Radio Free Ruin #2: Garments, Gadgets, and Third World Labor with Anne Elizabeth Moore is live! I speak with author/Truthout columnist/activist/former Punk Planet editor Anne Elizabeth Moore about garment work and third world labor, women in comics, cats, and much more. I also go deep into the whole Apple and Foxconn discussion, Mike Daisey’s The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and why all tech makers and users are implicated, not just Apple. Also, jokes of varying degrees of success and UFO flap news. Find it at the new Radio Free Ruin website, or:

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Author Anne Elizabeth Moore joins Radio Free Ruin to talk about her work, third world garment labor, why the manufacturing of technology gets more attention than garment work, the state of women in the comics industry, cats, and much more.

During Breaking News, host Paul M. Davis delves into Mike Daiseys’ one-man show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the nuances of the tech industry’s suicide-inducing Chinese factories and why all tech makers are complicit, and a cigar-shaped UFO flap over the South.

Download Radio Free Ruin #1: We’re an American Band (2012) with Cooper McBean (2 hrs 23 min, 103.2 MB, mp3)

Since the rise of Napster and file-sharing, it seems like every single music fan, tech pundit, opinion columnist, and blogger has an opinion on what’s wrong with the music business, and how things should change. There’s been a lot less conversation about how the technology shifts have actually affected the many professional independent musicians who have not been the subject of “future of the music business” trend pieces.

Cooper McBean of The Devil Makes Three joins Paul at Casa de Gato for a conversation about how technology and the Internet have transformed the lives of professional independent musicians for better and worse, the shady corners of the music business the Internet hasn’t disrupted, connecting with fans online, those “future of the music industry” trend pieces, whether bands using Kickstarter are enterprising or lazy, and Cooper’s advice for aspiring musicians.

During Breaking News, Cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein joins us to discuss the latest Cylon (military drone) news, the case of Bradley Manning, microagressions and Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls, why science is the 99%, and the enigmatic case of the Lesbian Bigfoot hunter.

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Show Notes:

Breaking News

• Motherboard: The Cargo Chopper That’s Hauling Drones to War
• Danger Room: Marines Want iPads to Control Robo-Copter Brains
• Danger Room: Almost 1 In 3 U.S. Warplanes Is a Robot
• Motherboard: Are Drones Collecting Too Much Information
• New York Times: Judge recommends Manning charged with all counts
• Wikipedia: Daniel Ellsberg
• Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls: blog.franchesca.net
• Microagressions
• Scientific American: Science Is the 99%
• YouTube: Neal Degrasse Tyson on Bill Maher
• Cryptomundo: Out Bigfooter Speaks Up For Lesbian Tolerance
• San Diego Gay & Lesbian News: Lesbian Biologist on Cult Hit Finding Bigfoot Spills the Beans

Cooper McBean Interview

• Danny Barnes: How To Make A Living Playing Music
• The New York Times: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
• The New York Times: Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.
• Techdirt: Amanda Palmer Talks About Record Labels, Art, Commerce & Retiring To Open A Juice Bar
• Crowdfunding Nation: The Rise and Evolution of Collaborative Funding
• Wikipedia: Jeff Mangum
• Wikipedia: Brian Wilson
• Mule Train

About the Guests

Cooper McBean is a member of The Devil Makes Three, which recently released the live album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre and will be touring with Flogging Molly in early February. He also fronts the country and folk band Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests. Originally from Vermont, Cooper now calls Austin his home, and can be found on Twitter @thecoug.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist holding a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first postdoc was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. Find her professional work online at cprescodweinstein.com and her non-professional blog at chandapw.tumblr.com.

Episode Markers

00:02:39: Breaking News with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
00:51:19: “Bangor Mash” by The Devil Makes Three from the album Longjohns, Boots and a Belt
00:52:15: Interview with Cooper McBean
01:24:18: “Over The Gates” by Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests
01:54:02: “Black Irish” by The Devil Makes Three from the album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre
02:20:19: “Gracefully Facedown” by The Devil Makes Three from the album Do Wrong Right

Credits

Radio Free Ruin art: “As Things Fell Apart (Jewelers)” by Carrie Sieh
Radio Free Ruin theme: “FT2 Theme” by Phil Manley from the album Life Coach used with the gracious permission of Thrill Jockey Records

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Link to radiofreeruin.com

I’ve been following Mike Daisey’s work for quite some time, and was bummed that I missed his one-man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, when I visited New York this past November. Despite my weariness with This American Life, this week’s Daisey-centric episode is a must-listen. It includes an interview with Daisey, as well as excerpts from his show, in which he evocatively, shockingly, and at times hilariously details his trip to China to view the factories where Apple devices are made. The unethical labor practices that produce our iDevices are modern atrocities, and Apple plays an outsized role in perpetuating them because of the company’s skill at dominating the supply and manufacturing chain.

Own Apple devices and hate to play a part in such exploitation? Let Apple know:

Apple 
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
408.996.1010

Tim Cook (CEO)
Arthur Levinson (Chairman)

Online: Apple product feedback page (I’d recommend sending one for each device you own)

Don’t own Apple devices? You’re not off the hook, and neither are the makers of your devices. A truncated list of the other companies that also manufacture their products at the same plants as Apple: Acer, Amazon, Dell, HP, Intel, Logitech, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba.

Whether you own an iPad, iMac, iPhone, Kindle, Wii, Samsung phone, Dell laptop, XBox, Sharp TV, Playstation, or others, this is your problem too. This is too important to get embroiled in platform partisanship (AKA fanboyism) or get mislead by the media’s outsized attention on Apple because the iPhone makes for better SEO and ratings than the latest Samsung Galaxy Whateverthefuck.

People’s lives and bodies are being destroyed by our hunger for high-tech devices at the lowest possible cost, and we’re all to blame. The only thing that will improve matters is consumer pressure directed at all of the major tech companies which engage in these manufacturing processes (which is, to varying degrees, every single tech company.) Complain to all these companies and let them know you demand more ethical labor practices, whatever brand you happen to prefer. You can find contacts for these companies at The Consumerist Company Directory.

To hear more about Daisey’s show and what can be done to improve labor practices in offshore and third-world manufacturing, check out his interview with Julie Klausner.

For some more background on the unethical labor practices behind our devices—not only in the manufacturing process, but also regarding the “conflict minerals” used in the devices—here’s some other pieces I’ve written:

• Demanding Ethical Gadgets
• Are Retailers Complicit in the Sale of Conflict Minerals?
• Steve Jobs Is Dead, And So Is My Dad: Two Very Different Silicon Valley Stories

Additional background and resources worth checking out:

• After Suicides, Scrutiny of China’s Grim Factories
• 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
• Raise Hope for Congo
• iPhone’s Darkside Exposed by New Banned Game App

Download Radio Free Ruin Episode Alpha (26:21 min, 14.3 MB, mp3)

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Radio Free Ruin is a radical talk show about tech, culture, and politics. Hosted by Paul M. Davis, the show is a freewheeling chat with activists, writers, leading thinkers, comedians, artists, and musicians about the week’s most important news and the burning topics that dominate these precarious times.

