missed call: the influence of cell phone culture on political polls

Politics and prophecy have ancient mutual origins in military tradition. It is obvious why knowledge of the future confers strategic advantage. Once a tradition of mysticism and ritual, prophecy now involves the application of algorithmic calculation to large data sets for the production of useful extrapolations. This is how finance capitalism evaluates companies, how Target uses sales data to know about a woman’s pregnancy before she does, and how campaigning politicians know which doors to knock on or avoid. In the era of big data, we should not be surprised that big money remains the dominant influence.

If it seems as though new, contradictory polls are produced daily, then we can thank the news media for increasingly relying on polling data to provide inexpensive programming. Commercial news is an entertainment product, a consequence of media conglomeration by large multinationals. In this context, polls quantify the drama of the electoral road and turn the relative boredom of electioneering into an adult videogame formatted for inexpensive mass consumption. Of course, without editorial discretion on the part of media agencies, this process often results in the publication of polls bearing dubious statistical legitimacy.

Gauging public opinion requires time to properly accomplish. Survey length and complexity dictates cost, and media organizations need to produce other content while waiting for the survey to be completed. As a result, new survey techniques which greatly simplify survey questions while reducing the time and budget required for data collection have come to the fore in the prediction industry, with the resultant products ready for media consumption. Some polling companies such as Angus Reid and Abacus Data have transitioned to online polls of dubious legitimacy. Most companies, such as MainstreetTechnologies and Forum Research – often cited in Toronto media – use interactive voice response (IVR) technology, a self-aggrandizing term for computerised phone surveys.

So what exactly is the problem with telephone polling in the 21^st century? Telephone collection of public opinion data from a random selection of Canadians has long been the gold standard for the polling industry, as landlines existed in virtually every residence in the country and data could be collected in a cost-effective manner. However, academic and industry studies have noted that the recent decline in the response rate to telephone surveys has greatly impacted the validity of data produced. Reasons for declining response rates are numerous, but often involve technological developments such as line screening and the adoption of mobile phones. Unlike the phone books which graced every home when landlines were common, wireless carriers have not coordinated their databases to produce a national cellphone directory. Furthermore, due to built-in caller ID and pay-by-the-minute billing, cell phone users are more prone to ignore calls from unknown numbers. As a result of these issues, many telephone surveys omit cellphones from their sample sets, as it is difficult and expensive to correlate demographic information with individual numbers.

Youth, urban professionals under the age of 40, renters, and low-income voters in particular are not being captured by polls relying on landline survey data. Governmental research suggests that mobile-exclusive residences currently represent nearly 19% of Canadian households, a number that is sure to rise as nearly 65% of people under 35 report using mobile phones exclusively. As a result, poll data is skewed toward older, wealthier voters in rural and suburban communities, reflecting a bias for conservative candidates. This bias evidences in polls as reported by the news media, but often vanishes once votes are actually counted on election day: witness the last Ontario election, in which poll data almost universally predicted a Conservative victory, while the actual election granted a majority win for the Liberal party. In a similar manner, Olivia Chow’s popularity lies with demographic groups not captured by landline surveys and so may not be reflected in poll results indicating a race between John Tory and Doug Ford.

According to polling companies, the use of IVR along with advanced statistical analysis results in a rate of predictive accuracy comparable to landline telephone surveys and other established methods for gauging public opinion. However, more often than not, polling companies simply do not perform the requisite statistical calibration to legitimate their results, suggesting that their data acquisition methodologies emphasize turnaround time and affordability rather than statistical viability. My own calculations indicate that IVR is only accurate when the results of numerous polls are averaged over a much longer term than the daily surveys being reported in the news media. Importantly, the long term trend is not reflected by individual studies, which vary wildly from the long-term median.

As a result of focusing on short-term results skewed by unrepresentative population samples, the news media often misrepresents public opinion to the voting public. With an increasing number of miscalled elections, hopefully the public learns the sense of editorial mistrust and critical evaluation which the news media, in thrall to the temporal acceleration of market forces, have relinquished. 

Published for rabble.ca 

Robin Williams -- the unsayable: thoughts on comedy, suicide, and modern capital

I’ve never written about a celebrity before, never having been moved, except perhaps with the detached professional guise of a film and media scholar, by the relatively crass marketing of a famous person as a human image or the banal, interchangeable films they tend to inhabit. Certainly there are favourite actors and performing artists who have made particular influences on my life. Some of them I even had the luck and pleasure to meet and work with. But celebrity culture is an inward-facing mirror which doesn’t really appeal to me in or of itself. I don’t consider it evil or a waste of time for those who enjoy the soap opera lives of the tabloid famous, but on a personal level I do find most of it exceptionally boring. Not the desires which lead people to obsess over celebrities, the desires which lead to lines of fans waiting outside of film shoots or premieres, or to express their desire creatively through jpegs and fan fiction. That’s not boring at all. That stuff is legitimately interesting, mostly because as a representation of the flows of capital more generally celebrity culture is the leading edge of a particular revolutionary politics which renders (or reflects) most of civilisation as a docile and manageable collective. What I’m bored by is all the talk following talk following what is, essentially, nothing.

Everyone keeps reminding us how fame is so often ephemeral and insubstantial. How it does little to appease the demons of those who have been made famous. We watch in necrophiliac fascination as celebrities turn against themselves and increase their fame by self-destructing live over realtime media. Drug and sex scandals which disrupt or emphasize our love of the self projected onto an object-person for our consumption. Palliatives for our own troubled lives, certainly, or perhaps a dose of intrigue for the absurd tedium of the contemporary leisure society in the early twenty-first century. How could they possibly throw everything they have away just to pursue temporary vices? we ask ourselves and sit happy in our self-satisfaction.

And then the suicide of Robin Williams lit up my digital feeds with one, overwhelming network of affect. A shared emotion distributed widely over small data packets. A person often described as the funniest person on earth was so tortured by what was not public, by what could not be made public, that he took his own life. An actor who was forced into the childhood psyche of a generation of North American youth born between the mid-1970s and the 1990s by means of Hollywood’s globe-leading position at the forefront of the complex of technological and financial interests which comprise modern (and postmodern) life. A comedian known for insanely energetic physical antics and a lightning-fast wit who became the voice of a modern middle-class who wanted to watch life on television. Someone who has brought so much joy to so many people that it is incomprehensible to many that he took his own life.

And so the story continues, and that is why I felt the need to write about his death. Robin Williams was an example and a possibility for the weird and disruptive hyper kids who had to navigate life in the age before pharmaceuticals and the stranger-danger, penal-colony policies of parents picking up their children from school turned everyone grey and docile and paranoid and corporate, looking for answers in simple questions with readymade solutions. I was introduced to Williams when my mom watched Mork & Mindy on television and she let me stay up late, and then again at the age of ten or so when I discovered the scatological excesses of Williams’s HBO stand-up tapes on Beta. Live, Williams seemed to be in full control of his lack of control, and his manic, adult-onset Tourette’s was a revelation to a pre-adolescent living in Mulroney’s vision for a clean and sober Canada focused on the numbers game. Robin Williams acted exactly as we were told not to act. Manic, hyperbolic, enthusiastic, continually in search of play. These are not the virtues of the successful office bureaucrat or entrepreneur, whose pageantry makes the world go round despite the lack of resources to see the spinning continue for much longer. Robin Williams was the turning point between kids who were policed by teachers and kept acting up and kids who were policed by society with insurance-covered drugs in convenient child-proof packages.

Comedy is an interesting thing. Often springing from tragic individual lives, comedy emerges to placate the wounds of the social, often by shocking the wounded and the non-wounded alike into a new kind of self-recognition. It is among the most dangerous of our political pleasures, and we often see it among the first victims of undemocratic or totalitarian censorship. Comedy is disruptive because it takes an ontological pleasure in this tragedy, of seeing suffering through to transcendence. It is often a defence against the self-hatred which plagues many creative and intelligent people who by their natures are wracked and sometimes hobbled by self-loathing and doubt. Most importantly, it is and must be a social phenomenon. Comedy does not isolate, except perhaps those who don’t get the joke or don’t wish to try. It is a bridge for the perils of contemporary habitation within the various and often conflicting flows of desire produced by a multitude of individuals. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, as the holy fool, the trickster, and the clown permeate much of the world tradition for myth and storytelling. These figures often serve to redeem their societies through the revolutionary subversion of pleasure. Of course, the Dostoevsky of The Brothers Karamazov only partially anticipated the dynamics of modern capital and the society it created. 

