Last week Twitter introduced an alert system that they described as “ a new feature that brings us one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information during emergencies, natural disasters or when other communications services aren’t accessible.” The alerts show up on users phones as special push notifications and SMS notifications and are marked with an orange bell in your feed. At first blush it seems like a great idea but, given that I’m writing this during yet another government “shutdown”, are governments and NGOs really the only organizations that should get access to this useful service? What can activists do to push back?

A government’s priorities are never quite as stark and apparent as when the free flow of money abruptly stops. These are the moments when cash stockpiles are revealed, and we see which purse strings have the most slack. According to Al Jazeera America, these are just a few services that are still running uninterrupted:

• Tax collection (although no IRS agents to help answer questions)
• Homeland security employees and agents
• All 1.4 million active-duty military personnel will be paid and about half of private mercenaries (err… “contractors”)
• All 116 federal prisons and criminal litigation services
•  Federal courts will have enough money for 10 days
• The post office[1]
• Air Traffic controllers[2]

Now compare that list to this list of things that close immediately:

• 97% of NASA including the team that runs the Curiosity Mars rover. (But not mission control.)
• Smithsonian and national parks
• The Center for Disease Control’s operations will be “severely limited”
• The FDA will only be handling “high risk calls” and continue inspecting meat.[3]
• Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspections stop immediately “except in cases of immediate danger.”
• Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests will no longer be processed.
• 19,000 children are losing access to Head Start programs.
• Clinical services and food administered through the Supplemental Assistance for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) stops immediately.

This chart showing the percent of furloughed workers for each agency provides another perspective. At the top are NASA, HUD, Education, and the EPA. At the bottom are Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. The military and incarceration system hums along unconditionally while services that inspect, protect, and investigate go down immediately. Even without the shutdown these priorities were evident when Congress votes on various disaster relief bills.

This sort of prolonged, institutionalized neglect of public services, coupled with the embarrassment of riches hefted onto prisons and the military, slowly starts to justify itself. When Gallup did their annual Confidence in Institutions poll last June they came back with some disturbing results: Americans’ confidence had dropped to historic lows in all categories except for four that had risen: the military, the criminal justice system, the police, and small businesses. Unsurprisingly, nonwhites were significantly less confident in the police, the military, and small business.

What does all of this have to do with Twitter’s new alert system? First, the system is only open to those government agencies and registered non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have failed so many and appear to be getting more dysfunctional with time. NGOs like Bono’s ONE Campaign and the homophobic Salvation Army (full list here) get special access to your feed but self-organized collectives are left with their traditional accounts. Twitter Alerts is an excellent example of how the Internet is not a wild west; it is shot through with the social, political, and economic forces that make up everyday life. Twitter Alerts reinforces the primacy of traditional hierarchical organizations by ignoring the rhizomatic ones that made it so popular in the first place.

The very nature of Occupy’s organizational structure precludes them from gaining access to Twitter’s new alert system. Occupy’s non-hierarchical organizational structure makes it incompatible with the eligibility requirements for the UN or the US. Even if they were eligible, the whole point of the Occupy movement was to prefigure a new society in the shell of the old. Alternative organizations like Occupy always need to assess how and to what degree they should compromise and interface with the status quo. Compromise too much and you end up reinforcing the systems you want to dismantle. Opt out of too many systems and you risk ineffectiveness. Twitter Alerts just adds another consequence to opting out of traditional NGO models.

Twitter Alerts ignore the organizations that made Twitter the go-to source for emergency information. Occupy Sandy (@OccupySandy), which set up supply distribution sites in places neglected by government and NGOs, does not qualify for the new Twitter Alert accounts. Occupiers worked in (and came from) areas like the Far Rockaways –places that were (and still are) neglected by governments and non-profits. Twitter was an excellent way to coordinate volunteers, broadcast information, and monitor community chatter for new emerging crises. Twitter Alerts betrays the collaborative properties of Twitter for the top-down model of traditional media.

I suppose someone could make a new social media service that with radical politics in mind. Something that reinforces decentralized authority and collaborative work while also providing all of the opportunities and tools to share cat videos when the world doesn’t need immediate saving. But alternative services lead us right back to the opt out problem, especially if the exodus isn’t popular. There are already a dozen or so alternative social media services (They’re all catalogued here [PDF]) and they all suffer from anemic user activity. Twitter works as a tool for emergency response because everyone is already there.  This is definitely not as simple as  “build it and they will come.”

I think recognizing that Twitter is a private company and its services are hobbled by the profit motive but (for the time being) ultimately more useful than harmful, is a good strategy. Using Twitter smartly means knowing its business practices and acting accordingly. When the company issues an edict on its blog two years ago regarding its position on freedom of speech it was a display of equal parts corporate ass-covering and international policy. They made it clear that they were willing to cooperate with state censorship, but only insomuch as it promised access to lucrative eyeballs. That meant, in part, maintaining their reputation as an effective tool for political organizing. Paying attention to corporate blogs is important not only because it helps us predict how the company will act in unpredictable times, but because, as I wrote at the time, “the inventors and innovators of technology embed within their creations, the politics of their own worldview.“ When someone goes off to build a democratic news-sharing platform, they are limited to their own definition of what democracy means. Ultimately, when we use social media for political action we are making an implicit political compromise with its makers. The good news is that technology can be appropriated (PDF) and used in ways unintended by its maker. I don’t know what appropriating Twitter Alerts will look like, but it might be the key to saving the platform from itself.

David still uses Twitter and won’t stop using Tumblr until Yahoo! screws it up.

Hello, I’m Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple, and I want to tell you about a new product that you will absolutely love. It has been crafted with pain-staking attention to detail. Absolutely every aspect of this phone has been given the kind of care that you have come to expect from an Apple product. The seamless integration of hardware and software produces a product that, once you use it, will make you wonder how you lived your life without it. Today I’m thrilled to announce our best iPhone yet. We’ve crafted a phone that works and smells just the way you expect it to and we’re calling it iPhone Pumpkin Spice.

iPhone Pumpkin Spice is like no other phone you’ve ever used. It is 0.02 centimeters thinner than our last iPhone and it smells 100% more like a pumpkin spice latte.  No other phone on the market today can claim that.

