Through the magic of Windows Movie Maker, I whipped up a short video on the day I spent gutting a home with ACORN on Caffin Avenue in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. The goal was to return the house back to its owners with it stripped down to the studs -- leaving nothing but frame, roof, foundation, and siding. With 20 or so volunteers, it was short work:
It was like we were termites or some sort of scavenger animals that just strip a building or a body down to the bare bones. But, you know, in a good way.
In the house we gutted on Tennessee Street, the kitchen was a challenge. Floor-to-ceiling wood paneling is a pain in the arse to pry loose, and we had to wrestle with cabinets, a sink, a stove, and a dishwasher:
Notice the under-the-cabinet coffee pot. It took me a minute to realize why it was full:
That's the water that has caused so many troubles. (All right, I'll lay off the photographs for now.)
I was trying to figure out how to do an animated gif to show a before and after of one of the walls in the house we gutted on Caffin Street, but I can't figure out how to do it within the confines of my blog templates. Such technical troubles today. So here we go, low-tech. First, a mud-caked and moldy hallway wall, before:
And after it met the business end of my crowbar:
There was something so powerful about the process of deconstructing the house that a family has lived in for decades, but I'm not sure it's something you can convey via photographs. (Or at least, that I can convey via photographs.) Luckily, I have some video from Caffin Street that I'm editing later today. And of course, there's always words. With that in mind, I'm working on some text-only posts on the whole trip.
Yep, I love being on radio. Tonight at 7 I'll be joining Adam Conner and the gang at MyDD's Blog Talk Radio for a "special reporting" segment on New Orleans.
I've been looking for a clean and elegant way to display here on the blog a selection of the photos I took last week. I didn't want to use the built-in Flickr slideshow as deciphered by Paul Stamatiou both because the design has too many distracting elements, I think, and because it scrolls through photos automatically -- I think it takes something away from the pleasurable experience of interacting with photographs if they're served up to you after regular 5 second intervals. So I settled on Flickrshow. I'm not entirely happy with it (for one reason, the javascript that drives it is hosted offsite), but heck, it's free and seems to be fairly reliable. I can't quite figure out how to display a Flickrshow inline in the blog format, because it requires that you add a unique head tag to the page where you want to display your photos. So I'm going to have to ask you to jump over here to have a look at the subset of forty or so "best" photos I've culled from all those I took in New Orleans.
Now why on God's green earth did I not frame the shot to include all of the smashed window? Argh. Anyway, the Barbara C. Jordan School in New Orleans East is mud-caked, busted, and broken.
It was a learning and interviewing day today. And I indeed learned a great deal about some aspects of rebuilding New Orleans -- I think. Tomorrow I get my hands dirty a bit, both observing one home-gutting project in the Lower Nine and busting down some moldly old walls myself:
I'll soon write up what I've found here -- this weekend most likely -- but for now, I'm taking everything I can about rebuilding in and starting the process of processing it.
When I posted notice on MyDD about me coming down to New Orleans, several commenters raised the idea that while the focus of national post-Katrina attention has been on the Lower Ninth Ward, neighborhoods like Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, and Chalmette are also still quite devastated. On their recommendation, I hit the western part of New Orleans East yesterday and went through the other three today -- as well as the Lower Ninth, as I'd never been. Wow, just wow. More on that later. But I ended up with about 400 photos (I've borrowed my brother's Nikon D70s digital SLR for the week) and just finished selecting out a set of 82 for Flicker. I'll be posting a bunch of them in the coming days and sharing some thoughts and observations on New Orleans, but I'm a bit pooped. Here's just a taste of a few of my more random shots. First, a car that nature's made a planter, in the Lower Ninth:
And the view through that car's window:
Next up, also from the Lower Ninth, Mary. doing her best:
Now this was eerie. I stumbled upon the deserted Barbara C. Jordan School in New Orleans East, and investigated. It was completely washed out and it seemed like other than a bit of clear-out work, things were pretty much frozen as they were in August of 2005. In the school courtyard were piled the students' desks and chairs:
And finally:
This puppy found stuck in a windowsill in Chalmette says g'night.
(It seems like it's all-hurricane, all the time here. For example, the local television station I have on in the background is showing a program that covers every aspect of the storm, from the levees breaking to how to hire a licensed contractor to handle mold removal.)
I joined Jonathan Singer and Adam Conner on MyDD's Blog Talk Radio show tonight, mainly to talk about the Employee Free Choice Act but we ended up riffing on anything and everything from Virginia Tech to Internet radio to copyright to Alberto Gonzalez to "Clinton people" to the Supreme Court's reproductive rights decision and more. Man, radio's fun. If one were so inclined, one could even be a call-in guest on a radio program while relaxing with a cocktail.
I'm just crashing now from my first day back in New Orleans. I visited here last about five weeks after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. It wasn't that I didn't know intellectually that not much rebuilding had been done places like the Ninth Ward since then, but I guess I somehow didn't expect things could in places still be so strikingly similar to the way they were what, 19 months ago? Here is a shot I took in 2005 of the Sheralane Dog Grooming Shop on Downman Road:
For whatever reason, those spray-painted signs chilled me to the bone back then. I took this photo of Sheralane today, more than a year and a half later:
But that's not to overgeneralize. Houses here and there in the northwest corner of the Ninth have been rebuilt or rehabbed. But they're still on streets that are largely deserted, from what I've seen. Here's an example of that:
The house of the left was beautifully manicured -- new mulch, flowers in the yard. The one the right was barely more than a shell, and you can still clearly see the line to which the flood waters rose.
