When Tasha and I were last in the Dresden area, we seemed to encounter Soljanka whereever we dined. It didn't matter if it was a concession stand at a national park or a classy restaurant; everybody seemed to regard this as essential Saxon comfort food. Soljanka is a Russian soup that it seems like the East Germans adopted and adapted to their taste. It's kind of like a hot and sour eastern European soup when it's done right, but this recipe doesn't have much heat per se; I'd like to experiment on that, but for the moment it's great in this form.
I doubled and translated this recipe from here after trying another that had no sourness at all. The secret, I think, is just putting pickle juice in it. That kind of makes sense, and the effect of that acid cutting through the sausage is divine. Make sure you don't forget the dollop of sour cream when you serve -- for bonus points, a slice of lemon on top in addition to the cream looks wonderful. You can also squeeze some lemon juice in your serving if you wanna up the sourness, I usually do.
I'm fascinated by the way Bhuddist thought aligns with my chosen philosophy of life and spirit, but the most intriguing aspect for me is the praxis of Bhuddism. While much spiritual information can seem unmoored from and hovering over the material life, Bhuddism has a wealth of accumulated practices, strategies, techniques, and attitudes that seem to be able to ground the subtle and intangible in the daily go-round. Chodron's article was the first that really woke me up to how much help there is available when we seem to be floating in mid-air.
The great lesson I feel I'm now learning is that of appreciating emotion. I've often approached it in the past in much the same way an objectivist might: that our emotions are reflections of the quality of our thinking. According to this attitude, a difficult emotion is a sign of some problem to be addressed, and the purpose of addressing it is to attain forward progress by overcoming or purging it. It is no exaggeration to describe my former regard for emotions as one regards noise in the signal.
It was Steven Tyman's A Fool's Phenomenology: Archetypes of Spiritual Evolution that really opened my eyes to another possibility. Tyman is quite emphatic about the vital nature of the emotions, not as obstacles to be overcome or distortions to be vacated but as sources of information that can communicate what we cannot rationally or intellectually apprehend. In fact, emotions are not even something we properly generate; instead they blow in of their own seeming accord, and we are utterly subject to them. To respect emotions, I suppose, is to grant them their own space in life.
Two alternatives to acceptance occur to me: either (1) repressing this energy by ignoring it, locking it down and using discipline and control to keep it at arms length, or (2) expressing it in a kneejerk, reactive manner that so often seems to leave us worse off but at least lets the energy flow onward. Both paths, turning emotion further inward and turning it further outward, seem to have as their end a desire for finality and resolution, to dislocate the emotion. The urgency of emotion compels us to react in one of these two extreme manners, neither healthy.
Chodron's article calls these two approaches out for their common end: the desire for bringing the pain, the tension, the edginess to a close. But this reflects a conceit that we can resolve emotions. While attempting to do so is a great teacher, one eventually must face the truth: these emotions cannot simply be disposed at our convenience. They will have their say.
Now, one can ignore any source of information, be it an announcement from outside, a flare of pain in our bodies, a letter we receive, etc. What we gain by avoiding the emotional information is the chance to avoid the edginess, tension, and lack of solid footing that attend emotions. What we obviously lose is what the emotion would teach us about ourselves, but we also forgo the ability to act upon a third option: that of simply allowing the emotion to abide, and learning how to allow that to occur without the need for extreme measures.
Chodron tenderly points out that it is precisely this extended discomfort that teaches. When we learn to sit with our feelings, not by imprisoning or evicting them but simply by accepting all of their nastiness and spikyness and sinking-ness, we find that it is here that true spiritual growth comes into play. For perhaps it is that emotions come at us from nowhere precisely because we have vast resources that waking consciousness cannot always seat. We find, in other words, that we cannot think these problems; we must rely upon other resources that are no less us, no less helpful. Repression and reflexive expression does not "resolve" anything; it just delays the pain as well as the learning the pain delivers. Genuine growth is never convenient.
And then there is the point about recognizing others' emotional reactions and seeing a mirror for the lessons we're grappling with.
Recognize that, just like us, millions are burning with the fire of aggression. We can sit with the intensity of the anger and let its energy humble us and make us more compassionate.
If nothing else, Chodron convinced me our helplessness in the face of emotion is a reason to be more patient not just with ourselves but with others. None of us come out of the "fire of aggression" unsinged; allowing others to work through emotion at their level provides us valuable experience and feedback, since it's hard to see somebody emote without emoting along with them to some degree. Indeed, I think emotion has often confounded me precisely because of its contagious nature. But we're not "catching" something from another really; all that's happening is that we're being reminded of our own feelings and unresolved issues. If one is apt to ignore them within, then the reflection from without is most assuredly a disturbing report.
So what we're really playing with here is the directionality of our attention, moving it away from escape from emotion and towards diving head-first into emotion. Others' unhinged emotions would not bother us if we were ourselves balanced. But when we lie to ourselves about our affective health, it can be absolutely flooring when we discover how easily our buttons are pushed. This is not a failing, though; it is once again merely information that we can use to understand ourselves better. In that way, we receive a true gift from others "freaking out", reminding us how compassion, understanding, and patience are genuine silver bullets (if slow moving projectiles) in these situations.
This was a big wake-up call for yours truly, even as I acknowledge many probably find this insight abjectly trivial. So often I have approached emotion in the human condition as some mistake to be corrected. That emotion could simply constitute a way of wrestling with realities, in the same way I wrestle with ideas in the mind, floored me. Additionally, Chodron described that indeterminate, uncomfortable feeling so well that it was easy to recognize and make the connection in my own life.
Right at the point when we are about to blow our top or withdraw into oblivion, we can remember this: we are warriors-in-training being taught how to sit with edginess and discomfort. We are being challenged to remain and to relax where we are.
This advice finally strikes me as very similar to the balancing exercises discussed in the Law of One material, where instead of trying to overcome feelings we actually sit with them, mentally intensify them to the extreme, and then intensify the opposite emotion to to the extreme:
To begin to master the concept of mental discipline it is necessary to examine the self. The polarity of your dimension must be internalized. Where you find patience within your mind you must consciously find the corresponding impatience and vice versa. Each thought that a being has, has in its turn an antithesis. The disciplines of the mind involve, first of all, identifying both those things of which you approve and those things of which you disapprove within yourself, and then balancing each and every positive and negative charge with its equal. The mind contains all things. Therefore, you must discover this completeness within yourself.
The goal is to have a balance of emotion in our lives, to appreciate all 360 degrees of emotion, both the pleasant and unpleasant ones. This is in no way, shape, or form an absence of, or escape from, emotion. To understand the full spectrum of affect is to familiarize oneself with the potentials out there which will meet us as we serve others more and more purely and thoroughly. As the aforementioned material states elsewhere, it's really about self-acceptance. If we know ourselves--not as we'd wish ourselves to be, but as we truly are, warts and all--we have no buttons to push, or as Chodron describes it, "we don't set up the target for the arrow."
For instance, I have real issues with feeling bossed around and controlled. The other day I encountered this feeling and, instead of responding to the proximate cause, I just allowed myself to feel that way as much as I could. I tried really hard to make sure I wasn't pushing the feeling down, but instead letting the horrible feeling fester. I focused and tried to intensify the feeling, really being with it. What I found is that this gave me an incredible sense of agency and empowerment! I realized that lashing out in the past never made me feel powerful, it usually only served to communicate how controlled and unhappy I felt, and poorly at that. Conversely, feeling the emotion deeply made me realize all the possible choices available to me, which made me realize how many opportunities I have ignored in the past, so bent was I on ending the pain. Enduring the pain, honoring it, bringing my attention to bear on it--it's amazing how much simple presence introduces you to a different side of yourself.
It is a really weird sensation, I must say, to feel a negative emotion and to let it simply occur to oneself, not trying to avoid it in some way or dislodge it through lashing out at phenomenal reality. I continue practicing this discipline poorly. But just knowing that there is a mode in which undesired emotions can benefit me, one in which I can be accepting towards myself for being exactly the kind of self I have often disparaged... well, that insight might be more valuable than anything else I've recounted on this blog.
]]>That is why I've been a big supporter of the Center for a Stateless Society ever since Brad Spangler founded it in 2006. Both left libertarianism and market anarchism (a label I try to hold at arm's length) deserve an outlet focused on getting their unique points of view in front of as many eyes as possible. The goal from the very beginning has been outreach and advocacy, to embark upon a coordinated, funded effort to get left libertarian polemics into mainstream outlets to influence policy and public opinion. The emergence of C4SS was a sign that left libetarianism had grown up and wanted to be a player on the political stage, not simply a loose ring of blogs (though those were heady, fun days indeed).
I've written several essays for the Center. The first two pieces I wrote for them were among the hardest writing I've ever done in my life. It turns out that writing for the general public outside the normal cliches of politics has very, very little in common with writing for an expressly radical audience. Couple that with the rules that guide newspaper publication, such as word counts, an emphasis on very accessible diction, and conforming to certain reading levels, and suddenly writing from the heart transforms into a kind of eristic crossword puzzle. However, the finished product was not only something of which I could be proud, but something that felt like an important, unique contribution to the conversation precisely because it was disciplined.
