My First Day at The Least Glamorous #Altac Job Imagineable

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

So, this past Friday was my first day at a new job.  I'm on a trial period right now (okay, let's be precise - I'm an intern, and have been told that will be re-evaluated in a month or two).  The opportunity is certainly interesting, I'm approaching it with an open mind, and it's amazing how little work it took.  I literally emailed a guy and had coffee with him, then got an offer.  I'm excited because it's an opportunity to learn the day to day of the business world as opposed to the academic, and show that I can hack it.  Which, I think it's safe to say, I clearly can.

In many ways, this new position is not the kind of job that gets mentioned when the discussion turns to alternative careers for academics, or #altac.  The buzzwords around that are generally things like research management, admin positions in academia, positions with government agencies - high-level glamour stuff.  I, on the other hand, am for the moment basically a copywriter.  My first assignment for the company, on a freelance basis, was actually writing SEO copy (the equivalent, in my humble opinion, of hiring Gustav Klimt to paint your house beige), and on my first day in the office I churned out some web copy.

But it might not be complete drudgery.  I actually spent most of the day working on my new company's application for a local technology innovation award, and in the near future it looks like I'll be working on investor prospectuses.  These are both tasks that exercise the analytic skillset I developed in my academic training.  For instance, explaining the impact and potential benefits of my new company's technology efforts entails exactly the same sort of social-systematic analysis, projection, and inference that I use when writing about, say, the social impact of car audio technology (forthcoming in Technology & Culture!)  The line of reasoning is reversed (what will happen vs. what did happen), but I immediately found that engaging.  My new company's core offering is a business and social networking tool, and so I got to write about the knock-on efficiencies of networks.  Pretty cool for my first day.

There are other big reasons I'm excited about my new path - mostly coming down to where I place my priorities.  Literally the day before the end of my academic appointment at the University of South Florida, I finished and submitted a proposal for an academic book.  I am excited by the possibility of having that book accepted for publication, but the process of preparing the proposal reminded me that, while there are certain kinds of enjoyment that come with academic writing, there is nothing fun about it.  I want to do things that are fun.

At about the same time, I asked a friend of mine who had recently finished a popular nonfiction book for some details about numbers - and they were eye-opening, maybe even staggering.  She was able to live for a year-plus on the money for writing a 200-odd page book, which I am sure I would have no problem blowing through in four months.  She made more from her book than I did from my postdoctoral fellowship.  I'm sure many other academics are genuinely not interested in writing for popular audiences, and I know there are a large number who are truly incapable of writing with humor, verve, and insight at the same time.  But as someone who has that ability and actually thinks the work is important, some very simple math makes it absolutely foolish for me not to pursue the possibility.

And so I'll be spending my mornings before work putting together a proposal for a book on conspiracy theory and its impact on American politics - a topic I'll also be blogging about over at my new site, Space Lizards in Black Helicopters (Spacelizards.com - and yes, I know it's the greatest URL of all time. Thank you for saying so).  This simply isn't something I would have been able to do as a first-year (or maybe even sixth-year) tenure-track professor.  The grind of academic research, teaching, and writing is draining, most of all on your creative resources.  There is no downtime - even your summers are dedicated to research and teaching prep.  There is no time that you can truly call your own, or that will allow you to pursue other applications of your gifts.

For some people that's okay, because teaching and research are truly their focus in life.  I'm not so sure that's true for me.  And in my new office, though there's a good bit of the new-startup buzz that can suck you in if you let it, it also seems perfectly okay to put in your eight hours and then simply go home.  The possibility of truly making a living by working seven hours a day, even after my time as a relatively time-rich postdoc, is pretty exciting.  And it's also exciting that I will be going home to work on a book that more than 500 people might end up caring about.

But then again, I did send out those academic book proposals.  I did finish a major publication, also just as I was headed out the door.  I certainly am working to keep my options open as an academic.  Maybe the urge to write about Lacan will catch up with me in six months.  Maybe I'll discover that the professional 9-5 world is less generous with my time than I'm seeing so far.  I am, unapolagetically, hedging my bets.  I'm keeping multiple options open - and more than any idea of simply ditching the tenure track, I think that should be the key theme of the #altac movement.  Having options is not something academics or academics-in-training generally keep in mind, but if they did, maybe it would put enough pressure on things like the adjunct pool and salaries to start having a real impact.

My Last Day As an Academic: What An Academic Departure Leaves Behind

Note: Not unrelated to the transition covered below, I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Today is my last day at USF, and I'm doing the final cleanout of my office, while simultaneously finishing final revisions on a journal article.  Yesterday, I finished submitting my academic book proposal.  I've engineered a pretty perfectly punctuated departure, I must say.

In the course of cleaning out my office, I've found I have a weird relationship to paper and information.  I guess it's not just me . . . we were all very excited when it looked like we might be moving into a post-paper world, but that didn't quite work out, did it?  I have stacks and stacks and stacks of paper, mostly printed out from the digital versions of books that I couldn't find physical copies of.  Some of the material I've got sitting around is simply ridiculous.  For example, I have a copy of Michael J. Raine's 2002 dissertation Youth, Body, and Subjectivity in the Japanese Cinema, 1955-1960.  It was given to me by John Peters, who just happened to have a printed copy of it sitting around his office, and knew I was writing and thinking about Japan.  It's about 400 pages long and weighs about ten pounds.  Apparently I brought it with me from Iowa, put it in storage in my parents' house for a year while I was in Japan, then loaded it into a moving truck to bring to Florida.  I never read it.

