By Maria Dinzeo
The agenda at Chevron’s annual shareholders meeting will be slightly different this year, as representatives from Nigeria, Ecuador, and Burma descend on the meeting to finally have their say. For years, Chevron has been accused of myriad human rights and environmental abuses, from having nonviolent protestors gunned down in Nigeria to the dumping of toxic waste into Amazon waterways in Ecuador.
Tomorrow, representatives from these countries will voice their concerns directly to shareholders and executives. Amazon Watch Director of Communications Simeon Tegel told us the event was designed to “potentially help shareholders become more active” in pressuring Chevron executives to finally address and rectify Chevron’s abuses.
“One hopes they are human beings too, although sometimes it’s hard to tell. But perhaps they will be motivated to do something, either from pressure from their shareholders or from the kindness of human nature,” said Tegel.
Chevron’s human rights violations are not limited to abuses abroad. Richmond has long felt the sting of Chevron’s environmental negligence, despite the company’s soaring profits. While Chevron promises more energy efficient oil refining methods, they continue to belch toxins into the air over Richmond, and plans for a $1 billion expansion of their Richmond refinery has increased resident’s health and safety concerns.
“Change is a long time coming,” said Rosi Reyes, spokesperson for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. “Unfortunately, the citizens of Richmond have read through Chevron’s Environmental Impact Report and they feel that there are empty promises. Chevron continues to use equipment that is over 35 years old, and everything in the report points to [Chevron] refining heavier crude oil.”
Reyes said that the City of Richmond’s aims to wean itself of its oil dependent relationship with Chevron: “We want Chevron to put a cap on crude oil and put money into green energy,” she said.
Though contacted repeatedly, Chevron’s Media Relations Department was unavailable for comment.
Although Richmond representatives will not be allowed inside the meeting, they hope to confront Chevron executives through their protest outside. Said Amazon Watch spokesman Mitchell Anderson, “[Chevron] may not be listening, but they will definitely hear us tomorrow.”
Media
Do people remember Chevron’s abuses? People do
Targeting immigrants…in a good way
San Francisco celebrated Spanish-speaking cultures over the weekend with fun Carnaval events in the Mission District, and housing activists followed that up by commandeering six billboards and using them to put out messages in Spanish urging voters to reject Prop. 98, which would end rent control and restrictions on conversion of rental properties to condos.
Members of the clandestine coalition who liberated the billboards say immigrants have already had to endure an increase in immigration sweeps and a rising level of anti-immigrant vitriol from the right, so now is the time to fight back against a change in housing laws that would hit low-income immigrants particularly hard.
One member of the coalition who was named, Ruben Salazar, said in a public statement: “What we need now are big, bold reminders shortly before the election to turn out the vote on June 3. Prop 98 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing hiding from public attention and sneaking into law during an off-season election. We decided to take over corporate billboards to loudly expose the hidden agenda of Prop 98 and to reclaim the corporate media for community use.”
A triumphant ‘Thirty Seven Isolated Events’ combines butoh, digital imagery at CounterPulse
Eyeing Blindsight. Photos by Byian Winters and design by Paige Sorvillo.
By Dina Maccabee
It feels a little overblown to say that Thirty Seven Isolated Events, conceived by choreographer Paige Sorvillo with her company Blindsight and presented at CounterPulse with the San Francisco International Arts Festival, is a triumph of independent experimental performance. It’s a relatively lean production, well-scaled to maximize CounterPulse’s somewhat Spartan interior. Still, for this audience member, there were so many successful aspects in what might have been a risky venture that triumph is the word I’ll use.
Though promotion for Thirty Seven Events uses spiffy words like “intermedia,” dance fans wary of fancy gadgets edging out real-life rippling muscles needn’t be scared off. In fact, displacement of human intimacy and desensitization to violence enabled by ubiquitous modern media are the kernels of Sorvillo’s exploration, and they provide a rich source of imagery and metaphor. The Blindsight company members slithered, twitched, and struggled with determination, fluidity, and tight control, sculpting their own flesh into an unforgettable reminder that real human contact, whether caressing or brusque, is utterly irreplaceable.
Sorvillo’s training in contemporary Japanese butoh clearly played into both the conception of Thirty Seven Events as a platform for dealing with fairly abstract emotional material, and in the style and mood of the movement itself. In the opening passage, Sorvillo writhed in a single column of yellow light, seeming to test the power of her joints and limbs against the pull of gravity in an alternately lyrical and frenzied monologue. But as she pointed out in an after-show panel discussion, the ghostly white body paint and gruesome facial contortions are parts of the butoh vocabulary she’s deliberately left out.
On Memorial Day, see “The Visitor”
By Bruce B. Brugmann
On Memorial Day, see the movie now playing called “The Visitor.” We saw it at the Empire theater yesterday and it broke our hearts. It’s an honest poignant indictment of callous Bush detention and deportation policies of illegal immigrants that have largely gone unnoticed in the mainstream media.
A young Syrian “visitor” seeking political asylum is grabbed on the New York subway by the INS, slammed into an anonymous detention building in Queens with 300 or so other “visitors,” treated harshly, kept virtually incommunicado from his mother, partner, and an economics professor who gets pulled into the story and is trying vainly to help. Then the young man is jerked out of the building and sent summarily back to Syria to face probable political persecution. Bang, just like that. All done in INS bureaucratic secrecy, without due process or even the semblance of fairness or justice or sunshine.
