The last democratic debate was mostly good. Two people, who represent very different visions for the future and strategies for how to arrive at that future, had just about as fair and faithful of a debate as one could expect from a cable news-hosted event. Orbiting this central debate is a swirling mass of half-arguments that has more energy than thought-out direction, made up of a cadre of writers who are lining up against the most tattered and boring of banners: Brocialism versus Lean In Feminism. The corporatized feminism that advocates for equal terms in boardroom competition and the smarmy machismo of socialism made for mansplaining both come out of several bad ideological compromises. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not attempt to move beyond these camps into a more honest discussion. more...

By now I think most people know what happened in Flint, Michigan. An unelected “emergency manager” –appointed and reporting directly to Michigan’s governor Rick Snyder– switched Flint’s water supply from Detroit municipal water to untreated Flint River water. The river water had a higher salinity than Detroit’s water which caused metalic pipes to corrode and leach toxic levels of lead into an entire city’s water supply. This happened back in 2013 and it is still an unresolved problem. The solution for Flint is straightforward: replace all the pipes and provide the kind of lifetime care needed for children and other vulnerable populations that have irreprable neurological damage from lead poisoning. What is less straightforward is how to prevent these kinds of problems from happening in the future. Because while this happened under a terrible governance structure, similar ongoing disasters are occurring in places that still have some form of elected, local governance still in tact. This is as much a problem of science and technology as it is an issue of governance and accountability. What is to be done? more...

Nick Bilton’s neighbor flew a drone outside the window of Bilton’s home office. It skeeved him out for a minute, but he got over it. His wife was more skeeved out. She may or may not have gotten over it (but probably not). Bilton wrote about the incident for The New York Times, where he works as a columnist. Ultimately, Bilton’s story concludes that drone watching is no big deal, analogous to peeping-via-binoculars, and that the best response is to simply ignore drone-watchers until they fly their devices away. With all of this, I disagree.

Drone privacy is a fraught issue, one of the many in which slow legislative processes have been outpaced by technological developments. While there remains a paucity of personal-drone laws, the case precedent trends towards punishing those who damage other people’s drones, while protecting the drone owners who fly their devices into airspace around private homes. Through legal precedent, then, privacy takes a backseat to property.

Bilton spends the majority of his article parsing this legal landscape, and tying the extant legal battles to his own experience of being watched. He begins with an account of looking out his window to see a buzzing drone hovering outside. He is both amused and disturbed, as the drone intrusion took place while he was already writing an article about drones. He reports feeling first violated and intruded upon, but this feeling quickly fades, morphing into quite the opposite. He says:   more...

Today marks the beginning of the official presidential primaries, launching off with voting in Iowa. While the political pundits and campaign camps scrutinize poll numbers, attendance trends, and even the weather, I find myself poring over this fascinating protocol document put out by NPR.

Admittedly, I’ve never voted in a primary election. I’m going to this year. Word has it, I’m not alone. With intense fractures both within and between parties, this election holds a lot at stake and political analysts say that the primary season is likely to see participation from those who normally abstain altogether, or those like me, who have historically saved their participation for the national election.

So what happens during primary voting? The answer is that it varies drastically, but Iowa has a particularly raucous caucus (<< I know).

In learning about the Iowa primaries, I am most struck by their charm, and relatedly, the simplicity of their technological apparatuses. In Iowa today, the eminent technologies include pencils, paper, voices, and feet. more...

This past year, I sort of disappeared from Twitter. Not completely – I’d poke my head in now and then – but for a number of reasons I stopped checking it at all regularly.

One of the things that ended up keeping me away for longer than I might otherwise have been was how it felt, those times when I poked my head back in. It was intimidating in a way it hadn’t been before. It was like I had been missing a long series of conversations that added up to one enormous conversation, and I no longer had any idea what was going on. Friends and colleagues and friend-colleagues with whom I used to be in nearly constant touch were suddenly discussing things I didn’t know anything about, and the prospect of trying to catch up was overwhelming. I felt like I had nothing to contribute to the conversation I left behind months ago. It was like a party I would wander into, circulate in kind of a distant and awkward fashion, and leave again. Because I had nothing to say.

I like people, but I’m very bad at feeling like I belong anywhere. It’s my default to feel like a fraud in any crowd I’m a part of, and awkwardness has a way of turning into a withdrawal spiral. This began in physical space, but physical space doesn’t have a corner on making me feel that way. Not at all.

