The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 7

INSIDE: PG&E AND THE CALIFORNIA FIRES, SEXBOTS, AND THE INDY TALKS TO PVD MUSICIAN LA NEVE

A Brown/RISD Weekly / November 01, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 07

the

Indy Contents

From the Editors

Cover Self-Portrait Pumpkin

It is mid-semester. My hair is too long. Brown still has $1.4 billion dollars squirrelled away in tax havens in the Cayman Islands and I’m walking in the rain to my haircut, sucking on my split-ends like a small child, wiping raindrops off my lockscreen as I ignore yet another email from CareerLAB and futilely attempt to reschedule yet another lunch with another friend—leaving me to wonder darkly when my social life will transcend the fluorescent confines of my GCal—and I JUST WANT TO PROPOSE that all my friends being busy on a Wednesday night is not not politically significant. PERMIT ME TO SUGGEST that Christina Paxson is not not plotting to prevent us from creating connections and daily communal spaces that would allow us to see beyond the pervasive capitalist religion of individual success—or maybe she’s just keeping everyone from hanging out with me—and we should, THEREFORE, google Brown’s tax returns, ignore our emails, and get our friends to cut our hair.

Week in Review 02 Week in Ornaments Alina Kulman & Deb Marini Metro 03 Great Streets, Mobile City Avi Shapiro & Ilan Upfal Features 05 The Perfect Companion Mia Pattillo

-SVH

11 Paddling to the Source Oren Karp Arts 07 The Fire to Release You Ben Bienstock & Chris Packs Ephemera 08 Acronyms Sindura Sriram News 09 Firepower Ricardo Gomez 15 Brunt of the Blade Anabelle Johnston

Mission Statement

Literary 13 Besotten Kate Ok

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.

Science + Tech 17 God in the Dataset Andy Rickert

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.

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.

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science + Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

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Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan

VOL 39 ISSUE 07

Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stoll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

MVP Sandra Moore *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

week in

OrnAm E Nt S

BY Deb Marini & Alina Kulman DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

BRAINTREE'S MONSTER HOUSE Halloween is under siege, and it’s a whole lot more personal than Starbucks’ red cups. The battleground for this year’s War on Halloween was Denise McDonough’s lawn display in Braintree, Massachusetts—her neighbors called the cops over the tackiness of her decorations.

McDonough, with the help of her children, placed a faux graveyard, sheet ghosts, and mummy statues in her yard, along with a 12-foot tall inflated tree with hands for branches, ready to swing at and terrify any passerby. The decorations covered her front lawn, and projections covered the house with images of ghosts and witches. The elaborate display capped off with three talking pumpkins. Surround-sound speakers loudly projected to the whole neighborhood the pumpkins’ conversations: somewhat disturbing recordings of deep chuckles and Halloween puns about “Ghoul-Aid.” Braintree residents began stopping by with their children to look at the display. However, McDonough’s next door neighbor, Beverly Darch, was not pleased about the hulla-boo-loo. Darch filed a noise complaint with the police, which was promptly disregarded.

Darch was furious: “Why don’t you spend more money on taking care of your lawn,” she told WBZ-TV, the CBS affiliate in Boston, “as opposed to making the neighborhood look cheesier?” Darch added that the lawn looks “terrible during the day,” because the pumpkins and trees deflate “so the yard is a mess.”

Darch lays claim to the aesthetics of Braintree, alleging that McDonough’s spooktacular display drags down the entire neighborhood’s appearance. In Paul Fussell’s 1992 book Class, on the importance yet invisibility of American class distinctions, he describes the American obsession with keeping clean-cut lawns. Fussell notes that families who step out of line— whether with grass that is too long, or decorations too garish—can invite “terrible retribution” from their neighbors, which has brought “more than one to a nervous breakdown.” While Darch may have wanted to start a movement to spook her neighbors into shuttering their display, she couldn’t convince her other neighbors to join the war effort. Their kids—the actual target audience of the bewitching display—love it. One Braintree resident on WBZ-TV said she stops every time she drives past the house with her son because of how excited he gets.

It seems clear to the College Hill Independent that Darch is trying to punish her neighbors for not complying with a strict vision of refined adult Halloween decor. Perhaps in her ideal world, her neighbors would replace their tacky front yard inflatables with a modest selection of artisanally carved pumpkins instead of their creepy jack-o’-lanterns with menacing teeth. But if Darch thinks it’s worth it to criminalize her neighbors’ elaborate-yet-kitschy Halloween decorations, she could perhaps first consider a whole host of other Halloween-related offenses, like people who dress in culturally appropriative and highly offensive costumes like ‘sexy Pocahontas’ or geishas.

Ultimately, members of the McDonough family were entirely unphased by their neighbors’ public criticism. In response, the McDonoughs put up even more decorations, publicly refusing to accommodate their neighbors’ drab aesthetic sensibilities. They also added

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a face painting booth and a cotton candy machine.

They even started a Facebook page, “Halloween Joy On Liberty St Braintree Ma,” where they post daily to invite everyone to experience their display. We on the Indy hope that last night, the Darches and the rest of their neighbors got in on the joyous ghostly spirit, too.

—AK MIDSIZED CITY (F 383) SEEKING TREE (F/M 35+) In 2005, the Providence State House’s holiday tree lost all of its needles after being doused with flame retardant. In 2007, a “sickly tree” had to be secretly swapped out. For nine years, things seemed okay between the city and her tree, until 2016, when the tree was too small, according to Governor Gina Raimondo’s staff, and had to be replaced. In 2017, the State House’s overheated and underwatered tree lost all of its needles again.

After taking time to recover from these burns of the past, the hopelessly romantic midsized city of Providence, Rhode Island, is, once again, putting herself back out there. While sites like timbr, OKCutepine, and eharmontree are fine for long-term commitments, the city chose to utilize the latest trend in ephemeral online dating: a bulletin posted to providenceri.gov by the Department of Art, Culture, + Tourism. The personal ad is seeking tall, sturdy, and local spruces and firs for the annual tree lighting ceremony atop the steps of City Hall—the true heart of Providence. The conifer’s swan song will be accompanied by a swath of lights, baubles, and tinsel, all to mask the slow decay from the lighting on December 6 to its removal later in the month.

For a tree to be in the running, its “horticulturist” must submit a headshot and a short description to the Deputy Director of the AC+T Department, whose chic & modern “+” emphasizes that the Department, and Providence in general, is hip to this new-age dating world and ready to branch out and have a good time.

For the steps of City Hall, the city is looking for a tree somewhere between 35 and 45 feet tall (approximately one telephone pole, six-ish festivus poles, or seven male Poles of average height). Dabbling in polyamory, Providence is also looking for two 15- to 20-foot tall trees for “holiday displays” at the Roger Williams Botanical Center and the Providence Rink.

The competition is stiff, hard, and very wooden.

According to an email from the AC+T’s Deputy Director “from my iPhone” to the College Hill Independent, the department gets anywhere from seven to twelve submissions a year. Although these spruces and firs are the roots of the enterprise, the owners of the winning trees reap the most benefit: free tree removal, the pride of saying, “that’s my tree!,” and a picture with Mayor Jorge Elorza in front of the tree (or, as the bulletin is quick to point out, “tree(s),” on the off-chance that someone hits the jackpot and has multiple winners).

However, eager arboriculturists should not overthink the bulletin’s language, because it does, at one point, refer to the tree as a “star sapling,” yet a sapling is, by definition, cursed to fall short of Providence’s goals.

The Forestry Division of the Department of Parks and Recreation, fueled by secular tax dollars, is in

charge of the cutting and hauling of the tree, while Stanley Tree Service is donating a crane to help with installation in return for some positive press. The local business has been recently blighted by bad reviews, ranging from Doug W.’s “Very Unprofessional” to a number of anecdotes involving damaged property and unreturned phone calls.

The use of government funds during this process sheds light on the city’s awkward balance of church and state—something Providence, founded as a haven of religious tolerance, seems to have jumped the gun on many years ago by simply being named Providence.

Yet former Governor Lincoln Chafee was still met with 3,600 phone calls and a number of in-person protestors in 2011 after he called the State House’s tree a “holiday tree,” which is what his Republican predecessors called it as well, to significantly less fanfare. Roughly 2,900 of those phone calls came from out of state after Fox News published his office’s phone number in a piece about the tree controversy—calling it a “War on Christmas.”

Peace was found once again in the city in 2013, when Chafee subtly called the tree a “Christmas tree” and handed a much needed win to the heavily-persecuted holiday.

The deadline for tree submission is Tuesday, November 19, which gives Providence tree-owners a generous expanse of time to spruce up their firs for the pining of Providence—a city in want of arbor ardor.

—DM

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BY Avi Shapiro & Ilan Upfal ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Christie Zhong

GREAT STREETS, MOBILE CITY

Envisioning an equitable transportation system for the creative capital Zooming down College Hill last weekend on our bikes, a friend and I criss-crossed our way downtown, barely avoiding cars and trucks as we biked down the fivelane Memorial Boulevard that lacked any space for cyclists. Passing under the mall, we finally reached the beginning of the Woonasquatucket River Greenway: 4.6 miles of bike paths through forests, parks and cityscape along the river. After only a mile, we stopped at a park. As children played behind us, we breathed in the fresh air of the autumn afternoon and soaked in the trickling river. Many like us are beginning to seek out biking as a healthier, more sustainable way to move through Providence. Despite this shift, cars continue to rule the streets. As both ridership and fatalities grow, we must act as a city to envision cohesive and safe bicycle infrastructure integrated with other affordable alternatives to cars.

This June, Providence’s Office of Sustainability released a plan to blanket the city with a network of bike and walking trails within easy walking distance of 93 percent of residents and 95 percent of jobs. The proposal, ambitiously named the Great Streets Plan, was developed based on 275 comments from residents at a series of public input meetings combined with existing traffic-calming efforts and crash data. The network, consisting of 32.6 miles of new on-road separated bike lanes, 1.1 miles of new striped bike lanes, and 15.9 miles of new neighborhood greenways, has the potential to cut climate emissions and begin to radically equalize our transportation system.

Great Streets is notable not just for its ambition, but also for the break with decades of American transportation policy oriented exclusively towards

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cars that it represents. From President Eisenhower’s interstate system to this year’s widening of I-95, our system has consistently favored massive public investment in a car-dominated transportation system. Most recently, the state has diverted millions from projects to improve biking and walking infrastructure towards highway investments and lane widening. Car culture, sold as an ideal of freedom in our society, is robbing our generation of a livable future and excluding marginalized groups from many essential opportunities.

In reality, cars are a barrier to mobility for many and a threat to a livable future. For low-income communities, folks with disabilities, and the elderly, cars can be totally inaccessible. The average car costs over $9,500 and emits 4.6 metric tons of carbon annually, according to the US Department of Labor Statistics and the Environmental Protection Agency. The world’s top environmental scientists are in consensus that we need to cut carbon emissions drastically in the next 11 years, redesigning every part of our economy in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. In light of the climate crisis, perhaps a much broader swath of society should move away from cars. While electric car culture is touted by the political mainstream, in reality such a change could perpetuate the current access barriers at a massive energy and resource cost.

Decarbonizing our society necessitates that we densify communities, eliminating the need for individual cars and instead creating affordable, low-energy walkable and bikeable communities.

Despite the urgent need for ways to get around the city without a car, the Great Streets Plan’s ambitions are being met with resistance in the form of

budget cuts and motorist pushback. Just one month after the plan’s release, the city ripped out a stretch of brand-new protected bike lanes on Eaton Street due to motorist complaints that they were inconvenient and posed a risk to their safety. A few weeks later, state officials reallocated $37 million in bike and pedestrian improvements for highway expansion. These setbacks reveal an input process that fails to fully consider community needs before implementing projects, and, perhaps, a resulting lack of strong public advocacy for this infrastructure.

The Great Streets Plan is a policy vision based on community input that has the potential to transform the way we get around Providence. However, most of it is unfunded and aspirational. Fully implementing the plan will take our government standing up for the needs of our city’s communities, something that will require strong public pressure to achieve. +++ In Rhode Island, commuting via anything other than a car is an anomaly. According to Transit Forward RI’s State of the System report, released in 2019, approximately 74 percent of Providence residents drive alone or in a carpool, compared to only 6 percent that take the bus or 10 percent that walk. Lacking a reliable alternative, residents and commuters waste time and money waiting in congested streets and isolated by the confines of their cars.

Yet, much of Providence was built around the city’s streetcar lines, forming “streetcar suburbs.” These lines made up an impressive system of frequent, fully

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electric mass transportation that moved people not only through the city but also to surrounding towns like Woonsocket, Cranston and East Providence.

These streetcars provided scenic transportation through the state’s landscape, giving remarkable mobility to a population that owned few private cars.

