The Breaking Time

Open Notes: Rural cyberpunk

2011 fire in the Great Dismal Swamp, seen from space. The fire was caused by drought, making the swamp's peat especially flammable. Image from NASA.

Awhile back, I made an off-the-cuff comment on Twitter about "rural cyberpunk." Visiting where I grew up this week (map above), I think there's a lot more there than initially met the eye, and it's time for some open, if haphazard, notes on this particular theme, mixing past, present, and twenty-minutes-from-now future:

• Landscapes full of abandoned buildings from variety of eras. Half-built bedroom communities, unfinished suburbs down the road from generational family homes.

• Relentless salvaging of old machinery to feed or mix with newer. Creative rigging of second-hand or "outdated" technology into rough but extremely reliable forms. Abandoned industrial equipment as resource. Constant repair/re-use.

• Blackwater. The world's most infamous private mercenary army, founded and originally based in Moyock, NC. Original training grounds on 3,000 acres of the Dismal Swamp.

• Farms as ground zero for backyard/grey market gene splicing. After all, it's not that different from what farmers have done for centuries: adapt technology and natural processes to alter forms of life. Use to find workarounds on killer seeds, etc. (farmers are also adept at slipping around central authority that gets in their way).

• Pervasive personal weaponry and a higher-than-average number of ex-soldiers from a variety of wars.

• Backroads dotted with towns largely ignored by larger governments. Weak or non-existent official social safety networks.

• Same lack of bigger institutions or gov, along with lack of attention from larger cities/culture providing appealing haven for people that want to be ignored — plenty of opportunity where no one's looking. Widespread surveillance is nigh-impossible in rural areas.

• Historical role of Northeastern NC (and many similar rural areas) as refuge for fleeing slaves, indentured servants, remaining natives during country's early history. Pockets of deep anti-Confederate/government sentiment during Civil War. 

• Juxtaposition of international ports and nearby complete wilderness. Revival of old smuggling routes along canals, inlets, and sounds. A lot of homes in this area have a small dock by a waterway. Evolution of decentralized black market distribution network for areas increasingly left out of "the future."

• Infrastructure neglect and the brunt end of climate change.

• Interesting things emerging from the area's "everyone" is ignoring or dismissing.

• Last, but not least, 'ol William Gibson's Twitter handle is, coincidentally, GreatDismal. The Dixie Flatline lives. ;-)

Feel free to add your own contributions or thoughts on this theme in the comments.

Politics is mutable: A century of voter shifts

Via Salon comes this quick, wonkish movie showing the shift in statewide party preference over the last century.

I first voted in the 2000 election, when the whole Red State/Blue State narrative emerged. I thought it was silly at the time, obscuring a whole host of more important divisions and fostering a smug sense of superiority among people who should have known better. As I've started working in media, it's amazing how quickly yesterday's unchanging truths (i.e. a Democratic nominee will never win a Southern state again) are forgotten, though that doesn't seem to keep pundits from continuing to dish them out.

While traditions certainly play a role, political preferences are incredibly mutable. That's worth remembering when thinking about what kind of world is emerging. Today's strongholds are tomorrow's battlegrounds, and "tradition" is usually a lot younger than we think.

Media spearheads endangered language revival

Map from National Geographic. Interactive version here.

Fascinating piece from the Atlantic on how public radio is leading to a revival of endangered languages:

Loris Taylor, the CEO and president of Native Public Media, still has the scars on her hands from when she was caught speaking Hopi in school and got the sharp end of the ruler as a result. "They hit so hard, the flesh was taken off," she remembers. "Deep down inside, it builds some resistance in you."

Now, she's at the forefront of a movement to revive dead and dying languages using an old medium: radio. As CEO and president of Native Public Media, she's lobbied the FCC and overseen projects to get increasingly rare tongues like Hopi onto airwaves so that Native Americans can keep their ancestors' ways of speaking alive—and pass those ways of speaking to new generations.

Similar efforts are taking place worldwide. In Ireland, Dublin's youthful Top-40 Raidio Ri-Ra and Belfast's eclectic indie Raidio Failte have been broadcasting entirely in Irish for several years. In Washington, D.C. earlier this month, indigenous radio producers from Peru, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, and a handful of other countries gathered for the "Our Voices on the Air" conference, organized by the 40-year-old nonprofit Cultural Survival and the Smithsonian's Recovering Voices program.