I still don’t check Twitter very regularly.

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Nearly a month after the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge began, Oregon State Police and the FBI arrested several members of the armed militia group led by Ammon Bundy. Lavoy Finicum, the group’s spokesperson, was killed by law enforcement in the incident. Details on the confrontation are spare at this time; militia members say Finicum was complying with the officers and surrendering, while officials say he was resisting. But the wildlife refuge and the strip of highway where the confrontation occurred are not the only battlegrounds in this war. Another fight has broken out between the militia’s supporters and critics—the Amazon review page for Finicum’s novel Only by Blood and Suffering.

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Almost two years ago, Facebook waved the rainbow flag and metaphorically opened its doors to all of the folks who identify outside of the gender binary. Before Facebook announced this change in February of 2014, users were only able to select ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Suddenly, with this software modification, users could choose a ‘custom’ gender that offered 56 new options (including agender, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, non-binary, and transgender). Leaving aside the troubling, but predictable, transphobic reactions, many were quick to praise the company. These reactions could be summarized as: ‘Wow, Facebook, you are really in tune with the LGBTQ community and on the cutting edge of the trans rights movement. Bravo!’ Indeed, it is easy to acknowledge the progressive trajectory that this shift signifies, but we must also look beyond the optics to assess the specific programming decisions that led to this moment.

To be fair, many were also quick to point to the limitations of the custom gender solution. For example, why wasn’t a freeform text field used? Google+ also shifted to a custom solution 10 months after Facebook, but they did make use of a freeform text field, allowing users to enter any label they prefer. By February of 2015, Facebook followed suit (at least for those who select US-English).

There was also another set of responses with further critiques: more granular options for gender identification could entail increased vulnerability for groups who are already marginalized. Perfecting your company’s capacity to turn gender into data equates to a higher capacity for documentation and surveillance for your users. Yet the beneficiaries of this data are not always visible. This is concerning, particularly when we recall that marginalization is closely associated with discriminatory treatment. Transgender women suffer from disproportionate levels of hate violence from police, service providers, and members of the public, but it is murder that is increasingly the fate of people who happen to be both trans and women of color.

Alongside these horrific realities, there is more to the story – hidden in a deeper layer of Facebook’s software. When Facebook’s software was programmed to accept 56 gender identities beyond the binary, it was also programmed to misgender users when it translated those identities into data to be stored in the database. In my recent article in New Media & Society, ‘The gender binary will not be deprogrammed: Ten years of coding gender on Facebook,’ I expose this finding in the midst of a much broader examination of a decade’s worth of programming decisions that have been geared towards creating a binary set of users. more...

I love taking and seeing photos of snow. As the east coast is enjoying right now, big snowstorms produce a blizzard of images across whatever social networks you use. As I tap through these photos this morning, I have some probably obvious thoughts as to why we take and post and like snow photos.

The Snow Day is exceptional and is thus picture worthy because we tend to document what is out of the ordinary and thus interesting and novel. The photo of snow says look how different things are right now. An image of your car so fully under it all suggests how much the normal flow is disrupted. Look what is happening to me. Look at what I witnessed.

In this way, the snow photo is participating in a larger news event, because east coast weather always seems to be an event worth caring about, which is never not funny to this midwesterner. Thus, we get the time-lapse style photo sets of the accumulation. There’s something to keeping track of the snow’s growth. How high can it go? There’s almost obsessive sports-like statistical attention paid to its progress, the hourly updated predictions down to the inch, the constant updates down to the tenth of an inch, the charting of how close we are to whatever record. The snow is progress, each extra bit making it all somehow more successful, more special, newsy, exceptional, and photographable.

Such a thick snow blanket over your world is a dramatic change of scenery, a shift in perception, and thus provides novelty worth a snap. Everyday surroundings that usually seem to have been already exhausted of their photographic potential are breathed new productive life. By making the mundane exceptional, the snow photo sits happily on any network, from the experience trophy in the Instagram scene to the spaces in between on a Snapchat stream.

