Jajuna

The US congress was apparently hard at work this week. I just saw a clip from the Daily Show (which I cant post here due to Canadian internet restrictions) that featured a story about a recent effort to pass health care for 9/11 emergency workers suffering from chronic illness. The republicans blocked the bill because they said it would create “new taxes”. One of these wing-nuts actually stood on the floor and said something to the effect of: “these emergency workers risked their lives to protect our freedom not to raise taxes”.The republicans were also apparently concerned that some of the workers were “illegal aliens” therefore rendering their sacrifice undeserving of health care benefits. It turns out that the bill would not have raised taxes as the republicans claimed (which is of course beside the point), but close a corporate offshore tax loophole which would force certain industries to start paying what they owe for money earned in the US. After stopping this bill dead in its tracks, the republicans then led a bill to protect gun owners from losing their arsenal during bankruptcy proceedings. It is actually rare to see Jon Stewart get upset, but this really burned him. To me its just more evidence of the complete unraveling of any semblance of the public good in the US. Just another day at the office for the fearless leaders as they shamelessly protect corporate power, issue death sentences for sick people, and pander to the worst elements of US culture.

We were having a conversation last night about Jane Jacobs over dinner, specifically the book Life and Death of Great American Cities. Andie Merrifield, who is a cultural geographer and author of the fantastic book Metromarxism, writes that Life and Death is simply the best book ever written on the city. I would agree, but would go one further: Jacob’s book is one of the most acute sociological interventions on any topic. It explores in exquisite detail and intelligence how cities work through grounded eye level examinations of space, architecture, design, and and social life within New York neighborhoods in the early 1960s.

This conversation led to Cuba, and how Jacob’s ideas might relate to Havana. My architect friend was comparing Havana and Miami. Two cities that share a great deal culturally but that took two very separate paths in terms of design at around the same time, with Miami embracing an auto-centric corporate development scheme even bulldozing many of the old Spanish sectors to make way for suburbanization and highways, while Havana’s development—while obviously caught in an embargo vortex—explored post-revolutionary Afro-Cuban modernist designs and more organic forms of local development.

When I came home last night, I recalled this amazing film on organic farming in Havana that features one contemporary zone of localized urban development that is decidedly post-petroleum. During the period of Soviet patronage Cuba developed their agricultural sector around petro-industrial farming methods: machines, oil, pesticides etc. After the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 their supply of cheap oil and farm equipment was cut off. This documentary explores the Cuban switch to mass produced local organic farming in Havana. It is hosted by Canadian environmental scientist and media figure David Suzuki. Below is the first installment, the rest should be up on google video or youtube.

I have been putting together some statistics this morning for the thesis relating to the structural and cultural linkages between advancing insecurity and the securitization and criminalization of urban space in the United States. Ultimately, the thesis studies how youth understand and navigate these processes in educational and urban contexts in the wake of the financial crisis. The statistics are both alarming and sadly unsurprising.

According to the United Nations, as of 2008, the United States had the highest level of inequality of any industrialized nation ranking slightly more unequal in relative terms to Sri Lanka and roughly equivalent to Turkmenistan and Ghana. Between 1978 and 2008, while the richest Americans saw their incomes quadruple and the bottom 90% saw a net decline, 35% of total income accrued to the top one-tenth of one percent of the population. While the financial sector continues to award hundreds of billions of dollars in record bonuses and create new billionaires at a record pace, the economic crisis has plunged ever more Americans into severe economic insecurity. Today, over 45 million people are now living below the federal poverty line including 17 million children, 14 million are currently unemployed, 38 million are receiving food stamps, 44 million lack health insurance, and homelessness has increased upwards of 50% in some cities.

Along with deepening inequality there is also broad evidence to demonstrate the intensive militarization and criminalization of US policy and culture. National defense spending is set to hit $900 billion in 2011, roughly equal to the rest of the world combined. In addition, domestic security spending has mushroomed to around $400 billion per year much of it going to enforce provisions in the USA Patriot Act and other post-9/11 “homeland” security protocols (Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation). According to the Pew Research Center, US corrections spending reached $68 billion in 2008, up from $11 billion 20 years earlier, which represents a rate of increase more than six times greater than higher education spending over the same period. Concurrently, there has been a 500% increase in the number of Americans incarcerated amounting to 2.2 million people, roughly equivalent to 25% of the world’s current prison population. Today, more than 7.3 million Americans or 1 in every 31 adults is under the direct control or supervision of the criminal justice system either in prison, parole, or probation. These figures are, of course, highly racialized, with Blacks six times more likely and Hispanics three times more likely to be incarcerated as whites (Urban League).

Anxieties related to the potential ill effects of Web 2.0 are often framed by concerns over how the internet is affecting our relationship to knowledge. For instance, commentaries found in articles like Is Google making Us Stupid? raise questions about how 24/7 access to instant information may be eroding our analytical capacities as well our cognitive ability to remember important pieces of information. Why bother with memory work if we know what we need is just sitting there in Wikipedia? This is something like what Fredric Jameson describes in his analysis of postmodern culture where the constant circulation and reproduction of ungrounded images, factoids, styles, and news cycles produces what he describes as a state of historical amnesia. The ultimate consequence being that our detachment from the grounding of the past hinders our ability to imagine and work collaboratively to build new images of alternative futures. This article, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”, from the New York Times adds a bit of a twist to this argument. What happens to subjectivity when every whim, thought, impulse, or embarrassing photo becomes permanently cataloged on Twitter, Facebook, or the Blog? How will this immutable digital trail impact our relationship to ourselves, to knowledge, to our understandings of past and the future?  One of the effects, as the article intimates may be a radicalization of image maintenance and protection that accelerates an already creeping cultural narcissism associated with immanent collective surveillance and identity/reputation construction.

