Obscurity

Obscurity makes meaningful and intimate relationships possible, ones that offer solidarity, loyalty and love. It allows us to choose with whom we want to share different kinds of information. It protects us from having everyone know the different roles we play in the different parts of our lives. We need to be able to play one role with our co-workers while revealing other parts of ourselves with friends and family. Indeed, obscurity is one reason we feel safe bonding with others over our shared vulnerabilities, our mutual hopes, dreams and fears.
Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd, by Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger, New York Times, 17 April 2019. This article by Dr. Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science, and Dr. Selinger, a professor of philosophy, is part of the New York Times’ Privacy Project

Let them go

“As an undergrad at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names. The mainstream textbook writers. The World Bank presidents. The White House advisors.

“And then Lehman fell.”

…To my great shame, I could not explain what had happened to my friends and family back home. Because my teachers could not. They did not include money or banking in their models. They didn’t see the crash coming. What insights could they have offered?

In a sentence, I realized I had been brainwashed.

Every experience in the financial reform world, every experience in law school, and every professional experience since, has only proved to me, more and more, that the Big Names do not know — or refuse to acknowledge — what’s actually going down. They were wrong about the global financial crisis. They were wrong about austerity. They were wrong about the EU. The list goes on and on and on.

Today, I work to help low-income communities directly fight banks, debt collectors, and other financial villains. I also collaborate with a wide range of heterodox scholars and activists.

In any case, I promise you what they’re saying is far closer to on-the-ground reality than anything I’ve ever learned from the Big Names, with rare exceptions. I know it’s scary to dismiss what the Big Names say. They have power and prestige.

But they are not scientists. They are not doctors. They are not objectively the best at what they do. Most of them are representatives of a failed elite consensus. They are afraid to admit their lens for looking at the world is fundamentally warped.

The Big Names simply could not and cannot explain the old world. They should not lead us into the future. Let them go.

Raúl Carrillo (@raulACarrillo), 5 March 2019 (with light edits)

The center line

Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.

Why do journalists and news organizations insist on doing this? I think the answer is pretty clear.

It’s because they want to appear fair without taking any chances.

The media feel safest in the middle lane. Just ask Jeff Flake, John Kasich and Howard Schultz by Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post, 30 January 2019

Now the war

“Now the war has come to Walmart. And Hooters. And Sam’s Club and McDonald’s, and an unnamed but homey looking restaurant that has a $7.99 Lunch Special. If this doesn’t look like war, that’s only because we so reflexively resist the idea of a war on American soil that we refuse to see the obvious.”
What perpetual war looks like in America, by art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 4 August 2019
Hooters2019-08-06.png

Kennicott's essay, in reaction to this week's mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, begins with a reflection on a photograph by Joel Angel Juarez of police in paramilitary gear outside a Hooter’s restaurant in El Paso.

Kennicott continues,

This convergence of our commercial landscape with violence is what the 21st century, ­slow-motion but persistent American war looks like. It also looks like the underside of a child’s school desk, people hiding in closets and wailing into cellphones, SWAT teams in parking lots, nightclubs with overturned bar stools and tables, piles of shoes abandoned outside a bar, and movie theaters soaked in gore. If we have the courage to do what we must do and look at the facts, we will also see that in one essential way, the American war looks like every other war everywhere on the planet, full of bodies riddled with bullets, bloodied, broken and dead.

Some wars are over in a day, or a week, and others go on for years. If there are opportunists and profiteers and cynical actors who are willing to fuel the mayhem for a tiny bit of personal or political advantage, then they can go on for decades. If war takes root in a society slowly, or by stealth, it can come to seem the ordinary state of affairs.

Charlotte S H Jensen

 
Charlotte S H Jensen

Charlotte S H Jensen

My friend and colleague Charlotte S H Jensen died suddenly last week. She was beautiful, kind, and funny and I will miss her very much.

Charlotte was an archivist and as far as I could tell she worked simultaneously for the National Archives of Denmark, the National Museum of Denmark, and the Copenhagen art and history museums. I’m not sure how she did that but I’m not surprised that it took three institutions to even partially contain her willpower.

She was a fierce advocate for the right of so-called ordinary people to use, benefit from, and contribute to the work of archives; and she was a force-of-nature in the vanguard of Danish museum, library, and archive professionals developing a more open, democratic, and engaged vision of cultural practice.

Charlotte was for the people, always, and I have never met anyone so passionate about their work and so dedicated to doing what is right for all.

Charlotte in Storm20, 2017.

Charlotte in Storm20, 2017.

Charlotte’s most recent project was the creation of the Storm20 makerspace in the ground floor of the Copenhagen History & Art offices in central Copenhagen. It is a warm, welcoming place — intimate but open — drenched with sun during the long Nordic winter and a welcome haven for ice cream during hot summer days. I always loved the fact that it was both a place to make and to socialize, with a little coffee house and shop up front.

