Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Confronting the difficukties of learning from the open source for contemporary social movements

live blogging the oekonox conference

social movements and the internet and how ngos use open source.

The internet is chaning political communication. There isa lot of research around these issues, for example: facebook and the obama campaugn. The impact includes previously excluded people. While the means have changed, goals have not.

Floss projects have tried to remain politically neutral. Even as social movemebts try to change the world. They represent a challenge to existing authority.

Social movement theory is explained very quickly by the speaker. One talks about social structures. Others talk about individuals. In the us, people talk about resources.

How new are new social movements? Where do they get their inspiration or resources? Are they product of post industrial economies? Are the participants all middle class? Are they intwrested in post material values? No, especially not in latin america where they engage things like access to clean water.

Resource mobilization theory
it’s good because you can talk about some other vocabulary words that are not meaningful to me.

There are different conflicts like ethnic or religious issues. But people work in more non-heirarchal structures. Maybe.

You’ve got you hacktivists. And then you’ve got your protest announcemebts or usibg email or whatever to progoate political messages.

What are the political unintended consequences of foss?

This theory does not talk of why, just how.

Mobilization structures include ideology. Activists may distrust foss organization may not have goals in common. There has only once been a foss physical protest. Tactics are more about production. Other movements are more about protest, generally.

Are all foss people white male and middle class? This has become more diverse recently. Private companies also participate in foss.

Recruitment is easier because onlibe causes don’t take much time, but the network is weaker.

Some argue that political ideology would reduce participation in open source. For example, the ron paul pitch on ardour certainly alientated me.

Who and how is the master frame defined. There are different ideologies arund the meaning of foss. In some culture, it’s about liberation. But in western europe, not as much.

Strategy and identity. This talk is over my head.

Greenpeace tried to migrate to foss, but had trouble. Indymedia has a principle of unity which includes dedication to foss. People new to technology may have problems with foss.

Dotcauses glue movements together. They are purely virtual. The symbols of actual protest are lost. But information can be widely distributed.

Are hack attacks ethical?

Why invest in social movements? Why do companies invest in foss? To look good! Why social movements use foss? Ngos generally only have one it person who may have a lot of trouble with foss. Do you give real support to your dotcauses? Which of your many ones do you help?

The world social forum will have a panel on foss, but foss may not want to be tied to the wsf. Some wsf folks want to use a foss organizational model.

Foss promotes liberation despite it’s apolitcal veneer.

Question: What about a conflict between openness in foss vs a need for privacy and protection in grups like indymedia? Their enemies will try to spy or disrupt.

Answer: Transparency is ideologically important to indymedia, so they compromise by using human moderation. You cannot impose ideology with technology.

Should they take money from the Ford Foundation?

Queston: If you subscribe to idelogy x, you must use foss. If you subscribe to ideology y, you must use foss. Does it apply to every ideology?

Answer: Human rights and social justice are not the goals of every ideology. If you don’t say what you stand for, somebody else will.

David Cameron says he likes open source. Does that mean it’s apolitical. Or is he a lying bastard who says he’s for lgbt rights but voted against lgbt rights legislation last week.

Question can old ideologies really apply to our shiny new product in which the rules of physics and banking no longer apply? Answer: if you don’t want to be labelled as a marxist, then name yourself as something.

Freedom can stand in conflict with the goals of equality. So how do we frame or name foss? This is still a contest. Is this actually a movement? All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Political agnosticism is dangerous. You must define yourself or else there will be a struggle to define you.

The word meritocracy is certainly a loaded term.

Incidentally, the presenter is using windows on her laptop.

Technlogy is changng our brains. Multitasking comes at the expense of memory.

The internet may be like the printing press. Ideolgies will expand rather than contract.

Key signing parties

live blogging oekonux

i came late, alas. Government ids are used. Language barriers are an issue. Names can become factors of exoticism. This can be meant to be friendly, but people are are asked about their name again and again. Foreigness is empahsized.

Ids are an issue. People may doubt the validity of foreign documents. This can also be framed as a joke. Expired documments may also be an issue.

Gender is an issue, but, the speaker claims, less of an issue than foreign. There is a roll call. Everyone turns to look at women.

Key signing parties provide no extra information. You must know ahead what’s going on. This is mainly an issue for experts.

You can rank keys by degrees of separation. This also creates a gap for noobs. Key signing thus becomes a source of othering.

The key signing party logs create data that can be used to reconstruct social networks. Also, ids come from the state.

Why are id cards worthy of trust?

Untrustworthy people have invalid paperwork, ergo only citizzens are trustworthy.