It's been a long time since I've regarded the Center as a disciplined outlet for left libertarian politics. It seems they try to get anything and everything mildly related to left libertarianism published. This would be fine for a left libertarian blog that sought to serve a readership that already agrees with left libertarian views (my leftlibertarian.org project was just such an unfocused survey). But it's important to remember that the Center raises money not simply to publish writing--anybody can do that these days--but to publish the best, most focused, most accessible writing that can subvert mainstream media outlets and turn non-anarchists into anarchists. That's not easy, which is why I was always in favor of paying writers for the burden of writing pieces that are not necessarily straightforward, enjoyable to work on, or directly from the heart like most of us enjoy writing.
Consider this essay by Aster Alice Raizel. Despite my rejection of the thesis, this is a really interesting piece, as a twitter friend reminded me, because it recalls the intensity of 19th century, luciferian-tinged anarchism. I've been a fan of her voice and writing for many years. The question is not whether this is a good essay, but whether it is an essay that promotes left libertarianism to a mainstream audience. After all, that mission is what brought me an others to the Center; it's no failure to expand beyond that, but does an essay like this marginalize the Center among mainstream outlets more than necessary? I think it does, and so it is incompatible with the Center's whole reason for existing.
Now, I won't pretend this isn't personal: Alice has been an extremely divisive figure in the left libertarian milieu. She was central to one of the first rifts that found me on a different side than many of my C4SS comrades. Based on my private and public interactions with her, I believe she is a seriously disturbed individual (it sucks this has to be said, but for the record, I am not referring to her gender identity). Based on observing her angry, vitriolic, unhinged behavior on public forums and blogs, I further believe she is an atrocious ambassador for any cause, let alone one that promotes the just and peaceful resolution of conflicts. So the fact that the Center would use donor funds to publish a wildly troubled person working out their daddy issues in public is just the latest and best example of its loss of purpose.
I was also struck by the sloppy and grating takedown of Greenwald by Arthur Silber that caught the Center's interest for some reason. Indeed, I wrote my own piece criticizing Greenwald's journalistic practices and principles not because I thought I was making an original contribution. Largely I wanted to salvage the ongoing, important conversation about journalism from such an overwrought and hysterical temper tantrum. There is simply no point in lecturing on integrity with a voice of petulent self-righteousness and caustic hate. I feel sorry for radicals like Raizel and Silber who have no other voice with which to discuss these matters, but it's simply a mistake for the Center to support such bile.
To give voice to concerns about an institution's direction inevitably risks offending those who see their interests aligned with the institution. This is even more true when people get their pay from that institution. So as desperate and sad as this seems for such an accomplished thinker, it just makes me grateful for the privilege to pursue politics on my own terms and eschew the constant performance that comprises politically correct leftism. And that's the position I've always strived to occupy on the libertarian left: an independent, anti-ideological, common sense position that can reflect on our faults as well as our virtues. I have no interest in the "me too" rah-rahing of movement clicktavists motivated more by publicly distinguishing their moral value from the fallen masses than by engaging with those folks to find ways forward for us all. Let me know when that kind of cultivated sanctimony actually effects changes in the world, Kevin, and I'll gladly eat my hat.
Any movement trying to find its own political identity, priorities, and values as well as maintain ideological integrity will make philosophical independence difficult. To their credit, left libertarians and C4SS adherents are if anything more honest than most ideologues. But if ideology requires any kind of balancing force, only the individual conscience can reliably provide it. Sometimes that means standing on the outside looking in, but that's immensely more satisfying to me than drowning myself in the echo chamber of self-congratulating, progressive puritanism. It's not true that the Center does no good work, but its supporters deserve to know the real motivation for its work. Presently the Center functions more as a thin veneer of institutional professionalism over of an insular clique of ideologues; I'm certain my comrades are capable of better.
The internet is a wonderful nursery for anti-system radicals, but eventually one needs to leave that noumenal realm of relative safety, put aside childish Twitter grandstanding and forum feuds, and apply one's values to the real world. There is an outlet that takes these kinds of politics seriously, which makes it both dangerous and promising. I believe Attack the System, for all its flaws, has usurped the position that C4SS could have thrived in, and I hope you will give that site and its writers a chance to show you what the application of genuine anti-state politics through a pluralist framework means for leftist aspirations and the egalitarianism we all believe is possible. (I no longer associate or support Attack the System and disavow them completely.)
As the year rolls to an end, I'd like to compile a few thoughts on the handling of the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ryan Gallagher, and others. This debate has occurred on ephemeral media like twitter, and these matters deserve a more extended treatment. There have been many developments since my last post on the subject; one of the most interesting has been the journalistic issues surrounding this episode.
Throughout this post, keep in mind that I approach this as a radical, anti-institutionalist anarchist. My values place very little weight on compromising secret government plots for any reason. I disagree fundamentally with Snowden's desire for selective leaking, though it shouldn't surprise anybody that an ex-NSA employee would maintain very different priorities than an anarchist. Nothing could be more useless or moronic than to expect relatively establishmentarian, statist folks like Snowden, Greenwald, or Poitras to act exactly like I might were I in their shoes.
However, I have a basic respect for Snowden's sacrifice and Greenwald's work that transcends my political preferences (I'm not familiar with Poitras's work prior to this episode, though she has my respect as well). I will not sully that respect by dragging any of these people through the mud, even if their chosen acts don't quite conform to my personal standards. Indeed, I wish to advance a critique of their conduct that can actually contribute to the debate without drowning everything in the noise of acrimony and belligerence.
Unlike many on the radical left, I believe tone is important, both for maintaining crucial solidarity within the larger resistance and for disciplining our own thinking against irrational laziness. Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others are fundamentally on my side of this issue, regardless of our differences in values and ideology. People on the same side can disagree and debate without devolving into crude infighting. I regard it as shameful, juvenile, and counter-productive to elevate any kind of political or methodological purity over those broad interests that unite us.
Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Julian Assange, Jacob Applebaum, and others have had to sacrifice some degree of the kind of personal liberty, safety and security we all take for granted. They did so in order to facilitate an informed, urgent debate that could advance beyond breathless, unhinged conspiracy theory. It is the U.S. government that has created the best argument for why Poitras and Greenwald are careful about releasing NSA documents, as Greenwald has stated:
One of the few protections you have when you're reporting on classified materials is that you're doing it as a journalist. It's therefore vital that we never act as a source or distributor of the materials, which is what the DOJ would eagerly claim if - as individuals - we just started handing out massive amounts of documents to media organizations around the world, rather than doing what we've been doing: reporting on them on a story-by-story basis with those outlets.
And it's not just known legal precedent that hampers him. Poitras and Greenwald must also contend with all sorts of governmental deceit, spooky dirty tricks, and outright nationalist bellicosity. There is no certain, clear, safe path here at all, and if you think there is then I'd argue you don't really understand the material situation.
Remember: the U.S. Government is not engaging in this debate with critics of their policies. They aren't entertaining anything but the most trivial, shallow observations from insiders and loyalists who fundamentally defer to them. So it is to be noted that Greenwald, on the other hand, has shown remarkable (if finite) patience with his critics. From the very get-go he has solicited a debate around the ethics of the leaks, appreciating his unique position. Now he's not a public servant and has no inherent duty to do his job in the way we like, let alone according to values he does not share. He does not deserve bile for seeking out critique.
It's also curious to see how few complaints Greenwald's critics hurl at Snowden himself. Indeed, it seems to me the primary constraints on Greenwald, Poitras, Gallagher, et al's reporting were placed by Snowden himself through the source agreement they concluded at the beginning of all this. Why does Snowden get comparatively little criticism? People like me who would have prefered a mass dump of all these documents on Wikileaks ought not to ignore his initial gatekeeper role. I'm sad to say that Snowden escapes his critics because he does not seek them out in the way Greenwald has.
Just because I oppose writing rancid denounciations of these heroes' acts and motivating principles doesn't mean I agree with all of it. It seems vital to me that we all wrestle with these matters as we search for a new consensus about institutional accountability and individual conscience. An unprecedented leak obviously sets a precedent for future leaks, so everybody concerned with covert misconduct and government overreach has an interest in how this plays out. We are learning lessons and hashing out disputes that will guide future whistleblowers, journalists, and activists for decades to come, and that elevates both criticism and civility as dual imperatives in ensuring a productive debate.
Greenwald in particular has asked folks who criticize his approach to suggest better ways to go about it. There is a sense in which any suggestions are meaningless without his and Poitras's access to the source documents. It may be a reason to defer to his judgment, but it's an unsatisfying principle to uphold. The ideal situation would not depend on any one small group or career class. That said, I find certain problems with how he has reported this story, and I'll make some general suggestions as we proceed.