In the breaking news roundup: Journalist Michael Hastings declares the Afghanistan war “hopeless”, US Judge seizes hundreds of sites and orders they be handed over to Godaddy, Ron Paul’s candidacy reveals the failure of contemporary liberalism, the New Hampshire GOP deems the US Constitution insufficiently foundational, “Shit White Girls Say…To Black Girls”, and much more, including Obama’s alleged secret CIA mission to Mars in the early ’80s.

This is an “alpha” episode to work out the kinks, so no guests this time. Please forgive the sibilants and the audio artifacts, they will be fixed in future episodes. Thanks for listening, and check back next week for an episode with Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry. We’ll be chatting about the relationship between Adderall, Occupy, and Gen Y.

Show Notes:

• Michael Hastings: McChrystal Was ‘Complex,’ Obama Was Naive, Afghanistan Is Hopeless
• Ron Paul’s Ideas Expose Deep Contradictions in American Liberals’ Worldview
  US judge orders hundreds of sites “de-indexed” from Google, Facebook
• US Senator Seeks Answers from DHS Over Hip-Hop Blog Seizure
• Google Transparency Report | Google Transparency Report map
• Stop Online Piracy Act (Wikipedia)
• Why SOPA Is Bad – How the Stop Online Piracy Act
• U.S. Constitution No Longer Original Enough for New Hampshire GOP
• Sh-t White Girls Say … to Black Girls
• #slatepitches on Twitter
• Three Reasons James Franco’s Novel Might Not Be Bad
• Against Pepper: Against Pepper: Salt needs a new companion
• White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars

Thanks To:

Radio Free Ruin art: “As Things Fell Apart (Jewelers)” by Carrie Sieh
Radio Free Ruin theme: “FT2 Theme” by Phil Manley from the album Life Coach on Thrill Jockey Records
Radio Free Ruin Interstitial Music: “Requiem for Dock Boggs and Sandy Bull” by Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests

Photo by Carsten ten Brink on Flickr.

• No iPhone, iPad or computer in bed. (Kindle okay, and computer allowed at foot of bed for Netflix viewing.)
• Read at least 30 books. (There’s no way I can do 50 in one year, much less 55.)
• Eat less brown food. Eat more green food.
• Write more. Remove all unnecessary modifiers. Use more precise language.
• Don’t second-guess people’s intentions, and assume arguments are made in good faith, unless that is clearly not the case.
• Finally record and release this goddamn album I’ve been talking about for five years.
• Do not presume that I have any idea how things will turn out.
• Be less afraid:
  “Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to stay permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.” – George Saunders, “The New Mecca”

Photo by HoundCat on Flickr.

In the middle of the last decade, there were bright hopes that podcasts represented a new form of citizen broadcast media. But over the past few years, that promise seemed squandered, as rebroadcasts of public radio shows dominated iTunes’ top 10 lists, crowding out independent efforts. It’s understandable: producing a quality podcast with consistently great content and high-quality audio is a time-consuming process, and requires more equipment, commitment and charisma than starting a personal Blogspot or posting funny pictures to Tumblr. And while here were some podcast-native successes, it seemed they required a geek-centric focus (Leo LaPorte’s TWiT network) or dogged determination (Jesse Thorn’s Maximum Fun mini-empire) to succeed. For people such as myself, who were inspired and encouraged by the promises of DIY broadcasting that podcasting promised, this was a disappointing fate for the medium.

Those trends reversed in 2011, the year podcasting came into its own. Buoyed by the success of WTF with Marc Maron, and the rush of mainstream attention garnered by the resulting New York Times profile, nearly every stand-up comic in the United States launched his or her own show, and comedy podcasting got its own network in Earwolf. This certainly drove wider interest and awareness, prompting a more mainstream audience to venture outside of the iTunes top ten list or finally figure out what the hell a podcast was. But outside of the comedy scene, there were other encouraging signs. Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network hosted numerous alternatives to the dominant tech podcasts, serving as the public radio-style analogue to the Howard Stern-esque approach favored by TWiT and the Cnet podcasts. The form matured to the point that longtime podcaster Jim Harold was even able to launch a successful network of paranormal news podcasts offering just the right balance of skepticism and belief.

As the form matures, it faces its own problems: the community is overwhelmingly white, male, and straight, and most political commentary is either dispiritingly partisan or comfortably centrist. The barrier to entry is high, and while there are a few examples of success, there’s a huge gulf between hours spent recording, producing and promoting podcasts and reaping any notional compensation. For the many people who have yet to figure out how to put music on their mobile device, listening to podcasts still seems an arcane science. And the success of comedy podcasts may pose its own problems, distracting from the breadth of topics that are out there.

Still, it’s been an encouraging year for fans of truly DIY broadcasting, for those like myself who find that broadcast media that doesn’t speak for us or use our language, who are alienated by shock jocks and partisan talk radio and NPR hosts who treat the culture of sub-sexagenarians with anthropological remove. There is a lot of space for podcasting to grow in the year ahead, to speak to new, underserved audiences, and reach the many people who have yet to download a podcast, but will soon.

The best podcasts of 2011:

WTF with Marc Maron

It’s hard to describe precisely what Maron does. It’s not journalism per se—no one with a J-School background would put as much of himself into interviews as Maron does—but in this context, it’s more effective. Whether by luck or design, Maron has landed upon an utterly unique approach to getting his guests to open up in remarkable ways, displaying an emotional honesty and openness that demands the same of his guests. As a result, Maron gets the sort of conversations that make you wonder if you’re really hearing what you’re hearing, whether it’s his call-out of the homophobic gags Gallagher tosses off mid-watermelon smash or getting Ira Glass to swear, talk about bad hangovers, and generally act like a human rather than a public radio automaton. WTF can be an exhausting listen, and Maron’s explications of his personal demons sometimes distract from the guest, but that messiness and off-the-cuff quality is also its greatest asset, and at its best—a height WTF reaches with remarkable consistency—it’s an exhilarating and gripping listen.

Radio Dispatch

If you were to create a demographic portrait of the average podcast host, it would probably look like this: white, male, probably straight, approaching middle age, center-left on the political spectrum. During this year of the Occupy movement, most political podcasts never seemed more out of touch. Radio Dispatch is a refreshing alternative, an unapologetically radical podcast airing three times a week hosted by the activist/comedian duo of siblings John and Molly Knefel. It has its flaws—the show sounds as if it’s been recorded on a Skype connection from within a steel drum, and the hosts are still honing their broadcasting skills—but those problems are made effectively irrelevant by the show’s sharp analysis of radical politics, wealth inequality, and feminism, its on-the-ground reports from the occupations, and interviews with activists, academics and comedians.

The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture

Flanked by guitar god Vernon Reid, wickedly sharp political comic W. Kamau Bell hosts an entertainingly rambling discussion of radical politics, music, comedy, and sci-fi, with occasional interviews with the likes of Alfre Woodard, Hannibal Buress, Fishbone and Ernie Isley.

How Did This Get Made?

