Advances. None Miraculous.

LonTario and the Removable Tent

2011-11-09T17:52:00.001-05:00

I have always known that I grew up in what was, essentially a bastion of right-leaning dingbats. London Ontario, in my personal memory was desperate to enjoy the benefits of a city existence while attempting desperately to avoid the politics of one. The ‘small town mentality’ of my place of birth is recognized by anyone I’ve met who has lived there … or simply stayed there for a prolonged period of time.

It should be mentioned that this is not, in itself, necessarily a bad thing. Small town people are not inherently bad people. Problems ermerge, however, when a polity attempts to hang onto a modality of existence that is plainly incompatible with the size of that municipality: It means that things are being ignored. London has a long and fabled history of preventing larger retailers from moving into the city because certain stalwart members of the community did not want to deal with the increased traffic. The University is perpetually at odds with the local community which is more than happy to enjoy the benefits provided by the city’s largest employer, but finds the students that come with those benefits loud, messy and frequently soaked in alcohol.

London, then, is simply too big to approach itself as the sort of stuffy community that doesn’t have to deal with the problems affecting the rest of the world. Not that they don’t try – but it is a battle that has been fought for as long as I can remember and it shows no signs of abating.

It comes as no surprise, then, that London Ontario is the first municipality to move against its Occupy encampment. Last night, the police moved into the protester’s tent city in Victoria Park. The tents were confiscated by the police and the protesters (temporarily) dispersed. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Amazingly, no one was arrested. Full credit, then, to the police for pulling off a surgical job (even though I wish they’d just joined in with the demonstration). It does make me wonder, though …

Is the cleanliness of this action down to a desire on the part of the police to avoid physical conflict? It’s possible. Still, I wonder if this obsession with a small-town modality is so prevalent that the idea of a mass arrest or a conflict between protesters and the police in the streets of LonTario is anathema to the city’s idea of itself. In other words, were the protesters spared the full wrath of an indignant 1% simply because the brawl would have been a tacit admission that London is no longer a town (and hasn’t been one for a very long time)? I don’t have an answer for this … but I will be thinking about it tonight …

Whatever the case, here’s hoping that those involved in the Occupy protest in LonTario can carry on … and that, if the police continue to represent the government rather than the people, they do so with restraint.

Movin' On Up

2011-10-14T16:24:00.000-04:00

A significant amount of my research deals with surveillance and the idea of the panoptic. That it is the current model for most first-world prison systems or that it applies to the datafication of the entire populous of the planet under the weight of the digital revolution is well established. What I find fascinating is the way in which the idea of the panoptic can indeed conform to different national cultures.

New Yorkers are so often derided for being obnoxious, Starbucks-swigging, quasi-cultured faux-European poseurs that it’s genuinely nice to come across an example that indicates the Big Apple is just as capable of fusing laziness, an unnatural attachment to Star Wars (think of the AT-STs from Empire), the automobile obsession and the assertion of freedom through overt dictatorial mechanisms as the rest of the country. The following photograph, taken by an ever-vigilant friend of mine, will better illustrate my point:

What we appear to be witnessing in this instance (and, to be fair, I haven’t been thinking about this object for a very long time) is the stop-and-search equivalent of the drive-thru window. The realization that the guard tower can now be driven to the point of concern and the dynamics of the total surveillance prison can be enacted anywhere on the street adjusts our relationship with systems of power in two ways.

The first is obvious: the ability of the police to view, capture and develop a case against a citizen is mobile, technological and allows the traditional, permanently fixed globe of the CCTV camera to shift from one location to another location. The physical aspects of the city are less stable than before – our relationship with objects that indicate power no longer fits to the object/stable – human/mobile dynamic … or not as clearly as before anyway.

The second is a bit more interesting. SkyWatch (the name of the tower) offers an opening in our understanding of urbanity from a public perspective. The necessity of a tower that is mobile might function as an indication of the fallibility of a power structure that encourages us to think that it is omniscient. There is a desperation that emerges from this thing; the need to turn the urban landscape into a potential prison block at the drop of a hat might indicate to us just how much of the landscape is a permanent blind spot on the security system’s radar screen.

The use of SkyWatch is problematic at best. The option to erect a guard tower anywhere on an urban map at the whim of the police puts all of us in the position of a potential prisoner. With that in mind, it might just be how obvious this thing is that makes me chuckle at it rather than feel a genuine sense of concern. More likely, though, that’s an indication that I’m becoming far too comfortable with the sensation of being watched at all times for no good reason at all …

It Takes a Thug ...

2011-10-12T21:15:00.000-04:00

Another expression of irrational optimism on the part of Amnesty International today. They’ve demanded that George W. Bush be arrested upon his arrival in Canada later this month and subsequently handed over for trial at the World Court.

It’s not that everyone knows he’s guilty – that doesn’t take a great deal of investigation to parse out. The Bush administration tacitly admitted it was waterboarding people and used other ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques when the plumbing wouldn’t cooperate. We now know that those claiming that the Iraqi government was in possession of weapons of mass destruction were aware that the charge was, at best a long-shot and, at worst, most likely false. We also know that Condolezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and, yes, Colin Powell (among a host of others) should be on trial for war crimes they have unabashedly copped to. From the torture of captives and the continued denial of due process for those detained to the prosecution of at least one illegal war, there is more than enough evidence to hold a trial at the very least.

None of this really matters as there is absolutely no hope that the Harper government would actually stand up to the United States under any circumstances. The man we currently have running our country is a mean-spirited bullying thug who is more than happy to stomp people who can’t defend themselves but has never shown any indication that he would be willing to lose a fair fight on principle. The idea that a Canada run by the political non-entities that made up the former Liberal government would challenge the absolute authority of the US is far-fetched enough. The suggestion that Harper might develop a conscience before the 20th of October borders on delusion.

I like that Amnesty has bothered to make this suggestion. They’re too well read, though, to be strangers to Canada’s record with respect to its own human rights abuses, let alone its willingness to look the other way when an ally is carrying out crimes. The mention is nice, but I would honestly be curious to find out whether there is anyone at the head office who really expects this argument to generate any real support. I admire their tenacity but I have to wonder whether the announcement made today was more about asserting what the right thing is rather than a ray of hope that the right thing might actually happen this time …

The Price Is 80 and rising.

2011-04-28T23:14:00.002-04:00

While I’m ranting, here, I’d like to point out that more than 80 people have been arrested in advance of tomorrow’s Royal Wedding. At first glance, it appears that the majority of those under arrest are guilty of simply planning to stage protests in a supposedly democratic country … but it’s the appearances that matter right? We can’t have the nuptials, that are being framed in an aggressively public context, have to deal with issues relevant to the public, now can we?

Ignoring, for the moment, the myriad arguments that might go against planning a protest during a royal wedding – the positioning of a spectacle around another spectacle enhances the exposure of the root event and, as such, the first spectacle is folded into the dominant text and disappears; the sentimentality of the zero-level of the event will make any attempt at a political point appear callous and opportunistic; etc. – the practice of arresting people on the basis that what they might do would be inconvenient for those in positions of power is a pretty good indication of where the British public rank on the government’s list of priorities.

I know that any protest carried out during the wedding is virtually guaranteed to backfire. I would also argue that a demonstration during the event lends credence to an essentially pointless bit of pageantry. In light of all of that, though, what I’m going to be fuming about for a long time after this is that 80 people are under arrest due to their connections with lawful protests over tuition fee hikes. It lends a great deal of credibility to the argument that the ConDemNation is entirely about stability through force, might in the place of right, and the preservation of appearances no matter what the cost.

The Jury's Out ... and It Doesn't Matter

2011-04-28T22:15:00.002-04:00

Any trial, when it comes to criminal responsibility, always seems to come down to intent. My memory is very, very spotty when it comes to legal terminology, but mens reas sounds right …

The coroner in the Ian Tomlinson inquest has instructed the jury, “has been told it can return a verdict of unlawful killing, but only if it is satisfied the police officer who beat him with a baton and shoved him to the ground acted deliberately and illegally.” In the abstract, it is difficult to imagine that anyone could view the footage of the attack on Tomlinson and determine that the blow that knocked him to the ground was unintentional. So, that leaves us with ‘illegal’.

Anyone who thinks that there aren’t different rules for security forces and civilians is simply not paying attention. A couple of days ago, the Met announced that it was charging Alfred Meadows with “violent disorder contrary to Section 2 Public Order Act 1986.” This was presumably the reason that a member of the police saw fit to bust his head open during that protest. The officer will most likely not be charged for that assault – assuming that we’ll even find out who he was – and the reason for this is that the overture to ‘control’ in a contemporary western culture is enough to justify the blatant and obvious implementation of a double-standard. Those who voice opinions that have to do with the modification of how a government is run are subject to acts of force whereas those who act on behalf of protecting that government may use force with a drastically reduced risk of objective oversight.

But, back to Tomlinson …

In the case of PC Simon Harwood, the verdict is essentially irrelevant. No decision is capable of bringing back a dead man. No amount of condemnation is adequate for a man who suggested that clubbing a man who was walking away with his hands in his pockets was an act of self-defense. Harwood, whether he intended to kill Tomlinson with that blow or not, is a thug who has no business working in a position that requires violence.

The real issue here is the fact that it has taken this much effort to bring a prosecution to bear on a case that included video evidence of the crime and a plethora of witnesses. The decision in this case will undoubtedly matter a great deal to the people who counted Mr. Tomlinson as a family member and a friend. For the rest of us, however, this case and the charging of Mr. Meadows should have us wondering what a win could possibly look like.

Imagination, Greed and Idiocy

2011-03-23T23:13:00.000-04:00

First, a qualification: I’m aware that my area of interest has virtually nothing to do with scientific enquiry and that this may devalue my further comments in this post.

So be it.

The announcement that the new president of Canada’s National Research Council has decreed that all research should work toward, “boosting economic development and technology, with less time for pure science” is disturbing to put it mildly.

It is worth noting that virtually none of the major advancements in technology that currently dominate the market (computers, cell phones, the Internet and the Global Positioning System [GPS] to name a few) were developed in the private sector. Broadly speaking, the major advancements that are made in science have to be done without a financial goal in mind because the risk of failure is so high and the initial return on investment is entirely speculative. That doesn’t mean that private companies won’t be able to reap massive profits off the technology or discovery once it’s developed. What it does mean is that the private sector has historically been too stupid or frightened to push the developments that subsequently inflated it.

That’s the capitalist argument against what John McDougall is proposing.

The ideological argument is a little more difficult to justify to half-wits who think the only real value of an idea is determined by the amount of money that accrues to its implementation, but I’ll try anyway. The actual naming of ‘customers’ and ‘partners in industry’ implies that the only real value to any kind of research (in this case scientific) is who it can make money for and how much. This is anathema to academic ambition. The purpose of any kind of academic work should be to understand the body/area/world/universe we live in on a more nuanced level and, as a result, hopefully make the world a better place. Typically, academics are optimists. The worth of the work they want to do is determined by its value to the rest of humanity. We typically want to help the largest possible number of people we can. There is very rarely a financial assessment to this. It doesn’t really factor in. And, for the reasons mentioned above, it shouldn’t.

The idea that there are some areas of human endeavor that belong outside of the market is something that is very difficult to communicate to neoliberals. As much as academics see the value of their work in the good it can do to the community, neoliberals see the value of anything in how much capital is accumulated as a result of its implementation. Cash is king, as they on the other side of the Atlantic, and academic discourse cannot possibly impress a mindset like that. It isn’t something that is supposed to generate an immediate profit. That has happened down the road in a number of instances, and on a scale that challenges the limits of avarice, but the initial valuation of the project should be on whether it advances our understanding of something in a profound way.

If we limit our endeavors to a simple profit perspective, there is no possible outcome other than stagnation. The following is a quote directly from the article in the Ottawa Citizen:

The new system, with most funding awarded by top management, will put existing staff in a position of having to apply to their employer to keep doing their own work. So far, they aren't faring well: McDougall notes that his scientists have suggested more than 70 research areas. But most of these have no clear "market driver" or "purposeful direction," he writes.

People like McDougall are poison. They have no imagination and, as a result, tend to do fairly well in business. Not extremely well; that requires daring and creativity. They do well enough, they make the right friends, and they speak very loudly at dinner parties in a constant attempt to prove that their success is the result of some inner quality only understood and validated by the market. The truth is that they stand on the shoulders of giants. Their justification for their standing is always post hoc ergo propter hoc. It would be nice if we could figure out a way to let researchers do good work without the caveat of propping these frauds up.

Revisiting Frank

2011-03-23T11:29:00.001-04:00

It's been ages since I had a look at Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool. I'd forgotten how much I liked it ...

"From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contrived cursing to saintly consumerism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Bob Dylan and to the astoundingly pretentious works of groups like Iron Butterfly and The Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s."

For some reason I'm having trouble getting that overrated fraud Lady Gaga out of my head right now ...

Enthusiasm and Ordnance

2011-03-21T23:25:00.000-04:00

Canadians are often affronted by the suggestion that we have an inferiority complex. While I sympathize with the reaction, I think that there is a justifiable track record to back up the accusation.

The current example would be our participation in the bombing of Libya alongside the US, France, Great Britain and others. The moral issues that surround the action are too dense to get into here (for the record, I am deeply ambivalent about the idea of bombing civilian areas in a supposed attempt to cripple Libyan anti-aircraft weaponry), but I find Canadian defense minister, Peter MacKay's assertion that Canada is, “very fortunate to be in a position to respond” to the United Nations endorsement of the bombing campaign unnerving.

It made major waves in Canadian politics and ruffled more than a few American feathers when Canada declined to participate in the most recent invasion of Iraq. Much of the American response amounted to a sense of betrayal – that we were obligated out of a sense of kinship to participate. I'm not certain that the Harper government's decision to get involved as quickly as possible isn't a regression along the same lines; we have to saddle up simply because the United Nations and our closest Western allies have announced their intent to do so. In schoolyard terms, we are about to jump off the bridge because everyone else is doing it.

For the record, I don't see how we can assume that bombing campaigns are going to manage to avoid causing 'collateral damage'. The absurd term, 'surgical strike' was more or less debunked after the rubble caused by the Persian Gulf War had been analyzed. I know that MacKay has tried to assuage the country's very rational fears that civilians will be hurt; “New technology should make it easier to avoid hitting civilians during the operations, he said, but the Canadian Forces are aiming for the least possible impact on civilians.” The key words in that statement are, 'least possible.' Civilians will be killed, the tyrannical government of Libya will respond in kind, and the people the 'allied forces' are claiming to protect will be threatened not only by their own government but the the overzealous enthusiasm of a group of supposedly benevolent outsiders. The end result of this action in Libya is that the old colonial powers are invading a supposedly sovereign nation in the name of preserving democracy and protecting the citizens of Libya.

Again, this is too big an argument to really get into here. That said, this ideological stance that indicates we have a responsibility to meddle in the affairs of other countries if we can come up with some condescending justification for it reeks of a lack of self-awareness. Peter MacKay's allegation that we are duty-bound to take part in the newest Western military operation has more to do with a reflexive need on the part of Canadians to feel relevant than it does with some overriding sense of moral obligation.

All Sales Final

2011-03-20T20:14:00.000-04:00

There is something a bit unnerving going on here. The announcement that the US State Department will be granting the BBC World Service a ‘low six-figure’ sum to ‘invest in anti-jamming technology and software’ makes me worry greatly about the supposed autonomy of the BBC.

I remember way back when, what was then called CBC News World (they’ve rebranded to ‘News Network’ now) announced they would be breaking up their broadcasts for private-sector advertising out of financial necessity. The announcement was met with horror by CBC devotees – myself included – because we wondered what this would do to the supposed objectivity of the journalism produced by the network. We all knew that CNN and other private networks were at the mercy of their sponsors when it came to what stories they could run with and which ones would be spiked, but we’d hoped that a government-run and independently monitored news network would be at least partially free of manipulation on behalf of the market. Whether that was really true or not is open to debate, but I think we can confidently argue that private sector influence is lower with respect to the editorial decisions of public broadcasters than private ones.

Why am I mentioning all of this in light of the BBC World Service’s acceptance of money from the US State Department? There are a number of reasons. Firstly, I think we need to be very wary regarding the issue of motive here. Supposedly, the goal here is to provide a broadcaster who has international credibility with the tools to potentially force signal exposure inside controlled areas like China and Iran. The purpose behind this is probably something a bit more subtle than the altruistic, ‘all citizens of the world deserve access to a variety of information sources.’ The real question is why what is supposedly a British broadcaster would be interested in carrying out the ideological work of a branch of the American government. I know that the BBC’s budget is being hacked at by the Cameron government but for an organization that has built its identity on international credibility, the acceptance of money and equipment with the expressed purpose of carrying out the ideological work of another government seems very strange to me no matter how dire their financial situation might be.

Much like the CBC’s decision to allow private investment in the form of paid advertising, this opening-up of the BBC to external interests is deeply troubling. I’m not naive enough to believe that any part of the BBC has ever truly functioned as an autonomous entity, but the fact that another government can buy the manpower and ideological weight of the World Service, the fact that those things are even for sale in a competitive environment, speaks volumes as to where we are regarding the independence of journalists, media systems and whether the old guard of journalism can really be trusted anymore.

Goldfish and Blackbirds

2011-01-04T23:38:00.000-05:00

There is something deeply eerie about the mass deaths of fish and birds in Louisiana and Arkansas in the last couple of days. I’m not the superstitious type, and will infuriate many of my friends by vocalizing thoughts they say should be kept private lest I bring on a jinx. That said, the suggestion that 500 small birds could simply fall out of the sky for anything other than atypical reasons boggles my imagination.

I remember watching an episode of Derren Brown’s Trick of the Mind series in the UK where a number of ‘celebrities’ were ushered into a room with a variety of objects scattered throughout it. In one corner there was a table with a bunch of magazines scattered across it, in another, an area that was littered with toys, at the back was an aquarium with a goldfish swimming around in it, and so on. Above the door leading out of the room was an electric screen that displayed the number zero. The celebs were then told that they would be allowed out of the room once the counter reached fifty … or a hundred … or something; it’s been a while since I’ve seen that episode.

The celebs set to moving around the room and interacting with the objects. The counter above the door began to start counting up at irregular intervals and those locked in the room surmised that there was some activity being carried out that was causing the counter to go up. They set about attempting to figure out what that activity was by interacting with different things and waiting to see if the counter went up.

There was no traceable correlation between the actions taken by the occupants of the room and the progression of the counter above the door. Though there was demonstrably no connection between their doing something and the counter going up and their continuing to do that same thing and the counter subsequently not going up, they continued to try to find the right approach to get the door open.

Needless to say, the counter reached the required number and the inmates were allowed out of the asylum. After their release, Brown explained to the television audience that the counter was simply keeping track of the number of times the goldfish touched the sides of the aquarium. There was no way the celebs could increase or decrease the progression of the counter. It was out of their control.

Brown pointed out that, though this might appear a bit dishonest, it does illustrate something very interesting about human nature. We all want to see our role in events that are completely out of our control. We would like to think that we have a larger influence than we do and we have a habit of seeing our hand in events that are entirely beyond our influence.

This is the only consolation I can come up with to the announcement that animals are dropping dead in massive numbers in the Southern United States. I hope that it is simply the whims of a captive goldfish and not some moron (or group of morons) who have more power than they realize. Regardless, events like this give me the willies ...

Can We Schedule a Signing At the Hague?

2010-11-09T18:55:00.000-05:00

It would be absurd to suggest that I didn’t know this day was coming. All presidents write memoirs.

I will admit that I haven’t read the book yet. All things considered, I’m not sure I’d be able to make it all the way through if I were to try. The idea of scanning across page after page of justification for what, under any objective assessment, was the worst presidency in American history sounds like it would be about as much fun as a three-month long dental surgery session.

