Lithography
Working in a university library copy-cataloging unit is OK, but far from interesting. Unless you actually care about RDA and FRBR. That's why I like the student assistants. Bright-eyed optimistic informed people who still find everything fascinating. Jake, our current student, is helping catalog a Persian collection. He reads and speaks Farsi as well as Turkish and the other Arabic languages. He also has an expertise in book binding and conservation. Grew up on commune outside Ithaca New York. And he knows Mona Eltahawy. I was describing what I liked about twitter and mentioned Andy Carvin's work, he asked if I had seen any of her tweets on Egypt (yes, of course). Jake says he's known her for twenty years.
I've also learned some things about lithography from him. Arabic script is cursive in nature. Through the 18th and 19th centuries in print it had facets of illustrative design; mixed letter-size, and line pitch on the page - between primary content and commentary. Often combined with purely illustrative elements. It did not lend itself well to the disparate nature of the movable type printing press or early Linotype, although later photolithography technologies finally proved adequate. Publisher's in script forms seized onto Lithography techniques and held to them long after they were consigned to graphic art technique elsewhere. Lithography involves writing onto a stone, a slab of smooth limestone, with wax producing a negative image which when inked and printed produces a positive image on paper. The stone is acid washed after initial marking, the wax (or whatever hydrophobic substance used) removed. The ink will accrue on the parts of the stone containing the micro-layer of embedded wax, but not to the rest of the stone which is kept wet to reject the oily ink. The image transfers cleanly and sharply to the page. From a relatively unburden-some technique, a durable printing plate suitable for complex integrated text and design, long press runs and reprints. This is lithography's special nature and gravitas; crisp permanent, unchanging. Written in stone.
As the year approaches the solstice the Arab Spring, gives way to summer. There is no going back, no undoing what has happened, what has been revealed. The depths of dissatisfaction Latest developments in Arab political unrest stretching from North Africa to the Persian Gulf - The Washington Post:. The discontent of the "Arab street" as a reality not just as a toy of the elites to bargain others with. The will for personal realization, for freedom, for a meaningful life and honorable standard of living. All this is forever written in stone. But what way forward? Between Tunisia and Egypt which saw nominally successful removal of inattentive ossified autocrats, against Syria and Bahrain, Libya and Yemen which saw suppression and civil war respectively what patterns can be seen? Both Tunisia and Egypt saw themselves as modern and secular in nature. At least in their urban centers as on the cusp of the first world. Tunisia's revolution started by a singular horrific and dramatic incident (the self immolation of the fruit stand vender Mohamed Bouazizi) that captured the public's imagination and galvanized action against blind corruption. Egypt had a corps of activists, the 6 April Movement, who had already been through a set of demonstrations and had made a detailed study of non-violent direct action Revolution in Cairo - Video | FRONTLINE | PBS:. In the other states where the revolution has stalled it seemed conditions were present that allowed the situation to slide towards a real or perceived bifurcation of the society. Clamp downs justified on the possibility of wholesale civil strife, or real civil wars started. Beyond these nations, many others are watching this situation. Countries with dissatisfied population or large disaffected minorities. Their regimes were studying these events to see the practical level of social media that associates with social control. Certainly among these are China, Vietnam, Burma, and North Korea Pyongyang Spring - By Sebastian Strangio | Foreign Policy.
The outlines of the Beijing Consensus are reasonably well known; the willingness to bestow some measure of wealth and/or material well being on a population (or segment of a population) in exchange for their giving up politicss, self determination, even the mere ability to question decisions. A mercantilistic market economy playing to a tight set of closely held rules. All in the name of the harmonious state. Behind this in the shadows but always close is, the Damascus option. The willingness to shoot down your own people like dogs in the street. And at that it is not all across the fence. Oppression in Bahrain is cold vicious and deliberate Arab Spring: An interview with Bahrain's foreign minister. - By Lally Weymouth - Slate Magazine. Calculated to reduce the majority population to a suborned internal proletariat with second class rights of citizenship, work, and worship. Yet they are our ally Repression in Bahrain by Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison | The New York Review of Books and brother kingdom to the Saudi's. There is no way however much they dodge it that US policy makers can avoid the fact that headquartering a US Navy Fleet in Bahrain legitimizes such behavior. That the United States in the last analysis enjoys and encourages the brute hobnailed order of autocracy when it suits us Time to Disband the Bahrain-Based U.S. Fifth Fleet - Toby C. Jones - International - The Atlantic.
