Category: Uncategorised

New Blog Location

A decade or so ago, when my blog hosting company was purchased by Google, I don’t recall being alarmed. They assured me that they wouldn’t be evil. Alas, for the good old days!

As Google has shed their concern about avoiding evil, I’ve been pondering moving away from them. There were two factors that finally pushed me to go.  One was the lack of control over the platform, which interferes with making posts about whatever hack pact I flirt with completing. I couldn’t post my javascript stuff at all. I couldn’t use my favourite music font. The final annoyance was that I couldn’t post my new PD patches with WebPD. Unfortunately, it turns out they don’t actually run with WebPD, but anyway…

The other day, I clicked a link to find out the origin of the slang term ‘on fleek’, which took me to those well known connoisseurs of youth culture, the New York Times. I can’t tell you if their article was good or bad, as I was unable to read it. They greyed out all of their text, pending my filling out a short survey that wanted my medical history. If I had disclosed to Google surverys whether or not I have high blood pressure or diabetes, I might be able to awkwardly use slang like a 39 year old who read about the term in the NYT. Instead, I tried clicking the opt-out link, which failed to work. And that was the moment that pushed me over the edge.

I’m not exactly happy about how google analytics tracks me around the web (which they do, to me and you – with the help of website owners, they know almost everything we click on). But trying to coerce me to disclose private medical history is a step too far. My medical records are private, protected sensitive data in both the US and the EU. They have no right to know and no right to ask. If I had disclosed, they would certainly share that information with advertisers and other interested parties, something that medical privacy laws were expressly written to prevent.  Screw that.

So my new plan is to stop handing all of my data to Google. Step one, the easiest step, is to move my blog. WordPress is extremely easy to use. This is my domain and my server and I can use whatever fonts I want!

The next step is dropping Gmail. Unlike most other email providers, Google does not just deliver your email, but they also hand over keywords to advertisers. Have you ever wondered how it is that you exchange some emails about maybe buying an inflatible raft (or whatever) and then suddenly see a bunch of banner ads about rafts for sale? That’s because Google read your email. Indeed, so many people have gmail accounts, that google is likely to be reading your email even if you don’t use them.

The widespread gmail usage also creates additional issues for users. Many people are confused about their email address and keeping giving out mine when signing up for stuff.  When I briefly signed up for whatsapp, somebody already had an account with my email address.  A lot of app developers seem to have given up even providing a mechanism to get them to stop spamming you with somebody else’s email notifications.  And, indeed, as a related issue, if some other person mistypes or misspells my address when trying to contact me, the typo is likely to actually be an account name for somebody. My would-be correspondent doesn’t get a bounce message or a reply from a user who is used to seeing things not meant for them. Which is why a publisher texted recently me to find out if I was dropping out of their project, as they’d never heard any replies.

And then, finally, I need to de-google my Android phone. My gmail account does not just have all my email, it has my contacts. I helpfully type in the first name, last name, phone number and address of people I want to keep track of. So if you sign up for some_cool_dude@gmail and think that they might read your email and know you have high cholesterol, but at least they don’t know who you are in real life, well, one of your friends with a Samsung just told them you’re John Smith of 124 Some Street, etc and gave them your phone number.

I used to work on web search many years ago and remember when google was a shiny new company. Even when it was small, a lot of employees there were ‘ex’ NSA spooks. Google was happy to hire them. NSA programmers are really good at search algorithms. Google’s journey from being a really good search engine to a gateway that won’t let you pass without demanding access to extremely sensitive medical data has been very gradual. It was easy to trade a bit of privacy for a lot of convenience, but this, finally, is a step too far.

So welcome to my new blog! Theoretically, all my old posts have been moved over. If you still use an RSS reader, update your feed to: http://www.celesteh.com/blog/feed/

Faux- French Food: Quorn Bourguignon

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • small knob of butter
  • 1 medium onion
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 2 medium-large carrots
  • flour
  • 3 portabella mushrooms
  • 3 shallots
  • 1 bag of qourn fake chicken pieces
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tsp herbes de provence (if they don’t include lavender, add some)
  • 2 tsp thyme
  • 2 tsp bullion powder
  • 1 tsp marmite (or less – to taste)
  • 0.5 bottle french red wine – if you’re outside of france, get the cheapest you can. If you’re inside france, get something you might consider drinking
  • ground pepper

Equipment

  • knife
  • cutting board
  • pan
  • measuring spoon
  • stirring spoon

Instructions

Chop up the onion and cook it over low heat with butter and some olive oil. After the onion goes translucent, add chopped garlic. After the garlic has cooked a bit, add the chopped carrots. After they seems to be somewhat cooked, add a light flour coating and the chopped shallots. After the shallots are a bit cooked, add the chopped mushrooms, hebred de provence and thyme. When the shallots are looking a bit cooked, add the mushrooms. Then, when they seem to have soaked up the oil, add an extra Tbsp of olive oil and wine so it’s an inch or two deep in the pan. Add in the bay leaf, bullion and marmite. Simmer over low heat, topping up with wine when it gets low. When the carrots are soft, add the quorn and cook for 20-25 more minutes.
Keep adding wine, such that there should be a bit of liquid left around at the end of cooking. You should be stirring intermittently throughout. All cooking should be done without a lid on the pan.
This is all based loosely on Delia’s recipe.

