Boomcrash

Iran in 2009 =/= cold warIran in 2009 =/= cold warIran in 2009 =/= cold war

With props to Just Jo Nubian for “The powers = chess”, Davey D for covering this first, and Clay Shirky for the big picture. You all rock my world with your amazing selves. <3

Somewhat distressed over anti-Empire folks from both the progressive left and the anti-NWO right pointing to CIA involvement in Iran in response to recent events. Consider the following scenario, which is based on history + unfolding events; please read accordingly:

Ahmadinejad is asserting that the Iranian uprising is a result of U.S. interference, which is being further reinforced by assertions by anti-Empire activists in the U.S., who point to this history of U.S. intelligence involvement in Iran both historically and as recently as 2008. This argument -– CIA involvement = U.S. backed destabilization — harkens back to the cold war; and while said argument is a matter of record -– the CIA was actively involved in the 1953 coup which brought the Shah to power, for example -– what is also clear is that Iranians in opposition to the current leadership have their own agenda. The inference from some anti-Empire activists that the CIA may have had a hand in the uprising also infers a conflation of the actions of Iranians in opposition to the present leadership with the CIA’s interests — an assertion which is very possibly inaccurate as well as enabling of both Ahmadinejad’s assertions of U.S. interference and the neo-conservative utilization of the present scenario to their own means; in particular, it gives U.S. neo-conservatives an opportunity to attempt undermining of President Obama’s seemingly more nuanced approach, while furthering their own militaristic objectives in the region – hardly an ideal situation for people who are in opposition to U.S. hegemony.

While the legacy of CIA destabilization of regimes around the world remains to this day, the problem is that we’re not in the cold war anymore. Instead, what we have is a global matrix of power that encompasses multiple social forces, both governmental and civic, that are approaching any given scenario -– all with their own needs, desires and objectives, some of which layer over the top of one other. If the cold war is drawn in analogy to checkers, what we have now is chess, of which the internet is a small but very important part, and even more ubiquitous communication tools (cell phones in particular) are actively a part of as well. Losing sight of this means that you’re looking at a different situation, with predictable outcomes, many of which are anything but liberatory.

Lessons so far:

This is the Iranians’ struggle for a new system, period. All of us on the outside who care about that struggle are just the helpdesk, if you will.

The history of CIA involvement in Iran is clear; what is also clear is that there are multiple interests at stake here. Conflating things into a cold-war like form of bilateral detente/brinkmanship is a deeply flawed analysis of this situation, and if anything, reinforces both the current Iranian leadership’s anti-U.S. assertions, as well as the U.S. neo-conservatives’ anti-Iran ones.

Decentralized tools increasingly multiply the chances of decentralized action using those tools (Shirky, 2008, “Here Comes Everybody”). This reality turns an already highly complex global scenario into a vastly more intricate one. Chess, not checkers; and losing sight of that has potentially unfortunate consequences, both for the players as well as those impacted by the “game.”

Are we actually starting to be in control here?

Rush job Twitter transcript follows below, with minor cleanup for continuity; much cred to Rebecca Walker for saying “more please” at just the right moment. <3

Solidadrocks The problem w/ the old school publishing system is that it constantly feeds off of a writerly underclass; poets are a prime example. (more)

solidadrocks However, Amazon isn’t the solution; open source models + p2p is. If coders can do it, so can writers – musicians already are.

Elliotharmon @solidadrocks What’s that mean? Just distribute our writings by bittorrent and the like?

Solidadrocks @elliotharmon In part, yes. I think what’s still emerging is a means to capitalize on social media for writers specifically (more)

solidadrocks @elliotharmon (cont.) but look at open source software — small distributed model as a result of deflated costs. why publishing (more)

solidadrocks why *old school publishing models don’t work is that

solidadrocks @elliotharmon (cont.) is that digital media has flatted the costs of creating infrastructure, aka distribution. making that model (more)

solidadrocks @elliotharmon (cont.) work is our job. /fin

solidadrocks the irony here is that by pushing the costs of distribution off onto artists, it’s given us the ability to recoup profits directly.

Solidadrocks It’s as if we’re at the stage of building an audience. The expectation is “where’s the money?” but you need to build audience first.