I loathe George W. Bush. I really mean that. I’ve heard Noam Chomsky describe him as a “spoiled frat boy” and I think that is an accurate assessment. That said, I do think that it ignores the pure fraudulence of the man. The ridiculous positioning of him as a “Washington outsider” (particularly in light of the fact that his father was head of the CIA, Vice President for two terms and President for one) compounded with the suggestion that he’s just an average guy (who ran a Major League baseball team, personally drove more than one company into the ground and had enough family clout to step past the draft and be sworn into the Texas National Guard the same day he applied for entry) belies something more than a sense of entitlement. This is a guy who is used to getting his way and is used to getting away with things.

People will buy this scumbag’s book. There are those who still hold him up as an example of ‘what makes America great’. They will flip through the pages, linger over the passages indicating Dubya’s professed uncertainties and subsequent resolve to ‘do the right thing’ and they will feel a kinship with him. They will continue to worship this trust-fund sucking jack-o-lantern and the rest of us will have to choke back the bile while wondering why the table he’s sitting at isn’t on the defense side of a courtroom in the Hague.

I Hear Munchkins Singing

2010-11-02T23:21:00.002-04:00

I have just discovered that Christine “I’m Not a Witch; I’m You” O’Donnell has failed in her grab at a Delaware Senate seat in the US. I can’t say I’m surprised. I had always assumed that no majority in any state could possibly be dumb enough to elect a half-wit zealot no matter how much money and press time had been devoted to her.

That said, the overwhelming impression this outside observer gets from this election is one of hysterical selfishness. Between the abhorrent rants against the funding of a public health care system to the irrational rage over the reestablishment of an estate tax for the ridiculously wealthy, the ghost of Horatio Alger continues to plague my friends to the South. It is only two short years before the next election and one would hope that, by then, many will have realized that a state that can support the poor and the disenfranchised cannot operate without tax revenue.

This is optimistic, however. The dark side of the American Dream is this notion that everyone will one day be fabulously wealthy. For most it won’t happen, of course, but it is the easiest way for those with a lot to lose to sell the idea of low taxes and a weak state to those who need support from a state structure because there is no inherent profit to be made in the practice.

I’m drifting slightly from the point here. I’ll make this a quick one and simply note that the defeat of that simpering twit in Delaware and Carl “I’m a racist, misogynist homophobe because I’m in the construction industry” Paladino in New York only just eases my fears about a return to neoliberal hyper-conservatism in the US. As long as voters believe that there are miracle fixes to major policy problems, there will be no responsibility in government. It isn’t required.

I'll Have To Rally From a Distance ...

2010-10-27T17:45:00.002-04:00

I have to admit that I’m absolutely gutted I’m not going to the Rally to Restore Sanity this weekend. I’d planned to, but a number of personal and professional engagements have kept me from making the commitment.

That said, I wish the organizers well. With this weeks Toronto mayoral race marked the appointment of a man who clearly doesn’t understand the scope of his new powers. And, more to the point, it is this characteristic that makes me think that if Rob Ford had been born south of the 49th parallel he’d be running as a Tea Party candidate somewhere.

I’ve been more than a little worried about this Western return to hyper-conservatism over the last few years. Nicholas Sarkozy elected to the highest office in France, the British public being forced to pay to widen the door frames at 10 Downing to fit David Cameron’s corpulent physique into the Prime Minister’s residence, and the continuing degradation of my home country’s parliament by a mean-spirited bullying neoliberal (Stephen Harper). For a while now, it’s seemed as though frightening voters was the only sure-fire way to win an election.

I suppose that’s why I breathed a sigh of relief when the Obamas won the Whitehouse. The honeymoon was short, and he’s disappointed on more levels than he’s impressed (witness the continuing legal abortion at Guantanamo Bay), but at least it meant that not every voter in the Republic was a coward, that there were people who were optimistic about the potential of their political system rather than overwhelmed with an irrational emotional urge to abolish it. And, frankly, even though there have been plenty of hang-ups, I like to think that that’s still the case … despite this week's evidence and the wave of absurdity coming across the news wires in the run-up to the midterms.

All said, good luck to Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert. I hope the numbers are massive. I hope that Washington streets vanish in a sea of people bellowing against emotional and fearful politics and a push toward informed debate and consensus.

It is always a mistake to think that things can’t get any worse. This is particularly what should push us to ensure that things get better.

Beyond These City Walls

2010-09-26T19:05:00.000-04:00

I haven't written here about surveillance in a while. I suppose I'd thought it might be getting a little boring for the handful of people who read these entries and it seemed like a good idea to mix things up a bit.

That said, the news that the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (or UAVs) is becoming increasingly enticing to the UK domestic policing services is interesting. In the abstract, the policing services have been using helicopters for a very, very long time. They've had to be relatively careful, however, as helicopters hovering overhead are a pretty good indication that the cops are onto you and, predictable, running those massive machines for any length of time is extremely expensive.

Beyond the fiscal considerations, though, there is something new here. What fascinates me from the article in the Guardian on Friday is, that, “[h]overing at heights of around 60 meters, they are said by manufacturers to be virtually invisible from the ground”. Some of those paranoid fantasies about technology exposing the whole of humanity to discovery at any time may have been a bit more prescient than we'd thought.

To be more precise, what interests me about this is not the suggestion that cameras are now mobile. The use of helicopters for domestic policing is nothing new. What I do find compelling is that, like satellites, there is now a low-cost option for the recording of human events from above that is nearly invisible to the naked eye. In other words, where we have become accustomed to seeing cameras mounted on walls in shopping malls, train stations or airports, the capacity for CCTV to move physically tweaks the dynamic a little.

CCTV is traditionally something that is tethered to a specific space. The locus of the camera is an important component of the understanding of the image. Space is surveilled according to relatively reliable assessments of need; high crime rate, perceived value of property within view of the camera, demands of local political representatives, etc. We know that the cameras are there more often than we don’t. The telltale object bolted to the wall in your local train station or the opaque inverted black dome built into the corner of the newer city buses you take back and forth to work are entirely typical sites in today’s urban environment. We know that certain spaces are of interest.

The realization that this practice has gone mobile, however, and in a very inexpensive way (comparatively speaking – these little drones apparently go for only £30k apiece) shifts the dynamic a bit. I’m not suggesting that there will someday be clouds of drones hovering over London or Toronto, but the realization that the process of establishing (near) constant surveillance is no longer limited to an urban area is a major shift in the paradigm.

Tea Partiers and the Centrality of 'Me'

2010-09-19T15:35:00.000-04:00

It is almost too easy to take a shot at Christine O’Donnell … but I’m going to do it anyway.

It is important to take some of these things seriously, of course, and the idea of a gang of half-educated religious fundamentalists taking over the legislature of the United States (again) should give us all pause.

Christine O’Donnell has been openly mocked for her history of financial irregularities (in fact, a non-partisan citizen’s group has recently demanded the government investigate her for illegally claiming personal expenses out of campaign funds) and her, frankly, moronic attitudes about sexuality and relationships. But, I think there’s something a bit more troubling going on here than a simple case of stupid people being elected to powerful positions in the United States. After all, that happens everywhere in the West (Nick Griffin in the United Kingdom as an example).

What worries me about the rash of Tea Party victories in the recent primary elections in the US is that I can smell the corpse of Horatio Alger upwind. The amount of damage that horrible jackass did to the American psyche is drastically underappreciated. Most people credit Ayn Rand with turning the act of being mean-spirited and selfish into a virtue in American culture, but I think that her contribution is contributory rather than solitary. Horatio Alger had that swagger that the Tea Partiers seem to value, that open-ended hypocrisy and myopicism that comforts the greedy and obliterates the recognition of luck in an evaluation of success.

The whiny, cowardly, selfish shrieking that is the hallmark of the Tea Party’s brand has more to do with the an unwillingness to admit that someone who has a comfortable lifestyle and solid financial prospects probably has circumstance to thank as much as their own hard work. The main vibe I get off of the Tea Party movement is a sense of entitlement and this is where Christine O’Donnell comes in. In short, she is not unique. She’s not particularly talented or bright as near as I can tell, and that is what makes her the perfect Tea Party candidate for office; she is mediocre, ignorant and frightened. She plays off these qualities by packaging cowardice as a pro-active political stance. Taxes – money of hers that will be taken from her earnings and put into programs that would benefit the rest of society (schools, roads, police, etc.) – are the single greatest indication that government is not doing its job properly and that everyone who is in need is simply lazy and trying to take advantage of her hard work.

I really think this is the element where the Tea Party phenomenon is most terrifying to us outside of the United States. Less than two years ago a collective sigh was released around the world when Obama was elected. I think many of us knew deep down that Obama was probably just as flawed and opportunistic as previous politicians, but there was a moment of hope that this heralded a new era where the American electorate stopped elevating morons … or people who posed as morons. The elevation of fear mongers and cynical hustlers like Christine O’Donnell and Louie Gohmert has many of us afraid that the wave has started to roll back too soon.

No Shoes, No Cops, No Service

2010-09-06T19:21:00.002-04:00

Just a quick follow up to that last entry.

It’s come out that Blair has cancelled the London stop on his book signing tour. His professed reasons are that he is worried about, ‘unnecessary “hassle and cost” for police.’ It is likely, however, that he is more concerned with the very real possibility that images of him ducking flying shoes and eggs in his adopted hometown will appear in the international news.

I have to admit, however, that I do enjoy the fact that he’s had to back down on this. The obvious sense of entitlement he exudes in even the most casual statements – regarding the security question at the now-cancelled signing he said that the Metropolitan police are “fabulous, and they will do whatever we ask them to do” – makes it that much more infuriating when he obstinately defends his political record. He’s clearly used to getting his way. It’s pretty obvious that he’s also developed an ability to reflexively regard anyone who questions his wisdom as a dangerous fantasist or the holder of a personal grudge generated by insecurity at recognizing the inherent superiority of Blair. In short, he’s an egomaniac. And, it is in that light, that I’m going to permit myself to feel good about the fact that he’s not doing this signing

… Although, if 1 million people marching against the invasion of Iraq didn’t give him pause, I’m sure he simply regards those picketing his book signings as half-wit peaceniks as well …

That’s the problem, isn’t it? You want him to know why people are angry with him but, at the same time, you just know that he never will. No matter what anyone does or says. Maybe, in light of that, the best thing would be to simply ignore him …

Falling Leaves and Flying Shoes

2010-09-04T16:49:00.000-04:00

First of all – and I know I’ve said this before – I should apologize to the handful of people who read this blog for not posting anything in the last month or so. I’ve recently been granted a teaching gig and have spent most of my time catching up on necessary research for the job … I haven’t thought about much else.

I always get a bit misty this time of year. There’s something I’ve always loved about autumn. The changing leaves, the crisp mornings and the ramp-up to the coming holiday season always puts a smile on my face. The fact that I have a teaching gig kicking off in a few days, the football season has started up again, and Tony Blair had eggs and shoes thrown at him at the first book signing for his memoirs is icing on the cake.

I do certainly hope that he is hounded at every stop he attempts to make promoting his book. The face that he’s an egomaniac is impossible to ignore if you’ve read any of the excerpts from his book. The suggestion that he’s a war criminal is one that I’m personally sympathetic to.

Blair has (very publicly) pledged to donate the proceeds from his memoir to organizations supporting British soldiers. This is, at best, an indication that he might feel some sympathy for the scores of lives he’s destroyed in the process of crawling halfway up George W. Bush’s colon. At worst, it is another instance of his compulsive need to demonstrate his own moral superiority to the gullible and the sycophantic throngs who confuse belligerence with strength.

Good things tend to happen in the fall … I still hold out hope that Blair, his cronies, and those on the other side of the pond who knowingly led us into war under false pretenses will someday stand trial for it. We might get lucky … It’s not that long a flight from Dublin to the Hague …

Pessimism Justified

2010-07-22T22:48:00.001-04:00

I would like to add my voice to the chorus of outrage over the CPS decision regarding Ian Tomlinson. I’d written late last night that I expected the officer responsible for his death would be given a cursory slap on the wrist and be back on duty shortly. I had not expected to read this:

In a written statement the CPS admitted that there was sufficient evidence to bring a charge of assault against the officer, but claimed a host of technical reasons meant he could not be charged.

Typically, the procedure with doing something abhorrent is to figure out a technical obstruction to the correct act. What the CPS has done today is to legitimize any future act of brutality on the part of the police through an assurance of the preemptive failure of the British legal system. In other words, the decision not to prosecute Ian Tomlinson’s alleged murder because it will be too complicated is an assertion that no officer will ever be prosecuted for similar acts.

I remember in Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007) the lead character imploring another police officer to remember that the name ‘police force’ had been changed to ‘police service’ because the word ‘force’ was seen as too aggressive. I think that this is where we need to be in terms of understanding the outcome of the combined IPCC and CPS investigations. The operative element here is semantics. The job that the police perform does not change in the slightest whether they are referred to as a ‘force’ or a ‘service’. In point of fact, the suggestion that the actions performed by the police are a ‘service’ is only supportable as long as you ignore the perspective of the person under arrest. Without the badge, the act of arrest is simply assault and kidnapping. It is the badge, the uniform, the guarantee that the person committing the act is doing so with in the interest domestic governmental authority – and, by extension, the public – that makes these actions permissible. The operations of the police are forceful. They must be. The mode by which police perform their duty is through the use or the promise of the use of force.

The assertion that the reasons for not prosecuting the officer responsible due to ‘technical reasons’ offers the injustice up as some sort of force of nature. It is beyond the logistical capabilities of the system to handle such a complicated or controversial prosecution. The absurdity of this suggestion is obscured only by the language that is used to describe it. Of course it would have been possible for the CPS to try the case (part of the disbelief surrounding this announcement is the amount of time it took for the CPS to conclude its review - conveniently six months after the deadline for filing a charge of criminal assault). It is entirely possible that they would have lost, of course, and that the officer would have walked free the same way that the cops who stomped Rodney King in front of a camcorder did years ago, but that isn’t reason enough not to have done it. As the Crown Prosecution Service would most likely prefer not to spend the next few decades trying whatever police brutality cases might come to light, it is easier to create a mystique, an aura around the notion of trying a cop. This element of violence is too complex, too fraught with subjective justifications for the feeble resources of the Crown Prosecution Service to contend with. It is best simply to throw up our hands and admit that the behavior of the police beyond our myopic readings of cause and effect, motive and guilt, decency and hypocrisy.

This is, of course, not exactly the final chapter in this story. The IPCC will now pass the case on to the Met who have the option of disciplining the officer internally. I imagine that the reaction to today’s announcement will determine what, if anything will be done at that level. The key thing, however, is that it doesn’t matter. The CPS has made it clear that the organs of power do not function at the behest of the population. The police disciplining their own is not an assertion of the public’s ability to hold its government to account. It is a token gesture, a patronizing pat on the head in lieu of actually addressing the problem.

A ‘police service’ would be a group of citizens in uniform. This farce has made it clear that a police officer, at least as far as the IPCC, the CPS and the Met are concerned is a different kind of animal altogether. It starts with the option to wear a balaclava and cover your identification number while working a public protest and ends with being able to duck a criminal assault prosecution because everyone is willing to get blind when it counts.

Preamble To a Disappointment

2010-07-21T23:11:00.000-04:00

Been a bit quiet lately, and I should probably be doing a bit more on this blog at the moment, but it’s been a very, very busy month.

Really, the only reason I’m writing this entry is because I’ve just found out that the Crown Prosecution Service is due to release its long awaited findings on the death of Ian Tomlinson later today. In the year since the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) turned the case over to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) very little has surfaced in terms of information. My personal opinion was that this is simply an old tactic – that the authorities were merely stringing the process out until both the press and the public had forgotten what all the fuss was about.

In light of that, kudos to the Guardian for continuing to report on it.

In truth, I am expecting to hear that the officer responsible will be simply be slapped on the wrist and worked back into active duty within a number of months. I’m really, really hoping I’m wrong about this but I honestly don’t see too many reasons to be optimistic. The combined inefficacy and dishonesty of the IPCC, the Met and (so far) the CPS display an appalling lack of empathy for Mr. Tomlinson’s family. There is also a demonstrable lack of respect for the importance of a public’s faith in its police force and legal system.

It’s just after 11:00pm here in Toronto, which means that the official announcement is probably about five or six hours away. Hopefully, I’ll have something positive to write about tomorrow …

There's No Business Like Show Business

2010-06-29T00:13:00.000-04:00

The smoke is clearing.

There was another rally tonight that marched from police headquarters to Queen’s park. Those in attendance were reduced to demanding the release of friends and colleagues who were still being held in the makeshift detention centre. I’m not sure how high their hopes are. There doesn’t seem to be much point in arguing with the jailers unless you have an active tie to the media (many journalists who were dragged off the streets and detained have been let out at this point) but anyone who cannot get a producer or director from a major media outlet to speak on their behalf is probably still rattling around in a cell. There is no point in shouting about the issues that brought them to the city any longer. Niche politics is irrelevant now. It’s simply a matter of who’s allowed to go home and who’s not.

There is a certain depressing adequacy in the location of the detention centre. Toronto has long been a locus for Canadian and American media production and the site chosen for the temporary prison is an inactive soundstage near the lakefront. Old sound stages were converted to massive holding pens for anyone who ran afoul of the police. These events always have a demented sense of theatre to them. From the creative methods utilized by the protesters to the symphonic whack of batons on riot shields that accompanies a squad of cops moving into position, the continuing show that is the contemporary trade conference circuit has morphed into some Tarantino-esque open-air version of the Wizard of Oz.

Worse still is the inevitable feeling of futility around the whole thing. Windows have been busted out and shops have been looted on a couple of major streets in the downtown area. Journalists are emerging with horror stories that range from unwarranted beatings to being threatened with rape by their captors. Nothing much was agreed to at the summit. Civil liberties were stamped on. Private businesses were mauled. The whole thing seems to have been a massive overture to a photo-op. We were all props, in the end, and the production has stalled until the next location is scouted, tweaked according to the new director’s demands, and trashed.

Mick Jagger sang, “I used to love her, but it’s all over now” and I’m having trouble keeping that line out of my head at the moment. I’ve never been Toronto’s biggest fan, but I’ve always had a guarded affection for the place. There is something different about it today … something that wasn’t there on Friday last week. But, for the last few days, it really didn’t seem like I was supposed to feel like I lived here any more. We were made to feel as unwanted guests in our own city. Masked police officers prevented you from taking your normal route while walking down the street, or bellowed at you to “MOVE” without giving reason. You were either a target, a weapon, or in the way. If you weren’t wearing a costume, you weren’t part of the production. Quiet on the set.

On the Edge Of My Shifting Seat

2010-06-24T16:35:00.000-04:00

I’ve been running around the past couple of days trying to store up just in case the bedlam promised by police, organizers and protesters at the G20 this weekend does, in fact, come to pass. I doubt it will, though. These things have a way of petering out before they start.

It is always better to be prepared, however. I was never a boy scout, but that was one kernel of wisdom that has always made sense to me and I have avoided a number of problems at different points in my life by following it. Many of the businesses in my area are planning to close during the event, although a number claim that they are planning to stay open … who knows? In any case, it makes sense to stock up on necessities if we do need to ride something truly chaotic out. If the batons are swinging wildly, it won’t be worth a concussion to pick up a carton of milk. Of course, that won’t make you want the milk any less.

Yesterday’s earthquake might be taken by some as an omen. I am not a religious man, of course, and I refute the suggestion that there is any real connection between the two things. That said, we are all – at one point or another – prone to using disconnected events to justify our actions and I wonder how many on either side of the demonstration divide will take this as a divine invitation to take the gloves off and really start hammering their opposition. Time will tell, of course. I plan on having a good vantage point and plenty of provisions.

