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no platform for Mr Robot noon notes 1.3

There’s no point in explaining how Elliot sees himself as a vigilante demi-superhero. There’s no subtext on that thought. Vigilante hacker is the plot. Elliot threatened to snitch on fsociety in the first episode. He had people arrested twice in the span of three episodes (truly terrible people, of course, but he immediately ran to police as a first option instead of infecting that cafe server or hacking a car and driving into the harbor. Or, ya know, just pipes to the face.) There’s no point in speculating further on how his financial hacking arrest only netted him therapy. Realistically, he could only avoid prison by agreeing to snitch or entrap others.

There is no hot take in closely reading the actions of superheroes as fascists. Everyone knows a superhero is fascist and fascists see themselves as superheroes ridding the underworld of filth.

The only thing left to do is ride out the plot while it blankets revolutionary statements on unclear politics. What sort of revolution wants to see only one conglomerate fall? I’ll continue watching when Cox Cable removes the geoblock so I can see how long it takes to unveil Elliot as the hipster cop. Is his social anxiety deep cover, or is his psychosis a software patch on a bigger bug?

Nothing guarantees that the fascist option won’t be preferred to revolution. -The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 2014

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noon notes on the politics of Mr Robot 1.2

The excellent person is related to his friend in the same way as he is related to himself, since a friend is another self. - Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics

Hello, friend. Hello, friend? That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name, but that’s a slippery slope. You’re only in my head.

Do you ever notice how Reuters and AP always make sure to apply the qualifier “self-identified” before “anarchist” as if people are talking to the press like this:

Reporter: can you tell me why you throw rocks at police? Rock thrower: as a self-identified anarchist, throwing rocks at police is both a defense and offense against the nation-state, and a state is only capable of violence; the function of democracy itself, formed by Athenian warrior-citizens, is to determine the specifics of war. That war continues directly through police and their protection of property, and indirectly through legislative and capitalist modes.

The style guide operates as a rejection of Elliot’s opening monologue “hello, friend” because the press is not your friend, it is a function of the state, and the state is not another self. Elliott’s address applies a proximity title, then gives a name. That name exhibits actions and presents ideas. The name is Mr Robot, but he is not a self-identifying anarchist, even though the USA Network has tagged him as such. The purpose of the press qualifier “self-identified” is to clarify the use of the title ‘anarchist’ is not meant as an insult by the author. This will then be an examination of the insult to Mr Robot, the not-anarchist.

November 2014, the Turkish Marxist-Leninist hackers Redhack announce they deleted 1.5 trillion Lira ($668 billion) worth of household electric company debts. The government of Turkey was quick to refute the ability to just erase debts. There are back-ups, they said, you still owe us. Redhack deleted delinquent utility bills in a smaller hack in 2013. I have not found anything confirming anyone paying a debt erased by Redhack, but I don’t speak the language. In an interview, the English-speaking contact for Redhack said “We go along with the current agenda in Turkey […] The current government is enemy of the environment and humanity.”

Debt abolition is a form of social democracy, if not coupled with or followed by political rupture, intersectional insurrection, full communism, or whatever phrase you want to apply to mean fix shit up. Mr Robot tells Elliot “money hasn’t been real since we got off the gold standard.” This isn’t a position of anarchism, but one of market libertarians. He goes on to say, “What if I told you that this conglomerate just so happens to own 70% of the global consumer credit industry? If we hit their data center, we could systematically format all the servers, including backup. Every record of every credit card, loan, and mortgage would be wiped clean.” Technically, loans and mortgages aren’t consumer credit. But that’s semantic when foreclosures and defaults are grinding people into dust. Finally, Mr Robot delivers the soundbyte the whole show was sold on. “The single biggest incident of wealth redistribution in history.” 

Wealth redistribution is going to be a root function of full communism, and full communism is full anarchism, meaning wealth is no longer a metric for success or survival. Abolishing debt is a zero-sum redistribution of wealth and it doesn’t abolish a monetary system any more than abolishing a monetary system would abolish the state. But Mr Robot isn’t talking about statelessness. He’s barely talking about anti-capitalism. The first question in his Ferris wheel pitch to Elliot asked, “what if you could take down one conglomerate?”

Mr Robot is pitching a hostile corporate takeover. Democracy has not been hacked.

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Theses on Mr Robot 1.1

in keeping with living a cyberpunk dystopia, my service provider has locked the 1st & 5th episodes, the 6th episode aired on USA Network last night, and I don't bother with torrent sites. My notes on Mr Robot then are culled from episodes 2, 3, 4, promos and the memory of the pilot episode. The aesthetics and themes aren't as liquid as the plot or character development, and it is also where I find the most intrigue. (also: the screenshot is not a real quote, or is it idk)

Every face in Mr Robot shares the look of a David Fincher film on jaundice. The muted yellow-greenish grey palettes with sharp black shadows keep the scenes tense and vibrant. The characters look sickly but not ill. Gaunt and pinched but not dead or dying. The purplish undertones of asphyxiation given off by florescent office lighting is applied to the muted hot white daylight as a metaphor of being trapped in a corporate hellscape. This visual style, the Fincher Style, lends just as much to the comparisons to Fight Club as the anti-consumer, young, white collar male experiencing a mental break from late capitalism in the form of hallucinating an older, more ambitious self. Or does the Fincher Style inform that character assumption?