There's no doubt that all journalism implicitly serves some political narrative; probably what defines the status quo is it's ability to sneak in political assumptions as neutral facts of life. Nevertheless, Greenwald has explicitly stated (at 52:56 in the video) that he, Poitras, and other journalists who work with him choose to release documents and details from the NSA leak cache in order to "create the most powerful debate and the greatest level of recognition, and to sustain the interest that people have in the debate that we felt was so urgently needed". As much as I might personally approve of their ends, I find this a troublesome and potentially discrediting criterion for publicizing source material in the public interest.
Imagine for a moment that Greenwald, Poitras, et al both dumped all the NSA documents and wrote all the stories exactly as they have done. Accusations of bias would ring more hollow, because anybody who doubted their take could check the source materials themselves. Greenwald, Poitras, et al's particular narrative could be tempered by fully informed alternative interpretations.
Or imagine that Greenwald, Poitras, et al both followed their current source material release strategy and wrote in a much less opinionated, more neutral and descriptive voice. No speculations, no denouncements, no context from Greenwald's constitutional law background--just the absolute basic facts about a leak and its contents. The rest of us could build our stories around interpretations of this data, but there would be less of a sense that Greenwald, Poitras, et al are personally curating leaked information to serve their narrative.
The problem with withholding leaks is that one wonders whether they are telling the whole story. What if these journalists are not releasing documents that contradict the picture they are painting? There's a certain amount of trust Greenwald, Poitras, et al are asking of their readers and, indeed, an entire world that needs to understand that cache of secrets. Many like me see these issues within the same general narrative that the Greenwald, Poitras, et al do, but we don't really need to have our minds changed. Do others trust him enough to let him withhold information? Just because I share Greenwald's distaste for totalitarian government surveillance, I don't necessarily want to give him or his colleagues complete control over what I do and do not learn about.
To be clear, every journalist filters source information in this way. However, most journalists can be independently fact checked and followed up on by other outlets. It's the combination of public importance of the source material and Greenwald, Poitras, et al's exclusive control over access to it that makes this so uniquely problematic.
Greenwald refutes accusations that he and his colleagues are monopolizing the documents by pointing to other mainstream journalists with whom he and Poitras collaborate. So the accusation should rightly be oligopolization, not monopolization, but the root criticism persists. Working with other establishment journalists to reach a consensus on what should be published doesn't put my mind at ease because I remember how Assange got screwed over by mainstream papers.
Journalistic mediation of source materials is not supposed to restrict access to the source facts themselves; that's not it's intent. Journalism is supposed to add clarity and understanding to the facts but not exercise total access control over them. Remember when Greenwald calling out Dina Temple-Raston for reporting national security stories based on materials only she was allowed to see? This is not the same situation, but it has a similar feel to it, because we're just supposed to trust the journalist without verifying it.
Moreover, I can't help but regard Greenwald's arguments for the urgency of mediation here as inherently elitist; the idea that we, the public, must be guided or conditioned by the "drip" strategy of reporting on the leaks seems almost insulting. If this debate is so important, why does it require so much guidance, especially from one faction of one class in society? If we the people cannot be trusted to react to these disclosures in the "proper" manner, why bother with reporting at all? Ultimately, as noble as I think Greenwald, Poitras, et al's ends are, I can't help but find this reasoning a bit hypocritical.
How else can the leaks be safely consumed than having credentialed journalists dishing them out? Greenwald in a recent blog post lays out some hypothetical situations in which we would presumably approve of his withholding documents:
- if we know the names of people the NSA is accusing of engaging in "online promiscuity" on the internet, or the names of those the NSA believes are terrorists, should we publish that, thereby invading their privacy and destroying their reputations?
- if we have the raw chats, internet activity, and telephone calls of people on whom the NSA has spied, should we just publish those?
- if we have documents that would help other states spy more effectively on their own citizens' internet activities, should we publish those, thereby subjecting hundreds of millions of people to heightened state surveillance?
- if we have documents containing the names of innocent people whose reputations or lives would be endangered if they were exposed, should we just ignore their plight and publish those?
- if we have documents that are so complex that we don't yet understand the potential consequences for other people from publishing them, should we just throw caution to the wind and publish them anyway, and learn later what happens?
Before I address his reasoning here, I must admit something a little sappy but sincere: I was astounded at how much more complex answering these questions became for me if I actually put myself in Greenwald's shoes in my imagination and considered the real logistics of my favored approach. There are no perfectly secure places to leak that volume of data. There's no sure-fire defense of Greenwald, Poitras, et al's conduct in this climate. Any act they would take would have downsides. That's why despite our differences I afford all of them a great deal of deference along with infinite gratitude for doing the job at all.
That said, let's address these hypotheticals by breaking the concerns down into three categories: Personal identity issues, technological issues, and national security issues.
This is a legitimate concern, so if it would speed up the release of documents I'd be in favor of redacting any and all personal names automatically, without exception. To me, the "who" is much, much less important than "what" and "how". Sure, there's probably some information that could be traced back to particular people even without explicit names, but at least some deniability would be preserved.
The advantage of this approach is that it is at once clear cut and achieves a stable balance between personal privacy and the public interest. A newspaper that legitimately cared about this debate could start churning through the documents as a public service, redacting names and releasing, all while maintaining a first scoop advantage. Frankly I fail to even see the controversy here, although Greenwald, Poitras, et al can't be expected to do all of it by themselves. As I'll get to later, they could convince these papers profiting off the leaks they provided to do the work as a public service.
I have a hard time believing that publishing any technological details mentioned by the documents would do more harm than good. Open information in this area can inform and quicken the production of countermeasures. I assume Greenwald, Poitras, et al would approve of the public at large learning to defend against NSA exploits. For me, that's enough to shoot down this criterion.
But there's a bigger issue here: the technical details matter relatively little because the most effective things the NSA has done are only possible at scale. The sheer amount of money and authority wielded by the NSA dwarfs any other institution and would make them powerful even if they had no technology. Think about it: they probably have enough resources to create a Stasi-like snitch network that could accomplish a good deal of the same work the technological approaches do that could do. It is the power, not the particular exploits or spyware schematics, that makes the NSA totalitarian.
The NSA's intentions are no more dangerous than those of other governments, organized crime syndicates, and gadfly hackers. Most of the technical methods they've employed can be discovered by anybody. But no one person, and probably no other institution on the planet, could assemble this kind of massive, comprehensive toolset.
For example, if the NSA had invested in uncovering only the software, hardware, and firmware exploits it absolutely needed for surveillance, that might be worth keeping secret according to Greenwald, Poitras, et al's less radical values. But the NSA has tried to amass an encyclopedic, overlapping catalog of exploits in the interests of maximizing not just the breadth of surveillance but its depth and redundancy as well. As a programmer I know that exploits can and will always be discovered in software; the NSA has simply directed their considerable resources towards cultivating and maintaining them for unclear reasons.
Couple that with the technological details about their collaboration with other companies and spy agencies, such as tapping into internet trunk lines and compromising encryption algorithms. These are methods that do not stem from technical expertise; they are hacks of other organizations through the projection of physical cloak-and-dagger force, intimidation, bribery, and mutual nefarious ends. Any agency operating with similar power could do the same thing--in fact, the U.S. has condemend China for precisely these kinds of activities. Political clout and force projection capabilities can greatly enhance technological sophistication, but it's still a crucial ingredient available only to organizations working at the NSA's scale.
I cannot accept that withholding technological information stops anybody from being spied on. Releasing this information publicly is in fact the best thing one can do to counter this power. Once these bugs, vulnerabilities, and technologies are public, they have the best chance to be addressed in the public interest. That's not to say there are no dangers, only that I see no scenario where those dangers outweigh the benefits by any civil liberties accounting.
What if there are documents that, once published, would have consequences we simply don't or can't understand? To me, this line of thinking totally validates the arguments of the NSA's defenders who say public knowledge of any of this endangers us. I doubt that there are any legitimate national security secrets necessary to our survival as an independent nation--at least, an independent nation sans the empire we've collected over the past century.
Now, neither Snowden, Poitras, nor Greenwald are anarchists, so it surprises me not at all that they'd strike a very different balance on national security than I would. Berating them over this is particularly unhelpful, not least because it reinforces any elitist notion that the public at large is too immature or reckless to handle this information. However, the facts about the true state of our security are among the very most important revelations we could learn. Such facts could undermine the entire imperial narrative and change the game completely.
At least given what we have learned so far, the NSA has had very poor reasons for concealing their activities. If Snowden, Poitras, Greenwald, and others involved in the leaks have similar or superior reasons, they should not expect our patience with non-explanations. Make your case for withholding explicit, release it all entirely, or relinquish the moral high ground in this particular aspect.
It seems to me that if Greenwald, Poitras, et al are going to control how these documents are disseminated, they cannot simply do so in the service of their own reporting or the reporting of their hand picked journalists and newspapers. There's been too much inside baseball already, and expanding the class of insiders is not equivalent to public knowledge. This story is just too important, and if the open debate he, Poitras, and Snowden seek is going to happen, one party cannot linger in a position to dictate terms.