Is this what our good service men and women are fighting for?
On Memorial Day, read the dispatch sent to me from Carolyn Schmidt, a free lance writer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She writes:
“The NYTimes story is the first piece I’ve seen on the big raid–the nation’s largest, according to reporters– on illegal immigrants at a Postville, IA kosher meat packing plant on Monday, May 12. (The May 24 NYT story was written by Julia Preston and headlined “270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push.”
“St. Bridget’s Catholic Church opened its doors to the family and friends left behind when the INS (now called the ICE) swept into the plant, loaded people on buses, and transported them to the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo.
“Our Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Des Moines Register have had stories about it all this past week and a half, but it is finally making it out to the national media.
The packing plant was abusing many of the workers–not even allowing them to take bathroom breaks, working 14-hour days, and paying them below minimum wage. So far the plant hasn’t been charged with anything, but charges MAY be coming. The Register story indicates that the company’s New York plant has been charged repeatedly.
“The people who are immediately prosecuted, of course, are the workers recruited to come up here and given false documents that they are now being prosecuted for having. Iowa is not the state you think of when the immigration issues are raised, but a similar raid was carried out in Marshalltown in January 2006. The Bush administration has found an easy way to make a statement, evidently. The attorneys representing the immigrants and the judges given this timetable by the feds all seem to be doing the best that they can.
“But running these people through hearings in groups of 10 and 20 does not seem like justice, in spite of what the attorneys say about their clients understanding the charges and being treated fairly. This is the biggest raid and the shortest time to accomplish it in U.S. history. The real culprit is the packing plant that recruited these workers to come here illegally, then abused them and underpaid them because the company knew they couldn’t complain to anyone in authority. So far the company has not been charged with anything. That is the travesty.”
Is this what our brave service men and women are fighting for?
Iowa made history by doing the right thing, voting Obama, and giving him the momentum that has carried him to near victory in the presidential primary. And now the ultimate irony is that the Bush administration, in this critical moment in the campaign, is making the case even stronger for Obama in the state where it all began.
It’s time for a change in Washington. ASAP. Support Obama. And support the GI bill, opposed by Bush and McCain with maddening duplicity and wrongheadedness. This is the bill that would show that this country on this Memorial Day and thereafter really remembers our fighting men and women throughout the years and really supports the troops fighting this Godawful war without end in Iraq for Bush and McCain.
Bruce B. Brugmann, a proud cold war veteran who ended up in l959-60 as a specialist 5th class, writing for Stars and Stripes in Yongdongpo, Korea
Disobey!
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Last week I wrote about the premise of Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press). He warns about a future of "tethered" technologies like the digital video recorder and smartphones that often are programmed remotely by the companies that make them rather than being programmed by users, as PCs are. As a partial solution, Zittrain offers up the idea of Wikipedia-style communities, where users create their own services without being "tethered" to a company that can change the rules any time.
Unfortunately, crowds of people running Web services or technologies online cannot save us from the problem of tethered technology. Indeed, Zittrain’s crowds might even unwittingly be tightening the stranglehold of tethering by lulling us into a false sense of freedom.
It’s actually in the best interest of companies like Apple, Comcast, or News Corp to encourage democratic, freewheeling enclaves like Wikipedia or MySpace to convince people that their whole lives aren’t defined by tethering. When you get sick of corporate-mandated content and software, you can visit Wikipedia or MySpace. If you want a DVR that can’t be reprogrammed by Comcast at any time, you can look up how to build your own software TV tuner on Wikipedia. See? You have freedom!
Unfortunately, your homemade DVR software doesn’t have the kind of easy-to-use features that make it viable for most consumers. At the same time, it does prove that tethered technologies aren’t your only option. Because there’s this little puddle of freedom in the desert of technology tethering, crowd-loving liberals are placated while the majority of consumers are tied down by corporate-controlled gadgets.
In this way, a democratic project like Wikipedia becomes a kind of theoretical freedom — similar to the way in which the US constitutional right to freedom of speech is theoretical for most people. Sure, you can write almost anything you want. But will you be able to publish it? Will you be able to get a high enough ranking on Google to be findable when people search your topic? Probably not. So your speech is free, but nobody can hear it. Yes, it is a real freedom. Yes, real people participate in it and provide a model to others. And sometimes it can make a huge difference. But most of the time, people whose free speech flies in the face of conventional wisdom or corporate plans don’t have much of an effect on mainstream society.
What I’m trying to say is that Wikipedia and "good crowds" can’t fight the forces of corporate tethering — just as one person’s self-published, free-speechy essay online can’t fix giant, complicated social problems. At best, such efforts can create lively subcultures where a few lucky or smart people will find that they have total control over their gadgets and can do really neat things with them. But if the denizens of that subculture want millions of people to do neat things too, they have to deal with Comcast. And Comcast will probably say, "Hell no, but we’re not taking away your freedom entirely because look, we have this special area for you and 20 other people to do complicated things with your DVRs." If you’re lucky, Comcast will rip off the subculture’s idea and turn it into a tethered application.