Publishing Live Notation

My piece Immrama is a live notation piece. A python script generates image files, as the performance is happening, which are put on a web page. Performers connect via any wifi device with a web browser to see the notation. It uses really simple technologies, so nearly any device should work. A Newton won’t (I made enquires) but an old Blackberry will.
Setting it up requires python and a web server and a lot of faff. It could be packaged into a mac app, but I’m working on linux and it seems like more and more people in the arts are turning to windows, as Apple increasingly ignores their former core audience of artists and designers. It runs fine on my laptop, of course, but I don’t want to have to provide that to anybody who wants to do the piece. Nor do I want to force ensembles to have IT people on hand. Fortunately, I think I’ve stumbled on how to package this for the masses.
I’m working right now to get it all running on a Raspberry Pi. This is a tiny, cheap computer. Instead of having a hard drive, it uses SD cards. This means that I can set everything up to run my piece, put it all on an SD card, and then anybody can put that SD card into their Raspberry Pi and the piece will be ready to go! …In principle, at least.
This piece needs wifi, which does not come with the Pi. Pi owners who want wireless networking get their wifi dongles separately. I got mine off a friend who didn’t need it any more. And while setting up the networking bit, I found at least three different sets of instructions depending on what dongle people have. I could try to detect what dongle they have and then auto-install needed software to match, but, yikes, there are many things I would rather do with my life. I think instead, if you order an SD card, by default, it should come with a dongle – the buyer can opt out, but not without understanding they may need to install different libraries and do some reconfiguring.
Or, I dunno, if you want to run the piece and don’t want to buy a dongle, send me yours and I’ll get it working and send it back with an SD card?
My last software job was doing something called being a release engineer – I took people’s stuff that worked on their own machine and packaged it so the rest of the world could use it. I wanted to be a developer, but that was the job I could get. It seems like I’m still release engineering, even as a composer.
Anyway, this is all very techy, but the point here is to prevent end users from having to do all this. When I’m done, I’ll make an image of the card and use that to make new cards, which I can post to people, saving them my woe. Or, even better, some publishing company will send them to people, so I don’t need to do my own order fulfilment, because queuing at the post office, keeping cards and dongles on hand, etc gets very much like running a small business, which is not actually the point.

Tech Notes so far

Later, I’m going to forget how I got this working, so this is what I did:

  1. Get Raspian wheezy, put it on a card.
  2. Boot the Pi off the card
    1. Put the card in the Pi
    2. Plug in the HDMI cable to the monitor and the Pi
    3. Connect the Pi to a powered USB hub
    4. Put the dongle on the powered hub.
    5. Plug in a mouse and keyboard
    6. Connect your Piu to the internet via an ethernet cable
    7. Turn on the HDMI monitor and the hub
    8. Plug in the Pi’s power cable (and send electricity to the Pi). Make sure you do this last.
  3. On the setup screen, set it to boot to the desktop and set the locale. then reboot
  4. Open a terminal and run:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install aptitude
    sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
    sudo apt-get autoremove
    sudo apt-get clean
    sudo aptitude install rfkill hostapd hostap-utils iw dnsmasq lighttpd

  5. Using your regular computer (not the Pi), Find the wifi channel with the least traffic and least overlap

    sudo iwlist wlan0 scan | grep Frequency | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

  6. Try to find out what dongle I have
    1. run: iw list
    2. That returns ‘nl80211 not found’
    3. run: lsusb
    4. That says I have a RTL8188CUS 802.11n adaptor
  7. Use this script for a rtl8188CUS dongle
    1. For future, it would be nice to get the location from the system locale
    2. Autoset the SSID to he name of the piece
    3. Autoset a default password
    4. Indeed, remove all interactivity from the script
  8. Reboot

It might not seem like much, but that was all day yesterday. The first step alone took bloody ages.

To Do

  • Install needed fonts, etc.
  • Try to ensure that the internet remains available over ethernet, but if this isn’t possible, You can still chekc out a github repo to a USB stick and move data that way…
  • Find out what wifi dongle would be best for this application – ideally it has a low power draw, decent range, cheap and commonly owned among people with Pis
  • Set it to hijack all web traffic and serve pages but not with apache! Use the highttpd installed earlier

Best Nutloaf

  • 1 Onion
  • 1 tsp vegetable oil
  • 2-3 slices / 100g stale bread OR 100g matzoh
  • 225 g nuts
  • 300 ml vegetable stock
  • 2 tsp marmite
  • 1 tsp herbs de Provence (or mixed herbs)
  1. Preheat oven to 180 C / 350 F / Gas mark 4
  2. Peel and dice the onion. Cook it in a pan on the stove with the oil
  3. Toast bread until slightly crispy. Process or mill it (or the matzoh, if you’re using that). Grind the nuts
  4. Heat the stock with the marmite. Bring to a boil and then remove from heat.
  5. Mix everything in a mixing bowl and transfer to a greased deep baking tray. Bake for 30 minutes or until dry on top, but not burnt. (You can cover it with foil for the first 20 minutes if you are prone to burning things.)

