapes boycott of the United Farm Workers, and other historical boycotts.”

Last Friday there were many successful actions in malls all across America. Just a quick search of my Twitter feed tells me that the Galleria Mall in St. Louis got shut down, as did a Wal-Mart in Chicago. There are too many simultaneous events with too many actors to characterize all the actions that happened over the weekend, but I think it is fair to assume that some white liberals gave the kind of quiet support that my fellow editor Jenny Davis called for last friday, but I also can’t shake the feeling that there are lots of liberals out there acting in bad faith. White activists must support this movement, but we should be cognizant of what our participation can do and has done to similar movements in the past. Anti-consumerist activism comes in many flavors but, if the past is any indicator of the future, there’s a very real danger that well-meaning progressives will quickly slip into condescending elitism.

“Much of liberal activism” Hari Ziyad points out, “is about silencing difference and promoting assimilation under the premise of equality.” It is the kind of one-issue politics that, just to take another example in the news right now, has no problem with naming Monsanto the “best place to work for LGBT Equality.” The mainstream left is willfully blind to the different needs, wants, and desires of all people and is at cross-purposes with broad coalition-building. Appeals to equality ––instead of justice or reparations–– ignores that violence in society has always already been unequally meted out.

It is also telling how this campaign is talked about on social media. Lots of black protestors seem to use the hashtags #blacklivesmatter, #notonedime, #blackoutblackfriday, and simply #Ferguson. Meanwhile white-presenting activists like the one at the top of this post seem to use #handsupdontshop or #handsupdontspend. This is definitely not a clear-cut difference, but it is noticeable. A St. Louis Fox affiliate for example, collected several prominent tweets during the weekend’s actions and as of this writing not one of them uses #handsupdontshop or #handsupdontspend. I do not know what is in the hearts and minds of all activists but the replacing of “shoot” with “shop” does not appear to be universally acceptable.

The racist history of police violence has direct ramifications on how white people participate in, or even chant the name of, campaigns like “hands up, don’t spend.” Even if you are a white person who recognizes who has what skin in the game, and you are chanting “hands up, don’t shop” in a diverse crowd, think for a moment about what that means coming from your mouth, instead of the mouths of those who are routinely searched, intimidated, and shot by police. Think about how many times you have had to put your hands up because you were assumed to be dangerous, and how likely it was that you would be shot anyway. “Hands up, don’t shop” can be a call to solidarity or a condescending demand depending on who it is from and the context it is uttered.

As more white people, along with their professional single-issue political organizations, feed the momentum of this black-led movement there is a growing danger that the anti-consumerist message will drift away from calls to upend racist capitalism, and instead settle firmly in the bougie rhetoric of Small Business Saturday. This is doubly likely given that many white people will inevitably fail to see the difference between calling for the patronage of black-owned businesses and local business in general.

And while it is easy to find images of white people participating in die-ins and marches, I don’t see evidence of them moving their money to black-owned businesses. I’ll concede however, that the public rarely sees the “opposite” side of boycotts: History remembers the Montgomery Bus Boycott, not the Montgomery Carpooling Campaign. One cannot exist without the other but, for better or worse, mutual aid rarely makes headlines.

What does make headlines is conflict, and white activists must be especially cognizant of how their bodies are treated by the police. In the heyday of Occupy the often-heard refrain was “don’t make it about the cops.” The reasoning was that the central message about inequality would be over-shadowed by the spectacle of clashes with the police. What was often missed by the media and Occupiers alike, was that the police are the guardians of inequality. Making “it” about the police is to talk about inequality in its rawest form.

But it isn’t as simple as “look at the terrible things police do to innocent people.” The real inequality is found in the distinctions between who is assumed to be innocent and who is routinely murdered by police.  The outrage over police violence in Occupy was largely spurred by seeing white bodies, just for an instant, being treated with the kind of disregard that has been the norm for people of color for centuries. But it was an outrage that, ultimately, ran shallow because it could be quelled by demanding a return to a time where police regularly gave deference to protesting white bodies. This time a more fundamental kind of change is being demanded. One that calls into question the purpose of police departments and what exactly they are serving and protecting.

