From The Morgue

“People will expect Morgan to wear something unusual.” – my sister, in an email to my mother, about her wedding. Email leaked to me by operative known only as ‘Long Neck’. Looking forward to seeing the sibling and her Matt!
The Alligator and I are off to the South Island. I am inordinately excited, and very grateful to the Alligator who did all the work to make it happen.
Farewells were offered to the King of France, Leon the God, who has returned to London. (Any Londoners looking for a gamer to bolster their numbers, get in touch.) Go ye well, Royal Donkey.
Back in Welly on the 18th. If possible there’ll be a morgueatlarge email or two before then. Go sign up now!

It will be a surprise to no-one, I imagine, that (leftie) U.S. science body the Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report that documents “ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science”.
(Direct link to the report: Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air. How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science, .pdf, 1.71MB)
It’s a damning picture, and it isn’t a new one – when I was investigating a letter to the editor that denied climate change, it was a trivial matter to find links between the letter writer and ExxonMobil’s money machine.
It’s worth looking a bit more closely at how this works. It would be wrong to claim that Vincent Gray, for example, is a liar, or is being paid to claim a position he doesn’t hold. It is clear that he does hold his views, very strongly. Gray’s morality is absolutely not in question here.
The corrupting influence of ExxonMobil operates because of two truths:
(a) science is uncertain, and there are always those who interpret things differently
(b) the real-world power of a scientific view is determined by the amount of patronage it receives
ExxonMobil’s work is not to create pretend dissension, but to funnel patronage to the dissension that is inevitably already there.
The report’s real genius is in its heavy referencing of the tobacco lobby. It is now clear and undisputed that Big Tobacco used exactly these techniques to cloud the issues surrounding the health risks of tobacco for literally decades. By making reference to these, the report is able to directly attack the integrity of the company without coming across as an ‘extremist’. It’s very clever message management.
I recommend downloading and reading the full report – it’s an easy and engaging read, very well presented. It includes several pages of potential responses to the disinfo campaign. I will quote one of these in full:

MEDIA ACOUNTABILITY
Too often, journalists’ inclination to provide political “balance” leads to inaccurate media reporting on scientific issues. Far from making news stories more balanced, quoting ExxonMobil-funded groups and spokespeople misleads the public by downplaying the strength of the scientific consensus on global warming and the urgency of the problem.
Citizens must respond whenever the media provides a soapbox for these ExxonMobil-sponsored
spokespeople, especially when the story fails to reveal their financial ties to ExxonMobil or those of their organizations.
Toward this end, citizens can send letters to the editor highlighting the financial ties that quoted
“experts” have to ExxonMobil or ExxonMobilfunded organizations. They can also encourage
individual reporters and media outlets to report science accurately. Well-established scientific
information should be reported as such, and members of the press should distinguish clearly
between those views of their sources that are supported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
versus those that have only been propped up in the ExxonMobil-financed echo chamber.

Take it seriously. There is power in this (especially in New Zealand, where our few newspapers are read avidly by politicians with real authority over our collective future).

The first part of the Wellington Bypass is open.
The bypass is a road extension that adjusts the route of traffic coming through the city, to circumvent some semi-central areas in favour of a more peripheral route. In the process, a historic and vibrant chunk of central city has been turned into roading.
I’ve written about this before (and linked to another’s discussion). The changes to the end of the Cuba precinct (and to Cuba St itself) are profound.
It has been pointed out – most often by Mayor Prendergast and her crew – that the reason for the upper-Cuba-St hippie aesthetic was the artificially low rent due to the Bypass being in question, and that building the bypass simply ends an artificial situation. To which I say, lower Cuba St has its hippie aesthetic just fine without any artificially low rents, thank you very much. If the bypass had been definitively stopped, and rents returned to market levels, the development of that area would have proceeded in an organic fashion and the aesthetic would I suspect have simply taken on a new, more upmarket form. Infinitely preferable to driving a big road through a chunk of the inner city.
Apart from what has been lost, the psychological barrier erected by the new road is already heavy in the minds of Wellingtonians. It worked its way in across a long period of construction. In fact, it’s a relief to have the road open, because it is such an improvement over the construction site we’ve had for the past year. BUt the mental map of every Wellingtonian has shifted to accommodate this new road.
None of this is major. It isn’t as though suddenly I feel dizzy and nauseous when I’m in town. It is however real, and more importantly it is pernicious. This is a significant step away from the kind of Wellington I feel we should have towards one that we should avoid.
All of the above is speculative and subjective. There is no set of facts that could convince a Bypass-backer that the new road creates an unpleasant psychological barrier or squanders the area’s value. However, it is crucial to remember the other side of the coin, which is that the rationale given for the bypass was, and is, nonsensical. The bypass will not significantly improve congestion in the city, as car traffic will expand to meet the available roadspace. The bypass will not improve the productivity of Wellington’s business community, as was so earnestly claimed and debated in the Council Chambers. These claims are, quite simply, ridiculous. And they have cost us $40 million, and one more chunk of the city’s soul.

