The Breaking Time

Holding up a funhouse mirror: An interview with Vermin Supreme

One of the many fan-made posters for Vermin Supreme.

This is the second of two very different interviews I did while covering the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte that I felt were worth highlighting in their entirety. The first was with blogger and activist Imani Gandy.

Longtime prankster Vermin Supreme has been running for a variety of offices — some of them non-fictional — since the 1980s. Wearing a boot on his head and promising a free pony for all Americans (along with zombie power and mandatory tooth-brushing) if elected, his 2012 run for the Presidency came to greater prominence when he glitter-bombed fundamentalist Randall Terry during the New Hampshire primary and showed up for numerous protests throughout the year. I talked to Vermin Supreme while he was preparing for his own "victory rally" in Charlotte.

So why are you running for President? 

Because I want to make America a better place, but still even.

But still even?

Still even better.

How?

Ponies, the secret ingredient, of course.

Ah, and why the boot on the head?

When I get in a different environment it serves different purposes. When I'm actively campaigning for the Presidency, after the primary, it's become somewhat of a trademark. Different people read different symbolism into it, “we're gonna boot 'em out” or the jack-booted thugs or a boot on the face, the Orwell reference.

But ultimately it's just something I started putting on my head in a rather absurdist, surrealist tradition. The people liked it and responded to it. Out in the streets, in the police environment, it's a disarmament technique. I'm disarming, through my charms, to officers who might otherwise see me as a threat if I was without the boot. If I was a normal-looking wild guy talking shit over the megaphone, I think I'd be perceived differently than with the boot.

It sort of signifies the jesterishness, the commitment to this absurdist aesthetic, it's a shorthand. Sometimes I've worn a clown nose in the past to telegraph that. It draws curiosity. I get into a lot of conversations, meet potential voters. Of course it draws the media, I've been saying as part of my media critique that the boot is a pile of shit and the media are the flies buzzing around it.

Culture and action: An interview with Imani Gandy

Image courtesy of Imani Gandy

While at the Democratic National Convention, I did a lot of interviews. I'm still working on a larger piece on my thoughts about the DNC in our Breaking Time, but two interviews in particular stood out — for very different reasons — enough that I felt they deserved to be featured in whole.

The first is with activist and blogger Imani Gandy, who founded the Angry Black Lady Chronicles and the Team Uterati coordinating resource for feminist action. She's advocated an aggressively pragmatic approach to politics, often clashing publicly with other progressives about President Barack Obama's actions and drawing attention to what she perceives as misogyny and racism among some leftists. We talked about divisions among liberals, different approaches to activism, and how race plays into today's politics.

How did the Angry Black Lady Chronicles start?

I started a pop culture blog with a group of women in 2008, and we were tossing around ideas of a column I would do, titled something like “Ask a black lady.” I was just kind of throwing it around, and I don't know why but I just decided my column would be called Angry Black Lady chronicles. I don't really know why, it just sort of came out of nowhere.

Then, when I stopped blogging with them, I decided to move my column onto its own blog, and it just become angryblacklady.com 

And then it got contributors, etc...

I started out blogging on my own in 2009. I went on medical leave. I had a pituitary tumor. That's sort of the cause of the anger, because I would have hormonal fluctuations. Have you ever been around a first trimester pregnant woman?

Yes.

You know how they get real irritable? Flashes of anger for no reason? I'd get that, but at the most ridiculous things, like “that light went out! Goddammit!” So that's kind of where the angry moniker comes from, but I also like to poke at people because of the stereotype of the angry black woman. Then when people meet me they're like “wait, you're not that angry,” and no, I'm very nice person, but I can be pretty strident in my writing and on Twitter. I like to juxtapose those, like a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type thing.

I started blogging on my own in 2009, I picked up my first two contributors in 2010, right around the 2010 elections. It's right around that time that I dropped all the pop culture stuff and became fully political, because I started to get really frustrated with the way progressives on the left were hounding President Obama for stuff that I thought he shouldn't be hounded for, like the public option and “why didn't you close Gitmo?”

I felt like there were facts about how the administration had done things and facts about how he didn't have a Democratic majority for as long as people think that he did. I just began to get really frustrated.

I also began to get really frustrated at what I saw as underlying racism on the left.

The Breaking Time on the (internet) radio

On Aug. 19, Epiphany Ayla Paris was kind enough to invite me on her online show, The Space Between, for an in-depth interview about the Breaking Time.

It ended up a great conversation that hit a huge variety of topics, from the political system and "There is no They" to generational optimism and public reaction to tragedy. I ramble plenty (as I do when I get on a tear), but I think it's some interesting ground and she kept the questions sharp.

The whole interview is below. Thoughts and comments welcome.

