Dissident Apps

This recent article in the New York Times got me thinking about a particular class of Apps appearing on Google Play and the iTunes Store: apps that seek to subvert the status quo. In the case of Our Malibu Beaches, by providing maps and access points to all the beaches in Malibu, which by law are public. This has not stopped the wealthy, often celebrities, from laying claim to the sections of beach directly in front of their property. Property owners use no trespassing signs, set up pylons on the street to thwart parkers, or in some extreme cases construct faux buildings, as in the case of record executive and billionaire David Geffen who built multiple fake garages–on public property–to prevent access to his beach front.

Famously Vibe, an anonymous Twitter like app that uses a users vicinity to other users to filter messages based on the original message senders location, was used during the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zucotti park. The app has several settings, from a “whisper” available to those within a 165 feet of you, to a “bellow,” available to everyone on the planet. Messages can also have a Mission Impossible-esque self destruct feature forcing them to disappear from the message stream within 15 minutes or longer, further making it difficult to attribute the message to anyone.

A protestor interviewed by the New York Daily News explained how the feature could be used this way:

“Let’s say you’re protesting and someone up ahead sees that the cops are getting ready to kettle people, they can set out this vibe that only lasts a few minutes that says, ‘Cops are kettling,’” said Hornbein.

“It’s anonymous too,” Hornbein added, “so not only are you able to send out relevant information to a small radius, but it also disappears, there’s no record of it, so no one can come after the person who sent it.”

Other apps that have appeared over the last several years, like Trapster, have until recently maintained DUI checkpoint location features. After a severe backlash from the US Senate, many of these apps were banned on Black Berry, Android and Iphone apps stores or modified to remove the offending features. Waze, recently acquired by Google for a reported 1.3 billion dollars, which crowd-sources and learns from its users driving times, still maintains a feature which displays speed traps.

The Cloud Atlas Extended Trailer

This is why I chose to start with The Cloud Atlas. Also, I hate reading books after having watched the film adaptation. Anne Rice’s Lestat has always been Tom Cruise with a blonde wig.

All the Books

For me a bookstore is a dangerous place. I do not browse or window shop when I am there. Even if I have no intention of buying a book, i’m just killing time while my girl shops, I will leave with at least one volume in my hand. I love books. The smell of glue tightly bound against the left edge of a hundred or more leaves of paper, the texture. I fetishize typefaces.

At the bookstore I think, I should read Proust or Joyce or Hemingway. I start many of them, but rarely finish any of them. I have a library full of books with un-cracked spines. These books pile on to my shelf until at dinner parties they become an embarrassment. Someone will hold up 100 Years of Solitude and ask, “What did you think about this one?” and I will say, “I don’t know, I’ve never read it.” When you have a shelf of books, they become a conversation topic and here I am dodging questions, interrogated about all my books I haven’t read.

It reminds me of a quote from a novella I never finished, in a large collection I have barely touched.

From the Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, “Tumble Home”: “There is the unidentified object that flies. When any one of us spots it hovering above the house, we all grab a book and run to the lawn and hold up the books to show them what kind of people we are.”

And that’s who I am, showing off who I would like to be, impressing no one but myself.

I have resolved to change this. I have chosen to read every last one and discard the others I have no intention of reading. I intend to document it all here to write something and possibly learn something.

I intend to start with The Cloud Atlas – cause why not. There’s a movie coming out. Maybe eventually I will get around to finishing “Tumble Home”.

On Mark Twain’s insect authority

Reading Tom Sawyer I come across a strange phrase from Mr. Twain.

The librarian “showed off”—running hither and thither with his arms full of books and making a deal of the splutter and fuss that insect authority delights in.

The emphasis is mine. Searching results in very little. Which either means I need to work on my Google-fu or the metaphor is obscure. Most of the results are from the public domain text itself; one uses the quotation as an example to define “splutter”; there are also definitions from personal blogs, my favorite of which states, “Insect Authority, in this context, refers to the perplexing and exceedingly annoying propensity of people (and institutions) to exert extreme effort to make a small amount of authority feel much bigger. It is an ego soothing mechanism.”

And then this brings me to my own personal experience of people who practice their own form of insect authority. Perhaps they feel powerless in their own lives, carried along by the state and with little meaningful control over their lives or the society around them. They exercise their power with tyranny, even it is something as insignificant as control over the office stationary supply.

Activism in the 60s and Activism Now

Murray Dobin for the The Tyee writes:

The difference between what Occupy is facing and what its predecessors were up against is profound. The last generation of movements which confronted capitalism in the 1960s was facing a state that was relatively benign and was essentially on-side with the postwar social contract. Corporations were still, for the most part, nationally based and subject to national imperatives; in other words, they paid attention to the politics and culture of the countries they operated in and adapted to them.

While this ignores the many South American misadventures by the US Military and CIA taken on behalf of the rich and corporate elite during the 50s and 60s, nevertheless the modern reach of global corporations is certainly unprecedented.

Of course that all ended by the late seventies and eighties with the advent of free trade, the rapid growth of transnational corporations and neo-liberal policies. But the movements, institutionalized in part through government grants that kept them going (perhaps past their natural life spans), did not change with the shift in the structure of capitalism and the power of finance capital. The underlying assumption was still that the state would respond to “legitimate demands” and corporations would behave according to established norms.

But increasingly both the state and its client corporations moved on. Nations were passé — they weren’t even called nations anymore, but “economies.” Corporations moved from adapting to local culture and social norms to imposing their homogenized products and services on every place on the planet with enough people to buy their stuff. It could be argued that the 1990s was the time for a whole new paradigm of social movements — an explicitly anti-capitalist movement which recognized the terrible destructiveness of the unfettered “marketplace.”

But it didn’t happen. With some significant exceptions here and there, the old movements were too bureaucratized and too complacent to see what was coming. They kept doing what they had always done even though, within a few years into the new century, it was obvious that it wasn’t working. The notion of speaking truth to power sounds courageous and bold. The problem is that power doesn’t care and isn’t listening.

Rather than the old movements being “bureaucratized and too complacent to see what was coming” one must not forget the profound cultural shock that occurred after 9/11 grounding the Anti-globilzatin movement to obscurity and irrelevance in a world fundamentally changed by that event.

The failure of the movements modelled in, and for, the 1960s to come to grips with the mounting crisis for working people is at the root of the Occupy Wall Street rebellion. Tired of waiting for a kind of movement organization that could inspire and mobilize them — or even speak to their experiences — the most conscious and passionate of those left behind took up the call.

What is certainly true is the pendulum has swung too far and rather than reforming the system the activists find very few redeeming qualities in the current system and believe that it must be completely remade.

What is the call? Implicitly, that the system is broken beyond repair. Indeed that might just explain why there were no conventional demands: The rebels know that the system is no longer capable of meeting such demands and its utter corruption has taken it far beyond the place where it could be expected to respond in any genuine way to the needs of ordinary people. Young people have been leading Occupy and it is young people who have lived their entire lives with a growing corporatism — that dangerous amalgam of reactionary state and ruthless corporation that Mussolini himself said was the definition of fascism.

My generation of activists keeps insisting that government — the state — is the only possible counterpoint to global corporate power and we just have to take it back. But young people have had such a viscerally negative experience of the hegemony of corporate rule and state complicity — constantly legitimized by a corrupt and monolithic media — that they aren’t buying it. The notion that we can somehow go back to the golden age is delusional and they know it. This is perhaps the most important lesson they are teaching us.

This thing of mine

My own Memory Palace. A place in which i drop notes and clips and research for the novel I am writing or anything else I am working on. Any resemblance to actual writing or a clear thought is purely accidental.