(Incidentally, a Google search provides no evidence that anyone named Michael J. Raine is currently working in academia, though I did find a corporate lawyer by that name on Linkedin.  Hmm.).

I also have stacks of journal articles, mostly related to one project or another, mostly carried all the way from Iowa, and each either readily available online, or, even more embarrassing, actually saved on my hard drive.  I'm in the process of either archiving .pdf copies of all of them from the usage-restricted archives I'm about to lose access to, or scanning them - printouts of .pdfs - back into .pdf form.

I know this is insane, but at least getting rid of the paper versions of these things is incredibly liberating.  Leaving academia is, so far, incredibly liberating.  The weight being lifted off my shoulders isn't just metaphorical (who knows if I'll ever write that academic book, and who cares), it's physical.  Like, hundreds of pounds worth of weight.

Wheee!

The Ph.D. and the Nonacademic Job Search: A Spectacular Albatross?

In my ongoing post-academic (inter-academic?) transition, one of the very practical questions that keeps coming up is - how do I present my Ph.D.?  On business cards, on Linkedin, etc  . . . I'd be a pretty hopeless 'strategic communicator' if I didn't realize that referring to myself as "Dr. David Z. Morris" made me instantly seem like an asinine boor.  But what about "David Z. Morris, Ph.D.," or just "David Z. Morris," with the Ph.D. tucked on the back of the card, the third or fourth line of the resume, etc?

You can find different takes on this.  The authors of "What Are You Going To Do With That?" (which I strongly recommend) are predictably upbeat, considering their audience of almost entirely MA and Ph.D. holders.  They emphasize the skills and accomplishments indicated by the Ph.D.  Penelope Trunk, on the other hand, is brutal, saying that if it's not directly related to your field, you should Leave Grad School Off Your Resume.

In my case, my graduate degree could hardly be more relevant to the field I'm pursuing work in - my Ph.D. is in Communication Studies, and my work is focused on media technology and culture.  I've taught both business communication and strategic communication for nonprofits, which believe me, is far more educational than simply taking those courses - plus, now I have some actual experience applying what I learned/taught.  So I don't feel much conflict about listing the Ph.D., and even highlighting it.

But still, there are moments when it's overkill - I'm applying for some entry-level positions along with more senior positions,  and in those cases I provide a little caveat as part of my cover letter.  What do you think, though?  Should I just be leaving this off?  But no, no, there would be insurmountable, inexplicable gaps in my timeline.  Nothing to be done but acknowledge that I'm a huge nerd who did something impractical with his 20s.

Separation Anxiety: The Symbolic Trauma of Sacrificing Your Academic Identity

If you read contemporary job search guides (or if you're just a commonsensical tuned-in person) you'll know that your social media presence is nearly as important to how you're regarded by potential employers as your resume.  For someone transitioning careers, this can be tricky.  In my case, there are still people who follow/know me as an academic, but if I leave my online profiles oriented towards that audience, I'll be putting up a big STOP sign for potential nonacademic employers.

So, I'm slowly making changes - like changing my twitter bio and the bio on this page to something that acknowledges my 'transitioning' status (I feel like I'm announcing a sex change . . . ).  I still haven't tackled my main website (davidzmorris.com), where for a little while longer you can read what I have to say about myself as an academic first and foremost.

These are all strictly practical moves in the game of life.  And for a lot of people, they would be simply practical decisions.  But for myself, and I'm sure for many others in similar situations, there's a kind of existential dread that accompanies changing social media profiles. It's really not at all different from the dread that accompanies turning a C.V. into a resume.  There's not much room in either of those genres, and boy, wouldn't it be tragic if people didn't know HOW AWESOME I AM?  Didn't know all the great articles I've published, all the awesome grants and fellowships I've earned?  There's the threat that one will remain too attached to those old achievements.

I'm trying to view it as a moment of freedom.  I have actually accomplished things outside of academia - but more importantly, I have GOALS outside of academia.  This is a chance not just to change how people see me online, but to rethink how I see myself.  Watch this space as I tweak, poke, and prod that self-presentation/self-perception.

P.S. There is another practical concern.  Even as I'm looking for real-world jobs, my plan is to continue applying for academic jobs for the upcoming cycle, pretty much in case I end up really loathing wherever I end up.  I will have to carefully calibrate my self-presentation so that academic hiring committees really understand where I'm coming from.

The Quest for Freedom: Why I'm Leaving Academia. Temporarily. Maybe.

Today is a big day. Many of my friends and family know about it, but this is the first time I've posted here on the blog about a major transition in my life. In about three weeks, I will no longer be employed by the University of South Florida as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. My two-year contract is expiring, so there's nothing terribly dramatic about that. What's more notable is that I'm not, as most academics at this juncture would be expected to, packing up and shipping off to another city to start either a tenure-track job or a visiting assistant professorship somewhere.  Instead, I've spent the last few months fine-tuning a resume (not a C.V.), thinking about what skills I've acquired in my time in academia, and, starting a few weeks ago, applying for jobs in copywriting.

In other words, I'm leaving academia.

I don't know if this is a permanent bail.  Probably not.  Right up until the end of my fellowship, I seem to find working on my academic book proposal (for my book on Japanese Underground hip hop) way more compelling and interesting than the task of finding a real-world job, so we're already experiencing some nostalgia.  But for a number of reasons, I feel I have to take some time to discover what the alternatives are, and whether I feel they might fit me.

