If you live in the United States and have been adjacent to something with the news on it, you have probably heard of the “Fiscal Cliff.” The fiscal cliff refers to several major tax breaks and earned benefit compensation programs that were set to expire at the end of 2012 unless Congress raised the debt ceiling. One of the few good things to come out of this manufactured crisis was some excellent reporting on the power of metaphor in politics. The ability to spur action and drive public opinion while offering next-to-no information demonstrates the awesome power of metaphors. Most people did not know why we were falling off the cliff, what the cliff was made of, or what the consequences for falling would be. Slate’s Lexicon Valley covered this phenomenon in an episode last month titled  “Good is Up.” Co-hosts Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield dissected the cliff metaphor using the classic book, Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Vuolo and Garfield note, “‘Success is rising’ and ‘failing is falling.’ Lakoff believes these primal, spatial metaphors form what he calls a ‘neural cascade’ that he says is ‘so tightly integrated and so natural that we barely notice them, if we notice them at all.'” In short, we might not understand what goes into creating or averting the fiscal cliff, but we know it should be avoided. Going down is bad, and staying up is good. The episode got me thinking about similar spatial metaphors and the work they do in our augmented society. One of the more ubiquitous metaphors is “high tech.” Is high tech “good” technology? Or is it high in the same way the Anglican Church uses the word; steeped in conservative traditions and formal code? 

What do we mean when we say “high tech?” Usually it has something to do with computers, but really complicated science also seems to fit. We would call nano-scale bioengineering high tech, or maybe pharmaceutical research. High tech is usually not civil engineering (unless we are talking about the highway operations center or “smart” parking), language (even though it is a technology), or carpentry. High tech is a nebulous, contestable term, but its associated imagery is remarkably uniform: blue and white swirls and streaks overlaid with floating sets of numbers, lines, molecules, and circuit boards. The disembodied hands are always white and the globes always show the western hemisphere. Writing your top 10 list of “high tech grills”? Then half of your stock grill image should be a glowing blue microchip. If you were to write a definition of high tech based on these images it would read: “blue-tinted gaseous substance, sometimes luminescent, emitted by ethernet cables that mark the arrival of humungous white people that want to poke continents. (See figure at top of page.)”

Where did the term “high technology” come from? A Wikipedia contributor, on the article’s talk page, offers this clue: “The band Love released an album called Cybertracks in 1966 with the words “HI-TECH ELECTRONIC MUSIC” on the cover. It’s not definitive, but I mention it in case it helps.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites Agar and Tate’s Who Owns America? as the first instance of the phrase, which is used to describe mass production of goods in factories. Who Owns America? originally published in 1936 was a popular conservative rebuttal to the New Deal reforms instituted by the Roosevelt administration. Anyone that has uttered the words “wealth redistribution” with a healthy dose of sincere disgust has been influenced (indirectly) by this book. Despite the text’s popularity, it seems as though conservative intellectuals were alone in their use of high technology for another three decades.

Google Ngram viewer shows the terms “high technology” (with and without a hyphen) and “high tech” coming into widespread usage in the seventies and peaking between the years of 1987 and 1988. Today’s authors use all three versions about as often as authors used “high technology” in 1976.

High tech, while usually used as a positive modifier today (i.e. “High tech gadgets that make your life easier!”) was originally used to describe an unwanted development. For Agar and Tate, High technology is something inaccessible and uncontrollable by the common person. High technology is alienating; a tool of big government to remove political and economic power from private citizens. How can a metaphor effectively convey both good and bad? We might simply write this off as a difference in opinion over complexity and technical organization. Some people like high tech, and some do not. But a metaphor can spread out in different directions. The “neural cascade” described by Lakoff and Johnson can branch out in different, sometimes opposite, directions. Lakoff and Johnson would consider the term “high tech” an example of an orientational metaphor. These are metaphors that make use of our shared embodied experiences (we all experience gravity, for example) to convey a certain idea about one subject’s relationship to an overall system.  The authors provide a list of attributes widely associated with “up” in Western contexts:

• Happy (spirits are high)
• Conscious (wake up)
• Health or life (top shape, peak of health)
• Control or force (one has control over something)
• More (production is up)
• Foreseeable future events (upcoming events)
• High status (lofty position)
• Good (things are looking up)
• Virtue (high standards)
• Rational (as opposed to emotional- we rise above our emotions)

It is important to note that the above bulleted list is not a matter of simple word association. These connections are linguistic, but they are also cognitive. By describing something as high tech you are not only associating it with power, and control, you are also reestablishing the social values that embue the object with those attributes. Would if we replaced all instances of high tech with “complex technology” or “controlling technology.” These might be passable descriptors in some instances, but it does not have the cultural cache of high. High tech is a reward, a sign of success, and an upgrade from whatever you had before the high tech gadget came along. The utterance of the metaphor high tech justifies the existence of the object it describes. Low tech solutions are poor, uncontrollable, and provide no control over the forces of nature that they are supposed to tame. High technology is associated with the future and, as Leo Marx has shown, sometimes we mistake new technological achievements for social progress.

This very basic metaphor: high is happy/good/powerful/rational is very different from the more deliberate kinds of metaphors that are used to describe the relationship between two objects. For example, the Master-Slave metaphor found throughout computer science and mechanical engineering has a very specific history and is almost always used to describe a hierarchical relationship within a technical system. Ron Eglash has charted the history of the metaphor and postulates, “the master-slave metaphor is attractive to engineers because its free use ‘proves’ that they inhabit a nonsocial or culture-free realm, which is a matter of professional pride.”  Eglash is describing what Haraway would call the “view from nowhere”: the notion that professionals view a problem based on objective criteria and never their own personal background or standpoint. If we were to ask a sample of engineers whether they thought the high tech metaphor was useful, accurate, or desirable, I suspect we would get a bunch of “that’s just what its called.” We would not hear about its connotations to patriarchal concepts of rationality or control.

These connections are, of course, just the beginning to a thought process. The “neural cascade” might encourage us to look at our new gadget in an uncritical way, but we are not inextricably bound to see iPhones as good and weaving looms as bad. By recognizing that the words we use to describe whole categories of technology can subtly influence our decision-making, we can regain control over our own creation. Just as we tend to avoid cliffs, we are also in favor of being happy, healthy, and good. Perhaps the answer is simply to redraw the boundaries around what we call “high tech.” An awesome cross-stitch pattern or an innovative work organization scheme could be high tech. We might desire more control or wish to make a calculated and rational decision, but we would be mistaken to think that a gadget will automatically give it to us.

Follow (well that’s a loaded metaphor!) me on Twitter: @da_banks

E. Gabriella Coleman’s new book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2012, Princeton University Press) is an ethnography of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) hackers working on the Debian Linux Operating System. It is a thorough and accessible text, suitable for  someone unfamiliar with open source software or coding. It would make an excellent addition to an IT and Society 101 course syllabus, or a reading group on alternative work organization. Coleman’s greatest achievement in this text, however, is not the accuracy of her depiction, but the way in which she dissects the political and economic successes of the open source community. By claiming absolute political neutrality, but organizing work in radical ways, contributors to F/OSS “sit simultaneously at the center and margins of the liberal tradition.” (p. 3) Coleman argues that while F/OSS, “is foremost a technical movement based on the principles of free speech, its historical role in transforming other arenas of life is not primarily rooted in the power of language or the discursieve articulation of a broad political vision. Instead, it effectively works as a politics of critique by providing a living conterexample…” (p. 185)

Throughout Coding Freedom Coleman provides incredibly concise, easily understandable definitions or explanations of key concepts. In just one or perhaps two sentences, the reader is equipped with an easily transportable set of vocabulary words that might bring richness and depth to what would normally be a shallow treatment of a complex idea. These small definitions keep her analysis coherent, and her audience engaged. I am making extended note of it upfront, because it is such an important skill and is woefully absent from most writing. What could have been a dense and daunting tome, is an inviting 254 page paperback. Her treatment of neoliberalism is an excellent example of her skill: “Neoliberalism champions the rights of individuals, deems monopolies regressive, and relishes establishing a world free of national boundaries with little or no friction (Ong 2006). In practice, however, the actual instantiation of neoliberal free trade requires active state intervention, regulation, and monopolies (Harvey 2005; Klein 2008).” p. 73 Coding Freedom makes excellent and quick use of a wide variety of concepts including but not limited to, Marcusian pure tolerance, Heideggerian things and objects, Goffman’s “face work”, and Latour and Woolgar’s inscription device. Coleman also draws from Graeber, Benjamin, Lakoff, Kelty, Rabinow, Arendt, and Galloway to make her argument.

