This month I have a new title—I’m an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, on tenure track. It’s not fully clear to me how this departure from the precariat happened, except that it involved a move across the country with my family, astonishingly supportive colleagues, patient students, and an opportunity to do some good that I hope I can live up to.
All this has gotten me reading about the origins of universities in self-governing medieval guilds and remembering my grandfathers—one a state-university professor and one who never made it to college because of a hail storm.
I wrote about them in America.
“a better internet is possible”
The enemy isn’t supposed to be this nice, but somehow Wired magazine chose Ours to Hack and to Own, the book I co-edited with Trebor Scholz, as one of the “best tech books of 2017.”
Buy it in bitcoin or dollars from OR Books.
I’ve also been getting kind of worked up lately about the potential for co-op and municipal broadband, especially in the wake of the FCC net neutrality decision. I’ve been writing on this for Quartz and The Guardian, and my congressman, Rep. Jared Polis, had me on a webinar to discuss it. Scientific American quoted me on the subject, too.
More to come. I’m currently (or currently should be) hard at work on edits for my next book, which will be out in time for Co-op Month from Nation Books.
Works not cited
Back in 1895, Hastings Randall was worrying about a lot of what university people today worry about when he wrote his hefty history of the medieval university.
Johann Hari thinks that worker co-ops might be at least as effective against depression as meds.
Kaya Oakes writes beautifully about middle age and the medieval women helping her embrace it.
Harvard says it so it must be true: community broadband is better.
I’ve been hearing from Kiera Feldman for years about her reporting among trash collectors, but what she published in ProPublica blew me (and lots of other people) away.
My kid isn’t that into Matt de la Pe?a’s Love, but I am.
Stops
- 2018.02.17: Denver, CO – ETHDenver panel on the crypto-economy
- 2018.02.23: Logan, UT – Talks on platform cooperativism and open research at Utah State University
- 2018.03.07: Cambridge, MA – Platform cooperativism discussion at Harvard Law School
- 2018.03.08: South Hadley, MA – Mount Holyoke College
- 2018.03.10: Austin, TX – “Platform Co-Ops: Competitive Edge, Social Purpose” at South by Southwest
- 2018.04.14: East Lansing, MI – MSU Student Housing Cooperative
Colorado could be on the brink of embracing universal medical coverage. Thanks to an effort in recent months led by a band of doctors and volunteers, a proposal called ColoradoCare is going to be on the ballot, which, if passed, would create a quasi-cooperative healthcare system for everyone in the state. In an article for Vice, I introduce some of the people behind the effort, as well as their delectably Koch-backed detractors.
Meanwhile, a group of Oregonians wants to put a price on carbon and distribute the proceeds to everyone. In YES! Magazine, I interview Camila Thorndike of Oregon Climate, who is leading the effort. As the COP21 talks wind down and Finland considers a basic income policy, the moment seems especially ripe for such adventuresome thinking.
For more on ColoradoCare, too, see my earlier interview in YES! with its chief architect, Irene Aguilar, a physician and state senator.
Platform Cooperativism
Last month, together with Trebor Scholz of the New School, I co-organized a two-day event called “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy.” More than a thousand people from around the world came to help build a new breed of online platforms, with shared ownership and governance baked in—a real sharing economy. To learn more, read our manifestos at Fast Company, The Next System Project, and Pacific Standard. Relatedly, also, in The New Yorker, I reported on a new cooperative, co-working “guild” in New York that sets out to practice “slow entrepreneurship.”
Now, back in Colorado, I’m working with a fearsome team of visionaries and cooperators to strengthen the cooperative ecosystem here. More TK.
#OpenTheseDoors
It’s Advent. As I wrote in my last column for America, the Mother of God is very pregnant right now. It was surprising how many fellow Catholics, who have no trouble contemplating the wounds of Christ-crucified, squirmed at reading about Mary’s stretching skin and discomfort. But whatever. This season is a great time to join the struggle to ensure necessities like paid family leave and access to the means for a safe, minimally invasive birth.
Last week, also, Pope Francis proclaimed a Jubilee of Mercy by opening the Holy Doors of St. Peter’s in Rome. In New York, some friends of mine took the occasion to call for the archdiocese to “Open These Doors” of its shuttered buildings for the city’s tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness. Take part in their Advent calendar here, and read my interview with them at America, as well as Kaya Oakes’ report for Religion Dispatches.
