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Chicago 10
Just got back from seeing Chicago 10, Brett Morgan's documentary on the trial of Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, and others for "inciting violence" during the protests around the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. I'd judge it uneven but enjoyable. The archival footage was a somewhat dry and disjointed. I found myself feeling completely crotchety for thinking "does the music have to be so loud?" And some of the scenes of the protestors and police clashing are soundtracked by non-contemporaneous songs like Eminem's "Mosh," which was completely jarring. But the animated courtroom scenes are pretty amazing -- particularly in the way they cut out noise to leave only signal, making them more powerful than actual footage. In fact, when the film ended the audience just gave a polite applause, but when the animator credits scrolled, it went crazy! I'm not saying that wouldn't happen outside New York, but sometimes you really do have to love how people behave in crowds in this city.
(Oh, and another reason to love it -- as the lights came up a straggly-haired dude in a black knit cap stands up and says, "Thanks for coming. Oh yeah, I'm Brett Morgan. G'night." Director guy's just sitting in the crowd, amongst us.)
A West Coast Coder Goes to Washington
I think I may well have managed to write the dorkiest thing to appear on the Huffington Post on many a moon. In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Larry Lessig makes this distinction between "East Coast code" -- aka laws and regulations -- and the "West Coast code" that's written by programmers and other tech folk. I have a go at laying that distinction over a possible Lessig for Congress run. Check it out. (Photo by SimSullen.) UPDATE: I scared him off with all my talk about the messiness of East Coast code. He's opted out of the race.
Downtime
It looks like this website was down all day today, but everything seems to be up and running again. You know, now's a good a time as any to mention that Dreamhost isn't a bad hosting company, if you're ever in the market for one. It took them about eight minutes to respond to and resolve the problem -- and on a Saturday, to boot.
"In Canon" Voter-Generated Content
(Just posted this over on TechPresident, and I thought it was kinda interesting -- or, at least, interesting enough to justify crossposting it here. Speaking of Lost, did Kate call the baby "Aaron" or "Eric"? I swear I heard Eric.)
Trolling the Internets today in an attempt to make some sense of last night's
perplexing Lost episode, I came across an idea that made me think, naturally, of a new way of understanding the tremendous amount of voter-generated content swirling
around the presidential campaigns right now.
The idea came from an
interview with two of the show's producers. They were quizzed about whether or
not it's safe for Lost fans to draw conclusions about the show's
core narrative from all of the related videos and games and other supra-show
stuff available online. In response, they drew a distinction between what's "in canon,"
as they put it, and what's not. The
mobisodes, short video clips distributed mainly via cell phone, are in canon.
The
Orchid video, a teaser film revealed at Comic-Con 2007, is too. But Find
815, an sort of online gaming experience, is not. (One potentially interesting
side note -- the producers' ideas on what is and isn't canonical differs from
those detailed on the community-created
Lostpedia wiki.)
Now, there's an obvious difference between the giant pile of Lost-related
content and the tremendous amount of content we're seeing generated around the
presidential campaigns -- particularly on the Democratic side and most notably
by the supporters of Barack Obama. In the show's case, a good deal of that content
is created by people working at or for HQ (aka NBC).
But there's something interesting happening on the political front where campaigns
are making decisions on what's "in canon" and what's not. And so we
end up seeing MySpace profiles cultivated by supporters co-opted by a campaign
and videos created by a Black Eyed Pea featured as the centerpiece of a candidate's
official email.
I can't say that I have any particular insights on this front yet. But it seems
to me to be an interesting way to think about a world where the distinction
between "official" and "unofficial" campaign materials doesn't
seem to cut it anymore. Maybe we should start exploring the idea that user-generated
content can be kinda official, "in canon" or not?
(A) Movement Leader, (B) Congressman, or (C) Both
Just posted on TechPres -- Larry Lessig is answering a fascinating question: is running for the open seat in California's 12th congressional district really the best way to advance his nascent Change Congress movement?
High-Def Sex
My own ma told me that my writing could use "more sex," so I wrote an entire post on high-def sex. That'll learn her!