Coleman opens with a composite life story of the “typical” hacker, composed from 70 interviews both in person and over email and IRC.  It describes a person (usually a man, and Coleman notes this by using the male pronoun throughout the chapter) who, at an early age, was intrigued by the inner-workings of engineered objects. Home appliances were dis-assembled and phone lines were held up for hours as the budding hacker sought out like-minded people on BBSs. Once the burgeoning hacker has enough money of how own, he goes to his first con. Debian conferences (Debconfs) are an eclectic mix of people and activity. Competitions, presentations, and raucous parties are typical. (Personally, It was surprising to hear how much Theorizing the Web and Debconfs have in common. Apparently TtW isn’t the only conference with augmented audiences: “At the con, these networked and virtual technologies [mostly IRCs] exist in much the same way they ordinarily do. Rarely used in isolation or replace the ‘meat world’ they augment interactivity.” [p.51])

Hackers, despite their monolithic media portrayal as vaguely anarchist loners, are a politically and socially diverse community. In fact, the only shared commitment Coleman was able to identify was a commitment to what she calls productive freedom. “This term designates the institutions, legal devices, and moral codes that hackers have built in order to autonomously improve on their peers’ work, refine their technical skills, and extend craftlike engineering traditions.” (p.3) Hackers have a wide range of political beliefs, life histories, and motivations for creating free software. Some see F/)SS as a cutting-edge business strategy, others see it as an orienting and all-encompassing political philosophy, all (by definition as well as institutional enforcement) agree that users have a right to do whatever they like to the software, so long as they do not impede on others’ rights to do the same. While primarily interested in coding for computers, hackers invariably and unavoidably develop a passable knowledge of intellectual property (IP) law. More prolific and successful hackers typically find themselves dealing with law as much as code. Many begin to recognize the two as intimately intertwined.

The importance of understanding, or even altering, IP law is a prerequisite for cutting edge F/OSS development. Code alone was not, and continues to be necessary but not a sufficient condition for maintaining F/OSS. Chapter two charts the rise of free software, but the story is more legal than technical. F/OSS represents, according to Coleman, an innovation in law, as well as computing. Richard Stallman GNU Project was a triumph of law as much as computer code. F/OSS could not exist without alternative IP law and the underlying jurisprudence was crucial to understanding the technical workings of F/OSS . Coleman notes, “The majority of the hackers I interviewed … came to free software at first merely for the sake of affordable, better-built technology and had little knowledge about the existence, much less the workings, of intellectual property law.” (p. 71) We learn later on, in Chapter 4, that such blissful ignorance is quickly dashed once a hacker applies to be a Debian developer. All developers go through a rigorous New Maintainers Process (NMP). The NMP is a “procedure of mentorship and testing through which perspective developers apply for and gain membership in Debian. Fulfilling the mandates of the NMP is not a matter of a few days of filling out forms. It can take months of hard work.” (p.124) NMP not only tests for practical coding skills, but also asks candidate developers to, in their own words, explain the importance of and justification for F/OSS. These long-form answers, which are reviewed and critiqued in an almost talmudic fashion, ensures that regular contributors to Debian have a working knowledge of the Debian Social Contract. While the Social Contract deals explicitly with issues of governance and orienting philosophy, it also includes the Debian Free Software Guidelines which act as a set of bare-minimum requirements for Debian software packages. Both documents are constantly referenced and interpreted, especially in instances of crisis or ethical ambiguity. Coleman, shows how Debian developers “commit themselves to an ethical vision through, rather than prior to, their participation in a F/OSS project.” (p.123)

As mentioned earlier, Coleman’s greatest achievement is her contribution to political theory. She argues that F/OSS hackers, by effectively arguing that code is speech, were able to marshal the rhetorical (and legal) power of classical liberal ideals. This seemingly esoteric debate was actually a powerful critique of the fundamental precepts of liberal democracy: the rights of private property and free speech were in direct contradiction and must be reconciled.  In defending the “hacker lifeworld” hackers and their legal compatriots (i.e. Stallman and Lessig) showed how free speech/software could exist alongside a new kind of property ownership regime. Hackers were engaging in what Coleman describes as “a material politics of cultural action.” (p. 185) The very act of producing free software is “an embedded critique of the assumptions that dominate the moral geography of intellectual property law.” (p.186) Essential to hackers’ success was the quality of their final product. By performing and living their politics, hackers demonstrated that their critique of liberal politics was the correct one. The result was a massive transformation of intellectual property law that, while not complete, has made remarkably large and quick changes. Coding Freedom concludes with a measured and very precise description of the limits of these tactics and the questions it raises about radical and reformist politics.

Demonstrate your politics through action. Follow me on twitter!: Da_banks

“There is no such thing as ‘getting it right,’ only ‘getting it’ differently contoured and nuanced. When experimenting with form, ethnographers learn about the topic and about themselves what is unknowable, unimaginable, using prescribed writing formats.” –Laura Richardson “A Method of Inquiry” In The Handbook of Qualitative Research (1991, p. 521)

“The major issue is how to use the variety of available textual formats and devices to reconstruct social worlds and to explore how those texts are then received by both the cultural disciplines and the social worlds we seek to capture.” Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffey in Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique After Postmodernism (1995, p. 49)

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“It’s a good thing you’re a volunteer then, since you’d make an awful employee.”

“To hell with you!” They both glowered at each other like a pair of hungry house cats eyeing the same can of tuna. It was 10:34PM, the printer was out of toner, and this meeting was going nowhere. In the next room someone was watching a youtube video with lots cussing and something that sounded like a revving truck engine. The florescent lighting made everyone look sallow and empty.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying the numbers worry me. There’s nothing in here that’ll guarantee a win in Cuyahoga or Franklin county.” Jeffrey motioned with an open hand to a printed excel spreadsheet on the table, the tips of his fingers briefly jabbing the top page before going back to their default position as support beams for his head. Jeffrey always held his head in his right hand when he was feeling attacked. He thought it made him look unaffected.

“So you’re saying I can’t take five people off the phones to go buy supplies for the rally?” Susan leaned forward in her chair and made a face halfway between exasperation and confusion.

“Its not a rally Susan, we’re calling it a storm relief event. The supplies are for people displaced by Sandy, remember?”

“I don’t care if we call it a sympathy ploy extravaganza! Its gonna look bad if no one brings anything to this event. We called it at the last minute and there’s no good way to secure participation. We have to have something for people to give Mitt in front of the media.” Everyone else at the table became intensely interested in their email. The intern went to start another pot of coffee. He knew when it was needed.

“Fine. Do it. Take the college kids though. They suck on the phones anyway.” Susan broke her granite stare and looked down at her legal pad. She scribbled down a few words, put her pen behind her left ear, and wordlessly left the table for, what the paid staff unaffectionately called “the corral.” Susan’s silhouette darkened the doorway and the three remaining Ohio State students looked up from their make-shift desks.

“C’mon, we have to buy hurricane supplies at Wal-Mart for the event tomorrow.”

“Really? I didn’t think it was going to be that bad here.” Paul was always slow on the uptake. He never read emails

“Its to give out at the rally. For the cameras and shit. We give them the stuff and they give it to Mitt.” Amanda was very savvy. She had a dedicated blackberry for work.