The celebrity life of Robin Williams serves witness to this capacity of contemporary life to make martyrs of us all, to celebrate the dissolution of our own revolutionary self-interests into the Q1-Q4 marketing strategies of the massive industrial conglomerates in control of so much of our technological media. Hollywood tamed Williams not simply through formulaic scripts and hackneyed characterisations, but through sheer success. The You’ve Made It! feeling which permeates the everyday among the mansions, cafes, and nightclubs of Hollywood and soothes – even if only temporarily – the unpleasured suffering of the not-famous. Money rolls in, everyone talks about you, and you’re in every big movie with your face splashed across the ad campaign. And then the act loses its edge as focus groups and mid-level executives weigh in on where everything all fits together in the contemporary marketplace. The authentic becomes the marketed, not inauthentic but differently authentic, an authenticity of massification, of mass duplication. But isn’t this what we’re all looking for as we troll our jobs and our friendships and the media we choose to play with looking for a moment of temporary relief from ourselves, from this process of looking? An incessant search, and one which always finds the same emptiness leading forward into more searching. Frankly, I do not wonder why many of those creative people who have found commercial success tend toward self-destruction. Self-improvement and self-loathing are mutually-contingent phenomena.

The conversation about Robin Williams and suicide is rapidly passing, and as expected we’re watching nostalgic clips on television instead of working to understand mental health issues with any degree of enthusiasm or sensitivity. We need to accept that some of our most interesting people are doomed to self-destruction, but this does not mean that we need to accept death. Self-destruction can manifest as a living force, and one with an austere and significant revolutionary potential. This dynamic is scattered across the history of revolutionary activities, whose gestures have so often been co-opted into the power structures which excluded them. I cannot help but view Hollywood as the benchmark for such progress in capital – the avantgarde is made safely digestible for mass consumption. This is both its terror and its revolutionary impulse, in one simultaneous gesture of productive consumption. No wonder that Hollywood film making is one of the most capital-intensive industries currently in operation. As the whole industry is fuelled by desire, the whole industry can manifest and vaporize like changes in the weather. This is why the large conglomerates play everything safe, and why comedy in particular is rendered docile, a domesticated leisure item which sits well with the livingroom furniture. And yet other potential dynamics remain in play: the Janus/Dionysian duality of Comedy centres it at the vanguard of the possibilities for the revolutionary disruption of normalcy by means of an avantgarde which breathes life into the corpses made by capital.

Robin, you’ll be missed.

Find more information about suicide and suicide prevention here.

open letter to Christie Blatchford of the National Post

‎Hi Christie,

While it is currently rather late in the evening, I just read your article in today's post and felt the need to respond. Not to the content of your article, which demonstrates that you are more of an opportunistic person than the deathbed Layton whom you set up as a martyr for the left. Such would prove an obvious and unnecessary reply to your writing, and I am sure that your email is currently overflowing with spectacularly colourful words indicating support for Mr. Layton in opposition to your inane prattle. Rather I am asking about the point of your words and the meaning behind them, beyond simply your paycheque.

Public figures have public deaths. Mr. Layton's was not unduly spectacular. Instead of simply letting the matter go, and writing about something more important than your own politics, you have positioned an argument based on a view that media coverage is the sole public. Other than a Liberal MP, no "normal citizens" are quoted. If you had done so, their words would indicate that they went about their unspectacular days unspectacularly. Surely you understand that the media organizations are fueled by viewership which translates into advertiser revenue, and the (unexpected) death of a notable public figure will often receive a full day of coverage on the news networks, with other stories being relayed by means of text crawlers or news highlights.

Surely you watch enough television to understand the limits of news broadcasting relative to the "hot story". To be frank, your paltry analysis of the public and/or media is limited to the CBC and Stephen Harper and is, as such, a complete joke. The tone of your words, on the other hand, is far from humorous. Your article is at best a rather selfish attempt to diffuse what conservatives often accuse as a weak and irrational emotion: the bleeding heart. Don't cry for Jack, you say. He's a schemer.

Frankly, not specifically to speak to the blackness of your kettle, but your pose around the funeral casket demonstrates that greed truly is the virtue of the damned. Unlike most of the people who have or are about to email you, I don't want you to go fuck yourself or anything, but if you aren't a better person than suggested by your opportunistic article, perhaps you had better go do that.

PS: I agree that Jean Chrétien was a bit of a douchebag today, but that's why you focus your nonsense on him rather than take a shot at a cancer patient.

Regards,

Disaster is the New Normal

Earth Day came and went this year with little fanfare. Token stories about turning off the lights and cycling to work made their usual rounds in the news media. The 24-hour news networks sent camera crews to schools to watch children sing and make paper signs demonstrating the need for everyone to recycle things like paper. As always, nothing really changes for most people. Just the passing of another single day devoted to all things Earth-friendly – whatever that means – during which the penitent ritually cleanse their sins from the rest of the year. And then at some point in the late morning, news broke about a massive oil spill happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

British Petroleum, the company which “owns” the oil well, reports that 5,000 barrels of oil per day are spilling into the ocean, while independent experts have calculated a rate of flow as high as five to ten times that amount. For the past three weeks, we have all watched as the circus shitshow of BP’s improvised attempts to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf have failed. Their latest effort – a tube which has successfully diverted some of the oil to ships at the surface – is clearly intended to recover oil in order to bring it to market, rather than actually stop the flow of oil into the Gulf.

Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate the environmental disaster have centred upon not allowing the oil to reach the Louisiana and Florida shorelines. The logic in play revolves around the fact that the oil which stays underwater will not threaten anyone’s opinion on BP, offshore drilling, or oil use in general. Nevermind that the real environmental damage occurs under the surface of the water, as the marine ecosystem in the Gulf collapses due to contamination. Or that the Gulf of Mexico is connected to every other oceanic body, to which the oil could spread. In the age of the televisual out of sight is, of course, out of mind.

While many among the talking heads on television enjoyed their own hyperbole about this event having the potential to be the single worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States, the reality is that the Earth has been bleeding like this for decades. The BP oil spill is merely a singularity which makes visible a much larger field of gravity.



Certainly, there are many legitimate concerns about how the spill happened. It is true that the oil industry was able to lobby American lawmakers to the point where lax regulations and an “industry knows best” mentality removed some safety protocols which may have averted or mediated the spill. However, pointing fingers at the companies who successfully sell their products to consumers who want them is misguided. We North Americans are absurdly inefficient in our use of energy. It is our desire for an abundant supply of oil which convinced BP and other oil companies of the benefits of offshore drilling. We must now understand that the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico are being discoloured by our inability to reduce oil use when alternatives to fossil fuels are increasingly presenting themselves.

In this capacity, it is we who are spilling the oil into the gulf, and we don’t stop there. As an aggregate dynamic, oil consumption is a process of continual spillage. We spill the remnants of oil into the atmosphere after it has been burned for energy, and we spill oil into the landfill after it has been transformed into plastics. The fact that such “spills” are relatively small in terms of each individual allows each of us to justify our mutual environmental disaster as the “normal way of doing things”.

As we get used to an increasing number of wide-scale environmental disasters, the rather ominous prospect arises that we have come to accept disaster as the new normal. In the wake of continual news about environmental damage around the globe, one might say that the BP spill is just another oil spill. Once the spill has been “contained” – an absurd impossibility – we will move on with our days, go for a drive, and buy another soda.

We must understand that humanity now functions as blind gods on Earth. Ours is the Anthropocene era. Our desires produce change which affects the entire planet, and we are engaging in this change without any idea of the consequences. The first conscious change we need to make is rhetorical. Whenever people talk about environmental issues, the phrase “saving the planet” comes up. The problem with this phrase is that it abdicates us from our responsibilities. Most people do not view themselves as heroes who “save” things, but as normal people living normal lives. They ask themselves How can one person make a difference? and so they don’t attempt to change their lifestyle much. Instead of “saving the planet”, we need to strive to “not wreck the planet”. Such a phrase might then allow a person who chooses to drive four blocks to the corner store to view this action in terms of wrecking the planet instead of not saving it.