What sets iPhone Pumpkin Spice apart from other phones is not just the pungent aroma of nutmeg, clove, and ginger mixing with off-gassing plastic adhesives, it is the way we have meticulously integrated the idea of pumpkin spice throughout the phone. We’ve added a photo filter specially designed to accentuate the colors found at the top of a freshly made latte. Your Instagramed weekly post-work, pre-yoga beverage will look better than it ever has before. We have also developed an all-new app that lets you record your favorite things about fall and send them out over social media at regular intervals to your friends and family.

With iPhone Pumpkin Spice, our working relationship with Starbucks has never been more important. You can already buy Starbucks products through the dedicated Starbucks app, but we didn’t think that went far enough. We wanted to integrate impulse purchasing of seasonally flavored coffee throughout the phone. That is why Apple and Starbucks engineers have teamed up to develop a GPS feature that will alert surrounding stores to your presence so that Starbucks associates can adjust, in real time, the amount of pumpkin spice flavored food products available in the store. It is nothing short of magical.

The phone’s casing is an engineering triumph all its own. Our design team painstakingly reproduced what is certainly the most pumpkin-y orange you have ever seen on a phone. A porous layer in the casing releases the constant, yet subtle aroma you love so much, while maintaining a stylish matte finish. It is unapologetically pumpkin spice flavored. You will literally feel compelled to drink your phone on a daily basis. It is that good.

We at Apple only make products that we would use. That’s why all iPhones, including iPhone Pumpkin Spice, are completely compatible with the Toyota Prius’s onboard computer, the Nike Fuel band, all Jawbone products, and quinoa.

iPhone Pumpkin Spice joins the recently released iPhone 5s and 5c to round out our holiday lineup. While we realize that pumpkin spice is only (marginally) socially acceptable between September and November; we are confident that we can do to the seasonal flavoring industry what we have already done to the music and cell phone industries: obliterate them into a relentless, kaleidoscopic parade of marginally different products that are desirable insomuch as they shatter and undermine the low expectations we set for ourselves through complete oligarchic domination of entire sectors of the economy. iPhone Egg Nog and iPad Mini Ginger Bread will be available by Black Friday.

David said everything he wanted to say about horse_ebooks on Twitter. He’s also on Tumblr.

I’m in the midsts of one of those unavoidable grad student extended crises this month so I I thought writing something this week was going to be out of the question. But last Monday I had an interaction with a PDF that I really need to tell someone about. Trust me, its more interesting than it sounds.

Lately, I’ve been taking advantage of my institution’s (appropriately ancient-sounding) ILLiad Inter-Library Loan System. Usually, if I can’t find journal article I need, I just ask a fellow grad student friend over GChat or Facebook to get me the article from their library. If I can’t find anyone (or I’ve asked them too many times) I resort to ILLiad. Getting a book from ILLiad means waiting about 24 hours for an undergrad on work study to copy and paste a DOI and send me the article under another institution’s journal subscription. It is the ultimate exercise in artificial scarcity: A teenager in a library basement, fueled on Moe’s burritos and motivated by the threat of crushing student debt, orchestrates the transfer of a few ones and zeroes in such a way that my desire for the article can be monetized to the benefit of a publishing company’s CEO and a couple of computer system designers. The physical scarcity of a paper journal is transmuted into a new kind of scarcity: the scarcity of student labor and my own dedication to reading this article that I saw in someone else’s bibliography.

The article in question here is Janet Moore’s “Living in the Basement of the Ivory Tower: A Graduate Student’s Perspective of Participatory Action Research Within Academic Institutions” published in 2004 in Educational Action Research. The journal is owned by Taylor & Francis. The article focuses “on the ways in which universities are adapting to the presence of alternative research methodologies.” Moore is mainly interested in Participatory Action Research or PAR- a deeply collaborative research method wherein academics collaborate with community members on every aspect of the research design. Or, as Moore says:

“Academic research projects that involve participants in the research process (participatory) are committed to social change (action), and have elements of social learning (education) are often described and defined as participatory action research (PAR)” (P. 146).

I’m not about to get into the pros and cons of PAR. Suffice it to say both columns are mighty full and there are a lot of questions with difficult answers. Can someone with a PhD (or in the process of earning one) really have a noncoercive working relationship with a poor community? Who gets their name on the final product when your IRB says your participants anonymity needs to be “protected?” How can you call each other co-researchers when, after receiving grant funding, your university gets 42% off the top for “administrative costs” and that orphanage you partnered with has to justify (in writing) their food purchases? The organizational landscape just isn’t made for horizontal relationships. Even the ethics boards meant to protect people assumes (and reinforces) an extractive relationship where the researcher observes and collects data while participants do as they’re told. IRBs are good for avoiding another Stanford Prison Experiment but they won’t ensure scientific inquiry is carried out democratically.

In any case, my institution’s library does not subscribe to Educational Action Research and Nathan was getting a digital detox so I had to use ILLiad. I woke up Monday morning to an email notification saying that the library gnomes (work study students eating burritos) had retrieved my article. I download it, put it in my Zotero library and open it in iAnnotate PDF. Then I get this sad little error message:

The high levels of Morissetteian irony might have obscured the full picture, so let me restate it, in full, right here: My article about radical democratic knowledge-making had been DRM’ed by a university’s library. I don’t know why this one article was protected (none of the others had been) but it seems like a pretty safe assumption that it had something to do with concerns over “intellectual” property.

I put scare quotes around “intellectual” because what we’re really dealing with here is plain old property. Just because IP looks particularly preposterous to the predominantly white, male libertarian digerati doesn’t mean intellectual property make any less sense than other ownership regimes. When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote “property is theft!” he wasn’t just coining a slogan, he was making an intellectual argument. In the same way that a person enslaves another by choosing not to kill them when they have the right and ability to do so, an object becomes property –according to Proudon– when someone has the right and ability to destroy that object but doesn’t. Proudon saw property regimes as nothing more than extended, institutionalized, and socially legitimated hostage situations. Thinking about the ownership of digital goods through this lens is confusing. The Internet makes destroying, and thus owning, digital artifacts very difficult. When you jailbreak your iPhone you’re not stealing anything, but you are breaking Apple’s ability to regulate (which includes destroying) the apps that you install. When Apple blocks (for example) Josh Begley’s app that alerts users when a drone strike occurs they are exercising their intellectual property rights. The right to destroy information. Owning information isn’t just about storing it, it can also be about destroying it.