Have a happy new year!
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For about a decade now, I’ve been undertaking a gradual and ever-escalating experiment in using free and open-source software for my everyday needs. It has come to feel like an integral part of my work as a writer and thinker; the computer, after all, is often the chief companion of my day. This has become all the more important as my reporting has focused on resistance to profit-driven economies and domineering ideologies. In the new issue of The New Republic, I write about the pleasures of the community-based technology I use. I mean it as an invitation and a plea—to join the challenging but satisfying task of aligning our digital lives with our analog values, to use technology that depends on how well we build together and learn from each other.
Read the article in The New Republic here. To help spread the word about it, retweet this, share or like this, and upvote this.
Has the Time Come for Universal Basic Income?
Across the political spectrum, the idea of a no-questions-asked payout for everyone is gaining momentum. I’ve written about how Silicon Valley is getting behind the concept as an antidote for what automation is doing to the job market. Libertarians want it as a replacement for means-tested welfare programs, while socialists see it as a step toward abolishing the wage system. It seems like a crazy, impossible idea, but it may not be for long.
On May 26 at Civic Hall in New York City, I’m going to be part of a discussion about the prospects of universal basic income with progressive entrepreneur and activist Peter Barnes. Barnes’ proposal for a “citizen’s dividend” based on carbon emissions is an ingenious way of both mitigating climate change and strengthening the economy. We’ll be joined by scholar and basic-income advocate Michael Lewis, as well as Institute for the Future fellow Natalie Foster. RSVP on Facebook and Eventbrite here.
To learn more about universal basic income, listen to recent podcasts on the subject from my friends at Belabored and Disorderly Conduct.
]]>[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together. As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said. She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her. With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”Read the rest (and see William Wedmer's moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.]]>
Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:
[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.
As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.
She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.
With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”
Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.
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Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision. The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.]]>
Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision.
The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.
Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.
]]>Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator. What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.Read the rest at America.]]>
In the national Catholic magazine America I’ve just published a short review of an important new book with a long title: The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration: A White Spirituality of Resistance. It’s an effort by three Catholic thinkers to articulate the depth of white complicity in this country’s massive, highly racialized prison system and to outline an approach to resistance grounded in Catholic social thought.
What would a movement against mass incarceration be able to accomplish with the support of the country’s largest religious denomination?
]]>Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator.
What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.
The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz's death were very much haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired hacker known as "weev," who faces as much as a decade in prison for embarrassing AT&T by publicizing a flaw in its system that compromised users' privacy. A member of Occupy Wall Street's press team handed out slips of paper about the case of Jeremy Hammond, an anarchist and Anonymous member who was in prison awaiting trial for breaking into the servers of the security company Stratfor. There was Stanley Cohen, a civil-rights lawyer representing some of Hammond's fellow Anons, and there was a T-shirt with the face of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with passing classified material to WikiLeaks. Just behind weev sat Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist, occasionally jotting notes in a notepad. She teaches at McGill University. Coleman first met Aaron Swartz when he was just 14, and over the years she had come to know many others in the room as well. Even more of them were among her 17,500-strong Twitter following or had seen her TED talk about Anonymous. Part participant and part observer, she began fieldwork on a curious computer subculture while still in graduate school. Now, more than a decade later, her work has made her the leading interpreter of a digital insurgency.Read the article at The Chronicle. And download Coleman's new book, Coding Freedom, for free at her website.]]>
My profile of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman in The Chronicle of Higher Education opens with a scene from the New York City memorial service for Aaron Swartz in January:
The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz’s death were very much haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired hacker known as “weev,” who faces as much as a decade in prison for embarrassing AT&T by publicizing a flaw in its system that compromised users’ privacy. A member of Occupy Wall Street’s press team handed out slips of paper about the case of Jeremy Hammond, an anarchist and Anonymous member who was in prison awaiting trial for breaking into the servers of the security company Stratfor. There was Stanley Cohen, a civil-rights lawyer representing some of Hammond’s fellow Anons, and there was a T-shirt with the face of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with passing classified material to WikiLeaks.
Just behind weev sat Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist, occasionally jotting notes in a notepad. She teaches at McGill University. Coleman first met Aaron Swartz when he was just 14, and over the years she had come to know many others in the room as well. Even more of them were among her 17,500-strong Twitter following or had seen her TED talk about Anonymous. Part participant and part observer, she began fieldwork on a curious computer subculture while still in graduate school. Now, more than a decade later, her work has made her the leading interpreter of a digital insurgency.