This blog is currently in the top ten google results for ‘morgue‘.
My nickname triumphs over 5.15 million other instances of morgue!
Edit: And a few hours later I’m fifth. Is that the effect of linking to my own search result?

This blog rarely takes a turn into the personal. This is one of those detours. Some thoughts on 2006:
Things have coalesced for me. The work done in my years outside NZ has been paying off in my understanding of my self and of my life-as-lived. I have a confidence in what I am doing here that was previously absent, and it feels like a step up from the positivity/improvisation that drove the last decade or so. Another phase of life with another mode of being, and while I am sure it will in time run its course and give way, for now it feels fresh and new and, crucially, empowering.
Aspect: Cal and I are together again. It feels deceptive, somehow, to say we ‘got back together’, because the associations of that phrase just don’t fit with my experience (but perhaps that is how it feels to every couple that parts and then reunites). In any case, the time we had apart was not a mistake, and coming back together was far from a foregone conclusion – but it has happened as a genuine development of the many and significant changes within both of us. I’ll go further, even: this feels to me like the relationship we were only approximating before. This feels good.
Counter: I have fallen back into old habits of relative isolation. I have an extensive network of friends who I love and respect, and mostly ignore the lot of them. Problem has been in particular focus this year as I’ve met a bunch of brand new people and have got back in contact with a few from, literally, a decade or more ago. I’m an introvert, believe it or not, and my social needs are largely met as a byproduct of activities I pursue (sports, roleplaying games). One part of how I’ve changed in the last few years: I’m no longer willing to shortchange my antisocial needs. Y’all just have to take my love on trust for the time being.
My intent in returning to New Zealand was, more or less, to get underway. And I have, after a fashion. I have been pushing my writing in a half-dozen directions, consolidating my experiences, and while I don’t have too much to show for it yet at the publication end, I’m confident that the groundwork this year will soon start paying off. And my craft has continued to sharpen and broaden, which is both wonderful and kinda embarrassing as I realise how crappy some of my old stuff really was.
If there’s something I regret about this year, it’s that I didn’t find the right way to cultivate key conversations without compromising the above. There are a lot of incredible people around me to engage with and I haven’t put enough energy into doing so, and I feel that failure. There are big ideas to be chased through the connected conversations of those around me, and with other things now falling into place it’s probably time to start. Perhaps that’s a resolution; every few years I make one, to take advantage of the symbolic momentum of change, so why not. Let’s call it done.
I have a stack of letters to the Edinburgh crew sitting on my desk, still unsent. Must do something about that.
This is the first year since 2001 in which I didn’t cross a national border.
This blog is something I’m enjoying, and I’ll keep writing it as long as I enjoy it. I particularly like the feedback I get, in comments (over 2000 since the blog began), in emails, in conversations at parties. I feel greatly privileged to have such an intelligent, funny and spirited crowd of readers to react to what I write, to keep me honest, crack wise real damn good, and show me to myself. Thanks for coming back again and again. Especially you lurkers. And thanks to all those on my blogroll; I know many people come here mostly to link through to everyone else, which means your awesomeness brings me readership, and that is teh r0XX0r and much appreciated.
Six hours left in the year. I’m gonna have some burgers. Yeah man.

