From the “experiments in web publishing” department comes anarquia.org, an “online journal of anarchist construction”. They’re soliciting submissions for their first issue right now, so there’s not anything there yet except for a mission statement, but it looks interesting. Essentially, it is an open submission journal of anarchist ideas and analyses, the theory to Indymedia’s practice.
The online Indymedias and Infoshops are excellent loci for sharing experiences and disseminating information, pedagogy, etc. Anarquia.org is more geared towards thoughtful critique, self-evaluation and assessment of our community building, direct and indirect actions, security methods and highly apparent insecurities, tactics and tactless insubordination of all of these things.
This image seems to be sweeping the web; I’ve come across it 3 times in the last few minutes. What you got is your basic George W. Bush signing his name on an American flag! Or maybe just writing a big ol’ “X” like in cartoons. In either case, it’s illegal. Under TITLE 18 , PART I , CHAPTER 33 , Sec. 700 of the US Code,
Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
Now, me personally, I say “Go for it!”–you can’t desecrate what ain’t been secrated. But this man plays the President on TV, for cryin’ outloud! What kind of role model is he for the little ‘uns in Congress?
As a wise man once said, “Shame on You, Mr. Bush! Shame on you!”
Accroding to Jonathan Peterson, the White House’s new webmail system, set to replace direct e-mail to the President (or George Bush, until next year) in the near future, doesn’t meet the legal standards for website accessibility, which all government sites are required by law to meet. To wit, the site lacks meaningful “alt” tags on its images and the from elements lack labels, making the page impossible to use for blind persons who rely on audio browsers to interfect the Internet.
No big surprise, right? After all, the point of installing these web e-mail interfaces is to discourage people from contacting you, or at least to control their interaction with you. You have to click through at least 4 screens (the 4th requires you to enter personal information, which I’m not going to do just to check things out) delineating whether your e-mail is a “supportive comment”, a “differing opinion” (note: disagreement with Bush is always only a matter of opinion), or a “general comment” and what the general and specific subject of your comment or “opinion” are–this way, the White House staff knows which e-mail to delete sight unseen, and which to use in the next fundraising dinner.
Under Giuliani a similar system was installed on the NYC Mayor’s home page, severely limiting the ease with which the Mayor could be contacted (I know, I tried!). He also put concrete barriers up around City Hall and banned the public from entering, among other steps taken to reduce any possible contact with the public, those who unkowingly considered themselves his constituency along with the wealthy and famous. I can’t help but see this move at whitehouse.gov as a page torn from Giuliani’s book.
This is kind of cool, a map of Blogathonging bloggers. Hover over the little people icons and see where your fellow Blogathongers are located in meatspace, or post your own location with a little message. Don’t know if it’s likely all 5oo-plus of us are gonna do this (or even see it) but it would be a cool record of everyone who took part. In fact, Blogathon.org should do something like this, maybe next year.
So the RIAA subpoenaed (sp?) a whole bunch of file traders, based on their Kazaa and Grokster usernames.Of course, there’s plenty of reasons this is just plain dumb, amply discussed elsewehre (for instance, here). But I wonder if maybe, just maybe, the RIAA isn’t doing us all a favor by pushing us further towards distributed, anonymous networks.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding–I don’t use Kazaa (preferring Gnutella-based Gnucleus and BearShare) so maybe I don’t get the system. But from what I can see, each Kazaa user has a unique, and thus traceable, username, which s/he uses to log onto the Kazaa network–and which the RIAA uses to issue subpoenas. Gnutella doesn’t require any log on, and since there’s no central location where accounts are managed, there should be no central place where my identity (e.g. my IP address) is compromised. This is not an attempt to advocate for Gnutella-based systems over others, but that element, at least, seems to give a degree of security lacking in Kazaa-like systems.