Some thoughts on the fundraiser tonight that Matt
mentioned this morning. A few years ago in Washington DC, Matt brought a
friend of his from New York named David Alpert to a BBQ I attended. David was
down in DC to speak at a conference as an organizer for Drinking
Liberally. That day, he and I argued over copyright for a while (I was much
more of a protectionist back then) and swapped emails. When I moved to New York
City about a year and a half ago, David invited me to go with him to Drinking
Liberally -- the original one at Rudy's Bar & Grill in Hell's Kitchen.
DL was the most welcoming liberal cabal (I kid) you could hope to discover.
The people I met at Rudy's, that night and subsequent ones, represent some of
my best professional connections today. That's certainly nice. But more important,
those drinkers have become my good friends and compatriots in progressivism.
DL regulars are some of the most intelligent, compassionate, creative, and adventurous
people I'm lucky enough to know. They're the sort who take seriously the idea
that we are to be the change we want to see in the world.
With the recent addition of a chapter in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, DL has grown
from that one drinking group at Rudy's to more than 200 chapters. That's amazing.
But DL is part of something even bigger. For a while now, DL has been collected
under the Cosmopolity banner with other
"Liberally" projects. If you were at YearlyKos in Las Vegas last year,
you saw Laughing Liberally comics
like Katie Halper and Baratunde Thurston perform. Screening
Liberally hosts free showings of progressive-leaning films. The newest Liberally,
Eating Liberally, brings people
together around sustainable food.
All together, DL, LL, SL, and EL are anchored in the thinking that whether
we call it liberal or progressive, it's not something we are only on election
day. More than that, it's not something we have to be all by our lonesomes.
We're liberals in lifestyle and in community.
Tonight, Cosmopolity is officially becoming Laughing Liberally with the Vast
Left-Wing Conspiracy: Living Liberally Launch Party in New York City. If
you can make it to Manhattan by 8pm, tickets
start at a suggested price of $100. The events at 349 West 12th Street in
the West Village and includes a space called "the Porn Palace." What's
more, there will be an open bar from until 11, entertainment, and gift bags
that contain books and other good things. The money raised will go toward hiring
Living Liberally's first full-time staffer.
If you can't actually, physically make it to the event, there will be a virtual
launch party in Second Life. No, I'm just kidding. But there are still ways
to help build Living Liberally into a core piece of progressive infrastructure.
First, kick in $100 to sponsor
a fellow leftie who might not otherwise have the means to attend. (That's
the route I took. I'm in New Orleans and won't be able to make it tonight.)
Second, support with your time and attention the groups and individuals who
are making tonight possible: organizational sponsors like Advomatic, BlogPAC,
Media Matters, and Working Assets; event sponsors like Alternet, Center for
Independent Media, SEIU, The Open Planning Project, and Young People For; and
event partners like Brave New Foundation, Chelsea Green Publishing, the Drum
Major Institute, Feministing, Magic Hat Brewing Company, Rudy's Bar and Grill,
The Albany Project, and the Yearly Kos Convention.
Iraq war veteran Paul Rieckhoff is nothing if not an interesting guy -- a soldier, writer, and now executive director of the 65,000-member Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I intereviewed Paul for a couple hours today for my Hearing Progressive Voices series on MyDD. We got into some interesting stuff -- what's the matter with Ned Lamont, George Bush's responsibility, "the politics of unity and purpose," John Kerry 1971 vs. John Kerry 2004, the Dixie Chicks and what Democrats should do with Natalie Maines, his girlfriend's "unpatriotic" music, Traumatic Brain Injury and Walter Reed, waging war in the Internet age, decentralization and the art of coordinating fires, war documentaries and milbloggers, and more. Have a look?
(I'm not up as late as it looks. I'm in L.A. and on Pacific time. Well, it's a little late, but I've been reading each one of the CNN.com profiles of those killed at Virginia Tech. Notice how much of the content was contributed by readers -- mostly friends and family of the deceased.)
You know, one way of looking at MyDD
is to see it as a tremendous social experiment. Not only are we trying
to restructure the political process in the United States, we're relying
upon the wisdom of crowds to do it. Look
at my post last night about my upcoming trip to New Orleans. Within
a few hours, commenters collaborated to produce a stellar set of suggestions
on what to see and do while there. Two commenters formed a relationship,
one inviting the other to write on a Louisiana-focused blog. I've heard
from other commenters via email. I'll be working with and relying upon a few
people down in New Orleans who I met only because I put up that post.
In the best cases, in networks we progressives find both smarts and strength.
Last night at the New School here in New York City there was a panel on "Democratization
and the Networked Public Sphere" featuring three academics -- danah
boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, and Trebor
Scholz. I read boyd and Zuckerman fairly religiously, she on social media
and he on technology and the developing world. Some of what was said last night
might seem a bit far afield from our discussions of progressive politics. But
really, I don't think any of it was. At the very least, together it makes up the
context for our net neutrality fight.
Public and private spaces, said boyd, no longer exist as two distinct
poles or even as two ends on a spectrum. What is private today is constantly
in flux, and depends greatly on environment, context, and what the expectations
are for our behavior at any given moment. What makes the online different
than offline are four things, said boyd. First, persistence: what you
say online stays online, which is good for asynchronized communication,
like the discussions we have via posts and comments here, but leaves a
record for the ages. Second, searchibility: online life is searchable
in a way that offline isn't and searching allows us to connect different
aspects of identity from otherwise unconnected sources. Third is replicability:
content online can be copied and pasted from one context to another, though
the authenticity of that content may come into question. Fourth is the
invisible audience.
boyd said that the Internet has radically changed the way we interact with people
and makes the building of walls irrelevant, in a way. That said, she asked what
does it mean when what you write on your Live Journal site or Typepad blog can
be read by millions, but is more like read by six or eight people that you know?
