Walking through Walls - Borders and the Future (part 2 of 2)

Following is part 2 of 2 of my presentation to the Border Crossing Lectures in Tijuana, April 29. (yesterday's Part one here.)



3. Virtual sovereigns and real networks.

In the Big Bend region of West Texas, a strange incident occurred a few years ago in which a bunch of real cowboys went to war against the virtual border wall. As they tell the story in the liberated territory of Marfa, where conceptual artists have taken over the old Indian-fighting Army bases and poets control the radio station, a craft from the Department of Homeland Security’s fleet of “OVNIs” fell to earth. The craft was a drug blimp, one of the tethered aerostats that shimmer over the plain like clouds chained to the yard, painting a zone of sophisticated electronic surveillance across the border area and into Chihuahua. When the blimp got loose, it started bouncing around the desert like some accidental surrealism, ignoring property lines and scaring all the cattle. So the ranchers rounded up a posse, hunted the drug blimp, and “killed” it. The government tried to arrest the cowboys for destroying government property, but gave up after realizing the cowboys might fight back.



The blimp was an unofficial component of the “virtual border wall” being developed as a somewhat science fictional way to secure the 2,000-mile long border between the US and Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security recently cancelled the “virtual fence” program that was being developed by Boeing for a fee of hundreds of millions of dollars. You might think that is because they figured out that imaginary fences do not keep the coyotes out. Quite the opposite: that announcement only meant that an even more sophisticated array of surveillance and repulsion technologies will be implemented at different points along the border, each tailored to local conditions. Many of these technologies are under development in San Diego at the headquarters of "HSARPA”—the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, a border security think tank modeled after the Pentagon’s “DARPA” (the people who brought you the Internet, armed space satellites, “Total Information Awareness,” and the Predator drone (also born in San Diego)). And they need your help, as evidenced by the broad solicitation for new technology proposals up on their website this year, including technologies that enable:



“Detection of, tracking of, classifying of, and responding to all threats along the terrestrial and maritime border – in particular, technologies that can:

• Classify humans versus animals in rugged terrain, concealing foliage, water obstacles, mountains, and other environmental constraints

• Lower false alarm rate with raised probability of detection...at least 90%

Operate at low power consumption levels—2 year battery life

Detect, exploit, interrogate, and remediate subterranean border tunnels

Detect and track low-flying threat aircraft

Improved analysis and decision-making tools that aid DHS watchstanders in evaluating information and making more timely and accurate decisions.

New and improved airborne sensors, including persistent, wide-area surveillance capabilities, for better land border security to assist in locating illicit activities, materials, or their means of conveyances.

The original Tijuana border wall is made of old portable landing strips—leftovers from the Vietnam War that were re-used in the Persian Gulf. Its descendant will be a force field derived from Star Trek, enabled by electronic eyes that see on, above, and below the ground.


[Pic: Author William Vollman peers through the border fence in Imperial.]

The government request for a machine that can “interrogate” a tunnel reveals the true strategy. The next generation of border fortifications will be invisible and essentially *imaginary*—an American exercise in State-sponsored science fiction very similar to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense against Soviet nuclear missiles, which did not have to be *real* to break the financial back of the Soviets trying to match it. The border wall does not actually need to work to fulfill its purpose.



In her 2010 book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, University of California-Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown makes a compelling case that the real purpose of the global boom in border fortifications is to restore the idea of the sovereign State, in a world where the nation-state is diminishing in relevance and coherency. In Brown’s view, the US border wall primarily exists to reinforce in the minds of American citizens the idea that the border—and the Nation—*really exists*. Because clearly, the border wall does not fulfill its intended purpose of repelling the non-state networks that infiltrate the border every day with unauthorized commerce in people and consumables. The border wall is an authoritarian variation of the “California Map Project” of artist John Baldessari, in which he made the map real by installing giant letters spelling out “C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A” in the actual places where those letters appeared on the map. The border wall draws the line from the map in “real” space, but as HSARPA’s call for ideas shows, it does very little to make that line “real.” Its declaration of impermeability and permanence seems especially silly when one looks at how fluid the border has been over the past 150 years, or how very porous it is revealed to be in a map that overlays demographic and economic data to show how deeply Mexican culture reaches into the Southwestern US (one-fifth to two-thirds of the population of every border county), and how deeply American corporate commercial networks reach into Mexico.


