Boomcrash

The Zen of being griefed

I’m new to Twitter, but I’ve already received a follow from a Virginia-based non-profit that promotes missile defense, as well as from the deliberately-offensive-yet-occasionally-hilarious website Ask Blackie. (Blackie as in “S’up, my niggas! Where the party at?”)

So I blocked the missile defense account, no worries – but the real moment of existential panic was over Ask Blackie. Who the hell is doing this? What do they want from me? God, life is hard enough as it is. I felt a slowly creeping anger setting in.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I watched the vBlogs on the site – but given my politics and background, what may surprise you is that I calmly viewed them, loled a bit, got pissed off a bit but didn’t stress out over it. Did the site annoy me? Yes, of course. Did I laugh despite myself? Yes. The anger receded, and I went on my my day.

You may be thinking, “Isn’t this the moment where people such as yourself are supposed to have your fist in the air, getting on the phone to your Congressperson, blocking the doors and shutting shit down? Isn’t that what you live for?”

No – or to be more precise, not anymore.

Let’s step back a bit. It’s 2007, and I’m out somewhere in the 3D Bizarroville known as Second Life. I – or rather, my avatar – is being bombarded by the following images:

A red-hued shit and disembowelment collage
A wryly smiling Bill Cosby holding a pudding pop
A cartoon image of an anthropomorphized fox/furry in hell

Dozens of floating memes, followed by hundreds of hamburgers and Super Marios, then back to viscera and The Cos – all making me enraged. Hunched over at my computer, I’m moving my mouse back and forth – which is causing the avatar to “run” back and forth frantically. I occasionally stop moving the mouse to type something deeply insightful, like “WTFH.” I was convinced that this was some sort of right wing l33t hax0r cabal determined to fuck with my business – I had read Vice magazine, I knew how the young kids thought! I was clearly a prime target, and as such, I was getting harassed. This resulted in me losing my shit, which was exactly the intention of those bombarding me: get a hoot or three out of my sorry ass chasing a bunch of images on a screen, as if the real life sky suddenly turned purple and started raining Chuck Norris action figures – a neoconservative god-figment tormenting my over-active imagination.

Eventually, I managed to calm down, unplug for a while, take a walk and get some air – for a year or so. (I also learned how to decypher contemporary Internet culture more accurately, where the joke is on everybody, not just “the left.”) But when whoever-the-hell runs Ask Blackie started following my newly established Twitter account, complete with over-the-top racial characterizations and various Internet meme references? A little speck of the old familiar dread set in all over again – a miniature frozen-pudding-worshiping Pavlov’s dog stuck in an awesomely proportioned Bosch triptych. Once again, my mixed-race intersexed femme dyke anarchist self was waiting for the memes to show up, because nothing sets griefers in motion like someone who has a complex set of identities. We’re a petri dish for potential lulz, a walking, breathing Mountain Of Fail in the making. I kept it all on the chill this time though, and the panicked anger receded.

What people need to realize is that when you react as I did back in 2007, you’re shouting all and everything at a very large wall, which then just gives more information to whoever is pulling your personal parts to make you shout even louder. It’s damned funny to watch, and equally painful to go through – a scatological koan gone viral, with whatever you’re obsessed about as the punch line. That is, unless you stop reacting to it, in which case it becomes really, really, REALLY funny for you, and a comedic version of an indifferent audience for whoever’s doing the griefing – and the best part is that you may even learn something about how your mind operates in the process. If you keep on feeding it material though, it quickly morphs into a Buddha virus, and the game is on.

I’m sure that some of you will go to the site and get seriously pissed off anyway, so here’s a bit of advice. If you want to score a truly epic fail for yourself, and an Epic Win! for whoever’s patiently watching and waiting? Try blogging about Ask Blackie (or the equivalent) with a thick tone of smug indignation, and see what happens. You’re guaranteed to be swimming in David Cronenberg outtakes in no time at all, and if you decide to up the stakes in response, you may find your home address being spammed all over the tubes, if the recent past is any indication. Jokes on you, winner! Welcome to Videodrome, use some muthafuckin’ common sense next time…

Oh-oh.