There is one hope which must be retained, no matter how remote and complicated the scenario presents. Several years ago, BP adopted “Beyond Petroleum” as a new motto for the new millennium. Perhaps after a few more months of oil contaminating the waters which sustain life on this planet, human civilisation will finally understand the sublime and graceful logic of these two simple words.

Gas High

As another week passes in 2008, we read daily reports about the rising costs of gasoline in this country. Motorists scream in alarm as gas prices continually reach new highs: greater than $1.20 per litre in Ontario; greater than $1.35 per litre in Québec. Rural commuters complain that they require nearly a quarter tank of gasoline just to reach the nearest gas station; some of them question the futility of remaining employed when faced with the economic reality of paying more to commute to work than they actually earn at their job. Every month of the year 2008 has seen a significant rise in the oil futures market, which as of April 23 has priced the May crude oil inventory at nearly $120 per barrel. That might not sound like much until you consider that only 10 years ago the price reached an all-time low of $11.

Over the course of the 20th century, we got so used to cheaply-produced, easy-to-access oil that we put it into everything. The biggest user of oil is of course transportation. We must not only consider personal vehicle use, which in and of itself is vital to a modern high-tech economy. Nearly half of all transportation in North America is freight. In order to stock local stores with all of the consumer products which we take for granted, oil is a cost input. Many of these products are currently shipped by trucks, which constitute the least-efficient mode of freighting goods to stores. As the price of oil rises, naturally the cost of everything that we buy – from chewing gum to plasma televisions – will increase as well.

On a more fundamental level than transportation, the world is bearing witness to the most dangerous reality of our present era. Food prices are escalating drastically as food producers must index their prices to account for the rising costs of their fuel and oil-based fertilizer inputs. Canadians may currently enjoy consuming tropical fruits in the dead of winter, but that luxury will not be so readily available to working families as the cost of a can of peaches approaches $5. While many understand that food prices invariably rise with inflation, citizens of western countries will not peacefully tolerate an exponential rise in the cost of such a basic provision as food, the cost of which will marginalise them as equally as the west has marginalised so-called developing nations over the past century.

Look around your house and you will locate innumerable products and services which would not exist in a mass-market context without a readily-available supply of cheap oil: plastic products, fertilizers, medicines, cosmetics, clothing, building materials, household chemical agents, home heating, and electricity (in some areas of North America). It is unlikely that modern industrial civilization will be able to continue to produce the cheap plastic items which currently populate our lives and our landfills. The economically marginalised of the future will enjoy short, brutal lives digging through landfills in search of the plastics of the 20th century, from which oil will be reconstituted and utilized by those wealthy enough to isolate themselves in a transplanted 20th century lifestyle of oil dependence. I hate to simplify reality and push a metaphor too far, but oil is and always was a dinosaur whose extinction was prolonged by human genius.

Y2K was an expression of the millennial angst inherent in a transition between centuries; it shared a tradition with medieval anxieties from a thousand years ago. Collectively we breathed a sign of relief as the computers continued to function and the planes did not fall out of the sky. Then we all moved on with our lives to enjoy the new millennium. Peak oil will fulfil these dormant anxieties and prove to be the long tomorrow which will obliterate everything that modern civilization has come to appreciate as “the good life”. In the pages of View and elsewhere, myself and others have repeatedly stressed both the nature and the importance of this concept, and I will not repeat myself here except with the following provision: without accounting for future growth in oil use and potential arctic deposits, there exists slightly less than 30 years of conventional oil reserves on the entire planet. Most people reading this article will be alive thirty years from now.

Don’t worry, you might say; in Canada, we have a few trillion barrels of oil, which will fulfill the oil needs of the planet for at least the next century. While I will presently ignore the fact that one hundred years is not much time when placed along the scale of human history and that such mathematics merely postpones the inevitable for a few generations, a more important fact must be considered. Canada’s tarsand oil deposits represent the dying vanities of modern industry. They are an environmental nightmare second only to China’s legion of coal plants. More importantly, they are the most expensive source of oil currently known. Much of the tarsands cannot be economically developed at even today’s high price of oil. These deposits will become financially feasible as oil approaches $200 per barrel and nuclear reactors, needed to evaporate the water necessary for oil extraction, start to become commonplace in the prairies. Ask yourself if you will truly enjoy a world in which the only way to produce enough oil to meet the “needs” of the world is to price it beyond the reach of the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants. This is the paradox which will terminally damn the world’s poor and middle classes.

Industrial civilization will transition from bathing in oil to rationing its use to those projects deemed most vital. Enlightened leadership will currently require the proper investment of oil as we enjoy the peak of world production – building massive-scale renewable energy plants and mass-transportation networks; reserving enough oil for the medical requirements of the next century; and perhaps most importantly, rationing enough oil for the production and distribution of affordable food supplies. Only then will the economic and social hardships of the transition from the era of plentiful oil to that of marginal reserves be minimized.

Citizens of democratic countries must demand action now and not when the pumps run dry. Resource scarcity leads to panic, which in turn leads to massive social unrest and violence, which in turn leads to civil and international warfare and ultimately to fascism. With a degree of willpower, sacrifice, and Obama-esque positivism (“Yes we can! Yes we can!”), then modern civilization will prove stronger as a result of the transition from a society of waste and excess to one of mutual and exponential socio-economic benefit. It is however my greatest fear that the true lessons learned over the 20th century – namely greed, vanity, and avarice – will ultimately lead to indifference toward the plight of those left out of the oil loop. Of course, the Pentagon in the U.S. has its own mathematics concerning the issue, namely the use of nuclear weaponry to dissallow foreign oil use by foreign populations. Darfur, Haiti, and Iraq are the opening wounds in a process which may prove to scar us all. Welcome to the 21st century.

forward to the future

One day soon, computer AIs are going to datamine things like email, and discover interesting patterns of "structural" anxieties manifesting through email forwards.

I received the first copy of this email in December of 2000, shortly after the first Bush election. I then received a whole bunch of emails with slight variations on this text shortly after the 2004 election. Suddenly, in early 2007, this forward returns to my Inbox.

you can tell that this text is a response to an election by the date given for "Come-Uppance Day", which is November 2. The presidential elections are always in the first week of November, and the 2004 election was nov. 2. Weirdly enough, this latest round of circulation doesn't follow any American election, save last november's midterms which saw the Democrats take back the House and Senate -- a move slightly antithetical to this email's call for "Revocation".

The attribution of this letter to John Cleese is what I find most interesting. This little addition opens the door to all kinds of theories. The reader is granted an authoritarian vindication for the sense of enjoyment they gain by reading the email, thanks to a more credible satirist. A desire for Empire, represented not only by the British history invoked in the email, but also by the legal framework and interpellative process by which the forward is structured (the reader is interpellated as an Imperial subject), suggests an unconscious and reflexive application of guilt on the part of Americans who are against Bush's policies, and yet do no further political action than send dispirited emails to each other at work. Furthermore, by invoking Cleese, a "friendly" subversive (Cleese was the most conservative member of Monty Python), the email is an impotently nostalgic return to the radical culture of the sixties -- a culture which was instrumental in realizing the most important anti-war measures of the late twentieth century.

That last point begs reflection: can a degree of political agency be realized by the citizenry? The most America seems to be able to do is send email and get its wishes vetoed by the President.

2006: The Year of “You”

In the middle of December 2006, Time Magazine released its annual Person of the Year issue and stirred up a small media frenzy by proclaiming this year’s winner to be the somewhat eponymous “you”. The idea behind this proclamation is the supposed influence of the accumulated efforts of the “little people” against the might of concentrated power. Thanks, Time, for yet another sentimental ode to the “little people”. This media-constructed humunculus – “you” – has, according to this particular arm of the Time-Warner media empire, taken power away from the corporate and media elite by means of YouTube and Wikipedia, open-source software and user-produced media, and Web 2.0 and cellphone cameras. What a magical and revolutionary time in which we live, when technology is available to liberate the individual.