[Pic: Images from John Baldessari's "California Map Project"]

To the extent the next generation border security systems will work, it will not be because they actually function as physical barriers. It will be because people *believe in them* as a representation of the idea of the country they define. Government-designed surveillance and interdiction networks, operated by the inheritors of Dr. Strangelove’s war room, really only work in Hollywood reality—as an accepted narrative of government power that reinforces the identity of the citizen living in a protective Panopticon. But information does not pay much attention to border walls, and systems of centralized authority rarely succeed in controlling naturally-occurring information networks. The more important borders in the 21st century are the the borders between cyberspace and meatspace, which are rapidly being obliterated. Do you think Beijing will really be able to build a Great Firewall of China that will keep out Facebook? Maybe you should ask Hosni Mubarak about that.



Israeli commandos have scouted out the future for us. Ten years ago, the Israeli military faced the challenge of how to control the “feral city” of Gaza—a densely populated, continuously improvised, structurally complex three-dimensional urban labyrinth where, like the Baja border, alternative networks for the movement of edge-people and edge-commerce branch out whenever their movement is blocked by linear fortifications. The Israeli Defense Force chartered its Operational Theory Research Institute, dedicated to applying the poststructuralist theories of Deleuze & Guattari to the domination of Palestine. How do you turn the city into a weapon against its inhabitants? Break down your tactics to the squadron level, use helicopters as weapons platforms in a three-dimensional wargame, turn tunnels into “sources of fractal maneuver,” and train your troops to walk through walls. In his 2007 book Hollow Land, Architect Eyal Weizman describes how the IDF learned to see the city as the networks it harbors, rather than the lines shown on the map. To combat a network of tunnels, they created their own, adopting a strategy of urban “infestation” that ignores established modes of movement through the city. Instead:

To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall [of a house] and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain — sometimes for several days — until the operation is concluded.



These tactics have proven successful in IDF attacks on Palestinian networks. The Paratrooper Commander in charge of one of the first operations, a former student of philosophy and architecture, explained his conception of these maneuvers:

'this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. The question is how do you interpret the alley? We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. I want to surprise him! This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls...Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. I said to my troops, "Friends! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!"'



At the same time as the Israeli commandos were improvising their own anthills in the fabric of Gaza, virtual borders were being surpassed with even greater innovation in Tijuana. It was here that ingenious entrepreneurs first converted the imaginary wealth of an online “virtual world” into cash money in the “real” world, by disregarding the boundaries between the two worlds. The company Blacksnow Interactive set up the first “point and click sweatshop” here, paying unskilled workers cheap wages to spend long hours playing three simultaneous games of “Dark Age of Camelot” (a fantasy online multiplayer roleplaying game similar to World of Warcraft or Ultima Online), collecting magical talismans and imaginary real estate to be sold for real dollars on eBay. Litigation shut down the operation, but the law still struggles to maintain the newest borders between the real world and the emerging virtual worlds.



As we look at the border in an age of Network culture ascendant, we need to do so with the special goggles of a Deleuzian Israeli commando, and see the presence of the networks that are the real nervous system of the cities on both sides, networks that pay little attention to the border. The idea of the nation-state reveals its exhaustion as the states send tanks and bombers to fight non-state networks, have the secrets that sustain their power revealed overnight and en-masse through a single eccentric website, and find their decades-long grips on authority overthrown by smart mob revolutions incubated on Facebook, Twitter, and repurposed online dating sites. Network culture has little use for borders, other than as a tool of atemporal play—the way borders serve as instruments of time travel that help us escape surveillance in our present reality.