It changes the way that we communicate. boyd argues that this isn't just a product
of the Internet, but of mass media. In the 1960s, black activist Stokely Carmichael
would make use of two voices -- one when appearing before a Southern black audience
and another before a white audience. When Carmichael had the chance to appear
on national radio, he had a choice to make and decided to communicate in the way
he would before a black audience. Ronald Reagan, said boyd, was skilled at negotiating
different audiences. How do we who engaged online deal with this idea of audience?
What many younger people do, said boyd, is to play ostrich -- "if I don't
see you, you don't exist."
And young people in this country who are quite restricted in their ability
to go out and engage in public life (for a number of reasons, from perceived
safety to lack of public transportation) lack a voice in the public sphere
-- particularly since they are age segregated and often only have personal
relationships with those in their same age bracket. Where they do have
a collective voice, like Facebook, they use it in great numbers -- witness
the 700,000 students who protested the introduction of Facebook feeds.
Trebor Scholz is concerned that the free labor invested in social networking
sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut amounts to "soft exploitation."
"Very few context providers," he said, "get rich off the
back of the very many." As things go mobile, Scholz said, with Facebook
Mobile and MySpace Mobile, and Twitter (more on Twitter below), and with
the enormous adoption of mobile technologies internationally, this exploitation
is amplified. And of course, of interest here is that MySpace was bought
for more than $300 million by Rupert Murdoch, who of course owns Fox News.
Scholz pointed to Larry
Lessig's questioning of "the ethics of Web 2.0" wherein
he detailed a distinction between "fake sharing sites" and "true
sharing sites." Fake sharing is when social media doesn't permit
content to truly be copied and shared beyond the bounds of the site --
for example, YouTube. Scholz said, amazingly, that his students tell him
that their parties now are really just opportunities to take photos to
post on Facebook. (We're learning to mediate life in real time! I find
myself in situations thinking "now how am going to blog this?")
Scholz suggested that social media participants truly take ownership of
their content and share in the monetary success it brings capitalists
who provide the context for that content.
As the founder of a "exploitative" context provider (Tripod.com),
Ethan Zuckerman took issue with Trebor's thinking. No one is forcing anyone
to contribute content to social sites, and the servers needed to run them
are enormously expensive to get and run, said Zuckerman. I'll add that
what's needed in this conversation here, I think, is some talk about literacy
and licensing. We port much of our online lives to free sites like Facebook
and YouTube and with good reason. But of course, they're not truly free.
We're simply paying for them with something other than money. That's fine
as long we enter into these relationships with out eyes open. Often the
important details are buried in the terms of service. If these are to
be healthy relationships that are good for everyone involved, we've got
to know what we're getting into. I'm hoping to explore this point more
soon.
Back to Zuckerman. Ethan runs a site called Global
Voices that promotes bloggers writing all over the world, particularly
where the government isn't too keen on that happening. He opens with the
1984 ad we're all familiar with here and suggests, a la Lessig, that this
mashup is the first real example of open culture and open politics coming
together. Next up was a remarkably
similar ad created by Tunisian blogger Astrubal
that replaces the talking head of Hillary Clinton with that of Tunisian
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian '1984' ad was created
in 2004 during Ben Ali's reelection campaign. Tunisia, Zuckerman said,
combines a high level of interest in connectivity with high levels of
censorships, which results in such political mashups as the Tunisian
Prison Map. (Mousing over each prison location produces information
on which political prisoners they're now housing. Wow.)
There's more. Activists in the very densly-populated country of Bahrain,
Zuckerman pointed out, circulated Google Satellite Maps that compared
the size of villages to plots of land reserved for royal palaces. They
were sent around as pdfs via email; the Bahraini government responded
by blocking access to Google Maps for a time. (Somewhat closer to home,
here in Brooklyn activists are
using Google Earth to raise questions about the building of a massive
new complex that includes an arena for the New Jersey Nets. No reported
cases of lost access Google Earth, yet.)
In Egypt we're seeing what Zuckerman called something like "the
only interesting and legitimate use of Twitter." If you don't know
Twitter, it's sort of a group-based
SMS system. So I sign up for Twitter, you sign up for Twitter, and when
we become friends, every time I submit a text message to the Twitter system
it shows up on your phone. It can be a overwhelming. (By way of example,
the latest SMS on the public feed is this: "Researching the new Pokemon
games. I'm getting pearl!") When I turned on Twitter down at SXSW
last month, my phone buzzed constantly. Not ideal if you get charged for
text messages over a certain number. But in Egypt, activists are using
Twitter to let their friends and families know when they get hauled into
jail.
(During audience questions near the end of the panel, danah boyd remarked
that there is an assumption in online interactivity now -- typified by
the Facebook news feed -- that the more information shared the better.
And it might be Twitter, danah said, that pushes to the point where we
really start to consider information overload. 24/7 news channels aren't
necessarily a good thing, she argued, and for one thing created a great
deal of space that needs to to be filled with more and more stuff.)