Lazy, unwarranted snark is the coin of the Internet realm, and only grows more draining. (So sayeth Onan about his seed.) It’s not really necessary to search it out, but worth it when the snark is as entertaining—and the targets as deserving—as on How Did This Get Made?. Hosted by comedians Paul Sheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas, the podcast is a celebration of shitty cinema. Their explication of the cult favorite The Room may be the last word on the subject, while an episode on Punisher: War Zone featuring Patton Oswalt and the film’s director Lexi Alexander evolved into a fascinating discussion about filmmaking, violence in movies, and the bullshit women directors have to contend with in Hollywood.

Hypercritical

There’s no more astute critic of the massive shifts underway in the tech industry, and the business, design and implementation decisions driving them, than John Siracusa. While Hypercritical is ostensibly an Apple podcast, Siracusa isn’t a blinkered partisan, and his critiques of Jobs’ empire are as sharp as his takes on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. A coder by trade, Siracusa brings a software engineer’s exactitude to his analyses, but unlike many of his peers, he understands and respects the significant role human irrationality plays in the development, marketing and end-user experience of technology.

Reasonable Discussions

Pop culture podcasting is a shitshow. There’s the barely-tolerable Ivy League-grad snobbery displayed on the Slate Culture Gabfest and NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, or the amateurish fanboy rantings of countless podcasts you and I have never heard of. Relaunched this year, the AV Club’s podcast is the rare bright spot: smart, critical analysis of music, television, film and other pop culture artifacts with an affable. Hosted by fellow Punk Planet alum Kyle Ryan and featuring a rotating cast of AV Club editors and contributors, Reasonable Discussions not only investigates the latest in pop culture but also features thoughtful reflection on the role of the critic.

Star Talk

Hosted by Neal Degrasse Tyson, the closest heir to Carl Sagan’s mantle as the Space Expert of the People, Star Talk is an entertaining look at the latest science news and the mysteries of the universe. Tyson is a gregarious host with a gift for explaining theoretical science concepts to a lay audience. He’s also a big comedy fan, and often invites marquee comedians on the show to discuss typical comedy topics such as astrophysics, general relativity and multiple dimensions. It’s an inspired combination, and the two-part live show with Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit, Eugene Mirman, and Alan Alda serves as an irreverent and educational entry point.

The Incomparable!

I’m an enthusiastic, but exceedingly picky, consumer of sci-fi and genre fiction. There’s a handful of TV series and films I love, I enjoy even fewer genre novels, and my tastes are admittedly idiosyncratic and persnickety. (To wit: X-Files, BSG reboot, Blade Runner = good, anything in the Whedonverse = bad.) Despite this, The Incomparable, a round table discussion show featuring a crew of smart and affable genre fiction nerds, is an ever-engaging listen, even when it focuses on books, films, tv shows, and comic books I’ve had no previous interest in.

Don’t Worry About The Government

While it suffers many of the flaws shared by too many political podcasts—it’s predominantly white and male, its politics reside closer to center-left on the spectrum—the twentysomethings on Don’t Worry About The Government set themselves apart through thoughtful analysis, deep knowledge of foreign policy issues, and a keen appreciation for the absurdity of world stage. In a year full of significant events in the Middle East and the Eurozone, the podcast provided a real service with its in-depth analysis of these seismic shifts in world politics and how they would potentially affect the United States. And while the political exits of Blago, Silvio Berlusconi and Kim Jong Il may take some wind out of their sails, there’s no lack of ridiculous political figures for them to skewer in the year ahead, as the cast of buffoons chasing the Republican Presidential nomination demonstrates.

The Bugle

A sad recommendation to make. Whether fed up with Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver’s skewering of the phone hacking scandal, the hosts’ unbridled lust for Florence Nightingale, or the infinitesimal profit margins in podcasting, the Rupert Murdoch-owned British newspaper The Times pulled the plug earlier this month on the self-proclaimed “Audio Newspaper for a Visual World”. This is British satirical humor at its best: scabrous wit, a keen eye for hypocrisy, high absurdity. With favored whipping boy Berlusconi stepping down, it may be an opportune time for the Bugle to similarly exit the stage, but many more years of Zaltzman and Oliver would be preferable. The hosts are looking for a new home for the podcast, and updates can be found on their new website and on Twitter at @hellobuglers.

One benefit to digital media is that it’s much easier to collect lists of all you’ve consumed over the year. As a result, this is possibly an overly-exhaustive list of the books, writing on the web, music, and television I enjoyed to varying degrees in 2011. I’d like to think this sort of exercise serves some purpose other than self-indulgence, though it’s certainly a manifestation of that; there’s value to getting a broad view of what you’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about over the year, and sharing it with others. It’s so damned easy to get consumed by the endless news stream of the Twitter news cycle that such reflection may be more important than ever. If nothing else, it’s a worthwhile personal exercise. Hopefully it’ll send you in some new directions as well.

(All listed in no particular order.)

Books

Books Read in 2011

• Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World • Trevor Paglen
  A fascinating road trip narrative and journalistic feat that offers a rare glimpse into “Black” America—the clandestine military installations, extraordinary rendition (torture) sites, and military satellites hiding in slightly-obscured sight.

• A Visit From The Goon Squad • Jennifer Egan
  Egan’s novel hit me in such a viscerally emotional place that it’s tough for me to engage with this one critically. One of the most generous considerations I’ve read of the staunch principles of youth, and how they give way to necessary compromises or bind individuals into a state of arrested development.
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires • Tim Wu
  Sobering look at the historical precedents for how previous revolutionary communication technologies such as radio became corporatized, consolidated and controlled.
• The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop • Dan Charnas
  An engaging, comprehensive history of hip-hop, a genre that has rarely shied away from the tightly-intertwined relationship between artistic expression and the business of music.

• Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter • Tom Bissell
  Interesting investigation of the problems of narrative in video games—why do attempts to impose a ludic, film-style narrative on games always fail? What do MMORPG’s and sandbox games say about the future of narrative? What are the narrative constraints of the platformer? Does Grand Theft Auto take on a different meaning when experienced high on coke in Baghdad after the siege?
• The Dream of Perpetual Motion • Dexter Palmer
  An enchanting sci-fi world undermined by the book squandering what seems to be an implicit feminist critique with a disappointing conclusion that only serves the fantasy-world of the despicable male lead  character.
• The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise • Michael Grunwald
  Engaging look at the 100+ year effort to “civilize” the Everglades, a region that serves as a strikingly effective microcosm of so many of America’s historical ills—Manifest Destiny, genocide, ill-considered development, predatory lending, environmental destruction, and the tenacious commitment to remaining in wars where there is no winner.
• Steve Jobs • Walter Isaacson
  Isaacson didn’t seem to please anyone—Jobs’ critics, curious observers, or die-hard Apple nerds—with his unfocused biography, but it was still an interesting read, for its unusually critical view of Jobs (given that it was an authorized biography) and the brief glimpses it provided into the thinking of an idiosyncratic world-changer whose figure looms large over Cupertino, the town I where I spent my teenage years.
• Dignity • Ken Layne
  The editor of Wonkette and one of our finest contemporary voices of righteous moral outrage gets (even more) serious in his fiction debut, a collection of communiques between members of co-op outposts established in foreclosed-upon McMansion parks throughout California in an all-too-plausible, totalitarian near-future America.

