The Breaking Time

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.

The drones will wait until the stars are right

Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth, Associated Press

So this is real:

Yes, the Argus is the world's highest resolution camera, and the system is capable of monitoring and coordinating the information it receives more effectively than ever before. If this trajectory continues, one day you'll be standing at a street corner, texting a friend, and someone in a facility will be able to read your message from orbit.

Notice the ending discussion about UAVs that will stay aloft for years at a time, paired with blithe acceptance that people will be constantly monitored. Coincidentally, I saw this video a year to the day after Tim Maly coined "argus" as the collective noun for a group of drones.

As if the skies weren't already turning into something out of an early '80s sci-fi novel, DARPA is also proposing military robots in the ocean, using the seas as a "vast area for concealment and storage" until the stars time is right.

Together, this puts some strange tools in the arsenal of an established government, any established government. Imagine a crumbling regime's leaders stockpiling hundreds of machines, sleeping in the air or the ocean, ready to avenge their masters if someone ever ousts them.

Oh well. We can always hide in our drone-proof cities.

The Rundown: essential equipment for the future

Flier for Adam Harvey's Stealth Ware

• What to wear in total surveillance A look at Adam Harvey's range of anti-drone/surveillance camouflage, ranging from sensor-deflecting hoodies to camera-blinding automatic flashes. 

Fascinating stuff, and a harbinger of the increasing arms race between surveillance and countermeasures. People are remarkably adept at avoiding detection, and some of Harvey's earlier work demonstrated that simple make-up (or war paint, if you prefer) can make facial recognition software useless. This may end up a fairer fight than many of us expect.

• "It’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect when it comes to broadband. Do rich countries spend on it so their citizens can stream more movies, or does having broadband make you rich? But it seems likely that broadband is a great enabler, like mass transit, good ports, a system of functioning courts, and other hallmarks of developed economies." You don't say? Of course, America's relatively terrible position in this kind of modern infrastructure isn't a matter of technology or resources. It's culture and politics that hold us back.

• Bahraini Princess facing multiple torture charges Of course, modern infrastructure doesn't mean that your government's not mired in a dark age. Of all the governing structures ever devised by humankind, I swear aristocracy is the absolute stupidest. "Here, you popped out of a womb, have some power." That'll work out well.

Let's start mass producing that anti-surveillance tech and shipping it over to Bahrain. Sounds like they need it to survive their rulers.

Good point from that mess. The trappings of the future can always end up used by archaic ideologies...

•

 

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 31, 2013

Of course they are.

Violence isn't it: time to address gaming's real problems

It's my pleasure to welcome Ian Boudreau to the Breaking Time with this intelligent piece on shifting away from the old "gaming causes violence" mess to deal with real problems in the subculture and industry

This isn't a social problem

Writing about video games after a violent tragedy like the one late last year in Sandy Hook is a delicate thing. One doesn’t want to appear too reflexively defensive, but at the same time, it’s important to express the frustration caused when some well-meaning politician or advocate suggests that video games may have had a hand in a massacre.

Video games simply aren’t the cause of violent behavior. There’s no evidence suggesting they are – and a set of data provided by the Washington Post helpfully illustrates this. In a set of ten developed nations, per capita spending on video games – including violent games – roughly correlates with a slight downward trend in violence. The only clear outlier is the United States – suggesting our problem with violence has its roots in something other than Doom or Call of Duty.

A fellow blogger suggested to me that the science does indeed show that a relationship exists between games and violence – that valid research has been done and that it shows “spikes in aggressive thoughts and expectation” after playing sessions of violent video games. (A good summary of this research, and the counterarguments, is provided by gaming site Kotaku.)

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, Vice President Joe Biden met with top industry brass from across the media spectrum, including the big video game publishers. On his recommendation, President Barack Obama announced a $10 million grant to the Centers for Disease Control to study the effects of video games and other “violent media.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of the facts,” Biden said in a subsequent Google Hangout on gun violence.

