From The Straddler Archives | |||
winter2015 Digital Records of Incarceration: An Annotated Bibliography “The collection of detailed metadata on prisoners by the US prison system represents a grand-scale archival effort. It is on the basis of records that fail to provide a full and detailed picture of incarceration that critical judgments are formed by our culture.” |
summer2012 Occupy by Analogy: in conversation with Christopher Mackin “‘Be practical. Demand the impossible!’ That sentiment is precisely what the Occupy movement has revived. It is a sentiment that pushes against this ever-present cynicism that nothing can be done. Now is the time to build the institutions that prove the cynics wrong. It’s going to take a lot of work.” |
winter2014 Thinking Through the Savage Machinery: Peter Temin and Economic Crises “The reason that I’m pessimistic is that I think we’re engaged in class warfare. The new technology has given rise to a very skewed distribution of income around the world, but particularly in the United States. And the rich are trying to destroy the New Deal, and they don’t even feel that they have to give a logical argument for it.” |
winter2014 Seeing Surveillance: in conversation with Kazys Varnelis and Trevor Paglen “If you build a surveillance society, you create a giant power imbalance between the people and the state. That’s kind of an abstract thing to point out, but the whole point of a democratic society is that people have more power than the state. When you create mechanisms where that is not true, then you are creating a situation in which a democratic society is increasingly difficult to approach and maintain. ” |