Well, please forgive this “little person” writer from Hamilton for questioning the wisdom of the Time-Warner empire trumpeting the technological utopia which awaits, but Pardon My Lunch Bucket.

Ok, just so the cards are on the table here: one of the largest media conglomerates in the world is telling us that through the collective will of our user-produced efforts, the power dynamic is switching from elite control to mass, democratic control of the mediasphere. Finally, after years of neglect by the media hierarchy, suddenly the voices of the mass citizen are being heard. The will of the people is now more accurately realized. Democracy 2.0, if you like. But of course, we won’t know the full story of this revolution unless money is exchanged so that a certain media conglomeration will release to the masses this knowledge in the form of a paid-subscription magazine. Which sounds suspiciously like that old democracy that we already have, and which for the vast majority of the working population amounts to Democracy 0.7 (beta).



So what? you might ask, they’re just trying to sell magazines. And here we come to the point. Time-Warner sells roughly 5 million monthly copies of Time Magazine in North America. It is not unreasonable to assume that an end-of-year special issue sold around the holiday season has the potential to double those sales figures. All told, production of this magazine amounts to roughly 200,000 tonnes of waste and consumes roughly 1,000,000 trees per year. You might assume in an era of blue-box programs that Time-Warner could use recycled paper to print, instead of cutting down virgin forests. In 1994, they did indeed move to a 10% recycled-paper mandate, but changed that stance less than a year later.

To make the issue even more obsessive, I am not so sure that the metallic foil used to create the mirror on the cover of the 2006 “You” issue of Time Magazine is the most recyclable thing. I would guess quite the opposite in fact, and thus the whole issue would end up in the trash in the face of the economic reality of recycling, namely who sorts the shit. Furthermore, we can talk about the environmental impact of the energy spent producing and distributing the magazine. Long story made brief, by purchasing this issue, “you” are indeed making waves in the world. To summarize: this corporation cuts down forests and contributes to climate change to sell us a product describing how we the “little people” are affecting positive change in the world.

2006 was for many the year of environmental awareness. After the surge in environmental “events” over the past three or four years, the media could no longer ignore the science of climate change. Leaders of the world’s nations are now almost universal in their call to address the issue. In the wake of a poll suggesting that 70% of Canadians think the environment to be one of the most important issues for the country, the notoriously anti-green Conservative government has done an about-face and reinstituted the Liberal government’s previous environmental policies that it had scrapped the year before (read: no new money, in real terms).

In light of the urgency of the matter (as of January 21, 2007, I would like to welcome most people who live in southern Ontario to the beginning of only our second week of “proper” winter temperatures) I think that Time Magazine’s rather empty gesture can be easily co-opted into something of greater significance. This indeed is the time in which “you” is a needed concept in relation to societal change, but not in the superficial manner suggested by Time .

Conceptually speaking, Time’s notion of the power and influence of “you” is misguided at best, and self-serving and delusional at worst. If Time Magazine were serious about its conception of this all-important “you”, then it would have printed a magazine containing user-produced content of the type it is glamourizing. A whole issue created by the readers. Or it might have put a different image on its cover, such as what I have here produced in five seconds.



An even more interesting discussion would be about the true power of this “you” in relation to social change. Along the lines of, say, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine a few years ago. Remember that little “you” event, when millions of Ukrainians participated in daily protests and general strikes until the leaders who stole power gave up control of the government to properly elected officials?

Such efforts might prove useful in dealing with the fact that 70% of the American population wants the Iraq war to end at the same time that the White House is requesting the commitment of additional troops. Follow that example of “you” from eastern Europe: stop going to work, stop going to school, stop going to the mall, stop everything until the war stops. Then when the war stops, put an “American” spin on the event by going back to work and fighting for health-care. Surely, Time could mobilize its wide readership to act for change by talking about this revolutionary “you” power in a more legitimate sense than they have. But then again, in the process Time-Warner would probably lose a great deal of ad revenue, among other things.

And yet the Time article was not wholly wrong. The technologies to which it refers in judging the importance of “you” are indeed progressive technologies. But the important thing about YouTube is not that more and more people are making videos about politics using Lego parts. It’s that people are realizing that they would rather spend hours and hours making said Lego masterpieces than sit and watch network television or otherwise participate in the traditional mediasphere.

I am well aware as to the reasons why a legitimate debate concerning the true impact of “you” on human civilization and the Earth as a whole will not happen in a publication such as Time Magazine. That discussion might begin by investigating the degree to which journalism has fallen from its once important function as arbiter for the public good.

Don’t listen to the media elites as to why this change occurred toward the end of the last century; they’ll tell you that they are simply providing that which “you” are demanding. After all, it was “you” that brought to television American Idol and to the internet the execution of Saddam Hussein. So it will be “you” that programs the next revolution: a people with revolutionary potential are reduced to staring into the cover of a magazine in a supermarket, trying to find themselves.

steal this movie

A report recently issued by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) concluded this week that movie pirates cost the American economy over $20 billion in lost taxes, jobs, and revenues. It should be noted that the IPI limited its research to data supplied by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). With this one gesture, the highly contentious issues of intellectual property copyright and consumer protections were thoroughly ignored. Instead, the public has been handed yet another industry manifesto in the guise of legitimate and productive discourse.

As a side-note, to take get a decent view of the biased nature of the IPI, here's a great video feed of a Capitol Hill briefing from September 19 concerning health care.

Watch the archived video of IPI's Sept. 19 Capitol Hill Briefing The Dangers of Undermining Patient Choice: Lessons from Europe and Canada. (depending on your system, in order to see the video you might need to copy the URL from the website that opens into Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc)

The issue of media piracy can be viewed as one of the defining examples of the problematic transition from a culture of physical media (books, records, film stock, etc) to one of digital ephemerality. No longer do I need the information contained in a film to be delivered to me using film stock, magnetic tape, or metal sandwiched between plastic. Instead, films can be delivered in a less tangible way. Many people already experience digital delivery of films and television through their cable boxes, which is a service that the MPAA and similar organizations endorse. Others happily avoid both pay-per-view and the movie theatre by downloading movie files from the internet. This last fact is where the discussion over fair use of intellectual property is most required. For the moment, I will ignore the tragicomedy surrounding the MPAA’s numerous legal suits pending against consumers who wanted to see MPAA films. Instead I want to focus more on the media distribution system itself.

Currently, there is no technological limitation to the immediate digital delivery of films, television, and music. Those among us who know where to locate such things on the net can tell you that downloaded films are often of comparable quality to a DVD. In some cases, downloads are of superior technical quality than the official release – think of high definition, which was not available until a few months ago.In the case of a few select films, marketing decisions might render a particular DVD issue less-than-optimal. North American issues are frequently censored or otherwise altered in order not to offend the more “puritanical” mores believed to exist in this continent.



Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, for example, has a highly problematic North American release. The film was digitally altered so that it would receive an R rating, and as such the narrative continuity between audience and protagonist is demolished (ie: the film’s meaning changes). Now I myself am an adult with the emotional maturity to handle looking at an erect penis or a simulated act of fellatio. Apparently, so are Europeans, who were treated to a non-altered DVD issue. Thanks to the brilliant marketing decision to incorporate region-coded limitations into the DVD format, I cannot even play a legitimately purchased European DVD on my North American player. I have to point out that it is highly likely that Stanley Kubrick wanted me to see the version of the film that he actually made, and not one that is region-specific. In this spirit I feel fully confident in my rights as a consumer to download a European DVD-rip, burn it to a disc, and then show this version to students or friends. Since I feel that I am more enlightened about this issue than the marketing department at Warner Brothers, I will supercede their authority over which version I am allowed to watch. When contacted, the MPAA mentioned that each region gets the “optimal” version of the film, and that region coding is intended to curb piracy. It seems that China is at the heart of the issue, and here we come back to the IPI report.