• America Pacifica • Anna North
  A captivating debut novel set in an impoverished, libertarian dystopia established on a tropical island in a near-future where the United States has been besetby a new Ice Age.
• Unfamiliar Fishes • Sarah Vowell
  I’ve never been able to stomach Vowell on This American Life, but I increasingly suspect that may have to do with TAL’s own shortcomings and overly-precious, ingratiating tone than any particular contributor. A brisk overview of America’s misadventures in Hawaii, from pious missionaries to drunk, skirt-chasing sailors to the political opportunists who convinced a somewhat-reluctant United States to annex the islands.
• Radiohead’s Kid A (33 1/3) • Marvin Lin
  Not particularly interesting when it focuses on long-shopworn debates over authenticity and artistic influence, but when Lin situates the album within its political and technological contexts, it’s a fascinating read.

Currently Reading

• The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom • Evgeny Morozov
• American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 • H.W. Brands

In The Queue

• Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution • Sara Marcus
• Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family • Jeff Goodell
• Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh • Anne Elizabeth Moore

• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City • Greg Grandin
• Follow Me Down • Kio Stark
• American Colonies: The Settling of North America • Alan Taylor
• Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future (33 1/3) • Dan Kois

Best Writing I Read on the Web This Year

• Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works • Joshua Kopstein
• No Ludo: The Illogical End • Jason Johnson
• Our Siri, Ourselves • Whet Moser
• Once, We Were (Not) Troy Davis And Then We Were Something Else • Roxane Gay
• Rebecca Coriam: lost at sea • Jon Ronson
• How to Draw Comics the New 52 Way: Women Get “Fridged” Again • Anne Elizabeth Moore and Mardou
• OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room • Sarah Leonard
• My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters • Matt Taibbi
• Nearly Beloved: How to Celebrate the Day You Don’t Get Married • Jen Girdish
• Condo at the End of the World • Joseph L. Flatley
• Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley • Hank Williams
• Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia • Mike Daisey
• Artists, Institutions, and the Decline of Public Discourse • Polly Carl
• Andy Rooney, Joan Didion, and the Aging Cultural Critic • Amanda Hess
• The Week Social Media Broke My Heart • Manjula Martin
• Shoplifters of the World Unite • Slavoj Žižek
• The Failure of the Occupy Movement or the Emergence of a Living Systems Organization? • Vanessa Miemis
• What Does the Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street? • Brent Cox
• What People Don’t Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper) • Derek Thompson
• How Teen Rap Group Odd Future Turned a Posse of Nerdy White Male Critics Into Rape Apologists • Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
• Postmodernism Is Dead • Edward Docx
• Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Race • Jen Graves
• The Work of Art in the Age of Googled Reproduction • Rob Walker
• Still Holding the Leash • Matt Wood
• Voluptuous Corruption • Will Schofield
• When Alan Met Ayn: “Atlas Shrugged” And Our Tanked Economy • Maria Bustillos
• Standard Gawker English • Matt Pearce
• Atlus’ Catherine And Gender Stereotypes • Eric Caoili
• The Internet Intellectual • Evgeny Morozov
• What’s Really Pornographic? The Point of Documenting Detroit • Willy Staley
• Consensual Hallucination • Sally Adee
• Conrad Schnitzler (1937–2011) • Geeta Dayal
• Depression, Burn Out and Writing Code • Lance Cameron Kidwell
• The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science • Chris Mooney
• A Rough Guide to Disney World • John Jeremiah Sullivan
• Bad Education • Malcolm Harris
• How the Internet Gets Inside Us • Adam Gopnik
• The Hard Edge of Empire • Charlie Stross
• The Ten Stupidest Utopias! • Jeremy Adam Smith
• The Influence of Anxiety: The Modern Writer’s Neverending Race • Amber Sparks
• Confessions of a Black Gentrifier • Shani O. Hilton
• Permanent retro: How now is then • Michaelangelo Matos
• The myth of ‘American exceptionalism’ implodes • Richard Wolff
• Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti’s Reconstruction Hell • Mac McClelland
• Unlimited Creations: Filipino Mobile DJs of the Bay Area • Oliver Wang
• Pop In The Age of the Atomic Bomb • Jon Savage
• This Is Your Brain on Metaphors • Robert Sapolsky
• Chicago on the Yangtze • Christina Larson
• Hot for Creature: William Dranginis saw Bigfoot • Eric Wills
• Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading • Ursula K. Le Guin

Television

• Fringe
  I’m still on the fence about this season—my opinion’s going to hinge on how the new alternate reality resolves with the previous realities, and I’m really hoping against a LOST-style “purgatory made of love” resolution. But Fringe’s third season, much of which aired in 2011, stands with the best televised sci-fi ever for its delirious risk-taking and willingness to throw it all in for the small but loyal viewership that remains.
• Parks and Recreation
  Everything about this show is pitch-perfect: the Entertainment 720 subplot, Amy Poehler’s impressive ability to humanize a character that Often risks broad caricature, the manic Rob Lowe and droll Adam Scott, the withering April Ludgate, and of course, Ron Fucking Swanson. Leaves me cackling like a child who just heard his first dirty joke.

• Downton Abbey
  A sumptuously-directed Upstairs Downstairs for this class-conscious age, in which the class sympathies have been inverted. Maggie Smith gets all the best lines as the Dowager Countess Lady Grantham, as it should be.
• The West Wing
  I wrote The West Wing off as centrist-Democrat wish fulfillment while it was on the air, which it is. But at its best, it harnesses Sorkin’s better demons and puts that prodigiously-verbose dialogue into the mouths of actors like Martin Sheen and Allison Janney who can actually say that shit.
• Ken Burns: Prohibition
  Somehow Ken Burns was able to subdue his greatest flaws—plodding earnestness, self-seriousness, grandiosity—long enough to produce this entertaining three-part PBS documentary about one of the more puzzling episodes in the nation’s history.

• The Hour
  It was a long year without any new Mad Men, but this engaging BBC knockoff helped fill in the gap.

Music

New Music I Enjoyed in 2011

• Civilian • Wye Oak
  Layered, nuanced, adult songwriting that belies Jenn Wasner’s years, with a tight grasp of dynamics that brings to mind early PJ Harvey.
• Wild Flag • Wild Flag
  Carrie Brownstein takes a break from roles as a NPR commentator and performer in the hacky side-project of an SNL player to remind us why she’s one of the greatest rock gods of my generation.
• Smother • Wild Beasts
  Grown-ass English men do the unprecedented: record an enveloping indie rock album about grown-ass male sexuality.
• House of Balloons • The Weeknd
  R&B act draws inspiration from contemporary rock music, as R&B acts have done for decades, bloggers and music critics mistake this for being a new phenomenon and freak out. Regardless, great pharmaceutically-addled sex jams for the Percocet set, with nods to Portishead and, less probably, Beach House.
• Within and Without • Washed Out

• The Rip Tide • Beirut
  Beirut’s blog buzz era is long gone, but Zach Condon continues to prove himself as one of his generation’s best songwriters, and matures sufficiently to release an album of relatively-upbeat songs.
• Dive • Tycho
  Gauzy ambient electro, like Boards of Canada minus the aphasia.
• Nine Types of Light • TV On The Radio
• Strange Mercy • St. Vincent
  Probably the most muso-nerd album I’ve ever enjoyed, Annie Clark tempers her Berklee College of Music provenance with real, and real great, songwriting chops.
• Raven in the Grave • The Raveonettes

• Let England Shake • PJ Harvey
  The most alive-sounding thing she’s recorded in years?
• Life Coach • Phil Manley
  He of Trans Am and The Fucking Champs fully indulges his Krautrock tendencies.
• Mariachi El Bronx (II) • Mariachi El Bronx
• Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming • M83
  It’s bloated and unfocused, but there’s a single great album buried in there. Would earn a spot on here for “Midnight City” alone.