Using Twitter to let your friends know when you've been arrested is perhaps
a straightforward uses of social media for political purposes. But then
Zuckermen raises the case of what happened in the Philippines in 2004.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Election Commissioner were caught
in what was alleged to have been a compromising phone call in which the
politician asked the commissioner to rig the presidential elections. An
MP3 of the call was released and turned into a ringtone called "Hello
Garci." The ringtone became enormously popularly, and the Philipine
Center for Investigative Journalism now hosts 32
different remixes of it on their website.
Zuckerman compares a
map from Freedom House showing restrictions on the press with one
from the OpenNet Initiative showing restrictions on the Internet.
As it stands, the world is more kind to the Internet than it is to the
press but Zuckerman warns that the second one might start looking a lot
more like the first if trends continue. From where I stand, In both cases,
this is a case of "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Restricting the free press anywhere weakens it everywhere; that's why
we have organizations like Reporters Without
Borders. And we threaten all of our ability to communicate when we
begin to fracture the global network by creating a Chinese Internet or
a Cuban Internet or even a Verizon Internet.
That's that. I tried to be diligent in taking good notes on what each
panelist said. If I got any of their ideas wrong, I'm truly sorry.
When did this become at New York City events blog? Oh vell. This Wednesday at 7:30 at the Old First Reformed Church at the corner of Carroll and 7th Ave here in Park Slope there will be a free showing of the new documentary "Brooklyn Matters." The subject of the film is the much-contested proposed 22-acre (I have not run out of compound adjectives yet) Frank Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards development project in north Park Slope and Prospect Heights. Amazing, isn't it, that a proposed development plan has its very own Wikipedia entry?
But you know what would be really cool? If someone built a 3-D model of Atlantic Yards in Google Earth.
For what it's worth, Steven Johnson wonders whether the project perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The end result would be to have a developed corridor running from the Yards to downtown, replacing what is now sort of an echoing chasm and introducing a touch of big-building urbanism to brownstone Brooklyn. Of course, many of us in the most recent wave of Brooklynites choose to live in this outer borough exactly to escape big-building urbanism. Johnson cites Jane Jacobs to argue that the charm of human-scaled urban places is tied to the fact that they exist in the same environment as more massive development. Exactly. That's why Brooklyn is so darn charming today. There's already a ready contrast to the livable scale of our borough. It's called Manhattan.
Unless New York State law changes, I may never get to send out those "Save the Date" cards for a wedding, but I can send one out for an event we have coming up at the Tank. On Wednesday, May 23, we'll be hosting an event called Internet Pioneers Night, which I humbly suggest will be completely awesome. We'll gather a group of presenters who have been online forever who will discuss our common online heritage. I'm hoping will touch on such things as how we conceive of identity online has changed over the years and about how there's always been obstacles to people getting online and participating in Internet culture. More details to follow, but save the date!
On Doculink, the fantastic documentary film discussion list I belong to, there's been a great debate recently on the idea of context. Should the documentarian avoid sending out screeners (advance copies of a finished film) knowing that they'll get watched on a TV somewhere by someone eating a sandwich and struggling to get thorugh a marathon screening session? Gene Weingarten's recent awesome article on virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell's mostly ignored performance in the Washington DC metro raises the same sort of question. Hey, did you know that that playing of live music in the metro in DC is forbidden? That's my newest answer when people ask me why I moved from there. Anyway, Weingarten chatted with Post readers recently about his piece, and one of them sent in a link to a video of Bruce Springsteen playing "The River" in Copenhagen with a local street musician.
Thing's happen in three, so this morning in the New York Times Magazine there's an article by Columbia sociologist Duncan J. Watts called "Is Justin TImberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?" It's not up online yet, but the gist is that Watts and his colleagues ran some online experiments to test whether music rated higher by other users would grow in popularity, independant of how well they were rated by users in terms of quality. You'll have to read it to see how it turns out, but Watts does say this:
[I]n fact, the question "Why did X suceed?" may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise best seller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold well because lots of people bought it."
I'll be back a bit later with more information on this, but coming up fast is the Living Liberally Launch Party -- next Saturday (!) in fact. Living Liberally, parent organization to Drinking Liberally and the other Liberally children like Screening and Laughing, is fundraising to hire a full-time staffer, and this "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy"-themed launch party is shaping up to be a great event. The beer is by Magic Hat, for example, makers of the delicious #9. Tickets are $100 and I'm on the host committee, so in the name of all that is good and holy, if you do by a ticket, please choose my name from the drop down menu under "Who tapped you for the conspiracy?"
I just posted something on MyDD's Breaking Blue -- that's where we post short couple-sentence kinda throwaway posts -- that attempts to connect two things I just learned. I don't know how successfully it connects them...still, the idea is this. At PodCamp this past weekend there was a woman in the audience who was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and now advises media outfits on how to do digital and the like. She offered an observation about the news business' slow adoption of new media techniques and I pounced. I said, "while we have you here, tell me -- who is it that's reluctant to do it -- reporters, editors, owners, who?" My assumption has been that editors are pushing reporters to try new things but reporters aren't eager to pick up new skills and responsibilities like podcasting, video, and blogging.