Therefore, I'd like to suggest that as steward of these leaked documents, their reporting is only one part of the job. Within the constraints of their source agreement with Snowden, I argue Greenwald, Poitras, and other involved journalists have an equal responsibility to see that the documents get out as quickly as possible, regardless of whether they serve their particular reporting narrative. This is a unique duty that stems from the singular position these journalists, especially Greenwald and Poitras, occupy relative to a matter of such gravity.
As soon as documents are cleared according to whatever criteria they choose (I assume they include the conditions I discussed above), they should be immediately released regardless of whether Greenwald, Poitras, et al report on them or not. I realize they cannot be seen as a disseminator of these leaks in order to protect themselves legally. But surely they could find a way with the help of this worldwide network of newspapers with which he's collaborating. There's a ton of resources there that could be put to a real public good equal to their reporting: expanding the historical record. Keep in mind that this is an unprecedented scale of disclosures entrusted to one small group; to treat this as just another instance of journalism, conforming to the exact same rules, may not be appropriate.
Finally, I can't accept their "drip" strategy as a sufficient reason to withhold these leaks from the public. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people will not even want to read the source documents directly, so it's not like one cannot maintain at once a drip of contextual reporting as well as a healthy stream of primary materials.
I mentioned earlier that it is the scale at which the NSA operates that makes it dangerous. Only with such concentrated resources and authority can the NSA compromise the entire communications network infrastructure at every layer. Any defense strategy or reform that doesn't squarely address the issues surrounding this unprecedented concentration of power is worse than useless. Clever hacking will not save us from concentrated power; crypto is a workaround and not a sufficient response to the fundamental challenge here. New oversight practices, such as a "privacy advocate" position in the FISA court, will fail as surely as old ones. Organizations like the NSA specialize in telling themselves and others precisely the narratives that justify their abusive, disingenuous conduct in the dark.
Knowing this, statists of all varieties must wrestle with how to check and balance the government in this era. The sheer level of secrecy and abuse here can't help but give the lie to their minarchist approach of legal reform and institutional counterbalancing. Clearly any government abiding an organization like the NSA is no mere accomplice but rotten to the core. Any reform that does not squarely face this reality is insufficient and counterproductive on its face.
While anarchists understand that even this latest outrage will not bring about the revolution, I do think we are uniquely positioned to advocate for extreme measures that others currently find unthinkable. There literally is no alternative, because who could ever trust anything the government does in secret again? The NSA's power and operation in the dark must be scaled far, far back if we are to have a real solution to this crisis. Indeed, the state must be made to understand that its very legitimacy is at stake, and this is a core anarchist goal in the first place.
Dissolution of the state and the NSA may not be politically feasible, but a sharp and crippling cut to the budget--especially the abolition of the secret black budget--may be one concession we can extract from the establishment. After abolition, containing the budget is the next best insurance against power becoming too concentrated in an organization. Granted, this is a long shot, but it both has the virtue of being measureable and also marking a grave reappraisal of the government's legitimacy.
I'm sure each and every person responsible for bringing the NSA cache of secrets to light has a different vision of what reforms are best. However, we are at a unique juncture in history--one we indeed owe to Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others, but nevertheless one which belongs to all of us. Never before have the people faced such pervasive and subtle totalitarianism so undermining to society as we know it. If folks finally consider radical solutions, it will not be because anarchists berated them into it. The right arguments could ensure the separation of the head from the snake this time, if anarchists can model a new attitude towards power that seeks not to alienate opponents but build a qualitatively different consensus.
]]>As you may recall, my approach to egoism is infused with an interest in the metaphysical. Much of political egoism is tied to a spiritual teleos for me because that's my experience of self, my reality tunnel, my model of the phenomenal world. Indeed, egoism appeals to me because it acknowledges the primacy of the subject in subjectivism. Now on the one hand, I go to great lengths not to impose this approach on others. It's not rational, and therefore I simply cannot argue it, and that's not a helpful mode to discuss such matters anyway.
However, I have no qualms about asserting the utility of a more contemplative, introspective, inward-oriented approach to the nature of the ego and the self (as well as the politics involved). I frequently and vigorously push back on the notion that the end goal of egoism is some sort of exaltation of the individual self. Indeed, I'm inclined to think that the ego is much more of a social phenomenon than we often realize, and our experience of ourselves individually can be as memetic and artifical as any institution.
All of that is to frame my quoting from Ken Wilbur's introduction to Talks with Ramana Maharshi. A dear friend of mine showed this to me, and it captures so well the tensions that are often glossed over by the egoists in their fixation on the "outer objects" of the world we perceive. The self is not some foil to the universe in Maharshi's view; there is no need to shove the ego down the world's throat. There is instead an understanding that, if the pure self is going to be a foundation, it needs to be understood as qualitatively different than the self so tightly and dualistically coupled to the world.
What and where is this Self? How do I abide as That? There is no doubt how Ramana would answer those -- and virtually all other -- questions: Who wants to know? What in you, right now, is aware of this page? Who is the Knower that knows the world but cannot itself be known? Who is the Hearer that hearsthe birds but cannot itself be heard? Who is the Seer that sees the clouds but cannot itself be seen?
And so arises Self-Inquiry, Ramana's special gift to the world. I have feelings, but I am not those feelings. Who am I? I have thoughts, but I am not those thoughts. Who am I? I have desires, but I am not those desires. Who am I?
So you push back into the source of your own awareness -- what Ramana often called the "I-I," since it is aware of the normal I or ego. You push back into the Witness, the I-I, and you rest as That. I am not objects, not feelings, not desires, not thoughts.
But then people usually make a rather unfortunate mistake in this Self-Inquiry. They think that if they rest in the Self or Witness, they are going to see something, or feel something, something really amazing, special, spiritual. But you won't see anything. If you see something, then, that is just another object-another feeling, another thought, another sensation, another image. But those are all objects; those are what you are not.
No, as you rest in the Witness -- realizing, I am not objects, I am not feelings, I am not thoughts -- all you will notice is a sense of Freedom, a sense of Liberation, a sense of Release -- release from the terrible constriction of identifying with these little finite objects, the little body and little mind and little ego, all of which are objects that can be seen, and thus are not the true Seer, the real Self, the pure Witness, which is what you really are.
As I read this book, I intend to offer remarks and observations on overlap or congruence between this metaphysical approach to the self and the classically understood egoist philosophy. Maharshi's dismissal of all things as nothing to him is quite literally worlds apart from Stirner's in tone, substance, and intent -- and yet I feel they both draw upon at least a bit of common insight.
]]>Because they are so frequently decent, I'm sometimes tempted to reconcile the profession of policing with the kind of free society I dream about. After all, I have several friends and family who are police officers, and I'm loathe to let ideology darken my opinions of them as individuals. I want to believe policing is possible outside the hegemony of a state, and that these people can be meaningful participants in a stateless community.
But I never persist in that belief very long. I cannot think of any acceptable justification for the existence of law enforcement as an institution at all. The entire enterprise is abominable, root and branch. There is no escaping the conclusion that, everywhere they exist, police are mercenary occupiers serving a power hostile to the authentic human flourishing. As I intend to show, so long as our society exhibits privilege and injustice, I cannot pretend law enforcement does not prop it up in some fundamental manner.
It is the transformation of the function of policing into a profession that chiefly offends me. It's as ridiculous as professionalizing the role of the voter in a democracy. I'm sure contractors or bureuacrats could devise a way to vote more efficiently than any of us flesh-and-blood folks can, but wouldn't that defeat the point? It's crucial to a democracy that everybody vote; it's what makes it a democracy (putting aside whether such formal democratic governance is desirable).
In the same way all eligble members must vote in order for a democracy to be most legitimate and authentic, being a member of a free, self-governing, non-authoritarian community necessarily entails policing on the part of every community member. After all, more is implied by "community" than mere proximity of domiciles. Rather, communities should comprise a population unit bound by shared values, a coherent body brought together and made distinct by the identity emerging from individual lives. When you surrender using coercion as an organizing principle, what other basis is there for collectivity?
These shared values do not ensure there will never be conflict, or even that these communities will always work. They do, however, ensure that the costs, side-effects, and consequences of that community's values will be legible to the people themselves. If you want racism in your community, well, you'll have to do the dirty business of pushing around people yourself--no passing laws and hiring cops to do it for you. If you want to enforce unequal distribution of wealth, you can't hire goons to keep your neighbors fenced off in squalor. Whatever problems face the community, at least the community cannot ignore them.
Professionalizing the policing of communities encourages people to promote values without fully internalizing the costs of doing so. These costs accrue not just monetarily; they are costs incurred through inconvenience, mental calcuation, averting one's eyes, and psychological coping, through the inalienable duties of community membership, through the inability to simply ignore the reality of your fellow man. If you outsource this, you don't just concentrate power in a class of people with obscene incentives to abuse it. You also outsource your ability to learn whether or not your community actually functions at all. And you will be hostage to the police because you're afraid to fully accept and participate in the consequences of your way of life. Shouldn't that tell you something about your community?