The idea of doing this first emerged about nine months ago, and I blame love.  There was a woman, and I felt things that I hadn't felt about anyone in a decade.  She opened me up - and I thought to myself, how can I leave this? It's the expectation, the way the model works - from postdoc in place A to Assistant in Place B, with no choice, nothing but the luck of the draw.  And the profoundly dated presumption that as a primary breadwinner, a professor could pick up and carry his (presumptively, his) entire brood anywhere.  But now marriages dissolve because neither spouse can or wants to compromise on their job.  Which, for me, seems like mistaken priorities.

That love affair ended in blood and fire - itself a transformational lesson in how callous humans can really be - but in the meantime other thoughts had crept in.  Last November, I visited my friend, an assistant professor at a private liberal arts college in a very small town.  I went there, and I saw he and his wife putting on a triumphant performance of mutual tolerance, and I took the three-minute walk to the only coffee shop in the three-stoplight town, and I heard the stress in his voice as he lamented his three year review, and the amount of pressure put on his teaching evaluations.  He seemed worn, old.  Another academic friend of mine indirectly revealed that for her full-time professorship, she was being paid barely more than I was earning doing only research.  The professorship that I'd been dreaming of all these years began to seem like a less alluring reality.

I powered through graduate school in Iowa City and nearly had a breakdown from loneliness and life-threatening weather, maybe because I could not conceive of a better alternative.  In Florida, though, one is given a profound window onto the possibilities afforded by money and flexibility.  I began to think I might someday want to be able to be spontaneous.  I might want to have great experiences that didn't involve reading.  I would perhaps really someday like to have sex on a boat.

Maybe a catamaran.

This is not to say that I want to get rich, but it will at this rate be another seven years before I can pay off a small amount in student loans.  This is an oppressive thought for me.

There was another, perhaps even more profound, because more immediate, factor.  About a year ago - just before everything went so horribly with a woman I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with - I connected with the principal organizers of The Venture Compound, an art gallery and performance space manned entirely by lunatics and flame-headed igniting angels.  I'm in its grip, fascinated and immersed, now committed to really make this place survive, committed to insane dreams of building something.  I maneuver city politics and I meet people from all walks of life, furniture makers and architects and witches, and because we are generous with our secret selves, our darkest thoughts, they feel that they can be, in turn, and so they stand there nothing but men with their skin on.

I am in the world, suddenly, I am of the world.  I have completely inverted my relationship to being.

And so now, I'm fantasizing about a new life, where I am part of a team that pursues a great goal together, instead of a series of piddling goals separately.  I want to think about the least predictable ways what I'm doing could impact, not just a few elites, but a true public.  I want to intervene in something other than debates.

I don't know if I have it in me.  Sometimes I look at myself and I just see some passive eunuch.  And I look at the world and it seems bleak, how do all those people do it out there without an institution behind them, without some superficially benign branch of the nanny state at their back, massed rifles just out of sight?

No, I don't really feel that way.  Education is a vital public good.  But still, how can I live if the government isn't forcing those Iowa farmers to support me?

But I think I'll figure it out.  I really do.  After all, people do it all the time, right?  Every day.  And it's not necessarily comfortable, or easy, there's that feeling of some small hook pulling your belly down hollow from the inside.  But in return you get the certainty that you have lived.  We as humans have been so diabolical to one another that, within a strictly bureaucratic framework, we have constructed a subjective experience that on a day to day level, for many people, is as terrifying as being stalked by a jaguar.  People kill themselves because they don't think they can handle the whole contraption, all of it put into place by nothing but humans working with and against fellow humans.

Wish me luck in the insanity.

I would like to thank Penelope Trunk and her utterly fearless integration of her personal struggles into her blogging about the professional world for inspiring me to pursue some new directions in my writing.  For the next few weeks or months, I'll be trying to combine my subjective experiences with some genuinely helpful and substantive reflections on the passage from academic to post-academic.

Three Essential Works on Sound and Territory

After a conversation I've now forgotten, with a person I can no longer remember, I still managed to write down three amazing tips on books I need to follow up on for my work-in-progress on car audio and territorialization.

Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare

Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb

Notes for "Re-Wilding: Contemporary Psychedelic Music and Anti-Civilization Rhetorics"

For a paper currently under revision:

The sonic character of contemporary psychedelic music constitutes an argument (or at least an assertion) about the nature of signification.  Its claim can, however, be read in two ways.  Psych may be actively deconstructing the clarity of contemporary recording, just as Zerzan advocates for the erosion and eventual abolition of language.  Maybe psych is straining for some parallel musical form of the wordless 'pure experience' that Zerzan fetishizes.  Or maybe it's something quite different - maybe what psych is telling us is that the imperfection is where the appeal lies, both in music and in language.  Maybe psych is the valorization of the spaces between, of the failures - yes, of the apparent freedom those moments bring, but also of the continued struggle for clarity.

This is why were are specifically talking about contemporary psych, and particularly about its noisy tendencies.  Just as Pierre Menard could rewrite Don Quixote in the 20th century and have it received as an entirely different and brilliant work, contemporary psych musicians can harken back to the fuzz and grime and recording imperfections of their 1970s progenitors, and their sounds have an entirely different meaning.  They live in an era where some sort of perfection is possible, and they consciously reject that.

Also likely relevant - Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever.

The App is Not the Territory: Representation and the Just City in Personal GIS

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Here's the text from my talk at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013.  This has been a great, great conference - I'll be writing more about how it's renewing my faith in academic seriousness.