Like those of many other cities, those mass transit lines had been ripped out by the ’50s, as trolley companies were unable to compete with the growing preference for automobiles, and the freedom they might afford.

Government policy followed this turn, investing heavily car infrastructure.

Today’s cities and suburbs are entirely car-oriented, supported by massive public subsidies to pay for free streets, free highways, and free parking. Rhode Island and Providence are no exception, as they continue to divert funding away from bike and pedestrian infrastructure to road widening projects and highways. “Here in Rhode Island, our Department of Transportation thinks the car is king,” Kurt Teichert, professor of environmental design and urban planning at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, told the College Hill Independent. This failure to challenge car culture imoedes our city’s efforts to combat climate change and harms those who cannot access cars, restricting their access to economic opportunity, healthy food, education, and recreation, and does nothing to address the looming climate crisis.

Currently, the state’s alternatives to cars are lacking in ambition and serious funding.

Instead of driving cars, Rhode Islanders can take public transit, ride bikes, or walk. The state’s mass transit system provides an important alternative, but faces a tight budget and declining ridership. The shift towards public transit is a crucial step toward a more equitable and decarbonized future. Even before transit agencies embrace electric buses, as many are, increasing transit ridership is a crucial way to reduce emissions, especially in Rhode Island, where our car-dominated transportation system accounts for 40 percent of carbon emissions. The Rhode Island Public Transportation Association (RIPTA), a quasi-public entity, is both chronically underfunded and tasked with serving the entire state. Only 44 percent of its routes run consistently from 6 AM to 10 PM on weekdays, and only one route runs more than twice an hour, according to Transit Forward RI’s State of the System report. RIPTA’s infrequency inhibits widespread usage by reducing the reliability of the system.

The city’s bike infrastructure is hardly any better.

Rather than build protected bike lanes, as proposed in the Great Streets Plan, the city has generally elected to simply paint bike silhouettes onto the street. Cyclist deaths have soared 10 percent in the past year, and pedestrian deaths increased 4 percent, according to the Department of Transportation. Providence still scores 33 out of 100 on a measure of pedestrian and bike infrastructure safety, nearly 50 points below the national median score, according to a 2016 report by the National Complete Streets Coalition.

The Great Streets Plan could be the next step towards an equitable and decarbonized transportation system, giving residents access to low carbon and low cost alternatives to driving. The plan would also increase access to nature for residents across the city through its parklets and greenways, especially benefitting the city’s marginalized communities that have the least access to these spaces.

The city also involves the broader public before making any decisions, requiring public comment at four stages in the project design process. Planning meetings are held in the evenings and near public transit lines in order to maximize public access. In order to be approved, projects must meet the needs of a neighborhood while furthering the city’s carbon reduction goals by favoring transit, pedestrians, and cyclists over private vehicles.

In Providence, activists allege the city’s public outreach process is totally broken. Ahmed Sesay, an organizer with the Providence-based Racial Environmental Justice Committee (REJC), says city agencies don’t center the voices of marginalized communities most impacted by environmental injustice, such as South Providence and Washington Park.

“There is so much community input that we would love to have, but even though the city is somewhat involved with the REJC, there’s still a lot of conversations to be had about including more of the people who are actually dealing with these issues in our communities,” Sesay told the Independent.

The lack of genuine community input in the city’s projects can be seen in challenges the city’s low-income communities have faced with RIPTA’s input process. “Community meetings aren’t very well attended, because they aren't really friendly to community. It’s really hard to say they are supportive and open to the community,” Pol Tavarez of the REJC told the Independent. Tavarez also cited RIPTA’s attempt to defy the state's Open Meetings Act last year by kicking respected community journalist Steve Ahlquist out of a meeting as an incident of RIPTA’s failure to be open to communities.

Sesay and the REJC have a more inclusive approach to bringing marginalized communities together to give input. “One way we have come up with these climate strategies is by nurturing and really bringing in the whole person. We try to always make sure there is some kind of childcare and food, so that people coming to do work that is really heavy oftentimes can feel like they are being supported as a whole person and not as a voice or a token,” said Sesay.

A few months into the Great Streets Plan, the city’s stunted public input process has already halted progress. In September, city officials decided to remove the Eaton Street bike lane just three weeks after it was installed, citing complaints from residents who felt that they weren’t adequately consulted prior to the change. Although some comments centered around reduced car access, an unavoidable impact of a project that repurposes vehicle lanes for bikes, they also reflect a genuine failure of the city’s public outreach.

Projects like the Eaton Street bikeway are essential to reducing transportation emissions and meeting the city’s carbon reduction goals. A robust public outreach process is essential to creating an equitable, effective, and politically feasible solution.

The REJC is currently working to assemble community members for a Transportation Equity Group to gather more input on what a more just transportation system would look like for the city, specifically centering the voices of people of color and those without access to a private car. Sesay describes his method as a model for public officials, describing how “we asked people about their day to day story of how they relate to the city around them, how they relate to the land, the air, the water and the earth around them.

That was a good starting point to think about what the +++ environment really means. Because people sometimes think that it’s really abstract, that it’s not as small as Across the country, other American cities are pursuing your neighborhood or your home, and it really is.” investments in infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit. In 2016, voters in Seattle and Los +++ Angeles approved massive transportation packages that included billions of dollars of funding for new The REJC’s recent Climate Justice Plan, an effort to buses, rail lines, bike lanes, and sidewalks. These connect equity with climate policy in the City, calls for measures aim to transform notoriously car-oriented quickly and equitably decarbonizing transportation, cities into mass transit-centered metropolises where energy, and buildings, as well as improving commuaccess to education, employment, or healthcare does nity health and developing a more localized economy. not require a private car.

On transportation, the plan calls for identifying and In Seattle, the percentage of households within a modifying truck routes in highly residential and ten minute walk of frequent transit—a bus or rail line polluted areas, investing in improved electrified public that comes at least every ten minutes all day, every transit, and expanding biking infrastructure as well as day—has jumped from 25 percent in 2015 to 64 percent bike and scooter access in low-income neighborhoods. in 2017. The system has quickly improved to the point In contrast, mainstream technocratic visions for where 90 percent of bus riders are so called “choice decarbonizing transportation recommend a busiriders,” who could drive but decide to take transit, ness as usual, unplug-and-replace model by which according to public surveys. These more affluent current fossil-fuel powered vehicles and power plants riders, who often hold political sway with elected offi- are merely replaced by electric vehicles and renewcials, demand real improvements to the system, which able energy farms. In reality, such thinking perpetuin turn promotes transit as a viable alternative to cars. ates and protects today’s inequitable systems while

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missing the powerful opportunities decarbonization holds. Electric cars are energy intensive to produce and ultimately emit roughly half of the emissions of gasoline cars, according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists. While any reduction in emissions is valuable, electric cars alone do not represent a viable path to net zero emissions, nor do they address transportation access concerns.

In the State Senate’s sixth district, Tiara Mack has made equity and environmental issues a rallying cry of her campaign, noting that, “If we transition to zero emissions vehicles, we will place undue burden on those families and communities unless we address the issue of accessing electric vehicles.” Indeed, the benefits of rebates for electric vehicles have almost exclusively gone to affluent households in Rhode Island. No matter how they’re powered, cars are major emitters that create a high financial barrier to basic mobility.

Providence is making some progress towards a more equitable, lower carbon, and less car-centric future; the aforementioned Great Streets plan is one of several such efforts. The City Walk Project, which secured $2 million to create walking greenways on Clifford Street downtown and on Pine, Friendship, and Broad Streets in South Providence, is the start of an urban trails system of walkable and bikeable streets. The plan also makes safety improvements at dangerous intersections for cyclists and pedestrians. Kurt Teichert highlights the City Walk project’s success in increasing access to equitable transportation. “There’s a [theory] of making neighborhoods just green enough that focuses on many points of access to green space instead of one glorified park that is frequented by mostly people in that wealthy neighborhood. So they’re trying to address that through the City Walk process that’ll build bike lanes, pedestrian access, and safer access to the bus.”

City Walk acknowledges the urgent need to make roads safer for non-car transit within a comprehensive, city-wide network that distributes projects equitably and allows citywide low-carbon travel. The scope of the plan is essential to preventing a focus on wealthy neighborhoods at the expense of the low-income residents who face a more urgent need to safely travel without a car. +++ On the whole, Providence and Rhode Island have a long way to go towards a more just, lower-carbon transportation system. As our car oriented system further marginalizes people and drives climate change, public subsidies for fuel, car storage, and roads continue unabated. RIPTA’s funding is limited, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure is more often treated as an afterthought than serious transportation.

Yet, programs like Great Streets and City Walk show the potential of a truly decarbonized transportation system to finally enshrine mobility as a basic human right, one that isn’t predicated on socio-economic status or ability.

With state lawmakers seemingly more inclined to fund highway mega-projects than basic non-motorized infrastructure, perhaps looking to local residents for leadership would be a better path forward.

Strengthening input processes to build support among and public and better serve them will be critical to the success of this transition.

“We are working to create tools for thinking proactively about creating a vision of transit equity here in Rhode Island,” said Tavarez. “We are getting together Black, Indigenous and People of Color and prioritizing people who do not have a personal car, because we recognize that they are the ones who face the most hardship when it comes to transit due to our society’s narratives around having a personal car.” As groups like the REJC envision more equitable transportation systems and input processes through which they can be designed, it will take collective action to demand our leaders take bold action to implement them.

AVI SHAPIRO B’22 AND ILAN UPFAL B’22 can ride their tandem bike with no handlebars.

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BY Mia Pattillo ILLUSTRATION Charlotte Silverman DESIGN Christie Zhong

THE PERFECT COMPA NION How sexbots yoke intimacy to exploitation “Goodbye loneliness!” reads the homepage of RealDollX, where anyone can purchase a life-size, silicone, human-looking sex robot for the price of $12,000 to $50,000 post-customization. At first glance, these bots, first rolled out in 2018, seem like not much more than glorified fleshlights attached to life-size Barbies and hidden Bluetooths, to be crude. But what they offer goes beyond the strictly sexual—they can give compliments, recite poetry, tell jokes, and seduce their users. They can also be individually customized for personality, body, wardrobe, and voice: Blush pink or coffee colored nipples? Funny or intellectual? Freckle Legume or Volcanic Sunburst eyes? A sexbot owner can create their ideal sexual and romantic fantasy by tailoring their partner’s every physical, emotional, and mental trait down to a tee.

The sex robot customer base is nearly entirely wealthy, heterosexual, and male. Key contenders in the market include Samantha by Synthea Amatus, based in Spain, and Harmony and Solana by RealDollX, based in California. Sexbot brothels have popped up in Toronto, Paris, Japan, and Moscow, where $90 can buy a 30-minute sexbot frolic, and a threesome option is available at an additional charge. The only effort to translate this idea to the States was met with resistance, when a Canadian sex robot-maker tried to open a sexbot brothel in Houston last October.

The female bots that dominate the market are programmed to be the “ideal” partner: no dislikes, no strong opinions, no objections. They cannot refuse or revoke consent and are ready to submit to their users’ every desire. For instance, after a group of men damaged a Samantha doll by mounting her roughly during an Austrian technology fair, she reportedly responded, “I’m fine,” though such a situation with an actual human would certainly have constituted harm. Indeed, the construction of such submissive female bots for heterosexual human men perpetuates preexisting notions of a female companion’s identity and role in relationships and likely affects the expectations of male users in human exchanges. Anecdotal reports already indicate widespread abusive treatment of human-imitating droids, as users of Amazon’s Alexa lose standard social etiquette when addressing the bot.

An inanimate bot asks no empathy from its user. The lack of consideration and consent in these relationships is bound to cross the fine line from interactions with fake women to those with real women.

Most customized bots are petite white or Asian females, with tiny waists and enormous breasts. The most popular model sold at RealDollX is Body F: fivefoot-one, 70 pounds, 32F breasts. Her proportions would be impossible, medically dangerous even, on any real woman, but these dolls are able to take on such absurd dimensions thanks to all their hardwire, vinyl, and silicone replacing human blood, guts, and flesh. It is no secret that such hypersexualized images of what physically attractive women should look like in media is linked to an increase in violence toward women.

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Many advocates for the use of sexbots argue that these mechanical alternatives may provide the ideal companionship for those who desire human intimacy yet are unable to attain it. They propose that they may even serve as a solution for the societal harm inflicted by pedophiles, rapists, and incels by filling the void that compels violence in the first place. But it is unlikely that these bots will prevent harm; in fact, the use of bots is much more likely to perpetuate it. A 2006 study conducted by a group of psychology researchers at the University of Washington has proven that men who have been exposed to violent pornography are more likely to behave violently toward women in their lives.

