I mean, I know the show was set up in order to provide some description of public forum, but the amount of back-and-forth squabbling between representatives of the major parties. Not only this, but often the questioners will identify this unproductive and vitriolic debate between the major parties, and yet members of the panel will still bicker over which side is to blame.
You can’t just sit an ALP member opposite from an LNP member and expect them to ‘keep each other accountable’- that just turns it into an exercise of rhetoric. The standard of policy debate in this country is poor as a result of its politicisation which is no doubt why the paradigm of a strong opposition is no longer effective counter policies but extensive criticism of government policy. That is not to say that the blame for this drop in standards is the fault of the LNP opposition. Indeed, their behaviour in the press and in parliament is a component, but equally so is the way the ALP government feel the need to respond; feel the need to respond to inneffectual nay-saying by a party they believe to be of business rather than of the people.
The problem is endemic in an adversarial system like the one we have, and until we adopt a model of consensus democracy, Is it too much to ask the the panel on Q and A is comprised of experts and academics rather than politicians?
This band have been hailed as one of the most important bands of the alternative movement, bridging the gap between punk and more melodic college rock. Or at least that’s what I’m told. Hmmm, I had better persevere.
My hope in the human race was restored somewhat when I found that at least one youtube commentator has a soul. I found this on the ‘From the Basement’ version of Radiohead’s song, Separator:
“This is my anthem for 2012. The depth of this song is incredible. Everyone who has passion and a soul has had those dreams or nights where they wake up and feel like their life has started over. Every time I listen to this song, I feel like I have a new beginning. My chalkboard has been erased and my slate is clean. Time to fill it up ladies and gentlemen. I am excited for the treasures and blessings to come. Peace and prosperity to all. “
-jeffkoenig79
I was about to say we’re at a fork in the road here, but that is untrue.
We were there 5 years ago, and technological advancement picked a path for us; The music industry is becoming increasingly digitised and the way music is consumed (I hate having to use that phrasing), distributed and, to some extent, conceived is largely through electronic means. We all know this. More people are listening to music than ever before, and ultimately, its technology that has delivered this trend.
OK, so we’re through setting the scene. I’m going to outline the basic premise of my observation: The music industry is well and truly digital, decentralised and diversified and yet the fundamental structure of the ‘means of production’ does not reflect this.
Just to disclaim at this juncture, I hate using terms like ‘means of production’ and ‘consumption’ and anything vaguely clinical/ business oriented. Having said that, the challenges faced by the music industry are largely economic in nature, hence requiring that approach. Even the phrase ‘music industry’ makes my skin crawl, but it does segue nicely into this argument:
Music has been an avenue for profiteering for some time now, and this profit motive has accelerated considerably since the 1950s with similar technological advances as we are seeing today. Also, there was a high degree of enterprise. If we look at the popular music movement, particularly in the western world, it is apparent that the means of production was ultimately owned by the entrepreneurs such as recording and distribution labels. Obviously the artists themselves had a degree of power in the process, but one only need look as far as the manufactured bands of that era to know that popular music was largely an economic phenomenon. There were a few reasons for this; technology then was such that music could be recorded and refined to a high calibre, however it was expensive to the point where it was considered capital. [Of course, nowadays, recording and engineering can be done inexpensively, with equipment that would be accessible enough to be classified as consumer goods]. The upshot of this: The means of production were centralised and owned by a handful of business enterprises. In effectively owning the means of production, they were empowered to corner the market to the point where the artists themselves became employees.
Its a blunt way to look at it, and this is not a perfect argument: there is no substitute for pure creativity in the process of making music, that is a fact. But I would argue that business can synthesise the product of the creative process to the point where process becomes irrelevant. Ownership of the means of production in a fast growing cultural movement places one in an extremely empowered position- All of a sudden, you can alter what you produce to steer a seemingly organic phenomenon. Look at the punk movement, or grunge after that: It’s true that these genre’s developed from artist’s experimenting with other genres, however, when the gerne’s following reaches a critical mass, the business side takes hold and the movement becomes driven by supply and demand.