But no -- it's not the reporters, she said. They'd love to be able to start broadening their game by, for example, taking video out in the field, but for one thing, their union is telling them not to pick up a camera without additional compensation. I've done a bit of poking around, and this does seem to be a point of contention between the Newspaper Guild and some employers. That's thing one. Thing two is that while doing that poking, I came across stories on a new plan in the works to remodel the respected Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern for the 21st century. Central to the Medill 2020 plan is the idea that, in the words of their dean, "every student needs proficiency in producing audio, video and text stories." Some folks associated with the school are upset about this new market-focused Medill:
The sellout of Medill to those who choose marketing half-truths over reporting facts has long been in the making. We first saw evidence of it when Medill began promoting its offerings in Integrated Marketing Communications.
Ah, communications - a word broad enough to include the marketing of products and the fabrications of public relations in order to mislead. Even in original areas of journalism education, the focus has shifted from skilled reporting of stories to techniques for marketing a story.
Messy, messy time in the fourth estate, no doubt. That's one reason that I'm so looking forward to heading out to LA next week for Election '08: Covering Politics in Cyberspace hosted by the the Knight New Media Center at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. As far as I know, it's a training session for working journalists who wanted to understand this new fangled media stuff and how it applies to politics. I'm on a panel called "Tech-politics: The 'Facebook Effect,' Netroots and Beyond." (The other reason I'm looking forward to it is that Jane and I had such a fantastic couple days in LA a few weeks ago -- I ate dinner next to Scarlett Johansson, yes I did -- and I'm eager to see more of the city. Oh, and also it is cold and wet and rainy in New York City and 70 degrees out there next week. It snowed on Easter here. It snowed on Easter! That' just not right.)
I've been completely enraptured by Google Earth for about the last
day or so. What Google Earth has done to so grab my attention is to partner
with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Museum's Genocide
Prevention Mapping Initiative. The idea is to document and display
the effects of mass atrocities in their early stages:
Beginning with Darfur, we are building an interactive "global
crisis map" that will provide citizens, aid workers and foreign policy
professionals with a new tool to share and understand information quickly,
to "see the situation", enabling more effective prevention and
response.
Google Earth's current release now features a pre-installed Global Awareness
layer that not only includes information on Darfur, but also data on World
Wildlife Federation projects (screen
cap in Flickr) and Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research sites in Tanzania.
Particularly cool is a sub-layer showing mountaintop removal sites (another
screen cap) in Appalachia, including data on 470 mountains destroyed
by coal mining.
Back to Darfur. Enter into Google Earth, fly to Sudan, zoom down to the
western part of the country, and click on the Crisis in Darfur icon. An
additional layer of more granular content like photos, videos, and testimonials
is added to the map.
One thing that's pretty fascinating to me here is that we're dealing
with a world that has a pretty poor record of responding to mass atrocities.
The Holocaust, Rwanda, now Darfur... the list goes on. As we're seeing
in Sudan, our national and international institutions aren't optimized
for dealing with these events. But this initiative is truly collaborative,
it seems. The U.S. State Department provided information on the 1,600
villages destroyed or damaged in Darfur. UNHCR (the United Nations High
Commissioner on Refugees) plotted refugee camps in Sudan and Chad. Independent
photographers contributed pictures. Amnesty International added testimonials
collected from survivors of Janjaweed attacks.
There's something important going on here. I'm not sure what exactly
yet, but I think it has to do with scale. Google Earth is a bridge between
the intensely local and the intensely global. One of the more salient
frustrations of modern life is, I think, that we're intimately familiar
with the world and its problems while at the same time feeling like we
lack the tools to do anything about them. I'd argue it's why watching
the news today is so depressing. We humans aren't really built to understand
things globally. We never really had to be before. But there's something
about Google Earth that let's you conquer that limitation by freeing you
to zoom in, zoom out, fly all over the planet. You inspect one destroyed
village after another while at the same time really grasping the fact
that they're on the very same ball of Earth as Darfur,
Minnesota (where I stumbled when I first typed "Darfur"
in the search box.)
Scale is why, I think, the most haunting images I still have in my head
from my post-Katrina trip to New Orleans aren't of the remarkable people
I met. It's images like this:
-- the scope of the situation I saw from a Blackhawk helicopter a few
hundred feet up off of the ground. That, and what I saw while high while up in the balconies at the Baton Rouge convention center with a sea of beds and people down below me. Images that conquer scale are powerful,
as Google found when they rolled back to pre-Katrina data in a recent
update to Google Earth. In heeding public demands that New Orleans in
Google Earth look like New Orleans looks on Earth today, Google
said that they had come to "recognize the increasingly important
role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse."
By the way, you'll see Google Earth
referred to in news accounts as a "website" or something similar.
It's not. It's stand-alone application that you install on your computer.
And the basic version is free. It's amazingly fun to play with -- there's
something intensely thrilling about sitting in your desk chair and manhandling
the universe, or at least our little corner of it. It almost feels like
a game. But it's more fun than a game, because it's real.
Was just using Google Earth to survey the site of the Greenpoint oil spill, and in particular the oil containment booms on Newtown Creek by the Peerless Importers building. I did find the booms -- those are in the yellow circles in the top right. But check out the old Amoco refinery in the bottom left. Painted on the top is "Amoco Welcomes You to the Big Apple" and then a picture of an actual apple. I guess was to make sure that passengers on planes flying overhead knew Amoco was really happy to have them in New York City.