People who are foreign or exoticized are trust worthy, but their non-normativeness is emphasized.

Small talk can come from projects, but more likely about exoticism.

Processes of otherings impact the community. What is the difference between friendly jokes and the subtle exclusion methods used t perpetuate discrimination?

Which power relations are reproduced in floss?

Question: what should be used instead of id?

Answer: people who actually know each other could sign ids.

Question: is there really a risk of impersonation?

Answer: they say yes, but it’s never actually occured.

Some participants view key signing as a form of public demonstration.

People may gain rank in projects by having a lot of key signing connections. It’s like being golfing buddies.

Key signing parties do not sound like parties. There is no social interaction, especially at conferences.

How does a government identity card enhance trust?

Key signing becomes a social networking tool, which does not further security and may decrease it.

How do you talk to participants about these issues?

A comic book has been suggested. It is non-threatening and can show the other’s experience at being othered.

Personally, i would not even consider going to one of these events. The constant comments i would get around my id would be difficult, to say the least.

Women in foss

live blogging the oekonox conference.

gender gap in technology. Starts from childhood socialization. Leads to life long work division.

There is unequal access to tchnology and imbalance in participation in development.

The number of women in computer science falls every year. Researchers in belgium interviewed girls, who mostly thought that cs sounds boring. Men control the production and distribution of nachines, and thus hey contain a male logic, said the researchers.

Foss is both a social and technical phenomenon.

Researcers mostly look at core developers and less at co-developers or users. Gender is rarely investigated.

The context of foss includes inequsl participation in core development. Andd foss projects tend to be homogenous and masculibe. 1.1% of women are in foss, but do we mean cire, co-dev or active users?

Foss participation has a steeper learning curve. Also hacker culture is male normative. Jargon can be exclusive. Beginner questions are met with irritation. Time is volunteered. Finally, sexual harassment is a problem.

The same forces that exclude women from cs are intensified in foss.

Women are less likely to have help / friends working with them to learn or use foss.

There is a false concept that programmers are the entire story. Not all developers are programmers. There is product management, i18n, testing, documentation, etc.

Discussion of foss must include social activities. The over valuation of coding discourages many people.

What is the specific contribution of women in foss?

Research example in Quebec:

All respondents considered themselves part of a foss community. 15.5% of partcipanrs were women. Half were from the most remote regions of Quebec. Women tended to rank activities: training or promotion, users, community participation, then finally, development.

Half were trainers. A third went to conferences. Only 1 self ided as a coder, but when interviewed, several more spoke of writing code. One, for example set up networks and installs ubuntu in community centers. Is she a ‘user?’

Question from the audience – are the catagories any more suited to men? Answer seems to talk about men having more confidence and possbly overstating their participation vs women understating.

Important conclusion: reduce the emphasis of programming.

Non technical tasks are a gateway drug to more techincal participation and a way to do outreach.

Death Penalty

Amnesty International, UK is currently focusing on the death penalty. They’ve got a column in the London Times on it right now. Some points in it are valid, some are less compelling.
There’s a few different arguments people have about the morality of judicial killing. Some, as the author notes, are pragmatic: what if you’ve got the wrong person? As he notes, DNA evidence has a context in which it was collected and can be contaminated or inapplicable. There’s also the contexts around the trials themselves, like, are the lawyers sober and awake? And then there’s the way that class and race play into trials. People of color are way more likely to get death sentences. And people who have public defenders. And people who have incompetent lawyers. If the death sentence was fairly applied, it would fall with equal likely hood on the rich and the poor, the white and the non-white, etc. It doesn’t and this seems to imply a system where people who are sentences to death are more likely to be people who might not have even been found guilty if they had proper legal representation and a anti-racist jury.
I had an argument with a friend several months ago about the death penalty. As it happened, we had both just heard of the Birmingham pub bombings. This was the most deadly bomb attack from the IRA. My friend argued that certainly that case was one that would have deserved the death penalty. Indeed, the sentencing judge agreed and lamented that he couldn’t administer it. However, later it turned out that the police more or less randomly grabbed a group of Irishmen and tried them. Because the IRA, and by extension all of the Irish, were guilty by nature of all being the same alien other. The actual guilt or innocence of individuals is less important than stamping down on the other as a whole. And the way to stamp down is to give the most harsh penalty we can administer.
I don’t happen to think it’s moral to kill people (except in self-defense) and I’m not keen on it being done in my name, and that’s why I’m against the death penalty. If you think killing people is ok, then you’ve got to be ok with the amount of error which will creep into any system and especially something as fraught with error as the court system. What percentage of “oops, wrong guy” are you willing to tolerate? Because a perfect system is impossible, there will always be some percentage. How much is too much?
And this leads to the strongest pragmatic argument against the death penalty. Do you trust your government with the right to kill you? Maybe you’re not poor or a person of color or otherwise at exceptionally high risk for being accused in error, but it could happen. Would you trust the justice system with your life?