How else could I be tracked? Well, it seems that my ISP will have a record of mp3 files being routed to my IP address. I’m not sure how much leeway the RIAA has in identifying files that may be copywritten by one of its members as they move through my ISP, but assuming that they can do so, it seems the next step is to make it as hard as possible for them to identify potentially copywritten materials. One idea: randomize file extensions, so that it is impossible to sort out mp3 files from the flood of email, document, webpage, and other files flowing through ISPs. The client could restore the original file extension after downloading. Another, better but more reource-intensive idea: the requesting client and the sending client exchange randomly generated keys with which the files are encrypted–an SSL kind of approach. Even if an RIAA spybot were able to capture the keys, it would have no idea what file the keys were meant to decrypt.
I think. I’m no expert, I’m just thining off the top of my head here. The general point is that the RIAA’s actions, in addition to alienating their customer base and curtailing users’ rights, should also be driving less and less vulnerable P2P systems. And that’s better for everyone, not just file-swappers.
(NB BearShare includes an ugly piece of spyware called SaveNow. This doesn’t bother me–the first time it tried to connect to the Internet, I instructed my firewall not to let it. So while it may run in the background, it cannot report any data about me or my system, and cannot download the ads its supposed to run, or whatever its supposed to do. I’ve never noticed any activity from it, in any case. I did agree to install the program with BearShare, but never agreed to allow it to use my bandwidth. Just a tip for Gnutella fans drawn by BearShare’s fast searching and easy interface.)
According to the New York Times, barter is the new buying. Since we’re all suffering from minor cash-low problems (no cash, no flow–no problem!) and on the butt-end of the massive wave of consumerism that were the ’80s and ’90s, seems we’ve all got junk lying around that somebody else might want to trade their junk for. I remember the old Carlin line: “Your stuff is shit. My shit is stuff!”
Not that barter ever went away–a lot of business is done “in kind”, and all those synergistic partnerships every corporation worth its salt boasts about are nothing more than a swap of brand influence–but I’ve no doubt that personal barter is coming back. The online epicenter of the new rise in barter is craigslist, which offer’s free beer (or Mt. Dew for the under-21 crowd) in exchange for helping someone load his truck, the loan of a digital camera for a week in exchange for a large pizza or lasagne, or your house painted in exchange for a futon or TV set (to take the first three barter ads from SF). According to the article, craigslist’s listings have doubled over the last year, no doubt reflecting the bottoming out of the job market and the ongoing repercussions of Bush’s friends on the stock market. As with most other activities, the Internet expands and intensifies the possibilities of bartering, and with peer-to-peer systems like eBay becoming increasingly corporatized into top-down blahness, I imagine that good end-matching services like craigslist will sustain a more stable barter market.
Of course, this article is in the “Style/Fashion” section, so you know it’s gotta portray bartering as less of an economic or, god-forbid, political strategy, and more as a lifestyle. Even when their respondants say nothing of the kind. Consider:
Ms. Bowling says she barters as a lifestyle choice as much as out of economic need.
“I think we live in a society that places too much emphasis on the value of money,” she said. “We are a throwaway society, and we don’t realize that something that is a throwaway to someone might be of value to another.”
Is there anything in that statement that indicates Ms. Bowling sees bartering as a “lifestyle choice”?
That aside, though, it’s an interesting article. craigslist doesn’t list my city, unfortunately, but I’m gonna keep my eyes open for local bartering networks–I’ve got a box of stuff destined for eBay that might be better served by a local trade.
This month’s Progressive carries an interview with Roger Ebert. Unbeknownst to us all until this year, Ebert is a committed liberal and a considerably good analyst of political affairs. In the interview, he discusses Michael Moore’s and Adrien Brody’s politcal remarks at the Oscars earlier this year, and offers some interesting thoughts on the way race and class are protrayed in movies, but what really struck me is a statement that’s somewhat incidental to the rest of the discussion. Asked about his response to the backlash against celebrities who came out against the war on Iraq, Ebert says:
I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class. I begin to feel like most Americans don’t understand the First Amendment, don’t understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don’t understand that it’s the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.
The criticism launched against folks like Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Jeneane Garafalo, Sean Penn, and the like tends to focus on the fact that they are no more experts on foreign affairs than the rest of us, so where do they get off commenting on such matters? The question should be, where do the rest of us get off not commenting on such matters. This whole country is founded on the idea of an informed and engaged citizenry actively participating in its own governance. While the details should rightly be left to the experts, allowing experts to direct the political process is the worst sort of elitism, and runs counter to everything this country is supposed to stand for.