In a New York minute, ooo-hoo-ooo, everything can change. In a New York minute, you can go to a bunch of really great different events. Does that rhyme? Anyway, two cool evenings in NYC this week. First up, tomorrow night at the Tank is a free showing of Blog Wars. Blog What? Blog Wars is a 90-minute documentary that aired on the Sundance Channel awhile back:
In 2004, political bloggers came of age. They propelled Howard Dean from fringe candidate to front-runner. They took on Dan Rather and won. And they charted the course for the "swiftboating" of John Kerry. As the 2006 mid-term elections approached, bloggers were preparing for battle again. Filmmakers James Rogan and Phil Craig's sharp documentary examines how online democratic activism is shaping important elections by focusing on the decisive Connecticut senate race and Ned Lamont's challenge to incumbent Joe Lieberman.
More details:
Join us for a FREE screening of: BLOG WARS hosted by Blogging Liberally Wednesday, April 11th Happy Hour from 6:30 on; Screening at 7:00 The Tank @ C:U - 279 Church Street btw Franklin & White, below Canal www.thetanknyc.org
And then on Friday night at the New School, social researcher danah boyd and guy-who-blogs-for-me/Berkman Center fellow Ethan Zuckerman will discuss "the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation." boyd and Zuckerman are two of my favorite thinkers, so this should be awesome. Starts at 6:30 and tickets are $8, or free if you are somehow affiliated with the New School.
What
Was Charlie Crist Thinking?, asks Farhad Manjoo. Crist is the Republican
Governor of Florida who has successfully fought to extend the voting rights
to ex-felons in that state. Two of the three members of the clemency board
in Florida had to get on board with Crist's plan, and in a bit of a shocker
he managed to convince both Democratic CFO Alex Sink and Republican Ag
Secretary Charles Bronson. (Not that Charles Bronson. I think.)
Manjoo is a bit gobsmacked that a Republican would act in a way that helps
Democrats electoral prospects by creating a million new presumably left-leaning
voters. They won't all go to the ballot box, but:
[I]n a state as closely divided politically as Florida, that could
still make all the difference. In the past several decades, say Uggen
and Manza, at least two Senate races in Florida would have gone to Democrats
instead of Republicans had felons had the right to vote. Buddy McKay
would have beaten Connie Mack in 1988, and Betty Castor would have beaten
Mel Martinez in 2004. And, of course, the 2000 presidential election
would have gone to Al Gore.
Under the new Florida plan, ex-felons who are neither murderer nor sex
offender will automatically have their voting rights restored after they
complete the full term of their incarceration, parole, and probation.
As for murderers and sex offenders, they'll still have to ask the state
to restore their civil rights.
If I may self-pimp, I have a story on AlterNet this week called "Roadmap
of a Progressive Victory" that looks at how a small group of
activists in Rhode Island (with the help of advocates on the national
level) managed to pass a ballot measure that gives ex-felons the right
to vote the second they step out of prison. Under the old scheme that
Rhode Islanders rejected, all ex-felons had their franchise restored automatically
after they completed probation or parole -- a situation that's actually
more liberal than the reform that Florida just put into place.
But 51% of Rhode Islander voters voted against the Florida approach of
waiting for parole and probation. Why? The message put before them was
that the right to vote was an important part of a former felon's re-entry
into society. Parole and probation just takes too long. I for one was
surprised to learn just how long we're talking. For a five year sentence
for a non-violent drug offense, it can last 30 more years.
Every state's different, of course. We know that felon disenfranchisement
really grew in popularity as a public policy approach in the South after
the passage of the 15th Amendment . It was a race-neutral tactic, you
see, like the poll tax, that had the intended effect of disproportionately
affecting black men. But in 2007:
[V]oting bans aren't limited to the Deep South. And they are in no
way uniform. Three U.S. states -- Florida, Virginia, and Kentucky --
disenfranchise every ex-felon for life. Many other states restore rights
at the completion of parole (conditional release) and probation (supervised
reentry). Kill someone in Maine, and you can vote from your prison cell.
Sell marijuana in Virginia, and for all intents and purposes you're
banned from the ballot box for life.
So states are all moving on felon enfranchisement at different speeds
and in different ways. In Florida, this measure took the Governor. In
Rhode Island, it took voters. (A felon voting ban was baked into the state
Constitution.) In Alabama, the question of what exactly is a franchise-negating
"crime of moral turpitude" is going to the state Supreme Court.
On the national level, the groups taking the lead on this operate under
the banner of Right to Vote are NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, the
ACLU, and the Sentencing Project
For the moment, let's forget the important
recent debate over whether easing the joining of labor unions is a net
good or a net bad for both American workers and American business. Let's
instead look at how a Fortune 50 like Verizon might attempt to
rid itself of an unwelcomed business reality: many of its workers currently
belong to a union, either the Communication Workers of America or the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon is a sophisticated,
modern telecom behemoth. It isn't likely to resort to blunt-instrument
union-avoidance techniques like summarily firing workers who are pro-collective
representation.
So what's Verizon to do? Verizon Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg is attempting
to restructure the telecommunications industry, or at least where Verizon
fits into that industry. Verizon's approach to the future is to grow the
business while lessening the impact of unionization. How? By quarantining
already the unionized technicians, sales people, and service reps of core
Verizon from the rest of the growing employee population by building cordon
sanitaires around their unit. The end result: unionized Verizon lacks
the density that ideas need to spread effectively.
As it stands now, unionization at core Verizon is concentrated to workers
who handle POTS -- that's Plain Old Telephone Service. The Seidenberg
approach is to not let that high rate of unionization in core Verizon
infect the rest of the company as it grows or acquires new units. Verizon
has long tried to keep the unions out of Verizon Wireless. Now it's attempting
to do the same with other units as they are added to the amalgamation.
