Subscribe in iTunesRadio Free Ruin #2 with Anne Elizabeth Moore is live! (At a different website)
Radio Free Ruin #2: Garments, Gadgets, and Third World Labor with Anne Elizabeth Moore is live! I speak with author/Truthout columnist/activist/former Punk Planet editor Anne Elizabeth Moore about garment work and third world labor, women in comics, cats, and much more. I also go deep into the whole Apple and Foxconn discussion, Mike Daisey’s The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and why all tech makers and users are implicated, not just Apple. Also, jokes of varying degrees of success and UFO flap news. Find it at the new Radio Free Ruin website, or:
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Author Anne Elizabeth Moore joins Radio Free Ruin to talk about her work, third world garment labor, why the manufacturing of technology gets more attention than garment work, the state of women in the comics industry, cats, and much more.
During Breaking News, host Paul M. Davis delves into Mike Daiseys’ one-man show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the nuances of the tech industry’s suicide-inducing Chinese factories and why all tech makers are complicit, and a cigar-shaped UFO flap over the South.
Radio Free Ruin #1: We’re an American Band (2012) with Cooper McBean
Download Radio Free Ruin #1: We’re an American Band (2012) with Cooper McBean (2 hrs 23 min, 103.2 MB, mp3)
Since the rise of Napster and file-sharing, it seems like every single music fan, tech pundit, opinion columnist, and blogger has an opinion on what’s wrong with the music business, and how things should change. There’s been a lot less conversation about how the technology shifts have actually affected the many professional independent musicians who have not been the subject of “future of the music business” trend pieces.
Cooper McBean of The Devil Makes Three joins Paul at Casa de Gato for a conversation about how technology and the Internet have transformed the lives of professional independent musicians for better and worse, the shady corners of the music business the Internet hasn’t disrupted, connecting with fans online, those “future of the music industry” trend pieces, whether bands using Kickstarter are enterprising or lazy, and Cooper’s advice for aspiring musicians.
During Breaking News, Cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein joins us to discuss the latest Cylon (military drone) news, the case of Bradley Manning, microagressions and Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls, why science is the 99%, and the enigmatic case of the Lesbian Bigfoot hunter.
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Show Notes:
Breaking News
- Motherboard: The Cargo Chopper That’s Hauling Drones to War
- Danger Room: Marines Want iPads to Control Robo-Copter Brains
- Danger Room: Almost 1 In 3 U.S. Warplanes Is a Robot
- Motherboard: Are Drones Collecting Too Much Information
- New York Times: Judge recommends Manning charged with all counts
- Wikipedia: Daniel Ellsberg
- Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls: blog.franchesca.net
- Microagressions
- Scientific American: Science Is the 99%
- YouTube: Neal Degrasse Tyson on Bill Maher
- Cryptomundo: Out Bigfooter Speaks Up For Lesbian Tolerance
- San Diego Gay & Lesbian News: Lesbian Biologist on Cult Hit Finding Bigfoot Spills the Beans
Cooper McBean Interview
- Danny Barnes: How To Make A Living Playing Music
- The New York Times: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
- The New York Times: Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.
- Techdirt: Amanda Palmer Talks About Record Labels, Art, Commerce & Retiring To Open A Juice Bar
- Crowdfunding Nation: The Rise and Evolution of Collaborative Funding
- Wikipedia: Jeff Mangum
- Wikipedia: Brian Wilson
- Mule Train
About the Guests
Cooper McBean is a member of The Devil Makes Three, which recently released the live album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre and will be touring with Flogging Molly in early February. He also fronts the country and folk band Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests. Originally from Vermont, Cooper now calls Austin his home, and can be found on Twitter @thecoug.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist holding a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first postdoc was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. Find her professional work online at cprescodweinstein.com and her non-professional blog at chandapw.tumblr.com.
Apple’s Devices Are Made of Blood and Misery. As Are All The Rest. So Do Something About It.
I’ve been following Mike Daisey’s work for quite some time, and was bummed that I missed his one-man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, when I visited New York this past November. Despite my weariness with This American Life, this week’s Daisey-centric episode is a must-listen. It includes an interview with Daisey, as well as excerpts from his show, in which he evocatively, shockingly, and at times hilariously details his trip to China to view the factories where Apple devices are made. The unethical labor practices that produce our iDevices are modern atrocities, and Apple plays an outsized role in perpetuating them because of the company’s skill at dominating the supply and manufacturing chain.
