Understanding Media...

"Obama sets new standard for managing the news". - McClatchy Newspaper.

In the past week, Obama has done the following.

1. Spoke with Iranians through video conferencing.
   
2. Spoke to viewers of a Latin American music awards ceremony through video conferencing.
3. Appeared on Jay Leno's "Tonight Show".
4. Appeared on "60 Minutes".
5. Wrote an opinion column that appeared in newspapers around the world.
6. Held a prime-time news conference aired on television.
7. Held an online town hall meeting.

A former Google manager is Obama's new director of "citizen participation". Obama has directors of new media, directors of online programs, broadcast media, regional media,
African-American media, Hispanic media, research, and "message events". All of this has created - in the words of McClatchy - a "symbiotic government-media relationship".

Cathode Ray Mission

There is one short scene that I really like in Videodrome (1981). In David Cronenberg's alternate timeline universe there is a Catholic style inner-city "mission" called the Cathode Ray Mission. Its purpose is to help what looks like homeless people get reintegrated into normal, everyday working life. But you soon learn that the people go to the mission are not really without homes so much as without televisions. What possible reason could there be for that? In order to patch the "derelicts" back into the world of normalization, they must be treated by exposure to television. So they come to Cathode Ray for their TV "fix".

"You look like them, like one of father's derelicts," says Bianca O'blivion, the mission operator who is also the daughter of Videodrome's first victim.

"I think it's a style. It's coming back," says Max Wren, the main character.

"In that case, Mr. Wren, it's not a style. It's a disease forced upon them from lack of access to the Cathode Ray tube."


Wren - "You think a few doses of TV will help them?"

Bianca - "Watching TV will help patch them back into the world's mixing board."



"The world's mixing board" - what is that? A gigantic network of information and signals which inform the teeming masses with socially acceptable discourse. Getting patched back in is like reading up on the day's news in order to have everyday conversation with other people: what products are being consumed, what TV shows people are talking about, what political ideas should you be having, etc. The parallel today is like checking Facebook or Myspace in order to feel more connected to the drifting social discourse that takes place beyond real physical events. You can come back to the "real world" having felt as if you are completely informed, less naive about various aspects of social life.

But what is the real world? The "world's mixing board" is an arena that is more and more "realistic" everyday, and the video seers are saying that video reality is more real to them than reality in the flesh.

This Cathode Ray scene in the film is short, but provides a lot of background that helps you understand the hypothetical world that people live in, and David Cronenberg's social commentary. You notice that each derelict person in the mission is sitting alone in front of a television set, completely alienated from the rest of the world, detached from the other people who share the same class consciousness as they do. As an alienated force, they absorb a new form of 'classless' consciousness that imports the values and emotions they must have to survive in a rigorous environment. In Marx's term, an opiate of the masses.



Here's the other part. Massive doses of Videodrome's signal - a mind-altering television show that broadcasts unedited torture, and still being tested in a Pittsburgh laboratory - causes a tumor in the brain that brings about hallucinations when it receives the Videodrome signal. (This is the farfetched version of how the "society of the spectacle" works, but it isn't too far off.) These surreal hallucinations can be recorded, broadcast, and also controlled. It's the ultimate brainwashing machine.

Since the creators of Videodrome - a government-contractor - have 'benevolent' intentions they dreamed that Videodrome would supposedly bring about an ideal social situation for a new world order. And for the first time ever it is possible to exert political and social power over the proletariat without having to convince them by traditional means. The "disease" that is forced upon the proletariat by lack of access to television is their class consciousness, and the television, helping them consume imaginary commodities, is the cure. This will give them a false consciousness. In the mission Bianca remarks that Wren is beginning to "look like them." He is beginning to look more proletariat: someone who has no control over their own life.

The ability to exert the power is also, what I find interesting, a philanthropic mission with just one simple idea. Just as 19th Century philanthropist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, convinced that his "simple idea in architecture", a panopticon, could solve the most vexing problems of Enlightenment social thought, so a Videodrome device could solve the most vexing problems of class struggle. By harmoniously coordinating self-interest with social duty in a capitalist system, Videodrome enforces as painlessly as possible a sense of social cohesion.

Video hallucination, and because the film has mild Cold War undertones, is the way to control the public mind away from the dangers of communism. "The battle for the mind of North America," says Brian O'blivion, a video prophet, "will be fought in the video arena." The company called Spectacular Optical - where Videodrome originates - also makes missile-guidance systems for NATO and products for use in the Third World. The interconnected interest between war with Soviet Russia, Third World dependence, and the need for greater public control in the liberal regimes is not something Cronenberg tries to disguise.

But Cronenberg's more obvious intention was to suggest something more along the lines of Baudrillard's simulacra. The transition of a society from industrialism to "hyperreality", marks a decisive turning point. Imagine, says Baudrillard, that a gigantic empire created a map of its own territory, and that map was so detailed that it was as big as the territory itself. When the empire eventually declined and disappeared, all that is left is the map. Baudrillard suggests that in the hyperreal transition, people merely live in the map. Beyond this horizon, value takes on a new meaning. In Baudrillard's object/value system - the sign value of an object can be considered more real than its functional, exchange, or use value. The real object, even if erased, is not as important as the sign.