Susan had picked Amanda after her answer to the first (and what ended up being the only) interview question: “Why do you want to work for the Mitt Romney campaign?” Amanda had been making textbook eye contact with Susan, her head tilted slightly to indicate legitimate thought.

“Because reality no longer appeals to my generation.” Susan’s head cocked back in surprise but Amanda continued. “Everyone knows that they’re either being lied to, or that the truth is what you make of it. Or maybe… A better way to put it is that everyone knows that there are two ways of looking at everything and when you hear one person say it a particular way, it either resonates with you or it doesn’t. If you are going to change minds, or at least convince people that your interpretation of the world is correct, you have to tell them something that resonates with them. Even if you’re a millionaire and you have to explain your plan for food stamps or whatever, you have to show them that you understand what it means to live with food stamps and what’s important to people who get food stamps. Anyone that says they know the ‘real’ way people live with food stamps comes off as suspicious because everyone knows that politicians are too out of touch to really know. So you’re obviously faking it. Better to say what you think is important for people with food stamps. Not what you know is important (Atkinson & Coffey, 1995).”

“What’s important to people who get food stamps?” Susan tapped her pen on her clipboard, trying to make it seem as if Amanda still had to work for the job.

“Food, probably.”

This girl is hired. Susan thought. It had been non-committal, four-month long, possible letter of recommendation-worthy love at first sight. The others had not been quite as promising. The current conversation reminded Susan of this disparity. Paul was being a realist.

“Would if someone notices?” Paul, in many ways, was a genius. It was his only weakness. He made a sweeping glance of everyone at the room, ending on Susan.

“If they do, it’ll play well on ThinkProgress for a news cycle. We don’t expect the network news to even run the story. If they do, it’ll be a smaller story than if we do a campaign event when The Other Guy is looking presidential, coordinating relief efforts with a Republican governor.”

“Bob McDonnell?”

“No Jason, you dipshit. Chris Christie.” Amanda was terse, but effective. Susan liked that about her. She also liked her penchant for checking emails on time.

“Oh… Okay. So we’re gonna lie to everybody about the donations so that we are just as good as Obama talking to Chris Christie?” Paul’s relentless realism was almost too much to bear. He, often accidently, revealed underlying assumptions that made easy decisions seem complicated. This was why he would end up in the NGO sector, never making into the big leagues of political parties.

Amanda quickly swiveled in her chair and shot Jason a look of visible disdain that quickly morphed into a look of honest self-doubt. She began looking at the ground: her eyes seemed to search for answers in the stained carpet. Susan was afraid of this. Sometimes inane requests for clarification led to profound and undermining realizations. Institutional momentum would prevail but countervailing winds were, nonetheless, unwelcome.

Paul had made a nasty habit of accidently disturbing campaign staffers with basic questions about messaging and the Mitt Romney brand. Questioning the narrative of the campaign—or any dominant narrative, really– was an affront to power (Atkinson & Coffey, 1995). It meant playing with the very essence of what changes minds and influences decision-making. The power to scaffold and shape voters’ opinions is wrapped up in the metaphors we live by and the unconscious connections we make between our lived experiences and abstract moral principles (Richardson, 1991). To accidently trip over such high-voltage power lines was dangerous and deeply troubling. Susan would have to send him on more coffee runs and less phone banking. Regardless of her future plans for job assignments, she would have to discourage this kind of behavior immediately. “You are about as useful as a bible at the DNC, Paul.” Paul looked genuinely hurt, but his cluelessness would soften the landing. Amanda snickered and did a bad job of hiding it.

“I remember reading once in class about this guy named George Lakoff and he says that metaphors are everywhere (Richardson, 1991)! They’re all around us and shape the way we think and act. It was super cool. I guess that means you’re really religious or something.” That was Laura. Laura was hired after the other applicants’ Facebook profiles revealed copious drinking and racist Halloween costumes. Susan would never make that mistake again.[1] Susan suspected that while her peers were out dressing like sexy whatevers[2] and stereotypical minorities,[3] Laura was locked away in her dorm emailing her professors about her latest revelation related to the assigned reading.  “You use a lot of religious metaphors and you are a part of the demographic that always goes to church, so it’s pretty obvious.” She was also good with spreadsheets.

“Thank you Laura, but that’s not what we’re talking about right now.” Laura kept smiling vacantly but nodded her head in confirmation. She began typing. Susan could expect an email from her in the next five minutes. Laura was better—or maybe just different—in text than while speaking. It gave her more time to think and less opportunity to make unproductive connections. Perhaps if she gave orders now, she could interrupt the email as well. “Grab your debit cards and your jackets, we’re going to Wal-Mart.”

As Susan pulled out of the parking lot and stared out onto the two bustling lanes of on-coming traffic she, in spite of herself, began to dissect the events of the last hour.  She had no problem with the constant political spin and the constant responses to the overtly political actions of the “other side.” She agreed with Amanda that reality was in the eye of the beholder. That it was more effective to get a firm grasp on and understand your subject as well as your audience. As a political strategist, a copywriter, or even one of those damn university professors (she assumed) you had to get to know people, but also tell their story the way they tell it to you. Change it only as much as it takes to make it digestible to your target demographic. Nothing comes off as more dishonest, fake, and misleading as someone coming to you with the Absolute Truth. No one believed in that anymore. Not when there are such great stories to tell.

The above story is fiction any semblance to real or existing persons or events is purely ideological. Follow me on twitter? da_banks

Don’t tell the Israel Defense Force (IDF) that sharing videos from your Twitter account is ineffectual. They will point to their two-hundred thousand twitter followers that have generated 35 million views on their official Youtube account. They will extoll the virtues of a ruthlessly efficient and effective ad campaign that invites participation without the young Israeli even knowing they are engaged in two wars: a war of flesh as well as a war of mind. Granted, the IDF is no Justin Beiber, but it is hard to deny the impact of the IDF’s 30-person social networking team. The IDF’s social media savvy has not gone unnoticed. Technology and business publications have been more than happy to publish uncritical, lengthy interviews of top officials. This meta-propaganda usually begins by noting that Pillar of Defense was first announced through Twitter. The conversation will then turn to their complete arsenal: (Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, Pintrest, and even Google+) before commenting on their brief tweet confrontations with Hamas. All of this happens almost apolitically. Every news pieces calls it propaganda, and yet it still has a powerful aesthetic and rhetorical effect. Social media is the Abrams tank of propaganda. Messages must navigate the harsh terrains of corporate and government-owned mass media and arrive safely in the minds of citizens. Unedited, unfiltered, pure. Social media can trample news cycles, navigate the minefields of editorial desks, and maintain total media superiority in the vacuum of Western under-reporting. 

First, it is worth noting the similar language used to describe both social media and geopolitical conflict: campaigns, coverage, deployments, and engagement are common words used to describe a Twitter branding effort as well as a ground assault on a city. Military officers treat the media landscape like a battlefield and are constantly adapting to the idiosyncrasies of augmented warfare. Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich of the IDF told Buzzfeed that their Twitter strategy was to “respect the rules of engagement of that specific platform.”  That means carefully following the terms of service and threatening the enemy with the detached, non-committal tone of a high schooler promising not to procrastinate. It is transparent, but maintains a necessary lie that keeps the relationship stable. The Atlantic’s Brian Fung later observed, “It’s an interesting turn of phrase, taking a traditionally military concept and applying it — so appropriately, as social media curators are always seeking ‘engagement’ — to digital communications platforms.” The language is eerily similar, and it is difficult to tell which came first, the war-like metaphors or their isomorphic sociotechnical structures. My analysis in this case is largely agnostic on this point for one simple reason:  In times of war and empire, engaging one’s followers has always been just as important as engaging the enemy. Bloodshed has always been bookended by healthy doses of propaganda. Winning hearts and minds is as old as war itself. Selling the war –to potential draftees, to your allies, and to the opposition– has always taken the form of the dominant media platform of the day. We should have all expected, in the words of Huw Lemmy, “War 2.0 [to look like] the early drafts of a footwear campaign or a coffee franchise loyalty card scheme.”