Following centuries of oppression that have marginalized minority languages, radio represents a modest but surprisingly promising way to reinvigorate the traditions keeping those languages alive. In the Maori community of New Zealand, for example, the combination of 21 radio stations and rigorous early childhood immersion programs have brought Maori-languages speakers from an all-time low of 24,000 in the 1980s to 131,000 in 2006, according to Mark Camp, deputy executive director at Cultural Survival.

Two interesting trends are merging together here. One is the fruit of the removal of the industrial era emphasis on cultural uniformity: the idea that a nation-state had a set language and culture and everything has to fall in line with that. While the more heavy-handed manifestations of this have been gone for awhile, it's naturally taken some time for the cultures those systems targeted to mend the effects of that pressure. I've mentioned before how sometimes Breaking Times shatter old barriers, and this is a perfect example. In the absence of artificial discouragement, communities are reviving languages with their own efforts.

The second trend is one I mentioned in The Circle, Unbroken: how media (especially social media) can serve to keep cultures united in the face of obstacles like distance or upheaval. While community radio is certainly one of the older forms of social media, and more centralized than its descendants, it has similar advantages. By tying together disparate individual groups with some common ties (a fading language), it's helped better organize the practitioners and provide an easy point of access for others to adopt the trait.

While media probably can't do much for languages whose speakers number in the single digits, it's a major boost to those like Hopi that were wavering but still have some real odds of survival. Cultures, even old ones, can be surprisingly hardy things.

Charting political mutations

A very strange snake. Here's the full version

From Mapping the Nation comes this fascinating 19th-century "conspectus" chronicling roughly the first century of America's political upheaval.

This helps to drive the point that political groupings aren't just monolithic blocks home. "Democrat" meant something very different in 1884, but beyond that, a lot of different factions fell under a party's banner, often due to convenience or fragile ideological overlap.

The chart also chronicles the entry of activist groups into political parties, something that remains an under-explored theme in our popular story of politics. Protest movements have a long, complicated history with larger parties, alternatively condemning them and joining in to use them as a springboard for larger goals. The same debates over how to deal with established power continue, and more knowledge of how such knife fights played out in the past is always a good thing.

If there were something like this today (and I really wish there were), where would it place Occupy? Gov 2.0 advocates? Anonymous? The Tea Party? Food for thought.

Big Black Market: The drug money bailout

An investigation from The Observer reveals that Wachovia, a major bank, laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels:

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico's gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

It gets better, mind you, with Wachovia hanging out the whistleblower who discovered the laundering out to dry. As a case of major financial malfeasance, this is bad enough. But this paragraph in particular struck me:

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the "legal" banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse. "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade," he said. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

That's big news, revealing the metamorphosis of corporate finance into a creature with enough tentacles in both government and the black market to draw from both in time of crisis. This is not entirely unexpected. Remember how one of the major factors behind the housing bubble was "everyone else is making shit tons of money off it, why don't we?" The black market, after all, is a growth industry that accounts for 15 percent of the world's GDP. For an amoral organization looking for quick profits, it's a natural fit.

The problem of the cartels' drug trade is its own issue, but historically financial entities had to (mostly) stay away from the black market on any massive scale. For all their white collar crimes, banking institutions do rely on legal guarantees to operate, and so are structurally more vulnerable to the law than the "black collar" sector.

Now? The line is fading, and Wachovia escaped with little more than a slap on the wrist. For future joint ventures between the legal and illegal markets, few things could be more auspicious.

P.S. If you happen to have an account at Wachovia, this might be a good time to switch to a credit union. They don't rely on murderous drug gangs and don't treat their customers like shit.

States. Who needs 'em?

Neil Freeman's reformed map of the United States here

Above is a brilliant cartographical thought experiment by artist and urban planner Neil Freeman. Responding to the wonky electoral college and the fact that sparsely populated regions have a disproportionate political power, while highly prosperous urban areas wield relatively little, he redrew the state boundaries along population and geographical boundaries. Each has (as of the 2000 census figures) roughly 5.6 million people.

It's particularly fascinating because it offers a snapshot of how an industrial society has changed and how some of the most important administrative divisions (states here or in Australia, provinces in Canada, etc.) fail to reflect that.  

This would seem to be a trivial difference, but it's not. Witness how New York, a city with the GDP and population of a small country, feels stifled by the legislature in Albany. Witness how different the needs and views of the many different parts of California are (would LA or SF Bay states have a Prop 8?). I've heard more than one urban Canadian grouse about how much power remains in the hands of clueless provincial governments.