I am certainly not aiming to discredit or belittle the work of artists that became popular off the back of these movements, but I’m trying to develop the point that the business side of music acts to distort popular culture because it is commercially expedient to do so. I’ve tried to paint you a picture of what the music industry lookes like when the means of production are centralised and owned by enterprise. Music would not have reached such large audiences if not for this, however, now our model of development does not necessitate centralisation of production. (Cheers technology)
The internet, P2P file sharing, digital downloads, free streaming, social networks, hell, even inexpensive recording hardware.
These are all examples of an industry that no longer requires business in order to reach large and diverse groups of people. These are the preconditions for a decentralised musical industry in which the owners of the means of production are also the agents of the creative process. Not only this, but music is accessible in ways that could not have been imagined a few decades ago. The digitisation of musical production and distribution has ultimately created a situation where the enterprise arm of the music industry ( I’m talking record labels and the like) could potentially be redundant. But there’s a problem:
Enterprise got clever. And how did they do that? How have we, in our digital age, come to be prisoners of an outdated, analog business model?
I don’t know.
I still subconciously think that these compaines have a place, even though I’m hard pressed to find a reason why. I still consider the excess of rock and roll a norm. I still look at independent artists as a minority. Some of the biggest bands in the world, Radiohead being one, admit that the business model is out-dated, self serving and, fundamentally: Not about the music.
My challenge to myself and to you is to work out a way to move on. There is an unequivocal direction that we have to take here. To hell with commercial expediency.
I’d love to say I’m back in the saddle, but I’ll probably get halfway through a train of thought, save it as a draft and forget about it for another three months.
“It’s been a shit year for me”
Such has been my catch phrase for much of the issues I’ve faced that weren’t to my liking. I don’t deny that I’ve had a difficult period of adjustment- this stuff happens. Its just that I’ve found that as soon as I’m given a way to retract some of my own culpability for the stuff I screw up, or for the stuff that I’m uncontent with I tend to put a lot of weight on whatever that externality may be. I’m not trying to be negative or critical of myself hear, but I figured that the process of evaluation would be pretty handy, and hell, we can all relate to this kind of stuff.
I remember a conversation I had on a bus ride a while back, and it cast my mind back to a moment that I’d had a long time ago. The guy that chatted to me on that bus ride was the same guy that told me in 2008 that my main attribute was in perseverence and little more than that. The latter part could sound harsh, but in effect, its actually quite positive. Its kind of reminiscent of Aristotle’s 10,000 hour rule- natural talent is weightless, people excel through doing more work than others. To a significant extent, this is true, but I don’t want to wander from the original point.
The key thing I am considering is that the person I was 3 years ago is the same person I am now, but for some reason, that perseverence isn’t there. I guess this question would require an interrogation of the origins of perseverence itself- what causes it? complete accountability to yourself? Or is it external conditioning?
There is something separating the person I was in 2008 from the person I am now, and I think that thing may be that which dampens that knack for perseverence. Whether that’s internal or external is a huge question and currently my head is saying the latter, But maybe this is incorrect. In any case, this isn;t something I can necessarily up and solve. Maybe the change involves a transition, maybe it involves the application of pressure, or maybe it requires a change of scenery.
On that last point, there is an abundance of this kind of thing; I wouldn’t readily admit it sober but the lifestyle I lead is one of insularity. That is to say that even when exposed to the severe problems faced by many in our society, the disconnect in living standards (The way that I am able to immerse myself in luxuries and escape the immediacy of the problem) staves off any motivation to engage with the issue. Its a terrible mindset and comes back to the central question: “Is it a product of conditioning or internal. Of course, it would be easy for me to say the former, but it wouldn’t exactly give me an impetus to make changes.
This is in the same way as me blaming my lackluster academic/financial/social performance on it being a shit year for me. It doesn’t really invigorrate me to make changes to my lifestyle. I guess the course of action is to actively make an effort on a consistent basis but that seems too simple, too generic and, dare I say it, too much like rhetoric.
