Planet FreeCulture.org

There is no need for TOS on ebooks that take away users rights.

I would like to thank Bill Hinsee for all his great legal work this summer at FFIP.  He worked on projects including: Bilski – patent reform, Fair Use & Bad Faith,  privacy labels, privacy case law research, Viacom v. Youtube research, and file sharing case law research. Bill was a great help this summer and will be a strong addition to the IP legal community and the free culture community.

Bill is a rising 2L at Boston Univeristy Law and a graduate of the Masters of Science in Information Management program at the University of Washington’s Ischool.  He is also a photographer with a photo blog that uses creative commons licenses.

Photo: Bill Hinsee under CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative

On February 11, a few of us co-wrote an op-ed in the Yale Daily News about Yale’s potential transition to Gmail. (“Lux et Veritas et Gmail“)

On February 17, I got this:

On February 18, I was interviewed (mp3) on Up All Night on BBC Radio 5 Live about this subject.

On April 12, one of the co-authors appeared on NPR regarding the same subject.

I love how they had to contact me via Facebook. Privacy is important, but I do want myself to be somewhat visible. Is that bad?

I’m going to write a bit about soccer today. But first, some football context. Bear with me.

Having grown up in Minnesota, I’m a recovering (always recovering) Vikings fan. The Vikings are perpetual heartbreakers and heart attack givers. Even from the days of Bud Grant and “Two-Minute Tommy”, you could never count the Vikings out. Fourth quarter, even two minutes left—it didn’t matter how much the other side led by. The Vikings were the king of last-minute rallies. The Vikings are explosive—and, appropriately, inconsistent. My time as a Vikings fan was spent watching them win against far better rated teams—and lose to teams they ought to have blown out of the water. They’d spend most of the season playing like Super Bowl champions, then lose ignominiously in the playoffs. My team has only been to the Super Bowl once, and has never won it. Vikings fans take nothing for granted—we’ve seen too many impossible wins and aneurysm-inducing losses.

The problem with soccer for many people, I think, isn’t really that it’s so low scoring (give each goal a touchdown’s worth of points and it’s comparable with American football). It’s that as the game goes on, often the players and the match as a whole give off an air of inevitability—it’s assumed that the team that’s ahead will win the match, or that both teams will let things drag to a draw. Of course it’s boring when teams don’t fight and the announcers take things for granted!*

Which is why the US-Slovakia game, and later the US-Algeria game, were SO great, and SO American. Everyone thought we were goners when Slovakia was up 2-0 at half. Two goals is considered a commanding lead in this bloody sport! Fortunately, our team was made of Americans who didn’t know better, so they not only went on to tie 2-2, they would have had a third goal and won the damn game if it weren’t for a terrible call.

And the US-Algeria game: what a Hollywood script match! Taking more risks, hitting more and more shots as the game went on in a passionate, full-hearted, grit-in-your-teeth effort to get the ball over the damn line and stay in South Africa. I’ve seen many a “hurry-up” football game, carefully managing the clock and racing against time. I’d never seen real, serious “hurry-up” soccer before. The New York Times declared that the second half was more like a track-and-field meet than a soccer game, with the US offense constantly sprinting toward the Algerian side as fast as they could, Tim Howard hurling the ball well past midfield to Altidore’s running feet. (The soccer version of a Hail Mary?) How many hundreds or thousands of Americans who’d never even watched a soccer match before ignored their work, clenched their teeth, begged for a goal, and hollered like madmen we when finally got it in stoppage time? All this for a “boring” 1-0 point difference? We love the team representing us. We LOVE this kind of game.

Soccer can become the kind of game that Americans love. Not if we try to play like Brazilians, or like Germans, or like any other powerhouse team style. We have to make the game our own. Arguably, at this World Cup, the US side is doing just that.

* This is becoming less true worldwide. The gap is closing between the traditional powerhouses and smaller teams. New Zealand was thought to be one of the worst teams in the World Cup; in fact, they went undefeated. Slovakia killed Italy; Mexico dominated France; both those teams from last year’s World Cup final are going home early. There are no kings in soccer anymore: it’s now conceivable that any team can beat any other team on a given day. The US, with its sports culture full of teams like the Vikings and deep-seated love of the underdog, just tends to believe that fact more readily than most.

I’m gonna write a bit on a song I’ve always liked, but more so in the last several months: “You Can Make Him Like You” by the Hold Steady. Go listen, if you haven’t heard the song before.

