114 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. The New England Telephone Company had planned to put a pole intheir front yard and workers from the company began digging the hole. Butthe Brewer sisters and Byington came out and sat in the hole, blocking theirefforts by sleeping there in a tent overnight. The telephone company installedthe pole across the road instead, making this a successful result fornineteenth-century Nimby activism.

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  2. Jan 2024
  3. Sep 2023
    1. I think we need more societal engagement among scientists.
      • for: scientist activism, idling resources - scientist activism, leverage point - scientist activism
      • comment
        • Both Johan and Kevin provide personal stories of how few scientists are out there doing societal engagement.
        • Hence, this is truly a idling resource that needs a space that will attract them to engage in impactful ways.
        • This is where citizens and communities can provide the support that scientists need to take on their societal responsibilities at this time
    2. I think we need to do much more of that. I totally agree with you. I actually think that we – and that's self-critical to me as well – I think we need to be more brave also going public with that engagement.
      • for: climate science - citizen engagement, johan rockstrom - advocacy for citizen engagement, scientist - activism
      • comment
        • supporting the previous comment, Johan Rockstrom see's scientists having a much more active role engaging with the public.
  4. Aug 2023
  5. Jul 2022
    1. 'Between September and December 2022, we will occupy hundreds of schools and universities worldwide to end the fossil economy at the international level under the callout to action “End Fossil: Occupy!”.'

      Offener Brief von "End Fossil: Occupy!" heute im Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/26/school-strikes-climate-protests-activists

    1. Could social systems be finally reprogrammed, at long last, ‘as if peoplemattered’ [ 8]?
      • They are currently programmed by minority power holders to serve their interest.
      • Many individuals and projects are trying to do this
      • Climate change is a classic example of power holders dictating the agenda
    1. As I was thinking through this on Friday, Culture Study subscriber and organizer Siena Chiang articulated the framework I needed. In a thread dedicated to the repeal of Roe in the Culture Study Discord, people were asking what so many of us were asking: what do we do. “Get organized,” Siena said. “Not just mobilized, which is showing up at a rally once or twice. Organized means acting in coordination with others who have a long term strategy. Finding a local group doing direct, tangible work and asking them how to help. They’re probably inundated right now so commit to following up in the coming month. Go in person if that’s appropriate, don’t just email. Show up thoughtfully. Be consistent and reliable. Follow their lead.”
  6. Jun 2022
    1. (a) What are the key levers and leverage points in social systems that might drive transformative change towards sustainability? (b) How are these derived from and perceived within and across academic literatures and in practice? (c) How might the levers and leverage points work together?

      Key questions are asked and the nexus approach of looking at the entire gestalt, consisting of many moving parts and their feedbacks is critical for avoiding and mitigating unintended consequences, also known as progress traps.

      Bringing this to a global public space to create engagement is critical to create a groundswell. The public must understand that leverage points offer us our greatest hope. Once they understand them, everyone can help to identify and participate in leverage points.

      Collectively mapping them and their many feedbacks in a global, open source map - an open knowledge commons (OKC) or open wisdom commons (OWC) for system change will drive global participation.

  7. Mar 2022
  8. survivedandpunished.org survivedandpunished.org
    1. Survived & Punished (S&P) is a national coalition that  includes survivors, organizers, victim advocates, legal advocates and attorneys, policy experts, scholars, and currently and formerly incarcerated people. S&P organizes to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations
  9. Dec 2021
  10. Oct 2021
    1. Do you despair because you’ve been writing free/open source software for decades but all your friends are still locked in walled gardens? Maybe you need to switch to volunteering at the local library or maker space to teach people how to use free software (from code to norms); or maybe you need to help a refurbisher outfit laptops with Ubuntu or another free OS (from code to markets); or maybe you need to talk to your town council, school board, or other local authority about changing their procurement rules so favor free/open code (from code to law).

      Nice real-world example on how to escape fatalism on [[FOSS]].

  11. Jul 2021
  12. May 2021
  13. Mar 2021
    1. according to Hao, Mark Zuckerberg wants to increase the number of people who log into Facebook six days a week. I’m not going to get into whether this is good or bad here, but it certainly shows that what you are doing, and how you are doing it, is very important to Facebook.

      Can we leverage these data points to follow a movement like Meatless Monday to encourage people to not use Facebook two days a week to cause this data analysis to crash?

      Anything that is measured can be gamed. But there's also the issue of a moving target because Facebook will change it's target which then means the community activism will need to change it's target as well. (This may be fine if the point is community engagement and education as the overall mission, in which case the changing target continually engages people and brings in new people to consider what is happening and why.)

  14. Feb 2021
    1. Help defend Monica from defamation! Stack Overflow, Inc. must repair the damage caused by their libel against Monica Cellio, cooperate with the community, be willing to talk, treat users with respect, learn about the world outside the United States, open the governance of the sites.
  15. Oct 2020
    1. “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in the face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit.”

      Perhaps the best defense against active measures is a little bit of activism of our own

  16. Jul 2020
  17. May 2020
  18. Apr 2020
  19. Jan 2020
    1. Together we can continue to revise resistance

      Robert Twigger has a great book about learning called "Micromastery"

      I am trying to figure out what the entry trick is for this discipline called "teen activism". This is some of what I am seeing, but these are not really entry tricks so much as abstractions.

      1.peer audience? 2.finding student capacity? 3.enlarging the field of possibility? 4.teaching for social justice? 5.navigate and negotiate with students? 6.research tools? 7.create media?

      Not being critical here, but I am looking for the entry level trick to get my students into activism much like Twigger explains here with cooking eggs as an entry trick into the discipline of cooking.

      Is this too big an ask?

  20. Mar 2019
    1. Everyday acts of resistance require literacy educators to navigate seemingly indissoluble contradictions.

      Is this basically saying that we need to teach educators how to say "no"?

    2. For literacy educators, consciousness of inequality is only the starting point for resistance, a basis for asking more immediatequestions: What happenswhen literacy classrooms are sites of activism? How do teachers work within and against the systems they are a part of to disrupt or challenge ideologies of social reproduction through the literacy curriculum? How does this involve more capacious understandings of the literate practices students bring to schools? What are the challenges teacher activists face when they strive to work within and against an educational system that is structured around normal curve ideologies? How might we re-envision the variance of student potentials, in a way that is not organized around a hierarchy of academic ability or essentialized notions of intelligence?
  21. Jan 2019
    1. You may not access or use the Site in any manner that could damage or overburden any MIT server, or any network connected to any MIT server. You may not use the Site in any manner that would interfere with any other party’s use of the Site.