Kenya, One Click at a Time
Ivor Tossell of Canada's Globe and Mail has what I think is an excellent piece that looks at how technology is shaping how both Kenyans and non-Kenyans alike are engaging in the difficult situation there. Ivor runs some of the roles that tech is playing, and then places them in a broader what-it-all-means context. Here's a taste:
The Western compulsion is to look at a crisis and ask what we can do. It's a noble sentiment, if maybe a patronizing one. The industry of Africa-saving is pretty deeply entrenched in these parts, lurching from one dubious mega-concert to the next. It only makes sense to look at the Internet -- social wonder that it is -- and ask how it can be used to extend that mission.
But I learned something from living there, something that's proved all too easy to forget: Africa, in the end, is going to save itself. There is a role for international interventionism, and aid, and education, and yes, even whiz-bang technology -- but the Internet isn't there to help us save Africa.
But if you have an interest in either Kenya or what our global wiredness means for how we experience this big bad world -- particularly when it comes to the disconnect between the world that we can observe and the one we have influence, I really really recommend you read the whole thing. And in a nice one-two punch, there's an accompanying podcast that's rather funny (in a dry, north of the border way).
The First Campaign
I just finished Garrett Graff's The First Campaign. The first chunk of the book is sort of The World is Flat meets Crashing the Gate, and I was quite looking forward to Garrett laying out the argument for why in our brave new world electoral and governing success is going to require a firm understanding of technology and the forces it's unleashed. But Garrett morphs from reporter to pundit in the second part of the book, and I think loses that thread somewhat.
I'd still really like to read a book that really nails how and why getting the Internet and other new tech is the critical issue facing political campaigns and what gets done once you get in office. It's a tough nut to crack, no doubt. Why, I myself had a go at it in a talk called "Geek Politics" that I gave at SXSW in 2007, which Garrett kindly mentions:
Nancy Scola is another Democratic technology expert and five-year veteran of Capitol Hill, who at the 2007 South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, pleaded to a room of lap-top wielding geeks for more experts in the new world to become politically active. "You can't really overstate how poorly understood technology is in Washington," she told them. She pointed to the example of the 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act, whereby 410 House members voted to prohibit social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster from being used in libraries and schools so as to hinder the ability of child sex predators to gain access to them. It was a remarkably boneheaded bill that could have passed only in a body with no understanding of where the internet and online communities were headed.
But it's easy enough to poke fun when we have "boneheaded" bills like DOPA, senators who confuse email with the Internet, and a President who professes that he uses "the Google." It's tougher, I think, to figure out what technology means for governing once we've crossed the threshold of total ignorance.
Oh, one last thing. If you're a Mark Warner fan, The First Campaign reads like porn. The work he did to bring broadband access to rural Virginia forms the spine of the book, and his ability to articulate why bits and bytes matter to every Virginian is held up as a fluency that modern politicos should strive to attain. A moment of silence for what could have been...
(UPDATE: I should mention that all and all, the book is actually quite good, and a heck of a first book. I had forgotten for a moment my motto, stolen from a talk I heard Arjun Appadurai give: "Don't be so hard on those who try.")
Public Schools and Private Science
Self-promotion alert: I have an article up on AlterNet right now on the question of who funds agricultural research at land-grant institutions -- those schools like Cornell and the University of Missouri created by Congress to serve as public learning centers on the mechanical and agricultural arts. The goal of the piece was to tie together government budget cuts and what agricultural research and development at public schools looks like in a post-Bayh-Dole Act (which pushed colleges to patent their research) and post-Chakrabarty decision (which okayed the patenting of living organisms) America. It's a messy and wide-ranging topic, but I tried to simplify it down to the really important themes and facts. Success or failure? Check it out and then you tell me. (Photo courtesy of Pikaluk.)
Harvard Opts-In to Open Access
Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty voted unanimously yesterday to make it so that faculty members' scholarly articles will be regularly submitted to an online archive, for all the world to see and make use of. It's a major step forward for academic open access, so huzzah for Harvard -- and school librarian Robert Darnton, who's been pushing for a more transparent and accessible university for a long time. It's not a bad thing to see major universities compete over who can be the most open and do the most good, like we've seen with the standard that MIT set by posting its coursework online.