When it comes to radically democratic research methods in the services of social justice, there’s an important and often overlooked issue of data publicity, not just data privacy. Working with disadvantaged groups doesn’t mean just protecting their identity or sensitive information, it also means making sure the data that they produce has a certain resiliency to it. Its incumbent on the researcher to assure that access to the products of collaborative research does not fall along the same institutional, socioeconomic, and cultural fault lines that marginalized participants in the first place. Not a single one of  the articles I’ve read on PAR (and that includes articles published this year) say anything about open access publishing. There’s a lot about making documents and ensuring that authorial credit is given when it is due, but the choice of academic publishing venue for the researcher is just not mentioned.

I’m not claiming to have read every single article about PAR, but I think I should have come across something about open access by now. If you run in circles that frequently cite Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and have articles explicitly about OA, please let me know. It certainly should be a prerequisite for collaborative and participatory research. And, just in case you find yourself in a similar PDF predicament, you should certainly check out PDFUnlock– a service that I have definitely never used.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr in between writing paragraphs of his dissertation proposal.

Correction: This article accidently abbreviated  Intellectual Property to IR. Comments that refer and quote IR are referring to IP. 

“If it weren’t for all of you I would have lost my mind at my job.” Its a familiar refrain that I hear at lots of small conferences and, occasionally, on Twitter backchannels. Its an amazing compliment to hear that your weak tie with someone means so much, but its also an immensely troubling prospect. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of highly trained professionals have serious misgivings about their professional associations, their home institutions, and maybe even their life’s work. I had heard variations on this theme most recently this past week when I helped out at the (really, really cool) Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace Conference hosted here in Troy, New York. The conference was attended by an array of people: engineers, educators, activists, and social scientists like myself. Some people worked in industry, others in academia, and a significant portion worked for NGOs like Engineers Without Borders. And again, I just want to reiterate: No single person said the exact phrase above, and I certainly don’t want to (mis)characterize any of the attendee’s personal feelings about their jobs or work. Rather, what I witnessed at ESJP is more accurately characterized as a feeling of “coming home.” Think of it as the positive side of the same disaffected coin. This anecdotal trend was in my mind when I read this Seattle Times article about social scientists finding new and inviting homes in tech companies. Are social scientists finding better intellectual homes in industry than in academia? Or am I connecting two totally separate phenomena? Is it just the pay? More to the point: can social scientists do more and better things for the world working in Silicon Valley than the Ivory Tower?

Social scientists of all stripes —from qualitative anthropologists to quantitative sociologists— are using their skills and (sociological) imagination to develop new iPhone apps and xBox hardware. Personally, I’m pretty torn on whether or not this is a good thing. I think all social scientists should be working toward a more egalitarian society through a better understanding of our shared human condition. Can someone do that by making sure we never see the likes of Clippy again? Kinda…?  How does the profit motive factor into the scientists’ methods? What does this do for social science departments if the well-known end game for graduate students (or even undergraduates) is a life redesigning the Office software suite? Here are some tentative answers:

Social scientists working in product design labs have the potential to bring about real and immediate benefits to underserved groups. Linda Layne, in the edited volume Feminist Technology, describes through example how home pregnancy tests could benefit from the observations of social scientists:

At first glance, it appears that a home pregnancy test takes power/knowledge out of the hands of experts and places it in the hands of women. Notably, opposition to these kits came from professional laboratory technicians who saw the tests as undermining their authority. However, despite the fact that these tests boast a very high accuracy level, accounts by users and representations of use in popular culture indicate that they are not considered authoritative by women or healthcare providers.

…

If we adopt a liberal feminist stance and concede that more choices are better and that commercially available, hormone-based kits will hold some benefit for some women under some circumstances, then we should work to improve them to better serve women. AT present, even though home pregnancy tests measure hCG levels, they do not reveal this level to the user. Even the expensive digital ones do not actually tell women what their hCG level is, only whether it is high enough to indicate a pregnancy is likely. The actual level (especially tracked over time by using repeat tests) can be an important indicator of many things, including whether a pregnancy is likely to end in miscarriage.

Layne goes on to describe the range of technologies and practices used to determine whether one is pregnant or not, and how a test that gives actual hCG levels empowers women in a way that helps them understand their bodies beyond a decontextualized elevated hormone level. Its important to note that the technology itself isn’t necessarily the fix, rather design interventions change how products and users configure one-another (to borrow a phrase from Ruth Schwartz Cowan). This is a crucial distinction: The designed technology is not fixing a social problem, rather social observations are informing the design of a technology that has social influences in the world.

When I pondered whether or not one could make an Anti-Racist Reddit, I was thinking along similar lines. Could social scientists equipped with Nancy Fraser and Sandra Harding redesign Reddit in such a way that majoritarian voting was just one of many ways stories got to the front page? How do we make a better “report abuse” button on Twitter? Should different Facebook users have access to completely different privacy settings? These are the sorts of problems and questions that Silicon Valley social scientists might sort out. Unless, of course, their bosses don’t want them to.

This is the big question: would social scientists actually use their positions in industry to make more egalitarian social networks and more empowering products? Of course there’s always the “for whom?” question when it comes to products and services. Social scientists that study technology know that it isn’t just the people that own, use, or consume goods and services that are affected by their existence. iPhones effect everyone, including those that do not own one or are part of the global assemblage that produces them. Acting in this space as a social scientist butts up against all sorts of confusing and complex social phenomena: the profit motive, techno-utopianism, ludditism, and consumerism just to name a few. For now it suffices to say that such roles are highly contingent. Working for Elsevier is categorically different from working at Microsoft Research Center. I’m not even convinced that working in academia versus working for a corporation is a morally or ethically meaningful distinction.

When weighing the overall gains and losses of social scientists in the for-profit section, we should keep in mind that universities are not bastions of anti-capitalism or mutual aid. Even if you aren’t working in a department that is directly funded by DARPA or Dow Chemical you’re still materially benefiting from your University’s ties to those organizations. As a social scientist you’re probably not getting paid as handsomely as your colleagues in aerospace engineering, but would your employer be solvent without those contracts? Of course corporations and governments have produced a situation in which universities have become financially reliant on problematic institutions, but for the purposes of individuals choosing in the here and now where the greatest good can be done, I think how we got here is a moot point.