Welcome to the Twithouse

The first few times I watched Dollhouse, I hated it. It seemed inexplicably bad, what with the cheesy soundtrack (bad porn) and the woman-as-prey plots (again, bad porn) – it was as if Joss Whedon had a bad dream in some not-so-alternate GOP universe after a much-too-late dinner, then left the cable on when he dozed off at 2 AM. (If you haven’t seen the series, the Dollhouse is mostly a sex-for-hire conclave, but with perhaps-willingly-perhaps-not human participants as programmable sexbots. It’s much more nuanced than that, but that’s the gist.) The show has started to raise some serious questions about the relationship of identity to technology, and particularly as the first season begins to reach its close, some serious overarching themes regarding race, class and gender are beginning to take shape. It’s also become as entertaining as Buffy was, but without all the gosh-shucks-I-have-a-dark-side hijinx – the intersections of sex work, technology and identity that are being covered is definitely transgressive territory, and Whedon deserves to be applauded for raising an increasingly provocative and uncomfortable series of questions in relation to that territory.

What happens though when something like Dollhouse – or if you will, a technology that resembles a neurologically programmable version of Second Life – becomes as commonplace as Twitter? If the evolution of the web is any indication, as social media evolves as a mass medium, there will be more people involved with far less agency in real life than the various and sundry digerati typically found in social media’s earlier stages; for example, more women and people of color will be involved, but most likely in an inverse relationship. (It simply is not the case that Oprah singing the virtues of microblogging means that homegirl on the corner with a cell phone and a Twitter account is gonna be kickin’ it with Ashton Kutcher – or landing a prestigious gig at Google – in real life.) It’s also true that at least some of the people involved with the earlier stages of the technology will drop out entirely due to becoming bored with the medium, or more precisely, because it doesn’t reflect their self image as much as it used to.

None of this is to meant to assert that bleeding edge d00ds jumping ship once a technology goes viral is inherently unwelcome. If anything, this particular point is where a given technology begins to represent actual social power on a national or global scale. (It also allows for the possibility of further advancement of the technological shifts in question, which in turn, creates the possibility for more rapid grassroots social change, as well as an expansion of social degradation and control.) This amassing of collective social power is brought up repeatedly by the critical theorists Hardt and Negri (and to some degree, by Shirky); pulling from Foucault’s concept of Biopower, which can loosely be defined as the mechanisms of global power made manifest in people’s social consciousness, Hardt and Negri note that mechanisms of social control that are utilized on a mass scale to empower Empire are so integrated into the fabric of people’s daily lives and interactions, that these same mechanisms can be used to cultivate mass power in a decentralized fashion. This also calls into question, or at least submits for revision, the notion that social transformation can only occur through centralized bodies, such as political parties. For Hardt and Negri, social transformation looks somewhat like culture jamming on a mass scale, and much less like building a worker’s party. This ties into historical and cultural shifts that have occurred post-World War II, which I will write about later this week; but for now, I’ll suffice by saying that all is not as it seems when it comes to agency and power in the post-industrial world, and there’s much that is reflected in Whedon’s work – and in particular, in Dollhouse and to some degree, Firefly – that can be viewed in the context of cultural and literary tensions between modernism and post-modernism.

Further reading:

Hardt and Negri, Multitude
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Springtime for MaoSpringtime for Mao

Anarchists and Maoists, we don’t always play well together. So when I stumbled upon folks from one of their more well-known bookstores having a garage sale, I was expecting the worst. Not really wanting to part with hard-earned cash to a group of political sometimes-adversaries-sometimes-not-so-much, I nevertheless wandered in to take a peek.

There it was: the holy grail of used computers – and it was affordable. In order to do my bread-and-butter work, I need to have two computers (one for Mac, one for Windows) running at the same time – or at least, it’s the least painful solution to that particular problem. As such, I had been planning and re-planning how I was going to get a second box on the cheap for months. After my last ill-fated attempt, Craigslist was definitely not an option, nor was shelling out several hundred bucks for components. So in a blossoming gesture of springlike generosity, the universe was providing the answer once again – courtesy of a bunch of über-statists.