Faithless

My last post was about loosing faith in “fate,” an idea I left undefined. It wasn’t a bearded sky god, passing judgement. But more like an intuitive, uninformed impression of the “Higher Power” of AA. Some sort of thing larger than myself. An idea that things would be ok in the long run. That’s all crap.
Ok, obviously all of humanity is larger than myself. And the movement of chance and the actions of others are all out of my control, which is part of the idea I had. So the idea of serenity is still valid. But other ideas are impacted.
Let’s imagine a metaphorical compass. The red side of the needle points at moral actions. You’re walking through the woods of life and are trying to follow the compass direction, but taking into account local circumstances, including things like cliffs, trees in the way, streams, etc. And the terrain itself has a lot of magnetic rock, which makes the needle direction really unclear sometimes. But there is, out there, a set of right actions, which are handed down from someplace outside of ourselves. But that view of morality is crap.
Foes of prop 8 angrily insist that we can’t put people’s rights up for a vote. But, in effect, that’s all we ever do regarding people’s rights. People have rights because we’ve all agreed they do. Because of our human emotions and logic and ideas like the golden rule. Actions aren’t moral or immoral because they adhere to some imaginary Platonic form, but because the people involved all pretty much agree on the action. One person leaving a comment on my last post called this “freeing.” There’s not one way to be good.
But, still, more questions. A lot of morality and especially the application of justice is configured such that “crimes” are what poor people can do to rich people. And morally-neutral actions are what rich people can do to poor people. This is crap. Are poor people less human?
Also, what the hell does humanness matter? If we’re not created in god’s image, what makes us better than battery chickens in cages laying eggs all day, unable to move with their beaks torn off? Aside from us having all the power and them having none?
All morality seems deeply vested in power relations. Deists think something is good because God demands it and he’s got more power than us. Atheists think something is good because they want to preserve their position in life and understand this relies on mutual cooperation. The golden rule isn’t just a good idea because it helps use empathy to figure out right actions, it is also the test condition and justification for right actions. And we can’t imagine being chickens, and there’s no danger of being reincarnated as one because none of that actually exists, so who cares about them? And in these circles of “us” and “them” and powers to enforce, we decide right and wrong. Can we see ourselves in an out group? Then they’re in. Otherwise, they stay out.
Which is what it’s been all along. And knowing that might be freeing because we’re free to negotiate our relationships with others however the people in them want. And we take whatever life has handed us and try our best with it. Or not. And it won’t turn out fine in the long run. In the long run, we’re dead. And either other people stop caring or it all becomes somebody else’s problem. And they might not solve it either.
So let’s say you wanted to have faith because somebody told you it was a good idea. You want to put it somewhere. Where? You can’t put it in god, because he doesn’t exist. You can’t put it in a happy future because that doesn’t exist either. You can’t put in humanity because they could very easily decide that ‘personhood’ no longer applies to queers or some other group you think it should. You could put in your friends, but in the short term, they might not be up to it. In the long term, one by one, they’ll die or leave and then, you die. Despite that, you could have it in yourself, which would be a nice heartwarming thing to do, but what is that but the idea of fate and happier future? That’s crap. So fuck faith. Drown your faith like an unwanted kitten.
I don’t know if it’s freeing, but I can live with it. What choice do I have?
I do feel better, though.