I don't understand why anarchists of all stripes underemphasize the degree to which anarchism is necessarily incompatible with mediating institutions like the police. It seems to me that speaking only of what people can expect to get from a stateless society smacks of typical individualist myopia. Abolishing constituted authority confers the duty to regulate and manage personally, relying on everybody to step up and do their part.
You can't hold the responsibilities of human freedom without unfiltered, direct information about the conditions under which that freedom exists. To be free in a particular context must entail an awareness of that particular context. Anarchism, sans ideology, is ultimately about being present, directly experiencing the collective reality, noticing the fluid conditions that are equally capable of frustrating and liberating us all. Any political principles following from that approach downright empirical facts.
Anarchism prefigures a world in which people go about human business in all its facets, without mediation or privilege. Self-government doesn't merely devolve the operations of governance, such as the parliamentary or legal, to the common man. It changes the nature of what we mean by government, transforming it from a formality of institutions running parallel to society into a day-to-day individual duty, a constant creation of and reaction to society, not in spite of the people's confluence and conviviality but as its logical product.
We find ourselves held hostage by police and their increasing demands for more intrusive, more arresting, more egregious domination because we know our communities cannot work on their own. So we put up with the arrogance, the abuse, the concentration of unaccountable power. In addition to pointing out the evil and error of this situation, anarchists must stress that it is also an abdication to the state of the very essence of our social nature. A police force tangibly represents the abandonment of community, a clue that the collective values of the population do not align with the lived reality.
A community doesn't require guards wielding lethal force to maintain itself. It doesn't have to protect those with more privilege, power, or wealth from those with less. The very fact that you have to constantly protect power and privilege in first place, let alone do so by hiring the goon squad, tells you whatever arrangements you wish to protect are artificial, illegitimate, and unsustainable.
If community wealth is imbalanced, of course you will have crime. If you have a subclass of people who are disrespected consistently by the others, of course you will have violence. If you refuse to engage directly with your neighbors, of course you'll need an armed mediation squad to protect you and yours from them and theirs. And if your reaction to the messy business of human beings is to wall yourself off from them with a professional cleanup crew, mopping up the trail of blood and pain your chosen existence creates, of course it will persist. To solve a problem you must first face it.
The police don't create injustice, inequality, suffering, poverty, and crime; those things will probably happen anywhere to some degree. All that police do is maintain the status quo that allows these things to continue and intensify, protecting business as usual from them. "Bad people" exist, but I see no evidence that the police has some sort of unique ability to identify them, so prevalent are they in the halls of power (and donut shops).
By sanitizing the problems our laws, practices, and values create for us, they make our collective dysfunction possible. We don't need to actually respond to the damage we cause; we just pay to have it managed for us, and this default attitude enables many of the intractible, ongoing crises of modern life because the community's fluid, adaptive nature has been denied. The police allow us to pretend this constant failure of humanity is just the way the world is, instead of what we ask them to institute as an alternative to facing it head on.
It's like a town living behind a dam that can't hold; every time it floods, the solution is a bigger, better, more expensive dam, instead of just moving to a place that doesn't require a dam. Similarly, it's as if the police manufacture the community's need for their services, with our all too frequently enthusiastic blessing. While I criticize the individuals who choose the crappy profession of law enforcement for not self-regulating more, I'm sympathetic to their predicament to defend an indefensible and unsustainable order. There's no way to do it but with brutal violence, ubiquitious threats, and raw, unaccountable power.
Professional police create the illusion that we can be passive consumers of government. Law enforcement is the indispensible institution of the modern state, the fulcrum of authoritarianism in our society. The honest anarchist intuitively recognizes this, but may not realize that any future stateless society with a professional police class will inevitably end up as bad or worse. When it comes to anarchism, you cannot alienate your agency to personally produce the society you wish to participate in.
The only alternative to hierarchy, authority, and privilege is to reclaim our inalienable duty to be the police ourselves, to be members of a horizontal community, to be the exemplars of the values we claim to hold dear, and to face danger and suffering squarely. Anything less is nothing but an amusement park, a simulcrum of community that sells us tickets to a cage. That kind of farce has nothing to do with the anarchist project, which concerns humans and the communities that emerge from their congress.
]]>Those of us who make a habit of dissent have gotten used to this frustrating complacency. It demonstrates that we as a social body don't trust ourselves, that the complex of media, government, academia, and business -- otherwise known as the state -- that proports to lead us can be better described as creating and curating our reality. This insight renders many radicals outright misanthropic, but I tend to approach our apathy sympathetically, regarding our behavior as a kind of learned helplessness inculcated by decades of spiritually arresting mediation. When political expediency necessitates disclosure, we don't know what to do with it, much like paroled prisoners who don't know how to live on the outside.
So when the school assembly is over and the principal has made her announcements, thank God the pundits are there to round us up and lead us back to our homerooms, single file. Our passive consumption of pundits' reactions give us a false sense of agency, as if somehow the variety of spins from which to choose is itself empowering. After all, we don't have time in our busy lives to mentally deal with this, let alone exercise our inherent duty to apprehend it. Better to signal our relevancy by choosing our coping mechanism from a buffet of cynicism, jingoist indignation, reformist compromise, or handwringing resignation.
And so it is with the NSA story. As far as I can tell, we're being provided a number of templates that can help us integrate this newly certified reality into our individual matrices, including:
You didn't see it, but you just got jammed. The way we're encouraged to cope with this is to make it about privacy: to turn inwards, take stock of our personal inner domain, and decide just how much of our lives can be offered up to the state. Large scale, bureaucratic intrusion into our personal lives is a given, but we can fill out a customer response card if we have any comments about the degree of the intrusion. If this is about privacy, the onus is on us to define its limits, to guide our servant institutions to the right policies that will protect our newly cordoned-off personal space.
It's in this way that pundits can claim that our ubiquitous sharing on social media validates such large scale, coordinated exploitation. Just like the rape victim was "asking for it" because of what she wore at the time of her attack, we're "asking for it" because our online sharing habits have been deemed unjudicious. They switch from condemning the aggressor to blaming the victim, and they do it because facing up to the cultural inertia behind the aggression risks exposing the perniciousness of the status quo. And so they invent a clever distraction about what the limits of privacy should be -- as if that were the only limits with which we should be concerned. It's like fighting rape by starting a conversation about the definition of tasteful attire.
Well, let me provide a counterspin that I hope is destablizing: when it comes to this matter, I don't give a goddamn about privacy. It's no more relevant to this story than the big paychecks NSA contractors haul in. Privacy, like fatcat military industrial intelligence complex profiteering, is an important issue without a doubt, but it's not at the center of this matter. The scandal is not about privacy, or whisteblowing, or whether Edward Snowden was a bad neighbor, or whether he had enough education to work within the NSA, or whether the media should have published the story, or the decline of community, or any of that. Anybody who makes the conversation about those issues are welcome to; they should find another room to talk in, though, lest they hijack the real conversation.
This is about state-sponsored spying, not personal privacy. The U.S. government has decided the best, most defensible way to fight whatever it deems threatening (now or in the future) is not to create a dossier on every human being on the planet -- that would be totalitarian! Instead they're merely building the infrastructure that enables them to do so both at will and retroactively. All they're doing is merely collecting anonymous "metadata". That's true insofar as it goes (though as a programmer I must protest the abuse of the term "metadata", which typicaly refers to "data about data", whereas phone numbers, emails, Facebook likes and the like are "data about us") but, like most spin, the argument routes around the point with expert precision.
The danger is not so much that government officials are currently investigating you (not that they aren't). It's that if they ever decide they'd like to, they already have your entire history of communication. Normally, an investigation would begin with the gathering of evidence. The cost and effort of beginning to collect evidence is a small and insufficient but important bureaucratic deterrent against starting arbitrary persecutions. However, now an investigation begins with merely bothering to look at the evidence already gathered. Essentially, they started the investigation into you years ago, but it's proceeding on autopilot, waiting for a government spy caring to look.
Imagine, if you will, the NSA claiming the authority to search and catalog the contents of every home on the planet preemptively, but promising never to look at it unless absolutely necessary. The justification is that, in case you're ever accused of a crime in the future, they don't need to assume the burden of getting a warrant or actually searching for what they want to find. They already started it ahead of time, they already have the evidence, and they can just go back and mine that evidence for a crime. Maybe the crime validates the accusation. Maybe along the way they find a totally separate crime. The point is that the investigation is preassembled, a keyword search away from being an actual indictment. If they can create a dossier anytime they want with minimal effort, that's functionally the same as keeping one on you right now.
There's a reason NSA is not in law enforcement: there's nothing limited or legal about the above. It has absolutely, positively zero to do with rights or the law as we understand them. They do what the CIA does to its targets: extralegal gathering of evidence for exploitation at a time of the government's choosing. That is espionage, and there's a reason we abhor it being done to people who are not part of the spy game, let alone people who are supposed to watch over the very government running the spy game.
