The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 5

07 Latvian humor beyond ‘Slav squatting’

09 Building trade unions and the left

17 Indy March Madness

Volume 38 • Issue 05

March 08, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

R

ly Week

A B row

n*

D IS

Contents

From The Editors

Cover Untitled Isabel Robledo Rower

The sensation half a foot of snow overdue all landing at once. I spot the trough at the end

News 02 Week in Upgrades Grace Keefe & Gabby Bianco

of the ducts. Having left the cistern we labor upwards. New system altogether functional,

03 Captioning Fascism Adam Fertig

specialists envisioning sea battle in the desert. Can I reconcile

Metro 05 A Lawyer on Broad Street Lucas Smolcic Larson

ancient machines to this one? The Romans sprawl

09 “To Hell With the Stadium” Harry August & Michael Shoris

would be my kind of directionality if they’d thin far enough.

a rectangle out to align their compendium of roads

-JH

Features 07 Scenic Depictions of Slavic Life Alan Emory Dean

Mission Statement

Arts 11 Cybernetic Ghost Towns Alexis Gordon

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Ephemera 12 Jennifer Aniston Claire Schlaikjer & Nicole Cochary Science & Tech 13 Modern Mind Control Griffin Kao

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

X 14 How to Beat HUAC! Ben Bienstock

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Literary 15 5x5 Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Sports 17 March Madness The Indy Staff

Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram-Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner

Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim

Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson

08 MAR 2019

VOL 38 ISSUE 05

Correction: In our “Beyond Screens” interview in Issue 4, we implied that the Black maternal mortality rate (MMR) has not changed since the pre-Civil Rights Era, when in fact the rate has dropped but the disparity between Black and white MMR has stayed consistent over time.

Eve Zelickson

Caroline Sprague

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Jessica Dai Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Marly Toledano

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung

Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador

Designers Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Jeff Katz

Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu

Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

Business Maria Gonzalez

MVP Ben Bienstock

Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

Katrina Northrop Chris Packs Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

*** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN UPGRADES

BY Grace Keefe and Gabby Bianco ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Christie Zhong

Robots Hit the Rhodes Years from now, in the throes of the Artificial Intelligence Takeover we all know is coming, when historians investigate the buildup to the robot crusade for world domination, they will inevitably single out 2019 as the beginning of the end: the year public transportation went autonomous (at least in Rhode Island.)

Indeed, it is here in Providence, the beloved hometown of the Independent, that driverless transport vehicles will make their next public appearance, for better or worse. Last year, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) announced it was accepting proposals for the state’s first autonomous public transit system. In a recent press release, the city named Michigan-based vehicle manufacturer, May Mobility, as its chosen partner in the endeavor to introduce self-driving buses to the Providence circuit. Once in effect, the six-seat golf cart–esque shuttles will offer free rides along a 12-stop route between Olneyville and Downtown Providence.

The RIDOT hopes to launch their fleet of “Little Roady” shuttles sometime this spring, as soon as they’re certain the buses won’t take any impromptu off-road detours, a possibility that manufacturers have been working diligently to avoid. May Mobility CEO Edwin Olson has assured the public that the shuttles’ 30 plus sensors are fully equipped to deal with all that Rhode Island has to throw at them, including Providence’s infamously erratic drivers. According to Olson, the shuttles have been programmed to “follow the rules of the road, just like a human driver would.”

They stop for pedestrians, they stick to a 25 mph speed limit, they boast the occasional fit of road rage—you know, the usual. Regardless of the shuttles’ suspiciously anthropomorphic abilities, ongoing safety inspections are currently underway at the North Kingstown Golf Course. And, while the city turned down the Indy’s offer to personally test the latest shuttle prototype, we can at the very least report that no major glitches—or, more importantly, signs of robot aggression—have yet to occur.

The introduction of self-driving transportation into busy traffic routes like Providence’s city center is part of a larger ongoing study focused on the assimilation of driverless vehicles into the mainstream. As of now, individually owned autonomous vehicles are few and far between, but tech giants like Elon Musk have been increasingly pushing for a mass adoption of Teslas and the like. In truth, the self-driving vehicle industry is just beginning to take flight—not literally, of course, although Providence did receive a proposal for a “flying pod” system, an emerging type of infrastructure resembling something of a giant ski lift. For Rhode Island, shuttles are just the beginning; and, while RIPTA won’t be going anywhere for a while, city officials hope to use the Little Roady project to gauge what types of steps would have to be taken if the city eventually chose to transition to all-autonomous vehicles.

In any case, Providence and cities around the

world may be ill-prepared for a Jetsons reality of flying cars and robot maids, but projects like the May Mobility partnership may soon usher in a new way of travel, serving as an instructional precursor for the future. And, even though the threat of malevolent Transformer-type automatons still looms in the back of the public’s mind, there’s no immediate reason to let this fear hinder the people’s access to cheap transportation. So, for now, we will welcome the Little Roady’s with open arms. Nevertheless, as new technologies grow increasingly independent-minded, the Independent will definitely be sleeping with one eye open.

- GK

Babe Lincoln In a world where the lines between fact and fiction are so often blurred, it seemed like Abraham Lincoln’s unattractiveness was one shred of information that could be relied on as invariable. Physical descriptions of Lincoln often include the word “homely,” or the fact that the Civil War aged him terribly. Little did the American people know what national treasure had been hiding in Los Angeles for decades. An image has recently been circulating on Twitter of a statue of Lincoln located in the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse by artist James Lee Hansen. Hansen won a contest in 1939 commissioned by the Fine Arts Section of the US Department of the Treasury to create the statue.

Lincoln’s bangin’ body is reportedly based on Hansen’s own physique and sources say he used the prize money he won to buy a car, which he subsequently crashed and had to serve jail time for. If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is.

This rendition of Lincoln has truly been given the LA treatment as it features him looking down right swoon-worthy. He holds a book in his left hand and the other suggestively tugs at his waistband. He seems to have emancipated his shirt, and his expression is blue steel-adjacent. This statue is not of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. No, this is Abe, the smoldering law student who wants to make a difference. The one who just finished cutting down trees to build his own log cabin. He is so sensitive, but also isn’t afraid to declare war on the American South if he needs to. It’s like looking at one of former President George W. Bush’s paintings. The work is so beautiful, you almost forget about his politics.

The popularity of this statue not only raises questions as to why this version of Lincoln isn’t on the five-dollar bill, but also about what versions of history prevail. Lincoln’s presidency was marked by numerous achievements, but certain elements of his legacy seem to have been forgotten or possibly even omitted from popular memory. For example, while Lincoln did strongly oppose the institution of slavery on a moral

and political level, his agenda during the Civil War was not as focused on emancipation as some may believe.

In his letter to Horace Greeley he wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” A quick Google search of the phrase “young Lincoln statue” shows that Hansen was not the only artist to take up the challenge of glossing history with their own dreamy renditions.

While this may warrant a different degree of analysis than other historical lore such as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, it does make one question how complete the accounts we believe to be true really are. (In Washington’s case, no amount of creative license can make a man with wooden teeth seem desirable.) And furthermore, it causes us to think about what institutions that have prevailed in curating a sort of common knowledge history. Surely, whoever decided that the image of old bearded and stove- top hat wearing Lincoln should be more popular than hot, young Lincoln is out of their mind. A commemorative statue quite literally sets in stone one’s legacy. Just as it is easier to think of Lincoln in terms of his accomplishments, it is more pleasant to see him as a young hunk. A campaign to commission Hansen to recreate his art piece on a larger scale to replace the current Lincoln monument would surely gain much attention–and he should throw in a Barack Obama statue while he’s at it.

-GB

FUCK STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE, OR SOMETHING ABOUT ANIMAL LOVE

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY Maya Bjornson

NEWS

02

CAPTIONING FASCISM Memes, misinformation, and political fatigue in Bolsonaro's Brazil

“Don’t worry, everybody, everything will get better after the 2014 World Cup.” This tweet has been immortalized in reaction GIFs, YouTube comments and memes across Brazilian webspace as hilariously, tragically wrong. Since Brazil’s loss to Germany at the World Cup, the country’s political system has experienced a dramatic upheaval, culminating in the election of Jair Bolsonaro to president in October 2018.

Bolsonaro, an ultraconservative ex-military officer, is often referred to in US media as the “Brazilian Trump.”

While there are definite parallels between the two, in many ways, Bolsonaro poses a far more serious threat to everyone who is not white, wealthy, male, straight, Christian and pro-imperialist.

I want to emphasize that attention to on-theground political events in Brazil is incredibly important.

Yet, it’s important to look not just at the crisis of his election as an event, but at the conditions that enabled him to be elected, and the efforts of liberals and leftists to regroup in the aftermath. To do that, I think that we must look at a crucial component of how politics play out in the public sphere: memes. Brazil has the world’s fourth-highest number of internet users, and social media is a primary sources of news, especially among young people. Last year, Datafolha, Brazil’s largest polling institute, reported that only 10% of people aged 16 to 24 have faith in the press. Meanwhile, 66% get their news from social media. As in the US, for many of Brazil’s youth, news comes in the form of personal social networks, online videos, and above all, memes. In this context, it becomes important to pay attention to the tweet above, to the irony that masks disillusionment.

Brazilians have plenty of reason to be disillusioned with their political system. A massive government corruption scandal known as Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) culminated in the imprisonment of dozens of high-profile politicians and businessmen, including, in July 2017, beloved former Workers' Party (PT) president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula.

The arrests marked not just a political upheaval, but an ideological collapse. Lula and the PT represented hope and grassroots change for much of Brazil’s population, especially the urban working class.

The unveiling of rampant corruption and bureaucracy dealt a shattering blow to the PT’s legacy. Amid huge protests, President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s protégé, was impeached in 2016. These protests, which began in 2013, and are collectively referred to as "Come to the Streets" (Vem Pra Rua), showcased

03

NEWS

the immense power of social media in the public sphere. The protests were predominantly organized on Facebook by the Free Brazil Movement (Movimento Brasil Livre or MBL), which billed itself as a non-partisan, anti-corruption movement. They received broad popular support across the political spectrum, with hundreds of thousands turning out in cities across Brazil to protest high bus tariffs, bureaucratic excess, and nepotism. Online, the protests coincided with the explosive popularity of Brazilian Corruption Memes (Corrupcão Brasileira Memes), a Facebook meme page that heavily echoed MBL rhetoric.

As the protests progressed, they became increasingly partisan and anti-PT, and by early 2015, the MBL was the driving force in Dilma’s impeachment. A report from Vice revealed that not long afterwards, MBL leaders actually bought control of Brazilian Corruption Memes from the non-MBL administrators (the irony of an anti-corruption page being paid off is palpable).

As a mouthpiece for the MBL, the page underwent a massive shift in demographics. The non-partisan base, as well as left-wingers who had initially supported an anti-corruption agenda, left in disgust, while ultraconservatives found themselves in possession of a forum with immense social media clout. Even though these memes were never explicitly endorsed by politicians, there is no doubt that the increased social media presence had real-world effects: in November 2018, one of MBL’s founders, 23-year-old Kim Kataiguri, was elected to Congress under the Bolsonaro regime.

Kataiguri’s bizarre political trajectory is not the only case where memes and social media have facilitated the co-opting of popular movements by the far-right. Last month, a YouTube video went viral of 72-year-old Nilson Papinho ecstatically playing with his first successful batch of “slime,” a squishy goop used to make ‘oddly satisfying’ online videos. What began as an innocuous video of a cute, elderly man quickly turned sour as Twitter posts began to circulate claiming that Slime Grandpa (Vovô da slime) was a serial child molester. Others quickly made posts denying these accusations, all claiming to know Papinho personally. At the same time, Brazilian Corruption Memes began churning out posts portraying Slime Grandpa as a fervent Bolsonaro supporter, or “Bolsominion.” The catch, as reported

by The Intercept Brasil, is that all of these accusations and accounts were fake: they were created en masse by Bolsonarist internet users hoping to stir up controversy.

The damage had already been done, though, as several

prominent left-wing accounts began posting warnings against Papinho’s ultraconservatism and pedophilia.

This, in turn, gave MBL pundits the opportunity to decry the Left’s smear campaign against a sweet old slime-making man.

One reason behind these convoluted transitions from popular to political to far-right is the versatility and easy distribution of memes. An image template can be easily re-captioned or re-worded to mean something entirely different than how it was originally intended. Perhaps in an effort to avoid these appropriations, several leftist meme pages have sprung up in the aftermath of Bolsonaro’s election that are dedicated to hyper-specific content. For example, Barbie and Ken, Good Citizens (Barbie e Ken Cidadãos de Bem) is an account that only posts images of Barbie and Ken dolls captioned with far-right slogans like, “A good citizen is an armed citizen!” It’s a satirical portrayal of Bolsonaro supporters as elitist, vapid, and overwhelmingly white, effectively turning their own rhetoric against them. Another popular page is simply a daily update on whether Bolsonaro has finally ended government corruption; the answer is always some variation on “no.”

Other pages, rather than aiming for specificity, have tried to appeal to a broad audience. The Brazil that Worked Out (O Brasil que deu certo) is one of the largest meme pages, with over 2 million likes on Facebook. The page purports to share images of quintessentially Brazilian culture. A recent post, for instance, was a picture of a detention slip for dancing samba while reciting the national anthem. Of course, what makes something ‘quintessentially Brazilian’ is up for debate, and the page definitely relies on certain cultural tropes to craft a national narrative. Yet according to Gabriela Lunardi, a PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology, these generalizations are a key trait. Lunardi, who wrote her thesis on Brazilian memes, argued in an interview that “it is the lack of a structured cultural identity that shapes Brazilian humour on memes. One of my findings is that Brazilian memes work as national identity shapers.”

Memes allow young people on both ends of politics to work out new definitions of ‘Brazilian-ness’ that may be different from those prescribed by the traditional media.

Nevertheless, the subjects around which these identities revolve are changing. Matheus Laneri, one of two admins for The Brazil that Worked Out, told The College Hill Independent that he has noticed a general

08 MARCH 2019

BY Adam Fertig ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Katherine Sang

shift in the scope of memes after Bolsonaro’s election: “Memes didn’t play the strongest role [on their own] in the recent elections; the real influence was fake news,” Laneri says. “Now that we have an elected president, all the memes are focused on Bolsonaro. Both to praise him and to critique him. What used to be scattered is now focused.” It is nearly impossible to produce content that does not reckon with Bolsonaro, whether in the post or in the comment section. And while The Brazil that Worked Out is not explicitly political, Laneri emphasized that memes of all kinds provide a relief from the crises of current politics. “We are unbelievers, politically speaking, so the only thing left to do is poke fun at yourself.” He noted, “I think it’s an escape valve, because if we don’t laugh, we’ll just be living to live.”

This idea of an emotional “escape valve” was echoed by a recent study at FGV-RJ, measuring posting activity by various political groups during the impeachment proceedings against ex-president Dilma. On the average day, there was a mix of posts by an anti-impeachment base, a pro-impeachment fringe and a ‘neutral’ press corps. However, on days of important events in the proceedings—culminating in the actual impeachment decision—a fourth group emerged: people posting memes and satirical content in the “native language of the internet.” Pedro Lehnard, the author of the study, told Nexo Jornal that it was a way to “depressurize” political emergencies: “since we have to talk about it, since we can’t not talk about it, let’s talk about it in a lighter way.”

It is important to note that this lightheartedness often co-exists with a deep frustration and resentment for the political system. This is a sentiment expressed by some of the more radically leftist meme pages, like Capitalism that Worked Out (Capitalismo Que Deu Certo). The memes are faster, cruder, and more pointed: a recent Twitter repost reads, “I’m not great at telling jokes but let me give it a shot: The United States offering humanitarian aid.” Oliver Lani, a 21-year-old from São Paulo, is the admin. Throughout our conversation, he noted the exhaustion induced by living in a capitalist society under a far-right regime: “Most young people are tired of their routine and are just trying to get home alive by the end of the night. Through online

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

content, you try to forget the depression and the stress and the anxiety, and to find people like you and with similar ideas.” He claims that this political fatigue and the need for emotional rather than intellectual connections feeds into the aesthetic style of many Brazilian political memes. “Nobody wants to spend more than 30 seconds trying to understand a meme. Our brains don’t want to strain, so it’s easier to place your bets on emotion. And laughing or finding something funny is the best emotion you can offer.”

Aside from comedic relief, Lani believes that meme communities offer a space for young, radically-minded Brazilians to collectively re-examine notions of cultural identity. “People today have a much better notion of our history, we really understand our reality. Many people with liberal and leftist tendencies have stopped idealizing the ‘American Dream.’

By informing ourselves, we can see things in Brazil as they really are, and abandon European social norms and behaviors, and begin to relearn and construct our own identity.” In fact, some meme pages have become spaces for reviving Brazil’s left in the wake of Bolsonaro’s rise to power, for salvaging socialism and social justice as legitimate ideologies in the political sphere. Brazilian Revolutionary Memes, for instance, is particularly adept at moving seamlessly between political and cultural commentary, exemplified by an image of a chart showing “Things that Brazilians don’t understand the concept of: communism, fascism, feminism, express lane—15 item maximum.” Others, like Leftist Menes [sic] (Menes da Esquerda) and Socializing (Socializando), are equal parts entertaining and educational posting both memes and videos explaining concepts in Marxist, feminist, and critical race theory.

Despite these advances, though, there is a deep anxiety among leftist meme-makers about the potential consequences of their content. Part of this is a concern for their immediate liberty and safety, as “the authoritarian attitudes of the current government make the opposition more apprehensive,” says meme researcher Lunardi. But there is also the danger of memes being co-opted, of posts repeating the errors of Brazilian Corruption Memes and Slime Grandpa.

“The way Bolsonaro's campaign happened, based on fake news shared mostly on WhatsApp groups, has made the Brazilian Internet community (at least the left-wing supporters) rethink the weight and power of creating memes that will circulate among people from different social classes and levels of digital literacy.” Lunardi explains. “The average Brazilian uses the internet to be informed and may not get the irony of certain memes that criticize the government.”

Indeed, all of this means little to the large chunk of the Brazilian population without internet access. And though Lani himself makes memes, he remains wary of how easily they can be exploited: “Memes become ideological tools for misinformation. The best way to transform a truth into a lie, is to transform the truth into a joke.”

It remains to be seen, then, how leftist movements will regain footholds under the Bolsonaro regime.

Especially with Bolsonaro’s support from far-right governments abroad, it will be an uphill battle. And memes may do more harm than good in this struggle, as “tools for misinformation” for a government built on misinformation. Yet, across the Brazilian web, pockets of resistance have formed. They are places to express, through humor, a resistance to the toll that politics takes on the minds and bodies of the people it neglects. As Lani puts it, “Nowadays people in Brazil are thinking more about politics. They feel indignant, and in the end this has united a lot of people and made them realize their realities and convictions. They don’t want to change the world. The want the world to change for them and become a place that’s less lethal and unequal.” So, while memes are unlikely to directly incite political action, they are a small, bizarre, unapologetic demand for a different world, a demand that may, perhaps, grow into a clamor.

ADAM FERTIG B/RISD’19 wants you to join the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil.

NEWS

04

A LAWYER ON BROAD STREET The mile-long boulevard of Broadway, in Providence, is a den of lawyers. Over 15 private law offices occupy the hodgepodge of Victorian estates and Greek Revival mansions, leftovers from a more ostentatious time on Federal Hill. But, two miles south, across I-95 on Broad Street, there’s only José Batista. At 30, he practices law out of a rented space in a converted three-story home across from a bodega and an elementary school. It’s in the neighborhood where he grew up, surrounded by his clients—the predominantly Latino South Side.

Batista has spent his career in the courtroom, first as a public defender, handling 25 to 35 cases a day for low-income defendants, and now with his own private practice. At least for the moment, though, he’s giving it up. On February 21, the Providence City Council unanimously approved Batista’s appointment as executive director of the Providence External Review Authority (PERA), the city’s recently revived civilian police oversight board. In the council chambers in City Hall, Batista beamed, his bald head gleaming, as applause erupted upon his confirmation. Then, it was over. No more than three minutes had passed since Batista’s name had been announced—a curt beginning to what will be a complicated two years for Batista, overseeing one of the most powerful institutions in the city.

The police department Batista and PERA are tasked with holding accountable has a rocky past. In 1978, then-Providence Chief of Police Angelo Ricci told the Providence Journal, “You’re [not] going to stop crime by being nice to people. You have to push people around.” His comments reflected a period marred by instances abuse of citizens by certain officers: beatings, intimidation, racist slurs.

The Providence Police Department of today is not that of several decades ago. A WPRI investigation from last year found that internal disciplinary actions against officers have risen since 2011, when current Chief Hugh Clements assumed his position, suggesting less tolerance for misconduct. But in 2017, the Associated Press published a report detailing abuses by a “third-shift terror squad” of white officers against Black and Latino residents of the South Side.

The story resonated with the ongoing experiences of youth, people of color, low-income, immigrant and trans people with the police in Providence.

In 2012, a coalition of community advocacy organizations formed to draft a police reform ordinance aimed at reducing police violence and prohibiting forms of identity-based profiling. The landmark Providence Community Safety Act (CSA), rebranded the Providence Community-Police Relations Act after last-minute objections by the police union, passed in 2017. But Vanessa Flores-Maldonado, campaign coordinator for the CSA, told the Independent, “We're still hearing that there are police officers who are still harassing folks and still even being violent towards them. We've still gotten those reports [since the passage of the act].” The drafters of the CSA anticipated this, writing an accountability mechanism into the legislation involving the revival of a long-dormant civilian review board: PERA. So now, at the helm of PERA, José Batista has his work cut out for him. He must create an independent process for community members to submit complaints of police misconduct, preside over investigations into these allegations, and, if warranted, hold courtroom-style hearings with police officers. Many who know Batista say he is the man for the job. But this lawyer stands at a crossroads, of his career and of police oversight in his city. +++ Batista

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is

broad-shouldered,

METRO

and

BY Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

clean-shaven except for the traces of a goatee. For his appearances before the City Council during his confirmation process this month (and for our interviews), he wore a starched white button-down and a suit, an outfit that belies his down-to-earth friendliness.

Over rice, beans, and pork at La Gran Parada, a Dominican cafeteria several blocks from his childhood home, where orders are placed in Spanish and the line regularly stretches 50 people deep, Batista told me about his past, stopping only to wave hello to those he recognized coming in for lunch.

Batista was born in 1989, the first of six children. His father, Francisco José Batista, had arrived in Providence ten years earlier from the Dominican Republic as an 18-year-old. Francisco Batista (also known to most as José) began working in a factory, shining and packaging jewelry, and met José’s mother, Sylvia, a Puerto Rican who had come to Providence at age eight. Batista’s father eventually became the owner of a popular club, The International Club, which he eventually renamed “Club 30-30,” in honor of Dominican baseball player Sammy Sosa. Batista remembers Mondays spent helping his dad restock bar shelves and clean up paper cups after raucous weekends at the venue (the club burned down in 2001). completely The ’90s were a high point for Dominican culture in the US, says Batista. “I like to think of it as like the

Harlem Renaissance,” he explained, “but instead of for black people, for Dominicans.” Batista’s father, part of a wave of Dominican migration to New England, was the “unofficial president of the Latino community” in Providence, says Batista, and helped found the Dominican Festival, which packed Broad Street with fancy cars for two weeks of pandemonium.

Also during the ’90s, according to a Human Rights Watch report, certain Providence police officers were committing extreme violence while on the job, beating South Side residents on the same streets Batista played.

Batista remembers the most high-profile case of police violence in his lifetime. Sitting in his sixth grade classroom at Roger Williams Middle School, he and his classmates watched the televised funeral of 29-year-old Sgt. Cornel Young Jr., an off-duty black Providence police officer mistakenly gunned down by two of his white peers on a frigid night in January of 2000. Young Jr. was the son of Providence’s highest ranking black officer and had been eating at an all night diner on Atwells Avenue when he heard a commotion outside. He exited the restaurant with his sidearm drawn (at that time department rules manded off-duty cops carry their weapons) and was shot three times by Officers Carlos Saraiva and Michael Solitro III. The murder galvanized activists, many from the local nonprofit Direct Action for Rights and Equality

08 MARCH 2019

Providence lawyer José Batista takes on police oversight (DARE), to push for an independent accountability mechanism for the police. Hundreds demonstrated outside City Hall in the days after the shooting, chanting “stop police brutality” and “they’re the murderers.” The protests developed into a year of sustained advocacy, and organizers finally pushed through an ordinance creating Providence’s firstever independent civilian review board, PERA, in November of 2002.

Then, Batista was 13, more concerned with his application to Classical High School. He says his parents were strict. “We came to this country for you to go to school,” they told him: to be the first of his family to graduate college. “Classical was a signal,” said Batista, “Classical meant success.” He made it in, and, eventually, landed a scholarship to Bryant University in Smithfield. There, he studied business. During his last year, he flunked out of the accounting program.

“Even the people who I had known who had gone to college, never finished,” he said, “And so in my mind I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I'm another statistic.’”

But Batista returned for a fifth year, and, on a whim, took a class on the TV show “The Wire” with Judith McDonnell, a sociology professor that he credits for changing his life. Her classes focused on social inequities: educational disparities and racialized police violence. Batista remembers thinking, “Wait a minute, that sounds like what’s happening in my community!”

McDonnell, still a professor at Bryant, told the Indy that Batista’s upbringing in the South Side informed everything he did. “It’s always traveled with him. No matter where he went. He’s never lost sight of that kind of familial foundation,” she said.

Also at Bryant, Batista joined Lambda Upsilon Lambda, a Latino fraternity. “In my life, there is a B.C. and an A.D.,” he said, “and it coincides with my being bald”—a consequence of the frat’s pledge process.

Batista says the frat gave him direction and forced him to pay attention to what was going on in the world.

“There was a young, charismatic senator out of Illinois running for president and for the first time the frat made me watch the news,” he said.

Out of this new-found social consciousness came law school applications, and then law school itself, at Roger Williams University in Bristol, where Batista fell in with a crowd of soon-to-be defense lawyers and legal advocates—“people who cared about social justice,” he said. +++ While Batista was in high school, PERA, the civilian review board he will soon head, was locked in conflict, with itself and with the police.

PERA, like the approximately 150 similar bodies across the country, is tasked with administering an independent grievance process for citizens. The police department has an internal complaint process, but a 2015 study found that external investigations are 78 percent more likely to sustain misconduct allegations than internal ones. (Nationally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that only one in every 12 internal complaints results in disciplinary action.)

Independent review boards are usually borne out of community advocacy for police accountability. But across the country they face opposition from police unions and underfunding from city governments.

Many, PERA included, are only able to issue recommendations for disciplinary action to the police, should misconduct allegations be confirmed—making them politically toothless.

Facing these obstacles, the PERA of Batista’s youth may have been doomed from the beginning.

“Politically, it was supposed to fail,” said Providence City Councilwoman Mary Kay Harris, who sat on

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the original board, at a public meeting last June. Its members, one appointed by each city councilor and the mayor, “were politically put there, deliberately, to destroy PERA.” The 21-person board was clunky and prone to turnover. Its first executive director, Leon Drezek, resigned a year and a half into his tenure and was replaced by his chief investigator, Kevin Dreary.

Both men were former members of law enforcement.

In September of 2006, the local Fraternal Order of Police and two officers under investigation by the board sued PERA, asking the courts to declare the agency unconstitutional for violating the state Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights. A December 2006 PERA annual report, obtained by public records request, notes that “the cases before PERA are in various stages mostly due to lapses in information from the PPD [Providence Police Department],” which, according to the report, stopped sharing information with PERA while the case was being litigated.

Eventually, the Rhode Island Supreme Court sided with the board, but the difficulties had taken their toll. The PERA board chose to dissolve sometime in 2008, and by 2014 the agency’s budget had dipped to one third of its original allocation, according to yearly financial reports released by the city.

For nearly 10 years it lay dormant, until the coalition responsible for the Community Safety Act wrote re-establishing it into their legislation, which passed in 2017. The new board, only nine people this time around, spent its first year learning about the history of its predecessor and hearing presentations from advocates and law enforcement. Then, it interviewed a dozen candidates to fill the executive director role—determining the person who will design and run PERA’s day-to-day operations. At the end of the process, Batista came out on top. “It was unanimous that he nailed it,” said Alison Eichler, chair of the PERA board, in an interview with the Indy.

Batista has also been praised by the advocates who fought to re-establish PERA. “This is the ideal candidate for us,” said Flores-Maldonado of the coalition, “Someone who’s from Providence, who knows the city, grew up and has invested in this area.” +++

rocket science. People just want to be heard.”

Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré told the Indy that he and Chief Clements have met with Batista. “We vowed to a build a working collaboration for our mutual goals: transparency and accountability,” he said.

Batista is clear that his role is to be independent and impartial. He will establish what is essentially a courtroom (although PERA’s rulings are only recommendations for discipline to the police department and carry no legal weight).

It’s clear Batista is reading voraciously—he describes himself as an introvert who would prefer to have the whole day inside to read and write. He cares about the research, like a study that prompted Las Vegas to change police policy to restrict officers in foot chases from actually touching pursued suspects until their partner arrives, and the numbers, like the resulting 10 percent reduction in use of force.

But those who know him well are worried. “It’s the difficulty of the position, especially in these times, with policing all over the country experiencing and causing a lot of community pushback,” said McDonnell, his professor and mentor.

I ask Batista about the possibility of facing the same kind of pushback from the police as the original PERA board. “I don’t think it has to be as adversarial,” he says, “Regulation exists everywhere. The FEC regulates the banks. The FDA regulates drugs.

So it exists. The question is how are we going to do it.”

Batista has committed himself to a meticulous process in answering that question, but said he will begin with the basics: creating a website and phone number for PERA, and establishing operating rules for the body.

Paré, on behalf of the police department, said he was committed to developing a good relationship with Batista, “We think we can get to where the board and Mr. Batista can perform their function under the law.” +++ Last year, before PERA was even on Batista’s radar, he considered running for attorney general of Rhode Island, to challenge the favorite for the position, Peter Neronha, from the left. Inspired by progressive prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, Batista dreamed of big changes. He rattled them off to me: abolishing cash bail, stopping marijuana prosecution, eliminating money bail altogther for low-level offenses.

He spoke of the structural inequities of the courts he has worked in for three years.

But he was a political outsider, worried about giving up his private practice, and decided against the run in the end. “Lo and behold, I think it was the right thing to do,” he said. “But I got to tell you that fire is still there.” The success of PERA depends on it.

Preparing for his new job, Batista says the combined 11 pages of the Providence Police-Community Relations Act (PCPRA) and the PERA ordinance are gospel. “I want to memorize those things,” he told me. He wants to stay “in the strong position where I’m doing things that are supported by law.”

That law has drawn the ire of the police union. “The FOP makes no secret in its opposition to the PCPRA," said Providence Fraternal Order of Police President Michael Imondi at a presentation to the PERA board last October, before Batista was hired. “There is no need for additional rules, regulations, or outside over- LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 believes in Batista. sight,” he added, characterizing community experiences of police harassment or violence as not based in fact, before finally affirming the legal backing of PERA and acknowledging that officers will cooperate with the board. (The Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to a request for comment on this story sent to their Facebook page and a message left at their publicly listed phone number. They have issued no public statements on Batista’s hiring.)

For Batista, maintaining PERA’s legitimacy means focusing only on three charges outlined in the ordinance: community outreach, accepting and investigating complaints, and reviewing police policy.

He officially assumed his post on March 1, but weeks before his schedule was already filled with meetings with PERA board members, city councilors, public safety officials, and activists. “I don’t think it’s

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SCENIC DEPICTIONS OF

BY Alan Emory Dean ILLUSTRATION Rémy Poisson DESIGN Cecile Kim

SLAVIC LIFE Buidling an language of irony in Latvian counter-culture

“The Slav Squat is not just about squatting down—no, no. It is about technique. About showing your Slav levels,” explains YouTube star Life of Boris in his May 2016 video “How to squat like Slav,” a viral success which has since reached over 7 million views. While in this video Boris attempts to sketch out just what the ‘Slav Squat’ is actually all about, this trend extends far beyond one YouTuber, having become a cultural symbol recognizable worldwide in its own right, if not the dominant contemporary representation of Eastern Europe in Western mass culture. While the stereotypical image of the ‘Slav Squat’ originated in the economic crises and social upheaval of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and early ’90s, its Western explosion in popularity is much more recent, with Google metrics showing searches for the term rapidly rising from almost zero prior to 2013, until a peak in late 2017 and a slow decline since.

As can be seen in the picture above, the term ‘Slav Squat’ suggests several key elements that, together, form an instantly recognizable visual scene: young men, tracksuits, alcohol, sunflower seeds, and dilapidated stores, block housing, or train stations in the background—in other words, a stylized and aestheticized Eastern European poverty. While exploitation, reproduction, and consumption of working-class imagery in Western culture and media is hardly unique, the degree to which such depictions of Eastern Europe are consumed almost entirely uncritically is shocking, and reflects the extent of the region’s political and cultural marginality.

While the West’s paternalistic relationship with the former Communist Bloc deserves much critique, what is perhaps more interesting in this case is the move towards self-representation within Eastern European youth culture, with the ‘Slav Squat’ serving as a useful example. Life of Boris demonstrates this well through his social media presence, as an Estonian-based creator of Russian origin riffing off of stereotypes of Eastern Europeans for comedic effect, with his content primarily marketed towards Western audiences. These aesthetics, however, also exist internally, independent of such audiences, having become a significant cultural object within Eastern Europe itself. This suggests that a sense of internalized otherness has taken an increasingly important role within post-Soviet culture as the process of integration with Western Europe moves forward, since the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the expansion of NATO and the EU. The key to understanding this otherness and Eastern European culture’s reaction to it (as well as its reproduction and reclamation of it), lies in how the stereotypes exemplified by ‘Slav Squat’ reveal the mentality with which the cultural symbol is treated.

Unlike Western consumption of these images, the Eastern European mode of engagement fundamentally relies upon an ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach to the subject at hand: themselves and their material conditions.

This method of interacting with culture extends far beyond the ‘Slav Squat,’ with an ironic affect being used to make sense of the world, and then incorporate a variety of cultural objects in the construction of identity. In my own experience, such objects can range from hip-hop to anime, to 4chan memes and fascism, creating a bizarre kind of life-theater of 16, 17, or 18-year-olds building a youth culture in (what they consider to be) an apolitical vacuum, putting on

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a sarcastic, absurdist show. In so doing, they seem to immerse themselves in irony almost as a means of defense or insulation from reality—a troubling phenomenon in light of the growing power of far-right movements in the region (and around the world) and the increasingly common intersections of ironic and real uses of hate language.

The Eastern European youth culture that I know firsthand is that of the shared space of the center city kids, Instagram stylists, SoundCloud rappers, artists, writers, and centra bērni (grunge kids); the youth culture of the strange and wonderful city where I spent my high school years: Riga, Latvia. The alternative culture of Latvia is one that is hard to imagine developing in any other historical moment than our current one; it is also, like Eastern Europe as a whole, deeply dependent on irony as a mode of relation. While the adoption of ironic distance allows for the repurposing and redirecting of stereotypes and creative adaption of global culture, it carries with it limits and consequences of its own, most critically the difficulty in maintaining the dangerously thin line between ironic representation and reality. +++ To further investigate irony’s function in the defining of the identities of young Latvians, it is crucial to understand the context in which Latvia finds itself today. As a small Baltic nation that is both a former Soviet Republic and a member of NATO and the EU, it sits, in many ways, right on the fault line of what is generally considered to be our modern East/West divide. A 200-year history of Russian rule—both Imperial and Soviet— has left the country with a significant ethnic Russian minority. Because of this, the current Westernizing impulse is often seen in direct conflict with the long arc of Russian imperialism and Russian culture’s role in Latvia today. Because of this positioning, Latvia finds itself at the intersection of several different marginalities, whether they be economic, cultural, or political.

Like much of the former Soviet Union, is today struggling to define an identity for itself when so much has and is being imposed upon it from the outside.

Latvia, like much of the former Soviet Union, has witnessed a strong revival of previously repressed ethno-nationalism, largely as a backlash to Soviet Russification policies. That it is happening alongside and together with Westernization creates a paradox of sorts, at least on the surface. How can a nation ethnically define itself at the expense of minorities (Russian or non-European) and simultaneously emulate the modern, cosmopolitan model of Western liberal democracy? Of course, a discerning reader would note that Western states themselves seem to maintain this contradiction quite well, and are by no means above the racist nationalism allegedly characteristic of Eastern Europe, and never have been. Nonetheless, the belief that Westernization means a move towards cosmopolitanism rather than nationalism is critical to understanding the position in which Latvia and Eastern Europe as a whole find themselves.

In some sense, these states have escaped their long historical position of subjugation in the Russian sphere of influence, only to become similarly marginal players in the Eurosphere. To many of those who dominate the political alliances and shared culture they’ve now gained entry to, they remain backward, undeveloped and tied to all the connotations of their past.

The raw nationalism that was and is the basis of the modern liberal state now serves as proof of their not quite equal status. As often happens due to cultural imbalances of power, much of this rhetoric is internalized and adopted by its targets, both politically and in cultural depictions, as demonstrated in the case of the ‘Slav Squat.’ Non-Russian Eastern Europe seems to suffer from this phenomenon doubly so, for Russia at least has found the outlet of embracing their ‘outsideness’ as militant, renegade power disrupting today’s imperial order (though this is hardly a positive, sustainable course of action). This is not an option for the weaker states, however, who very much depend on being let into the club. While both the European Union and the states themselves have undertaken an effort to geographically redefine the Baltic States as belonging to Northern Europe, rather than Eastern Europe, cultural associations require much more than a change to the map to break down. This national anxiety over self-perception and agency, rooted in a history of domination, seems to be the primary instigator behind Latvian and Eastern European youth culture’s reliance on irony, insofar as it is coupled together with, and fed by, the role of the internet. +++ A crucial aspect of these shifts is the significantly more dispersed cultural landscape created by digital forms of communication and social media, which have both increased access to Western culture in places like Latvia and allowed their own penetration into their fringes. It is these structural changes that enabled the development of memes like the ‘Slav Squat’ into a wider ‘Eastern European Aesthetic,’ which has since shown itself capable of morphing into a variety of new forms. One example of this is the world of high fashion, where a variety of designers and brands, most famoulsy Gosha Rubchinskiy, Vetements, and Adidas have quickly capitalized on the popularity of post-Soviet styles. The widespread consumption and visibility of these styles in the fashion world reveal the degree to which the imagery of Eastern Europe has been able to proliferate.

Nonetheless, they are also, to some degree, fundamentally exploitative; in many ways these aesthetics are still those of poverty, both Soviet and post-Soviet, and serve to further typify Eastern Europe as lagging behind modernity. In the case of designers who are themselves Eastern European, such as Gosha Rubchinskiy, the situation is less clear cut, but the function of the capital investment of Western European brands remains the same. The ‘cool’ parts of Eastern European style are extracted and made profitable, with the profits largely staying in the West.

At the same time, the notion of Eastern Europe as a backwards place unable to keep up with modernity persists, further entrenching the unequal distribution of economic and political power.

Of course, this process is complicated by the fact that oftentimes the very same derogatory content is made by its subjects themselves. A specifically Latvian example of this style of humor is the Facebook meme page “Riga Trash,” which creates its content out of explicitly classist mockery of Riga’s least presentable. Several undercurrents run beneath such images; the connotations of “trash” are much the same as in the West, but are also inextricably linked to a kind of ‘Soviet-ness’ or inability to adapt to the new society

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post-1991. Even the seemingly straightforward (and quite upsetting) pictures of disheveled old men passed out drunk on the street, presented as a joke, all on their own carry this history, as a continuation of the trope of the бомж (bum), a demeaning Russian term for homeless alcoholics. These memes are not, however, all just mean-spirited mockery (though many are, at least on this particular meme page); there is also a kind of sardonic embrace of all things Soviet and dilapidated, as the ironic withdrawal holds it all together. This can be clearly seen in the image above, sourced from the same page.

Thus, it can be seen that irony functions in this context as a sort of shield, a way to safely engage with a world in which your identity and wider sense of community have become fundamentally unmoored by the processes of globalization and modernization.

With this defense measure one truly can embrace their status and position, however degraded it may appear or have been made to seem. +++ This use of irony as a safe way to engage with a fragmentary world, while indicative of the contemporary moment faced by Eastern Europe, has an older history within Soviet culture. Стёб (pronounced st-yo-b) is a Russian term for a style of humor that, while primarily drawing upon irony, sarcasm, and absurdity, cannot exactly be translated by any of those words. The origin of стёб dates back to the economic stagnation and slow fracturing of institutions characteristic of the Late Soviet Period. As an increasingly weak Soviet leadership attempted to double down on hardline positions, particularly during Leonid Brezhnev’s administration, a sharp divide between official and unofficial culture began to take root. The ruling powers were considered to be so clearly intellectually bankrupt that mockery via imitation became the outlet of choice for dissent, creating стёб. To practice стёб, then and now, one adopts the language and style of the chosen subject and exaggeratedly plays it out to demonstrate the absurdity inherent in it.

Of course, one of the most important parts of the practice of стёб is the consistently blurred line between mockery and sincerity. To see this phenomenon and its potential dangers, one only needs to look to Eduard Limonov and the Nationalist Bolshevik Party (NBP), an arts and protest group that, in the 1990s, adopted the aesthetics of fascism for its taboo shock value. The NBP initially sought to unite the far-left and far-right, along with other punk and countercultural scenes, as a means of resisting Russia’s transition into capitalism. The group, however—banned in Russia since 2007—has in many ways morphed into a genuine fascist organization. They seek an end to the current oligarchy in Russia through a language coded with racism, misogyny and ethno-nationalism that speaks to the мужик (mu-zh-ik), or common Russian man (emphasis on man), explicitly at the expense of ethnic minorities and women. Notably, Limonov’s rhetoric on Vladimir Putin since the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass has shifted from hostile to endorsing; to the former NBP, a crony capitalist mafia state may be bad, but Russian neo-imperialism, even if practiced by the very same state, is undoubtedly good.

While the concept of стёб is a very Russian one and does not necessarily translate perfectly to the Latvian or wider Eastern European context, it is

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nonetheless a useful framework to keep in mind when considering the state of Eastern European alternative cultures today. Despite the political reasons for its denial, the shared history of the Soviet Union has had a deep impact on all its former members’ cultures and identities, and the cultural challenges they face have far more in common than not. The example of the NBP in particular can serve as a direct analogy, or as a warning. Images, rhetoric, and symbols have power of their own, and it would be deeply naïve to believe that irony is always going to be able to seal them off from application and consequence.

but also allows us to use it as a mirror to the Western world that is assisting, developing, appropriating, and exploiting it, all in the same historical moment.

While the ironic affect adopted by Eastern European alternative culture has inherent flaws, some of which carry truly dangerous possibilities, it would be both ignorant and wrong to moralize and judge. Irony as a way of interacting with the wider world is very much a defense mechanism, coming from a place that has experienced immense historical trauma, and in its process of reconstruction is being told it must abandon itself, to become itself. Culture in the former Soviet Union is truly trapped between a rock and a hard place, +++ youth culture most of all. All of us around the world, the West included, may be feeling the contemporary Where, then, does Latvia and the rest of the former moment’s identity crisis, but not all of us have the same Soviet bloc go from here? A friend of mine currently stakes in this game. working in Riga’s arts and fashion scene told the College Hill Independent that both the ironic embrace of ALAN EMORY DEAN B’21 is tired of squatting. fascism and the romanticizing of post-Soviet aesthetics have outstayed their welcome and are receding, no longer capturing young people’s interest the way they were able to a year or two ago. While this seems to be a clearly positive shift, it also troubling in what it reveals about how these ideas were engaged with initially. Nazism, as the most extreme case, is seen not as a real ideological object with real historical consequences, which included the extermination of over 95 percent of Latvia’s prewar Jewish population, but a ridiculous cultural object, floating in a vacuum. This is exemplified by another individual running in similar circles who, several years ago, had a swastika tattooed on himself, not as a genuine political statement but as an extreme joke, inspired more by American 4chan culture and shock humor than Latvia’s actual history of fascism.

Latvian cultures of oppositions, emblematic of the entire region, thus seem to be at present trapped in an uncomfortable growth period, as wider geopolitical changes send powerful ripples through their own culture. Irony as a prevailing mode of expression can only go so far, and has proven to be far more effective at sabotaging the old than it is at constructing the new.

This is not to say by any means, however, that what is currently happening in Riga’s alternative scenes is lacking in energy or creativity, in fact it is exactly the opposite. What we see today is a part of the world that has long been a cultural crossroads, often via political domination, attempting to grow into its own.

The contemporary crisis of identity, however, is far from unique to the region. The current state of youth and alternative cultures in Eastern Europe, one of the frontlines of globalization (and the closest to its source), can be seen as an exaggerated example of the state of such cultures everywhere. While perhaps less acute and obvious elsewhere, the vacuum of identity that forces us to develop methods of self-construction, ranging from ironic absurdism to ethno-nationalist fascism (or both!), permeates the entire world today as we are all brought closer and closer together through new technologies. Looking at it from this perspective reveals not only a good deal about Eastern Europe itself,

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"TO HELL WITH THE STADIUM" At a July 19 Providence City Council hearing, affordable housing advocates and local construction unions clashed. Chants and shouts from the building trade unions dominated a chamber packed with critics of the proposed Hope Point Tower construction on vacant I-195 land. Hand-scrawled signs of local activists, most calling for affordable housing, vied for space with posters printed by the Laborers’ International Union (LiUNA). Construction workers wore high-visibility green shirts and white hard hats, holding signs printed by the Union: “Support the Fane Tower.”

The fight wasn’t confined to the hearing floor: up in the balcony, individual tensions boiled over. In one testy exchange, a local activist and Brown University junior, “NO NEW TOWER” sign in hand, confronted one of the many construction workers in attendance.

The activist argued that Providence should not subsidize luxury housing; the construction worker defended development as a job source, and wondered aloud whether any construction at all might win activist support. As Norbert Oliveira, representing the local International Union of Painters and Allied Traders (IUPAT), told the College Hill Independent, “When we do a job, we finish, and we need another one.” A project like the Hope Point Tower, the developer and unions have claimed, would provide over a thousand construction jobs.

Arguments like these are emblematic of a larger division between the state’s building trade unions and its progressive activists. Hope Point (better known as Fane) Tower is one of many recent ‘mega-developments’ to split two factions which both claim to fight for the working people of Rhode Island. Before the Fane fights, the building trades clashed with a variety of progressive (and less progressive) groups opposed to new developments. Disputes centered on a proposed fracked-gas power plant in Burrillville and (failed) plans to construct a PawSox baseball stadium in Pawtucket. In each debate, the same conflict appeared to repeat: leftists’ broader foes—corporate subsidies, tax breaks for luxury housing, investments in fossil fuel infrastructure—were pitted against trade unions’ immediate need for construction jobs.

In many ways, progressives and labor unions make unnatural enemies. Each group fights for an empowered working class with living wages, comprehensive benefits, and jobs with dignity. And their political relationship is often symbiotic, for progressives regularly rely upon union support. But just as a broad leftist coalition cannot exist without labor unions, labor unions’ very existence often hinges on legal protections under attack by the American right. “The most progressive construction trade unions,” warned leading labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein in an interview with the Indy, “have come to realize that going it alone, they’re going to be destroyed.”

However, as Lichtenstein told the Indy, these conflicts between the left and construction trade unions in Rhode Island are not new developments either: “That’s been going on for many decades.” At the same time, forging a path forward in Rhode Island means looking towards the innovative coalition-building in recent labor movements across the country, as well as considering the compatibility of progressive policy interests and trade union necessities. But a coalition between the two groups shouting each other down at City Council hearing is possible,

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and from this unity might arise a way out of the coun- the Civil Rights Movement. Fierce debate over the terproductive divide between Rhode Island’s construc- Vietnam War reawakened lingering fears of commution unions and its progressive activists. nism, and protests over the ongoing war divided the party even more deeply. Republicans savvily seized +++ onto fractured pieces of the former Democratic coalition, winning broad support from formerly liberal Construction unions, Michael F. Sabitoni explained to union groups. By the end of the 1960s, divergent the Indy, are “practical organizations.” Sabitoni, pres- ideologies, demands, and backgrounds within the ident of the Rhode Island Building and Construction Democratic party led to increased tensions. Democrats Trades Council and business manager of the Laborers’ lost their political majority, and some clashes between Local Union 271, leads many pro-development fights, former allies turned violent. writing op-eds in the Providence Journal, speaking at Perhaps the clearest embodiment of this political public hearings, and meeting with state legislators. (In schism came in New York City during an ugly conflict fact, state representatives from the town of Burrillville known as the Hard Hat Riots, which also marked the left Sabitoni’s office just before his interview with methods by which Republican leadership drew upon the Indy.) The loss of the PawSox, which recently antagonism between Democratic factions in order to announced plans to move to Massachusetts, seems solidify working-class support. to have gotten under Sabitoni’s skin. Before our interOn the morning of May 8, 1970, hundreds of view, he looked around his office and wondered aloud students gathered in downtown Manhattan to protest whether it was time to take down his office’s locker of the ongoing war in Vietnam and mourn the murder PawSox paraphernalia—multiple jerseys, a bat, and a of four anti-Vietnam War protesters at Kent State stack of team schedules.

University earlier that week. All proceeded peacefully Sabitoni is generally unfazed by the frequent until hundreds of local construction workers violently opposition he faces from activists opposed to new stormed the protest. Clad in work gear—hard hats, projects; his members’ needs remain at the core of his overalls, steel-toed boots, belts with pliers and metal organization’s policy demands. Construction work is tools—the men burst into the crowd and attacked the dependent on development within the local economy, ‘unpatriotic’ students, beating them with helmets and and, in turn, any lulls have direct and sometimes dire tools. The New York Times reported that workers sought consequences. At that July Council hearing, IUPAT’s those with the longest hair, proposing to “kill the Oliveira put the reality plainly: “Our work is not Commie bastards,” and shouting “[Mayor] Lindsay’s steady.” IUPAT workers are paid by the hour, and if no a red!” job is available after a project finishes, they’re someAs the construction workers beat the students, the times forced to collect unemployment insurance. In Police Department looked on. The workers stormed other words, Oliveira says, “we need another job to put City Hall, raising flags lowered in honor of the Kent my guys back to work.” But, he said, referring to proj- State victims. Chants shifted to “USA, love it or leave ects like downtown hotels and construction on college it!” as the counterprotest became a larger statement of campuses, “Right now, all my guys are working.” union support for the war. Over the next week, a series This staunch commitment to development of pro-war, anti-Lindsay railles called for the impeachoften pits construction unions directly against local ment of their ‘traitor’ mayor and rallied en masse in progressives. Nate Carpenter, state coordinator of support of Nixon and his war. Involved in all of these the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, criticized rallies, and directly responsible for the violent countthe Fane Tower, telling the Indy that he could not er-protest on the March 8, was Peter Brennan, leader of support “luxury homes in low-income areas.” Aaron New York’s Building and Construction Trades Council.

Regunberg, former state representative and one of the Rather than facing condemnation for the violent leading voices of the progressive movement in Rhode conflict, Brennan was rewarded. President Richard Island, wrote in an email to the Indy, “you cannot be Nixon, grateful for the support of the construction progressive if you don’t fully support the labor move- workers during and after the Riots, invited Brennan ment.” At the same time, he said, “we cannot afford to the White House with a group of union leaders. The to build massive new fossil fuel power plants if we're meeting confirmed union Democrat support for the going to be able to keep this planet livable.” war in Vietnam, solidifying a key allegiance in Nixon’s Sabitoni understands the opposition, but he wide base. remains unconvinced. “Whatever it is,” he says, Having lost the unions, their working-class “there’s always a group that’s against. As the Building members, and the working-class unemployed, little Trades, we’re always out to support it.” He says some remained of the former ‘party of the working man.’ progressive groups are simply “naysayers.” Activists, As the union vote shifted to the other side of the aisle, he argues, put political values before practical ideas, Nixon enjoyed a historically decisive victory in 1972. and at the end of the day, working people lose job Peter Brennan kept Nixon’s ear, and after the election opportunities. was appointed Labor Secretary. Leftward progress for labor stalled, as Brennan personally fought against +++ affirmative action and progressive wage reforms in the workplace. Nixon kept the gift Brennan offered to celeThe risks of this division are serious, for a fractured brate their allegiance: a white hard hat.

American left has historically enabled the rise of a decidedly right-wing political majority. Through the +++ 1950s, the Democratic party enjoyed a broad coalition of labor support, but that unity collapsed in the 1960s. Forty years later, the shouting matches at Providence Southern Democrats first broke from the party during City Council meetings may be tamer than any violence

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BY Harry August and Michael Shorris ILLUSTRATION Justin Han DESIGN Christie Zhong

Can building trades and the left find common ground?

of the ’70s, but the cast of characters is not all that different. The hubris of college students dictating policy to union members with jobs and families at stake is undeniable, and the canyon between the aims of construction unions and progressives in Rhode Island remains deep.

The division does no favors to either side. And the stakes of the split, argues historian Nelson Lichtenstein, are higher than they’ve ever been, as a result of decades of disintegrating protections in labor law. In the wake of Janus v. AFCME (the 2018 Supreme Court decision which ended compulsory union dues for public employees), Lichtenstein warns that traditional models of collective bargaining (“between workers in this factory, or that hotel, or that chicken plant and the owner”) have become practically impossible. “If you’re trying to organize a private sector employer with multiple sites—Wal-Mart is an example—you can’t do it,” he told the Indy, “You can be revolutionaries, but you don’t have the leverage any more.”

Many unions, Lichtenstein said, have begun to rethink their strategy, broadening their goals and forging larger coalitions. One of the new, more ambitious models (widely practiced in Europe) is sectoral bargaining, through which unions negotiate as political actors on behalf of all workers in an industry (like builders or teachers), instead of within one company or workplace. As Lichtenstein explained to the Indy, construction unions could join together to fight for project-labor agreements which heighten safety requirements on worksites or establish better benefits for workers. In the future, sectoral bargaining could mean the building trades advocating for policy changes which would both facilitate new development and achieve progressive initiatives. Supporting these sorts of projects, like affordable housing or clean energy infrastructure, might allow development imperatives for union job security to go unopposed at local Council hearings.

Sectoral bargaining might also begin to chip away at what Carpenter describes as a more structural problem. The most important division is not between unions and progressives, he says, but between workers and developers: “Those people that direct [the unions] have one goal in mind and one goal only: profit. They are giving the orders. The people appointed and asked to work on these jobs have little say in what they’re building.” Fighting in coalitions, unions might be able to reimagine this relationship.

Some campaigns, like the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) “Fight for $15” campaign, have used sectoral bargaining to merge widespread progressive goals with practical union demands.

Rather than organizing at each individual franchise, the SEIU and other major unions convinced the National Labor Relations Board to recognize parent company McDonald’s as a joint employer of its franchise workers, allowing the SEIU to negotiate on a far wider level.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) successfully employed another coalition-building strategy this past January which some call “Bargaining for the Common Good.” Instead of focusing solely on traditional concerns, like low wages and large classes, the union prioritized improvements in the general quality of schooling, demanding meals for low-income students, limits on random searches of students, and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

expansions of after-school opportunities. When the L.A. teachers went on strike, parents and students lined up behind them, joining the teachers in demonstrations and skipping work themselves to stand with the union. With this broadened coalition, the UTLA won smaller class sizes and new hiring of support staff.

During February in West Virginia, a similar teachers’ strike met parallel success.

These case studies offer a reason for optimism in the face of diminished union power across the United States. The basic message is clear: labor organizing efforts to build coalitions with the broader left can lead to real gains in what unions can win at the bargaining table. Whether or not these lessons can translate to success in the less historically progressive building trades remains unclear, but Lichtenstein remains hopeful. “Success leads to success,” he told the Indy, “When these teachers strike and win, everybody sees that.”

they’ve got enough work, they’re not going to push for these unpopular, divisive things. If they’re building unionized housing, new roads—then to hell with the stadium,” Lichtenstein said. That just might be enough to settle the tempers at the next contentious Council hearing.

MICHAEL SHORRIS AND HARRY AUGUST B’19 think workers (and progressives) of the world ought to unite.

+++ At his desk at Laborers’ Local 271’s busy South Main Street offices, Sabitoni is not about to give up any ground. But he sees the power in this type of coalition building. His old approach to working with state progressives groups, he admitted, was often “just forget it, don’t even waste your time.” But he told the Indy he’s changed his tune. “I’ve looked at the way we’ve conducted business to say that maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to do.” Now, he said, “my intention, and the intention of the Building Trades Council is to have more interaction with the ‘far progressives.’ If they’re willing to sit down, I’d be willing to try.”

Carpenter, for his part, says he’s also open to sitting down. “Bringing people to the table is incredibly important,” he said the Indy. “We want to work with them.” The tension between trade unions which rely on development for their members and progressive groups reticent to support projects they equate with gentrification, overcrowding, or environmental damage will always exist. But facing an increasing imperative for unity and recognizing the useful potential in a coalition, finding common ground is on the labor agenda. “You shouldn’t need one hundred percent alignment with someone to partner with them,” Regunberg wrote in an email to the Indy.

And when it comes to some infrastructure projects broadly popular among progressives, the pragmatism of the trade unions may prove fruitful for coalition-building. “We’re a practical organization,” said Sabitoni. “I’m for renewables; I build the renewable projects. What we say is we want a practical Green New Deal: improvements in rail, improvements in transportation, mass transit—that all lends itself to the reduction of emissions as well.” Regunberg supports the Green New Deal, and he wrote to the Indy that when progressives focus on “shovel-ready projects,” they can finally expect “support from the building trades.”

Hard hats and green thumbs, in other words, might find something to agree on. And Lichtenstein argues that recent local battles in Rhode Island, like those over the Paw Sox Stadium and the Fane Tower, might grow less common as trade unions find steadier employment in the wake of new environmental and other infrastructural projects. “The building trades, if

METRO

10

CYBERNETIC GHOST TOWNS

BY Alexis Gordon DESIGN Amos Jackson

New pathways of communication, histories of warfare, and the practice of listening

Norbert Wiener first outlined the theory of cybernetics in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings.

Cybernetics describe a system of communication and control where humans, machines, and the environment act on each other through information. Wiener concocted the idea of the “steersman” to describe how messages control society—in this formulation, the steersman’s communication commands and directs the boat.

It is perhaps shocking to realize that the pioneers of new networks of communication are often the perpetrators of violence—to sustain colonial and neo-colonial practices, wider nets of information must be cast and linked. To help conceptualize this, think about undersea wire networks, whose fiberoptic cables carry the internet. These lines were laid along telegraph lines, which developed under colonialism to aid imperialism. In this way, in their functionalities, as well as their entrenched physical pathways, communication and information networks restage power dynamics of Western imperialism.

Another useful way to explore this phenomenon is through the history of Extremely Low Frequency Receivers, or ELF Receivers. Extremely low frequencies are a range of electromagnetic frequencies that are, as their name might imply, very low. The spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies humans began using in the late 19th century for signal transmission spans FM radio, AM radio, and HAM radio and walkie talkie range, among others. During the 1950s, the federal government reserved an “extremely low frequency range” at the bottom of the spectrum for the military, partly because these broadcasters were of real benefit to the developing military technology of submarine warfare and partly because they were extremely difficult to build. During World War II, the Soviet Union, India, and the United States undertook the task of digging a metal rod about a mile into the earth and connecting it above ground to distant nodes. This converted the earth itself into the antenna and made the broadcast wavelength as big as the diameter of the earth. But even then, these broadcasters could only transmit ASCII text, a code in which numbers stood for letters. For the most part, the military only ever transmitted short messages, often requests to change to a different form of military communication. The transmitters were phased out when the landscape of technological warfare began to change, and all but one transmitter in India have been dismantled. They nonetheless existed as nodes within a new military communication network, a grandiose manifestation of the World War II cybernetic military complex.

One might need megalithic broadcasters to send

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ARTS

out Extremely Low Frequency waves, but what about receiving them? As it turns out, there is a little-known history of listening to ELF waves, with hopes of intercepting not only man-made communication but feedback from stars, comets, and other cosmic entities. In the book Handmade Electronics, composer and writer Nicolas Collins briefly describes 'hermits' who built antennas out of two pieces of wood and wire to ‘listen to the universe’ in the post-WWII US. +++

ghostly apparatus of violence, the oars and the boat left behind. As Hastings approached the base, her goal was ultimately to develop a meditative practice of deep listening, thereby reconstructing the purpose of these devices outside of the military complex and reinscribing systems of dominance with new relationships to communication.

Deep listening is a concept pioneered by Pauline Oliveros, who describes it as an “aesthetic [that] is designed to inspire both trained and untrained performers to practice the art of listening and [respond] to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations.” Her work was foundational to Hastings’ explorations in the void of violence, in the ghost town of military technology. This deep listening becomes then a new ecological practice in which an awareness of the marks humans have left on the environment opens and equalizes the information flow through a deep meditation on and respect for the world around us. This cybernetic process of feedback distinctly differs from the work of famous cybernetic artists and poses a critical intervention.

For Hastings, it was not a matter of finding some answer in listening or hacking the system to send new messages, but of formulating a practice along the contours carved out by violence. This methodology not only reconstructs networks of communication that previously enabled violence (toward both people and the environment), but also allows for the development of a relationship with such histories of violence.

Building an ecology, for Hastings, is personally affective—deep listening is an internal and external experience—and, most importantly, a way of accessing and processing information without taxonomizing either that information or our emotional response. Hastings felt physical strain, anticipation, excitement, confusion, reverence. Radically, in a world that inherently discriminates as it categorizes, this process demands that one hears the noise of histories and relationships without ordering, listening and respecting without demanding an assimilation of information into hegemonic taxonomies. Hastings’s work, likewise, asks us to hear what we cannot understand and to build a relationship with it all the same. To recognize our effect on each other, the environment, and machines without dominating through a promotion of feedback. This reinhabitation and reterritorialization is the work of listening and the work of radical networks. It is also the work of Molly Hastings’s Extremely Low Frequency Receiver.

I recently sat down with a local research practice artist and Rhode Island School of Design student Molly Hastings to talk about her attempts to build her own version of these hack receivers and the theory behind them. Hastings told me it took her multiple tries to construct the device, and she eventually reached out to Collins to ask what he knew of the receivers. Collins told her that while he wasn’t “a radi0o guy” [sic] he did have some thoughts, and Hastings set out to build a wooden cross with very thin wire wrapped many times around. This way, the resistance could build up to about 200 ohms, enabling interception of extremely low frequencies.

When I asked Hastings what she was hoping to find, she expressed to me that her desire wasn’t to find anything at all, but rather to listen. Such a practice of listening taps into one arm of cybernetics, a branch wherein feedback in systems of communication opens up truly radical networks, allowing the receptor of a message (i.e. the receiver of control) to send a message back (i.e. to equally influence and control). Committed to letting sites of now abandoned military structures talk back to her, Hastings took her receiver to an arms depot on Prudence Island, in Narragansett Bay, which faces a now defunct submarine naval base. She imagined there could be an ELF broadcaster there and that the island would be far enough away from the electric grid. What did she hear? “Obviously, nothing,” she said, “mostly just vrrrrrrrhhhhh.” Seeking radio emissions from the world around her and from the now abandoned submarine base, Hastings dove directly into the apparatus of this cybernetic power. But for Hastings, it’s not just about networks of communication, but “a listening practice.” This reception of incomprehensible noise lies at the heart of her work.

She described the landscape of the site, and the extremely low frequencies themselves, as a ghost town, a network of interlocking structures left behind by the military after World War II. But rather than just trying to reconceptualize those structures as a steersman, ALEXIS GORDON B’20 wants everyone to build their Hastings attempted to develop a relationship with the own ELF on a Shelf.

08 MARCH 2019

MO D Our era of

Mind control in its various forms—hypnosis, possession, brainwashing—has captured our imaginations for centuries in literature and in film. George Orwell’s 1984 famously conceptualizes means of ideological indoctrination that allow a government to brainwash its subjects, while Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange describes a fictional conditioning technique used to psychologically rehabilitate a serial criminal. Similarly, movies like those in the X-Men series construct storylines that affirm mental manipulation as the purest form of power. They depict mind control as the ultimate way to subjugate the opposition, by depriving them of the sentience that makes them human, and thus position it as something to be deeply feared.

As our understanding of human psychology has developed, mind control has rapidly expanded past the confines of science fiction and our imaginations into reality. Famously, the psychologist B. F. Skinner conducted an experiment in which he taught pigeons to tap a lever to receive food. He found that when he changed the machine to dispense food after a random number of taps, the frequency at which pigeons would tap the lever dramatically increased. His experiment established the idea that variable rewards could be incredibly addicting, and psychologists began to observe similar behaviors in people. They found that an element of unpredictability in the result of a given action made people want to do it again and again, which is partly why activities like gambling can be extremely addicting. Game makers began to use this knowledge to compel people to continue playing their games when they wouldn’t otherwise.

When it comes to methods used by product designers to create products that grip consumer attention beyond personal control, the idea of variable rewards is just the tip of the iceberg. In Hooked, Nir Eyal outlines what he calls the “Hook Model.” Eyal is one of the most prominent figures in the world of product design, having taught at Stanford’s school of design and founded a number of successful tech startups.

His model for design, used by product designers in a wide array of industries, describes a four-step cycle to cultivate desired customer behavior. The four steps— trigger, action, variable reward, and investment—rely on a vast body of psychological knowledge to exploit recurring human thought patterns. To manipulate consumers, the process leverages detailed Pavlovian conditioning which describes the usage of rewards to positively reinforce desired behavior. The Hook Model also borrows heavily from the Fogg Behavior Model, the product of years of psychology research positing that the desired behavior is achieved in the simultaneous presence of a trigger and sufficient quantities of motivation and ability.

Product designers also utilize many of the heuristics or mental shortcuts we take in making decisions or forming opinions, like the “scarcity effect” and the “endowed progress effect.” The former explains the tendency for consumers to value the same product more when it appears less abundant and the latter describes how motivation increases when people believe they are closer to a goal. Since product designers want people to use their products, the knowledge of such irrational tendencies produces unbelievably

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SCIENCE + TECH

L RO

N D I C M O N NT R E

BY Griffin Kao ILLUSTRATION Sarah Clapp DESIGN Amos Jackson

addictive products effective products—indeed, nothing makes me click For apps like inKin, guidelines that may dictate that “purchase” faster than seeing “Only 1 left in stock!” product designers create products in the best interest on Amazon or finish filling out a profile like the half- of consumers are impractical because, again, that way-full progress bar on LinkedIn (despite the fact “best interest” remains subjective. that I’ve given them only my first and last name). Due Worse, product designers might not be inclined to to massive growth in the technology sector, product care that their actions are ethical. Dempsey explained designers increasingly work at companies producing that not every designer will “believe they should share consumer tech, and with the power bestowed upon power with the people they’re designing for,” a chilling them by consumer psychology developments, they’ve thought for consumers, since designers hold the ushered in a new era of addictive technology. Their potential to rot the brains of future generations. The influence on Generation Z, those born in the 1990s and instinct here might be regulation, but holding product 2000s, is undeniable. According to Common Sense designers and the companies they work for accountMedia, the average teen maintains a whopping 6 hours able is nearly impossible right now, given the legal and 40 minutes of screen time a day. limits. The same ambiguity in defining what’s ethical and what ethical considerations should look like in +++ a product makes proving mal-intent out of the question—Taylor pointed out the difficulty in identifying The product designer is faced with a difficult dilemma. culprits as an obstacle to regulation. She made the case While they work in a variety of industries and come that “the structure of how designers work with each from a variety of backgrounds like computer science, other… it doesn’t seem as clear cut as if a surgeon cuts art, or even economics, product designers all share the wrong organ out of you.” the same employment objective. The companies that In the absence of regulation as an immediate hire product designers want to generate revenue which viable solution, consumer conscientiousness may be then necessitates the increased usage of their products, our best bet. While our mass addiction to technology so the nature of the job compels designers to create is driven by methods of product design, such methods products that people will use as frequently as possible. are effective because they capitalize on our own lack of It’s this part of the job description that is often at odds circumspection; they give validity to seemingly trite with ethical considerations; on one hand, product and overdone phrases like “be mindful” or “think designers want users to use their products, but on the before you act.” But when I asked how users might be other, using their product might not be a good thing— able to resist these products, Taylor and Dempsey simiand all the while, this bind is further complicated by larly talked about “living intentionally.” They pushed the basic subjectivity of “goodness” itself. Take inKin, for “constant vigilance, or really being aware of how a social fitness app that takes advantage of the our need we want to live our lives and making conscious choices for peer affirmation in order to get users to exercise. about that.” Their perspective offers insight into how Many may interpret the app’s friendly reminders that product designers assume we can and should disrupt you’re running less than your friend Karen as a healthy the orchestrated relationship between consumers and thing, but others may dislike how it feeds into the need the products they use. for external validation.

Right now, collective change may seem too far Samantha Dempsey and Ciara Taylor, two user off or daunting to consider, regulation is logistically experience designers who have worked on the inter- unfeasible, and products are increasingly persuasive in faces of a number of healthcare companies, struggle demanding our attention. Within this environment, it with this very dilemma and are working to clarify the may be helpful to keep in mind that the effectiveness ethical considerations that designers should take into of addictive product design often hinges on our mental account. Some product designers have argued that shortcuts—not on physiologically addictive stimulants, those in the profession should be required to take an like nicotine. Smokers certainly can’t “just quit,” but oath like the Hippocratic Oath, which physicians take when it comes to mind control, due diligence may, for to pledge they will provide each patient with the best the time being, be our most effective policy. medical care possible. In response, Dempsey and Taylor created the Designer’s Oath tool, which has GRIFFIN KAO B’20 is trying to get his screen time evolved from a fill-in-the-blank agreement to role- down to 2 hours a day. playing software that enables teams to think more consciously about how the products they’re creating fit into their shared values. They told the College Hill Independent that engineering and product teams use the prompts given in the latest version of the tool to engage in discussion of team morals. In their words, the goal is to “help multidisciplinary teams define the ethical guidelines of their engagement.” But when probed further, they admit that it’s more of a stopgap measure, since it can be tricky to put these words into practice. Even if we have some standard set of ethical considerations were agreed upon across a given industry, what exactly do they look like in a product?

It’s hard to say and harder yet to define a threshold where the guidelines are met by the design process.

MARCH 8 2019

5×5

BY Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña ILLUSTRATION Kela Johnson DESIGN Bethany Hung

15

LITERARY

Bingo night is every Thursday. I will never go. The game is a purgatory for squares and number counters, and worse yet it is a game without stakes. The grand prize could be a can of beans and yet it always draws a crowd. The retired accountant lays his head to rest, exhausted from looking for tax breaks on his card, while the old gambler lifts his head, wipes the saliva from his card and cashes out.

Maybe because I hate bingo, they sentenced me to the burgundy corduroy chair in the corner of the other room. The pale green walls amplifies the delusional wins in the game room. From here I can see the other members, the checkered floors, and the sunset beaming onto the dust in the home. It’s important to get out of my room. Clarice comes by everyday and asks, “How are you feeling today?” I wish she would use her elegant stride for something other than surprising the shit out of me. She is wearing a new perfume. The lavender alone would have suited her, but the man was thinking of another woman when he asked the perfumist to add rose. Why she insists on asking me questions she will never get answers to, I will never know. Maybe it's because she knows I hate bingo.

On the dusty orange steps of the Cholula Cathedral, I saw the guitar being played for the first time. This is where I spent my childhood, or more precisely, where I herded its skeletal memories. The

08 MAR 2019

5×5

O M ON A E M N R A T E D R O T D D N O D P A

O F N P A D

O F R F D E R R F R H E T R E R H O R T U E A O R F M U A M F M M W A A M II AM W , A O , OR RD D..

guitarist would move between frets with quick ease.

Passerbys left black shells in front of him, their rocky jagged exterior hid a milky translucent interior. He plucked at the strings making each note sting and cry before moving his fingers to the next position. To him of course, these were not just notes. He doesn’t remember how he knows what to play. He could never tell you about chords or harmonies, just as I could never explain breathing.

All I have is me and my chair in front of the television. There are chairs in this room and people sit and leave. After Clarice takes care of me my eyes follow her and stop at the camera in the corner of the room. What do these people think we are capable of besides withering? Staring into the camera, I can feel my own gaze coming from the television. My eyes dart back to the television. Golf.

I best understood Alice in the alley next to a churreria. In those nights while the breeze settled, the heat diffused the aroma of chocolate and cinnamon that would stick to the alley road after hours. After hours, the gnats dive into the cobblestone to feast, the lucky ones struggled to escape with legs and wings missing, others were preserved in the worn-down chocolate.

Her parents were expats, only recognizable in her anglo O’s. She held her parent’s identities close. And even knowing that she is from the place that she knows, she had doubts. She enjoyed guiding me through the night, renaming the streets in ways that made me forget. She leaned on the golden wall behind her and allowed the night to settle on her face. She pulled a page from her journal, and I saw part of a title, “Muerte y mem-” she sprinkled tobacco on the rest of writing before I could read it. The ember at the end of the cigarette illuminated each word before turning them to ash.

Three-quarters: Hombres—This all feels so familiar.

And yet, my feet are planted. My body has decided to stay a little longer.

Half: Golondrinas—The breeze whispered between the cobblestones and past our ankles.

My stomach meets my throat, and I can only hope that her gaze ends at skin.

One-quarter: Silencio—The smoke filled my hesd like a balloon. I stumbled both in step and in words.

The cigarette was the last thing in-between us.

I have friends here. I have James, Pedro and Janice.

They mull around the room and they talk to me. None of us know where the others came from. We sit in the same ward where the cracks in the tiles are a little wider.

They are surprisingly good company. James and Janice are always together. They look related, which is easy to

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imagine: Mother pops out two and gives them the same name. Pedro has been here longer and is lonelier than most people here. His stories trail off into tangents, and uneasy with their conclusions are cut short. I can’t help but think he is the smartest person in the home.

He tells different stories about his eye, revealing what he thinks of you on the given day. From my seat, I once saw him put an imaginary ball in the hand of a guest at the end of a story; the guest squeezed the ball and let the fluid drip between his knuckles, horrified he could only let go a faint scream. Pedro never stopped being a kid, and a little bit of play helps run the place.

Foolishly, I forgot what the fortune teller on the bank of the river told us while we were in our 20s, but years later, our hairs started to gray and Alice started waking up pleading, “The kids, the kids." She looked over, slightly embarrassed, knowing my awful sleep habits had woken me up before she had said anything.

She sat up, accidentally pulling the sheets up, uncovering her upright feet. She looked at her toes like a lighthouse keeper searching for a rowboat in fog. Alice massaged her forehead with the pads of her fingers before saying anything.

“I’m not quite sure what’s tying me to this world anymore.” Her words settled. Smoothing out the sheets, she looked up and back down, “There are these faces that I see, ones I recognize but can’t pin names to.

It feels like im giving myself up to them, but I see now I don’t know who they are or how to give them what they want.”

“Well, what are they asking of you?”

“Well, these faces they look at me and they offer themselves. But when I look at them, they drone on at the other faces. And the droning—it only gets louder the more I look.”

That night, Alice dreamt of a pigeon in an iron cage, whose jutting head kept its eyes fixed on her. A lifetime of showing strength meant she could only be fragile in abstractions.

It was a blessing that my room came decorated. I think collecting new things to put in the room would’ve been hard to go through again. I put my collection of shells on the mantle and a vase on the nightstand.

Later, I moved the vase by the floor near the crack on the wall, hoping it would grow out of it. And the crack does grow, but never as fast as I would like. I hear voices on the other side of the wall, voices I have heard. I hear my friends here, Jane and Jameson and Paul, and if I listen a little longer there is Alice.

And even while dying, Alice consoled me. She spent her last days trying to find out what my life was like before her, which she would use to prepare me for what life would be after her. She pinched her amber necklace when she asked me, as if lamenting

the butterfly that she had a jeweler cutout swearing it was trying to escape. The butterfly had all of eternity to escape, yet it waited for Alice, both of them understanding the nature of the transaction. I told her that as a boy my body fell asleep before my mind did and I spent the nights counting, not by choice, the numbers always showed up under my eyelids. “It’s because your parents taught you how to read with a phonebook,” she teased, knowing that it was the only way to make me comfortable, and knowing that the numbers would eventually return. Even as her head dropped to her right shoulder, she had a plan. Nothing left to understand.

Clarice says it’s time for me to sleep, but I don't want to. She tells me that I need to sleep if I want to feel better. Life here moves at a boring but agreeable pace.

But when the ceiling fan and lights are turned off and I fall asleep, I feel like a thrashing newborn experiencing light and sound for the first time. A dream could seat me in front of Alice or my friends or my grandfather, but it's up to me to speak. And dream on top of dream, I am further from a word. And yet tonight, a freshness moves over my tongue, ridding it of its lingering staleness. I feel the starchy peaks and creases of my sheets, gently poke into the sides of my chests.

The tips of my fingers and big toes tingle, feeling the breeze just once more. The numbers trickle back, and I remember what to say.

LITERARY

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AOC

MARCH M

BDE Urbanism Orbanism Blue wave Blue waffle Green Book Green New Deal Pulling out of Queens Pulling outta queens Sheldon Whitehouse Young Sheldon Diane Feinstein Mr. Burns Warren Kanders Colonel Sanders Bezos dick pic Sick kick flip Gaslighting Bunsen burners Birthchart Birthright The Granoff dinner The Slug Club PostPost-apocalypse TikTok The Doomsday Clock Brooklyn DSA Brown Alumni Assoc.

They did surgery on a grape Universal health care

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SPORTS

08 MAR 2019

MADNESS

Slavoj Žižek Jordan Peterson Seize the means Lean cuisine Semiotext(e) Sending a risky text Sunrise Movement Bowel movement Owning the libs Mad Libs Amazon Cuomo Rivers Cuomo Big blue bug smol bean The Gap The wage gap Kill all normies #NotAllMen Beto O'Rourke Keto diet Venice bitch Pasta Bitch No ethical consumption under capitalism Eating a*s Women's March March Madness AirPods John Podhoretz Draining the swamp Masturbation Muller investigation

BY Indy Staff ILLUSTRATION Nicole Cochary DESIGN Amos Jackson

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Mulled wine SPORTS

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PPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY ~ HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

FRIDAY 3.8

International Women’s Day // lululemon Wayland Square // 8AM-6PM International Women’s Day originated in 1909 as a day of organizing for socialist women, far preceding feminist movements around women’s social and symbolic labor later in the century. You may think that this lululemon celebration might represent how commercialism has declawed this sentiment, but this event is branded with the reminder that “The Other 364 Days” are just as filled with eternal toil. Plus, yoga gear is a sensible, flexible choice for an uprising.

International Women's Day with DJ Slick Vick! // Troop (60 Valley Street) // 10PM-1:30AM If you’ve ever been to a Downtown Boys concert, you’ll be familiar with their practice of making tall dudes “fall back” from the stage, and this List Writer thinks this dance party is a great opportunity to borrow that habit. According to the event description, DJ Slick Vick “values the dance floor as a sacred space where human connection is not only found but amplified,” so go dance the bros off the floor—not doing so is sacrilege!

SATURDAY 3.9

Doggos, Donuts, and Drafts // PVDonuts (79 Ives Street) // 5-8PM This is a birthday party for what appears to be a man running a donut blog, but also a benefit for Providence Animal Rescue League, so you take some and you lose some. Do you think if they raise enough money for the “doggos” we could fund a lobby to get everyone to stop calling them that?

Modern Sounds // Tea in Sahara (69 Governor Street) // 8PM A rare earnest moment from your dear List Writer: Tea in Sahara is my favorite place to read the Indy, and they always show us love by having some floating around their beautiful café.

Perhaps you can peruse a copy while attending this very soothing weekly improvised music night. Maybe you’re reading this there right now!

SUNDAY 3.10

Mark Steinbach, organ // Sayles Hall (Brown University’s Main Green, 75 Waterman Street) //4-6PM The title of this concert makes it sound like the organ is named Mark. It might, or it might not. Come Sunday evening and it might, to the tune of Bach and Hindemith, bellow out its name, deep, ancient, primordial…

MONDAY 3.11

Impeachment, Recall, and Removal //Lippitt House Museum // 6:30-8PM Join the Fox Point resistance at this talk on the legal protocols surrounding the impeachment of government officials.

Hosted in partnership with the Providence League of Women Voters. Anyone else think it’s amusing that the East Side Mueller-brigade looks like a partnership between historical preservationists and 21st-century suffragettes?

TUESDAY 3.12

Siksa. Stabat Mater Dolorosa: Musical About Death and the Maiden // AS220 (115 Empire Street) // 9-10:30PM On AS220’s website, an event description for the Polish punk-artist Siksa’s experimental play “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” concludes like this: “A gun, a girl and death – those are the times we live in.” Reimagining girlhood as a site of power, Siska’s show offers a phantastic exploration of the artist’s own childhood obsessions with dressing up as other women from history and making believe that gender could be anything other than a mode of violence.

Treasures in the Attic: A Tour of the Museum’s Archives //Museum of Natural History and Planetarium (Roger Williams Park, 1000 Elmwood Avenue) // 10-11AM // $3 By “museum’s archives,” the curators at Providence’s Museum of Natural History actually just mean “rows upon rows of manila folders in file cabinets containing postcards and scrapbooks of how the museum used to look at the time of its erection.” Unless you’re a total archive-head, you might not enjoy this $3 trip down literally no one’s memory lane…

WEDNESDAY 3.13

Artist Talk: Cecilia Vicuña // List Arts Center (64 College Street, Room 120) //5-6P Cecilia Vicuña is a multidisciplinary Chilean artist and poet embracing the disruptive, anticapitalist potentialities of indigenous knowledge and traditionally feminized forms of labor. Her most recent work, The Red Thread, explores the significance of red-colored thread in Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe, and pre-Columbian America.

THURSDAY 3.14

Thursdays at The Parlour // StrangeCreek Battle of the Bands //The Parlour (1119 N Main Street) 9-11PM Has anyone gotten famous off winning their local battle of the bands competition since like… ever? (Especially now that the four-piece rock outfit and its enabler, the radio station, are archaic concepts.) Probably not, but that’s what makes this low-stakes excuse to drink beer across the street from North Burial Ground all the more enticing. At round one of three, Kooked Out, Six Fox Whiskey, and The City Limit are all on the chopping block.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S ~ DAY MARCH 6 ~ HAPPY