I’m probably sharing too much

(Note: I posted this and then decided I was perhaps being too dramatic and took it back down, but in the mean time, it got syndicated and a bunch of people saw it anyway, so here it is again.)
When I was in my first semester at Wesleyan, I used to worry I would start crying in class. The reason for this worry was that my mother had died less than a year previously. I knew that my friend Angela was planning on playing some music from the Brother Where Art Thou sound track and some Hank Williams and I had played these things by my mother’s bedside because they seemed to give her some comfort. But, by the time it was Angela’s term to give a presentation, I was on more solid ground.
Two years later, when I moved to Paris, I worried I would start screaming on the metro. I had anxiety, from several factors including gender, being foreign, normativity, etc etc etc and I didn’t know that people with anxiety do not actually just start screaming. Nor do we die from our chests pounding. I just wait and it passes. So I never did scream.
I don’t know what I’m worried about now, exactly, but lately, I often find I’ve been holding my breath. I feel dizzy more than is typical. I’ve always had a tendency to not quite be in my body, but now I sort of feel like I’m not quite in my head and that things might turn very white and blank. Which is similar to thinking I might pass out, sort of. But I think that this too will pass without coming to pass.
Reality or whatever seems to be something like a string or a thread, but I don’t think it’s something I could let go of. I think it’s tied to my wrist like a balloon on a child at the zoo. So I’m not worried like I was in Connecticut or France. But when people ask me how I’m doing and I say, “ok,” I’m not entirely certain if that’s actually the truth. But it might be. In time, it will be.
. . .
I realized two things recently. One is that I’ll always be crazy. I’m not screaming-on-the-metro crazy, but this tendency or whatever I’ve got is something I can manage, but not something that will evaporate away.
I was learning to deal with it by trying to acknowledge and even share my emotions instead of trying not to have them. And then, after that, trusting to fate. But there is no fate. Things don’t happen for any kind of reason. We live until we die and that’s it. There’s no plan. There’s no meaning. You just carry on until you don’t anymore. Everything we have to sort of smooth over the abyss and make it seem nice is just a human invention. There’s no soul. There’s no god. There’s no plan. It’s just suffering with the occasional respite. And that’s all.
I’d like to carry on as long as possible, but the emptiness of it all . . . is kind of a lot. It’s a large realisation to get used to.

On Feeling Angry

I walked through downtown Oakland yesterday and it began to rain again even as the sun was peeking through the clouds. I looked up into the sky and saw a triple rainbow, stretching across even the exposed patches of blue sky. It was obscenely lovely and I hated it’s beauty, which seemed so inappropriate. The rainbow is God’s promise not to drown the world again by flood and it seemed mocking. What’s worth saving in this ugly place? I looked at a dog shitting on the sidewalk ahead. A woman next to me noticed the weather and said loudly, “Uhoh, the Devil is whupping his wife again! I wonder what she did this time?” and then asked me for money. I told her she wasn’t funny. Not funny at all, but at least her mythology seemed a better fit. And laughing at this kind of misery, well, that has a place in this world. This ugly place, watched over by a worthless creator, simperingly promising not to wash us out, no matter how much we deserve it.

There is a war against women. Not just a metaphorical glass ceiling war, but a war fought with blood and violence. A war winked and nodded at, the subject of panhandling jokes and police inaction. Their is no single front. No tank to stand in front of. No easy target for counter-attack. No obvious action to take. So I simmer in rage and wish God dead.

“The universe tends towards justice” my friends say, but justice is so inadequate. Even vengeance seems empty. Ten of his lives are not worth this one of hers. There is nothing to take from him that comes near what he has taken from us. And to wait for divine retribution from the same gods that let this happen is too little. Everything is too little.

My anger is a single drop of rain in the downpour. A helpless tear. An empty gesture.

Timanna Bennett, R.I.P.