But there's one point I don't understand, and don't know enough about academic publishing to begin to figure it out. It seems like faculty members will, under this new regime, be required to submit all of their articles to the archive (unless, importantly, they opt-out altogether). The thing is, it seems to me that the moment in the past when a paper/article became a finished creation was when it was readied for publication -- peer-reviewed, edited (I'm guessing). The way things are going to work now, is it now up to the academic herself or himself to decide, "yep, this baby's done and ready for archiving"?
And what if an academic wants to wait and have her or his work go through the 'traditional' review and vetting process before deciding that it's worthy of being saved for posterity? It seems like then he or she has to negotiate the rights to the piece from the journal in question in a way that frees her or his hand to go open access with it once it's published. And that would seem to involve a concession from the journal, which may not be too inclined to make it.
DNC Protest Planning
Forgot to mention that I have a post up at Huffington Post on the planning going into the protests and events that will greet the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August. It's really a first crack and understanding the meaning, if any, of what a group called Recreate '68 is up to. (I called the post "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dems." I've never even seen the movie, but it totally cracked me up when I thought of it.)
Greater Greater Washington
My good friend David Alpert recently left our fine metropolis to relocate down to Washington DC. He's got a strong interest in urban livability and building better cities -- if I recall correctly, he's actually the one who introduced me to Jane Jacobs when I made the switch from DC up to New York a few years back and first realized that cities could be so compelling. Anyways, it's natural that he's launched a new blog called Greater Greater Washington:
The Washington, DC area is already great. DC itself has some of the most beautiful, mixed-use, and transit-accessible neighborhoods in any American city. Arlington and Bethesda contain Smart Growth areas that are models for cities everywhere. As the region grows, we must preserve what already works and expand what is possible, to ensure that there are enough great neighborhoods for everyone who wants to live, work, shop or play in one.
Great name, wish I'd thought of it. Check 'er out.
Playful Sophisticates
We had a good time liveblogging the Super Tuesday results over on TechPresident, and if for some reason you want to re-live the experience you can replay the whole thing here. We got a mention in Newsweek's useful roundup of the myriad ways that people used online tools to engage in last night's festivities. Me and Josh and the whole TechPrez crew got called "playful sophisticates," which I think you have to admit has a nice ring to it.
Voting for Delegates in NYC
This is a PSA for all my New York City peoples. The way today's ballot is set up on lever machines is confusing. The Democratic presidential candidates run across the top, and their delegate slates are below them -- except for Richardson and Edwards (and maybe Biden, now that I think about it), as their slates are blank. I heard from a handful of reasonably bright people who have voted already that they didn't realize that they were supposed to pick delegates in addition to voting for their candidate. Some were worried that their vote might not have registered because of it.
So I rang up the NYC Board of Elections. A staffer there assured me that your presidential choice is counted even if you neglect to pick the delegates that support that candidate. They're "separate votes," he told me. So, it seems pretty likely that if you voted Clinton but failed to turn the tiny lever next to "Joe Smith, delegate pledge to support Clinton," you're all good.
There is one added twist. According to the NY Democratic Party, you could, in theory, vote for both Obama and delegates pledged to Clinton, but that wouldn't change the presidential tally. All you'd be doing would be helping to select the delegates (meaning Joe Smith goes to the Democratic convention instead of Jane James) assigned to the presidential candidates in whatever proportion the direct votes for them earn them. There's one caveat there too -- delegates are assigned in a way to make sure that there's a healthy gender balance, so Jane might get the nod even if Joe gets more votes today.
This is why I didn't laugh when all those Floridians messed up their butterfly ballots.
(Republicans do things differently; there are no delegate options on that side of the ballot.)
Liveblogging Super Tuesday on TechPresident
It looks like I'll be co-liveblogging tomorrow's Super Tuesday excitement with my good friend Josh Levy over on TechPresident. From about 7:30 on we'll be discussing all things primary and Internet, live from that Manhattan bat cave known as the Tank. We'll be using a neat tool called CoveritLive, a sort of a cross between traditional blogging and Twittering/IMing/SMSing. Posts are short and quickfire, which I think encourages looser blogging. And oh, the best part is that comments show up right in the river of posts. If we do it right, it should feel like a real discussion.
Should be fun. Stop in and visit at some point in the evening.
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