      Vamos a realizar pequeños scrapping, que no sobrecargarán el servidor, así que estamos cumpliendo con esta parte y de hecho, después de que trabajemos, permitiran repartir la carga del servidor, pues una copia estará en nuestros servidores.

  22. Dec 2018
    1. In his influential book The Net Delusion and in earlier essays, Morozov argued that “slacktivism” was distracting people from productive activism, and that people who were clicking on political topics online were turning away from other forms of activism for the same cause.
  23. Sep 2018
    1. End-Users

      Because Grafoscopio was used in critical digital literacy workshops, dealing with data activism and journalism, the intended users are people who don't know how to program necessarily, but are not afraid of learning to code to express their concerns (as activists, journalists and citizens in general) and if fact are wiling to do so.

      Tool adaptation was "natural" of the workshops, because the idea was to extend the tool so it can deal with authentic problems at hand (as reported extensively in the PhD thesis) and digital citizenship curriculum was build in the events as a memory of how we deal with the problems. But critical digital literacy is a long process, so coding as a non-programmers knowledge in service of wider populations able to express in code, data and visualizations citizen concerns is a long time process.

      Visibility, scalability and sustainablitiy of such critical digital literacy endeavors where communities and digital tools change each other mutually is still an open problem, even more considering their location in the Global South (despite addressing contextualized global problems).

  24. May 2018
  25. Feb 2018
    1. “la modernidad sabe cómo lidiar con aquellos que son anti-ciencia o anti-tecnología; no sabe qué hacer con aquellos que utilizan conceptos plurales de ciencia y tecnología”

      [...] subordinando la ciencia y la tecnología al buen vivir y al fortalecimiento del tejido convivial de la vida. Lo mismo sucede con la articulación con los mercados y la economía: estos deben estar subordinados al buen vivir de acuerdo con criterios de lugarización y no al revés. Argumentar que los activistas mantienen una opinión contraria es caer en una caricatura de sus conceptos y prácticas reales.

  26. Jan 2018
    1. La carta, escrita en el contexto de la tensa negociación de paz entre el gobierno y la guerrilla de las FARC, también contenía una acusación directa al Plan Nacional de Desarrollo del gobierno, uno de cuyos pilares o locomotoras es, precisamente, la minería. Para Márquez este modelo solo puede generar hambre, miseria y guerra. La implicación es clara: la paz será ilusoria sin transformar, radicalmente, este modelo y sin condiciones para la autonomía de los territorios. Nunca podrá haber paz, añadió en su segunda carta, si el gobierno “no es capaz de cuidar de la vida, si no pone la Vida de todos los seres por encima de los intereses transnacionales». Como recordara a todos en su segunda carta, menos de una semana después, «salimos a caminar para contarles que la minería inconstitucional y la minería ilegal nos está dejando sin familia, arrancándonos las raíces, robándonos la posibilidad de continuar viviendo donde nos enterraron el ombligo”.16 La carta fue dirigida «A las mujeres que cuidan de su territorio, como a sus hijas y sus hijos. A las cuidadoras y los cuidadores de la Vida Digna, Sencilla y Solidaria». La carta terminaba con el lema de la marcha: Los territorios y la vida no se venden —se aman y defienden.
    2. sus académicos/as e intelectuales-activistas esperan visibilizar los entramados heterogéneos de vida que enactúan mundos relacionales no dualistas. La ontología política también tiene una orientación decididamente decolonial porque rearticula la diferencia colonial (la clasificación jerárquica de las diferencias creadas, históricamente, por la ontología dominante del MUM) en una concepción de múltiples formaciones relacionales onto-epistémicas. Esta rearticulación expone, de nuevo, la incapacidad epistémica del MUM para reconocer lo que lo supera y renueva nuestro entendimiento de ‘lo humano’ y de lo que existe en general.

      Interesante el permanente vínculo entre activismo y academía. El primer texto sobre Grafoscopio también considera dicha relación cuando habla de objetos activistas y la relación entre publicación y poder.

    3. El diseño a nivel de la comunidad también se utiliza para conectar la justicia ambiental, la memoria, el performance, la materialidad (e.g., toxinas en el suelo) y la tierra y el paisaje para mantener con vida, y renovar, la larga experiencia de protesta y resistencia de una comunidad al tiempo que se reimagina su futuro, por ejemplo, en el contexto de las luchas de justicia ambiental en Estados Unidos (K
    4. The Stack es el nuevo nomos o geografía política de la Tierra. Es la dimensión que necesitamos añadir a la tríada analítica del Estado, la sociedad civil y el mercado —así que ahora también tenemos la Plataforma o The Stack—. Dentro de ella la nube y el usuario operan una sub-estructura, que Bratton llama Black Stack, una ‘totalidad computacional’ de hardware y software que produce una geopolítica acelerada y que media y da forma a las economías como a las subjetividades, transformando el significado de lo humano mediante la proliferación de sus habitantes y usuarios no humanos. Más aún, para algunos activistas, las infraestructuras digitales son el ancla y medio esencial de las nuevas tecnologías de gobierno de las poblaciones, más allá de los estados y los mismos intereses económicos, y su propósito no es otro que el control, así se sea bajo la apariencia de la libertad de interacción (Invisible Committee 2014). Esta geo/biopolítica de lo digital tiene profundas implicaciones para el diseño.
    5. Podemos encontrar respuestas a estas preguntas, distintas pero complementarias, tanto en los mundos activistas como académicos.

      Para acercar estos mundos complementarios, se puede pensar en cómo deconstruir la publicación y la educación desde el hacktivismo, como hacemos con Grafoscopio.

      El desafío es ver si tanto académicos como academía están dispuestos a apostar a otras infraestructuras y prácticas de publicación, en medio del sistema patriarcal, depredador y extractivista, del que participa la academia actual.

