References for European Heritage Hub Forum, Bucharest

Just scrapping together a quick list of references for my talk today at the European Cultural Heritage Summit in Bucharest.

This was an event organized by the Europeana Foundation and the European Heritage Hub in association with Europa Nostra.

The topic was an exploration of the role of digital cultural heritage in the triple transition of Europe (digital, green, and social).

My role was to present a short provocation advocating for the daring, urgent use of cultural infrastructure to catalyze global effort - - actual action - - towards the climate emergency and the SDGs.

Links and references:

Examples of projects on the other side of the Big Frickin’ Wall

  • Brooklyn Library, Books Unbanned

  • MIT Open Courseware

  • Internet Archive National Emergency Library

  • Leiden European City of Science 2022 (365 days of programs in the community)

  • NEMO - Network of European Museum Organizations (activity around climate action, political action, etc)

  • List of references (good Digital stuff) prepared for European City of Science (40+ projects in 4 blog posts starting here)

  • MuSo homepage

  • National Geographic Society’s pivot toward environmental/social impact reporting (I don’t have a reference for this, but as I recall the editors decided to pivot to a more activist voice as a result of the programs and panels that took place during the Society’s 100th anniversary in 1988.)

  • Hip Hop Festival, Maramureş History & Archaeology Museum

    • https://hiphopkulture.ro/evenimente/roots-festival-de-cultura-urbana-2024-baia-mare/

    • https://www.directmm.ro/comunitate/cultura-urbana-la-muzeul-de-istorie-maramures-in-premiera-va-avea-loc-concert-special-de-hip-hop-in-incinta-institutiei-cand-are-loc-recitalul/

    • https://www.directmm.ro/comunitate/cultura-urbana-la-muzeul-de-istorie-maramures-in-premiera-s-a-organizat-un-concert-special-de-hip-hop-fondurile-pentru-achizitia-de-rechizite/

    • https://​www​.maramuresmuzeu​.ro​/

  • Green Council, Șirna Communal Library, Prahova County, Romania

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC1CC4lhEmQ

    • Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/irna-public-library-romaniapdf/257829154

    • https://www.ifla.org/events/ifla-ensulib-webinar-series-sirna-public-library-from-romania/

I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?)

I just posted a new essay, I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers, subtitled “Can museums save the world'?

It’s an un-edited, pre-publication draft of a piece for for Seize the Moment: Rethinking the Museum (Marsha Semmel, Ken Yellis, Avi Decter, ed.) to be published in early 2022 by Rowman and Littlefield. It is also an expansion of a short piece I wrote with the same title for Ten Perspectives on the Future of Digital Culture, a 2018 publication commemorating the 10th anniversary of Europeana.

The basic idea of the essay is to use a very modest, first-person time-travel narrative as a way to speak bluntly about what I see as the cultural sector’s reticence to get much involved in climate action and social justice.

In one passage I find myself standing at my office window looking out at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution in the days, months, and years following 9-11 (a very real memory for me and one that has shaped much of my work over the last 20 years).

How would these three, august institutions help us understand what had happened to us as a nation? What would they do to help us chart our way forward in this complex and dangerous world?

As I stared into my beer, I couldn’t think of a single thing that any of these institutions, or even museums in general, had done to help Americans think clearer thoughts or make better decisions after 9/11. It wasn’t a museum’s job, or so we thought. Just hunker down, entertain the guests, conserve the collections and don’t rock the boat. So we lost our minds and went to war for 20 years without even an exhibition catalog as a souvenir.

More at I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?).

* * * On a related note, in November, 2021 I’m organizing a workshop and strategy charrette to try and do something to jumpstart real action from the cultural sector. We need help funding travel for participants. Please give us a hand!

GoFundMe: Help Send Climate Activists To The Hague
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-send-climate-activists-to-the-hague

Image credits: Remix of ‘The Boyfriend’ by Alžbeta Halušková. CC BY-SA. Source material: Za frajerom | Hanula, Jozef. Slovak National Gallery. Public domain. Creator: Alžbeta Halušková. Date: 2018. Country: Slovakia. CC BY-SA

Actionable solutions

Bruce Springsteen, talking with President Barack Obama.

Then came the country music in my late 20s and 30s. Looking for other solutions than Rock music provided. Rock music was a great music and there was some class anger in it and that agreed with me. Ah, then there was a beautiful romanticism and melodies, a lot of energy. But as you were getting older, it didn't address your adult problems.

So I went to Country music. Country music was great, incredible singing and playing, but it was rather fatalistic. You know?