Such reasoning sounds like technological determinism, but it is actually quite the opposite. Almost all of the interviews with IDF spokespeople describe an uninterested senior staff that are unconvinced of social media’s efficacy. It is only after pet projects produce tangible results that real resources are devoted to setting up and maintaing a social media presence. In an interview with Fast Company, Eytan Buchman (the head of the North American division of the IDF Spokesperson’s unit) describes the genesis of their social media division as if he were pitching a new iPhone app to a venture capital firm:

When flexibility and innovation reaches the communications world, suddenly it opens up new horizons. A number of years ago, one of our soldiers inside the foreign press branch suggested that we try to increase our social media presence. Initially, it was very grassroots inside the military. At one point, a soldier paid for a WordPress account using her own credit card just to get it off the ground instead of dealing with the military bureaucracy.

In the space of only a couple of years, it blossomed into a full-size branch with people who deal with all different forms of mediums–interactive mediums on a variety of platform and a variety of languages.

In doing research for this piece, I came across a Facebook conversation between Nathan Jurgenson and The New Inquiry’s editor Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen). They were discussing the previously mentioned Lemmy article on Facebook, and Chen made the excellent point that Lemmy, “doen’t distinguish between the official instagram photos put out by the IDF and the ones just taken by soldiers on their personal accounts.” Chen’s critique highlights one of the most important features of social media as propaganda. The “blossoming” described by Buchman can be read not only as an acknowledgement of social media’s power to deliver unedited propaganda to a global audience, but also as a revelation that propaganda can be crowdsourced. The state can conscript your body as well as your Instagram photos. The state military apparatus owns your augmented self, and it will use it as a weapon of awesome rhetorical and aesthetic power. As Lemmy describes it: “’These are the photos you would take if you served in the IDF,’ the aesthetic says, ‘we are just like you, and these military decisions are the ones you would take, if you were in our situation.'”

The picturesque self-documentation of the soldier, according to Lemmy and Jurgenson, creates a nostalgia for a battle-not-yet-finished. It appears as though it has already happened: decided, and valorized. This distance in time is bolstered by the social distance from state military authority. These dual psychological distances confer a deep sense of authenticity that can only come from a self-portrait.  The result is near-perfect propaganda: personal, authentic, automatic, far-reaching, and instant. The speed by which military decisions can be contextualized and justified by formal and informal social media is the “killer app” of state-sponsored slacktivism. Within minutes, an entire soundscape of opinions, apparent first hand accounts, and official statements paints a picture of valiant defense against a ruthless enemy. Paul Virilio describes speed as the decisive advantage in war:

Speed is the hope of the West; it is speed that supports the armies’ morale. What ‘makes war convenient’ is transportation, and the armored car, able to go over every kind of terrain, erases the obstacles. With it, earth no longer exists. Rather than calling it an “all terrain” vehicle, they should call it “sans terrain” –it climbs embankments  runs over tress, paddles through mud, rips out shrubs and pieces of wall on its way, breaks down doors. It escapes the old linear trajectory of the road or the railway. It offers a whole new geometry to speed, to violence. [Emphasis in original.]

Social media is the sans terrain vehicle of augmented warfare. It escapes the linear trajectory of the radio signal or the press release. It offers a whole new geometry to speed, to propaganda. Pillar of Defense has been under-reported in the United States, and the IDF’s social media is filling the information vacuum. As Joseph Flatley wrote in The Verge:

The latest Israeli offensive on Gaza is currently in its second day, and if you’re following the events you can get your news from a number of sources. Of course, the usual American news organizations are keeping an eye on the situation, and any major updates will make it onto their newsfeeds. (ABC News, for instance, has placed an item about yesterday’s hit on Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari beneath a story about a baboon that befriended a kitten in a zoo.) For those of you that prefer by-the-minute coverage, the Web 2.0 tradition of “liveblogging” is another alternative. RT America is doing a pretty good job with its effort, while I must admit that I’m a little disappointed by Al Jazeera’s liveblog, which has had but one sparse update all night. But the liveblog that captured our attention today is being maintained by the IDF itself.

IDF’s tweets and blog posts are a running tally of rockets and resources. Hamas rocket attacks are crucial for justifying military action and painting the enemy as an unfeeling terrorist. Too many rockets and the IDF seems ineffectual. Too few rockets, and people start questioning your occupation. The result is somewhat contradictory and paradoxical: the IDF’s anti-missile defense strategy (aka Iron Dome) is described as extremely effective but is never depicted as impervious. In fact, daily rocket counts always include how many rockets they failed to intercept:

In last four days, nearly 500 rockets fired from #Gaza hit #Israel – another 267 were intercepted by the Iron Dome system.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 18, 2012

Some numbers from the last 3 days: 492 rockets fired from #Gaza hit #Israel + 245 Iron Dome interceptions = 737 rockets fired at us

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 17, 2012

809 rockets fired from Gaza hit #Israel + 389 Iron Dome interceptions = 1,198 rockets fired at us #IsraelUnderFire

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 20, 2012

The IDF Facebook page is slightly less deprecating and omits the missed rockets. It also asks the reader to “like” their multi-million dollar anti-missile defense system. The critical comment hanging at the bottom of the propaganda serves to affirm the idea of the state as a peace keeping body, not as an occupying force. It will not censor its citizens or detractors because that is something done by governments with something to hide. More pragmatically, it is better to “engage the enemy” on your own turf where you can rest assured that fans will defend you and Facebook will collect everyone’s data. You have the higher ground.

While you might have the higher ground, the home field advantage, you must still follow the “rules of engagement.” The IDF’s assassination video of Hamas commander Ahmad Jabari was removed from YouTube but, according to the Associated Press, “Google Inc., which owns Youtube,… reconsidered and restored it.” The high ground is not totally safe. It has its own set of unique dangers. The IDF has warned citizens to turn off the geotracking when using Twitter and Instagram near Hamas strike zones. The high ground metaphor begins to break down, when we consider who is granted access to this position of power. While the IDF tweets from an officially verified account, Hamas’ own @AlqassamBrigade is under constant threat of banishment. The allotment of American-made information technology follows the paths of our weapons technology: the lion’s share goes to the Israeli military and, despite the government’s best efforts, some of it gets to Palestine. But just as weapons manufactures find loopholes to sell their wares to the markets that demand them, social media companies will get their services in the hands and modems of as many people as possible. After all, the Tweets Must Flow.

Social media is a major development in the creation and delivery of propaganda. It can avoid the editor’s desk and reach the discerning eye of the cynical news reader with its authenticity in tact. It can be called out as propaganda, and still “work” because it also serves as the arena for political debate. “Perhaps our own messaging won’t persuade you, but your fellow Facebook users might.” The “blossoming” of informal and undirected social media content –Instagramed photos of teenagers reporting for duty and Facebook posts from shell-shocked homes– convince even some of the most skeptical. No single post will have this effect, thus it is the institutional orchestration and curation of social media that is crucial to gaining the most benefit from social media. Without the attention to organizing individual efforts, the messages appear as disjointed blathering. It is only in the aggregate, indeed in the act of aggregating itself, that states (and yes, even social movements) produce coherent and effective propaganda campaigns. Without the collective effervescence  you are just another person yelling on the Internet, not getting anything done.

