USA – Page 14 – Robert Sharp

February 5, 2009

Big Brother, we're watching YOU

At the fantastic and soon-to-be-essential techPresident, there’s a post on a new technological openness from Congressional Republicans. Although their site at GOP.gov carries pretty run-of-the-mill content, it actually has an extremely substantial API. For non-technophiles, the API is the Application Programming Interface, and gives all the information that programmers would need to interact with the site, and – crucially – to pull data from it. Nancy Scola notes that people have been wondering what the Obama Administration has in store for the whitehouse.gov site, and suggests that a robust API may be more important than ensuring that there are enough photos of the Obama’s for us to gawk at ( abug-bear from a few days ago).

And that raises the idea that for all the attention we’ve been paying whitehouse.gov, maybe thinking about the White House site as a destination is just wrong-headed. The focus should instead, perhaps, be on pushing clean data — and the engagement it can fuel — out from the White House , in the hopes of creating “government everywhere.”

Its Big Brother in reverse. A robust API removes another barrier to scrutinizing the government and legislators, something that will become ever more important as President Obama begins to spend the $800 billion or so in his ‘”fiscal stimulus” package, and the Senators and Representatives start to vote on any number of issues. There will be no escape!
I do think that the very fact of more information in the public domain will increase the trust people have in politicians, precisely because there is less room for obfuscation and drastically reduced room for corruption and misconduct. As I’ve noted previously, a Governmental cover-up is always worse, and much more annoying, than a Governmental cock-up. We saw an example of this earlier in the week, where President Obama made a swift mea culpa when it turned our that two cabinet nominees had not been vetted properly, and not paid their taxes. An early admission neutralises the story.
It also goes some way to restoring the trust that has been lost through the cock-up. Why? Because it avoids the possibility that Government spokespeople will have to engage in the sort of verbal and logical gymnastics, the mongering of letter-but-not-the-spirit technicalities, that characterised the Bush administration… and which still plagues New Labour.

February 4, 2009

Think local, act local?

Philip Blond’s interesting cover essay for this month’s Prospect, ‘Rise of the Red Tories’, advocates a new form of Conservatism for David Cameron, centred around the Tories’ new thinking on social issues (I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer says Cameron). Blond says the consensus that has emerged in British Politics – socially liberal-left, economically liberal-right – has failed on both fronts. The vice-versa, which would be a social conservatism alongside a leftist economy, seems a rather chilling prospect to my mind, but Blond thinks that an alternative could be to push through a full-blooded new localism which works to empower communities:

[Cameron] could start with four task: re-localising our banking system, developing local capital, helping normal people gain new assets and breaking up big business monopolies.

I suppose the emphasis on market forces (albeit at the local level) makes this a nominally right-wing policy, but with an emphasis on local, community ownership and assets, its not immediately clear to me why these ideas couldn’t be labelled left wing instead (indeed, I assume that confusion is why the article is illustrated with a graphic of Thatcher-as-Che). Yes, Conventional Wisdom would have it that a Labour Party under the Authoritarian Gordon Brown would not adopt such policies. But on the other hand, these ideas seem to be precisely the sort of wings that Hazel Blears’ Community Empowerment agenda requires, to get it off the pages of think-tank reports, and into actual communities.
Meanwhile, The Economist reports on ‘For-profit activism’, that is, harnessing the power of social networking to build-up buying power, to bend markets in favour of socially acceptable or environmentally friendly businesses.

Residents of San Francisco have been signing up enthusiastically for a new green-energy campaign called 1BOG. Short for “one block off the grid”, it aims to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy one block at a time, by organising them into buying clubs. Members get a discount on solar panels, and typically try to get their neighbours to sign up too. The city has also seen several recent examples of Carrotmobs—crowds of activists who buy everything in the winning shop in a contest between retailers to be the greenest.

As the article notes, we’ve seen these sorts of enterprises before, from the Body Shop, to Bono’s RED iPods, to Fair Trade Labelling, to the expensive soaps and hemp shirts you find in charity catalogues. Only this time, its local.
However, I would note a fundamental difference. On the national level, the kind of eco-friendly, ethical capitalism has found a niche within the retail economy. It has become successful, and crucially, normalised. On the other hand, the Carrotmobs and 1BOG seem to be one-off gimmicks. Indeed, the latter only works because a large company subsidises it as part of a marketing campaign. Its almost as if those people who are actually spending the money to make this work are participating in a leisure activity, rather than an everyday participation in a market that could sustain the local economy. We won’t be able to herald the coming of a ‘new localism’ until this sort of thing can arise and sustain itself without being shepherded by a well-meaning entrepreneur, or subsidised as part of a pilot scheme. Its not clear from these examples that this is possible.

February 2, 2009

Social Cost of Slavery

Via Blattman, by way of Sides and Sullivan, an interesting piece of research on how the slave trade had an impact down the generations:

we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily threatened by the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, family co-ethnics, and their local government. (pdf)

This reminds me of several things. The first is the debate between Alan Keyes and Barack Obama in 2004, when they contested the Illinois Senate seat that Obama eventually won by a landslide. Keyes essentially accused Obama of being “not black enough“:

Barack Obama and I are of the same race, but we are not of the same heritage. And there is a distinction. Race is something physical. Heritage is something that may have an element that is physical or biological, but that also includes other elements of history and experience–the kinds of things that have helped to shape the mind and heart of an individual and that are not determined by physics and biology. And we are of different heritages. I’m of a slave heritage, and he is not.

