The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 10

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 10

Vol.29

a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Companions Dominique Pariso & Tristan Rodman

Volume 31 No. 10

03 The President Will See You Now Wilson Cusack 06 Campus On Fire Francis Torres METRO 05 Cry Me A Pebble Ben Berke ARTS 15 Boxed Lunch Alec Mapes-Frances, Eli NeumanHammond & Athena Washburn FEATURES 04 Qualify This Henry Staley

From the editors: This marks our last issue.

Tomorrow, the Indy goes into hibernation, but it does so in the middle of many thaws.

At the Paris talks, world leaders might finally overcome obstructions to concrete action.

On campuses and across the United States, the fight against structural racism intensifies.

At our own newspaper, the cocoon in which we grew too comfortable has cracked open.

The light is brighter in the parched air.

Bring on the thaws.

SC / KS / MS

11 In Transitive Julia Tompkins TECH 09 1nf0rmat10n Stat10n Dash Elhauge & Charlie Windolf OCCULT 07 In The Walls Lance Gloss METABOLICS 14 Duck Season Jonah Max LITERARY 17 PS, I ______ You Gabrielle Hick EPHEMETAGS 13 Goodbye, Maude India Ennenga X 18 Muscle Memory Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan & Pierie Korostoff P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Managing Editors Sebastian Clark Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee News Wilson Cusack Dominique Pariso Francis Torres Metro Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Annie Clark Jonah Max Athena Washburn Features Piper French Yousef Hilmy Henry Staley Science Camera Ford Tech Dash Elhauge

Interviews Madeleine Matsui Occult Lance Gloss Literary Gabrielle Hick Metabolics Eli NeumanHammond Ephemera Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Jay Mamana Cover Jade Donaldson Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Polina Godz Alexa Terfloth

theindy.org

Staff Writers Jane Argodale Ben Berke Liz Cory Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Julia Tompkins Erin West Staff Illustrators Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Juan Tang Hon Copy Miles Taylor Web Charlie Windolf Business Kaya Hill Senior Editors Tristan Rodman Rick SalamĂŠ MVP Henry Staley

@theindy_tweets

by Dominique Pariso & Tristan Rodman

Dogs Good Almost every week, there is a new Dog Study. These reports, compiled by some of the finest researchers in the world, tell us what good our dogs do. Their findings are backed up by the scientific method, and corroborated by anybody who has spent like fifteen minutes in a room with a golden retriever puppy. Dogs are good and we keep finding it out.

This week, like most weeks, there was a new Dog Study.

In it, researchers from Dartmouth and the University of Oklahoma found that having a dog can reduce anxiety in children. In particular, having a pet dog makes a significant difference in feelings of separation anxiety: children with dogs fear being left home alone far less. This makes sense, especially if you get left home alone with a dog. Studies like this often veer towards correlation problems, what might colloquially be termed a chicken/egg scenario. Do less anxious children have pet dogs? Or do pet dogs make children less anxious? “It may be that less anxious children have pet dogs or pet dogs make children less anxious,” the study concludes.

Last week, like most weeks, there was also a new Dog Study. In it, University of Nevada, Las Vegas anthropologist Peter Gray found that women view men with dogs as more attractive mates. In particular, having a pet dog signals capacity for caregiving more than having a pet cat. Studies like this often fall into the trap of confirmation bias, what might be colloquially be termed a no-shit-Sherlock scenario.

Do women find men with dogs more attractive because they can take care of something? Or do women find men with dogs more attractive because it’s a rather accepted societal norm that dog ownership is evidence of some kind of caregiving quality? “I think this is one of those things where the intuition has long been out there,” said Gray, “and then it’s like science is catching up with the intuitions.”

Three weeks ago, right before researchers nationwide took an apparent weeklong break from dog-related inquiry, there was yet another new Dog Study. In it, epidemiology researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden found that children who grow up with dogs are less likely to develop asthma. In particular, growing up on a farm is a significant factor when it comes to decreasing asthma risk. Studies like this often fall into the trap of— I give up. Can’t make fun of the Dog Studies anymore.