The chorus is short and goes like this:

There’s always other boys, there’s always other boyfriends

There’s always other boys, and you can make them like you.

It might be a rather empowering thing to sing to a girl, or as a girl, if it weren’t for the rest of the song…

The song lists a bunch of things the girl doesn’t have to do for herself because her boyfriend does them for her: talk to dealers, know the way home, go to the right schools, and so on. It’s great, all the effort and annoyance that his presence spares her. “It only gets inconvenient” when she wants to do things by herself.

I like the song, but it makes me angry, too. Maybe I like it because it makes me angry, because it reminds me of lessons I had better not forget. The song reminds me too much of my relationship with N, at least in the early years. Minus the drug usage, it hits a little close to comfort. Especially this stanza:

You don’t have to know the inspiring people.

Let your boyfriend know the inspiring people.

You can hang in the kitchen,

Talk about the stars of the upcoming sequel.

When N and I got together, in the early days of my involvement with the free culture movement, I didn’t feel like I had the experience or expertise to have anything important to say. So I, fairly consciously, hid behind N, who seemed to know what he was doing. N was friends with all the cool people, the free culture warriors and scholars. I met them and admired them from a distance, but it didn’t even occur to me that I could or needed to become friends with them in my own right. So I didn’t. I have one or two friends today that I wouldn’t've had if I hadn’t been involved in SFC, and my free culture involvement let me do a few crazy things like visit Croatia, but I feel I wasted most of that opportunity.

I’ve never forgotten an evening towards the end of the first summer N and I spent together. L came over for dinner, bursting with ideas for rebooting SFC. I slipped into the kitchen to make dinner while he and N talked. When we were eating, L said that he was aware of how Marxists and other organizers would (intentionally or unintentionally) exclude women from the strategy and debates by fobbing scut work onto them and that he didn’t want that to happen here; he promised to do his share. By the end of the meal, though, he’d forgotten, and I washed the dishes while L and N planned and plotted.

I’m ashamed to say, I was mostly comfortable with that role. It was easy to justify—N was outgoing, I wasn’t, so of course he could take care of talking and networking and social organizing for the both of us. Just as I made up for his weaknesses in other areas. Being young, I couldn’t tell that our arrangement was codependent, not interdependent. It’s still difficult for me to tell the two apart.

For all of my time in free culture, and most of my time on the East Coast, I let myself be in the background. I let myself be just “N’s girl”. I didn’t push myself outside my comfort zone and try to connect with people I didn’t know well. I didn’t assert opinions that I wasn’t confident of. It was only later, when I had more confidence in my knowledge of the org and held passionately-held opinions to match, that it mattered that I was nothing but “N’s girl” to the rest of SFC. Then no one took me seriously.

Something that often keeps women in unbalanced or unhealthy relationships is the fear of being single. As the song goes, “They say you don’t have a problem, until you start sleeping alone.” But it’s clear—in the song and in life—that that’s not the real problem. Yes, women should be confident that they’ll have other partners; it’s generally the case. But the problem is unless something fundamental changes, they’ll let their new relationship be as unbalanced as their old one. A broken record; change without progress.

I do want to someday be with someone who knows what they want, who has their life mostly sorted, who has their own set of “inspiring people.” I want to date people who are impressive in one manner or another—who doesn’t? But what’s more important than that is I want to be one of those impressive, inspiring people in my own right. I have to promise myself that I will never again hide behind a boyfriend (or anyone else for that matter), never let someone make up for my weaknesses instead of working on them myself. It pisses me off to no end to think of how I shrank back in the past—all the *more* infuriating because of how comfortable and natural it felt to me at the time. That’s why the song makes me mad. It reminds me of how not-myself I let myself become. Whatever else I am, I am no shrinking violet.

I thought about grad school during my lunch break today and got extremely nervous. It’s not a feeling I’m used to; I’ve never had nerves about big events or impending school years or even the transition from high school to college. My course of study was always mostly the same liberal arts dreck, mostly things I was already good at, so I never doubted I would do well. But this fall in my graduate program, much of the curriculum will focus on things I’ve either never done before or have tried in the past and have found difficult. The part of the program I am already familiar with—information law and policy, from my time in the free culture movement—is explicitly what I do not want to concentrate in. Thus, my confidence in my success is much weaker than usual. So much, too, is riding on the next two years. I won’t have the financial wherewithal to fumble around any further and I’ll die before I ever live with my parents again. I *must* find a place for my career to seriously get started when this degree is complete. So, although it’s out of character, I worry.