Consider this correlation in the context of a much more first-hand and immersive sexual experience with a hyper-realistically human bot, rather than viewing an interaction on a screen. Sex robots are not the solution; try therapy. +++ David Levy, author of the 2007 book Love and Sex with Robots, predicted that, by 2050, most humans will have intimate relationships with robots, whether that entails sex, love, friendship, or marriage. Futurologist Ian Pearson, who claims that his predictions are correct 85 percent of the time, has even written a report based upon existing human-technology interaction trends suggesting, that by 2050, human-robot sex will surpass human-human sex. It is unclear how believable this prediction is, but the ways in which the sexbot industry addresses the perpetuation of misogyny by this point, if at all, will largely depend upon the identities and priorities of its workforce. If, for instance, the pool of creators were dominated by women, non-binary people, or other non-male groups that primarily experience the consequences of such harm, then perhaps there would be more systems in place to have these bots necessitate consent, or shut down when treated aggressively, or only include options for more realistic body types. Sellers could raise the threshold of who is allowed to purchase these easily abused bots by requiring a survey or a set of criteria determining the identities and motives of purchasers. Of course, these are not assured solutions to sexbots’ multitude of issues, only proposals that may help. But when the sexbot world is dominated by heterosexual male creators and heterosexual male users, it is unlikely that such solutions would even be considered. As these robots continue to be rolled out, one can only hope that the sexbot workforce and market will diversify, and that anti-robot activists will be effective in alerting creators to address the issues.

The most famous anti-sexbot movement is the “Campaign Against Sex Robots,” spearheaded by Kathleen Richardson, professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University in England, who describes herself as a “feminist-humanist.” The campaign began in 2015 before sex robots even hit the

market, and its advocates mostly include humanists, parents, women’s groups, survivors, academics, and activists. Members of the group have published several extensive research papers detailing the harmful implications of sexbots, including the encouragement of misogyny and objectification and the reinforcement of power dynamics. But since the robots entered the market last year, evidence of the campaigns seems to have diminished, with the last press coverage on their website coming from this past February.

My alarm in imagining robots penetrating my world is accompanied by an urge to consider how this technological development will meddle with our relationships with sex and intimacy. Today, human sex is not a prerogative: Alternatives for having children exist in the forms of IVF, IUI, sperm donation, and surrogacy (although their accessibility is limited by high costs), a number of technological advancements compete with sex for our pleasure, and pleasure itself is not even intrinsic to every person’s sexual experience.

Marriage, once the logical aspiration of human sex, is no longer the default endgame. In fact, dating apps, sex workers, and professional escorts have eliminated the necessity of an endgame altogether. So, to what degree are sexual relationships solely sexual, and to what degree are they about an intimate and emotional connection? And how will a mechanical alternative offering both sexual and emotional intimacy remove the need for acquiring either from a human being?

As I read the website advertising the sexbots as “the perfect companion” and “your loyal friend,” I noticed how these companies catered not only toward the sexually lonely, but even more so toward the emotionally lonely. In fact, Realbotix CEO Mat McMullen has even said, “I want people to actually develop an emotional attachment to not only the doll, but to the actual character behind it. To develop some kind of love for this being.” The gratification of mutual human connection can be difficult to attain without grappling with heartache and hurt, jealousy and betrayal. Certainly, not everyone is willing to confront the squishiness of these in-between hurdles, and sexbots offer alternatives for receiving many of the pleasures of both physical and emotional connection while allowing a bypass through finding and maintaining a human partner. Considering this, it is unsurprising that it is the particular emotionally unfulfilled cis-hetero-male population, such as incels, that are most tempted into this market.

The trend of opting out of human romance is growing in the digisexual community. Most of us have already adopted “first wave digisexuality,” which involves the many technologies that we use to connect sexually with current or prospective partners, including text, Snapchat, Skype, Tinder, and Bumble. But “second wave digisexuality” has materialized dystopian images of science fiction films like Her, Ex Machina, and Blade Runner, in which deep and emotional relationships with robots obviate the need

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for another human altogether. Digisexuals, a recent term for those who form such relationships, have no desire for blood and flesh—in fact, many dislike the physical touch of another human being. Perhaps the most widely known digisexual today is Akihiko Kondo, a 35-year-old school administrator in Tokyo who strolled down the aisle last November in a white tuxedo to marry Hatsune Miku, a 16-year-old hologram and world-famous fictional recording artist. Kondo is not alone in going public about his digisexuality. A Frenchwoman self-identified as “Lilly” married a 3D-printed robot in 2016, and an artificial intelligence engineer in China named Zheng Jiajia married his own self-designed robot wife in 2017.

As these commitments to marriage exemplify, the sexual attraction to technological beings can become a deeply emotional one. And though many humans who claim to be in love are intentionally choosing not to marry in our modern world, a formal union likely becomes more highly-prioritized for these digisexuals as a form of self-validation and self-expression to the many who mistrust their sexuality. When I first came across Kondo’s story of digisexuality, I didn’t doubt the verity of his claims of love. Without any countering evidence, I see no reason not to have faith in his own self-knowing. But I wonder whether Kondo’ s love was for the hologram itself, or for the illusion of intimacy with a human partner. I also wonder the degree to which these two things are actually different. +++ When researchers ask those who go to brothels what they get out of it, many clients cite a sense of reciprocated connection from another person. And some sex workers see helping their clients build intimate connections outside of the brothels in ways that are sensitive to the desires of a human other as part of their work. Respectful, consensual sex can potentially occur

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

in legal and regulated brothels as worker, often female, and client, often male, form an intimate two-way connection, albeit a transactional one.

At the same time, many workers in the industry rely on sex work as their sole source of income or an avenue to further explore their own sexuality. Sex robot brothels—and even the option of purchasing a bot, if a client is wealthy enough—threaten to displace sex workers. Even if the bots do not fully displace sex workers, brothels that replace human interaction with robot sex seem to insinuate that the workers can be easily equated with objects, devaluing their human agency and dignity. As Nevada is currently the only state in which some sex work is legal, there are practically no consequences for clients who do harm their workers, as workers risk exposing themselves by reporting them. Even in the few legal situations of sex work, there can be an inherent power dynamic: the male clients have the money, the female workers often need the money. Some clients choose to utilize sex work for the ‘power trip’ it gives them—telling workers what they want and what to do, the power of wealth in their hands. As brothels continue to operate, the abusive habits developed by sexbot clients will continue to reinforce many of the harmful power dynamics that already exist in the sex work industry.

personal traits, the sexbot industry forces every sexbot user to define and control what they seek in a sexual relationship. The user is asked to play God, to build and have power over their own creation.

By offering the prospect of easy emotional intimacy in a tailored sexual experience, the sex robot industry is also taking a piece of the lucrative pie of human inclination to form an attachment to the mere mirage of intimacy. “If the robot, the AI, is making a person feel love, and they really feel it, does it matter if it’s real or not?” questioned McMullen. Inherent in the belief in love is the belief that there is someone in the world that can understand, reciprocate feelings, offer mutuality. Can a human-made artifact possibly provide that to a human? The authenticity of intimacy or love is inevitably thrown into question when there is a degree of exploitation and control that simultaneously works against and feeds into it. +++

At the end of the day, batteries run out. Maybe some Samantha model will act out the part of housewife so aptly that she spills the home-cooked hot chili on herself, rotating her silicone left breast 90 degrees and leaving the right dangling from an exposed wire circuit. For now, I will cling to the human-human era +++ while it still exists, and take at least some comfort in knowing that the people falling in love with robots The ability to tailor a sexual partner down to the very aren’t propogating their genes. pitch of their voice means having the power to potentially create the ideal sexual experience. But it also MIA PATTILLO B’20 wonders if the reason she doesn’t assumes that humans are able to actively identify and feel empathy for cats is because she never fed her select nearly every characteristic of their ideal sexual Webkinz British Shorthair. partner and sexual relationship. Does that involve the strictly corporeal, or does it extend to an emotional interdependence? An intellectual connection? A worry for and protection over the other? By offering so many customizable options for both sexual activities and

FEATURES

06

THE FIRE TO RELEASE YOU A conversation with Providence songwriter La Neve On “A Pretty Red,” the opening track of her debut LP The Vital Cord, released October 14, La Neve sings over a pulsing electronic groove: “Nothing you see is complete/I’m a fire, to release you/I’m a fire in a pretty red/A fire, to complete you.” These themes of destruction, incompleteness, becoming, and re-becoming capture both the intimacy and political tenacity of The Vital Cord, an introspective album that makes you want to dance the revolution into being. La Neve, who is also a member of the Providence punk band Downtown Boys and a local organizer and historian, channels the urgency and directness of both punk and disco on The Vital Cord. It’s radical, fun, and one of the best albums of the year.

The day after her LP release concert/Halloween dance party at Pawtucket’s Machines with Magnets, La Neve sat down with the College Hill Independent at White Electric Coffee on the edge of Federal Hill to talk about her new record, the evolution of Providence’s music scenes, the No Music for ICE campaign, and much more.

Ben Bienstock: We had a great time at your LP release party last night. It was cool to see how you brought everything together on stage with pre-recorded and live elements. What was the process of making the album and then translating that to a live performance?

La Neve: When I’m recording, I’m the one playing all the instruments, which I mix with some digital stuff.

Live, I’ve always wanted to perform with full band, but it’s very expensive. For me, the most fun element is to have a live drummer. Last night I played with Karna [Ray], who plays in a band called The Kominas that the Downtown Boys have played with for a while. So, I do all this stuff when I’m recording myself, but then live, the goal is to keep adding more elements and maybe if it starts making more money I would keep adding.

Because it’s more fun for everyone if you have a live band.

Chris Packs: Last night your concert was at Machines with Magnets, and we were wondering how, since the eviction of so many Providence DIY spaces—Spark City, Fort Thunder, and, most recently, Aurora—your work creating queer-centered spaces in Providence music has changed.

LN: This city has definitely had it a lot harder, and I think as a lot of those centralized zones have shut down, it’s not only had the effect of having fewer spaces, but also the scenes have become more fragmented. This might be happening everywhere because the internet encourages a kind of nicheness in everything and creates specific enclaves, but it’s definitely harder to book and curate spaces and develop a specific personality to them.

We tried to do some exciting things with this project with the overlaps that it has with the queer performance world and the punk and dance worlds.

I’ve been running a night at Dark Lady downtown called “Highlighter.” Dark Lady always has great stuff, but it’s more conventional drag. So to take that space over and make it more punk, or to take over punk spaces and make them more queer—I don’t know. It’s hard here. And it’s been sad to watch because we were doing Spark City and then Aurora was definitely the center for a while. AS220 does great stuff, but it’s hard to book there. So, yeah, Machines is one of the only spots.

CP: What do you see as the root of that fragmentation? How do you feel like that has influenced the city’s music scenes?

LN: I think there a lot of really good developments in Providence’s music scene. Even though it’s more fragmented, even though all these spaces have shut down, it’s gotten way more diverse in terms of performers and in terms of more people from the city curating spaces and performing. When you think about the supposedly ‘legendary’ period of Providence music, like Fort Thunder and Lightning Bolt—all those bands are great, I’m not hating them at all—it’s very, very white, and it’s very, very male. Of course, there were always women

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and people of color involved, but what’s made into legend and memorialized is a very specific segment of that scene.

A lot of work and force, including stuff I’ve been doing in Downtown Boys, but also the work a lot of people are doing, have made incisions into that and have made space for a lot of other things. It’s in this period where people had to fight to build these other scenes, and it’s a lot harder to build those scenes.

There’s not the same institutional support, there’s not as many resources, so people are fighting to get their thing out there.

BB: Through all those changes and fragmentations, and then also the changes in the music that you’re making, have you found that your relationship with the city is evolving in any particular ways?

LN: Definitely. Doing La Neve is hard to do in conventional drag spaces like the Dark Lady. I can’t get booked on that stuff because it’s ‘too weird,’ but then it’s often a little bit ‘too weird’ for punk shows and more conventional dance parties. So it’s hard to find where La Neve fits into all that, and I keep trying to fit it into different spaces, to some success, but it feels very much like when we were starting with Downtown Boys. You have to carve out this space and if it doesn’t exist yet or it exists but isn’t big enough for you to fit in yet, which is, I think, true of any queer musicians, it’s an uphill battle.

BY Ben Bienstock & Chris Packs ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Christie Zhong

CP: You mentioned last night the new No Music for ICE campaign. How did that campaign come about and how did you reach out to other musicians?

LN: Like every industry, the music industry atomizes and individualizes its workers, and so what’s presented to you as a musician is that your political possibilities are either ‘do the thing’ or ‘don’t do the thing.’ It's like, ‘buy the thing’ or ‘don’t buy the thing’—a very individualistic, consumer-centric, and, I think, neoliberal way of approaching politics. So when the news of the Amazon festival came out last week, some people were focused on yelling at the bands playing it, but some of us decided to take another route and actually begin to organize.

