Spent a large portion of last weekend back-reading Emeka Okafor’s , a technology and entrepreneurship blog focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. (Someone turned me on to Okafor a while ago, but I've forgotten who; apologies to you if you know who you are.) In between lots of optimistic blog-and-tell (apparently the African swimwear manufacturing sector is heating up), Okafor does some neatly programmatic prognosticating about a possible, tech-driven African renaissance, , for example, whether the West's (or at least the Bay Area's) reignited "need to grapple with the tangible tactile 3rd dimension" has application in Africa:
The now almost retro cyber-age had emphasized the importance of all things digital at the expense of those objects we can grasp.The merging of the bit the biological and non-biological atom in the developed world is on track courtesy of robotics and nanotechnology, while in areas south of the Sahara the 'made' atom has barely gotten of the starting block. The uptake of technology in Africa has been symbolized almost completely by cellphones, computers and information -ICT as it commonly labeled. As a result the nerves are beginning to sputter into life, but the equally important muscles and sinews have not even begun to coalesce.
In a Timbuktu Chronicles post " the non-existence of an industrial mechanical base was highlighted and its pivotal nature emphasized. The boring 'old' industries of Metalworking and various types of Manufacturing and Chemical Engineering have had to bow off the stage in the developed west while the young upstarts of the information age, biotechnology et al bask in the spotlight. This could rightly be considered progress in the industrialized and developed/ing countries, but not where industrialization has experienced a still birth and these industries do not even exist.
The ability to communicate effectively does not confer the title of 'developed' on its wearer's head, ICT is to a large degree an enabler and facilitator.
Okafor is bullish on the idea that the post-hobbyist instrumentalities and practices popular among our local DIY types will open up transformative zones of people/entrepreneur driven growth and industrialization. It's a compelling, current, optimistic scenario, and if I have a nano-sized nit to pick it's that “reignited” interest in the atom in the West or no, places like Haiti or portions of sub-Saharan Africa have always already being zones of intense "maker" activity.
The atom hacking and hustling required just to keep head above water in some places means that people are constantly surrounded by a nimbus of modification. It’s like a literal poor man's version of Madeline Gins and Arakawa's , an enveloping "architecture" that exists not to support Gins and Arakawa's (art)project of life-extension but plain old life-continuance, maintenance, life-not-dying-enance and so on.
(This is a random aside, but I had a chance to hear Madeline Gins speak/read last year in LA.
She was fascinating but scattered, and when the audience started tiring just a bit of her shtick she disdainfully saluted the crowd and spat "Goodnight, plants!!!
" at us before storming off the stage. Completely amazing.)
Okafor name-checks MAKE Magazine and the transit from there to there (and potentially back) could fill the pages of several well-designed magazine special issues.
How long, for example until we see a “MAKE: THIRD WORLD” issue? ("MAKE VISITS THE GARAGE LABS OF SUPER TINKERERS FROM TURKMENISTAN TO NIGERIA TO PARAGUAY!!
!") How about a February MAKE exclusive: "BLACK MAN HACKS TRAFFIC LIGHT!!
USING XBOX SCRAPS!!!
" As much as MAKE contemporizes Popular Mechanics and Heathkit (there’s also a hint of "In Search of...
" thrown in there somewhere, but that could also just be the taste of nutmeg) it also indulges in stealth deployments of “Budweiser Presents A Black History Month Special: Great Black Inventors,” MAKE's central “genius in you” storyline implicitly suggesting the existence of “genius in them” angles, “look what I made!” being less than six degrees of separation from “didja know what they made?”
Or is that “didja know what we made?
” The communitarian storyline might be the spécialité de maison of middlebrow, corporate-sponsored, African American media but MAKE still a kind of freedom that when applied to US blacks (pun not intended, but noted) takes on science fictional overtones. Even correcting for the it seems a universal black affliction, infecting even Okafor's straightforwardly earnest postings. His hopes for a coming maker golden age seem the stuff of a hacked , but then that’s likely why he put “The Timbuktu Chronicles” on the header and not "Sub-Saharan African Technology Today.