So what is the solution, if it isn’t nice crowds of people creating their own content and building their own tether-free DVRs? My honest answer is that we need organized crowds of people systematically and concertedly breaking the tethers on consumer technology. Yes, we need safe spaces like Wikipedia, but we also need to be affirmatively making things uncomfortable for the companies that keep us tethered. We need to build technologies that set Comcast DVRs free, that let people run any applications they want on iPhones, that fool ISPs into running peer-to-peer traffic. We need to hand out easy-to-use tools to everyone so crowds of consumers can control what happens to their technologies. In short, we need to disobey. *
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd whose
best ideas have all been appropriated and copyrighted by corporations.
Good news: Big Media stopped
By Bruce B. Brugmann
This is the good news that you won’t find in the Big Media or, as I call them, the Galloping Conglomerati.
The U.S. Senate, in an incredible near unanimous vote, stood up to Big Media and voted yesterday to junk the FCC decision to let the largest media companies swallow up even more local media.
As the Stop the Big Media press release noted, “This historic vote sends a clear message that the only people who support more media consolidation are Big Media lobbyists and the White House.” Let us remember that it it was the Big Media who were almost unanimous in whooping along the Bush invasion of Iraq and have largely supported it ever since and who are benefiting greatly from government broadcast licenses and the hope of getting more.
Next battleground: the U.S. House of Representatives.
See the press release from Stop Media.com and the Free Press group. Sign up and join this historic battle. And let me know if you see this story in the Big Media press. B3
Continue reading for Stop Beg Media’s press release.
Driving reign
Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive (XBOX360, PS3)
GAMER Since its April 29 release, more than 6 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV have been purchased. While Take-Two Interactive is still taking contractor bids on Scrooge McDuck–style cash swimming pools, the gaming press has worked itself into a frenzy, bestowing five-star reviews and expostuutf8g on how GTA IV will revolutionize gaming, culture, and possibly the world.
This hyperbole exemplifies gaming’s innate pathologies. Since their inception, video games have been portrayed as the puerile inferior to other entertainment media, and game designers, players, and critics have long coveted a seat at the table alongside the realist novel and the feature film. When a game as ambitious as GTA IV is released, advocates are quick to frame it as the "future of the medium," a kind of messianic product that will show those old-media Luddites what they’re missing.
GTA IV is not video Jesus. Still, by any reasonable standard, it’s an incredible game, taking the hallowed legacy of the previous GTA games, striving to be bigger and better, and mostly succeeding. At this late date, weeks after its debut, describing it as "only" the next Grand Theft Auto game can seem like very faint praise. Then again, criticizing the game using the metric of its hype is like getting a Benz for your 16th birthday and complaining that you didn’t get a Batmobile.
The GTA series is credited with inventing the "sandbox" game, which drops the player into a vast interactive world with little or no agenda. Complete the missions that drive the story forward — or don’t. Murder passersby until the police have to call in the National Guard — or don’t. Furnished with the power of today’s consoles, Rockstar Games has created a staggering sandbox, recreating New York City’s five boroughs (and a miniaturized New Jersey) in such loving, exhaustive detail that it’s hard to list all the coolness concisely. There’s a working subway system, multiple hours of fake, satirical television — one could go on forever.
In addition to the huge strides the game makes in environmental design and artificial intelligence, it also delivers the latest in interactive storytelling. You play Niko Bellic, a veteran of Balkan strife who disembarks in Liberty City hoping to escape his past and embrace the American lifestyle his previously arrived cousin Roman has touted as luxuriant and easy. Of course, it is not, and Niko is inexorably drawn into the criminal underworld he tried to leave behind.
While it doesn’t quite deliver the reinvention of the immigrant narrative parsed by some reviewers, the game provides an engrossing tale, full of three-dimensional characters (in both senses of the phrase), magnificent action sequences, and deft plot twists. The voice acting is superb and extensive; many conversations have alternate versions, expecting you to get killed and end up listening to them twice. The character animations — in a sense the game’s other kind of acting — convincingly capture the most esoteric gestures, down to the shudder of a crime boss as a line of Colombia’s finest explodes into his sinus.
The save system is still frustrating, and the prospect of replaying a long, violent confrontation after failing right at its end is often almost too much to bear. Despite GTA IV‘s unfettered gameplay, the missions are still very conventional and leave little room for creative problem-solving. Sure, there are a number of red pill–blue pill dilemmas. But in a game that allows you as much freedom as GTA, having to stick to the plan in each attempt becomes annoying. The new multiplayer mode provides a panoply of game types, ranging from traditional death-match and racing modes to cops-and-robbers high jinks that exploit what’s best about the game. Unfortunately the interface is confusing and finicky, and the online player-base seems to still be enmeshed in the game’s vast single-player story.
Grand Theft Auto IV is not without its faults. It may not establish video games as a serious medium. But if you want to have 300-odd hours of fun, there’s no better way to spend $60.
