Jose Antonio Vargas and Joy Reid at Powerhouse Arena

 I first heard about Jose Antonio Vargas in 2007 from my wife Tina.  She was editing Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's Wikipedia pages, and Jose had called her for an interview in a article he was writing for The Washington Post about the impact of Wikipedia on that Presidential election.  Those were early days in the advent of social media - or what I call New New Media (buying a book online is new media, creating a book online is new new media, or consumers becoming producers).  Twitter and YouTube were just a year old, and Wikipedia, though a little older, was not allowed as a reference in student papers in probably every class except mine at Fordham University.   But it was a new new medium par excellence - anyone who could read an article on Wikipedia could edit it - and Tina and Jose recognized its importance.

Tina and Jose kept in touch after that article was published in 2007.  We were delighted when Jose's team at The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize the following year for their reporting of the Virginia Tech massacre, and applauded his incredible bravery when, in 2011, he announced that he had been living here in the United States since age 12 as an undocumented immigrant.  Jose and I had met for the first time, a month earlier, in May 2011, when we both were guests on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, talking about social media and politics.   Tina and I greeted him at a screening of his autobiographical documentary Documented at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan in 2014 and saw it again on CNN.  (Jose had asked Tina to look at part of it before the film was completed.)

We of course were in the front row last night when Jose was interviewed by Joy Reid at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn about his new book, Dear America.  First, the venue, with a Manhattan Bridge archway out the window as backdrop for the speakers, was perfect.  And Joy conducted a savvy and sensitive interview, not easy when you're better known than the subject of interview.  Jose told the story of his difficult and dangerous life, which is the story of his book, which I'll review here in the next few weeks, after I've read it.  It's the story of someone not only unwilling to accept the hand our idiotic and arbitrary immigration laws has dealt him, but unwilling to accept this for everyone else in the same or similar boat as he.   Not only does Jose refuse to live off the radar, he and his group Define American actively campaign in every way they can to take this discriminatory radar, inconsistent with the true spirit of America, totally offline.

From such an all-out warrior, we shouldn't be surprised to find unusual opinions.  Jose of course sees Trump as a threat to what is good in America, but musing about Presidents and their impact on immigrants, he cited George W. Bush as the President who was most congenial to immigrants, meaning that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama not as much.  In other words, Democrats and Republicans have been more equal opportunity abusers of this crucial aspect of the American dream than we may have supposed.

Go see Jose talk wherever you can.  And get his book.  And look here soon for my review.

MSNBC Cuts Away from Zimmermam Attorney Resignation

Unbelievably, MSNBC cut away from George Zimmerman's attorneys, as they were explaining to a press conference why they were resigning from the case.  Back to Dylan Ratigan and his planned concluding segment.  Fortunately, CNN provided continuing coverage (I didn't check about Fox).

MSNBC is thus continuing its amateuristic approach to news programming.   When news of the Mumbai massacre broke on the Thanksgiving weekend several years ago, MSNBC offered canned documentaries about prison life.  They still switch to prison coverage at 10pm every Friday - as if no real news happens after that time.

Two bright spots are the four new hours of sharp, intelligent commentary by Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris Perry every Saturday and Sunday.  But as today's poor performance in covering a live press conference about one of the most important stories of the year shows, MSNBC still has a ways a to go.

Occupy Wall Street, Direct Democracy, Social Media: A Thumbnail History of Media and Politics Since Ancient Athens

The role of social media in triggering and facilitating the now world-wide Occupy Wall Street protests - of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and kindred systems in getting word out about Occupations, and documenting them for the world to see and join - has been remarked upon so often as to almost seem a cliche.  But the link between social media and direct democracy is true and profound, and is the current culmination of an evolution of media and political expression that began in ancient times.

Back in the city state of Athens, in the time of Pericles, direct democracy arose, in part because of the new literacy that allowed citizens to be informed of public events and the views and actions of their leaders.   The words that these people read were handwritten, which meant that anyone who wanted to write and be read could do so.  Writing and publishing were just as about as easy, in other words, as reading.  

All of that changed dramatically with the invention of the printing press, which had the wonderful result of spreading the written word to millions, but the anti-democratic effect of greatly reducing the ratio of published writers to readers.   Millions of people became accustomed to reading words written by a handful of others.   Unsurprisingly, when democracy slowly re-emerged in the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, it was not the direct democracy of Ancient Athens.  Instead, it was a representative kind of democracy, in which elected officials made all the decisions, and all the people could do was vote the representatives up or down.   This was almost exactly parallel to the transformation in information production and reception brought about by the printing press, in which all the people could do is read and agree or disagree with a book or manifesto or pamphlet, and in no way write or produce it, unless you were in the less than one-percent of the population fortunate to have a monarch's or a printer's (later publisher's) favor.