But for now, here's my little contribution:


Michel De Certeau has written . . . “To walk is to lack a place.  It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.  The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place . . .” (2011, 103).  This placelessness has been touted as part of cities’ democratic potential – their placelessness leads to the chance encounter that overturns social barriers and creates new possibilities.

But in cities and across the entire landscape, personal navigation systems are putting this placelessness to rout.  Goals are always at the ready – the best restaurants, the most perfect attractions for the bearer's taste, the places to find one's own kind.  The city may yet appear to be a strange melange, a mix of class and kind without parallel.  But the mobile screen now works to create a different truth – connected to global positioning systems and data networks, the screen labels and divides, inflects the cityscape with information, guides currents of bodies and interest along constructed paths of meaning.

My objects in this study are ‘locative’ applications and the portable platforms they are used through – software like Yelp!, Foursquare, Tripadvisor, Layar, Urbanspoon; the smartphones and tablets by which they are carried through and made to interact with the world; and the Global Positioning System of geosynchronous satellites that fix these networked objects in their landscape.  The most successful and prominent geolocative apps seek to connect residents and travelers with attractions and amenities that meet their desires – for instance, allowing searches for restaurants according to price, style, and location, then providing in the same technological package directions to the destination.  Much of the information in these applications is provided by users, in the form of both basic information and reviews or other commentary on locations.  

However, I must admit that my close reading of these technologies is here going to be very limited, in favor of broader analysis.  Let’s look briefly at a few screenshots to identify features I’ll be building on.  Here’s Urbanspoon, an older app that uses augmented reality technology to place information about restaurants and attractions over the user’s view of the city, as if she were seeing through buildings.  Here’s Yelp!, which emphasizes a deep bench of crowdsourced user reviews, and uses a top-down map view to arrange information – a view that makes us think again of De Certeau, in his description of looking down from a skyscraper: “One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law . . . It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one' eyes.” (De Certeau, 184, pp 92).  Both applications, which use data display formats common to mobile locative applications of all sorts, engage in a rhetoric of mastery, of – to use a phrase rooted in a military context shared with GPS technology itself – total information awareness.

Phenomenologically as well as rhetorically, these applications remove sizeable intangible barriers between places – barriers of information that would in a previous era have been overcome much more haphazardly through personal networks, analog media, and chance encounter.  They strip away the layer of mystery that would have driven the flaneur’s urban exploration, and satisfy desire seamlessly.

However, the technological rhetoric of transparency and mastery advanced by locative apps overshadows a class-inflected blindness symptomatic of the neoliberal network society.  The network society, underpinned by internet and transportation technologies and new regimes of free trade, has rendered places like cities and nations increasingly subordinate to the networked flows between them, and subsumed regional and national class systems to a global logic that intensifies local stratifications and differences (Castells).  Personal GPS reproduces and reifies this stratification within the city, linking points of interest and rendering the spaces between mute and irrelevant.  What falls out of this sorting, what is not worthy of the screenholders' attention, disappears.

Critical Geography:

My interest in mobile GPS and mapping is an attempt to add something, from a media studies perspective, to a discourse that is decades old within the field of Geography – a field which, starting particularly in the 1980s, experienced a massive critical turn, in which what had long been taken for granted as a certain scientific facticity of space and landscape, and their representation, was reconceptualized as the outcome of deeply political and power-inflected social processes.  This turn grew out of and was fed by voices outside of geography proper, for instance Michel Foucault’s lament of the Western bias towards the interrogation of the progress of time over the extension of space, and extolling of the promise of a history of “spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.” (Foucault 1980, 149).

Maps are obviously key to this power-inflection of space.  Interventions have been delivered by both an interdisciplinary array of intellectuals deploying cartography as a lens for the social problems of the current era, and by a wholesale critical turn in the field of geography itself.  One standard-bearer was Edward Soja, who in 1989 summarized the necessity of the critical turn.  “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spaciality of social life, how human geographies are filled with politics and ideology.” (Soja 2011, p.25)

As an easy example of the role maps play in this process, see how in this medieval map, castles, churches, and the houses of important people were larger, or how in contemporary maps found in the United States, the Northern Hemisphere is always on ‘top’ and North America is always centered.  My distinguished panelmate Sangeet Kumar, in an article in Global Media and Communication, has written about how representations in Google Earth intervene in the debate surrounding the disputed territories of Kashmir, and similar global disputes around places like the Senkaku Islands have only multiplied in the era of globalization.

Writing in 1968, Henri Lefebvre inaugurated the more local demand for what he termed the “right to the city”, which argued for control over space-making as a necessary feature of any truly democratic enfranchisement (Lefebvre 1996).  David Harvey – almost certainly the world’s most famous geographer – addressed the city as a specific problem/nexus of capitalism, and read the efforts of urban planners like Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses as, in essence, acts of class warfare (Harvey 2009).  Harvey emphasized the project of democratic city-making as one that should be collective and communal (Harvey 2008).  

The need for these interventions was acute: used undemocratically, computerized, centralized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were proven very capable of furthering and accelerating the process of disenfranchisement and disempowerment, for instance when decisions are to be made about the placement of polluting industrial facilities or the distribution of access to amenities.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s geographers pushed hard for greater community involvement in the usage of GIS, though with little consequence.  As to whether smart phones, locative apps, and their crowdsourced “Volunteered Geographic Information” represent a ‘democratization’ of what was once a strictly centralized and largely governmental GIS regime, I unfortunately only have time here to point you to Jose Van Dijck’s great piece “Users Like You,” which unpacks the rhetoric and reality of open access on Youtube.