The earth will probably shake again before Monday …

Masts on the Horizon

2010-06-10T15:27:00.001-04:00

The G20 is coming to Toronto shortly and everyone living in my neighborhood has been told to keep identification on them at all times as a result. It will be necessary, they say, to prove that you belong in the area and are not there simply to Cause Trouble. The behavior that will warrant a challenge to your right to walk down a public street is not specified, but I have a feeling that possession of a large backpack, Birkenstocks and the conversion of free-flowing hair into dreadlocks will appear somewhere on the list of crimes against the sensibility of the police.

In anticipation of the types of organized protests that are now a common feature of these events the police have also begun erecting an enormous network of CCTV cameras around Toronto. They have promised to take them down once the event has concluded, but I honestly doubt that that will happen. At the very least, I expect a leisurely pace to their removal that is totally at odds with the rate at which these things are going up.

Legality is entirely dictated by circumstance and, for the month of June at least, Torontonians will have to suspend their rights for the privilege of hosting a party they are not invited to. In the aftermath, I would imagine that any abused protesters will be treated to the same courtesy as those who blocked the APEC summit in Vancouver years ago: The parliament will drag out hearings for years on end until anyone who wasn’t there neither cares nor remembers and the final report will be printed on page 20 of the national papers the next day.

So get your driver’s license out of your wallet and have it grafted to your forehead. Make sure your children can recite their address including postal code, and political affiliations on cue. Avoid eye contact with anyone wearing a uniform. The drawbridge is down and the rope has been cut. The long cars have crested the horizon and will be at the city walls before you know it.

The (Re)Birth of CRMEP

2010-06-10T12:06:00.000-04:00

Just a quick update on the attempted murder of the Middlesex University Philosophy Department:

The campaign to save our philosophy programmes has just won a partial but significant victory: Kingston University in south-west London will announce today that it will re-establish our Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston, by employing the four senior staff in Philosophy at Middlesex (Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford). Our MA and PhD programmes (full-time and part-time) will be re-launched at Kingston this September, and all current post-graduate students will be invited to move along with the staff. Institutions in France and Germany have also made significant new proposals for collaboration with the CRMEP, which may allow it to expand the European dimensions of its work considerably in the near future.

This remarkable turn of events would never been possible without the extraordinary local and international campaign that began six weeks ago, to save our philosophy programmes.

Like Middlesex, Kingston is a post-1992 university, with a commitment to widening participation in education. Unlike Middlesex, Kingston is expanding rather than cutting back its provision in humanities subjects, and it is investing in research in these areas. In addition to taking on CRMEP staff, Kingston will be making a number of other high-level appointments over the coming months, and is launching its own London Graduate School in conjunction with colleagues from several other Universities internationally. We believe that Kingston will provide an enthusiastic and supportive base for the activities of the CRMEP.

Although we have not won all the demands made by our campaign, the move to Kingston is a major achievement. We have found a way to keep all of our postgraduate programmes open, and to keep most of the CRMEP staff together in a single unit. We have preserved a place in London for the unique academic community that has built up around the Centre and its distinctive research interests, and this will continue to be a place where the criteria for entry and participation remain as open as possible. The campaign has directly refuted the line that Middlesex managers have repeated for many years now – a variation of the line that ‘there is no alternative’ but to follow the neoliberal way of the world, and to close down small academic departments in favour of large vocational ones. The campaign hasn’t merely proved that ‘another way is possible’: it has helped to indicate what needs to be done to make such a way a reality, and shown that there are universities in the UK and in Europe that are willing to embrace it.

We hope that the campaign will continue, evolving to become one of several contributions from a range of institutions across London and the region to a broader and deeper struggle in support of philosophy, the humanities and public education more generally. Some of the protesters who made the biggest impact in our campaign came from supportive universities such as Sussex, KCL, SOAS, Westminster and Goldsmiths. This emerging network of education activists isn’t going to disperse, and is likely to play an important role in the struggles that will soon affect the entire sector. Although the closure of Philosophy at Middlesex is yet another indication of the ongoing commercialisation of education in the UK, our campaign, along with other recent mobilisations at universities up and down the country, has helped change the balance of power across higher education. The campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex has already made a powerful intervention in the fight for public education in general and for endangered humanities programmes in particular. The future looks challenging but there is now much to build on, at Middlesex, at Kingston and across the UK.

Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford

* * * * *

The decision to leave Middlesex University was very difficult. Recently it became clear that some of the steps taken by Middlesex management to shut down Philosophy would be irreversible in the short term. Management have already written to all our current undergraduate applicants, informing them that our BA programme is closed. No new PhD applicants have been able to apply since early March. Belying some apparent suggestions of last-minute compromise from his deputies, on Friday 28 May Middlesex Vice-Chancellor Michael Driscoll reiterated his determination to end Philosophy recruitment and to phase out all Philosophy teaching. Management ignored a UCU motion calling for staff suspensions to be lifted by noon on Wednesday 2 June, and we know that effective UCU action to oppose the closure and suspensions will now take several months to prepare. The national political context is also significant. A first round of severe cuts to the Higher Education budget will be announced on 22 June, with more drastic measures to follow in the autumn. Given the financial pressures that will soon apply to every university in the country, if the door is shut at Middlesex then the time for a group move may be now or never. If programmes are to be validated and new students admitted in good time for the start of the new academic year in September then we need begin the transition immediately.

We are acutely aware of the fact that such a move is only an incomplete victory for the campaign. Despite relentless local and international pressure the central demand of the campaign, to save philosophy at Middlesex itself, has fallen on deaf ears. Vice-chancellor Michael Driscoll and those managers who support his vision of a university purged of critical thinking, research and humanities teaching have amply demonstrated their contempt for the passionately argued priorities of their own students, and for the academic judgement of many highly respected scholars in and around our field, in the UK and the world over.

Kingston University, meanwhile, doesn’t yet have an undergraduate programme in Philosophy, and in order to make this move possible it will have to provide a substantial sum of transitional funding, through to the end of the current research funding cycle (i.e. for a minimum of three years). Given these constraints, Kingston is only able to take four of the six members of staff in Philosophy at Middlesex. We very much regret that we haven’t managed to find a secure base for the CRMEP that includes all Middlesex Philosophy programmes and staff. We hope that Middlesex will now honour its commitment to teach out its under-graduate programmes and that it will retain our colleagues Christian Kerslake and Mark Kelly (if they so choose) to teach them. In the longer term, we hope that Middlesex will offer to retain Christian and Mark to teach philosophy courses for programmes in other areas. In addition to providing a place for current Middlesex undergraduates to pursue an eventual MA or PhD, we hope that Kingston will launch its own undergraduate provision in due course, enabling new appointments in Philosophy.

We know that in leaving Middlesex we are leaving many courageous and embattled colleagues who have supported the campaign and whose own programmes remain vulnerable. We know as well that several of the most urgent issues of the campaign remain unresolved: students and staff are still suspended, our undergraduate programme is slated for termination, the situation of our current undergraduate students is uncertain, the criteria for further ‘sustainability’ decisions remain unclear, and the future of humanities provision is as precarious as ever. Middlesex managers have not changed their position and the union remains in dispute over the staff suspensions and the way in which closure decisions are taken. The mobilisation of Middlesex staff in and beyond our UCU branch is proof of their readiness to fight not only for a radical transformation of these procedures but also for the general principles that have animated this campaign: the defence of universal access to education and the opportunity to pursue independent critical thinking; the defence of teaching and research in terms that challenge the prevailing divisive and hierarchical criteria used to assess ‘performance’ and ‘excellence’; the defence of academic freedom and the right to protest; the defence of collective action by students and staff alike.

We will continue to do everything we can to support our colleagues and our suspended students, and to resist any further intimidation of campaign activists. Christian Kerslake, Peter Osborne, and Peter Hallward have suspension hearings scheduled for this coming week, and we will fight not just to overturn these suspensions but to discourage any future use of such punitive and inappropriate sanctions in the face of peaceful protest and dissent.

Today our campaign enters into a new phase. It has succeeded in showing that there is indeed an alternative to the narrow corporate priorities championed by Middlesex managers, and that in closing their Philosophy programmes and then persecuting their students and staff, Middlesex management have violated their own procedures, damaged the reputation of the University and lost the confidence of many students and members of academic staff. These students and members of staff will no longer tolerate management incompetence, bullying and unaccountability. Middlesex can no longer be managed in the same old way. As it changes to become part of the broader struggle for public education, our campaign will continue to emphasise collective action and direct confrontation with the forces that are driving the neoliberal assault on our education system.

One phase of this campaign is over; the struggle continues.

Encouraging, needless to say, but I can't help but feel bad for future students at Middlesex ... there still won't be a philosophy department on hand ...

Treme and the Politics of Pain

2010-05-26T15:39:00.001-04:00

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about Treme that bothers me so much. I think, in the end, it is the fundamental assumption that a cultural legacy lifts a certain group of people above another group. In other words, the overwhelming impression we are left with when it comes to Treme is that the real tragedy of Katrina is not the lives lost, the scores of people displaced or the inefficiency of the government’s response to the suffering of its own people, but that all of these things happened to New Orleans.

Anyone who has suffered a major disaster – manmade or otherwise – deserves sympathy. The problem with the way Treme is proposed almost attempts to ignore this. The endless overtures to the spectacular nature of New Orleans, the nearly mythical image that all of the characters in the series apply to the place, apparently makes the tragedy of its suffering greater than it could be anywhere else. The problems with this are obvious. The suggestion that any population’s suffering is somehow worse or inherently unjustified as a result of their culture is inherently bigoted.

In a very real way, one could make the argument that the writing of Treme works against the claim to injustice that is endlessly reiterated in the storyline. The constant claims of great music, uniqueness work against the scale and impact of the catastrophe that was Katrina. In fact, keeping the creators in mind, this is a lesson that should have been learned from the Wire. You could not watch the show without hearing, over and over again, that it was set in Baltimore. Though the very structure of the show was organized around the premise that Baltimore is a broken city and is broken specifically because of its institutions there was a potential parallel to every suffering metropolis in the United States and, arguably, cities all over the world. The structure … hell, the whining about uniqueness and creative energy specific to the locale of Treme makes this impossible. It is simply good storytelling to inform your audience regarding the location of your story. You need to set the background – offer a little context to augment the interactions and human realities that make up the action of the narrative.

The problem is that Treme has buried itself in the background. The entire thesis of the show is that horrible things have happened to essentially defenseless people. The amount of relief promised has not materialized and an infrastructure that would allow the city to return to its deservedly vibrant status shows no sign of appearing in the future. The city is broken, they claim, and no one in a position of influence appears to have either the temerity or will to correct the problem. That this is a common narrative, a situation that applies to myriad cities around the globe is, however, immaterial. Because we are talking about The Big Easy, the tragedy is greater, more dire for the rest of the world than it would be if this had happened anywhere else.

Treme is, in the end, an exercise in that cheap sort of ego that causes people to suggest they understand generic things on a higher level than the rest of us do. In the same way criticizing a twelve-year-old’s favorite band will elicit a loud and indignant, “You just don’t understand!” the creators of the Wire have turned the legacy of hurricane Katrina into a prolonged temper tantrum over a perceived lack of appreciation. It is the kind of self-righteous indignation that can only stem from a total hypocrisy. The plight of those left homeless and – to this day, in fact – unsupported by the very government that, ostensibly, exists solely to look after its citizens in a time of crisis is sickening to be polite. It is, however, profoundly immoral to suggest that this abandonment is more inexcusable due to the domestic cuisine, nightlife or music scene.

The citizens of New Orleans have a great deal they can be proud of. That this is used in Treme as a trope to intensify the U.S. government’s guilt and the suffering of the working poor, however, is equivalent to suggesting that the shooting of Tupac Shakur was the worst drive-by in U.S. history. I’m used to artists suggesting that they understand the human experience on a deeper level than the rest of us do … and, in some cases, they may even be right. What we are called to in Treme, however, is not a valid artistic interpretation of the degradation of the citizens of New Orleans but the suggestion that the suffering of a community is greater or lesser depending on the appreciation of its art. It is the final argument that art is the value of a people rather than the people themselves.

Apparently, there is no true suffering in the absence of adequate expression.

Really?

2010-05-20T13:44:00.001-04:00

The London 2012 Olympic Committee revealed their mascots yesterday. According to The Guardian,

“With a metallic finish, a single large eye made out of a camera lens, a London taxi light on their heads and the Olympic rings represented as friendship bracelets on their wrists, they resemble characters dreamed up for a Pixar animation.”

Obviously, my first question is, why an eye made out of a camera lens? Why is that specified? Are we actually at the point of saturation in London that you cannot hope to adequately represent the city without ramming a CCTV camera into the presentation?

Incidentally, I know that most people are going to say that the camera lens is an overture to the media attention that coincides with the Olympics and the desire to capture every moment of the event. This would be correct if it weren’t for the fact that the camera is apparently no longer separate from the body of London. The characters that have been created to represent the ‘Olympic spirit’ (whatever that means) of London are capable of capturing and reproducing the events verbatim.

Granted, I have a tendency to spot things like this everywhere. Studying surveillance and governmental control can have you looking for evidence in the overwhelming absence of the real hope of finding it. That said, why a camera? Who on earth thought it would be appealing to the public to create characters that are, in effect, movable surveillance machines? Is that what we’re supposed to think of as cute?

Previous Olympic mascots have angled themselves at the indigenous culture of the host country. Munich used a dachshund as its mascot in ’72. Four years later, Montreal would use the beaver. The Beijing committee attempted to amplify things by presenting five separate characters all linked to the national culture. Apart from the Atlanta games, which presented a character that ostensibly had no basis in reality, all previous committees have relied heavily on the domestic culture when designing their mascots. Is the camera the one reliable symbol of London? Is there nothing that we can say about the city other than it is a surveillance state littered with black cabs?

A Friendly Warning

2010-05-12T00:11:00.001-04:00

Speaking as someone who’s had to deal with a mean-spirited thug running a minority government in his own country for the last four years or so, I have some advice for my friends in the UK.

In short, do not allow yourselves to think that a minority government is any less destructive or dangerous than a majority might be. The impotence of a minority government is entirely contingent on the tenacity and honesty of the parties in opposition. In other words, if you think the hacks you voted for are nearly as corrupt as those on the other side of the hall, you’re in for a bumpy ride. If you don’t, you’re in for a bumpy ride and a long series of horrible disappointments.

The minority government that is currently operating in Canada has functioned, pretty much since its inception, as an autocratic entity. Stephen Harper’s reputation for bullying and alienating even his own party members is a matter of public record. His talent for obfuscation is reminiscent of Kissinger. He is, in a word, the absolute demonstration of just how centric and uneven a minority parliament can be when the opposition has no convictions, guts or morals.

I say this now because I see not only the same qualities in that treacherous little twit Cameron that I see in Harper, but because I see a subtle, simpering greed beginning to show in the actions of Nick Clegg. I will admit that, when I was watching the final debate on the BBC website, I did think that Clegg was making the most sense. After finding out today that he’s signed a pact with the Conservative party to form a coalition government I had to concede that he’d been just another snake oil salesman all along.

The fact that the Labour Party will be choosing a new leader shortly, I assume from the same poisoned well that held up Blair and Brown, leaves us little consolation. The potential leadership looks like the Republican field of nominees who were hoping to replace Bush II: a gang of semi-intelligent career party hacks with all the connections in the world and no attendant sense of duty or responsibility.

In other words, the outlook is not good for the immediate future of the UK legislature. If you have to deal with the kind of jack-booted, chin-thrusting, spoiled-brat tough guy crap from Cameron that we’ve had to endure from Harper, I do feel genuine sympathy for all of you. The immediate myth that goes along with any unclear majority in a parliamentary system is impotence. Don’t you believe it: a government does what it believes it can get away with. One party leader has just written Cameron a blank check for the privilege of driving the limo and the other has aimed his horse at the sunset, riding away from 10 Downing. There is a real shortage of gunslingers left in British politics and it’s ten minutes past high noon.

It's Late and My Brain Is Limping

2010-05-04T00:14:00.000-04:00

I’ve spent the last few hours trying to tie this idea together … we know that surveillance is primarily a vehicle for legitimizing actions on people. It might be that we’re trying to figure out how many people live in a given area and assign a proportional number of representatives to them by looking at tax records or the voting registry or something of that ilk. It could also be that we’re trying to determine whether a person has committed a crime in which case it might be necessary to review financial records or to tap their phone in order to gather information.

In both of those cases, among others I could mention, the direction of surveillance is easily traced. Some section of the government has decided to direct its attention at a specific person or specific persons in order to determine an outcome – to enact and retroactively legitimize a decision and contingent action. Are we not past that with CCTV? I’m sure similar arguments could be made for email scanning programs that crawl the web indiscriminately searching for uses of word combinations that indicate deviant plans … the program was named ‘carnivore,’ if I remember correctly …

CCTV is perpetual. By definition, it should have no end. The archive of imagery expands unfettered beyond the horizon. It is, however, the lack of a horizon that seems to rupture this idea of it being a tool of governing and favor the idea that it is a growth of the process of governing. As much as McLuhan was right when he suggested that, “we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace”, this embrace does not allow for separations any longer. There is no zero-level of the signal. If CCTV is to operate properly, we are all exposed … for good or ill.

A Penny For No Thoughts

2010-04-28T16:36:00.011-04:00

Just a quick one today.

I remember, way back in the dark days at the close of the twentieth century an appalling return to soft-brained economic deregulation and conservatism (the Thatcher government in the UK, the Mulroney/Chretien governments in Canada and the so-called Common Sense Revolution in the United States Congress). The result was endless cries of woe from policy makers about the West’s lack of academic performance in the sciences compared to the East. The rationale for this hand wringing was normally a supposed link between a population’s technical aptitude and the expansion of its financial markets. This invariably resulted in cuts to funding of the arts and increased obsession with standardized testing. In short, the school system became a type of living statistic challenging governments to produce the greatest metric result with the lowest level of investment.

Little has changed in the last twenty years. The importance of critical thinking continues to be undervalued and sparsely taught. The only ray of sunshine for those who are willing to take on the financial burden and postpone the development of their professional lives is admission to a university and the subsequent exposure to an arcane and mysterious study known as “philosophy.” The importance of the availability of this cannot be overstated. As such, it is deeply disappointing to read the following notice posted on The Third Estate:

Dear colleagues,

Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche, informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his recommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and MPhil/PhD.

Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the University. Building on its grade 5 rating in RAE2001, it was awarded a score of 2.8 on the new RAE scale in 2008, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world.

The MA programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex have grown in recent years to become the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009.

The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close the programmes was ’simply financial’, and based on the fact that the University believes that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources to
other subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.

As you may know, the University currently expects each academic unit to contribute 55% of its gross income to the central administration. As it stands (by the credit count method of calculation), Philosophy and Religious Studies contributes 53%, after the deduction of School admin costs. According to the figures for projected recruitment from admissions (with Philosophy undergraduate applications up 118% for 2010-11), if programmes had remained open, the contribution from Philosophy and Religious Studies would have risen to 59% (with Philosophy’s contribution,
considered on its own, at 53%).

In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent research reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the University.

Needless to say, we very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy, and its likely consequences for the School and our University and for the teaching of our subject in the UK.

· Professor Peter Hallward, Programme Leader for the MA programmes in Philosophy

· Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

· Dr. Stella Sandford, Director of Programmes, Philosophy

The world is a fascinating place. The more you train your brain to process the things that come in contact with it, to pick through it and wonder rather than simply adding, subtracting or accepting it as is, the more you get out of life. This closure will nearly ensure that a significant number of would-be thinkers will never get a chance to do that. Shame on Middlesex University.