Videodrome was designed to create this turning point in human history, to push us into the world of signs. The brain tumors caused by Videodrome would create a new outgrowth, a new evolutionary step in human history. Instead of being so enamored with reality in the flesh, humans will elevate their consciousness to a higher plane, the video arena. In Baudrillard's term, hyperrreality.

"Your reality is already half video hallucination," says Brian O'blivion in a video dispatch to Max Wren. "If you're not careful it will become total hallucination. You'll have to learn to live in a very strange new world."

This advice is not heeded. "Long live the new flesh!" is a slogan Max Wren starts saying once he is totally brainwashed by Videodrome. He is convinced, like others before him, that "public life on television" is more real than "private life in the flesh," in Bianca's words.

What I find the most creative on behalf of Cronenberg's vision was to use the Cathode Ray Mission as a way to explain the turning point from industrial to hyperreal forms of society. The fact that the derelicts in Videodrome's world are in need of objects that have greater sign value than functional values, describes with great surrealism the kind of warped and twisted place a late capitalist society is. Objects in the system of signs are fetishized to such an extent that they have more value than anything else.

What happens in Athens...

... does not stay in Athens ...

And revolt is everywhere, even close to home.




A Greek interviewed with Crimethinc said that some of their best direct and indirect organizing methods included indymedia and word-of-mouth. Even though the aim of the media has been to downplay insurrection, indeed, to suppress it by all sophisticated means available, it has not succeeded. Even the most tolerant of the bourgeois media such as the BBC sees its role as protective. And while some resort to name-calling, others have adopted a policy of 'no coverage'.

Curiously, the Greek National Council of Radio and Television announced during the first week of the Greek uprising that its media networks needed to:

"avoid viewing scenes of extreme violence and incidents in a way that can be interpreted as an encouraging demonstration of extreme antisocial behavior."

It goes without saying the death of the author was somehow overlooked, and now they're just being obnoxious. Anti-social behavior, such as striving towards a non-hierarchical society, will not be televised. "... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting," said Jean-Claude Dassier from the LCI news service in France - one of France's largest TV news networks. He said during the Autumn 2005 riots in France's suburbs that LCI would not "fan the flames of violence" by broadcasting the images. So they fanned the flames of obedience and viewed nothing.

That is not a novel idea, to encourage obedience, nor one that comes only from the newscasters. A document from France's Parliamentary Assembly called Riots in European Cities: lessons and the Council of Europe response echoes the same "concern". The assembly reported it needed to research the alleged link between media coverage and riots,

"...with a particular focus on the long-term consequences of limited or recurrent coverage of violent riots in the media and in some countries the no coverage as a policy of government."

The French Parliamentary Assembly admits that no coverage could lead to further human rights abuses in some places. But it seems open to the possibility of pursuing the policy in liberal democratic regimes.

In light of this tendency, the revolution will be blogged. During the revolution, you will be put in the driver's seat. Don't hate the media - be the media.

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[Edmund] Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

- Thomas Carlyle, the Hero as Man of Letters

Up against the wall motherfuckers! We've come for what is ours...

Students occupying the Polytechnic University in Athens may not be in classes but are writing manifestos, press releases and stories about where Greece might be going. Solidarity actions have been initiated in Europe and the Americas. The students at the Polytechnic have called out for European and global-wide actions of resistance on December 20th in the memory of all assassinated youth, migrants and all those who were struggling against the lackeys of the state.

Students in France are also protesting a conservative education reform plan announced by Sarkozy this week. From the government's perspective, now was not the best time to reveal to students that bailing out the banking system meant 'balancing' the education budget. So French politicians were concerned that the Greek riots would spread elsewhere. Well, too late.




Occupied London has been translating the Greek texts into English, German, French, and also Turkish, Spanish, and Italian for widespread dissemination. Up against the wall motherfuckers! We've come for what is ours... is the title of one - it gets its name from the radical New York anarchist and artist affinity group (they were the first to use the phrase "affinity group") from the heyday of Ben Morea and Dan Georgakas, who were known as Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers!

This communique or manifesto from the Polytechnic is on OccupiedLondon.org/blog. Here are some excerpts.

In these days of rage, spectacle as a power-relation, as a relation that imprints memory onto objects and bodies, is faced with a diffuse counter-power which deterritorialises impressions allowing them to wonder away from the tyranny of the image and into the field of the senses. Senses are always felt antagonistically (they are always acted against something) – but under the current conditions they are driven towards an increasingly acute and radical polarisation.

But these Days of Rage are certainly more exciting, and waking thousands of people from the 'imprinted memories', and bringing them toward a more antagonistic attitude - than the original Days of Rage in Chicago, which was actually just four days and only 200 people showed up. A poll in Greece "confirms" this is a wide cross-section of society who are involved in the general strike, the sit-downs and the blockades. But the media still does not have a clue. iReporters on CNN know absolutely nothing about the situation. They found an American named John to tell CNN watchers what is happening in Greece, how insightful. (I think he just wants a job with CNN). Anyways, the phrase "deterritoralisation" comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari.