Mr Robot is only addressed as such one time in the first episode, and to everyone's confusion. Christian Slater assumes the titular character but never introduces himself as Mr Robot. His only hard connection to the name is the patch on his jacket. This leads the viewers to associate the use of Fincher's visual style with the plot of Fight Club. I think Mr Robot is real. Not real as in non-fiction, but real as opposed to imagined.

In the first episode, Elliot asks why fsociety would want to meet in person rather than online, where Elliot is far more comfortable. "Our encryption is the real world," Mr Robot says. His example is a hacker group busted by the chatlogs with an FBI informant, an obvious analogous reference to LulzSec and the snitch Sabu. What it ignores (or foreshadows in Elliott's paranoia) is the possibility of someone being tailed by feds, the Men in Black, gumshoes, those old school spook investigations, or the overlooked exploit that they might be inviting an informant into their abandoned arcade.

The show's writers are praised for being the first cyberpunk hacker depiction to get the tech aspects correct while still remaining entertaining. They also acknowledge the recent movements that Mr Robot cribbed for revolutionary slogans, and get characters to use the lingo in ways that don't feel forced. The show let’s you know that they know they got it right in a scene where Romero mocks the film Hackers. “Hollywood hacker bullshit. I’ve been in the game 27 years, and not once have I ever come across an animated singing virus.” This is a low bar to meet and Mr Robot gracefully clears it, but if the entire genre of cyberpunk hacker drama is predicated on a false interpretation of two assumed positions, what can be left other than wrongly coded malware? Social media theorist and sociologist, Nathan Jurgenson has considered the implications of thinking digital and physical as separate, virtual and irl, online and afk. Jurgenson named this habit of separation "digital dualism" and Mr Robot is hard-coded with this line of thought, as I noted in the first entry.

"Digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other." Jurgenson’s perspective on augmentation is applied to the dualism of online activism: "Taken alone, yes, much of the cyber-activism would not amount to much. But used in conjunction with offline efforts, it can be powerful." Jurgenson wrote in his 2011 digital dualism introduction that this was the case with the Arab Spring digital and physical organizing.

In the painfully unnecessary essay "Fuck Off Google" released in 2014 by the Invisible Committee, there is an unsourced (and ungoogleable, therefore apocryphal) passage looking beyond the digital dualism of online and irl.

"in the words of a member of Telecomix, a group of hackers famous for helping the Syrians get around the state control of Internet communications, if the hacker is ahead of his time it’s because he “didn’t think of this tool [the Internet] as a separate virtual world but as an extension of physical reality.”

Telecomix did help reroute web traffic for Syrians trying to get images out to the world in the first days of the revolution-turned-civil war. But this quote against digital dualism is unfounded in English search results and, knowing how IC writes, is a likely attempt to prove the theory it is quoting is correct by publishing a seemingly backdated quote about the theory. Therefore "dialectically co-creating," or using a backdoor exploit into the source code. Invisible Committee,Tiqqun, et al. are the theory-insurrection predecessors of fsociety.

Mr Robot is talking about a similar insurrection in an attempt to create the "single biggest incident of wealth redistribution in history" without offline efforts, save for the replication of the fsociety brand mascot: a rosy cheeked old white man with a curly white mustache.

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noon notes on Mr Robot

(Gif originally posted by maleklovers)

MR. ROBOT is a psychological thriller on the USA Network that follows Elliot Alderson, a young programmer who works as a cyber-security engineer by day and a vigilante hacker by night. He suffers from social anxiety disorder and forms connections through hacking. He's recruited by a mysterious anarchist, who calls himself Mr. Robot.

Perhaps the most mysterious aspects of Mr Robot remains, "how is Mr Robot an anarchist?" A single vaguely socialist line about wealth redistribution makes Mr Robot more likely a presidential candidate than an anarchist. I'll tease that out later because Elliot is far more complex in his simple dualisms.

all binary everything

In the first and third episodes, Elliot helps NYPD arrest violators of bodily autonomy; perverts and rapists. But he also outs romantic infidelities uncovered by hacking. Without much laboring over the idea, a conservative estimate of ninety-nine percent of people, if asked, would likely consider it a moral imperative to take action against any known sexual predators. Comparatively, far few people might consider taking any action against adultery not involving their own relationship. To use Elliot’s many tech metaphors, the latter is just his operating system working around a bug: trust issues.

In a voice over, Elliot says never show someone your source code because a bug will eventually surface. But he does just that by telling Mr Robot he knew his dad secretly lived with leukemia. Mr Robot points out how Elliot betrayed his dad's trust at age eight, when, out of fear, he told his mom. (Mr Robot is seen pushing Elliot off the steep Coney Island boardwalk as a punishment for this betrayal.)