Read the article at The Chronicle. And download Coleman’s new book,?Coding Freedom, for free at her website.
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The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.
I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”
Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.
Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called "The Hourglass." It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.]]>The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.
I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”
Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.
Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.
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Most of my writer friends are used to me extolling the virtues of Midori MD notebooks, these fabulous little buggers from Japan: tough signature-bound pages, bendability for comfy back-pocket storage (unlike your average Moleskine), and the ability to lie flat, on any page, at a moment’s notice.
The toughness was especially useful when I took my first Midori on a reporting trip in Costa Rica, where the moisture in the air makes short work of flimsy books.?Back-pocket storage was often necessary while reporting on Occupy Wall Street, when at a moment’s notice I’d have to take off my reporters’ hat and help out on something with both hands. Lying flat, then, came especially in handy on my recent trip to Israel/Palestine when, for fear of the notorious security at Ben Gurion Airport and Israel’s anxiety about anyone seeing its occupation up close, I decided to photograph my entire notebook, upload it, and leave the book itself behind.
Thanks to the Midori’s marvelous ability to lie down on a dime, photographing the whole 176 page notebook took only a few minutes, with no need for fingers in the way to hold the pages to the table.
So get your Midori MD today; the more of us in the United States who do, the more likely they’ll continue being available here. I buy them from?the good folks at MyMaido.com, based in California, who’ve given me great service and the best prices I can find on this side of the Pacific.
And if you want to read about about I saw and did in the Holy Land, start with my first dispatch at Waging Nonviolence. More to come.
]]>As the movement matured, … it became common practice for occupiers to make reference to the guarantees of the First Amendment as they justified their actions to the public. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” passed by the General Assembly on September 29, states, “We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right.” It further calls on “the people of the world” to “exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” The “Statement of Autonomy” passed on November 1 described the occupation as “a forum for peaceful assembly.” Meanwhile, lawyers working on behalf of the movement were trying to establish, on First Amendment grounds, the occupations’ legal right to exist — even as the constant police presence around the occupiers suggested that they had none. The “right” the legal documents spoke of were more an aspiration than a reality. Ultimately, however, the struggle didn’t play out on legal grounds; Zuccotti Park remained occupied mostly thanks to extra-legal pressures. When the city proposed to clean the park on October 14 — effectively a forcible removal — thousands of people arrived before dawn to stand in the way. A month later, when the eviction finally came, it was as a surprise in the middle of the night. The difference wasn’t so much legal as tactical.In the end, I think the "peaceable assembly" this movement is doing is less about the letter of the law than about a law inscribed in us elsewhere—in the conscience. Call be a bad lawyer. Or maybe just go ahead and call me an anarchist.]]>
Law, law, law. The other day I published an essay about the renegade lawyer William Stringfellow. Today I’ve got a new one at Harper’s?exploring what Occupy Wall Street has to do, if anything at all, with the First Amendment. Most people think it does, and I think they’re mostly wrong. Here’s a bit of it:
As the movement matured, … it became common practice for occupiers to make reference to the guarantees of the First Amendment as they justified their actions to the public. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” passed by the General Assembly on September 29, states, “We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right.” It further calls on “the people of the world” to “exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” The “Statement of Autonomy” passed on November 1 described the occupation as “a forum for peaceful assembly.” Meanwhile, lawyers working on behalf of the movement were trying to establish, on First Amendment grounds, the occupations’ legal right to exist — even as the constant police presence around the occupiers suggested that they had none. The “right” the legal documents spoke of were more an aspiration than a reality.
Ultimately, however, the struggle didn’t play out on legal grounds; Zuccotti Park remained occupied mostly thanks to extra-legal pressures. When the city proposed to clean the park on October 14 — effectively a forcible removal — thousands of people arrived before dawn to stand in the way. A month later, when the eviction finally came, it was as a surprise in the middle of the night. The difference wasn’t so much legal as tactical.
In the end, I think the “peaceable assembly” this movement is doing is less about the letter of the law than about a law inscribed in us elsewhere—in the conscience. Call be a bad lawyer. Or maybe just go ahead and call me an anarchist.
]]>