Google in the Tower

UPDATE, DEC.14, 2009: LiberalWatch has now been renamed "KeyWiki."

Since Professor Dan Ryan slowly wrote the word "GOOGLE" in the observation tower of the Panopticon on our chalkboard, I've been telling everybody about it. Revealing the "panopticization" of our everyday lives is a staggering, endless activity (and so collegiate..), and focusing on the internet alone provides plenty of meat. I've been thinking a lot about whether people will reach a tipping point with the freakiness of the internet, the speed with which we lose control over what of ours is sacred and private, and how it stays that way.

The other day, I Googled myself to find a radio story I'd done, and play it for a friend. The first result? A link to all of the notes I'd posted to Facebook--no login needed, full text. This includes a summer address from a few years ago and a plea for letters, a goofy survey taken by my roommate and I, a roommate posting, and various political links. ANYONE could see this?!

I tinkered with my Facebook settings, and tonight, set out to re-google myself. On the third page of results, I found this link:

http://www.liberalwatch.org/index.php/Sonya_Rifkin

It's a wiki, and the information on me is a rearranged, categorized version of a bio from the website of an organization where I interned last spring and summer. With certain omissions, and some things italicized as direct quotations, it remains verbatim. The source link is from that organization's website. There is no other information about me there. But it clearly was pulled from an arbitrary scan, not a meaningful search for my associations and history.

Before I go on--a word from the anonymous wiki-ers at LiberalWatch:

Our mission

Liberal Watch promotes liberty and freedom through the free and open sharing of information about the radical left.

What we do

Liberal Watch is a wiki, which means anyone can improve it. By adding your knowledge and fixing mistakes, the quality and depth of Liberal Watch information improves over time.

Why we do it

We believe in the power of information to transform politics, and we're committed to making the most knowledge available to the greatest number of people. We believe that the more informed we are as voters, the better our government becomes.

Liberal Watch isn't a part of any political party and we don't support candidates. We're simply a community of users dedicated to transparency in politics, on both sides of the aisle. Our users welcome responsible, knowledge-building contributions from anyone who wants to participate.

Ok. So I began searching LiberalWatch. People I knew. The entire city of Oakland. Organizations.

It became clear right off the bat that the content was generated according to a narrow, somewhat arbitrary set of search interests, collected from select websites, and run through some kind of format that arranged information from preexisting bios and membership lists into familiar wiki categories: early life, education, and so on. Profiles represented things like membership on the boards of organizations, and all of the members' profiles would be similar. The pool of associations seemed relatively small.

I searched my father. He is a prominent executive vice president at a progressive labor union, and has hundreds of internet hits. No profile. Neither the past nor present presidents of that union has a profile--and all three are certainly more prominent "liberals" than I. Interestingly, though, all the members of the staff and board of the organization where I interned have profiles, all sourced from the same web page.

To expand on the fishiness of the methodology behind the wiki, I searched Angela Davis. No doubt there would be a wealth of information on her--anything ranging from her arrest in 1970 and the mobilization that followed, to her academic work teaching at UC Santa Cruz. What constitutes her profile on LiberalWatch? To start, it's shorter than mine. It mentions her positions with the Committees of Correspondence, the Rosenberg Fund for Children, and the Women of Color Resource Center, as well as the names of other (past and present) board members of that organization. The source list is comprised of the three websites of the organizations cited.

I searched more. It became clear that either the wiki automatically trolled certain sites, or the users were highly selective--the people and organizations profiled almost exclusively involve connections to communist or socialist organizations, ideals, or affiliations. If this is, as the "About" section claims, an unaffiliated site in pursuit of "liberty and freedom" via transparency, it's awfully particular.

The kicker is almost too obvious to report--search Barack Obama, and any questions about the selectivity of the wiki's users' definition of "liberal" are put to rest. The information exclusively focuses on his supposed affiliation with various known "communists" and "socialists".

There is, it should be noted, a User List for the LiberalWatch wiki. The only user with an active link goes by the username Russell19. His one line profile?

"G'day, the name's Russell. The need to expose socialist extremists is evident, and this wiki proves very useful towards that end."

Well, LiberalWatch wasn't lying when they said they don't support candidates or political parties. Sure, their understanding of "both side of the aisle" may be a little fuzzy. They just represent the roiling right wing keyboard-tappers and their increasingly vocal presence in anonymous politicking. They've always been around--let's not forget that. I don't want to contribute to fear-mongering of any sort by speculating about their rise under Obama, and the potential for violence, although I believe there's truth to that. But the coincidence of their appearance on the national radar (whether masked as the interests of the public, or exposed) and the increasing ease of obscuring and dispersing accountability through technology warrants attention.

The rising internet, media and organizing presence of far-right conservatives masquerading as freedom crusaders is still noteworthy, but certainly not new. What continues to be startling is the degree to which these technologies allow people--and their interests--to hide. The process of verification and sourcing keep getting more complex, and the public persists in being pretty lax about screening this information.

There has been some (not enough) pushback to the radical right wing media's assertion of objectivity and straightforward reporting (thank you, Rachel Maddow...), but where is the toehold for accountability with wikis, PACS, or advocacy groups that form overnight? When I was growing up, my grandparents and parents told me cautionary tales about the FBI knocking, and left me to imagine the girth of their individual files in the bowels of Washington D.C. I understand the pervasiveness of government surveillance, especially of leftists, however defined.

As a child of the Internet generation writing this, and a leftist who knows her history, I feel a bit like a wacky alarmist and a prude at the same time--we all know the Internet is watching us, and if we knew the government was anyway, what's the big deal? And furthermore, my generation is quite comfortable with the former reality. So while we shouldn't panic about our Facebook settings, or our Google results, or reinvent the wheel about surveillance, perhaps we should remember that as organizers, we have to keep up with these things. They sure keep up with us. Maybe be more vigilant, or maybe not squander our energy, I'm not really sure....but eyes peeled, people. The tower is watching.

brush your teeth!

