AM HAVING AN ANXIETY ATTACK OVER THIS ELECTION.HOW CAN THEY GIVE STATES TO OBAMA WHEN SOME STATES ARE STILL VOTING.MAKES ME PHYSICALLY ILL,WE WILL BE DOOMED.
Have a nice day, Fox News commenters!
Fu*k all you dems and liberals. I pray that you die a horrible horrible death. You deserve it. You should not be called americans. YOu don’t deserve the AMERICAN air you breathe. You will get what youdeserve
Your rage fills me with joy!
Just think, if not this year, we will have Sarah Palin in 2012.
*dies laughing*
Doing Elections Wrong
As stories come in from the U.S. polling places, I am reminded of one of the most ridiculous aspects of the U.S. political system: its archaic and difficult voting system. I continue to believe that the single most important change that can be made to the U.S. democracy is to sort out these structures. Consider just a few things that come to mind right now:
* you need to register to vote. Most countries don’t do this – if you’re a citizen, that’s all the registration you need. Sure, if your records aren’t up to date then there’s a bit of extra paperwork and the election staff will glare at you, but your vote will still be welcomed and counted. Not so in the U.S., where you need to go through a registration process. This, apart from being a barrier to participation, also opens the door to the kind of Republican shenanigans we’ve seen the last few elections, with voter registrations being strategically challenged and blocked. There’s simply no good argument for voter registration as a separate process, and as long as it remains then participatory democracy is weakened in the U.S.
* Election day is Tuesday. That is, of course, a day when the vast majority of people have to work. Sensible countries schedule their elections for weekend days, for obvious reasons. Apart from everything else, scheduling on a weekday puts barriers in the way of vulnerable low-wage workers who don’t have much autonomy over their work schedule, either because of their particular work arrangements or because they can’t afford to take a few hours off.
* Voting takes too long. Some details from reader accounts on the front page of Salon’s War Room blog as I write: “…the line at my polling place at 7:30 this morning… snaked around a parking lot and down the street and around the corner. The hour and a half I spent in line…” (St. Louis, Missouri); “My wife, daughter and I arrived at the polls about 6:40am, 20 minutes before they opened, and the line was already out to the road from the HS gym. We only have one polling location in town and it becomes a logistical nightmare. After we voted and were driving home the backup to get to the HS was already a mile long and cars were turning around and giving up. In a town of at least 12,000 registered voters, probably more, we desperately need more than one polling location.” (Londonderry, New Hampshire) Again, these are huge barriers to participation.
* Voting machines: from the archaic devices and poorly designed ballots that gave us the hanging chad debacle in 2000, to the Republican-connected Diebold voting machines that don’t give a paper trail, through a report on CNN (that I read an hour ago and can’t find now) that votes on one machine were being switched from Dem to Rep and vice versa – this is, frankly, embarrassing. Ruth’s post the other day, “My favourite thing about New Zealand elections is that you vote with a fat orange felt pen, a clear sign of a serious democracy at work”, takes on another meaning – a fat orange felt pen can’t screw up your vote for you.
There’s more, of course, this is just off the top of my head and not even as a citizen of the U.S. And none of this is old news. In fact, I just discovered Wikipedia has a big article on exactly this set of issues. Change is urgently needed. It will take grassroots pressure, top-down resources, skilled systems designers and leadership, but it must be done and perhaps under Obama the political will that has been lacking in the past will finally be there. Otherwise, the U.S. will continue to elect its presidents under a cloud of confusion and corruption.
Feels like Christmas Eve
I’m going to leave milk and cookies out for the U.S. electorate for when they shimmy down the chimney to leave Obama under the tree.
***
I’m wearing my Obama badge today, and I’m checking CNN.com, which I only ever do when there’s an election in the U.S. And I can’t forget how I was feeling this time four years ago:
November 2, 2004
9:53 PM: I’m not nervous about the winner. I’m confident it’s Kerry. I’m nervous that somehow or other Bush and his sickening puppeteers will find a way to walk away with their heads held high. I don’t just want them to lose – I want them and their entire mad project to be humiliated.
11:24 AM: Aargh.
***
*crosses fingers, again*
Rasslin’
Urged on by Buzzandhum, AndyMac and TuataraLad, I joined a posse for my first ever night of home-grown pro-wrestling entertainment at KPW’s Halloween Howl 3.
It was very much fun.