Dogs are good. Somebody get me a dog.

Woof. –TR

Dec 4, 2015

For Sale: Ghost Town Fully Furnished One closed bar, an unoccupied house, several trailers, spacious hardwood floors, and a lot of natural light. The bar may not suit your needs but it could definitely double as an office or even a guest room. Sale price now is $250,000, dropped down from the original starting price of $399,000. Just a short 2.5 hour commute from Rapid City. It’s a bit of a fixer-upper, sure, but there’s an opportunity here to really make it your own.

Swett, South Dakota is on the market. It is “set in the beautiful prairie and near popular pheasant hunting locations” as its MLS.com listing brags. And as they say in the real estate biz it’s all about location, location, lo-ca-tion. Is it haunted?

Probably. But we here at the Indy encourage potential buyers to just think about the possibilities. You could be King Sovereign, Ruler of all 6.16 acres that you survey! Or at the very least, be your own mayor.

Lance Benson, the previous owner, really loved the place but it’s a bit too spacious for him at this stage in his life. He purchased it in 1998, and then his ex-wife got it in the divorce, but he regained ownership in 2012. But now the bank owns it.

A real shame.

Swett has a lot of rich history as well—it was established in 1931 by a farmer (who, you guessed it, named the town after himself ). This was back when the town was large enough to support a post office and grocery store.

Plus, there’s been some light renovations done already. The bank has cleared out some of the more decrepit mobile homes and erected a new town sign.

And as for this whole ridiculous ghost business, don’t worry: they are nothing but friendly.

Interested buyers can contact real estate agent Stacey Montgomery at Keller Williams Realty Black Hills. Serious buyers only, please. –DP

NEWS

02

The United States Responds to the Refugee Crisis

by Wilson Cusack

The terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 brought new urgency to the discussion of how the United States should respond to the Middle Eastern refugee crisis. More than anything, the attacks have provided fodder for those who are afraid that accepting refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq will lead to similar terror attacks in the US. Many of the GOP presidential candidates have been particularly vocal opponents of taking in refugees, and have condemned President Obama’s plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year.

In an interview with Fox News, Ted Cruz said, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America—it is nothing less than lunacy.” Later, he added that “Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them.” He also said in the interview that Muslim refugees should be sent to “majority-Muslim countries.” Ben Carson sent letters to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, encouraging them to pass legislation “that terminates all public funding for any ongoing federal programs that seek to resettle refugees and/or migrants from Syria into the United States.” In a November 14 statement on his website, Mike Huckabee said that the US should “close our borders instead of Guantanamo.” Donald Trump said he would not only ban Syrian refugees from coming to America but would deport the ones that are already here. He suggested that the US could build them “a big beautiful safe zone” in Syria where they could live.

The fear is not limited to GOP candidates, or even to Republicans. Though a CBS News Poll conducted after the Paris attacks showed that 68% of Republicans opposed letting Syrian refugees into the United States—compared to 36% of Democrats—77% of Democrats still said they “think it is necessary for Syrian refugees who want to come to the United States to go through a stricter security clearance process than they do now.”

Fear of terrorist attacks by Syrian refugees is misplaced, especially if that fear is fueled by the recent attacks in Paris.

Investigators are still sorting out exactly where all nine of the attackers came from, but at most two of them came to Europe posing as refugees—the rest were European nationals. This means that they could have come to the US with the same (lack of ) scrutiny as every other European national, and it also suggests that barring Syrian refugees from entering the country would do nothing to prevent such an attack from happening in the US. The conditions under which refugees may enter the US are also drastically different from those in Europe.