#Handsupdontspend is a boycott, but white activists must not forget that it is in service of a larger rebellion against a system that corporations benefit from and cops defend. The white anti-consumerism activist that insists that people exchange hand-made gifts instead of spending money on a new smartphone needs to take a back seat for now. Americans buys more than its fair share of phones, but pronouncements about the meaning of phones-as-gifts usually hides the fact that Americans’ needs are vastly different. Smartphones might be luxury items to some people, but can be essential lifelines to people who actually accrue savings from wrapping up phone, computer, and their attendant monthly charges into one pre-paid bill. Of course, even if that wasn’t the case, there is never a need (and especially not now) for a white person to condescend to people of color about when one has earned the enjoyment of a new iPhone. Concerns over what makes a meaningful gift should not be confused with a tactic meant to illustrate the systemic devaluing of black life.

As Blake O’Neil writes in the Washington Post, “We’ve been bombarded with [Black Friday ads] for weeks now, from corporations eager to entice shoppers with so-called “door-buster” deals. And then, once the shopping public falls for them, a privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes them for its collective amusement.” He also reminds us that many Black Friday shoppers are single mothers of color, which begs the question: How many white, middle-class liberals wouldn’t have thought twice before protesting in front of a Wal-Mart in Ferguson or some other predominantly black neighborhood last year, but proudly yell “hands up, don’t shop” this year?  Those people are still around, and it is crucial that their bad faith be called out as soon as it rears its ugly head.

Perhaps that is one of the best contributions white activists can make in the next few weeks: confront and call out fellow white activists who are ––unknowingly or otherwise––  hijacking a rebellion to further their own ultimately racist cause. Lend quiet support, but don’t be quiet in the face of liberal racism.  Above all, do as organizers ask, and make sure you’ve lent your voice and body to organizers that understand the stakes and not the rich NGOs that want to usurp another movement.

I don’t regret exorcising that ATM because I wasn’t taking attention away from another movement. It was the right place and time and with the right people. Reverend Billy appears to have been in Ferguson since Thanksgiving and as I had hoped, the actions appear to be respectful and give deference to the people of Ferguson. The Reverend doesn’t even seem to be leading much of the singing and marching. If a man who has made it his life’s work to lead 100-person choirs into malls can step back, you can too.

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One of the most dangerous misconceptions about our present political climate is that it is broken. That too many “bad apples” have achieved high-ranking positions and it s their greed and malfeasance that is to blame for rising inequality and state-sanctioned violence. Overcrowded prisons, rapid gentrification, industrial disasters, and predatory banking practices aren’t bugs, they’re features of our current historical moment. Even if CEOs and presidents wanted to end any of these problems tomorrow, they could easily be sued or even jailed for threatening their bottom lines. And while we should never hold critics to the impossible standard of “come up with a better system” it never hurts, from time to time, to play Minecraft with words and come up with some replacements for the current way of doing things. What would a vastly better technological society look like?

First, some ground rules and disclosures: I’m coming at this as an anarchist, so while government and private property seem equally unsalvageable as means of progressive change, I’m willing to play with both as a means of lessing the suffering of others in the relative short term. What I’ll describe below are fairly radical reforms but ones that could easily happen within my life time, even within a single presidential administration if the government felt sufficiently threatened by its own people. My hope is that these reforms might remind people that guarded private property and militaristic governments are not the only things keeping the boogey men of terrorists and criminals at bay, but are in fact their sole creators. From these reforms enough people might be sufficiently convinced that we can trust one-another to govern without the constant threat of violence.

At present we ––and this is a pretty broad “we” encompassing all but the most isolated communities–– live in a world where necessary goods and services are highly policed because they are distributed so unevenly. Information isn’t the only resource that wants to be free, and it takes a considerable amount work to keep stuff from being distributed evenly. Its as if you wanted to take a lake and dam it up such that some parts of the lake are 20 feet higher than other parts. Maybe you even dredge the bottom of an entire bank so that it is kept artificially deeper than it would be otherwise. You’d need to build and maintain enormous and heavy walls to keep the water from getting back to a stable equilibrium. Despite all of the concerted efforts to make competition and domination seem like a natural condition, that is simply not the case. As Evelyn Fox Keller has demonstrated,  scientists, through language conventions that are not backed up by observable evidence, “support the characterization of the biological individual as somehow “intrinsically” competitive, as if autonomy and competition were semantically equivalent”.