From Another Dinner is Possible, which is the best vegan cookbook I know of. You should get a copy.
Americans: 300 ml = 1.25 Cups. Apparently, according to this, if you use almonds, you’ll want 1.125 Cups. However, I think you might just need to get a scale for this one, which is a good investment anyway. They’re very useful for beer brewing.

Meet the new phase of Capitalism

It’s a lot like old phases of Capitalism (like, pre-1930), but with more technology. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the US has decided to become an oligarchy coupled with a security state apparatus necessary to maintain extreme inequality. This is not new news, but the rapid emergency of the technology and systems needed to maintain this state of affairs does seem new to people living under it, especially to people who were previously part of privileged classes.
An article in The Nation is looking at bits and pieces of what is emerging. This is, in effect, the neoliberal state. When everything is privatised, everything is organised towards the benefit of the people who own the private systems. Since the private sector is taking over state functions – big functions – the emerging privatisation is big companies. Which means that the owning class is the really very very rich. And the functions they want to take over are sometimes surprising, unless this is viewed as a bid for total political and cultural control. Take, for example, Starbucks.
A few days ago, Starbucks decided that it was time for (white) people in America to have a large conversation about race. Ok, obviously, white people in America really do need to talk about race. We need to listen to things black people are saying, talk amongst ourselves, and work to dismantle white supremacy. Starbucks is not wrong about needing a conversation. What is perplexing is why a chain of coffee shops would take this task on board.
One might be tempted to explain this historically. Coffee shops used to be places where people did gather to talk about politics, especially a few centuries ago. More recently, Starbucks has been forced into culture wars, specifically, the gun debate as they finally decided people carrying large assault rifles were not welcome to terrify their staff. The brand itself has a political resonance, on the side of Apple computers, gay rights, urban ‘creative classes’ and 1990’s Bill Clinton. All of that is specifically proto-neoliberal baggage. And this is a neoliberal project. Let’s look at how it was promoted to baristas on twitter:

(The images on the tweet are from a screen shot of this page. Note the tweet does not contain a link to the post and thus is completely inaccessible to people who rely on screen readers. Seriously, people, if your post is worth sharing, it’s worth making it accessible to blind people.)
The promotional text starts it’s second paragraph with, ‘Change won’t come from the government. It has to come from everyday people like us.’ This fits in very well with the disenfranchisement described in the article in the Nation. Despite being a democracy, this asserts that we cannot depend on the government to have anything to do with our needs or desires. The government does not serve ‘everyday people’. Therefore, the business of social change cannot come from the sort of action one normally undertakes to change government. Not from voting, certainly, but not from marches either. The days of MLK giving speeches in Washington are over, because this not Washington DC’s problem. It’s Seattle, Washington’s problem. To emphasis this, the coupled picture shows a hashtagged coffee cup in front of the Washington Monument, where MLK’s speech happened. Starbucks wants to privatise social movements.
They’ve already made efforts to insert themselves into culture, above and beyond serving coffee. They have previously sold CDs in their shops and want to shape, control and profit from culture more generally. And also this is also a way of wading into a disagreement among billionaires as to what extent white supremacy continues to have utility. On the one hand, voter suppression laws are quite openly removing the right to vote from black people. On the other hand, racial unrest is disturbing the market. Under a deligitmised government, this is how democracy is meant to take place: by people with money coming into a private forum to have a conversation about what number of rights to extend to others. (Starbucks does not tend to build coffee shops in black areas and the imagery they’ve chose to promote this effort is specifically designed to make white people feel comfortable (‘the only race is human’), so this is very much a conversation about others, which is not surprising in a conversation that seeks only to decide on the acceptable amount of white supremacy, but I digress.)
It’s extremely obvious why an oligarchy would want to control the means to the conversation about race. People in the street are alarming. People purchasing things is good. Which is exactly why any effort like this is ultimately disempowering for everyone involved, aside from the owners. The emerging security state is distressing, but it is not insurmountable. It is still possible to resist. Not by heading to our local multinational outlet to demand extra emotional labour from the staff, but by being in the streets. They want people to politely consume and that is what absolutely will not destabilise concentrated power. People do still have power in the US, from mass movements and street protests. Privatisation has zero long term plans about anything, certainly not about managing us. We can still make a better world.

