Archive for the ‘afrofuturism’
It’s not the artform, it’s the delivery mechanism?
Living Art, originally uploaded by Unbowed.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer bit the dust today to be reborn as an online only edition. The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million/week and if it dies I believe that Sanfran will be the only major city without a major newspaper.
(as an aside i think the loss of the Seattle Supersonics was covered more than the loss of the Post-Intelligencer.)
The advertising based model of providing content is dying on the vine. Today’s NYT runs a story about the dearth of blacks on television, using the cancellation of both wack DL Hughley’s and my man (Go Blue!) David Alan Grier’s shows to ruminate about the challenge of having a diverse lineup on television. But who wants to diversify a burning house? Television shows are based off of ad revenue. Again, a dying model. I noted yesterday that there’s no way in hell that you can use 10,000 bic lighters to replace the lights of a baseball stadium.
It looks like those lights ARE going out though.
For those in the creative narrative game this is going to provide a tremendous opening. Ed has it partially right. Augie has part of the picture too. But creating cultural democracy means nothing if there are no institutions powerful enough to keep government institutions in check through shining a halogen light on their insides.
We’re all living in a science fiction novel together
The line of the last four months has been something like the following:
I’d never thought I’d live to see this happen.
Of course those of us in the states, and even outside, know what “this” means.
But what is going on is so much bigger. Hell I didn’t think I’d live to see the day I could hold a phone in my hand with 20,000 times the power of my Apple IIc…but there you have it.
I’ve been trying to bring together seemingly disparate pieces to question our new reality, to question its texture, its sound, its taste, its look. And I’m going to continue to do that.
I never expected to live to see 40. Not because of any Menace II Society like concern with my life. But because I was raised on a steady diet of science fiction novels, and B-movies. I couldn’t see beyond 32, because that was 2001.
And 2001 was the future.
So the very idea of being 40 was foreign to me.
Yet and still here we are.
But the future is still there and waiting to be made. I took the title of this post from a fascinating interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Here’s hoping we’ll all be here over course of 2009 to talk about the future together.
A model for…food citizenship??
According to the Worldwatch Institute, the value of global trade in food has tripled since 1961, and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold, while population has only doubled. In North America food typically travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to plate, as much as 25 percent farther than in 1980. Cheap oil, subsidies, corporate consolidation and technical innovations have tipped the balance in favour of large scale production agriculture. Many people argue that there is no alternative for our rapidly expanding global population.
What happens when this shifts?
In Canada, a new non-profit certification program called Local Food Plus (LFP) is now helping shoppers separate sustainably grown apples, canned tomatoes, eggs, milk and meat from mass-produced, processed imports. According to Rod MacRae (agricultural consultant and Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University), Local Food Plus is dedicated to rebuilding local, sustainable, supply chains from farmer to consumer. This is done by introducing farmers who produce locally grown, sustainable foods to the food processors, supermarkets and food service companies operating at universities and in cities.
More here.
40 Big Ideas for Obama (and everyone else)
A while back I noted the powerful black party discipline that attended Obama. Rather than take the opportunity to talk about ideas, about what we would actually want from an Obama presidency, we talked more about getting him over that electoral hump. To the point of cutting off dissent in some limited cases.
What I’d like to do is begin a conversation about what comes next. And as a first step I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. Folks talk about the first 30 days of a presidency? I’m going to up the ante. My motto next year is “40 is the new 40.” So in that spirit I’m going to present 40 ideas for Obama. Some of these ideas are ones Obama is already promoting. Some of these ideas are technically not within the federal government’s purview. Some of them are unworkable.
So what.
We’ve got to stop believing that the one thing government does well is punish black and poor men and women.
In no particular order:
2. Low interest loans to businesses/homes for energy improvements.
11. Release non-violent offenders.
14. Support the Millenium Project.
15. Make Election Day a Federal Holiday.
16. Change how the census counts prisoners.
17. Restore their right to vote while you’re at it.
19. Build a bridge to somewhere.
22. End private financing of political campaigns. (pdf)
23. Increase funding for the arts.
24. Restore the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.
25. Reduce government secrecy.
26. Put Greenhouses in every classroom.
27. Give working class families individual development accounts.
28. Expand Horizons.
31. Fix our bridges and roads.
32. Bring scientists back into government.
35. Stop trying youth as adults. (pdf)
36. Give 47 million Americans the ability to get sick.
38. Promote zero-pollution cars.
What did I miss?
Race in the Video Game Industry
Two links worth checking out:
MTV has a series of posts based on interviews with blacks in the videogame industry.
A grad student has created a blog about his dissertation, entitled “Becoming War.” The link between this and the MTV stuff can be found in Chapter three. Did you know that the United States Armed Forces not only has a first person shooter available for free, but that they track your results for recruiting purposes?