The imposition of inequality, through guarding and hoarding of necessary goods by a minority of elites, is the single greatest challenge of our present society. According to the economist Samuel Bowles about a fifth of Americans are employed in “guard labor”; work that keeps stuff in places that benefit elites at the expense of everyone else. You don’t have to be a literal guard with a flashlight and a walkie-talkie to be doing guard labor. You can also be the person that designs that annoying hard plastic packaging meant to deter theft. Or you can be the employee of Elsevier that maintains paywalls and keeps people from reading this article on guard labor.

This is why all of my reforms will, in some way, look to break down guard labor and make it easier for individuals to cooperate and solve long-standing problems that present institutions and organizations are incapable of tackling because they are, at least in part, charged with implementing guard labor themselves.

Where to start? Jesse Myerson at the beginning of this year enumerated “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For” and it’d be a shame if that discussion lost steam so let’s start there. His five reforms are:

1. Guaranteed work for everybody
2. Social security for all
3. Take back the land
4. Make everything owned by everybody
5. A public bank in every state.

I disagree with 1 in the sense that “work” as we understand it today and productive activities should be separated out and reassessed. Full employment is desirable to the extent that it ensures individuals gain access to necessary goods and services, while also being conducive to human flourishing and creativity. Instituting full employment while conflating productive activities with present conceptions of work is a recipe for more useless, bullshit jobs. In my reforms I don’t want to conflate individuals’ access to needed goods and services with the necessity that productive activities need happen. In other words, we must think outside of the wage economy box.

Of course that brings us to number 2: most of the people on Earth have to do some kind of work in exchange for money that they can use to go buy necessary goods and services. Ultimately, it’d be nice if we could get the middle man called money out of our day-to-day lives and have direct access to individuals’ needs and desires. Until we get to that post-currency world however, I really like the idea of social security for everyone, also called a universal basic income. The idea is simple: every single citizen gets a subsistence wage tied to the prices of staple products like bread, housing, and maybe even internet access.

Universal basic incomes are a really simple and affordable way of raising everyone’s standard of living while keeping government interference at a minimum. The government doesn’t get a say in how you spend your money or who gets how much. Its one standard income for every single adult. You could eliminate byzantine and manipulative federal food aid programs that tell people what to eat, and put federal workers to better use in more fulfilling jobs than their current ones that have them acting as guards rather than care takers. Of course if you want to live a more comfortable life you’ll have to supplement your basic income with wages from a job or starting your own firm.

Perhaps a midway point between a universal basic income and the present would be a recognition that house work is in fact work and should be compensated by its benefactors.

What’s really cool about providing a safety net for everyone is that you free everyone up to take bigger risks.“The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America” insists Molly Crabapple, “is a universal basic income.” If you know that there’s no chance of starving if your business goes belly up, maybe you’ll take the chance to be an artist or an inventor. More people will be willing to take those long-shot chances at solving really tough problems if they know society will catch them if they fall short. Taking a chance on something big doesn’t mean you’re at risk of going hungry or becoming homeless.

Having a universal basic income might help buy food, but housing has its own unique issues beyond affording the rent or mortgage. Taking back the land (reform 3) means eliminating ownership of real estate that one does not actively and regularly use. As Myerson puts it, “landlords blow”. They extract rent money simply for putting their name on a deed and occasionally repairing things. Even worse, our present land ownership model is wasteful because it expends resources to build new homes when we could already house every single American with existing housing stock. Instead of overlapping and high-overhead homeless assistance programs let’s just give away houses.

This isn’t a far left theory but actually existing policy in Utah. From the New Yorker: “Lloyd Pendleton, the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, told me of one individual whose care one year cost nearly a million dollars, and said that, with the traditional approach, the average chronically homeless person used to cost Salt Lake City more than twenty thousand dollars a year. Putting someone into permanent housing costs the state just eight thousand dollars, and that’s after you include the cost of the case managers who work with the formerly homeless to help them adjust.” If we were to buy every homeless person alive today a home at the average cost of a modest home the federal government would spend about $86 billion, a little more than what we spend in bank subsidies every year. We’d also have over 13.5 million vacant homes left over. We might use these left overs to move people in energy inefficient homes into newer, more efficient ones. Simple. No cutting-edge smart grids necessary.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need more research and development, or that present R&D is properly allocated. Innovation is deeply uneven. What should be pressing issues ––remediating or preparing for the effects of climate change; sanitation for the millions of people that do not have access to a toilet around the globe; and ever-encroaching government and corporate surveillance–– rarely get the lion’s share of research and development dollars. One might even go so far as to say we wouldn’t have to deal with these issues in the first place if we had done a better job of allocating resources in the past. Too much of our sociotechnical history has been spent leaping without looking: brand new materials and industrial processes were scaled up way before we knew what their potential negative effects would be.