As we look at the robot eyes of the surveillance cameras, we need to pay more attention to how Networks let the people conduct surveillance on power. Consider the example of Trevor Paglen, an experimental geographer from California who connected the tail numbers of mysterious civilian aircraft with corporate documents and flight plans to expose and map the CIA’s secret program of “extraordinary rendition,” flying prisoners to secret prisons in faraway countries. In Mexico, UNAM’s Nelson Arteaga Bolleto has documented how the people of Monterrey and Reynosa (at least the young and middle class) use Twitter and Facebook to conduct networked surveillance of cartel takeovers of their cities. The combination of social media and ubiquitous computing through smartphones and their cousins is young, but incidents like these point us toward a future in which *the people* govern through constant real-time surveillance of those to whom power is entrusted. We already have the ability to see, and maybe walk, through border walls.



Network culture—in which most of the information ever created by human beings in the past several hundred years is immediately available at the click of a mouse—gives us the tools to see the border differently. These are the tools of hackers who repurpose networks, of musicians who create their works on laptops from mashups of a hundred other recordings. These tools reveal the atemporal nature of the border, as a space of constant change and intermixing, a process whose direction can be influenced by networked participants in its literal and semiotic space. We can see, for example, that the border is a fluid thing that has always moved. That the border is a permeable thing, and that its very permeability will define how it changes in the future. The geopolitical futurist George Friedman, consultant to major American corporations, plausibly predicts in his book The Next 100 Years that by 2030 declining population growth in the US and Europe will turn the current anti-immigration sentiment on its head, as governments from the north compete to attract immigrants from the south—and that demographic trends along the border will so radically redefine the cultural politics of the United States that the border will become either an anachronism of the old world of the twentieth century, or the focal point for military conflict—perhaps when the Tejano governor of 2050 decides the Army National Guard is under his control and he no longer wants to take orders from George Bush’s Mexican-American nephew, George Prescott Gallo Bush.



Projects like the intervention being conducted here by CECUT, Pepe Rojo and his students use these tools—the playful, atemporal tools of science fiction writers—to see alternate pasts, presents and futures of the border zone through which they are moving. To see how all of those versions of reality coexist in the minds of all of us here now, and each has the power to contribute to the manner in which those realities are manifested in the imminent future. The paramilitary fortifications of the border are also the irrigation structures of the more intermixed society to come, and our manipulations of the present can help the territory being incubated become one that is more authentically free than either of its precedents.



The movie about to be screened, Sleep Dealer, shows us a world in which `physical borders are irrelevant, because they are crossed through virtual means—whether Ramirez’s drone pilot bombing Mexican space by remote control from a California television studio, workers building American skyscrapers by controlling robots networked into their infomaquila, dreams and memories being uploaded by nomadic writers, or a young hacker manipulating satellites and listening in on covert operations from a concrete shed in rural Oaxaca. As you watch the film, see if you don’t agree that it is an excellent example of the cyberpunk aphorism: the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed. And consider how the technology of the Tijuana street is already finding its own uses for the things of the border Interzone, and how that will change the future today.

Walking Through Walls—Borders and the Future (part 1 of 2)

Following up on my post about my recent kidnapping by the Tijuana Liberation Front, I have been asked to release my hostage video, in the form of a transcript of the remarks I gave April 29 at the Border Crossing Lectures in Tijuana put on by the media studies faculty of the Autonomous University of Baja California and the Tijuana Cultural Center. Included are some of the slides that were visible to the lines of cars watching the talk as they crossed the border, as well as some web annotations. I plan to post the piece in two parts, today and tomorrow.

The speech preceded a screening of the Alex Rivera cyberpunk film Sleep Dealer, and tried to provide some context for thinking about the possibilities and futures revealed by that outstanding work.





Walking through Walls

1. Runners!

In Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Jacob Vargas plays Rudy Ramirez: a Mexican-American drone pilot who protects American corporate assets in Mexico from damage by the locals. Rudy is a clever variation on an interesting archetype in the American popular narrative: the Spanish-speaking immigrant who becomes an American soldier, often recruited by the special forces as a talented double agent to infiltrate his homeland. Unlike his predecessors—like Tom Clancy’s Cartel-buster Ding Chavez, Richard Nixon’s Cuban “plumbers,” the fascist future-yuppie Argentines of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, maybe even Dick Cheney’s pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi—Rudy Ramirez starts to question the reality and semiotics of the border, and the power structures it represents.