I’ve been interested in writing on race, politics, and the videogame industry, for a few reasons. I’ve been playing since the Atari 2600 days (still have mine at the crib) and have witnessed the shift in immersive technology and game types. Accompanying the increased immersion is increased affect, and we don’t quite know where this is going or what it means. And while the appearance and play of these games has increased tremendously they are still fairly stuck in the seventies and eighties. Every now and then we get a tetris, or a Katmari Damacy, but something like Doom that knocked me for a loop when I first saw it is nothing more than Contra from a different perspective. And Contra itself is nothing more than Wizard of Wor or Bezerk.
What does this mean for politics and for race? With the increased immersion we increase the reproductive ability of games. Games become the equivalent of leeches, or duppies, controlling not only how we interact within games, but how we move in the world. The USAF use games to reproduce warriors, to get their players to literally “become” war.
Solving the Housing Crisis by Thinking in the Box
Did you know that we have a problem with too many shipping containers? These days, the United States doesn’t export much, but it imports a lot, and it’s not economical to send the containers back empty, so the shipping containers just keep stacking up. One source said there are 700,000 abandoned containers in U.S. ports. That number has undoubtedly gone up. More and more people are looking at the things as housing components. (Teresa)
I’ve got a student studying the problem of urban homelessness using Philly, Baltimore, and New Orleans as case studies. And because of the way that the housing market is structured there really isn’t a market for inexpensive housing. But the solutions found here are worth seriously considering. Stackable and arrangeable like legos, the only limits here are those imposed by our own imaginations. Lord knows that places like Detroit have the space.
The Future is Here-Dragonfly surveillance
I wrote a story set in a military installation years ago, based on a vivid dream I had. The details of the story remain fuzzy…and it’s likely that I never completed it. One thing I do remember though was the idea of cameras embedded in tiny mechanical objects the size of dragonflies. They would be used for riot surveillance, and inevitably, control.
Combine this with the fact that we’re less than five years away from invisible fabric?
The Future is Here–the Singularity and Black America
Ths is the singularity. The best fictional description of a society dealing with the consequences of the singularity is Accelerando.
We’ve been operating under the general auspices of the early twentieth century even as we move deeper and deeper into the 21st. Why the hell, for example do we organize our data into “files” and “folders” rather than a term more appropriate? Why do we still use scarcity as the basis of pop culture economics when the means of production AND distribution have been so widely distributed as to reduce the price point of these objects to zero?
There are two very recent news pieces that indicate a signal shift in human society is around the corner.
This one I just read about a second ago.
The other one I read about a couple of days ago.
These two findings combined with the increases in computing production and distribution means that we have in effect reached the precipice. There is no going back. You and I will probably not see the benefits/consequences of this directly–there is too much cultural baggage that our generation has been saddled with. But to our grandchildren hacking their own code will seem as obvious and natural as taking a pill to stave off pregnancy. What this means for black people is much much deeper than the prospect of “changing our race with a pill” as George Schuyler posited in Black Like Me.
For those interested in the cultural consequences of this and other significant civilization-altering events from a black partisan perspective check out Craig Nulan’s new spot. It was through Craig that I understood the problems presented by the reality of Peak Oil, and the possibilities present in doing internet-enabled collaborative work.
Several months ago I got tagged with one of those “thinking blogger” joints. A lot of blogs make me laugh (and that’s not always a good thing). A few blogs give me information (Earl stands out here). But if anyone deserves that tag it’s Craig.
Lousiana Levees to Minnesota Bridges…
Traffic coming off I35 Bridge, looking South
Originally uploaded by Mordac whose website can be found here.
The recent problems in Minnesota, New York City, and according to Craig Nulan, Montreal, and Saint Louis, all reveal the growing problems in managing our infrastructure. Many of the roads and bridges built during the first major wave of highway construction were overdesigned, so if the specs say that the structures can bear 100 tons, they can likely bear 200.
But this assumes constant maintenance. Which also assumes money to pay maintenance workers, to train maintenance workers. This also assumes education to train people to become maintenance workers. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to blame the current administration.
Make no mistake, particularly given the recent attempt of Tony Snow to blame this on the states (go to the “questions” section of the press release), the current administration does bear a great deal of responsibility. Not just because they happen to be the ones in charge and the highway system is clearly the responsibility of the federal government. But because the ideology they support–conservatism–is at base an anti-government ideology that rails against the use of the federal government for any purpose other than national offense and incarceration.
However they are not alone. John Edwards is the first major democratic presidential candidate to talk earnestly about economic inequality, and to a lesser extent racial inequality. Has any candidate over the last 30 years suggested devoting the billions of dollars needed to make sure our roads continue to work? Our bridges?
Apocalyptic movies like Mad Max, Escape from New York, and the like rarely say exactly how the world went to hell. But I don’t think it starts with a nuclear holocaust. It starts like this. A bridge crumbles here, a series of pipes burst there. There is a brief blip of public awareness, then back to business. But the ties that link cities to one another dwindle. The ties between individuals in cities dwindle.
Those gardens are starting to look better and better every day. Craig and Cobb are beginning to think seriously about this issue. We all should.
