Liminal states

Update, August 2: discussion of Google+ and HR1981 in a new comment

Originally written January 19.  Updated January 24, after discussions with Weaver2World and MissHealth.
I modified one of the recommendations and added a new one. See the pink highlights in the text.

Mark Stanley of the Center for Democracy and Technology wrapped up Tuesday’s #privchat with a heck of a good question.  And as is usually the case in the weekly Twitter privacy chat, there were good answers from a variety of perspectives. For example:

All great ideas … so I put my process hat on and suggested that we encourage people to think and blog about it, and continue the discussion next week.  Here’s my contribution (with early assistance from @hellrazr of @PrivacyActivism and additional suggestions from @Weaver2World).

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Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the world through its own prism.

— Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch

Quora has that certain magic that only one or two startups a year have. When it first launched it seemed kinda dumb, a slightly better version of q&a sites from before, that all flailed into spam. But it became exceptionally clear very shortly that it wasn’t like those other sites. that the product, combined with the launch strategy of concentrating on a certain group of people (which is how facebook launched as well) made for a very nice product. Now the question is can they turn the corner. I think they will.

— TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, in a comment

Oooh, controversy!

In Life imitates art imitates life … I’ve been talking why I come to the same conclusion as Vivek, so I was looking forward to seeing what he had to say on.  And there’s some very good stuff, including an excellent point I hadn’t seen elsewhere, talking the important of topic-specific and community-oriented Q&A sites:

This is where people with common interests will gather and exchange ideas.  For example, for people seeking legal advice, there is LawPivot, and for businesses looking for experts, there is Focus.   For techies, there are sites like StackOverflow, Slashdot, Hacker News; for children, there is Togetherville; for business students, there is PoetsandQuants; for entrepreneurs in India, there is StartupQnA; for Indian accountants, there is CAClubIndia; and China has its own groups, and so do many other countries.

Indeed! So I added another bullet to my answer on How would Quora be different if it prioritized diversity.

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Today’s Blog for Choice Day. This year’s question is

Given the anti-choice gains in the states and Congress, are you concerned about choice in 2011?

To which my answer is a resounding “yes”.  The combination of well-financed political assaults on women’s right to choose, assassinations years of packing courts with conservatives, and lack of support from key Democrats have all severely restricted women’s right to choose.  In fact, “concerned” isn’t strong enough: alarmed, scared, and angry.

But as NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin said in their post, I’m not defeated.  In fact, I’m with Shark-Fu, who has a great post on Angry Black Bitch: Be Encouraged

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Draft, work in progress. Feedback welcome!

Last updated February 5.

Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”. Demographically and stylisticly, Twitter is far less male-dominated than the big blogs of the progressive blogosphere …

— Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus, The #p2 Hashtag and Strategies for Progressives on Twitter, February 2009

Twitter is, quite possibly, the best available medium for this particular kind of protest. The format has a number of features that level a playing field that tends to push women into the outfield.

– How #Mooreandme Worked, Lili Loofbourow, December 2010

Twitter was an instinctive choice for #MooreandMe, because it made the target of the protest accessible and ensured that he could hear us. But I liked it as a medium for #DearJohn too, because it was really equalizing, it wasn’t hierarchical, it ensured that voices and perspectives could influence the conversation regardless of how well-connected or well-known they were, and it was a very visible, trackable way to register dissent.

– Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, interviewed in where is your line?, January 2011

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Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines” … here’s an excerpt I was just editing last night from g0ddesses.net, my comic novel-in-progress. The scene’s set on a discussion forum that’s modeled after Hacker News:

Today, I saw a link on HackerNews to a Read Write Web story Quora for the Enterprise: Two Contenders:

Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky* suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.

But what about Quora for the enterprise?

Indeed!   And reading further in the story, discovered that one of the contenders is “is applying gamification principles in an attempt to drive adoption”.

Nice to know I’m in sync with the Zeitgeist.

Life imitates art.

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Work in progress! See discussion questions at the bottom

EPIC’s The Stripping of Freedoms conference has an all-star cast: Kate Hanni of FlyersRights, pilot Michael Roberts of Fed Up Flyers, Jim Babb of We Won’t Fly, Prof. Jeffrey Rosen, Bruce Schneier, Nadhira Al-Khalili of CAIR, Chip Pitts of BORDC, Ginger McCall and Lillie Coney of EPIC, and many many more.  So it’s a great chance to mobilize the resistance to the TSA.

Social media* are an important way of getting the word out; letting people participate whether or not they can make it to Washington DC; putting pressure on Congress, the Obama administration, and the airlines; and trying to get the traditional media to cover our side of the story as well as the TSA’s.   Here’s some thoughts about how to approach it.