In a movie about borders, Rudy is the only character who crosses one. And he goes the wrong way! Or at least his culture tells him that, in the voice of the cyclopean robot fortification of future San Ysidro. Who leaves the shiny order of utopia for the dusty chaos of dystopia? Might there be a reason why the border wall is so much more intimidating from the US side than the Mexican side? The gate at the end of a metallic tunnel, guarded by a robotic combination surveillance camera, retinal scanner and machine gun—that plays Muzak while it decides whether or not to shoot you—conveys its true purpose very clearly, like the iron fences of a suburban gated community: to keep people *in.* The light that shines through the gate as Rudy crosses over signals that, in his search for Memo, the innocent hacker Rudy has wronged in his unthinking acceptance of his own culture’s narrative, Rudy is really seeking his *own* liberation.



The surveillance is greatest at the border because, on the other side, there is no surveillance—at least from the culture of your origin. No surveillance by your State, no extension of the omnipresent eye of social class, no more semiotic definition by the advertising industry’s chosen cultural referents. Borders are where we go to escape the eyes of our own society.



Watching Rudy Ramirez in this film, you realize that the prototypical Mexican border crosser in American genre cinema is an alien hunter: a representative of American property chasing criminals, revolutionaries, or stolen property. And that what they are really seeking is not the completion of their mission, but their desire for freedom from the alienating confines of their own society. The Texans in the Western are always chasing a killer, or Comanches, or Villa, but when they go over it is also their *own* escape to freedom—sometimes the hedonistic freedom of Prohibition-era Juarez; sometimes the freedom to fully express primitive instincts of profound violence, as in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; sometimes even the freedom to try to create a better community.



The armed Americans crossing the border are all like the Sandmen of Michael Anderson’s 1976 film Logan’s Run—the policemen inside a giant shopping mall city of the future who enforce the law of the computer that runs the society: preventing “runners” from evading the rules that sustain the society’s orderly luxury. When Sandman Logan-7 is sent outside the walls as an undercover runner, the odyssey leads him through a series of conflicts with the technology that controls him, and finally free to the green ruins of Washington, D.C., where he and his mini-skirted concubine find themselves a new Adam and Eve inheriting an entire continent of liberated territory. The American dream, renewed!



Of course, the reality of crossing over—either way—rarely works out that way. Causing one to ask: do you really need to cross the border to escape its confines? Might we find the liberated territory in our minds by more thoroughly interrogating the representational territory of the border? There are many entry points to the Interzone, and even more exits—sometimes through borders that disappear overnight.




2. Edgelands.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the elaborate series of border fortifications that physically expressed the “Iron Curtain” was dismantled. The walls and fences and no man’s lands that bisected Europe from Finland to Albania, including the German wall that divided two parts of the same country in half, were torn down. Like pulling a piece of tape off a painted surface long faded, the removal of the Iron Curtain revealed a weirdly preserved zone: border wall as accidental wildlife refuge. European conservationists have since made substantial progress in transforming the zone of the Iron Curtain into the “European Green Belt,” an ecological network of parks and reserves running from the Barents to the Black Sea.



Borders like the Iron Curtain and the US-Mexico line create edgelands: the blurred spaces between different land uses and territories that can be occupied by the invisible, the accidental, and the unofficial. The English poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts invented the term “edgelands” for their 2011 book of the same name, as a way to describe the unnamed transitional zones created where urban development meets open land. Farley and Roberts focus on the exploration of edgelands in the interior of their own country, as “England’s True Wilderness.” By giving a name to these invisible places that exist at the margins of all of our cities, they provide the rest of us a vocabulary to use to be able to *see* these places.




