2.27.2014

Two Tucsons: A Gentrification Story

I should have posted this back in January, but my Latino USA piece is online. It's the first time I have produced a story expressly for a network program and worked with their editors and engineers from the first draft. The experience demanded a different type of storytelling than I'm used to and I think Two Tucsons sounds far more like an NPR story than an Aengus Anderson one, which actually makes me happy. It's fun to be challenged by other narrative forms and speak in a voice that isn't one's own. Hopefully I pulled it off. And because we all like symbolism: I recorded the story while trapped at home with the flu, rendering my voice literally, as well as figuratively, different. Whoa.

Narrative challenges aside, I'm excited to throw out the time constraints and simplification of broadcast radio and edit a few new episodes of The Conversation. The epic house-restoration project that inspired Two Tucsons is finally coming under control, yielding the free time necessary for editing. Expect the first new episode soon, ideally before March 10th, when Micah Saul and I present a critique of our typical ideas of progress at South by Southwest. Drop by and heckle us if you're going to be out there.

12.03.2013

Intermission

A few months ago I made the questionable decision to buy a century-old house. A smarter man would have foreseen the implications of home-ownership, but I'm a naif. So instead of editing the next ten episodes of The Conversation I've been expressing my creativity with a sledgehammer and pickaxe. Couple this with full-time employment and I've had to table my independent projects for the moment.

The only exception to this is a story about gentrification in Tucson that I've been working on for NPR's Latino USA. It should be running early in the new year. I'll post a link when it's live.

Also, I'm going to be working with Micah Saul to deliver a presentation at SXSW Interactive this spring. We'll be building upon The Conversation to discuss the unspoken philosophy of Silicon Valley. This will not be gentle.

Hopefully my house will have running water and all of its walls by the spring. When that's done I'll get back to posting interesting work.

5.13.2013

A Challenge to the Digital Rights Community

One of the more surprising discoveries to emerge from The Conversation has been the invisibility of digital liberties to extremely well-informed thinkers outside of the digital liberties community. Only one interviewee of sixty mentioned them—James Bamford—and I invited him into the project specifically to cast light on digital liberties.

I'm hardly the most informed or eloquent proponent of digital liberties, but it's an issue I care about deeply and one that receives far too little attention, especially given its ramifications for other forms of activism. If digital liberties erode, so to do our possibilities for achieving any kind of healthy reform, whether in economics, environmental policy, or any number of other fields.

The digital liberties community is incredible and they are working tirelessly, often without recognition, to defend rights most of us don't even know we need. Yet I think they haven't done a good job of articulating how digital liberties relate to other, more visible concerns. So I wrote a friendly op-ed that challenged digital liberty activists to reframe their issue in a more accessible way and, luckily, Boing Boing published it.


4.19.2013

A World Grown Too Small and Too Large


Last night I stared at Twitter while chaos erupted in Boston for the second time this week. I am still trying to make sense of the events—not as a narrative, but as part of broader trends that underlie all of these insane rampages, from Loughner in Tucson to Lanza in Newtown. This is probably futile, but I want to explore an idea...

Our world exists on multiple, simultaneous scales.  The increase in random, violent outbursts results, in part, from tensions created by changing geographic and social scales since the industrial revolution.

The world is too small: beginning with the steam engine and telegraph, accessibility has made the physical world feel smaller. All land is accounted for. The Earth has been mapped, enclosed, and made accessible through transit. For those who feel constrained by society, there is no escape. More recently, information technology has demystified much of the world. We can travel without motion, making the exotic cheap and commonplace. In the process, sharp cultural distinctions are slowly mellowing into global homogeneity—our inability to escape physically is becoming mirrored by our inability to escape culturally.

The world is too big: global population has increased hyperbolically, growing from roughly one to seven billion in the last century alone. Concurrently, we pack ourselves into cities (often forced by economic necessity) more tightly than at any previous point in history. The weight of our numbers devalues life and the immense volume of our creativity renders us unable to keep pace with the present. Inundated by a flood of our own species, we are forced to confront our limits in new ways, not only the limits of our empathy, but the eerie limits of our biology—our most creative thoughts are common to hordes of others and a quick search on YouTube exposes our most practiced talents as commonplace. Elsewhere, our greatest thinkers and most powerful organizations flail about in efforts to make sense of the world and, even when they command our respect, we view them with a tinge of contempt and pity. Everything is cliché. In the big picture, personal agency feels dead.