Is he crazy or not? Do any of these people exist? In the character bio on the network site, it is revealed a court ordered Elliot to seek therapy, presumably his only punishment for a financial hacking arrest in the very recent past. Elliot is more closed off than usual in his sessions with Krista and their relationship is very stiff, and hostile. The adulterer Elliot confronts is Krista’s partner. For a show praised on its technological accuracy, the writers would know convicted hackers aren't offered plea bargains so unbearably light. What else did Elliot agree to in the plea, if one existed? Snitch? Entrap?

Elliott's psychosis begins operating in the foreground making the psychologist all the more curious to see his source code. He has to submit to piss tests, and lucky for his addiction, the hospital network is wide open. But when he decides to force kill his morphine addiction by having his rapist supplier arrested, his withdraw hallucinations blend with binary logic. Elliot becomes more vulnerable and in charge of fsociety. He is the key to whole project, Mr Robot says. The possibility of Elliot convincing himself he isn't an informant as a suppressive coping method seems more plausible than a predictable Tyler Durden scenario where he is Mr Robot, or in the Matrix. It also better fits his binary of true or false; ones or zer0es.

In episode 1.3 (fourth episode) the on-screen fsociety roster consists of 6 people; 4 men and 2 women. The patriarchal binary shows the men embarking on a hunt for the Stone Mountain data storage facility while the women stay at the arcade to gather intel. Darlene, a brash white woman is dismissive of the leadership assertion by Trenton, a quiet Muslim woman, by insinuating her hacking abilities are more advanced—in a way only presumptive white feminism can. In a later scene, when Darlene wakes up after the all-night intel gathering at the arcade she sees Trenton is already up and on her prayer mat. Darlene silently observes through the dank air clinging to pinball machines with a quizzical gaze, as if she is also gathering intel on Trenton.

The show premise operates on a binary system. The only characters filling non-hetero roles are closeted, sinister, cis and white; or all four in the case of Evil Corp's exec, Terrell, whom is also married to a woman into bondage while pregnant. Non-binary does not compute, it is a bug, a tempting fault in need of correction, or exploitation in Mr Robot. You're a one or a zero, as the title of the second episode states.

Bugs frighten the paranoid Elliot. If someone sees your bug, they have everything needed to take over. You’ve blown your cover if someone finds it. Bugs in Mr Robot are given object oriented ontology. Elliot sees agency in daemon programs running in the background operating systems to the point of claiming it harbors deep, silent hostilities. “I’ve got more than most,” he says.

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Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States and my most embarrassing relative

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on heritage

In the newly revived argument of the contemporaneousness of the Confederate flag flying at state buildings in South Carolina and Mississippi, or whether flying it privately is to honor "heritage" or promote racism, remember these three points of interest: First, the vice president of the Confederate States, and a man I have the unfortunate distinction of calling my direct ancestor, Alexander Stephens said this in his famous Cornerstone speech just weeks before the start of the war at Fort Sumter in Charleston SC: "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." Second, the Union flying the stars and stripes of Old Glory did not fight the Civil War to free a single slave. It was merely a dispute about taxes and profits. CVP Stephens, again from the Cornerstone speech, "There seems to be but one rational solution and that is, notwithstanding their professions of humanity, they are disinclined to give up the benefits they derive from slave labor. Their philanthropy yields to their interest. The idea of enforcing the laws, has but one object, and that is a collection of the taxes, raised by slave labor to swell the fund necessary to meet their heavy appropriations. The spoils is what they are after though they come from the labor of the slave." The open oppressors often have a better analysis of their systems than those claiming platitudes against it. Third, the Dixie rebel flag was never ratified by the Confederate Congress but became the Southern icon it is now because the KKK adopted it for being the battle flag of General Lee. They actually had 3 national flags in the 5 years the confederate states officially existed. The star studded blue X on a red background is now used in countries that have outlawed the display of the Nazi flag as an ersatz symbol of white domination. So when someone favorably discusses the rebel flag as their heritage, they are favorably discussing racist structures meant to benefit white capitalists, but when someone discusses burning the rebel flag, why are they not also discussing burning the U.S. flag for the exact same reasons? All flags burn black regardless, but they are only symbols of ideas for action. Burning every flag will not change an idea. But fire does have other uses. It is the responsibility of white people to deconstruct racist systems, and even more so a burden when the perpetrators, the architects, of these structures are family. When I posted this to Facebook and tagged my family, my dad and stepmom removed their tags because erasing history is that simple. They had no idea.

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Unwritten rules for baseball are as esoteric as a high society dinner séance. Never show fear nor pain, be talented but not flashy, be on time but not hurried, be vigilant but not vulgar, snipe but don’t snark, forgive but never forget.

Much of the unwritten rule book is transcribed from cricket—baseball itself finds more lineage in the early Victorian game of rounders—and players absolutely concede deference to the rulebook. The rulebook says uphold the spirit of the game. As a spectral puff of intuition, spirits avoid definition, seemingly making the rule obtuse and open to interpretation. But more concretely, the spirit of cricket reflects a Eurocentric etiquette, one of aristocratic authority and the convoluted processes to subvert that authority. As cricket fueled the spread of the British Empire, the spirit found homes in lesser regulated and informal leagues of the hybrid ball and bat game. Caribbean islands and Japan each made contact with the spirit about the same time mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States cities absorbed the newly urbanized and out of work. In the earliest days of hardscrabble town ball, a runner was tagged out by taking a hit from the ball, rather than a gloved catch. Modern, professional baseball is a haunted form of cricket and rounders with unwritten rules clinging tight.