Edgelands represent the potential for liberated territory. The slivers of open land between jurisdictions and uses is often territory that cannot be occupied under the existing legal regime. Because it is environmentally delicate, or toxic, or a floodplain, or a failed business project trapped in development limbo, or quarantined paramilitary space such as the California border zone. Edgelands therefore become natural targets for habitation by edge-people—people without real property, without real legal identities. In the interior of the United States, a careful observer can find the improvised edgeland homes of the invisible people the society barely recognizes. In my town of Austin, Texas, I have found an earthen dome tent built from found materials in the shadow of a radio antenna along a busy street, a clan of Burmese fishermen living in an abandoned shack on a stretch of the Colorado River near the airport, a cave of fallen branches beside a stretch of railroad track running through downtown, protected with neon string, a plastic toy light saber, and a picture of Santa Claus. Edgelands are where we go to find refugees, favelas, commerce outside the law, and wild nature spliced in to human space.



The occupation of edgelands—by people, dwellings, business—gives tangible reality to the invisible world unacknowledged by the official systems of the State. The Peruvian economist and economic development proponent Hernando de Soto argues that the key tool for accelerating economic growth in “developing countries” is the conveyance of enforceable legal title to outlaw homes and unincorporated black market businesses. De Soto’s study of Egypt noted that 80% of the public housing did not officially exist: unrecorded residents had constructed several additional floors onto most of the public apartment complexes. In Latin America, de Soto observes that most small business activity is so small and informal as to exist entirely outside of the system: the State cannot track the activity, and the business-person cannot enforce their rights as an “owner.” Perhaps even more confounding is when the invisibles occupy spaces that are owned and created by Capital, but consumed by the edge—like the unfinished 45-story skyscraper in Caracas that has been taken over by two thousand evangelical Christian squatters who haul water and wood by pulley up to high-rise flats without windows or balconies.



De Soto’s real complaint is that there is a world that lives outside Capital—a world of things that exist in the sense that we can observe them with our senses, but have no official existence, because their contours and coordinates have not been described in the legal ledger book of the State. Things without borders do not exist, and the borders that matter most are the virtual ones: the codes that define official reality by describing what can be sold, and at what price.



In his 2010 novel Zero History, William Gibson tells the story of a *product* that evades Capital, by breaking these same rules. The protagonists of the story search for designer denim clothing that is produced in underground ateliers, distributed through random viral networking. Because it has no brand, no name, and not even a price, it does not exist in the commodified realm of Capital. It cannot be found until you stop looking for it. And the real story of the book is that, by devising a stratagem to prevent the products of their self-expression from being co-opted by Capital, the designers chart a path to their own liberation from alienation.

Here in the edgelands, there are other paths of evasion.


Click here for Part Two - Virtual sovereigns and real networks

Scientific Process Rage

Paul Vallet created a hilarious and astute cartoon version of the scientific process as viewed by the general public and by scientists for the Electron Cafe. In the form of flow charts, it's a reaction to how the media tend to depict research as straightforward and rewarding. Vallet depicts the real deal as messily, maddeningly complicated and hard. Which it is. Scientists have been forwarding this to each other and getting a hearty laugh of self-recognition from it.

I was kidnapped by the Tijuana Liberation Front

[Vid: Kiosk dispensing sf minibuks to puzzled pedestrian border crossers.]

This past May Day weekend I had the good fortune to be a guest at one of the more interesting events I have ever attended: a science fictional convocation on the U.S.-Mexico border (like, so "on the border" the Homeland Security guys could watch our Power Point slides without the need to use the surveillance cameras looming over us). The event was "Lecturas de Cruce" (roughly, the "Crossing Lectures"), a four-day series of lectures, round tables, and performances endeavoring to illuminate the border region as a zone in which we can see and create the future. The lectures followed a two-month program of science fictional interventions, DESDE AQUI VE EL FUTURO (roughly, "from here you see the future"), in which students from the Autonomous University of Baja California under the tutelage of Professor (and science fiction writer) Pepe Rojo presented visions of the future to the travelers gathered at the border. The event was sponsored and programmed by the Tijuana Cultural Center (CECUT) under the direction and management of literary director Mara Maciel and her colleague Samantha Luna.