I think Whetu the Maori warrior was my favourite in the ring, and the high-energy cheating manager Charlie Roberts was my favourite out of it, but the whole show was hella entertaining. And it was nice to see a short but heartfelt tribute to recently-deceased veteran Al Hobman, who was remembered by the “legends of NZ wrestling” including NZ’s most famous wrestler Steve Rickard.
The only way it could have been more fun is if the mysterious Dr Diablo had been on the card – I’d love to see him demonstrate how he earned his PhD in Pain!
Spooky Linky
Happy Halloween…
From Peaseblossom, two Thriller-related treats. One demonstrates how online video is pushing lip-sync into a new folk-artform, when what seems like a couple hundred students deliver an astonishing one-take performance of Thriller as the steadicam roams throughout their school, checking out the geeks, the jocks, the wasters, the band… even cooler is that it isn’t even in their native language. They’re all French, from IUT of Rouen. Anyway, it is no surprise that I adore this.
LIP DUB IUT SRC ROUEN 2008 from arcanes-prod on Vimeo.
And for extra Thriller thrills, here’s Thrill the World, a noble online quest to get people to dance the Thriller dance en masse – over 4,000 people took part around the world. There are many videos…
Remixing and snarking on daily comic strips is another big web past-time. My brother brought this online delight to my attention, and it is great fun: Marmaduke explained in which the hidden depths of each Marmaduke cartoon are revealed. Ben likes this one in particular. Oh that big dumb dog!
(Related: weirdly, Garfield Minus Garfield has just been collected and released as an official Garfield book by the Garfield publisher, with the blessing of Jim Davis.)
Chris Cole, inspired by the Chema Madoz photos last week, emailed me a link to the breathtaking paper-folding artworks of Peter Callesen. Just amazing – no glue or anything involved, just taking one sheet of paper and slicing into it then folding it up.
Michael’s comment on last week’s linky, finding one of the abandoned cities on Google Earth, introduced me to the Google Sightseeing blog which visits all kinds of neat places around the globe. Here’s a giant kiwi design cut out of a chalk hillside in England! Not as well-endowed as the Herne giant, but still kinda impressive.
And finally, this local news story gave me a laugh…
Jim Henson’s Memorial
Following the Young@Heart stuff, I was reminded of something else I’d been meaning to blog for a while.
A few weeks back I stumbled across some videos on YouTube from Jim Henson’s memorial service in New York, from 1990. I watched them with my heart in my mouth – these were moments I’d heard about years ago but had never seen. Henson was an inspiration and an example to me when I was a kid, and he is even more so now, and the story of his memorial always seemed to sum up his legacy: open to the public, full of performances from friends and Muppets, equal parts laughter and tears.
So I finally got to see Big Bird doing “Being green”. I made it through the whole song without losing it, but right at the end, Big Bird looks up and says in a quiet voice, “Goodbye Kermit”. That tipped me over. So sad.
There were many other great moments – Harry Belafonte doing “Turn the World Around” was a highlight – and I was eager to share them. But I waited too long, for all of those videos are now gone from YouTube. It bothers me a little – surely Jim Henson would have wanted his memorial out in the public domain? – but it seems silly to make a cause out of this.
Simply mark this, that the internet is a big and wild place and you will certainly have the chance to see this memorial some time in the future. When the chance comes, grab it. And maybe flip me an email so I can give it some linky…
(Also disappeared from YouTube: Henson’s wonderful Time Piece short. If you get the chance, watch that.)
Young@Heart
Watched Young@Heart the other day, the doco about the elderly choir who do rock songs. It was great. Not often you walk out of a cinema feeling more grounded than when you went in, but this does that.
Not from the movie, here’s the choir doing Nirvana’s “Come as you are”:
Also not from the movie, the choir singing with David Byrne:
And this one from the movie, the bit that turns a Coldplay song into a genuine heartbreaker.
Watch this movie.
CauseWired review
Tom Watson’s book CauseWired is about the rise of online social activism. I was informed by Johnnie that advance copies were being distro’d free to bloggers to generate some online buzz, and seeing as this sounded right up my alley, I signed on up. Not too long after a proof copy turned up in the post. Neat! Thanks, Wiley!