Whenever I visited Storm20 there were a mix of tourists and locals; colorful bits of knitting, glue, electronics and fabric everywhere; and always photocopies, books, and notes about a half-made project going on — usually something connecting the past to the present through your hands.

Storm20 was created, as a sign in the workshop says, as a “historic maker space”, a place where you could “learn about the city of Copenhagen by participating in activities and workshops.” One of the first times I visited they were working on a project to reconstruct knitted work gloves found in the excavations for Copenhagen’s new subway line. One of the gloves, a mitten really, was unearthed and discovered to have two thumbs (!) and the Storm20 knitters were making reconstructions from the archaeological documentation to figure out why. All of the gloves were gorgeous, fascinating to touch and behold, and the point was clearly made: What one knows in one’s hands really matters; One can learn about the past — live it, feel it — by making something now; History belongs to, and is within reach of, all of us.

Interior of Storm20 makerspace. Knitted glove reconstructions are on the table in the foreground. The ones with two thumbs are on the far right.

Interior of Storm20 makerspace. Knitted glove reconstructions are on the table in the foreground. The ones with two thumbs are on the far right.

‘Yarn bomb’ on a vent pipe outside Storm20

‘Yarn bomb’ on a vent pipe outside Storm20

Charlotte cared about people, and history, and joy. And also about change.

As you work at Storm20 you can sometimes hear the screams of people on the rollercoasters at the Tivoli amusement park across the street. I often thought of those rollercoaster screams — screams of happiness and terror — as we talked about the joys and sorrows of trying to make a difference in the world. Change can be hard, and Charlotte took it seriously; both the successes and the setbacks. She was one of the first people to believe in me as I began to have bigger thoughts, and take more risks, in my own work and I believed in her and supported her as well.

Charlotte in Storm20, keeping careful eye on the robotic embroidering sewing machine, 2017

Charlotte in Storm20, keeping careful eye on the robotic embroidering sewing machine, 2017

A memorial service will be held in Copenhagen on August 5th (details here).

Goodby Charlotte. We loved you and we’ll miss you so much.

On stage at the Danish archives conference, 2017. Det er svært at spå navnlig om fremtiden — “Sometimes it’s difficult to predict the future”

On stage at the Danish archives conference, 2017. Det er svært at spå navnlig om fremtiden — “Sometimes it’s difficult to predict the future”

Photos CC-BY Michael Edson

WhatsApp — half of Zimbabwe

The crackdown on social media [in Zimbabwe], in part, is a demonstration of how the WhatsApp corner of the internet has become a powerful space for Zimbabweans. WhatsApp facilitated the spread of misinformation during elections in Brazil and has contributed to caste-based violence and mob killings in India. But it can also serve as a platform for democratized distribution of news in a country with a storied history of oppressing government critics.

Independent media in Zimbabwe are turning to WhatsApp as a primary distributor of news in the midst of an information landscape that is shifting to social platforms. State broadcasters and newspapers have long dominated the media, but alternative platforms began to exist and gain increasing traction in the last years of the Mugabe era.

Zimbabwe, with a population of 16.7 million, has a mobile penetration rate of close to 100 percent, and an internet penetration rate of about 50 percent. WhatsApp connections comprise almost half of all Internet usage in the country. Mobile network operators such as the country’s largest, Econet Wireless, provide data bundles specific to WhatsApp and Twitter, or Facebook and Instagram, for as low as $0.50 or $1 per week, making it more affordable for people to freely communicate in an economy where a significant majority are unemployed.

“When someone talks about internet access in Zimbabwe, they basically are talking about WhatsApp access,” said Thulani Thabango, a Ph.D candidate in media at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

WhatsApp has come in to fill the void: In Zimbabwe, the future of news is messaging, by Julia Thomas, Neiman Lab, 13 March 2019

Hudson Yards

“Up in the sky, Hudson Yards’ observation deck may also become an attraction — a triangular platform, 1,100 feet high, theatrically cantilevered from the top of 30 [Hudson Yards], with bleachers that provide an even loftier view. It opens next year.

I got a preview the other day. It’s one of the most amazing vistas over the city. I gazed north toward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

New York is awesome, I thought.

Then it occurred to me.

From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.”
Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves? by Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times, 14 March 2019

What sort of place?

Screen grab of https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/14/arts/design/hudson-yards-nyc.html

Screen grab of https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/14/arts/design/hudson-yards-nyc.html

“A new place is emerging.
The question is, what sort of place?
And this is the immediate problem with Hudson Yards.”

It is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent.