Trapped on a postage stamp-sized planet, suffocated by numbers, marching to the tune of bureaucracies seemingly conscious yet inhuman, our old explanatory narratives ring hollow and farcical. Millenarianism is debunked weekly, sending believers scurrying hysterically to the next phony apocalypse. Glassy-eyed pimps of techno-rapture sell an ill-conceived future that is always arriving yet never here, never satisfactory. Even war has been stripped of its phony pretension to meaning. It has been a long time since we've had the purposeful joy of killing Nazis and today our enemy is a vague concept defined by politicians we hate and mistrust. What are we left with? Plastic surgery and sacred underwear.

As our narratives implode around us and we are dwarfed by careening systems of our own design, we retreat into micro-narratives of control like bulimics exerting power over the most basic aspects of their lives. In its best manifestations, this control-drive can be sublimated into career, family, local community, or a fixation with health. It can be a positive interior journey that is spiritual, philosophical, or artistic.

There can also be micro-narratives that offer meaning through violence. Because state sponsored war is too anonymous and pointless (and probably scary) for the violent egoists among us, they hallucinate enemies at schools and marathons. With sufficient brutality, their personal micro-narrative can explode onto the media landscape and, briefly, give us a collective narrative. The Tsarnaevs, Lanzas, and Loughners of the world lust for this moment and bask in our attention—they're living out a fantasy war with their own ludicrous grievances, foes, and justifications. They are desperate to impose this narrative arc on our post-narrative world, to be the story we talk about. They will do this if it means murdering innocents, psychologically destroying their parents and dying, broken and alone, on the concrete of a sidewalk or a cell.

All of these young men are sadists and might have been so in any era, but they are uniquely visible today because we inhabit a world which gives them nothing to believe in, no space to be feral, and constantly pricks their soft egos with reminders of smallness. In a disgusting twist of irony, their deranged bids to achieve meaning through violence only highlight their ultimate meaninglessness. Families will spend lifetimes grieving for irreplaceable and senseless losses, but the media will bury the spectacle (it's really not a story) under a million fresh banalities, Twitter will revert to solipsism, and the shape of the world will remain unchanged.

We are all casualties of this world, not just because we could get shredded in the crossfire of another zit-faced madman, but because we encourage them. Even when our micro-narratives are satisfying, they don't fulfill all of our needs. They can be repetitive, dull and, if we step back from them, lose their meaning entirely. Spectacles like the Boston Marathon bombing and ensuing shootout give us a break from routine, a common story, and a simple plot: there are clear villains and the solution is to kill or capture them. We get off on determining truth from gossipy tweets, cliffhangers, and the death of strangers. We bond over a common story with friends, delight in casting judgment, and quietly relish the horror—as long as the people we know are safe. "Voyeurism" doesn't capture the perversity of our fascination with distant tragedies.

It is temping to glance back in nostalgia, to imagine a primitive and undeveloped time when we could naively enjoy the psychological comfort of big narratives, feel like we objectively understood reality, and go on a good adventure. Yet we know those eras were violent and senseless too, albeit for different reasons, and every one of today's shooters could have been the foot-soldier burning your town. The answer is not to turn back the clock, but to focus on how our challenges differ from the past.

We live in a historical moment when we can no longer vent our worst element into an imperial army or spew them across the West as greedy and sanctimonious homesteaders. Unfortunately, coliseums are out of style, too. But we can reign in our love of simple, dramatic narratives and stop rewarding bloody outbursts with fawning attention. For those of us out of the line of fire, we could use our much-vaunted social media to start a conversation about the root causes of violence rather than titillating ourselves with the irrelevant details of an unfolding story. Should we examine class and social mobility? Depictions of violence in media? Gun control? The alienation of cities? A real conversation would demand research and thought—neither of which we like—and comes with no guarantee of solving anything. But here's the deal: talking about substantive issues can't make things worse. With luck, the right conversation might even help us find better ways to ease the tension of a world that is too small and too large.

12.30.2012

Test Driving the Apocalypse and other media stuff

Here are some media odds and ends from the last few months:

• I just wrote an article for Boing Boing about our apocalypse fetish.

