The Breaking Time

Ending rape culture: less apologies, more consequences

An apology would be good. Firing all three would be far better.

In the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict and the despicable reactions of CNN's commentators, there's a petition demanding a public apology from CNN.

That's laudable, but I think the approach leaves something to be desired. Rape culture's incredibly deeply embedded in many different parts of society, depressingly so. A big part of decreasing that is education and changing cultural norms. But consequences are also vital, and they don't get as much attention. While the military has an epidemic rape problem, for example, Helen Benedict's groundbreaking reporting found that "if a commander won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen." Something about the prospect of life in Leavenworth tends to focus the mind.

So whether organizations like CNN help spread this nonsense or not has far less to do with how apologetic they personally feel and far more to do with how scared they are of public backlash. Public figures stopped spouting as much racist tripe when it became clear it would ruin their careers and their social lives.

Likewise, vital as education is, rape culture will start truly crumbling when anchors, administrators, managers, and bosses that ignore or actively encourage it get fired or turned into social pariahs. It will take another hit when sentences for rapists are measured in decades instead of months, when police devote actual resources to catching them, and when prosecutors hand out less lenient plea bargains.

Deterrence and changing the power dynamic can, hell must, play a role in social progress if it's to have any lasting impact. Next time, the push should focus less on statements of repentance, and more on measurable consequences to show some change is actually taking place.

Fighting for the ashes: Individuals tending towards savagery

Damn. That took way too long, readers, and you have my apologies. I've been embroiled in freelance and day job projects, and the Breaking Time has been neglected in the process. So let's start our return properly, with this piece from Damien Williams on the latest manifestation of the urge to smash everything.

The aftermath of an Aug. 8, 2011 attack that wounded two professors at Monterey Tec. Individuals Tending Towards Savagery claimed responsibility. Their statement, if you can bear to read it, is translated here.

I've spent the last few months trying to lay the groundwork for a better world. That's a bit pompous. What I've really been doing is sitting around writing about the philosophical problems of cybernetics and cyborging, and relating them to various television shows, because I firmly believe that people can be made to see more than the potential terror of technology if they can see it in entertainment and then made to think about it.

So the real world comes along to remind me what I'm actually up against, out here: The Group known as "Individuals Tending Toward Savagery" (and isn't that just a fantastically uplifting, human-centric name?) has claimed responsibility for the 2011 shooting death of Dr Ernesto Méndez, a leader in the field of biotechnology, and they've promised more of the same, and worse, for any nano- or biotech experts who continue to do work in the field.

All of this death and terror to try to prevent the fabled Grey Goo Scenario which has been inimical to nanotechnology since it became known to the public imagination. Now, the nature of these "anarchists" seems to more be one of posturing and half-tactics, rather than what many would claim a "credible threat"-- their claims of responsibility are spotty, while their threats are many and varied-- but that doesn't mean they aren't stepping up their game.

And for what? To scare people into a Luddite fear of technological advancement? To act as a reactionary, loom-smashing gestapo- boogeyman? What's gained by this? What in these tactics and aims makes this world a better place?

I'm reminded of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, and the story "Detonation." In it, a terrorist group (caveat: terrorists are not necessarily anarchists, nor vice versa) called the Red Right Hand seeks to devolve the world into a state of constant war, because the leader believes that it is only when we're at war that we reach our full potential. Or some utter bollocks like that.

You see, that line of thinking makes a valid argument. That is, if its premises were true, then its conclusion would necessarily follow. But what people always forget about the difference between validity and soundness is that validity doesn't make the premises true. "All aliens are secretly Jewish people and every Jewish person has a personal golem with them at all times. This is why I demand to see the Area 51 Records of the two golems recovered in the New Mexico desert in 1947." That is, technically, a perfectly valid argument. And also something I just made up, right now.

My point is this: what is it about smashing looms that makes people think we'll be better off? What is it about pure destruction that people tend to prefer to the work of creating and destroying, at the same time? Is it just that change is scary? Because, let me tell you, we've known that for about 10,000 years, so it's not exactly a startling revelation.

I only ask because it seems like the far better option would be to try to learn and understand as much about technology as possible, and then take all that loom-smashy energy and put it toward grassroots education of the wider culture. Make the real dangers and real benefits known to the whole world, and teach people how to not just blindly react to new tech.

Because this is a blind reaction. This is just fear on more fear on more fear. I don't see the world being better after this, I see it being more terrified. What's the point of that?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.