State governments were drawn up in the days when slower technology made quick administration over a nation difficult, and thus a middle layer of government was more essential. Today, the boundaries are essentially arbitrary, and state governments complicate a whole range of policies on important issues such as transportation and the environment. Even many smart people still (mistakenly) peg cultural qualities to certain states, whether dividing them into Red or Blue or swearing to boycott/move away from a particular one when the electorate votes the wrong way.

Freeman's map shows a country organized closer to how it actually functions: large rural swaths, clusters of medium-sized cities and a few super-dense city-states.

It's often said that the future is local. To some extent I think this is true: there's certainly a need for active, powerful local government along with a more self-sufficient economy. I also think that a grander-scale government entity is absolutely necessary to have a hope of tackling more massive problems. However, to fulfill that, a far larger structure than the traditional state/province is needed.

The larger question then, is where the state, history's political middle-man, fits in the future. Does it have one at all?

P.S. - Freeman's map also abolishes South Carolina. The official Breaking Time stance on this is Yes.

Gov 2.0: Brilliant maps and blind spots

It's the first day of the Gov 2.0 conference; up on the giant screen in a darkened room, I see a California wildfire unfold in real time. Mapping technology has advanced this far and the demonstrators are eager to demonstrate how they can overlay the maps, rapid-fire to show the gathered attendees a new vision of the world.

Fascinating stuff, and not just due to my map fetish. Maps are powerful things: they affect how we influence the world, and what information we have to grapple with it. It isn't hard to see this capability changing how government interacts with the world, especially in increasingly large metropoli that must balance environmental, demographic and development concerns all at once.

There was a whirlwind of ideas, so many it's hard to know where to begin.

Clay Shirky managed to balance optimism with practicality, noting that people never do what's expected of them, and that there are dangers in an organization—government, newspaper or otherwise—losing control completely, just as there are in it keeping too tight a grip. Carol Dumaine, of the Energy Department's intelligence arm, gave a much-needed bitter blast about the coming upheavals of climate change. MindTel's David Warner talked about combining maps with intelligence and reconstruction work in Afghanistan (he's been there 10 times). Those last two were refreshingly practical. 

There was also an interesting note of controversy when Rep. John Culbertson (R-TX) took the stage. Culbertson, a hard-line conservative, got to technology early and often. He called the health care reform bill "trash" and said, in a nutshell, that more transparency and openness would make officials more accountable (to conservative opinion). Shortly after Dumaine had soberly warned of the dangers of climate change, here was Culbertson, praising the Tea Parties and proclaiming proudly that he represented the oil and gas companies. It was, perhaps, a wake up call to the audience, many of whom seem to have disagreed with him: new tech and more transparency might benefit causes besides your own.

The media panels were excellent, especially the roundtable assessing "new, new journalism." The Seattle-PI's Monica Guzman stole that last one hands down. As someone at the ground level of the transition between old media and new, she was well equipped to talk about her own quest to keep the values of a free press alive in a very different world. The news industry is booming, she asserted, if we look at evolving neighborhood blogs and community journalists.

During lunch, a longtime business computer specialist talked over Caesar salad and chicken about "the potential for evil. Imagine what the Russians could do if they chose to throw $500 million at using these open networks to really screw things up. You can do good or evil with computers. The social network's going to stay the same."

There's far more to talk about—like the roiling conversations on Twitter, or understanding Islam through Second Life—and I'm missing a lot. Much of it I'll have to come back to in the coming days and weeks. But there's limited time before today's conference swings into full effect and a larger realization has emerged that I want to devote some time to before leaping back into the fray.

As I approached the Grand Hyatt, there was a woman clad in an orange bodysuit, complete with shiny boots. She was accompanied by a team of fresh-faced youngsters, handing out cards for Aquilent. I recognized the plastered-on "I've done this pitch 5 million times" look from my own days in retail. At the same time, a hotel employee was taking a free moment behind a grand stone pillar, doing push-ups.

Walking to the hotel this morning, I saw a homeless man's newspaper nest, molded against a bench, still bearing the imprint of the night before. 

This is a world that seemed far removed from the grand ideas inside.

At the conference itself, there was a dearth of women onstage. Out of the first day's 35 speakers, 7 were women. One was a co-presenter, two were Gov 2.0 expo award winners, Guzman was part of a panel, Dumaine got five minutes, so did Bev Godwin. The only speaker that got anything approaching a major presentation was the White House's Beth Noveck. This didn't go unnoticed: it became a major talking point in the ongoing Twitter discussion (broadcast up on the main screen, thankfully). Plenty, however, didn't see what the fuss was. I even saw the word "whining" thrown around a few times.