About this time last year I asked our readers, “why we don’t criticize other things like we criticize the internet?” It seemed like a fitting topic for the season; we utilize some of the most resource-intensive technologies at our disposal so that we may enjoy egg nog with old friends or taste grandma’s famous Thanksgiving day turkey. Everyone wants to be near their loved ones for the holidays, and so begins a massive effort to transport ourselves in cars, trains and planes until we arrive at our optimal holiday season arrangements. It is a wonder, then, why we spend so much of our lives outside of this optimal arrangement. What kind of relationship do we have with our immediate surroundings? Not just the people, but the technologies and the patterns. There is a lot of excellent work on carbon footprints, local food movements, and walkable communities but I hear comparatively little about who is capable of making this transition. What does opting out of the status quo truly entail?  Like many problems of the modern era, we have a decent amount of data, but not a lot of actionable alternatives to remediate the situation. There is a lot of data, for example, that shows that Americans are less happy and more lonely than ever before. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the usual go-to empirical text for white people that are afraid of dying alone, has this to say on the matter:

Countless studies document the link between society and psyche: people who have close friends and confidants, friendly neighbors, and supportive co-workers are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping… The single most common finding from a half century’s research on the correlates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world, is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one’s social connections. (P. 332)

The general thesis of the book contends that the sources of social connectedness: bowling leagues, quiet hometown bars, and other kinds third places are going away as we run low on time, live further away form one-another, and consume mass media. More recent studies however, (Bowling Alone was published in 2000) have shown that the Internet will have a much more positive impact on our social lives than Putnam originally thought. According to Pew Internet: “The internet lowers traditional communications constraints of cost, geography, and time; and it supports the type of open information sharing that brings people together.” Anecdotally, I can attest to the simple pleasures of keeping in touch with friends and family across the country. If the Internet went down, or I chose to go without it, I would lose quite a bit of my social network (not to mention this sweet blogging gig). I could write letters or make phone calls, but neither can meet the efficiency and ease of checking Facebook or Twitter. I also lack sufficient information to catch up without the Internet. How many of your friends’ mailing addresses do you have? I have very few. The selection and embracing of low-tech, as PJ Rey has written, helps us feel like we are in control of technology. He concludes, “It is a fantasy of achieving the most radical expression of individual agency: the opt-out.”

Opting out in this manner requires the accumulation of enough resources and capital, that the loss of efficiency does not severely impact one’s quality of life. In fact, such opting out is supposed to enhance that life. Reestablishing the sorts of romanticized institutions that Putnam prescribes would require a lot of leisure time. Sames goes for slaughtering your own meat or biking to work. For most, the big trade-off isn’t about cost, its about time. The near-constant birage of demands for jobs and paying work makes it easy to forget that just a few decades ago Richard Nixon (yeah, Nixon) predicted most Americans would soon enjoy a four day work week. But, without the pressure of organized labor and other activist organizations to keep capitalists honest and the workplace humane, work weeks have gotten longer. After all, why pay two people to do 20 hours of work each, when you can pay one person to do 40 and save the cost of healthcare for one whole person? Why make risky investments in making labor-saving technologies when its cheaper and more predictable to just buy someone else’s labor at bargain prices? Where does “slowing it all down” fit into this? How does one start to “live locally” when jobs are a 3 hour bus ride away and the cost of housing near employment centers is too high?

Then there’s food. As Jenny Davis pointed out, the modern diet is meant to be extremely inefficient in some respects, and ruthlessly efficient in others. Food that is largely devoid of nutrition –fast food meals, pre-packaged frozen dinners– are efficient in their calories-to-dollars ratio. Pound for cash, the frozen food section will feed a family quicker and cheaper than the produce section. Factory farming is environmentally disastrous, but it does produce a lot of very cheap calories. Sometimes, this argument is taken to odd extremes. For example, Pierre Desrochers, a libertarian technological determinist that hates Michael Pollan, says to his CATO institute audiences that the only role for local farming is niche markets for rich people. He is right in one respect: under capitalism (and the underlying engines of technique) the rich will be the only ones to exclude themselves from poisoned food, air, and water.

Movements that ask individuals to “slow down” without proffering a critique of capitalism are, by their nature, elitist. Plenty of good intentions (not to mention labor and capital) have gone into movements that claim to provide a means for opting out. Some work, many of them do not. Urban gardening can bring healthy food to the tables of poor people, only if the food comes with the knowledge, space, and time to cook it. Protest that focuses on the deleterious health and environmental effects of fast food (as seen in Fast Food Yoga above), without an equally explicit critique of the structural inequalities that make fast food such an appealing option to the working poor only serve to alienate them from the movement.

Indeed, urban gardening can serve a myriad of purposes outside of providing food (for example, it can remediate some of the social cohesion problems described by Putnam) but this means we must be careful to temper our mission statements and personal claims about what we are capable of achieving. Let’s continue to build gardens and live in walkable neighborhoods, but we should also recognize the sociotechnical structures that prevent fundamental change. Opting out of fast food and cars would undeniably help the environment and society, but to ask any one individual to forego the efficiencies of modern life is a demand on their own personal resources. Instead of asking individuals to give up their Facebook accounts and their cars, academics and activists need to find new ways of providing the same or comparable services that embody a different sort of politics. Build a world where Facebook is obviously the inferior mode of communication and fast food just seems gross. It means building the capacity for critical human engagement outside of the confines of capitalist notions of efficiency.

I live a fast-paced hedonistic lifestyle on twitter: @da_banks

Also, its my birthday so I’m allowed to do whatever I want. Here’s a gif of truckosaurus that was GIFted to me by @nathanjurgenson:

Also, here’s one I got from @disco_stu

From @nick_lalone

From @ferocissima

In the aftermath of what both sides agree was the most substanceless presidential election in our nation’s history, some variation of the phrase “post-truth politics” has begun haunting the pages of op-eds and news show roundtables (Seriously, its everywhere. Here’s the first five that I found: one, two, three, four, five.).  To say that we live in an age of “post-truth politics” isn’t totally inaccurate, nor is it unworthy of the attention it is getting, but the discussion has yet to truly wrestle with the characeristics of commodified information. Information can be true, and it can be false, but how that information is disseminated, used, and ignored is what truly matters. Information doesn’t (just) want to be free, it also wants to be exploited.

In what is sure to go down as one of the most profoundly ironic moments in American presidential campaign history, the Romney campaign was blinded by its own half-truths and outright lies. They believed “unskewed polls” and isolated themselves in a pasty-white bubble of racism and elitist condescension. As Maureed Dowd put it:

Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.

The vacoousness of the this race had a lot to do with the candidates’ uneasy relationship with their base. Both Romney and the President stood to benefit from saying as little as possible. Romney could not win battle ground states without alienating the historically vindictive Socially Conservative Base. Women’s health is the obvious example, but so is alternative energy (swing states also have lots of green jobs), and the bailout of car manufactuers (very popular in, ya know, places that build cars). Obama had (and continues to have) a hawkish war record that would make any Republican proud, but stands to lose a largely anti-war base.

Why then, in “the information age,” did we know so little about our presidential candidates? The typical answer is made of equal parts Aldous Huxley and Evgeny Morozov: the Internet lets us say more, but what we actually end up saying is more distracting than informative. We are so over-stimulated that the important stuff either gets lost in the cat videos, or never made at all. Political parties might not make cat videos, but they will manufacture distracting stories to filibuster a news cycle. Eric Alterman writing for The Nation gives us a perfect example:

Remember Condoleezza Rice’s vice presidential candidacy? It was based on nothing more than an anonymous item appearing on the Drudge Report, transparently designed to change the subject from Romney’s refusal to divulge decades of his tax returns.

Granted, stories like Rice’s possible VP pick are perfect time fillers. Grab two talking heads, some file footage from 2006 and an anchor can waste a solid ten minutes talking about whether or not Rice would “add anything to the ticket.” Nine times out of ten, it will probably work but the outcome is not inevitable. As Nathan Jurgenson has written before, “Campaigns can’t plan memes. Instead, the campaigns can merely react to them. Savvy staffers quickly jump in as a meme begins to go viral and try to capture the moment with an image.” Just as memes don’t go viral, sometimes no one cares about your deflection story. No single person, or even a single organization, can successfully and routinely control the entire discourse. Institutions like Fox News come close through sheer size, but once an idea is put “out there” the end result cannot be totally known.