This inequality of producer and consumer - few producers and legion consumers - was not only continued but exacerbated by the advent of broadcast media, which reduced the number of producers (harder to get your views on radio and television than in newspapers, which at least has letters to the editors) while increasing the number of consumers.   People in representative democracies became better informed, but the information was created by fewer and fewer people.  In some countries, such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, this inequality was masterfully mined to do away with democracy altogether.

The introduction of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the first decade of the 21st century shifted that ratio back to a more even distribution of producer and consumer for the first time since the handwritten manuscript held sway in Ancient Athens.   These new media live online, but they were unlike other new media like Amazon and iTunes, which still run for the most part like traditional publishing media, with few producers and many consumers.   In contrast, any one can Tweet, post a status on Facebook, upload a video to YouTube - any consumer could become a producer.  That's why I say these new social media are not just new but "new new media".

People in the streets, demanding freedom and justice in the Arab Spring, and redress of economic grievances in the United States, Europe, and Asia, are the healthy and long-overdue political expression of the revolution in social or new new media.  The Occupy movements are expressing a dissatisfaction with others making decisions for us - with our elected representatives doing the bidding of banks rather than the people who elected them.

With means of expressing one's political views in almost everyone's pockets and hands, the age of mass media and representative democracy may well be in irreversible decline, replaced by the more equitable system of direct democracy in which the majority not only truly rules, but in which everyone's views can get a public hearing, and everyone can vote at any and all times.   Campaigns such as Dylan Ratigan's to "get the money out of politics" may be well meaning, but miss the point that it's representative democracy itself that must go or be transformed into a system of democracy that always moves to the people's views.

I talked about all of this a bit more and led a discussion after the 7:15pm screening of Tiffany Shlain's new movie Connected, at the Angelika Film Center in New York City this Wednesday, October 19.

I also discussed many of these issues on Good Day Street Talk, Fox-NY-5, on a panel taped on Thursday October 20 and broadcast Saturday October.   Video is here:



Occupy Wall Street Chronicles, Part 1

WikiLeaks and Democracy vs. the U.S. Government

Excellent, instructive segment on Dylan Ratigan's show on MSNBC last hour, with computer scientist David House describing his experience when summoned before the WikiLeaks grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia yesterday.

Just to be clear:  What's not at stake is the life of any American military personnel - VP Biden, Secretary of Defense Gates and others in the administration have repeatedly made that clear.   What is at stake is to what extent our government can conduct our foreign affairs in secret - that is, in a way that makes its action not accountable to our citizenry.

And this, in turn, puts our very democracy itself at risk.  For how we can elect our Representatives, Senators, and Presidents with any intelligence, if we are kept from knowing crucial things that they are doing in our name?

House made clear the way he was badgered during his testimony.   The Obama administration would do well to end this persecution as soon as possible - do well, that is, if it wants to live up to its 2008 campaign promise to bring a different kind of government to Washington.

In a world in which the new new media of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogging are bringing new life into democratic movements from North Africa to Spain, it is unacceptable that our democratic government continue the tradition of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Nixon administration, China, Syria, and Iran of opposing the free flow of information.

The First Internet Revolution

It came close in Iran in the summer of 2009, but brutality and murder by the government there put it down.  It succeeded today in Egypt, because the government and military were enlightened enough to listen to the people. 

The peaceful revolution in Egypt was propelled and made possible by many things, but none so prominent as the Internet.   The three pillars of new new media, of consumers becoming producers of information - Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube - kept the world in constant touch with what was happening in Egypt, and allowed Egyptian protesters to keep in touch with one another.   The Egyptian government tried early on to shut down the Internet in its country, but it wisely decided to reinstate that access.  In so doing, the Egyptian government allowed its people to pave the way to its future.

And this future is more than Egypt's.   As Dylan Ratigan just pointed out at the end of his hour on MSNBC, no longer can governments and corporations control information as easily as boarding up a newspaper office or taking over a broadcast station.   In our new world, people can be fed with the sustenance of democracy more easily and efficiently than ever before.   And that sustenance is information.

The press led to the rise of democracy in the West in the Age of Reason.  Broadcasting has been a mixed blessing for freedom, because its centralized facilities are easily controlled by a central government.  But the Internet is far more potent in dissemination of information than newspapers.   And it stimulates great reporting from broadcasters - such as the reporting of Richard Engel from Tahrir Square today, translating a multitude of jubilant Egytpians on the spot, on MSNBC.   Edward R. Murrow would have been proud of him (Engel already won the Murrow Award for "outstanding achievements in electronic journalism").  It was really something to see.