I’m also starting this chapter in my life truly single and alone for the first time in four years. I’m completely free to determine my fate—and completely responsible for it. (But I repeat myself.) In three months I have to go do awesome things, meet awesome people, and find awesome projects, all on my own. I’m going to have to develop a mostly-new circle of friends, despite the fact that I hate talking to people I don’t know. The possibilities are endless, sure—and it scares me witless. It’s completely terrifying to be wholly responsible for your own life. There’s just no way around that existential truth. But I have promised myself to face up to it. I know now that dependence and bad faith are even worse. So I’ll have to do my best to live for myself as I try to live up to my eternally unrealistically perfectionist expectations.

And, sure, there may be other boys, but I sure as hell had better not make them like me. At least for now.

Cows near Amenia, NY.

I spent the better part of the day today reading/watching/thinking about stuff by the ever-awesome Merlin Mann. If you’re a fan of his work, you’ll see where I’m coming from when I say that I decided that I had better do something generative and fulfilling before the day ends, so here I am at 3am scribbling some half-baked thoughts in to my browser window.

Because I’m interested in playing an active role in creating an awesome college experience for myself, I often think back to my idealistic 12th-grade vision of my future small-school liberal arts education. Probably the biggest part of that vision was intellectually stimulating late-night conversations in dormitory hallways.

And recently, especially tonight, I’m thinking that I don’t just want to have “intellectually stimulating” conversations with my peers; I want to read words and watch lectures by people who have/had really great ideas about morality and creativity and personal fulfillment and everything else that is inspiring and potentially life-changing. Then, I want people—students, profs, both—to hold my feet to the fire and say this to me:

You’ve encountered this inspiring idea, and you’ve taken some time to reflect on it alone or through conversation. Armed with this new knowledge, how are you going to live your life differently starting right now?

Then I want them to hold me to it. I want them to check in with me and to give me unsolicited feedback when I’m talking the talk without walking the walk (or worse, ceasing to talk the talk when I realize how hard it is to walk the walk). I want them to encourage me to write on my blog about my personal goals and convictions so that they are fully articulated and I am publicly accountable.

Then I want to do the same for my peers. I want to be surrounded by purposeful personal growth.

This is in response to Tim O’Reilly’s piece on the O’Reilly Radar: My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy. O’Reilly’s thesis is simple:

The essence of my argument is that there’s enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions

In his essay it quickly becomes clear that O’Reilly presupposes that the only/best way to provide web services is through centralized servers owned and operated by private (and probably large) companies. I think that this is really super extremely wrong.

O’Reilly writes, “We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone.” But you could imagine a service where you hosted all of the map code and data on your own computer—maybe a machine sitting under your bed at home, or maybe your cellphone itself (hey, they’re getting faster and faster). This mapping software gains no benefit from any sort of network—it’s purely Software as a Service (SaaS).

Of course, the network service doesn’t have to be SaaS to benefit from thinking outside the box of centralization. This is what Diaspora* and a few other projects are hoping to prove. If the network is decentralized, you don’t have one primary party that can access all of the data, so you have more privacy. See also email, where your messages go directly to the email provider of the person receiving them. Sure, we can all choose to give up on the decentralized internet and use gmail (guilty), but if we decide that we really care about controlling who sees our messages, we can still choose to host our own mailservers (plus there’s always end-to-end encryption). No one person is controlling this information flow—we just agreed on a protocol and then moved on.

I don’t doubt that there are some examples of services where the very nature of the service means that information from a huge number of people makes it better, and thus some amount of centralization (or at least reporting back to mother ship) makes sense. Recommendation engines, especially ones that use machine learning algorithms, are a clear example (think Pandora, Grooveshark, Netflix). However, this class of services is only one slice of the social web, and facebook does not lie within this slice.

Just finished written honors exams. Orals come all at once in 6 days. I think I can be ready by then. Maybe more than ready, but I guess we'll see.

I did quite a lot this semester. Directed one play, acted in two, wrote a bunch more stories and managed to get a magazine out.

All the while fighting went on in my head. At first there was the reaction to disappointment and disillusionment, a sweeping rejection of all formerly sacred. Especially science. Around the middle of the semester, a friend of mine happened to use the metaphor of an abusive relationship. It was more true than it should have been. I'd let this thing take over my life. It wasn't even a proper obsession. Seeking validation from a young age, I'd found it, only to realize in my young adulthood that praise and marks could not be spent as currency for happiness. I came to cash in my piety points and soon realized I'd been hoarding ice before a winter.