...The history of the legal order and the bourgeois class brainwashes us with an image of gradual and stable progress of humanity within which violence stands as a sorry exception stemming from the economically, emotionally and culturally underdeveloped. Yet all of us who have been crushed between school desks, behind offices, in factories, know only too well that history is nothing but a succession of bestial acts installed upon a morbid system of rules. The cardinals of normality weep for the law that was violated from the bullet of the pig Korkoneas (the killer cop). But who doesn’t know that the force of the law is merely the force of the powerful? That it is law itself that allows for violence to be exercised on violence? The law is void from end to bitter end; it contains no meaning, no target other than the coded power of imposition.

This interpretation of the law as power dynamics is like what critical legal studies theorists have argued, but the point is driven more forcefully here. But this has always been a powerful critique, one that the advocates of the corrupted jurisprudence theories never adequately take on.

...The global capitalist crisis has denied the bosses their most dynamic, most extorting response to the insurrection: “We offer you everything, for ever, while all they can offer is an uncertain present”. With one firm collapsing after the other, capitalism and its state are no longer in a position to offer anything other than worse days to come, tightened financial conditions, sacks, suspension of pensions, welfare cuts, crush of free education. Contrarily, in just seven days, the insurgents have proved in practice what they can do: to turn the city into a battlefield, to create enclaves of communes across the urban fabric, to abandon individuality and their pathetic security, seeking the composition of their collective power and the total destruction of this murderous system.

At this historical conjuncture of crisis, rage and the dismissal of institutions at which we finally stand, the only thing that can convert the systemic deregulation into a social revolution is the total rejection of work. When street fighting will be taking place in streets dark from the strike of the Electricity Company; when clashes will be taking place amidst tons of uncollected rubbish, when trolley-buses will be closing streets, blocking off the cops, when the striking teacher will be lighting up his revolted pupil’s molotov cocktail, then we will be finally able to say: “Ruffians, the days of your society are numbered; we weighted its joys and its justices and we found them all too short”. This, today, is no longer a mere fantasy but a concrete ability in everyone’s hand: the ability to act concretely on the concrete. The ability to charge the skies.

Amazing!

One of my friends and I were talking about "manifestos" a few weeks ago, and she remarked that when a set of ideas has reached a point where a group decides it can be embodied into 'a manifesto', it implies that many things before it had been leading up to that point. She has a dialetical theory about how ideas get embodied into manifesto. It certainly seems true now. All of the post-modern theory I have read is somewhat depressing when you wake up from the spectacle-as-commodity fairy tale and realize what it means. But is it culminating to something? Will it be a positive culmination? Is Greece the start of something new? These are questions I am grappling with now.

If all of these, namely the extension of the conflict into the sphere of production-circulation, with sabotages and wild strikes seem premature, it might just be because we haven’t quite realised how fast does power decomposes, how fast confrontational practices and counter-power forms of organising are socially diffused: from high school students pelting police stations with stones, to municipal employees and neighbours occupying town halls. The revolution does not take place with prayers towards and piety for historical conditions. It occurs by seizing whatever opportunity of insurrection in every aspect of the social; by transforming every reluctant gesture of condemnation of the cops into a definite strike to the foundations of this system.

Off the pigs!

"Off this pigs" was a Black Panther Party slogan, and the name of that communique actually comes from a poem called "Black People" by Amiri Baraka, and the poem was used against him in trial. The poem itself was - the white jury said - enough to incite riots in Newark, because you know, free speech "contains no meaning, no target other than the coded power of imposition," in the words of the Polytechnic students. Baraka's original poem goes:

You can't steal nothing from a white man, he's already stole it he owes you everything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker! this is a stick up... We must make our own world, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man is dead. Let's get together and kill him my man.

UATWMF also took part in the 1969 student sit-in at Columbia University, where members of the black community and radical university students barricaded Columbia, holed themselves in, and outfoxed the police when they tried to invade. Their goal was to prevent the university's gentrification of New York and the IDF's military weapons programs which was complicit with the Vietnam occupation, but it grew into something bigger. This photo is a screenshot from the student-made documentary film Columbia Revolt (part 1, part 2).


Thanks to Occupied London for translating these invaluable texts.

Now is a good time for Propaganda

I think now is a good time for propaganda. Because we have a new president, people are yearning for new ideas. Thanks to Jonathan McIntosh from Rebellious Pixels for this 10-minute culture jamming exercise which reveals the infinite possibilities and rebellious pleasures trapped and hidden by a social system dependent on the unending supply of self-reinforcing knowledge. As if inspired by a dream or a day dream, Rebellious Pixels' videos draw out the "secret appeal from within" that the surrealists praised as moments of "objective chance". Culture-jamming activity at its best - investigating the attitudes, interests, and environments that give way to the eruption of political surrealism.