Foucault's talk about discipline and routinization has me thinking about all of the ways to take that framework over the top, to its farthest reaches, where routinization begins to seem like the most human tendency.  It's said that humans "naturally" categorize and classify things around them--is this true? What have sociologists had to say about this?  And when it comes to routines we are taught to maintain for our own benefit, what then of the power dynamics inherent in any such relationship? The value imposed on the dentist or parent who instructs a child to brush their teeth twice a day, for their own health? What of that kind of routinization?  Can we enter into analyzing the subjectivity of health, or is this a point at which we have decided that discipline is necessary?

When is discipline and routinization, or "exercises," necessary?

danner: red cross torture report: what it means

thoughts....

*In thinking about this rhetoric of national security, I can't help but think how MACHO it all is--based on the same insecurities as any other kind of chauvinism--it's political chauvinism, the refusal to be wrong at any cost, which is rooted in a power system that rewards popularity and palatability and abstract loyalty, and eschews actual policy in favor of perceived character. It's about muscle, like the U.S. is that age old tragedy in which the guy drinks the beer, beats up the pansies, and goes home at night and lives in the closet! Or something!

*It's interesting that Obama's arguments against torture revoled around

1. Cultivating anti-American sentiments, which Americans tend not to blame themselves for anyway

2. Increasing Arab and Muslim mistrust of the U.S., which Americans have little popular regard for as it affects diplomacy or reputation, only insofar as it deepens a mutual sense of hatred..

3. Claiming that our policies have increased the recruitment of "terrorists", a direct affront to Cheney's argument, and a claim that is the most alarmist out of Obama's statements...a concession to the rhetoric?

*I can't help but feel that many people, when pressed, would justify torture if the victim were a terrorist, which is not something the Bush administration is really going for, but it is enlightening anyway...might uncover a desire for retribution, avengement..also relates torture to guilt--who has the power to determine who is deserving of torture?

thoughts on mr. foucault: punishment

Question: p.85, What does he mean by the illegality of rights?

*I know the Enlightenment was considered a big turning point for the concept of punishment, which was influenced by new notions of the individual self, but it seems that the evolving world of punishment took indivuality and ran with it on its own after that, to some interesting ends--on p.89, I was taken with the idea of the 'contract,' the individual as party to a social contract, thus binding them to their own punishment by virtue of participation in society. Very iiiinteresting! A different kind of guilt--guilt to king--guilt to god--guilt to society...and later, we will come to the guilt to self and micro-societies--the family, the race, the neighborhood..hmmmm...

the public

I'm very interested in the evolving role of/for the public in punishment. Today, the public's main interaction and complicity in the penal system is in the form of taxes and jury duty. We fund a massive penal system, including prisons of increasing sizem, with skyrocketing numbers of inmates. And we are also asked to represent a peer judicial opinion, the jury of 12.

foucault the quotable!

sticky noteworthy:
(from discipline and punish)


p.11: "...from being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights."

p.25-6: "..the body becomes a useful force only if it is...both productive and subjected."

p.103: "A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at this stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain."

p.106: "Law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature."

thoughts on mr. foucault: torture

a compilation of revelations, questions, and muses i had while reading:

(from "torture")

*It's interesting that throughout this section, Foucault refuers to the procedure of execution as 'punishment,' or as the passive, post-tense, 'death' --never as killing or muder. Would this be ascribing morality..? A window into Foucault's sensibility as a writer/reporter of torture? He condemns it via complex, well rounded arguments, and maybe that's why he doesn't feel the need to call it murder...he does, however, seem to be a man to call a spade a spade...

*(Re: the trend of moving away from punishment as spectacle) UH, Foucault---what about punishment way post-18th century--like LYNCHINGS. Hel-looo?! The point of lynchings was, however, to degrade the victim back to the ages of deserved corporal punishment, and spectacle was absolutely a part of that. Where did the individual's culpability/body stand in lynchings? The body was considered contaminated, was target as much as the soul, which was either considered inherently corrupted or unsavable, or both...

*Evolving ways of including everyday people in the justice system ((LINK TO POST ABOUT THAT)) --jury vested with responsibility of a certain judicial culture vs. onlookers who may someday find themselves punished (deterrence)

padlocks and redwoods

Hiking with my mother through Redwood Park yesterday, I was coming down from the city's highs, taking in the damp leaves under my sneakers and the immense, humbling trees, when I looked up to see a small wooden fence against a rising hillside, and in front of it, a small platform made of slippery two-by-fours. The wood was old and had turned a green that almost matched the park's natural floor, but it rested on top of something hard and metal, still discernible through the moss. Between the plywood and the base were three metal padlocks, hanging equidistant across the platform.

Padlocks in the woods! A lock had never looked so strange. In the middle of an ancient redwood forest, where all of nature's most vulnerable secrest to survival take the beatings of visitors, weather, disease and exposure every day, there is something so important it needs to be kept under lock and key! The obvious explanation--that park rangers kept emergency or maintenance supplies there, and did their best to disguise the container--didn't even matter. The presence of security in the middle of the woods revealed the human urge for secrecy and containment in all of it's man-made paranoia. But still, it was powerful: For all that we could touch and see in the park, all of the opportunities for exchange, there remained something completely closed off and inaccessible. It felt offensive, in a way, to be meditating on one of nature's greatest creations, and be surreptiously accused of still maintaining some human desire to steal.

Padlocks in the forest--society's fears drive society's rules...