Back when I was writing about Bill Gates’ charitable tendencies, the issue of employee chrity programs came up (alas, I’ve changed comment systems, and those comments are no longer with us). While I certainly appreciate the extension of workers’ charity dollars that is possible with employer matching funds programs, I mentioned that I was uncomfortable with the way some programs limited workers to specific, employer-approved charities.
Here’s why. (By way of xoverboard.) Berkshire Hathaway, a company in which Warren Buffett is a major investor, used to have a program that allowed its shareholders to designate up to $18 for every share they own to up to 3 charities of their choice. Buffett–widely known for his philanthropy–used the program to donate to Planned Parenthood. An employee and shareholder of one of BH’s subsidiary’s, concerned that her company’s profits were going in part to support causes at odds with her ” Christian, pro-family values”, complained. The story was picked up by pro-life organizations, and the controversy eventually led the company to terminate the program, eliminating about $200 million in charitable giving from BH–charitable giving that doubtless went to organizations across the political spectrum and in fields far removed from family planning.
Granted, these donations came from shareholders, not employees–but that makes it worse, not better. Employees would have had even less ability to resist the polics-driven reassignment of their charitable dollars. After all, shareholders at least have a vote in how a company is run, employees have nothing. If an employee is limited to those causes which his/her higher-ups or, as in this case, fellow employees, think is worthy enough, s/he is acting only as a surrogate for someone else’s agenda–and given the priorities of corporate managers and executives, that agenda will be the corporate agenda. As the BH example shows, even entirely open systems are subject to political pressure, and I am sure that people in companies with similar programs will be thinking twice about who they designate funds to and how those causes will be perceived by their fellow employees and shareholders, lest one person bring the system down around them as happened at BH.
A new blog named Blue Notes: Riffing on Jazz has openied its doors. Normally I don’t post about blogs in general terms–I prefer to point out an interesting comment or post–but this is an exception. One of the things I think is missing from the Internet is in-depth but personal writing about music–not just “The new whatever album rocks” or “Went to see Famous Band last night, got drunk, stagedived, killed a hedgehog and drank its blood” but really personal reflections about music (and, I suppose, about art–literature fares slightly better). Its not necessarily something I could do, so I’m glad to see someone else doing it well.
And especially about Jazz. I grew up with Jazz, my father having owned a Jazz club in Denver some ten years before I was born. One of my favorite bands growing up (and still one of the few musical groups that my brother and I really bond over) was the Stan Kenton Orchestra. When I got older, I got more into bebop and its more avant-garde offspring, but Stan Kenton paved the way, preparing me to hear music that didn’t echo whatever the hit-of-the-day was.
Today, Jazz faces a sort of crisis. The things that made Jazz a vibrant, crucial medium in the first half of the last century–the emotional and political costs of being black (and Jewish) in America, the innovation, the improvisation, the rawness, the attack on listeners’ sense of just what music is and could be–have been taken into hip-hop, leaving Jazz classicists like Wynton Marsalis to transform living, breathing Jazz into a conservatory art, chamber music for middle-class culture vultures. There are Jazz musicians I like today, don’t get me wrong, but for the most part I don’t see Jazz as a living medium today, any more than abstract expressionism or musical theater are.
Where Jazz does still live is in the tiny nightclubs–much like my father’s old club, in fact–where nobody’s concerned with making a statement or in fact any of the things I’ve just written about, where they just want to make music. In Harlem, there’s a club called St. Nick’s Pub, a long and narrow room that seats maybe 40 or 50 souls, where Jazz happens. Monday nights, after the tourists fall out, musicians come from all over the city to jam with the house band, musicians like James Carter, Don Byron, Terence Blanchard, and Savion Glover, as well as some guy you never heard of, some woman with great pipes or magic fingers, and the (un)usual collection of misfits who maybe don’t belong but certainly don’t care. It’s a lot like this:
Recordings are fine, but they lack a certain urgency. Give me an average band in a smoky room and you can have your box sets, CD Guides, and liner notes. I like the way the acoustic bass tickles my spine. I like the way the piano rings through the glassware. I like seeing guys sweat there way through a solo. I like watching them whisper to one another after the chorus, guessing what they might be saying. I like to close my eyes and drop into a meditative state while waiting for an unexpected turn or tear in the fabric?.even when it doesn’t happen (and, even on the best of nights, it rarely does), I love indulging in the possibility.