Election Anecdote, some things I noticed about us

I sat and watched the election results last night with a handful of liberal college students in a lounge area at yuppie university. One television was broadcasting CNN, another was broadcasting Comedy Central. In another part of the campus a television news crew from King 5 was airing students jumping up and down as the election results came in.

Before this the college students' eyes were glued to Comedy Central. What is constantly in the back of my mind as I watch the Colbert Report is how we can be so amused by it, but at the same time castigate and argue against students who organized campaigns against racism or imperialism. The response to the Colbert Report – the show which exposes neo-conservative ideology by détournement – demonstrates to me that the liberal electorate is half-scared to exist, too embarrassed to give themselves away.

If you ask them they'll probably pretend to agree with you about this or that particular issue, but they do not have an analysis of society. "...Stephen Colbert is so funny," they say. But they do not identify with any ongoing struggle against racism, patriarchy or oppression, etc. - even when these critiques are often implicit in the Colbert Report. They do not recognize that the world really is upside down, even though the critique presented before them is a complete inversion of life. What effrontery!

"The task of the various branches of knowledge that are in the process of developing spectacular thought is the justify and unjustifiable society and to establish a general science of false consciousness. This thought is totally conditioned by the fact that it cannot recognize, and does not want to recognize, its own material dependence on the spectacular system."

- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

The point is not to write the sociology or psychology of the television set, the point is to watch. They knew almost every advertisement that aired during the election. I found that very disturbing. They discussed the ads obsequiously and uncritically. As long as the advertisement was funny, it didn't matter what it was advertising. They could recite them, and did so out loud and sometimes in unison. If one of the students did not know the particular facts about popular culture or advertising, he or she had nothing to say to the group.

You cannot dissent. If you dissent then you’ve ruined the fun. You’ve crashed the party. You’ve made it no longer enjoyable. You’ve challenged someone to argue with you instead of just relaxing and soaking up the spectacle’s optimism in capitalism. Just relax!!!

In other news, last night thousands of people took to the streets of Seattle and celebrated Obama's victory. They stopped traffic and created a bit of frenzy. I am glad to see people celebrating and injecting their voice into the public space; it is free expression and spontaneous. Being in the street in large numbers is subversive simply because you’re not supposed to do it without warning. It’s subversive and rebellious even though it’s not dissenting.

I particularly like the part in the video featuring the singing. Being in a public space to share your joy with the rest of the society is an empowering and participatory thing to do. I hope this is never taken away from people. But compare last night's celebration to the "zero-tolerance" approach to dissidents. If these people were in fact dissenting, against Obama or dissenting in any other way, the street party would have been an "unlawful assembly" and there would have been a confrontation with the authorities.

Maybe! Maybe this is a sign that we can abolish all attacks on free speech activity and all the free speech "zones" - And! under an Obama presidency the streets will be owned by the people, gardens will spring up everywhere, people will fall in love with the revolution, and there will be massive direct action against the televisions, and a rainbow will form at dawn to greet every new day in peace and to celebrate this newfound creativity! Good times, good times. Don't stop believing! Hold on to the feeling, streetlight people!

Materialism, plain and simple

I tend to set my mind in rigidity. I unwittingly follow hidden assumed rules which manifest in habitual patterns of thought and behavior. These thoughts don't manifest when I am completely detached from my material possessions. In fact, when I have no sense of materialism, I think I am the most happy. Rigidity manifests when I am trapped in routine, when I want to control my situation, when I long, crave, confuse myself, and ultimately, suffer.

The problem is I am still a materialist. I have not given up that aspect of my life. Where would I be without my computer, my books. I resist becoming detached from materials because I don't see anything possible for myself outside material life. It is a ridiculous resistance, because I know that I am happiest when I do not resist. So what the fuck am I doing?

Credit Card

Oh you. Look at you.
I love you though you kill me
And bore me each day stronger.
You integrate me so well
Into alienated forms of struggle.

Kill Your TV

A public service announcement:

CNN is like the worst "news" source. Ever.

I sometimes envy blogs that have very specific purposes, like chronicling the attempts of a large news corporation to inform the citizenry. I came across the blog CNN is like the worst "news" source. Ever. in a quick search for why CNN was focusing so much of its time this morning discussing a YouTube video where a woman is shown spinning around an escalator railing. A friend of mine told me she was watching CNN talk this morning for fifteen consecutive minutes about the new trend of "escalator spinning".

The network appears to be taking its cues from popular vlogging styles like Zadia from Epic Fu. Though Epic Fu itself is becoming more corporate with time, its in-the-street atmosphere and tech/arts-centrism keeps it focused. It is laughable when corporate and mainstream informants attempt to mimic this style.

