The Breaking Time

Building a phyle

Though, let's face it, the Neo-Victorians wouldn't cut it.

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway. 

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

How would a phyle actually work?

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

When Amazon uses fascists

...with having rights

Well this is interesting:

Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.

Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.

The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.

The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.

This is one of the big problems with viewing companies — any sort of companies — as the potential heralds of a better future: they're essentially amoral entities. Their job isn't to make the world better, it's to do a task in a way that makes them a lot of money. The bigger the company and the longer it endures, the more this is the case. All Steve Jobs' ideals didn't prevent Apple from using Chinese companies so hellish their workers committed suicide in droves.

I've made this point before, but it's worth repeating, because it's what I find most disturbing about the reverence Silicon Valley sometimes receives. It's not that tech companies don't make some really useful things, but their core purpose is entirely venal. "Don't be evil" and "think different" are nice, but expendable. If keeping the cheap labor in line requires hiring fascists, then so be it.

First they came for the libraries

By Damien Williams

Photo by Gregory Maxwell

News came yesterday that radical Islamists have burned the ancient library of Timbuktu.

When I was twelve years old, one of the most important resources for my family was our local library: RL Christian Public Library, on H Street in Washington, DC. Though the area has changed, quite a bit, as any DC Metro-area resident can tell you, it's certainly not the best part of town. Nineteen years ago it was even rougher around the edges.

As funding for city libraries was cut, the operating hours of R.L. Christian were some of the first things on the chopping block. My sisters and I, along with other children from our neighbourhood, wrote essays and went before the DC City Council and explained to them —clearly but forcefully — what this library represented to the neighbourhood.

RL Christian Public Library had free after-school programs for children whose parents worked late. Study resources for those who would need them. A place to be off the street, later in the evening, in a part of town then still coping with regular gang violence. We, the children most affected by this, not our parents, made this case. And they shortened the hours anyway. Eventually RL Christian Public Library closed its doors.

People who know about but don’t fully understand history may ask, "Why do conquerors and fanatics always go for the Libraries?" Our most famous example has always been the Library of Alexandria, but it is by no means the sole instance. And if you take a look at that list, you can see something of a distinction: sometimes invaders burn libraries and loot them, and sometimes they just burn them. Why is that?

It's because a library, more than any other thing humans have ever made, is the physical promise of a wider, more inclusive world.

Hierarchy has its place

Sometimes, this is actually the right way to go

Megan Erickson has a great Jacobin piece defending the concept of public education against the "unschooling" fads. While it's full of great points, it also has some interesting bits on hierarchy, like this:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Yes, yes, and yes. This doesn't get said nearly enough, and along with her point about the difference between privilege and authority, it takes this from a good essay to a great one.

While Erickson's piece is focused on education, the same assumptions behind "unschooling" — extreme suspicion of any power structure — underlie a whole slew of other movements, from open source to consensus protest groups.

Sometimes, in some arenas, this approach works just fine (with information especially) but in many it doesn't. Sometimes hierarchy is exactly what's needed.

"There's a meeting:" MLK mixes the grand with the practical

There will be many good tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. today, and in previous years here I've noted his forgotten side and quest for balance. 

But there's something else worth highlighting, and the speech above is a really good example. It's the end of "We Shall Overcome," an incredibly powerful few minutes. Almost lost in the applause, you can hear King giving the rapturous crowd instructions.

He's telling them to attend a meeting. After the heights of this speech, it seems an absolutely mundane thing to do. "That's why we're fighting for a more moral universe against all odds. Meet me in the fellowship hall in 10 minutes." Not a call to find themselves, not pulling them towards vague evolution, King wanted a concrete, immediate action. The rhetoric's important, but it's that combination that made the civil rights movement work.

Open Notes: Tech giants, North Korea, and convenient dystopias

Your next iPhone, made in sunny North Korea

• Google Exec Eric Schmidt recently returned from North Korea. While ostensibly a humanitarian and diplomatic mission, it's hard not to see in the wary welcomes for Kim Jong-Un's "knowledge-based economy" and the broaching of an end to sanctions as the beginning of North Korea becoming a China-style source of cheap labor for the tech industry. In fact, it's already being discussed.