For a film to be considered “legitimate”, it has to go through regular distribution channels, involving lawyers, middlemen, retail expenses, and mark-ups galore. Since so many people get a slice of the revenue, that pie needs to be big enough that everyone is satisfied. The IPI (by extension the MPAA) argued that piracy has cost all of these people their livelihoods (more specifically: $5.5 billion in “lost” earnings; 141,000 new jobs not(!) created; film studios losing 10% of their potential revenue). At this stage it should be noted that all these “loses” remain in the jurisdiction of potentiality. To be fair, there is a case for the loss of potential revenue, however misguidedly optimistic such a concept might initially seem. At the same time however, we cannot let considerations of possibilities consume the argument, which should be focussed on both consumer rights and intellectual property rights. I have a right as a consumer of a cultural product to a direct relation with the art involved; I will not have that right taken away from me by non-artists who believe that marketing concerns trump aesthetic or philosophical ones. Out of this comes a dictum of sorts: it is more important to experience art than to pay for that experience. In this guise, call me a communist if you must.



In China, the consumers are winning. The reason for this is simple: the Chinese market has rejected the idea that films should cost as much as they do in the rest of the world. When the cost of producing a DVD is around 50 cents (not a burn, which can be significantly cheaper than 50 cents, but an officially-printed disc), it should not be sold at retail for more than ten times that price. Consequently, when Hollywood attempted its North American standard pricing of $24.99 - $34.99 it was almost laughed out of the country. No thanks, the Chinese consumer seemed to say, we’ll just make our own copies and sell them at more reasonable prices. Hollywood responded by trying to strongarm Chinese consumers into paying the “regular” price, but after almost ten years the fight has concluded. Warner Brothers recently announced that it would release the Chinese version of Superman Returns on DVD for around $2, thus pricing an official release competitively with its bootleg counterpart. Similarly, when I was in Korea I purchased an official 6-DVD boxset of Kieslowski’s Decalogue for $30, while the cheapest North American release I found was a 3-disc set for $95. I ripped the Korean DVDs to my computer thus bypassing the regional coding, then burned them to DVDs that my player would read. MPAA, please send your lawsuit to: my ass, c/o bite it.

This issue is about balancing consumer rights with those of the producers of intellectual property. I thoroughly believe that the arts deserve financial support, which can involve a significant investment on the part of the consumer. With Hollywood however, we are for the most part not really talking about art but rather product, and consumers will respond in rather mechanical ways to its consumption. Personally, I think that for North America, $5 is a good digital download price, while $10 would be a great retail price (barring limited/special issues). More DVDs would be sold, and while initially the studios would not see higher profits due to the lowered price, any dime-store business student can describe volume as more important than margins in the long-term health of a company.

Groups like the MPAA whine that the high cost of films reflects ever-increasing production costs. No offense MPAA, but that’s your fucking problem (YFP). Not too many industries complain about production expenses while continually raising them. Furthermore, in and of itself production costs do not explain the public’s dwindling interest in Hollywood properties. To paraphrase a conversation that I had with a local video rental retailer, the 2005 Pink Panther remake tanked at retail, rental, and the box-office not because of piracy or lack of marketing initiatives. That movie and many like it lost money because they fucking sucked donkeys. At the end of the day, it boils down to a simple query: why has the cost of making Hollywood films escalated to two or three hundred million dollars? Coupled with the aesthetic and narrative bankruptcy of most Hollywood releases, this trend signals to me that the writing is on the wall for this little self-important group who consider themselves to be at the forefront of world culture. I can just picture the cynics lined up on Hollywood Boulevard: there’s rampant poverty in this country, real wages are declining rapidly, jobs are being outsourced, only half the country has medical care, Asian and Indian cinema are progressing exponentially, an energy crisis is looming, etc, etc, and you are spending how much money to make a Superman movie???

Andy Warhol celebrates the death of us all at the AGO

Andy Warhol,
Triple Elvis, 1964,
aluminum paint and silkscreened ink on canvas.

America is a hybrid nation, stuck between the physical rendition of nationality as buildings, presidents, and a sizeable military, and an internalized ethical identity on the part of its population interpellated as citizens. Importantly, this is a trans-border phenomenon. American business interests, which have proliferated across the globe over the past century, are themselves means of conferring the American form of citizenship upon a foreign (host) population. Citizenship may only be conferred for a moment or two, perhaps the duration of an electronic financial transaction at the point of purchase, but yet the effects of inclusion in this manner are persistent.

The American system has many problems, the first of which is its unmatched economic success. Politically, dominance within the world marketplace has created a series of aggressive, arrogant governments which have guided American foreign policy to its current trends of unilateralism and military conquest.

And yet the philosophical tradition of the nation promises both freedom and opportunity, and to some extent these goals are indeed realized. However, the country experiences a drastically uneven distribution of wealth, most obviously in the uneven distribution of municipal, education, and healthcare infrastructure. Without social support structures, there exists a serious political vacuum manifesting as poverty and criminality unmatched in the developed world. In both cases many rights and guarantees that normally are provisional with citizenship such disappear.

On the other side of the coin lies American Celebrity, which perhaps best demonstrates the cultural supremacy of the American political and economic system. Individuals such as Bill Gates, Paris Hilton, and Dick Cheney enjoy a degree of wealth and social opportunity unimaginable when viewed against the reality that 3 billion people worldwide live on less than two American dollars per day. Celebrities themselves are in many ways dead before their time, as media representations of their persons and lifestyles render them in- and trans-human.

Andy Warhol understood the extent to which America could invent itself as a mighty and surreal transnational entity. His was not an analytic process, but rather by reproducing and manipulating images of household products, car crashes, and various celebrities he came to understand modern citizenship in the guise of a juxtaposition and simultaneity of the sacred and the profane. Citizenship was inclusive (everyone can afford to buy the same products, and consequently consumers become a relatively homogenous group), finite in time (witness Warhol’s fascination with instruments of death, such as those used by the State to terminate the lives of its undesireables) and yet infinite in magnitude (Warhol’s infamous statement to the effect that everyone will enjoy fifteen minutes of fame is rendered inverse by the repetition of Jackie Os and Elvises in many of his silkscreen pieces).

It seems quite fitting that David Cronenberg curated a new Warhol exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, opening July 9 and extending to October 22. I have a feeling that the auteur of some of modern cinema’s most intellectual and disturbing films might have something to say about Warhol and his creative process. Check out Andy Warhol -- Supernova: Stars, Death, and Disasters 1962-1964 for yourself.

CBC has an interview with Cronenberg posted on its website.

An Inconvenient Truth

According to the vast majority of the world’s climatologists, when carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere reach 400 parts per million, we will have attained a level that can only be described as “dangerous”. At this point, the earth’s climate will have reached a “tipping point”, after which there is simply no return to the temperate climate which has sustained human civilization for the last ten thousand years. What puts this little fact into perspective is that our CO2 levels are currently sitting at 379 parts per million, and that number is increasing at a rate of 2 ppm per year (a figure which is itself growing as well). That gives us about ten years, folks.

Scientific data such as this constitute the heart of the film An Inconvenient Truth, which documents Al Gore’s project to bring awareness of the implications of climate change to the masses. Thankfully the film sticks to the climate message without getting bogged down in the behind-the-scenes showbiz minutiae of Gore’s speaking tour.

The facts of Gore’s case are ably presented by director Davis Guggenheim. In most cases, both Gore and the science he presents are allowed to speak for themselves. Gore explains some of the processes behind gathering and interpreting such data – ice cores, atmospheric readings, satellite data, etc. – and then follows through with the results, in a typically professional PowerPoint fashion.

It is important to stress that there is little to no dissension among the scientific community. Gore notes that while scientists are universal in warning us of the dangers we are presently facing, the media has considerably distorted and clouded the issue. You don’t have to look further than a recent Fox News (sic) piece in which a senior member of the National Center for Policy Analysis denounced the science in An Inconvenient Truth by referring to a paper which was published by his own organization (note: the NCPA is not a major centre for climatological research) instead of one from, say the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can see some more of Fox News (sic) in action here.

The “tipping point” that was referred to above works as follows. As the atmosphere accumulates CO2 and the Earth continues to warm, the polar ice caps begin melting. Since ocean water absorbs heat while ice reflects sunlight from the Earth, the arctic must be seen as a “canary in a mine”. Gore explains that if even only parts of the arctic melt, sea levels world wide would be raised seven metres, enough to submerge coastal cities such as San Francisco, Shanghai, Calcutta, and New York. When the arctic disappears, we will have a new climate and geography, period.

