I wrote a few days ago about Immanuel Wallerstein and his writings on the rise and fall of Liberalism. Here's a great passage from his essay called "The Collapse of Liberalism":

We may emerge from the transition from historical capitalism to something else, say circa 2050, with a new system (or multiple systems) that is (are) highly inegalitarian and hierarchical, or we may emerge with a system that is largely democratic and egalitarian: It depends on whether or not those who prefer the latter outcome are capable of putting together a meaningful strategy of political change.

It's interesting that he wrote this about 13 years ago, long before the current surge in what he could call "antisystemic" activistism that exploded with the Seattle WTO protests in '99, and even before the Zapatista uprising in '94. A lot of his advice is still good, and at the same time resonates with what has already BEEN happening. He talks about how there must be "a definitive break with the strategy of achieving social transformation via the aquisition of state power." I believe a large part of the current progressive movement has accepted that idea. He also talks about the central agent of change will be groups, lots and lots of different but equal groups, who recognize each others' rights and work together but are not a unified mass, do not attempt to form one centralized huge group. "Democratic centralism is the exact opposite of what is needed."

Such a coherent, nonunified family of forces can only be plausible if each constituent group is itself a complex, internally democratic structure. And this in turn is possible only if, at the collective level, we recognize that there are no strategic priorities in the struggle. One set of rights for one group is no more important than another set for another group. The debate about priorities is debilitating and deviating and leads back to the garden path of unified groups ultimately merged into a single unified movement. The battle for transformation can only be fought on all fronts at once.

(italics are mine)

It's impossible to read that and not think of current events and debates in the progressive activist world.

The second Bolivian war over water, this time in El Alto, appears to be heating up. My spanish isn't good enough to really understand this article well enough, but people I know there are extremely busy over this.

Dynebolic is a boot-from-CD, running-out-of-the-box Linux distribution. Looks somewhat like Knoppix, but it's specifically aimed at multimedia producers, media activists, and artists. Loaded with sound and video editing tools, encoders, and the like. Wow. I'd like to try this out. Runs on the Xbox, too! Seems too good to be true. I've been wanting to see a really good bulletproof linux video editing program that is easy to install and works with firewire. That just works. If linux gets there I will stop needing to buy macs and I'd be really happy.

I've been reading this book of essays by Immanuel Wallerstein called "After Liberalism." (props to Jennifer Whitney for recommending him, though not this particular book). I've been interested for a while in the word "liberal" - what it means, why it's used as a perjorative in both right-wing and "radical" circles, and what its history is. In this book Wallerstein, an esteemed sociologist, goes into the birth of liberalism as an ideology, along with 2 other ideologies, socialism and conservatism, as a result of the French Revolution. His thesis is basically that that was the beginning of ideology itself, and those 3 were really just 3 flavors of the same thing, which developed and influenced each other but were basically after the same thing: "maintaining order" in a world where constant political change, for the first time, was normalized. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Additionally he asserts that with the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989 not only is communism over but liberalism is too. He writes a lot about colonialism and the "rights of peoples" as opposed to "human rights." Here is an excellent passage at the end of an essay called "The Insurmountable Contradictions of Liberalism":

What is the argument put forward in Great Britain, Germany,
France, the United States? That we (the North) cannot assume
the burdens (that is, the economic burdens) of the whole world,
Well, why not? Merely a century ago, the same North was assuming
the "White man's burden" of a "civilizing mission" among the
barbarians. Now the barbarians, the dangerous classes, are saying
Thank you very much. Forget about civilizing us; just let us have
some human rights, like, say, the right to move about freely and
take jobs where we can find them.

The self-contradiction of liberal ideology is total. If all humans
have equal rights, and all peoples have equal rights, we can't
maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world-
economy has always been and always will be. But if this is openly
admitted, then the capitalist world-economy will have no legiti-
mation in the eyes of the dangerous (that is, the dispossessed)
classes. And if a system has no legitimation, it will not survive.

The crisis is total; the dilemma is total. We shall live out its con-
sequences in the next half-century. However we collectively resolve
this crisis, whatever kind of new historical system we build and
whether it is better or it is worse, whether we have more or
fewer human rights and rights of peoples, one thing is sure: It will
not be a system based on liberal ideology as we have known that
ideology for two centuries now.