The old saw “information wants to be free,” a relic of the early information society boosterism of Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, is no longer sufficient to describe the behavior of information flows and data patterns. The tendency of information to be free in both senses of the word—not restrained but also very cheap—is just one of many characteristics. When information is treated and sold as a commodity, it follows many of the same laws described by classical thinkers like Karl Marx and Pyotr Kropotkin. Information can be shared or exploited. It can be privatized for the good of the few or to amass capital for large projects; or it can be made public to aid in development of industries and the redistribution of wealth. Information does work and its exchange can result in material (not just semiotic) consequences. The tendency to make sweeping claims about the behavior of all information– from medical records to big bird memes– ignores the complexities of the social. Information is contingent, reactionary, and anarchistic.

Unlike most commodities, information has unpredictable properties: its value fluctuates wildly and who benefits from the transaction is never totally known until after the fact. Predicting what information will do, is like predicting the weather. You can predict possible outcomes, and the percentages of certain possibilities, but nothing is set in stone. Instead of looking at (mis)information as a tool of individuals, think of information as hiring the services of The Joker. You might unleash him, you might even have an agreement about what he is supposed to do (kill the Batman, naturally) but you are ultimately powerless to control the final result. In the case of the Romney campaign, their alternate reality was too tempting; an elaborate concoction of mythical independent voters and disaffected young Obama supporters that would come out to the polls in droves. Racist birther propaganda, woe-as-me stories about liberal media bias, and accusations that the labor department was fudging jobs reports all did exactly as they were supposed to do: convince people that Romney was the heir apparent. What they did not count on was how easily it would blind them and alienate others. John Dickerson of Slate writes,

How did the Romney team get it so wrong? According to those involved, it was a mix of believing anecdotes about party enthusiasm and an underestimation of their opponents’ talents. The Romney campaign thought Obama’s base had lost its affection for its candidate. They believed Obama would win only if he won over independent voters. So Romney focused on independents and the economy, which was their key issue.

It is not enough to say post-truth politics was a failed tactic. The more salient point to make is that it was a reckless strategy. The Obama campaign used similar tactics: deflecting bad press with meaningless stories, obfuscating their position on controversial issues, but the strategy was developed and deployed by Blue State Digital, one of the best online engagement planning firms in the US. Republicans on the other hand—as they are wont to do—went about extracting a resource without care for unintended consequences. The GOP drilled for fodder and meaningless spin like they were fracking for natural gas. Their plan might have worked, had they put more effort and resources into their social media and informatics teams. I am not making the case that only experts understand the internet, or that there is a certain superiority of the perspective taken by credentialed experts. I am merely saying that people who have a sophisticated understanding of how information travels (socially as well as technically) has a better chance of using information towards their own ends. Predicting how information will behave requires a lot of resources and cannot be treated as an afterthought. An organization as large and complex as a federal presidential campaign stands to gain by including many people with this expertise. It might mean the difference between a massive case of ineffectual groupthink and winning an election. For as long as that distinction matters (and it may not already), organizations will have devote their resoucres to the uncertain science of predicting what technology wants.

Believe David’s gross lies on twitter, won’t you? @da_Banks

There’s nothing particularly glamorous about Troy, New York. Troy is a city that, in an alternative universe, might have been a major metropolitan region. It stumbled early though, one of the first places to suffer the oxidation of the iron belt. What it lacks in size or elegance it makes up for in internal contradictions and a special brand of awkward coquettish charm.  It is the home of Uncle Sam and the setting for Kurt Vonnegut‘s novels. Its buildings have been painted by Norman Rockwell and torn down by public officials in search of progress. The local university has one of the highest-paid presidents, but also hosts the Yes Men. My campus office is on the fifth floor of a 19th century chemistry laboratory. The former lab sits atop a steep hill, providing a view that, on clear days, can go for miles.  The view from my office (above) is an eclectic blend of multiple decades of technological achievements and blunders. Highways, public housing, suburban enclaves, and the husks of Victorian factories stand in conversation with one-another like old friends. It is obvious that they need each other.  Some get along better than others, but they would be lost without the others’ continued existence.  New technology may be introduced to us as singular entities; improvements and replacements that make the old obsolete and irrelevant. More often than not however, these technologies find themselves sitting next to veterans of past technological revolutions. I have lived in Troy for almost three years now, and each day is a lesson in the history of technology. 

In the background, just below the hazy skyline, runs a thin ribbon of concrete and asphalt called State Road 7. An extension of the local (and crowded) Hoosick Road, SR-7 is a 60-mile-per-hour corridor of international capital. The product of a federal block grant, it connects centuries-old downtown Troy with a suburban mass to the west called Latham. To the east, it crosses over the Tomhannock Reservoir and delivers travelers to the sleepy tourist town of Bennington, Vermont. SR-7, like all highways of the time, is built on a lie. A fundamental lie about urban economics and the behavior of rational actors. These sorts of roads are always built with the promise of connecting a nearby municipality to the global exchange of goods and services. If you aren’t accessible by highway, the reasoning goes, then you aren’t accessible to capital. Instead of money flowing in, it hemorrhages out into the suburbs and larger cities. Frear’s Cash Bazaar loses to Sears, and later, they will both lose to Wal-Mart. Its an old story but one that is particularly tragic when you see some of the grand old buildings sitting vacant, their roofs sagging from the vacuum of human activity.

Off in the right corner of the picture is the Kennedy Towers. The pluralized name for the singular public housing structure is representative of our country’s dedication to its poor: promises left half fulfilled. The tall cylindrical complex is one of the tallest buildings in downtown Troy. A fine exemplar of Le Corbusier’s modern tower in a park, the building sits far away from the road, amongst thick foliage and sparsely populated parking lots. When projects like Kennedy Towers were first conceived, they were heralded as the technosocial fix that would end homelessness.  These buildings were meant to imbue in its residents the same values that were built into the structure itself: modernity, efficiency, and cleanliness. These monuments to state paternalism still provide much-needed shelter, but have also begun to multitask. The building is also a cell phone tower and a gunshot tracking system. As the former bathes residents with high doses of EM waves, the latter listens closely for the distinctive sound of gunshot. After coordinating with fellow microphones it alerts the police to the approximate location of the sound.

Every night, as if were an aspiring Empire State Building, the Hedley Building is festooned with seasonally appropriate lighting. The fifth floor of this beige office building is the new home of Troy’s City Hall. As a sign of the times, the government doesn’t own, it rents as if it isn’t sure whether to stay around long enough to pay off a mortgage. All 36,000 square feet is rented at a little less than a dollar per square foot, per month.  Nothing about the Hedley building is particularly appealing or awe-inspiring. It is the kind of building that could exist anywhere. Hedley could just as easily be in a corporate park in Phoenix or in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. It is the perfect soulless anchor for a new “revitalized” live/work project called “The Hedley District.” This imagined future began in the optimistic days of 2007 when it seemed as though any project could work as long as you could securitize and redistribute the debt as far away as possible. Today, these images seem further away then when they were first drawn.  The promises of New Urbanism, which is actually very old urbanism, would have to wait. In the mean time, Troy would have to consider rehabilitating one of the biggest contiguous strips of 19th century architecture in North America.

On the other side of the river, conspicuously absent form the idyllic imagined future of the Hedley District, is a strip of townhouse suburbs. Their grey vinyl siding and shallow pitched roofs look out of place and foreign amongst the brick and steel of Troy proper. I have never met anyone that admits to living in those buildings and I think I know why: no one in there has any interest in Troy. They came to live in the suburbs, Troy is a noisy culture factory whose products they consume on a semi-annual basis. Their everyday lives are out on the suburban arterials: strip malls and megaplexes that could exist just about anywhere. I feel as though, if the Hedly building were to be bulldozed tomorrow, those little two-story townhomes would just crumple with it out of sheer empathy.

I am cautiously optimistic about the rust belt. Midsize towns from Indiana to New Hampshire have the potential to re-emerge as the centers of industry and culture. The area made the mistake of being too useful- too sensible in its land use and far too conservative in its embrace of six-lane highways and Chuck-E-Cheeses. The unique confluences of global trade and 200-year-old manufacturing equipment are settling into a new array of  hyper local economics. There’s chatter of establishing a local currency, we just started a tool library, and we brew our own beer. You should join us sometime.