It quickly dawned on me how much it didn't have to be like this. Science is a thing, after all, an at will power rather than predestination. For whatever it was worth, I would use it at convenience. At this realization did some of my mind return. Again did I think of strange ideas linking fields. A tentative peace was established. Progress has continued since.

I want to do well on honors again. When I advance to another level, I want it to be known that I jumped ship not for poorly hanging on, but because I spotted another shore.

As for post-college, my chances of being back in New York City are very high. Probably still trying to start a company, though our efforts up until now haven't made it as far as we'd hoped.

I love sleep. I can have such strong emotions in sleep that appear lacking during the waking hours. I used to think that events would repair the loss of feeling - meeting that special someone, finding the secret of riches and power, etc. It always seemed a Catch-22. Maybe the breakthroughs of my dreams will carry through to the waking hours long enough to change this world as well.

I like to think and daydream as well. Sometimes they're separate but often they meld. I especially enjoy the incoherent but strongly emotional and ever creative wanderings of the mind as sleep begins to take hold. No longer do I always seek conclusion or analysis when thinking - it becomes a play of stumbling.

All I need now is another. Probably female and probably romantic, but we'll see. Maybe need is too strong. All I really need is a future and a dream, both of which I have. Only, the world keeps turning me back, throwing me again into the pit of boredom and apathy. Where can I go next that will become less tiresome?

Maybe the scattered events of these days are prophecies concocted in my own head, strung together unconsciously as a hint to what I dare not or struggle not to remember.

I write more these days. Some coherent and some less. Very little ends up here. Much more finds its way into a vast body of amateurish literature of varying quality and connectedness.

Know what else I need? MOAR SHAKESPEARE!

The New York Review of Books
The Walrus
Harpers
The Atlantic Monthly
The Times Literary Supplement

… plus stacks of Philosophy, Sociology, short stories, essay collections, collected reporting, poetry, works of religion, biographies and autobiographies…

All of these things adorn my desk, dresser, bedside table, floor, coffee table, kitchen table, radiator, and any other relatively flat surface. I’d have my cat balance them on her head if she wasn’t so grumpy about it.

And, the extreme anxiety of leaving the house without something adorned with print.

From as far back as I can remember I have been surrounded by the word.  True computers were there too, but they seemed something which fascinated me in a negative way.  I was always interested in the fact that people were sharing their lives through the computer.

But the computer has never been something sublime to me. It is easy. The word is difficult. I’ve been trying to find a profession which would allow me to work with books and words on a full-time basis. I thought scholarship was it, but I wasn’t ready to compromise my polymathy for a life behind a magnifying glass.

Librarians–of course they deal with books. What could be more elementary, the word “book” is contained in their name. But it only seems that my younger colleagues are trying to run away from books as fast as possible.

The perfect sentence is something which gives me the most profound joy. I sometimes think about trying to create them myself. The greatest compliment I can give to a writer–and I will give this to Pasha Malla whose The Withdrawal Method is moving me in profound ways right now–is that they make you want to be a writer.

But that is going to take another 5 years (giving myself 5 years for my 7 years of university writing. Even though it is bad I feel like I came out a better writer then my peers). What career in the meantime?

I find now, because I can say with confidence why I enjoy in writing, even to the point of finding flaws in very successful writers, that I have a desire to move into editing and publishing. I never really felt like I had to actualize my love of reading in this way before. I was merely content to read and hope that someone would pay me to do so. So perhaps a new path, after a few years of walking down the wrong ones.

I’m at the Students for Free Culture conference, catching up with old friends — including the current leaders of Florida Free Culture, which I realized is 5 years old this month. This morning a phrase popped into my head that I’d never heard before, but could be valuable to the free culture movement going forward: “culture justice”.

The term is obviously coined by analogy to “environmental justice”, an incredibly powerful idea that succeeds at articulating the costs of environmental degradation. Most simply, environmental justice is the concept that damage to the environment disproportionately affects the most vulnerable human populations. It’s an obvious idea once you think about it: if you’re poor, a child, elderly, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged, you have fewer resources to cope with (or move away from) environmental perils in your environment. In some sense, it’s an argument against inequality per se (and rightly so), but it also accounts for the fact that some inequality will always exists and helps clarify the burdens that are inequitably distributed.

Culture justice is my attempt to do the same for topics that the free culture movement is concerned with. (The term “information justice” already has some traction, but I prefer a frame that includes access to and participation in culture, not just access to information.) This approach is particularly valuable to the free culture movement (with its roots in elite law schools) and SFC (with its roots at elite colleges).