Major League Baseball traditions are therefore colonialist traditions.

Recently, Chris Rock, of all people, lamented the staid nature of baseball in the twenty-first century. There was a time, he said, when he could talk baseball with anyone he saw in the neighborhood, but not anymore, black baseball fans are an “endangered species” and the MLB is in danger of returning to its whites-only roots. He attributed this in part to the steep decline of African-American players, once twenty percent of the league, merely eight percent now and, in part, to the unwritten rules prohibiting showmanship. He didn’t, however, mention how over a quarter of the 2015 starting rosters feature players born outside the United States, most prominently from Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Cuba. If baseball is an American pastime, it’s possibly the only time this isn’t deployed as shorthand for talking about the U.S. exclusively.

On a warmer than average Spring evening, humidity hung low at Kauffman Stadium as the Oakland Athletics and Kansas City Royals opened a three night engagement. The numbers on the scoreboard slowly volleyed backed and forth then plateaued at a 4-4 tie when Oakland’s Josh Reddick took the plate in the seventh inning with Brett Lawrie on first. A well-aimed ground ball bounced off the pitcher’s mound, ricocheting off the foot of Kelvin Herrera. The ball was quickly gloved by Mike Moustakas at the third base line prompting Lawrie into an abrupt hard slide feet first into 2nd base, with one cleat raised, his spikes making a solid impact with shortstop Alcides Escobar’s calf, successfully breaking up the double play. After a few moments of trying not to writhe around, Lawrie, holding tight to the base; Escobar, holding back visible agony, rose from their prostrate positions. Escobar was helped limp off the field. Lawrie was seen on the tv feed inaudibly mouthing “fucking bitch” as a teammate walked him chest-to-chest to the dugout.

As you might imagine, sliding into a base cleat spikes up is as dangerous as thrusting nine short daggers at someone. If an umpire deems this deliberate, the player is guilty of breaking the Mcrae Rule regulating what a player attempting to break a double play at second can reasonably do with their body. Lawrie didn’t get this call. Ironically, the Mcrae Rule is named after the 1970s Royals designated hitter Hal Mcrae for his infamous habit of body checking takedowns of basemen.

On account of baseball embodying the gentleman’s spirit, post-game decorum dictates an apology be extended if responsible for injuring an opponent. Lawrie asked Royals’ infielder Eric Hosmer for Escobar’s cell number to apologize. He claims his heartfelt text message got a rude reply in Spanish calling him stupid and accusing him of intentional injury. Escobar tells reporters he never got a text and if he had, he always replies to English with English.

In the following game, as predicted by baseball tradition, Lawrie’s lower ribs caught the impact of an inside pitch from Yordano Ventura and he took his base with a knowing smile. Ventura was ejected. That’s how the unwritten rules of the game handle situations in which grown men throw balls at each other. Ventura took home advantage in the sacrifice knowing the next match up puts them under Oakland’s summer sun. Sometimes retaliation takes on a slow burn to make the mark sweat in the batter’s box, but Ventura was hot off having just aided a three-run homer before Lawrie took the plate. Which is yet another unwritten rule: knowing your next-at-bat is already disliked, don’t jeopardize their safety for your gains, or, paint the corners, not the walls. Oakland held the game winning five-point lead, although, the score was settled.

However, during the first inning of Sunday’s game, Royals outfielder Lorenzo Cain had to jump out of the box away from a pitch with some English on it, and still caught it on his foot. The A’s pitcher Scott Kazmir was not ejected. Protesting this disparity of calls, both the Royals pitching coach and manager were thrown off the field by umpires. Unwritten rule: don’t challenge umpires. Avenging a payback plunker is not an unwritten rule and it certainly isn’t in the spirit of the game. Oakland was attempting to rattle last season’s unexpected division champions.

The idiom put some English on it contains more insight than possibly intended. First introduced as a sporting term in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad describing ulterior methods of navigating a difficult game of billiards on an unleveled table in a seedy French billiards room in 1867. Twain explained the method of allowing for the warped curve “or you would infallibly put the “English” on the wrong side of the ball.“ Suggesting as much, the English would do anything to stay on the right side of the ball, as that is the perceived order of things. As a metonym for the invaders tactic of divide and rule, this couldn’t be a more apt shorthand code imprinted onto the very language of the sport. The dugouts spill onto the field after each provocative play, leading to ejections stressing and weakening the Royals roster for future games, and molds a narrative of hot tempered hooligans.