[Pic: Maestro Pepe Rojo, a little spent after the last evening of programming.]

The interventions included a talking dispensary of free science fiction books, a newspaper of the future handed out to the cars queued in the 90-minute line to cross, dance performances by pre-programmed cyborgs, future scenarios printed on bookmarks and handed out for consideration by the crowds, and even a procession of devotees of an imaginary saint, the cyborg Guadalupe known as Santa Ste.la, whose appearance with her acolytes passing through the center of Tijuana caused a near-riot, multiple anti-Satanic genuflections, and several calls for immediate baptisms.


[Pic: The procession of Sta.Ste.la.]

The idea of science fiction as the source of artistic interventions in real life is a brilliant and underused strategy. There are precedents—Ballard's 1960s crashed car installations, the recent post-apocalyptic reality show, and all our 20th century American Tomorrowlands—but no real direct analog (I can think of) for an event in which the imaginations of scores of local college students are harnessed to season the arteries of border commerce with visions of dozens of imminent futures. In the atemporal age of Network Culture ascendant, I expect and hope we will see more such speculative interventions in the present.


[Pic: Cyborg dancer points the way forward: through your head.]

The final event, the lecture program, was held in an abandoned government facility, a former Mexican passport office a couple of hundred yards from the U.S. border crossing. This is the chokepoint for the whole region, at which cars and pedestrian crossers converge to take their place in lines that can take hours, surrounded by dispensaries of prescriptionless pharmaceuticals (and soda bottles of pseudo-Viagra) and billboards advertising budget plastic surgery. During the program, stickers advised drivers to tune into the lectures on local simulcast as they sat in the adjacent lanes of crossing; they could even see the slides of the presenters as they approached. Overseeing it all was a giant Verizon billboard featuring an image that keynote presenter Bruce Sterling duly noted could have passed for an eyeball-kicking cyberpunk book cover in 1985, but is now taken for granted: a lovely woman surrounded in concentric colored halos of network radiance, begging Mexicans to plug into her 4G as fast as possible.


[Pic: A captive audience (programming underway to left of photo).]

In addition to Pepe and Bruce, participants included leading Mexican science fiction writers Bernardo Fernández (aka Bef), Gerardo Porcayo, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, and children's author Francisco Hinojosa. Latin American sf scholar Professor Libby Ginway also attended and led most of the q&a. The program also included a screening of Alex Rivera's brilliant film Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk tale of near-future Tijuana, and a performance of improvised techno by Casa Wagner (who also ended the program with a wild night of trance-inducing electrocumbia).


[Pic: Surveillance interrogation device presented by yours truly for the consideration of the captive audience.]

The border is a perfect place to go to envision futures. The border wall articulates an insanely dystopian present—a DMZ far more intimidating than the Berlin wall was for those of us saw it live and in the flesh complete with schefferhunds and land mines. Approaching Mexico from the US side, you are admonished with escalating warnings that you are, in essence, playing with your life by crossing over to Narcoland. For those of us who survived downtown Manhattan in the 70s and 80s, or DC in the early 90s, it's like back to the Escape From New York future. What you quickly realize after you have crossed over a few times is the extent to which the border is a permeable membrane designed to reinforce the fiction of political jurisdictional boundaries that Network Culture (including the culture of the most powerful network: Capital) is obliterating—and, as Berkeley's Wendy Brown suggests, the increasing effort to reinforce the border with physical and virtual fortifications is really just an effort by an increasingly irrelevant sovereign nation state to sustain the idea of its existence. Revealing an American future in which either the Nation State no longer exists in a form we recognize, or sustains the fiction of its 19th-20th century version through co-optation of a media-doped populace backed by a nascent Homeland Security sort of tyrannical force.


[Vid: Casa Wagner makes free jazz Tijuanense from the sonic materials of the border city.]

So while you think about what your own path would be to get Snake Plissken out of the cultural labyrinth, I would point you in the direction of Tijuana, where you can get some of the best Lacanian Cochinita Pibil around.