The Internet dystopia
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION A couple of weeks ago I went to the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, an event where people from all over the world gather for a giant DIY technology show-and-tell extravaganza. There are robots, kinetic sculptures, rockets, remote-controlled battleship contests, music-controlled light shows, home electronics kits, ill-advised science experiments (like the Mentos–Diet Coke explosions), and even a barn full of people who make their own clothing, pillows, bags, and more. Basically, it’s a weekend celebration of how human freedom combined with technology creates a pleasing but cacophonous symphony of coolness.
And yet the Maker Faire takes place against a backdrop of increasing constraints on our freedom to innovate with technology, as Oxford University researcher Jonathan Zittrain points out in his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press). After spending several years investigating the social and political rules that govern the Internet — and spearheading the Net censorship tracking project OpenNet Initiative — Zittrain looks back on the Net’s development and predicts a dystopian future. What’s chilling is that his dystopia is already coming to pass.
Zittrain traces the Net’s history through three phases. Initially it was composed of what he calls "sterile" technologies: vast mainframes owned by IBM, which companies could rent time on. What made those technologies sterile is that nobody could experiment with them (except IBM), and therefore innovation related to them stagnated.
That’s why the invention of the desktop PC and popularization of the Internet ushered in an era of unprecedented high-tech innovation. Zittrain calls these open-ended technologies "generative." Anybody can build other technologies that work with them. So, for example, people built Skype and the World Wide Web, both software technologies that sit on top of the basic network software infrastructure of the Internet. Similarly, anybody can build a program that runs on Windows.
But Zittrain thinks we’re seeing the end of the freewheeling Internet and PC era. He calls the technologies of today "tethered" technologies. Tethered technologies are items like iPhones or many brands of DVR — they’re sterile to their owners, who aren’t allowed to build software that runs on them. But they’re generative to the companies that make them, in the sense that Comcast can update your DVR remotely, or Apple can brick your iPhone remotely if you try to do something naughty to it (like run your own software program on it).
In some ways, tethered technologies are worse than plain old sterile technologies. They allow for abuses undreamed of in the IBM mainframe era. For example, iPhone tethering could lead to law enforcement going to Apple and saying, "Please activate the microphone on this iPhone that we know is being carried by a suspect." The device turns into an instant bug, without all the fuss of following the suspect around or installing surveillance crap in her apartment. This isn’t idle speculation, by the way. OnStar, the manufacturer of a car emergency system, was asked by law enforcement to activate the mics in certain cars using its system. It refused and went to court.
Zittrain’s solution to the tethering problem is to encourage the existence of communities like the ones who participate in Maker Faire or who edit Wikipedia. These are people who work together to create open, untethered technologies and information repositories. They are the force that pushes back against companies that want to sterilize the Internet and turn it back into something that spits information at you, television-style. I think this is a good start, but there are a lot of problems with depending on communities of DIY enthusiasts to fix a system created by corporate juggernauts. As I mentioned in my column ("User-Generated Censorship," 4/30/08), you can’t always depend on communities of users to do the right thing. In addition, companies can create an incredibly oppressive tethering regime while still allowing users to think they have control. Tune in next week, and I’ll tell you how Zittrain’s solution might lead to an even more dystopian future.
Annalee Newitz
Funkonnection 5
PREVIEW A few months ago, I came across the popular blog Stuff White People Like, and loved it. Finally, there was a piece of online real estate dedicated to dissecting the bizarre interests of white people. I grew up amid the city’s "we’re so liberal!" facade that included Mumia rallies downtown, peace festivals in Golden Gate Park, and rainbow flags in the Castro District. But every facet of this liberal oasis was laced with the irony of a skyrocketing housing market, a growing black exodus, and a media that spoke of poor folks only in terms of symptoms of neglect — drugs, violence, and hopelessness. To come across a blog that explicitly pokes fun at the ironies of white privilege was, like, hella tight. Then I found out it was authored by a white comedian based in Los Angeles who recently inked a book deal with Random House, purportedly for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, I’m all for getting paid, but I’m also pretty sure that some version of Stuff Black People Like has been a part of the American fabric since day one. Yet the makers of cultural icons pre-fad status often don’t get recognized. Funk music and fried chicken also can be included in that category. So for better or worse, Mighty is hosting Funkonnection 5, a night of funk music, dress-up, and free fried chicken.
FUNKONNECTION 5 With Fort Knox 5, Thunderball, Mat the Alien, and Vinyl Ritchie. Fri/16, 10 p.m., $15. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. (415) 626-7001, www.mighty119.com
Here comes the public power initiative!
By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down to see the historic Mirkarimi/Peskin/City Attorney resolution)
Today, at the Board of Supervisors meeting, Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin introduced
a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco and start the process of kicking PG&E out of City Hall and the rest of the city.
The amendment, as our editorial in Wednesday’s Guardian outlines, would “provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.”
The move is prompted by the battle over whether the city should replace the ruinous Mirant private power plant with city-owned power plants called peakers at the foot of Potrero Hill. PG&E has quietly orchestrated a major political and public relations onslaught to kill the peakers because they would be what PG&E fears most: city-owned public power.
In fact, as Tim Redmond’s blog discloses, PG&E even marched seven lobbyists (yes, seven) into the office of would-be-green Mayor Gavin Newsom, who once personally backed the plan and whose Public Utilities Commission backs the plan. PG&E jacked Newsom around and muscled him into asking for a delay in today’s scheduled power plant vote to give PG&E more time to kill the peakers.