    6. ¿Los nuevos diseñadores podrían ser considerados como activistas de transición? Si así fuera tendrían que caminar de la mano con quienes están protegiendo y redefiniendo el bienestar, los proyectos de vida, los territorios, las economías locales y las comunidades en todo el mundo. Estos son los emisarios de la transición hacia formas plurales de hacer el mundo.
  27. Dec 2017
    1. overall, the character of the CCC was defined by the objective to form a collective of politically motivated technologists that would not only do things with technology but also act upon i

      Ac

  28. Nov 2017
    1. Thismaynotbestatedexplicitly,butthediscourseoninscribingdigitalrightsashumanrightsininternationalhumanrightslawoftenassumesthattheforceofsuchlawswillguaranteethatindividuals,states,corporations,andotherbodieswillperformthem.Thisassumptionfailstorecognizethathowpeopleexperiencebeingdigitalcitizensandhowtheyperformrightsbybringingthemintobeingthroughenactingthemselvesarethegroundsonwhichrightswillbeguaranteed.Howpeopleexperienceperformingrightsisthekeytounderstandinghowtheyinhabitthatspaceofrightsanddevelopapoliticalsubjectivitynecessarytomakingrightsclaims‘I,we,theyhavearightto’.Withoutsuchunderstandingandwithoutdevelopingconceptsandmethodsappropriatetosuchanunderstanding,mosteffortstoinscriberights,weareafraid,wouldremaininadequate,forthesewouldberightswithoutpoliticalsubjects.Conversely,thesamecanbesaidforthosewhoassumethattheenactmentofrights,ofimaginativelyandperformativelybringingrightsintobeing,wouldguaranteetheirinscription.Withoutunderstandingthelegalityofclaimsandtheirscopeorsubstance,suchenactmentswouldremaininadequate,too.Withouttheforceoflaw,thiswouldamounttosubjectswithoutpoliticalrights.Itisthatspacebetweeninscriptionandenactmentthatprovidescluestounderstandinghowdigitalcitizensareemergingaspoliticalsubjectsofoureraandthosewhosepoliticssidewitheitherinscriptionorenactmentaresomewhatmissingthesignificanceofthatrelation.

      Aún está pendiente ver cómo los temas de colectivos como RedPaTodos se cruzan con temas como los del Data Week y cuáles son los espacios para dichos cruces. Pueden lugares como la Biblioteca Pública Digital, Universidad, Institutos (como ISUR) y hackerspaces (como HackBo) favorecerlos?

  29. Oct 2017
    1. ‘citizenjournalismunderstandspeopleashavingpoliticalroles,interestsandrelationships,andasactivelyinterestedinsharingnewstheydeemrelevant.Itunderstands,orperhapsintuits,thataknee-jerkdefinitionofallformsofjournalismasacquiringanddistributinginformationmissesthepoint.’

      La ventaja de términos neutralizantes como "datos" es que permiten convocar públicos distintos, sin pensar en su condición de profesional o amateur, o la disciplina particular desde la que se vinculan a los datos. Esta por ejemplo, es una ventaja que se aprecia en eventos locales, como "Datos y Guaros", si bien también hay que atravesar las diferencias entre las formas de actuar y comprender de cada uno de los lugares desde donde se proviene.

    2. BoletteBlaagaard,forexample,arguesthatthecontributionofcitizenjournalismhasbeentochallengetheostensibleobjectivityofprofessionaljournalism.[4]Shearguesthatincreatingajournalisticobjectivity,professionaljournalismportrayedaknowingsubjectthatisdetached,unemotional,neutral,unbiased,andindependent.Bycontrast,citizenjournalism’scontributionhasbeentodemonstratethatpassionate,attached,affective,andbiasedyetfairreportingcanresultfromjournalisticsubjectivity

      [...] ‘[O]nce we acknowledge the social construction of news, why should we then reject alternative journalism simply because it is not subject to the same normative and epistemological limits of mainstream journalism?’

      Esta también es la postura de la tesis. El rigor no tiene que ver con la "neutralidad", sino con la trazabilidad y transparencia, a pesar de que supone una postura apasionada y políticamente comprometida del investigador.

    3. Inthisinstance,criticsprotestedthatTwitterwasinvolvedincensoringpoliticalcontent,butothershaveshownthatthecomplexalgorithmsoftheplatformorganizeandfiltercontentinwaysoftenbeyondtheintentionsoftheirdesigners.Ratherthanasimplemeasureofpopularity,thealgorithmisbasedonacombinationoffactors,andthosethatTwitterhasrevealedincludeidentifyingtopicsthatareenjoyingasurgeinaparticularway,suchaswhethertheuseofatermisspiking(acceleratingrapidlyratherthangradually),whetherusersofatermformatightsingleclusterorcutacrossmultipleclusters,whethertweetsareuniqueormostlyretweetsofthesamepost,andwhetherthetermhaspreviouslytrended

      Se podría invitar a una figura (política por ej) de relativo renombre a que maneje su presencia en línea desde un lugar como los de Indie Web (Mastodon, Known, etc) y mirar qué ocurre con sus redes de seguidores. ¿Alguno migra a una nueva red para tener interacciones ampliadas con dichas figuras?

    4. Toputitbluntly,fromourperspective,popularcriticshavebecometooconcernedaboutcyberspacecreatingobedientsubjectstopowerratherthanunderstandingthatcyberspaceiscreatingsubmissivesubjectsofpowerwhoarepotentiallycapableofsubversion.
    5. Or,aswewouldputit,actingthroughtheInternetandmakingconnectionswithothersdoesnotreplace,displace,orsupplantotherwaysofactinginsocialorculturalspacesinwhichweareembedded.
    6. the‘actofhangingoutonline[wasfoundtohave]enormouspotentialforcreatingthecivicnetworksthatsupportreal-worldpoliticalengagement.’

      Esto lo experimente por mi cuenta con la Ley Lleras y otras formas de activismo.

    7. Theempoweringpossibilitiesofaccessingandworkingwithdataalsounderpin‘opengovernmentdata’programmes.Opennessisextendedtomakinggovernmenttransparentthroughapublicrighttodataandfreedomtoinformation,aversionthatisalsoadvancedbycivicorganizationssuchasmySociety.[19]Thesecallforthanimaginaryofcitizensasdataanalystsequippedwiththeskillsnecessarytoanalysetheircommercialtransactionsandthusmakebetterdecisionsortoanalysethetransactionsofgovernmentsandthusholdthemtoaccount.

