Another day, another drone in the news. The US military is moving towards remote controlled aircraft, saving US lives while completing tactical missions. This future seems inevitable; critical debates or understandings of the many political forces being blackboxed is nowhere to be found, only percolating in the back of science studies conference halls. Enter Lucy Suchman’s blog.
Suchman, author of Human Machine Reconfigurations, has started a blog to critically illuminate and unpack robot warfare: “Robot Futures”.
News you can use from differenceengines.

Kavita Philip, Paul Dourish, and I co-authored a piece for Science, Technology, and Human Values called Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey. The piece brings together feminist science technology studies with postcolonial understandings of culture and theory to offer some tactics for detangling contemporary temporary politics. Enjoy! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Inspired by an article on turn-of-the-19th-century American whiteness this morning, I made my first tumblr-style triptych.

Today we’re greeted again by images desecration, brutality, and celebration as YouTube screenshots hit the news showing Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers — with other Marines out of frame filming it, of course. Hillary Clinton condemned the acts and claimed that they are utterly incompatible with the values of “the American people” and the discipline of the military. Consistently, the behavior is located in the aberrant soldiers that we as a nation can come together to declare as the exception that emphasizes our distance from this event.

What if making these films isn’t the exception? What if it is instead the symptom — the eruption — of a culture of media spectacles of domination by forces convinced of their opponents inhumanity — or their own righteousness? I submit as evidence the t-shirt declaring “God will judge our enemies * We’ll arrange the meeting.” I spotted this shirt on a flight from Newark to Orange County two months ago. I was shocked that somebody would wear that in public, that they would wear that in public in such a regionally heterogeneous place as an airport, and at the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the shirt — the this man is god’s sweeper.

The video of the marines urinating isn’t just evidence of men urinating. It is evidence of a social milieu where you can get those people behind the frame to film this thing. It’s evidence of a milieu where marines felt like this act should be commemorated in the larger public that is YouTube viewership.

In a Radical History Review piece on Abu Ghraib, Nicholas Mirzoeff points out that breaking people into lumps of bare life is a documented interrogation strategy for the CIA and the army: “Declassified CIA and Army interrogation manuals make it clear that the point of all humiliation was to break down what the military understands as the civilized veneer of the mind to break through to the supposedly primitive core, where resistance is less effective” (2005:52). Freud gone wild.

These strategies of breaking down and unleashing primitivism isn’t just reserved for the interrogated. I had a high school friend who joined the Marines who explained that part of Basic Training was to break soldiers down to a primal place. He told me about an exercise where the marine to be placed in a deep hole and left to scream at the sky as loudly and deeply as they could muster until their superior tells them they can stop.

Jennifer Terry, professor of Women’s Studies at UCI, has also shown that making such videos is also a routine part of military action for documenting operations, proving the effectiveness of particular violent techniques, to inspire adherents to one’s cause, and to mock opponents. “They are part of larger and psychological and affective dimensions of this kind of war,” (“Killer Entertainments” in Vectors Journal). You can view the US military and opposition force videos that Terry collects, curates, and juxtaposes in Vectors multimedia journal. Videography is routine.

I’m no fan of the Taliban, but it is downright deceptive to declare that these recurring videos of violence are just the work of bad apples.

It looks like feminist-claimants like Sarah Palin have stirred National Organization of Women to speak intersectionally. I may be particularly surprised after reading these notes from the trenches of trying on trying to deal with white feminist privilege in non-profit organizations from DailyKOS. I wonder if NOW is doing anything more than sending out surprisingly with-the-decade emails.

I wonder if their attention to poverty is at all connected to Smiley and West’s Poverty Tour bringing class back into the public American conversation after decades of McCarthyite chilling.

Today you are going to receive tons of requests for donations from women’s organizations because today is Women’s Equality Day. We aren’t asking you for any money. Not because we don’t need it; we do. But we aren’t asking because the equality path we have been on must end!

We are a long way from women being fully recognized as fully human in this country. There are many reasons for this, but one is especially highlighted today – the definition of equality. I know what our definition of equality is – that all human beings are born free, equal in dignity and rights, and must enjoy the equal protection of the law against discrimination based on sex, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age or other actual or perceive classification.

Sadly, this year actually shows huge gains for the kind of equality too many of our mothers and grandmothers worked for (equality only if you can prove you’re like a man)…more women have reached the ranks of millionaires and billionaires and more women are running for higher office. But is that what our mothers and grandmothers really wanted for women? Is that what we’re fighting for – a world where women occupy half of the 1% of 1% who own more than 99.9%? Is our job done when women participate “equally” in an economy that requires women’s free labor and forces 90% of women children and elderly to live in poverty ? No!

Is it equality when women running for the highest political offices believe that other women’s bodies should be controlled by an ever more intrusive big government? Is it equality when women claw their way to the top of predatory corporations exploiting other women, children, the disabled, the infirm and the elderly? No!

We have to stop celebrating kyriarchal* equality because the forward momentum we have achieved is driving us down a hole with no ladder out! The way forward is not to leave behind the 99.9% of women and their families. We must stop rewarding the women who continue to promote the kind of feminism that excludes women of color, young women, poor women, sick women, uneducated women and any woman who doesn’t have the right pedigree.

We must work to become intersectional feminists; understanding that our liberation is bound to each other’s liberation and knowing that the time to achieve success wasn’t yesterday and isn’t tomorrow. The time is today.

Register to vote, work, act to insure that everyone you know registers to vote, then work, act to educate everyone you know and encourage, facilitate others to do the same because when people lead, leaders follow. Women must lead moving all us toward the path of real freedom and equality – a path free from dominance.

Wow – Oprah’s a billionaire! How’s that working for YOU?

Linda Long
Action VP, California NOW

Think. Talk. ACT!

* kyriarchal: the structures of domination working together as a network – not just one group dominating another.

Over at apophenia, danah boyd writes that quitting facebook is pointless and what is actually needed is for us to challenge facebook to be more responsive.

I find this rhetoric profoundly disempowering. Social movements and social pressure doesn’t happen only from everyone marching to the beat of one drum. I’m sure more moderate feminists told radical lesbian separatists that their actions were pointless too but the movement needed all these different ways of acting to build the solidarities and arguments that it did.

I think danah might be reacting to tech elites who are presuming that because they quit, they will be taste leaders. I think that is crap. However, calling quitting pointless misses that quitting isn’t just about affecting Facebook. Decentering Facebook, we might recognize that:
1) Quitting actually creates time and occasion for other modes of sociality. Making those other forms, in some cases by going back to straight up talking on the phone and in others, playing and experimenting (as my lab did by making LUCIbook with whiteboards). Quitting, then, is an opening to a set of experiments. But you don’t *have* to quit to experiment.
2) If quitting is meaningful and feels good to some people, why deny them that? Why slam it and call it pointless? Why use a position of authority as a prominent blogger to foreclose options?
3) Quitting (and switching, perhaps) seems, to me, a better alternative than hoping FB gets its act together, changes its corporate culture, and starts actually being responsible and responsive. It doesn’t even have to be an anti-corporate mobilization. Frankly, compared to Facebook, Google and Twitter are amazing at being responsive and simple to understand, and they are right there right now, ready to use. This doesn’t have to be about corporate purity, as I noted in my last post about platform pluralism.

The role of feminist argument ought to be deepening our analysis of complex power relations, open-ended possibilities, and agencies springing up in unusual places. It should not be making foreclosing claims about alternate social practices, whether that’s quitting facebook or staying on it.