the new freedom movement

Man, I feel like I get beat with a sack full of doorknobs.

Rolled with the Kinetic from 8am to 7pm yesterday, then to the inugural bout of Humboldt Roller Derby, and then the dancy afterparty. Lots of screaming, bike riding, tugging machines up sand dunes, tailgating, screaming some more, jumping around and carrying on.

But hopefully with a couple cups of coffee and some Motrin, I’ll get through enough work today to take tomorrow off for the finish-line run of the race. Its good to be out doing things.

New tag. Drupal set message “Power dating.” Backstory on that is here, and I’ll elaborate with new thoughts now.

Well, actually, first I start with self-quote, to illustrate just how sisyphusian this feels at time. From my report back from Baja, which feels like another lifetime:

I realized, for instance, just how blatantly I’ve been keeping myself out of range of romance out of fear more than anything else. Sex and love have always been intertwined in my experience, and avoiding one is a pretty good way to skirt the other. Much as I bemoan my lonely state, it’s my own choices and habits of action that render it so. I’ve been rationalizing this to myself as a kind of jaded maturity, but now I think that’s just bluster.

The truth is I’m afraid of what might happen: of getting hurt, of hurting someone else, of getting into unknown territory where the possibility of both those things just gets greater. It’s weak sauce, really, because this is what life is all about; but as they say the first step towards finding a solution is admitting you have a problem. So there’s that.

I also realized in conjunction with the above that I’ve been looking backwards a lot, for similar reasons, when really I should be looking forward. The possibilities of the future are almost literally endless, and when I begin to entertain them I feel a real true gut-level sense of trepidation — “don’t make plans; don’t invest; shit doesn’t pan out, remember?” — and it feels like it might be that good kind of Allen Ginsburg brand of fear. The kind I know I should pursue.

That was nine months ago. Today I remain in almost exactly the same position. The Girth sort of confronted me with this last night — in the good way that friends do — as we were getting ourselves fired up to go out in Berkeley. Because it’s true. I am afraid, and even as I can feel my whole being becoming increasingly energized, I have nervousness and trepidation in my heart. I have performance anxiety, concerns about failing to meet my own high standards. More than any of this, I have layered defense mechanisms which are used to rationalize and obfuscate the whole situation under the auspices of reducing hassle.

This is childish. It is time this ended.

So we went out to a nice little drinking establishment where they have ginger beer (great with gin) and soothing live jazz music. I rode my new Mission Bicycle down just for kicks. After a little seat adjustment it feels like god’s own chariot, and I’m actually kinda bummed to be leaving it here for a while. Doesn’t do me much good in the HC though (or doesn’t it…).

Anyway, the speedy ride and sparksplus get me well-primed to hit the scene. Not that we’re doing anything crazy, just having a couple cocktails and looking at pretty girls of a Saturday evening. There are two such behind the bar, and as a sign of how high I feel I’m riding of late, I skip on past the Girth’s worldly wisdom of not attempting to engage such creatures — to wit: pretty women who wait tables, sling coffee or pour drinks are virtually un-flirtable owing to their massive overexposure — I give the one a little friendly sass while ordering our beverages.

Conversation turns to the increasingly bourgeoisie nature of our lives, and my man is nice enough to humor me with some flattering words about how I’m going to be successful without losing my humanity, and to let me spin out my faux philosophical ramblings on our first-world problems. I invent a good bit about Maslow’s pyramid of human needs as a series of mechanisms for social control, and the ascending of said pyramid as the sweet road to freedom. We talk about the general fuckedupness of the world. The evils of the prison system. The gradual stripping away of the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments (only true checks against a police state), and the strong chances that we will get a Democratic president and congress, but not universal health care.

The revolution misses us, and we miss it. Part of my feeling better and better about life makes me think once again that there’s something good to be done with our cultural capital and freedom to work outside institutional structures. There’s a lot of injustice, especially when you’re not a financially comfortable, physically fit, straight white male American. What to do with all that dumb luck, you know?