Run Toward Running From

2010-04-25T23:53:00.000-04:00

Let’s make no mistake. The Internet is fantastic. Regardless of the origins (pseudo-military project never designed for public consumption) or the incredible evil that can be found there (white supremacists, child pornographers, etc.) the sheer amount of opportunity for human expression and connection is astonishing. Facebook may be an “Evil Postmodern Construction Relegating Life to a Video Game.” Twitter may be fundamentally incapable of allowing for complex discussions and really only suit the kind of communication that skirts details and depth in arguments. All of that aside, the fact that anyone can become a publisher, can reach a massive audience can only be a good thing. We do learn by talking and arguing with each other, after all …

With that in mind, I can’t help but mention a brilliant blog I just happened across a few minutes ago. Running From Camera operates on a very simple principle. The artist photographer finds a location, sets the camera’s automatic shutter for 2 seconds, presses the button and runs like hell away from the lens. The result is fantastic. The landscape changes, often the images appear still apart from the subject moving away from the eye, but there is an eerie similarity between all of the shots … and not for the obvious reasons … There is an instant longing in these images – something romantic I can’t put my finger on. This was supposed to be a quick note, of course. I’ll close by simply recommending everyone pay this blog a visit.

Checking Out

2010-04-24T19:51:00.000-04:00

I am, for the record, amazed at the fact that the contemporary North American political landscape only allows someone to determine how they’re going to die if they’ve done something horrific enough to cause the government to put them to death.

Last week, the Canadian parliament rejected a bill that would “permit assisted suicide in Canada under strict conditions.” South of the 49th parallel, the state of Utah granted a condemned man’s request to be executed by firing squad. To restate, if you’re in the final stages of a debilitating, painful disease and the only outcome of that situation is an excruciating death you have no legal recourse to end your suffering in a humane way. If, however, you kill a lawyer and wound a bailiff while trying to escape a courthouse, you are granted the autonomy to determine how you will die.

In both cases, in the abstract, the person concerned is going to die. In one case, the inevitable death of the person is the result of a (horrific) natural process. In the other, a person is going to be destroyed for grossly violating the sensibilities of a community. Put another way, one person has not objectively done anything to offend the polity and the other person has.

It would be easy to launch into a litany of examples as to why assisted suicide is not a community decision and really only effects the person suffering and those personally in contact with them … and that any argument to the contrary is invariably a selfish, mean-spirited attempt to treat other people like objects in the interest of preserving one’s own limited world view. It would also be easy to suggest that capital punishment has never worked as a deterrent and might simply be the ultimate way of legitimizing what are invariably deeply inequitable and prejudicial legal practices – we go to the furthest possible degree in punishment to demonstrate the potency of the system rather than determine the accuracy of that power.

Neither of these arguments are relevant, really. They’re correct. They’re on point. That said, the primary question here is one of perception. The common denominator in both of these cases is death. The individual in both cases is going to die in the near future. In one case, the body is doomed as a result of an internal problem that will invariably result in the end of that body’s functioning. In the other, the body is scheduled to be destroyed as the result of a direction from the state – a body must be destroyed due to an offense made against that state (In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether the body is guilty or not after sentence has been passed – as a result of the determination that the body must be destroyed, the body must be destroyed to validate the legitimacy of that original judgment … going back on that decision would invalidate the entire act of condemning someone to death in perpetuity … but I digress …). The invariable link between the two cases is that the person who’s supposedly abhorrent to the culture he’s living in is allowed the autonomy to determine how he’s going to die.

I know that there are a number of logistical problems with this argument – the fact that the euthanasia bill was defeated in Canada, a country that doesn’t use capital punishment, for one … As I’ve mentioned, however, the problem is one of perception. In the simplest analysis, we allow people who are condemned by the state to determine the methods that will end their lives. Those who are ostensibly innocent, however, are doomed to suffer until their bodies give out. The death penalty is used on a regular basis in a number of US states. I am unaware of any US state outside of Oregon that allows assisted suicide. There are a significant number of Canadians who favor the use of the death penalty. I haven’t heard much in the Canadian media about the rejection of a terminal patient’s right to die with dignity. Something is wrong here.

Quick Note

2010-04-08T15:47:00.000-04:00

Just glancing over “In Defense of Lost Causes” again to get the brain in the right place and came across this rather long passage:

“[I]t may seem that the only consistent Hegelian standpoint is the one which measures the Notion by the success or failure of its actualization, so that, in the perspective of the total mediation of the Essence by its Appearance, any transcendence of the Idea over its actualization is discredited. The consequence of this is that, if we insist on the eternal Idea which survives its historical defeat, this necessarily entails – in Hegelese – a regression from the level of the Notion as the fully actualized unity of Essence and Appearance, to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its Appearance. Is it really so, however? One can also claim that the excess of the utopian Idea that survives its historical defeat does not contradict the total mediation of Idea and its Appearance: the basic Hegelian insight according to which the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself continues to hold. What one should simply add is that the gap that separates the Idea from its actualization signals a gap within this Idea itself. This is why the spectral Idea that continues to haunt historical reality signals the falsity of the new historical reality itself, its inadequacy to its own Notion – the failure of the Jacobin utopia, its actualization in utilitarian bourgeois reality, is simultaneously the limitation of this reality itself.” (Zizek, S. In Defense of Lost Causes. Verso, London: 2009. p. 208-9.) [ital. author's]

The Bastard and the Ghost

2010-03-11T20:53:00.000-05:00

Alright. I’m going to be moving away from the usual ranting over contemporary topics for a while since I really don’t have time to be thinking about it … I’m trying to get towards the end of my dissertation and am having a hell of a time trying to write through some of the problems. That said, there are points that I need to make and I’m planning on using this blog as a sort of working journal of what I’m trying to get across.

Lately, I’ve been wrestling with Baudrillard’s idea of ‘the precession of simulacra.’ In a nutshell, the theory was that, since replication has greater exposure and greater reach than that of an original, the copy now precedes the original. Towards the end of his writings, he modified this principle under the umbrella of ‘Integral Reality.’ If we are under the yoke of a system of reference where all things are simply traceable to other duplications and other non-original referents, the term ‘real’ becomes an empty qualification. As a result, everything is real. Baudrillard opened his essay “The Precession of Simulacra” with a quotation from Ecclesiastes:

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

Well, I’m dealing with surveillance as a mode of social control. Surveillance, in its verifiable form, is the production of duplication. We need referents of events in order to substantiate accusations. The point of state surveillance is normally the subsequent justification of violence – arrest, imprisonment, etc. The production of the ‘real’ in order to justify action leaves us with a problem with respect to lineage … does the use to which the image will be put count as a simulacrum? Is punishment the simulacrum of the surveillance? Is the production of surveillance now, specifically CCTV, simply a second-stage simulacrum of the source – punishment?

The View

2010-02-19T14:47:00.000-05:00

The view from my apartment balcony is brilliant. It’s the sort of view I can imagine Bob Krane looking out on in New York when he was developing Batman and the Dark Knight’s habitat, Gotham.

Most things look better from a distance. The streets, neat rows vanishing into the distance, are generally more impressive at night. I might be rapidly approaching middle age, but the spectacle of twinkling lights marking distant buildings in low light is still something that carries a little bit of wonder with it. We all began to move closer to each other once technology allowed it. Factories, mechanized transportation, culture and communication drew us in on ourselves. The Romans figured out how to manage an empire by cutting roads out of the wilderness and creating human flow between places that Were Important.

I suppose that’s the magic of cities, particularly at night. We are all small. Each of us is really only one in several billion. Those lights off my balcony, however, tell me that we are all here for some reason. We look for each other in order to make sense out of things. Cities are really just noise in a concrete form – cave paintings that outgrew their natural surroundings. And, no matter how small we may be individually, the closer we get to each other the brighter the noise – the greater the residual effect. This species is Big because it is constantly Finding Itself.

That is the beauty of cities. No matter the brute Darwinian mechanics of living here, or in any other urban environment for that matter, the lights tell me that we are all still looking, still making light, still making noise. I am lucky enough to have box tickets for the orchestra every night.

Glitter and Flat

2010-01-31T22:17:00.001-05:00

As I write this, the Grammy Awards are taking place in Los Angeles. I normally don’t watch these broadcasts. I do, however, occasionally regress back to my early teens and think that there might be some import to these shows. There never is, of course. All of the cynical noise I’ve heard regarding the Golden Globes, Oscars, Grammys and Emmys is, in the end, entirely true. They are simply industry back-slapping sessions created to reinforce an internal sense of self-importance and a manipulation of the cult of personality to sell advertising revenue.

Since none of that is really surprising anymore, I think what’s giving me a nasty case of the heebie-jeebies is just how mechanical these things look nowadays. The robotic applause, the chiseled smiles directed endlessly at the stage in case the camera happens to be panning across the audience at that moment … More and more it is like looking at a gigantic billboard rather than a collection of (supposedly) breathing human beings. The appearance has none of the classic animation of what I understand to be music performances. My primary musical love from my early teens was the blues. Towards the end of high school I developed a love for punk music. I’ve been to see a number of shows over the years that fit into both of these genres. I’m not naive enough to suggest that the Grammys should take on the properties of a dingy club show. I know that the main point behind this event is reinforcing the importance of the music industry by giving the overwhelming impression that music is not enough on its own.

The more astonishing thing is that they’ve begun giving you exact time projections as to when specific acts will be performing: 24 minutes until Taylor Swift takes the stage; 39 minutes until the re-re-reanimation of an overrated Muppet (Michael Jackson). Bon Jovi will be playing at some point and, in true American Idol fashion, the audience is being encouraged to vote which of three songs will be played. The show itself now seems to take the shape of a vending machine. The myth of interactivity is the only way to sell music to music fans at this stage …

It is not enough to listen to music now. We must consume it. The specter of a transaction is the thing that makes an experience real.

Inject Them With a Poison

2010-01-28T12:50:00.006-05:00

Fox News haunts me. Specifically, the poltergeist of Glenn Beck. I suppose that’s why this passage by Žižek reminds me so much of him. This is, I think, what Beck would like to see happen to anyone who does not share his perspective on patriotism, morality, etc. (just replace the words ‘Communism’ with ‘Capitalism’, ‘Moscow’ with ‘Real America’, and ‘Soviet’ with ‘Traditional’):

“In good old Soviet times, the Serbsky Institute in Moscow was the psychiatric flagship for punitive political control; its psychiatrists developed painful drug methods to make detainees talk and extract testimony for use in national security investigations. Underpinning the ability of psychiatrists to incarcerate people was an invented political mental disorder known as (“sluggish vilotekushchaia schizophrenia”). Psychiatrists described symptoms thus: a person might appear quite normal most of the time but would break out with a severe case of “inflexibility of convictions,” or “nervous exhaustion brought on by his or her search for justice,” or “a tendency to litigation” or “reformist delusions.” The treatment involved intravenous injections of psychotropic drugs that were so painfully administered that patients became unconscious. The overriding belief was that a person had to be insane to be opposed to Communism.”
- Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Verso, 2008

Doomed.

2010-01-27T15:05:00.000-05:00

I will admit that I was deeply annoyed by the recent proroguing of parliament in Canada. I will also admit that I was not in the least surprised when it happened and, consequently, that the Conservative Party’s numbers began to slide. All of this is announced in the interest of my next point, which is that acts like these are the reason why we are doomed to have, at the very least, another minority Conservative government or, in the worst possible circumstance, a majority Conservative government after the next election.

The reason I say this is because Stephen Harper appears to be untouchable. Not because the Governor General bows to his every whim. Not because I think that the leaders of each of the other national parties are overrated scheming hacks. I honestly believe that the combination of arrogance, animosity, hatred and fear that characterize Harper and his cabinet has created an aura of impenetrability that is normally applicable only to monarchic systems of government. In the abstract, Harper’s government has been vulnerable to a vote of non-confidence from the moment he took leadership. He has demonstrated no respect for the Canadian population or members of the other parties in government. He has openly ducked his responsibility as leader of all Canadians by allowing Omar Khadr to waste away in Guantanamo Bay since 2002. He has demonstrated no fear of consequences regarding any of his unpopular policies.

The reason for this is that, through a combination of apathy on the part of the voting public, a myopic perspective offered by the Canadian press (which is chiefly responsible for public apathy in the first place), and an absolute unwillingness on the part of the opposition parties to sacrifice personal interest for the opportunity to implement accountability, there is no possible way Harper can be taken to task. Those who lead our opposition parties are cowards. Those who pay attention to politics in this country are understandably uninspired. Those who supposedly function as the fourth estate are either lazy hacks, obedient propagandists, or just as disenchanted with Canadian politics as the public they are charged with engaging.

I could take a great deal of time outlining why Stephen Harper is a mean-spirited punk who treats this country like university undergraduates treat their first apartment, but it would be a waste of time. He is a problem. The majority of Canadians do not want him as their leader. He is politically vulnerable in a very tangible way and this does not matter. It doesn’t matter because he understands the way politics works in this country. We are apparently far more comfortable with a spoiled, vicious monarch at the head of our parliament than we are with a competitive, complicated political system that would require our attention and involvement to function properly. Stephen Harper is the government we want but cannot like. He is the heir to the throne and we will anoint him again because it is easier to be bullied than relied upon.

Complicity

2010-01-21T15:06:00.002-05:00

John Worboys is a scumbag. A low-life, knuckle-dragging sack of detritus who should be dragged naked through the West End by an Addison Lee people carrier just after the gutters have filled with vomit on a Saturday night.

Of this there can be little dispute.

It is also too obvious to drive the bile to the tip of the back of my throat. That achievement belongs to the police. In this instance my confidence in the Met and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has totally evaporated. The quick notes published a couple of days ago in the Guardian regarding the Worboys case are enough to make a rational person want to storm Scotland Yard. Over a number of years, Worboys drugged and raped at least 85 women. During that time, several Met officers prejudged, screwed up or just plain ignored the case and allowed him to continue doing what he was doing. 85 women.

When a tenacious and, clichéd as this may sound, brave young woman referred to as “Anna” in the report took her situation to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (at best, an organization that exists to legitimize the worst activities of the police in the British Isles – the Tomlinson case is a pretty good illustration of this) the officers identified as involved in the case, “lied to and laughed at her.”

This would be bad enough.

The results of the inquiry, however, indicate that the IPCC has recommended that only five of the officers responsible for the case be given either written or verbal warnings. None will be fired. None will even be suspended. A monster was able to irreparably damage the lives of at least 85 people and the police were complicit in a majority of those events through their inactivity and incompetence. Bravo.

My main problem here, if I’m honest, is the actions of the IPCC. I know that there will always be problems with the police. I’m old enough to know that for every person who joins the force in order to do good and ‘serve their community’ there is at least one more who simply wants to be able to beat the s**t out of someone and not stand trial for it. I’m not twelve anymore; I understand that. One would imagine that this realization was the primary reason for the development of the IPCC in the first place. The problem is that the current incarnation of the IPCC appears to be little more than a PR wing for the cops they supposedly monitor. In this instance, specifically, they should be particularly ashamed of themselves.

Weak Tea

2010-01-10T22:04:00.002-05:00

Canada has always held onto certain aspects of its British heritage. Unpopular as the allegation may be, there is a recognizable class system in Canada and the degree to which that indigenous upper/higher class is relied upon to govern and manage the country is unlikely to change in the future. There basic mythology of Canada doesn’t really support the requisite animosity that would force a change in the status quo. Our neighbors to the south often mock us for our passivity. I suppose there’s something to that …

With that in mind, however, what generally passes as revolutionary or rebellious in the US these days is so bereft of self-awareness that it borderlines on mass psychosis. I’m thinking primarily about the so-called ‘Tea Party’ protesters here, but there are other examples we could apply this argument to. The ‘Tea Party’ protesters are interesting strictly because they appear so much like the base that would have brought the Nazis to power in Germany in the ‘30’s. By that, I mean that a group has been convinced that they are victims of some overarching conspiracy. The people who are at the helm of that conspiracy are ‘different’ from them in some essentially constructed way. The real reasons for the decline of their society are ignored because complexity is no friend of hysteria. And hysteria is the easiest way to direct the politically blind.

I will admit that I haven’t really been able to pin down a specific ethos that goes along with the ‘Tea Party’ designation. In this instance, ‘Tea Party’ appears to apply to a recognizable political position as voodoo does to organized religion. The protesters have simply managed to combine a number of irrational hatreds, social prejudices, and a nearly inexhaustible amount of panic into a reason to print bumper stickers. This, however, is the most important point to bear in mind: the professed reasons for these people to take to the streets are essentially irrelevant. As a political movement, what we’re witnessing here is really just an eruption from the recognition of what Hunter S. Thompson would have called, “The death of the American Dream.” The unpleasant result of this recognition, however, is that the dream itself can be resurrected. Rather than coming to the conclusion that the dream was never alive in the first place – that it was simply a marketing dynamic developed by slave owners and perpetuated by fantasists and half-wits like Horatio Alger and Norman Rockwell – the reaction to the lie is to point to someone and exclaim loudly that they are the ones responsible.

As such, the targeting of the Obama administration or (more worrying) the “Intellectual Establishment” as the source of all Americans’ present woes is as predictable as it is depressing. I did open this blog with the caveat that Canadians are indoctrinated with the impression that there are people who are granted an ability to govern more as a birthright than a personal accomplishment. The ‘Tea Party’ movement would appear to have more to do with a rejection that the ability to lead requires any base level of intelligence or education at all (I’m ignoring the ethical links with the Khmer Rouge here more out of sympathy to the victims of the killing fields than a recognition of difference in tactics or probable acts). In the abstract, antipolitics is the basic result of both of these positions. In the case of the ‘Tea Partiers,’ however, the specific brand of antipolitics emerges as a more animated presence and one that fears critical inquiry and abstract thought (up here in the North, we’re generally just happy to let someone else deal with those things). While the Canadian antipolitics seems to come more out of a royalist background, the “Tea Party” dynamic appears to reject rather than embrace the lack of presence of an omnipotent class who are charged with telling them exactly what to do, think, and believe. The “Tea Party” protests are astonishing in that they are a rebellion that demands the return of their chains. In other words, the “Tea Party” protests are about a contingent, and specifically American, fear of freedom.

It is important to realize that I am not suggesting that this systemic cowardice applies to all Americans, mind you. I am specifically thinking of the ones who take Glenn Beck seriously, become anxious whenever they’re expected to remember the location of a new country on the map, and honestly believe that the world was a less complicated place when they were six years old. There is something inherently wrong with these people. They are the real-life embodiment of the literary Fall From Grace. Their anger, their disappointment, their shame all come from the loss of bliss that can only exist when it is tethered to ignorance.

Doe See Doe

2009-11-25T01:30:00.001-05:00

Alright. Just a quick one this time around. I realize I haven’t written much over the past month but, frankly, I’ve been busy. I won’t be this mute for too much longer. Things are falling into place on the whole living-situation front …

Considering my previous posts on policing and the use of tasers, however, it’s impossible not to put something up on the deer that mysteriously appeared in central Toronto today. The animal was hiding out near Union Station in a small green space and had to be tranquilized, chased and finally tasered before it could be loaded into the van and (supposedly) be donated to the Toronto Zoo … or something. I’m honestly hoping they just keep the doe under sedation until they can drive her up North and just let her out of the car. There’s no need to imprison an animal for life simply because she entered the wrong off-ramp on the Gardiner Expressway. Hell … we’ve all done that.

There’s obviously a lot going on here. The encroachment of human life into other habitats and the reciprocal push of non-domestic animals into the human sphere as a result, the use of force by cops under unusual circumstances, the ethics of zoos, etc., etc. I’m reminded of the appearance of a whale in the Thames River a few years back. The dynamics are roughly the same. Though I can’t help but smile when I think about the hysteria that went along with both instances. We are so fully insulated in our connection with the urban that the appearance of the world outside the city walls appears at once miraculous, absurd and frightening.

