The Breaking Time

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.

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.

Going Ghost

So, exactly how does a person disappear in today's modern world? Wired decided to answer that very question, using writer Evan Ratliffe as the guinea pig:

I’m driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught.

I had intended to flee in broad daylight, but when you are going on the lam, there are a surprising number of last-minute errands to run. This morning, I picked up a set of professionally designed business cards for my fake company under my fake name, James Donald Gatz. I drove to a Best Buy, where I bought two prepaid cell phones with cash and then put a USB cord on my credit card — an arbitrary dollar amount I hoped would confuse investigators, who would scan my bill and wonder what gadgetry I had purchased. An oil change for my car was another head fake. Who would think that a guy about to sell his car would spend $60 at Oil Can Henry’s?

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

Wired then offered a reward for enterprising investigators to find him. What follows is an interesting cat-and-mouse game, and full of interesting information about exactly how seemingly hard it is to disappear in our increasingly surveilled age.

Of course, Ratliffe's disappearance was still a game. It was an extremely revealing game, and he's clearly a smart guy who did a whole bunch of research in how not to be found. But it missed some key factors that I'll get into in a moment.

By contrast, federal agencies have, for the past seven years, been spending millions to create a system that better tracks homeless and transient populations. Ratliffe, with ingenuity and extensive preparation, had an extremely difficult time keeping ahead of his pursuers. Meanwhile, the government's spending millions because social agencies have a hell of a time tracking down individuals whose invisibility was often accidental, conducted with practically no resources.

This happens because the best way to escape notice is when no one's looking; and when there's an entire social network out there to keep it that way. Despite the seeming pervasiveness of records and monitoring technology, there are entire populations of such "ghosts" in the cities of our time.

 

The Chair Leg of Truth: Transmetropolitan and objectivity

It's about giving something back to these bastards, there people who we somehow let run our goddamn lives for us. Giving them a taste of what it means to be us. Every law that curbs my basic human freedoms; every lie about the things I care for, every crime committed against me by their politics -- that's what makes me get up and hound these fuckers, and I'll do that until he day I die, or until my brain dries up or something

 

That's what we achieve, we show them they're accountable. We show them that just as they try to herd us back into cages of quiet mediocrity, we can chase them back to fucking hell with the truth.

 

It's the Journalism of Attachment, It's caring about the world you report on. Some people say that's bad journalism. That there should be a detached, cold, unbiased view of the world in our news media.

 

And if that's what you want, there are security cameras everywhere that you could watch tapes of.

 

I want to see humans talking about human life, personally. I want to see people who give a shit about the world. I want to see Possessed Journalists! Yes!

-Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan

 

I recently finished the entire run of Warren Ellis' brilliant Transmetropolitan, and the above passage in particular struck me (about the head and shoulders, repeatedly). 

 

Transmetropolitan will always occupy a special place in my heart, mainly because I read the first volume several years ago at a really nasty time, a time when I was seriously considering quitting journalism. The story snapped me out of that really, really quickly. In addition to being a damn good tale, the entire work is a reminder of why journalism is vitally, beautifully important.

 

The last few years in particular have done much damage to the old image of the Objective Journalist, mainly because those who proclaimed themselves as such failed, time and again, in the primary duty of all journalism: find out the truth and tell others about it.

 

They deserve to be kicked around for that, but there's more to Objectivity than meets the eye. What follows is my scattershot defense of the old bitch, and why journalism needs her just as much as it needs Spider's demon-possessed truth hounds.