Own Apple devices and hate to play a part in such exploitation? Let Apple know:
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
408.996.1010Tim Cook (CEO)
Arthur Levinson (Chairman)
Online: Apple product feedback page (I’d recommend sending one for each device you own)
Don’t own Apple devices? You’re not off the hook, and neither are the makers of your devices. A truncated list of the other companies that also manufacture their products at the same plants as Apple: Acer, Amazon, Dell, HP, Intel, Logitech, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba.
Whether you own an iPad, iMac, iPhone, Kindle, Wii, Samsung phone, Dell laptop, XBox, Sharp TV, Playstation, or others, this is your problem too. This is too important to get embroiled in platform partisanship (AKA fanboyism) or get mislead by the media’s outsized attention on Apple because the iPhone makes for better SEO and ratings than the latest Samsung Galaxy Whateverthefuck.
People’s lives and bodies are being destroyed by our hunger for high-tech devices at the lowest possible cost, and we’re all to blame. The only thing that will improve matters is consumer pressure directed at all of the major tech companies which engage in these manufacturing processes (which is, to varying degrees, every single tech company.) Complain to all these companies and let them know you demand more ethical labor practices, whatever brand you happen to prefer. You can find contacts for these companies at The Consumerist Company Directory.
To hear more about Daisey’s show and what can be done to improve labor practices in offshore and third-world manufacturing, check out his interview with Julie Klausner.
For some more background on the unethical labor practices behind our devices—not only in the manufacturing process, but also regarding the “conflict minerals” used in the devices—here’s some other pieces I’ve written:
- Demanding Ethical Gadgets
- Are Retailers Complicit in the Sale of Conflict Minerals?
- Steve Jobs Is Dead, And So Is My Dad: Two Very Different Silicon Valley Stories
Additional background and resources worth checking out:
- After Suicides, Scrutiny of China’s Grim Factories
- 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
- Raise Hope for Congo
- iPhone’s Darkside Exposed by New Banned Game App
Episode Alpha: Afghanistan and Counterinsurgency, Godaddy Takes The Internet, and Obama’s Mission to Mars
Download Radio Free Ruin Episode Alpha (26:21 min, 14.3 MB, mp3)
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Radio Free Ruin is a radical talk show about tech, culture, and politics. Hosted by Paul M. Davis, the show is a freewheeling chat with activists, writers, leading thinkers, comedians, artists, and musicians about the week’s most important news and the burning topics that dominate these precarious times.
In the breaking news roundup: Journalist Michael Hastings declares the Afghanistan war “hopeless”, US Judge seizes hundreds of sites and orders they be handed over to Godaddy, Ron Paul’s candidacy reveals the failure of contemporary liberalism, the New Hampshire GOP deems the US Constitution insufficiently foundational, “Shit White Girls Say…To Black Girls”, and much more, including Obama’s alleged secret CIA mission to Mars in the early ’80s.
This is an “alpha” episode to work out the kinks, so no guests this time. Please forgive the sibilants and the audio artifacts, they will be fixed in future episodes. Thanks for listening, and check back next week for an episode with Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry. We’ll be chatting about the relationship between Adderall, Occupy, and Gen Y.
Show Notes:
- Michael Hastings: McChrystal Was ‘Complex,’ Obama Was Naive, Afghanistan Is Hopeless
- Ron Paul’s Ideas Expose Deep Contradictions in American Liberals’ Worldview
US judge orders hundreds of sites “de-indexed” from Google, Facebook - US Senator Seeks Answers from DHS Over Hip-Hop Blog Seizure
- Google Transparency Report | Google Transparency Report map
- Stop Online Piracy Act (Wikipedia)
- Why SOPA Is Bad – How the Stop Online Piracy Act
- U.S. Constitution No Longer Original Enough for New Hampshire GOP
- Sh-t White Girls Say … to Black Girls
- #slatepitches on Twitter
- Three Reasons James Franco’s Novel Might Not Be Bad
- Against Pepper: Against Pepper: Salt needs a new companion
- White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars
Thanks To:
Radio Free Ruin art: “As Things Fell Apart (Jewelers)” by Carrie Sieh
Radio Free Ruin theme: “FT2 Theme” by Phil Manley from the album Life Coach on Thrill Jockey Records
Radio Free Ruin Interstitial Music: “Requiem for Dock Boggs and Sandy Bull” by Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests
Resolutions for 2012
Photo by Carsten ten Brink on Flickr.