I guess this year has taught me the extent to which I have to sort things out, more than anything else.
Again, this isn’t really a negative thing, just a frank push in the desired direction.
"
1978. San Diego. I’d just come out the other side of a relationship that blew up…I was angry, and disillusioned, and ultimately self-destructive. I’d lost everything I believed in …I was as utterly, completely alone as I’ve ever been.
So I began going on walks.
I started taking late-night walks around the San Diego suburb I was living in at the time. I’d start walking early evening, and come back close to midnight, sometimes later. Walking and thinking and chewing over what had gone wrong with my life.
One night, at Fourth and E Streets, I got mugged and beaten by a street gang—sent me to the hospital with serious intimations of mortality. When the ER techs asked what my religion was, I refused to answer. I made my private peace with the universe, content with whatever was going to happen, live or die.
Then something happened. I got angry. I got angry because I still had stories to tell. So I fought back.
It took two months to fully recover. But two things came out of that incident. First, I have no fear of death. None whatsoever.
Second, as soon as I was well enough, I started walking again, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning through parts of town that made even street people nervous.
When people asked what I was doing out there, the only answer I could give was, “I’m looking for something.”
So I kept walking through some of the most dangerous parts of San Diego, before it got cleaned up, when it was still home to hookers and drunks and gangs. Finally, one afternoon, I came to the same areas I walked through at night and I was struck by the dichotomy between that corner at night, and the very same corner during the day.
In the daylight, there were businessmen and kids and clerks, eager to get home to dinner and TV. Then, later, came the night shift, the lost people, emerging from shadows and beds of pain to walk the same streets in search of fixes, money, and bars, gradually fading away with the dawn. Two totally different worlds, sharing nothing but longitude and latitude. There was the nation in the day, and the nation at night, existing side by side but each fleeing the other.
A daylight nation.
And a midnight nation.
I saw a country bifurcated by more than just the presence and absence of light, but by lives cast aside and lost and uncared for; the walked away and the thrown-away on one side, and on the other, those who pretended not to see them, because not seeing is easier.
And I saw someone forced to walk both sides of the metaphor, to learn that the greatest cruelty is our casual blindness to the despair of others, that there but for the grace of whatever god you subscribe to goes any of us.
And finally, I realized that I had found what I was looking for, without ever being quite sure what it was. I found a story that would make my own life make sense again.
This story.
I still take long walks, and I still stop and talk to the people who stand at the corner and wait for something to happen to them, who wait for money to fall into a hat or a cup, who wait for someone to recognize their pain, because the line between the midnight nation and the place where I sit right now, writing these words, is thin and ephemeral and can be crossed in an instant.
And because the road to the midnight nation can be erased only through compassion.
I found my story, this story, on a hazy afternoon in 1978. Now it’s yours. The keys to the midnight nation are in your hands.
What you do with them is up to you.
"—
J. Michael Straczynski.
Sherman Oaks, CA
July 21st 2002.
7:00am- Wake up
9:00am- Commence Foreign Policy Exam
11:10am- End Foreign Policy Exam
2:00pm- Begin Torts Law Exam
4:10pm- End Torts Law Exam
5:30pm- Go to work
12:45am- Knock off
This is going one hell of a day.
Turns out the guy from whom I borrowed a fixie has returned home 4 months earlier than expected. No big thing, I guess, but it means I have to give it back.
That thing has been a true companion to me. As it turned out, after 3 weeks of riding the thing everywhere, I found out how poor the componentry was and then I crashed it pretty heavily, but whilst it wasn’t exactly a quality machine, it sure did bounce back. After my rose-tinted view of the bike wore off, I could see it for what it really was- simple, moderately fast, durable transport. Nothing more but that’ll be plenty.