By and by we get another chance to make friendly with the bartender since the gentleman to our left is being a bit of a prick. Common enemies are good at producing solidarity. Her shift finishes at about midnight and she takes a seat next to my buddy, and I think suddenly this has potential, though she spends a good amount of time talking to the handsome long-haired fellow further to the right and at some point a very skinny man with a very trendy haircut enters and exerts some signs of social ownership.

It’s at this point that I disengage, and upon reflection I’m a little disappointed. She was obviously at least somewhat interested in me/us, initiating small-talk and asking to try on my hat, etc. She introduced herself, and when we did finally roll out she put her hand on my chest and told me it was nice to have met me. Her skinny/trendy companion could easily have been an affectionate homosexual friend, but I used the pretense of a putative boyfriend to ignore the fact that this girl, who I legitimately thought was attractive, seemed to think I was attractive as well. And this is a move borne of fear, or perhaps even cowardice.

So yeah, baby steps. I’ve been making some progress. Getting it up to flirt in the first place, and I did an ok job talking to a cute girl down at Coachella, and with a couple of shiny local faces in the elevator at work, and having nice correspondences and the like. But the killer instinct is lacking. As my brothers at Wu-Tang Financial remind me, you gotta play this game rough: in, out, grab, get, bonk. Coffee’s for closers.

To that end, I think the next logical step for the plan of Power Dating is Operation Get Real Hot, which involves improving my personal grooming routines and getting into a healthy gym habit for the next three weeks I’m up north. After that it’s Operation Get Out There And Mix It Up, which is a little more of an unknown.

I’ve been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper’s, I’ve digested a few books, which I’ll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

Air Guitar
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled “Essays on Art & Democracy,” this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don’t know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn’t really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey’s prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper’s recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the “retreat into criticism” and the “politics of infinite demands.” It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who’s an art critic and not a “Critical Theorist,” but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I’ve ever read.

On Bullshit
This is really a single essay cleverly packaged as a small book, but it’s fantastic, a serious and scholarly inquiry into the ubiquity of bullshit. I also have the similarly-sized companion essay On Truth, but have yet to crack it. Surprisingly, the direct contemplation of bullshit is unclaimed intellectual territory, but it feels vital, and as someone who probably aught to shut up or say “I don’t know” more often — and in failing to do so produce my own quotient of BS and then some — reading through it provides an interesting guide to introspection.

One of the most intriguing takeaways from the book has to do with how the essence of Bullshit is not really about whether or not someone makes true or false statements, but whether this person is even concerned with the truth in the first place, or whether they are instead attempting to convey a sense of their own situation and state of mind, regardless of what the facts may be. The parallels to the current vogue of “balance” in journalism comes immediately to mind, but so does the often mind and spirit-killing discourse of organizational politics (as exemplified by, say, the HBO series The Wire), wherein interlocking and overlapping personal agendas obscure and compromise the putative “real goals” of the entity in question.

The Looming Tower (Not pictured)
Zack gave me this to read, a highly researched non-fiction account of the origins of Al-Qaeda and the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, including the bureaucratic infighting which prevented the FBI and CIA from putting the pieces together. Some of it was remedial, but it certainly challenged several assumptions I’ve made about all this — principally that there wasn’t really any preventing the attacks; this is clearly untrue — and definitely deepened my understanding of Middle Eastern politics and radical Islam.

It’s a tragic read, particular in light of how the past six years have gone. Made me angry again, and feeling a renewed commitment to drive the development of open-source organizing techniques. Far moreso than any technology I piddle around with, the means and methods used in this kind of active wide-reaching loose-tie collaboration need to be refined, packaged and promoted, because, in brief, the Empire will always lose, even if it wins (as we’re seeing.)