      Agregar la gráfica de la manera en la cual se puede hacer al gobierno:

      http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/doc/tip/Docs/Es/Presentaciones/AbreLatam2016/index-13.html

    8. Inequalityisexpressedasleadingtotwodivisions:betweenthosewhodoanddonothaveaccessandbetweenthosewhodoordonotcontributetocontentorleavedigitaltraces.

      Aumentar la capacidad en la comunidad de base para enunciar sus propias voces.

    9. Wecannotsimplyassumethatbeingadigitalcitizenalreadymeanssomething,suchastheabilitytoparticipate,andthenlookforwhoseconductconformstothismeaning.Rather,digitalactsarerefashioning,inventing,andmakingupcitizensubjectsthroughtheplayofobedience,submission,andsubversion

      Nosotros hablábamos de deliberación, implementación y seguimiendo sobre las decisiones, como forma de participación. Desde el Data Week estamos yendo del seguimiento a las primeras.

    10. ‘Theforceoftheperformativeisthusnotinheritedfrompriorusage,butissuesforthpreciselyfromitsbreakwithanyandallpriorusage.Thatbreak,thatforceofrupture,istheforceoftheperformative,beyondallquestionoftruthormeaning.’[22]Forpoliticalsubjectivity,‘performativitycanworkinpreciselysuchcounter-hegemonicways.Thatmomentinwhichaspeechactwithoutpriorauthorizationneverthelessassumesauthorizationinthecourseofitsperformancemayanticipateandinstatealteredcontextsforitsfuturereception.’[23]Toconceiveruptureasasystemicortotalupheavalwouldbefutile.Rather,ruptureisamomentwherethefuturebreaksthroughintothepresent.[24]Itisthatmomentwhereitbecomespossibletodosomethingdifferentinorbysayingsomethingdifferent.

      Acá los actos futuros guían la acción presente y le dan permiso de ocurrir. Del mismo modo como el derecho a ser olvidado es un derecho futuro imaginado que irrumpe en la legislación presente, pensar un retrato de datos o campañas políticas donde éstos sean importantes, le da forma al activismo presente.

      La idea clave acá es hacer algo diferente, que ha sido el principio tras Grafoscopio y el Data Week, desde sus apuestas particulares de futuro, que en buena medida es discontinuo con las prácticas del presente, tanto ciudadanas, cono de alfabetismos y usos populares de la tecnología.

  30. Sep 2017
    1. wewillspecifydigitalacts—callings(demands,pressures,provocations),closings(tensions,conflicts,disputes),andopenings(opportunities,possibilities,beginnings)—aswaysofconductingourselvesthroughtheInternetanddiscusshowthesebringcyberspaceintobeing
    2. Deleuzethinksthat,bycontrast,incontrolsocieties‘thekeythingisnolongerasignatureornumberbutacode:codesarepasswords,whereasdisciplinarysocietiesareruled...byprecepts.’[67]Heobservesthat‘thedigitallanguageofcontrolismadeupofcodesindicatingwhetheraccesstosomeinformationshouldbeallowedordenied.’[68]ForDeleuze,controlsocietiesfunctionwithanewgenerationofmachinesandwithinformationtechnologyandcomputers.Forcontrolsocieties,‘thepassivedangerisnoiseandtheactive[dangersare]piracyandviralcontamination.

      [...] For Deleuze, ‘[i]t’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called “sabotage” (“clogging” the machinery).’

      Otras formas de contestación pueden referirse a la creación de narrativas alternativas usando las mismas herramientas que crean las estructuras de control.

    3. Butthefigureofcyberspaceisalsoabsentincitizenship

      -> But the figure of cyberspace is also absent in citizenship studies as scholars have yet to find a way to conceive of the figure of the citizen beyond its modern configuration as a member of the nation-state. Consequently, when the acts of subjects traverse so many borders and involve a multiplicity of legal orders, identifying this political subject as a citizen becomes a fundamental challenge. So far, describing this traversing political subject as a global citizen or cosmopolitan citizen has proved difficult if not contentious.

      Ver: https://hyp.is/6bnriqSPEeeYN7sZXlOCNg

    1. Civic hackathons have been hotly debated in recent years. Critical studies scholars have lambasted civic hackathons for aligning with middle-class citizenship(Irani, 2015)and co-opting participant labor (Gregg, 2014a). Silicon Valley is often the fait accompliin these perspectives, bringing a flawed ideology that seduces organizers and participants into transposing technological language onto civic issues (Also see: Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Morozov, 2013). In this paper I refer to this perspective as an “imposed civic ideology.” The second perspective comes from design scholars interested in material participation (Marres, 2012) as cohering publics to work on particular social issues. Lodato and DiSalvo (2016) suggested that civic hackathons served two purposes. First, they help people think through civic issues using props — “objects, services, and systems that engage with issues” (p. 16). Second, they cohere ephemeral proto-publics for short-term engagement on issues of public concern. As they summarized, "what is important is not the inventiveness of a particular prototype product or service, but rather, how the event fosters opportunities for collaborative or collective issue articulation" (p. 15). They drew attention to how outcomes of civic hackathons may more likely be social and cultural than functional material objects. I refer to this design perspective as an “emergent civic subjectivity.”

      La pregunta sería cómo los protopúblicos y activistas pueden encontrarse en este formato y cómo los "props" se convierten en prototipos durables e iterables, parecido a como lo hacemos con Grafoscopio.

      En particular me llama la atención entre las narrativas de datos y soluciones completas/integradas para ellas (tipo Grafoscopio) y las aplicaciones móviles más orientadas a la recolección de información, así como las redes sociales y canales de chat para articular ciudadanos. Los puentes sobre esas materialidades serían motivo de exploraciones futuras.

    1. “everyone who has been involved in organizing the space is a social justice activist, and that is often social justice outside of tech, so that is a little bit dif-ferent” (Wu, 2014: Interview with Sarah Fox and Rachel Rose Ulgado, 20 February). Organizers’ interests lay in serving their community, which was localized to the neighborhood.