Out of the Blue is a troubling, understated account of a New Zealand massacre, where loner David Gray shot dead 13 people in an isolated hamlet, Aramoana.
Many reviews of this film emphasised the lack of attention to Gray’s motives, the way in which the film avoided the question of how his actions had come about. (“It’s much, much harder to understand or explain what Gray did. Sarkies and Tetley don’t really try…”, “Pic makes no effort to explain or analyze his actions…”, etc.) I think these reviews are wrong. Gray’s psychology and situation are given plenty of attention, albeit in a subtle and understated way. There is a line clearly drawn of a man in a spiral of decline, losing his connections with those around him, increasingly unable to cope and this inability feeding back into itself. The reviewers seem to be looking for a Freudian narrative, a primal scene where his father strangled his puppies or his mother locked him in a cupboard or he was discovered masturbating or whatever. They, and we, have no right to such a narrative. The world is not made of such things. Freud was wrong. The real story of the Aramoana massacre is the fragility of the social human.
Children of Men is a vivid political fever-dream, a nervy reaction against global tendencies towards paranoia and fascism as channelled through Tony Blair’s government. The film’s future history is ridiculously implausible (no children are born for twenty years, chopping out a significant portion of the labour pool – but immigrants are despised and feared, when they would be the only way of shoring up these shortages?) but that just didn’t matter. The film is a personal journey through a set of social nightmares, delivered with absolute conviction and a technical audacity that is simply breathtaking. The film wears its Grauniad-liberal convictions proudly (possibly those who have never lived in Europe won’t understand just how incredible it is to prominently feature selfless heroics by an unkempt gypsy) and casts unpleasant shadows on what is already in place around us.
And lest this review give the impression that the film is leaden and worthy, I should emphasise it is first and foremost a great thriller/action film, with more edge-of-your-seat sequences than anything I’ve seen out of Hollywood in years. Weaknesses: a conclusion that seemed a little undercooked; that’s about it.

Christmas is for pictures like this.

Found this by coincidence today: an article about Teens and electronic media

So much technology makes teens feel they are playing a starring role in their own reality TV show, said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group, which conducted the 2006 Teen Trend study.
“This generation is unique,” Taylor said. “Teen life has become a theatrical, self-directed media production.”

When revolutions happen, most people only find out afterwards. However, if you know where to look you can watch the whole thing as it happens. Well, this is where to look – and this particular revolution is made for watching.

(This is a big one, it turns out. Writing it kind of took over my whole morning. Oh well.)
Last week, Cal and I spent a little while plugging random search terms into YouTube and looking at what came up. As we watched random videos, it became obvious to me that there is a genuine cultural shift well underway right under our electronic noses.
Of the various videos we watched, three stand out in memory.
First was the YouTube Community Choir singing ’12 Days of Christmas’. In this, a large number of YouTube contributors, with their screennames captioned in, are edited together singing the complete 12 Days song. It’s all quite random, with some very ordinary enthusiastic folk singing their hearts out.
Second was a karaoke clip – a couple of teenage girls, apparently in their basement, leaping about lipsynching a song for the camera while taking the piss out of the song and themselves at the same time, and collapsing laughing several times.
Third was most interesting. It was a static camera shot of a room full of teenagers – obviously held by someone sitting in the corner. It just showed the group hanging out, awkwardly talking. That was the whole thing, for about four minutes, just teenagers standing around a room. It wasn’t engaging, and there was nothing in it that could possibly appeal to anyone outside the group of friends concerned. They had just recorded a bit of their lives and for some reason released it on YouTube.
I started chewing over what this might mean in the back of my mind. Then, a few days after, two other things happened:
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was announced to be “You”.

We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Meanwhile, Making Light posted about Deaf culture finding expression via YouTube:

Why did it not occur to me that the signing deaf would be using YouTube as a public forum? This is transformational. Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be their first language. YouTube gives them an easy, expressive, unmediated channel for many-to-many communication.