[UPDATE 11/17/12]- I have noticed some readers have read my pessimism (cautious optimism?) as an aloof detachment from Troy’s future. While I understand how that could be read from the text, nothing could be further from the truth. I have offered a brief clarification on my personal web site.

This is a GIF picture from the 4th Annual Hallowmeme costume party in New York City.  I got it from this awesome AngleFire site I found: http://www.hallowme.me. I couldn’t go because it was too expensive and none of my friends with licenses wanted to go. What is up with that? Sometimes I think people who are really excited to get some government document are secretly lame. Its like the government tells people to think that the people with licenses are cool so that people will get more licenses. I don’t think making people drive cars to get places is a great way to build cities and towns, etc. What is up with that? Anyway, I think its interesting that people like to dress up like things on the Internet and take pictures of each other and put them back on the Internet.

First, I think it is interesting that memes, even if we always see them on the WWW, they are sometimes performed or made in the physical world. This cool page says some smart things about memes: https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/12/06/internet-memes-the-mythology-of-augmented-society/. I especially like this part:

Not only can we see that the myth and the meme share a semiotic structure, but I argue that the internet meme is the predominant and logical form of myth in an augmented society. I put forth 4 supports for this argument, all of which link the construction and spread of internet memes to the affordances of augmented reality: 1) internet memes are simultaneously digital and physical; 2) internet memes are quickly spread and often 3) user generated; 4) internet memes are easily adaptable.

A good way to make sure everyone knows you are Hipster Cop is to make sure you have an NYPD badge (A fake one of course ;)) and also maybe have your friend dress up like that girl that was pepper sprayed in the very beginning. Then people will get your costume a lot better.  One year I dressed up as a soldier from the USSR but I don’t think anyone noticed until they looked at the patches really closely. In English there is a technique for understanding words you don’t know called “context clues.” You can use words around the word you do not know to help you understand what that word means. Really good costumes bring their own “context clues” to help others understand your costume. Like that article that I linked to before says, memes are myths and myths are kinda like stories, so we are wearing stories. You have to tell the story really well with stuff like your outfit and your hair so that you don’t have to do the embarrassing thing where you have to describe your costume. But sometimes, it is cool when people have to interpret your costume for a few seconds. For people to do this they usually have to like the same things and talk about those same things all the time. Like, the jocks might not get a meme costume about Nyan Cat but they might get Scumbag Steve. It could take a second or two before the the jock recognizes the hat from a /b/ message board, but maybe a girl could recognize the Nyan Cat outfit and really like it. Nathan told me this was a really great way to start conversations with girls but I don’t believe him.

Internet meme costumes are a cool way to share a cool joke or a story. They do not really have to ALWAYS be from just the Internet. They just have to be popular on the Internet. Honey Boo Boo (someone is dressed like her in that top photo GIF), Hipster Cop, Pokémon, Banksy’s Anarchist-Throwing flowers, and that mom that loved tanning were made for other kinds of media. The memes are talking about those things that happened, and most of that talking happens on the Internet so they get mistaken for Internet things but really they are just things that people say to each other. So, its like the meme is a social thing and a thing that is made in technology. 

I’m going as Vermin Supreme for Halloween. He’s a guy but he’s also a meme. So I guess that means I am dressing as a meme, but I’m also dressing up as a person! He has a great youtube video about it!

 Anyway, apparently my parents found out about this blog and read it now, so I’m gonna have to make this journal friends-ONLY pretty soon. I don’t understand why parents have to always read things that their sons and daughters write on the Internet. Its not like the Internet is doing anything bad to us. AND PLEASE MOM AND DAD DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS BLOG ITS JUST FOR MY FRIENDS!

Current Mood: Nervous but excited

Current Music: “Muzzle”, by The Smashing Pumpkins

The theory and policy of Internet connectivity has not kept pace with the increasing diversity of network access. The full variety of access points, social practices, and meaning created by networked individuals has not been critically engaged by most authors.  Jenna Burrell’s new book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafe’s of Urban Ghana is the start of a major corrective in the social sciences’ treatment of the Internet. For “nonelite urban youth” the internet café provides an opportunity to extend one’s social network outside of the zongo (colloquial term for slum) that they grew up in, and gain access to resources and contacts they would otherwise never acquire. A majority of Burrell’s work takes place in these cafés but we are also treated to a discussion of global ewaste streams, international consortiums on the “information society” and the collective reputation and shared meaning of Ghanaians  on the Internet. Burrell provides a broad, but at times penetratingly deep look at the Internet from the margins. Burrell describes internet café’s as “indeterminate spaces” that refused to “appropriate” the internet by making a uniquely Ghanian space, nor did it attempt to transport the patrons to a totally new world. The space was part of a “particular strategy of handling the distance between imagination and action.” The internet café was not neutral per se, but it did offer a new space that was relatively free from the control of older family members. In a culture where older generations have unquestioned authority over youth, the Internet café offered a domain of relative freedom of expression and action. She is careful to note that these spaces are probably not “destined to become the sort of café-as-third-place thought to play a role in civil society formation, rather the expense of timed access and the allure of foreign contacts means everyone pays attention to their screen with rare invitations to check out an offer for free CDs or the transcript of a Yahoo! messenger conversation.

The acquisition and  collection of goods and personal connections from over-seas is particularly important for many young Ghanaians. From computer games to T-shirts, Ghanaians  displayed a “fascination with abroad and with whatever evoked travel and connectivity with foreign lands. Airline membership cards and CDs or books by mail personalized with a name and address provided this sense of global interconnectivity that was far more compelling to young people than the gambling games the CDs contained.” Whereas most authors describe the Internet as a geography-annihilating force, Burrell’s account of internet cafés explicitly rejects the “unwarranted assumptions about the homogeneity of receiving populations” and demonstrates how the Internet can be seen as a “foreign commodity.” For young Ghanaians  the Internet brings the world “closer” but it also makes place more important, not less.

Young Ghanaians  are not only looking for foreign goods, but contacts as well. Establishing regular contact with fellow Internet users across was a main component in “enacting a more cosmopolitan self.” Burrell opens her book with an interview between a young woman and her new Canadian husband. The couple met online and due to visa complications their relationship has largely remained computer-mediated. This long distance relationship, while not ideal, is a minor success story both romantically and financially. Foreign contacts, while having a very pragmatic dimension to them, were also meant to be sincere and durable.

The reactions many Ghanaians receive when they attempt to reach out are hostile and suspicious. Part of it is warranted- the infamous “Nigerian prince” scams are not limited to their namesake country. Côte D’ivoire, Ghana and the rest of Western Africa is associated with internet fraud. In Ghana, such practices are “referred to locally as 419 (Nigerian police code for fraud) or sakawa (a vernacular term from the Hausa language)…” The scams occupy a very complicated role in Ghanaian youth culture. While 419 scams rarely work, the rumors of successes make them very popular. Many Ghanaians  hope to pull off one successful scam so that they may parlay the winnings into a legitimate business. A few thousand dollars is enough to buy a truck or another expensive resource that can be used to start up a new business. 419 scams have consequences for Ghanaians  not actively involved in criminal behavior. Popular travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity will not sell tickets to Accra and Ghanaians in search of contacts and goods are often rudely turned away.

Much to the chagrin of well-meaning penpal seekers, the scammers reinforce the Western perception of Africans as needy poor people, greedy scam artists, or corrupt politicians. Potential connections end before they begin as soon as Ghanaians  reveal their “real” identity. Burrell concludes her chapter on internet scams by saying:

“In the end, the potential for the empowerment of marginalized groups through new media technologies relies on producers who represent themselves in authentic as well as strategic ways. The problem of authenticity and its seeming incompatibility with persuasive self-performance was significant to Accra’s nonelite Internet users…The question thereforeis what conditions facilitate empowering self-expression and what conversely provokes individuals to become complicit in their own damaging self-representations?