Solidadrocks and fwiw, i have a much bigger audience on the web than i did without it. it’s the first step, but definitely not the last one.

Solidadrocks now, if you already have a large audience, this can seem like a pain. what folks need to consider is how much is getting opened up here.

Solidadrocks a very large, indeterminate number of artists who were heretofore under the radar suddenly have both a broadcast and a distribution model…

solidadrocks …for free. so i’m not exactly sweating copyright, if you get my drift, y’all.

solidadrocks all i know is that the #hustle is my new currency. less of it means more slack = more time to write. sounds good to me

rebeccawalker @solidadrocks more please.

solidadrocks @rebeccawalker will do – just getting started thanks

elliotharmon @solidadrocks It seems like it’s a much older question sans technology – the freedom of DIY vs. the polish of an established press.

Elliotharmon @solidadrocks Ultimately, the writers I’m most attracted to sort of straddle that fence.

Solidadrocks @elliotharmon like most upheavals in culture, it definitely has a history; as you said, it points back to DIY. free software mvmt, too.

Elliotharmon @solidadrocks The connection to open source is interesting, I hadn’t thought about that.

Solidadrocks I mean, consider the impact of this on an intersexed mixed-race lesbian author w/ radical politics. No longer just a whipping post 4 BillO.

Solidadrocks re IS mixed-race etc. author: not that I’m naming names here or anything. seriously, it changes things.

Elliotharmon @solidadrocks But most attempts I’ve seen to directly monetize online literature are pretty – dopey?

Solidadrocks @elliotharmon I think that’s because 1) digital distro is still new, and 2) consider who is making the platforms.

Elliotharmon @solidadrocks I’d rather to the monetizing in person; i.e., touring.

Solidadrocks @elliotharmon see that’s just it. the same thing is happening w/ musicians — you sell in concert, not through brick and mortar.

Solidadrocks It’s like that poet who is supporting the pirate bay — he’s famous, hell, seemingly he would have a lot to lose. but he notes…

solidadrocks…that audience is the first step. the existing models stifle creativity more than nourish it en masse. Winterston talks about this as well

elliotharmon@solidadrocks Yeah, I get you, and the internet has a pretty amazing ability to nurture marginalized communities, no question.

Solidadrocks @elliotharmon which in turn, opens the possibility for nurturing for everybody, not just the marginalized.

Solidadrocks re the platforms: i think free CMSes such as joomla and drupal, as well as semi-open platforms such as Ning, are the first step in what…

solidadrocks …is going to be a long process. writers and developers collaborating is a critical step in this process imo.

Elliotharmon @solidadrocks This is really interesting, I’ll try to send you an email, but now I gots to work.

Solidadrocks @elliotharmon coolness, please do.

Solidadrocks none of this is to say that people shouldn’t organize for better contracts – they should! but what if you have “the stuff”, but never get 1?

solidadrocks most of the writing contracts i’ve signed over the years have been shit – either $$ but work for hire, or shitty pay w/ some (or no) control

solidadrocks also, the work for hire contracts were for doing things i absolutely hate, like tech writing. UGH. still, i’m fortunate, rel. speaking.

Seattle is dead, long live MultitudeSeattle is dead, long live MultitudeSeattle is dead, long live Multitude

One of the things that tires me to no end about left activists is the notion that we all have to be on the same page, all the time, about everything. Having weathered through a seemingly endless number of house meetings, groupthinks, clusterfucks and so on, I can personally testify to the incessant drum beat of such practices. Note that this includes anti-authoritarians, although for obvious reasons, not to quite the same degree as a centralized, cadre-driven Marxist-Leninist party: think vegans, punk rock/hipster conformity, and collective living.

In no small part, I think this hive-mind-as-potluck tendency is due to leftover – and in some cases, active – strains of 1960s/70s Leninist centrism within left activist circles; an approach that has its origins in a centralized vanguard controlling a mass movement via multiple satellites. Simply put, this approach has outlived its debatable usefulness, both culturally and practically. If anything, discussing this in anything other than the past tense reflects how much a large portion of the activist left is out of touch with the changes that are happening rapidly within global culture. A cursory glance over the political landscape in the US reveals many recognizable movements, and then there’s the thousands of internet-based groups, of which a small but notable minority are political in nature – and yet, if you were to take your information from your standard Usual Suspects, you would be under the impression that there’s a small scattering of such movements, if not a monolithically framed “The Movement” – as if working for social change was some sort of singularity for process freaks – while groups on the internet are dismissed as being escapist or dilettantish.