This instance should tell us something. The initial reaction to this image is the wrong one. The deer appears small in the middle of the city. The reverse, however, is true. The appearance of that doe in central Toronto is simply an indication that there is a much larger world around these tiny settlements. That world may appear out of place and frightened when it pushes over the banks of our little island, but it stretches all the way out to the horizon.

I get the same primal thrill from the doe story as I did the one about the whale. I like seeing that ocean out past the beach. Of course, that may be part of my repatriation. After all, I’ve spend the last few months living near Owen Sound. Regularly, I go to sleep at night listening to the sound of coyotes in a clearing behind the house baying at the moon …

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2009-10-29T22:43:00.001-04:00

I must admit that one of the best things about being back in Canada is the return to the holidays of my childhood. Halloween is one of my favorites … probably my absolute favorite, if I’m honest. There was always something about the macabre nature of it, the overture in the spirit of fun to all things we’re supposed to fear that I appreciated. Around this time of year, when the leaves start to change and the dark settles in a little bit earlier than it did a week ago, I do have trouble keeping a smile off of my face. I’m encouraged to laugh at death this time of year. Why the hell not?

Somehow, I could never really get into the English holidays. I do, for the record, appreciate the novelty of Guy Fawkes’ day. There is something farcically appealing in the establishment of a national celebration for someone who once attempted to blow up the government. That said, it lacks some of the pageantry of Halloween, the Day of the Dead or the Ghost Festival (中元節). I suppose I’m still not over that pre-adolescent obsession with death, skeletons, ghouls and all manners of improbability that most likely have something to do with un-comprehended libido and mortality. It’s tough to top that with a gang of malcontents who harbor legitimate beefs against their government resorting to explosives as a political tool.

For now, it is time to dig into chocolate and horror movies. Horror movies are about 80% soundtrack, anyway, so I don’t feel quite so bad about tapping away at a keyboard while I’m watching them …

Soon, the window displays will shift over to candy canes and an elderly obese elf in a red snow suit. Witches on broomsticks will be forced out of their flight patterns by more aerodynamic reindeer. The somber glory of a half dozen false headstones adorning a front lawn will be excavated by a crew of mute, bottom-heavy albino squatters wearing out of date clothes. Halloween is fleeting as are all holidays. The payout is never quite as good as the energy involved in the build-up. In a weird, paradoxical way, I think the let-down I feel after each Halloween is a mourning for the anticipation of the event rather than the event itself … Be that as it may, this is supposed to be the time of year for insincere mourning anyway …

A Quick Note On My Neurosis

2009-10-28T13:03:00.001-04:00

Considering my current employment situation, I spend a lot of time watching the news. Now, at the moment, I feel reasonably healthy, but I’m fearing an onset of acute hypochondria … which I guess might be a bit redundant now that I read it back to myself.

I was living in Ontario during the 1990’s and have been through media-manufactured health panics before. The SARS outbreak and West Nile fears were a part of my early years at university. As such, I am immediately skeptical when the CBC decides to turf all other news reports for a matter of weeks and focus on the newest invisible attacker that will invade our respiratory systems and turn our innards into mush, or whatever. If you take the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation seriously, I am supposed to have died about fifteen times already from a variety of exotic and normally non-domestic illnesses … but that’s another line of thought altogether.

I am, for the record, not diminishing the sadness or the legitimate concerns that came about as the result of an ostensibly healthy 13 year-old boy dying over the weekend. I would, however, like to suggest that the line between ‘informing the public’ and ‘scare mongering’ is not nearly as fine as most of those working in the news industry would have us believe. The constant coverage, the endless challenges from host to pundit over whether or not someone is going to get the jab themselves, the images of long lines followed by close ups of hypodermics sliding effortlessly into anonymous shoulders have been enough to program me.

I’ve been back in Canada for less than three months and do not yet qualify for health coverage by the government.

As such, there is a degree of nervousness setting in. I’m not currently living in a densely populated area … which should lessen the possibility of exposure. That said, the aforementioned coverage and my own willingness to be stabbed rather than deal with long-term illnesses make the unavailability of the shot a bit of a pain in the neck.

In light of this, I’d like to say that I’m going to spend less time wringing my hands while watching CBC NewsWorld, but what the hell else is there to watch?

'I can't get your knee and his face in the frame ...'

2009-10-15T21:03:00.000-04:00

I’m aware that this is not a unique incident. Some poor guy was tasered at a John Kerry rally in 2007. There are others that I’m forgetting … I remember some kid being pinned to the floor in a library at another American school when he refused to open his backpack for inspection by campus police …

The assault by University of Western Ontario campus police on a student in the video posted on YouTube is pretty typical, unfortunately. What I find interesting, however, is the fact that camera phones are beginning to take up the leveling position that CCTV cameras have. The threat of constant surveillance is heavy news for anyone who depends on the use of violence to do their job. The ubiquity of camera phones threaten to prevent any cop from prosecuting a single arrest independent of defending their physical actions against a grainy recording carried out by some random onlooker.

For the record, I do not dislike this idea. Take away the badge on any officer’s chest and the legal definition of arrest is assault and kidnapping. If we do have a group of people in our culture who are allowed to do things like that as long as it’s ostensibly in the interest of protecting other citizens, there should be potent mechanisms available that would prevent the abuse of that power. We are often told that police officers are above reproach and willingly put themselves in positions of significant danger simply to allow us to carry out our lives in peace. While this is no doubt true for the majority of officers, the events of the Battle of Seattle and Quebec City indicate that any group of people who have violence as a tool on their vocational belt sometimes collectively agree to throw the rest of the kit away.

Unlike the guy whose conductivity was repeatedly tested at the Kerry rally, we would not have heard about someone being gang stomped on campus at UWO. It happened in a corridor in what is essentially an office building after regular business hours. Those who had witnessed the event would most likely have been dismissed as hysterical campus radicals and pacifist freaks. The guy who was pinned to the ground would have had nothing but his already tarnished word to back him up (‘he must have done something to deserve it …’). Thanks to a commercially fostered obsession with self-representation this will not happen.

Promises, Promises, Promises ...

2009-09-18T00:10:00.005-04:00

Just a few random thoughts I've been working through:

In the 1970’s and the 1980’s the drug trade in Boston was controlled by an Irish-American gangster named James “Whitey” Bulger. Bulger is still wanted by the FBI on racketeering and murder charges. After having fled the authorities, other criminal organizations have filled the void. Regardless of the charges against him, older members of the community have been heard lamenting Bulger’s absence. They confidently claim that, when Whitey was around, there weren’t any drugs in South Boston. This example illustrates a point when it comes to crime and public perception. The presence of crime in a community is less important than the impression that there is a system of control. In the same way that a community will willfully ignore the activities of a gangster in their midst if they believe the gangster’s presence intimidates other criminals, the same community will ignore the inefficacy of crime prevention if the overtures to crime prevention are enough conjure the tactile illusion of control. The crucial element to this equation, and the one that is generally overlooked, is the fact that the inefficacy of that element in stifling, reducing, or preventing crime is totally irrelevant to the public’s feeling of dependency on that element. CCTV cameras have been demonstrably ineffectual in reducing crime rates in certain areas. Whitey Bulger was personally involved in drug trafficking in South Boston. The image of control is, from a political perspective, more important than control itself.

Or maybe that isn’t it either. It might be more accurate to suggest that the image of control is politically feasible whereas the establishment of actual control is politically impossible. The emphasis on demonstrably ineffectual modalities of control like CCTV and, in an extreme sense, Whitey Bulger is an indication that there is a mutual agreement between a population and those who claim a protective position over it. We encourage those who claim dominance to assure us of our own safety. The realism of that safety is essentially unobtainable is, for practical reasons, irrelevant. As effective politics involves an agreed illusion between a population and the body that manages it – a promise of security, accountability and humility buttressed against a structure that necessarily incorporates an accountability mechanism – this illusion is one that is propped up both by the governing body and the citizenry. Whitey Bulger was a gangster. His approach to life was the dominance of a geographic area through violence and the exploitation of that area for his own personal gain. Likewise, CCTV continues to be erected in urban centers across the United Kingdom independent of any demonstrable proof that it actually lowers crime rates or offers any preventative function at all. We trade our opportunity to act out against these power structures even though we know that they are ineffective and, in the end, exploitive. The reason for this has already been stated – we desire assurance as a result of the subconscious recognition that any assurance is fictional. Whitey Bulger did not protect the people of South Boston. CCTV, apparently, does very little to reduce crime events in the areas it is set to capture. None of this matters. It is the promise that we are after. Not the delivery.

Spectacular Purposelessness

2009-09-14T11:06:00.010-04:00

Amid the current chest-thumping going on in Canadian political circles, I’m already saturated with this obsession we have with polls and statistics. I’ve always found it more than a little strange that we accept the idea that one hundred random people cold-called by pollsters will produce an accurate image of the mood of a population. I accept the idea that, as Sun Tzu would have opined, knowing the landscape is essential to victory in battle, but you don’t survey one square meter of land and assume you’ve got the whole map figured out.

Whatever the case, it looks as though we’re going to be drilled into the voting booths for yet another election battle and I’m not entirely optimistic about the outcome. I dream of the defeat of Harper. I would love to watch that smug, mean-spirited thug stand in some hotel ballroom at two-thirty in the morning and explain to the throngs of homophobic, racist, greedy cowards that make up his party members that the time has come to follow the leadership of another party and continue ramming their agenda down the throats of Canadians at whatever opportunities may remain …

I should mention, however, that I have no reasonable expectation of seeing that happen this fall. The Conservatives will most likely retain their minority rule in the House of Commons and the two parties scrambling for seats will flash their typical ‘Gee Shucks’ smiles at the cameras and pretend that they’ve resurrected the nobility of failure once again.

I won’t say that I’m sick of elections. I realize that there are legitimate arguments to be made against the holding the fourth federal election in six years. I would also argue that this is what democracy is supposed to look like. It should be messy. We should have to keep working at it. Honestly, independent of the reported cost of holding these things, anything that gets the electorate involved more often that previously should be treated as a good thing. Hopefully, we’ll someday learn that polls are not participation and the dependency our leaders have on them is a symptom of our own apathy.

Rambling Again ...

2009-08-30T11:37:00.004-04:00

Tomlinson.

There are the typical clichés that go along with all of this; the single representative of the people crushed … that woman shot during the protests in Iran would be a good example … wish I could remember her name …

But we need to get beyond that. We have to look at how an isolated example, independent of the human tragedy that this specific one carries, would impact the overall functioning of the world around it. The suggestion that Tomlinson’s death was either anomalous or extraordinary is absurd. The suggestion that his death was a specific part of the functional plan of the policing system in Britain is equally ridiculous. There are systems wherein the imperfection of the tools available must result in catastrophic failure.

With that in mind, we have to ask ourselves about the purpose of the system in the first place. In other words, if the system is guaranteed to failure, if the goals that will be accomplished by the implementation of that process will inevitably result in tragedy, is the action defensible? For that matter, is this sort of anomaly describable as failure? Perversely, a weird kind of marriage between totalitarians and the Utilitarians – the greatest good for the greatest number, or something like that – but this is part of the process. It is wrong to think of this as a breakdown in the system of control. It is, in fact, a fully functional component of the system of control.

There must, in other words, be a degree of directed chaos in order for the action to have the desired effect. There must be a constant risk of a surrender of control for the mechanism to have any credibility. In other words, the image of the perfectly operating machine would dampen optimism about the success of procedure. De Menezies is a good case in point here. The murder of Jean Charles de Menezies indicates the orchestration of a system that does not function in the aid of the citizenry as much as it functions as an antidote to the unpredictability of a citizenry in the abstract. The system of control must be organized according to an ethic of acceptable failure. The failure, however, must always function in the appropriate direction. Control is maintained by both a determination of presence and the substitution of predictability for effect in aid of that presence.

Hello

2009-08-15T10:08:00.003-04:00

A few months ago I went to see Fishbone play the Islington Academy in North East London. The show was good and, as often happens when you’re around a group of strangers in an uplifting situation, a number of us began talking at the end of the night. I spent the majority of the rest of the evening talking to Junior, a midlands Fishbone fan of Jamaican descent. We rambled back and forth about different things for a while and finally got to the topic of where I was from.

“Canada.”

“What the f**k are you doing here?”

Momentary interruption while Junior’s girlfriend chastised him for his language/abraisiveness.

“Sorry … sorry … I meant: What the f**k are you doing here?”

“I’m a student.”

“So?”

Junior then went on to describe his own trip to Canada years before. Anyone who’s lived most of their lives in the Great White North probably won’t get this, but he was blown away by the number of people he passed on the streets of Toronto who said ‘hello’ to him as they were walking by. The natural nervousness someone from another part of the world will feel being addressed unprompted by strangers was an issue for him, he said. By the end of the trip, however, he found himself slipping into the same practice. He missed it, he said, and couldn’t understand why anyone who’s had access to it would voluntarily move to a place where people were generally more distant and casual contact was something remarkable rather than the norm.

I’ve been back in this country for less than a week and, while I couldn’t really get what he was talking about that night at the pub, I get it now. I suppose I’d just accepted the distance of casual contact in London - the lack of warmth that is a natural component of living in close contact with millions of strangers and having to weave a path through many of them on a daily basis in order to get to work or the grocery store or …

I will miss London. There is no way to avoid that. I will say, however, that the general mode of social interaction in Ontario is something that I may have forced myself to forget. It is good to be home.

Excuses, Excuses ...

2009-07-30T11:25:00.002-04:00

Alright. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything and I doubt that there will be a hell of a lot of substance to this post. In short, I won’t be able to make up for it.

The pre-emptive nostalgia that has littered my [not-so] recent posts has faded into a sustained panic over the last couple of weeks. The acts of putting the shipping together, figuring out what you’re going to be able to get by with over the next three months before said shipping arrives on the other side, and getting all of the administrative/bureaucratic ducks in a row before leaving the country have overshadowed the romance of a final few days in London. Apart from that, it’s been a matter of finishing things off at work and organizing, organizing, organizing …

The shippers have come and taken the boxes away at this point. We now have dinner plans with friends and will have to return to the flat for tomorrow – the cleaning blitz. After removing whatever physical evidence we’ve existed in this space for the last five years, we’ll stay over at a friend’s place for a couple of days … Hopefully, I’ll get some time to walk around this city and offer it a proper goodbye.

I doubt I’ll be writing much over the next couple of weeks. We’ll be in Rome for a week between leaving the UK and arriving in Canada. Hopefully I’ll have something a bit more substantive to write about after that.

‘Till then …

How Much is That Adulthood in the Window?

2009-07-09T07:40:00.006-04:00

I’ve recently bought my first good quality camera and have to admit an immediate addiction to playing with it. For the past couple of years the best camera I’ve had access to you was my phone. A Nokia with a 5 megapixel camera is an extremely handy piece of kit to have, but there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do with it from a creative point of view. Also, the ‘zoom’ function is essentially a matter of telling the camera to capture a smaller percentage of the whole image – you can’t bring it any closer than it is.

I remember my dad having a camera with interchangeable lenses when I was a kid. I thought it was a high quality camera at the time, of course, but I honestly can’t remember what make/model it was. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure he still has it … Whatever the case, the professional looking camera has remained one of those objects I think of as emblematic of adulthood. That snapping sound of the shutter and the click you heard when a different lens successfully slid into place is a major part of the soundtrack to every family vacation we took. Those who decided where we were going to go and what we were going to do were also those who documented the trip on film.

As such, I have a feeling that part of my fascination with this new toy has at least one subconscious link with an attempt to buy adulthood. When you’re a 31 year-old student, and have never really had another career, the uncomfortable suggestion that you stopped maturing during frosh week is not an easy one to fight off. My new armour, however, should put some of that anxiety at ease. The proof of my maturity, that I am now of an age where I will do serious and interesting things - and that these things must be permanently documented at 12.2 megapixels and flawless focus - swings easily from my neck and threatens to turn everything within sight into a part of that narrative. This object has only one purpose and that is to capture time and reality. I am now at a stage of development where I recognize the importance of this.

Bullshit. Obviously.

Technically, I could have done exactly the same thing with the camera in my phone. The benefit of the Canon is that it captures better images and allows for a little more flexibility when setting up different shots. I have upgraded a previously existing practice rather than laying claim to an entirely new one. The reason I’m tempted to view this new object as a component of an entirely new practice rather than a modified old one is fairly simple: both the practice and the object have no history and are easier to justify when they are new. When you are simply upgrading, you have to make comparisons in order to justify your actions.

With that in mind, I will admit here that I have modified. The practice of capturing life around me will continue as it has for years albeit with significantly improved results. I will age and hopefully develop as a human being and this camera will capture a great deal of that. For the time being, however, I will be posing whether I’m in front of the lens or not …

People Who Live in Glass Igloos ... II

2009-07-08T07:52:00.010-04:00

One thing that makes me cringe about being Canadian is the desperate way many of my fellow Canucks cling to an illegitimate sense of superiority to those who live below the 39th parallel. Too many times have I had to listen to people rant about ‘ignorant Americans’ and the horrible faux pas they commit regularly when travelling beyond their own borders - e.g. driving into South Western Ontario in the middle of July, ski equipment strapped to the roof of the car, and indignantly demanding to know where all of the snow is, or honestly believing we all live in igloos and ride dog sleds twelve months out of the year (and, no, I'm not making these comments up to support my argument).

All of that stuff is really just amusing, to be honest. Ignorance like that does have an impact on how our largest neighbour views us and, subsequently, on our political relationship, of course. It should also be mentioned that their opinion of us has a larger macro effect than ours could on them. Obviously this is where the frustration felt by Canadians comes from.

The problem is that we’re not honest with ourselves about this. We pretend that we’re better educated, more refined, better travelled and more accepting of those with different cultural/ethnic/sexual/political perspectives/positions than ours. We wax philosophical about the benefits of the ‘cultural mosaic’ rather than the ‘melting pot.’ We trumpet the benefits of a universal health care system while we elect and re-elect provincial governments who seem to be determined to abolish it. The same point could be made about our education system. We are hypocrites because we think that these things are inherently Canadian and that they are our birthright. We don’t have to work at being enlightened or decent because we can endlessly, and often wrongly, point to the United States and proclaim, “We are far superior to that!”

I guess that’s why a story in the Star today about a conservative backlash against federal funding of Toronto’s Gay Pride parade has crawled under my skin as much as it has. I’m sick to death of the lack of self-awareness on the part of Canadians. The Yanks may be inward looking, but at least that puts them in a position to be self-critical. Apparently, we Canucks are so comfortable in our position of self-proclaimed moral authority we’re incapable of recognizing how low on the roster of national cultural enlightenment we really are. F**k Brad Trost. F**k anyone who voted for him. And f**k anyone in Canada who doesn’t think this is an issue.

Nobody Publishes, Nobody Gets Hurt

2009-07-02T10:18:00.006-04:00

I have to admit, I didn’t know about it until now. The erstwhile head of counter-terrorism for the London Metropolitan Police force has written a memoir. That memoir has been blocked from publication (about fifteen minutes before publication to be exact) on the request of the current head of Scotland Yard.

I honestly doubt that there will be any major revelations in the text. I have a feeling it will amount to another self-serving diatribe about ‘wanting to serve the community and be a police officer since I was small’ and ‘having done the best I could with limited information and resources in time-sensitive situations.’ It will be the swan song of a now retired police officer who presided over a police department that witnessed the assassination of a Russian émigré, the subsequently sanctioned murder of a Brazilian guy who just looked too ‘Asian’ not to be dangerous, and the July 7 attacks. I would be absolutely floored if he were to come out mentioning any personal responsibility.