All the sky... and I mean all of it

Now readers of Wired and Gizmodo may have already seen this (yeah, like we have such a huge crossover readership) but this is simply too spectacularly nifty not to share. The Photopic Sky Survey is something I would do if 1) I had a daring sense of adventure, 2) had an imagination large enough to conceive of such a project and 3) had astrophotography skills somewhat more accomplished than those of a nearsighted lemur. So what's the big deal? I'll let Nick Risinger explain:

The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.

In concrete terms, Risinger took a year to travel the globe, spending an inordinate amount of time in the western states of the U.S. and the western Cape of South Africa to effectively photograph the heavens visible from both the northern and southern hemispheres throughout the year. Encroaching light pollution has dramatically reduced the number of truly dark-sky sites on the Earth today, and Risinger had to travel quite a bit to reach these isolated areas. That's 45,000 miles by air, 12,000 overland. Any way you slice it, that's dedication. Click on the image above for a breathtaking tour of the largest true-color, all-sky photographic survey ever made.

Changing corporate gender: a case study.

The following is a prose version of a Twitter lecture I did yesterday over on my Twitter feed.

It was based on a fascinating article: Robin J. Ely’s and Debra E. Meyerson’s “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms,” which appeared in Research in Organizational Behavior v30 (2010).

The authors begin by examining the ways in which gender has become, for men, a dynamic performance rather than a static state of being. The authors compare how men define masculinity in traditionally male occupations, especially those occupations which entail physical risk: policemen, fire fighters, oil rig workers, soldiers, etc.

The traditional research has shown that men in these occupations try to achieve a kind of hyper-masculinity, but this comes with a cost: excessive risk-taking, poor decision-making, interference in training and recruitment, marginalizing women workers, violating the civil and human rights of workers, and alienating “men from their health, emotions, and relationships with others.”

However, the authors of this paper looked at “high-reliability organizations” (HROs), which are “organizations designed to avoid catastrophes despite operating in dangerous, technologically complex environments.” Studies have shown that male workers at HROs “deviate from conventional masculine norms. In place of toughness, these men avoid taking unnecessary risks, seek help, and inquire after failures.”

The authors of this paper, seeing the basic contradiction, did on-site examinations of two offshore oil rigs, which are HROs.

The authors recap typical male behavior in dangerous workplaces (not HROs): demonstrations of physical prowess, the idealization of strength, bravado in the presence of danger, the projection of the image of sexual potency, assuming the guise of being technically infallible (never admitting mistakes), covering up the mistakes of co-workers, and the “presentation of self as emotionally detached, unflappable, and fearless.”

The two oil rigs visited were in the Gulf of Mexico. As of the mid-1990s, the companies that owned them had a distressingly high rate of worker injury. So the companies built new rigs and went out of their way to do daily business differently, as a way to reduce worker injuries. That production, efficiency, and reliability increased as a result of this change was anticipated, but was not the main reason that the companies changed their ways of doing business.

Quotes from rig workers: it used to be that the “guy that was in charge was the one who could...out-intimidate the others...intimidation was the name of the game.” “They decided who the driller was by fighting. If the job came open, the one that was left standing was the driller.” But after the change in doing business: “we had to be taught how to be more lovey-dovey and more friendly with each other and to get in touch with the more tender side of each toher type of thing. And all of us just laughed at first. It was like, man, this is never going to work, you know? But now you can really tell the difference. Even though we kid around and joke around with each other, there's no malice in it. We are...kinder, gentler.”

The authors pointed out that: “importantly, these men did not repudiate traditionally masculine traits but they did not seem focused on proving them.” [italics in the original].

“Everyone–workers, managers, contractors–attributed this break from the past to the company-wide initiative to make safety its highest priority: ‘macho’ behavior was unsafe and therefore simply unacceptable.”

The authors point out that the ethos of individualism, which in the case of oil rigs is a kind of machismo taken to extremes) has been replaced by collectivism. “These men indicated that they were as committed to giving protection as they were grateful to receive it. ‘It’s for the safety of us out here,’ one explained, ‘and I appreciate that.’”