Thankfully, we all seemed to be in good spirits, so we got to talking. They offered me a newspaper, of course. I politely mentioned that we had differing political views, but took the paper anyway. (They were raising funds for their legal defense in a police brutality case, which no matter what you think of Maoists, is usually a good thing to throw down for.) We haggled a bit over price, but in a friendly way – success. I went to the ATM, got the money, came back. I paid for it, hoping not to get into an argument over the effectiveness of statism in people’s movements – and then I said:

“Keep up the struggle, ok?”

The woman taking the money looked down and replied flatly:

“Yeah.”

I appeared to have blurted out the wrong thing. The air grew thick – I thought to myself, Struggle is bad? I don’t get it. It seemed as if everybody who was mulling about – which in this case, appeared to be just them – stopped and stared.

Oh shit, here it comes, I thought – I’m officially non-PC. Gonna get dressed down, in three…two…

Then she looked up, and beamed.

“But you also gotta win!”

Winning? As in, succeeding? Hell yeah. We all laughed, the air cleared, a nice Maoist lady gave me a ride home with the box. We’re all happy.

Lessons to be learned? As an anarchist (or if you want to get specific: an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, pro-self-determination, anti-capitalist, horizontalist feminist, prison abolitionist autonomist socialist; I hope this makes it clear why I just say “anarchist”,) I’m not really big up on the fight for an authoritarian “people’s state” – lots of bad history there, including some really bad results for anarchists such as myself. I also know that we’re in this shit together, and contrary to what some folks who live in areas with a heavy activist population seem to think, we don’t always get to choose our allies – not if, as she correctly pointed out, we want to win.

Therein lies the problem. I’m not that sure we anarchists, as a whole, know how to succeed at the moment, all assertions to the contrary.

Consider: from 1999 until 2003-4, anarchism was in the mainstream news, and for good reason. In a refreshing blossoming of resistance, there were massive anti-globalization protests in the US, at which anarchists were active, present and accounted for. We were on the public radar, and not always as “those angry white boys who smashed up Starbucks.” The New York Times ran a lengthy article on an anarchist collective house, focused in part on a woman in her 50s who left her corporate career to live there, and it wasn’t a highbrow version of a neo-liberal smack down. Anarcha-feminist and anarchist POC groups were springing up, and developing their own responses to the capitalist prison-industrial state. We were looking less like a scraggly bunch of unfocused malcontents and more like an autonomous decentralized movement.

Then Miami happened (where for those of you who don’t follow such things, we got our asses beat en masse by the popo), the public outcry to the war started to recede, and by 2006, the focus was all on the national elections. Our visible numbers dwindled down to the dozens, and when we were mentioned in the mainstream news (which as awful as the MSM is, is the only way that 99% of the US population knows we even exist), it was to cover some small grouping of afore-mentioned angry white boys, or the occasional piece on animal rights. Some of us ended up going to jail with decades-long sentences, especially among those who were convicted of militant direct action, which always takes its toll on militants and non-militants alike. Through no fault of our own, we started to lose focus, and honestly? Most of us haven’t regained it since. As a result, I wonder sometimes if many of us are in a sort of we-want-to-fail depressive malaise, because it does appear that way at times. Soldiering on with the same approach despite increasing relevance and effectiveness? That is a really good way to get stuck. (Look at how well its panned out for many sections of the anti-war movement, for example.) I mean, where’s our friendly neighborhood garage sale, with all smiles, good vibes, and as always, the have-you-read-our-newspaper pitch – but in a casual, not in-your-face sort of way? Nowhere to be found, at the moment.

There is a shit-ton that I could criticize about Maoism at this point, as well as “Marxist” cults of personality and so on, of course – but when I lived in Seattle years ago, I seem to recall our differences not mattering that much. We were a smallish community of activists, leftists, peaceniks and various and sundry radical flavors, tendencies and ideologies, and despite our small numbers, things always got done. We had no choice but to work together if we wanted to accomplish so much as jack, and I really don’t think we could have lived with ourselves if we had done otherwise. That is what I think of when I see sectarian squabbling among ever-shrinking groups of people on the left, not who dissed whom and whatnot. (Back in the day, we also managed to get a chuckle out of the more loopy sectarians, but always in a kindly-wise way.) I also wonder if leftist/statist groups wish we would just get our act together, differences to the contrary – which if true, just goes to show that sometimes your adversaries are your best teachers.