”
does the CBC hate net neutrality?
A Democrat-sponsored bill protecting net neutrality was by a 34-22 vote. Said House committee has a Republican majority, so the amendment by Ed Markey (MA-D) was unlikely to make it out alive, but five Democrats - including Congressional Black Caucus members , , and still felt the need to cross the aisle and vote with the Republicans. Throw in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' Charlie Gonzales and four out of five of the are members of the Hill's civil right's caucuses. What gives?
What gives is that these four made the cynical and depressing calculation that black and Latino folks don’t care about or follow telecom/internet regulation issues, giving them a free vote to toss the telecom lobby’s way.
Besides being gutless, this vote puts Towns, Wynn and Rush’s constituencies at greater risk for higher internet bills and poorer service. Lots of folks , but suffice to say that if telecoms are allowed to pin premium pricing schemes to the delivery of services they currently treat "neutrally" (delivering you this blog page vs. a video download vs.
an e-commerce site vs...
) black consumers will be among the first to get fucked.
That prediction isn't idle conjecture on my part, but a projection of current patterns in how telecom, cell, cable and information services are marketed to black audiences. After decades of being redlined and underserved, the African American market has become highly attractive on the thesis that we tend to spend heavily, first and freely on premium telecommunication services, and that where we go youngish, crossover audiences tend to follow.
(Where you at, indeed.)
Advertisers and providers have all kinds of shiny jargon and sociology to account for these behaviors: we are "luxury conscious." African Americans "enjoy feature rich environments.
" We're "trendsetters." Black folks like and understand bling. What all this boils down to practically is that the media, advertising and telecom bizzes expect black folks to enthusiastically pay for any old "extra" shit that comes packaged as a premium, style or luxury add-on.
In my experience, study after focus group after sales presentation has enshrined this counter-intuitive fact as ethnic marketing 101, and any rep worth their pillar of salt can toss off related factoids like how, compared to the average white cell phone customer, a demo-comparable (age, sex income level and so on) black cell customer will tend to sign up for more initial minutes or text messages or photo uploads. (Sure, they may dial it back after a few bills, but the initial deviation still makes for pretty spreadsheets.) The same goes for black new car buyers choosing between stereo systems, cable subscribers picking standard, bronze or gold plans, and, of course, no one needs me to rehash the long history of hijinks associated with high end sneakers, a story whose only silver lining is the near ubiquity of cheap knockoffs.
This counter-intuitive spending pattern (in so much as black people are simultaneously imagined as having less) is the dirty little secret of all black consumer media and no business plan proposing a black magazine, website, telecom, MVNO, cable channel or radio station is complete without it.
Which brings us to net neutrality. Do you imagine that in a post-net neutral world AOL or Time Warner Cable, for example, is going to deliver AOL Black Voices the same way they currently deliver competitor BlackPlanet.
com? Or taken from another angle, imagine the epic buffets of pointless feature-sets, packaging hustles, and junk “premiums” that will be hawked by SBC in a post-net neutral world, the byzantine universe of hidden deals and associations. For-pay BET branded chat for the teens?
Creflo Dollar paying to slow down TD Jake’s sermon streams? Conglomerate A paying to stream crap music at superspeed while everyone else’s beats crawl along or queue up at the entrance to the thin, slow pipes? These are precisely the kinds of scenarios that should inform the thinking of representatives like Towns, Wynn and Rush, but I guess that telephone money was just too good to pass up.
right hand - Over the past year I've been having powerful urges to make stuff, as in with my hands make stuff. As luck would have it, there's an awful lot of easy to follow, out there these days, meaning I'm either particularly attuned to changes in the aether or just another trend victim jocking today's iteration of the next.
I'm going to start my solid-state, open source kick small, with a homemade electric cat drinking fountain templated on 's hack pictured above.