      Como dije en otra nota, nuestro impacto local ha estado limitado.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. The baroque succeeded because it expressed something all Latin American people (Indians, Africans, mestizos, and even sons and daughters of Spaniards born on the con-tinent) had in common: the rejection of the domineering and distant center. Carpentier (1995) explains that to understand “Why is Latin America the chosen territory of the baroque?” we must look at the people and processes that allowed them to finally own the continent: “Because all symbiosis, all mestisaje engenders the baroque. The American baroque develops [...] with the self-awareness of the American man [...] the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo” (p

      Eso se parece a la idea de decir, con las tecnologías del colono, la voz de los colonizados y es similar a lo dicho por Freire y lo que practicamos desde el Data Week, donde rechazamos el discurso centralizado, imperialista y capitalista del "emprendimiento", a pesar de que usamos tecnologías digitales producidas en EEUU para hablar de las voces locales.

    2. Surman and Reilly (2003) focus on appropriation of networked technologies in a strategically, politically, and creatively innovative manner oriented toward social change. In this context of advocacy, effective technology appropriation includes strategic Internet use for collaboration, publishing, mobilization, and observation. Here, the delineation between the use and appropriation occurs when technology is adapted to reflect goals and culture. Camacho (2001) describes appropriation by civil society organizations at the pinnacle of a technology use ladder. In the middle of the ladder, organizations focus on adoption of conventional technology. Toward the bottom, organizations and individuals with constrained access or slow adoption rates lag behind and seek access to technology. At the pinnacle, however, pioneers and activists appropriate technology to promote causes, for instance, creating flash mobs through mass text messaging to instantaneously organize large groups of people for social protest

      Desde el comienzo, el Data Week ha estado preocupado por la perspectiva de transformación social en la apropiación tecnológica al estar vinculada con la creación de capacidad en la base, modificación de la infraestructura y la amplificación de voces ciudadanas frente a iniciativas privadas o públicas.

    1. Civic hackers might be most appropriately described as utopian realists (Giddens, 1990: 154), a term Giddens employed to capture how assuaging negative consequences in a risk society required retaining Marx’s concern of connecting social change to insti-tutional possibilities while leaving behind his formulation of history as determining and reliance on the proletariat as change agents. He positioned utopian realists as sensitive to social change, capable of creating positive models of society, and connecting with life politics.
    2. That “hackers” can model beneficial process disrupts the often presumed subversive nature of hacking as much as it does easy assumptions about a Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Prototypes act as working evidence to lobby for changing government process, particularly those that improve digital infrastructure or direct communication with citizens. The capa-bility of code to act as a persuasive argument has long been noted, and modeling can produce charged debates about the very meaning of “civic.”

      [...] On a level of hackathons, prototypes can be speculative (Lodato and DiSalvo, in press) rather than an “outcome,” revealing conflicting notions of “civic tech” (Shaw, 2014).

      Nuestro enfoque ha estado centrado más en la modelación, que es requerida para la visualización, pero también en la idea de construir capacidad en la infraestructura y en la comunidad, lo cual va más allá del prototipo volátil, que se abandona después.

    3. The most popular apps to date have been highly instrumental ways to request services to fix city infrastructure, such as SeeClickFix, a platform that lets residents take pictures of issues that need repair, that are delivered to the appropriate city department as an actionable item. We might think of this as a base-level civic act similar to picking litter off the ground or paint-ing over graffiti. Other activities are thicker modes of participation by generating data or metadata. The primary effort of the 2014 CodeAcross effort was to map exist-ing sources of open data. The leader of the event, D.W. Ferrell, described “our role as citizens is to complement” efforts by the government and organizations such as CfA. Contributing to data repositories served purposes for multiple stakeholders:

      Esta perspectiva instrumental (en el sentido latino, no inglés) se ve en el solucionismo de crear una app para salvar el mundo. Nuestra aproximación es más crear competencias críticas, mediadas por la programación y los datos para conversar con el gobierno.

    4. dis-putes over community as a particular category threatens to distract from a general focus on solidarity by activating “social bases of discursive publics that engage peo-ple across lines of basic difference in collective identities” (p. 374). A mutable, popu-larized hacker identity may have this potential, capable of processing and interpreting abstract systems of regulation.

      processing and interpreting abstact systems of regulation.

      La idea de usar la tecnología digital para aumentar nuestra capacidad de agencia en sistemas tecno-políticos complejos. Esto está en confluencia con los argumentos de Bret Victor, pero asume una perspectiva más política.

      Acá la idea es que los hackers cívicos pueden ser puentes entre distintas comunidades. De alguna manera, esto está pasando con los Data Week y cómo articulan distintos públicos.

    5. Data activism and advocacy ranges from civic engagement (Putnam, 2001) to more oppositional activism (Jordan, 2001). In this sense, it is a spe-cific association of technologically mediated participation with particular political goals (Lievrouw, 2011) resulting in a wide range of tactics. Although open government data is still evolving and is constrained by predictions for economic growth and self-regulation, I argue it enables civic hackers to participate in civic data politics. This is particularly important because data-driven environment is often distanced from pro-viding individuals a sense of agency to change their conditions (Couldry and Powell, 2014). Data activism and advocacy can take place through organizing on related top-ics, online through mediated data repositories such as Github, and in-person events such as hackathons.

      [...]Contributing, modeling, and contesting stem from residents leveraging possibilities of open data and software production to attempt to alter process of governance.

      En este amplio espectro, sería chévere ver maneras de gobernanza y cómo pasan a la esfera de lo público y se articulan con los bienes comunes y las entidades encargadas de preservarlos y extenderlos.

      Esta transición aún está desarticulada y no la hemos visto. Las formas de gobernanza de HackBo, aún se encuentran distantes de las formas institucionales públicas, privadas y del tercer sector (ONG), si bien piezas de este rompecabezas se exploran en paralelo, su escalamiento a nivel ciudad aún está por verse.

    6. First, FOIA provided accessible tools to put abstract ideas into practice. Everyday citizens started to attach various political notions to these activities. Second, information flowed into a journalistic ecosystem that was prepared to process and interpret it for everyday citizens. Information obtained through FOIA was being interpreted in stories that changed public opinion (Leff etal., 1986). Third, ability for individuals to request information led to alternate uses for activ-ists, public interest groups, and non-profit organizations.

      Interesante ver cómo se conectan el periodismo y el activismo. Una necesidad de dicha conexión ya había sido establecida en la entrada sobre los Panamá Papers.