Spook Country
It’s no secret that I was a sci-fi kid growing up, played D&D and the whole bit. The literary work of William Gibson is one of the true gems of the genre, and I like to think the level of his writing and quality of his insight helped to elevate my mental state up from comic book clashes between good and evil, helping me become the worldly dude I am today. He’s also an interesting author in that he started out writing about a fantastically distant (though utterly recognizable) future, and now sets books published in 2007 in the year 2006. Reality caught up with his vision, I suppose.

Spook Country continues the present-tense world he began exploring in Pattern Recognition, and feels much the same. I’m not done reading it, but I like it so far, and especially the way it tugs at various contemporary questions about the evolving nature of power as derivative of information, both in the mechanistic and mystic senses. Gibson’s greatest virtue as the “father of cyberpunk” is that he’s always been fascinated with humanity, the mythic elements of personhood, with the voodoo powers we organically possess. His most piercing insights are not about technology, but about how technology (and other things) acts as an agent in the evolution of human consciousness.

Interconnectedly?
It’s a bit of a stretch to put all these chunks of writing into a neat little pattern, but they all contain elements of the stuff I’m really interested in.

To wit: the failures of our current establishment or “system,” and the way in which a more evolved human consciousness, supported by superior technologies of organization, can do it better. That’s really what “the revolution” boils down to for me. Less bullshit, better organization, less oppression and institutionalized inequality, more fun, free time, health, happiness, etc.

So, as you may have heard, Atlanta is running out of water, and nobody really seems to know what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and drought persists for another two months. But it’s not as if this is really a new thing.

It seems like somehow in the latter part of the 20th Century, we in the US lost track of the fact that we’re actually quite small and powerless in the face of macro-scale events. Droughts and other disasters (some of them manmade) have always happened, and will happen again, but we’ve forgotten this. We seem to believe too deeply in our exceptionalism, that we’re somehow exempt from history and the cruel twitches of fortune.

As Bukowski said, “The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed.”. We have no feel for loss. We’ve constructed massive metropolises — the fastest growing in the nation — in the middle of deserts. There were dead cities in the same places when white people first got here. It’s a failure of history and memory; hubris.

As Dick Cheney said, “The American way of life is not negotiable,” and indeed it seems literally inconceivable to our leadership class that shit might not work out. I find this baffling and sad.

Politically I think this is part and parcel with the rise of post-modern conservatism. It’s a particular blend of resource-intensive, non-scalable, non-sustainable infrastructure — think exurbs, big lawns, etc — coupled with a paradoxically anti-government philosophy (juiced with reactionary cultural backlash, of course).

It plays into the mythic trope of rugged individualism, but only really works as long as there’s sufficient plenty to give people running water in the desert. When larger-than-individual-scale forces come into play, be it a drought, a hurricane or a terrorist attack, all of a sudden people recognize the vitality and necessity of collective action and shared responsibility.

This movement reached it’s apex with the invasion of Iraq, I think; a massive and horrifically misguided collective (if not consensus) response to an individual-dwarfing event. We still don’t really know why, for sure, that happened, but those two to three years have the feeling of a historical pivot. At the time it was disorienting and frightening, but the momentum is now clearly moving away from anti-government rhetoric and narratives of oppression at the hands of the state, and towards a realization that the problems we face and the choices we make are bigger than our immediate surroundings, and that ergo the solutions must be as well.

I do fear that in the transition period there will be more systemic failures as we discover just how frayed things have become. Bridges collapse. Levies fail. Pointless wars grind on because democracy itself is sputtering. A mini dust-bowl in the Southeast would be a tragedy. I also fear that should things continue without improvement that the momentum towards collective action will take on a fascistic tone.

Conversely, the great hope seems to be for a new-New Deal with a global scope. This would never be managed effectively (or justly) though a traditional federation of nation-states though. It would require actual cooperation among human beings from all around the world. In my wildest fantasies I think the internet could allow this, but it seems a long way off, and the next steps are unclear.