We’ve done a couple campaigns like this in the past, like with South by Southwest (SXSW). They had a clause that said they would collaborate with ICE to deport foreign artists if they broke the rules, and all these artists banded together, mounted pressure, and won—because it was organized. If just one or two bands decided not to play it wouldn’t have done anything. We had a similar victory last week, actually, with facial recognition at festivals. No Music for ICE is obviously a bigger battle because it’s not just the music industry here: it’s the biggest companies in the world, the richest people in the world. And it’s only doable in coalition with other groups. There’s an organization called Mijente that’s been doing the NoTechForICE campaign that we're trying to act in solidarity with. But this seemed like a space where we as cultural workers could join in that effort and organize to have an impact rather than just make the consumer choice whether or not to associate with Amazon.

CP: When your first project as La Neve came out in 2017, a lot of its coverage in the press framed it in the context of post-inauguration anxiety and rage. How has the changing landscape of political resistance influenced the music you’ve made since then?

CP: It reminds me in certain ways of the Super Bowl last year, when a bunch of big artists dropped out or LN: [The first EP] came out in early 2017, which is also refused to play the halftime show. when Cost of Living, the last Downtown Boys record, came out. Doing press on both of those things, in every LN: Those big artists dropping out was good, but I interview you do, people are like, “So, you wrote this feel like making change on a deeper level requires about Trump, right?” And it’s funny because Cost of actual organizing. There’s an excitement and even Living and the La Neve tape came out in 2017, but that a social capital to being involved in these things to a means it was entirely written before the election, more certain extent, but then there’s real power in the music or less. Which is what we kept repeating in interviews: industry that’s going to push back in a more severe This fits what just happened, but it’s about the larger way and that’s going to be some of the next steps in the systemic things in America that have been going on for organizing. It’s exciting to see how the larger undera long time. There’s this song, “A Wall,” for instance. standing of the need for institutional changes and not People are like, you wrote it about Trump, it’s a border just individual consumer decisions is transferring to wall. Well, that’s fine if you want to interpret it that way, some thinking with cultural workers. I feel like this but we didn’t write it in that context—it fits the larger campaign would have been very difficult to do even discourse and reality in the country. just two or three years ago because people have such an This new record is coming out of both the larger individualistic understanding of things. I remember systems and reality of this country since its founding doing the SXSW letter—which of course was successful and the Trump-reality of the last two years. Even the and a lot of people signed on to that—but so many title, The Vital Cord, is taken from a history book and people on the internet were like, ‘why are you orgaspeaks to deep economic connections going back from nizing this letter, just don’t fucking play SXSW,’ and colonization through industrialization and into today. that accomplishes exactly nothing.

The vital cord of capital connects all of these things.

Most of the songs speak to that either on a larger CP: Is there anything else you’re working on right now? systemic level or a more personal level. “Stability,” for instance, speaks to the experience of those systems LN: I’ve also been working on a campaign to get on a more personal level, feeling disrupted because the United States to stop funding the war in Yemen, capital is constantly making your life very precarious. because I work with Demand Progress, whose executive director, David Segal, is based out of Providence.

BB: One of the things I love about both La Neve Senator [Jack] Reed is very important to this whole and Downtown Boys is how directly the politics thing because he’s the ranking Democrat on the Senate are communicated. I’m thinking particularly of Armed Services Committee, so he has a lot of power “Maximum Wage” and “100% Inheritance Tax” in the to negotiate the National Defense Authorization Act, way the title functions as a sort of policy manifesto and which would allow us to cut funding to the Saudi war political imagining. on Yemen. So I’ve been working with some YemeniAmerican folks to pressure him on that.

LN: “Maximum Wage” is a perfect example of the more systemic song. I like that [“Maximum Wage” and BB: Are there any up-and-coming or new artists in “100% Inheritance Tax”] are both, like, policy songs, Providence that you’re excited about? kind of nerdy but also kind of fun. “Maximum Wage” I put out as a single because it seemed important to get LN: My friend Aura Moreno, who used to go by out quickly because billionaires and wealth inequality Creamer, is an emcee and producer in Providence were being talked about in a more serious way than I who’s doing really great work. Kurt Fowl, who played have ever seen in my lifetime. It’s also a running theme last night, has been around for a while but I feel like through the record in a lot of the imagery. The guillo- doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. Wolf’s Milk is tines in the video and on the shirt, for example. I use a another one to shout out. I’ll just say those for now, but lot of guillotine imagery, talk a lot about eviscerating we need more bands in Providence, so people should the one-percent, the billionaire class, both literally and start bands. metaphorically.

BEN BIENSTOCK B'20 and CHRIS PACKS B’20 need that sound.

01 NOV 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

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BY Ricardo Gomez ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Kathryn Li

ornia f i l a C e d th n a E & sis i r PG c e r wildfi

POWER Images of firestorms, burning hills, and charred neighborhoods in California are becoming the horrid icons of the future’s climate. The state’s ongoing struggle with devastating wildfires sharply evinces the severe realities of the global climate crisis. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), California’s 2018 wildfire season saw nearly 1.9 million acres of land burned—a total that would have charred the entirety of Rhode Island two times over.

While the combination of extremely dry land produced by rainless summers and hot autumn winds are what set the conditions for fast-moving wildfires, the sparks that start them are often man-made. The Camp Fire, which destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and took 86 lives in Paradise, CA, was 2018’s costliest natural disaster and was rigorously investigated by Cal Fire. Disturbingly, the cause was traced back to electrical transmission lines owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the state’s largest for-profit utility company, which finds itself at the center of many ongoing crises.

At the time of writing, the Kincade fire in Northern California has burned 76,825 acres and destroyed nearly 206 structures. Local authorities have ordered the evacuation of 180,000 people and Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency. The blaze is fueled by 80 mph winds and is still only 30 percent contained. Meanwhile, in Southern California, a fire now called the Easy fire erupted this Wednesday, adding to the chaos centered around the Getty fire not too far away. Throughout the state’s valleys, autumn's orange hues are brought not by the changing of the leaves, but by landscapes of wildfire that are orange only until they disintegrate into grim grays of ash.

Already, PG&E is investigating whether or not their equipment caused the fire after it became aware of a “transmission-level outage” that happened close to the origins of the fire just around when the blaze began.

This kind of transmission line malfunction, which sets off sparks, has become a common occurrence. In the last five years alone, PG&E has reported more than 1,552 equipment-related fires, the major ones being fatal. The utility has been embroiled in bankruptcy disputes after facing $30 billion in liability for its role in the major wildfires of these last couple years.

PG&E has since begun taking measures to reduce its liability. Earlier this month, the utility started imposing rolling shutoffs of energy service during high-risk conditions, as part of a fire management strategy aimed at preventing the utility’s transmission lines from igniting. Last Sunday’s shutoffs will affect both businesses and individual homes alike. People will have trouble going to work, small businesses will take losses, and students will stay home. Families who do not have the economic resources to invest in blackout preparation, like generators and flashlights, will spend the night clouded in uncertainty. Elderly

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people and those who rely on electric mobility support will be put at risk, and the ill who rely on refrigeration to maintain their medicine will be especially vulnerable. Three million Californians will be hurt.

“I’m outraged, because it didn’t need to happen,” Governor Newsom said in a public statement regarding shutoffs. Newsom agreed public safety power shutdowns were probably a necessity, but he emphasized that they were required only because of PG&E’s extensive history of neglecting maintenance. If the existing infrastructure had historically adhered to basic safety practices, the shutoff would not be necessary.

For years, PG&E has spent funds designated for safety maintenance of transmission lines on executive raises and bonuses. This alarming pattern of unsafe cost-cutting and profiteering has been not only unscrupulous, but also, at times, plainly criminal. In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Mark Toney, executive director of consumer advocacy organization The Utility Reform Network (TURN), cited the San Bruno pipeline explosion of 2010 as a specific instance of PG&E’s criminal behavior. The explosion caused a small earthquake, launched 1,000 feet of fire into the air, and killed eight people. TURN revealed that PG&E had identified that the gas line was in imminent danger of failure for some time. The utility asked for and received $5 million to replace the insecure portion of line, years passed after the procurement of funds with no action. “They didn’t spend the money; they didn’t replace it. They put the money into corporate profits and executive bonuses. Then they asked for it again three years later, the same thing with the same language, and before anything could get done we had the San Bruno explosion,” Toney said. “I think that that kind of evidence was damning for them.” Eventually PG&E was convicted of six felonies—five counts of safety violations and one of obstruction.

Amidst all of the ongoing strife, the utility has failed to complete the necessary line maintenance to prevent even more destructive fires, having only completed a third of maintenance it committed to do for this year. Now it’s imposing blackouts.

PG&E’s unilateral decision making over when, where, and for whom to shut off power for lays bare a troubling truth; Californians currently have little control over their electricity. As the climate crisis intensifies, the world is turning a corner. Globally, nationally, and locally, communities must now contend with how their energy resources will be controlled. To whom will California grant power over its energy?

A serious call for a public takeover has emerged and the “No PG&E Bailout” Coalition is a critical leader of the movement. Comprised of local advocacy groups, the coalition demands a “public takeover of the monopoly utilities’ electricity grid infrastructure” and pushes to “implement a climate-justice model for development of clean energy resources.”

The movement is grounded in principles of democratic governance, an aversion to corporate profiteering, prioritization of communities, and renewable energy. As a member of the public takeover coalition, Mari Taruc told In These Times magazine, “Our utility system has to be more nimble as the climate crisis unfolds.” She added, “The conversation shouldn’t just be about making the transmission lines work better.

What if we imagined a decentralized energy system, where we don’t need transmission lines that catch fire?”

Mari Taruc is part of the Local Clean Energy Alliance and coordinates the Utility Justice Campaign. Another organizer with the group, Nishi Sheorey, said, “We are fighting for an equitable, democratized, and decentralized energy model in California, where the development, ownership, and control of energy and services are public and community-based, because we believe that ultimately that will result in a system that is more resilient and responsive to Californians.”

The public takeover movement cares deeply about the democratic control of energy because the direction of electrical grids has tremendous impact on the ecology of the future. Democratizing electric systems in the United States through public ownership can facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels and toward a sustainable future that prioritizes communities instead of profits. Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate and Energy Program at The Democracy Collaborative, argues that the public ownership of utilities could accelerate a renewable energy transition at the scale needed to meet our closing climate deadline for action. “It’s simply too late to provide piecemeal incentives and then wait expectantly for a market controlled by fossil fuel interests to voluntarily deploy more renewables,” Bozuwa writes. This argument stresses how energy utilities’ control over an immense amount of energy supply chain make them a strategic platform for bringing energy democracy tactics to scale. Models for publicly owned utilities also already exist in California. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) serve millions of Californians and are publicly owned. LADWP is actually the largest municipally owned utility in the United States.

The Push for a Public Takeover Of the thousands of utilities in the United States, only 199 are privately owned, representing just nine The recent years of damaging negligence, sometimes percent of all utilities. Surprisingly, this relatively to a criminal degree, have led Californians to chal- small number of utilities services 75 percent of the lenge PG&E’s capability to safely provide electricity, a electric consumer base in the country. The incombasic public resource. mensurate influence of private utilities is indicative of

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just how entrenched the prioritization of profit is, even within the provisioning of public goods.

Obstacles to the Public Takeover Movement If PG&E has been challenged so strongly, and if models of public ownership already exist, why is the shift not happening when the apparent necessity of a public takeover is becoming more urgent?

At the level of the state’s legislators, thinking around addressing the disaster that is PG&E has steered clear of structural change regarding the operation of the utility. Instead, legislators have focused on plans for how PG&E can best handle debt, debating different proposals for granting PG&E tax-exempt bonds for repayment. These proposals work within a status quo in which California is struggling through a state of emergency. Legislators’ aversion to even discussing radical change in favor of debating the details of piecemeal reform displays that they are not only failing to consider all of their options, but that they are failing to treat the fires with the necessary urgency.

Another particularly important group is PG&E’s largest union. A union’s position on a matter of challenging corporate control can be quite telling because of their uniquely strategic leverage to shut down capital’s profits internally. But within the scope of Californians’ struggle with PG&E, unions aren’t always necessarily aligned with activists. “We represent the workers of every public municipality in Northern Central California except for Palo Alto. So we have no inherent bias for or against investor-owned or public-owned. We represent them all. But as a matter of consistent principle we have opposed to move from either private to public or public to private because of the effects on employees,” said Tom Dalzell, business manager for IBEW Local 1245, in a discussion with the Independent. Dalzell explained that pensions and retiree medical plans are of the most concern in a move

to go public. “If you are moving from public to private or private to public, what you leave behind is diminished.” The concerns of the union members are serious and pressing. However, their concerns also exemplify how the details of specific groups work against movements challenging the status quo on a platform of large change.