(Hat tip to the .) I've actually owned two store-bought . (Or did my cat own them?
) The motor on the first one died and the second broke in transit from MA to LA. Complete ripoffs at 49 or so bucks twice, and me with no receipts. :(
I'll post photos when the thing gets a bit beyond the ideation stage.
left hand - This is likely a common chain of association, but the maker meme reminds me of my father.
Although he was born and raised in Haiti, Dad was a fairly typical American/home-ownerish type who believed in the powers of his own ingenuity and hammer. If something could be made from scratch, in his book it must be made from scratch.
In his day he replaced car engines with salvage, hacked boilers, cobbled together roofs; he built carports, sheds and bathrooms. I was less than appreciative of his ways (I thought he could be unnecessarily frugal) but I went to the well gladly whenever I needed to, medalling in science fairs, for example, throughout junior high on the strength of his contraptions. My ambitions to, say, make bendable models of "spacetime" in the 7th grade (?
!) found their perfect expression in an insight he had had (likely years before) about the properties of solder and thick copper wire, in his habit of buying odd things like magnets and lenses just in case he might need them later, for lord knows what.
His entire life, literally until the day he died, was one long, sisyphean work of home and auto improvement, our house and cars perpetual works in progress.
Dad even managed to die with his tool-belt on: The stroke that killed him set in as a mild buzzing in the ears while he was picking up some obscure power tool at the home of a friend. The two discussed my father's worsening headache at some length in dude's garage, but instead of going to the emergency room (or, more plausibly just to bed, given his various anti-clerical temperments) Dad went to the hardware store, likely imagining that the fix for what ailed him might be found there. He bought a drill bit or some such, stopped for chinese, drove home and then promptly dropped dead in the driveway after perfectly parking his ancient, jury-rigged ride in his rigorously chosen, preferred spot.
(The location had something to do with a tree. It grew out of our sidewalk at on odd angle, and for thirty years my father had daily premonitions that it would fall.)
His orderly, suggestive exit aside, my dad's drive to make things was explicitly political.
He was not much concerned with the environment as he was American hubris. As an involuntary immigrant he had ambivalent feelings about life in the land of plenty, saw connections between the grinding poverty in Haiti and the blithe excess here. He was a bit disconcerted by his hand in expanding evil in the world (like most Haitian men, he viewed his wife and children as extensions of himself, and my mother, sister and me are all inveterate consumers) and he took great pleasure in short-circuiting what he viewed as an top down directives to consume by making and reshaping existing products to his various needs.
He had an analogue of the intuition part of the post-internet generation has come to, gassed as it is on its power to code lots of something out of literal nothing: even a world full of trash can be made anew. Shit, endless supplies of cheap trash might actually be a new-making pre-req.
Whenever my mother or I insisted on the freshly minted or new Dad would sneer that we were "making America beautiful," and it was in that crack that I found my own voice in opposition to him.
I've clearly resconsidered my quarrel with my father on the question of making v. buying certain things (you wouldn't be reading this otherwise), but on the crucial question of aesthetics we will likely remain at loggerheads. My dear old dad, you see, did not much believe in beauty.
For example, to my great chagrin he made my first bicyle out of a pile of parts he had collected at the no-joke, actual junkyard. The thing worked fine but was a mess to look at - seat, frame, spokes and handle-bars a mish-mash of styles and eras, states of disrepair and decay. I had to force him to put a new seat on (he was going to throw this crazy, gold-speckled banana seat he had found back in the junkpile), and it was another ordeal getting him to paint the thing a single color.
I think he could have turned me on to the pleasures of symetrical ownership and sourcing sooner (i.e., pre-posthumously) if he had been less engineer and more artist, but therein lies the tale, right?
All of which is why you can bet that when I post my pics of my cat waterer there won't be tape on the walls like in the hack above. (Will that even stay on?) Part of the reason is that I don't want to mar my pretty walls and part of the reason is that all that tape seems unsafe.
