Occupy California; UC Walkout; G20 Protests; Baader Meinhof Komplex

It is important to remember that democracy and capitalism are two separate things, the former being an economic structure, the later being a system of government. That the two are conflated so often here in the states reveals how the nuances of economic and political bodies are difficult to separate, especially for those operating within those bodies. Witness our current moment.


On Thursday the G20 met in Pittsburgh, hashing out economic plans for a globalized world. The president was in attendance, and it seems the white house's prioritizing the G20 over the G7 represents the growing wealth of other previously impoverished nations, also the growing disparity of US(western) economic privilege. While the US is still managing to provide the form and means of dialogue, it is quickly becoming a ceremonial right. In the wake of our current economic situation our silence is illuminating. It suggests that in typical US fashion we will decide our own fate, according to what our own interests are despite sitting at the table alongside everyone. This is much like an abusive husband giving domestic advice to a group of neighbors at his backyard BBQ. When they address him, he quietly drinks his beer.

Our domestic situation is dire. Especially here in the Golden State. That I'm able to go to this during the day, and this on the same night, is testament to the energy in the air. More importantly the message of both seems to be that all of our actions have political ramifications. Action is always political, as is inaction.

Yesterday the students of UC Santa Cruz, alongside workers of the university, began to occupy one of the buildings on campus. Their statement is here. We're in solidarity with peaceful action, resistance, appropriating spaces. If you do not place a stake in the ground and claim it something, that space is otherwise ignored. I've long been wondering why our state employees are not doing the same things in regards to their furloughs. The belief that our government can operate at 80% with 100% efficiency is irrational; the belief that education can operate at 90% with 100% efficiency is irrational; the belief that an education of 90% should cost 32% more is irrational.



We want to offer a few ideas for those seeking further action politics.

1) The UC Students, staff, faculty and others needs to take action to the capital. Let the House, the Senate, Governor Schwarzenegger, see you in person. Occupy the lawns, roam the sidewalks and streets, let them know that the defunding of public education, system wide, will not be tolerated. That the prison systems should never, ever, receive more funding than education. EVER. Else we live in a state that values containing past criminals more than educating future generations. That the impoverished should not be impoverished further because of the financial mistakes of the wealthy. That public universities should not financially exclude the public.

2) If the university system increases student fees by 32%, as students, feel free to not enroll in 32% of your classes. Effectively taking the UC spring quarter off and going for an extended summer would create a true budget emergency for the university system to deal with. It would help establish that $6,600.00 a year is a nice round number to cap tuition costs at. If that's the most students are willing to pay, the "market" must self adjust (or die trying). Remember you have the right to take semesters and quarters off, free of charge, without losing your student eligibility. If you do not exercise your rights, your rights will be taken from you.

3) Use that summer time to create communities, communes, occupy spaces. There are no jobs for you to work, but there are spaces that mandate public occupation. If the public is to benefit from our dire situation, our spaces must be wrestled back from private interests.

Moral Panic[and vomit] and the Copyright Wars.

In the course of his book William Patry covers the history of copyright, beginning with its development in England through time to where we are today in America. Essentially his argument focuses on the definition that capitalism is by design a system of "creative destruction" for established business models, which is to say that our economic system can never be fixed and necessitates new business models that over take old business models infinitely (in the name of progress?). This we can call the "free market" ideology. Copyright, in its history, has never been retained for the protection of authors or creators rights--however many times this has been the claim--but for the protections of business models that depend on monopoly rights to fight off new technological developments. The argument to establish the monopoly rights goes something like this: in order to enable society to receive a surplus of works via the market, copyright is essential to guarantee a monetary return to the producers of these works. Works which would assumingly therefore not exist with out copyright protection. Finally we are to remember that the owner of copyright is almost unanimously not the original creator of the work, the creator having been paid for "labor," but the publishers of the work who seek to capitalize on the "intellectual property" of the author or artist.