Compared to issues like territorial dispute and environmental justice, my interest here seems less urgent: the ideology of urbanism, and the phenomenology of the urban experience.  The famous inaugurator of the urban experience was the 19th century city-walker, the flaneur, whose openness to organic, randomized encounter, whose hunger for difference and novelty, was a marker of sophistication.  Personal GIS is the final death knell of this ideal.

The City and the City

A haunting metaphor for the experience of the networked city is found in China Mieville's The City and the City, a Borgesian thought experiment distended into a novel.  Mieville, a Phd-holding Marxist best known for his hallucinatory contributions to the techno-critical subgenre known as steampunk, in this book imagines two Central Asian cities – Ul Qoma and Beszel – that share the same geographic space, but are, in accord with a centuries-old convention, completely functionally and psychically separated.  A citizen of Beszel, for instance, might walk the same street with Ul Qomans, but through the learned ability to 'unsee,' would never interact with them, even in the most subtle ways.  A citizen of Beszel could never enter a shop 'in' Ul Qoma, even if it were physically next door to their house in Beszel.  

Though taken by some as a metaphor for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, The City and the City stands much more easily as an exploration of the new kind of citydwelling produced by neoliberalism and the network society.  Beszel and Ul qoma are separate, and unequal – Beszel struggling in poverty, while Ul Qoma stands within and beside it, rich from commerce.  Just as in real contemporary cities full of homelessness and desperation, passing without seeing is a survival mechanism, a means of avoiding conflict and contradiction and getting about one’s business.

To go from the fictional to the real, we can take my current hometown of Tampa, Florida, where I moved a year and a half ago.  Tampa is a radically stratified and geographically bloated place, whose population is starkly divided between haves and have-nots – here very closely related to the drives and the drive-nots.  There are traditionally segregated neighborhoods in Tampa – places like Channelside and South Tampa where elites can be left undisturbed.  My own neighborhood, though, is more paradigmatic of 21st century distributed urban geography – Seminole Heights, and adjacent Ybor City, are neightborhoods in redevelopment.  I knew within a few weeks of arriving in Tampa where I ‘belonged,’ and a traveler of my social ilk would have known the same thing within a few hours.  This is a map representing the path between places like Ella’s Americana Folk Art Café, the Independent tap room, Microgroove Records, Yesterdaze Vintage, the Mermaid Tavern, Tempus Projects art gallery, etc. etc. etc.  What would not show up on a visitor’s map is that Ella’s is right next to a pawn shop, the Mermaid is right next to a used tire store, and across the street from an hourly hotel.  Tampa is two cities, three cities, many cities existing side by side, but the map reduces it to the one you want it to be.

This sort of situation holds in any number of redeveloping neighborhoods in cities from the south to the rust belt, for example in Columbus, Ohio’s Short North, where I really tried to encourage Sangeet to buy a condo a couple of years ago.  These trends, roughly dateable to the mid-1990s, are a reversal of the urban planning realities of the 1960s through 1990s, best characterized by City of Glass, Mike Davis’ poetic study of what he termed “fortress Los Angeles,” in which opaqueness and impenetrability were politicized strategies for dealing with the frictions of urban class disparity.  For Davis, the early projects of the architect Frank Gehry, with their “walled compounds and cities . . . offer powerful metaphors for the retreat from the street and the introversion of space that characterized the design  backlash against the urban insurrections of the 1960s.”  Between those insurrections and the crack wars of the 1980s, there was a powerful, mounting sense of a nationwide confrontation between the forces of urban 'order' and dispossessed, predominantly nonwhite citizens.  This mounting tension culminated in the Los Angeles Uprisings of 1992-1993.

But since that nadir, many urban centers have experienced a change in the social fabric that is, if not total, certainly drastic, and that has significantly altered the nature of the barriers confronting visitors and outsiders.  With the exception of outliers such as Baltimore and Detroit, America's largest cities have experienced almost uncanny drops in the crime rate since 1993.  The phenomenon is still not entirely understood, but it is at least partly underpinned by new technologies and practices of relocation – particularly, GIS-driven ‘smart’ policing which has, in turn, fed a pathological expansion in the relocative prison-industrial complex, removing and neutralizing entire segments of the population seen as foolish enough to engage in open, violent class warfare.

With this oppressive support, urban geography and planning have begun to reflect a superficially gentler mode of class coexistence, primarily characterized by 'urban renewal.'  Though this can often consist of large-scale municipal projects or high-dollar developments, it also encompasses the smaller, fragmentary efforts of middle-income, mostly young, often white professionals to take advantage of inexpensive housing and retail stock in neighborhoods that are no longer perceived as zones of class warfare.  Thus the fortress mentality of high-dollar enclaves in Los Angeles may now be less typical than the appearance of coffee shops and trendy restaurants in struggling neighborhoods now seen as full of ‘potential’.  

They can be scattered geographically and cater to highly specialized social niches.  Smartphone location applications including Yelp!, Foursquare, and Layar are technological corollaries for this re-entry into the city, and of at least some degree of retreat from the late 20th century ‘fortress’ mentality – but, in a classic illustration of the tenets of neoliberalism, the appearance of systemic neutrality – ‘we’re just helping you get where you want to go – is based on, and reinforces, displaced inequality and subtler mechanisms of exclusion.  In addition to the looming shadow of the prisons, these proliferating individualized sites present their own implicit cultural barriers to strangers, visitors, and community members, while creating rich distraction from persistent despair in the urban landscape.