In his presentation today, Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge made the argument for open textbooks by pointing out that most of the growth in higher education has come from students with low-SES backgrounds, many of them first-generation college students, attending schools where they pay less than $5,000 in tuition per year. No one clapped. Unfortunately, most of the students in this room are not those students.

SFC’s base has been in the Northeast and West Coast. Although women have had important leadership roles, it’s always been dominated by men. Some panels today couldn’t find a single woman among the five participants. There is a significant place for higher-SES ethnic minorities, such as East Asians and South Asians, there’s a paucity of participation from lower-SES ethnic minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics. Most are training for high-status careers in IT. My point isn’t to smear SFC, but to point out some of its privileges. (I should point out, many of its leaders are acutely aware of them.)

To be fair, white male software engineers and tech enthusiasts have legitimate issues with public policy and dominant institutions. That’s my background in the free culture movement. But its claims will have greater resonance if they’re drawn more broadly. This has been a perpetual aim for SFC.

Culture justice takes this further by attempting to articulate a general framework for the role of social privilege in cultural policy.

One example is re-use of copyrighted material. Less privileged users will have less knowledge of their rights under the law, less ability to negotiate licensing, and in some cases even less protection under the law (see e.g. discussions of gender in fan fiction).

Similarly, Net neutrality is ultimately an argument about privilege and justice.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s enough to make me think that culture justice (under whatever name) could be an important and valuable frame for the free culture movement. Freedom is an important frame, but so is justice. In some cases they may work at cross purposes, but they can also reinforce each other in important ways.

What do you think?

Generally, I try to keep this blog focused on information policy, but I can’t help myself. I’ve had climate on the brain thanks to Copenhagen, but the confluence of news items that crossed my desk today is striking.

Much of the American media coverage of climate change is of the political back-and-forth about the costs of addressing climate change. It goes something like this: “Democrats today called for action to stop global warming, but Republicans said we can’t afford the cost to the economy. In other news, [insert celebrity sex scandal] …” There’s rarely a discussion of what those costs might actually be, just an intimation that they must be high.

Certainly there are costs (although there are also benefits — and there are staggering costs to inaction, too). But the three items I spotted this morning highlight the argument that much can be done, today, with existing technology, at relatively little cost and with relatively impact on the much-ballyhooed “American lifestyle”:

1. A mocking piece in today’s Guardian pokes fun at U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s fascination with old-hat technologies. Those of us who’ve seen Secretary Chu’s efficiency roadshow before, though, know that he’s not excited because he thinks these technologies are new and cutting-edge — he’s excited because they’re old, easy and cheap. The Guardian column only reinforces Chu’s point: in Europe, these approaches to energy efficiency are passé. So we don’t have to wait for cutting-edge, expensive, untested strategies to cut greenhouse gas emissions: even an advanced economy like the U.S. can make a big dent just by adopting some of the many cost-effective, tried-and-true tools already at our disposal.
2. ScienceInsider points to a new National Research Council report that estimates just how much could be saved. According to the report, adoption of existing or imminent technologies could reduce U.S. energy use by one-fifth in ten years. In other words: despite population and economic growth, energy use could decrease (in absolute terms) rather than increase, simply by adopting technologies that already exist or are expected to enter commercial availability in the next ten years.

   Just to spell it out, there’s a lot of economic good news in that scenario. Despite upfront costs, consumers save money on long-term energy costs. Meanwhile, a lot of people make a lot of money: namely, the manufacturers of those devices and their supply chains, through to the retailers who sell them and the contractors who install them. Basically, it’s good for everybody except energy companies — which brings me to the final item…

3. Avaaz and Oil Change launched petitions to end the U.S.’s staggering $10 billion annual taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel companies. (There seems to be some debate about the exact number, but at any rate, it’s huge.) Why we should subsidize these companies at all is difficult to fathom. If we simply eliminated the subsidies, fossil fuels would be less competitive. If we re-directed the funding to clean energy or efficiency, the gains would be even greater.

I doubt that these simple fixes alone would get us to 350. But it’s clear that there is much low-hanging fruit, perilously ripe for the picking — a fact all too often missing from the narrative around climate change.

I have been reading Hubert Dreyfus’ On The Internet and enjoying it greatly.  When I began reading it a few weeks ago it started my return to philosophical writing and an interest in the phenomenology of technology.  I am now reading Don Ihde in an attempt to develop a language to think and talk about media and other technology that differs from the regular critical political economy or cultural studies approaches.  More about these two in another post, particularly my distaste for cultural studies writing.