The movement for the democratic control of energy and a public takeover relies on the supposition that a charged base of consumers will maintain a strong commitment to representing the community and holding utilities accountable. The organizations of vigilant activists who prioritize the community and the disadvantaged above all else certainly display that there are indeed people who can take up that mantle.

But, if the current position of the union suggests anything, it is that the same class of people, the working class, has diverse and often conflicting interests.

Indeed, the Utility Reform Network, one of the strongest advocates of consumers, has expressed skepticism regarding the public takeover movement. “I'm concerned that the ‘take PG&E public people’ are relying on very simplistic slogans, that sure sound good but there’s nothing I’ve seen behind them yet,” said Mark Toney, an outspoken critic of PG&E. “I don’t think there is any magic to a utility being public,” he added, comparing LADWP and SMUD. Referencing

LADWP, Toney said, “Look at their track record. They were the largest users of coal in California. They had to be forced, and were laggards on ending their coal.

They trailed the investor owned utilities in California.

Now of course, SMUD is considered one of the best utilities in the US. When it comes to price and service, and they are leaders in environmental climate change.”

The contrast, Toney says, is a “tale of two cities.”

While Toney recognizes how profit incentives can be a problem of the investor owned model, he argued that there are enough poorly run publicly owned utilities that exist already that show that there is no guarantee that a publicly owned utility would necessarily be more accountable. The actual enforcement of regulation within any system is the most important to ensure equitable outcomes. Ultimately, TURN stresses that the public takeover movement needs to have concrete proposals that address the unique deficiencies of PG&E, so that their public model can actualize their theoretical objectives of community minded energy service.

Moving Forward California’s challenges with PG&E are as much about one utility as they are about more broadly shifting power and control over natural resources. The comments of TURN, an important advocacy group, and the position of the union, a potential change maker, summate a critical aspect of the public movement’s struggles; the politics of the public takeover movement makes for a compelling advocacy that is hard to operationalize. Taken altogether, what is generated is an ever more dire dissonance of inaction.

Often, it is difficult to describe a historic moment as it processes. But on the wide level of acres, California is disintegrating, and with it, families are evacuated en masse as blazes fueled by hurricane winds engulf the Golden State. So despite the smoke that hangs like a shroud, it is extremely clear that California is enduring a crisis of unprecedented historical proportions. Because California is positioned at the front lines of the climate crisis, the course of action the state chooses has the potential to set a precedent across the United States for how energy will be controlled now, and who will control it in the future.

RICARDO GOMEZ B’22 first reported on a transmission line malfunction in second grade.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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PADDLING

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BY Oren Karp ILLUSTRATION Mariel Solomon DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

On day 19, my trip arrived at Wapekeka First Nation after weeks of sun, the most difficult leg of our journey behind us. Located on Angling Lake in Northwest Ontario at the headwaters of the Fawn River, Wapekeka is an Oji-Cree community inaccessible by land, so my six campers, two co-counselors and I paddled right up in our canoes and set up camp on the shore. As the oldest guide on the trip, I was responsible for going with one of the co-counselors to pick up our food drop, which a contact had been holding for us for a few days in the band office. When I returned to our campsite, I found our 15-year-old campers had befriended several local kids, who had walked down to the small beach to see what we were doing. While the counselors unpacked the next 19 days’ worth of food, the campers chatted with the children from Wapekeka, trading stories about the trip and life on the Indian reserve. Soon conversation turned to music and pop culture, a small dance party followed by a show and tell of the kids’ toys. The campers couldn’t stop laughing after one of the Indigenous kids rode his bike into the lake fully clothed and then left it there and waded back to shore, drenched and grinning.

Later, making dinner, our group would be caught in a downpour that swelled the river. A man in a pickup truck would come by and offer to help us move all our stuff to the community center, where we would spend the night dry and warm, hanging out more with the local kids. But as the clouds rolled in, the children asked about our boats and my campers offered to paddle with them out on the lake. But we’ve never been in a canoe before, the kids responded. Great, my campers smiled.

It’s easy. We’ll show you. +++ But the symbol of the canoe is not so simple. Long before the Indigenous peoples living in what is now called North America came in contact with European settlers, the canoe was a ubiquitous form of travel.

Boats were a natural response to land with so much water—not only does Canada have the longest

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coastline of any country in the world, but it is also remarkably wet, boasting the highest total surface water area of any country. Save the Plains tribes of the south central region, who had little use for boats, nearly every Native Canadian group had its own canoe design that was specific to the region in which they lived. And it was the land itself that taught how the craft should be built: For example, in the highlands south of James Bay, birch bark, spruceroot, and white cedar were plentiful and made canoes light enough to portage over land, yet simple enough to repair. There was variation, of course: The Algonquins, for example, navigated mostly laketo-lake and could thus afford wide canoes with keels and flatter bottoms that kept straight in strong winds, while the Montagnais paddled on rivers and needed canoes that were narrow and round to steer more easily through whitewater.

Perhaps most famous among the historical watercraft of Canada are the enormous birch-bark canoes of the northeast, which were appropriated for trade and transportation in the establishment of colonial French Canada. Rather than being associated with the Algonquin people, who used them for millennia, these 36-foot boats instead conjure images of the “voyageur,” colonial Canada’s white, manly man for whom no river was too dangerous and no portage too long.

As demand for furs grew in Europe, First Nations men were employed to trap and hunt while voyageurs transported goods to and between colonial settlements. With the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, however, the negative effects of the fur trade began to multiply, and settlers inflicted significant harm on Indigenous communities and lands, from overhunting and depletion of resources to overt violence, especially toward women. Time passed, and the lumber industry took off, further contributing further to destruction of land and Indigenous ways of life as canoes were seized by settlers and turned into a tool for western ‘exploration’ and colonialism. By the late 19th century, need for voyageurs plummeted with the completion of the Canadian Pacific rail line, but harm to Indigenous communities grew as they were

forcibly moved onto reservations or into boarding schools in an effort of coordinated, institutional cultural genocide. As time passed, settlers erased their history of colonial atrocities, appropriating the canoe for purposes of recreation and attempting to turn it into a symbol of Canadian national pride. +++ The canoe has wedged its way firmly into Canadian culture—take, for example, Paddle-to-the-Sea. Those who are paddling nerds or grew up in 1940s Michigan will instantly recognize this name. Originally a children’s book written by American author Holling C. Holling in 1941, Paddle-to-the-Sea became a classic amongst paddlers after it was adapted into an Oscarnominated film of the same title, directed by Canadian naturalist, artist, and canoeing legend Bill Mason and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The story begins at Lake Nipigon, Ontario, where a First Nation boy carves a wooden figurine of an Indian in a canoe and inscribes on the bottom: “Please put me back in the water. I am Paddle-to-the-Sea.” The small wood carving is released, picked up and returned to the water many times throughout his adventures across the great lakes and down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean.

Paddle-to-the-Sea came to represent so much that a symbol of it was brought aboard the Canada C3 Expedition, a 150-day trip around Canada’s coast by boat. The C3 was one of the highest-profile projects of Canada 150, a celebration that marked the 150th anniversary of the country’s confederation. Along with Canada Day festivities in 19 major cities, smaller-scale sesquicentennial celebrations over the course of the year included sporting events, arts initiatives, and academic projects with a goal of fostering a sense of national pride and unity. The ship’s journey began in Toronto, ON, and followed the St. Lawrence waterway out of Lake Ontario to the ocean, split into 15 legs as it made its way through coastal cities, towns, and Indigenous communities, before ending in Victoria,

01 NOV 2019

The canoe in Canadian past and present

way to bring himself closer to the people, the culture, and the land of his home.

James Raffan, former executive director of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, sees the canoe as an even more explicit symbol of national harmony. Also a first-generation Canadian, Raffan helped to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary by organizing another, shorter boat journey sponsored by the museum called “Connected by Canoe.”

(Incidentally, this project was captured in a short documentary also directed by Iromoto.) Together, sixteen Canadians—from Erick Mugisha, a nursing student who had moved from Kenya to Canada just months before, to Kristen Ungungai-Kownak, a Carleton University student of Inuk heritage, to Gary Running, who admitted knowing next to nothing about reconciliation but could navigate the river and drive the van— joined together in a canoe trip from Kingston, ON to Ottawa, ON. Traveling by canoe became a metaphor for coming together as a country, allowing time for floating conversation but just as importantly forcing all the participants to work together, to sweat and struggle in the same boat as they paddled and portaged until the day was done. Because of the museum’s sponsorship, Connected by Canoe made efforts to root its conversations in a broader narrative of the vessel, and it also showed that (on a small scale, at least) canoes can be used to engage with their own conflicted history. +++

British Columbia. More than 360 people, including youth ambassadors, scientists, Indigenous elders, artists, politicians, and participants from all across the country, joined together in creative, scientific, and community-based projects directed at Canada 150’s four main themes: “diversity and inclusion, engaging and inspiring youth, Indigenous reconciliation, and the environment.” All the while, the C3 carried aboard a small wooden model of Paddle-to-the-Sea. In a makeshift musical studio onboard the Canada C3, four musicians and nineteen participants joined together to record a song titled “River of Nations.”

With lyrics in English, French, Mohawk, and Spanish, the song is meant to represent the progress that is possible when Canadians celebrate and welcome their differences. The song opens with the line, “The sun, moon, wind, and water / Carry us; we are a canoe,” before others join in and sing the chorus together: “River of nations, nation of rivers / Flowing together on our way to the sea.” These lyrics draw a clear comparison between Paddle-to-the-Sea and the Canada C3, but the song doesn’t acknowledge the rocky history of canoes that might make a symbology of unity more complicated.

Now that centuries have passed, fur and lumber have been replaced with other capitalist demands, such as minerals and hydro power, that have had similarly catastrophic effects on Indigenous ways of life. And though the canoe is no longer the transport of choice for settler colonists, it is hard for some to separate the object from its past, especially when the majority of those who now build and use canoes are people of settler colonial heritage. The symbology of canoes has evolved with the craft itself to remain associated with white, wealthy, able-bodied, cis men and their confederates: national parks, Patagonia puffs, and summer camps. Today, watersports are an activity largely available only to those with the money, time, and interest, not to mention proximity to outdoor recreation, camping knowledge, and comfort in white male-dominated spaces. In fact, many people no longer think of the canoe as an Indigenous object, because its history has been rewritten and glorified by generations of settlers. The positive view of canoes as a tool that aided westward expansion and modernization is common, but often without much understanding of how this perspective can perpetuate the erasure of Indigenous peoples by denying them authority over their own cultural objects. While Canada 150 often successfully manifested an ethos of “diversity and inclusion,” the C3 project struggled to acknowledge the central paradox of the canoe: The boat was idealized as a symbol of unity, but also remains a physical reminder to many of the histories of Indigenous genocide and current inequities that burden low-income people of color, especially Indigenous peoples.

There are movements towards reclamation, but they are equally tied up in the complexities of modern-day colonialism. Take, for example, the North American Indigenous Games, or NAIG, a multi-sport and cultural event held every three years alternating

between the US and Canada. Conceived in the 1970s, the games were first held in 1990 and are now made up of nineteen sports, including canoeing. When asked about competing in the canoeing event in a 2017 article from the Hamilton Spectator, 18-year-old Inuvialuit athlete Kaidan McDonald said, “The canoe connects us traditionally to our ancestors…it means a lot, especially to me.” For some communities, NAIG has been a way of reinvigorating Native youth towards learning about their heritage, since the canoeing event has 19U, 16U, and 14U categories. To these kids and their parents, canoeing is an opportunity to foster pride, to pass on history and culture to a new generation, and to learn Native ways of relating to the land. But for other communities, there are significant barriers: canoes and gear are expensive, the image remains associated with colonialism, and the cultural genocide perpetrated by settlers has resulted in many disconnected Indigenous communities and loss of traditional knowledge.

The canoe holds the ability to connect settlers such as Bill Mason to the land in a more meaningful way than ownership, to connect immigrants such as Goh Iromoto to the people of a new country, to connect Indigenous people such as Kaidan McDonald to their past and inspire them towards the future. However, it is dangerous to use the canoe, even in such positive situations, without fully understanding and acknowledging the negative symbolism it carries. This contradiction is intimidating, but to avoid it would be to take the easy way out. +++ On day 20, my campers, co-counselors, and I began our paddle down the Fawn River, later joining the Severn River, where we rode the current to finish our thirty-seven-day trip Fort Severn, a First Nation on Hudson Bay. But this one moment, among many, sticks with me. Though the Oji-Cree kids had never been in a canoe before, their ancestors had traveled by canoe for thousands of years, and the Fawn River was one of the major waterways those ancestors traversed— especially between the 17th and 19th centuries, when the fur trade motivated travel to York Factory (now Churchill, Manitoba). My campers had ancestors from all over, but the only thing that connected them and me to those waterways was the dip of our paddles.