Coverage on the Iraq War has drastically been cut back this year as well, as a New York Times piece reports. Almost halfway into 2008, CBS, ABC and NBC have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage. Compare this with the 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. CNN and Fox News have only two full-time correspondents in Iraq, and no American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera, on the hand, covers Iraq and other nations in the region very well. The network has won several prestigious journalism awards, for example, the IFEX's anti-censorship award, for coverage on issues that American networks do not have the resources or the interest to pay attention to. The American networks also have the justifiable disadvantage of being distrusted by many people and heads of state in the region.

CNN and Fox News have done their best to discredit Al Jazeera too. After the alleged broadcasting of the American soldiers' beheading, Al Jazeera was labeled a propaganda machine for Al Qaeda. Also in 2005, during the height of the Falluja attack, the Nation Magazine posted an exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and an American reporter about Al Jazeera's coverage.

REPORTER: Can you definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?
RUMSFELD: I can definitively say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.
REPORTER: Do you have a civilian casualty count?
RUMSFELD: Of course not, we're not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don't go around killing hundreds of civilians. That's just outrageous nonsense. It's disgraceful what that station is doing.

Al Jazeera consistently reports on events that Washington does not want the world or its own population to see. This is why it has so many enemies within the state and media apparatus. It is not surprising, then, that many Americans look to Al Jazeera with smarmy and disgusted eyes. Many had never heard of Al Jazeera before 2003. Last July I had a long, drawn-out argument with an American student in Germany over the reliability of the Al Jazeera network. What he and several others knew about the network, it turned out, was only what the American networks were saying. I had them go to the Al Jazeera homepage and analyze it before feeling justified in their remarks.

Niel Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death was right about American media. Entertainment and information are increasingly fused, and the public is hardly aware of the importance of global issues; they are only aware of them as entertainment. As the Fox News anchor says in a recent interview with Mark Dice, an anti-war activist, "This is not a joke: it is actually happening".

Charleston, Mississippi: Separate But Equal

Charleston, Mississippi is a town that was deeply segregated, historically affected by Klan activity, and was shielded from the Civil Rights movement in the South during the 1950s. With a population of around 2,000 today, and with influence from the outside being very low, the town is still trapped within the kind of time loophole devices found in Star Trek episodes.

For example, the town's high school has never had an racially-integrated prom night. I heard this story on NPR. Each year black students and white students have attended separate proms. A student interviewed said that it has been the parents who have imposed this "tradition" on the students, not the students who wish to be segregated. But, "that's the whole thing with our town, everybody's afraid of change," says the student.

Ten years ago, actor Morgan Freeman - who is from Charleston - said he would pay the school board to hold an interracial prom night, but the offer was rejected. When Freeman put the offer back on the table in 2008 (with a new school board in place and a documentary crew following him around) the Charleston school board eventually decided for change. Though a number of white families decided to hold the "white prom" anyway and prevent their children from attending the integrated prom, it should be interesting to see how this event transpired when the documentary, Prom Night in Mississippi, is released sometime in 2009.

Backed Against the Wall

This is a photoblog from the student sit-in I visited at Evergreen State College.


Students for a Democratic Society at Evergreen has been suspended for not following guidelines set out by the school's administration in the wake of the February 14th Dead Prez "Valentine's Day Riot". That night the Olympia police attacked demonstrators and a police vehicle was subsequently overturned and its equipment stolen. Two Evergreen student groups, The Hip Hop Congress and Students for a Democratic Society (groups which brought Dead Prez to the school and were unfavorably linked to the riot), have since been under investigation by the Olympia Police Department.


When you walk to the floor where the sit-in is taking place, you are greeted with a sign that says "Welcome to People's University". Each night of the sit-in SDS has organized speakers, teachers, musicians, and other community organizers to speak on topics of interest: when I was present I listened to SDS students lead workshops on, for instance, the queer movement growing away from its radical roots from the Stonewall riots to its more whitewashed and complacent position in contemporary society; an eye-witness account of 'first-responder' anarchist street medics during post-Katrina New Orleans shortly after FEMA's fallout; and a discussion about the "Sanctuary City" project to make Olympia a sanctuary city for both GI war resisters and undocumented workers.


"People's University": a concept that invokes the openness of free education that the Evergreen SDS group is striving towards. Students here are listening to a supportive professor and long-time SDS member Pete Bohmer speak about the history of student sit-ins and strikes worldwide from 1968 to 2001. He also gave a concise history of activism at Evergreen.


The sit-in was called two weeks ago when SDS was notified of its suspension (until January 2009) from the college due its apparent non-compliance with Evergreen's new moratorium on concerts and other events that may benefit non-Evergreen organizations, musicians and speakers.


Since the SDS events were previously approved before the Dead Prez incident, and other Evergreen events which did not follow the new guidelines were allowed to happen, the SDS group decided this was hypocrisy and staged a "sit-in" in front the Office of the Vice President of Student Affairs, Art Constantino, and called for the group's status to be reinstated immediately.


At one point during my visit Prof. Pete Bohmer said something that made everyone chuckle. He mentioned an event that gave a bit of insight into the campus culture at Evergreen. In 1999 there was some controversy at the school regarding Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and death row inmate who was charged with killing a police officer and now writes on crime and punishment in a police state. He was scheduled to speak at their graduation ceremony, and this was heavily protested by the Fraternal Order of Police and other organization. But he was, after all, voted in by the students to speak.