My favourite parts of this little book were Chapter Three, which deals with the problem of embodiment and virtual social interaction, and Chapter Four, which deals with nihilism under the weight of the infinity of information on the Net.  I will talk about the second part first as the later ties in with something I am writing for a class I am auditing.

Dreyfus quotes heavily from Kierkegaard’s “The Present Age” which discusses the mass media of newspapers and its negative effects on culture.  Dreyfus quotes from Kierkegaard:

The Public is not a people, a generation, one’s era, not a community, an association, nor these particular persons, for all these are only what the are by virtue of what is concrete.  Not a single one of those who belong to the public has an essential engagement in anything.

The Internet allows people to comment and discuss everything without having to act on it.  Dreyfus does admit that for those who are engaging in social struggle in the real world, the Internet is an essential tool to help people socially organize and get their message out.  But discussions which are completely virtual are much less committed.  I thought immediately of those whose social action is limited to subscribing to causes on Facebook.

Becoming an expert, and putting one’s ideas into practice, requires risk and the possibility of failure.  But there is no commitment when only debating online.  As well, the endless triviality of the discussion online leads to the ultimate trivial discussion, talking about the Internet itself: how big it is, how it is growing, how new and profound it is.  Such talk has always disgusted me to no end.  From McLuhan to the present day, it distracts us from the more important task of critique and a desire to ask why we would want technology the way it is, and what the proper path is for us in the future.

Ultimately, the only way to stay engaged is in living what Kierkegaard calls an aesthetic existence.  Dreyfus says:

Such a surfer is curious about everything and ready to spend every free moment visiting the latest hot spots in the Web. He or she enjoys the sheer range of possibilities. For such a person, just visiting as many sites as possible and keeping up on cool ones is an end in itself. Life consists in fighting off boredom by being a spectator at everything interesting in the universe and in communicating with everyone else so inclined. Such a life produced what we would now call a postmordern self — a self that has no defining content or continuity but is constantly taking on new roles.

Instantly I thought of my daily skimming of BoingBoing. This is not the first time I’ve been overwhelmed by the triviality of it all.  Every day there is a new wave of “Wonderful Things” made up of pop culture, nostalgia, middle brow science, and the occasional political comment.  The thing that always struck me was that I knew that none of these things would make an impact on me.  Regardless of whether I saved the link to any of them I would not look at them ever again.  I surely wouldn’t go back to them like I go back to Kierkegaard or Heidegger again and again.  I don’t mean to disparage BoingBoing, I am sure the writers take it very seriously.  But life on the Internet feels like BoingBoing: A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, ultimately. We are not really compelled to react to the flood, but only keep up with it.  This is Kierkegaard’s aesthetic commitment.

The third chapter of Dreyfus’ book deals with embodiment.  We forget how important embodiment is to our social interactions, and we’d like to think that virtual community can be as fulfilling, something else I’ve come to believe is not true.  I’ve been a lover of virtual communities ever since I dialed-up to an IBM BBS to find a driver for my broken computer when I was 12 or 13.  There were people talking on there!  Boy did I rack up a long distance bill.  But as I’ve overcome a lot of my own social anxiety, I’m reaching the conclusion that real social interaction, real talking and debate, watching of local sports or local artists, speaking to people as they walk down the street or sit on a park bench, these are much more important to the health of our society.  It seems like we are making more of a “connection” with people on Facebook, but ignoring the grocer who is an actual member of our actual community.

This ties into my paper for Information Ethics, where I hope to discuss the important of embodiment for ethics, building hopefully on Levinas.  This may be the source of the problem of ethics on the Internet, which is lacking if you read studies on racism in message boards.  I love not having to pay for this class and get a credit, because I can develop this argument without caring about deadlines.  If it takes me until the Spring I am going to write something I am interested in and proud of.

In conclusion, I have a message for those few regulars who read this blog.  You may have noticed my lack of “library” discussion.   I am much more interested in the essence of modern technology and what our phenomenological relation to it is.  So this blog is going to get more philosophical, even as it remains a discussion of technology in general and media technology in particular.  If this is interesting to you, feel free to continue your reading and comments.

Jonathan Lethem on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY

No (on air) guests. Trying out a bunch of diff tracks just to see what works. Lots of brazen trainwrecks. Some happy accidents. Sweaty studio. No fan. Rippin irish breakfast tea at 2am.