The rationale: some sort of vague and ridiculous idea of retrofitting the Mirant plant and keeping the PG&E uber alles status quo.
IF PG&E ultimately loses the peaker vote (and it will be close), PG&E will most likely run a referendum on the November ballot against this dread move to peaker public power. So the Mirkarimi and Peskin move is aimed at putting a counter initiative on the November ballot and breathing new life into the historic battle to enforce the federal Raker Act (which mandated San Francisco have a public power system) and bringing our own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the people of San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969.) The initiative would be timed to take advantage of the expected heavy turnout of Obama forces for the presidential election and for the election of supervisors.
The legislative digest sums up the amendment in a paragraph of City Hall legalese:
The amendment is to “address the need to change electricity production, delivery, and use to ensure environmentally sustainable and affordable electric supplies for residents, businesses, and city departments and to require the Public Utiliies Commmission to comprehensively study and determine the most effective means of providing clean, sustainable, reliable, and reasonably-priced electric service to San Francisco residents, businesses, and city departments.”
The amendment was written and signed by Deputy City Attorney Theresa Mueller and approved as to form by City Attorney Dennis Herrera. It was introduced by the president of the board (Peskin) and a powerful supervisor who is obviously running for board president and mayor (Mirkarimi). These references are important: when the public power movement was reinvigorated in the late l990s, it faced a massive lineup of PG&E stalwarts inside City Hall: City Attorney Louise Rennie, Mayor Willie Brown, the PUC executive director and PUC commission, and all the supervisors with the notable exception of Sup. Tom Ammiano.
Mikarimi led the two famous initiative campaigns as campaign manager in 2000 and 2001, which PG&E defeated with muscle, mutli milliions, and staunch daily paper support. Now, Mirkarimi is inside City Hall in a starring role leading the charge for community choice aggregation (CCA) and now a public power initiative. And the whole thing scares the hell out of PG&E.as never before.
.
Hurray! The battle is on!
P.S. PG&E marches in: You can see how PG&E works by seeing who was at the critical May 5 meeting in the mayor’s office. No public power people, nobody from the Sierra Club, and no environmental justice activists who are also opposing the peakers (but for understandable environmental reasons.) But standing tall at the secret meeting were seven PG&E lobbyists, led by Travis Kiyota, and such PG&E friendly folks as PUC Commissioner Dick Sklar (remember him?), Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and a representative from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
PG&E and NRDC arranged to have a timely letter on NRDC letterhead, dated May 12 , come to the supervisors from Robert Kennedy Jr., with ccs to Newsom, President Michael Peevey of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The letter was of course released to the press and the public on the eve of the vote. PG&E, NRDC, and Kennedy had at least one line right: “Where San Francisco ultimately decides to invest its precious energy dollars is a choice that will send a message to cities around the country.”
The tipoff: nowhere do the PG&E supporters, including the Chronicle editorialists who suddenly took a down-with-the-peakers stand yesterday, nor the Examiner, with a wimpy story today on Newsom’s sudden change of plans, mention those dread three letters that divulge the secret agent at work (PG&E) nor that dread phrase that tells what the secret agent is really up to (killing public power.) C’mon, folks, this isn’t that hard to figure out. Is there some law somewhere that says the local media can’t cover what PG&E is doing to perpetuate the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and once again kill public power? (See “The Shame of Hearst” in previous Guardian and blog items.)
On guard. The pubic power forces are once again moving up to the front lines, muskets at the ready. B3 (who sees the fumes from the Mirant plant every minute of every day from my Potrero Hill office window)
Click here to read Mirkarimi and Peskin’s recent Charter Amendment.
Click here to read Redmond’s recent blog, PG&E offers Newsom a blank check
Click here for this week’s PG&E editorial.
SPORTS: Boo-yah! Johnnie LeMaster returns
By A.J. Hayes
In current baseball vernacular, “wearing it” refers to owning up to a hellacious slump, a shoddy performance or bone-headed play sans lame excuse.
“I threw like ass… basically,” former Giants pitcher Sidney Ponson so elegantly put it following a horrible game a few seasons ago. That’s a fine example of “wearing it.”
Blaming a shipment of “soft” bats for a home run drought — as Oakland slugger Jack Cust did this spring — is most assuredly not “wearing it.”
In the late ’70s, much-maligned former Giants shortstop/futility icon Johnnie LeMaster, AKA “Bones,” AKA “Johnnie Disaster,” took “wearing it” to a whole new level.
In one game vs. the Montreal Expos in 1979, LeMaster “wore it” – literally.
A prototypical good field/no hit shortstop during his best days at the park, the super slender LeMaster was enduring a prolonged stretch of through-the-wickets fielding/don’t-even-bother-stepping-into-the-box hitting that had everyone from little kids to blue-haired ladies at Candlestick Park calling for his scraggly ’70s-style mustache.
Razzing LeMaster had become the official second language of the frozen concrete bowl by the freeway.
So without informing the higher ups in the San Francisco front office, LeMaster had his name plate removed from the back of his No. 10 Giants jersey and replaced simply with a three letter word: “Boo.”