    7. Yet, the natural equating of “openness” or government transparency (Hood and Heald, 2006) with accountability increasingly became dubious (Tkacz, 2012). The move to “open data” was often an imperative that didn’t make clear where the levers were for social change that benefited citizens (Lessig, 2009). Still, I argue that civic hackers are often uniquely positioned to act on issues of public concern; they are in touch with local communities, with technical skills and, in many cases, institutional and legal literacies. I conclude by connecting the open data movement with a specific set of political tactics—requesting, digesting, contributing, modeling, and contesting data.

      Transparencia y reponsabilidad no son lo mismo y no hay vínculos entre lo uno y lo otro directos. Los ofrecimiento gubernamentales de datos son sobre "emprendimiento" y no sobre reponsabilidad y trazabilidad.

      Sin embargo, los saberes locales que ponen datos como una forma de acción política ciudadana, que incluye la contestación han sido evidenciados en HackBo, con el Data Week y las Data Rodas.

    8. Civic hacking can broadly be described as a form of alternative/activist media that “employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social arrangements of new information and communication technologies to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (Lievrouw, 2011: 19). Ample research has considered how changes in technology and access have created “an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-inten-sive” (Bimber, 2001). Earl and Kimport (2011) argue that such digital activism draws attention to modes of protest—“digital repertoires of contention” (p. 180)—more than formalized political movements

      La idea de tener "repertorios de contención" es similar a la de exaptación en el diseño.

    9. Organizations such as Code for America (CfA) rallied support by positioning civic hacking as a mode of direct partici-pation in improving structures of governance. However, critics objected to the involve-ment of corporations in civic hacking as well as their dubious political alignment and non-grassroots origins. Critical historian Evgeny Morozov (2013a) suggested that “civic hacker” is an apolitical category imposed by ideologies of “scientism” emanating from Silicon Valley. Tom Slee (2012) similarly described the open data movement as co-opted and neoliberalist.
    10. Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data
    1. Challenges have been mounted to those who view hackerspaces through simple economic and political lenses. One comes from viewing hackerspaces as a whole with a coherent ideology.

      Aplazar la caracterización de la cultura hacker fue benéfico, pues este texto dialoga con otros que estaban puestos en el esqueleto.

      Concentrarme en la dualidad dinácas y artefactos y su visualización es mejor por lo pronto.

    2. Maxigas (2012) used political ideologies to claim a differences between overtly politicized lineage of European hack labs and only partly political hackerspaces. By his reading, hackerspaces either came from a lineage of activism or had activist potential that had yet to be fully activated. Others have taken a middle-ground, using cultural approaches to hackerspaces

      [...] that are more culturally and geographically situated.

    3. That hackers are created, not born, is hardly a new claim. In Coding Freedom Gabriella Coleman described how an open-source hackers’ identity emerged from a fervent brew of digital connectivity, technological concepts, and shared work (Coleman, 2012). Political awareness was connected to liberalism through open-source and code over time. Put simply, being a hacker is a trajectory with multiple points of origin and destinations. Neither is suggesting that hackers are ordinary meant to discard a concern with exceptional hackers. We should be concerned with the Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens of the world, and the causes they have championed.

      Can the data activism be a connection between the concerns of the ordinary and the extraordinay hacker? The Data Week experience seems to support this claim, as a frequent activity in our common hackerspace, that invites a diverse group of people but put activist concerns as a explicit topic, instead of the neutralized "hello world" introduction to technology.

    4. Ordinariness– the everyday, unexceptional, and mundane – is a useful hermeneutic to view collective action and identity in hacker and maker spaces (or simply “hackerspaces”) (Schrock, 2014). This framing is a response toassumptions about hackers as exceptional. Two types of exceptionality have emerged. Critical scholars praiseactivism in hackerspaces(Maxigas, 2012)orotherwise bemoan the invisible hand of “cyberlibertarian” ideology(Golumbia, 2013). Then there are writers who look tohackerspaces as the key toeconomic profitability(Anderson, 2012). Thedefinitional disputebetween activism and corporatization bears more than a whiff of similarity toa previous such dispute; Pekka Himanen’s “hacker ethic”(Himanen, 2001) idealized hackers as labor for modernity, while McKenzie Warkpositioned hackers as a resistant class (Wark, 2004).
  31. Aug 2017
  32. May 2017
    1. When you looked at the March on Washington in 1963, you were seeing the Civil Rights movement's organizational strength, the effort and discipline it took to be out in those numbers. The recent Women's March in Washington, D.C., was also very large, but it was the first step of a potential movement, not the culmination of a decade of work. Without a Twitter hashtag or Excel spreadsheets to do your logistics, you really had to build a lot of [organizational] muscle. If you want to be a credible threat to the powers that be, you need to build those muscles.
  33. Mar 2017
  34. Feb 2017
    1. The Campus Carry movement is largely the creation of the Leadership Institute, a conservative activist organization, partnered with gun rights activists who are further right than the NRA. They have paid college students to form Campus Carry clubs.

  35. Dec 2016
    1. In an online guide made public Wednesday night, a number of those onetime Hill staffers say that the best way for individuals to derail the policy agenda of Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is to organize locally and badger their own congressional representatives to vote against individual pieces of legislation.

      The guide argues that, like the “Tea Party patriots” who found common cause in their unified loathing of President Barack Obama, progressives who oppose Trump should stand against him before all else rather than try to articulate a policy agenda that has no hope of advancing while the GOP controls all three branches of government.

      Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda

  36. Nov 2016
    1. Trump is dangerous. But his election has also angered many millions of people who don't like him. We need to take advantage of that.

      We've been too dependent on the theory of monolithic power, "the idea that government and the representative leaders within our institutions are the primary means to change people’s lives." Government and civil rights organizations are necessary, but not sufficient. We can't sit back and depend on them to work for us.

      "Together, we can redefine civic participation not by organizational membership but as movement-building. Movement-building is an ongoing process of building leadership, relationships and avenues for getting involved."

      Strategic Unity and Common Purpose: "We may disagree on specific policies, but we can be united around values and a common vision for the future — the American ideal of inclusivity, around civil liberties, around a secular government that protects the freedom of diverse religions, and around the right to decide what happens to our bodies."

      Participatory Leadership: "We need participation-oriented leaders whose job is to empower and activate rather than represent and control, allowing communities around the country to replicate the same behavior"

      Strategic Action: protest is good, but it isn't a strategy. "Strategic action feeds movement growth by ensuring each action leads people to another action."