He's basically saying throughout the book that liberalism is this big 200 year old lie that finally pepole are starting to not believe in any more, and so some big changes are around the corner. I can see that some would disagree with the above passage on this key point: IS capitalism really an inherently inegalitarian system, as he says?

Really interesting, no?

I'd also like to mention that I recently got some new OCR software that I just used to scan that in, and I can say OCR software is pretty damn accurate and painless to use now. It's nice to see not just brand new whiz-bang uses for computers that we never thought of before but also things like OCR and video software, stuff I've been WANTING to do with computers for many years but that never really worked that well, cheaply, till recently. Hurray for the commodity computer economy! heh.

I just discovered that if there's a bright light (like the sun, for example) behind my powerbook display it shines right through the apple logo on the back and shows up on the screen. Kinda funny. Seems like a mistake, like they would have thought to put something opaque between the back of the display and the little logo LED assembly.

In other news, it's really really really cold today. A friend's dad arrived in town last night from Michigan and said it's colder here in Portland than in Detroit. Depressing. But, at least it's nice and sunny today. Of course the clear sky is WHY it's so cold, but i'd rather have sun and cold than overcast and a little less cold.

This article says that a study found that 8 million Americans have blogs. Yikes. Yet 62% of online users "have no clear idea what a blog is." Hmm.

It's interesting that blogs seem so strange and new. The concept seems so simple and obvious to me, and in fact has been in action since the beginning of the web, starting with one of the very first web sites, Justin's Links from the Underground, by Justin Hall, who I count as a friend (from Cyborganic days).

A blog is simply a public diary. The fact that some have taken this diary form and merged it with the newspaper form, or a couple other basic forms, is not that important. The important idea is that it's a regular place where someone publicly writes stuff, and the cloud of technological tools that surround the blog enable revolutionary ways of connecting and distributing the information in the public diary. That's where it gets really interesting. But the basic idea is still really simple. So it's not the blog itself that is that interesting or new, it's its location on the internet and the infrastructure of technology that supports it.

This report from the Center for Social Media studies the effects that intellectual property clearance requirements have on documentary filmmaking. A very comprehensive project, it looks like. This was posted to the Detritus blog, which I administer, by contributor Peter Lopez, but I feel like it's important enough to those who only read this blog to post it here too, as it's very relevant to indymedia video producers.

I've never worried that much about clearances in my films, but I suppose that as I continue to get more exposure for my work I should start thinking about it more. Of course if you know my work you know I have a radical stance on intellectual property. I'm a little concerned though, that a requisite for getting documentary work widely distributed is to be sure all the IP 'i's and 't's are dotted and crossed. But it's very unnatural to me.

Not only the IP stuff, but I also wonder about the use of footage of people only after getting a waiver or whatever it's called. I remember when I was in Juarez there was another videographer there who is from a more professional background, and she passed around these forms to all the people on the delegation. It seems ludicrous when you're doing journalistic work, because you can't reasonably expect to get a form filled out for everyone, especially when filming public events like protests and stuff. So I wonder what the actual real legal rules are? Perhaps it's as fuzzy as IP law - you basically, supposedly, want to try to cover your ass as much as you can, but you'll never completely do that, because you can be sued for anything, and even if the suit has no merit you still have to prove that and pay money to lawyers.

I just sent a message out to my mailling list of people who signed up for updates about the Computers of Bolivia project. It's really close to finally happening. I'm excited, and a little stressed out about it, because there will be a lot of work in the next month making it really happen. But hopefully it will all work out and by April the machines will be at their destinations!

Meanwhile, as explained in an excellent recent article by my friend in La Paz, Luis G

I was invited to try out the newest 43 things site. It's about the same as the old one, post your goals in life, but you can also write stuff about them and denote certain goals that you've already done, and it's not anonymous. seems to have potential, on one hand, but on the other I think it's just another way to waste time on the internet. however, it's cool to see people I know on there, like rabble and gaba.

I just have to go on record to warn people, a sort of consumer report, I guess, about an online camera store called A&M Photo World. I ordered a digital camera from them yesterday and got totally jerked around. I've cancelled my order.

I don't want to waste too much time on this, I just want to briefly describe the problem. no, wait, fuck it. I have better things to do. let's just say they are typical sales weasels and leave it at that.