Now as de facto initiator of what became a three day assault, Lawrie’s luck crumbled like Escobar’s knee during that dirty slide. In the eighth inning, Kelvin Herrera’s first pitch was high and inside. As was the second. Way inside. Behind Lawrie’s strike zone, in fact. Herrera was immediately ejected for throwing above the elbow—a written rule. As the dugouts again emptied on to the field, Herrera either pointedly gestated while speaking, or pointed to his head, perhaps to imply Lawrie was lucky it wasn’t a headshot. Herrera later blamed his bad grip on the increasing rain, and this is entirely possible; it is equally possible that Herrera tactically conspired with the rain and simply offered a postscript by pointing at his head: think about your actions, Lawrie. In the visitors’ locker room, reporters were fed a victim’s statement from Lawrie on this assumptive repeated affront. Into the cameras and microphones, he expressed deep, doe-eyed concerned for his own safety because these pitchers, way up on the mound, throw with such speed and strength, he says. Justice must be served, he implores. This is embarrassing, he’s quoted. Ventura and Herrera must be punished, by the book. Ventura was slapped with a standard fine and Herrera got a five game suspension and an undisclosed fine.

How unfortunate that Lawrie’s lack of luck has a long streak. In 2012, his batting helmet took “an unlucky hop” off the ground and hit an umpire in the back during a close range exchange about a strike out. Lawrie was suspended with pay for four games. Fans pelted the umpires with beer cups and trash at the close of the game. Luck, as explored by Ta-Nehesi Coates in The Atlantic that same season, is merely another word for innocence, and unlucky is the happenstance most confused with guilt.

In Bitch Magazine, Claudia Garcia-Rojas writes: “white innocence is historically predicated on the criminalization and violation of (primarily) black bodies. The framing of whites throughout United States as inherently innocent and blacks as guilty not only encourages the continued perpetuation of white violence against black people, such as physical police violence, the discriminatory enforcement of laws, and mass incarceration, but also makes it a necessary condition of the state, as the state maintains its power and dominance through the criminalization of (mainly) black people. [Darren] Wilson’s testimony reveals how the historically rooted rhetoric of white innocence not only goes unchallenged but is also state-sanctioned. In his testimony, Wilson frames himself as fearing for his life despite the fact that he was carrying multiple weapons the day he chose to murder [Michael] Brown.”

Lawrie, outfitted in his spiked cleats and bat, continued leveraging his white innocence to publicly provoke Royals fans by labelling them as aggravators of violence against him because they rooted for the home team, (kind of like how his fans threw trash at the umpire he assaulted during a temper tantrum?) This, again is another unwritten rule: don’t make sacrifices on the road. Actually, Lawrie is following this rule to the very bones by claiming every stadium he visits is hostile territory and the greatest fans on Earth are his own.

In response to the pandering and accusations of violence, Royals fans rallied around the 2014 World Series hashtag #StraightOuttaKauffman.

Through the use of this cultural shorthand referencing the progenitors of gangsta rap, the Royals fans subconsciously played into Lawrie’s narrative where he is the victim of revenge by the gang of Escobar, Ventura, and Herrera. Duly reinforcing the idea of assumed criminal culpability when black and brown people engage in self-defense.

The hashtag was soon enriched with image macros of the burning Quik Trip in Ferguson with the caption “MLB SUSPENDED HERRERA. THEY HAD TO KNOW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN” and a fan video edit of Herrera’s near-miss dubbed to the parodic titular ssong by N.W.A. with a dramatic black and white slow zoom of Herrera walking off the mound. Fandom spilled over into expressing desire for Straight Outta Kauffman shirts, quickly satiated by two Kansas City screen printing shops: Brookside Tees, a quirky online boutique named for a young and white, upper-middle class Kansas City hood; Seen Merch, the go-to printers for young rock bands and music festivals. White capitalists commodifying a pathologized African-American and Latino criminality to affect thug life and machismo as access to street credibility is tried and true, there’s no need here to unpack the majority of pop culture over the last quarter century.

Those team boosters in the hashtag however, eager to mock Oakland, leaned heavily on the thug archetype to lend the joke premise some self-reinforcing street cred. The platonic ideal of a racialized thug posited the bearded Herrera as an underground pit bull fighter in one tweet, Ventura’s head Photoshopped on Tupac’s shirtless body displaying his Thug Life stomach tattoo in another and many others assigning N.W.A. analogues within the roster.

Speaking of tattoos, Lawrie is perhaps best known as the heavily tattooed, Canadian fratbro photographed playing Edward Fortyhands (a drinking game in which a forty-ounce beer is duct taped to your hand, encouraging you to chug) whom happens to also play professional baseball and wears war paint style eye black on the field, (breaking yet another unspoken rule: peacocking.) In fact, one of Lawrie’s tattoos in particular, a spider web on his elbow, is a known marker of criminality and originates in skinhead and Aryan Nation prison gangs to signify the wearer has made a racially-motivated kill. But of course, that’s an unspoken rule of tattoos, how was he to know? Ventura’s forearm tattoo, however, of a fiery fastball is hard to misinterpret.

The attacks on the Royals continued as they faced the Chicago White Sox later in the week. But honest mistakes do happen. José Abreu took a pitch on the elbow, and gave a thumbs up to Ventura on the mound. The following inning, Sox pitcher Chris Sale, poorly read the unwritten rules and spun Moustakas around like a cartoon with a plunker in the shoulder, which is the exact pitch that got Herrera ejected four days earlier. In the seventh inning, Adam Eaton sent a short line drive right up the mound and was seen mouthing something unintelligible to which Ventura clearly responded “fuck you” before leisurely tossing Eaton out at first.