Yet the most pundits can offer is a shallow, parochial debate about some bourgeois, neutered conception of privacy. For them, this is only about the exact nature of our freedom to share with sufficient insularity pictures of cats, what we had for lunch, and silly memes. Now we need to all sit around indian style and figure out the kind of Stasi with which we'd be most comfortable, what kinds of checks and balances, safeguards and oversight would allow us a good night's monitored sleep.
Don't be fooled. The onus is not on us to properly circumscribe the boundaries of our private lives. The onus is on them to explain the way their leviathan, totalitarian institutions spill out of the confines they agreed to obey, those charters that give them their existence in the first place, the enumerated powers they claim separate them from totalitarian regimes or organized crime syndicates. The lesson here that no pundit will mention is that the state is inherently a scam. This domestic spying on us is but one facet of the overall institutional hegemony that dominates us and teaches us helplessness.
It's understable to feel powerless when massive bureuacracies continually body check your sense of self. If you'd rather ignore the reality of what our world is becoming, fine. But you don't have to accept the turnkey distractions of the punditry. Who knows, one day you may decide that this time they went too far, and if that happens, you'll need a sense of judgment and agency that hasn't completely atrophied.
]]>I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts... And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something. It is enough that I do.
The rest of the interview has some fascinating insights, anecdotes, and theory on networks, social movements, politics and conspiracies, technology, and even ontology (never knew URLs were so deep). Highly, highly recommended!
]]>So, first off: are women and minorities underprivileged in the technology sector? Of course; they are underprivileged in almost every sector of society. Biases, hostile environments, outdated socially constructed roles, bigotry and outright discrimination are pervasive in our community, as they are in most communities. And it doesn't just suck for our community because it's manifestly unjust, but also because it hurts us and our work.
We technologists can write all the code, build all the gadgets, run all the software we want--but if people can't use it, if it doesn't actually solve their problems, if it doesn't speak to their diverse experiences, then it's useless. As women become an ever larger user base, we require their perspective as first-class citizens in the creation of software, hardware, and other high tech products that have become so important. We need to listen to them, sure, but they should also be part of our community as creators themselves, possessing the same skills and ability to pursue their vision in concert with, or independent of, male technologists.
None of this is particularly controversial in the ongoing conversation about women in tech, though I think the ways in which people pursue it often undermines authentic progress. In a field that has experienced such dramatic upheavals on such a regular basis, why has this rather common problem persisted? I want to bring up a few points about institutional power and the nature of community that I believe have been overlooked thus far. I seek to absolve us men of neither our failures in the past nor our responsibility to work towards a more just, compassionate, and inclusive community. But can we do better, and if so, how exactly?
Consider that those who understand the problem as simply "not enough women in the technology community" are being too reductive and simplistic. "The tech community" is a vague, expansive, and shifting concept by which people mean different things. Sometimes it means programmers, hardware technicians, and other highly technically skilled people who associate through online fora, mailing lists, IRC, etc. Other times it means almost anyone with a smartphone, bloggers, social media users, "enthusiasts" of certain tech brands, tech journalists without any specialized knowledge, etc.
First of all, one should be clear about the specific community to which one is referring when discussing gender parity in tech, because it determines what the prerequisites for respect are. Hackers, developers, and other folks with specific technical skills are known for respecting competency. For decades they were the misfits and outcasts who fiddled and experimented, forging a community out of the successes and failures of this often marginalized and forgotten activity. "Open source" as we know it is largely an outgrowth of people who took personal responsibility for the software they used, building a bottom-up meritocracy out of this sorely needed--but unappreciated and uncompensated--labor.
Nowadays, being a "nerd", a "geek", or a "hacker" is looked upon favorably. This has more to do with the money, influence, and outright power that high tech, startups, and non-traditional technology activities of all kinds command in our society; it's not some nerdy arc of history bending towards us. It's important to remember that many of our tech forefathers were themselves socially marginalized. But now you're seeing more people who don't have the skills wanting to associate with that crowd (Portlandia parodied this hilariously, and got the requisite sexism critique).
Now, are women the only party fudging their tech credentials to get a seat at the table? Absolutely not--not even a little bit. There are plenty of skilled women in our industry, but they are often invisible to us. In addition to the standard discrimination all women experience, they often face humiliating assumptions that their participation in the community is merely on the periphery as girlfriends or "booth babes". When they are doing technical work, they often have to deal with bigotry and disrespect from their colleagues.
If there's a weakness to the point I'm making here, it's that I and other men in tech have often dropped the ball in maintaining the emphasis on skill as a measure of merit and respect. It's not always about sexism, but we have often not extended the same compassion to others that we benefited from as noobs. Programmers focus on communicating with compilers and interpreters, and we could spare some effort to work on communicating with human beings who may not be operating on our precise protocol.
Secondly, the phenomenon of unskilled women identifying as members of the tech community is especially sad because I suspect women have long been tracked into careers on the periphery, careers that require more "emotional labor" or "people skills" like management, customer support, and other less-than-technical fields. These roles lend themselves much more to building the organization than building the product itself, and they are consequently more dependent on workplace politics. Indeed, computer operators were chiefly female at our industry's inception--right up until it was discovered that what they were doing was not mere secretary work but took real skill. When bosses (not technologists themselves) systematically exclude a certain type of person, we should not be shocked when it affects the accompanying culture.
In fact, if I had to guess I'd say that unskilled, wannabe males have been infiltrating the tech community in greater numbers and for longer. However, doesn't this therefore mean the gender parity problem isn't some situation unique to bonafide geeks? Instead, this is a situation where a wider social problem is manifesting in a part of society precisely because it has gotten more diverse.
Finally, all this injustice may have had a quite unfortunate side effect: women in tech placed excessive emphasis on the organizational bureaucracy to the detriment of building technical skills, for the very reason that the chief obstacles have been political, not technical. Has the systematic disadvantages experienced by women convinced many to elevate skill in leveraging managerial power over the technical skill that confers legitimacy in our community?
That wouldn't be entirely their fault, given our community's failures to be sufficiently accommodating. But it also suggests this isn't as simple as pure sexism. This is also an issue of class and workplace control, the same constructs that always pit management against labor and induce people to place business interests and career advancement over the actual work and those who do it.
I think this alignment with the formal tech industry against the informal tech community might best explain why Richards addressed the situation by reporting it to conference authorities rather than addressing them directly, as well as why so many women in tech would never behave that way. After all, "developer evangelists" don't write production code much as far as I know. They tend to play a role closer to media personalities or spokespeople, selling to the newly powerful market of software developers, system administrators, and other technologists. Perhaps this is why Richards and many women instinctively appeal to corporate managers, government agencies, academic departments, etc. to champion advancement and equality for women, when the history shows women have every reason to be uniquely and especially hostile towards these centers of concentrated power.
Indeed, if the tech community as a community can be characterized by anything, it is not their rejection of women so much as a disdain for how they are managed. Whether in business, academia, government, non-profits, or other organizations, technologists often feel stifled and let down by the way their skills are employed, the frequency with which their experience and insight are overridden by raw power. They often deal with management grudgingly and derisively (see Dilbert). This is an attitude that singles out power, not women, as the enemies, those who hold the purse strings, boss us around to do what amounts to busy work, taint cool and useful projects with the need to turn a buck, bully us into conforming with byzantine and meaningless top-down policies written by lawyers, and generally make what should be a limitless endeavor appear to be pretty fucking limited on a regular basis.
I believe that's why much of the tech community--male and female alike--chafes at Richards' actions. It's not simply about taking diversity and justice seriously. It's how one pursues those goals and the class with which one instinctively aligns. We techies know arbitrary, under-explained, superficial, imposed demands when we see them, and that's not how members of a genuine community of equals behave or how mistakes and bugs are exposed.
Put aside the distinction between a sexual and a sexist joke. Put aside misunderstandings about the context of "forking". These disputes will happen even without underlying bigotry, and dragging power into it is neither healthy for the community nor how these issues can be resolved. So maybe Richards' behavior shows that she herself doesn't feel part of this community, not that she is a marginalized member.
That could be because of her gender, but it might have more to do with her lack of real participation in our community of skilled technologists. One demonstrates this not by merely "appreciating technology" or "evangelizing for software development" but actively tinkering with it, pushing it, writing it, building it with ever more elegance and ingenuity, creating the open source, bottom-up infrastructure that leads to community, congeniality, respect, and the best possible solutions and standards. Her lack of participation doesn't mean she doesn't deserve respect as a human being; it might very well mean that she doesn't deserve respect as a member of the tech community.
Nothing I'm arguing should be construed as an apology for misogyny in our ranks. I've seen it myself, and have indeed looked for it and expected to find it because plenty of it exists in society at large. Techies are not some special breed of enlightened human.
What it does mean, however, is that looking for a solution from the tech industry--corporations, policies, conferences, and all the constructs duly organized by money and power--is not only utterly mistaken, but it risks casting reform as something that the business folks must impose upon the nerds and geeks, as if through their cleverly crafted anti-discrimination policies, lawyerly anti-harassment tips, and mechanistic affirmative action programs they can or would want to truly empower more people. It's fighting for justice from the top-down rather than from the bottom-up, and the latter has a better history than the former. None of us, in other words, should trust the man.