CauseWired is the name Watson gives to social causes that leverage online tools, particularly social networks. It’s the name of his supporting blog as well. It’s also the first mark against this book for me. It’s a clear case of buzzword-creation, trying to add a new phrase to the lexicon like “tipping point” and “long tail” came along in recent years. That’s no great sin in itself, but “CauseWired” is an ugly, ugly ohrase, complete with the oh-so-00s capitalisation in the middle of the compound word. It’s a name that looks horribly dated already and the book isn’t even out yet.
And that, in a nutshell, is my problem with the book as well. Tom Watson is clearly a very switched-on guy and he’s explored social activism in great detail, but the book left me feeling underwhelmed and convinced that it will date rapidly.
CauseWired consists of ten chapters describing a number of online tools and projects, like Facebook Causes, Kiva, Razoo, DonorsChoose, Change.org and MyBo. It discusses key people behind the scenes and relevant anecdotes to represent the power of the new models. The message is very clear that these online tools lower the barriers of entry and enhance organizational capacity so that it is fairly easy to build and communicate with a network, and that makes some radically new infrastructures possible for philanthropy and political organization.
It is something of an exhilirating tour, and more than slightly humbling when I note that 90% of the people leading these projects are younger than me. However, its a tour without a thesis. Watson isn’t arguing any case, or projecting any particular future as likely, or saying anything more than “this is a thing that’s going on, and right now it looks like this”. There seems to be an unwarranted confidence in the power of the new platform; the massive success of the Obama and Hillary primary campaigns was certainly enhanced by online tools and distributed yet tightly-managed structures, but it was probably more important that it was a clash of potent identity-politics to anoint a challenger to eight years of the most toxic rule in American history. This is a perfect storm of conditions and probably doesn’t indicate how any future effort will work out.
In the final chapter Watson gives more than token acknowledgement to some of the real problems with online tools, such as saturation, which will inevitably become a huge issue as online cause platforms multiply and fight for sunlight. However, Watson doesn’t do much more than acknowledge the problem, then move on to other issues. It is trivial to see that online social activism sites and tools cannot expand infinitely, but what the consequences of their growth might be is not given much consideration.
Ultimately, I think the problems I have with CauseWired are because I wanted Tom Watson to ask himself harder questions. Instead it feels to me like he’s played safe and contents himself with giving a tour and quoting extensively from others. To give credit where its due, it is a very good tour of the online cause state of play in early 2008, but I can’t see this book retaining much value beyond 2010 or so. In that sense, it isn’t really for me. It’s something to give to, say, a charity director who is wondering what is possible online, or someone who hasn’t previously considered the ramifications of “web 2.0” – the stories and examples here will get them up to speed very quickly. But it doesn’t seem to have much to say to those already involved in social activism, or whose experience of the net is already two-way.
So by that measure I guess I can’t recommend this book to most of the readers of this blog. It may be I’m being rather too hard on it, and asking far more from it than I really should do. To that end perhaps I’ll embrace the Web 2.0-ness of it all and invite questions and queries from readers. Are you intrigued by this book’s premise? Ask me in comments about whatever interests you and I’ll do my best to shed some light. There might be a whole constituency for the book that I’m just not seeing.
Green Image Design
The accolades for this Greens billboard keep coming, with a best-of-week award from international ad-industry site BestAds. Judge Alan Russell of ad agency DDB Canada gave the Greens billboard the “best outdoor” nod, saying “First Choice goes to Green Party. It’s so damn simple I ask myself, as with all the best work, why didn’t someone think of that before? Few words, striking photography, emotional appeal, clever, yep it’s got my vote.”.
I’ve also been impressed with the visual design of this one-sheet, released with a major policy announcement that the Greens would favour a coalition partnership with the Labour party rather than the National party. This is an amazing piece of communication, condensing huge amounts of information into a small space and giving the reader great tools to unlock the content; it is comprehensible at a glance and also rewards detailed study. This is a really difficult task and they’ve absolutely nailed it – I wonder if the same team who did the billboards are behind this? The Greens have really lifted their game this cycle, and while it would be foolish to say the Greens are riding a wave of support due to their snappy design, it surely isn’t hurting them and is making it impossible to dismiss them as amateur idealists who don’t know what they’re doing – which has been, in the past, a surprisingly tenacious criticism.
Take Me To Your Linky
An amazing tour through a bunch of real-world ghost cities, almost none of which I’d heard of. Mesmerizing.
This one’s been all over the place – the 2008 US electoral campaign as a game of D&D
I love these photos by Chema Madoz
And finally… the brokers with hands on their faces blog!