Dad would likely have also disapproved of nicrosin's design owing to some insistent disquiet about all that looping wire - just the thing a cat might pull down and chew and electrocute himself in a bowl of water. (Doh!) Now that I think about it, it seems that of the million things my father knew about jury-rigging and hacking and re-purposing, the only techniques he was at any particular pain to pass on concerned the right and wrong way to do potentially dangerous stuff - change a light switch, for example, or how to properly move cars on and off cinderblocks.
I always found his care on these topics somewhat insulting, like I struck him as some sort of moron or incompetent. The lessons took, though, and, if there's anything bitter at all at the bottom of this it's that while he had the eye that looked at left-over fish tank pumps and saw cat waterers, me, I got stuck with the vision that looks at a cat waterer and sees a kitty death trap. Which is to say, I got the evil, deconstructing eye, putting me somewhat at odds with the spirit of the age, after all.
Actually, it really does sting, all of it: the lost patrimony, the uninherited impulses, the need at this late stage for me to bend my knee north towards all those happy, shiny, optimistic, enterprising kids and websites, most of them in San Francisco, most of them very quite nice, just like James Murphy . But you do what you have to, right? If you don't make your fresh lemonade out of the freely available lemons, you're just another consumer making America beautiful, just like dad said.
December 20, 2005
Some Jack Bauer-ish ex-spies are speaking out about the wiretapping scandal. (Hat tip )"It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen," one source says. "You do a lot of weird shit.
But at least you don't fuck with your own people." [ ]
Although it's heartwarming to hear that previous generations of spies were better lovers of the Constitution than the current lot, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that all intelligence agencies engaged in active pursuit of "hostiles" (declared and undeclared) break the law at some point. The difference these days is that the lawbreaking has become endemic; instead of the standard conservative sin of hypocrisy, these folks are boastful and aggressive about their misdeeds and seek an Orwellian re-definition of any term that might impeach them, their motives and means.
("Torture," for example.) The arrogance of this administration, its messianic self-righteousness as it defines constitutional deviancy downward is mindboggling. Every single one of them - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Colin - belongs in jail.
Dreams of the big house for George et al aside, the above spooky quote came from , a nifty site that's a fucking goldmine for the very conspiracy crowd it disavows. On pretty much any given day editor is serving up some super-weird, borderline science-fictional newsbit, as in this tasty news item:
Pain Ray Headed to Iraq? It's been talked about for years.But the Pentagon's microwave-like pain ray may finally be headed to Iraq, Inside the Army reports.
DefenseTech's comments on the Tapgate go for the long ball, suggesting that there's a new technology at play in the wiretaps, and also catching the (TIA) reference in Senator Jay Rockerfeller's (!) to Cheney.
To those of you not in the conspiracy or defense tech crowds, TIA was 's proposed plan to index, like, everything electronic, in hopes of finding the needle of terrorist communication in the haystack of the billion or so bits that have been produced and exchanged about Jessica Simpson's divorce.
Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology's most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity's greatest sources of strife.
The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned.
That person's offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world's races.
Hat-tip Kwaku Gardiner. In an email on a related topic he writes: that ain't nuthin' but a mutant.
True indeed. True indeed!
(Brother Kwaku has also been doing some on the fracaso between Eagles QB Donovan McNabb and the head of the Philly NAACP.
)
The discovery by credible scientists (read: white scientists) that ofayism is the result a genetic misstep should have members of the NOI and Five Percent Nation buzzing. As I understand it, the Nation of Islam's genesis myth posits a black-ruled, high-tech pre-diluvial eden that got ruined by the machinations of Dr. Yacub, an albino biologist who created white people in order to pave his own deformity over with the bio-industrial steamroller of mass paleface replication.