Although Keyes was right to make the distinction between heritage and race, he was wrong to think it had any electoral relevance. And in the light of the Harvard research, it looks like he was wrong about the extent of the differences between his and Obama’s heritage. Even if Obama, through his father, is not of slave descent, he is however from a people from whence slaves were drawn. And that brings with it similar social problems to bona fide slave children (as Keyes would have it).
Second, I’m reminded incidentally of the correlation between the counties that voted blue (i.e. Democrat) last November, and the cotton picking regions of mid-nineteenth century America.
Thirdly, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s formulation: “We are the heir of all ages”.
Which in turn allows me to ponder the idea of ancestor worship, popular in many African cultures. Taken literally, the idea that your forebears might be watching you seems like an irrelevant and primitive idea. However, seen through the prism of the Harvard research, the idea of being haunted by your country’s collective past takes on a new and very real meaning. The unease of great-grandparents long-since buried, still festers in the soul, and it cannot be excised by education, science or modernity.

Part of the 'Gambella Stories' series by Turkairo — Part of the ‘Gambella Stories’ series by Turkairo

January 23, 2009

Satire Resumes

Is it hard to make fun of Obama? Chris Rock:

He’s just one of those guys, you know, like Will Smith. There’s no Will Smith jokes. There’s no Brad Pitt jokes. You know, what are you going to say? “Ooh, you used to have sex with Jennifer Anniston. Now you have sex with Angelina Jolie. You’re such a loser.” What do you say? “Ooh, your movies are big. You make $20 million.” There’s nothing to say about Brad Pitt. [And with Obama] it’s like “Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids. You’re the first African-American president.” You know, what do you say?

Not so, Chris, not so. Jon Stewart (until recently labelled as Obama’s Fawner-In-Chief) has resumed the satire. And a good thing too.

Update: Other Inaugural Addresses

While Stewart compares Obama to George W. Bush, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight thinks that the new President’s speech had echoes of FDR.
Elsewhere, a MetaFilter user has located inaugural addresses dating back to 1901 (via Kottke). Watching at the Kennedy speech, I’m struck by how his delivery matches Obama’s on Tuesday. Neither “soar” in the manner we saw in Obama’s 2004 convention speech. Instead they seem businesslike and assertive, which is probably more appropriate. In fact, Kennedy’s delivery doesn’t age well – the parody of his style by Dan Castellaneta as Mayor Quimby in the Simpsons sadly damages the gravitas, I feel.
It strikes me that we may actually have seen the last of Obama’s barnstorming speeches. They were appropriate for a young, upstart candidate seeking to break a glass-ceiling and an establishment lock on the nomination. Less so for a President, who must exercise greater caution, diplomacy and tact than the Average Joe Politician.

January 21, 2009

Photos in the Crowd

The buoyancy of the President’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, at the inauguration yesterday, was refreshing and delightful. Its fashionable to lament the fact that children “grow up too quickly these days.” Its becoming equally fashionable to note the innocence of the Obama girls in the midst of the overwhelming pomp of campaign, transition, and inauguration.

Malia gets her own snaps for the family album (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

Especially noteworthy, bizarre yet endearing, was Malia’s insistence on taking digital photos of the event with her consumer camera (appallingly, though not unsurprisingly, E! Magazine has wondered aloud about how much those pictures would be worth). Most hilarious was the moment, right after her father’s speech, when she leant forward and asked the old man sitting in front to take a photo of the crowd, because he clearly had a better view. It was Joe Biden, the new Vice-President.
Meanwhile, a defining image of the inauguration for me was the sight of thousands of other citizens all stretching to capture the moment on their own cameras, phones and camcorders, something like this:

The clamour for the photo (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

This sort of image will become, has become, commonplace. I think this obsession with recording significant moments for ourselves is fascinating. Malia and The Crowd had two utterly different viewpoints on the proceedings, yet both exhibited the same urge. In both cases, there is an irrationality to their actions. The inauguration was long known to be one of the most reported events in the history of news media. On one level, its absurd that the First Daughter would need to actually press the shutter herself – the image of her father raising his hand will persist without her (I noted athletes doing a similar thing during the Olympics). Likewise, its absurd that the grainy figure of Obama raising his hand in a wave, as he strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, will not be similarly recorded in high-resolution, extreme close-up, by hundreds of professionals.
And yet, I’m as guilty of this as the next man. For example, was my recently posted photo of Gordon Brown at all necessary? To no-one but me, I would suggest.

And that, I suppose, is the answer. Contrary to what the reporters at E! Magazine might hope, Malia’s photos are not for public consumption. They are a personal aide memoir (much like this blog). The camera-phone photos, poor quality, though they may be, server as a document to one’s presence of the event, a self-generated certificate of attendance. The grainier the better, to the extent that poor picture quality actually becomes a mark of authenticity.

Update

ChicagoSuz, a commenter at Huffington post:

Weegee (my favorite photographer) would go to a fire and while all the other photogs were taking pictures of the flames, he would take pictures of the fire’s victims watching their homes burn. That seems to be what Malia is doing. While the media focuses on her Dad, she seems to be focusing on the people who came to see him. It’s a whole different perspective.

Update II

Here’s the sort of image I mean. The glow from the digital camera screens looks like fireflies:

President and First Lady at the Washington Hilton. Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com