      Existing movements have been working hard (and sometimes bleeding) to fight for the rights most of us have taken for granted. "White Americans ready to fight must either prioritize minorities' struggles or we will all lose."

  37. Oct 2016
    1. Bird-Dogging

      Bird-dogging is a technique whereby activists get candidates on the record about their position on an issue. The term comes from the analogy of a bird-dog which flushes birds out of hiding. In the metaphor, candidates for office often want to conceal their positions on controversial issues or keep their language around them vague. Bird-doggers go to events and ask carefully crafted questions on issues they wish to talk about to try to "flush a candidate's opinions into the open."

      Bird-doggers often work in issue advocacy organizations, and are less concerned about who wins an election than about getting their issues addressed as part of the campaign.

      The term was popularized in 2004 by New Hampshire Quaker activist Arnie Alpert who noted that the way people were asking questions at "town halls" with presidential candidates was allowing the candidates too much wiggle room:

      "If you simply go in there and say, ‘What do you think about health care? What do you think about Iraq?’ the candidate can pretty much say anything and have it sound like it’s a good answer,” said Arnie Alpert, the program coordinator in New Hampshire for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group.

      So in the lead-up to the 2004 primary, he started teaching people how to ask questions. Basically, it takes planning, precision and a little bit of courage. (see New York Times story)

      Albert's techniques were later adopted by Priorities NH, a Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's) group trying to get military spending issues addressed, as well as other groups in the 2008 primary. The rise of citizen video made such techniques an important tool of activism.

      Controversy

      Rhetoric around a 2016 controversy created by James O'Keefe wrongly portrayed bird-dogging as a Clinton campaign term dealing with the instigation of violence at Trump rallies. The term pre-dates the Clinton campaign and has never been used in this way.

      Sources

      New York Times Article: Bird-Dogging in N.H. and Iowa, March 2007

      From the 2016 book Service Sociology and Academic Engagement in Social Problems: "Bird-dogging means attending a political candidates public appearances with the specific aim of challenging or seeking clarification of a particular issue."

      From 2011 book The Young Activist's Guide to Building a Green Movement and Changing the World: "Bird-dogging refers to attending public events where a candidate for public office or an elected representative will appear and calling on him or her to publicly address an issue, support your cause, or reconsider a stance already taken."

  38. Sep 2016
    1. Readers are thus encouraged to examine and critique the model. If they disagree, they can modify it into a competing model with their own preferred assumptions, and use it to argue for their position. Model-driven material can be used as grounds for an informed debate about assumptions and tradeoffs. Modeling leads naturally from the particular to the general. Instead of seeing an individual proposal as “right or wrong”, “bad or good”, people can see it as one point in a large space of possibilities. By exploring the model, they come to understand the landscape of that space, and are in a position to invent better ideas for all the proposals to come. Model-driven material can serve as a kind of enhanced imagination.

      This is a part where my previous comments on data activism data journalism (see 1,2 & 3) and more plural computing environments for engagement of concerned citizens on the important issues of our time could intersect with Victor's discourse.

    2. This is aimed at people in the tech industry, and is more about what you can do with your career than at a hackathon. I’m not going to discuss policy and regulation, although they’re no less important than technological innovation. A good way to think about it, via Saul Griffith, is that it’s the role of technologists to create options for policy-makers.

      Nice to see this conversation happening between technology and broader socio-political problems so explicit in Bret's discourse.

      What we're doing in fact is enabling this conversation between technologist and policy-makers first, and we're highlighting it via hackathon/workshops, but not reducing it only to what happens there (an interesting critique to the techno-solutionism hackathon is here), using the feedback loops in social networks, but with an intention of mobilizing a setup that goes beyond. One example is our twitter data selfies (picture/link below). The necesity of addressing urgent problem that involve techno-socio-political complex entanglements is more felt in the Global South.

      ^ Up | Twitter data selfies: a strategy to increase the dialog between technologist/hackers and policy makers (click here for details).

  39. Apr 2016
    1. Case in point: the only harsh critiques I saw around Katy Perry’s yellowface were by Asian-American journalists and bloggers, whereas Julianne Hough’s blackface Halloween costume was roundly denounced.

      The public only makes a point to be outraged by the racism that has been openly made unacceptable, whereas other more recent cases stand unnoticed in the historical shadow of political correctness.

    2. But #NotYourAsianSidekick also proves that Twitter is the wrong place to have this conversation. 140 characters isn’t enough to express a lifetime of experiences — both oppressive and uplifting — and to be able to do it in a place where it can be heard and taken seriously.”

      The internet is a good spring board to be inspired, however it is a call to duty to pursue activism in a more literal sense.

  40. Feb 2016
    1. And the first aspect of activism that must be rethought is our notion of temporality.

      activism needs to be more permanent-hashtags are permanent on the internet.

    2. While some may caution against immediate action by pointing out that societies often predict perils that never come, what is remarkable about our times is that the apocalypse has already happened.

      Today's issues are due largely to the inactivity of generations past, from a belief that the general population didn't have a voice.

    1. 1 in 3 youth activists would boycott a business if it goes against a cause they care about?

      This shows the importance of social action and sticking to one's beliefs is to today's youth.

    1. In August 2007, designer Chris Messina asked his followers how they felt about using the pound sign to group conversations on the micro-blogging platform, and thus became the first person to use the hashtag on Twitter.

      This is an excellent example of how we can "recycle" old concepts and repurpose them for a greater use.

    1. But there's something valuable in making sure you're not surrounded by people who think like you. It helps you understand what you think better. And I appreciate that about Twitter. It's a cacophony of voices. Even when you don't agree, you at least understand different perspectives. The medium itself sets that up.

      Social media allows us to connect with people we wouldn't normally and understand more about the way we think based on our interactions with other diverse people.

    2. But what social media has done is that it has exposed the intensity of hatred in America.

      For the first time, confrontations are public, no one can hide behind the mask of stretched truth. The truth is at the world's disposal

    3. When people think about protest, they think that protest is always confrontation, protest is always disruption. But protest is also intellectual confrontation and disruption.

      Instead of making protest something violent and very physical, the future of social reform begs that it be a peaceful, intellectual movement that positively impacts a society of equal citizens.