Fragmented plurality: An interview with Gabriella Coleman

Gabriella Coleman moves between a lot of different worlds. She's an assistant professor on media, culture and communication at NYU, a writer on digital culture, and an anthropologist by training. Her work, specifically on the (in)famous collection of hacktivists known as Anonymous, combines an admirable skill for tackling new trends while bringing the best traits of an academic background to bear, better placing the cutting edge in a larger context.

In this interview, she discusses the multifaceted beast that is Anonymous, and how digital culture and political activism collide.

How did you first become interested in Anonymous and hacktivism?

I've been working on computer hackers and software informally since 1998, more seriously since about 2001.

How I started to work on Anonymous was really accidental. I started to do research on free software, and during that time period people would raise the question of Scientology quite a bit. It always intrigued me, but I sort of didn't know what to do with it. People had mentioned that they would protest the church or were on some BBS critical of the church . Then I went to the University of Alberta for a year as a post-doc, and there's the largest Scientology archives in the world. Now I understood why they protest the Church of Scientology, it's kind of a perfect nemesis.

When Anonymous in 2008 began to protest the Church of Scientology, I followed them there, because it was in that lineage of geek and hacker protest against the Church of Scientology.

You originally come from an anthropological training and background, how do you think that helps you undersand the evolution of digital culture?

I think it helps quite a bit. While there's technical forms of organization and power — those with technical knowledge often have more authority — when you have a grouping like Anonymous that is really premised on this anti-leader, anti-celebrity ethic, certain cultural and behavioral norms are the ways in which you can find consistent order. If you don't have an eye towards that, you might miss some of those dynamics at play.

Driven by norms instead of leaders; it almost sounds like a tribe

No, not really. In academia we're also driven by norms, and certain types of ethics and so it's kind of implicit in so-called modern forms of life that are not tribal, we just choose not to think about those elements in modern society because there's such a commitment to individualism that we tend to not focus in on them, but they exist. They exist in the workplace, they exist in religious organizations, they exist in unions, they exist in many places.

I don't like the language of "tribal" because it makes it seem like it's lower on the totem pole, and makes it seem like so-called modern society doesn't have some of those elements as well.

In your perception, what's the biggest misconception the general public has about Anonymous?

The biggest misconception is that they're kind of angst-ridden pre-teens who are socially isolated who are working out their anger, born through their isolation, through forms of juvenile politics.

Spinning down superpower: An interview with Quinn Norton

Quinn Norton leads an interesting life, to say the least. She's written for publications from Wired to the Guardian, taken aim at the tech elite's class bubbles and still found time to get a magnetic implant. Currently, she's among the adjunct faculty at NYU, teaching courses on body and self, among other matters.

Recently, we sat down (virtually) for an interview/conversation that used the digital divide as a starting point. It ended up going into upheaval, political lock-in, labor strife, infrastructure, the Romans, the difficulties of spinning down a superpower and how community remains the most profound prosthetic human beings have ever invented. Also; Thomas Jefferson was apparently the first psychohistorian (you heard it here first).

So, in what I hope is the finest Breaking Time tradition, it ended up militantly eclectic. My own questions are in bold. Enjoy, there's plenty of food for thought here.

What are some of the biggest mis-impressions popularly about the digital divide, or lack thereof?

You have to scope it, because the digital divide is a really different matter in the US than it is internationally. Have you heard the statement that “after dark, Twitter is black”? 

Twitter, unlike most of the social networks, actually overrepresents African-Americans compared to percentage of population, and there's a black Twitter-sphere that looks very different from the white Twitter-sphere. After night, you see a lot of social grooming and a lot less of the broadcast branding that many of the white Twitterers do. So at night, after work, you can look at the trending topics and see ones — like things my boyfriend or girlfriend says — that don't seem to relate to the “normal” trending topics. If you go and look, the people tweeting them will often be black; it's a whole different type of tweets.

Yes, to some degree I've seen that happening in my own city. Essentially, different times of the day, different social groups use Twitter. If you can't go on Twitter at work, which tends to happen when you have a desk job, you'll go on at night.

You mentioned that scope differs. How is it different between the U.S. and internationally?

I don't know if you've followed Danah Boyd's research, it's really interesting. She researches youth and social networks. You remember when MySpace was the old Facebook? It was huge. What Danah identified that it was actually white flight to Facebook. You don't have that kind of divide with Twitter, but you do have an emerging phenomenon of racial homophily on the internet.

I don't know what exactly to make of that. I think we're in a situation where there's less of a big digital divide than there used to be and many, many more small digital divides than there used to be. So you have the internet being used by different groups for social grooming in a way it didn't used to be, but social grooming along a lot of race and class lines.

At the same time you do have a really profound destruction of the local going on, so homophilies are replacing local in kind of a mindshare.

This is one reason why local news coverage has a really big problem on its hands, because that's just not as strong of an identity marker anymore, not when you can find a lot of other people that are like you online. It's an opportunity/cost issue; paying attention to the particulars of the place you are in takes away from time to pay attention to the particulars of people who are like you.