It’s a message that most people have heard before, although not likely in such a pressing or intimate manner. Gore likens it to the sudden awareness brought forth by science that cigarette smoking would prove fatal to most smokers. His own family earned a fair amount of money growing tobacco over the years until Gore’s sister, herself a smoker, died. We also get to see some telling photographs demonstrating the effects of climate change over the past few decades. One interesting bit of data that has presented itself to recently for this film to document is the occurrence of the fabled North-West Passage – a shipping lane that has been dreamt of for five centuries – in the Canadian arctic this winter. The times they are indeed a changin’.

Some of us had parents who would tell us almost every day of the week to take out the garbage. We ignored and ignored – sometimes even more so when the nagging persisted – and then all of a sudden garbage day had passed and we were left living with a smelly bag of garbage for another week or two. The insistence is more serious in the case of global warming. Since we are out of balance with the natural order of which we are a part, any catastrophic strain on the system is a catastrophe for us. The focus isn’t really on the future but rather, like Gore’s sister, how we live in the present.

After seeing the film, it is hard not to ask the question as to why the Democrats didn’t run with this at the heart of their 2000 presidential campaign. The Al Gore of this film is passionate, funny, intelligent, and a demonstrable leader. Perhaps the fires in Gore’s belly were lit when he saw the presidency stolen out from under him. At the same time, had the American population witnessed the passion and ability of 2006 Gore in 2000, the vote would likely not have been close enough to allow the legislative coup that brought Bush to office. One cannot help but wonder how differently this new millennium might have progressed under an Al Gore White House.

More importantly, maybe some real democratic change can be effected as distribution for this film expands. Gore’s take at Hollywood stardom right before mid-term elections and 18 months before the next presidential campaign might seem like post-modern politics at its best. However, even the most cynical viewers of An Inconvenient Truth will be hard pressed to ignore the consequences of inaction. Begin the process of change by taking several of your more environmentally sceptical friends to see this film.



continue watching the film

here we go again, or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

MP3: Sun Ra Arkestra - Nuclear War

There has been quite a lot of talk about Iran in the North American media these days. We hear many things: that they are bellicose fundamentalists intent on destroying the west; that they have nuclear ambitions which threaten every nation on earth; that they harbour terrorists and train them for future activities. The new mantra down south seems to be one of preemption, a get 'em before they get us attitude.

It might seem dreadfully obvious, but such talk in the media would likely convey to Iran an idea that the only way to defend itself against American aggression would be a strong nuclear arsenal. You really do have to love catch-22 situations, especially in regard to lobbing nukes around. The seeming inevitability of the situation evokes an almost religious fatalism, and that is precisely what hardline American and Iranian officials are exploiting in their separate camps. According to an article published in the New Yorker, President Bush is absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped, and that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do ... saving Iran is going to be his legacy." Since it is highly unlikely that George Bush was actually elected in either 2000 or 2004, this statement is perhaps the most disturbing bit of information ever to emerge from the White House.

The U.N. Security Council is also concerned with Iran, as it is concerned with any member nation which seems to be pursuing nuclear ambitions (except the US of course, which has had free reign to develop weapons of mass destruction; will we one day see America sanctioned for its militarism?). President Bush has repeatedly stated that his administration is pursuing every diplomatic means at its disposal (importantly, the CIA describes this as "inaccurate", but doesn't elaborate). It should here be noted that currently the US military is staging a continual series of military training exercises - such as strategic nuclear bombing simulations - within arms' reach of Iran. Of course, then there's that grand military exercise which is the occupation of Iraq.

Interestingly enough, Iraq seems as a quasi-ironic precursor to a more open form of regime change, ie nuclear war. Talk about Saddam Hussein and his government has adequately diluted the debate surrounding American involvement in the Middle East. No longer is the Palestinian-Israeli issue at the forefront; similarly pushed aside is the influence of American foreign policy on Lebanon and Syria, among others. We now have the great and secret show which is the trial of Saddam Hussein to occupy the foreign correspondent sections of our newshours and RSS feeds. What we are in fact getting is the classic bluff-and-swap manoeuvre. The White House is not filled with idiots, despite the child-king who is their leader. It was known for a long time that Hussein posed little threat to world peace. After all, it was America which sold Iraq much of its military arsenal. It seems much more likely that Iraq was invaded to secure a large oil deposit while simultaneously granting a second strategic foothold (after Israel) in the Middle East.



Seymore Hersh stated that in conversation with several high-ranking civilian staffers at the Pentagon, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was repeatedly described as "the next Adolph Hitler". Here's the switch after the bluff. Public debate concerning tyrants and monsters such as Hussein and Hitler, when breathed in the same utterance as Ahmadinejad, serves the purpose of rhetorical contingency that most listeners find captivating. Of course Ahmadinejad is bad, the public will say, lacking all proof to that effect other than I don't like Hitler.

According to several Pentagon-affiliated sources, America is quite advanced in the planning stages for military operations in Iran. We should not assume this operation to be as 'bloodless' as Iraq (to the 50,000 dead Iraqis, please pardon the use of this term). After all, after wiping out Iraq's army in 1991, military strategists knew full well the extent of Iraq's military capacity - none. In regard to Iran, the question is a lot more open. Iran does indeed have a standing army which is decently equipped. As well, there can be no denying that Iran has the potential for nuclear deployment.

In light of this, Pentagon strategists have come up with an all-or-nothing solution. Conventional and chemical weapons, such as those currently in use in Iraq, will not be able to decisively annihilate Iran's geographically dispersed nuclear processing facilities, nor will they be able to penetrate Iran's purported underground uranium enrichment facilities. Some estimates posit that more than five hundred distinct sites would have to be rapidly destroyed to ensure Iran's submission to American nuclear authority. Consequently, only the nuclear option remains to ensure that Iran doesn't respond to a military strike with a nuclear counter-attack.

In light of this might we surmise about a statement in the Project for a New American Century - that wonderful and terrifying in situ holocost museum - released a little more than a week after the 9/11 attacks. To ensure American hegemony over key material resources, namely oil, water, and uranium, and continue the war on terrorism, the country would have to escalate warfare considerably. Winning the war on terrorism would likely "require the United States to engage a well-armed foe". Just to remind you, the signatories and principal architects of PNAC are currently members of George W. Bush's administration.

Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is quoted in the New Yorker as saying that "we have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates....This is not like planning to invade Quebec." So the waters of an invasion into Iran don't get diluted by another bluff-and-switch potential, I'll leave that last somewhat ominous Freudian slip for a future article.

power down

When Canada became a signatory to the Kyoto protocol, many Canadians held their heads a little higher thanks to an increased sense of moral virtue. After all, we just had to look to the ‘ignorant’ south, who didn’t sign Kyoto, to feel better about ourselves. It’s now a few years later and sadly little has changed in terms of our emissions, despite the Kyoto requirements. Certainly there’s a greater amount of media awareness surrounding the issue, and many Canadians have begun to think about the ramifications of climate change. Indeed, the exceptionally warm winter that we are all experiencing this year should prove that the times they are a changin’. In case you assume this to be a momentary blip in weather statistics, it should be noted that of the ten warmest years in recorded history, eight have occurred since 1990.

We all know that transportation is a big part of the problem, but electricity consumption is also a climate change issue. At it’s heart it all boils down to this: we are going to be using a lot of electricity for the foreseeable future. As more items become electrified and more people (ie: China, India, etc) can purchase and use them, electricity use will skyrocket over the coming decades. There’s just one problem: it can’t, at least with our current methods of production.



Most of North America’s electricity comes from burning coal and oil. This has two fairly severe consequences. Firstly, both are finite resources that will not sustain our current usage profiles let alone adapt to the ever-increasing population. Secondly, there’s that pesky business about air pollution, as emissions from generators are the biggest single contributors to climate change and smog.



It is likely that nuclear power will have to fill the deficit when oil use becomes more prohibitive. Don’t believe me? How about some math on this issue. 65% of North American electricity comes from oil, coal, and natural gas. These technologies will never be clean. Either we accept dirty air which warms our planet, or we reduce demand to 35% of our current usage. Given how much we all like our televisions and fridges, the latter seems unlikely. Renewable technologies cannot currently match this level of production. Once every building is fitted with solar panel roofs and wind generators are almost household items, maybe then we can start talking about sustainable growth. Until then, our growth will be always-already unsustainable. More than likely however, over the next few decades we will see the proliferation of nuclear generation, with all the environmental, social, and safety issues that it entails.