And snow photos themselves look good. The white wash makes the image simple and more striking by removing extra elements from the frame. The bright snow provides instant contrast, making any subject pop. The flurries in the wind provide movement and texture and depth. The snow itself falls and is blown into beautiful and unpredictable designs and arrangements, wrapped around the contours of objects so smoothly and lifelike. And some snow photos appear almost black-and-white even when shot in color. Snow is its own photo filter.

Anyone in the snow photo is made more interesting, too. Snow implies effort and adventure, sometimes hardship and discomfort, but most of the images posted right now suggest fun. Snow is itself almost comical when it is too much. For some, snow means time off of work, off of adulthood. It can remind of childhood. So snow photos are often of play, throwing snowballs and diving in. Kids and dogs look especially happy. We get to walk, or ski, down the middle of the street. Rules suspended, we photos of people enjoying the snow dressed in costumes.

Providing extra motivation to take photos right now is that this snow is ephemeral. Like photos of a newly served plate of food, you need to document it now or never. Snow around here is quite temporary: This week’s forecast is for temperatures well above freezing. So, take and share and enjoy snow photos now. It’s not just that snow melts but that it slushes and gets dirty and refreezes into a mess that’s soon soiled and jagged. The elegant formations get shoveled and plowed into piles. The snow becomes more work than play. The novelty and documentary potential gets used up, the snow gets less photogenic, less likeable.

nathan is on twitter and this piece was crossposted from his tumblr

When Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump, it provided political commentators with a goldmine of analytic fodder.  Working through the Palin-Trump team up, there is a lot to untangle.

For instance, how do we make sense of a political climate in which the 2008 vice presidential candidate, who so damaged the presidential campaign of her running mate that he could barely mask his contempt for her on election night, is now a desirable connection?

Or what dynamics were in play that pushed Palin to Trump rather than Cruz, especially given Palin’s support of Cruz in his senate bid?

Or could her endorsement backfire, finally impressing upon moderate Republicans the urgency of nominating Rubio or Bush? And relatedly, what’s up with Rubio falling into the mainstream/moderate category?

While commentators touched on a few of these things, largely, the conversation was dominated by another topic entirely: Sarah Palin’s sweater. more...

Rachel Monroe recently published a fascinating essay on Jared Rutledge, the pickup artist whose Asheville, NC community turned against him after discovering his dehumanizing and degrading comments online. Rutledge’s comments were quite similar to what you might find in much of the manosphere if you go looking—lashing out at women who won’t have sex with him, saying women are only valuable if they are beautiful and submissive, tallying the number of women he has slept with, and going so far as to give them scores.

Rutledge expressed a great deal of remorse for his actions, even trying to make amends by donating to a local rape crisis center (which was rejected). For the story, he told Monroe about his past, and what had drawn him to pickup artistry and the manosphere—anger, bitterness, insecurity, and a feeling that he couldn’t make sense of the world around him. In my own research on manosphere discourse, and what men say about the current state of dating and masculinity, Rutledge is far from alone. Many men turn to these communities to try to make sense of their role in a society that looks very different from their fathers’; the decline of the industrial economy, the end of “The Greatest Generation,” and of course the decades of feminist movement and LGBT activism that have dramatically changed the landscape of gender and sexuality.

The work of author and journalist Susan Faludi has been foundational for my own thinking on the topic, and her account of this problem can shed light on what brings men to the manosphere in the first place. In her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, she writes:

It’s often been observed that the economic transition from industry to service, or from production to consumption, is symbolically a move from the traditional masculine to the traditional feminine. But in gender terms, the transition is far more than a simple sex change and, so, more traumatic for men than we realize. A society of utility, for all the indisputable ways that it exploited men’s health and labor, and in an industrial context broke the backs and spirits of factory workers and destroyed the lungs of miners, had one saving grace: it defined manhood by character, by the inner qualities of stoicism, integrity, reliability, the ability to shoulder burdens, the willingness to put others first, the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice. These are the same qualities, recoded as masculine, that society has long recognized in women as the essence of motherhood. Men were publicly useful insofar as they mastered skills associated with the private realm of maternal femininity. Like mothers tending selflessly to their babes, men were not only to take care of their families but also their society without complaint; that was, in fact, what made them men.

…

In a culture of ornament, by contrast, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered ‘individuality’ that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one. The aspects of this public ‘femininity’—objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing—are the very ones that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are ‘gaining’ the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing. [pp. 38-39]

Britney is on Twitter.