• Player Piano • Memory Tapes
  Ignore the “chillwave” albatross: this is some of the most incandescent synth-pop in recent years.
• C’mon • Low
  As unlikely as it may be, late-period Low (The Great Destroyer and on) is far more interesting than early-period Low.
• King of Hearts • Lloyd
• Watch the Throne • Jay Z and Kanye West
  It’s great. Or at least, 3/5 of it is. Jay Z is back, after a long vacation.

• The Big Roar • The Joy Formidable
  A fierce contemporary reformulation of shoegaze, Britpop, and noise-pop.
• 101 • Keren Ann
• The Hood Internet • The Hood Internet
  The closest thing we’re likely to get to an “album” by the Chicago mashup demigods, a collection of remixes and original “covers” they’ve recorded.
• Sound Kapital • Handsome Furs
• Ceremonials • Florence and The Machine

• Gravity the Seducer • Ladytron
  Ladytron’s chilliest, most teutonic, and potent album to date.
• Looping State Of Mind • The Field
• I Am Very Far • Okkervil River
  The rare band that starts out mediocre and somehow ends up great mid-career.
• Hiding From Our Time EP • Computer Magic
• Metals • Feist
• Take Care • Drake

• Last Summer • Eleanor Friedberger
  None of the Fiery Furnaces’ many annoying traits—the forced, studied experimentalism, the ersatz slam poetry-by-way-of-riot grrrl lyrical detours—are in evidence on Friedberger’s solo debut, which is instead a tight collection of economical indie-pop in the traditional style.
• Zonoscope • Cut Copy
• Rapproacher • Class Actress
  Sex, drugs, privilege, numerous Madonna nods, more sex. Your mileage may vary.
• Salt for Salt • Brown Bird
• Halo • Blackbird Blackbird

Older Music I Enjoyed That Was New To Me in 2011

• La Roux • La Roux
  Soaring vocals, seductive production, taut and emotionally resonant songwriting—case study in what great dance-pop can be.
• Trunk Muzik 0-60 • Yelawolf
  2010: The year a second great white MC emerged.
• Flockaveli • Waka Flocka Flame
• Epic • Sharon Van Etten
  I don’t usually enjoy singer/songwriter music, except when the singer and the songwriting are this excellent.
• The Knot • Wye Oak
• We Are Young Money • Young Money
• Hands • Little Boots

• InnerSpeaker • Tame Impala
  Psych-rock that doesn’t forget psychedelic’s long relationship with pop.
• Still Night, Still Light • Au Revoir Simone
• Love 2 • Air
• HaHa Sound • Broadcast
• Voodoo • D’Angelo
• Past is Prologue • Tycho
• Entire Belle and Sebastian catalog
  Never too late?
• Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never • Tears Run Rings
• Station • Russian Circles

Old Music I Enjoyed Years Ago That I Rediscovered in 2011

• Zooropa • U2
  Rule of thumb: the more Brian Eno fingerprints (and Johnny Cash!) on a U2 album the better.
• Soul Food • Goodie Mob
• Ruthless by Law • RBL Posse
  Not a single subpar song on here.

• In The Wee Small Hours • Frank Sinatra
  The Chairman’s most elegant and subtle set.
• Entire pre-Reveal R.E.M. catalog (particularly: Automatic for the People, Out of Time, Murmur, Document)
  I listened to enough R.E.M. in high school and college to last a lifetime, but the band’s long-overdue breakup this year had me digging them out of the dusty corners of my 1 TB hard drive. Despite playing all these albums to death from 1992 through (roughly) 1998, they make for great late-night road trip music, and the sophistication and maturity of the songwriting allows the albums to hold up better than the music of most of their contemporaries, while revealing new layers for adult listeners.
• Too Far To Care • Old 97′s
  See Ruthless by Law.
• Kid A • Radiohead

• Outer Perimeter • Presage
  Schizophrenic instrumental hip-hop with a healthy dose of pre-Millennial paranoia via Coast to Coast AM.
• Dots and Loops • Stereolab
• Trans-Europe Express • Kraftwerk
  I’ve long “liked” Kraftwerk, but only this year really came to appreciate the glacial chill and the metronomic rhythms that make their music so iconic.
• The Hot Rock • Sleater-Kinney
• Music Has The Right to Children • Boards of Canada

• No Need For Alarm • Del tha Funkee Homosapien
  The möbius strip flow and dusted production on this album could sustain an entire career. Unfortunately, they did.
• Aquemini • Outkast
  They never again reached this peak, but god, what a peak.
• Musik von Harmonia • Harmonia
• Queens of the Stone Age • Queens of the Stone Age
  Nowhere else is the influence of Kraftwerk and Krautrock on Josh Homme’s songwriting as apparent.
• Radio Ethiopia • Patti Smith
  Sounds like a collection of arcane incantations to a faded era of decadence.
• Moon Pix • Cat Power

Other assorted media I enjoyed in 2011

• Bombay Beach
  A transfixing experimental documentary film by Alma Har’el about the denizens of Bombay Beach, near the Salton Sea, the epically-failed attempt from the ’20s through the ’50s to establish a resort in the middle of the desert.

• Sin and Punishment: Star Successor (Wii)
  At this point, I have little patience for a video game that demands close attention and revels in complexity. If I’m going to think, I’d rather read a book or catch up on my long Instapaper queue. Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is precisely the type of game I’m looking for, and one rarely made these days: a twitchy shooter that envelops the player in its inventive world.

• This Has To Be Funny • Marc Maron
  I was a bit dubious about Maron’s first comedy album in years: as loyal a listener to WTF with Marc Maron as I am, Maron’s neuroses, mom (and dad) issues, and fear of commitment are often the least engaging elements. But Maron’s a pro, and that’s evident in this tight, wickedly hilarious, emotionally excoriating set.

I’m a big fan of the new generation of e-ink Kindle devices, but Amazon’s hardware, software and commerce ecosystem is the most constricting walled garden of all. Though the functionality of the devices is limited by design, the Kindle 4 and the Kindle Touch are lightweight and relatively affordable tiny computers. (They’re also fantastic if you’re an Instapaper junkie, which I am.)