The authors give examples they witness of new hires from other rigs who had to learn how to ask for help, to obey safety rules, and to admit mistakes. One sample exchange: “At [company x], they don’t do this.” “You’re not at [company x]. Forget everything you know about where you came from. You’re here now.”

This emphasis on asking for advice and help led to greater administrative willingness to listen to input from lower-level employees. The informal company motto became "If you're out doing something, you're going to make mistakes. It's all part of the learning process." This lack of assigning blame extended to employees who tripped safety valves, stopping production and costing the copy big money, not being blamed. The mistakes were analyzed, but the employees were not punished, despite the financial cost to the company.

The authors: "In short, men routinely breached conventional-male norms, acknowledging their own and others' shortcomings as part of the learning process.”

Which leads to the really interesting (to me) stuff: the results of this change in the "emotional domain" of the workers.

Employees became comfortable sharing their problems at home with supervisors, as a way to help maintain group safety. One worker, first thing one morning, told his coworkers about his sick child and said: "This is what I'm dealing with at home. If you all would please keep me focused and understand if I'm a little distracted, I'd appreciate it.”

The authors: “Workers displayed raw fears in our presence, with no indication of shame.”

One inexperienced worker precipitated a shut-down because he followed the advice of his physically intimidating coworker. After error analysis "this exchange led to a larger team discussion about the need to guard against one's potential to intimidate, however unwittingly, or to be intimidated.” Production goals on the rigs “were stated in relative terms rather than absolute numbers,” which workers saw as concrete evidence of the company’s concern with safety over profit and the bottom line.
One of the oil rigs made light of the mistakes by establishing the "Millionaires Club," made up of workers whose mistake cost the company millions of dollars. "To become a member was not a source of shame, but rather a mark of being human."

One worker described "how he had become less blaming and more attentive to others' feelings" from the emphasis on learning from mistakes. "You realize you need to change when you see a look on someone's face after they made a mistake like that--and you see the hurt. Because that's something you don't want to cause."

For the workers, the definition of being a man changed. It "doesn't mean I want to kick someone's ass" or "being macho or arrogant." "I don't want to be a superhero out there. I don't want to know eveyrthing."

The money quote:

"A man is a man when he can think like a woman," which means "being sensitive, compassionate, in touch with my feelings; knowing when to laugh and when to cry." The authors add that "several interviewees corroborated this view, offering definitions of manhood that similarly emphasized humility, feelings, approachability and compassion."

In the final section the authors provide a theoretical how-to for undoing corporate gender. "By consistently putting collectivistic goals front and center, cultural practices anchor men to work goals that connect them to others. Men's sense that others' well-being is at stake in how they perform their jobs gives them a compelling reason to deviate from conventional masculinity when the work requires it."

The authors also touch on how the presence of women–there were none on the oil rig–might change things: "consistent with the finding that men 'place the highest value on their identity in the eyes of other men' male-dominated workplaces are a breeding ground for conventional masculinity." "Even in women's absence, men strive to prove their masculine credentials; hence, women's presence does not appear to be determinative."

Finally, as an example of the unusual (for oil rigs) "emotional domain" and "sharing concerns and advice about personal matters," an overheard conversation among men at lunch: "Sent home a tape of that Mozart and Chopin for Joe's baby, because it's real important for them babies to listen to music like that. Real soothing."

FLURB

The new issue of FLURB, Rudy Rucker's "Webzine of Astonishing Tales," includes a new story by me, "Medusa." Guest edited by Eileen Gunn, the issue also includes work by three amazing Mexican authors, Pepe Rojo, Alberto Chimal, and Bernardo Fernandez (in both English and Spanish), as well as an impressive roster of Canadians, Brits, and Americans: Doug Lain, io9's Charlie Jane Anders, Minister Faust, Leslie What, Kek-W, Robert Guffey, Michael Swanwick, and Rudy Rucker himself. FLURB is meant to provide a home for stories that are a little too "astonishing" for the mainstream magazins, and I am delighted to be included in such exciting and impressive company.

Check it out!