So here’s to small victories. After I was dropped off by the nice Maoist lady, I got a system without making M$ or Intel more rich – and they got money for their legal defense, which regardless of what you think of them, they do both need and deserve. The computer is humming along, I just upped my odds of finding work in a truly shitty economy, and they have a bit more cash towards making sure that yet another brother doesn’t end up in jail. I happen to think we need more of this kind of simple solidarity stuff, not less – differences be damned. It’s not enough to be right: as she said, we also need to win. I’m starting to think that should be our slogan as well, or at least, that we need to seriously consider a range of options and ways forward for all of us, because nobody else is going to do it for us. As the gamers say: “For The Win!” Or if you want to pull from the Spanish anarchists: “Viva Yo!”

Meanwhile, I’m gonna go configure my new computer. Thanks, Maoists! I hope your legal defense goes well, despite our obvious differences. The universe does move in mysterious ways…

Hello, activism? I need my life back.Hello, activism? I need my life back.Hello, activism? I need my life back.

I ran into a friend of mine from grad school a while back, and as part of getting caught up, I mentioned that the people I was spending time with were holding up the works – I was starting to flounder a bit in terms of my creative process and life direction, and as a result, I was ready to pack up and move to LA or NYC. After pointing out the obvious fact that it’s far easier to change who you hang with than where you live, she asked who these meddlesome folks were.

I replied sheepishly, “Um, activists…”

Her jaw dropped. “Oh, honey…”

Needless to say, activism is not her game; she’s more into a combination of art and deal-making – but it definitely was mine. I got my head or other body parts banged around a few times, got arrested a few times more than that, sat through an endless procession of meetings, and pretty much was living the life on-again, off-again just prior to the first US-Iraq war, and all but full-time since 1999. I had paid my dues, and thoroughly was in the mix — between organizing and living collectively, my day-to-day life looked like a cross between The Real World and Battle in Seattle. I loved it tremendously – after a long period of vacillation between counter-culture and corporate “culture,” it was very refreshing to be true to myself and to my politics.

Then? I walked.

It wasn’t for lack of trying to make things work; if anything, I was stubbornly trying to hold it all together, as if activism was some sort of dysfunctional-but-the-sex-is-great relationship that was starting to spin out of control. The minor disagreements that had occurred over the years started turning into pitched confrontations with increasing regularity, and conversations were taking that “Sweetie, perhaps you should not mix Vicodin and Hennessy” tone in both directions. When I got booted out of yet another collective house, I packed it up and moved to LA…

…where I found myself in the middle of the May Day cop riots. I managed to not get my head beat in, but just barely. That sort of ended it for me right there, not so much because of the risk involved, but because I was putting it all on the line – and I do mean it all, people do die or end up with permanent injuries on occasion – for what, exactly? It felt like I was increasingly running counter to my life’s purpose; while I managed to make time for both art and activism, I was doing so at the expense of everything else, and was stressed to the eyeballs as well. So I stopped for good.

After I had packed up yet again and moved back to the Bay Area, humbled yet strong, I went about rebuilding my life without activism as a central fixture. I stopped going to protests, and gave up on meetings. I even managed to shrug off the resulting I’m-abandoning-the-movement feelings of guilt – which may seem uncalled for, until you realize that I had been involved in campaigns and organizing since the 4th grade – and set to work on finishing up a poetry manuscript, followed by designing social community sites. I also vowed to live with fewer people, even though that meant risking higher rent, which thankfully didn’t turn out to be the case. Life started to feel like something that was uniquely mine, rather than time-shared with an ever-changing cast of characters, all with hard-won opinions about everything. I was less stressed, and definitely a lot more happy. I was becoming human again.

So what’s the lesson here? Peoples, listen. The world needs more activists, and badly does it need them. But what the left seems to miss out on with a frightening level of consistency is that activism takes many forms, including things that don’t typically get labeled as activism at all – and socially-minded arts and media creation are two of those things. (Spirituality, relationships and in some circles, community building/organizing frequently get placed this way as well, which pretty much leaves activism as the primary option for social change agents, in terms of collective power. See how this works?) Never mind that activists are frequently active consumers of socially conscious media – but in my experience, activists in the US are as guilty as anybody else when it comes to entertaining the mistaken notion that music, writing, poetry, art, performance, social media and so on just create themselves out of thin air while also being tremendously important, which paradoxically enforces the supposition that creators of art and media are completely on the wrong foot and of critical importance at the same time. It’s a losing battle, and one that I got tired of fighting. I’d rather be creating it than debating it – so that is what I’m doing. End of story.