Liberationist Agendas and Notation

Graphic notation, the story goes, is meant to be liberating. But for whom?
Not all graphic notation is actually open. Some of it, like the pieces written for David Tudor by Cage and others, were not open at all. Tudor used a ruler to take very precise measurements and worked out a performance score from the score that he received. These scores were graphic, but also very highly specified. When discussing notation in 1976, David Berhman wrote, ‘Learning a new piece can be like learning a new game or a new grammar, and first rehearsals are often taken up by discussions about the rules – about “how” to play rather than “how well” (which must be put off until later).’ (p 74). Indeed, this mining for exactness and rules meant that players needed specificity to approach a new piece. In the same book, but in a different article about the performer’s perspective, Leonard Stein wrote, ‘Little wonder, then, that when first faced with a new score of great apparent ambiguity the performer’s reactions to the music may be seriously inhibited, and he may be discouraged from playing it at all.’ (p 41)
In the era of serialism, every aspect of the piece (from notes, to dynamics, to timbres to articulations) would be carefully mapped out according to rules. Although he’s framed in opposition to this movement, Cage did also often map everything out, but used ‘chance operations’ to do so. That is, he cast the I-Ching, which is all a roundabout way of saying he used different algorithms to write very precisely closed music.
When everything is specified, the performer is at risk of falling into very rote renditions of things. He or she may play very mechanically, as if they are on a grid, or just repeating practices they learned in school, trying to get everything right. Musicality is at risk from hyper-specification. Therefore, according to Berhman, when Morton Feldman’s Projection scores have little high boxes in them, specifying a range of possible pitches, but not precise notes, this is meant to nudge the performer into greater engagement with the piece and the genre. ‘As a part of his interpretation, the player must ask himself what sort of pitches are appropriate – in effect, what sort of music he is playing.’ (p 79) The performer is liberated from their rote practice and forced to engage. But this liberation is not the performer’s liberation – it is the composers. The composer, broken free from the shackles of European Art Music and Serialism can use any method they want to get something very exact from a performer. Cage draws squiggles and Tudor takes very fine measurements of them. Performers: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Meanwhile, European Art Music was also weighing down in people in Europe. But obviously, the political valences of this were completely different. Cage, tired of Americans being compared negatively to dead white European males joked that the US needed ‘music with less sauerkraut in it’. (Problematic!!) But Europeans who wanted more freedom had much less to prove. Nobody thought British people were somehow culturally incapable of writing large scale symphonic works worth listening to. They had Elgar! Which is not to say they didn’t also long for freedom, but they did so with much less nationalism.
American experimentalist composers had a project of proving their worth as composers. They rejected the strict, imported methods that came form Europe, but reacting to that by relinquishing control would be risky. Firstly, there is the danger of association with Jazz. White supremacy may have pushed some white composers away from engaging any of the openness suggested by jazz practice. Improvisation would be a step too far. And, indeed, composers trying to prove their worth as masters of their art may assume that retaining control would make a stronger case for their own work.
Those not embarking on nationalist projects, who have much less to prove, did turn out to be more open. Cornelius Cardew played in the AMM, a small group that improvised, influenced by jazz, but tryied to play outside of jazz’s generic boundaries. Cagean composers shunned improv, but Cardew embraced it and developed his own squiggly notation. Unlike Feldman, he did not seek exactness or a greater freedom to realise the composer’s vision more precisely. Cardew wrote, ‘A square musician (like myself) might use Treatise as a path to the ocean of spontaneity.’ (1971 p i) What Cardew gives, Feldman takes away. (Of course, when generalising about entire cultures, exceptions abound. Earle Brown argued for performer freedom.)
There is a tendency in musical writing, especially in the popular press, to see graphic notations as a high point of music’s historic embrace of left-wing libertarianism. While certainly Cage did come to embrace anarchism (and his writings on that deserve a fresh look), it would be an error to see most American notational experimentation of the period up to the 70’s as embracing any kind of class-conscious liberation. Sure it was liberationist for composers, but performers had to look abroad if they wanted freedom for themselves.

Works Cited

Behrman, David. ‘What Indertiminate Notation Determines’ (1976) Perspectives on Notation and Performance ed Benjamin Bortez and Edward T Cone. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. [ book]
Cardew, Cornelius. “Treatise Handbook” (1971) London: Edition Peters. [Book]
Stein, Leonard. ‘The Performer’s Point of View’ (1976) Perspectives on Notation and Performance ed Benjamin Bortez and Edward T Cone. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. [ book]

A note about notes

Musical notation, as you may have learned in school, is a lot like a mathematical function. That is, one of those math equations that you can graph. For every x, there is exactly one y. Which means that the graph is a line that may meander up or down, but it will never loop back on itself, nor split in two, nor do anything more interesting other than getting more and more to the right as x goes up

Similarly, unless there is a repeat sign, you read notes strictly left to right. There is no symbol for linked 8th notes (aka: quavers) that play in any order aside from left to right.

And, indeed, letters of words plot a similar route. But when drawing musical lines, like the UPIC system, people sometimes want to double back. This impulse is also evident, at least occasionally, in non-musicians.

Wallenda by Penalva at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is a study in naive notation developed by a visual artist. This is an example of a closed and particular form of graphic notation, invented to communicate a monophonic line extracted from the orchestral score of Rite of Spring. Its meaning is specific and fixed.

The artist has divided the movements into sections, each of which has a single page of notation. The third movement is 153 pages. The notation is sometimes mnemonic and sometimes drawn lines. It appears to be read right to left, top to bottom. many of the images resemble piano roll notation as used by some MIDI programs. Some of the lines curve up and down, presumably tracing a melodic line. This has a strong implication of a left to right directionality. However many panels, starting with 69 in the first movement as the first such example, have loops in them.