I don’t know any of this to be the case for certain, of course. The damned thing’s been relegated to the back of the warehouse because people with powerful connections are worried that they might be portrayed unfavourably. It’s censorship to protect people’s reputations. It isn’t mentioned, however, that the job that these people have elected to do should require just this kind of scrutiny. It’s the only way to keep them honest … provided the text is honest, of course …

The more worrying thing is Met Commissioner Paul Stephenson’s assertion that senior officers should be prevented from publishing in the first place. It certainly makes sense, given the treatment of the Nightjack blogger. The Met is comfortable with criticism from outside its own ramparts. Hell, it practically thrives on it. Boris Johnson spins it as an indication that they’re doing their jobs. What it can’t handle is people on the job opening their mouths. Who knows what they might say?

Panning for Gold in a River of ...

2009-07-01T09:50:00.012-04:00

I’ve spent a lot of time picking apart the problems with surveillance in contemporary culture. There is, however, a noticeable silver lining that should be acknowledged.

When Ian Tomlinson was killed by the Metropolitan Police during the G20 Summit in London last spring the cops and their cronies were very quick to announce that there was no CCTV footage available to detail what had happened. The public refused to believe it.

In 2008, protesters filmed two women being arrested at a demonstration after they’d demanded the officers present provide their badge numbers.

Earlier today, the Guardian released CCTV footage of the arrest of Faisal al-Ani in 2005. Al-Ani died in police custody. The footage depicts the usual pinning of the accused complete with one sizable cop leaning on his knee as it’s placed squarely across al-Ani's neck.

This is the silver lining.

As much as the saturation of CCTV cameras in London may be an instant violation of the right to privacy for everyone living within the M25, the plausible deniability of every police and security force has been crippled. As much as we all know that our every movement is captured for posterity at all hours of the day or night in all possible corners of this Orwellian wet dream they stubbornly refer to as ‘London,’ the suggestion that there hadn’t been a camera rolling (either journalistic or governmental) was immediately branded absurd. The G20 protests involved thousands of people being ‘kettled’ into pre-ordained areas and held for hours on end. Tomlinson was killed near one of these locations. It happened in broad daylight on a busy street in the financial district.

No footage? You're kidding, right?

I won’t go so far as to suggest that the very apparatus erected in order to make it easier to convict criminals has backfired. We all know that video footage of police acting like mean-spirited, simple-minded thugs is not enough to bring down those cops involved (Rodney King leaps to mind for obvious reasons). There is, however, enough friction created out of these incidents to make a quasi-rational Met cop deep in the throes of a ‘roids rage think twice about thumping someone for the hell of it.

The camera sees all, of course, and, while there is always that Puck known as ‘Interpretation’ to deal with, the heat coming off of the lens is enough to make anyone worry about getting burned. We’re used to the idea of our ‘betters’ doing abhorrent things and telling us that it’s in our best interest. Rendition, ethnic profiling (in the UK remarketed as the Control Society playground game, ‘Stop and Search’), and cutting public funding to ‘stimulate the economy’ are all blatant hypocrisies we seem to have accepted. The benefit of our acquiescence to total control, however, would appear to be the total exposure of that process of control.

The contemporary surveillance culture, as far as the camera is concerned, really did begin with Rodney King. The practice of mounting cameras in shops/stores in the interest of prosecuting shoplifters or armed robbers has been around for a long time, but the realization that surveillance could identify any aggressor rather than simply the ones who were supposed to be prosecuted was and still is a shock to the top-down use of force we are comfortable with in the West.

There will always be abuses, but I can’t help but be a bit optimistic when I look over the cases mentioned. Most of the complaints will be swept under the rug by the IPCC; they always are. However, years ago we wouldn’t have been able to call them liars and back that accusation up with video. As much as I hate to admit it, there may be a bright side to the condition of constant exposure ...

Nostalgia I

2009-06-25T08:25:00.006-04:00

The nostalgia is beginning to grip me. Over the last week I’ve been to the last end-of-term party I’m likely to go to for my PhD programme. Just this morning I bought my last travel card for the morning commute (they last a month). This weekend my father-in-law will arrive for his final visit to our flat before we pull up stakes and head back to the Great White North.

London, though difficult, has been good to both my wife and I. It wasn’t easy to get started, but we’ve both managed to do most of what we were planning to when we came over. We’ve travelled a bit around Europe, worked in the areas we’ve wanted to work in, and gathered some experience that will help us when we try to settle in back home. It was brutal getting started here, but the time we’ve put in has paid off.

We’d always assumed that we were heading home eventually. The original plan was only to stay a year. Katie then got work she liked and I somehow managed to get into the degree programme I’m in now. Time kept slipping by and, before long, we’d been here six years. One year stretches into six more easily than you’d think. It’s like a car accident: it happens very slowly and it happens all at once.

Certain things have been popping up lately. The realization that we’re running out of opportunities to visit our local pub, or take a train down to Waterloo Station and have a walk down the South Bank in good weather, or spend a Saturday afternoon wandering around Wimbledon Village or Kingston has popped up more frequently lately. There will be opportunities for similar activities in Toronto, of course, but I grew up near Toronto. It will never have the same hint of the exotic that London has for me.

Hell. I’d never been outside of North America before I moved to the UK.

With that said, I have been here for a while. Everything is exotic, yes, but familiar at the same time. I do wonder how odd Canada will feel after being away for so long …

Requiem for a Whistle-Blower: Nightjacked II

2009-06-18T07:19:00.009-04:00

I would like to update my comments on the Nightjack case. I closed the last entry with an assertion that writing a blog on your professional experiences more or less negated any real hope of maintaining anonymity.

It’s been pointed out by another anonymous blogger, Belle de Jour, that the removal of an expectation of anonymity from bloggers will have a muting effect on potential whistle-blowers (Nightjack’s case would certainly appear to support this suggestion). There are people who will witness ugly things in their places of employment or in their neighbourhoods and the only real hope we have that they will speak out against the ugliness is the possibility that their identities could be kept secret. This is certainly the principle that governs organizations like Crime Stoppers in Canada and there is some evidence that it works.

Whistle-blowing is not an attractive prospect for anyone who has something to lose. When you’re planning on ratting your employer out, you have to factor in your dependency on the income coming from the job (which, these days, I would imagine is higher for the average worker than it has been since the 1930’s) as well as the potential chill in your workplace if you manage to hang on to your existing job. If you’re unable to hold on to your existing job, you’ll have to consider the possibility of an all-encompassing white-out in the industry as a result of your actions. Who the hell do you go to for a reference?

With that in mind, the strength of the anonymous tip is limited for obvious reasons. It is easy to dismiss rumour. Without a source to validate the content of the statement, those in the wrong can always claim that the complaint comes from a personal issue rather than a genuine dishonesty or inefficacy on the part of the company/organization in question. There may be secondary ways to validate accusations from anonymous sources, but that kind of evidence will never have the same weight as that of the identified individual speaking on the record.

I admire whistle-blowers, to be honest. It takes a lot of guts to put your neck on the block and declare that principles are more important than your immediate comfort. I do, however, fear that the protection of anonymity softens the impact of major revelations. There should be a mechanism to protect whistle-blowers but I’m not sure that anonymity is the right one.

The bottom line is that Nightjack published information on his constabulary that would only have been within the reach of an employee of that constabulary. He published information that was important and may very well lead to greater transparency and tighter regulations for police in the United Kingdom (something that is long overdue). With all of this in mind, the trail of breadcrumbs coming from someone in a position to provide real, accurate and useful information to the public is simply going to be too easily traced for anyone interested in following it.

The point of this entry isn’t to suggest that freedom of speech should be curtailed. The point is to suggest that any overture to free speech has always entailed risk. The improvements in communication media cannot get past this – we validate the integrity of a message by looking toward the author. If the author remains hidden, the integrity is too easily attacked and dismissed.

Nightjacked

2009-06-16T17:25:00.006-04:00

There was once a great blog called Nightjack. Part of what made this blog special was the fact that it was published “anonymously” by a detective constable in the Lancashire constabulary. Advice was offered to one and all regarding procedures of arrest and fallacies in police practices. Illuminating anecdotes were recorded and distributed to all who were interested. It generated a lot of attention and, in the end, when a reporter figured out who was writing it, the officer attempted to obtain an injunction preventing them from publishing the officer’s name. The court has subsequently ruled against the officer indicating that someone who writes a blog has no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Whatever the arguments may be in favor of punishing the officer for disclosing confidential information, the real curiosity is this idea of blogging anonymously. I will admit, I’m very new to the blogosphere, and I certainly don’t know enough about the culture or the ins and outs of the etiquette just yet, but I have to admit that I found the idea surprising that anyone publishing in this medium could expect to have their identity kept secret for very long. With that in mind, the idea that you could be found out and subsequently argue that the release of that information would be unfair (which is pretty much what the officer in question was suggesting) is particularly ridiculous.

I liked Nightjack. I didn’t know about it for long, but what I’d read before the author deleted all of the content was worth reading and it did come from an interesting perspective. I will miss it, but something about the author’s claim to a right of anonymity seems absurd. Publishing on the basis of anonymity is all well and good, but if the material comes from your own personal/professional experience, you have to figure you’re going to get nailed sooner or later.

Silence

2009-06-16T07:08:00.008-04:00

Apologies for the last few weeks’ silence. A lot’s been going on.

In the last week, my other half and I have booked our tickets home to Canada, I’ve put in my notice in my current job, and begin the process of thinning out six years’ worth of crap squirreled away in our flat.

The flight was the big thing, really. We’ve been holding off on the booking waiting to get a good price and figure out our other travel plans for this summer. In the end, it seemed the best course to simply book the flight back home and then plan a short trip around the dates between giving our flat up and the exit flight back to the Great White North. Now that it’s handled, I can honestly say that the near-paralytic fear of diving into the unknown (again) is beginning to grip me.

I don’t, for instance, have a firm job offer in Toronto. The economy is doing pretty well, comparatively speaking, at the moment so it’s not as much of a concern as it would be if we were moving somewhere like Calgary or Vancouver. That said, I moved to the UK without having a job lined up and the first six months over here were a complete nightmare. I’m certain I don’t want to go through that again.

The hell with it, though. The Home Office will not allow me to stay past January anyway and the lease on the flat is up at the end of July. For that and a number of other reasons it is time to move on. We had always planned on returning to Canada ... Christ, originally we were only going to stay in the UK for a year ... we've been here for six ...

The No-Vaseline Education Machine

2009-05-28T11:37:00.010-04:00

One of the intrinsic elements of being Canadian is seeing trends appear in one of the two Goliaths (US, UK) from whom you have inherited most of your cultural heritage and hoping like hell that those trends will not make it to your front door. I could point to Simon Cowell (UK), privatized health care (US), xenophobia (US & UK), police brutality as a component of public demonstrations (UK & US) and Neo-Liberal governments (US & UK) as examples. I could also point out that, in one way or another, all of these things have filtered into Canadian culture whether we professed a desire for them or not.

Recently, pupils walked out of class at a school in Loughton, UK to protest CCTV cameras having been set up in their classrooms. Once assured that the cameras had finally been turned off (the situation was not resolved for three weeks), the students returned to class wearing masks to continue their protest. The subsequent fall-out has involved a member of parliament, the parents of the students and the douchebag who thought the whole thing up in the first place, school headmaster Chris Seaward.

I have to express my admiration for the students involved in the protest. My memories of high school are peppered with feelings of deep frustration at the hands of simple-minded teachers (not all of them, but enough of the total to leave a lasting impression) and administrative practices that were little more than disciplinary regimes. The temptation to act out was often overwhelming and it was really just that guaranteed date of parole in the future that kept me from being more than a nuisance to the people whose unlucky fate it was to educate me. With that in mind, there were things that bothered me on a number of occasions and it would have been an indication of greater character to have tried to do something about it. I, of course, never did. The students in this case, however, managed to enact a debate on a larger scale regarding something we should all be very, very concerned about.

Techniques of control and discipline predictably emerge from situations that involve a captive population; prisoners, mental patients, children, the poor, etc. People are subjected to experiments and the results are catalogued. Further examination is carried out and the subsequent data is added to the subject knowledge. This is how we develop ideas and systems of implementation regarding education, (social) rehabilitation and community policing. All of this, it should be noted, necessitates a violation of individual liberty and it is this quality that causes reactions amongst the population surveilled.

In most cases, this reaction has little effect on the system that is conducting the surveillance. The irritation of a few prisoners regarding their treatment rarely finds a sympathetic ear and the endless monitoring of the poor tends to appease the nervousness of the wealthy. The one thing we can depend on, however, is that successful practices of control rarely stay limited to their original purpose. The temptation to test these things out on a larger scale is simply too much.

The issue then becomes the assignment of that programme to a population that is normally incapable of determining its own rights. Students, particularly ones who are below voting age, are constantly screwed with in this manner. I can only assume this is the reason the school administration thought they would get away with this – a significant amount of secondary education is really just convincing people that they’re not supposed to stand up for themselves. The implementation of new disciplinary practices (I’m reminded of the debate surrounding the use of the ‘Mosquito’ in Canada to deter teenagers from loitering in public parks) is normally unwarranted and simply carried out as the result of an innate desire to bully others into predictable limits of action.

The installation of CCTV cameras in a classroom is a pretty ugly indication of this. The desire to put a population under constant watch is pandemic in the UK and getting increasingly worse in the US. It would be comforting to think that Chris Seaward was simply a lone crackpot, a low-life bully whose job satisfaction is derived solely from manipulating people who can’t defend themselves, but there is something uglier going on here. Seaward is, by all appearances, all of these things. The fact, however, that the school’s cafeteria installed a finger scanning device as the mechanism that would allow the students to buy lunch and wasn’t burned to the ground in a fit of morally justifiable rage is deeply troubling.

Chris Seaward still has a job. The cameras, as far as I can tell from available sources, have not been physically removed from the classrooms. The ‘Mosquito’ is still available for sale even though it blatantly violates teenagers’ human rights. The degree to which technology allows cowards and amoral bullies to victimize the subaltern continues to expand. Blinking lights and mechanized lenses relieve us of the participatory element of creating civilization.

I began this entry with a wail about the subjective position of Canadian culture. In light of that subjectivity, it is events like this that worry me most. Are we doomed to take on the same paranoid, bigoted, lazy, amoral position toward the ‘other’ that the United Kingdom has? I have a very, very bad feeling that we are …

Extreme Rationalization: Home Edition

2009-05-27T09:18:00.013-04:00

I have, not for the first time, just had to subject myself to a marathon of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and I think I may have figured out why that show bothers me as much as it does.

It’s not that I don’t think that the people on these shows deserve the help that they get. And, for the record, I’m aware of the normal protest; “If they couldn’t afford the renov ations, how in the hell are they going to be able to cover the cost of the utilities on that massive house?” Additionally, I’m relatively certain that the regular cast members of the show (despite some personality ticks that make me cringe) are decent people.

What bothers me are the broader implications of the presentation.

Let’s assume, for the moment, that those who are granted a visit from the EM:HE crew are vetted according to severity of need rather than the uniqueness of the horror that has put them in this position or the attractiveness of their personalities. The inevitable result of the presentation is the overall feel that good things will happen to good people and that, somehow, corporate sponsorship will save the world. Sears will come to the rescue of the down-trodden, the weak and the vulnerable and it shall descend upon them in a giant tour-bus captained by a twit with a bad haircut and a Dr. Phil complex.

What’s the result, then? A handful of families who meet the criteria outlined by ABC’s production team are transplanted into customized manors and we all get to feel a little better about the world around us. In the meantime, a massive demographic in New Orleans still don’t have homes to call their own, the middle class continues to disappear into an expanding lower class, and 31% of men over the age of twenty are now unemployed or no longer seeking work in the United States.

The main problem with EM:HE is that it legitimizes neglect on the part of the state. Amazingly, it’s never pointed out that the parents of disabled children should never have to worry about affording the care necessary for their children. The fact that this show routinely depicts families who are financially crippled as a result of the financial burden inherent in caring for special needs kids is an indication of something sick at the core of the American social system.

More to the point, the suggestion that a television show can make up for something like that is openly immoral. This is the disease of the spectacle: A handful of what must be a much larger demographic are (at least temporarily) elevated and this somehow diminishes the plight of other people who are one visit to the emergency room away from not being able to pay their mortgage. What we’re dealing with here is the myth that charity can take the place of infrastructure. We’re encouraged to believe that the community can take care itself and that the market can actually adjust to compensate for its own shortcomings.

The space that this show occupies lies somewhere between fantasy, commercial (it is, essentially one long preamble to a massive orgasm of consumer satisfaction), and circus. I will admit that I hate it. In an economy where people are being dragged deeper and deeper toward the oblivion of bankruptcy there is no rational argument in favour of creating a Pity Lottery. We are, at this point in human history, all comparably pathetic and what will solve the problem is a secure social assistance system rather than an orgy of self-aggrandizing sympathy justified by Neilsen ratings.

Deus Ex Mail Slot

2009-05-24T11:53:00.007-04:00

At long, long, long, long last I finally have my passport back.

On Friday morning a package as unceremoniously dropped through the letter slot on my door and within was my passport and all of the documentation that went along with my application; bank statements, references from the university, my employer, etc. My new Identity Card issued by the Home Office will arrive later, of course, and I know that that’s the only item that the UK Government can lay claim to. As such, what’s the security of my bank details, the documentation that allows me to travel? I must admit that it bothers me that this stuff was just dropped off rather than really being delivered – the goddamned package was marked ‘Signed For,’ for crying out loud.

Be that as it may, the whole thing’s real now. The overtures we’ve made over the last few months that we would shortly be leaving the United Kingdom and returning to the partially frozen outback known as Canada have been made with sincerity but there was always a mechanical barrier to the reality of the situation. The documentation that owns me, my passport, has been returned and we can now book flights. We have to make decisions. Plans need to be finalized. We’re past the point where mere verbiage is synonymous with action.

It is a strange, terrifying kind of freedom. It’s been six years, but here I am standing at the edge of the cliff again. Moving from one country with an (arguably) stable employment situation to another where the jobs may be thin and far between. It’s a gamble. In the long run, it worked out the first time I tried it, but it took a long, long time to get to a good place here and I’m not in the mood to run that marathon again. It would be easier to fathom if I knew we were going to land on our feet on the other side …

With that in mind, we don’t have much choice. The visa extension only lasts until the end of the year and there’s no point in renewing the lease we have on our existing flat. It’s time to move on … even if I’m taking some significant baggage with me (an unfinished thesis not being the least of the weight). Saddle up, take one last long look at the homestead, turn around and kick your spurs back. Dig the buggers in deep so your mount takes off so hard you can’t turn your head back for fear of falling off …

Daydreamin'

2009-04-30T10:06:00.008-04:00

I know that summer is coming on when I’m unable to avoid daydreaming about certain things. Driving along a two-lane highway in Ontario at dusk with loud music playing and the windows rolled down, for instance … or my friend’s cottage on Otter Lake in Muskoka … or the pond in front of my parent’s house near Owen Sound …

I think it probably comes from growing up in Ontario. This euphoria at the change of seasons is bred out of the ingrained feeling of your (already) frozen feet shuffling down the sidewalk to school early in the morning. That repetitive action is the reason that most Canadians (I’m excluding Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland residents here for obvious reasons) have a nearly Pavlovian response to shifts in the weather. That first drop running down the side of an icicle or the first blades of grass poking defiantly through the snow cover send a rush of sensations through the spine of any half-frozen Canuck. To hell with Proust and his madeleines. If you want to find out what an arresting flood of memories is like spend February without seeing the sun, huddled next to the fire or a vent connected to your furnace and then, one clear morning, step outside and let that first warm breeze find your face.

It’s nothing short of magical.