All of this lined up in my head, and it points at something big that is afoot.
YouTube is the most potent example of the rapid shift in our society from the old structure of mediated content delivered from a narrow source to a broad audience, to a new structure of (relatively) unmediated content delivered from a broad source to an (initially) narrow audience. (Those paranthetical clauses are in there because of how content is propagated online. It is impossible to reach a broad audience directly over the net, but if your narrow audience is impressed, they will spread awareness of the content far and wide. The viral effect will kick in and the audience can grow exponentially; this process serves as a form of mediation as well.)
Aside: There is no shortage of predictions that YouTube will collapse, or its culture will die due to increased commercialisation. There’s a good chance these predictions are right. But the phenomenon YouTube has channelled isn’t going anywhere. If YouTube falls, other venues will step into the gap without a second thought. There’s a bunch which are eager for a shot at YouTube-style prominence, and the mighty can fall fast online – where the hell is Friendster now, for example? (Answer: on MySpace like everyone else.)
YouTube is potent because it deals in audio-visual content. The moving picture is the holy vessel of our world; it is by far the most powerful form of media, being the closest we can manage to recording and sharing direct experience. Video gets us.
But video is also, historically, a huge pain in the backside. Recording has always been tricky, editing has been an absolute nightmare, and displaying it never less than problematic. In all three areas, technology has changed the rules massively. The digital video era is well and truly with us, with standard cellphone models carrying built-in video cameras; digital editing on your home computer has finally come of age as data storage and data handling limitations get overcome; and with YouTube the third, crucial piece of the puzzle has arrived, providing a forum for displaying and distributing your home video. Not only that, but it makes the whole thing so damn easy, and “The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life.” (Cue bog-standard morgue rant about usability online and in the real world.)
This has all happened quickly. The implications are only just beginning to be felt.
YouTube isn’t even meant to be about original content. Probably its greatest value is as the world’s greatest repository of clips; an amazing range of video history is available if you dig around, from old Sesame Street clips to Mikhail Baryshnikov performing in Giselle in 1977. But what is important about YouTube, as opposed to what is valuable about it, is not its role as archive but its role as global video noticeboard.
As always happens, the new world is being explored and created by teenagers. A friend said the other day that she believes you can put any word you like into the YouTube search engine and find a fourteen-year-old girl lip-synching a pop song. Slate wrote about the rise of lip-synching via YouTube and lauded lip-synching as a distinctive folk art. There’s something going on there that is quite profound – this is the kind of thing that was once restricted to sleepover parties and now it’s recorded and put online. Why? What audience is being sought? Is this an attempt to communicate to your direct peer group, or to reach for the random fame of being seen by anyone anywhere? Is the audience even a factor at all? I could make some guesses (mostly, that it’s a mixture of all of the above) but all I know for sure is there is an entire channel of cultural engagement that simply didn’t exist in my youth.
There’s other kinds of artistry easily found, in large part driven by what music-maker/intellectual Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) calls ‘remix culture’. An amusing local news spot is remixed into a dance track; a trailer for Mary Poppins is remixed to look like a horror movie; a teenager’s self-recorded humiliation is made to look awesome.
The flip side of ‘remix culture’ is deconstruction; YouTube finally gives a platform to respond to the sophisticated message manipulation practiced in broadcast video. (For example, ‘Liberal Viewer’ spends four minutes exposing fifteen seconds of Fox News editing chicanery)
More artistry can be found in entertainment content created specifically for the medium – the lipsynching fourteen-year-olds fall into this category – such as the infamous LonelyGirl15 ‘Breeniverse’, the Chad Vader series, and sketch comedy weirdness by (TIME-profiled) Smosh.
Related to this is video-blogging, which is essentially people talking about their lives on video and posting it. It’s a different kind of thing to entertainment content, although clearly similar. TIME’s profile of a video blogger references the same William Gibson quote as Making Light: This isn’t what YouTube was designed for—to be the public video diary of a generation of teens and twentysomethings. But sometimes the best inventions are the ones people find their own uses for. “You have people from all walks of life wanting to share a piece of their life with you,” Leila says. “The feeling of togetherness is unbeatable. It’s a beautiful thing.”
There’s also a kind of artistry in the way we harness video distribution for other conversations. The tirade by Michael Richards would have sunk fast if the video hadn’t flipped on to YouTube and been spread all over. (Ed Driscoll: “in an era of demassified individual publishing, the safety net that the liberal mass media provided its favorite sons no longer exists.”) U.S. Republican Senator George Allen’s racial slur of a student following him on campaign helped wreck his campaign. (LA Times: “The impact of this instantaneous access has been earthshaking.”)
There’s some sharp thinking going on about this. Berkeley’s ‘Digital Youth Research’ features the research outline The Semiotics of Video Production, Exchange, and Reception on YouTube and Among Video Bloggers:

The project is interested not only in examining what particular technical tools children and youth learn to manipulate, but more importantly, how they learn to participate and find social acceptance in particular technical communities by creating videos. The researcher will investigate how video production plays a role in shaping young people’s values, beliefs, and goals with respect to learning about technology and learning how to behave in techno-social environments.

I don’t have any snappy conclusion other than ‘keep watching the skies’. This is big and new, and it is happening fast. This isn’t about what your kids will be doing in a decade – your kids are already doing this now. The world has already changed. Get ready to shift your balance.