For some approaches and pedagogies, I think employment with for-profit enterprises might actually be better than universities if for no other reason that your work might actually effect more people. The hard part is making sure what gets propagated isn’t compromised by problematic interests. Right now, I think academics have a lot of bad options and a handful of acceptable ones that zigzag across academia and industry. Color me naive, but I think the excellent options —the new sorts of organizational forms that will shatter academia as we know it— are right around the corner. So long as we can seek each-other out and come together in small groups through in-person conferences and social media we can build our own academic homes and let the old bureaucracies wither away.

 David is on Twitter and Tumblr. 

As someone working out of a Science and Technology Studies (STS) Department, I was proud to see that Dr. Chris Kelty (Author of Two Bits) had just won a major battle for open access. Kelty is an excellent example of the kind of scholar that reflexively applies the findings of his scholarship to the everyday concerns of his job. As an Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, he studies open source communities and concepts of responsibility in scientific research. As the chair of the UC University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), he just spearheaded one of the largest windfalls for open access publishing.

On July 24, 2013 the University of California Senate approved a state-wide Open Access Policy that will, according to the press release, make all “future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC… available to the public at no charge.”  This is a huge step forward for the Open Access movement because, as the press release goes on to say, 

The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty at all 10 campuses of the University of California, and as many as 40,000 publications a year. It follows more than 175 other universities who have adopted similar so-called “green” open access policies. By granting a license to the University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for future research publications.

…

UC is the largest public research university in the world and its faculty members receive roughly 8% of all research funding in the U.S. With this policy UC Faculty make a commitment to the public accessibility of research, especially, but not only, research paid for with public funding by the people of California and the United States.

While the numbers are impressive (seriously, the UC system produces, every year, somewhere between 2-3% of all peer-reviewed articles in the world) I think the tactic is even more note-worthy. Pledges to boycott for-profit journals (e.g. The Cost of Knowledge) are essential —they organize people across pre-existing and disconnected institutions— but they put a lot of pressure on individuals. It doesn’t seem fair to ask early career scholars to limit their publishing opportunities in the same way as tenured senior faculty, especially when the latter group got to where they are because of a lifetime of publishing in for-profit journals. You could try to organize tenure committees to weight open access journals higher than closed ones, but there’s no good way of coordinating across departments in the same field, except through professional organizations, which usually run the for-profit journal you’re looking to devalue. Good luck with that.

Perhaps the more important question is, do sheer numbers matter at all? If nine out of ten journals were  open tomorrow, but everyone was still striving to publish in the one prestigious, privately-owned journal, should we call that progress? I’m not totally convinced such a scenario would even be possible, but as a thought experiment it highlights one important fact: the OA movement isn’t necessarily about any one journal, or even the publishing industry- its about competing notions of what publishing rigorous inquiry is supposed to accomplish and what role it plays in society. I’m definitely not saying “only supporters of OA are concerned with the free and open exchange of ideas.” Rather, I think OA supporters have a much different view on the means and ends of knowledge production. I don’t think its a coincidence that Kelty, who wrote one of the definitive texts on open source communities, is also deeply concerned with the very basis by which his text (and everyone’s texts) are written, shared, and read.

Just like organic produce and sweatshop-free clothes, open access journals can be more expensive and less compatible with your everyday life, than the conventional, corporate, standard. Its one of the brilliant inventions of late-Capitalism: ethical decisions are sold at a premium. That is why, as I’ve already stated, I think the tactic, more than the impact factor (pun intended), is more newsworthy here. These policy changes make it much easier (if not effortless) for younger professionals to make the right decision. And while today’s tenure committees may still look for those top-tier journals owned by Elsevier, tomorrow’s committees (who led the charge for OA) might not. Then there’s the pure and simple fact that with the freeing up of access to journal content, new organization forms outside of traditional academic positions are possible. Organizations that do not need millions of dollars to buy access to their own published research.

The exact process by which UC faculty comply with this new OA policy is worth a look, although it isn’t particularly unique. over a hundred other individual universities have similar OA policies in place. It works by effectively flipping the status quo from “seek out open access” to “opt out” of open access. There are some that think the opt-out is too easy (see the last bullet point below) but  I think it strikes a nice balance between an individual scholar’s control over her work, and the gentle tyranny of bureaucratic standards that are so effective at changing day-to-day life. Again, I don’t think this is about getting individual articles out into the public per se, so much as it is a very big and loud statement about how scholarship should be done.

You can read about the specifics of the policy in their FAQ.

There are lots of great discussions going on about this decision and OA in general as of late, here are some links:

• This discussion on twitter, responding to danah boyd’s (@zephoria) question about personal commitments to #openaccess.
• Discussion participant Tim McCormick’s (@tmccormick) blog post on open scholar ratings
• TechCrunch’s article on the UC OA Policy has a nice overview of recent OA successes.
• Michael Eisen, co-founder of PLoS, asks that we “not get too excited about the new UC open access policy.” Saying that it’s “toothless” because of the generous opt-out policy which he describes as an “major, major hole”. Similar policies implemented at individual universities have been met with opt-out requirements by publishers including, you guessed it, Elsevier.

Last week I came across an announcement on Facebook that said, “Introducing: The Occupy Money Cooperative.‪ #‎LetsCooperate‬.” At first, I’ll admit, I thought it was a poorly executed joke. Perhaps I’m projecting a little bit, since I’m one of those terrible people that still think occupy jokes puns are funny. (“Occupy toilets!”) Still thinking the link was from Occupy Lulz I clicked on it (maybe it would be funny…?) and was brought to a page that could have been mistaken for the Chase website. The cool blues and abstract shapes scream “financial institution” and the video still looks like it might come from a credit card company. All the distinguishing aesthetic features of finance are there. But this is definitely an Occupy venture, and a serious one at that. Why would a radical leftist movement try to make a bank?

“Bank” is technically (read: legally) not the right word. According to their FAQ page,

The Occupy Money Cooperative, Inc. is a cooperative that will offer access to low cost financial services. We will not take deposits or offer loans, or other such services offered by banks. The Occupy Card will be offered through a bank, and so will be FDIC insured.

OMC is a way to hold money without holding cash. It gives you access to all those things that require a debit card, (buying a cell phone, paying your energy bill, getting your paycheck direct-deposited) but without the exploitative business practices that fuel the cycle of poverty. Its a great idea, maybe one of the best ideas self-identifying Occupiers have had, but it certainly isn’t a brand new one.