Now that Yifan Lu has jailbroken the Kindle Touch, it should be interesting to see what applications hackers come up with for the devices other than reading and giving money to Amazon, both things they do very well.

Daria is starting in on Downton Abbey season two. She reports that Maggie Smith (Lady Grantham AKA the Dowager Motherfucking Countess, if you’re nasty,) is as wonderful as ever. Here are some of Lady Grantham’s greatest burns, a few via Vulture.

“Why does every day involve a fight with an American?“

“What is a weekend?”

Lady Grantham: “You are quite wonderful the way you see room for improvement wherever you look. I never knew such reforming zeal.” Mrs. Crawley: “I take that as a compliment.” Lady Grantham: “I must’ve said it wrong.”

Doctor: “Mrs. Crawley tells me she has recommended nitrate of silver and tincture of steel.” Lady Grantham: “Why, is she making a suit of armor?”

Lord Grantham: “We better go in soon or it isn’t fair to Mrs. Padmore.” Lady Grantham: “Oh, is her cooking so precisely timed? You couldn’t tell.”

“Edith, you are a Lady, not Toad of Toad Hall!”

Mrs Crawley: “What should we call each other?” Lady Grantham: “Well, we could always start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham.”

Lady Grantham: “So, that’s Mary’s replacement. Well, I suppose looks aren’t everything.” Cora: “I think she seems rather sweet. I’m afraid meeting us all together must be very intimidating.” Lady Grantham: “I do hope so.”

“Last night! He looked so well. Of course it would happen to a foreigner. No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house.”

Cora: “I hope I don’t hear sounds of a disagreement.” Lady Grantham: “Is that what they call discussion in New York?”

“I couldn’t have electricity in the house, I wouldn’t sleep a wink. All those vapors floating about.”

Bombay Beach // Trailer (by Alma Har’el)

I’m watching Bombay Beach, an experimental doc by Alma Har’el about the denizens of Bombay Beach, near the Salton Sea, the epically-failed attempt from the ’20s through the ’50s to establish a resort in the middle of the desert. The area now ranks among the most impoverished areas in Southern California.

It seems there is something uniquely Southern California about a site like the Salton Sea. Land speculation, promises to transform a desert into a verdant playground for the rich, wild ambitions of hucksters and the wealthy that are destined to fail, leaving the impoverished denizens to deal with the wreckage…it’s like a pitch-black, tragic parody of the entire region’s economic and housing development cycle circa 1930-2008 and the…shall we say “complicated”…relationship those hucksters have with the region’s ecology, not to mention empirical facts. I’m sure others have made this observation, the parallels are so obvious.

Bombay Beach doesn’t take this tack, though. It’s a hybrid documentary/tone poem/collection of vignettes full of powerful material—languorous shots of this ecological disaster site people call home, unflinching video essays of the lives of the small handful of residents who are bound together by little more than their proximity, as well as some really lovely choreographed amateur dance vignettes starring the members of the community. Despite all this, the film mostly avoids succumbing to cheap disaster porn tropes. I rented it on iTunes, and within 30 minutes I went ahead and bought it as well. (Added bonus: the soundtrack is by Beirut.) It’s available to rent or buy on all the big digital platforms, it seems. Highly recommended.

While setting up a “person” page for my writing and/or vanity this morning, I briefly became hopeful that Facebook finally was allowing individuals more choices for gender identity than male or female when I encountered a dropdown box suggesting this was the case. Facebook’s refusal to allow more inclusive and accurate definitions of gender identity is a long-standing issue. (I wrote a post for Shareable last year about the debate; hopefully I did it without without swinging my moderately-sized straight white male dick around the discussion too much.) 

Anyway, a year later and nothing has changed. Profile pages continue to only offer “male” and “female” choices. It seems the extended options offered on “people” pages allows to refer to groups of people, not to create a more inclusive environment for individuals. There are bullshit reasons developers and data scientists offer for this (“messy databases”) and then there are the real reasons (targeted advertising, a heteronormative corporate culture.) It seems that Facebook’s data team has managed to map relations between free-form entries in the fields for music, movies, and the like, as can be seen by the service’s ability to offer autofill suggestions. There is no practical reason why a similar approach couldn’t be taken for gender identity.

This may be difficult for Facebook’s team to grasp, but gender identity among human beings is not a circuit—it’s a spectrum, not an on/off switch. Zuckerberg and company continue to disenfranchise many of their users. And for what? Easier advertisement placement? It seems that if anything, more accurate gender identity choices would allow the service to even better target their creepy advertising for singles. Not that I want to encourage such use of our personal data, but of course, that’s probably the only logic they’ll listen to.

There’s an online petition at allout.org calling for Facebook to allow more gender identity options, sign it here.

Image by Andy Gilmore

It’s been far too long since I made a mixtape, so here’s an extra-long two hour one to make up for lost time. May be my best one yet! It’s conventionally schizophrenic: emo R&B, dance-pop, indie rock, legacy synth-pop, “chillwave” (AKA “contemporary synth-pop by and for stoners”,) and of course, some hip-hop bangers. I’m going to try to get a new one of these up every month. 

Download it here and spread the word! (Depending on your browser, you may need to alt-click/right-click and “save download as” or “save link as” as just clicking on the link will often just play the mix in your browser.)

My Dad died five years ago, and I often dream of him. Two nights ago, I awoke from a dream in which I was attending a 70th birthday celebration in his honor. In a large field in Cupertino, the size of a high school football field, hundreds of people had come to salute him, for his Steve Jobs- or Bill Gates-level contributions to the computer industry. He was recognized, and loved, and this was his day.

Since learning of Steve Jobs’ death last night, I’ve been working through my conflicted emotions about this influential but problematic figure, and thinking a lot about my Dad and that dream.

In real life, my Dad died before he turned 70, was survived by his small immediate family and a handful of acquaintances, and did not transform the tech industry or the world in the way that Jobs or Gates did. He was a casualty of the Silicon Valley’s youth-obsessed culture and its rapacious drive to constantly produce more product for less money, human cost be damned.

Like Jobs, my Dad was a college dropout. He learned his trade by repairing hardware during battles as a Marine serving in Vietnam. After the end of the war, he got a job in the nascent computer industry, a heady time when law-breaking phone phreaks like Steve Wozniak were on the cusp of becoming millionares, and the industry was open to just about anyone with an interest and some technical know-how. My Dad worked his way up as a software engineer in an industry that was very different than it is now, with employees expecting that they would grow old comfortably working at the same company. When I was very young, he was a well-paid project manager at a Motorola subsidiary located in the same building that now houses Apple’s world headquarters, an office park since given the iconic name “1 Infinte Loop”. We had a large house in the pricy Santa Cruz suburb of Aptos, and I remember eagerly awaiting Christmas mornings where it seemed that no expense had been spared.

photo by storem on Flickr

In the mid-’80s, his division was shut down and my Dad was laid off. Unlike Jobs, he did not enjoy a golden parachute or late-career comeback. Instead, he was told at the many job interviews he went to that his experience left him overqualified, that his lack of a college or advanced degree left him underqualified, or that he was too old, in euphemistic terms. He doggedly applied for jobs that paid much less than he was worth, for entry-level positions, but there was no place for unconventional backgrounds or desperation in the newly minted, efficiency-obsessed tech industry of the mid ’80s.