The first step is to let people know about the conference — and get them excited about it.  There are a lot of easy ways to do this: invite people to the Facebook event, share the links to EPIC’s page and blog posts on Facebook and Myspace, tweet it, mail it to your friends who are likely to be interested, tell any bloggers and journalists you know about it. A lot of people have never done anything like this before, so we’ll try to have some basic instructions available.  We’ll also set up threads in the FlyerTalk forums and the We Won’t Fly blog to ask for questions and strategy suggestions.

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Last New Year’s Eve, the card for the “final outcome” in my Tarot reading was Temperance, which represents vibration.*   And what a coincidence: guess what tonight’s psytrance party is called?

It’s been a long decade.  Ten years ago, things were spiralling down: the dot-com crash, a stolen presidential election, with Enron and 9/11 fast approaching.   The ten years since then have been pretty depressing, watching our economy and civil liberties go down the drain as the rich white guys in charge struggle to keep everybody else down and the plutocracy gets greedier and greedier.  I’m sooooo ready to put the Awful Aughts to rest and start moving forward.

First though, let’s take a few moments to remember that there was plenty of good stuff over the last decade too.

At the societal level, the last couple of years have included the emergence of social networks, choosing hope over fear (at least partially),  reenergized womanist, mujerist, feminist, and anti-racist activists, Wikileaks, and an emerging coalition that’s neocons’ worst nightmare and the future of civil liberties.    So the trend is positive — and momentum is building.

And at the personal level, all I can say is … wow.

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We got back from D’s family around 6 p.m. Christmas Day, car stuffed with food and presents. Looks like we won’t starve 🙂 Then we took a nap, and after munching on leftover spaghetti I headed out to Death Guild’s X-Mess night at the DNA Lounge. Saturday night in the big city! How cool is that?

Saturday night, I posted as Kallisti on Dreamwidth, danced like crazy, and had a great time.   Tonight it’s Death Guild again, a regular Monday night … yay darkness!

The DNA Lounge is one of San Francisco’s great clubs.  We’ve been going there for years, long enough that I remember when they were serving “smart drinks” for groups like D’Cuckoo, the time when Wil Wheaton used John Gilmore’s light saber to strike down Barney at an EFF benefit, and a great performance by Snog.   It’s a fine spot for Death Guild.

It’s been a low-key few days, thinking about restructuring g0ddesses.net and wrestling with a blog post on Wikileaks … so much to say! And of course starting to think about New Year’s Resolutions too. So a great time to go out dancing.

I heart darkwave.

The Center for Democracy and Technology is running a Twtpoll on the biggest privacy story of 2010. 

Vote early and often!

Then come back and read the rest of this post.

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It’s been another tough year for the Bill of Rights in the US. We spent Bill of Rights day on the road, opting out of the TSA’s abuse of our rights by driving (not flying) from San Francisco to Seattle — so apologies for the lateness of this post.

The National Archives has a great Twitterized version of the Bill of Rights, where each one is reduced to 140 characters or less.  Here’s the Fourth Amendment, by @swanroad:

Don’t seize me big bro! or search me, without a warrant

Yeah really.  And despite what the Obama Administration wants you to believe, the Fourth Amendment applies at airports too: the naked scanners and enhanced patdowns are unconstitutional. TSA Administrator John Pistole told USA Today that he thinks they’ve pushed the public as far as they can, but I think they’ve miscalculated.

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An experiment, a (net)work in progress, a meta-level solution, a work of art…

e-luminatus

Another Geomagnetic party at the Gingerbread House, and then Arjuna at a downtown venue I haven’t been before … time to take a quick break from the infowar and civil disobedience for a weekend of psytrance in San Francisco!

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‘THE net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.’ This quote from John Gilmore, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, often appears on the Internet. It reflects its users’ confidence that their electronic world, designed to resist nuclear attack, can also shrug off government regulation. By nature of its global reach and its decentralised design, they believe, it is unpoliceable.

They may be mistaken.

— Christopher Anderson, The Accidental Highway, The Economist, 1995

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

— John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996

Fifteen years later, Barlow is calling the troops to battle: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks.”   And Gilmore’s observation once again proved accurate, as hundreds of sites begain mirroring Wikileaks and Twitter briefly functioned as a ‘sneakernet DNS’.   Then Anonymous stepped up, first with denial of service attacks against PayPal, MasterCard and Visa, and now with Operation Leakspin.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded by Gilmore and Barlow 20 years ago along with Mitch Kapor, is calling troops to battle as well with their Say No To Online Censorship campaign.  What’s the impact likely to be?  So far, there have been a couple of blog posts: Executive Director Shari Steele’s Call To Action, and Kevin Bankston’s legal analysis Information is the Antidote to Fear, valuable reading for anybody at a web 2.0 or media company.   But they’re clearly capable of a lot more.

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