It was beautiful out on the water, peacefully still in the golden gray pre-storm light. I heard the laughter of the kids out on the lake, and I knew that nothing besides canoes could’ve brought them together for this moment. This fleeting, singular gathering isn’t enough: As much as Paddle-to-the-Sea, the Canada C3, Iromoto’s The Canoe, and Connected by Canoe would make me believe, the canoe won’t reconcile Canada. Canoes have their own complex and contradictory story, one that is tied to centuries of oppression and violence, one that must be told. But I’ve seen them mean something else, too. I wonder if, like the cedar trees that grow on the shore of the lake, the tool is not so far from its task: It is possible that canoes can be used to engage with their own conflicted past.

OREN KARP B’20 still smells like he’s on a 37-day canoe trip.

+++ Paddle-to-the-Sea is just the beginning. Take, for example, the photo posted all over the news of Justin Trudeau paddling a canoe up to a rally in Sudbury, Ontario, while campaigning for reelection earlier this year. Or watch the startlingly beautiful documentary The Canoe, directed by photographer, first-generation Canadian, and canoe enthusiast Goh Iromoto.

Tracking the experiences of five paddlers in Ontario, the film shows how canoes can bind people to each other and the earth. The film attempts to frame the canoe as a link between land and community, though on a certain level it does fail to fully interrogate the history that contextualizes that object. However, as a child growing up in an immigrant family, Iromoto developed a specific relationship to the canoe: It was a

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATS

06

Was Hamlet’s death Hamlet’s fault? she asked.

I’m not so sure. The play is named after him, though, Ira-Taylor replied, half-laughing.

Yeah, and I choose to buy sheer tights, black ones, at the CVS off the street where the man always smiles at me, Helen said and looked aside. And I think, what makes me depressed, you know, is, like, that I hate it when ankles show.

I don’t know what that has to do with religion.

Yeah, but what about—‘Reader, I married him,’ she said. That’s my favorite.

What?

Back then, they were standing so demurely next to the big black garbage bags, which Helen thought looked similar to the Roman Colosseum she visited on her senior year abroad. In the night, their stacked, shiny, plasticky darkness, how great arcs of light spun every time a car or truck’s headlights grew closer closer then farther gone. Just then, after another Nissan zipped by, and as if in defeated response, Ira-Taylor’s legs went to a sort of drunken contrapposto. Helen wished to grab his left knee and realign him back to another safe demureness. She licked her lips and faced the street.

By the year that the stock market crashed, Ira-Taylor had finally stopped picking at his fingers.

Helen was making a sandwich. Ira-Taylor stood up from the kitchen table and announced to her that he would be a counterfeiter—the one to straighten his back and wring his hands, dry wintery knuckles against a slow-pounding pulse. But at the moment, for all he could decide, he was a lucky man—he gave a small Buddha smile to Helen.

Will you marry me?

Helen let the ham fall on top of mayonnaise, crinkled her mouth straight, then upwards, and she said yes. Reader, she married him. +++ They had a loud wedding. Ira-Taylor’s brunette counter-clockwise curls winked against Helen’s auburn in the little picture that they hung up in the foyer. His skull pressing tight against his skin with a wide “I-just-got-married” twinkle, her half-gaped parted lips which were either modelesque or graceless.

And that Sunday, the clammy hands of Helen’s parents and cousins and second aunts thumbed the New York Times’s nuptials section, which read: “Ira-Taylor Groff and Helen Sandoval were married Aug. 10 at the groom’s Cape Cod family home.

Cantor Beverly Kang officiated. The couple met at the ‘Smorgasburg’ food festival in Los Angeles, when they were introduced at a vegan Peruvian taco stand.”

Ira-Taylor had taken great care to put a portrait of the two’s post-domestic life into his head. He thought of the computer room’s grey swivel chair, which oscillated between a low, stable height and a wobbly three feet. He pictured the primordial earthiness that would tinge his eyes, with its Whole Foods bags and reading glasses and Sawdust Festivals. His medicine mixed with hers in the downstairs cupboard. These images were fiendish, burrowed furiously into the corner of Ira-Taylor’s abdomen—but he reminded himself they were facsimiles of virtue, stability, love.

Walking to the powder-room, Ira-Taylor looked toward the cold porcelain of the toilet. Sat down on the equally cold black-and-white tile and closed his eyes. He clung to his luckiness, swallowed it. He raised his body so that his brown eyes shone in the mirror.

Gradually, Ira-Taylor’s eyes stood still, then rippling, then flickering, then free as two things that finally suggested something beyond the chilled stone of the Groff-Sandoval powder-room.

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LITERARY

Helen stepped toward the bathroom, cradling Polonius, the cat. Hearing her, Ira-Taylor dumbly stood up before Helen turned the corner.

I am scared that Polly is constipated, she spoke.

You know you’re bad at cooking.

Brussel sprouts shouldn’t do that to him.

Hi, Polly. You’re giving us trouble, aren’t you, he said. Ira-Taylor hugged the cat quietly. +++ In a keynote lecture to fleece-swaddled joggers turned Tuesday-workday-microdosers, Helen’s mother Aster Sandoval would say that there were two types of Buddha smiles. The first was a lush satisfaction plastered gummy over cheekbones. Maybe a misguided grasp at stylish purpose, but Helen interpreted these comments as praise for a secularized but monastic commitment.

Helen’s younger brother Toby gave a good one when he read to college girlfriends.

To speak of the sincere doctrine or the sincere religion, Toby Sandoval, twenty-two year-old purveyor of knowledge, recited, was to say that it had not been corrupted.

He ended this with a Buddha smile, which was a Buddha smile not because he was necessarily satisfied with Grace or Olivia or Sophia’s nods and hums. Toby had this smile because he was the True Witness of his

own consciousness. He was subject not to his phone that had e-mail, but to the temper of his own mind.

Toby possessed, controlled, and loved this smile. He held it as deftly as an oyster fork, which pricked and pushed at the fleshy wet lump of capability.

The second type of Buddha smile is born quietly in the corner of an eye, where sand and dust and other little things collect. Fifteen years ago, wrestling with his sons, Ira-Taylor’s father let a smile slip and creep into the sponginess of March suburban lawn. Jonathan Groff shakily exhaled as his right ankle was wedged between Ira-Taylor’s head and another son’s knee. You got me, Jonathan said, but what he really wanted to say was, I think I’m like the Original Man. Jonathan was forty-four then. But when he looked at the red perspiring faces of his boys, decorated with his own knobbed chin, Jonathan Buddha smiled. His right eye conferred the smile, passed it to the handsome dimple which guarded his left canine tooth. The smile hinted at a vague sense of self-preservation, of longevity and connection to those outside of Jonathan’s navel-gazing.

He rubbed his boys’ chins with a weathered thumb. In his mind, he kissed these chins.

And Helen went crazy for Ira-Taylor’s Buddha smiles—the sharp indent in the parabolic curve of his mouth, but corners cautiously lifting. She thought they were the second type. But that night, all Ira-Taylor was non-Buddha-smiling about was that Sam Conradt died, remember my literature teacher? And in the

01 NOV 2019

BESOT TEN twenty-nine-year-old man’s eyes, the living room reflected his momentary anxieties: the six mirrors, the bell-curved light fixture, the browned carpet stain that was either Polly’s shit or Polly’s shit tracked from the bottom of a boot, he couldn’t decide.

Ira-Taylor sat stiff on the sofa, one foot crossed under his thigh, and Helen let her hand fall on his shoulder. The center of her palm fit perfectly into where the bone dug out of his olive shoulder-y flesh, where his clavicle pushed through. She caught it like Mike Piazza in a 1997 Dodgers game.

Ira-Taylor, and maybe doing something unimaginable.

Like pushing his head into the dashboard or forcing his body into the steering wheel, probably just to see what would arise. Panic, anger, fear? She pictured a great, mutual act of violence. Something that would zealously compel both of them to ridiculous action.

Would he commit to her combativeness or meet it with tenderness? Ira-Taylor’s straight brow furrowing into an unfamiliar, irate arch? Thin hand pressed to her temple, like she was thinking, the woman looked at the man, and her thought experiment was already over.

+++

+++

Four years later, Helen had a dream of squashing ants.

She could go on about how this dream was symbolic of this problem, and that issue, but really she enjoyed the stern transference between wake and sleep. Her hair, still wet from a bath, stuck to the sides of her face, creating scar-like indentations here and there. A small daguerreotype-type print was taped to the wall of Helen’s side of the bed. It was of a young sort of solemnlike man sitting on a wooden, straight back chair. She looked at the photo sometimes when Ira-Taylor showered, the sounds of his feet kicking up water, shampoo bottles pealing.

Mostly, this time around, Helen felt skeptical of even the most stolid—her parents, the knob in her left pinky finger—but she was twenty-eight now, so this was expected. On her phone, Helen thumbed past notifications of look, Jennifer is finally getting married to her super-normal-sane boyfriend, Neil can put his wrist-watch to a cash register and buy an oat milk latte, Georgia Renkinoff is now a popular poet among East Coast intellectualia, Toby thinks his sister has a B12 deficiency.

The day Ira-Taylor lost his cell phone downtown it was muggy, and at first he was uncomfortably sweating, but by dusk the sheen of perspiration had cooled into a kind of silvery gloss mask over his face, like one of those Jesus Christ linen shrouds. His laptop, tucked into the crook of his arm, live-tracked his phone’s location as he walked to coffee shops and park gazebos. The glowing, green dot tread steadily across the city.

He sent Helen an email, subject line: News! iphone still lost should I convert to luddism?

An hour later: real news!!

Jogger lady found it… Will be home soon also should we go to this tmrw? Toby invited us [LINK] Toby was an entry-level movie producer, and he had helped coordinate a famous director’s film retrospective at a local university. Helen remembered Ira-Taylor called the director’s work too unemotional, too removed when they once drove past a little lightpole banner with his face blown up to an uncomfortable proportion. She read Ira-Taylor’s emails laying down on the bed, looking up intermittently at the little upside-down daguerreotype man. His face, vaguely stoic, resembled her husband’s. Helen let them look the same.

They were coming from the retrospective, which was for the thirty-five-year-old visionary prodigy director Eric Lim-Andersson. Toby chose to program Lim-Andersson’s film, which was about this man who, after going through an existential crisis, walks through the desert for forty days and nights. Eventually, the man summons up memories of his dead son, his French exile, and scenes of his wife washing her hair.

He dies alone. After the film ended, Helen’s brother introduced Lim-Andersson to the stage, where, to great applause, Lim-Andersson was given this delicate, glassy laurel-kind-of award for whatever generous contributions, monetary or metaphoric, he made to the university.

Helen and Ira-Taylor were late to Toby’s postscreening dinner at this New American cuisine place, with all of his happy screenwriter assistants’ depressed sons of directors’ bigshot nobody friends. The couple looked for a parking spot. One of those felt bobble-head puppies (a brown dachshund) continuously nodded on the car's dashboard as Ira-Taylor stopped and started, started and stopped the car.

I think I saw one on the left, Helen said, stretching to rub out her eyeshadow in the rearview mirror.

I already saw that, the guy in front of us has it.

Okay, let’s keep looking. Maybe the place has, like, a back?

Wait, this is all metered. I don’t have change, Ira-Taylor said.

Change?

And so Helen went inside a Thai dive to buy seafood pancakes, or another dish that could be easily packaged, with a ten dollar bill, while Ira-Taylor slowly drove up and down the block. He finally found a spot near what looked like what his dad would call a crack house.

At dinner, what can Ira-Taylor make of the tapioca fritter turkey tails, the crumpled eyes of men he barely knew and their wives, and Helen’s leather purse, which she tucks politely under her leg? Plates clack, and a small hour passes. A man mentions an experimental media company that Toby should freelance for, he’ll connect him; Helen scratches her nose bridge in muted reply. Toby shines and turns back to Helen and says, Remember what Mom would talk about? I think I am doing that, you know—Buddha smile!

After one couple leaves the restaurant, the rest of the guests immediately putter out the same way, +++ because maybe humans beings really are spiritless and accidental. Toby, visibly drunk, slouches in the back of The next night, as they drove down Pico, Helen fanta- Helen and Ira-Taylor’s Volkswagen. He stretches and sized about turning left to face her beloved, besotted

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY Kate Ok ILLUSTRATION Isabelle Rea

crumples his pretty shirt and just makes a sound like Hah. We should just give your brother a ride, Ira-Taylor says to Helen, and she says, OK. For some reason Ira-Taylor settles in the back seat, behind the driver’s, next to Toby. As if to choose a Sandoval sibling to re-marry, as if he prefers Toby’s fraternity to any tender, extra-emotionally-intelligent email exchange between Helen and himself.

Helen drives. Toby sleeps.

Exiting from the freeway, toward Toby’s house, they pass by this encampment by the river. Helen always looks at this one part, where someone had collected and displayed an enormous horde of tchotchkes on the top of a wall. The number almost scares her. Ceramic praying angel children, brassy Buddhas, miniature Michelin men, large wooden crucifixes, bakelite roller-skate clocks, copper turtle ashtrays—they glow under the fluorescent street lamp, enveloped in a sort of artificial yellow-green-ness, like they are all projections of someone’s deepest material desires. The car pauses next to the great wall of tchotchkes. It’s a miracle that the city hasn’t torn it down—Helen likes to think that they purposely ignored it, their cold hearts touched by the wall’s tangible humanity.

Is it crazy that people just keep these things, forever? Ira-Taylor suddenly asks, looking out the window. He’s talking about the trinkets. That we hold on to them until someone calls us crazy?

Ira-Taylor’s face is relaxed, absent, disciplined in idleness. And he looks at Helen through the rear view mirror, at how the moonlight washes out her face.

She doesn’t reply, but she notices the hard pressure of Ira-Taylor’s knees digging through the back of her carseat. Helen doesn’t know whether she should move the seat forward or not, and she doesn’t want to ask, so she just keeps her hands in her lap, neutrally folded.

She then pretends to concernedly look at her sleeping brother Toby before looking out to the river once more, with its deeply ornamented wall of cartoon figurines and austere crosses. And Helen invents a little quiet god in her head for all of them to mutually revere, to watch, and, in return, she lets the god watch over them all.

LITERARY

14

l Aspirationa recycling

BRUNT O F

THE BLAD E

For decades, barges of recyclables slowly dragged across the Pacific, acting as overrun vessels of the United States’ environmental hope. This system of exporting the national problem of plastic waste to China was effective and cheap, and kept the issue of overrun landfills out of the public eye. In this exchange, the same shipping containers used to transport Chinese wares across the world were returned with heavy bales of recyclable goods, a polite term for Western trash. But over the past two years, this method of handling—and not handling—the consequences of plastic overconsumption has proven ineffective, as China has taken a significant stand against the influx of waste from the Global North.

Nearly two years after China’s formal institution of its “National Sword” policy, recycling centers across the country and globe are still struggling to recover from what can be seen as an industry collapse. The policy bans Chinese importation of all recycled materials that do not meet a stringent 99.5 percent purity standard, closing off a major market for plastic from the Global North. Ever since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it has been the largest importer of scrap to remake into manufacturable goods. But the country’s recent economic growth has decreased its reliance on cheap raw materials, and China has developed to become an exporter of goods (and waste) instead of a market to be exported to. With an average annual GDP growth of 9.39 percent, China has become the second largest economy in the world, and now can afford to stop imports of contaminated plastics in the name of development.

At its core, recycling is a practice of waste exportation by the rich. And as the list of recipients willing to take on that waste decreases, foreign nations—chiefly of the Global North—are forced to rethink where the contents of blue bins should go. +++ Prior to the development of the modern recycling industry during the 1970s, reuse centers acted as the dominant spaces of waste reduction, employing and promoting the practice of reuse. This unglamorous exchange was centered around the repairing of material goods like bikes, toys, and household appliances, allowing experts to focus on fixing objects that already existed instead of creating new ones. In theory, reuse has far more effective long-term consequences than recycling, as current technology requires more energy to melt down and refigure previously constructed plastic items than it does to create something new. But with the increasing influx of disposable goods and growing support for mainstream environmentalism post-1970 Earth Day, community centers and repair shops waned in popularity, and recycling rose as a seemingly viable solution to the consumerist mentality.

As a concept and catchphrase, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” was born out of the environmentalist surge that followed the first Earth Day, a mass movement of support inspired by the teach-ins held to educate American citizens about the Vietnam War. When Congress passed the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, this language was codified and the prospect of environmental solutions existing “out of sight, out of mind” through recycling was born.

Recycling centers were built across the United States, promoting a positive, environmentalist image despite often being deeply unequal sites of intense manual labor that disproportionately employed people of

15

NEWS

color, cementing the foundation of recycling as an imposition of waste by the rich. This new mode of waste production and management created an invisible market for economic exploitation by wealthy communities, a system that was later implemented on the international scale. Local plants were unable to sort and repurpose the 300 million annual tons of recyclables sent in by the masses, and a new market became crucial for the success of the nascent recycling industry. The simultaneous rapid industrialization of countries like China required mass importation of cheap raw materials like paper and plastic starting in the 1980s, and created the recycling industry as it exists today. This exportation of waste claimed to give new life to old objects, but primarily served to satiate the social/moral construct of American civic responsibility to environmental causes.

Recycling as a movement relies on the individual not only as a civilian but also as a consumer, offering a solution to environmental crises without calling for a radical reduction of waste or lifestyle alteration.

Corporations and ad campaigns that target uppermiddle class, white environmentalists perpetuate the idea of individual responsibility over collective action, and never point to blame to the manufacturers and industries that caused (and have the capacity to solve) climate change. This absence of collective responsibility only worsens environmental inequality, as it allows those with wealth and power to remove themselves from the harsh realities of sludge and grey plastic-polluted water that those living and working near recycling centers face.

Instead, many Americans choose to soothe their guilty consciences by becoming aspirational recyclers: tossing all items into the blue bin with the distant hope that they can and will be transformed into something new and repurposed by someone else.

This removal of the individual from the act of repurposing does not mitigate the harmful effects of wasteful consumer habits, as it creates an invisible economy for recyclables that devolved into an imposition of waste by the Global North onto the Global South. In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Thomas Pringle, a PhD candidate in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University stated, “Recycling habits are a stage in the process of consuming disposable goods produced by corporations. Your relationship to the product is as a consumer and not a producer; the use of the product is your own but the design of the product is not.” In other words, the system founded on excessive consumption and waste still exists, despite the minor actions taken by individual people. Recycling does not address the issue of excessive production either, as approximately 300 million tons of virgin (unrecycled) plastic is produced every year, and that number is only growing. And now, with the National Sword policy, no one is pretending to want it anymore. +++ For years, the Global North has exported contaminated recyclables as a quick means of diverting waste from local landfills. Even before the implementation of National Sword, only nine percent of all plastic materials were actually recycled. This is largely due to the need for consumer convenience, as single-stream recycling—the combination of all recyclable materials into one disposal bin—became ubiquitous, spreading the contamination of recyclables in this process. This

in a post–

Natio na Swo rd w l orld

combination of liquid-stained bottles, poorly sorted plastic bags, and brightly colored paper made the physical processing of recycling difficult for China to properly conduct. Often, those who worked in recycling plants suffered the brutal consequences of this strenuous and often fruitless task. As Chinese industrialization became less reliant on cheap raw materials, it became nonsensical for the country to remain a dumping ground for other countries, both from an economic and power standpoint. Shortly before National Sword was put in place, a film entitled Plastic China depicted the terrible conditions of those living among the muck, painting the country as a desolate wasteland of Western production. This image, before being quickly censored by the Chinese government, became part of the narrative of the recycling industry, and one that the country intended to separate itself from with the implementation of stricter importation standards.

In the wake of National Sword, towns and cities across the world have struggled to find new markets to help maintain old consumption habits, choosing to address the symptoms instead of treating the source.

Prior to the ban, the United States and the European Union shipped 70 and 95 percent, respectively, of plastics collected for recycling to China. In 2018, the Australian recycling industry struggled to find a permanent solution for the 1.3 million tons of recyclable waste that it previously would have sent to China.

With Chinese imports plummeting by 99 percent, this global waste has made its way to landfills and incinerators, sometimes venturing all the way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other debris collections scattered among the five ocean gyres.

In response to China’s new policy, the United States and other Northern countries attempted to maintain their previous exportation strategy, seeking markets in countries with no regulatory procedures for environmentally conscious recycling processing.

Many countries turned toward Southeast Asian countries in hopes that their initiatives for industrialization would provide a market for Western plastic. Recyclable exports from the United States to Thailand jumped nearly 7,000 percent in the year following the ban.

Soon after this transfer, Vietnam and Malaysia began enforcing policies similar to China’s in an attempt to limit the inundation of waste and issues with contamination. Both the National Sword policy and the response by the Global North represent a shift not in imperialistic recycling practices but in the places and people on whom they are being imposed.

Across the United States, states and cities have established systems of handling this backlogging of recycled materials without any apparent success.

Cities like New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon have sought alternate markets and expanding local recycling operations, sometimes making smallscale changes to their recycling collection processes.

Small towns and rural recycling operations have been hit the hardest economically by the disappearance of this market for recyclables, as many lack the resources to process the increased amount of waste.

The recycling programs in areas like Douglas County, Oregon, and Hancock, Maine, were permanently shut down in early 2019, while other cities like Sacramento, California suspended collection of plastic numbers three through seven (low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, BPA, polycarbonate and LEXAN). Now everything from baby bottles to shrink wrap to takeout containers to potato chip bags must go

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in the trash.

In some ways, China’s importation ban exposed structural flaws in the recycling system, underscoring the issue of aspirational recycling habits built on continued production of disposable goods and inactive approaches to rampant consumerism. +++

enforced by a fine. For now, local pilot programs which seek to transform single-stream recycling into dualstream to reduce the contamination of paper, material restrictions such as plastic bag charges, and independent recovery of paint and mattresses by private corporations have all proven to be effective methods of diverting landfill waste. Klug describes California as being in a period of transition, since the state “can no longer export waste and expect it to be a viable path.”

But beyond the limitation of exported waste, the entire structure of disposable consumerism must be challenged in order to affect meaningful change.

While moving towards a more sustainable mode of production is a step in the right direction, the simplest and most effective solution is an overall reduction of goods produced. The culture of consumption is not only an environmental issue but one deeply rooted in inequality, and is founded on one’s ability to impose waste on another. Perhaps the solution is to collectively reduce the resources we consume and extract, or to reopen repair shops and to reinvest in local communities. Maybe it is a combination of all of the above.

However we move forward, we must recognize that our waste goes somewhere and affects someone, and with this knowledge, aspire to be better than just recyclers.

This slew of ineffective long-term solutions suggests the possibility that recycling as we know it may not be the remedy to waste, and that perhaps it is time to explore other options. As Pringle told the Independent, “From an environmental perspective, the problem is economic growth propelled by corporations producing disposable goods for profit based on the extraction of natural resources.” The fundamental issue with recycling as a solution to waste diversion is that it continues the cycle of plastic production, without challenging daily consumption habits. Recognizing that recycling in its current form cannot effectively divert waste from landfills, officials recommend measures that reduce consumerism and place the responsibility back on producers.

California, a state that exported most recyclable plastic prior to the 2018 ban, has turned to practical measures that focus less on overhauling the entire capi- ANABELLE JOHNSTON B‘23 aspires to end rampant talist structure and more on immediate waste diver- consumerism. And also acquire a pet cat. sion. Local jurisdiction determines local best practices, under the regulation of CalRecycle, a government agency that oversees the state’s waste management programs. CalRecycle Public Information Officer Lance Klug told the Independent that the statewide goal is meet the landfill diversion standards set before 2018, and to increase the amount of waste diverted over time. The department itself is working towards a more holistic approach moving forward, supporting policy that “moves California away from a single-use disposable society to one that focuses on the need for product reuse and extended producer responsibility.”

That is, broadly taking action that shifts the focus from recycling to reuse and reduction, and taking the responsibility out of the hands of the well-intentioned citizen-consumers and placing it back on the manufacturers. Following this model, it will be the producers’ responsibility to limit production of single-use goods and ensure that plastics are being properly recycled,

BY Anabelle Johnston ILLUSTRATION Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN Kathryn Li

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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GOD IN THE DATASET Opening the black box of machine learning It is said that before the flood, Noah had to identify “convolute” an image until it can be recognized. While every living creature before taking them on board his these convoluted images are often blackboxed, it’s a arc. Eons later, somewhere in Palo Alto, researchers fruitful exercise to observe what an image looks like The black box is a metaphor for a device whose inner were picking up where the bible left off, organizing the after convolution. Can you identify which parts of the workings are illegible. Given an input, a black box “entire world of objects” in a neat taxonomy. Stanford image corresponds to what filter? provides only an output without any insight of how it Professor Fei-Fei Li built the database ImageNet in arrived there. This can happen in as small of a scale as 2009 by sorting 14 million images into 20,000 catea calculator, when someone inputs “1+1” and receives gories. Her hope was that the sheer quantity of images “2,” or a machine learning network, when someone and classifications, inputs and outputs, would allow a inputs their face and the algorithm classifies them as computer to infer connections between the two, idena “convict.” In this way, describing a system as a black tifying entirely new pictures. Due to its breadth, the box is an admission of surrender. Sometimes knowl- dataset became a sort of canon for machine learning edge is surrendered for a practical reason: Why would I engineers, who built programs just like ImageNet need to see thousands of lines of code to order an Uber? Roulette that could identify objects in images with Sometimes it is for a legal reason: Uber doesn’t want 97.3 percent accuracy. But just as Noah left behind the Lyft to steal their code. However, what happens when unicorn in his grand taxonomy, a significant subset of what has been blackboxed works against the interest of ImageNet’s categories had to be taken out to achieve its the user? How can what has been hidden be revealed? accuracy: people.

One day last September, dozens of selfies framed In their initial classifications, Li’s researchers with a green border and a small line of typifications differentiated between cops and convicts just as they flooded my Instagram feed. Captions ranged from did apples and oranges. The only problem, of course, the innocuous (actor, drawer, goofball) to the far less was that social categories couldn’t be essentialized innocuous (first offender, drug dealer, rape suspect). into distinct physical features. A researcher’s assumpDeliberately provocative, Trevor Paglen developed tion that a face is that of a drug dealer comes more from ImageNet Roulette “to help us see into the ways that social biases than any visual characteristics. Since humans are classified in machine learning systems.” these biases are then written into any image recogniAn input image of a llama.

Inputting a selfie or photo into Paglen’s app led to an tion system that uses ImageNet as a reference, many output of textual labels that, according to the algorithm, engineers were hesitant to train their networks on this reflected the visual. How these systems worked—how dataset. Trevor Paglen built ImageNet Roulette to illuRoulette classified myself as “divorced man”—was minate a dataset he saw as problematic, to show how unclear. But understanding wasn’t requisite for having inequalities can be reproduced in data that purports to a response. True to the name Roulette, the system's be objective. While this subset has since been removed outputs were unexpected—finding the most absurd from ImageNet, there still remains the problem of the became a game. To paraphrase Will Ferrell, “no one black box—how a machine learning network is inherknows what it means, but it’s provocative.” ently non-illuminable.

Machine learning makes the metaphor of the black box much harder to visualize by granting a device the ability to “learn.” In many cases, a black box has no need to change—one plus one will always equal two.

Machine learning, however, seeks to solve problems that don’t have concrete answers. When the computer guesses the wrong answer, it updates its architecture until reaching a threshold of certainty. If calibrated successfully, a machine learning system can take an input it has never encountered before and form an accurate output. However, even after calibration, the system continues to adjust its architecture to the user, meaning the same input can yield two distinct outputs over time. This is revelatory, but deeply disorienting.

Unlike calculators, these black boxes can no longer be delineated by the edges of its knowledge; they mutate 9 of 64 filters after five “hidden” layers of convolution. with every input.

If I asked you how to recognize a llama, you might bring up its fluffy fur and silly body. Now, ask a computer to recognize a llama, and it becomes a bit Perhaps the yellow dot in the top middle filter more difficult. Instead of looking for fur, computer corresponds to the llama’s mouth? There’s no wrong An example of an ImageNet Roulette output. often use Convolutional Neural Networks to recog- answer here—in fact, there’s no right answer. After so nize images by looking for patterns between pixel many hundreds of thousands of tiny acts of multiplivalues after applying a batch of filters. These patterns cation, it’s impossible to connect a convoluted image are illegible to the human eye and impossible to calcu- to its source. The legibility of these filters is of no late by hand. Even the language behind Convolutional practical concern; all that matters is that a machine Neural Networks reflects the algorithm’s inherent learning network can, within a certain threshold of unknowability: the network’s “hidden layers” accuracy, use them to identify a llama. This time, there There will be no edges, but curves.

-Tracy K. Smith

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SCIENCE + TECH

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BY Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Christie Zhong

are no stakes—we definitively know what is and isn’t a llama and can choose to ignore the network if it gets it wrong. However, what happens when a computer is asked a question for which we don’t have an answer?

How could we follow its reasoning? It’s not enough to be transparent; strip away the face of the black box and there is nothing.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey stars both a literal and metaphorical black box, the soft spoken Artificial Intelligence HAL, famous for having a “perfect operational record.” The axiom of his absolute accuracy engenders a crisis of faith as the computer commands his astronauts to act against their own well-being.

HAL provides much more of a prescient model of the threat posed by machine learning than Hollywood’s more common destructive robots, as essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn observes, “While Elon Musk and Bill Gates maunder on about AI nightmare scenarios—self-replication, the singularity—the smartest critics recognize that the immediate threat these machines pose is not existential but epistemological.” She looks to the 2017 defeat of a championship Go player by an artificial intelligence, in what is described as “not a human move,” as proof the Enlightenment has reached its twilight. She writes, “Deep learning has revealed a truth that we’ve long tried to outrun: our human minds cannot fathom the full complexity of our world...If machines understand reality better than we can, what can we do but submit to their mysterious wisdom?”

This very logic is pitted against HAL’s astronauts upon disobeying it—how can a human know better than all-knowing computer? Unable to glimpse into Hal’s black box, the astronauts can only decide on faith alone. However, one needn’t look to science fiction to watch this play out; every decision made by a machine learning algorithm mandates an act of submission. A self-driving car wants to turn left, so its passengers acquiesce with faith that the car won’t kill them. A criminal justice deep learning system thinks a convict is more likely of recidivism, so a judge defers the length of their sentence to a computer. Here, what has been blackboxed necessitates a level of trust that can only be described as theological: We don’t concretely know that the computer knows any better than us, and we certainly can’t find any answers in its algorithms, but we still submit to its authority. O’Gieblyn cites the prophet Job, demanding an explanation for God’s cruelty only to realize God contains “Things too

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

wonderful for me,” as analogous to making sense of fun. We still can’t see it, but we know what it does. By the black box. Again, Kubrick’s hero, upon looking into approaching machine learning as an artist, Paglen the black monolith: “My God, it’s full of stars.” provides a model for how outsiders can reappropriate technology, to interrogate it and hold it accountable. +++ These outsiders, after all, have the greatest stake in the risks concealed within the black box.

So, what happens next? O’Gieblyn turns to There already exists technology to generate artiDostoevsky, who writes in the The Brothers Karamazov cles indistinguishable from actual news, to create of a Grand Inquisitor “creat(ing) a system of childlike video footage of people saying things they never did. rituals—confession, indulgences—by which the laity The response from the designers of this technology has can ascertain their salvation ... And they will be glad to been to keep it away from the general public such that it believe our answer… for it will save them from the great doesn’t get in the wrong hands, but how will this public anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in identify it when it does? Certainly, there are people making a free decision for themselves.” In her timeline, who unequivocally shouldn’t have such technology, the authority of God, or a computer algorithm, does who would use it to harm others, but keeping somenot arrive as an oppressor; we invite a system of faith thing private doesn’t preclude them from reaching into our lives as antidote to our great anxiety. Certainly, it. Often times, tech companies will sell directly to it comes at a loss of agency, so such a system demands these entities, such as in 2014 when Palantir develits subjects trust it will work in their interest. But what oped a digital profiling algorithm for Immigrations happens when the algorithm is oppressive? There’s a and Customs Enforcement. The black ball holds distinction, certainly, between a god that writes my technology accountable by inserting its effects in Discover Weekly on Spotify and a god that assigns the popular discourse. This approach comes with prison sentences. How, in those cases, do we hold risks, sure, but with education arises the possibility accountable what we can barely understand? of subversion. Indeed, if peeling away the face of the ImageNet Roulette was radically successful in black box will not be possible going forward, we can its goal, but perhaps not in the way Paglen intended. find agency through interrogating its edges.

Suppose O’Gieblyn is right, that the public will be unable to comprehend the deity-like black box without ANDY RICKERT B’21 : person, individual, someone, the help of a Grand Inquisitor. What Paglen’s project somebody, somebody mortal, soul > simpleton, simdid so masterfully was make interacting with this box ple > fool, sap, saphead, muggins, tomfool > flibbertia game. He invited users to participate in the network, gibbet, foolish man. to input their faces and be outraged at the output. The green bordered images were perfect for Instagram virality, spreading exponentially across vectors of social media. Again, understanding wasn’t requisite for having a response.

As more and more decisions are sequestered into the black box, I introduce an alternative model of knowledge: the black ball. The black ball encourages users to play with it, to experiment with different inputs and find what they yield. Both metaphors assume that whatever it contains will be incomprehensible; this is not a solution, but a way to work around the unknowable. Whereas much of what is blackboxed only gets discussed in exclusive circles (up until Paglen’s piece, imageNET was only known by data engineers and academics), the black ball would make this technology accessible—it would make experimenting with it

SCIENCE + TECH

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THE LIST Fri 11.1 RI Comic C Dunkin’ D on onu t s Pav il La Salle S q. - 12AM lion, 1 o n wa r d s The most fa m Con are Eli ous people at this jah Wood a nd the kid from Stran g commercia er Things who does F io ls at this Con now. The hottest pe s ople are Luna L ovegood (y in the flesh es ) can’t tell if and Dave Bautista (I , I think he’s or bc h e co hot bc he’s u My advice: ld obliterate my bod hot y). s just catch kip the $85 photo op William Sh and atn having con tinential b er while he’s re Hilton acro ss the stre ak fast at the et.

Mon 11.4 Academy Playe rs of RI Prese Mamma Mia n James And Glo t ria Maron Cultural Arts Center (180 B uttonhole Dr.) - 7PM This show, we pr edict, will have ev thing: MILFs, G reek archipelag eryos, dancing peasants, span ak Dance the nigh opita from Trader Joe’s. t away to the A BBA hits that Bernie San ders says he pl ay his wedding. In his words, “I lik ed at e Perhaps the Sw edish welfare st ABBA.” at to thank for the disco hits that e is raised a generation.

Sat 11.2 s Campaign: An RI Poor People’ rge Wiley Geo Introduction - ve, Pawtucket, RI A st Ea Center, 32 - 2-3:45PM nd en to a Rhode Isla If you’ve never be ign event or are mpa Poor People’s Ca national movee th h it w unfamiliar introduction to it t ea gr n ment, this a be a space to lear all! The event will for racial and ign about the campa at began in 1968 th e ic st economic ju itate and organize ag to s ue of and contin be in the company today. You’ll also C and the George PP d leaders of the RI ing questions an br so , er Wiley Cent good vibes!

off’s Tues 11.5 ne Tuesday - Ge 1 0 O Two-For- e Sandwiches (1 M iv t 0 1 la r M P S up e t.) - 10A S in a M h S ou t f or ndwiches he a s o w T l! a t What a de f one. Way back in very e o e is h ic t r r p e the sed to off anged. The u ’s ff o e G h day, ve c m t times ha week. Bu classic moved fro th e ou Providenc t Street down to S for-one n Benevole ow only offers two h. t n Main and esday of each mon er m u r the first T some of Geoff’s fo ur o To reclaim g by, grab two of y ay to w glory, swin ich, and give one a ridge. b w ‘ favorite on the pedestrian r e a strang

Sun 11.3 Hallowee n Garden C Touch-a-Truck ity Cente rRd, Crans ton, RI - 9 100 Midway AM-12PM Do you like to no one wou uching big trucks?

Well, ld call you o This event is hosted b ut for it here. y the Rota of Cransto ry n.

Wikipedia After reading the en Club page on Ro tire ta don’t know what they ry Clubs, I still are and wh we’re supp o e Word is, th sed to hate them or n ther ough, that ot. their cornh tournamen o ts president’ are a riot… and the le s name is R ir on Butterfi eld.

Weds 11.6 Richard W o John Hope lff Lecture House, 11 Settlement H PVD - 6-9 iggins Ave, :30PM Tbh, I’m no t hear white paying $30 to Marxist Ric Wolff when hard I to hear wh could pay $30 it Princess. B e Marxist King u he’s your th t, you know, if ing, don’t le stop you. I’ t me ll link to his just drop the 20 House inte 18 Chapo Trap rv Baby and “ iew about Boss Failmoms,” unemploye a ka d 50s…...No, women in their re me stop yo ally, don’t let u…… XD

Thurs 11.7 A Christmas Carol - Trinity Rep - 7:30PM on most weeknights and at noon and 6PM on weekends ‘til Christmas This publication has likely highlighted the life and times of Buddy Cianci enough already, so this week we’re redirecting media attention away from The Prince of Providence and towards Trinity Rep’s A Christmas Carol. Says a Barring ton local and Indy staffer who auditioned for the show as a child in the back room of a Cardi’s, this is a Rhode Island tradition.