Case in point is Verizon Business, aka VZB. VZB used to be part of MCI
until last year or so, and is now operated as a separate, non-unionized
business unit under the umbrella of Verizon Inc. Verizon is moving more
and more services and clients and accounts to VZB -- so rather than getting
rid of existing union jobs exactly, they're just growing the areas where
non-union jobs currently thrive.
As part of my work with the AFL-CIO I've been meeting with the CWA, who
along with the IBEW are running a joint campaign to organize about 400
VZB techs in the northeast. About 150 are right here in New York City.
The VZB techs have signed cards saying that they want to join the union.
Those cards were verified by John Kerry, Stephen Lynch, John Tierney,
and others (watch
the video). Verizon won't recognize them. Senators Clinton, Kerry,
Edwards, and Schumer, and Reps. Slaughter, Weiner, and Nadler and
others have pushed the company to recognize the employees' choice.
Of course, were the Employee Free Choice Act to pass the Senate
and become law, that card check would be enough to form a union here.
A big part of this picture is that Verizon is aiming to compete with
the cable companies, particularly via FiOS, Verizon's fiber-optic cable
service to the home. FiOS means super-speedy broadband Internet. (Like
up to 50 Mbps under ideal conditions. At that speed I could fully download
the next movie in my Netflix queue, which happens right at the minute
to be "Harlan County, USA," in about 5 minutes.)
But FiOS also means that Verizon can compete with the cable cos in delivering
custom digital television content. Not to draw too much into this discussion,
but the buildout of resource-intense last 100-yards technologies like
FiOS is one of the things that telecoms cite when they argue against net
neutrality. Neutrality (they argue) threatens their ability to control
their own revenue streams, and the buildout of FiOS is 'spensive, something
like $18 million.
So Verizon wants to compete with the cable folks. But whereas the rate
of unionization in the phone-line-in-the-ground business is around 90%,
it's at just about 4% in the cable industry. By comparison, it's at something
like 35% in the wireless industry, where Verizon also competes. But even
in wireless there are other models. Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) has
adopted
a stance of neutrality when its workers want to join a union, and
something more than half of its workers are unionized. Verizon's different
approach means that Verizon Wireless and Verizon wireline are kept deliberately
separate, including distinct websites at verizon.com and verizonwireless.com.
Verizon customer service reps for the wireless service can't answer a
question about wireline services. Instead, they'll transfer you to a unionized
rep. Quarantined, see?
As I learn about labor, it seems to me that the whole field of union-avoidance
is self-educating, in a way. Best practices get studied and copied. If
Verizon is successful in quarantining its union workers as it diversifies
and grows, then I'm thinking we'll see these techniques learned from and
replicated by other employers in the same boat.
About six years ago when we were traveling through Ghana, Jane and I were sitting and waiting in one million degree heat on a packed tro-tro in the coastal city of Takoradi when we both noticed the same guy shuffling down the road. (To the right, that's what Takoradi looks like, courtesy of thiooof on Flickr.) This guy was particularly noticeable because in this drab, dusty town he was wearing a jet black t-shirt emblazoned with the Harley Davidson logo and the delightful message "If You Can Read This, The B*tch Fell Off!" As much as seeing a shirt like that in America might tick me off, seeing it in that context we both just had to laugh. (Course, it may have been heat induced delirium.) That t-shirt looked a long way from home.
So how'd it get there? Finally, some answers. In doing some archival research yesterday on the north Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, I came across this great George Packer piece from the New York Times about five years ago. (It's the same George Packer who wrote The Assassins' Gate.) Packer traces the path of "University of Pennsylvania" t-shirt given to charity by one Susie Bayer of Manhattan. He follows it to a thrift shop on the Upper East Side to a textile recycling plant in Greenpoint to an importer's warehouse in Kampala, Uganda to a marketplace in the town of Kamu until it ends up in the eager hands of Yusuf Mama. Somewhere along the way, an old t-shirt goes from a donation to a highly-prized status symbol. It's a nice piece, particularly where Packer thinks about the blurry line between charity and commerce.
So most likely, someone in the States at some point thought that his or her "The B*tch Fell Off!" t-shirt was no longer needed, but a fine thing to give to the less fortunate.
PodCast NYC is turning out to be an awesome event, it seems. There's something like 1000 people registered to talk about all things podcasting. I'm not big on podcasting, per se -- if you're limiting the term to just audio clips delivered via some syndication mechanism like RSS. But I've been promised that we can also talk about things I do like very much, like bite-sized digital audio and video content served up online. I'm scheduled to be on some sort of a panel with my good friends Noel Hidalgo, Matt Browner Hamlin, and Phillip Anderson. It's free, and runs from 8:45 to 6pm at the lovely New Yorker Hotel in Midtown. (Yeah, the sticker to the right says "at the New School." They've had to move it to a larger space.)
It was a couple months back
that I heard, on the radio I think, that voters in Rhode Island
had passed a measure to restore voting rights to ex-felons the very moment that they were
released from prison. It was intriguing to me. First, because
I really hadn't a clue that felons sometimes had their franchise taken
away in the first place. And second, because it was amazing
to me that a majority of voters could be convinced to extend
rights to a demonized class like that. So I asked AlterNet if
I might write an article on it, they consented, and here
we are:
America has always had felony voting bans. But their popularity
spiked in the Reconstruction-era South after the 15th Amendment
gave blacks the right to vote. Felony voting restrictions
were a seemingly "race neutral" tool, like the
poll tax, that in practice kept many blacks from the ballot
box. (Currently, 1.4 million African-American men cannot
vote because of past felony convictions.)