The elitism inherent in this hierarchical answer to bigotry does little but subvert the meritocracy and decentralized character of our community. Such heavy handed measures will only backfire to the detriment of all, the more marginalized and the less marginalized alike. And when they fail, it will not be seen as a failure of tactics and philosophy, but rather as a reason to keep doing the same thing with broader license and ever more draconian vigor. They can't understand that fighting one kind of oppression by ratcheting up another kind of oppression is a recipe for, well, more oppression, and more confusion about who's doing it and why.
What is the solution to the gender imbalance in tech, the lingering misogyny, the unfairness and imbalance of power? I'm not certain, but I think it includes the following:
As the people who actually write the code, run the servers, build the gadgets, etc. we need to take charge of getting more people involved as equal, skilled peers, especially those from diverse backgrounds representing a variety of world views. The community creating technology needs to look like, understand, and represent all the people using technology. We can do this without subverting the emphasis on quality that the tech community's meritocracy and respect for competence has championed thus far.
The manner in which Playhaven and Sendgrid reflexively fired those involved underlines our desperate need for more control over our careers. We have to distance ourselves from mercurial, bottom line, gray flannel corporations that only seek profit--not just for our own personal freedom, but for the freedom to be a community that can tackle sticky issues like sexism. These institutions, mere abstractions of human behavior, are programmed to see social justice in terms that will always reduce people to homogeneous, shallow, easily managed units of labor, which disempowers us all. We need to depend on ourselves for our livelihoods, since nothing promotes an appreciation for competence over superficial details like one's need to put food on the table. Better yet, let's form a culture of worker cooperatives that can not only help others achieve independence and build solidarity amongst our community but also host the conversations outside the earshot of bosses, managers, and those who just want to capture the community we've built. Finally, and most importantly:
A genuinely free and open conversation about gender, race, and class on our own terms, as human individuals, is sorely needed. It can no longer be subordinated to the special interests of the managerial class or the academic humanists. Just as women should be equal participants in tech, we should be equal participants in figuring out how to be a more just community. Our meritocratic legacy suggests the community's potential to be a truly flat, peer-to-peer forum for a variety of concerns, minimizing the noise of power and hierarchy drowning out the signal of honesty. We might be able to pave the way towards the kind of frank, difficult, honest, and searching exchanges that will help us all see how equally vulnerable and alike we are as human beings. And we can show other industries how to go about doing this without lazily outsourcing the struggle to the managerial class's top-down policy wonks, who only care about justice when and if it affects business as usual.
On that final point: those who have turned gender parity into a rallying cry often grossly understate how nuanced and complicated this coming together is. So you have formulaic presentations like "Anti-Oppression 101" in which some admittedly well-meaning activists represent the struggle as simply changing some personal habits and doing a few things differently. They understand a complicated human matter in terms of statistics and institutional signifiers: how many women are being hired or graduating in our field, or how many reports of discrimination are made? Is it really so simple?
This glosses over the formative role that power and privilege of a non-gender variety play in reinforcing the sexist status quo. Few are asking about the class issues that are arguably more prevalent in tech, or whether getting any gender hired into management shifts the net disempowerment in our industry. By leaving the issue of hierarchy and institutional power totally untouched, those who push a narrow "women in tech" message ignore the crucial ingredient in all oppression: power. Reducing the struggle to a few easy things you can do that won't disrupt your career cannot combat entrenched, organized privileges that sustain the poisonous elements that marginalize people in our field. No, this is revolutionary stuff, and you have to start by liberating yourself.
A truly egalitarian, meritocratic tech community will only thrive once it has built an alternative, parallel tech industry that completely embraces open source, peer-to-peer culture. We must not only take responsibility; we must control our labor and its product so it can be fully leveraged against those ends we choose. Deposing capitalist control of what should be a barrier-breaking, genuinely liberatory community is the only way we can hope to lead the charge for true equality (for more on capitalist faux-egalitarianism, see this essay criticizing from a leftist perspective what we often call "political correctness").
Technology is now an integral part of every institution, from supra-national organizations to families. Those who can operate it have a unique kind of privilege, if you will, that will last no longer than it can be deskilled and commodified by capital. We could choose to leverage this against bigotry on our own terms, without giving the glory to some preening, entitled CEO going through the motions, or some hypocrite who thinks hierarchy is A-OK so long as a person who looks like oneself has a seat at the table. We can see that decentralized, non-hierarchical political groups like LulzSec, Anonymous, and Wikileaks have emerged to take the fight to entrenched power, even as they show how much work we have to do on ourselves still. If we truly care about making our community more just, it means we have to do it ourselves and get rid of all the reactionary, incompatible obstacles that hold us back, those within and without.
]]>Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
It's scary to think that some of our best and brightest are probably being medicated into mediocrity, but I posted the above excerpt for all my friends who wrestle with these issues. Kissing the boots of some jackass has always felt like a small death to me, but I've had the support from family to deal with it in a healthy manner. My mom always told me that getting through the public school system was a game I had to play, since she knew I found it intolerable and incredibly dumb.
I never realized at the time how much such a simple acknowledgement of my reality helped me. There was little she could do about the bureaucratic hell of public schooling, but she could at least let me know that I wasn't crazy. What drives people over the edge isn't the madness of the world so much as denying the madness. Surrounded by people playing a shallow and insincere part, one comes to believe that the elusive happiness we seek is a matter of submission and giving up.
That's why those winks and nods from other folks, signalling that they see the fnords too, mean` so much. If you have the strength to acknowledge what's going on, it doesn't mean you're crazy -- it means you are needed more than ever. We must support each other by simply bearing witness to the reality around us, so that people can keep that inner fire alive and avoid the existential death of surrender and conformity.
]]>And I'm cowed to be an American
Where the drones are watching me
And I won't forget the men who died
In that no-knock raid last week
And I'll gladly lay down on the ground
With my arms behind my back
'Cause there ain't no doubt that I'm under arrest
God help the USA
]]>Obviously, the first thing you need to do is make sure you always have access to the current account as keyed by the subdomain. This means a before filter on any controller that runs under the subdomain that loads in your account. The idea is that once you load the account, you never have to pull it from the database again:
class AccountSubdomainController < ApplicationController
before_filter :current_account
protected
def current_account
@account ||= params[:current_account] ||= get_account_by_subdomain
params[:user][:current_account] = @account if params[:user]
@account
end
def get_account_by_subdomain
Account.where(:subdomain => request.subdomain.downcase).first
end
end
If you're not using an account-specific subdomain, just modify this to pull out the account from the URL or something.
Once we have our account, we need to inject the current account into the params to keep it over the whole request. We also need them in the users subhash if authentication is currently being run. That means you need to define current_account
in your authentication keys, either in the devise.rb
initializer or on your model's devise
invocation:
config.authentication_keys = [:email, :current_account]
This tells devise to use not only the email
request parameter but also the current_account
parameter to look up users. Now we just need to override the lookup method for authentication:
def self.find_for_database_authentication(conditions)
acct = conditions[:current_account] || Account.where("users.email" => conditions[:email]).first
acct && acct.users.where(:email => conditions[:email]).first
end
That's sufficient for the initial login, but if you stop there your app will authenticate correctly, store the user in the session, but never be able to pull it back out. We need to a way to get to the params
to pull that current_account
out and provide it to the user
model for a proper lookup. This is where shit gets a little hacky, because we're going to create an initializer that overrides how Warden does something:
class Warden::SessionSerializer
def deserialize(keys)
klass_name, *args = keys
# add current account into mix so we don't have to pull it from the db again!
args << params[:current_account] if params[:current_account]
begin
klass = ActiveSupport::Inflector.constantize(klass_name)
if klass.respond_to? :serialize_from_session
klass.serialize_from_session(*args)
else
Rails.logger.warn "[Devise] Stored serialized class #{klass_name} seems not to be Devise enabled anymore. Did you do that on purpose?"
nil
end
rescue NameError => e
if e.message =~ /uninitialized constant/
Rails.logger.debug "[Devise] Trying to deserialize invalid class #{klass_name}"
nil
else
raise
end
end
end
end
That's the link between the current_account
in the request and our user
model. Now we just need a way to use it, and instead of using self.find
like that old gist, we'd be better off implementing this on our model:
def self.serialize_from_session(*args)
key, salt, account = args
single_key = key.is_a?(Array) ? key.first : key
account.users.find single_key
end
You should be all set now. Note that this hack has not been well tested, but I thought it was high time somebody shared a different approach. Please advise if you have criticisms or a better way.
]]>To describe this line of reasoning as selective would be a gross understatement. After all, let's assume that labor unions are as evil as the RTW lobby says they are. Even granting that for the sake of argument, labor is not the only interest engaging in collective bargaining. What about the individuals involved in the employing corporation? Aren't these businesses effectively "capital unions" exploiting incorporation laws to achieve a better bargaining position relative to labor? Isn't the reason why investors pool their resources and form businesses to get better deals in the market through economies of scale? Isn't that why they try to get investors rather than simply borrowing all the money for their start-up costs--to spread the risk and the reward?