For the following two decades, until his death in 2006, my Dad had no choice but to take minimum-wage service jobs, often two at a time, to support his family — his wife, my Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother, and myself, his only son. He worked at 7-11, as a security guard, and as the desk attendant at a hotel, and never let his pride or the fact that he was capable of so much more get in his way. The large house in Aptos was sold, and we relocated to small apartments in also-expensive Cupertino and Sunnyvale. During my first two years of high school, the four of us shared a one-bedroom apartment as my parents struggled make ends meet.

Having grown up watching my father’s hardships, I long harbored a resentment for the Valley’s culture and ethics, alongside my enduring admiration for my Dad’s perseverance, hard work, and commitment to doing a great job, no matter how menial that job that might have been. I spent my twenties with little direction other than a firm belief that I would never join the tech industry. During the dot com boom, I served coffee to 18-year-olds who were so flush that they would tip for their drinks with five-dollar bills. I sneered at the Lexus-driving, commuting yuppies who would visit my Santa Cruz coffee shop and behave like they were kings of the world. As my twenties ground down, I became less sure of the path my life was on, but remained emphatic that I would never enter the computer industry. However, that entire time I was my father’s son, and loved tinkering with computers, keeping up on new software and gadgets, and never doubted that computers and the Internet were the most important and revolutionary forces of my time, for good, bad and ambiguous ends.

Like my Dad, Steve Jobs entered the tech industry from an unconventional background, as did many in the ’70s. His path in the unforgiving Silicon Valley tech industry was much different from my father’s. By all rights, that long-harbored grudge that I have long held against the Valley’s culture and its cannibalistic business practices should be directed at Jobs right now. Yet I find myself more affected by his death than I could have expected. Since I woke from a feverish nap yesterday evening to hear the news on Twitter, I’ve been trying to parse out why this is. Though I understand and respect people’s grief over the death of deceased famous figures, it’s rare that I share it. I feel no personal intimate connection to Steve Jobs the man, yet I’m still profoundly affected by his death.

Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in Cupertino, Sunnyvale and (to a lesser degree) Santa Cruz, Jobs’ figure loomed large. While in elementary school, I wrote and published a neighborhood newspaper on my Apple IIc using a primitive precursor to PageMaker. This is how I first expressed my passion for writing, publishing, and DIY projects. Some years later, I attended Homestead High School, where Jobs had once attended, a place where he and Wozniak’s presences loomed over a decade later. One of my teachers often lamented that he had once turned down an offer to invest in the company Jobs and Wozniak were creating in a garage, to his regret. As a member of the high school newspaper, I learned many of the writing, editing and layout skills I use today during the many hours I spent staring at a monochrome Mac display in a stuffy, ad-hoc production room built in the corner of a classroom.

In the years after, I switched Windows machines, which were all I could afford as a college student, and later as a low-paid customer service employee and aspiring musician. Though I secrety coveted the industrial design of friends’ sleek MacBooks, I adopted many of the staunch self-rationalizations common to committed Windows users—that Macs were toys for the rich and the fashion-obsessed which allowed for less customization and didn’t “really” let you get under the hood. I defended every Windows machine I bought, even though each one had components die within weeks of their warrantees expiring, requiring that I dismantle and repair the system myself, or that I spend hours Googling for obscure registry repairs and mysteriously-vanished hardware drivers.

As an underemployed twenty-something with little direction and a lot of time, this was novel for a few years, though I had no interest in becoming an IT person or learning more than was necessary to fix a system failure. After I became employed in much more time- and energy-consuming jobs, and came to realize how much I disliked repairing hardware, messing with registry settings, or looking at code, the customizability and cheap components of Windows machines ceased to be novel and became time-wasting impediments to my ability to do what I wanted and needed to do with machines that were no longer a hobby, but were now a necessary tool. A year ago I swallowed my long-time Windows user pride and bought a MacBook, and while there are a few design elements in Windows that I still prefer, I haven’t regretted the switch.

Yet even when I was at my staunchest point of Windows advocacy, I recognized Jobs’ outsized impact on the world we live in. The fingerprints of his vision, influence, design philosophy, and drive to iterate are on every graphic user interface, computer, or mobile device we use today. We take these things for granted, but without Jobs, they would look very differently. If it wasn’t for Jobs emphasizing throughout his career that hardware and software should be made for normal people, not engineers—for designers and writers and artists and filmmakers and musicians and administrative workers and retirees—the computers and devices and user interfaces we use every day would probably look a lot more like Microsoft and Google at their most user-unfriendly and engineer-centric.

Thank you for delivering us from this, Steve.

Amid the outpouring of grief for Jobs’ death, there are also a lot of legitimate critiques of him and his company’s practices from activists and progressive publications, of Apple’s reliance on underpaid third-world laborers working in appalling conditions, and its use of materials potentially sourced from war-torn regions. How the company, like other Silicon Valley tech firms, hides massive profits in tax havens while the Federal Budget is slashed and the State of California nears bankruptcy. That Jobs placed the sort of unreasonable demands on his employees that are all too common in the tech industry, and which wouldn’t be tolerated in other businesses. That he is also often given credit for the work of others, and was just as comfortable with appropriating others’ ideas as his longtime rival Bill Gates.

And now is as good a time as any to raise them. Jobs’s life is no more valuable than those of the FoxConn workers who committed suicide, or the children in the Congo who mine the conflict minerals that are potentially in our mobile devices and the electric cars that dominate the Valley. If his death brings more attention to these pressing issues, that would be a ghoulish, but ultimately positive, catalyst.

However, there’s no need for moral posturing, the scolding of people who are processing a torrent of news in real time, or suggestions that being affected by Jobs’ death somehow negates ones’ ability to also care about his failings, the tech industry’s abhorrent labor practices in the third world, the brutalities of globalization, Occupy Wall Street, or the death of civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

Photo via Gawker

Within minutes of Jobs’ death, my social media timelines filled up with expressions of surprise and grief, alongside sentiments of disgust and outrage that people were expressing grief for a captain of industry while Occupy Wall Street protestors were being beaten by cops. There were admonitions that Jobs was a ‘sweatshop slavemaster’ not worthy of being honored.

In a recent post for the Rumpus, “The Week Social Media Broke My Heart”, Manjula Martin writes about the social media responses to the near-simultaneous execution of Troy Davis, the breakup of R.E.M., and the Facebook redesign. She wrestles with the common impulse to become what I’d call a “social media scold” during times of breaking news:

…Some things are a bigger deal than others and it’s good to have perspective. White people like indie rock and are not frequently killed by our government. I got it. But also … something about the mean-spiritedness of it all didn’t sit right with me. Why are we so invested in judging each other’s real-time filtering of current events online? Of course a rock band breaking up isn’t as important as Troy Davis being killed. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t touched in real and important ways by it.