Historically, the severity of felony disenfranchisement
laws in America draw inspiration from the idea of "civil
death," a medieval construct that punished criminality
by excising the offender from the body politic.
Today, it's not surprising if you hear "felons and
"voting" and your mind jumps to Florida. In Gore
vs. Bush, you'll remember, that state attempted to erase
ex-felons from their voting rolls. In the process, they
robbed thousands of legitimate voters of their franchise.
However, voting bans aren't limited to the Deep South.
And they are in no way uniform. Three U.S. states -- Florida,
Virginia, and Kentucky -- disenfranchise every ex-felon
for life. Many other states restore rights at the completion
of parole (conditional release) and probation (supervised
reentry). Kill someone in Maine, and you can vote from your
prison cell. Sell marijuana in Virginia, and for all intents
and purposes you're banned from the ballot box for life.
Legal-types call it the "crazy quilt" of voting
law, a patchwork of statutes and provisions that differ
from state to state. Take the situation in the Four Corners
region of America's southwest as an example. In Salt Lake
City, Joe Felon gets his voting rights back while walking
out of the prison gates. In Denver, he has to wait until
his parole term is up. In Santa Fe, he must bide time until
his probation term expires, which could be years or even
decades. And in Phoenix, he'll never vote again.
A million things, nearly, had to go right in Rhode Island for
this change to occur. The Executive Director the Rhode Island
Family Life Center, the organization who led the campaign to
restore the vote, described it to me as a "perfect storm."
In some ways, what I've written is a process story, no doubt.
But I'm of the opinion that process is often where both the
devil and the fun reside. Hope
you'll take a look.
Wow,
I just got a bit overexcited while watching Brooklyn's own Jamar something-or-other
win just $10 on Deal or No Deal, and I'm having a tough time
calming down enough to write a recap of today's DMI "Is New York
City Still a Middle Class Town?" event. Deep breaths...
All right, here goes. Without knowing much about him at all, I found
Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión impressive, though there
did seem to be a good deal of tension between him and the feisty Rep.
Anthony Weiner. I like what Carrión had to say when asked if the
professional press has failed in its responsibility to inform the public
on economic matters at the core of its own existence. The job of the press,
said Carrión, is to "democratize" news about money and
policy. Check out this quote: "we're building a nation, for god's
sake, not trying to get their attention for five minutes."
That's
a dig at Weiner, and it was pretty clear that Carrion didn't think much
of the Weinerian focus on rhetoric and $400 tax cuts in combating the
problems of the middle class. This isn't about marketing easy solutions,
said Carrion, this is about process and structure. (Winning my affection,
for I love process geeks to no end.) For his part, Weiner emphasized that
much of this debate is about the aspirational -- giving struggling New
Yorkers something better to aim for. Announcing the latest local winners
of the Intel prize -- something that NYC's government has failed to do
for the last couple of years -- is, says Weiner, evidence that the mayor
and his people have forgotten that having goals to aim for is good in
and of itself -- even if most New York school kids aren't winning national
contests for the best and the brightest.
As I alluded to above, there seems to be no love lost between Carrión
and Weiner. They just seem to be very different guys with distinct ways
of doing politics. And of course, both of them would like to be mayor,
it seems. See if you can read the body language here. Weiner's on the
left, Carrion on the right (and moderator Andrea Batista Schlesinger of
DMI is between them):
Contrasting both Weiner and Carrion was John
Liu, a city council member from Queens and the head of the NYC Transportation
Committee. What New Yorkers want from their city government, said Liu,
is predictability. We want to know when we're going to get a ticket and
for what behavior. I think Liu's onto something, and I want to hear more.
It does seem to me that there's something innately unstable about living
in this city, but what is it, exactly, beyond not knowing what you might
get written up for?
Oh yeah, back to Weiner. I admit that I haven't been following who's
won his endorsement, but I think he might have given it away when he said
that "we might have to wait for President Clinton in 2009" to
get change in our health care system on the federal level.
When the discussion turned to illegal occupancy -- people living in structures
that the law doesn't recognize -- it sparked a mini debate about who exactly
is to blame. Is it the people living five or six or seven families deep
in a single family house in the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens,
and Staten Island)? Is it the landlord who rents it to them? Is it the
neighbors who get frustrated and angry? I liked Weiner's take, that these
are situations full of victims. "You have middle-class, hardworking
people creating animosity against middle-class, hardworking people because
we in politics have failed."
Near and dear to my heart was a discussion about the independently employed
and the role they'll play in New York's future. On the morning's first
panel was Sara Horowitz, a labor lawyer who founded the NYC-based Freelancers
Union. The way we work has changed, said Horowitz, but our laws haven't
changed since the 1930's. The city wants to attract the "creative
class," no doubt, but there seems to be a consensus that the government
hasn't done its part to make New York a particularly welcoming place for
the independent worker. The discussion struck fear in my heart with talk
of the rigamarole around the unincorporated business license. Yep, I think
I might well need to get one of those for myself, someday soon.
Done! Off to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. I hear season 2 is when
it starts to get good...
The opening speaker this morning at the Drum Major Institute's
awesome "Is
New York City Still a Middle-Class Town?" conference was none
other that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Cuomo's an interesting
figure -- a personable, persuasive, populist Democrat who never really
made the leap to the national scene. But man, the guy can talk. I shot
a short video of him riffing on conservatism: an approach that uses public
policy to "starve the beast":