Loop pages include 69, 94 in the first set. 16, 74, 107, 110, 111, 113 in the second set and 23, 57, 92, 93, 117, 119 in the third.

While I can only speculate as to the meanings of these gestures, some of the very tight loops do seem as if they may be intended to suggest vibrato. Some of the larger loops appear more mysterious, given their violation of the directionality implied.

Page 44 in set 2 does not loop but does have a gesture that is not a function in a mathematical sense. Instead, it goes down and then backwards. It’s meaning is intriguingly mysterious.

I would guess that the reason that people tend to want loops (despite making up a system that does not support them), has a lot to do with gestalt psychology. The relationship between it and musical notation is very beautifully illustrated, in this analysis of Cardew.

Alas, no pictures are allowed in the museum, so this post is without illustrations of Penalva’s score, but I did do some possibly ambiguous notation of my own in myPaint. In what order would you play those notes?

Racists do not Speak for Us

White liberalism has problems. First it was Bill Mahler on his Islamophobia rant, now it’s a column in the Independent. They claim to speak for liberal values, which are often broadly reducible to atheism and LGBT people. I want to address this.
For too long, the atheist and LGBT communities have tolerated our self-appointed leaders seeking advantage in Islamophobia. Maybe Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell really think there is some threat of Sharia Law being imposed in the UK. However, this seems unlikely. Muslims make up a tiny minority in Europe in general and within the UK. Even if a majority of Muslims were in favour of abandoning a thousand years of common law, (which is already a dubious assertion), they don’t have the political backing or the numbers to make this happen. The idea that this is some kind of threat is absurd. Dawkins and Tatchell are being deliberately disingenuous. These men are (presumably) smart enough to know better.
Meanwhile, Christianity, the majority religion, is often threatening to both atheists and LGBT people. One need look no further to our closest allies, the US, to see a country where Christian parents can bully their trans children to death, like the case of Leelah Alcorn. And where Christianity is such an official part of that ‘secular’ state, that they hold a National Day of Prayer. Indeed, former president George HW Bush gave an interview where he called for atheists to be stripped of their citizenship. American Christian extremists are part of an international network, which does have links in the UK and have done some serious harm abroad. These religious extremists have travelled to Uganda, specifically to persecute LGBT people there.
And nobody spills endless ink on a national stage about the Christian threat. Because Christians are dominant and have power. Which is exactly why they actually are a threat, and also why nobody wants to have to deal with the fallout. Because obviously not all Christians are extremists, only a small minority – something that is also true for other religions, although that fact tends to be conveniently forgotten. When one lives in a dominant Christian milieu, it’s immediately very obvious that there are some positive aspects to the structures created by Christian organisations and that many Christians are peaceful and harmless and privately horrified by the misogynistic and homophobic activities undertaken under the banner of Christianity. Yet, somehow, white liberals are systematically unable to perceive that this kind of ideological diversity might exist in Islam. Why is that?
LGBT people and, to a much lesser extent, atheists in the UK are ‘subaltern’. In many ways still, we do not have direct access to power and are not granted platforms to advocate for ourselves unless we enter into a bargain with the powerful. We can have nice shiny platforms to advocate for ourselves only if we couple that with advocating against other unpopular groups. At least, according to Spikvak in Can the Subaltern Speak. Surely now, though, atheists and LGBT people are much more empowered than we used to be? And Grace Dent, the Independent columnist, does not appear to be part of the LGBT community, so we’re not even getting access to a major media platform, we’re just being used as a stick to beat people with. Our role as subaltern has shifted from being consistently outsider to some sort of militarised symbol of tolerance. ‘Look at how well we treat LGBT people’ says the west (please pay no attention to the discrimination behind the curtain). We’re better than our military enemies because we’re less awful. And thus our militarism becomes pink-washed. We invaded Kuwait many years ago to defend premature infants thrown out of incubators by the Iraq army (one of the most telling and canny lies ever told in the US congress). Now we fight ISIS to save the gays. Militaries that only recently decided to admit LGB people are now supposed to be our saviours.
There are multiple problems with this model, aside from the obvious moral ones. If we turn LGBT people into symbols of western values and western tolerance, then those who we would bomb are incentivised do the same. Putin shows he’s different from the bullying US though the state’s aggressive homophobia. Western militaristic pink washing puts the lives of LGBT people in other countries at risk. LGBT people in the west, as a whole, don’t have a lot to gain from this strategy (although individual self-appointed leaders may find it personally very rewarding), but our community overseas has really a lot to lose.
Furthermore, and very importantly, this narrative erases the entire existence of Muslim LGBT people, especially those who are organising for their own rights. The binary opposition of white liberal vs homophobic Muslim is an invention of the western press, serving the pinkwashed military. This is the ideological heir of Blair’s war in Iraq. The binary opposition of white racist vs LGBT Muslim almost never arises in the media, despite this being a real issue with a real, non-imaginary risk of violence for people in the UK. Hate crimes maim and kill people in the UK. ISIS doesn’t. One of these things is a real risk for people here. The other isn’t. Some fascist groups in East London have specifically appealed to the imaginary dichotomy between LGBT people and Muslims as a basis for their organising. The kind of rhetoric used in today’s Independent is not without consequences.
For too long, white liberals, atheists and LGBT people have only quietly grumbled at the Islamophobia of the more famous members of our ranks. ‘Sure Peter Tatchell might be an idiot about his warnings on Shaira Law in the UK, but look at all the good he’s done,’ we said. However, we cannot let people advocating for our rights throw others under the bus for our supposed benefit. In addition to being immoral, it’s also dangerous for us as a community. One need only look at Tatchell’s recently split with trans people to see how a willingness to sacrifice some unpopular people can easily grow to include ourselves.
We need to take stronger action – to link our remaining struggles for inclusion to the struggles of others. We must complain loudly when Islamophobes are invited to speak on our behalf. We must cease financially supporting organisations, like the Peter Tatchell Foundation, that make Islamophobia part of their platform. We must condemn Islamophobia where it happens and not let our white liberal ‘allies’ use as as tools to further racist agendas. This must stop now.