    4. So the goal was to be a hub of information. I think the first newsletter that went out had 400 subscribers, and we're at a little bit less than 14,000 now.

      Today, while the expansion of web resources provides us with ample information about various topics, there can also be a lot of false sources with biased or distorted information. Thanks to hashtag activism, the right people can be in charge of distributing the most authentic information to the concerned public.

    5. You are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things that they know are unjust.

      Don't be afraid to speak up. Most likely there is at least one other person who has the same concerns, and social media is a good opportunity for those with quieter tendencies to really speak up and be heard.

    6. The people, in a very democratic way, became the voice of the struggle.

      "The people" finally have a way to make their ordinary voices heard by many: social media. It is a lot easier to handle social issues from a collectivist perspective rather than individualist movements from the past. A figurehead is no longer necessary to fuel change: we can all work together and make it happen as a unit.

    7. If we think about this as community building, and we think of community building as a manifestation of love, and we think about love being about accountability, and accountability about justice, what's interesting is that Twitter has kept us honest.

      Technology has the ability to unite us despite our location and social status. People with similar opinions who would not normally associate are now given the opportunity to have those deeper conversations and expand each other's intellect.

    8. Missouri would have convinced you that we did not exist if it were not for social media.

      The institution of editing the news and only telling the stories that certain people want to hear is put to rest with the implication of social media. For the first time, everyone's stories are worthy of being told.

    9. Mainstream-media figures often portray social media as a buzzing hive of useless outrage.

      All too often, social media is viewed as a meaningless outlet to tell the world what you ate for lunch or how you decided to style your hair. Instead, we need to accept, as a society, the idea that there are multiple applications to the same technologies.

    1. The promise and potential of digital popular education is to formulate a means of empowering those on the margins with a means to fight back and organize to build equitable communities.

      Public access to a median of communication helps to create a sense of unity with our greater community, as if a small, integral piece in something much bigger.

    2. It is time for academe to move its research from being “inequality porn” to knowledge in service of the public, knowledge in service of a vision of transformative and restorative justice.

      Often times, academia guards its intelligence and resources from the general public because it is seen as "too advanced" or "superior in intellect". It is time that we finally open the door and make academic research more about application instead of theory.

    3. People across demographics are finding ways to analyze the social issues impacting their lives.

      These movements involve more than education; they relate to any and every social issue of today's society. Also, public education is open to anyone, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, financial standing, etc. These are steps to improving communication between all people.

    4. Hashtags are not only a means to having discussions but also a useful teaching tool that people organize around to distribute popular education. Making scholarship public

      Everyone has access to social media, therefore we have a new generation of millennials that are very aware and active in the current social issues that the nation, and even the world, is facing and devoted to understanding and reforming such issues. Authority is finally given to all to have an intelligent opinion on the affairs of today, which was the goal of our founding fathers in the first place: to raise a nation full of scholarly, well rounded citizens capable of caring for the well-being of the nation.

    5. Popular education is a process that fosters the empowerment of dominated people to take control of their learning process and contribute to building social change, justice, and equity from the bottom up.

      Here we see that social media urges "popular education" for all, through which all students have the ability to be involved in current social issues, regardless of class, ethnicity or gender.

    6. One thing that #BlackLivesMatter has managed to do as a collective movement is highlight the need for the people outside of academe to know what is being said about their lives versus the popular notions that we’ve all been told to believe.

      This movement can be seen as a call to higher learning. Perhaps a motivational declaration of certain social issues that need to be currently addressed. In this way, we as a society can become more educated and involved in the social issues taking place today.

    7. BLM is seen as a movement that gives voice to many Black people, not just in the US but across the diaspora.

      It is evident that social media has empowered those who wouldn't commonly feel entitled to have their voice be heard on complex political and social topics today. Its a way of empowering the "average Joe" and giving more voice to the American people.

    1. When creating a social media campaign, the approach should be action first, share second. In order to join the Facebook group, you must donate.

      This is an interesting point. It is hard to gain support if the cause is not active already.

    2. While there is no refuting the importance of social media’s role in social change, the impact of online activism, or clicktivism, may be more modest than we originally anticipated.

      Online activism is continually growing and the impact is increasing, but at what cost?

    1. Effective digital activism employs a number of social media tools.

      In order to reach everyone, interest groups have to go to multiple places.

    2. Digital activism is usually nonviolent and tends to work best when social media tools are combined with street-level organization, according to new research from the University of Washington.

      It is actually effective and can be used in positive ways.

  41. Oct 2015
  42. Aug 2015
    1. There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

      The two paragraphs that follow are spot on. Nerds think government doesn't do anything right and they see government as this monolith thing apart from themselves rather than something they can and should work to affect, rather than circumvent.

      One thing I got out of reading Graeber's "Democracy Project" was the idea that it is not rational people that inhabit the middle of the political spectrum. Most people are more radical than the media makes it seem. The media reinforces the narrative that if you hold strong political opinions you are a radical. Your neighbors think you're crazy. You should probably just follow the herd, more.

      While there are definitely fundamentalists at the political extremes, there are also great thinkers.

  43. Jun 2015
    1. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

      The only counter-argument that comes to mind for me didn't form itself until I had read this last paragraph a few times.

      If your identity marker connotes tolerance then it hopefully has the opposite effect. Insofar as the experience of marginalization promotes empathy such identities might be good evidence for intelligence, and I do think individuals who feel oppressed or marginalized tend to empathize with others who suffer for different, marginalized identities.

      These identities will only breed stupidity if the individual feels a competition for scarce resources that overwhelms their empathy, whence the perniciousness of the belief in zero sum attention economics as a greater threat to activism than inaction, ignorance, and exhaustion.

  44. Nov 2014
    1. But these features also make it ripe for conflict between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists who oppose sex work. One of the most frequent attacks on Twitter is that these activists are pimps pretending to be sex workers. This argument defeminizes sex workers into the masculine identity of a pimp and paints them as co-conspirators in trafficking. It’s a form of gendered shaming against female-identified sex workers that pits them over and against victimized women and girls
  45. Jul 2014
    1. At a recent gathering in Berlin, we considered the idea of attaching a suggested action, like a petition or campaign, to web articles. The hope was to facilitate action at the moment people encounter issues online.

      I like this idea!