• It's not that tech companies can't make good money if they pay their workers well and don't use Dickensian sweat shops; plenty do. But to make really whopping Apple-level amounts of cash requires really cheap labor, and that's easier in places where people are desperate and don't have any political power. Hence FoxConn.

• China's getting more prosperous and more restive, so the cost of doing business there might well go up, especially given growing labor unrest. Sooner, rather than later, escape hatches will be needed.

• The extreme irony of Stalinist states and the chic business sector finding that they need each other.

• Google's little-discussed yellow badge workers. While hardly laboring under North Korean conditions, it definitely points to a willingness to have an underclass even closer to home. Companies, whatever the ideals of their founders, are a structure set up for making money, and over time everything else becomes secondary.

• Combined with the slow collapse of the social safety net and real wages, give these trends a few decades and you could see more tech companies having large numbers low-wage employees closer to home, especially as the original founders age and they become more established institutions.

• William Gibson's line about the future not being evenly distributed applies to the future's nightmares as well (ask a Somali). It turns out the shining tech-fueled tomorrow might not just coexist with industrial dystopia, but require it.

The Red Umbrella Fund and financing social change

 

So here's an interesting initiative:

"Save us from saviours" is the piercing refrain of a growing human rights movement demanding that sex workers be recognised as more than victims to be rescued or strategic populations to be targeted for public health campaigns. It's likely to strike a nerve among some in the traditional aid and development industry, often criticised for top-down, paternalistic projects.

"Sex workers are discriminated against and their human rights unrecognised around the world, even where sex work isn't illegal," says Nadia van der Linde, co-ordinator of the Red Umbrella Fund, the first global grant-making mechanism set up to give sex workers more control of projects that directly concern them. "Even when they stand up for themselves, it's very hard for them to find support."

The fund, which was launched in April 2012, and will announce this month who will receive its first grants, grew out of a multi-year collaboration between sex worker organisations and interested donors, who first met five years ago to discuss campaigns to curb human trafficking.

Embracing a philosophy of "nothing for us without us", the innovative fund is governed by sex workers, who sit alongside donor representatives on the committees that oversee and manage its work.

More of this, please. When I've mentioned that movements for social change often flounder because of a lack of attention to infrastructure, the lack of things like the Red Umbrella Fund are exactly what I mean. Movements need resources, but that's traditionally an area that would-be activists don't think about. Witness Occupy, for example, which often had no idea to handle the funds it received, and ended up with horrors like meth fiends in control of finance.

That's what happens when an organization, whatever its philosophy, doesn't think about, well, organization. Shepherding resources carefully is even more important for the causes of the poor or ignored, because they're less likely to have patrons capable of just shoving them suitcases full of cash. A lot of worthy causes flounder because no one pays attention to the details.

Furthermore, structuring the organization carefully around access to those resources — instead of treating them like an afterthought — helps to increase the power of the populations who most need them. This looks like a promising model, and I hope to see more of it.

Amsterdam gulag: when your annoying neighbors can put you in prison

Piss off your neighbors and you have to live in the box

Amsterdam is going to create "scum villages" 

Yes, if your neighbors get too annoyed at you in Holland's capital, they'll soon be able to have you shipped off to what's essentially a low-level gulag. In fact, "there are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police."

Just to make clear, these are people who might be annoying, but whose behavior "falls short of criminality." So they've broken no law, but will essentially go to prison. That's amazingly fucked up.

I don't know about y'all, but like most people who live in cities, my neighborhood's inhabitants range from wonderful to absolute assholes. Yet I've mostly chalked the latter, as long as they don't cross any major lines, as a natural downside to living in a densely populated place. I don't feel the need to put them in a damn camp because they occasionally get on my nerves, and I sure as hell don't want them to have the power to do so to me. 

In practice, I can see this helping to put a really nasty edge on gentrification, shoving out the poor or different if enough of their neighbors get together. Indeed, that's how similar initiatives like the UK's ASBOs are generally used.

I've generally seen the Netherlands (from the outside, admittedly) as having an admirable combination between robust social services and a respect for individual freedom, but apparently that's not quite the case. Shockingly, to remain pluralistic, societies occasionally have to protect individuals from their own communities. Letting people send the couple down the hall to a damn shipping container because thheir neighbors think their sex is too loud doesn't accomplish that.