A boot stamping into a human face forever.

So I logged into twitter and saw this:

Allow me to provide more context than anyone wants about the latest trans vs terf twitter storm.
The weekend, the Observer published a letter, where terfs complained that universities no longer invite them to speak. One section of it complained that Julie Bindel is no longer given a university platform to advocate for conversion therapy for trans people. She is forced to constrain her remarks to national newspapers, instead of taking her case directly to trans young people.
If the phrase, ‘conversion therapy’ seems familiar, that’s because it came up in Leelah Alcorn‘s suicide. Conversion therapy doesn’t turn trans people cis any more than it could make a person gay or straight or left-handed or blonde. It wouldn’t have any effect at all, if it weren’t devastating for people. Leelah specifically cited it in her suicide note. Terfs such as Bindel think it should be absolutely the only option for trans people. Alas, given her national platform, she has advocated this as public policy and nearly scuppered the law that gives legal recognition to trans people in the UK. This is not a harmless disagreement or just an ideological row. Terfs have been much more effective at causing material harm to large numbers of trans people than right wing Christians have been. Normally, this is framed as a long running any annoying internet argument between trans women and some feminists, but in fact, it was because of successful organising by terfs that, until recently, all trans people in the US had to pay out of pocket for trans-related medical care. They got it removed from medicaid, which had the knock-on effect of also dropping it from private insurance. Bindel has campaigned for this to also be the case in the UK. In response, the NUS has a policy of not inviting her to speak at student unions (so-called ‘no-platforming’). She describes this as a McCarthy-esque limitation of freedom of speech – to not be given a university platform to advocate for something that would surely mean the deaths of many trans people. (Bindel says she doesn’t want trans people to die, but not all Terfs agree.)
So the letter in the Observer says it’s undemocratic not to give a platform for a relatively privileged group of people to call for harm of less privileged people. Peter Tachell, an often heroic campaigner for LGBT-rights, is a free speech fundamentalist and signed the letter. Possibly he was not entirely aware of the context. Or maybe he is – I seem to him recall him defending hate speech that was directed at him personally. Nonetheless, I think it’s a stretch to say that demanding an apology from a political candidate who questions whether or not trans people should have the right to access public toilets (Rupert Reed) is an attack on his free speech. Indeed, normally free speech involves a lot of back and forth and often this includes asking politicians to apologise. (Which he did and the Green party has reaffirmed that their platform is welcoming to trans people, so I would tend to see this as having had a positive outcome.) Indeed, I think the entire letter is disingenuous and I’m disappointed to see Tatchell signed it.
As I said in an earlier blog post, I tweeted at him about it, as did loads of other people. For the record, I’m sorry for being part of such a huge mass of people and for the snarky tone that I took. I’ve been the topic of a much smaller twitter pile-on and did not enjoy it. Some of the posts directed at him were much more hostile than mine. The included image above contains a tweet which reads: ‘I’d like to tweet about your murder you fucking parasite’
While this stops short of an actual death threat, it does cross a line. I’m not going to condemn or excuse the person who sent it (nor is it my intent to condescend to them like the concerned person who photographed the tweet). I will say that a lot of trans people are vulnerable. Many come from homes that do not support us. If we run into financial difficulty, poorly-thought-out ‘protections’ of our privacy can make it extremely difficult to access benefits. Many trans people experience tremendous amounts of transphobia from the family, their community and their work environment. A very large percentage of trans women lose their jobs on coming out and many of them face systemic discrimination which makes it difficult to get a new job. I’m sharing this not to assign any angry a tweeter a mantle of victimhood, just to note that some trans people are very badly stressed by circumstances that are not their fault and are due to them being trans. Many are not, but most trans people have dealt with very serious transphobia for at least part of their lives.
Meanwhile, Peter Tachell, for whom I have quite a lot of respect, has managed to make a career as a campaigner. He has a foundation. He can work full time at addressing injustices, including ones that don’t effect him personally. He has taken on trans rights recently because he thinks its the right thing to do. I see this as noble and note that his LGB campaigning has caused him quite a lot of personal hardship and even physical injury. However, his support for trans rights is somewhat undermined by his signing of this letter. He has a strong identity as a champion of trans rights and some of the funds that he collects to support his work are from trans people and allies who want to help him work on this cause. If he is getting identity and funds based on work for other people, but then suddenly sides with those who want us to die, you can see where the term ‘parasite’ might come from. And indeed, how a stressed person in a vulnerable community could easily get angry enough to tweet that.
