“Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.” -C. Wright Mills

Last night I accidentally caught Digital Nation on PBS’s Frontline. David Rushkoff hosted and presumably wrote the piece. An unapologetic advocate of the digital internet age for twenty years now, he expresses his first quiver of uncertainty, wondering if we’re becoming too distracted. The internets had been building up the program, so I watched.

It was broadly interesting if a bit light, but I have to take umbrage with it basic, underlying ideolgical claim, which is based on a misrepresentation of Korea. Rushkoff first travels to Seoul to look at PC Bangs, rooms full of high speed, networked computers, and internet addiction. He argues, basically, that Asians have become addicted to the internet. Meanwhile, America (USA! USA!) is finding its own way forward. While the internet is isolating individuals in Asia (cut to asian youth on computer), it’s bringing people together in America (cut to World of Warcraft convention with people talking to each other).

But the argument fails. The presentation itself contains evidence that the correct thesis may be the opposite. I didn’t get the numbers exactly, but approximately the same percentage of people were addicted to the internet in Korea as players of WOW were. More importantly, however, the “coming together” of Americans seemed to be a once a year convention. If that’s the basic measure of togetherness, then the Koreans are immeasurably closer. What he fails to note when he’s interviewing a bunch of young men about how much time they spend online playing games is that they all probably came to the PC Bang as a group of friends, and that they probably do that frequently. So, the use of PC Bangs in Korea is vehicle for socializing with friends rather than going out to find friends.

I won’t deny that there are Koreans who get addicted nor that there are Koreans who go online to find friends (After all, my sister-in-law met her current boyfriend playing some online game.), but there is a good chance that they are online with friends they know in real life. So, Rushkoff is wrong to argue that the internet isolates Asians and brings Americans together. If anything, it’s the opposite. And if the Asians have a problem, ours is already much, much worse.

Wish I could go…

The Ammann Singstad Lecture series on Infrastructure
January 21, 2010 | Thursday | 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

The Museum of Modern Art
Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater)
Enter at the 4 West 54th Street entrance to the Museum

The Ammann Singstad Lecture on Infrastructure honors the memory of the two great civil engineers who shaped the bridges and tunnels of New York in the middle of the twentieth century-Othmar Ammann (1879-1965) and Ole Singstad (1882-1969)-by inviting the most distinguished civil engineers in the world today to speak about their own work and its greater impact. The lectures highlight the aesthetic and social dimensions of large civil and landscape engineering works and their repercussions on the physical, social, and political environment. Norwegian civil engineer Tor Ole Olsen will speak on infrastructure in the marine environment with an emphasis on his work with concrete structures in oil and gas, bridges and renewable energy sources. This program is sponsored by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General and presented as part of the public programming associated with the upcoming MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. This lecture has been scheduled in  conjunction with the Detour exhibition at Parsons, The New School for Design.

The event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required. Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at 5:30PM on Thursday, January 21st. Please RSVP at  <mailto:adevents@moma.org> adevents@moma.org.

SM suggested this video on Mumbai’s water crisis for the class I’ll be teaching this spring.

Now that the new layout makes the byline more prominent, I felt that I should try to live up to it. So here is the current dilemma I’m facing (other than not getting work done because I have involuntarily become a daycare dad):

I’ve been arguing that progressive unionism created political unity among longshoremen all along the West Coast. This singular identity established a geographical monopoly that allowed the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to successfully combat exploitation and ultimately to achieve relatively decent, secure wages in exchange for allowing mechanization on the docks (i.e., containerization). Attaining this peace between employers and employees, I want to argue, enabled (or compelled) the international shipping and stevedoring companies to turn their exploitative efforts to politically fragmented port authorities.

What I’m now discovering is that the East Coast union, the ILA, despite ultimately attaining a similar agreement guaranteeing annual income (GAI) in exchange for not opposing mechanization, has historically been more fragmented. Even during the negotiations over GAI, the South Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports established a separate bargaining confederation because they felt that the ILA was only negotiating for the benefit of New York. This fragmentation (exacerbated by the right-to-work states) led to a rapid deterioration and eventual elimination (?) of the GAI. (I also realize now that there is additional organizational fragmentation on the East Coast, because the warehousing workers and longshoremen are in separate unions.)

My major case study takes place on the East Coast after this deterioration. And the fragmentation resulted in union locals competing against their colleagues in other ports. So it’s not clear to me that I’m a position to make the same argument. It occurs to me that I might have to put more effort into the comparison with a similar competition between LA and Long Beach, which was more efficaciously and advantageously resolved (from the perspective of labor and the ports). I could then argue that political unity on the West Coast made the local actors stronger, while political fragmentation on the East Coast made them weaker. That is, incentive competition is more effective (from the perspective of capital) in a politically fragmented landscape (i.e., nonexistent geographical monopoly) than in a politically unified landscape (i.e., geographical monopoly).

A short example of a couple of fellows using GIS as an advocacy tool.

Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but Chomsky has a new article in Boston Review.

This time series map of US unemployment before and during the current Great Recession is fairly dismaying. It looks like a smokers lung over twenty years. The Plains states appear relatively unaffected, however. I presume this is due to lower populations and dependence on agriculture, for which demand is fairly steady.

Douglas Rushkoff recently presented a fifteen minute talk entitled Radical Abundance. The basic premise is intriguing. The introduction of government monopolized currency in the Middle Ages was a technique for keeping power in the hands of the aristocracy, since it gave them control over the relative scarcity of currency and thus the ability to extract interest without working. Parallel to this, current efforts to manage the internet economy (e.g., DRM) seek to maintain control in the hands of an oligopoly that extracts value from the real producers by copying open source or employing crowd sourcing. Instead, Rushkoff argues, we should introduce new “currency” for peer-to-peer exchange based on (I think) labor time, a new OS for the economy. Essentially, he wants to reintroduce electronic bartering based on  labor value rather than exchange value. He directs the listener to superfluid.biz as an example.

Interesting to think that we might be able to rebuild our economy from the ground up through sophisticated electronic, peer-to-peer bartering.