• Two Wheels to Nowhere got mentioned in an article about authenticity by Misfit Economy author Alexa Clay.

• John Dankosky of Where We Live on WNPR interviewed me about The Conversation.

• I also spoke to Kate Rath of Ask Brooklyn on BBOX Radio. She posted a two-part interview about The Conversation here and here.

• There's an article about the storytelling platform Cowbird on Transom.org that mentions The Decisions Project.

I don't think anything else is going to surface before 2013. Talk to you next year.

10.14.2012

Half a year of The Conversation

I'm overdue to post something here, if only to point you towards The Conversation, which is live and well. Given that you're on my personal site, I imagine you already know about The Conversation and have tuned in at some point. If you haven't, check it out: a sprawling, multi-month, asynchronous conversation about the future and the fate of humanity might be for you.

At this point, I've been on the road for nearly half a year, interviewed a host of remarkable people, and confronted more immense ideas than I can digest. It's utterly exhausting and, without doubt, the most interesting, challenging, and satisfying project I've worked on. Currently, my plan is to travel through late December and record as many conversations as I can without getting too jumbled and incoherent. After that, I should be back in the desert for several more months of editing and posting my backlog of work. And how to wrap this thing up?  I have a few ideas and they all involve more than two microphones. I'll post more about that on The Conversation when I get things ironed out.

I'll be back on this site when The Conversation has finally run its course and I'm on to the sprawling list of other projects I want to work on.

In the meantime, remember The Decisions Project? I am putting it on Cowbird, accompanied by all of the (freshly edited) vignettes I wrote that summer while traveling. It's exciting to have the audio, writing, and photography assembled in one place. Hopefully it helps The Decisions Project reach a few more people. Now how am I going to find time to set up a Zeega site with interactive maps for Two Wheels to Nowhere?

4.24.2012

The Conversation: Update

May is approaching and, with it, the launch date.  Micah and I have been spending lots of time researching potential interviewees and, one by one, we've been sending out the emails.  This has been the most intimidating and difficult part of the project thus far, but The Conversation seems to have a certain resonance right now: with only a few exceptions, all of our emails have met positive responses.  We're excited about this.  The Conversation will only be as good as our participants and we are lucky to have a tremendously diverse group of thinkers on board.  When I last posted we had:

Colin Camerer - neuroeconomist at the California Institute of Technology
Jan Lundberg - oil industry analyst and eco-activist
Douglas Rushkoff - documentary producer and author, Life, Inc., Program or Be Programmed
Laura Musikanski - co-founder, The Happiness Initiative

Since then, we've gotten confirmation from:

Lisa Petrides - founder of Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
Paul Glover - community organizer, founder of Ithaca Hours, the longest used local currency in the US
Eduardo Kac - bio/tech/unclassifiable artist
Joseph Tainter - anthropologist, historian, author, The Collapse of Complex Societies 
Michael Keenan - president, The Seasteading Institute
Alexander Rose, executive director, The Long Now Foundation
Lawrence Torcello, philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology
Ethan Zuckerman, director, Center for Civic Media at MIT
Max More, president, Alcor Life Extension Foundation
Rev. John Fife, co-founder, Sanctuary movement, No More Deaths
Daniel Suarez, author Daemon
Andrew Keen, author Cult of the Amateur and Digital Vertigo
John Lewis, professor emeritus of planetary science at the University of Arizona, author Mining the Sky
Richard Saul Wurman, architect, designer, founder of the TED Conference and WWW Conference
John Zerzan, anti-civilization theorist, author Twilight of the Machines, Elements of Refusal

I have a lot of letters yet to write and I will, no doubt, be researching and emailing from the road.  That said, the beginning of the trip is taking shape and, ready or not, The Conversation is going to be real next week.  In the meantime, we'll be getting our official website in order and preparing to launch our Kickstarter campaign.  We're shooting for $12k, which is at once a skeleton budget and a dauntingly huge number.  If we go over budget, I may be able to afford legal campgrounds and pay the web team.  But if we wash up under budget, well, we will see if I can run a motorcycle on oatmeal.  With a KLR, that's not inconceivable.

More updates and a Kickstarter link soon.