In the mean time, I hope we’re able to rehabilitate the notion of governance and public service in this country, get ourselves that health care we all deserve, and shore up our social, economic and physical infrastructure so that we’re better able to deal with the trials and tribulations to come.

If you haven’t seen this already, give it a peep. It’s quite funny and good. I never made any effort to get into the entertainment unions, but as someone who has paid his/her rent from time to time with my cultural production, I would like to express my solidarity with the writers.

One big union, bitches.

I got a chance to peep the OLPC product at Drupal Camp last weekend in Berkeley. Now mine is on its way.

This project may or may not work, but it’s the strongest concerted effort to date by socially conscious technologists to directly alter the course of human events. I think it sets an important precedent.

Plus, based on my brief test drive, these are awesome little machines. I’m looking forward to playing with mine.

Update: extended through the end of the year if you want one (thanks for the tip, Andrew!)

Another imageless post, but via Atrios check it out: The Eagles are also disintermediating record labels.

Building on early work by Prince, and several upstart indie successes, it looks like more and more established acts are taking this route. Look for a new kind of helper company to emerge that can do online distribution, fan-club stuff, and booking for tours.

Via Mr. Kos, more proof that we are not as free as we can be:

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that’s up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin’s secret ingredient. Whenever the truck’s juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it’ll recharge a set of “supercapacitor” batteries in seconds. This means the H3’s electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What’s more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it’s time to fill the tank, he’ll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease—as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double—from 300 to 600.

“Conservatively,” Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, “it’ll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You’ll be able to smoke the tires. And it’s going to be superefficient.”

Because we are serfs in our cars, beholden to a relatively small business elite when it comes to answering the automotive engineering questions of our times, we are not doing what we could be doing.

Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they’re too cramped and meek for our market. They’ve lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry.

Basically a bunch of executives with no real technical expertise set the parameters around what can and can’t be driven in America, and they do so without regard to long-run outcomes. I’ve heard reliably stories that all through the 1990s, GM had a two-man engineering team working year round on electic concept cars: putting a new-looking shell and interior together around the same never-to-be-produced drivetrain.

That’s how an aristocracy behaves. There’s an enormous institutional investment in The Way Things Are™, and as a result these people are not only myopic to scientific potential, they actively resist change for fear of losing their already tenuous position.

If the dream is a big, badass ride that’s also clean, well, [Goodwin is] there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. “They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use.” He doesn’t have an engineering degree; he didn’t even go to high school: “I’ve just been messing around and seeing what I can do.”

So, like, what the fuck? Where’s my 60mpg hummer, my Japanese-level free internet, and my universal health care? What the hell is wrong with this country?

For his part, Goodwin argues he’s merely “a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are.” He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can’t they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. “Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now,” he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. “I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we’re good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.

This is how the DIY generation thinks. I guarantee you that if someone were to assemble a team around this guy, do technical documentation, and start putting it online you’d see an explosion of this kind of activity over the next few years.

“Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to,” he adds.

That’s the real point. We’re not locked into a horrible doom-cycle if we don’t want to be, if we have the courage to change, and if we can get the lazy fatback motherfuckers in charge of 90% of the useful infrastructure to realize they need to work for a living.

One can hope Detroit would take this to scale, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Hopefully Goowdin’s kits will be popular, and hopefully people-power can continue to drive innovations where corporations and catatonic 20th-century governments continue to fail.

So, in 2001 the Bush Administration cut the funding that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab was using to investigate some promising nuclear fusion technologies. This guy’s project is sitting around in need of $2M in funding to do a proof-of-concept which would demonstrate something we’ve never seen before: a controlled fusion reaction that produces a net energy gain.

Why can’t this guy raise $2M on the internet? It seems totally possible, but there’s a critical gap in expertise and entrepreneurial acumen. I’m a fan of the positive disruptive potential that this here world-wide-web offers, and if we can scrounge up tens of millions for a bunch of lag-ass politicians on a regular basis, why can’t we start making strategic investments in things that Make Sense for humanity?