The bells of freedom around the world - including in Iran - have just begun to ring.

Dylan Ratigan confuses Theodore Roosevelt for Harry Truman

Harry Truman famously said about Republicans - when he was urged to "Give 'em hell, Harry" - "I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."

I thought everybody knew this. Apparently not Dylan Ratigan, who in a promo for his show on MSNBC, just attributed a mangled version of the quote not to Harry Truman but Theodore Roosevelt, of speak softly and carry a big stick fame.

Boos not only to the usually more erudite Ratigan, but his producers, or the producers of this promo, over at MSNBC. One or more of these people either wrote the line for Ratigan, or if he said it on his own, his producers not only failed to catch the mistake but saw fit to highlight it in a promo for Ratigan's show.

News anchors and producers are only human. Of course they get things wrong on occasion, just as do professors (my profession). But this rises to a new level of, well, ignorance and/or carelessness. We deserve a little better in our promos.

*Note added 13 July 2010:  Well, it's good to see that someone at MSNBC is paying attention to bloggers - I just heard the Ratigan promo, and Harry Truman was dubbed in to replace Theodore Roosevelt!

Armstrong, Lovell, and Cernan Are Right to Criticize Obama on Space

I heard Dylan Ratigan and Arianna Huffington blithely say, on Ratigan's show on MSNBC this afternoon, that they supported Obama's cutback of some of the space program, including the Orion, Constellation and Ares I and V projects.   Ratigan and Huffington cited the same tired reason - the money is better spent here on Earth - a reason which, if JFK had adhered to, would have resulted in no people on the Moon, and little of what we've accomplished in space.

Obama's plan would actually increase the NASA budget by 8 billion dollars - but the plan would end the current Moon initiative, and replace it with a mixed bag of endeavors in which Mars was the most prominent goal, and robots rather than human beings would take the initiative for us in space.

Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan think this is a bad idea.  The three sent a powerful letter to Obama, urging that he reconsider his policy, and pointing out its dangers.  The letter focuses on the damage such cutbacks will have on America as a world leader.   I would go even further, and stress the damage such a policy could have for Planet Earth, and we, its sentient inhabitants - cutting back the American space program would hurt the entire human race.  The truth is that what little we have accomplished in space since the 1960s and 1970s, in getting beyond this world out into the cosmos, is precious little.  If we lose more of the opportunity we have failed to build upon since our voyages to the Moon, we could be sentenced forever to living on this planet, and no place else.  As I pointed out in my 2003 book, RealSpace, this could well mean that we'll never know much more than we do right now out who we are, what we are doing here, about our place and role in this Universe.  These reasons transcend political, military, and even scientific benefits.   The deepest reasons for the human species to get beyond this planet are closer to spiritual.

Obama wants to stimulate a commercial space program - getting out into space financed by private enterprise - which is something I'm all in favor of.    Capitalism is a powerful mechanism, and one of the problems our space program has had thus far is that it has failed to attract sufficient private and corporate investment.

But cutting back on NASA is not the way to do this.  My online friend MPAndonee put it well, in his comment on the Huffington Post: "I voted for Obama, and am a big supporter of Health Care and many of the things he has tried to accomplish [but] I strongly disagree with the cancellation of the Orion, Constellation and Ares I and V. A strong commercial space industry would be great. But, until we get it, NASA is the only game in town."

What about the emphasis on robots in the Obama plan?  There's nothing wrong with robots, and they're preferable to humans on interstellar voyages in which there is no hope of safe or any return to Earth.  But for our own solar system - when was the last time you saw a robot come up with an original theory, an unexpected insight, an unlikely but brilliant connection of ideas and experiences?

What's wrong with a focus on Mars?   That's fine, as long as Mars doesn't come before the Moon.  The reason is simple arithmetic.   The Moon is about 240,000 miles from Earth, which means we can reach it physically in a few days, and communicate back and forth to it in seconds.   Mars various from a minimum of about 36 million to as far away as 250 million miles from Earth.   You do the math for transport and communication time at even the minimal distance.

Look at the birth dates of Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan - 1930, 1928, 1934.  That should tell us something about how fast our voyages to the Moon are receding into history.  We're running out of time.   The last thing we need now in our long journey to find our place in the universe is a cutback of the most feasible next step.


14-min podcast about astronauts vs. Obama on space