By my reckoning, in the 3 months I had it I must have clocked around 1000 k’s on it between work, uni and just general riding. And you know what, whilst being fully aware of the thing’s nuances, I would seriously consider getting one. Such is the bond I’ve developed with this machine.
I would have taken a final spin on the thing, but I figure I’ve punished it enough, so instead, I’ll take this opportunity to thank Rhys (the real owner) and the fixie itself for the countless times its put a smile on my face on otherwise very dull commutes.
The whole ‘Occupy x place’ movement has gotten to the point where its takeup around the world is moderately blindsiding the issues. I mean, I’ve always been a supporter of grass-roots activism but I am starting to think that its incarnations with respect to certain issues could be getting counterproductive. At this juncture, I’m going to go back a few months to an experience I had at a Tertiary Education conference:
There was a panel discussion on social movements in education and the differing forms it takes. Anyhow, what was largely the consensus of the room was that there is no right or wrong approach, but often the best approach was one that was measured/ punctuated by knowledge of the magnitude of the issue. Not only this, but, in a country such as ours, often the most successful movements were those that were intelligent, rather than a mere display of people power. In other words, the educational movements that get up are often founded on a pretty solid grounding in fact, and a very precise view of the issue. This is to say that in a country where the official channels for social change are decent (I say that very loosely in Australia’s case, but we do have it pretty good) widespread support is great, but not compelling. And in any case, any support would be attained through a clear and measured message.
[I’ll editorialise here, and say that this was not necessarily the view I would sympathise with, and its by no means a rule, but in recent developments in student politics, this has been the case. What I’ll also say, is that issues in Tertiary Education are, by definition, niche issues, which probably goes a long what to accounting for why the aforementioned is the case. OK, back to the recollection]
So anyway, this is the consensus and then this guy pipes up with a comment. This guy was the same guy I saw bagging some socialists for their ‘un-pragmatic opinions’ earlier that day. And yeah, the people he was talking to seemed pretty uninformed, but I wouldn’t say that ‘un-pragmatic opinions’ are necessarily a bad thing when you’re a student. The point is, this guy was a classic example of a smarmy Labor- Right hack from an Eastern States campus (The process over there is heavily politicised compared to WA). In a conversation I’d had with him earlier that day, he’d advocated the position that students are consumers of education/ guild services rather than participants in the process- he qualified this view as the ‘pragmatic approach’ when it comes to lobbying.
[ And yeah, in a way, he’s right, its easier to lobby a university as a consumer than as a participant, but to take that view kinda blindsides the fact that tertiary education creates positive externalities- Its unequivocally in ours and society’s interests to recieve one and that makes it more than a consumption decision]
Anyhow, this guy piped up and said, looking directly at the socialists as he said it: “Do you think that the legitimacy of educational movements has been eroded by people who take the extreme view?”
I was immediately dismissive of this question given his apparent intent, but as a question, it was actually quite interesting. I’ve been mulling over it for a while now, and I think it can be answered with respect to the occupy Wall St and etc movements. RECOLLECTION OVER.
So anyway, I saw a poster for the Occupy CHOGM stunt at uni today and it said something along the lines of “Social Justice and Climate Change Action, NOT sexism, racism and war”. That’s a good cause- its a good thing to get active on, but it sounds undeniably like some radical, left wing students have sat down and written down 2 things they like and 3 things they hate, and used it as a platform from which to protest. As I say, they’re all excellent causes, but there’s no apparent cohesion between them- So I put the question to myself- Is this good for the movement or is it too non-committal to be taken seriously? Crucially: Is this counterproductive?
Honestly, I have no idea how to answer this, but I can begin to answer it.
For starters, I don’t think its fair to dismiss this as long as the approach is inclusive, passionate and reasonably informed. And I think that it’s all of these things, I really do. So in that sense, I don’t think it should be termed counterproductive- but then the perception thing comes into play: These CHOGM protests are aimed at official channels, they’re not intended to be revolutionary- so, somewhere along the line, they have to appeal to policy makers. I don’t think its enough to show that ‘the people want this’ anymore- the ideological rigidity of the party system we have in place seems to veto policy ideas that are accepted by the majority of people- (see: gay rights, action on climate change, even onshore processing of asylum seekers) It would seem that this ideological rigidity has placed an even greater burden on activists to not only demonstrate community support but to demonstrate that the movement is in the interests of policy-makers.