Afternoons like this I can only think of that feeling that you needed to use that weather – it will be gone soon, so make the most out of it. Drink it in. The snow will return, the driving will become treacherous and the sky will be dark until you walk into the office and blacken again by the time you are allowed to leave. For now, we can all feel free for a few fleeting moments bombing down an empty highway with the wind whipping through the car, wandering down a lakeside beach or wedged into a deck chair with a few friends and a fridge full of cold beer within easy reach …

What's That On Your Face?

2009-04-24T10:32:00.007-04:00

Every once in a while a story comes across the feeds that reminds you why we’re all supposed to value our new access to constant communication. An enormous amount of noise is made about the vulnerability of personal information, the potential for fraud, and the essential ‘there-not-there-ness’ of online interaction in general. True, there have been a number of horrible situations that owe their existence specifically to the expansion of human communication through fiber-optic cables and html script (the recent revelation of the Craigslist killer being the most obvious example).

There are those who have been against the expansion of the Internet from the beginning. I agree with a number of them and disagree wholeheartedly with the rest. Probably the best indication I’ve seen in a while to be optimistic is was the vote held by Facebook to determine their new terms of service. In what other medium could something like this be organized?

Every once in a while it’s nice to take a good, long look at this horrible thing the mainstream media would have us believe is simply a recruiting tool for hate groups and pedophiles and realize that there are massive benefits to this communication medium. I don’t necessarily think that Facebook is blazing a trail here (social anomalies like Linux have been baffling Hearst-esque market analysts for decades now) but the fact that a massive outcry regarding the practices of a company providing a free service caused the company to initiate a purely democratic process to determine how it should run is something pretty amazing …

I’ll get back to being grumpy in the next blog.

Why Cops and Electricity Don't Mix

2009-04-22T10:15:00.009-04:00

I realize that I’ve been ranting about cops a lot lately … this probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve been waiting for the UK Border Patrol to return my passport for more than three months now … but I digress …

The issue regarding the use of tasers in Canada has been hot since the murder of Robert Dziekanski by RCMP officers at Vancouver airport in October of 2007. The steady stream of obfuscations and absurd excuses that the RCMP have offered regarding their conduct in this case are essentially irrelevant on a macro-scale here, however, and I’m not interested in whether they ever do accept blame for Dziekanski’s death.

I have long been suspicious of the impulses that cause people to join a police force or the military. In the abstract, the only difference between an arrest and assault and kidnapping is the badge. Beyond that, the impulse to stomp someone is present in cop lore from the Paris revolt to the G20 protests in London a few weeks ago. Police, if they are not enthusiastic about it (and I think most of them are), view violence inflicted on other people as an essential part of their jobs.

The frustration, then, comes out as a result of having this incredible apparatus for violence – your service weapon – at your disposal and never being able to use it. You are trained, you are made to be familiar with the weapon, and eventually you will come to the conclusion that, as a member of a Canadian police force, you will quite possibly never be involved in a situation that will require your using that weapon.

Behold the taser.

It has a trigger. It is deployed simply in the palm of your hand. If you pull that trigger after aiming carefully, your target will drop to the ground in a sudden, spastic orgy of violence. In short, you may now get your rocks off without having to worry about committing murder. Urge satisfied.

That tasers – and the assholes who’ve used them unnecessarily – have “accidentally” killed people is an entirely predictable outcome of their use. Nothing that can drop a full grown human being to the ground on first contact is non violent. The taser, then adjusts what could broadly be called the acceptable level of violence at the disposal of security forces. At first glance, it is a minor adjustment from simply night-sticking someone to the ground and driving your knee into their back while trying to get the cuffs on. The benefit to the police, of course, is that they are now able to maintain a safe distance from an assailant while being able to incapacitate them without killing them … probably.

I know I’m probably alone here in the hope that tasers will be taken out of the cops’ hands entirely. I am far more comfortable with the idea of them only having a gun at their disposal – it’s easier to pull the trigger when you’re playing video games than it is in real life. Staring down the aim point at someone is a very different action when you’ve only got to twitch your index finger to make them dead. It will create a hesitation … and sometimes that’s all that’s needed to breed uncertainty.

It is worth bearing in mind that most people will have joined the force for action but most of them weren’t sociopaths to start. There is a culture of violence, a siege mentality that goes along with toeing that “thin blue line.” The knowledge that wearing that uniform makes you an immediate scorn and distrust from anyone who’s ever been pushed around on a bad night or lost a friend/relative to the prison system must whirr around at the back of your brain while you’re on duty. Take that recognition and let it ride for a few years and I would imagine that wiping the smirk of someone’s face would be more of a compulsion than a measured decision.

Police also are interested in thumping people and getting away with it. The imperative toward violence I’ve been talking about is sweetened significantly by the realization that said violence is part of your job. Strictly speaking, you are at work when you are preserving the impression that only people pre-emptively sanctioned by the state are allowed to stomp people in a civilized society. You are maintaining order by demonstrating the muscle that maintains that order.

The taser, then is the sterilisation of that violence. It is also another instance in the endless march of progress that allows technology to do the heavy lifting for us. Cops love tasers for this reason. They can keep the public in line without scraping their knuckles. They can shoot people without having to deal with the hangover from killing. They can act out those old playground cops-and-robbers fantasies complete with the (presumptively) temporary collapse of their prey. The problem is that this hasn’t been happening with the same regularity lately.

The problem with these goddamned things is that they’re not supposed to kill anyone. Guns are different – you know that the person you’re pointing it at isn’t supposed to come back after you’ve pulled the trigger. The fact that people are beginning to die on a semi-regular basis as a result of taser use should be reason to suspend their use indefinitely. The fact that this will not happen is directly related to the intended outcome of the object – they’re not supposed to kill people and, according to moron logic, any death that results from their use is purely accidental.

This is the same pseudo-logic that would cause your teenage son to tell you that he hadn’t intended to crash and, as a result, is not in the wrong for having taken your car.

Tasers will, for the foreseeable future at least, remain a part of the RCMP arsenal. The bottom line is that, when we challenge the police’s ability to use whatever force they deem necessary, we are challenging the government’s ability to sanction violence. There is a much bigger conversation going on here …

Retraction Control

2009-04-19T09:22:00.010-04:00

One of the fundamental problems with legitimizing a system of surveillance, particularly from a governmental perspective, is the suggestion that unlimited capabilities will invariably lead to abuse of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they say.

I suppose it’s little wonder that Councils in the UK have had their ability to conduct unwarranted surveillance on their own populations stripped. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has announced that, due to a number of blatant abuses of power, the ability of local governments in the UK to direct video surveillance will now reside solely with federal government authorities.

It would be a massive omission if this were not greeted as progress. Granted, I have a number of problems with the existing breadth of the Home Office’s power, but the prevention of the expansion of those capabilities is an important step forward. The idea that all branches of government should have the ability to violate a citizen’s privacy for any reason is a little too unnerving – particularly when it comes to the local government system in the UK.

I once heard Bob Geldof refer to the local councils as local busybodies who’d managed to have their meddling elevated to a kind of politics. They are, he said, the lowest rung on the party political ladder. He was right. The desire to run for one of these positions must have more to do with being able to bully your neighbors than it does with any altruistic sense of civic duty.

In the abstract, there is very little to be accomplished. The concerns of local government are primarily operational – street cleaning, trash collection, etc. – and the breadth of their influence should not push much further past that. The really terrifying element to this announcement is that the hysteria surrounding terrorism has progressed to the point that we are granting extraordinary powers to people who have absolutely no business swinging the bigger clubs. The councils never, under any circumstances should have been granted the right to spy on local citizens. It’s all well and good to suggest that the nature of contemporary terrorism requires the vigilance of every available official but that statement fails to take into account the competence of every available official.

Frankly, it is frightening enough to think of the power available to the mouth-breathing incompetents currently working in the security services in any Western country. The fact that the inherent danger behind that existing schematic was overlooked and, in fact, expanded is probably the best available example that terrorism does in fact work. Common sense has taken a backseat to an endless cry for safety and peace of mind. The result is that we end up investing privileges that should be reserved for those who’ve passed tests a bit more comprehensive and thorough than simply winning a local election.

There is an interesting element to this situation, though. The fact that councils have been using this technology and expanded legal latitude for things as petty and mean-spirited as investigating people who’re lax at cleaning up after their dogs or, far worse, “families anxious to secure places at successful state schools” for their children, is entirely predictable. As I’ve been saying, that is what social organisms like local councils are designed to do. They have never been about governing, in the broader sense of the term – they are reactive and continual management of the civic environment rather than something that exists in order to preserve order in the macro-sense.

This forced mission that we are all on now, this charge we have all been given, essentially functions as an imperative for the abuse of power. There is no other way this sort of thing could work out. The power of local councils has been curtailed, and the more robust authorities have supposedly reclaimed singular authority to spy on their own citizens, but the problem lies in the limits of this assumption of necessity.

The problem in the Times story isn’t that people have had their privacy invaded for spurious reasons so much as it is the accessibility of those who have done the spying. The act of surveillance is supposed to be conducted by those who exist above the Great Unwashed. The lowly citizen is not supposed to be able to make a connection between the motive for the invasion of privacy and the act of surveillance – it is the mystery that grants legitimacy. The vulgarity of monitoring a family who are interested in improving their child’s education is immediately revolting because there is no grand narrative that can be used to validate the violation in the first place.

Suggesting that councils have conducted inappropriate surveillance in the UK is absurd. The assertion that surveillance is a necessary component to ‘safe’ urbanity removes the possibility of establishing acceptable degrees of intrusion. If the contention that spying on a citizenry is a legitimate mechanism for the maintenance of safety (read: control) is not challenged in its entirety, the suggestion that there are limits to the use of that surveillance mechanism becomes a matter of political maneuvering rather than an establishment of legitimate use. In other words, the removal of local councils’ ability to conduct unwarranted and, ultimately, punitive surveillance is purely the result of that surveillance becoming common knowledge rather than the immorality of the practice. The dialing back of that power is a defensive move intended to preserve the popular attitude toward the state’s endless violation of citizen’s privacy rather than an acknowledgment of wrongdoing. As they say in the US Army; “the only real crime is getting caught.”

Too Right

2009-04-14T14:14:00.003-04:00

Thought this one followed the last blog rather well. Thanks to Owen Hatherley for posting this image on his blog.

I'd recommend a visit if you have time.

The Norm Applicable to Chaos

2009-04-10T19:40:00.017-04:00

I spend a lot of time thinking about cameras and surveillance. I suppose it’s odd, then, that I haven’t written anything down here about the events surrounding G20 meeting in London until now. The curiosity for me is rooted entirely in the resulting death of Ian Tomlinson rather than any technical aspect of the deals reached. Call it myopic, but I do have a relatively focused area of interest …

According to the latest, the thug-in-uniform who slammed forty-seven year old man to the ground and most likely caused his death has come forward to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Anyone reading this blog who is not familiar with UK news should read up on the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes by the Metropolitan Police.

The result of the inquiry into the de Menezes killing was fairly predictable. There was the usual admonition of the police involved, the promise of refined police procedures, and the typical whisper of mild reprimand for those who engineered his death. In de Menezes’ case, the rationale for shooting him in the head five times as he was pinned to an Underground train’s floor was that he lived in the same housing development as one of the suspects linked to the previous days failed bombing attempts and, apparently, resembled that suspect.

That was enough.

That was enough to forfeit care or restraint in the pursuit of a suspect and to subsequently absolve the officers involved in any real reprimands after two investigations by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The system had healed itself and the death of one foreigner wasn’t enough to cause any real damage regarding this country’s approach to terrorism and dissent in general. The false act of contrition had played out the way it always does in the media – the headlines got smaller and were pushed further towards the back pages of the newspapers.

The fundamental difference with that death and this one is that, in the Tomlinson case, we have video. I have no doubt that the case would have been swept quietly under the rug had the Guardian not released the video online. The subsequent exposure – it made every evening newscast that week and continues to dominate the headlines – backed the Met into a corner. If we’d had press footage of the officers pumping lead into the back of an innocent man’s head the cops involved would have been lynched. As it is, thumping someone to the ground is shocking enough when displayed on television in slow motion and there will be a great deal more attention paid to this case than that of de Menezes.

With that said, I hate to admit that I’m still not convinced there will be any different outcome this time around. A quick, cursory examination of cop cock-ups the world over indicates that nothing short of a sudden military junta will enact real accountability on the part of an existing police force. Police are allowed lenience in line with Weber’s suggestion that a state must maintain a monopoly on the legitimacy of the use of violence in a society in order to maintain power. In other words, the cops have to be granted a wide scope on the acceptability of their own thuggery in order to deter thuggery on the part of the average citizen. The fact that ‘arrest’ is really just assault and kidnapping with a badge to sanctify the act is the basic principle here. In line with that, the majority of the public don’t mind the sight of a line of police officers swinging batons at demonstrators because the alternative would be to admit that a large enough group of citizens could trump the power of the police.

But that’s the catch in this case, isn’t it? The sight of a few hundred people lined up opposite a few dozen uniforms doesn’t provoke a massive amount of sympathy on the part of the public because the cops always look as though they’re outnumbered. The Guardian video, in an idyllic world, would change all of this. The sight of a man walking past a group of cops, obviously not participating in the demonstrations – in fact, he was simply heading home after a days work as a newsagent in the area – and entirely on his own, being thumped to the ground simply for not showing some asshole the deference the uniform is supposed to inspire should offend people. The knowledge that the same man died of a heart attack moments after the end of the video should provoke outrage in the strongest terms.

I have little doubt that there will be a great deal of noise made about this from highly concentrated sources. University student groups will begin action. I’m sure that Mr. Tomlinson’s family will press heavily to see the officer(s) punished. I just don’t think that any of this will happen. With every public embarrassment, the image handlers for the Met get better at putting out fires. There will be a great deal of noise made about accountability, about the sensitivity of the Met and its responsibility to the public, and a final push made to prove that the actions taken by the officer(s), while abhorrent, were still in the interest of maintaining peace and saving small puppies from cancer … or something similar.

In rare instances the potentialities for surveillance work wonderfully as weapons against tyranny. The threat of exposure, however, will not act as a deterrent until organizations exist that can deal with new certainties actively. The Independent Police Complaints Commission managed to sweep a fatal shooting under the rug twice. I see no reason to assume that Mr. Tomlinson will be (dis)honored in any other fashion.

Twitter Titter

2009-04-01T08:49:00.008-04:00

All good jokes have a whiff of the truth to them. The best punch-lines are the ones that seem totally out of proportion with what was initially a believable narrative. Even George Carlin’s “7 Words You Can Never Say On Television” bit was really only funny when it came to the analysis as to why the words were inadmissible … but shouldn’t be.

Perhaps that’s the reason I find The Guardian’s April Fool’s Day joke funnier than any of the other ones I’ve come across in years. The paper has stated that it plans to discontinue the traditional pulp-and-ink motif of the traditional newspaper (Seattle Post-Intelligencer workers would be able to relate on a darker level) and will henceforth only be publishing news via Twitter feeds.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I have to admit that it took me a minute to think of it as improbable as well, though. You can almost feel the truncation in regular reporting these days. It does feel like half of the stuff I read in the papers is composed first in text-speak and then edited into something resembling actual language. The Guardian is normally a little bit better than this (in the negative context, I was thinking primarily about my home-town’s lacklustre rag, The London Free Press), and there is a great deal to be said in favour of British journalism. However, the increasing need to appear ‘hip’ or ‘current’ in media does cause me to worry a bit about little things like depth and relevance being pushed to the side.

The suggestion that we are inundated with information is, at this point, much like pointing out that water is wet. The argument, however, that this requires messages directed toward shorter attention spans is absurd. The constant exposure to information creates a dependency on it: after a certain period of time living within constant reach of a signal of some kind the mind will need that signal to determine normalcy. We see this with people who’ve lost their cell phones or those who’ve suddenly found themselves without Internet access. It is the constancy of the input that becomes the object required rather than the shape or the qualities of the signals themselves.

With all of that in mind, there is no validity to the charge that this requires shorter content overall. If it is the exposure to information and not the information itself that has become the shape of the dependency, would not the long narrative be the ideal format rather than the 140-character blurb? Does briefness not create an agitation or a frustration to someone who is in need of constant input and constant exposure?

I know I’m wrong about this, by the way. The frustrating thing is not knowing why I’m wrong.

As such, is the suggestion that 140 characters are enough to tell a story absurd because it’s simply too limited or because it cannot, by definition, capture the intended audience for a significant period of time? If that is the case, and we’re still going back to the trough, are we all truly junkies? Are we shooting stepped-on information because we can’t get the pure anymore and even a shorter high is better than sobriety and withdrawal?

Community Cannibalism

2009-03-26T19:33:00.006-04:00

In the increasingly Orwellian (see John Hutnyk's blog about new regulations for the supervision of international students) world of the 21st century United Kingdom, the unappreciated and marginalized racist may now rejoice. The British Transport Police are putting out a poster series calling on ‘ordinary citizens’ to report ‘suspicious behaviour’ to police in the interest of preventing terrorist attacks. The key development, however, is that they are not limiting the location of scrutiny to the Underground, Network Rail or the Bus systems. The call to arms now stretches from the hallowed ground of the shopping centre to the model of acceptance and racial harmony that is the British suburb.

The transferring of responsibility for vigilance from security forces to the public is really nothing new in the UK. For years the transport system has been awash with advisory announcements and posters directing us to report unattended luggage and bags. This new promotion is something different though … This overture to the involvement of citizenry in the investigative and preventative process is more than a little worrying for obvious reasons. It opens up possibilities for persecution and the settling of personal scores by manipulating the state as a weapon against people for dubious reasons.

It is impossible not to see at least a lukewarm comparison with this new initiative and the practices of the Stasi. Hunter S. Thompson referred to the United States as the ‘Kingdom of Fear.’ It is beginning to look like that Kingdom has claimed its first colony.

Qwerty Qwime

2009-03-26T09:46:00.009-04:00

The standard advertising slogan that goes along with any new development in consumer technology is freedom. Cars were going to open the country up to us at the beginning of the twentieth century. Air travel was going to put the rest of the world within our reach. Television was going to squeeze the entire globe into our living rooms. The Internet was going to provide for a greater exchange of ideas and the instant access of research, literature and culture instantly from the convenience of your monitor and keypad.

In a number of cases, this actually did turn out to be true. Despite the required interaction with frotteurs (read: airport security) prior to boarding a flight, air travel has delivered the rest of the world to a broader group of would-be-adventurers. It isn’t always cheap, obviously, but it is possible to get from London to Singapore without boarding a series of steamers over the course of a month. That has to be progress no matter how you look at it.

The automobile, despite its environmental consequences, has allowed a greater mobility of both people and goods and the possibility of greater interaction between people since the start of its production. It has also increased the number of people killed as a simple result of the self-directed transportation of human beings, of course, but speed always implies risk … and I’d rather be James Dean than a member of the Donner party if I have the choice. The car separated of the human from the bounds of gravity, muscle power and (within obvious limits) the elements.

Television, while not affecting the body in a positive way, allowed the viewer to turn the domicile into a site of greater potentiality and the television became a portal to the rest of the world. We were able to witness events in real time taking place well outside our immediate surroundings. Spheres of reaction to events became global and simultaneous. The magic window in the family room dragged the domicile out into space.

All of this advancement begs a question. Government requires control. The process of managing a population requires a limitation of freedom in order to produce a system of manageable outcomes (Foucault, Dean, etc.). Technology cannot escape this. The reflection of a culture necessarily requires a level of involvement in it. As such, the limitations that must be applied to human behaviour are applied in a pre-emptive fashion to the technologies that may enable that behaviour: speed limits, airport security, governmental censorship of television programs, etc.

