Category: Politics

Reading James Howard Kunstler‘s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.

Here, as promised, is a photo taken in Starbucks. I ordered a latte, and as it was being made, and after I had paid, I handed my friend Ted the camera, and he shot the photo. One of the workers said, “you aren’t allowed to take pictures here”; I replied, “I know, I am taking the photo as an act of civil disobedience”; and she didn’t do anything further to stop me.

A story, via BoingBoing, originally from Lawrence Lessig, reports that it is not permitted to take photos in a Starbucks, “because this was an absolute violation of Starbuck’s copyright of their entire ‘environment’–that everything in the place is protected and cannot be used without Starbuck’s express permission.” Lessig mischievously ponders: “I wonder what would happen if hundreds of people from around the country experimented this holiday weekend by taking pictures at their local Starbucks…” I’ll try it this afternoon, and post the results here.

Linux users, pissed off at the fact that SCO, a company that claims to hold certain patents on Unix, has started to sue companies that provide Linux distributions for violation of their ownership of “intellectual property,” have started a petition, reading as follows:

To: SCO

I am a Linux user. I feel that SCO’s tactics toward an operating system of my choice are unjust, ill founded and bizarre. I am willing to be sued because I am confident that SCO’s tactics toward Linux will fail. If I have published my email address as part of this petition it is so SCO representatives can email me and begin the process of serving me a court order.

(Petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/scosueme/petition.html; via Techdirt).

It strikes me that a similar strategy would be of use in regards to mp3 filesharing. What would the record companies do, if millions of people signed a petition saying, in effect, “I have made music files available for peer-to-peer sharing; go ahead and sue me”?

William Burroughs, from Ah Pook Is Here:

“Here lived a stupid vulgar son of a bitch who thought he could hire DEATH as a company cop.”

This epigraph would make an appropriate epitaph for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Walkowitz, or Perle, when their time comes.

I haven’t been watching much of it–I find it hard to take–(whereas Jacalyn has had it on all evening)–but the war coverage on CNN and the other news channels is quite bizarre. Endless shots taken from, and showing, tanks rolling across the utterly empty desert, nothing happening, nothing to see except for the occasional white flag of surrendering Iraqi soldiers (who look like they haven’t gotten a square meal, or a bath or a change of clothes, in weeks). Inane, repetitious voiceovers by the news anchors and reporters, reminding me of nothing so much as the “color commentary” in football games. This is quite different from the war-as-videogame metaphor that dominated media coverage of the first Gulf War. This time, it’s war as reality television. Only it’s not edited down the way Survivor or Anna Nicole are, where each day is compressed into seven minutes or so. Screen time equals real time in the Gulf War Show, which gives it an oddly avant-garde quality. Boredom is the sole redeeming quality of this war coverage. But I wonder what will happen when they get to the actual carnage–will it be the reality show version of Saving Private Ryan, or will it simply not be shown at all?

“Representative John Carter, (R-Texas), suggested that college students would stop downloading if some were prosecuted and received sentences of 33 months or longer, like the defendants in the DOJ’s Operation Buccaneer. ‘I think it’d be a good idea to go out and actually bust a couple of these college kids,’ Carter said. ‘If you want to see college kids duck and run, you let them read the papers and somebody’s got a 33-month sentence in the federal penitentiary for downloading copyrighted materials.’ ” (from Yahoo News)

I have nothing to say about the war. Everything Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company are doing is too revolting and too cynical for words.

Everybody seems to be linking to the story about how Benetton is tagging all its clothes with RFID chips, tiny radio transmitters embedded in the clothing that allow the clothing to be tracked from factory to store–and possibly beyond. This is supposed to reduce theft, as well as letting “business managers easily store detailed information about customers’ buying habits that could spur further sales. For example, when a Benetton customer makes a purchase, a sales clerk could pull up that client’s history and say, ‘Last time you were here, you bought a black skirt. We have a sweater that matches that skirt.'” Of course, the potential for the police to track people this way hasn’t been ignored either, though the story says something about deactivating the chips at the cash registers, so that customers can walk out unmarked. Frankly, I’m less worried about being tracked in my everyday motions by RFIDs–since I always assume that this can be done anyway, if the FBI really wants to have me followed–than about how this sort of device could be used by corporations to enforce brand loyalty, for instance (as in, “you’d better not ware our competitor’s shirt with our pants”), or to preserve trademarks and copyrights (no removing the corporate logos from your clothes, the way Cayce Pollard, the heroine of Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, does). I’m sure science ficton writers can come up with some even more creepy uses for this technology… Not to mention the use of guerrilla RFID readers as a counter-measure, as Rick Bradley suggests on nettime. The possibilities are endless.

Salon has an article by Joan Walsh on “interracial intimacy,” and especially on Randall Kennedy’s new book on that topic. Though Walsh is at least somewhat guarded on the idea that miscegenation will somehow solve America’s racial problems, the main contention in her article is that blacks, rather than whites, are the ones responsible today for opposing interracial sex, marriage and relationships. I’m sorry, but this is yet another example of a sincere white liberal blaming the victims of racism for racism’s perpetuation….
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