In moving from one of these islands of gentrification to another, with the aid of a locative app like Yelp!, the user is enacting a radical reversal of the ‘global village’ envisioned by Marshall McLuhan and other optimistic thinkers of the network era.  They are using what Mark Graham has termed “virtual portals,” connections of the same sort that connect distant points and drive macro-globalization.  But rather than crafting international connections that shorten long distances, in this case virtual portals erase local space, creating phenomenological shortcuts that craft a different, narrower city out of the variety of raw materials at hand, in a process of very selective collage by which social and economic worlds that share continuous physical space are separated into tiers of varying value and power.

So, while the automobile was perhaps the gravest blow to this democratizing ideology of the flaneur, with its expectation of randomness and joy in experience, personal GIS is its final death. The flaneur is replaced with an elite urban subject who is a strategic neoliberal maximizer.  We are able to instantly determine, in any city where we as the mobile international elite might find ourselves, the right ‘kind’ of places for our ‘kind,’ represented on screens that erase the spaces between them – the spaces of the poor, dirty, and hungry.  Thus the pursuit of pleasure renders us terrifyingly fixed within an informational-social matrix – a prison of excess knowledge.

Conclusions: Writing the City

That a technology promoted as an enhancement to seeing might actually have the effect of hampering it isn’t surprising.  All vision and representation is inherently interpretive, not a progress away from filtration or blockage or distortion, but a choice between the different varieties of modulation and meaning-making inherent in human sociability.  In this sense (not to be too much of an intellectual imperialist) critical cartography is inherently a branch of media studies.  That personal mapping technologies are overwhelmingly capitalist (rather than, like the old maps, statist) is the defining vector of their meaning.

The new city-being-written through the confluence of network technology and mobile locative media echoes in microcosm the global trends in social stratification brought about by networks.  Just as Manuel Castells diagnosed early in the process, the construction of a global ‘network society’ has produced increasing stratification within particular geographic spaces, in the place of differentials between geographic spaces.

Thus, under network regimes that both demand personal GIS systems and are reified by them, the reintegration of cities across various lines of difference may be less relevant to the task of social integration and democratization than it might have been under previous technological regimes.  Through writing networks of difference and similarity – particularly networks of class-inflected taste – into everyday experience, these technologies not only re-map, but re-segregate the new, more physically integrated city of the 21st century.  This amounts to a limitation of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city,’ insofar as the management and construction of the city is taken out of any public process and into the commercialized meta-spaces of information crowdsourcing.

Locative mapping more generally literalizes or embodies the gap in meaning-making processes between built human space on the one hand, and the broader, delocated social discourses that shape their meaning, on the other.  As with so many media phenomena, this is not a truly new thing entering the world.  Older media regularly pointed towards and lent meaning to spaces at a distance, and often in explicitly commercialized form – through advertising, through restaurant reviews, etc.  But the immediacy of this new mapping draws down substantially greater barriers between particular spaces, circuits, and citizen-customer-users.  As all places become written-on, and particularly as the taste dimension of these places become more and more intensely and rigorously reified, the chance encounters that embody the democratic and discursive possibilities of city life will be further and further curtailed.

Noriko Manabe on Dengaryu and Stillichimiya as 'Rural Rap.'

Great article at Japan Focus from the enduring Noriko Manabe.  Dengaryu's album is titled "B Kyuu Eiga no you ni," which means "Like a B Movie."  So, that's a big point in his favor already.

Video with subtitles:

Dr. James Tracy and the Paranoid Style in Floridian Academia

Starting December 20th, just one week after the shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dr. James Tracy of Florida Atlantic University began offering a version of the events quite different than that seen on the nightly news. On his blog, Tracy has speculated that the Connecticut medical examiner in charge of the case was an impostor, and claimed that there were two to four gunman in addition to accused shooter Adam Lanza. He has written that “compelling geopolitical and diplomatic conditions” suggested those additional shooters were part of an Israeli paramilitary team. In the culmination of these postings, Tracy wrote that he “is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shootings ever took place, at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described,” and suggested that the event was engineered by the Obama administration to help erode civil liberties. Even in its skillfully hedged form, the claim that Sandy Hook didn’t really happen, combined with Tracy’s position as a tenured professor, has made his claims national news.

Tracy has other odd ideas – his blog refers to weather-controlling “chemtrails,” FEMA-run concentration camps, and a shadowy conspiracy aimed at undermining American sovereignty. These echo a shockingly widespread belief in what is known as the New World Order, conceived by adherents as a massive plot to establish a single, oppressive, authoritarian global government. The New World Order is believed to include such groups as (variously) the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and the Rothschild banking family. These groups and others are believed to have orchestrated everything from the Kennedy Assassination, to first contact with space aliens in Area 51, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Sadly, without the “PhD” after his name, Tracy’s strange beliefs would be unremarkable – the conspiracy industry is big business in America, with figures like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and Pat Robertson peddling versions of the “Master Conspiracy” to an eager audience. Of course, it’s all hokum, part of a long tradition of fabricated pseudo-politics that stretches back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document showing an international Jewish plan for world domination, but which was really cooked up the Russian secret police in 1903 as a way of whipping up anti-Jewish hysteria. The Protocols were eagerly touted by notorious American Nazis such as Henry Ford, and to this day anti-Semetism remains a major underlying theme of New World Order ideas. But conspiracism crops up in many smaller ways; For instance, when the Pinellas County commission voted in 2011 to remove fluoride from county drinking water, it was partly due to New World Order theories that linked the mineral to government mind-control. But isn’t this the province of some narrow lunatic fringe? Hardly. Dr. Tracy’s strange and hurtful outburst illustrates an important point about conspiracism – very smart, sometimes very accomplished people can be pulled in by strange ideas, and they tend to be very good at defending their conclusions. Tracy’s blog is soberly written and carefully argued, for the most part sticking to the common conspiracist tactic of ‘raising doubts’ about the official narrative, and concluding that the discrepancies must mean there’s a larger, malevolent force at work.