“It really caught everyone off guard, in fact when I walked to the plate that night I could hear manager Joe Altobelli say, ‘Why does John have “Bob” on the back of his uniform?’
“That stunt cost me a $500 fine, but it was worth every penny. It won over some of the media and the fans really got a kick out of it,” said LeMaster who was honored by the Giants last weekend as part of the club’s season long 50th San Francisco Anniversary celebration.
It was the Paintsville, Kentucky resident’s first visit to San Francisco’s downtown ballpark.
Whining at the Weekly
My old pal Andy Van De Voorde is back. Village Voice Media, which owns the SF Weekly and is now pleading poverty, managed to fly Van De Voorde and the two top comany executives, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, in to San Francisco for the hearing Friday on our lawsuit. And Van De Voorde, writing as The Snitch, has put forward a remarkable work of journalistic whining.
Oh, dear, says Andy; Judge Marla Miller is prepared to accept the jury’s verdict after a five-week trial and follow the law by issuing an injunction. Requiring the Weekly to follow the law would violate the First Amendment.
There are a couple of key points that he misses.
One is that courts have found consistently over the years that newspapers, despite their First Amendment protections, are also businesses — in some cases, big businesses — and have to follow the same sorts of basic regulations as all other businesses. It costs money to comply with OSHA rules, the National Labor Relations Act, and environmental laws. It’s costing the Guardian (and, I assume, the Weekly) a bit of cash to comply with the city’s new health-insurance law. Should those laws be invalidated because complying with them means I as an editor have less money to spend on reporters and freelancers?
Be serious.
The other point that he misses is that the Unfair Practices Act, the Progressive Era law designed to keep small business from being destroyed by giant predatory competitors, actually promotes the goals of the First Amendment, which, history tells us, include the notion that a broad variety of voices in the marketplace of ideas make for a healthy democracy.
Preventing one large media company from driving a locally owned competitor out of business is a positive result.
See, the Weekly can whine about the First Amendment all it wants, but a jury found that the 16-paper chain, with revenues of some $150 million a year, that owns the Weekly, was trying to silence a First Amendment-protected local San Francisco voice. The Weekly wanted to shut us down, in part because the owners of the chain don’t like what we have to say and the way we say it.
Um, Andy, isn’t there a First Amendment issue there?
If the Weekly now wants to whine about the size of the verdict, let me say for the record that we have warned these folks repeatedly, going back more than five years, that they were violating the law. When we first sent a warning letter, we asked for no damages at all; all we wanted was for the predatory activity to cease. We filed suit only because we had no other choice — and even after years of litigation, the jury found that the below-cost selling continued, up to the moment of the verdict.
And now we have no choice but to ask for an injunction, to do what we tried to do from the start: Make these guys follow the law.
Now the Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, have resorted to trying to overturn the Unfair Practices Act and complain about their First Amendment Rights.
Boys: As my late grandfather, the Honorable James C. O’Brien, a New York State Supreme Court judge, used to say, you made your bed — now eat it.
Examiner expanding to Sundays
Editor & Publisher is reporting that the San Francisco Examiner will be creating a Sunday edition of the paper and also expanding its Thursday edition. Right now it’s published six days a week. It will also be scaling back home delivery of the free paper — residents have been enraged over them piling up on their porches — to Thursday and Sunday.
It seems odd that a newspaper company would be growing its deadwood edition when so many dailies are laying people off and trimming back operating expenses. But one theory says that the Examiner papers, which are also available in Washington and Baltimore, are popular even among younger readers because they’re free, easy to pick up on the way to public transit and contain mostly boiled down local coverage. The company that owns the Examiner, Clarity Media Group, took over the Examiner in 2004 after the Fang family nearly ran it into the ground.
Obligatory video game outrage
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION At this point, the outraged response to the latest installment in the Grand Theft Auto series of video games, GTA4, is pretty much obligatory. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is lobbying to get the video game rated "adults only" (effectively killing it in the US market, where major console manufacturers won’t support AO games) because there’s one scene in the game where you have the option to drive drunk. Apparently none of the good ladies of MADD have ever played GTA, since if they had they might have discovered that when you try to drive drunk, the video game informs you that you should take a cab. If you do drive, the cops immediately chase you down. Which is exactly the sort of move you’d expect from this sly, fun game, which hit stores last week.
GTA, made by edgy Rockstar Games, is basically a driving game franchise packed inside an intriguing, disturbing, elaborate urban world where you become a character whose life options are all connected to the ability to drive around in various cities. Usually you’re some kind of bad guy or shady character. Think of it as the video game equivalent of a TV show like The Wire or an urban gangster flick. What has made GTA so popular among gamers is the way it combines the fun of a driving game with the sprawling possibilities of gamer choice. And I think that’s what nongamers find so confusing — and therefore threatening — about it.
When you jump into a car in GTA, you aren’t rated on your driving skill. You don’t have to stay on a predetermined track. Sure, you have to complete a mission, but you can choose to just drive around insanely, exploring the big worlds of the GTA games, beating up cops and murdering people at random if you want. You can take drugs and get superspeedy or ram a truck into a building.