Our courts bought the argument, and more recently with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the film industry and music industry have control over the forms that their copyrighted works become available and how these works become available to the public.

The underlying point of the book, which is spelled out for us on every occasion possible, is that contrary to its ontology copyright actually works to handicap development, create monopolies, and "fix" a market while using as its defense "free market ideology."

Patry even goes on to equate the current copyright rights as they're provided by our own legal system as Lenin style Communism, or even Mussolini style Fascism.



Far and away all of the information contained within this book is interesting and useful, and on one level--according to the definitions he establishes for Communism and Fascism, and how they relate to the business practices of copyright industry--we're in agreement with him. But the curious thing is trying to decipher exactly what Patry thinks of the free market ideology itself.

He praises Obama multiple times, uses Greenspan as an apt example of deregulation and how free market ideology isn't by definition a good thing in itself, and the entire thrust of the book is about breaking down the monopoly of copyright law. One of his early examples, from the first English copyright wars, is how they define copyright alongside property right, as intellectual property.

It seems he is opposed to a truly free market, believes in private property, but uses a jingoistic appeal to free market ideology to oppose the copyright monopoly. I guess that makes him a moderate. Yet the conclusion of the book suggests otherwise, perhaps he is progressive. He cites the development of Korea and Japan in opening up new markets for internet use through their determined approach to providing high speed internet for their citizens. In fact they have internet connections that are cheaper, or the same price as ours even, which run at 2-4 times our current connections speeds. In South Korea this is done through government action, the exact opposite of private enterprise or corporate development, and Patry seems to suggest that we really need our government to provide these large scale infrastructures for us.

Yet if we understand the development of capitalism, like all things established by legislation and practice to not exist in nature--that is to say it's a social development--then wouldn't the free market ideology be the thing that moves us forward? Isn't large scale government the opposite of free market development? If he can recognize that copyright explicitly protects the wealth of Southern California while impoverishing our national culture, why does he attempt to use the exact same economic system that brought us to this point as a possible way out of it? Finally we're asked to take action against these entities who believe that control equals profit (and what other end does capitalism really have?):

In other areas where government monopoly, created to serve the public interest, is blatantly abused over a long period of time, it is taken away.

It seems as though he's calling for a revolution, a change, you know, something akin to the nature of capitalism, that elusive "creative destruction." So while we little people of America ponder how to fit that revolution into our house payments, loans, student debts, and family lives, Patry will go back to doing legal work for google.com

Teen Personal Essay.

As more and more conversations emerge in the wake of the Facebook-healthcare-reform-status-update-meme, I've been drawn to more and more interesting ideas about the (real or otherwise) convergence of politics and social/viral forms. Beginning with a post from Gerry Canavan, followed up by a post from American Stranger, the issues of viral politics obviously falls short of actual public demonstration and likewise still counts for something (beyond the subtle commodification of certain political perspectives, as all social-network-perspectives are readily available for this sort of packaging).

In his post Stranger(or Traxus) links to this fun write up about the tensions between Facebook and MySpace, a debate my generation has been entrenched in. One of my most memorable initiations with MySpace happened as I was slumming with some of my musician friends in LA as their tour brought them to The Roxy. The day of the show the boys each spent over an hour on their respective MySpace pages looking at provocative photos of young ladies and writing on their profile walls, encouraging these ladies to attend that night's concert. (The boys also spent about an hour each flat ironing their hair.) I was quite skeptical of the MySpace revolution as it garbled up most of my actual social circle, thus my experiences were based mainly on how my male friends would try to pick up on girls while simultaneously achieving a lot of self promotion for whatever hobby or artistic endeavor they were involved in. I had a long term relationship at the time and my band wasn't touring the country and therefore I never signed up on MySpace. Mostly what I remember of the first users was their ages, all late teens to early twenties, our pioneers of social networking sites.