This has two effects- firstly, it necessitates a much higher degree of organisation and information on the part of the protesters and secondly, its likely to make radical actions like occupying a city square counterproductive. At this juncture, I’m not going to try and defend what our democracy has come to, but its important to note that this is the system we have to operate in if we’re going to use official channels.
Secondly, it demands a multi-faceted approach with regard to how informed activists are. We’re living in a time when information is a significant driver of public policy. Actually, that’s not strictly true. In fact, not true at all. To take the climate change debate as an example; if information was the driver of public policy, we’d probably have much more significant targets with respect to renewable energy. OK, I made a bad call. The reason a multi-faceted and well informed group is vital really boils down to persuading policy makers- often the rational argument isn’t enough, but if you can show that its in the interests of the ideologically rigid, you’re doing well.
So it would seem that the pressure to perform in a social movement falls squarely on the shoulders of activists- particularly in the face of ideological rigidity and vested interests. Now lets get back to the Occupy Perth movement see whether the approach is counter-productive:
Well, for a start, the movement originates from Occupy Wall St- a rally against the treatment of the banking sector in the US at the expense of working people. That’s as bluntly as it can be put. But in more detail: The collapse of the US banking sector threatened the external security of the US economy as well as several significant industries that employ millions of unskilled or semi-skilled Americans. Not only this, but the banking sector’s manipulation of the housing market through sub-prime lending which gave rise to collateralised debt obligations resulted in a stagnant housing market and millions of foreclosures. OK, you know what, you probably already know how all this happened, but the main upshots of this that Occupy Wall St deals with are a lack of social security in the US, double digit unemployment, lack of access to universal health care and increasing poverty whilst the banking sector that caused the crisis gets persistent bailout packages from the Fed ( Which places the external security of the US economy under further threat). I could ramble on all day, but you have the key facts right there.
The thing is, in that movement going international, the ‘occupy’ idea has become construed as a display of general discontent with capitalism. Of course the ‘99%’ thing relates to the GINI coefficient-distribution of income, but its become less and less about income inequality as the movement becomes more generic. Put it this way, the more the movement spreads internationally, the more diverse the perceptions of ‘what the movement stands for’ become for activists.
So in a sense, its fair to say that the ‘occupy Perth’ rally will be not necessarily ‘uninformed’ but disparate from the origin of the movement. More problematic will be the lack of consistency with other equivalents worldwide. I’d almost go far enough to say that in some cases, the movement has become a licence to voice discontent rather than anything more substantive. Ultimately, the movement seems to be indecisive or ambiguous as to what it wants to achieve. At least on an international level. I guess that could be considered as a failure of organisation and a result of a lack of information among participants- ultimately no cohesion. What I will say is this: Anyone with an ear to the ground on the origin of the movement can infer what it is intended to mean. And if you look at it that way, to some extent, the inconsistency is immaterial- there’s a message here, and its pretty firmly in favour of better income distribution and stronger economic protection of all people.
It sounds like my view on this is bouncing around a bit, but I think I can settle on this: Yes, the “occupy” movement has become less informed and more generic as it is emulated internationally. And yes, movements with poor cohesion and organisation are unlikely to persuade policy makers in this society. But maybe that’s where I’ve erred: maybe the very system that requires activists to be better educated and better organised if they are going to persuade policy makers is the same one that witholds opportunities for ordinary people to do so. I think this is a conclusion I can work with for now: In answer to that prick from that anecdote earlier- yes, people on the extremes can be counter-productive in social movements, but this is in the context of the system that sneering bastards like you created. More on this later- Next, I’ll be talking about the nature of grass roots movements.