On cue, the benches cleared and the dugout flooded the field. Wild haymaker punches from the White Sox met Royals bodies. The spirit of the game receded, this was an all-out brawl. As Chris Rock noted on HBO, the San Francisco Giants made it to the 2014 World Series by beating the St Louis Cardinals, both of which he claims had all-white rosters. This is only true if Rock doesn’t acknowledge African ancestry in the peoples of the Dominican Republic, an anti-black sentiment as common to the unwritten rules of settler-colonialism but also a very specific form.

Willing into the clubhouse the spirit of Hal Mcrae, as a professional muse, and the Caribbean and U.S. black power revolutionaries of recent memory, as philosophical muse, if these attacks continue could possess the Royals to lead a formation of a sort of Afro-Latino Solidarity Defense League, in which coordinated activities might seek to chiefly protect the twenty-six and half percent of non-U.S. born and eight percent of black players in the MLB. The antecedent here for such a rupture point being St Louis Cardinals centerfielder Curt Flood leveraging black union power to end the Reserve Clause making indentured servants of players to their signing teams, and not just in baseball, but the entirety of pro sports began allowing free agency, and with it came the rise of Dominican players entering Major League Baseball.

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The Pony Express delivered its first piece of mail 155 years ago this day. To celebrate, Google Doodle created a simple video game of a horseback rider picking up letters on the eastbound route back to the stables in St Joseph, MO. The Google Doodle was not created because the Pony Express is of any relevance to anyone outside those few still directly profiting from retelling the short history. Rather, Google knows many ideas die of dysentery shortly after leaving the stable.

Pony Express only lasted 18 months, and that’s with federal funding and private contracts. The short lived service wasn’t defeated by the Western installation of the telegraph as the apocryphal story goes, it was defeated by the Civil War, or more precisely, it was defeated by the redirection of private and federal funds in preparation of the war effort. Even the largest tech companies know those feels. (Google and Microsoft sued the government while competing for a contract to migrate government email to cloud computing. A rather bold business move, but then again, they're also fully complicit in NSA spying. Bold is an understatement. ) Google has created and discontinued more services than is worth noting here. However, discontinuation is not because the services are rendered obsolete, but because they weren’t properly maintained.

Remember Froogle, the group coupon and price matching service from Google? Groupon offers the exact same service and remains wildly popular. The same happened with the Pony Express. The firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell had a veritable monopoly contract on freight supply to U.S. military outposts and the private stagecoach line Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company before creating the Pony Express, but the Fed's, fearing the Civil War might become a reality, withheld payment on the five million dollar contract. That on top of maintenance of forts, stables, coaches, riders and horses, ultimately made the debt more costly that the convenience of ten-day mail service. The Pony Express was merely a failed app in the Russell, Majors, and Waddell portfolio.

Mail carriers under the flag of various companies traveled along the same routes as the Pony Express, although the myth of technological advance states the Pony Express was rendered obsolete in October 1861, two days after the telegraph connected Omaha with Salt Lake City, and all points west. Other mail carriers survived the new emergent technology, so how did it render the Pony Express obsolete? Perhaps that had more to do with William Russell embezzling from the Indian Trust Fund as a secret means of recouping the delayed government contracts. Although arrested, he and his accomplices weren't charged. Instead they provided aid to the Union's mail delivery after Texas confederates seized control of and stopped the Overland Butterfield Mail Line, cutting off communication to California.

“To protect communication lines with California, both houses of Congress, with President Buchanan’s approval, modified the Overland Mail Company mail service contract by discontinuing the transportation of mail along the southern route and transferring it to a new central overland route. This new service would originate in St. Joseph, and provide mail service to Placerville, California, six times a week. In addition to this new route, the contract required that the company run a pony express semi-weekly at a schedule time of ten days … until the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line.” (National Parks Service Organization and Operation of the Pony Express, 1860-1861)

The federal government turned the western half of the central route mail contract (Salt Lake City to Placerville, California) that Russell, Majors and Waddell’s C.O.C. & P.P. Express Co. previously operated over to the Overland Mail Company. In exchange for giving this segment of the passenger/mail route to the Overland Mail Company, the government promised to indirectly support the Pony Express until the completion of the telegraph. Technological progress is too often a myth we find ourselves telling so it feels like we’re advanced beyond robber barons and gunslinging bandits of the Western frontier. The truth is, industrialists and politicians will always find new methods of banditry. (postscript: the Pony Express increased in use after each stage of the telegraph went operational)

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I'm in thenewinquiry:

By Cory Stephens

The Kansas City Royals’ Kauffman Stadium is in a suburban sports complex that is perfectly modernist, which is to say, perfectly designed to quash riots.

On game day, the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex could be described as the innermost suburb clinging to the outermost...

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Message in a Bottle, Smashed in the Face of a Cop

We are the storm we’ve been waiting for.