Any movement, even if it seeks to radically alter that status quo, must decide how it is going to relate to the existing power structure. You might aim to reform “the system” through existing channels (lawsuits, petitions, etc) or you might opt for more unconventional, extra-legal forms of political self-expression. Occupy (for the most part) opted for the latter, issuing no formal demands and explicitly rejecting American political institutions as fundamentally corrupt or otherwise fatally flawed. This tactic is, by no means, unique to Occupy. As David Graeber writes in his latest book The Democracy Project:

“For most of human history, rejection has been more likely to take the form of flight, defection, and the creation of new communities than of revolutionary confrontation with the powers-that be. Of course, all this is much easier when there are distant hills to run away to and states that had difficulty extending their control over wide stretches of terrain.” (P. 189)

Global financial institutions are a difficult thing to defect from. They are as close to ubiquitous as any human-made organization can be. Despite the neoliberal rhetoric that claims capitalism is about deregulation and the clearing away of government, transnational trade requires a complex scaffold of planetary bureaucracies to function properly. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank exist to make the Earth compatible with high finance. Without these organizations there would be no mechanism that releases $5 billion when you move aluminum from one warehouse to another. From buying food to the War on Terror, global finance regimes are virtually inescapable.

Enter, The Occupy Money Cooperative. Pre-paid debit cards (or any banking, really) are probably the last thing most people would associate with anarchism, and yet the Occupy Money Cooperative is utilizing one of the best time-tested anarchist strategies: divestment. By offering a better alternative to traditional banking, Occupy makes it possible –maybe even desirable– to opt out of corporate banking while suffering minimal damage to one’s own ability to survive. It isn’t a total separation –one could even argue that defection from such an immense sociotechnical system is impossible– but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

For all the talk of “unplugging” and “digital detoxes”, there’s little mention of those sociotechnical systems that follow you against your will. Credit card company servers, healthcare bill collectors, and your landlord’s phone calls will keep coming no matter how much you need a break. As your social status moves to the margins, these sorts of non consensual digital augmentations get more frequent and more intimate. If you think putting up with Instagramed lunches in your news feed is obnoxious, imagine what its like when your food bill is the subject of national debate. Ever been arrested? Ever file for bankruptcy? These digital profiles can’t be deactivated. Debt collectors aren’t going to respect your “digital detox.”

The Occupy Money Cooperative lets individuals test the viability of a radically new society. Its like living your politics in reverse: It lets you try a new economic relation just to see how it feels. Does mutual cooperation and horizontal governance seem like a viable alternative to the abuses of corporate banking? Yes? Maybe you want to seek out and try this in other aspects of your life. Maybe even start something yourself. Start a tool library in your neighborhood. Or a community garden. Organizational forms that once seemed alien or impractical seem that much more realistic.

Scientists have to do something similar every time they propose a new theory or practice. Bruno Latour, in describing Pasteur’s anthrax experiments, said that scientists build theaters of proof to convince their peers of experimental conclusions. You have to provide a convincing scenario wherein the only explanation is your own: Whether you’re trying to prove that fungi come from spores or that mutual aid can replace the profit motive, the best arguments are ones that yield tangible results. They are self-evidently better answers because they do useful work. You make the case for anarchism by demonstrating how it solves a problem in your life better than capitalism ever could.

Science and anarchism have a strained relationship. Marxism and anarchism, in their early (or classical) stages sought to explain the social in the same way physics explained the material. Peter Kropotkin defined anarchism as “a world-concept based upon a mechanical explanation of all phenomena, embracing the whole of nature–that is, including in it the life of human societies and their economic, political, and moral problems.” Post-anarchism, while not something that people may self-identify as or even know the definition of, characterizes much of today’s anarchist-inspired movements. Post-anarchy rejects the scientistic notions of classical anarchism in favor of the post-modern (that’s where the prefix comes from) critique that what we might have called objective and knowable is really just one culturally-situated interpretation.

The Occupy Money Cooperative represents post-anarchism in that it does not present itself as the people’s banking opportunity. It is a working demonstration of a solution to a particular problem, and presented in the “language” of its (for lack of a better word) competitors. The site uses the word “revolution” but not any more than an iPhone app might call itself revolutionary. It bills itself as a “financial service” not the only true and good way for liberated humans to exchange capital. Its a little more approachable, a little more recognizable as a potential part of your life. Anarchists have, for many years, described their work as “building a new society in the shell of the old.” A way to take the hollowed out, meaningless or alienating aspects of the world, and offering something alive, new, and welcoming.  In a high finance-compatible world OMC offers a small shell (shell script?) wherein a slightly different society can grow. Its a small step. Its still fiat currency being exchanged for property rents and poisoned food but that’s what a post-anarchist critique looks like. Any single action is never the complete answer to a problem because no one has all the answers. To presume otherwise is to ignore situated and tacit knowledge, the sorts of esoteric and arcane thats-just-the-way-its-always-been-dones that fill our daily lives. The best projects though, and I think OMC does this well, let us see the cracks in the pavement: they clear the mental cobwebs and free up our imaginations to see more egalitarian and meaningful ways of organizing society.

UPDATE: After posting a story I usually set up a few Twitter searches to keep track of where the story goes and who’s reading it. Having done that I came across a lot of people tweeting this article by Suzahn Ebrahimian that came out last Sunday.  While I stand by some of my analysis –mainly that it is a small step in a better direction that gets people thinking about other forms of organization– I agree with Ebrahimian when she says:

If any one can join in (and people will join, as OWS has an excellent upper hand in branding), then people will take their money out of their local credit unions and put it into the national Occupy Cooperative. I’m not one to stand behind the efforts of credit unions or any bank sponsored community development, but I am a bit confused as to how any communities can be helped locally by consolidating individual resources into a national, centralized blob.

I also should have done due diligence with some of the downright obvious details that should give one pause. For example, the card uses the Visa platform, which seems to sort of negate much of my “defection” points. Also, having looked back over the Board (which the web site says will “eventually” be replaced by voted-in members) there are former employees of Deuche Bank, Blackberry, and the Federal Reserve.

I apologize for not doing my due diligence in many aspects of my analysis, but am still interested in what sorts of new organizational configurations OMC inspires. Whether that be in league with, or in opposition to, the organization.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr

The Occupy Money Cooperative says that anyone that goes to the OMC through this link will be “credited” to me in the form of “Social Capital” but I’m still not totally clear who benefits from that system. 

