While bemoaning the current state of the academic job market with some friends, it occurred to me that this market is exhibiting many of the same characteristics as urban areas in the US: it was built in the post-WWII boom, wasn't built for this many people, and is facing massive budget shortfalls for the foreseeable future.
Many cities in the US experienced a burst of infrastructure spending following the war as the US economy assumed the number one position in the world. As urban renewal spread throughout major urban centers, new roads, highways, public transit systems, water and utility provisions, and large scale engineering projects were funded by combinations of federal, state, and municipal funds. However, the explosive growth in the numbers of people moving to cities - not to mention who it was that was moving to and from cities (thus changing the tax structure of many municipalities) - has largely proven too much for an infrastructure unprepared for these influxes. Traffic nightmares, crumbling roads and bridges (especially you, Minneapolis!) and an inability to procure or use the right fixed equipment decreases the quality of life for many - though obviously not all - of those who inhabit or work in urban areas.
In the same way, a nascent US higher education system emerged from the post-WWII era. Strengthened by a burgeoning industrial-military-academic complex (Eisenhower included 'academic' in his original draft, but omitted it his speech), the GI Bill, and, in the 1960s and 70s, the Baby Boomer's entrance into college, higher education was extended in unprecedented and exciting ways. Many would would not have dreamed of a college education in the 1950s now consider it a right of passage - a necessity to participate in the professional job market. As the neo-liberal era winds down, without bringing any of the promised benefits to 90% of the US population, a tottering education complex appears, to those of us faced with the prospect of an academic career, on the verge of failure. Education, once a blessing, has become an albatross around our neck. All that had been promised to us as kids - get an education and you'll always be in demand - is now verifiably false. Urban life and academic life - both signs of booming prosperity - reveal the depth of the problem facing the US far better than Wall Street or the Dow Jones.
For many of us, we have too much education - as universities and colleges cut back on class sizes and tenure track positions, re-evaluating what is necessary when budges are taken up administering education, we find that competition for incredibly difficult and low wage work is fierce, to put it mildly. Too many people have entered this market but, because of the demands of student loans, rent and credit cards, we can't pull out. In an era of economic expansion, such as the 1950s and early 1960s, highly skilled or trained individuals such as ourselves would be in fine position to place ourselves in a good market or create new ones. As the economy contracts, and information is no longer as valuable a commodity as it was even ten years ago, we face an inhospitable future unless we - along with others whose economic outlook is similarly dire, make our own future: that is our only future now - to make it ourselves.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
On Radical and Rogue Archivists
Victor Serge is among the first of the radical - not rogue - archivists. After the Bolsheviks took power, he was tasked with sorting through the vast files on snitches, provocateurs and double agents. There was a vast wealth of information that had to be sorted, interpreted, and assimilated in some way to maintain the Revolution. Properly understood, this meant absolvement, prison or death, depending on circumstances, for those who had insinuated themselves into revolutionary circles in order to betray them. A mass of information was suddenly at the disposal of Bolsheviks and action was absolutely necessary for the survival of proletarian state.
Recently, a massive trove of information has been released by Wikileaks concerning US war and diplomatic policy and operations. The reaction to these releases has been moderately interesting, having elicited a mostly normal range of reaction: calls for Assange's head from the right-wing of the US, cries of hypocrisy from the 'international community', and uneasy lecturing on the need for the openness of information in a modern democracy from the 'left'. Among many, though, the question remains - so what? 'Anonymous', a nebulous group of cyber activists, took up Assange's and Wikileaks cause through online sabotage to limited effect. As the hacker magazine 2600 tried to show, however, these attacks are largely counterproductive. Rather than crippling Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, it creates the conditions under which they become sympathetic entities.
Overshadowed in all of the hubbub is the fact that very little of what has been made public in these cables is either surprising or new. Perhaps they confirm something about what many had thought about the way the US saw its role in the world, but as a pure release of information, there is little to keep it from dissipating into the ocean of information that the internet makes available - like a rock thrown into a lake. The reaction by the US state does also reveal something about information, in that this is one of the few times that the US has not been the aggressor in an information war and, as such, we see how it defends itself when provoked. Beyond that, it does not seem out of the question to wonder what use will be made of the bounty of information available to anyone who seeks it.
In a recent conversation, my neighbor, Jimmy, and I were discussing this very problem. Information exists, what was necessary, he thought, was for someone to draw a line between what the information is and what it means - that the US backs up dictatorships and uses international democracy as a ruse for its own ends. This, though, misses the essential element that Serge and the Bolsheviks implicitly knew: information, even if it reveals state machinations, is worthless without an institution in which to put that information to use. While our own times are far different than the Red Terror, that does not mean that its lesson are then consigned to the dustbin. If it is correct to say that information wants and needs to be free, and that it must be corralled and made to reveal its secrets, those secrets change nothing unless they are made to work within an organizational form.