I know, in my life, there have been many people who loved me, but maybe two people who i feel like have ever really understood me. Yesterday was the funeral of one of those people. Timanna’s memorial service started with her family speaking, then her best friends and exes. People spoke about how accepting and understanding she was. She would accept one person and simultaneously accept her other friends being judgmental.
T was queer and genderqueer. She could grow a sparse moustache (better than mine), which she often did. For the inauguration, she decided to wear a wig and a muumuu to go to the Parkway Theatre and watch Obama get sworn in. She also would sometimes butch up in a suit or a tux, and cut quite a dashing figure. Several butch women spoke very movingly about how T helped show them that it was ok to be a masculine woman. Alex talked about how she and T used to go to thrift stores and buy old man clothes together.
Other people spoke about T being unconventional and flamboyant. Somebody mentioned getting thrown out of a movie theatre. Nicole told me about a road trip where they had been thrown out of a Denny’s (for playing Madonna on a boombox). When I was an undergrad, I had an overdeveloped sense of propriety and T liked to shout “penis!” at the top of her lungs in grocery stores and whatnot when I was with her, just to watch me squirm.
Sophie wrote a eulogy where she shared that when she was a freshwoman and new to Mills, a group of new students had decided to go skinny-dipping in the fountain in the middle of campus, during the night. Timanna grabbed all their clothes and ran off with them.
T was almost larger than life. She was the most creative person I’ve ever met. Frustratingly, she didn’t do that much concrete with it. Her senior art show was really cool and she did an awesome zine. I always hoped she’d have more frequent output. It seemed like she was always helping other people be more creative. When I was a youth and put out my first album with Mp3.com, a vanity label, T bought a copy. I think she’s the only one to have bought it. A couple of years ago, she commissioned me to write a short piece. She was one of two people who encouraged me to start blogging.
Somebody said how T seemed to have trouble figuring out her life path. Lately, she had some problems with drugs, but it seemed like she was really sorting herself out. She was trying to quit and was volunteering at a law center to help victims of domestic violence. She had just applied to do a MA program at Mills in public policy. T was an activist, always working for social justice and change. One of her professors from her undergrad days talked about how she had written a recommendation letter for T, how she was going to get into the grad program.
The professor wants to set up an institutional memorial for T at Mills. T has been around Mills for over a decade now, involved in the community. Her mother spoke about how T had never felt she fit in anywhere, until she got to Mills. There was a stirring of recognition in the mourners, many of whom were Mills women (and another Mills man aside from me). I started crying at that moment and haven’t stopped much since.
There’s so much I want to ask T, about herself and about gender issues – like what it means for me to have felt so strongly validated as a Mills woman then, but a man now? And I just want to talk about Madonna or whatever pop culture thing she was into at that moment.
The last time I saw her, I was home for Christmas and it was a stressful visit. I saw my family for the first time since starting transition and my ex girlfriend for the first time since breaking up and I almost didn’t want to be in California at all. Timanna came over and we went to the White Horse, her favorite gay bar, in Oakland. It was karaoke night. I’ve barely got any control of my voice since it started to change, but the overall quality of singing was on a par with what I could manage. We sang a duet of “I Touch Myself,” a song I hadn’t even heard in years. If we got any notes right at all, it was by happy accident. But we acted like “horndogs,” according to the MC. T didn’t even seem embarrassed, even as I was blushing.
I think all the queers and butches and femmes and transfolks and academics and activists and friends packed in the pews of the chapel and standing in the back could tell a story like that, about how T was a bright spot in their life. And at this dark hour in mine, I keep thinking that if I’m in the Bay Area and I’m so sad, I should call her up. It’s hard to even conceive of a world without her.

Will be in California . . . for a funeral

Timanna Bennett died. I don’t really know what happened. T was a good friend for a long time. I’m flying out tomorrow. T’s memorial service is at the Mills chapel on Saturday, 14 February, at 11am. There will be a potluck reception afterwards. As far as I know, T was the first of my Mills friends to die. A lot of people who knew her then seem to be planning on coming. I think some of them fell out of contact since, but T was just such a remarkable person.
I will post more about her later, but right now I just can’t. I should be packing to travel anyway or washing some of the many dishes that I shouldn’t leave in my sink for two weeks. I’ll be in the Bay Area until the 23rd. I hope to be able to see as many friends as possible while I’m back, especially if I haven’t seen them for a while. I didn’t see too many people when I was home for Christmas, but I did see T, thank gods.
My cell phone number is 917 355 5064. That’s a New York number, but it rings in my pocket.
This is all very distressing.

Questions for composers

When you compose, do you start with the form or with the content? Do you decide on the structure before you gather materials? Do the materials suggest a structure to you or vice versa?
I’ve never been so good at structure and I really need to do something about this. I wonder if there are any good books on musical structure? Maybe I should try to write some stuff with historical structures. Not sontata form, though. When I was at Wesleyan, I realized that I wrote everything in sonata form and stopped doing that, but I didn’t really replace it with any other structures, just sort of trying to intuit things for every piece.
What pieces are best to study for cues into form and structure? I’ve been thinking of looking at John Cage’s Square Root pieces, something my supervisor has encouraged.
But I think I should also get a book. Back in my miss-spent youth, I thought I wouldn’t need to know anything about non-electronic music because the world was shiny and new and out with the old and in with whatever I was doing. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention in some of my classes. Much like when I was 17, and similarly had an idea that I would never need to know statistics.
So, due to a lack of diligence in my studies, I’m totally unclear on how this works at all, really. I imagine that it’s like having a bunch of plastic boxes, like you use for food storage. And in each one, there’s a different sort of food. Each like a course of a fancy meal. So they all go together, but they’re all separate. However, they probably have ingredients in common like olive oil. Or pumpkin both in the pie and the soup. However, this metaphor is crap, as it’s non temporal. Pumpkin soup is a gestalt. It doesn’t change over time. Maybe it’s like stanzas in a poem or chapters in a book? I imagine that stanza length is decided a head of time, whereas chapters seem to stem from the content that fills them?
Is it ironic not to have a structure of understanding to apply to structure?