But who is this person who is so concerned about the orignal tweeter that they chose to photograph the tweet? Indeed, before we get to that: posting images to things like twitter is not only a huge waste of bandwidth, but is a major accessibility problem for people who rely on screen readers, such as blind people. If you’re going to use a screen cap, please provide a transcript. If that’s too long for twitter, you’re on the wrong platform!
The photographer, Beatrix Campbell is, of course, the person who wrote the letter in the Observer, complaining that universities don’t like to issue paid speaking invitations to those who actively wish harm to some of their less empowered students. She also is, unsurprisingly, a terf, who has previously written about Julie Bindel being no-platformed. How does she describe her ideological foes who don’t want their student fees to go towards people who would deny them medical treatment? ‘Transgender people who used to live as men and now live as women’, she wrote, also in the Guardian. (For people claiming to be silenced, they do seem to get rather a lot of space in influential national newspapers.) It should be very clear that this formulation is calling trans women’s womanhood into question. She complains in the column that she doesn’t like being called a transphobe. I think there might be an easy solution for that, which is to stop using formulations like that one. Indeed, this formulation would deeply problematic if applied to trans women in their 30’s, 40’s and so on. But as most undergraduates do tend to be young, it’s especially disingenuous. Somebody who has come out in their teens or early 20’s to start living as a woman probably has not actually lived ‘as a man’ in any meaningful sense or for any length of time. Which is neither here nor there, as you don’t need to have lived as any gender to be against giving paid speaking engagements to somebody who wants to deny you needed medical care!
So Ms Campbell, who wants to gently remind everyone that trans people are not always and forever their own gender, is very deeply concerned about the well-being of this angry tweeter. Not so concerned that she wouldn’t try to keep her out of ‘women only spaces’, like public toilets, or to reach out to her directly, but I’m sure her concern is entirely sincere. She’s also very concerned for her new bestie, Peter Tatchell, who was the target of this wish for death. Peter was touched enough by all this concern that he re-tweeted it.
Meanwhile, Tatchell is fairly angry about all the abuse he’s getting and is posting inadvisably to Twitter about all the very hard work he’s done for trans people (which is true, he has done) and how under appreciated he feels (this is the less advisable part) and why can’t we be nicer to our allies even when they collaborate with people who are out to harm us?
And… that’s it.
This is twitter. Twitter is hurt, angry people lashing out. People with OBEs and national newspaper columns whining about being silenced. People who should know better crying they aren’t beloved enough and should be allowed to speak over those for whom they’re meant to be working for and how their free speech is violated when they can’t.
Everyone is angry. Everyone is hurt. Everyone feels like they’re right. Everyone feels like their feelings are the most important thing going on here. Everybody is lashing out. And this is today on twitter. And yesterday on twitter. And tomorrow on twitter. And every day on twitter. I just can’t take it any more. I’m done.
What twitter is good for: if a corporation does something stupid and embarrassing, you can force them to apologise and stop doing the thing that was probably not making them any money anyway.
What twitter is good for: multiplying anger and hurt feelings until they risk turning into a black hole of awful.
What twitter is shit at: changing anyone’s mind about anything, getting corporations to stop doing things that are unethical but profitable, getting people to behave better, being a thing I want to spend any more time with.
I’ll be on Diaspora, where we can have longer posts, longer comments, visible threads and hopefully a lot more light and a lot less heat.
And I’ll be at my local. Talking to people I know, to their face, taking a walk when I feel really angry and trying to avoid being murderously angry or petulant as fuck.

The Problem with Twitter

These last few days, I’ve run into Twitter storms twice. Once was reported on in a New York Times article, How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life. This was a followup on what happened to the woman who tweeted a crass AIDS joke about Africa. I remember the tweet when it happened and the sense of outrage at her apparent racism. What was she thinking?

I don’t remember if I tweeted about it at the time, but I probably did. And today, I tweeted annoyance at Peter Tatchell. Along with 2000 people. To be fair, Tatchell is often a bit annoying. He’s also extremely consistent and has campaigned tirelessly for years. I don’t agree with all of his positions, but he applies them absolutely evenly, treating homophobes exactly the same no matter where they’re from or what the cost to himself personally. He may be wrong some of the time, but he’ also extremely principled.