Even more troubling are the suggestions that it’s hypocritical for those with a social conscience to be moved by Jobs’ passing and accomplishments. The Internet’s a uniquely efficient tool for engaging in moral posturing and calling out perceived hypocrisy. It’s not as great at encompassing nuance, contradiction, or human imperfection.

All of us who exist in social media’s liminial space between newscaster and news consumer live in fear of being labeled hypocrites. That fear has a toxic effect on our psyches and limits the complex, evolving, and inherently contradictory people that we are. It stands in the way of us taking risks or expressing ourselves earnestly. It limits us, and distorts our own humanity. As Merlin Mann succinctly puts it, the best you can attempt is to be the “hypocrite you can live with”.

As someone who has done my fair share of moral posturing on social media over the years, and only reconsidered after being turned off by the torrent of tweeted recriminations that followed the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, I know that playing the social media scold is tempting and briefly satisfying. But that self-satisfaction curdles next morning: it doesn’t enlighten or inform people, it merely shames those who are also processing the same breaking news, in different ways than yourself. This isn’t high school debate team; we are engaging an unprecedented form of media with few established social norms, in which we are all simultaneously creators and consumers of news, in which we think and work through events publicly, in real time, a process rife with conflict and contradiction and emotion.

Photo by Grassroots Group on Flickr

Today, many people who never met Jobs who feel affected by his death are writing articles and blog posts, and sending well-wishes to his friends and family. If you are not moved, or if you consider him a “sweatshop owner” or a modern “robber baron”, I share your concerns, even if those aren’t the terms I would use. But instead of chiding those who are articulating their grief about Jobs’s passing, let me suggest that you write a letter or call the company that manufactured the device you are reading this on — be it Apple, Dell, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Amazon, HP, or one of the many other companies that share the same manufacturing and supply chains — and let them know that as a customer, you demand products that are not manufactured in sweatshops with materials sourced by children from war-torn third world countries, and that you’re willing to pay more for these devices if necessary. Try to educate others about these issues, and what they can do. But don’t be a dick about it.

Even if you find it ridiculous that people are emotionally affected by the death of a famous billionaire, if you find these outpourings of grief distasteful or disingenuous, many of us still sincerely feel affected by his death, for many different and often conflicting reasons. I have no personal connection to Steve Jobs the man, and have many critiques of his business practices, products, and the company he built, which I will continue to write about and discuss. But despite my many reservations, I feel his influence in the tools I use every waking hour of the day, which I have developed an intimate and even emotional relationship with, for better and worse.

To Steve Jobs, thank you for making products and user interfaces with impeccable design taste and great vision, for your commitment to excellence and iteration, for making the ethos of “the intersection of technology and liberal arts” more than a slick PR line, and thank you for saving us non-engineers from the goddamn command line and endlessly nested menus. Your accomplishments have had a profound effect on my life. To his friends and family, my sympathies, and to those also touched by his work and his life, I commiserate.

Steve Jobs died at 56, my Dad died at 63, both too young. Jobs’ vision suffuses the tools I use every hour of every day. I feel my Dad’s absence in every moment. Steve Jobs was one of the winners of the new economy, while my Dad was not. As I see the people taking to the streets who, like my Dad, ended up on the losing side of capitalism despite their best efforts, I’m reminded of the empty office parks that now surround my Mom’s Sunnyvale house like a spectre of a near-future dystopia, of the tech industry specialists near retirement age whose jobs were outsourced or cut years ago and now greet me when I enter the Sunnyvale Home Depot, if they’re one of the few fortunate ones to have found a service industry job. These are the casualties of a world-changing industry largely modeled in the image of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs and Gates are far from heroes, but they have still had a profound effect on the lives of us all, and that cannot be denied. I will not ignore or deny Jobs’ failings, but I will certainly recognize his accomplishments.

It’s been bothering me lately, in regards to Occupy Wall Street. The critiques—so many of them are well-meaning, and so many of them are calling for the protesters to have read this or that pet theorist, to have studied the history of protest movements, to have been connected to organizers on the ground.

And the thing is: we live in a society that is structured specifically so that “the 99%,” most of us, DON’T do that. You don’t read Gramsci in public high schools. Fuck, I’m a leftist with a Master’s degree and I STILL haven’t read Gramsci. Yes, I know enough to understand the political implications of the term “occupy” besides sit-ins—but most people don’t, because they haven’t spent the last six years reading feminist blogs and all the theory and history they could get their hands on. They are struggling to get by.

I don’t intend to delegitimize or neutralize debate about the legitimate failings and imperfections of Occupy Wall Street, or disregard the (I believe in this case necessary) myopia of focusing on the economic collapse; there are a seemingly countless number of important issues that must be dealt with. There must have a place in American discourse and activism for their discussion and debate. I also know that the blanket term “post-left” is an inexact and oversimplified term for a number of schools of thought. Nor do I want to minimize the work of hard-working radicals who have worked for change outside of the academic system, who risk health, security and their own freedom pursuing precarious and low-paying careers working at outreach centers for at-risk youth; engaging with the massive technological shifts underway and trying to understand how new media is perpetuating the marginalization of disadvantaged communities; or going to the third world to document and fight the effects of globalization and oppression. These people are an inspiration to me.


Photo by respres on Flickr.

But their efforts remain invisible or abstract to the millions who are losing their homes and running down their unemployment benefits with no job prospects while paying obscene sums out of pocket to pay for necessary medications. What inspires a rare glimmer of hope about Occupy Wall Street is this: in its unwieldy and admittedly compromised way, it presents a popular focus for the righteous outrage over ever-increasing wealth inequality, foreclosures, risky financial instruments, gutted entitlements, and an alternative the manufactured, Wall Street-pacifying Tea Party that defines the contemporary vision of populist dissent in this country. As the country coheres into a mouldering, diabetic mass of despair and desperation, academic debates about the corrosive effects of globalized capitalism are not what will galvanize a popular movement of the exhausted, the overworked, and the unemployed.

I am usually despairingly cynical about this sort of thing, but Occupy Wall Street is gaining such momentum, in an era when technology has disintermediated the transmission of news in an unprecedented way, that I’m not so sure that this is doomed to obscurity in the way that the Iraq War protests were, or that existing rubrics for protest movements completely hold.



Will Occupy Wall Street ultimately affect fundamental structural change? I doubt it. The majority of the country still remains too comfortable for Arab Spring-style revolution, even as it worries about where the next mortgage payment or health insurance copay will come from. There is also the moderate conservatism held by a slight but election-deciding majority of Americans, the majority of whom don’t believe there is significant economic inequality in the country. The list of demands that has arose from the general assemblies is rousing, but ultimately unfocused and in many cases politically naive. But this doesn’t mean that Occupy Wall Street is a failure: the American left has long needed a moment that captures the popular imagination and reminds the entrenched powers and media elites that conservative white men near retirement age aren’t the only citizens who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. If a inchoate and perhaps ideologically at-odds assortment of anarchists, hackers, union workers, disgruntled pilots, forgotten veterans, foreclosed-upon victims of the 2008 banking collapse, and nostalgic ’60s lefties can send this message and shift the debate, then Occupy Wall Street will have succeeded in my eyes.