From reading George Orwell's essay on Ghandi [Collected Essays, by George Orwell] (which I think was twittered into my ken by Zeynep Tufekci): I see how non violent resistance draws its strength from a structured dependence on the opinion of a morally aware and sympathetic population. One that can directly or indirectly influence decision makers. Without that non-violent resistance has little ability to bring about change. This does not mean that the answer is violent resistance. the battle is towards a preparation of the population for months if not years before the move to direct action: wholesale public appeals to this population such as mass demonstrations and general strikes, occurs. Outside of some degree of defensive moves (barricades, symbolic actions, stone throwing against intrusive police elements) violence can only serve to doom a peoples movement. You alienate the pragmatic and bourgeois, and allow endless exaggeration of your own proclivity to disorder. If by some happenstance you take control of the state by violent means, it must then be ideologically and militantly guarded from all else forever going forward. All thought and aspiration of the people becomes the enemy. I also read not too long ago the book "Homage to Catalonia" which was Orwell's account of his time in the Spanish Civil war. This was Spain's semi revolutionary moment. A socialist government, against the Church and a Phalangist party determined to reassert their privilege and authority. Stir chill and serve as civil war. Orwell had gone to Spain to cover the war as a journalist. Once there he couldn't resist signing up with a militia, unfortunately for him his militia was branded Trotskyite and brutally suppressed by the Soviets who were underwriting the war. This was done at the expense of anything particularly Marxist about that struggle which the Republicans soon lost to Franco's fascists. Orwell's account of the bitter and bewildering factional battles fought well behind the front: with posters and manifestos, state police corps, secret prisons and secret prisoners, continues to be more than illuminating.
The rulers reaction to suppress or control is a given, a constant of human nature. elites instinctively see themselves as having graduated from the morass of human travail, they view themselves as having grown beyond men, beyond the norms of those engaged in mere survival. These feelings are decorated with touches of mystical divinity by way of rationalization. They view it, right or left, as a natural course to channel limit and exploit the masses as dross.
There is a clear and obvious role of social media in modern popular resistance movements, in organizing outreach and in-the-moment coordination. But as with any other portion of human technology it is a two-edged sword Web 2.0 versus Control 2.0 - Reporters Without Borders.
The broad outline here is simple. To one side idealists to the other realists. Trenchant cyberoptimism is the redoubt of those that believe that the Internet has created a new place; where different rules, norms, and possible human natures exist. A kind of Noosphere (de Chardin's term) whose difference is predicated on its immateriality, the quality of not being the impinged by materiality. It is the transparency of thought, ubiquity of information, and convergence of awareness that supposedly characterizes telenets from bulletin boards, gopher sites, newsgroups, through to the two-zero internet. A libertarian wild wild west as entrenched in romanticism as anything has been. I would also include here those that believe that technology somehow forms a Just-in-Time shipping service of solutions to humanities most dire problems from some unfathomable un glimpsed warehouse. That is not what technology is or what it is doing. It is an iterative process in plain sight often accidental that takes hold in response to specific perceived inadequacies in other processes. Not generalities such as freedom or autonomy so much.
Against this is the resilience of pre-existing patterns of hierarchical control. This view point has been forcefully treated at book length by Evgeny Morozov The net delusion : the dark side of Internet freedom (Book, 2011) The so-called "Dictators dilemma": to turn on or turn off the Internet As Egypt Shuts off the Net: Seven Theses on Dictator's Dilemma | technosociology. Left on it becomes an information war, a public relations battle between the state and peoples movements. Infrastructure particularly telecommunication infrastructure is dependent on the State BBC NEWS | Technology | Hi-tech helps Iranian monitoring. In the hands of a threatened regime this turns to Miji'ing your own. MIJI is a old acronym left over from my Navy days: Meakoning Intrusion Jamming and Interference. A bit of an awkward fit here, but it paints a picture. Meakoning : originally the practice of setting up false air navigation beacons to lure helicopters out into the Mekong delta to be ambushed, in this context is creating or co-opted networks designed to entrap activists. Intrusion : false flags on existing networks. Pretending to be what they're not, seeding bad information. Jamming : blocking, or degrading telecomm networks. Interference : filtering, the most predominant anti-internet tool, of either search or connectivity results. "You can't get there from here"
These tactics, all of which seem to have been used, range from passive to active, nettlesome to insidious. Governments have learned that when their opponents use social media you can recreate a social network by observing mapping, identifying and arresting it ONI Home Page | OpenNet Initiative. And Western corporations are more than willing to supply the technology to accomplish this, see especially this report West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011 | OpenNet Initiative. Two key elements stand out here. One is the need for preservation of anonymity so that the internet is not used as a weapon against one. The other is to avoid state controlled bottlenecks. Drawing a line between new technologies and old, between what we were trying to due with Radio Free Europe and the like, our avowed commitment to open access of information. The US Government is quietly assisting efforts to add occaissional mobile robustness to the internet or at least cell phone networks, to make harder to raise national walls against it U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors Abroad - NYTimes.com. I also recall seeing mention that as part of setting up state nationalistic alternative to western social media, which as a matter of course will run their content through state intelligence offices, states such as Iran will use their control of telecommunication infrastructure to slightly and benignly degrade the performance of the western competitors to shape consumer response. This was somewhere deep in dry pdf I cannot find now. But it is easy to see the great interest authoritarian regimes have in creating face book and twitter clones. See for instance this Singapore university page on social media in Vietnam Digital Media in Vietnam - Digital Media Asia. Being merely manipulated is the highest level of autonomy achievable under the present regimes.
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