The more we know about the White man's studies in these fields of knowledge, the more advanced we will be in the Hereafter. His words along with the subsequent discoveries he is making in every field of science, caused me to reflect upon Yakub's history and the scientific studies that he engaged in while studying in the laboratories and schools of his day. Though Yakub had a strong premonition of the work he would do as a child, while playing with two pieces of steel - one with magnetic in it attracting the piece that didn't have magnetic in it - he ultimately discovered while looking through a microscope, the secret of two people lying dormant in the life-germ itself.I remember rather vividly the front page of the Final Call going all gaga over the release of , given the mother wheel depicted therein. As Louis Farrakhan memorably :It was through the study of the life germ that he altered the genetic material lying dormant in the Original Man and people. Thus through a special method of birth control, practiced in a specially chosen environment, he gave birth to every race and people that has come to populate our planet today. This experiment began with the Original Black Man and People, and it is our responsibility and challenge to perfect the evolution of our species for the whole of humanity.
There is a saying that Truth is Stranger than Fiction!
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Motherplane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres.White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekial, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Hon.
Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the original scientists. It took 15 billion dollars in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel.
America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour.
He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this mother wheel which is a half mile by a half mile. This Mother Wheel is like a small human built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said these planes were used to set up mountains on the earth. The Qur'an says it like this: We have raised mountains on the earth lest it convulse with you. How do you raise a mountain, and what is the purpose of a mountain?
Have you ever tried to balance a tire? You use weights to keep the tire balanced. That's how the earth is balanced, with mountain ranges.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that we have a type of bomb that, when it strikes the earth a drill on it is timed to go into the earth and explode at the height that you wish the mountain to be. If you wish to take the mountain up a mile, you time the drill to go a mile in and then explode. The bombs these planes have are timed to go one mile down and bring up a mountain one mile high, but it will destroy everything within a 50 square mile radius.
The white man writes in his above top secret memos o the UFOs. He sees them around his military installation like they are spying.
That Mother Wheel is a dreadful looking thing.White folks are making movies now to make these planes look like fiction, but it is based on something real. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that Mother Plane is so powerful that with sound reverberating in he atmosphere, just with a sound, she can crumble buildings. And the final act of destruction will be that Allah will make a wall out of the atmosphere over and around North America.
You will see it, but you won't be able to penetrate it. He said Allah (God) will cut a shortage in gravity and a fire will start from 13-layers up and burn down, burning the atmosphere. When it gets to the earth, it will burn everything.
It will burn for 310 years and take 690 years to cool off.
you are hereby invited to participate in a grassrootsdigital,
dirtyfast, hip-hop gutbucket distributed project in afrofuturist JES'
GREW.
new orleans has been abandoned.
the coastline is destroyed.
hundreds of thousands are now refugees, and if we measure Reality in
terms of the images presented to us on the news, most of them are
Black. even if we don't, most of them are Black.
what will they return to?
let us imagine the possibilities.
".
.. elevated for sure.
.. but would it be naked pre-cast concrete?
or
would it be decorated? what would the interiors be like? would the
structures be solar powered?
would they have some of those new
condensers that can produce drinkable water from the surrounding air?
would there be individual units? village formations?
would they have
hydroponics facilities?" -- David Goldberg (08/31/05)
"..
.a Baptism of the City? A Yemeyah/Oshun reclamation ritual?
Egyptian celestial boats? Shoplifting barges? A pattern/shape made up
lamps?
" -- Charles H. Nelson (08/31/05)
themselves of for emotional reasons..
." -- Amanda Williams (08/31/05)
this is just the beginning.
cities.
make use of but do not let your self be limited by
propaganda, materials science, architecture, sociology or history.
please digitize and send your thoughts, fleeting, fragmented or
fully-developed, be they words (rants, shards of fiction, poems,
rhymes, manifestoes, dreams, prayers,) back-of-the-envelope
paintings, images of maquettes, etc. to david@smashtv.
com.
materials on its way into the hands of gulf coast refugees.
Work fast, as every CLOSURE is an OPENING for only so long.
thank you for your attention.
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