Here is a list of skills that, as a grad student at one time or another, I’ve been expected to have with absolutely no offered training whatsoever:

• Creative writing
• Public relations writing
• Typesetting
• Sound engineering
• Videography
• Photography
• Graphic design
• Web design
• Film editing
• Institutional procurement
• Professional event catering, with the commerical refrigerator rental and similar related services
• Conference planning and management
• Brand representation on social media
• Copy editing
• Public speaking
• Managing a grade book
• Learning content management systems
• Advanced settings and features of Excel

These skills are not optional for me. I cannot expect to be competitive in the Ph.D job market without possessing at least three quarters of these skills. Through trial and error and the mutual aid of fellow grad students and sympathetic junior faculty (who know what its like and help in spite of the fact that this kind of service won’t go towards tenure) it all gets figured out, but there’s a serious, unsustainable problem here. Don’t get me wrong, there are much more egregious workplace abuses happening around the world, and enjoy an immense amount of privilege in society just by saying that I’ll probably have a Ph.D in a couple of years. I am not claiming that my challenges are the same caliber that fast food workers and Wal-Mart employees have recently started to fight against, but there are some important intersectionalities at play here. Namely, the ill-defined role of the grad student replaces well-paying jobs with privileged students that can afford to work for little money until they are credentialed enough to maintain a destructive status quo. 

First, there’s the simple fact that all of this informal learning takes time. Lots of time. In between reading Foucault or waiting for spores to bloom in petri dishes, a grad student might learn WordPress or Maya. They might spend an hour in a campus computer lab (on the off chance their key card grants them access to this “non-essential” service) learning the entire Adobe Creative Suite or fiddling around with the infamously incomprehensible BlackBoard interface. Once you develop a passing fluency in InDesign or Logic, you have to decide if you want to keep that skill a secret within your department, lest you become known as the go-to person that knows how to make posters, film a speaker, or speak in the arcane language of the Business Office. Its a fine line between establishing your worth in the department –showing off the fruits of your new skill– and becoming the grad student that fills the gaping hole left from the last round of your department’s staff lay-offs. “Oh, can you order the food for next week’s department brownbag? Great! Barbara used to do that before they consolidated the offices.”

Which brings me to the second intersection: Universities are saving a ton of money in this arrangement. Good jobs with health insurance and a decent salary are being replaced by grad students who are desperate to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Our own job descriptions are so vague (if they exist on paper at all) and our employment so tenuous (its common to not know if or how much you’ll get paid from semester to semester) that you can convince us to do just about anything: we’ll work 60, 80, maybe 100 hours a week on things that amount to maybe one line on a CV and another soon-to-be outdated software fluency skill. This is time that could be spent on a second job (if you’re contract lets you even do that) that might supplement your paltry living stipend. A grad student might need the money for all of the supplies and services that she’ll need to buy upfront on her credit card while she waits a few weeks or months for her reimbursement. Or maybe a grad student just needs to buy a new computer, something that every other white-collar corporate job would have waiting for you at your desk. Or $400-worth of books because your cash-strapped library hasn’t procured a recent title in your field since 2007.

Its the darkest of ironies that at precisely the historical moment that the human race need as many people as possible to parse complex problems –climate change, energy crises, lock-jawed governing bodies, and brand new forms of systemic poverty– being a grad student has become something akin to a feudal apprenticeship. You are at a severe disadvantage if you do not have some source of external income and/or a profound gift for writing grants and selling yourself as a professional scholar. It means that the young scions of families that have benefited the most from corporate welfare and oligarchy are the ones that will graduate into the positions of power charged with nothing less than saving our planetary civilization. It means that the large corporate and nonprofit entities that have amassed enormous war chests will be funding and directing the research of those few graduate students that don’t have a personal stake in maintaining an unsustainable status quo.

Lots of different kinds of people can become a graduate student, but those that succeed are more well-to-do. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “The GRE [basically the SAT or ACT of graduate school] is particularly susceptible to the influence of socioeconomic class. ETS’ own research has shown a strong relationship between family background and test scores.” Men tend to do better on the test, independent of other factors, and outside of any kind of predictor of graduate school success. Race factors in as well, but its mostly socioeconomic. The National Center goes on to note that “When family income was held constant, most of the test score differences between races disappeared or shrank dramatically.”

Socioeconomic status (SES) not only predicts one’s chances of getting into graduate school, but it also predicts successful completion. Unlike undergraduate admissions, graduate schools rarely set up admissions procedures that give preference to low SES applicants. In too many peer-reviewed articles to mention,^[1] the most common predictors of success once in a graduate program (regardless of discipline or field) seem to be a mix of race, class, and gender. Even this American Psychological Association article that claims IQ as a major predictor, uses GRE scores as its measure. To which I say, well, look at my previous paragraph.

Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) has written several excellent opinion pieces for Al Jazeera on this subject. Last December she wrote, “One could argue that these problems are limited to a small segment of the population. But when a graduate degree is considered mandatory in so many professions that shape society, who can obtain it and how – and at what cost – matters to everyone.”  She also cites an NSF study [PDF] that shows blacks carry more grad student debt than any other race and women have more debt than men. Cumulatively, blacks have almost twice the amount of student debt than whites.

I say all this after being the benefactor of grants, endowed research programs, and a decent living stipend. (Not to mention all of the cis-white male privilege I enjoy as well.)  I’m relatively comfortable and am grateful for all the opportunities that have been presented to me. I like my department a great deal, and am proud of our collective opus of publications, reports, conferences, workshops and careers. What I’m trying to highlight, and I think the list I opened with does this on its own, is the downright bizarre way the American academy has arranged its labor to the detriment of all. The well-to-do are positioned to succeed in graduate school, but only because they have the time to learn a dazzling array of skills that at one point were the jobs of middle class support staff or the service component of tenure-track faculty. This doesn’t even include the intangible and difficult to define cultural distinction necessary to make it seem as though you belong in the academy to begin with. Or, as Kendzior puts it, “ Higher education today is less about the accumulation of knowledge than the demonstration of status – a status conferred by pre-existing wealth and connections. It is not about the degree, but the pedigree.”