And yet…I still feel conflicted about it all. It’s as if I’m wanting approval from a tribe that I’m still a part of, but that I have a fundamentally different relationship with, post-capital ‘A’ activism. The problem with this line of somewhat irrational thinking on my part is that it tends to cloud the void-like well that creativity springs out of; in other words, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I do what I always do when pernicious doubt tries to sneak into the equation and suck my creativity dry: I ignore it, but make sure to throw it a bone on occasion (chocolate works, but long meandering walks work better) and tell it to pipe down when I need to. I also make sure to give it the love that it desperately wants, while not being ruled by it.

So let this serve as a warning to y’all, as the economy continues to spin and reel, and we all continue to look for answers – the solution that you find may just be the one that most closely mirrors your true desires, and not what your superego-like conscience tells you to do. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you otherwise! Trust yourself, trust your instincts, and together, we artists, activists, visionaries and so can start to build a sustainable future together, free of being ruled by guilt and shame.

The border. The right. What’s the solution?

Just so we’re clear: I have my biases. I’m Black Portuguese via mi mama, born and raised in Califlas, and my step-grandpa was Cherokee. I’m also solidly Internationalist, definitely Horizontalist, and pro-Indigenous sovereignty. What I know as well is that the re-location of non-US labor into the US is part of yet another get-even-richer-quicker scam of the likes that we’re been seeing since the 1970s. Given that, it’s not surprising that the present political situation between Mexico and the US, as well as the resulting social upheaval in both countries, is not helping anybody in the long term — save for the elite of the elite.

While a mutually cooperative rank-and-file response to this sociopathic ponzi scheme is the ideal in my view, the reality is anything but cooperative. What we are presently witnessing, and have been witnessing for some time, is an erosion of both the US and Mexican economies due to corrupt, self-serving politicians and greed-based policies in both countries. Mexicans are being squeezed from both sides, which can lead anyone in the direction of dog-eat-dog solutions, partially formed revolutions or both; and in turn, working people in the US (black, brown, yellow, red and white alike) are being squeezed as well by similarly corrupt forces. This has been and promises to continue to be a destabilizing factor in both countries, which breeds resentments in both directions. Further, if the US economy fully collapses, it’ll most likely take the Mexican economy and many others with it as well. (The reverse is also true — further erosion of the Mexican economy is anything but good for the North American economy as a whole.)

As such, it is my view that the right in the US is attempting to respond to the US part of this equation from a perspective of intelligent self-interest, at least in some cases. I also think that the solutions they are coming up with are deeply flawed (Minutemen, supporting ICE raids, et. al.); even if you happen to think that this all constitutes a legitimate approach, which I don’t, it still doesn’t change the socioeconomic realities described above. Terrorizing people benefits nobody – what it does do is create further animosity, tension and resentment; the problems are too globally interconnected to solve by drawing a line in the sand, armed or otherwise. (It is also true that the problems are too complex to address by linking hands and singing “We are the world” — but that is not what I am proposing, nice though it may feel.) What people on the US right — and in particular, the anti-corporatist right — need to realize is that the alienation that they feel is not unique; if the governments of the US and Mexico are not going to address this problem adequately, the US and Mexican people need to start figuring things out for each other, not against each other.

What may change things for the better is a re-evaluation of economic, trade and social policies that is in keeping with the globalized economy — but from a perspective of addressing the world’s needs, including those of US citizens, while not further eroding global standards of living, especially but not exclusively among those who are the most in need. This is what the anti-globalization/anti-capitalist movements, as well as other movements, have been promoting for decades now, and continue to promote to this day.

We are not going to accomplish that goal without a fight though, regardless of whether we want one or not — which in turn raises the question of how do we all succeed towards that goal, in a world where both Capitalism and Communism has failed. I’ll save that for a later post.

How to survive the crash

The United States financial system is abandoning ordinary people at home just as it has throughout the world for decades. As a result, most of us are frustrated to the point that our upset is starting to turn into a clearly focused, highly determined anger. So how do we go from this place of anger to standing up and becoming the change we want to see, not just by voting, but by our actions as well? Read below for some ideas.