Tracy’s descent into the rabbit hole shows the fine line between the healthy distrust that has driven some of the best of American politics, and a growing plague of conspiracism that threatens to erode the common cause that allows our society to function. There are some very good reasons to be skeptical of both government and the media – for instance, the tragedy on 9/11 really was used as a political tool to institute frightening curbs on American civil liberties, and programs like COINTELPRO and FBI surveillance of Occupy show that the U.S. government sometimes works against its citizens’ freedoms. Skepticism of the media, moreover, is vital to real democracy, and Tracy has published respectable academic work unpacking various forms of media bias and institutional failure. In fact, Tracy’s scholarly work is very similar to my own – we even both got our doctorates from the University of Iowa. Where does healthy skepticism cross the line to destructive conspiracism, and why?

The conspiracist fallacy is an emotional as much as an intellectual one. We live in a world of human imperfection, one in which not just natural disasters, but the failures of individuals and institutions seem constant. Depending on your politics, you’re likely to see various failures as causes of the Sandy Hook tragedy – but only a few of us will be tempted to explain those failures as part of a larger, carefully coordinated agenda. In a strange way, the conspiracist viewpoint is comforting – it transforms the complicated and sad reality of our imperfect world into one in which dark, Machiavellian forces are the source of all suffering. James Tracy and conspiracists like him would rather live in a world ruled by sensible evil, than have to confront senseless tragedy.

Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers

There was a time when you just got solicitations for turning your master's thesis into a poorly-edited vanity press book.  Now you can get trolled for a conference presentation and bait-and-switched into a page fee in the several hundred dollar range.  This list of predatory journals might help you avoid a serious waste of time . . .

Beall's List

Batman Shooter was a PhD Candidate: Let's jump to some conclusions.

So, the BBC is reporting that James Holmes, who apparently shot nearly 50 people in a paramilitary-style attack on a movie theatre near Denver, was a former neuroscience PhD student at UC-Denver.  This adds to a lengthening chain of doctoral candidates who kill, including Gang Lu at the University of Iowa in 1991, and James Eaton Kelly at the University of Arkansas in August of 2000.  Both of these were individuals who, while obviously insane in the way most homicidal people are insane, were immediately motivated by career difficulties.  Lu was unable to find a professional position on graduating, and Kelly had been drummed out of his PhD progam.

Obviously these are widely scattered incidents and there is no metanarrative to be drawn from them, much less any speculation to be done about this current tragedy.  But it does point out the fact that the academic world is tied into the same competitive and high-pressure system that encompasses the rest of America, with its disgruntled postal carriers, police officers, and office drones.  These expressions of malevolent rage come from people who seek validation and worth in their careers and, when it isn't forthcoming, have no ongoing reason to engage in society.  It's that disconnection from society - utter, complete alienation - that allows such things to happen.  And the isolating, hypercompetitive, high-pressure world of graduate school is a potent brew for those already disposed to instability and violence.

Anarchism and Japan's Anti-Nuclear Movement: Part 2

Here's part 2 of my recent talk at All Power to the Imagination, about Tokyo's anarchists and the antinuclear movement.  Enjoy!

Video: Anarchism and Japan's Anti-Nuclear Movement

Here's the video of my recent presentation at New College of Florida's All Power to the Imagination conference in Sarasota, FL. It was a great experience, with a small but attentive audience of anarchist activists and (mostly) theorists.  It's an annual event, and I highly recommend that you make the trip next year if you're at all interested.

Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School

Hey, so a couple of years after writing this, I'm out of academia!  Temporarily! Maybe!  Check out my new blog, focused on my interests in weird fiction, experimental music, and generally all things so post-academic that they're not academic at all, over at Blownhorizonz.com.

I spent a good chunk of last night strolling through the excellent blog, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School.  I'm reading it from a particular perspective - about a year and a half after finishing grad school, now with a couple of years of good employment under my belt and a slow, tentative sense that everything might actually work out okay.  I think the blog is great because much of what it highlights is simply facts about graduate school that, apparently, people don't necessarily enter into it fully aware of - the amount of work, the need to be truly fanatical about your intellectual interests, the difficulty of writing a dissertation.  But particularly in reading the comments, it strikes me that as factual as it may be, it's obviously set up to emphasize negative possibilities, and encourages a tendency of certain people to generalize their own experience to an entire institution.  So I just want to take a second to say one thing:

I spent six years getting my PhD, and it was the best decision I possibly could have made.  Therefore, GRADUATE SCHOOL IS OBJECTIVELY AWESOME and everyone should do it.

I'll show you the life of the mind.