Sarah Brown and Natacha Kennedy do a good job explaining what the issue is, but let’s leave that aside and talk about twitter. That I happen to agree with the points raised by the 2000 tweeters (or rather, me and 1999 others) is almost beside the point. I entirely disagree with GamerGate and while many or most of those guys just want to intimidate and harass, at least some of them just want to talk about what they find annoying or personally oppressive.

For whatever reason, Twitter seems to lend itself to outrage. There are several possible reasons. The Twitter company has been extremely poor at dealing with trolls, which may have encouraged a certain institutional culture, but I think that’s not it, as the Twitter pile-on effect seems to be non-ideological. I suspect there are two major reasons. One is the brevity required and the other is the extremely poor threading.

Yesterday was my birthday and I have not actually deleted my facebook account. So I logged in to look at an event and found around a hundred messages posted to my timeline. I thought I could take advantage of people cruising by to better advertise the event, but this didn’t work at all. Because people didn’t actually look at my profile. They saw a notification, a chance to leave a very short message and they did so. Along with everyone I’ve ever met. That kind of UI decision distances people from the milieu in which they are operating. They never saw the other messages, including my own post inviting them to a concert. Similarly, I had no idea that I had joined thousands of other people when I was snarky about ‘freeze peach’ at Tatchell. What’s more, the brevity of the medium forced me to distil my snark down from a much longer thought about how he is really consistent about free speech, even if I think sometimes misguided, and how given the context in which he began his activism, this view might make more sense.

Whether or not twitter is actually more prone to pile-ons is something that seems deserving of more research. Could this happen with tumblr, or does the (terrible, but still less bad) threading help put things within a context? Does the longer format help? I’ve seen trolls on Diaspora, especially repugnant MRAs lurking on the feminism tag, so it may be that pile-ons are cross-platform and not a side effect of brevity. However, Diaspora MRAs are certainly aware of their attempts to shout down all feminist discourse and are not stumbling blindly into it the way I think many twitter users seem to do so.

Accounts like @YesYoureRacist exist to point out that casual racism is still very prevalent online. With more than 59000 followers, though, it’s clear that when I make a reply to a racist tweet he’s highlighted, I’m hardly alone. Indeed, I sometimes get ‘likes’ on my replies even weeks later. And these likes bring up a performative aspect mentioned in the times article. I might not realise exactly how many people are tweeting along side me, but I am definitely tweeting publicly. Each of which might reach a few more people, in widening concentric circles of outrage. Each of which is devoid of knowledge of other circles, making it seem like each of us is one of only a few voices crying out in the wilderness, to the acclaim of few, but still to acclaim.

The times article also talks of this direct, public reach of people seeming democratising. But instead it easily becomes mob-like, for a strange sort of mob that may be largely unaware of each other. It is a neoliberal simulacrum of democracy, in which we all think we have something special and unique to say back to whatever has provoked reaction. It’s as if each of us is at the centre of our own little protests. But in fact, we are an avalanche of (often interchangeable) opinion falling upon another unfortunate individual. Worse than not actually being democratic in any meaningful sense, it feels like a way to be heard. It seems like action has been taken, when in fact, one poor sap has been made an example of. It takes each of us less than a minute each to say something snarky, outraged or mean to whatever has come up that day, and then we can move on. If this is a company or a brand and the problem is not complex, this really can be effective at solving the issue. If some shop has stocked a racist children’s toy, for example, the outpouring of thousands of angry tweets will quickly cause an apology. But most of us are not companies.

I probably say at least a dozen idiotic things per day. And since I was raised in a deeply prejudiced culture, some of those things are occasionally fairly awful. In the old days, I was sometimes met with stony silence, realised my error, apologised and tried not to do it again. Call-outs made me a better person. But these days, I’m more socially isolated, tend to spend most days working alone and post my random thoughts to Twitter. I have not yet caused a storm of outrage, although I have said dumb things to some activists who very nicely took the time to point out that I should stop – something they did not have to do and which I appreciate. Their followers did not chime in. One day, though, maybe I’ll try to be funny in too little space, or say something sarcastic that gets stripped of context. Nobody is right all the time, and when it’s my turn to be wrong, how many people will speak up? How many will see it? I once played in a concert in front of other music students and every single person in the audience separately and quietly pointed out my one wrong note.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who blindly joins a mob. I don’t want to cause people to lose their jobs. I’m not even sure I want to always be so brief with expressing my thoughts. I used to complain about political soundbites on the news and now my own words, as if I’m trying to be some kind of celebrity, are often similarly abbreviated. Finally, the near-constant outrage, even when I’m entirely in agreement, is really tiring. How many of us really have anything to say that’s meaningful in that format? We might all have aspirations of being Jenny Holzer, but even she provokes in a way that can’t be responded to so briefly.

I’m not quitting Twitter, but I’m re-evaluating it’s usefulness, especially as a political tool. Although a rather offensive twitter advert claimed that #Ferguson happened there, it really did not. Our engagement with online mediums from our living room is really not being on the street. And, again, this simulation of democracy is ultimately disempowering. Nor was Twitter really any kind of serious force in the Arab Spring. Twitter is ultimately just another for-profit social network, selling our relationships, thoughts and even outrage back to us for a profit.