So, I said well, “Who's trying to play…Where is a music of hope?” And when you went to Woody Guthrie and Bob [Dylan], you know... They were spelling out the hard world that you lived in, but they were also providing you, somehow, with some transcendence and some actionable solution to societal, and your own, personal problems. You could be active.

That drew my attention because I was now a relatively big rock star. I was interested in maintaining ties to my community. I was interested in giving voice to both myself and folks in my community. I was also interested in being active to a certain degree, taking some of what I was earning, putting it back into the community […] And that was where I found my full satisfaction and that's how I put all the pieces together.

Bruce Springsteen, talking with President Barack Obama in the American Music episode of their podcast series Renegades, via @kattvantar.

More Gibson than Gibson

“Welcome to 2020, time travelers, where white grandads fighting for racial equity mid pandemic are equipped with n95s and super charged leaf blowers to ‘blow the tear gas away.’”
— Jacqueline Alemany @JaxAlemany, 24 July 2020, in response to Sergio Olmos' video of Portland protestor Peter Buck. With "Gibson" I'm referring to the work of cyberpunk/speculative fiction author William Gibson.

Everybody knew

Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too… As did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid…They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.

The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.

Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, “The Bell Science Hour” — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired “The Unchained Goddess,” a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” warning that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate” through the release of carbon dioxide. “A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,” says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. “An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.

Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.

The closing passage of Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, by Nathaniel Rich, New York Times, 1 August 2018

The Web We Want

"The Web We Want" Submitted remotely and screened at Ignite MCN. November 5, 2019 Music Box club, San Diego http://www.mcn.edu

I was supposed to be in San Diego this week for the Museum Computer Network conference, but business called me away. Here’s my Ignite talk, The Web We Want, composed with both the news of the day (fake news, propaganda on Facebook) and the rhythm of N.W.A.’s Express Yourself stuck in my head. I produced this video facsimile as a self-contained all-in-one production to try to give a sense of the moment — of being on stage with and for my people.

It’s a bit of a sequel to the last MCN Ignite talk, Jack the Museum, given in 2012.

Jack the Museum asked us to reach outside the constrictive idioms of traditional museum practice to seek greater impact in the world. Now, seven years later, with the humanistic vision of the Internet and the Web under threat, the Web We Want asks us to fight to reclaim the positive values of a digitally connected world.

Good luck tonight Nathan, Effie, Alison, Andrew, Beth, Koven and Nik — I’ll be with you in spirit, sending you all good vibes from somewhere over the Atlantic! Cheers!! https://conference.mcn.edu/2019/Ignite.cfm

Here’s the script (and an annotated version is here as a .pdf).

Hey I’m Mike; Cheers! Tonight I’m in absentia.
Talking to you across a digital connection.
Broadcasting from my trusty cyber station,
My code, copper, glass, and silicon creation.

Yeah I love the web — and it’s our baby.
And many-of-us are insider spiders that can ride her, maybe.
Or are we flies that come around …  get stuck and eaten?
That web’s a sticky place now, and that smilin’ spider we be greetin.

What am I talkinabout? Well you may know me, Willis.
May know the things I care about I think will kill us.
May know the scope, scale, and speed-lovin man I am.
May know the green-eggs-and-ham lovin Sam-I-am.

I look out my windows and I see a shit-show.
If you log-in, or blogging with your noggin there’s a quid-pro-quo.
So let me take you through the categoric history.
To sweep the evils of these platforms to the dustbin of our history.

Facebook, Insta, YouTube, and Twitter.
I loved them, but these days I’d use them for kitty litter.
Flush them right down the pot — yeah, I’m pretty bitter.
They stealin’ from us like a Ben Franklin counterfeiter.

Facebook? It aided a genocide. A genocide. A genocide.
Facebook? It aided a genocide. 
Yeah, they did that, and people died.

‘But we’re too big to mod-er-ate on-line activity.’
That’s a laugh! Facebook you could have the proclivity
To care about people and values and civility,
And redirect some of your vaunted corporate creativity
 
To make common sense solutions that work for all humanity.
Hate is not a fair choice ‘tween free speech, profit, and inanity.
Grow a spine and learn from those who’ve learned to love their community.
Weave a web of love and trust like RPG and Ravelry.

YouTube, oh, don’t get me started.
I love this platform but then they departed
The land of common, objective civic decency,
When they give aid and comfort those who spread conspiracy .

Twitter, hell, it’s a travesty,
How harassment and abuse is right there for all to see.
It’s not convenient to care when your mistress is a business model,
That makes you into every troll and dictator’s mollycoddle.