I suppose it’s no surprise, then that the Canadian government is complaining loudly about the Blackberry and the difficulties involved in wiretapping them. Other phones, apparently, are ridiculously easy to sit on. Blackberries appear to have some inherent quality relative to their operating system that prevents third parties from accessing the conversation (I’m sure others reading this blog could provide further details).

I realize that I’m on the other side of this debate – that I am among the minority who is not willing to trade a little autonomy in order to gain a little security. As such, I do have a problem with this line of thinking. As a matter of fact, I have a problem with the suggestion that any object capable of facilitating communication should be instantly accessible to security forces as a matter of policy. The equivalent, given the previous examples, would be calling upon car manufacturers to produce only transparent trunk lids to allow the cops to see what you’re transporting at all times or demanding tracking systems installed in television sets to track viewing habits.

For the record, I’m aware that some limited version of both of these examples is already in place … but I’m trying to make a point here.

The alarming element of this story is the suggestion that technology should never function in aid of privacy. Communication tools increasingly require the surrender of information and privacy as a matter of function (social networking sites, and so on). The rub is that we are increasingly linking technology with exposure. The background of media and communication is littered with examples of government initiatives toward transparency of the public and the opacity of those same government agencies. From the Enigma Machine to the Carnivore program, the emphasis has been on management of exposure.

I will be watching this one with interest. Research in Motion have an interesting position to occupy in this debate. The production of a mechanism that blocks government surveillance is always going to be a touchy issue (I’m reminded of so-called fuzz-busters used to detect speed traps). The question that never really gets asked is whether anyone has a right to use something that cannot be surveilled – whether there is a claim to autonomy that is still believable now that we’re all hooked up to our own synthetic breathing machines. The concern brought up by this argument is not whether Blackberry should acquiesce to the whining of a few authoritarian parliamentarians but whether the demand for exposure voiced by government is, by now, a demand for the exposure of the object or the exposure of all citizens. Is the frustration voiced here the result of a perceived lack of control over some aspect of the citizen’s body or is it rage over the realization that there is still a site of potentiality outside of pre-emptive control?

What most likely won’t be addressed is that this debate really has very little to do with the Blackberry object. The argument here is over the limits of control and the position of technology in determining those limits.

Street Cred

2009-03-20T07:43:00.009-04:00

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation on Google Street View by Scott McQuire at Goldsmiths. He was ostensibly presenting work from his most recent book, The Media City, but the bulk of the talk centred on Google Street View and its implications for urbanity and the contemporary cityscape.

It is a question that keeps nipping at the back of my brain, though. This digitization of space, this conversion of settled territory into the virtual does say something about our relationship with the brute physical reality of the world around us. Is nothing ‘real’ now unless it is digital? Have we finally fulfilled Baudrillard’s fear regarding Integral Reality? Is the endless precession of copies and simulations really responsible for destroying the principle of authenticity and rendering everything real?

There is an element of hysteria in all academic debates.

Still, this endless creation of the intangible to illustrate the reality of the tangible is something that begs attention. The suggestion that a typical topographical map is insufficient for general navigation purposes does seem a bit odd. The need to find a path from one place to the next is the theoretical purpose of any map. The need to determine the exact layout of a street is not, strictly speaking, required in order to navigate to that street or to find the correct address on said street.

What is the purpose of Street View, then?

Street View is the rational reaction to the intangibility of the Internet – the relation of the abstract to the concrete is instinctive. Maps are points of frustration – they represent potentialities, a world that hasn’t been revealed to us yet. As much as we are all dependant on the tools that allow us to get somewhere, it is the being there that is the primary goal.

Insofar as the Internet is being blamed for the slow death of the traditional newspaper (particularly in North America), it is the result of a re-evaluation of the virtual as more real than reality. This social adjustment is now dragging actual physical space into its vortex. Street View allows the map’s claim to represent reality to come to full fruition as challenging the map to prove its coordinates produces a two-dimensional photographic representation of that reality.

The map, then, has fallen down the same perceptual maelstrom that the newspaper has with one important caveat: while the ‘blogosphere’ represents a reduction in the amount of oversight we used to see in newspapers, Street View represents a push toward higher degrees of accuracy and a ‘proof’ ethic that goes along with reductive information. It would be interesting to think about how information appears to be going in two completely different directions in these two cases …

Maybe in the next blog.

Street View has two purposes, then. The first would be to make the navigation of the physical available pre-emptively via the navigation of the virtual – the pre-validation of the tangible reality. The second would be the legitimization of physical space via the electronic. Whether this really represents an invasion of privacy seems irrelevant to me. The concern should be the impulses that bring it about in the first place – the reason we would place value on the implementation of something like this. We now depend on the virtual to validate what we see.

Thaw

2009-03-19T10:37:00.012-04:00

Ah … Springtime in London … the clouds have held off for a total of three days now, there is a trace amount of vitamin D rattling through my system and the cherry blossoms are springing up all over the landscape.

I’m not wild about summers in London. The general lack of air conditioning and the increase in wide-eyed tourists gumming up the Underground system can take the shine off a sunny day. That said, there is something special about the ramp-up to summer; that solid two months of continual bloom and the mass opening of windows and the opportunity to get ripped outside without having to run inside to warm up every ten minutes …

There’s something about this city in warm, sunny weather that forces a smile onto your face. My morning commute is a little less horrific. The bridge/tunnel between Waterloo and Waterloo East stations feels a little less like a Habitrail … the walk down the high street is a little less dank and grimy. That old cliché about springtime being an overall birth or renewal is something only those who’ve lived in changing climates can appreciate. The shift from frozen to thawed is a specific feeling. I suppose a lot of the enthusiasm comes from living in Ontario for so many years; the moment you can walk out the front door without having sixteen pounds of added weight wrapped all around you to prevent frostbite is a good one. It isn’t quite that drastic here in the UK, but an upswing in temperature and a good deal more sunlight than you’ve had over the last couple of months will put a bounce in anyone’s step.

Soon the trees will be green again. I’ll be able to get home at the end of the day and still see sunlight coming in through the windows. The heat will come, but so what? For now, it’s enough to be reminded that this city is a living thing and not some embalmed corpse featured nightly on the History Channel.

Feeding the Dragons

2009-03-11T17:56:00.007-04:00

Watching the UK version of The Dragon’s Den last night, it’s a little tough to ignore the symbolism. We’re currently weathering a nightmare of an economic storm across the globe and there is very little on the horizon to stand up and cheer about. For that reason, I guess, it’s that much harder to sit still during this festival of bowing and scraping that is supposedly a televisual affirmation of the entrepreneurial spirit.

If you look at the structure of the show for a minute, there is very little left to the imagination. A number of interchangeable wealthy people sit along a wall in a dimly lit loft somewhere in London. The applicants/contestants/sycophants/supplicants ascend from the filth of the vulgar street to address the gods and beg their favor. Their audience is granted, the Dragons determine whether they are worthy of elevation or whether they will continue to scrape and dig amongst their equals until the end of time.

When you’re looking for a job, having trouble finding one, and staring down the barrel of an arguably bleak economic future watching these five millionaires validate the ambition of lowly serfs can be a bit much to take. Rarely in day-to-day life is it made so obvious that your success or failure depend on the not-so-objective review of your own abilities by total strangers and that ‘fair’ has nothing to do with the outcome. The less of The Dragon’s Den is that offering entrails to the gods is not an obsolete social phenomenon. The deity is still hungry and those who feed it may determine its next victim.

That said, there is something redeemable in the basic premise of the show. The applicant must have produced something – they must have constructed something on their own and brought it forward as validation of their potential. It beats the hell out of Big Brother where the only real determination at the end of a contest is who proved to be the biggest douche bag (most duplicitous, least emotionally developed, etc.). At least here there is an element of productivity and brute capitalist justification for elevation. It may be a backdoor legitimization of the practice of kowtowing, but there is an initial step required to get through the door that demands a modicum of independent thought and initiative. You cannot approach the altar without a sacrifice.

The important understanding at the end of the show is that the contestants will always change but the people sitting in those chairs cannot. The stability of the Dragons is the appeal of the show – Olympus cannot be destroyed or even altered. In a culture that champions material wealth and increasingly devalues critical thought and education, the right to criticize the achievements of others is rooted entirely in the volume of your savings and the prosthetics you can afford to enhance your spouse.

The Mobility of Prison Walls

2009-03-08T09:00:00.007-04:00

Foucault’s work on Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish went a long way in explaining the connection between government and visibility. The example was limited to the process of incarceration, of course, but the links traced between this idea of exposure and the act of governing were and are applicable in a much more general context. Governing happens after a recognition. That much is obvious, but the expansion of the ways we can be spotted does add a new element to the equation.

I find it interesting that we now have to acknowledge the existence of this digital presence outside of us. My Oyster card that allows me to travel around the London public transport system is essentially a tracking system – Transport for London knows when I scan my card to get onto the bus in the morning and which stations I’ve travelled to on the Underground. I have direct debits set up with the bank to cover bills every month. There is a wealth of information out there that could be used to monitor me and turn me into a subject of control and scrutiny.

The degree to which governing organizations are willing to use these mechanisms to manipulate a population, on the other hand, has always been a touchy subject – particularly here in the UK. It’s not so much the fact that the security services here have struggled with the idea of suspending liberty in place of security, but that they have a massive problem admitting it. In a country that has as extensive a history of social disobedience as this one (miner’s strikes, newspaper strikes, anti-war protests, etc.) it isn’t surprising that the police would keep tabs on known agitators. I am stuck, however, on just how much more expansive the exposure of the person through digital information has become.

The Guardian has announced that the British cops are now keeping records of known political protesters for up to seven years. The act of voicing dissent has always involved a certain amount of notoriety on the part of the protestor – you know that you’ll be noticed. In fact, that’s half the point. The curiosity here is degree to which a person’s daily life can be investigated. The other end of the problem is the mobility of this information – disks can be copied, information can be fired out in all directions via email, etc. The fact that information like this has been lost regularly is old news. The prison walls are no longer necessary, of course, and it’s difficult to guess what Bentham would have thought of this degree of exposure.

Whatever the case, the lesson here is that security structures will take whatever steps are possible to make their jobs easier. The fact that the cops have been following dissidents and even journalists who cover those dissidents is really not all that surprising. My lack of surprise is compensated for by my increasing worry about the mobility and scope of the profiles created … I doubt this is what Baudrillard was thinking about when he came up with Integral Reality …

… More on this later …

Your Financial Doppelgänger

2009-03-05T10:53:00.004-05:00

Ages ago I got into an email argument with a couple of friends of mine over Facebook and privacy issues. One of my friends, who is routinely cautious to the point of being paranoid about identity theft and other leakages in data security, was killing his account as a result of perceived vulnerabilities in the security of your information and so on. He’s right, ultimately, and I had trouble arguing with the basic elements of his position. The moment you put information about yourself out there, you’re allowing other people to catalogue that information. Following that, there is always a way that information can be used against you.

Fine.

What I couldn’t let him get away with then, and can’t let anyone get away with now, is the fact that the security of our information is no longer voluntary. I spend a lot of time ranting about CCTV, and there is an argument that you can snub the presence of the camera with all sorts of creative dodges and slights, but there is no getting past the endless demand for information and verification of your identity that plagues you at present. Three weeks ago I had to have my fingerprints scanned by the Home Office in order to complete an application for the extension of my student visa. This morning I had to hand over my date of birth and my mother’s maiden name while on the phone to Transport for London. I’ve practically shouted identity theft information to a host of total strangers over the phone simply because living in this city demands it.

Facebook is the cartoon version of the problem. Credit card databases, online banking and, apparently, the simple act of renting an apartment in the Greater Toronto Area leave you vulnerable to security violations that could reduce your credit rating to that of a gambling addict with an ambitious stock broker and an incurable Fabergé egg fetish. Simply putting your favourite music, movies or pet peeves up on the web is no more risky than doing your Christmas shopping.

They’ve been collecting this information on us since we stopped using cash as payment for anything. Points cards, credit cards, direct debit … they’re all mechanisms for creating a thing outside of you that still bears your name. It exists only in digital space. It is capable of endless self-replication. It has never belonged to you and it has always been for sale.

The Old Bill’s Fragile Image

2009-02-24T10:37:00.004-05:00

A recent piece of legislation pushed through with little debate or (apparently) understanding, however, has piqued my curiosity for a host of negative reasons. It would appear that the British parliament has allowed legislation enacted that criminalizes the photographing of police officers, police stations, or military personnel. The rationale given for this is pretty obvious: it’s a component of anti-terror legislation.

The absurdity of this is obvious at a first glance. Tourists prevented from snapping shots of guards in front of Buckingham or bobbies in front of Parliament? An enormous amount of the chest thumping that comes out of the UK still has a lot to do with these iconic simulacra. I do find it interesting that the threat of the image is so deeply ingrained into the contemporary psyche that we have to worry about the act of photography – that the creation of the image is now cause for concern and indicative of intent.

Obviously, this is umbrella legislation intended to allow police to do whatever they want and to drag people in for questioning on flimsy and improbable pretences. The dominant assumption here, however, appears to be that terrorism requires a great deal of research and reconnaissance. In other words, the act of terrorism begins with the creation of the image, with the development of the representation. I can’t help but find this interesting. The state is so sensitive to the idea of capture that they’ve begun mimicking the sentiments of aboriginal North Americans; “They take your picture, they steal your soul.” The initial demonstration of a threat is now reduced to the display of interest and the chain of events that interest sets in motion can only result in disaster and the hollowing of the subject.

We are, in fact, now past the fear of the image. The smouldering towers of the World Trade Centre or the eviscerated double-decker bus in Russell Square are now the second step of the problem. The real worry is that someone will be running around with a camera snapping images of other potential spaces for violence.

We have, then, arrived at a kind of Foucauldian locus in this argument regarding the prevention of terrorism and the control of a culture. Since the state has to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence, and the primary validation of violence is the enactment of violence directed at the body, the possibility of the identification of the body as it is linked to the state has to be controlled. The body is swallowed whole by the state …

People Who Live in Glass Igloos ...

2009-02-18T10:53:00.003-05:00

It is a condition of being Canadian that you’re constantly comparing your country to others. We exist in a system of negatives: “I am Canadian in that I am not American”; “I am Canadian in that I am not British”; etc. It is moments like the arrival of a new US president to Canada that bring this impulse to the forefront.

The comparison du jour is mainly attributable to the stability of the Canadian economy in comparison to that of the US. This seems a little short-sighted. My country of birth is an economy built on exports. The US is our biggest trade partner. If they’re strapped for cash, we’re soon to be piling up an inventory and not selling south of the border. With the probable exception of the grow-op community in British Columbia, we could all be looking at a very ugly end to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

But that’s not really what I’m concerned about.

I suppose it’s fairly predictable, but Canada’s quest for validation has become the clamouring of praise from this century’s political Christ-child. Barack Obama shows early signs of being the type of president we’ve all wished the US had had for the last fifty years, but there is still a sense of déjà-vu here. I remember a similar angling for praise from the US around the appointment of the last Democratic president and I don’t think that it is coincidental. In both cases, the US had demonstrated a willingness to move left after destructive and polarizing presidencies whereas Canadians appear to be content to continue voting for right-wing ideologues (I’m specifically talking about Harper here, but I see no reason to exclude Martin, Chretien, Campbell and especially Mulroney here) while applauding whatever progressive movements may be made south of the border.

I do worry about this.

I am viewing things from the outside here – I haven’t lived in Canada in nearly six years – but it does seem as though the country is drifting further and further to the right in terms of domestic politics and international relations. Once of the consistent lines I hear from my colleagues while here in England is that Canada is “where we would live if we had the choice.” I am wondering how much of that desire is built on the brand of Canada rather than the reality. Like Italians and Irish landing at Ellis Island around the turn of the last century, you have to wonder how recent immigrants to the country react internally to the realization that this liberal paradise known the world over as Canada is less interested in the welfare of its own citizens than it claims in its self-marketing.

The election and re-election of political thugs like Chretien and Harper say something ugly about the Canadian social climate as does the dismal turnout for any election in Canada. Canada may be enjoying the fruits of greater economic regulation at the moment but I wouldn’t be quite so quick to mark this as an indication of our political superiority. Obama’s (however brief) visit to Canada should function as a push toward self-evaluation. If the only thing we have to hold up high as an example to the new president is the stability of a banking industry, can we honestly suggest that the new president has anything to learn from us at all?

F**k the Children

2009-02-13T12:11:00.009-05:00

That, incidentally, is a quote. George Carlin was talking about the amount of attention children commanded in United States contemporary culture. After six years, I can personally attest to the fact that it is far worse in England. I honestly cannot remember a single broadcast of the BBC morning show, Breakfast, that hasn’t involved some hyper-fetishistic controlled panic over the fate of Britain’s children and the myriad ways that more neurotic parenting can alleviate the problems.

The follow up to that initial quote, incidentally is the assertion that the constant cries of ‘Save the children,’ ‘Think of the children’ and the like is the establishment of children as fetish objects in contemporary culture. There is little that can be doubted that statement when you watch the BBC first thing in the morning on a weekday. The endless hand-wringing, the watery eyes of the social workers and the hysterical parents who sweat through the studio couch at 7:30 in the morning are an exceedingly unpleasant reminder of the inherent tendency of all human beings to project their own fears and disappointments onto their offspring.

I used to find this interesting. I used to be able to ignore the feeling of the bile pushing to the top of the back of my throat and consider, objectively, the consequences of a national culture built around living vicariously through its own offspring. I used to be able to do that.

For the moment, let’s think objectively about this. In the abstract, a child is a non-socialized human being. This process of socialization is what school is all about. It is what playing with other kids is all about (a practice that is, frankly, not granted enough importance and, as a result, not enough spontaneity). Kids are people who are not fully introduced to the act of human socialization. We learn how the world works by moving around in it, by experiencing it.

This crusade over the manipulation of children, over the sterilization of the child’s environment, results in a process of anti-socialization. It is the onset of an inability to deal with the world as long as it stops bowing to your needs and a fear of anything unpredictable. It is, in effect the production of underdeveloped people and it is the main reason that the majority of kids these days display signs of neurosis and a desperate need for chemical assistance in order to make it through a normal school day.

I do not have children. I will cop to that. I would, however, like to think that the desire to see the entire world as a threat to either the mental health or the physical existence of a child would be a level of narcissism I would not be able to sustain for long.

The BBC, on the other hand, appears to be able to construct five shows a week out of it …

Inaugural

2009-02-07T19:08:00.004-05:00

This will be my first post and, by way of an introduction, I suppose I should try and lay out what I’m planning to do here. I will, hopefully, be able to do a little pontificating with respect to theory and the way I apply the academic work that I’m doing to the world around me. With that said, I do not plan on making this blog a running commentary on my thesis and would much rather use this as a platform to write on other things. It’s likely that there won’t be much that follows this that won’t be in some way influenced by my obsession with surveillance or security or the politics of control and population management, but I will endeavor to keep that in the background rather than the foreground.

Hopefully, the majority of the writing posted here will be interesting. Overall, blogging is an intensely masturbatory activity. There is a hope that, in spite of the Kleenex-in-hand-esque thrills of spewing your thoughts out into the Internet and the presumptive element of importance that act engenders to the aforementioned thoughts, the residual mess that this blog will eventually become will be of some abstract value to someone … somewhere …

And, if not, screw it. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the primary appeal of this mode of communication is catharsis. I will immediately cop to the charge that it requires a basic amount of ego to do something like this. I will also cop to the suggestion that the easy thing to do with respect to these things is start them. It’s the keeping up of the writing that is the hard part. I have never been a columnist in any real way. To be honest, the majority of the writing I’ve done over the last eight years or so is primarily academic – grand theories, critical analysis … what those who are already interested in the subject matter might consider marginally interesting and what those who are not be interested would consider pompous dribble.

That’s the catch, isn’t it?