GTA4 is set inside an alternate version of New York City and takes the player even further into a world of narrative choices. You play a character named Niko, a Serbian war vet who comes to Liberty City to get revenge — or to make peace with his past. Along with several other characters, he’s just trying to get by in a huge city, but gets sucked into a world of crime and murder along the way. As you get deeper into the game, you realize that your interactions with characters are just as important as running your car missions. You can’t get anywhere without making friends, connections, and plunging deeper into Niko’s troubled past.
If GTA4 were a movie, it would have been directed by Martin Scorsese or David O. Russell, and we’d all be ooohing and aaahhing over its dark, ironic vision of immigrant life in a world at war with itself. But because GTA4 is a video game, where players are in the driver’s seat, so to speak, it freaks people out. Earlier installments of GTA-inspired feminist and cultural-conservative outrage (you have the option to kill prostitutes!), and concern over moral turpitude from Hillary Clinton (you can beat cops to death! Or anybody!).
And yet there are other video games out there, like the family-friendly role-playing game The Sims, where players can torture people to death in ways far more disturbing than those in GTA. I was just talking to a friend who told me gleefully how he’d taken one of his Sims characters, stuck him in a VR headset, and walled him into a room that only contained an espresso machine. The character kept drinking coffee and playing the headset, pissing in the corners of the room and crying until he died. Other players have reported that you can stick a bunch of characters in the swimming pool, remove the ladder, and drown them. Then you can decorate your yard with their tombstones. That’s not the point of the game, but people can do it.
The reason these horrible things can happen in The Sims is exactly the same reason they happen in GTA: these are cutting-edge video games defined by player freedom rather than locking the player into a prescribed narrative loop where veering off the racetrack means "lose" rather than "find a new adventure." When you give players the option to explore their fantasies, you’re going to get some dark stuff. Yes, it’s disturbing. But it’s also the foundation of great art.
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who has just started playing GTA4 but has already read all the spoilers for it.
Newsom axes sunshine
EDITORIAL Shortly before he left on a trip to Israel last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom quietly vetoed a bill that would have greatly expanded public access to the workings of San Francisco government. The supervisors need to override that veto as quickly as possible.
The measure, by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, seems so simple that it’s hard to imagine why it would be controversial. Mirkarimi wants the city to audiotape or videotape any meeting of any public agency at City Hall, and post that tape on the Web within 72 hours.
That would make it much easier for people following local government actions to see or hear the actual testimony and discussion at board and commission meetings, most of which take place during the day when people with jobs can’t attend. The Board of Supervisors meetings are televised, as are most board committee meetings, but dozens of other agencies meet regularly with few people attending and virtually no press coverage. And there’s no easy way to find out exactly what went on at those meetings.
Posting the recordings on the Web is part of a larger agenda promoted by sunshine advocates who want to see the city use easily available and inexpensive modern technology to promote open government (see Sunshine in the digital age, 3/12/08). Among their proposals: at the very least, post and stream the audio portion of all meetings on the Internet. Most meetings are already recorded anyway, and all the meeting rooms are equipped with recording gear. But those recordings aren’t easy to access. The only way to get a copy of the proceedings is to send $10 for a DVD and $1 for an audiotape to the city, then wait a week for your media to arrive in the mail. How hard could it be to put that material on the Web?
Sunshine activists want to go a lot further. They suggest, for example, that every document and e-mail created by a city employee be sent automatically to a public server where it can be viewed over the Internet. And if there was adequate wi-fi service at City Hall (there isn’t), bloggers could post video of the meetings themselves.
Mirkarimi’s bill didn’t go anywhere near that far. All he asked was that the meetings that take place in rooms equipped for audio or video taping be recorded and that the files be placed on the Web. The total cost was pegged at $131,000 per year, but the city’s cable-TV franchise deal would require Comcast to pay $55,000 for the necessary new equipment. So the final tab would be only $72,000 a year. That’s such a minuscule percentage of the city’s $5 billion budget that it fits into the category of what Mirkarimi calls "decimal dust."
And yet in an April 30 veto message, Newsom said he found the cost too high. "I would urge the Board of Supervisors to hold off on new spending initiatives" until the next budget cycle, he said.
That’s crazy. We recognize that money is tight, but Newsom has pushed all sorts of new programs and initiatives that cost more than $72,000. In fact, he spent almost twice that much ($139,700) gussying up his office back in January.
Four supervisors voted against Mirkarimi’s bill: Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd, Jake McGoldrick, and Michela Alioto-Pier, so Mirkarimi appears to have seven votes to override the veto. It will take one more — one more supervisor willing to stand up for open government — to make this program happen. It’s embarrassing to see neighborhood supervisors voting against sunshine. Call the four and demand they vote to override. Chu: 554-7460. Elsbernd: 554-6516. McGoldrick: 554-7410. Alioto-Pier: 554-7752.
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Early in January 1992, with Bill Clinton poised to win the crucial New Hampshire primary, a woman named Gennifer Flowers came forward with a sordid tale of a 12-year affair with the young Arkansas governor.
Pundits proclaimed that the allegation by Flowers, a former TV reporter who later posed nude for Penthouse, would sink the Clinton campaign. Instead, Bill and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes right after the Jan. 26 Super Bowl and, in a stunning performance, the candidate diffused the damage and went on to win the primary and the White House.