Around the nation police departments were outraged, and a number of police officers staged a protest outside the graduation ceremony itself. The message Mr. Abu-Jamal gave the students that day was: use your degree to become a revolutionary. Faculty members at one point asked somewhat humorously whether graduation ceremonies at Evergreen could ever just be exempt from the rest of the highly-politicized atmosphere on the campus during the academic year. In Washington D.C. on the same day of the graduation, a group of conservative activists marched the streets and protested the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. At the same time Mr. Abu-Jamal's speech was being broadcast from his penitentiary in Pennsylvania.


A student participating in the sit-in is pictured here doing her homework in front of Art Constantino's office. SDS and supportive students have slept in the halls and stairways of the administration's building for two weeks. Last Tuesday about 150 people crammed the fourth floor of the building to hear Kimya Dawson, an anti-folk singer and song-writer. Dozens of sleeping bags and books are spread out in the stairwell each night. Each day they commute to class and return to the sit-in for more congregation.



Evergreen SDS taped a list of demands and their meeting notes from each day on the door of Art Constantino's office. Their first demand is the only demand, to my knowledge, that is being negotiated with the administration. There are seven demands altogether.


I was told that one faculty member, Frank Fatseas, does not like SDS at all. He says they're a bunch of "Bolsheviks". His office is just down the hall from Art Constantino's, and the SDS students who see him everyday said there is no end to the sort of fun-and-games rivalry between him and the students.


One SDS student, Kelly Beckham, was fired from her job at campus security for being too close to the students participating in the sit-in. Here she is discussing with other SDS students the implications of the new negotiations and her position on the Evergreen security staff.


Jonathan Steiner was one of the students whose records were handed over by the college to the Olympia Police Department for investigation. He was severely beaten and hospitalized by Olympia PD at the start of the Dead Prez incident, but said he was still accused of overturning the police vehicles which happened significantly later. At that point he was laying in a hospital bed, he said, and couldn't have been involved.


One of SDS's contentions is that Evergreen had no reason to submit to a flawed subpoena demanding Jonathan's and other students' private information, and they demand that no more students' information be willfully handed over in such a manner. Another demand involves Kelly Beckham's status as an employee with campus Police Services.


Here is one of the many posters around the campus. This one condemns the police suppression of graffiti culture. One Evergreen student who was raped a few months ago began creating anti-rape graffiti and posters after the incident. A number of students believe the walls provide ample space for democratic dialogue and discussion. The police disagree.


This last week has been more hopeful for SDS, however. The Evergreen administration decided to talk with SDS members in private to discuss the group's possible reinstatement. According to the students involved the talks seem to be going well. There has been heavy media pressure, significant student support, and any of these factors might have contributed to the administration's willingness to discuss matters with the students.


The administration declined to speak with me about the suspension of SDS or the negotiations, however. At this point, they said, they don't want to jeopardize what progress is being made at the moment. I was not sure what this meant, exactly, since I have no idea what the administration means by progress. Ostensibly, this means ending the sit-in.

From what SDS at Evergreen has told me, the administration is only asking that SDS acknowledges their violation of Evergreen policies: the concert moratorium, the people's university, etc. If SDS acknowledges this, they may be reinstated. But it is unclear whether the college wants SDS to recognize these rules as legitimate or not, and unclear whether this requires an apology for breaking the rules.


At any rate, Friday was the last day of school at Evergreen, and many students will be leaving Olympia shortly. Naturally, a summertime sit-in might be unproductive. Where SDS is going from here the pictures cannot tell.

It appears as though SDS, which two weeks ago was back against the wall at Evergreen, is now gaining some of its student activities privileges back. Being a recognized part of campus is integral to a functioning student group, and at the same time integral to this student-based activist movement. Several students wondered whether they really needed to be a campus "student group" at Evergreen, but if they are not it means they cannot host any events or use Evergreen facilities for activism. Other students argued if their suppression ignored, it would have been a slippery slope towards further suppression of free speech at The Evergreen State College.

Meditation on White Male Psychology

I picked up an interesting zine today with the windy title, Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change and other people socialized in a society based on domination.

I found the zine interesting and accessible in that it is written in a style that is common in pop culture magazines: the Top 10 lists, the conversational self-help style, the focus on communication and perlocutionary speech-acts. The primary aim is to shift the locus of white male dominance from reinforcing negative power relationships into creating positive relationships and situations where the white male can practice social change through group communication with others.

The author, Chris Crass, admits reassuringly that he is himself "a white guy who talks a lot." I've experienced many group discussion settings like the kind the author is talking about, where awareness of socialization into roles of dominance is encouraged to promote better communication. And as a white guy myself who like to talk a lot, I try to use these sorts of "tools" without actively acknowledging them as tools. Yet on a few occasions, I can recall a white male or two standing up and saying to everyone else that they feel too contrived and then questioning whether the others are too sensitive for him. This is something that is not usually addressed, but more often not even said aloud, and it is also assumed that the white guy who cannot deal simply has too many dominance issues and perhaps is bound to myths of colorblindness, systemic racism, patriarchy, and what have you.