The role of the graduate student needs a serious overhaul, if not for the sake of the graduate students themselves (which, honestly, are doing far better than most in the world) than for the people who would have filled the hundreds of different jobs that grad students  are informally pressured into taking on. Or do it because grad school needs to be seen as and treated like a job in and of itself, not a wobbly stepping stone towards some quickly disappearing professional career. Maybe we could start by removing “student” altogether in favor of “training faculty” or “Professor’s Assistant.” From there we can start deciding whether it makes sense to describe earning a Ph.D as a process of credentialing or just another job with a very peculiar and uncertain form of promotion. Perhaps that would give prospective grad students a better understanding of what they’re getting themselves into.

David Banks is on Twitter and Tumblr

Note: This article discusses virulent racism and white privilege. However, every effort has been made to not post or link to the images discussed below.

At first, I didn’t want to write about the privileged little shits who, sometime around May of last year, got it in their heads that it would be funny to lay facedown on the floor with some skittles and tea and call it #trayvonning. The Zimmerman verdict brought the disgusting meme back into timelines and news cycles, so I feel obliged to make short mention of it. I thought it would be disingenuous of me to write a post for just about every other (1, 2, 3) performative internet meme without mentioning this disgusting bit of racism. #Trayvonning shows up on the usual platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr—albeit I don’t see as much #Trayvonning as I did #standingman or even #eastwooding in its heyday. There are no dedicated web sites to #Trayvonning (although I haven’t checked Stormfront), nor have I ever seen the hashtag reach trending status. If there’s any silver lining to this story it’s the fact that I encountered many more people deriding the meme, than participating in it.

One might be tempted to begin and end this post with the simple observation that performative Internet memes can promote or perpetuate problematic behavior just as easily as it can spread a liberatory or (punching-up) satirical message.  That, however, would ignore the important fact that communication technologies have politics of their own.  How would we describe participatory Internet memes’ politics? Given that memes require a large amount of people and (unless you’re a high-powered marketing firm) aren’t terribly difficult to make (thanks to easy-to-use web-enabled cameras and photo manipulators) it would be safe to call them populist technologies.[1]

Populist technology might be similar in many ways, but different in key respects, to Virginia Eubanks’ term “popular technology.” She defines popular technology as a “problem-posing rather than a problem-solving strategy for achieving equity in the information age.” It also “has as its goal the creation of collective knowledge, the practice of people’s science, and the exercise of power in political movement.” To be clear, Eubanks would describe a participatory design workshop as a popular technology, not the widget that workshop produces. Populist and popular technologies are both approachable and meant to be mastered quickly by non-experts, and they are both effective means of exercising power and creating collective knowledge (no matter how racist or repugnant that knowledge and power might be). And while some memes like #standingman might go towards achieving equity, #Trayvonning certainly does not do that, nor can we call it a “problem-solving strategy.” In short, content is just one part of memes’ politics. Populism is a political means to an end, and that end isn’t always liberatory for all people.

When I started this post, I had hypothesized that incidents of #Trayvonning would trend with increased white and affluent user bases. After all, almost instance of #Trayvonning showed a young white male in relatively nice clothes. But after reviewing Pew Internet’s latest report on the demographics of social media users and doing some unscientific searches for the hashtag on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr I found almost no discernable correlation. I couldn’t find any on Facebook (the most affluent network) and I found a couple on Twitter[2] (one of the more diverse and least affluent network). All networks had posts condemning the meme, although the users who wrote those posts didn’t seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. As far as I could tell, a single Buzzfeed article (not linking to it) contained just about every #Trayvonning incident I found in news stories or on social networking sites. That article pulled most of its photos from Twitter, which again torpedoed my original hypothesis.

#Trayvonning is disturbing, but it teaches us something important about how memes work and what they’re good for. It should be no surprise that performative Internet memes can be used for repulsive jokes. Daniel Tosh has always been good at starting those. What should alarm us is just how easily these modern myths can be conceived of and read. It is a stark reminder (for those of us that live such privileged lives that we need reminding) that callous racism is still rampant, especially in our youngest generation. And while I am still keen on racism as a design problem, there’s absolutely no substitute for a good old-fashioned Jane Elliot-ing.

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran yet another hilariously digital dualist piece on a new surveillance system that lets retailers follow customers’ every move. The systems, mainly through cameras tied into motion capture software, can detect how long you stared at a pair of jeans, or even the grossed-out face you made at this year’s crop of creepy, hyper-sexualized Halloween costumes. The New York Times describes this as an attempt by brick and mortar stores to compete with data-wealthy “e-commerce sites.” (Who says “e-commerce” anymore? Seriously, change your style guide.) Putting aside the fact that most major retailers are also major online retailers, making the implicit distinction in the article almost meaningless, the article completely misses the most important (and disturbing) part of the story: our built environment will be tuned to never-before-seen degrees of precision. We have absolutely no idea what such meticulously built spaces will do to our psyches.

This is an actual thing that was said in our nation’s flagship newspaper:

But while consumers seem to have no problem with cookies, profiles and other online tools that let e-commerce sites know who they are and how they shop, some bristle at the physical version, at a time when government surveillance — of telephone calls, Internet activity and Postal Service deliveries — is front and center because of the leaks by Edward J. Snowden.

Putting aside the larger editorial decision to use “leaks” instead of “revelations” or “disclosed documents by whistleblower” it is beyond obnoxious (even for the business section) to describe people reacting to the dispensing of the information and not the content of the information. Monitoring systems like Nordstrom’s (administered by a company called Euclid which sells the system to large and small businesses alike) [Edit 9/3/19– The We Company now owns Euclid: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/wework-just-acquired-spatial-analytics-platform-euclid-to-bolster-its-software-offerings/] are just the sorts of things that the NSA would intercept and monitor. The problem isn’t that Snowden “leaked” the information and now everyone is “bristling” at the idea of surveillance.  Rather, now it is widely known that the government has built a system that turns us into boundless informants incapable of keeping a secret so long as we come within reach of a networked device, willingly or otherwise.

The very fact that authors Stephanie Clifford and Quentin Hardy make the connection between “the physical version” of surveillance and the digital surveillance conducted by the NSA at all, should alert the reader to just how interwoven the digital and physical truly are. Tracking someone in a store, also means you’re tracking them “online.” It is unfortunate that the journalists asked a computer information systems professor in a business school about the differences between cookies and in-store surveillance systems (certainly he couldn’t have a vested interest in one of these!), rather than a social scientist or someone else that studies the social and legal aspects of surveillance systems. That oversight, however, is more of an indictment of social scientists’ inability to market themselves as people with valuable insights into these matters, than the work of either journalist.