Indeed not. However, it’s a shame that this discussion – and the grant money – are focused on a problem that doesn’t exist rather than one of the many that do within the games industry and community.

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.

Poems for Friday: The Fornicator

It's been a very busy day, and I'd considered skipping this Friday's poem. But this is Burns Night, so I'm happily honor-bound to put one of Robert Burns' amazing works up here.

Two of Burns' poems were banned for some time. The first is the searing Scots Wha Hae, forbidden for its advocation of rebellion. This is the other:

Ye jovial boys who love the joys.
The blissful joys of Lovers; 
Yet dare avow with dauntless brow,
When th' bony lass discovers;	
Pray draw near and lend an ear,
And welcome in a Prater,	
For I've lately been on quarantine,      
A proven Fornicator.

Before the Congregation wide
I pass'd the muster fairly, 
My handsome Betsey by my side,
We gat our ditty rarely; 
But my downcast eye by chance did spy
What made my lips to water, 
Those limbs so clean where I, between,
Commenc'd a Fornicator.

With rueful face and signs of grace
I pay'd the buttock-hire, 
The night was dark and thro' the park
I could not but convoy her; 
A parting kiss, what could I less,
My vows began to scatter, 
My Betsey fell-lal de dal lal lal, 
I am a Fornicator.

But for her sake this vow I make,
And solemnly I swear it,	
That while I own a single crown,
She's welcome for to share it; 
And my roguish boy his Mother's joy,
And the darling of his Pater,	
For him I boast my pains and cost,       
Although a Fornicator.

Ye wenching blades whose hireling jades  
Have tipt you off blue-boram,
I tell ye plain, I do disdain 
To rank you in the Quorum;
But a bony lass upon the grass
To teach her esse Mater, 
And no reward but for regard,
O that's a Fornicator.

Your warlike Kings and Heros bold,      
Great Captains and Commanders;
Your mighty Cesars fam'd of old,	
And Conquering Alexanders;	
fields they fought and laurels bought
And bulwarks strong did batter, 
But still they grac'd our noble list
And ranked Fornicator!!!

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.

Poems for Friday: Dirge Without Music

I've posted this poem, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, before. When I was 12, it helped get me through my father's death, and to this day I can't finish it without fighting back tears.

The past few weeks have seen many good people I know hit by the loss of good people. There are no words, and every time I say "I'm so sorry" I know that the sympathy is true but the words always, completely inadequate.

This is too, but it's closer:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Scientology hits schism time

Disorder in the House of Hubbard.

Fascinating piece from Alex Klein on the looming schism in Scientology, specifically over a real-estate scam involving the construction of its "Ideal Org" local headquarters:

But inside the church, the Ideal Orgs are sparking insurrection. Across the country, donors and high-ranking executives say that the aggressive fundraising and construction scheme is used to enrich the central church at the expense of the rank and file, helping to grow the Scientology war chest to over a billion dollars. Two former members, Mike Rinder and Mark Elliott, went so far as to call the project a "real estate scam." To some of these defectors, the structures are metaphors for the religion itself: garish on the outside, empty on the inside. The irony is that the very expansion that Scientology lauds as its renaissance is actually a symbol of internal dissent and decline.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is the dissidents' repeated references to L. Ron Hubbard's intent or original teachings. While some who've split from Scientology have ditched the whole thing, others have set up their own splinter groups.

That's a natural reaction. If people are attracted to a set of ideals and then the institution that supposedly represents them becomes corrupt or goes in a different direction, it's psychologically easier to find that the original goals were betrayed by the current leadership rather than abandon the whole structure.

The process of schism has happened in every creed from Christianity to Marxism, but this is a fascinating up-close glimpse at how it plays out. Hubbard's still within living memory, and people are already sharply disagreeing over what his intent really was. It's easy to see "Scientologists" in a century encompassing all swaths of ideologies.

This also highlights that arguing over whether a given creed, especially a large and old one, is good or evil somewhat misses the point. On a long enough timeline, multiplying sects will use the same founding mythology to justify every position.