A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, it declines to blend into the city grid. […]

[T]he whole site lacks any semblance of human scale…as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.

It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.

Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves? by Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times, 14 March 2019

Breaking news

“I'm still learning how to say things like ‘allegedly’ or ‘it’s being said’ when I’m describing breaking news,” Ms. Villarreal said. “It’s a challenge, because I speak the language of the streets, and that’s why people follow me.”
La Gordiloca: The Swearing Muckraker Upending Border Journalism, by Simon Romero, New York Times, 10 March 2019. The article is a profile of Priscilla Villarreal, a self-taught, self-employed journalist in Laredo, Texas.

It was so easy

“On November 5, 2016, Jestin Coler, founder of the fake newspaper Denver Guardian, posted a ‘news story’ saying an FBI agent involved in leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails was found dead in an ‘apparent murder-suicide.’”
“Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy,” Coler told NPR. “Our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums, and boy, it spread like wildfire.” The made-up tale went viral on Facebook before the 2016 election—and was probably seen by tens of millions. “It was so easy,” Coler told me once.
Zeynep Tufekci, The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, Wired, 18 February 2019

In Defense of Gerontocracy?

I have come to see the moral clarity and conviction of young people and the wisdom and pragmatism of the old not as adversarial forces but as two elements in a dynamic system that need to be designed for as parts of a whole.

Here are two reactions to Frank Bruni’s column In Defense of the Gerontocracy: Maybe older is better. Just look at Nancy Pelosi, about US Senator Dianne Feinstein [age 85] apparently scolding of a group of young constituents who pressed her for action on the Green New Deal. The two comments below, from Micah and Paul B., are not directly responding to each other’s posts, but the effect is the same.

From Micah in NYC,

I usually love Frank Bruni’s columns, but this one infuriates me. Sure, yes, there are good Boomers. Fine. But, fundamentally, that’s not what the Feinstein kerfluffle was about. It was about a powerful woman condescending to terrified children who will inherit an Earth rendered uninhabitable by her brutal timidity long after she is dead. I am 23; if we don’t act now to demolish the structures that enable climate change, our planet will be in catastrophe long before I am Dianne Feinstein’s age, or Frank Bruni’s. Acknowledging that is far, far more important than a fragile generation’s ego.
Micah, NYC, 26 February 2019

From Paul B. in New Jersey,

You miss the whole concept of this essay. Ms. Feinstein was not dismissive of the children’s concerns; anything but. What she was saying is that large problems deserve passionate attention but also deep thought and planning. The devil is indeed in the details. The passionate intensity of youth insists upon immediate solutions without thinking deeply on the nature of the problem and the construction of complex solutions, essentially saying, “wouldn’t it be great if... or it is terrible that...” It is only through life long painful experience that anything remotely resembling wisdom is gained and one possesses it only at the apex of life and only briefly. Even though passion may seem to have dimmed, commitment remains. You would do well to listen to the elders while you can, rather than charge into what you know little about. Decent manners would not hurt, either.
Paul B, New Jersey, 26 February 2019

While I do see these two views as connected parts of a whole I will place my bets with Micah — with the the young and the young at heart. At this moment in history, with the ticking bomb of climate change, there is simply not enough time to rely on the slow, wise processes of the past.

As Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone, “If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win.” Or as Alex Steffen has said, “Winning slowly is same as losing.”

Addendum

In the article If Americans Can Find North Korea on a Map, They’re More Likely to Prefer Diplomacy (New York Times, 5 July 2017) Kevin Quealy unpacks several studies that show that when people know more about the geographic location of geopolitical hotspots — when they know where North Korea and the Ukraine are, for example — they tend to favor diplomacy over military engagement.

The people who had the most geographical knowledge were, by-and-large, highly educated, but the next most knowledgeable group was…older people.

“Nearly half of respondents 65 and older found North Korea. The Korean War, which ended in 1953, may be in the memory of today’s older seniors,” wrote Quealy.

From these studies it might be fair to conclude that the lived experience of older people may give them quantifiably different starting points for decision making than the young — which seems uncontroversial when I put it that way, but given Americans’ general state of ignorance regarding geography and history I would want more people in the proverbial “room where decisions are made” who had a living, working knowledge of where things are and what happened there in the past, than not.

A great challenge to society

Netflix does seem to be pushing cultural boundaries and sparking new conversations all over the world. After it plastered Bangkok with billboards advertising “Sex Education” last month, a conservative Thai political party filed a complaint against the company for airing the racy British comedy, which the party called “a great challenge to Thai society.” The young, progressive Thai internet responded in fury, and in the outrage, people started talking about actual problems in Thai society, like the lack of sex education and the high rates of teenage pregnancy.
Netflix Is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet Earth by Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, 22 February 2019