- No iPhone, iPad or computer in bed. (Kindle okay, and computer allowed at foot of bed for Netflix viewing.)
- Read at least 30 books. (There’s no way I can do 50 in one year, much less 55.)
- Eat less brown food. Eat more green food.
- Write more. Remove all unnecessary modifiers. Use more precise language.
- Don’t second-guess people’s intentions, and assume arguments are made in good faith, unless that is clearly not the case.
- Finally record and release this goddamn album I’ve been talking about for five years.
- Do not presume that I have any idea how things will turn out.
- Be less afraid:
“Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to stay permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.” – George Saunders, “The New Mecca”
The Best Podcasts of 2011, and The State of the Medium
Photo by HoundCat on Flickr.
In the middle of the last decade, there were bright hopes that podcasts represented a new form of citizen broadcast media. But over the past few years, that promise seemed squandered, as rebroadcasts of public radio shows dominated iTunes’ top 10 lists, crowding out independent efforts. It’s understandable: producing a quality podcast with consistently great content and high-quality audio is a time-consuming process, and requires more equipment, commitment and charisma than starting a personal Blogspot or posting funny pictures to Tumblr. And while here were some podcast-native successes, it seemed they required a geek-centric focus (Leo LaPorte’s TWiT network) or dogged determination (Jesse Thorn’s Maximum Fun mini-empire) to succeed. For people such as myself, who were inspired and encouraged by the promises of DIY broadcasting that podcasting promised, this was a disappointing fate for the medium.
Those trends reversed in 2011, the year podcasting came into its own. Buoyed by the success of WTF with Marc Maron, and the rush of mainstream attention garnered by the resulting New York Times profile, nearly every stand-up comic in the United States launched his or her own show, and comedy podcasting got its own network in Earwolf. This certainly drove wider interest and awareness, prompting a more mainstream audience to venture outside of the iTunes top ten list or finally figure out what the hell a podcast was. But outside of the comedy scene, there were other encouraging signs. Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network hosted numerous alternatives to the dominant tech podcasts, serving as the public radio-style analogue to the Howard Stern-esque approach favored by TWiT and the Cnet podcasts. The form matured to the point that longtime podcaster Jim Harold was even able to launch a successful network of paranormal news podcasts offering just the right balance of skepticism and belief.
As the form matures, it faces its own problems: the community is overwhelmingly white, male, and straight, and most political commentary is either dispiritingly partisan or comfortably centrist. The barrier to entry is high, and while there are a few examples of success, there’s a huge gulf between hours spent recording, producing and promoting podcasts and reaping any notional compensation. For the many people who have yet to figure out how to put music on their mobile device, listening to podcasts still seems an arcane science. And the success of comedy podcasts may pose its own problems, distracting from the breadth of topics that are out there.
Still, it’s been an encouraging year for fans of truly DIY broadcasting, for those like myself who find that broadcast media that doesn’t speak for us or use our language, who are alienated by shock jocks and partisan talk radio and NPR hosts who treat the culture of sub-sexagenarians with anthropological remove. There is a lot of space for podcasting to grow in the year ahead, to speak to new, underserved audiences, and reach the many people who have yet to download a podcast, but will soon.
Books/Writing on the Web/Music/TV/Other Media I Enjoyed in 2011, With Short Occasional Blurb Reviews
One benefit to digital media is that it’s much easier to collect lists of all you’ve consumed over the year. As a result, this is possibly an overly-exhaustive list of the books, writing on the web, music, and television I enjoyed to varying degrees in 2011. I’d like to think this sort of exercise serves some purpose other than self-indulgence, though it’s certainly a manifestation of that; there’s value to getting a broad view of what you’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about over the year, and sharing it with others. It’s so damned easy to get consumed by the endless news stream of the Twitter news cycle that such reflection may be more important than ever. If nothing else, it’s a worthwhile personal exercise. Hopefully it’ll send you in some new directions as well.