1. As Naomi Klein points out, the antidote to shock therapy is information. Share with others of like mind, and don’t be afraid to talk with those who aren’t.

2. Utilize your connections (friends, family, co-workers) to build active, engaged support networks, so when things really start to get tough, you’ll already have worked through the bulk of your interpersonal/cultural/ideological issues and conflicts while you still have the time to do so.

3. Don’t be daunted by fluidity — the world is changing rapidly. Be both flexible and immovable, depending on the situation.

4. Needless to say, use the Internet for all it’s worth.

5. If the people you work with are cowed into silence, regroup and find another way to keep the work going.

6. If “they” won’t let you do it, and it needs to be done? Do it anyway.

7. Promote and encourage as wide a range of responses as possible.

8. Don’t rely on the left-right dichotomy for your political anchor — but do know what you believe, and speak up if you are being messed with.

9. Read voraciously and live simply; learn about social movements throughout history, and take time to become fluent in social movements in the present. Read People’s History of the United States!

10. Recognize that there is a way to be a warrior for change. Key to this is getting your mind clear, as well as your heart.

11. Don’t get too stuck in the virtual. Trees are good — and I don’t just mean the virtual kind.

12. Be bold. Shout your truth from the mountain tops. Tell friends, talk with strangers, live the world you want to see.

13. Be really bold. During the elections, a Code Pink activist managed to get right up to Condi Rice and confronted her as a war criminal. We need to step up the heat, not turn it down.

14. Remember that organizations that don’t have clear goals that serve functional purposes become self-involved and self-interested. As such, focus on the work more than enterprise.

15. Horizontal organizing is more resilient than top-down organizing. As such, encourage forms of resistance that reflect this. Examples: Spokescouncils, APPO, Argentinian worker collectives and neighborhood councils.

Is this a technology blog or a political blog? Yes.

Back in early 2006, I had recently graduated with a MFA in Writing, and my life was on fire. My dad had died, I was increasingly at odds with my political community, and in a sign of things to come writ large, all my editing work was drying up. With the exception of a few crazed years during the 90s, I had careened between the lower rungs of the middle class and the upper rungs of poverty for quite some time, but this was looking downright scary in its proportions. I was crazed with grief, and struggling to hold my life together at a time when everything seemed to be coming apart.

Nevertheless, I managed to keep going -– keep writing, keep performing, always, always making music -– and then? I fell back into the technological soup in a way that even moi could not have foreseen.

Understand: After several years of juggling the tech industry, social justice politics and writing, I got laid off three weeks after 9/11. Still reeling from both that and a canceled east coast spoken word tour, I counted my blessings that at least I got a chunk of change from the process and went on tour elsewhere. As a result, while the whole social networking thing was taking shape, I was more concerned with getting from Chicago to Kalamazoo than musing over the benefits of fiber optics over DSL. As the corny joke goes, I was much too busy having a first life to worry about a second one.

In the two years and change that followed, I had gone through more stillborn “movements” than I could count, learned and relearned a whole slew of webtech, and last but not least, gave the aforementioned political community the heave-ho. After all that struggle, I was reborn…as an open source software/content nerd? It works for me, and in my own still-in-recovery way, I’m happy as well.

So, that’s the online story. Here’s the personal is political one: webgeek, author, musician, performer, sometimes video artist; feminist, queer, intersexed, black-and-brown-centric, all with a thick dose of open source advocacy. I also design and administer the new open source publishing platform Sharebook, which should be public any day now. (If you want to beta test, I’m still looking for help with the final touches, so drop me a note.)

Lastly, a few words about what to expect out of this blog. I’m envisioning this as a wedding of the more social/political aspects of online life with a varied range of issues and struggles on the real life tip, with a lot of commenting on events as they unfold. Sort of like Angela Davis meets Gonzo journalism, with a good dose of Huffpo for the measure, as well as a fair amount of Twitter integration. It’ll all reflect my overarching politics, but always with room for dialogue and discussion. Can’t get change without mutual support, amirite?

So that’s about it! Lucha sigue, peoples. See you soon.

All my best,

solidad