Five years later my long term relationship became a marriage and my wife created a Facebook account in my name so that she could keep in touch with her friends while simultaneously ensuring that her High School students (and co-workers) could not find and/or view her profile. (Yes, I'm aware that you can edit your settings and she has created her own account since then.) But since this moment I've also amassed a pretty large group of friends without trying very hard and the more I think about it, the more homogeneous all of these friends seem in the wake of reading the above Facebook-MySpace article. This is not to say that I was unaware of this phenomenon, but that I was also perhaps neglecting it's significance. I bring this to light so that we might consider the relative similarity between Gerry Canavan's and my own recent Facebook status update phenomenon. The telling detail is that likely most of our "friends" all fall into a relatively similar political perspective, class, race, etc., etc.

But also today I was reading this (via GC's blog) about Marx, Taylorism, childhood, and amusement. And beyond the fact that the picture on the right, plus a mountain lion, should definitely be the cover of the new Abraham Lincoln, the final paragraph of the post really hits home:

It's almost as if no one who doesn't have a product to sell or an axe to grind takes the world of children and childhood all that seriously.

And here I am recalling the development of (private)social networks, explicitly how they shape and have been shaped by children-teens-young "naive" adults.

It's no discovery that a large part of our economy is made up of marketing to children. I've got a neighbor who doesn't have any television access because she doesn't want her two boys hounding her for new plastic toys after they watch cartoons; we all remember New Kids on the Block via N'Sync; the current wave of full print tee-shirts; the sheer volume of a store like Target devoted to childrens toys, school supplies, clothing, music, DVDs, and videogames (it's probably half of their inventory and sales). But the fact that this "demographic" which fueled the rise of social networking, has also been the main deterrent from MySpace for adults and those of the white background Facebook interface, informs us again that none of these forms exist to bring us together. As Dana Boyd says, they mirror society and our prejudices are reflected in them. Which is to say Facebook is the new virtual Shady Terrace gated community where we continue to seek private spaces free of prying (foreign) eyes. A spacial relation and fear Jameson condemns oh so eloquently in Postmodernism:

Here a certain Nietzscheanism operates to defuse anxiety and even fear: the conviction, however gradually learned and acquired, that there is only the present and that it is always "ours," is a kind of wisdom that cuts both ways. For it was always clear that the terror of such near futures ---like the analogous terror of an older naturalism--- was class based and deeply rooted in class comfort and privilege. The older naturalism let us briefly experience the life and the life world of the various underclasses, only to return with relief to our own living rooms and armchairs: the good resolutions it may also have encouraged were always, then, a form of philanthropy. In the same way, yesterday's terror of the overcrowded conurbations of the immediate future could just as easily be read as a pretext for complacency with our own historical present, in which we do not yet have to live like that. In both cases, at any rate, the fear is that of proletarianization, of slipping down the ladder, of losing a comfort and a set of privileges which we tend increasingly to think of in spatial terms: privacy, empty rooms, silence, walling other people out, protection against crowds and other bodies. Nietzschean wisdom, then, tells us to let go of that kind of fear and reminds us that whatever social and spatial form our future misery may take, it will not be alien because it will by definition be ours. Dasein ist je mein eigens---defamiliarization, the shock of otherness, is a mere aesthetic effect and a lie.

This again echos Boyd's narrative of the great MySpace exodus of maturing and well to do youth, which we can read as the spacial distancing of classes, the elites from the others. That these networks of varied private providers are also explicitly private spaces, indefinitely not public spaces, therefore aligns them quite nicely with the (exclusive) public spaces of our previous eras (again as noted in Boyd's lecture).

Likewise these networks exist as Traxus/Stranger appropriately notes, to keep us off the streets, but in doing so we are also appeased to just like children in the demo area of the Crayola factory seeking constant interaction with quizzes, updates, nostalgic and genuine friendships, all those empty boxes of archaic production we feel obliged to consume. In other words, we are the children of Taylorism; our dwindling factories full of autonomous working machinery are correlations of our public spaces (real and/or privatized), our atmospheres littered with the negative space tweets and virtual political updates.