Hacker Jailbreaks a Kindle Touch
I’m a big fan of the new generation of e-ink Kindle devices, but Amazon’s hardware, software and commerce ecosystem is the most constricting walled garden of all. Though the functionality of the devices is limited by design, the Kindle 4 and the Kindle Touch are lightweight and relatively affordable tiny computers. (They’re also fantastic if you’re an Instapaper junkie, which I am.)
Now that Yifan Lu has jailbroken the Kindle Touch, it should be interesting to see what applications hackers come up with for the devices other than reading and giving money to Amazon, both things they do very well.
Maggie Smith AKA The Dowager Countess AKA Lady Grantham’s Greatest Burns
Daria is starting in on Downton Abbey season two. She reports that Maggie Smith (Lady Grantham AKA the Dowager Motherfucking Countess, if you’re nasty,) is as wonderful as ever. Here are some of Lady Grantham’s greatest burns, a few via Vulture.
“Why does every day involve a fight with an American?“
“What is a weekend?”
Lady Grantham: “You are quite wonderful the way you see room for improvement wherever you look. I never knew such reforming zeal.” Mrs. Crawley: “I take that as a compliment.” Lady Grantham: “I must’ve said it wrong.”
Doctor: “Mrs. Crawley tells me she has recommended nitrate of silver and tincture of steel.” Lady Grantham: “Why, is she making a suit of armor?”
Lord Grantham: “We better go in soon or it isn’t fair to Mrs. Padmore.” Lady Grantham: “Oh, is her cooking so precisely timed? You couldn’t tell.”
“Edith, you are a Lady, not Toad of Toad Hall!” Continue Reading →
Life in the Salton Sea, A Uniquely Southern California Wasteland
Bombay Beach // Trailer (by Alma Har’el)
I’m watching Bombay Beach, an experimental doc by Alma Har’el about the denizens of Bombay Beach, near the Salton Sea, the epically-failed attempt from the ’20s through the ’50s to establish a resort in the middle of the desert. The area now ranks among the most impoverished areas in Southern California.
It seems there is something uniquely Southern California about a site like the Salton Sea. Land speculation, promises to transform a desert into a verdant playground for the rich, wild ambitions of hucksters and the wealthy that are destined to fail, leaving the impoverished denizens to deal with the wreckage…it’s like a pitch-black, tragic parody of the entire region’s economic and housing development cycle circa 1930-2008 and the…shall we say “complicated”…relationship those hucksters have with the region’s ecology, not to mention empirical facts. I’m sure others have made this observation, the parallels are so obvious.
Bombay Beach doesn’t take this tack, though. It’s a hybrid documentary/tone poem/collection of vignettes full of powerful material—languorous shots of this ecological disaster site people call home, unflinching video essays of the lives of the small handful of residents who are bound together by little more than their proximity, as well as some really lovely choreographed amateur dance vignettes starring the members of the community. Despite all this, the film mostly avoids succumbing to cheap disaster porn tropes. I rented it on iTunes, and within 30 minutes I went ahead and bought it as well. (Added bonus: the soundtrack is by Beirut.) It’s available to rent or buy on all the big digital platforms, it seems. Highly recommended.
Hey Facebook: Gender Identity Isn’t a Circuit
While setting up a “person” page for my writing and/or vanity this morning, I briefly became hopeful that Facebook finally was allowing individuals more choices for gender identity than male or female when I encountered a dropdown box suggesting this was the case. Facebook’s refusal to allow more inclusive and accurate definitions of gender identity is a long-standing issue. (I wrote a post for Shareable last year about the debate; hopefully I did it without without swinging my moderately-sized straight white male dick around the discussion too much.) Continue Reading →
November Mixtape: P@RTY T1M3 M3G@M1XXX$$$
Image by Andy Gilmore
It’s been far too long since I made a mixtape, so here’s an extra-long two hour one to make up for lost time. May be my best one yet! It’s conventionally schizophrenic: emo R&B, dance-pop, indie rock, legacy synth-pop, “chillwave” (AKA “contemporary synth-pop by and for stoners”,) and of course, some hip-hop bangers. I’m going to try to get a new one of these up every month.
Download it here and spread the word! (Depending on your browser, you may need to alt-click/right-click and “save download as” or “save link as” as just clicking on the link will often just play the mix in your browser.)