READ: [PLAYLIST]
LISTEN: [STREAM]

(The following post is an assignment for my class, Imagining Asian Americans, but that doesn’t make it any less real talk.)

I used to be one of you. Yeah, two years ago I would have skipped out of this post like you’re tempted to right now just after reading the title.

What happened?

Early on, I was taught without words that if I didn’t think I was a minority maybe they won’t treat me like one. That I was better than those minorities. So like a camel sticking its head into the sand, I disavowed that I was different and loudly questioned why we spent so much time studying race at schools. I argued against affirmative action because I thought we should be postracial and colorblind. Whenever minority issues came up, the knee-jerk reaction was to shrug it off, to prove that I wasn’t like those militant-for-no-reason minorities.

In this way I isolated myself from the other minorities. And then I left the Asian-Americans behind, too. I traded in my model minority mandates for new-to-me white rebellion (as much as I could, anyway) because sex, drugs, and rock and roll were way more appealing than the only agenda pop culture ever laid out for me. I avoided other Asians like the plague, worried that people would think I was one of those Asians. I fought to be included in that edge case of “cool” Asians as if my lives depended on it–my throat hoarse from proving that I can be just as loud as anyone else, my purity score plundered by (occasionally reckless) experimentation. Fighting the expectations with increasing intensity, I broke free of the gravitational pulls of the communities I grew up with–to find myself eating moon cakes alone.

It wasn’t really until I went to Jamaica that I started questioning all of this. First, I learned that despite answering “China” for the last 12 years when asked where I came from, I actually identified more as an American at a third point because it explained much more about who I was. Second, I learned that I was pretty happy with my perch outside of the racial binary in Jamaica, which made me realize that I was on a similar perch here. Finally, despite the racialized (racist?) catcalls (“Pssssst Ms. Chin” and “Chinese Japanese!”) that hurricaned on me, I found myself happier about being Asian than I had been in a long time. Why? Because despite the frequent politically-incorrect statement from black Jamaicans, Asians in Jamaica didn’t seem as constrained as Asian-Americans in terms of expectations and stereotypes. They were accepted as just as Jamaican as everyone else. All of a sudden, I felt freed from having to constantly distancing myself from The Stereotype (because it didn’t exist on the island!), an activity that occupied far more of my time and energy than I realized. And then I started wondering why things were so different in America.

With eyes now open to the processes of racialization, at least in the cases where the US differed from Jamaica, I became increasingly interested in understanding why Asian-Americans were framed as continuously foreign, why the myth of a homogeneous(ly successful) Asian-American experience was so entrenched, why Asian-Americans were treated so differently from other minorities, why the outrage I thought was missing from the Asian-American community was, in fact, alive and well, just marginalized as rare exceptions not worth mentioning.

It was these questions, in addition to many more that I had not thought to ask, that Asian-American studies has helped to answer. It is a study of history: understanding how two centuries of codified discrimination, old misunderstandings, uprisings and struggles for rights and equality and events the government would rather forget shape how we are perceived, classified, and treated today, a study of Angel Island, Sa-I-Gu, Vincent Chin, the Hays Code, Manilamen, Executive Order 9066, Yellow Peril, the Third World Liberation Front, the Chinese and Asian Exclusion Acts. It is also a study of representations: how the media has controlled and shaped the image of what an Asian-American is supposed to be over the years, broadcasting constraints and bamboo ceilings into our self-perceptions. It is a study that understands its internal conflicts: the problems with a pan-Asian identity, the problematic intersection between queer and Asian-American.

For me, it has been a study of a culture I barely realized I was a part of for most of my life, of problems I didn’t know I was struggling against, of a community and a movement I didn’t know about and didn’t think I would be willing to join. Maybe more than it has been about figuring out how to stop them from looking at us as a nameless, souless Mongol horde, it has been about figuring out how to make me shed years of alienation and discomfort and, basically, stop doing it myself. That I don’t have to be ashamed when a Cindy Kim somewhere is doing “the Asian thing” and excelling at violin instead of shaving her hair into a mohawk and rioting on the streets because it is her right as an Asian-American and therefore an individual to do whatever the hell she wants and it don’t have to affect me none because I, too, am an individual. That indeed, violin concertos contain movements of their own, and can be just as good of a soundtrack for revolution as anything else.

1:50pm

Scrobbled a song on Last.fm. Peter Allen - She Loves to Hear Music

Originally published at Skyfaller.net. Please leave any comments there.