I don't think there's any malevolence or prejudice here, just blindness and a sad reflection on the state of Gov, be it Beta, 1.0 or 2.0. Most government department heads and high-ranking types are men, symptomatic of a bigger problem of isolation and power that seems to be beyond Gov 2.0's realm of discussion. I understand this, but the lack of diversity was telling, and it affected the ideas brought to the table as well: I would have killed for a ground-level community organizer to take the stage for 10 minutes.

The business world was also out in force: breakfast by Hewlitt-Packard, lunch by Microsoft, reception by Booz Allen Hamilton. I don't even want to hazard a guess at the annual income of the average attendee.

The problem with this blind spot is that, for most of the people here, government is already working quite well. Listening, I didn't hear talk about police brutality or the high cost of education. Looking around, I didn't see the glaze of working 18-hour days on little food. I didn't see the fear that comes with the driving uncertainty of living paycheck to paycheck. I saw precious few scars.

I saw a lot of good ideas, but I saw a worldview that remains blinkered, tragically so. It's going to be damned hard to build a better government without the input of those who need it most.

Are Big Freaking Cities our savior?

Oh Fritz Lang, when will you stop being right?

 

Yes, survivalist wet dreams aside, the places best set to survive the current economic and social woes might be massively dense cities. Observe, for example, Washington, D.C.'s home values. The surrounding suburbs are getting gutted, but the hyper-dense core actually saw its values go up in the middle of an economic meltdown.

 

Quoth Smart Growth advocate Kaid Benfield:

 

First, a story by Alejandro Lazo in Saturday's Washington Post once again demonstrated that central locations in our metro area are not suffering the same declines in housing values as outer locations.  I have covered this before (see also here), but what's new is a full year's worth of data on all home sales in the area in 2008.  Only one jurisdiction in the region had its median home sales price increase, compared to 2007:  Washington, DC itself, with an 8 percent increase.

---

The third thing that came to mind in the last few days is the sad plight of Detroit, a severely depressed city both highly decentralized (the least centralized on Glaeser's graph) and highly dependent on manufacturing.  According to the Michigan Association of Realtors, the average sales price of a Detroit home fell to $13,638 in January,

a 42 percent decline from the average home price in January 2008.  By at least one report, the median sales price of a home in Detroit in December was only $7,500, and that is not a typo. 

 

Tim Jones reports in the Chicago Tribune that "Detroit, which has lost half its population in the past 50 years, is deceptively large, covering 139 square miles. Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston could, as a group, fit inside the city's boundaries. There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters."  The city's unemployment rate, meanwhile, is 22 percent.  Man, all that's hard to read.

 

While the recession may do the least damage in places where centers are strong, it can be extraordinarily cruel elsewhere.

 

Indeed it can. Benfield goes on to point out that the denser and more centralized a city, the better it seems to weather economic collapse. This backs up something I've believed for awhile: suburbs will be the new slums.

 

This bodes well for places like New York (possibly Chicago), along with fairly centralized small cities like, well, Asheville. It does not bode well at all for Charlotte or Los Angeles (though I'll admit to knowing less about the latter, feel free to correct me, Angelenos).

 

There's been a primitivist backlash against cities for awhile now, with the wide assumption that they're a) unnatural or b) unusually vulnerable to socioeconomic disruption. But honestly, for a species of social tool-making monkeys, what could be more natural? 

 

(Dense cities use a lot less energy, too, but that's another story).

 

I grew up in a very rural, extremely small town, and I'll happily say that while it's not where I live anymore, they have their merits and get a lot of undeserved crap (as do large cities).

 

But suburbs -- or the urban sprawl that goes along with them -- always struck me as extremely strange. Lacking both the self-sufficiency/close-knit community of the more rural life or the sheer concentration/cultural vibrancy of the urban polis.

 

So it is that suburbs seem now an ancient artifact -- a version of the American Dream that's long since faded, now unpractical due to hideous consumption and an inability to create a long-term culture that actually works.

 

A hopeful trend for the future would be an increasing division between extremely dense, efficient cities and more quiet, self-sufficient rural areas, with suburbs either gobbled up by much denser urban development or sinking back into the ground. This would be healthier for the environment and for humanity's long-term survival.