Okay, kidding aside. I had a great time in grad school, and I knew many other people who did as well.  There's no denying there are a larger number of people who have a negative, or just a more complicated, experience - but I think it's just as important to attract the right people as it is to warn off the wrong people. Maybe if I present where I came from to have such a positive experience (and what I'm beginning to suspect might become a good career, but who the hell knows) it'll help people make the right decision at least as much as having a list of warnings about potential negatives.

Academic Cliche Watch, Minisode 2: Dyer on "Argumentation by Announcement."

Several months ago, I wrote a post about the phrase "I want to argue that . . .", pointing out just a few of the reasons that it's worthless and destructive to the integrity of academic writing.  Geoff Dyer, the genius author of unparalleled books like But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage, seems to have noticed the same thing - though not surprisingly, he's responded with a level of subtlety and comprehensiveness that outstrips my modest effort by several degrees of magnitude.

In my defense, he seems to have found the perfect target in Michael Fried's "Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before," which he dissects with a precise brutality that could be paralleled to what Christian Bale did to all those poor women in American Psycho, if it were done in defense of decency and clear thinking.  Geoff Dyer is easily one of the most brilliant cultural essayists alive, right in the league of Joan Didion or . . . well, very few others.  So to be on the receiving end of such a performance from him, while certainly painful, could also be considered receiving a scolding from someone so elevated the rest of us could hardly be expected to even aspire to the same plane.

That said, I have no sympathy for Fried, who I hope is enjoying the comforting sleep of reason in the bed he's made for himself.

Regarding Workers

I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).

I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director.  The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school.  Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but  I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.

I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.

Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society.  Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom.  I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.

David Schmidtz - Motivation and Tips for Writing

There are dozens of great pieces of advice here.  Watch it repeatedly.  Or if you're as venal as me, skip straight to part two, where Schmidtz does some stunning math - writing enough can net you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in additional salary.

Plato on Music as a Threat to Order

I'm teaching Mladen Dolar's excellent book A Voice and Nothing More, and came across a passage that I had unforgivably forgotten, in which Dolar joins with Plato in laying out the fundamental reason I study music - because it has profound anti-authoritarian potential.  Remember, of course, that Plato himself is rather a Machiavellian apres la lettre.


A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes.  For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions . . . it is here, then, I said, that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch.

It is certain, he said, that this is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved.
Yes, said I, because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm.


Nor does it work any, he said, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attack their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds agains the laws and the constitution with wanton license, Socrates, till finally it overthrows all things public and private.  (Republic IV, 424c-e)


As Dolar demonstrates, the greatest risk of music comes (according to Plato) when it doesn't match the words, when its meanings are ambiguous or its tone feminine.  Plato elaborates on what follows unregulated music:

So the next stage of the journey toward liberty will be refusal to submit to the magistrates, and on this will follow emancipation from the authority and correction of parents and elders; then, as the goal of the race is approached, comes the effort to escape obedience to the law, and, when that goal is all but reached, contempt for oaths, for the plighted word, and all religion.  The spectacle of the Titanic nature of which our old legends speak is re-enacted; man returns to the old condition of a hell of unending misery. (Laws III, 701 b-c)


Right on, brother.  Right on.

Academic Cliché Watch Volume 4: Admitting Defeat

I had a very dispiriting exchange recently on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to.  The main topic at issue was the accessibility of research online and/or through illegal means.  The two separate issues got a little blurred, but my position basically was that it is our job as academics to work for the good of all, and that making our work available as widely as possible was part of our role in society.  Separately from the issue of the survival of institutions such as journals (which I agree are very important), several other discussants took the position that academic research shouldn’t be widely available because it might be subject to misinterpretation or misuse.

This is a position that I’ve seen surface before in the reticence to publicity of a lot of graduate students I studied with.  I always supposed this was simply a lack of confidence that people would grow out of.  Imagine my surprise to find that, quite to the contrary, it is a fear that only becomes formalized and rationalized as individuals of a certain type progress through the academy.

One of the responses was borderline offensive, equating the work of academics with that of the research subjects who we interact with, as deserving of careful protection as the cultural practices of isolated primitive tribesmen.  This is a complete abdication of the responsibility of representation that is inherent to the role of the academy.  It is our job, quite literally, to frame the world carefully and knowledgably for those who want to learn about it.  Saying that the public is somehow ‘unprepared’ for our work reminds me of nothing so much as those who complain that their students aren’t smart enough for what is being taught.  You’ve got it backwards.  It is not the job of your audience to interpret your work in the way you intended – it is your job to make your intention clear and accessible to your audience.

I received a response to this sentiment that dug even further into the depths of blinkeredness.  Essentially it boiled down to: “Yes, it would be great if we could all write material that represented our subjects responsibly, but we don’t live in a utopia like that, so I’m going to continue arguing for limited access to academic work.”  I find this absolutely stomach-turning, as it boils down, not to an admission of defeat, but a desire to eliminate the possibility of failure by getting rid of any condition for success.  “We are imperfect and therefore should not strive to work up to a standard that will withstand scrutiny.”  What this boils down to is professional irresponsibility.

Obviously, the audience for academic work is not often going to be a broadly-defined “general public,” and not all researchers have the skills as writers to push their agenda along those channels.  But consciously talking only to those within the academy is the height of ridiculous self-defeat - the world is full of thoughtful and inquisitive people, often in better positions to make practical use of researchers' insights than other researchers will ever be. We have to be willing to let our work into the world, realizing that it is subject to misinterpretation or misuse, but working to the limit of our various powers to limit that risk.  Anything less is simply cowardice.