Maybe it was Napoleon Bonaparte or maybe it was Frederick the Great that put forth the maxim that moves the people. Try as you might—and it matters little outside of boutique branding opportunities—you cannot accredit an idea whose time has come. An army marches on its stomach; neoliberal forces crawl on its belly.

A breadth of events outline September 17–24, 2014, as New York City hosts the United Nations Climate Summit in preparation for the COP20 in Lima, Peru where the party-states will set the agenda for the 2015 COP21 in Paris. Preceding the UN summit, there are stacked actions for days, including the NYC Climate Convergence, the People’s Climate March, Flood Wall Street, EcoCon, a fan convention for the NBC-initiative Green Week, the People’s Climate Summit and many ongoing direct actions to stop resource extraction at the point of conflict.

The organizing head of the People’s Climate March, 350.org, promises attendance in the hundreds of thousands – culled from over a thousand organizations – to march through Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon for the purpose of maybe convincing someone in a global position of power to do something. The totem environmental justice NGOs involved are nothing short of neoliberal arbiters between the corporate state and the working class to cushion the former from the latter, more often than not with the former’s financial support. Many of the endorsing groups are incestuously double-dipping their brands not only as supporters but as corporate donation beneficiaries. For example, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund owns 350.org and has previously partnered in campaigns against competitors’ tar sands with many of the top endorsing groups of the People’s Climate March, such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, World Wide Fund for Nature, the Natural Resource Defense Council, and Global Exchange to name a few. Rockefeller’s Climate March intends to go swimmingly. Here’s hoping it doesn’t.

As with all permitted marches, the People’s Climate March in New York City is planned in full cooperation with the police and their demands on when and where to vent that anger. There aren’t any flagship demands waving over the estimated 200,000 people marching on the city. The march is decidedly without demands. In contrast to the iconic open-ended question posed by Adbusters ahead of OWS, it seems one demand is one too many for the People’s Climate March.

In the summer of 2013, the Creative Action Cookbook was released by 350.org to promote the hashtags #summerheat and #fearlesssummer and was branded onto some daring indigenous-led tar sands shutdowns and oil refinery blockades. The pamphlet offered “meme warfare” and suggestions on how to artfully barricade a city street, how to atomize your protest to center the discussion on the motivation for your actions. But it also outlined the umbrella safety that comes with a 350.org protest as opposed to one that forsakes their leadership and the police violence they will unleash as punishment. An excerpt from the passive threat in the pamphlet reads:

A Tale of Two Protests: Which would you rather attend? Which would your mother prefer to attend?

Protest A: Screaming chants, hastily painted angry signs on different sizes of cardboard and the police are in riot gear and begin pepper spraying protesters. The protesters are all dressed in black and wearing face masks. The crowd is mostly white young men in their twenties. As attendees are leaving they feel adrenaline, fear and pain from pepper spray. Many are going to jail after being arrested for rioting.

Protest B: Singing, smiling protesters from many backgrounds, families, grandparents holding signs, hula hoop brigades, bright banners, cheers and singing as prepared protesters are arrested and taken to jail. Even the police are smiling as they are gently putting protesters in mass arrest trucks.

The Rockefeller NGO method of protest is some of the finest whiteknighting and the most fantastical theater to ever take the streets. Any rogue improv actors that show up will be punished later in the news and reviews for going off-script. The 350.org demand for absolute pacifism means anyone arrested or brutalized by the police surely brought it upon themselves for exiting stage left, pursued by a bear.

Self-identified left-liberals are calling for an ultimatum to the 350.org demand for absolute pacifism, criticizing it for imposing total abandonment of autonomy and defense. Rather ironically, Chris Hedges has expressed exasperation in his own belief that militancy was the “cancer of Occupy” by stating “resistance will come from those willing to breach police barricades. Resistance will mean jail time and direct confrontation.”

As seen in the Tale of Two Protests, the 350.org march has solved both of those issues by claiming only young white men wear black to a march, and coupled with the last minute McKibben pledge to put indigenous groups at the prestigious front of the march like trophies, thereby absolving his organization for the years of ignoring and speaking over these very same groups at meetings and mobilizations. Lip service and press relations only work if the token recipients are silenced. Amanda Lickers of Defend Our Lands/Reclaim Turtle Island refused that silence. She had a few words for Bill McKibben during a Montreal speech on September 3, 2014 that highlighted so many of the lies, distortions, and blind eyes cast by the 350.org PR machine. As McKibben was describing his idea of truth in justice, Amanda Lickers interjected, “We have these dreams of justice and this idea of coming together, right? But, if we cannot understand justice as it is so deeply tied to processes of colonial and capitalist violence, we will never achieve that dream.” She went on to express dismay and distrust in the People’s Climate March organizing because “there is no acknowledgement of indigenous territories whatsoever and the ongoing invisibilization of settler-colonialism is unacceptable.” Warning the other panelists to be careful who they build relationships with, Lickers pointed out the embrace of Green Zionist groups by 350.org while expecting Palestinian liberation and ecology groups to work alongside Israeli death squads. Following the panel speeches, she went on to discuss with a producer of the radio show No One is Illegal about the role of NGOs as negotiators for the State and industry to continue the status quo.