The author does not address why a white male would find these tools contrived and possibly annoying, only that they are tools for working more collaboratively with others. So why is this often so difficult to do? Let me practice a little bit of white male psychology and examine what I think is going on here. The most relevant reason seems to be that practicing this kind of awareness can be a hindrance to natural communication in a Heideggerian sense.

Let me illustrate with Heidegger's own example. When we are involved in a task like sweeping the kitchen floor, the broom is not something alien to us, it is almost as if it were a part of us. It is only when we reflect on the nature of our task that the broom becomes a separate thing that we study and distance from ourselves. We re-see it when we are reflecting in this way, whereas before we were acting in a way that Heidegger calls 'pre-ontological'.

I think this is a very insightful discovery of Heidegger's, and he was the first to really examine our different modes of 'being' in this wat. In our primitive histories, and even today, to act and reflect at the same time prevents us from looking out for our own survival. Imagine a lion running at you and making a lunge for your neck, and you suddenly reflecting on the objects of your perception, logical forms of judgment, etc. and becoming distant from the situation. Evolutionary psychologists would tell us you and those like you would soon die out. And with all the differences between male and female brains neuroscientists are discovering (for example, the narrow corpus collosum in the male brain versus the wide corpus collosum in the female brain) it makes more sense that the male brain is less capable of reflecting and acting simultaneously due to evolutionary pressures from hunting and gathering. This may all be pure speculation on my part, but I don't find the need to search for some scholarly paper to justify it at the moment.

The broom example seems to match well analogously with our group communication tools. The white male who unknowingly communicates his dominance in situations where he has always been socialized as the dominant agent is involved in his act 'pre-ontologically'. Like sweeping the kitchen floor, the white male simply talks and talks without reflecting on his position as the dominant agent. As Heidegger noted, and as Sartre clarified later, however, to reflect on the broom's ontology whilst sweeping makes the task difficult and existentially unbearable. Reflection is not at all like being involved in the task - it is then awkward and does not feel natural to act and reflect at the same time.

Unless the white male has completely socialized himself out of the context in which he is the dominant agent, provoking his movement away from that sort of 'pre-ontological' agency will understandably make the situation awkward and difficult to deal with. While the white male is talking and listening, he is now also reflecting constantly on whether he is or being perceived as dominant, oppressive, and insensitive. The perlocutionary dimension of his speech-acts is suddenly under intense scrutiny. If his angst becomes too nauseating, we should expect him feel ridiculous and unnatural for being socialized into a role which he must constantly socialize himself out of. And upon further reflection, he may feel even more ridiculous for having complained about struggling with his socialization whilst others may be habitual victims of that socialization.

There is a way out, of course. If the tools that the white male uses to work towards social change become the broom with which he performs his tasks, then he no longer has to be frustrated with the separation that existed before. This is an optimistic way of looking at it. On the other hand, since the tools themselves call for constant reassessment and practice, the pessimistic alternative is that the tools themselves become the guilty broomstick that he cannot use naturally unless he is completely socialized out of his socialized role as the dominant agent.

On a side note, I had a dream about brooms last night, and they have been on my mind all day. My Sunday has been one of reflection, and yet my floor is still in desperate need of sweeping!

"A Brief, Bright Flash of Red Light"

This is a short film that I created.

Thanks to Nathan from Beyond Modernity for discussing Nietzschean values, feminist values, and the meaning of this film (before it was finished) on one of the earlier posts, "On Women Being Murderous in the Movies".

"Militainment", call it like it is

Military recruiting.
Military advertising.
Entertainment.
Military entertainment.
That's militainment!
America's Army for Xbox 360.
Get it while it's hot.

And while you're being amazed by the latest advertising strategies and life-like graphics, check out NoArmy.com. It's a new counter-recruitment website launched on the 5th Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion to counter the military's aggressive campaigns to target high school youth.

One interesting video I came across on the NoArmy.com video channel was about a high school student journalist who penetrated the 'military recruitment complex' and pretended to be a drug addict and a drop out who wanted in the army. His recruiters told him to write up a fake diploma from "Faith Hill Baptist High School", write a fake grade transfer, and use detox chemicals to pass the drug test. You can find this video and others under the tab "recruiter lies".

Combating the Combat Zone's Bullshit

Read the original article here, in which an imaginary situation was fabricated in order to poke fun at student groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Student Union, and Students for a Sustainable Campus. This was a little response I wrote. It's in a style that closely resembles their own.

...Once the coast was clear, The Trail's staff emerged from their hiding places checking to see whether their golf shoes were still white.

"I don't understand why people just can't sit down and watch Comedy Central like the rest of us," one freshman writer said gingerly.

"I was raised to respect authority," piped a freckled boy wearing Abercrombie & Fitch, his head hiding in a Rambo comic book.

"Don't they have jobs!" screamed the sports columnists in unison, their little mugs flushed with challenge.

"Racism, war, environmentalism... all those things aren't problems anymore." said the senior editor assuringly. "Protests don't solve anything. Good journalism does. I want all of you to write stories that tell it like it is."

"Yeah!" the club agreed. "They don't belong in our school. They never did! No one - not even the press - picks up on their stupid little issues anyway."

Sauntering off to the media house together, they worked up some irregular verbs and exchanged more hotheaded invectives for the next week's edition.

Somebody made a comment on their website that they liked my addendum better than the original article. Ha! Thank you, fans!

Brave New Spectacle

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet three crew members from Brave New Films. They're a popular video collective who led a workshop on creating viral videos. The video above was posted yesterday onto their YouTube channel. If you have ever seen any of Robert Greenwald's films (Iraq for Sale, Outfoxed, Unprecedented, etc.) you have seen Brave New Films. Perhaps their most well-known viral YouTube video is "Fox News Porn", attacking the myth that Fox is a conservative news organization (that's a myth?) and eschews sexual deviance. In fact, BNF shows, Fox embraces sexual deviance. But perhaps my favorite BNF mashup is "Fox Attacks Bloggers". How pertinent?

The key to BNF's viral-ness is its ability to "pick fights" as they said in their workshop. Succinctness also plays an obvious role with regards to the internet. They likened the good vs. evil plot purity of their films to DC comic books and Star Wars films. I think this is a more intelligent move than most would assume. In the first chapter of Society of the Spectacle, Debord wrote that,

"In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught."

Nothing but Obama

So why did I make this video? Don't ask...

Class / Media

Last week I spoke at a local bookstore, King's Books, about independent media.

I would say the most important point I was making is that media is dominated by class, and perpetuated by the idea that only one class can tell our story for the rest of society (not to mention the permits and the badges and the capital.) One example of the class-based system I brought up was Josh Wolf, the video-blogger from San Fransisco who spent 6 months in jail to protect sources that the FBI wanted from him.

Josh Wolf is much more vulnerable than any other journalist simply because he is not affiliated with any major news media corporation. The video he took is his, and he does not need to reveal any of his sources because that would make him - and his profession - ipso facto investigators for the government. The government has all kinds of ways of getting information about its citizens, including wiretapping nowadays, and all the journalist has are the same tools everyone else as citizens in society have. They can agree to a confidentiality. If you take that away, you take investigative or original journalism away, and you're left with only the government as a means of getting information about your society. The government has become more devilish lately and has tried to push professional journalists in that direction, as we saw with the Valerie Plame case.

At any rate, through illustrations from independent work, essays, and history, my point was that the "Freedom of the Press" applies to the new conditions of production, where anyone with the ability to publish - and it doesn't need to be an acknowledged publisher - has the freedom of the press. There are literally hardly any barriers to entry. Anyone with a laptop or a cell phone can be reporter - so journalists aren’t the only ones with a license to film. Anyone can perform an act of journalism. I think it’s a big mistake to define journalism by the person who does it. Anyone can do journalism. The badge and other emblems of professional journalism are really just a symbol of the class system, seeing as badges are not legal documents. One of the many independent media models that I appreciate is Kuro5hin's ("Corrosion"), where the voting application allows users to increase the visibility of each article. There is also a set of standards that contributors are expected to follow, and users can also comment on the advertisements on the site.

Technology is empowering the user, hence the "Age of the User" (web 2.0), and with that class-barriers are breaking down. The standards debate is basically pointless at this point since if users wish to abide by a set of standards, they can. And if they'd like to publish whatever they'd like--articles on ideology and taxonomy one day, for example, and obscure poems the next--they are permitted that as well. That is what Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech mean in an open society.

Framework and Discourse For Media Democracy

Chomsky wrote:

The concept of 'democratizing the media' has no real meaning within the terms of political discourse in the United States. In fact, the phrase has a paradoxical or even vaguely subversive ring to it. Citizen participation would be considered an infringement on freedom of the press, a blow struck against the independence of the media that would distort the mission they have undertaken to inform the public without fear or favor... this is because the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

Now obviously Chomsky gave the word "democracy" in that last bit an ironic signification. "Democracy" is supposed to be the framework the mainstream media exists within, yet their establishment is itself un-democractic. The press have created an a class-based society where only those who are credited by institutions and corporations can participate in society's story-telling process. The "Freedom of the Press" thus represents the disconnected autonomy that the press class has, and if class-barriers are coming down then this is an infringement upon autonomy. This is the implicit framework for political discourse about media democracy which the ruling classes have setup. When Chomsky wrote that 20 years ago, "media democracy" had no real meaning within that political discourse. Today media democracy has the potential to be a vibrant marketplace of ideas, and is potentially very meaningful. We realize that freedom of the press actually belongs to anyone with the ability to publish, which includes virtually everyone. Now the internal media democracy discourse should be focused on standards and whether there should be any.