From the article:

In the nearer future, Internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines, like today’s Spokeo and Pipl, which combine data from online sources — including political contributions, blog posts, YouTube videos, Web comments, real estate listings and photo albums. Increasingly these aggregator sites will rank people’s public and private reputations, like the new Web site Unvarnished, a reputation marketplace where people can write anonymous reviews about anyone. In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks.

Anticipating these challenges, some legal scholars have begun imagining new laws that could allow people to correct, or escape from, the reputation scores that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the future. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, supports an idea he calls “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate the problem, Zittrain showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by Intelius, that offers a “sleaze detector” to let you investigate people you’re thinking about dating — it reports their criminal histories, address histories and summaries of their social-networking profiles. Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers — like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example — which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.

I have been reading a number of blog posts regarding the March 4 day of action protests against the privatization and de-funding of public education across the United States. There is a broad ranging and passionate and often substantive conversation being had amongst students, faculty, and concerned citizens about how to effectively and democratically re-appropriate the educational sphere for the common good. March 4 proved that this issue has the power to unite a wide swath of divergent social elements and actors as hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the US to demand autonomy and justice in education.

Below is a provocative piece called “We are the Crisis” written by an anonymous blog collective that I think captures the sense of malaise and political possibility within the student movement:

We are faced with an eruption that no one can yet explain, an eruption that does not yet have a name. But we need to stop and ask ourselves: how did we get here? And now that we are here, is what is happening at universities across the world something real, a true rupture with the present order?

The 00’s destroyed our dreams. The horror of September 11th in New York was quickly translated into the global horror of the neoconvservative agenda. We saw wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that could not be stopped by millions of people marching in both Washington D.C. and Tehran, in Islamabad and Mumbai, in Palestine and Israel, in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Lagos and Istanbul. The anti-war movement became our iconic moment of revolt and the living nightmare of defeat.

With environmental devastation looming, no health care and the temerity and fear we learned in the Bush years, the future seemed a grey haze. At the same time, the housing market was booming, invincible. Credit flowed freely. Gas prices decline from the near $4 a gallon we’d seen earlier in the decade. Students had the promise of finding, if not equal prosperity as their parents, something approximating the middle class life they’d grown up in, or seen generations of Americans fight for.

We had two options.

One, we could try to get jobs that might secure that kind of life. But the only people making money were the ones who knew how to cheat the very system that promised a fair chance for all. That’s what the guys at Enron proved to us, what Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion investment scheme proved to us. That’s what real estate agents making a quick buck off of loans they knew would fall through proved to us. And that’s what the CEO’s of banks who gave themselves raises in the midst of the biggest economic downfall since the Great Depression proved to us.

Playing by those rules revolted us.

So we chose to go to school, more because we thought we should than because we knew what we were doing. Some of us went to develop our love of the sciences, the arts, philosophy, politics, and literature. But we knew that these degrees — even in the sciences — didn’t mean we would find a fulfilling job where our skills would be put to their full use. Our degrees held no promise of economic stability or anything more than a stamp on our way towards the next round of education, skills training or a new career.

The economy no longer needed just our bodies, or even a specialized set of knowledge or “intellectual” skills. It needed us to become highly adaptable, more professional, yet more relaxed, more personable, ready to work with people in different parts of the company, newly emerging companies, companies in different countries. This economy needed us to switch careers when jobs moved overseas, shut down or became obsolete to those who hoped to make a profit from us.

It required us to learn how to design web pages in a week or become a “leader” in our office. Fewer of us became the workers caught in the cogs of the machines. We became the baristas who had to smile while we spilled espresso on ourselves, graphic designers who checked our email in between the digitalized images we mistook for our own art, restaurant servers who knew the ins and outs of organic wines we couldn’t afford, dotcomers who worked twelve hour days in our “casual-fun” offices.

To learn the new skills in the university would mean more loans, more work-study jobs or shit jobs in the world and more checks cut to the university itself. It would mean more time in limbo, between the comforts of youth and the promise of a joyous transition into adulthood.

And then in September of 2008 the economy went into freefall.

We lost our jobs, our friends or our parents lost their jobs. We didn’t know how the fuck to pay back credit card debt we’d accumulated in the delirium of the housing bubble. For those of us in school, or thinking of going to school, the cuts to public education annihilated our last illusions of so-called prosperity. The crisis took away all ideas that our generation had a future comparable to that of the last generation.

In 2009 those cuts to public education symptomatic of the 00’s became monstrously visible. In the past few months, we have seen library hours reduced, writing programs shut, tuition raised, cultural services destroyed and schools go on furlough for weeks at a time while funds continue to pour into stadium and police station renovations, the business schools and executive pocketbooks. We have seen office workers on furlough, custodians and service workers laid off.

We are angry but many of us feel powerless. As we have said, the defeat of the anti-war movement and the consequences for those who have had to flee — or stay behind — in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute the fundamental trauma of our generation, acknowledged or not. Traditional activism: marches, rallies, signing petitions, calls to Congress did nothing to stop the right-wing agenda. And while we may have put momentary hope in Obama, and stood in awe as America elected an African American president, we have become increasingly disillusioned by his refusal to fight for health care, environmental standards, for ending the wars abroad, indeed for a better world. (more…)