The exaggerated differences between cookies versus cameras, physical versus digital, gives the authors cover to make the digital dualist, overgeneralizing assumption that consumers care more about tracking when it happens in a brick and mortar store than online. This distinction is silly for two reasons:

First of all, there’s a –for lack of a better term—technological literacy issue at play here. A camera in a store and a sign that says your movements are being tracked via your smartphone is easier to understand than the technical definition of a cookie, let alone these new-fangled “super-cookies.” Even if we’re ready to accept using the Internet as a tacit endorsement of corporate online behavior tracking, we should think twice before making a one-to-one comparison between cookies and cameras. One is a poorly described option in your browser setting, the other is a declaration at the front of the store stating, in excruciatingly PR-crafted terms, that your smartphone is telling Nordstrom where you are and what you’re doing in the store at all times.

Second, let’s not confuse the latest battleground in the fight for control over one’s data as a wholesale acceptance of online tracking and total rejection of in store tracking. By coincidence The New Inquiry’s Rob Horning was tweeting about this article just as I had finished reading it. We both quickly agreed on Rob’s point that “tech journalists [are] now reading learned helplessness as a tacit endorsement” of surveillance technology. (You can read the full conversation here.) The article ignores the fact that most browsers not built by a company that also owns a big search engine, have developed strong preference tools that prevent third party tracking and targeted advertising. It also ignores the protracted legal battles surrounding online behavior tracking, and the massive amount of energy put into projects like (I shit you not) “Panopticlick.”

The implications of Euclid’s technology do not stop at surveillance or privacy. Remember, these systems are meant to feed data to store owners so that they can rearrange store shelves or entire showroom floors to increase sales. Malls, casinos with no deposit bonus, and grocery stores have always been carefully planned out spaces—scientifically arranged and calibrated for maximum profit at minimal cost. Euclid’s systems however, allow for massive and exceedingly precise quantification and analysis. More than anything, what worries me is the deliberateness of these augmented spaces. Euclid will make spaces designed to do exactly one thing almost perfectly: sell you shit you don’t need. I worry about spaces that are as expertly and diligently designed as Amazon’s home page or the latest Pepsi advertisement. A space built on data so rich and thorough that it’ll make focus groups look quaint in comparison.

Euclid will enable the construction of highly agentic spaces. Spaces that can discriminate as well as web sites and lull you into a raw, consumerism-fueled love trance faster than one of those pomo Old Spice commercials. They will make casino floors look clumsily thrown together and Apple stores, cluttered. We should be exercising a bit of the precautionary principle with this technology, given that we don’t know what these sorts of spaces will do to people. How will they cause us to act? What sorts of long-term side effects will they be associated with? It would be folly to think that such expertly designed places would do only exactly as they are intended.

We can infer some future consequences by studying the places and populations that are already tightly controlled and designed using similar systems: schools, prisons, government assistance centers, and the entirety of Waziristan. These are places of high stress, low quality of living, and bloated budgets (okay, maybe not that last one when it comes to schools and government assistance centers).  They are inflicted on the under-privileged but they’ll soon be mobilized to sell Beats headphones and argyle socks to the dwindling middle class. This is all pretty funny, in an extremely dark and sardonic way. Not just because of the when-it-happens-to-white-people-its-an-issue-effect, but also because we’ve been doing this to the employees of these stores for decades. From Taylorism, to secret shoppers, and quota systems; the “behind the scenes” command-and-control infrastructure for the service sector has always been equal parts draconian governance and technologically mediated surveillance. Now the customers will enjoy the same sort of control.

David is on Twitter (@da_banks) and Tumblr.

I “Like” CNN on Facebook. Not because I enjoy getting the news on my Facebook feed (my friends do that) but because I love watching a bunch of people hate on CNN. As the above photo demonstrates, CNN tends to show its ass a lot. Asking your readers about the Royal Family’s baby on the 4^th of July, will undoubtedly piss off a dozen different demographics. It is constantly being called out for doing all of the things we know are wrong with American cable news. There are dozens, in some cases even hundreds, of comments about calling a revolution a coup, ignoring the important parts of stories, and generally missing the mark when it comes to stewarding and curating these weird things we generally call “national conversations.” I just want to know why CNN chooses to subject their brand to such public, naked criticism on a daily basis.

The quick answer has to do with controlling the meta conversation about conversations. If you can gather up all the people who are talking about your coverage in one place that you control, you’re generally in a better position to steer that debate. Giving people a venue to vent offers great market research while simultaneously showing that you can take criticism like a Grownup Journalist. You might even hire some interns to argue with critical viewers in the comments.[1]

There’s also a chance that CNN doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Facebook has done an excellent job of convincing everyone that having an “Internet presence” means having a Facebook page. Bruno Latour might say that Facebook has become an “obligatory point of passage” for being on the Internet. Wouldn’t it be weird of CNN had a Twitter account, a Pinterest, and a Tumblr but no Facebook presence? They would come off as outdated or clueless, especially if their competition had Facebook pages.

Facebook might have a monopoly on what it means to have an Internet presence, but as it stands right now, viewers seem to gain more than they loose from this scenario. The affordances of the platform let us see each other reacting to CNN’s reporting and, on the whole, the reactions are not happy ones. It is good to see each other being angry and frustrated about cable news. After all, mainstream media doesn’t necessarily try to convince you of a particular mainstream ideology, so much as it encourages you to think everyone else already believes in and shares that ideology. A Facebook page full of angry and disaffected commenters makes it hard to keep up the farce. At the same time however, the millions of “Likes” seem to add popular credibility to CNN’s brand. We wouldn’t be engaging with the page at all if we didn’t think it was important, or that millions of people are still uncritically accepting of their coverage.

Facebook pages make consuming CNN a public act, and it is that publicness that erodes the false political center they are constantly building. Not every topic has a middle road that every Reasonable Person can agree on, nor does any particular journalist have a totally objective View from Nowhere that is free of bias. Rather we have subject positions, prejudices, ideologies, private and public interests that color our view on stories that we read and write. When we talk to each other (watching talking heads do it doesn’t count) we can get outside of our own heads and see things differently. Or, perhaps more importantly and immediately, we can see how much we have in common when it comes to our dissatisfaction with the state of news reporting.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr