Politics

The Israeli elections are over, and it looks like Netanyahu’s “reelection campaign” wasn’t as successful as the last one he staged 4 years ago. A few months ago, in November ‘12, I had just returned from visiting Palestine/Israel when the IDF launched an attack against Gaza. Although Palestinian rockets raining down on Israel are nothing new, the new extended range of the Qassam rockets allowed the Gazans to attack new targets. I listened in disbelief as I learned that a few of the missiles hit Jerusalem suburbs. As far as I am aware, the last time Jerusalem was bombed from the air was in 1967, by the Jordanians. And, I’m pretty certain the Old City was off limits. I mean, can you imagine the reactions if one of those Qassams scratched the holy dome of the rock?  Or, Jesus’ tomb, which is down the block? The only way I have been able to understand these attacks is like an act of self-cutting—driven by utter desperation, isolation, and hopelessness. From what I could tell, our Gazan (Brethren|Terrorists|Freedom Fighters) were basically lobbing missiles north, without the ability to aim. Humanity has been targeting projectiles for thousands of years, without the assistant of computers. Heck, the study of mechanics and the discovery of the parabolic equation was largely driven by military applications. For example, if you could calculate the rocket’s fuel, the wind speed, and the launch angle, you might be able to more accurately target a rocket. Or, even simpler—have some friends on the ground near the impact site tweet the lat/long coordinates of impact, and then adjust your next shot accordingly. But, we’re living in the 21st century, and the CTOs in silicon valley are playing with toy rockets controlled by open source missile guidance systems, like Altus Metrum. The weaponization of open source is democratizing access to the world’s most advanced killing platforms. The Gazan militants are likely aware of these techniques, but if they aren’t, a lack of education is surely to blame. Education is a casualty of the occupation, alongside connectivity, mobility, access to water, fuel, electricity, etc. The Gazan militants are labeled terrorists since they kill civilian targets. But, if they can’t aim, they are hardly targeting civilians. The nuttiest part of this equation, is that if you tried to help them learn how to target their weapons, so they could aim at military targets instead of civilian ones, you would be accused of aiding and abetting terrorism. So, you can’t teach them how to not hit civilians.  You can’t help them overcome terrorism.

By now you may have heard of the innovative citizen-driven election monitoring system, Twitter Voter Report (they are getting great press cycles, with purportedly more to come).  I actually wrote up and submitted the post that appears on infosthetics.com, a wonderful blog that tracks innovations in data visualization. This projects represents a really innovative use of Twitter as a “just-add-water” (gratis, but not truly free) infrastructure for distributed structured-data collection. It reminded me of a free platform a group at  UNICEF is building to collect distributed structured-data in the third world (for places w/out easy access to the internet, but with cellular connectivity) -  RapidSMS. Imagine how many millions of dollars the government would have spent to build a cell-phone enabled election monitoring system (that likely wouldn’t work). Instead, a group of volunteer activists, weaned on the open-source, do-it-yourself culture of code jams, shared repositories, and issue trackers, decided less than a month ago that they could build this themselves on a shoestring. This is definitely a big deal, and relates closely to a new tier of participatory media which I began to describe at my talk at CCNMTL’s New Media in Education conference this month. It also has everything in the world to do with the TagMaps tool I wrote about last November in my post Crowded Wisdom. Systems are coming online which are helping us synthesize vast volumes of tiny fragments of information into meaningful knowledge. Twitter Vote Report allows anyone to report voter suppression, and problems with specific voting machines, but it support tracking wait times, which will be aggregated and mapped on the website.

It is virtually uncontested that the McCain campaign has attempted to divisively identify Obama as the Anti-Christ through a systematic campaign of allusions and coded associations. This innuendo was largely missed by people who don’t believe in the literal reading of Revelations, but the sophisticated tactics make it unlikely the multitude of associations were coincidental. “The One” advertisement alludes to the cover art and even the title fonts of the popular “Left Behind” series, and there are numerous biblical associations as well. But, what confuses me is that by the logic of fundamentalist Christianity, if Obama really were “The One”, wouldn’t they be obliged to vote for him to fulfil prophesy and usher in the rapture? Isn’t this the logic behind the Christian right’s support for Israel? Kinda reminds me of seating Jesus on a white donkey, but really, whatever it takes to bring about a change we can all believe in…