So what can be done by the average person? While not everyone has the money to dump $15,000 into a personal solar or wind generation system, there are many other steps that can be taken to ensure that your energy use is minimized. Of course, if you can afford to install a small wind generator or add solar panels to your property, then please do so. In fact, give me a ring and I’ll help you install your system. Check out Energy Alternatives for more details. If you are building a new house, why not add a renewable energy source? It will pay for itself in about a decade, and then your electricity will be free. Not a bad price, considering the increasing rates that power companies are charging.

One much smaller step that can be taken is to pay attention to those objects in your life that consume electricity. I know this sounds rather pedantic, but little things like changing all of the light fixtures in your house from incandescents to compact fluorescent will be a great step (and since these efficient bulbs last ten times longer than “normal” ones, you will be less of a burden on our landfills), Obviously, I am not suggesting that you ditch your high-tech gear and move into an earth-warmed cave in the woods. Electronic toys can be great fun, and definitely enhance many aspect of our lives. The easiest way to save on power use is to turn things off when you are done using them.



This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people leave appliances running when they are not in use. Televisions, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances – if they aren’t in use, turn the damn things off. Fans, heaters, lights, and such don’t really need to be on when you aren’t actually in the room. Here’s a fun idea: put all your lights and fans on motion sensors and timers so that they only operate when they are needed, then forget about them.

Computer equipment is another culprit. Monitors do not need to be on when the computer is not in use, and you can set up Windows to put the whole computer into a low power mode using the screensaver settings. Don’t leave the machine running overnight unless it’s actually performing a function. In this capacity I am looking straight at Hamilton’s business community. Just walk past a place of business at night and you can see that most of them leave their computers and cash registers on all the time. There’s no need for those monitors to be on all the time guys; turn ‘em off, save some cash. Even better, if you see that a business is wasting power, why not walk in and tell them? It’s usually out of ignorance rather than apathy that waste occurs. Also, when you go away on vacation, don’t leave on lights or appliances as a means to deter thieves. My cop buddies tell me that robbers tend to “case the joint” before doing anything. Most thieves are smart enough to notice things to suggest that you aren’t actually home, such as lights which never turn on or off, cars which never appear or leave the house, and people who don’t come and go. If you want to play this game with them, at least get a timer to control the lights. Otherwise, your little counter-insurgency strategy is entirely laughable.

Perhaps most importantly, if everyone were to upgrade their house to ensure maximum efficiency, a great deal of electricity would be saved. The federal government is actually providing grants for this very purpose. You do have to invest some money yourself to have an energy audit performed and retrofit your house to maximize efficiency. There is serious money available to those who truly wish to lower their household power use. Find out more at the website for the Office of Energy Efficiency.

Reducing our energy consumption isn’t a leftist agenda. In the long run, saving money is something from which we can all benefit. That our air will be more breathable and our climate more liveable is icing on the cake.

the body politik

These past few weeks, I’ve been oscillating between a decision to stop paying attention to the “political” issues that get brought forth in the popular media, and the opposite position of wanting to attack much of what gets talked about in public discourse as so much horseshit. It continually amazes me that a citizenry will so patently avoid dealing with issues of such importance as health care in a more aggressive fashion.

You really do have to love media “debates”. Once again we’re being told by conservative pundits about the virtues of privatizing healthcare while at the same time the horrors of a for-profit health system are being expounded by the left. It pains me to no end to continually hear the same bullet points from both camps while any debate about the issue is perpetually stifled. I don’t want to get into the issue of why there is no space for such discussions in the public sphere (an issue of both corporate hegemony over broadcast sources and public apathy to that which is not immediate to them).

More importantly, I think it’s key to look at precisely that which is not being said, falling to the margins of public discourse. Health Canada is reminding us of the economic burdens of particular lifestyle choices. One wonders why government does not take a more active stance against things are known to be harmful to our health. Prevention should be the mantra of our health system, and yet all of the public discourse surrounding healthcare involves funding various treatment issues.



Every time you turn go to the Canadian news media these days, you hear about the various failures of the health care system. From wait times to bed shortages, it’s all a big love-in of negative punditry. And yet solutions are rarely, if ever, given. Except the mantra of privatization, which gets held aloft as a white knight leading us to the promised land. The only manner to improve the system according to the proponents of privatization is to allow private capital to be invested in the system. We need more beds, more doctors and nurses, more equipment, and more physical space in hospitals.

According to such thinking, the health system needs an injection of capital to expand and meet the needs of Canadians. If we were to allow doctors to set up private clinics, those doctors will be able to secure loans to expand health infrastructure in this country. They would then pass on the expense of these (privately accrued) loans along to their customers along with some conception of a profit margin to thus provide what Conservative thinkers like to call “adequate service”. That profit would then be used to further invest in the system and find ever more opportunities for “market expansion”. So that is the grand strategy on the part of proponents of privatization. According to these people, systems only work when somebody is making a profit. Of course, isn’t the system then more expensive, when in addition to health services it has to pay for mansions and cars and such for its investors? I’ll get to that math in a second.

Some of us are currently asking why, if Canadians have so much money that they wish to put to health care, there is no further injection of money into the public system. If all we need is investment, why are we not investing? After all, it’s far more efficient and less expensive for the government to secure loans for investment on a system-wide level than it is for thousands of small investors. As well, governments can accommodate losses in one sector of the budget (let’s say healthcare, as a continual expense) with gains in another (energy stocks, anyone?). Furthermore, the federal as well as a few provincial governments are enjoying surpluses that could easily be used to further investment in health care. All of these things would keep the overall price of health care lower than if the private sector were to be in charge.

So why are such investments not forthcoming? Well, let’s just say there’s a whole hell of a lot of money in the health system, and the financial sector is chewing at the bit to gain access to these public funds. When profit comes from people being sick, corruption is quick to follow.

There’s one aspect unique to health care that makes it impossible to marry profitability to a sense of human compassion and what we might call “good governance”. Every time somebody gets sick or has an accident, a cost in incurred. By its very nature, taken as a whole health is a depreciating economy. There is simply no manner to make a profit without either isolating access to only those who can pay for the continually-increasing profit margins of all the middlepeople in the health services chain, or to downgrade services when they are universally accessible and cut costs to the bare minimum.

A great example of this kind of health care is provided to the south where HMOs, which are America’s attempt at universal coverage, do not cover a vast majority of health services and more importantly are not accepted by a majority of hospitals or doctors. Since profitability is the raison d’être of the system, patients who are not profitable are perishable. They will remain externalities to a system which chooses not to account for their existence.

So yes, health care is expensive and will continue to burden governments who choose to socialize its access. Health care spending in this country was pegged at about $121 billion for 2003, which represents nearly 10% of our GDP. Shouldn't the healthy lives of a citizenry be worth ten percent of what the country is worth? By the way, America spends 14.6% of its GDP on medical care. While all that money is footed by taxpayers, many Americans lack the quality of care that every single Canadian receives. Interestingly enough, the OECD found that while the USA spends nearly twice as much per person on health care, Canadians live on average two years longer (I realize this might have to do with crime statistics and environmental protections, and might not reflect wholly on health policy).

A body politik must be healthy to be wealthy and productive. You might hear about wait times in Canada, which many espouse as representative of an "ailing" health care system. That's not during life-threatening situations, except when organ donations are required. The wait is for elective surgeries, like hip replacements and such. Health care needs to prioritize. It's more important to save a person's life than it is for one to get a new hip. Sorry, that's just the way it is. Conservatives in Canada complain because they can't access health care the way they can access the mall. They want service they can pay for, and because many of them are wealthy they think they "deserve" it. Tough. Despite some elements to the contrary, the wealthy do not represent the centre of human rights in Canada.