Another step, though, must enter: Serge writes in What Ever Radical Should Know About State Repression that, "Nothing great is achieved without disinterestedness. And the autocracy had no disinterested supporters" (68). It is arguable that inertia is a defining characteristic of human life: unless it is made evident that a transformation of a given is not only necessary but also possible, very few people willingly engage in a course of action to address that given - whether that be picking up clutter, introducing more a more efficient operating system or changing the shape of a state. You could call this inertia 'disinterestedness'. If there is an active core on multiple sides of an issue, how those who are disinterested lend their support decides the issue. In the US, the conditions under which last three characteristics might provoke radical transformation are absent or weak. So, the question becomes, how are they installed?
That is where, I believe, rogue and radical archivists come into play. 'Anonymous', in the aftermath of its negligible affect, wrote that what must be done now is to cull the information that Wikileaks made available, distill that, and then make that public. That is a good first step. As the mass of information that the internet and networked communication makes available has ballooned, the need for accessing and assimilating information has become more dire than ever. Installing that information into organizational memory so that it can be activated in the manifestation of that organization is now an essential activity of those who would understand themselves to be on the political left. What the organizational form with a shape to challenge for the support of the disinterested looks like is yet to be determined, though, here too, there are hopeful signs on the horizon in the shape of international student movements and the international workers fighting against austerity measures. For those to move forward though, critical and radical archival methods are a manifest necessity.
Recently, a massive trove of information has been released by Wikileaks concerning US war and diplomatic policy and operations. The reaction to these releases has been moderately interesting, having elicited a mostly normal range of reaction: calls for Assange's head from the right-wing of the US, cries of hypocrisy from the 'international community', and uneasy lecturing on the need for the openness of information in a modern democracy from the 'left'. Among many, though, the question remains - so what? 'Anonymous', a nebulous group of cyber activists, took up Assange's and Wikileaks cause through online sabotage to limited effect. As the hacker magazine 2600 tried to show, however, these attacks are largely counterproductive. Rather than crippling Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, it creates the conditions under which they become sympathetic entities.
Overshadowed in all of the hubbub is the fact that very little of what has been made public in these cables is either surprising or new. Perhaps they confirm something about what many had thought about the way the US saw its role in the world, but as a pure release of information, there is little to keep it from dissipating into the ocean of information that the internet makes available - like a rock thrown into a lake. The reaction by the US state does also reveal something about information, in that this is one of the few times that the US has not been the aggressor in an information war and, as such, we see how it defends itself when provoked. Beyond that, it does not seem out of the question to wonder what use will be made of the bounty of information available to anyone who seeks it.
In a recent conversation, my neighbor, Jimmy, and I were discussing this very problem. Information exists, what was necessary, he thought, was for someone to draw a line between what the information is and what it means - that the US backs up dictatorships and uses international democracy as a ruse for its own ends. This, though, misses the essential element that Serge and the Bolsheviks implicitly knew: information, even if it reveals state machinations, is worthless without an institution in which to put that information to use. While our own times are far different than the Red Terror, that does not mean that its lesson are then consigned to the dustbin. If it is correct to say that information wants and needs to be free, and that it must be corralled and made to reveal its secrets, those secrets change nothing unless they are made to work within an organizational form.
Another step, though, must enter: Serge writes in What Ever Radical Should Know About State Repression that, "Nothing great is achieved without disinterestedness. And the autocracy had no disinterested supporters" (68). It is arguable that inertia is a defining characteristic of human life: unless it is made evident that a transformation of a given is not only necessary but also possible, very few people willingly engage in a course of action to address that given - whether that be picking up clutter, introducing more a more efficient operating system or changing the shape of a state. You could call this inertia 'disinterestedness'. If there is an active core on multiple sides of an issue, how those who are disinterested lend their support decides the issue. In the US, the conditions under which last three characteristics might provoke radical transformation are absent or weak. So, the question becomes, how are they installed?
That is where, I believe, rogue and radical archivists come into play. 'Anonymous', in the aftermath of its negligible affect, wrote that what must be done now is to cull the information that Wikileaks made available, distill that, and then make that public. That is a good first step. As the mass of information that the internet and networked communication makes available has ballooned, the need for accessing and assimilating information has become more dire than ever. Installing that information into organizational memory so that it can be activated in the manifestation of that organization is now an essential activity of those who would understand themselves to be on the political left. What the organizational form with a shape to challenge for the support of the disinterested looks like is yet to be determined, though, here too, there are hopeful signs on the horizon in the shape of international student movements and the international workers fighting against austerity measures. For those to move forward though, critical and radical archival methods are a manifest necessity.
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