This summer I was part of an amazing reading group where we slowed to a crawl and closely read Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature. When I say we read the book, I mean we literally went around the table and read the book out loud, stopping to discuss difficult passages until we were confident we understood them. I haven’t taken to the time to read a book this closely in ages, and the experience reinforced the age old addage about finding the universe in a grain of sand. Reading a book that deals with such deep eternal themes, written by a brilliant theoretician who has himself synthesized and integrated an incredible amount of history, philosophy, and literature, was like glimpsing the entire cannon through Latour’s eyes, and well worth the effort. In this work, Latour performs a root canal on a form of conceptual dualism that has haunted Western thought for millennium. The book revolves around a perplexing circumstance in world we have constructed for ourselves - How did we end up in a world where one set of propositions (usually known as facts) are authoritative, unassailable, and incontrovertible and another set of propositions (usually known as values) are the kinds things we are allowed to argue about? Apart from the challenge of figuring out which of these flawed categories a particular proposition belongs to, the artificial separation between the tasks of constructing the common world and constructing the common good shuts down all possibility of discourse - before we even get a chance to try to arrive at consensus! The institutionalization of facts and values are so inextricably intertwined that it is folly to erect barriers between these two enterprises. Latour illustrates his perspective with examples from controversies in the sciences (especially Environmentalism and Political Ecology), but it is trivial to transpose his argument to the great debates between objectivity and subjectivity in Journalism, and the ways that certain kinds of propositions (‘data’ in many conversations about technology, and ‘revelation’ in conversations about religion) are invoked as trump cards to shut down all debate. Medical “science”, especially psychiatry and brain science are horrendous perpetrators of these offenses right now, and the consequences are anything but theoretical. The Onion provides my favorite example illustrating the confusion between facts and values. Latour’s proposed strategy for re-imagining the mexican standoff between nature/culture, science/democracy, facts/values, objectivity/subjectivity, necessity/freedom, etc is to re-tie a metaphysical Gordian knot as an epistemological one. He would like us to consider an dynamically expanding collective of players/concepts, composed of humans and non-humans (the non-humans have spokespeople, whose assertions are speech acts - qualified by the same kinds of language we use to indicate our confidence in any speech act). Revisiting and reinterpreting Plato’s metaphor of Cave, Latour traces the West’s tendency to cleanly divide smooth facts from messy values to the flawed idea of aspiring to leave the Cave to grasp/glimpse/experience the Truth. Even if this were attainable, the sojourners would still need to return back into the cave, to mediate and relate their experience to those still trapped within. Instead of aspiring to leave the cave, we need to transcend the entire Cave system. It isn’t completely fair to criticize a book for what it’s missing (no single book can be all things), but it would be great to expand this line of analysis in the future and elaborate on the role of mediation in the current and imagined collective. It seems pretty clear to me that for Latour, the ‘Sciences’ encompass the entire enterprise of Science, including the scientists, the funders, the corporations, the educators, and the scientific journalists. But, there is little in the book that unpacks these relations. A broader criticism sets an argument that John Durham Peter’s advanced in Speaking into the Air, against Latour’s conception of the Collective. Peter’s argues that we often view communication as salvation, when in fact alot of discourse never leads to consensus, and there are perspectives that are mutually incommensurate and irreconcilable. I may be naive to think the Collective that Latour dreams of is a realistic aspiration, though I sure would love to live to participate in it. I also want to explore the connections between this work and the Death of Environmentalism essay I encountered last year. I think Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ argument is a vivid and direct application of the theory Latour argues in The Politics of Nature. Ulises Mejias’ work on Networked Proximity is another work which might be fascinating to juxtapose with the dynamically expanding collective (which, can be thought about as a network).  Ulises’ notions of the para-nodal might be crucial to consider when the collective invokes the power to take things into account.

Given the Alchemist’s recent trackrecord of predictions, I am going to pass along another prediction that we came up with at lunch the other day. The ‘08 presidential campaign will witness political rallies, and probably counter-protests, inside of second life (for activists who don’t have a first life?) We also wondered if the recent moves to restrict people’s right to assemble publicly in New York City (see Assemble for Rights) might carry over into cyberspace. No more than 50 avatars per server? I’m not sure if even Gonzales would have the gumption to distort our constitutional right to assembly, but like with his recent frightening attack on habeas corpus, the constitution only states that “Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” - so executive orders or judicial rulings might be fair game?

I am bummed at the failure of politicians and the media to connect the issue of Net Neutrality to the issue of China’s internet censorship. The issue of internet censorship in China led to congressional hearings where:

“The House International Relations subcommittee’s top Democrat, Tom Lantos, told representatives of the companies that they had accumulated great wealth and power, “but apparently very little social responsibility”. “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.” (bbc news)