This whole ideology of profit, which leaves everyone to their own devices in terms of fending for themselves when they are sick, is an abject failure. You will not see the results of that failure if you concentrate your studies on affluent Americans who don't seem to have any problem buying into adequate health coverage. You will see it in the disenfranchised who do not have any coverage at all (the US Census for 2003 states this to be 15.2% of the total US population, or about 43.6 million Americans -- ten million more than the entire population of Canada!). You will see that failure in the low-to-mid of the middle class (about 100 million), who do not have coverage which equals the coverage every single Canadian is assured by our constitution. You see it in the record number of bankruptcies that are filed every year when families have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical treatments out of their own pockets.

Most reasonable Americans have had enough of these beliefs. They are sick of paying ridiculous prices for medicine. They are sick of getting turned away from hospitals which do not recognize their insurance. And most especially, they are sick of insurance companies who do everything they can to get out of paying for medical treatments. In this capacity, America represents a travesty. The USA has enough wealth that every citizen should have the best treatment in the world. Instead, you get a reality where a family must seriously consider the consequences of paying $200,000 for heart surgery and possibly face bankruptcy or instead allowing a family member to die. That is unacceptable in the modern world. Now is not the time to bring such hideous complaints to Canada, when our national wealth is rising substantially and our population is expanding.

mental real estate

It seems that companies are vying for memory space at an alarming rate these days. Advertising is beginning to cover nearly every surface imaginable. Storage space is going up at a massive rate. The exponential growth of information capacity is an interesting parallel to the process of restriction that is occurring in material resources. Commercial space -- public advertising, video, music, etc -- expands rapidly as data storage increases, control over these resources is inevitable.

One of the fun side effects of having more powerful tools to archive culture is the increasing amount of inter-relational analogy. The shear amount of data that is added to this cultural database causes anguish in the human mind that can only be relieved by organizing the variety of data that we are presented with into relational nodes.

People are tivoing whole months of televised entertainment and whole years of music, This capacity to encode the now will increase exponentially with storage capacity. And yet, already we are seeing increasing attempts to control digital media content. Media companies are starting to flex the muscle behind their monopolized positions and usurp rights that we have begun to take for granted. Things like being able to record television shows at our discretion. Right now, it is not very tough to record everything you want with a couple of VCRs lying around. The Outfoxed video was constructed in this manner, for example. When the majority of television channels are digital feeds however, digital rights management will be in full effect. We will be limited in our capacity to use what we have consumed with our analog broadcasts.

TV Carnage is a fun examination of what television consumption isn’t quite saying about itself. The DVD runs like a mixtape of television played against itself. What was once the meandering, random, and thoroughly banal sequence of channel flipping at all hours of the day becomes a rhapsody to the absurdity of the entire process of televised entertainment. It contains all your favourite stars such as Gary Coleman, Steven Segal, Alan Thicke, and Charlton Heston. Check it out here.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

what goes in must come out

Hey kids, it's Buy Nothing Day! Happy Festivus for the Rest of Us.

So, why McDonald's in particular?

Principally, targetting an organization like McDonald's gets us to the heart of the problem with overconsumption. We in North America have quite literally grown fat from our own excess. High-energy yet nutrient-deficient diets, as perhaps best exemplified by the McDonalds nightmare, have tainted what should otherwise be regarded as the healthiest period humans have experienced in our existence. There is no logical or technological reason for modern humans to be malnourished. We create plenty of food for both human and animal consumption, and we certainly have the capacity to distribute that food to wherever it is needed. So what is keeping our nation underfed?

I should probably lay my cards on the table regarding what I consider to be 'underfed'. There's plenty to eat in North America, of course. Stores are full of packaged foods, restaurants are plentiful, and most people earn enough money that they can buy food when they need to. So why the health epidemic, with food-related illness at a high unmatched since the invention of refrigeration? Why are so many children morbidly obese? (This may indeed be far less of an issue in Canada than the USA, but trends here are similar.) Why do so many people who eat three or more meals a day malnourished, lacking nutrients in their bodies that are more widely available now than in any other time in human history?

Several studies have suggested that not only do we eat too much on an individual basis, but also that we waste a huge amount of food in the process. Dumpster divers have taken this little fact to heart, as freeganism has spread by means of ideological urgency and economic necessity. The existence of these groups among the urban poor and not-so-poor has shown that the recovery of food from society's wastefull habits is no simple rejection of social convention. Rooting through garbage containers of restaurants, supermarkets, and food production facilities to recover the tonnes and tonnes of edible food that is allowed to rot is an ideological stance against corporate agribusiness. The locus here is an economic one, in terms of how production is numerically evaluated. If, for example, I grow vegetables to feed people who have no food, the economy is in official terms stagnant. If a grocerystore throws away a truckful of food to make space for some more, the GNP/GDP goes up. In the latter case, the poor are still hungry.

The key for a good food supply is not increasing food production, but rather increasing (or more properly stated, maintaining) the quality of our food sources. It's really just a matter of having a proper infrastructure for food production and delivery. Sadly, that infrastructure has been taken over by corporate agribusiness, which does not gauge success by means of food quality or the health of their clientelle, but rather through crude profitability. Big business does not care about long-term health trends in individuals. BSE (mad cow) symptoms, for example, can take a decade to become manifest in a human. Do we really think that ten years after the fact, McDonals will ever be held accountable for helping spread a disease that can come from a variety of food sources? From the point of view of industrial food producers, if profits are impeded by more thorough food inspections, then those inspections do not occur.

Corporations focus on quarterly profits and stock-market accountability. That is their nature, and we should account for this behaviour when dealing with corporate involvement in matters of life and death (food production, health care, etc). They process food to be tasty (ie: tonnes of sugar and salt), long-lasting (full of cancer-producing preservatives), and cheap (unhealthy pesticide use, for example, to remove production costs).

The end result is food which is processed for maximum shelf-life and transportability and minimum nutritive value. If you don't believe me on this point, check the label of any package of processed vegetables. Canning can be a relatively harmless procedure, so long as vegetables are not cooked at the plant. Freezing, overcooking, and otherwise modifying the veggies is a sure way to lose any or all vitamins and minerals that they may contain. A normal serving of those same vegetables obtained fresh from a grocer maintains the food's nutritional value (assuming that you don't destroy those precious vitamins and anti-oxidants by overcooking your food -- ask Woody Harelson). Some manufacturers get around the fact that they are destroying their food by adding a vitamin or mineral to their product. Vitamin C is a great example, as it is very cheaply produced, can be inserted into most foods, and is absorbed by the body quite easily. Vitamin fortification can be an expensive process however, especially for some vitamins and minerals, and thus you do not see vitamins in every food product that you can buy.

To make a long story short, when you hear from various sources that you should eat 5-8 servings of vegetables per day, it is unlikely that frozen stir-fries, creamed corn, frozen dinners, and V8 vegetable drinks give you any of the actual vitamins that doctors are telling you to consume in order to be healthy, which is the whole goal of the exercise. Parents, you are not doing your kids a favour by including frozen peas or broccoli on their plates. Sadly, instead of opening the microwaving package, you have to actually spend the time it takes to cook fresh veggies, otherwise your kids are eating calories largely empty of nutritional value.

This is where McDonalds comes back into the picture. They basically launched the fast-food revolution that has engulfed North America. Their marketing and production techniques have made it possible to convince hundreds of millions of people that good food can be prepared in about a minute. That people live a 'quick' life these days is a topic that's too broad to properly examine here. It should be enough to state that the McDonalds process is not an evil one in the sense that they are trying to keep people malnourished. Rather, quick and crappy food is a natural adaptation to the manner in which we view production and consumption: addictive, cheap, now.

There are other aspects of McDonalds culture that should keep you the fuck away. There's the anti-union nature of the company, the exploitation of immigrant and poor labour sources, the massive amount of environmental damage that accompanies daily operations at their restaurants, the unsubtle manipulation of our youth to pursue products which are detrimental to their development, and the proliferation of animal cruelty through industrial meat production facilities. Also, by avoiding McDonalds you can join those two kids from out west who are boycotting the company to protest softwood lumber duties.

Buy Nothing Day does not suggest that you need nothing to live on a daily basis. That would be a very naive position. Rather, November 25th should serve as a reminder that we have ritualized certain forms of production to the detriment of others. By blindly accepting our system as 'the best', we are ignoring alternatives that are much more healthy and sustainable, and do not rely on cheap gimmickery to maintain themselves.