Fortunately, we can remediate this problem while also vesting improving the fairness of our current banking practices. We can tackle Myerson’s 4th and 5th reforms while simultaneously vastly improving the way new products are made. How? Seth Ackerman has one elegant solution:

Suppose a public common fund were established, to undertake what might be euphemistically called the “compulsory purchase” of all privately-owned financial assets. It would, for example, “buy” a person’s mutual fund shares at their market price, depositing payment in the person’s bank account. By the end of this process, the common fund would own all formerly privately-owned financial assets, while all the financial wealth of individuals would be converted into bank deposits (but with the banks in question now owned in common, since the common fund now owns all the shares).

Instead of flowing to a small set of capitalist elites, firms’ profits, according to Ackerman, would go back into the common fund and used to fund public services or perhaps sent directly to individuals in the form of a guaranteed basic income. Firms would still be private, and capable of making all the same buying and selling choices that they do now, but the perverse incentives of the profit motive would (theoretically) be lessened.

I would take Ackerman’s idea a step further and give voting-age individuals the opportunity to choose how the common fund re-invests every 10 years or so. For example, let’s say the common fund is managed by economists appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress, but they only have direct control over 60% of the total value of the fund. The other 40% is divided equally among every citizen (perhaps via the same system that distributes the universal basic income) who may choose from a list of pre-registered firms and organizations. Each potential recipient of the money would be barred from campaigning and be limited to a single, standard proposal form that would state how the money would be spent. This process will be manipulated by powerful people but hopefully enough of these reforms will reduce inequality overall to the point that this flaw will become less troublesome over time.

We could further democratize investing of resources and access to credit by opening up regional public banks like they have in North Dakota. These banks can offer loans at far cheaper rates and, because they are not-for-profit entities, have far fewer incentives to invest in risky securities markets. Something more akin to George Bailey’s Savings and Loan in It’s A Wonderful Life, than the coke-fueled investment firms in Wolf of Wall Street. These banks are meant to hold, keep track of, and grow a community’s shared resources, not profit off of them. Relatively large investments might be open to town hall-style deliberation instead of shady backroom deals. There’s well-worn problems with both, but its worth trying something new because what we have now certainly isn’t working.

Finally, while the unfair allocation of resources and capital lies at the heart of most human strife, there is also a misallocation of expertise as well. Of course expertise is a kind of resource, but it has unique features that make it harder to reallocate than factory equipment or savings bonds. Expertise resides in people after all, and while some firms might be able to hire more experts as money becomes more fairly distributed, there are some issues that need attention faster than financial reforms would allow. That’s why I think we need radically new institutions of science and technology.

Last April I suggested in Tikkun Magazine, that the federal government pay scientists, engineers, and other experts to respond to the stated needs of small communities that have identified a need for an area of expertise:

Free education should be available to all, but nothing changes if newly minted experts continue to work for malevolent corporations and/or detached universities. Therefore, in addition to providing no-strings-attached block grants, the government should pay an array of experts to put themselves up for hire by communities to help solve problems in a collaborative and deliberative way. Imagine a clearinghouse of sociologists, water chemists, lawyers, economists, and geologists all fully paid by the federal government and willing work with a community to solve problems identified by its residents.

This clearing house would let people with advanced degrees do the work they’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t because small organizations couldn’t afford to hire them. Urban schools could have nurses again, rural communities looking to preserve their water sources could hire hydrologists, and a new co-op could hire an accountant or an economist to help establish a horizontal federation of employee-run companies similar to the Evergreen Cooperatives operating in Cleveland, Ohio.

None of the above reforms are particularly anarchistic, they’re not even very radical in the grand scheme of things. Myerson notes that all five of his suggested reforms are based on actually-existing examples out in the world. What I’ve outlines above are only stepping-stones to a vastly better technological society that I believe is imminently possible. Presently we have too many people involved in guard labor and wages in other, more productive sectors of the economy are so low that worker exploitation and law suits are more cost efficient than researching and developing new technologies to make productive activities easier or more enjoyable. Unlike food and water, there are no shortage of challenges to be faced, but with the right political and economic innovations we can overcome them together.

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