This is one of the central points of the book. As the unmarked category, Western internet users have significantly less influence on one-another. In other words, my actions online do not affect another American as much as one Ghanian’s scamming activities effect another’s search for a foreign penpal. Ignorance of such differences was on full display at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Accra in February of 2005. Burrell spends a chapter reviewing the conference and comparing it to her own observations. She notes that “speaking about Africa through the lens of poverty and development has consequences for representations of Africans.” Burrell rightly points out that this paternalistic attitude toward African countries misunderstands the realities of Internet use and gets in the way of productive work. The way she describes the WSIS sounds eerily familiar to the way the New York Times described the “New Digital Divide.” Burrell’s critique of this language is similar to the ones that Nathan Jurgenson and the rest of us have levied in the past. She writes, “Avoiding this black hole of thought is an effort to avoid the analytical impoverishment that such insistence on a presupposed normative order imposed by conventional models of development [demands].”

While many Western authors see the internet as a force for dividing and individuating, the Internet appears to be competing with major religions for the same sorts of tangible and pragmatic necessities. Burrell writes, “Much like Internet use, religious practices were perceived as a set of techniques allowing individuals to extend themselves exerting a more powerful force of influence over broader social terrain.” Computers had the same metaphysical properties (and geographic origins) as the contemporary Christian and Muslim faiths that offered connections to international networks and the promise of economic prosperity.

Ghana and Ghanaians relationship to the Internet does not end (or even begin) at internet cafés. Ghana is one of the major global sites of ewaste in the world. The physical artifacts that bring the internet to millions have an excellent change of eventually ending up in Ghana, either as repurposed café computers or as scrap that is dismantled and sold for precious metals and parts. The industry is large and continues to grow as more computers are thrown out at a faster pace. This unique relationship with the “information economy” means that while Westerners can enjoy a “post-industrial” economy, many nations in the Global South must deal with its the toxic, lead-filled byproducts. For Ghanaians  the information economy (or the information society, or the post-industrial economy, or whatever you want to call it) has a very real and present material component.

Burrell titles her final chapter “Becoming Visible” and catalogues the ways in which marginal users, are both deeply affected by Internet policy in the United States. Internet neutrality debates mean just as much, if not more, to Ghanaians as they do to North Americans or Europeans. Creating a tiered Internet could mean shutting out those users that have just gained access to the world wide web. She also calls for “scholarship on technology development and diffusion and on the construction of ‘the user’ to encompass the full diversity of political-economic processes.” I would like to add to her call by also noting that the mobile web (something that has risen astronomically since Burrell completed her field work) is not subject to the same net neutrality regulations as the wired net. As Tolu Odumosu and Venkatesh Narayanamurti have noted, the burgeoning LTE market could be a series of walled gardens and not the digital agora we are used to. In many ways, net neutrality was defeated by providing a slightly different service through a totally different physical infrastructure. Again, Burrell’s focus on the materiality of the Internet becomes useful here: the hardware is not incidental nor does it disappear as users interact in a realm of bits. The Internet has very physical components to it, and this characteristic becomes more noticeable (and important) as your connection becomes more tenuous and marginal.

Jenna Burrell’s “Invisible Users” is one of the few texts explicitly dealing with the Interent that will not feel dated in five years. Her approach, focusing on the social action that is enabled and constrained by and through the technology, will keep her book relevant until the challenges she poses are solved or new challenges supersede them. While the content is excellent, they way she approaches the subject matter both methodologically and conceptually is her greatest achievement. There are no long ruminations about the constraints of the Yahoo! messenger interface. Science and Technology Studies and related fields would be well served by taking up Burrell’s call for pluralizing the concepts of users and the net. In so doing, we will move beyond a privileged and shallow depiction of what digital devices are capable of and finally begin talking about what it means to live in a digitally augmented world.

The Jager Bomb:
Ingredients:

• One 8 oz. can of Red Bull
• One shot of Jägermeister
• Willingness to overpay for an overhyped experience

The shot of Jager is dropped into a glass of Red Bull and chugged until all evidence disappears down the throats of the youthful.

As I (and a record 8 million other live Youtube viewers) witnessed Felix Baumgartner jump from a floating platform 128,000 feet in the air, I could not help but think about those little red bulls on his helmet. Red Bull, the ubiquitous energy drink and funder of all things Extreme™, had branded nothing less than a moment in human history. A monumental achievement brought to you by a peddler of a sugary drink that has fueled some of the worst decisions in the world [NSFW]. There was a day when the United States government was in the business of dazzling humanity with its feats of technological superiority and raw tenacity. For three years we were landing on the moon almost every six months. We made it look easy. Baumgartner’s jump is truly incredible, but it also makes me a little angry. I am tempted to bemoan the fall of civic life and the rise of corporate-sponsored spectacle, but ultimately I cannot find a moral handhold. Do I want an arms race or consumer capitalism to fund the greatest technological achievements of my lifetime?

As I tend to do with most of my nagging thoughts, I tweeted about Red Bull and the funding of technological progress:

Within an hour it became apparent I had struck a nerve with librarians, conservationists, engineers, urban planners, alternative energy researchers, and other scholars. (Full Storify here.) I am not saying this to be immodest. Rather, I think it is telling to see for whom this statement rings true. The professionals that have devoted their lives to solar energy, affordable high speed rail, and hundreds of other life-changing technologies must fight tooth and nail for a few thousand dollars of government grants while Red Bull pays for a quarter-million-dollar suit and $70,000-worth of helium. Why is a man jumping from the edge of space when we still rely on 18th century energy sources and can’t build a train network as advanced as the one we had a hundred years ago?

My theory has something to do with the inherent contradictions in our progress narrative. The future we were promised is in the past, and today’s promises are no longer quite as grand. The anthropologist, Dr. David Graeber, considered a similar question last summer in an issue 19 of The Baffler. Graeber asks “Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?” Greaber concludes that existing bureaucratic systems under corporate capitalism are not up to the job of creating immortality drugs or colonies on Mars because huge disparities in wealth and power make it too cheap and easy to clean our homes and build our iPhones with cheap labor instead of robots. He writes,

Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power—one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

I am very sympathetic to this explanation. Jumping from outer space is a spectacle: something entertaining and suspenseful for everyone to watch. It is a difficult procedure that requires all of the technique and precision of a moon landing, but almost none of the basic science and technological development that came with the Space Race. Red Bull will most likely never fund a trip to Mars or a high speed rail line. Both kinds of projects can take decades to develop (Stratos took about four years of planning) and can suffer catastrophic failures. Projects like Red Bull Stratos must serve primarily as marketing stunts and incidentally as technological achievements.

On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, ushering in a new era of human space flight. Just ten days later, while the front pages of most major newspapers still ran headlines about Apollo 11, the Birmingham, Alabama Public Services Commission approved the demolition of the Birmingham Terminal Train Station. For many, it seemed as though the past was so clearly defined, and the future was equally palpable. We were in modern times, which necessitated the appropriate technology. America needed rockets, not trains. Fast forward to the present, and we are faced with a different scenario. The Space Shuttle has seen its last flight, and high-speed rail projects are dying on the drawing board. Our trajectory of technological progress might have been ambitious, but today it looks like an unrealistic dream. Our only hope seems to come from the private sector and the likes of Space X and Virgin Galactic.

Private space flight is the obvious heir-apparent to large, government-funded space exploration. Private enterprise might have the cash, but it lacks the grandeur and shared social meaning of the Apollo program, or even the Space Shuttle. Then again, nostalgia has a funny way of making past achievements seem grand in comparison to today’s stunts. Both government programs were panned in their times as over-priced science projects (the opposition to the Apollo program in particular is quite interesting). But today we crowd the streets to catch a glimpse of the shuttle. Perhaps, a decade from now, we will look back on the Red Bull Stratos project and place it in the pantheon of major achievements in human history. It will be described as the first time we ignored our nationalistic tendencies, and just did something great with funds from around the world. We came together as a human family and achieved greatness. Or, perhaps we’ll just look at it this way: