Gina Webb

What if we refuse to see? What would be the result if we refused images of devastation and destruction? Could we still bear witness to the excesses of war?

The result is more horrific than anything that can be captured in a single image. Vicky Moufawad-Paul, curator of A Space Gallery, presents us with “A Refusal of Images”. “Through abstracting and reconfiguring the notion of witnessing…[artists can] circumvent a system of images that are often trapped in meaning and over-determined by our viewing habits”.

With an ingenious use of space, and a knack for juxtaposition, Vicky brings together a multimedia project with photos and films from Toronto-based artist Rehab Nazzal and British artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Nazzal pushes us up against the Israeli wall where weekly demonstrations take place. In a world of “exhausted images of demonstrations”, Nazzal’s piece is mortifying precisely because there are no images; there is no focus. Submersed in tear gas, we are forced out of the realm of mere representation and into the realm of affect.

On the opposite wall is Broomberg and Chanarin’s video which features the journey that their camera makes between security barriers in Afghanistan. While the images we see on the screen are clear, there is an almost surreal feeling to the video. The hyper-reality of the video, and the calm and robotic movements of the soldiers create a drama that far out-performs representations of intensified conflict by showing us the logic of the military complex. In Vicky’s words, “The absurdity of the actions in the video rub up against the seriousness of the context of war and the beauty of the abstract photographic works”.

The photographs are set up in a similarly dramatic way: On one wall is Nazzal’s “Dead Sea Series” which depicts everything but the Dead Sea. As a Palestinian she is unable to get close enough to take photos of the sea, save for a few quick shots of the coast, which is “peppered with military paraphernalia”. On the opposite wall are Broomberg and Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died”, which is a series of overexposed film on days of heightened tensions in Afghanistan. The artists felt their images would be more effectively perceived by audiences as abstract images rather than literally displaying the events unfolding in front of them. The first image starts as an intense red and the last is white with small traces of orange. The result is a profound experience.

And finally, perhaps the most shocking and encompassing of the pieces is another of Nazzal’s films. Eerie because it is set up in a blackened room, all on its own. Petrifying because of the sounds we hear. Unbearable in its explanation. Unforgivable as it forces us to witness something we could never otherwise even imagine. The screen is totally black, with sparse flashes of white light. Nazzal, with her young children, was visiting her mother in Palestine when late one night her village was raided. Afraid to turn on the lights, Nazzal grabbed her camera and started filming from her window, though nothing could be seen through the thickness of night.

Images are always bound to the media in which they are depicted; they are doomed to always be mere representations of themselves. Sometimes it is more unbearable to witness the unseen, or to literally not see. When we stop obsessing over images, we can allow art to arrest us in other ways. With “A Refusal of Images” we are no longer being shown representations of war, we are forced to partake.

Joshua Moufawad-Paul

Perhaps the most significant science-fiction novel that stands above the genre is Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1979). A sprawling, surreal, and obscurist book of nearly 900 pages, Dhalgren has often been called “the Ulysses of science-fiction.” More daring critics have compared Delany’s novel to Ulysses itself, as well as other modernist novels, in order to shirk conventional genre boundaries. Indeed, Dhalgren is a difficult novel that has generally puzzled those science-fiction fans searching for sci-fi action and space opera grandeur.

Dhalgren opens with three sentences, the first beginning at mid-point: “to wound the autumnal city. So howled out the world for to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind.” An unnamed protagonist who cannot remember his origins, and who will eventually be referred to as “the Kid”, wakes up in a ruined landscape. He encounters a woman who turns into a tree. He finds a strange set of linked necklaces comprised of prisms and mirrors. He eventually decides to hitch-hike his way to the fabled city of Bellona that exists at the very centre of America. During the Kid’s journey to the fictional Bellona (and we are not entirely sure why he is driven to find this place), we learn that Bellona suffered some apocalypse: something to do with a science-based disaster, or maybe the moon, that drove the initial population insane. Now Bellona has been forgotten by the rest of America, the accident ripping it out of the collective memory, remembered only by the country’s misfits and exiles. When the Kid arrives at the outskirts of Bellona he encounters a group of fleeing women. They warn him of the city’s madness. They discuss whether they should tell him about certain people and events but decide he will eventually learn for himself, and instead give him an “orchid”; a complex set of knives that can be strapped around his hand. From here the story of Dhalgren begins, which never becomes more than an exploration of an insane and post-apocalyptic city.

The Kid is trying to make sense of both the city and himself, but never crosses the threshold of meaning. There are always signifiers that seem to indicate meaning, but since the city itself has been ripped out of understanding, the Kid can only approach, rather than grasp, a full comprehension of the Bellona Event. He finds a notebook filled with poems written by a William Dhalgren that might or might not be himself; he turns this notebook into a palimpsest, writing over its pages, which becomes the subject of the final part of the novel (“Palimpsest”) as well as a book the Kid publishes in an old printing press in Bellona under the title of Brass Orchids. Large portions of the book devolve into queer sex (the Kid, like Delany, is queer); other portions centre on racial divisions and racial violence (the Kid, like Delany, is a person of colour). And then, due to further madness and violence unleashed by the protagonist and his allies at the novel’s climax, Dhalgren ends with the Kid fleeing the city only to encounter a woman on her way into Bellona. In a passage that is almost word-for-word the same passage that explained the Kid’s entrance to Bellona, but with roles reversed and names replaced, the Kid gives this woman the orchid and attempts to warn her away. We are led to believe that this woman belonged to the group he encountered at the novel’s outset, though she cannot remember him because time perhaps has folded, and Dhalgren concludes in the following manner: “But I still hear them walking in the trees: not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the hills, I have come to”. The reader is meant to link the unfinished last sentence with the unstarted first sentence; thus the novel seems, at first glance, to be circular.

Yet, Dhalgren is more of a moebius strip than a circle. The end links directly with the beginning but the structure of the entire novel moves in loops. Moreover, there are numerous points of echo in the book where passages are almost identical to previous passages – though the meaning altered – and the protagonist experiences moments of distorted repetition. If Dhalgren is meant to be linked in the fashion of a moebius strip, then its meaning is distorted from the opening passage where the reader assumes s/he is at the beginning when the beginning is only a “beginning” because it has been severed from the end. Echoing the structure, there is a point in the novel where the Kid hears the name “Dhalgren” being repeated over and over but, because he only started listening halfway through the repetition, he thinks he is hearing the name of the monster from Beowulf being repeated: “grendal, grendal, grendal.” There is a jarring effect, a shift in consciousness, when he reads the name and understands that he had a backwards grasp of repetition.

Although Dhalgren seems at first to be about the search for meaning and identity in the face of apocalypse, this might be an asinine interpretation. For there are also moments when Delany appears to be obsessed primarily with quantum events (Bellona being one such quantum event that echoes forwards and backwards through time) and perhaps the overall collapse of the foundations of “meaning” itself. And there are other moments where Delany seems more concerned with what a moebius strip would look like in literary form. Or the problem of multistable perception; the schizophrenia of Bellona and the Kid replicates the text itself. In William Gibson’s introduction to the most recent edition of Dhalgren we are told that it is “a riddle that was never meant to be solved”––and perhaps this is the most appropriate interpretation.

Simon Granovsky-Larsen

Things haven’t been going so well for the United States of America. While the country was affirmed as the sole global superpower in the wake of the Cold War, the collective mindset of Americans was slow to catch up the decline of power shortly thereafter. The transition from bully to lost soul has been gradual—via an attack on home soil, the simultaneous loss of two wars, and the violent cashing in of financial debt at home and abroad—but the realization that America has painted itself into a corner seems to have come crashing home with forceful speed.

Consider the shift in how American might is portrayed on television. During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was arguably most prominent in the series 24 (2001-2010), where fear of terrorism was still matched by the stalwart ability to defuse attacks. Today, many of the writers and producers of 24 work to deliver Homeland (2011), a drama in which an American Marine returns from captivity at the hands of terrorists only to serve as their agent inside of the US. Faced with potential attacks from within their ranks, the domestic counter-terror apparatus responds with incoherence and futility.

More than the shift from terror-busting to helplessness, Homeland reflects the violent shock and trauma that have come to haunt the American psyche. The main characters on both sides of the show’s CIA-vs.-terrorist divide—played by Clare Danes and Damian Lewis—have suffered violence in their war roles, and their actions in the present are deeply affected by persistent trauma. Both live in a world of paranoia, fear, and painful memories, which affects their ability to perform their duties. As with the collective American experience, the shock of war and impotence was sudden, and its trauma has left them reduced, helpless, and fearful.

The themes of trauma and paranoia are also depicted outside of reference to war. In Take Shelter (2011), Michael Shannon plays a man preparing to protect his family from an imagined looming storm while he grapples with the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia. The pain of losing his mother to the same condition sets the stage, but his current trauma stems from violent nightly dreams involving his loved ones, which leave him uncertain of whom to trust. Again, the film is set up by recent shock and saturated with paranoia and a sense of helplessness.

These themes are repeated almost identically through the very different plot of Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011). Elizabeth Olsen, sister to the famed twin child prodigies, delivers an emotionally wrenching performance as a young woman who escapes a violent cult. The manipulative power of the cult leader sets over Martha slowly, but the shock of her experiences—physically, sexually, and psychologically violent—hits her hardest once she has left. Martha attempts to slip back into normal life, but is left incapacitated by her recent trauma and the fear of its return.

In both Take Shelter and Martha Marcy May Marlene, prescription drugs appear as the only available solution to profound psychological shock. We see this again in the Starz series Boss (2011): Kelsey Grammer plays a corrupt Chicago mayor whose long reign can only be understood as the backbone of the local 1%, but who suffers in secret from the onset of a degenerative disease. Mayor Kane engages in a medically-unsound attempt to hold onto power, but a political and personal sea change is at the doorstep, consuming him with a quite reasonable fear of his own demise.

The series and films discussed here are on the fringe of popular culture, but they share an emotional platform which seems to cut to the heart of the American psyche today. No mention is made of pain and trauma inflicted onto others by American military and economic chest-thumping, of course, but the resulting break-down of the home front has moved to centre stage. The wars were lost, the boys came home broken, the stock markets crashed and the bubbles broke, and all the while the powerful steered the course of the status quo. People are left traumatized, with medication pushed as the quickest solution, but with the storm of the unknown looming ever-threatening on the near horizon.

Gina Webb

The YU Free Press is going POP-culture! I’ve interpreted “science” – the theme of this issue – to mean science fiction. Here’s a look at some of the movies and video games that I can’t wait to get my hands on this year:

The AVENGERS! : What can I say about The Avengers? As a newcomer, The Avengers were one of my first real encounters with Marvel comic books. Superheroes, skin-tight costumes, explosions, global apocalypse, fun gadgets and an ensemble cast, including Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr. reprising his role as Iron Man, and Samuel L. Jackson being… Samuel L. Jackson (a.k.a Nick Fury). Oh, did I mention that Joss Whedon is directing it? The movie promises what can only be described as nerd porn. And it’s going to explode all over your face.

Twisted Metal: In 1995 a new, young director burst on the scene forever changing how we view and play video games. David Jaffe combined all the greatness of car racing games and all the brutality of fighting games, subtracted all the suck from each genre, to create an unspeakable hybrid beast, oozing sinew and particulate from every orifice. Twisted Metal was born under the unholiest of conditions and Jaffe is back to direct the 8th instalment in the franchise.

Prometheus: Prequels suck, right? WRONG. I don’t know anyone who isn’t excited about the release of Prometheus. From the director who brought us Blade Runner – redefining the face of science fiction film, Ridley Scott graces us with his talents for what has become known as a “spiritual” prequel to one of his most successful films Alien. Even though the film is not directly entangled in the Alien mythology (nor does it even take place on earth), Scott describes it as possessing strands of Alien DNA. If he is bad-ass enough to describe his work with that analogy, I am bad ass enough to experience it.

BioShock Infinite: Dystopia. Revisionist 1912 America. Survival. Horror. Immersive storyline. Philosophy. If the third BioShock is anything like its predecessors, I need not spend one more breath building up this devastating, thoughtful, discomforting world.

Xenoblade Chronicles: This is last on my list because it’s only being released on the Wii, and I regretfully don’t have a Wii. However, due to the bothersome dearth of original video games being released this year, I feel obliged to include this one. If I had a Wii, you’d better believe I would be in line for this game. The game takes place in the science-fantasy world of Bionis, where robots and magic mix gloriously. This game is perfect if you like long, involving games (100+ hours), beautiful, expansive landscapes and the freedom to stick to the plot or not.

Jesse Zimmerman

Just recently at York University, there have been complaints about a particular poster in the Student Centre that reads, ‘Zionism is Racism.’ To understand the meaning behind the poster, one needs to have a clear understanding of what Zionism is.

In this case, it refers to political Zionism, which is the ideology that permits the existence of a Jewish State. There are arguments made for other types of Zionism, some of which are not directly tied to the idea of a state. Due to the fact that the group displaying the poster is Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA), we shall assume that the poster is referencing political Zionism since the group is based on a political discussion, and this shall be the focus of this piece.

Political Zionism was once a political movement in the late 19th to early 20th century, favoured by a minority of Jews. When it began, it was largely supported by Christians, many of whom had the ulterior motive of shipping the Jewish populations out of Europe. Although different locations for a future Jewish state were explored (Madagascar, Uganda) the Zionist movement ended up settling in Palestine, which was administered by the British since the fall of the Ottomans.

What I wish to address in this piece is not the situation between the state of Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or the refugee Diaspora, but rather on the nature of Zionism and the concept of the ‘demographic threat.’ We know about the Jewish-only settlements dotting the landscape of the West Bank of the Jordan River and of the collective punishment of the population in the Gaza Strip. What I wish to explore here is the nature of Zionism in itself. There are three examples that come to mind that are not directly to do with the Palestinians whether they be Palestinian citizens of Israel or the stateless people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The focus of this piece will be on the inner workings of the state of Israel and why it can be considered a system of political racism.

Israel like many of the wealthier countries in the world has foreign worker programs, particularly caregiver programs that bring over workers mostly from South-East Asia, and in particular, from the Philippines. These workers are given temporary work permits but some try for citizenship as people do in the United States and Canada. It is estimated that there are approximately 300,000 such foreign workers in Israel.
Controversy has followed the Filipino community in the past few years, arguably starting in 2009 when current finance minister Yuval Steinitz blamed foreign workers for “the widening of social gaps.” At times, female workers lose their permits if they become pregnant, as these non-Jewish children are seen as a threat to the demographics of the state. Zionism requires a Jewish majority at all times, which is why, for instance, Israel does not recognize Palestinians’ right to the land. Since 2011, Israel has begun deporting the Israeli-born children of Filipino workers despite the fact that many of them attend Israeli schools and speak Hebrew fluently. There have been activist movements within Israel, both Filipino and Jewish, that oppose these policies, but as long as Zionism remains the state ideology, non-Jews born in Israel will have the threat of deportation hanging over them.

Another case of the ‘demographic threat’ to Israel is the Sudanese refugees who fled persecution, particularly during the Darfur crisis. Pro-Israel activists have long used the case of Sudanese refugees finding a haven in the state of Israel as a talking point to imply a kind of ‘Israeli benevolence.’ What these same pro-Israel speakers may fail to mention is the fact that these same refugees now face deportation. The Israeli government has stated that the reason behind the deportation is that South Sudan is now a country separate from Sudan. Meanwhile, tensions are still high between Sudan and South Sudan and there is fear that other crises may occur in the future. Israel may be deporting Sudanese refugees back into danger.

One may ask why the Sudanese refugees cannot simply stay in Israel, particularly when Israel’s proponents cite the original settlement as one of mercy and benevolence. The reason is simple. They are not Jewish. They are not the ‘right’ ethnicity to be able to stay in their adopted homeland. Imagine if Canada deported people for not being part of the majority after they took them in as refugees.

Why is it so controversial to describe these policies as racist?

The last example deals with the Bedouin of the Negev region, a largely sandy part in the South of Israel. Palestinian Arabs once farmed much of the land but most were expelled in 1948 to make way for the Jewish State. The Bedouin have lived a semi-nomadic life in this region, but since the founding of Israel, they have been pushed off much of their land to make way for Jewish settlements. These semi-nomads live in villages that were established before Israel’s founding and yet, because Israel is the only political entity that exercises sovereignty over the region, the government does not recognize these settlements.

Between 30,000 and 90,000 (possibly more in the long run), Bedouin Arabs faced relocation from their ancestral lands to make way for Jewish settlements in the Negev. They received resettlement in Arab-populated villages — which eerily resembles the story of First Nations in Canada and their own displacement. The villagers of al-Araqib have refused to leave and in turn, Israeli security forces have demolished their village nearly 17 times. This is a form of ethnic cleansing and no one should hesitate to name it as such.

These three instances of state racism merely represent a visible tip of the iceberg of Zionism and its results: the children facing deportation from their place of birth for their ethnicity; the South Sudanese refugees who were brought into Israel for superficial public relations reasons and then forced to leave; the Negev Bedouin dislocated to ethnic enclave communities from their ancestral homes. No matter how one wishes to phrase it, Zionism in its political form does represent a racist ideology.

However, there is a debate within Israel and Jewish Diaspora communities on these issues and we cannot paint all of Israeli society with one brush. The particular expansionist Zionism is what leads to the system of Apartheid in the West Bank, where Palestinians’ rights to the land are unrecognized and they are not granted protection by a state that expands into the territory where they live.

It is best that we familiarize ourselves with the terminology and what it means exactly, particularly the reality that political Zionism creates. It is better to go toward a solution by understanding where the criticism comes from, rather than to condemn it without fully understanding the point that is being made.

Nazampal Jaswal

It is easy to assume that the modern world is defined by science and technology, that it conditions our worldviews, but isn’t it the case that the opposite is true? Do our societal values and “worldviews” define science and technology? By valuing certain ideas, we give some ideas the opportunity to develop further while paying very little attention to others. People are constantly creating ideas and we, thankfully, are never short of minds that are constantly thinking, re-thinking, and creating.

However, ideas have a purpose, and if that purpose does not meet the criteria we want, it is cast aside.

This situation reminds me of some of my favourite cartoons: Rugrats, Angela Anaconda and Powerpuff Girls. Adding to the comedic mix of these shows are the wanna-be inventor fathers. Tommy’s dad, Mr. Anaconda, and Professor Utonium humour us with their relentless attempts devise the one invention that will make them big, but always fail to create something that anyone in the real world values. Their inventions fall short of success because of technicalities of immature design and because their inventions, no matter how ingenious, have no real use. Since society decides what ideas are valuable based on whether they meet our needs and wants, it shapes technology. We decide how we want to progress. I think the question to ask is: how do we decide what technological development is valuable? The ideas that we value are reflected in the culture we foster and the way we have organized our society.

Geared towards profit to sustain a livelihood, people create to sell by looking at what we need and what we are willing to buy and consume. This is how we have come to give value to creativity. We measure success by how much is sold, how many people read it, how many times we see it daily  value lies in quantifiable measurements.

Passion and creativity are only valued if they can be turned into a career, or something that can be commoditized. Ryan Gosling’s character in Blue Valentine said something rather interesting when questioned by his wife. Being so talented in music, why didn’t he consider finding a job in that area? He has, as she said, “potential.” He asks, what does that mean  to have potential? If all he wants to do is be a husband and father, why is that not enough? Can he not make music simply because he enjoys music rather than turning it into a career, or a job? Tommy’s dad, Mr. Anaconda, and Professor Utonium are confronted with the same problem – they are trying find worth and value in their ideas by trying to become the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

How we decide what is valuable for our consumption is reflected by our cultural values. Living in a consumerist world, we want our lives to be convenient, efficient, and constantly stimulating. We have a certain kind of life that we think we need to follow and we look to technology and products that will do just that.

For example, with social issues moving towards the centre-stage, there is a desire for ethical consumerism. “Ethical” products are all the rage and even if excessive consumption is part of the problem, we look to even more consumption to solve these issues. Slavoj Zizek in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, sees this as one part of culture consumerism, where we exist within our buying power, and being more “aware” of social issues, we buy ethical products that will make us feel good. It is important to recognize, however, buying ethical products is much easier than searching for and challenging a broader economic and political system that produces those social issues.

What if we had different guiding principles? What if we took efficiency, convenience, and the LCD television screens out of the equation and created a new framework for what we value? This isn’t to say that the mentioned criteria do not develop our society – they absolutely do. However, they develop a certain kind of society. It is important to take a step back, evaluate and ask: is this the society that we want? How are we defining development and what do we mean when we say, “progress”? Is this the direction we want our world to go in?

Science and technology do not develop without a purpose. By understanding and questioning that purpose, we have better control over how human society progresses. Our technological advancements and science are developed by our culture within guiding principles, not the other way around.

Amy Saunders

I didn’t really know what I was walking into. My friend had invited me two weeks prior to see Dr. Vandana Shiva speak, someone I had honestly never heard of. He described her as “the lady who’s like: ‘occupy all the crops!’” I had never been food and climate justice, so I did minor research, learning that the breadth of Dr. Shiva’s work investigates and aims for the betterment of the connection between human rights and the environment. What I also did not know was that, as an introductory speaker, Cree Environmental activist Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Mathias Colomb Cree nation, would speak about his experiences in Environmental justice, community action, and organizing. Clayton Thomas-Muller is a natural public speaker. He is charismatic, honest, and has an aptitude for interjecting humour during serious moments to lighten the mood and make the discussion accessible and comfortable.

During his talk on Wed. Feb. 29, in Accolade East’s lecture hall 102, organized by the York Federation of Students, Thomas-Muller discussed his opposition to Monsanto and the Tar Sands, and the relationship between food, the environment, and human life. Noting, “capitalism is the new god,” Thomas-Muller discussed the connection between the displacement of Aboriginal peoples, the placement of environmentally damaging oil refineries, and the economic benefits of this to the settler colonies of Canada. Utilizing Cree and Indigenous beliefs, the Indigenous Environmental Network (for which Thomas-Muller does the breadth of his activism) stands in opposition to projects like the Tar Sands in Northern Alberta. Thomas-Muller highlighted the relationship Canada’s Indigenous populations has with the Tar Sands, not only through the Tar Sands crude pollution of Mother Earth, but also through an institutionalized injustice, which Thomas-Muller calls, ‘environmental racism.’ Environmental racism is a harassment of the basic human rights of minority groups, and specifically, the Indigenous populations of Canada. It is the placement of minority communities in environments that are classified as uninhabitable due to their close proximity to factories with deadly emissions, oil refineries, areas used for surface mining, oil sands, and the like. This is undoubtedly an example of the systematized and normalized practices of modern-day colonialism in Canada. Put simply, Thomas-Muller states, “climate change is a problem rooted in social inequity.”

Unsurprisingly, we can see that Canada’s economic paradigm is embedded in colonialism and racism, with systemic environmental racism being driven by economic policies. The Northern Alberta Tar Sands is a convergence of all aspects of climate change, racism, colonialism, economic, and environmental injustices. While the subject matter of the talk was heavy, Thomas-Muller is a speaker that incites his listeners to act and mobilize. Upon closure to his talk, Thomas-Muller invited all listeners to join him in Ottawa in October for ‘Power Shift 2012,’ a day for thousands of students and citizens to march to parliament and demand an end to the injustices being committed against our environment.

Since attending Thomas-Muller’s talk, I have found myself reflecting on my notes every day, insisting that I will learn more about how we can affect change, positively, and efficiently, to the environmental situation. Daily, I notice one particular note I took during the lecture, circled, underlined, and now highlighted. This note was the most important note that I have taken from the entirety of the event, as it is personal, political, and a difficult question to answer. Thomas-Muller asks of me, and of all students and attendees in the lecture hall: what is your relationship to Mother Earth?

For more information on Clayton Thomas-Muller’s activism with the Indigenous Environmental Network, visit ienearth.org
Follow Clayton Thomas-Muller on twitter @ claytonIEN

Sabah Rahman & Amy Saunders

In a world that chronically suffers from historical amnesia and short attention spans, KONY2012 is no doubt a very effective method of consciousness raising. But as soon as the campaign went viral on the internet (over 50 million views in just its second day), some crucial criticisms about the campaign began to emerge.

The campaign KONY2012, led by Invisible Children, goes something like this. Use the internet to make Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), both rightly accused of war crimes in Uganda and recently other countries such as Eastern Africa, famous! The hope is to connect a broader global audience to the “invisibility” of both Joseph Kony and the LRA in the abducting and recruiting of child soldiers in Central Africa.

In many ways, this campaign reflects Western sentiments of the War on Terror. It speaks the language we are all too familiar with: the permeation of transnational terrorism onto seemingly borderless terrains coupled with an increased importance of surveillance and capture; the policing of national borders; and identifying terrorists who defy physical and immaterial guard posts. All of these have a crucial purpose within questions of broader existence and maintenance of US hegemony.

The Bush administration declared Uganda an ally in the War on Terror in 2003 and announced an accompanying $100 million USD “aid package” for Uganda including selected East African countries to heighten efforts in tracking insurgents. As a result, President Yoweri Museveni, (who has maintained his presidency in Uganda since 1986 and has been accused of massive corruption and human rights violations within his country) took his military offensive against the LRA to Southern Sudan in Operation Iron Fist in Mar. 2002. The offensive was considered a failure, but since then the international community has increasingly linked development aid to Uganda with Museveni’s personal political agenda in Northern Uganda and the militarization of the national army. The political and military conflicts in Uganda are historically drawn and incredibly complex, and the US is intricately linked to the Museveni government based on its own political and military interests in the region.

While the US relies on Uganda for a great deal of its arms trade in Northern Africa, and there have been recent discoveries of rich oil and mineral reserves on the outskirts of the country of Uganda, Joseph Kony and the LRA have moved on to neighbouring countries, causing continued destruction in their wake. You will not find any of this information in the newly famed KONY2012 campaign that has recently gone viral.

Throughout the two-decade conflict within Uganda, Ugandan parliament has worked tirelessly to find Kony, end his wave of destruction, and pick up the pieces left in his trails. But you will not find this in the hashtag KONY2012 campaign. Instead, you will find an old rhetoric, knee-deep in racial epithets, in which one white man, cheered on by his blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of the suburbs, promises to put an end to Kony and his army – if he doesn’t have the power do it, who does?

Utilizing simplistic message campaigns and the wonderful world of social media, Invisible Children, the NGO that has started the KONY2012 campaign, has overly simplified years of conflict in Northern Africa. What has resulted has been mass-appeal to what I would call “Facebook activism.” One click and lives have been saved; one post and suffering children are joyful; one tweet and a warlord’s army is dismantled.

Lauren Berlant, queer theorist and author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington, would prescribe these attitudes as dead citizenship: the idea that through consumption and exchange of capital, we are contributing to the betterment of the life of our nation, nationhood, and others. No need to question or be critical; through the buying of a KONY2012 bracelet, you are saving African children – you are a hero. This campaign also follows rhetoric of the West as advanced, free, and most of all the exceptional humanitarians the world needs.

The campaign valorizes the 21st century obsession of the gaze, and builds on a culture of celebrityhood that sensationalizes atrocity in similar ways that terrorism have captured the limelight. The UK-based newspaper the Guardian launched the Guantanamo Prison files in 2011 to showcase the 779 detainees currently imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. The website heading reads as follows: “Documents leaked to the Guardian give details of the capture and transfer to Guantánamo of 779 people, some of them 9/11 masterminds, many of them Afghan farmers. Find out who’s who, how they were captured, and why, according to the files, they ended up in Cuba.” It is hard to conceive of the usefulness of some of the information that is provided on the inmates unless here too is another attempt to profile graphically the invisibility of terrorism and those who commit terrorist acts.

While it is undoubtedly an atrocity what Joseph Kony and his army, and many like them have done, it is imperative that we critically investigate how we are implicated in these types of situations. How we are implicated in not only their existence, but their prolonged proliferation and, as such, begin to think of new ways to organize and mobilize solidarity, across-borders, and cross-culturally around such an important issues, and many others like it.

During one favourable online conversation vis-a-vis #kony2012, a good friend suggested: “why not stop this kind of violence at its roots: let’s forgive debts owed to Western countries by African governments; balance trade agreements to be a little more fair; and compensate for all that murder, slavery, colonialism, and resource theft.” What many new Facebook activists, and youth of the West (whom the campaign seems to target) have forgotten is the context of the conflict in Uganda and the history of the country in question. Speaking upon acts of solidarity, Chandra Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders, would simply say: history and context matter.

Paul Blackburn

We can all agree that exploiting human suffering for commercial gain is unethical and immoral. Yet, this is exactly what the Canadian oil industry’s ‘ethical oil’ argument does.

The ‘ethical oil’ argument, simply put, is that since Canada is not as oppressive a country as Saudi Arabia or Nigeria or Venezuela, that therefore it is ethically and morally superior to consume oil from Canada. At first, this claim may seem to make sense, but rather than demonstrate that the oil industry and its political supporters are compassionate, ethical and moral, it actually proves the opposite.

The “ethical oil” argument is immoral and unethical for three reasons. First, it exploits human suffering in developing countries merely to advance oil industry commercial interests. Second, by suggesting that consumption of tar sands oil will improve the lives of oppressed people when it will not, it manipulates the decent desire of Americans north and south of the border to relieve suffering and protect the environment. Third, it trades on Canada’s humane democracy to sell its product when it is the Canadian people – not the oil industry – that are responsible and deserve credit for this democracy.

Global demand for oil is so great that faster extraction of Canadian oil will not reduce demand for oil from oppressive countries. If the U.S. buys less oil from the Middle East, then India and China will step in and keep demand for Middle Eastern oil high, and business in the Middle East will continue as usual. The industry knows this. Therefore, buying Canadian tar sands oil cannot and will not create economic pressure on oil dictatorships to increase political freedom, reduce human oppression or protect the environment.

Unlike prior efforts to use consumer pressure to force change in oppressive regimes, the oil industry has not suggested that buying tar sands oil will support a boycott of oil from oppressive countries, allow the oil industry to cut commercial ties with oppressive regimes, result in economic aid for uprisings to overthrow dictatorships, or otherwise protect people in oil dictatorships. Instead, the oil industry seeks to hide the truth: that it has continued and will continue to work hand-in-glove with these same oppressive regimes.

Thus, the “ethical oil” argument showcases human suffering in developing countries and implies that buying oil from Canada will relieve this suffering, when in fact purchasing oil from Canada will not improve the lives of anybody in an oil dictatorship. The Canadian oil industry is merely exploiting human suffering solely for the purpose of advancing its own commercial and political interests. This exploitation is immoral.

Moreover, the industry is manipulating the decent heartfelt desire of good people who want to relieve the pain of other human beings and protect our global environment. What is manipulative is that the oil industry tells consumers that supporting Tar Sands oil will somehow help relieve human suffering and prevent environmental destruction when it will not. It encourages U.S. consumers to feel morally superior when in fact they make no moral choices.
Consumers do not know and have no choice about where the oil they put in their cars comes from. Gas station pumps are not labeled by country of origin or the morality of these countries. Instead, the oil we consume comes from a variety of countries, primarily depending on the cost of transportation, oil company commercial decisions and geopolitical factors.

Oil companies choose where the oil that we buy at the pump comes from and this choice is based on market factors, not ethics. In particular, the reason that the U.S. consumes oil from Canada is because of geographic proximity – not morals or ethics. It is cheaper for Canadians to ship oil to the U.S. than to other countries and Canada’s overseas export options are very limited. Since we consumers have no choice about the source of our oil or the reasons for buying this oil, it is not logically possible for us to take moral credit for buying oil from Canada or anywhere else. The “ethical oil” argument implies otherwise and therefore is misleading and manipulative.

Finally, it is important to look more deeply into why Canadian oil is claimed to be “ethical.” The basis for this claim is that Canada is a humane democracy whose laws and culture provide greater protection for human rights and the environment, such that the oil industry operates more ethically in Canada than it does in other countries. However, Canada is the way it is because of the past and current efforts of the Canadian people, not because oil sales made Canada this way.

Since oil is not responsible for Canada’s more “ethical” culture, buying oil from Canada is not what will sustain this culture. Oil or no oil, it is the will and democratic effort of Canadians that have made and will make Canada more ethical. If oil made countries ethical then we should expect that oil-exporting countries would be more ethical than other countries, but the opposite is more often the case. If anything, the oil boom in Canada threatens Canadian democracy because oil industry money and power profoundly corrupt democratic governments in part by saturating the wallets of politicians. Trading on Canada’s ethical heritage to sell a product is a way of taking credit for moral and ethical choices that the oil industry did not make.

The truth about the “ethical oil” PR campaign is that the industry is using human suffering and environmental destruction in other countries to justify the oppression of indigenous people in Canada, the destruction of enormous areas of virgin Canadian forest, the pollution of some of the purist water in the world, and the emission of disastrous amounts of air pollution into our global skies.

Exploiting human pain for commercial gain is immoral. Manipulating the good intentions of honest people for commercial gain is unethical. Trading on the humanity of a democracy bought with the conviction, sweat and blood of its people to sell a product is profoundly disrespectful of the generations of everyday people that have kept Canada free and humane.

The “ethical oil” argument is manipulative, dishonest, base and vile. The falsely pious who smugly trumpet it, including Prime Minister Harper, Governor Schweitzer of Montana, and a choir of other politicians and oil industry executives and PR flacks should stop their hypocritical crowing and reflect on the lack of ethics in “ethical oil.”

Cory Doctorow

The following article based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, December 2011, and has been shortened for our purposes at YU Free Press. The full-length version can be found at http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html.

General-purpose computers are astounding. They are so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they are for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself. In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had Sneakernet. We had floppy disks in Ziplock bags sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms. They introduced physical indicia, which the software checked for — deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors — and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy. These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these did not stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

Typically, the way this happened is a programmer (in possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself), would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn’t. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the rights to watch a movie for a Euro  sell it for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information — and what might be charged for each.

Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the right to move music from the player to another device. How could you stop that once you had given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.

You must now also stop the user from saving the file while it’s unencrypted — which must happen eventually — and you must stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, enabling them to permanently decrypt the media and ditch the player app entirely.

Now you have three problems: you must stop the users who figure out how to decrypt from sharing it with other users. Now you have four problems, because you must stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs and tell other users how to do it too. And now you have five problems, because you must stop users who figure out how to extract these secrets from telling other users what the secrets were!

That’s a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the ‘WIPO Copyright Treaty,’ passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. This created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and extracting media (such as songs and movies) from the unlocking programs while they were running. It created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and hosting copyrighted works or the secrets. It also established a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to interact with lawyers, and judges. And with that, illegal copying ended forever; the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world. As they say on the aircraft carriers, ‘Mission Accomplished.’

That’s not how the story ends, of course, because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve. In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. Copying only got easier following the passage of these laws — copying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get.

It is tempting to conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it is fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power. But I have another theory about what’s happened.

It is not that regulators do not understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law. MPs and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We do not have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we do not have a Senator from the great state of urban planning. Yet those people, who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, still manage to pass good rules that make sense. That is because government relies on heuristics: rules of thumb about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue. Unfortunately, information technology confounds these heuristics — it kicks the crap out of them —in one important way.

The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it is unlikely I would succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can’t we do something about this?” the answer would be “No.” We do not know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to criminals. We can see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that it would be foolish to risk changing them in an errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies — and society was on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies — no one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

However, if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I requested a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars, the regulator might say “Yeah, I’d take your point, we’d do that.” We might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say that once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars. We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them.

This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network — the PC and the Internet. If you think of computer software as a feature, a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that is running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature. The heuristic would lead you to think that a computer unable to run spreadsheets or games would be no more of an attack on computing than a ban on car-phones would be an attack on cars.

And, if you think of protocols and websites as features of the network saying, “fix the Internet so that it doesn’t run BitTorrent,” or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves,” sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy signals,” or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network” and not at all like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

The rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It makes you part of the vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless.

So, our regulators go off, they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are, suddenly, numbers that we are not allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we are not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is the mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it does not stop people from violating copyright. It bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement — it satisfies the security syllogism: “something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done.” As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation does not go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

Today we have marketing departments that say things such as “we don’t need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that does not run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it does not run programs that I have not authorized that might undermine our profits.”

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we do not worry if it is still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. What is problematic, is that we do not know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we do not like, is prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user’s knowledge, or over the objection of the computer’s owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware.

In one famous incident — a gift to people who share this hypothesis — Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit’s existence by causing the computer operating system’s kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. That’s not the only example. Nintendo’s 3DS opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you have not altered the old firmware in any way. If it detects signs of tampering, it turns itself into a brick.

Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it only runs “signed” operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from operating systems unless they allow for covert surveillance operations. On the network side, attempts to make a network that cannot be used for copyright infringement always converge with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. Consider SOPA, the U.S. ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ which bans innocuous tools such as DNSSec — a security suite that authenticates domain name information because, they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures.

Canada’s Parliament did not vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation’s fisheries, and a thousand other issues. The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish — not a war.

Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We do not have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. A radio is no longer a crystal: it’s a general-purpose computer, running software.

Consider radio. Radio regulation until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and cannot be easily altered. You cannot flip a switch on your baby monitor and interfere with other signals. But powerful software-defined radios (SDRs) can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher or air traffic controller, just by loading and executing different software. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, and asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in “trusted computing” machines. Ultimately, the question is whether every PC should be locked, so that central authorities could strictly regulate their programs.

Even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to fully-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. It does not take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers.

Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. All attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we have spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it has just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.

We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that run on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger  the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Tor Teens/HarperCollins UK novels like For the Win and the bestselling Little Brother. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London. Cory Doctorow is a proud York University dropout.