So unions of labor are only one side of this story; to emphasize collusion on the workers' side is to leave another form of collusion totally unaddressed. Corporations are capital unions, organizations whose members work together to negotiate wages and benefits (and other costs, of course) downwards to get the best return for themselves. Why is one form of collusion wrong and the other not?
I'd add that, in historical comparison to labor unions, corporations are much more fully creatures of the state. While labor unions have existed for much of their history in legally unrecognized forms, arising from the spontaneous organizing efforts of workers themselves, government-granted incorporation has always been a necessarily statist activity. There's nothing free market about dictating to the market that corporations must be dealt with on their own, special terms. Conferring limited liability, entity status, and other privileges on corporations is intervention to skew the market, a crime that can only be laid at the feet of the state and the capitalists that run it.
I view this RTW movement as not only the argument that capital gets to deal with labor in a privileged manner, but also a defense of the entire balance of power between employers and employees. It's about more than just authoritarianism and a system that favors capital over labor; it's also about the legal codification of class distinctions inherent in the structure of production. To the extent capitalists decry so-called "class warfare," I believe they are trying to gloss over the privileged terms on which they want to do business, allowing them to claim there are no classes of consequence while entrenching them further. That allows them to safely defer to the market, while ensuring it always delivers the balance of power they desire.
After all, if RTW folks truly believe that each and every worker deserves the right to negotiate individually with the capital union, why stop there? Why not also grant each and every shareholder, investor, creditor, and other owner of the corporate capital union the right to negotiate individually with the worker himself or his labor union? Why should both the worker and the owner be forced to deal with the extractive, exploitative management class as the exclusive agent of the corporation? If it's unfair for the labor union to monopolize labor relative to a given employer, isn't it equally unfair for the capital union to monopolize capital relative to a given employee?
The reason is that capital unions are politically and legally favored in labor negotiations, because they have always been favored. Our entire political economy is built around doing business on their terms. If you want a genuinely free market in labor, you can start by ridding yourself of the biased narratives that explain how collective barganing is virtuous and crucial for those with money, but unnecessary and evil for those who don't.
]]>A few minutes ago Tasha and I said our tearful goodbyes to our friend and companion for the last twelve years, our beagle Tela. Tela wasn't just a wonderful, cheerful, cuddly dog whom we doted on; her life intersected with our relationship so completely that it is difficult to picture us without her. We always told her that we were a couple, but that she made us a family.
Tela came into our lives because I needed a present for Tasha when she graduated from college. She was actually promised to Tasha before she was even born, and ended up being born on Tasha's graduation day. Tasha would be going back home to start building her pottery business, and I still had another year or so of school. So my mom got me in touch with a breeder in my hometown, and they arranged for us to come visit the litter once it arrived.
If you think beagles are cute, you need to experience beagle puppies. Tela was from a litter of six or seven, but all of them died but her and her brother. Tasha connected with her instantly; she was mostly black with brown and white areas, and she had a little Hitler-moustache-like marking under her nose. If I hadn't been a broke student living in a non-pet-friendly apartment, I might have taken her brother. As it was, we certified ourselves as decent people to the breeders, and a week later we picked her up on the way back from a Disco Biscuits show (Tela is a Phish song, I was kind of a hippie back then).
We took her to my apartment in Fredericksburg and, after playing with her a bit, put her in a crate and went to dinner. That was the last time we ever tried to crate Tela; she did not like and let us know by leaving a mess for us when we got back. Luckily she was so goddamn cute it didn't matter. We still have the photograph of her that first night of hers with us, scared and sitting on (what was to her) a giant pillow on the bed. Matt was actually her first babysitter, as we left her with him the next day at the apartment he and I shared.
Tasha lived in Mathews on her own for the next year, but just about every weekend they came up to visit and hide out in my non-pet-friendly apartment. We spent a lot of time walking around Fredericksburg, and Tela broke hearts left and right. Tasha and I also went on our first backpacking trip together, and we brought little Tela--probably not a good idea in retrospect, since the elevation changes were pretty bad for us, let alone a little puppy. However, as the consummate hound, Tela loved trails, and held her own the whole time. The only exception was a flash storm where we all got drenched, and Tasha made a makeshift sling out of a towel and carried Tela against her chest like a baby carrier for the next hour or so.
One fixture of Tela's life was The Poddery, where Tasha worked for many years. It was on fourty acres of rural land in Mathews, and Tela could roam around to her hearts content. Everywhere else she was on a leash or fenced in, so this was a big deal. She would wander off for hours, but when we'd call, inevitably she'd coming racing back, often smelling like something really, really smelly she got into. She also socialized with the resident German Shepherd, LeRoy, and they were good friends.
Until recently, Tela spent time in Mathews when we needed to leave her and travel. Tasha's parents would watch her, and she grew mighty close to them. Tasha's dad can't hear high pitched noises, so Tela's whining never got her any food, and she eventually stopped whining altogether around him. This was also helped by the fact that he always gave her a great meal after he ate. Tela turned Tasha's dad into a dog person, and they ended up adopting a hound puppy that we found abandoned in Mathews. That puppy grew to be six times Tela's size, but there was never any doubt who was in charge. I should mention that she was not an anarchist like me, but a natural ruler.
Tela never liked getting in water. One time in Mathews, we were at the beach swimming in an area where the outgoing tide left little islands. We really wanted to see Tela swim, so I did something mean--I went out to one of the little islands and whimpered and whined like I was hurt. Tela started whining back at me, and then jumped in and doggie-paddled over to me, crying the whole way. I was so heartbroken after that that the only other time I made her swim was when I was canoeing with her at The Poddery, and the guy with me capsized the canoe (to operate a potato cannon, but that's not germaine). Everybody went underwater in a flash, and when I bobbed up and got my bearings, I could see Tela paddling and crying. I put her on land and she instantly peed. Good girl!
One thing that was tough was that she never liked car trips. We used to take her to Shenandoah National Forest often for backpacking and hiking, but she got really nervous and panty in the car. It might be because, one time, we put her in the front seat while Tasha changed in the back after a hike, and she got her collar caught on a piece of metal in my car and almost choked to death. After that, Tasha always insisted we remove her collar when we left her alone.
Tasha and I moved to Tappahannock to be in between her work and mine, so we were basically out in a cornfield for over three years. This afforded Tela many opportunities to spot and chase rabbits, and we had some good places to walk as well. Once when we were walking down a road by a cornfield, a puppy lept out and went up to Tela. Tela never really got along with other dogs well, especially ones she didn't know, but she helped me find an entire litter that had been abandonded. We were able to place them all in good homes, ensuring that Tela could be the only baby again, which was exactly how she liked it.
Tela was part of our wedding party, and her outfit actually cost more than mine! We got married at The Poddery, so it was someplace where we all could become a real family on paper. This was right after we had moved to Richmond, when Tela was really maturing and had fully developed her personality. She really liked cuddling and comfort, and would snuggle down the bottom of the bed to find it. She loved belly rubs, smelling things, and of course, FOOD. Her greed for food was a force of nature, and we were never quite able to stop her from whining while we ate--the best we could do was get her not to whine but merely tremble violently in anticipation of some treat when we were done.
When we finally moved into our house, Tela made it her own. She staked out exactly where she wanted to nap, where she wanted to sleep, and where she wanted to roam outside, which just happened to be the area we fenced in for her. Tasha's sister and brother-in-law, Kristal and John, moved into the neighborhood a few blocks away with their dachshund, Boudin, who was just about exactly the same size. We went on a lot of walks around Springhill, down Buttermilk Trail and across Belle Isle. I really appreciate where we live because it afforded Tela wonderful walks during the last years of her life.
Unfortunately, Tela had been diagnosed with weak kidneys years ago, and this caught up with her in late September. She eventually went blind for a few weeks until we got her hypertension under control, but her recovery was tepid. Her once voratious and ever-present appetite disappeared, and we couldn't get her to eat, let alone take her medicine. Eventually she became so lethargic and obviously unhappy that we finally knew it was time to say goodbye. Our vet graciously offered to come to our house and put her to sleep. She died with Tasha's arms around her and her chin resting on my hand as I looked into her eyes.
I never had a pet growing up. Tela was not only my first dog, but the first person (yes, she is a person, just not human) who was completely dependent on me. But she was also the first creature I ever encountered who loved me so wordlessly that I had to open my heart completely, without any thinking or intellectualizing. I wonder if I'd ever let myself down if I saw myself the way she obviously always saw me. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that dogs, and probably lots of animals, are sentient beings who have personalities and feel love. And her expert taste in comfort inspired us to make her house a home. She will be dearly, dearly missed by Tasha, me, her family, and all who knew her.
]]>Marat
these cells of the inner self
are worse than the deepest stone dungeon
and as long as they are locked
all your revolution remains
only a prison mutiny
to be put down
by corrupted fellow prisoners
The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, by Peter Weiss, Athenium. 1965
]]>