It looks as if Penthouse, long-time second runner-up in the “male entertainment” magazine field, will be shutting its doors. The magazine itself, and all its subsidiaries, disappeared from newsstands a couple months ago, and now employees are finding themselves with drastically reduced paychecks and the Penthouse Mansion is due for foreclosure. Cash flow problems, apparently.
I don’t have any special interest in this story, not being much of a fan of “male entertainment” mags–I’ve never read or bought Penthouse regularly, or its classier fellow traveller, Playboy–but I thought I’d use this as an opening to discuss pornography in general. A subject on which I am fairly ambivalent.
The stock complaint against pornography is that it is demeaning to women, portraying them as sexual objects existing solely for the pleasure of male viewers. While there’s certainly some substance to that argument, it’s strangely out of line with what the people ostensibly harmed by pornography tend to report as their actual experiences. Whenever anthropologists or other social scientists, even strongly feminist ones, go out and actually talk to models, actors, strippers, and sex workers, they tend to find women who resent the implications that they are merely puppets of some vast male patriarchal system, women who consider themselves active agents in the construction of their own image. The old fall-back, that these women suffer from “false consciousness”, falls way short of explaining this gap between what women report as their experiences of working in these fields and what activists assume must be the case.
This is not to say that women in pornography, or sex workers in general, are not exploited, manipulated, and even threatened in the course of their work. But then again, so are we all. We are all exploited by our employers (that’s where profit comes from, after all, and the record-breaking profits of recent years mean we’ve all experienced record-breaking amounts of exploitation), we all sell our bodies (in the form of time, attendance, workplace discipline, dress codes, etc.), and we have all found ourselves in degrading positions at one time or another in our working lives. That’s capitalism, and the story’s the same whether we earn our living having sex or selling pharmaceuticals with sexual side-effects.
If pornography is more degrading than other forms of work, it is because of our particular (peculiar?) attitudes towards sex and sexuality more than anything else. Can it be that we consider having sex to be more degrading than, say, handling feces? If not, why is prostitution, not to mention posing for soft porn, considered more degrading work than cleaning toilets or processing sewage?
I’m willing to concede that pornography instills and reinforces in men attitudes about gender and sexuality that are often distasteful, but in perhaps a different way than we usually assume. Pornography–like the subject lines of penis-enlargement spam (am I the only one who finds the “insult your customer” strategy a little odd?)–preys on and reinforces male feelings of inadequacy. The women in Playboy and Penthouse are inattainable for the vast majority of men, as are the lifestyles in which their images are situated. The titles tell it all–most of us will never enjoy the life of luxury of a jet-setting playboy, and most of us will never even get past the doorman in a building with a penthouse, let alone actually live in a penthouse.
The message such magazines convey is that this collection of pages you hold in your hands, this bundle of ink on paper, is as close as you will ever be allowed to get, not only to these women, but to this lifestyle, this world of leisure. Even more “earthy” pornography, the Hustlers and the low-budget hardcore, forces an implicit comparison with our own lives, a comparison in which our lives, the sex we have, must always come up lacking. Are you doing everything you could be doing with your partner? No, because there will always be something, some act or position or combination of people and body parts that you will not only not know about, not only not be physically capable of doing, but that you will be too embarassed, too shocked, too confined by the dictates of acceptible social behaviour to even bring up with your partner. Far from being objects for male consumption, the women portrayed in pornography become emblems of a self withheld, of an existence that the viewer will not and cannot have, will not and cannot allow himself to have.
The danger in this comes not so much from the degrading portrayal of women but from the degrading portrayal of men, of pornography’s audience, a portrayal that can produce (but I hesitate to say necessarily produces) frustration, conceivably violent frustration, with oneself and one’s partner.
Then again, maybe it’s just dirty.
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