This would be cool, and essentially means dis-intermediating existing political systems as a means of shepherding the Public Good. It’s an exciting prospect, both in this particular case (who wouldn’t kick down $20 if it would get this thing off the ground?) and as a test case for how we might Solve Obvious Problems going forward. It would be nice if the State were more useful here, but it’s priorities are fuxxored, and its ability to deal proactively with big problems that are associated with entrenched influences (global warming for $2000, Alex) is apparently quite weak.

Much own political activism has tended to be framed as an investment — e.g. if it’s worth some volunteer time and donations to get Universal Health Care — or else oriented around decisions (War) which the government has more or less exclusive control over. Increasingly, my patience is wearing thin. Even as significant electoral gains are made, the static friction of “The Establishment” has not been overcome. Change is not happening. Things are not improving. I see a dark future ahead if we remain chained to these ossified, recalcitrant and massively inefficient institutions as a means of managing collective responsibility.

There are huge opportunities that are getting missed all the time, and also huge amounts of waste and corruption. Resetting priorities seems very hard. I mean, as an example, caltrans is talking about building a new highway interchange on the 101 between Arcata and Eureka, at a cost of up to $60M. That’s a totally unnecessary enhancement to a legacy system that’s double or triple the cost of getting a reliable redundant internet link into the area (and fund this fusion project on the side).

Now, it’s not as if CalTrans can just decide to spend its money on fiber optic cables instead of asphalt, but this situation is an expression of our collective will and understanding, or at least the collective will and understanding that’s been institutionalized into the state budget, where we get bogged down again in politics.

This is why one of the primary slogans of the New Freedom Movement is Move Lateral. While we can’t ignore the stewardship of existing systems, neither can we afford to limit the scope of change to the reform and control of established institutions. Nothing succeeds like success, and it seems to me like the thing to do is just to start doing it.

See, this is why I think there’s something to be said for the New Freedom Movement: the Pirate Bay is the first site I’ve seen rocking the “free Burma” banner.

Monks and students in Rangoon, Burma (or Yangon, Myanmar as the dictators would have it) protesting their cruel military Junta. They’re calling it The Saffron Revolution. We don’t see much about this on the TeeVee, but Al Jazeera is on the scene. So was a Japanese photojournalist, who got himself murdered:

The last time this happened over there, the military killed a few thousand students. Hopefully it won’t go down like that, but who knows. There’s not much I can think of for people here to do for people there, but if you feel the cause of freedom, you can stay informed at least.

There’s also this: US Campaign for Burma.

When it comes to information, the rules are changing:

[Burmese] bloggers rely on word-of-mouth, cell phones, online chat groups, instant messaging, and firsthand accounts of protesters facing barricaded streets, tear gas and gunfire from Burmese security forces. The best blogs provide photos, video and text updates purportedly by eyewitnesses, which are later confirmed by news organizations or, in some cases, can’t be verified.

The nation’s military regime has refused to grant visas to foreign correspondents, and has even blocked visa requests for many foreign tourists after the mass uprising worsened this week.

As a result, blogger accounts have captivated the outside world…

Update: on the other hand, the state apparently has the power to cut the internet and news is drying up.

Will any of this matter? People were watching Tiananmen square too. Really, China has the most sway of anyone over the Burmese military junta. What with their big “coming out” hosting the Olympic games this summer, maybe they’ll try to cool it out. On the other hand, they’re already in for some criticism from the west over the far more chic cause of a Free Tibet, so they may not want to “show any weakness” here.

I actually have a but more sympathy for the Burmese cause, being that Tibet (although cool and all) was a relatively unpopular theocracy that still permitted slavery prior to being annexed into the People’s Republic. Burma, on the other hand, liberated themselves from British colonial rule after WWII and had a promising democracy before the military took over. But I digress…