Years later, a political operative I know offered a bizarre story: Clinton’s senior advisors not only knew that Flowers would go public; they were happy she did it.
See, back then, my source said, polling showed that Bill Clinton was popular among women and educated liberals. His only problem was with the so-called working class white-ethnic men, the blue-collar guys who were Democrats but voted for Ronald Reagan. Those voters thought Clinton was weak, and that his wife was pushing him around.
The Flowers affair was bound to come out eventually, the operative told me. So the strategists figured that sooner was better. Of course, the morality voters and the sanctity-of-marriage crew would be aghast, but they weren’t going to vote for Clinton anyway. The blue-collar guys wouldn’t be offended at all; in fact, some would think a guy who had a Penthouse centerfold on the side wasn’t such a chump after all. And the women had nowhere else to go.
So why not control the release, let Bill and Hillary deal with it, put it behind them, and defuse its potential as an October surprise?
If that account is true, the strategy worked brilliantly.
I thought about Flowers when I saw the video of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright speaking to the National Press Club.
The news media and a lot of Obama supporters say Wright, after talking about the oppression of African Americans, derailed the campaign of the only African American ever to get close to the presidency.
But let me offer a strange but plausible thesis here: what if the Obama campaign not only knew what Wright was going to do, but quietly approved of it?
Think about it: Obama is about two whiskers from being the most powerful person on Earth. If he really wanted Wright to shut up, he could have made a few calls, and I suspect the guy would be cloistered behind closed doors for months. But no: the fiery minister went and attacked America and insulted Obama in a way sure to make huge headlines.
The result: Obama gets to denounce and distance himself from a guy who was going to be a problem in the fall. The damage was done early enough that it will be old news by October. Obama will still win North Carolina, be close in Indiana — and Clinton simply won’t have the numbers to win the nomination.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the story I was told all those years ago was a total fabrication. Maybe Gennifer Flowers and Rev. Wright acted alone. But I’ve watched enough presidential campaigns to know it’s entirely possible they didn’t.
The Nation
Click here to read The Nation’s article, Our Lapdog Media.
Click here to read The Nation’s article, Mickey Mouse Media.
User-generated censorship
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION There’s a new kind of censorship online, and it’s coming from the grassroots. Thanks to new, collaborative, social media networks, it’s easier than ever for people to get together and destroy freedom of expression. They’re going DIY from the bottom up — instead of the way old-school censors used to do it, from the top down. Call it user-generated censorship.
Now that anyone with access to a computer and a network connection can post almost anything they want online for free, it’s also increasingly the case that anyone with computer access and a few friends can remove anything they want online. And they do it using the same software tools.
Here’s how it works: let’s say you’re a community activist who has some pretty vehement opinions about your city government. You go to Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, and create a free blog called Why the Municipal Government in Crappy City Sucks. Of course, a bunch of people in Crappy City disagree with you — and maybe even hate you personally. So instead of making mean comments on your blog, they decide to shut it down.
At the top of your Blogger blog, there is a little button that says
"flag this blog." When somebody hits that button, it sends a message to Google that somebody thinks the content on your blog is "inappropriate" in some way. If you get enough flags, Google will shut down your blog. In theory, this button would only be used to flag illegal stuff or spam. But there’s nothing stopping your enemies in town from getting together an online posse to click the button a bunch of times. Eventually, your blog will be flagged enough times that Google will take action.
And this is where things get interesting. Google has the option of simply shutting down your access to the blog. They rarely do that, though, unless it’s a situation where your blog is full of illegal content, like copyright-infringing videos. Generally what Google does if you get a lot of flags is make your blog impossible to find. Nobody will be able to find it if they search Blogger or Google. The only people who will find it are people who already know about it and have the exact URL.
This is censorship, user-generated style. And it works because the only way to be seen in a giant network of user-generated content like Blogger (or MySpace, or Flickr, or any number of others) is to be searchable. If you want to get the word out about Crappy City online, you need for people searching Google for "Crappy City" to find your blog and learn about all the bad things going on there. What good is your free speech if nobody can find it?
Most sites that have user-generated content, like photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube, use a system of flags similar to Blogger’s that allow users to censor each other. Sometimes you have to pick a good reason why you are flagging content — YouTube offers you a drop-down menu with about 20 choices — and sometimes you just flag it as "unsafe" or "inappropriate." Generally, most sites respond to flagging the same way: they make the flagged stuff unsearchable and unfindable.
Censorship isn’t working the old-fashioned way. Your videos and blogs aren’t being removed. They’re simply being hidden in the deluge of user-generated information. To be unsearchable on the Web is, in a very real sense, to be censored. But you’re not being censored by an authority from on high. You’re being censored by the mob.
That’s why I find myself rolling my eyes when I hear people getting excited about "the wisdom of crowds" and "crowdsourcing" and all that crap. Sure, crowds can be wise and they can get a lot of work done. But they also can also be destructive, cruel, and stupid. They can prevent work from being done as easily as they can make it easier. And just as the Web is making it easier for crowds to collaborate, the Web is also making it simple for mobs to crush free expression.
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitaiton.com) is a surly media nerd whose blogs cannot be censored by the mob, even though she’s well aware that there are mobs who would certainly like to do it.