As a final jab to the false information propagated through the 350.org one-way channels about acceptable tactics, Lickers offered this explicit call-to-arms: “Good luck to the black bloc and I hope that y’all make a real serious dent. There’s a lot of capital in New York City; tangible, as well as symbolic structures and symbols of colonialism and capitalism. It is white supremacy that allows colonization to become a social norm and it is white supremacy that fuels capitalism.”

Erased and buried under white noise for centuries, the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and the colonized United States and Canada have continued to offer clear demands about environmental issues. Stop stealing resources and leave. Stop stealing resources for capitalist accumulation. Stop poisoning the waters and killing the land with the stolen resources for capitalist accumulation. Stop.

Drowned out by the noise of expansion for hundreds of years, the non-native people of color and poor whites in the United States have continued to offer clear demands about environmental issues. Stop placing the toxic industries and its wastes in our communities. Stop stealing the resources for capitalist accumulation. Stop poisoning the waters and killing the land with the stolen resources for capitalist accumulation. Stop.

But, the hoisting of these distress flags are taken down by the self-appointed general of the armies – the NGO steering coalitions, funded by capitalists and the State. They keep taking on more passengers on an ark built big enough to weather this storm they say affects us all.  All are welcome as long as they agree climate action is needed, regardless if that action is green capitalist ventures giving up the ghost on reality, like carbon credits or clean coal, domestic oil or carbon capturing. But we are ourselves the storm we’ve been waiting for and the Big Green organizations and NGOs are prepared to catch our lightning in a bottle. Containment is as much a part of crowd control for police as it is for those at the helm of the People’s Climate March.

We are the 100 percent. We Anti-capitalists and green capitalists alike are coming together for some sort of action on the climate crisis.. We’re just floating memes out here in the sacrifice zones and ghost towns of Moab and Escalante, Utah; Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; North County St Louis, MO; Rockaway Beach in Queens, NY; Lakota territory; Kalamazoo, MI; Omaha, NE; Springfield, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Aliceville, AL; Pilsen-Chicago, IL; Iatan, KS; Mayflower, AR; Ripley County, MO; Richmond, CA, the entire Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes and most of Ohio, Texas, Nevada, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. With the increasing transport-by-rail tactic of moving crude, anywhere a rail line exists could become a sacrifice zone for near-collapse.

Sacrifice zones for resource extraction and waste storage are as easily replicated as a broken window or severed head, everyone has at least one and the conditions can present anywhere a vulnerability is found. Sacrifice zones are also where the people are finding themselves directly marching against the dead-eyed collapse doers, but without some affiliation with at least one 350.org tentacle, will only be at the NYC street fair in spirit. Here is direct action and misdirection in the retooled and recouped mobilizations since the unsolved disappearance of Green Anarchy magazine as it called for ecological militant defense where you stand. The People’s Climate March aims for misdirection, pleading for something to be done by the UN, (and before the member-states even convene in what amounts to a corporate trade show for resource extractors), finally chalking it up with an eerie ‘well, we tried’ and leaving the State and the capitalists to continue sloughing on with a meager resistance ahead. If 350.org succeeds in the coalescing of a climate people without a clear victory against capitalist resource accumulation and this new climate bloc is piped back to the sacrifice zones, save for some lost souls damned into the purgatory bowels of prison, the NGO arm of the State have accomplished their goal of containment and de-radicalization.

350.org knows it wields incredible powers of abdication of the State. 200,000 people are estimated to descend on NYC for a day of action and maybe one-third of that can stay for the week of divergent actions. 200,000 is a mighty force and one-third of that is still more than the 34,000 uniformed cops in the New York City Police Department. But, again, the State has doubled down on the pacifist pathology in the Big Green leadership and the cop-to-climate marcher ratio becomes closer to 1:1.

“State power does not rest on a war-machine, but on the exercise of binary machines which run through us and the abstract machine which overcodes us: a whole ‘police'… One of the most formidable problems which States will have will be that of integrating the war-machine into the form of an institutionalized army, to make it one with their general police. The army is never anything but a compromise. The war-machine may become mercenary or allow itself to be appropriated by the State to the very extent that it conquers it. But there will always be a tension between the State apparatus with its requirement for self-preservation and the war-machine in its undertaking to destroy the State, to destroy the subjects of the State and even to destroy itself or dissolve itself.” (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II, p 141-42)

To embrace the street fair aesthetics, in this moment, the opportunity is given to both test our collective abilities and the affinities we can make. In this context, being in contact with, sharing knowledge and showing solidarity is very important. Perhaps far more important in this microburst storm is to devote as much time as possible while in the New York area engaging with existing efforts in stopping the Rockaway pipeline, oil train traffic, nuclear plants, tar sands barges, enormous power line tower construction or a proposed gas-fired power plant. Upon returning home, continue this work locally. If you’re privileged enough that you don’t already live in or near a sacrifice zone, somewhere in your region is a sacrifice zone waiting to eliminate that privilege. Write the epitaph in your footsteps. Seal capitalism in a coffin of its own making.

It is time to turn the Financial District of NYC into a sacrifice zone.