My apologies to everyone who is following me on Livejournal! I re-imported my entire Livejournal archive into my blog but I accidentally left my LJ cross-posting plugin turned on, so it got into an infinite loop where I would import a post, and then it would get cross-posted, and then imported again… This meant that duplicates of my old posts dominated everyone’s friends pages. I went back using Xjournal and manually deleted all of the duplicate posts from Livejournal, so everything should be back to normal.

The good news is that all of the old LJ comments have been imported with threading this time, thanks to the new Livejournal importer in the unstable “trunk” version of Wordpress Huge thanks to Beau for writing the importer, it worked perfectly.

Originally published at Skyfaller.net. Please leave any comments there.

How nice that the names of the months, when arranged chronologically, happen to form this gorgeous curve! Thanks, serendipity, for making me smile at 4 AM.

The domain 'findandreplace.org' is somehow still available for purchase --

It's a shame that Obama's delicious victory is alloyed by the bitter taste of not one, not two, but three propositions and amendments across the country to ban gay marriage. Whose fucked up idea was it to legislate the definition of a word? I am so pissed about this. Also, California's humane animal treatment proposition is silly. Guess I should have voted in California instead of Texas... our local propositions were boring.

One victory at a time, I guess. Obama, show us how it's done.

Hi everyone!

GO VOTE.

Thank you.

Although I continue to blog at Blurring Borders, I've also been doing some guest posts at Techdirt. If you don't already read Techdirt, I'd recommend subscribing.

Some recent posts:

• Should the Next President Use a Computer?
• Is There Any Good Reason to Pull the $1,000 iPhone App?
• Eight $1,000 App Buyers Later, and Apple Pulls It
• Is Privacy That Cuil?
• Newest Industry to Be Crowdsourced? Internet Censorship.
• GPS Data Used to Disprove Radar Gun in Speeding Trial
  

As you can tell, Copyrightings hasn't been receiving much attention recently. Instead, I've migrated to Blurring Borders which allows me to discuss a broader range of topics (though I still touch on Internet law). Head on over to check it out!

Whoa! I showed up on the Grooveshark blog --

-- and I was further informed that, in May, I was a featured image on Wikinews!

What a wild Web we weave :)

I feel like blogging more, lately.

I enjoy writing now and then, and would like a venue to do so -- one where I'll feel comfortable pointing people to, and hopefully one that can attract some readership, so I can have feedback.

I set up a WordPress install at gavinbaker.com over a year ago. I've never updated it from the SG campaign site. That's going to change, and relatively soon.

I don't want to break links to the existing URLs, and a part of me thinks I might even want an archive of that content, some day. But I also don't want to have to maintain an inactive WordPress install definitely: at best, it's an annoyance to maintain; at worst, it's a security risk and an invitation to spammers. So I'll be stripping WordPress out and leaving static copies of the pages in place.

I'll install a new instance of WordPress and get things set up the way I like it. Eventually, I'll start using it. Hopefully, I'll use it somewhat regularly -- posting at least a few times a month -- because I know that updates attract readers, and readers leave feedback.

I'll also stop posting here, both to encourage readers to move to gavinbaker.com and join the discussion there, and because I'm done with LiveJournal. I still have some fondness for LJ, but I want something more professional. (If I want the benefits of pseudonymity, I'll use a different account which is not attached to my public persona.) I imagine I have a few friends who would read posts here but wouldn't use RSS or check my site, and I'd be happy to import my RSS from gavinbaker.com, but IIRC you need a paid account or something to do that. (If anyone would like to volunteer to set up a feed account on LJ, please let me know.)

I'll probably continue to use LJ for reading others' blogs, commenting, and communities.

I'll also be making some other changes at gavinbaker.com (out with the old and in with the new), including switching my domain registrar (see ya, GoDaddy).

In addition, my email address will be changing within the next three months (most likely to something @gavinbaker.com). I'll also be going through a twelve-step program for Facebook (step 1: admit you have a problem), so if that's how you normally communicate with me, it's time to dust off the email client. (Yes Virginia, email does have other interfaces besides the Web.) I'll also be, let's say, cleaning up my accounts on random sites I briefly used (I'm looking at you, Friendster).

No, I will be getting a LinkedIn account.

I don't like Web services that won't let me do what I want with my data and that won't let me run the service myself (i.e. they don't give me the code). These proprietary walled gardens are not what I want the Web to be like. (And even if they have narrow windows through which they allow you to pass some data, they're still walls.) I want to start living Web 3.0; and those social networking sites are just a time suck, anyway.