In fact, it is not centralized, factory-like apperatti that drive social change at this point; instead, it is the very same tendencies towards decentralization and spontaneous mass formation that are part of the culture as a whole, and that are frequently used to formulate mass opinion via crowd psychology. As awful as that may sound, this trend is enormously beneficial: as Rosa Luxembourg noted back in the day, revolution starts with the unconscious: the spontaneous forming of mass resistance to societal forces occurs when a critical mass of people can’t take the unbearable bullshit of it all and start to fight back. It is after this resistance starts to mature a bit that the need for some sort of organizational structure begins to take root. In addition, as Hardt and Negri note in their seminal books Empire and Multitude, the fomentation of a decentralized mostly rural resistance under a centralized command has started to give way to a urban one of a more autonomous nature, circa 1968 onward. As such, the formation of Empire through a decentralized web of semi-conscious individuals, wherein each person is a potential consumer (or if you will, an energy source within a Matrix-like socioeconomic framework) is also the same mechanism wherein individuals can wake up, creatively formulate and strategize with others, and start to resist their own subjugation.

This process of shifting from centralization to autonomy began as many things do: at the end of a cycle. As anarchists were still suffering from the defeat in Spain (as was everybody on the left who was within Franco’s purview), the beginnings of what would become the New Left were beginning to take shape, both culturally and politically. Possibly because of the psychological impact of World War II, as well as the eventual mass availability of the birth control pill and the personal computer, the progressive modernist ideals of the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century were giving way to postmodern ones. It is for this reason that what has matured throughout the latter part of the 20th century up to the present day is not a centralized, vertical apparatus, but a swarm of decentralized, horizontal pluralities with varying states of authority or autonomy on a case-by-case basis. Seen through a modernist lens, this may look like a regression; but in fact, it is a meaningful shift in tactics and strategies to the present-day virtuality of culture. What is now clear is that centralized organizing as a unitary movement-generating tool has long outlived its prime, and what the left – and in particular, the radical left – is currently suffering from is the last vestiges of that dying ember.

And now, we find ourselves in the midst of an even more articulated form of autonomous resistance yet again, thanks to the internet. The very technologies that are being used to monitor us all are also being used to coordinate the beginnings of mass resistance. As Clay Shirky notes in his seminal book Here Comes Everybody, what used to be the exclusive domain of governments and mainstream media is now potentially in the hands of all, or will be very shortly: from flash mobs in Belarus to internet-coordinated student walkouts in the US, people are using digital technology to assert their collective power in creative and unpredictable ways. (The irony of this to Star Trek fans should be evident: it’s as if the Federation – the government – had given the Borg – the resistance – a bad reputation by castigating it as mindless and hierarchal, when in fact the opposite is true.)

With time, hopefully the activist left will start to capitalize more effectively on this trend towards mass decentralization and empowerment, and act accordingly. As it presently stands, it appears that we’re going through a prolonged period of the left using these tools, but not necessarily being adept at manipulating them. (My own personal attempts to educate fellow activists on the usefulness of these technologies can stand as testament to this fact: having grown weary of debating the merits of the web with laptop-lugging luddites and patiently re-re-schooling “How do I use the internet?” newbies, I’ve taken to blogging instead.) While I do think this is a shame, I also contend that it is critical for people on the left to realize that people en masse are going to empower themselves, with or without activists to “help” them. Any other course of action would be a rather profane act of self-effacement, serving no real purpose other than adhere to antiquated notions about the nature of power in society, such as technology being exclusively in service to our supposed betters, rather than a multi-faceted manifestation of biopower that embodies as much as it oppresses. Most people do not have the sort of luxury that allows for such adherence, and the left should not delude themselves into thinking that they have that sort of cultural opulence either.

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

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