Google, aw, where to start?
They’ve turned exploitation of privacy into an art.
Micro-targeting, tracking, and ruthless data aggregation,
Reduce life-changing choices to an algorithmic calculation,

Blurring our lives into a smear of ruthless averages.
When they work they work but when they don’t who pays the damages?
Not people like me, white, straight, schooled, and privileged.
The grievous harm they cause to the powerless and poor can be unlimited.

So don’t tell me it don’t affect you.
Don’t affect those you met and those who beget you.
“Come into my parlor” say we spiders to the flies outside.
Hey, everybody goes there, why not? Don’t worry ‘bout the sticky side.

I think it’s a matter of owning up to consequence.
We all ask our global family to play here, and at great expense,
We burnish the street cred’ of dot coms with our edifice,
And risk harm to our community while we’re being generous.

Microsoft, Apple, and the Amazon crew.
ISP’s and the mobile’s are part of this too.
They claim public good, civic virtue, in their soundbites,
But when push comes to shove will they shove the Benjamins or human rights?

Oh bruh and sis, I almost forgot.
Elections and fake news are what we begot.
Remember that thing with Cambridge Analytica?
Well how’ you feelin’ about the current situation politica’?

Not so good? Huh — well me neither.
Catastrophic atmospheric carbon’s rising in the ether,
And just when we all must be connected, fast, and democratic,
The web we need is rotting, unacceptable-ly problematic.

Are we going to let 7 billion people live and love on a Web that’s autocratic?
Where the values of decency and common good make the dot-com’s panic?
Where the captains of Silicon Valley are running manic?
Piloting our commons to an iceberg like their own Titanic?

To transcend greed. Avarice. The fecklessness of feckless pricks,
We’re going to have to work as one, renegotiate some politics.
Boycott, cajole, write those letters band together,
Take a stand, take a risk, take the streets hell bent for leather.

This heart, these beats from this spider-web practitioner.
This time, these rhymes bustin’ from this long-distance exhibitioner
This urgency this planet this community can get get it done.
The web we want’s the dream we got if we spin our silk together, connected and strong.

[Updated 29 November 2019 to include link to annotated notes and link to official MCN version of the video.]



“I know you are trying but just not hard enough. Sorry.”
—
Greta Thunberg to [US] Congress: ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry’, by Lauren Gambino, The Guardian, 17 September 2019

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish activist who has galvanized young people across the world to strike for more action to combat the impact of global warming, politely reminded them that she was a student, not a scientist – or a senator.

“Please save your praise. We don’t want it,” she said. “Don’t invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it because it doesn’t lead to anything.

“If you want advice for what you should do, invite scientists, ask scientists for their expertise. We don’t want to be heard. We want the science to be heard.”

In remarks meant for Congress as a whole, she said: “I know you are trying but just not hard enough. Sorry.”.

Or suffer the consequences

It’s working… But the question is, is it working fast enough? Paraphrasing the great abolitionist leader Theodore Parker, Martin Luther King Jr. used to regularly end his speeches with the phrase “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The line was a favorite of Obama’s too, and for all three men it meant the same thing: “This may take a while, but we’re going to win.” For most political fights, it is the simultaneously frustrating and inspiring truth. But not for climate change. The arc of the physical universe appears to be short, and it bends toward heat. Win soon or suffer the consequences. 
Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?, by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017

No answer

At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?

A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?”

We had no answer.

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us, by George Monbiot, The Guardian, 14 November 2018

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.

They never got to the second paragraph

"Now, if everybody wants to sit around and wait until the world warms up more than it has warmed up since there have been humans around — fine. But I would like to have a shot at avoiding it," said Pomerance.

Most everybody else seemed content to sit around.

When the group reconvened after breakfast, they immediately became stuck on a sentence in their prefatory paragraph declaring that climatic changes were “likely to occur.”

“Will occur,” proposed Laurmann, the Stanford engineer.

“What about the words: highly likely to occur?” Scoville asked.

“Almost sure,” said David Rose, the nuclear engineer from M.I.T.

“Almost surely,” another said.

“Changes of an undetermined — ”

“Changes as yet of a little-understood nature?”

“Highly or extremely likely to occur,” Pomerance said.

“Almost surely to occur?”

“No,” Pomerance said.

“I would like to make one statement,” said Annemarie Crocetti, a public-health scholar who sat on the National Commission on Air Quality and had barely spoken all week. “I have noticed that very often when we as scientists are cautious in our statements, everybody else misses the point, because they don’t understand our qualifications.”

These two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.

They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place.

The scene at the 'Pink Palace' conference, 1980, "the first rehearsal of a conversation that would be earnestly restaged, with little variation and increasing desperation, for the next 40 years," from Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, by Nathaniel Rich (lightly edited for context), New York Times, AUG. 1, 2018