Several European countries are daily receiving hundreds of refugees, which makes screening nearly impossible. The US screens refugees from a distance in a process that, contrary to popular perception, is already highly intensive and can take up to two years to complete. Jacobin magazine describes the screening process of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which refers refugees to the US: “…each applicant goes through background checks, followed by face-to-face interviews with trained interrogators from agencies such as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. They check applicants’ testimonies against one another for inconsistencies, and they collect detailed biographical and biometric data.”

Senator Marco Rubio has suggested that these background checks are not trustworthy due to a lack of data: “The problem is we can’t background check them. You can’t pick up the phone and call Syria.” But he is overstating the problem: a senior State Department official recently described Syria as having a “very, very heavily documented population.”

03

NEWS

The UNHCR accepts less than one percent of the world’s refugee population and the US to date has accepted only 2,200 of the 22,457 refugees that the UNHCR has referred.

Because the US has asked the UNHCR to prioritize the most vulnerable refugees, only two percent are single men of military-service age. About half of those the US has accepted are children; the rest are mothers, the elderly, and people who have been tortured or who need special medical assistance.

Russell Berman wrote in an article for The Atlantic: “In the 14 years since September 11, 2001, the United States has resettled 784,000 refugees from around the world...And within that population, three people have been arrested for activities related to terrorism. None of them were close to executing an attack inside the US, and two of the men were caught trying to leave the country to join terrorist groups overseas.” +++ The number of refugees admitted to the US thus far has been shockingly low: 200 between 2011 and 2014, 2,200 to date.

But the proposed numbers—10,000 under the current White House plan and 65,000 as suggested by Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley—also fall short compared to other countries and to prior policy in the US. In comparison to other Western countries, 10,000 refugees is a low quota. Germany has pledged to spend $6.6 billion to cope with the 800,000 refugees expected to arrive over the next year and after the November 13 attack, French President Francois Hollande reaffirmed the country’s commitment to take in 30,000 refugees over the next two years. Both of these countries are much smaller than the US in terms of geography, economy, and population. And that is to say nothing of Syria’s neighbors: there are an estimated 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 1.1 million in Lebanon, and 1.4 million in Jordan.

Moreover, the US’ projected intake falls short of previous responses to refugee crises. The US accepted over 200,000 refugees per year during the early 1980s, the largest percentage of which came from Vietnam. We have accepted tens of thousands of refugees from Cuba, Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda.

Cruz’s quote suggests that he still wants America to be a welcoming destination—but only for Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghani Christians. Many other GOP candidates have also suggested we should prioritize helping persecuted Christians.

It is true that Christians have been specifically targeted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq and have been subjected to brutal crimes: Mosul, Iraq was home to one of the largest Christian communities in the world before ISIS invaded and either murdered or expelled them all, and there have been videos posted on Facebook of ISIS beheading groups of Christians.

But it is also true that homosexuals have been targeted, having been thrown off roofs, hung, or, in a video similar to the execution of the Christians, lined up and shot. Yet Cruz and his constituents have asked for no special treatment of homosexual refugees. And regardless of this double standard, a conversation about who has it worse is inappropriate when the vast majority of the 14 million Syrian refugees are the Muslims whom so many want to turn away.

Whether it is the rejection of refugees, drone warfare, or unhindered data collection on US citizens, actions taken to quash the threat of terror always tiptoe around the question: just what is the US willing to sacrifice in the name of security?

The resistance to taking in refugees and the xenophobia that has pervaded debates in this election cycle beg the question of whether the imagined vision of the US as a place of refuge, welcoming the “tired, huddled masses” is just that: imaginary.

On November 18, Obama tweeted “Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values. That's not who we are. And it's not what we're going to do.”

WILSON CUSACK B’16 is trying to figure it out.

+++ In his weekly address this Thanksgiving week, President Obama got at another aspect of the debate, which is that our resistance to taking in those who are being persecuted and forced to leave their homes runs contrary to both the ideas that created America and to the best of what America imagines itself to be today. Obama compared the refugees to pilgrims on the Mayflower, who themselves were fleeing “persecution and violence in their native land.” In an interview just last year, Ted Cruz showed that he, at least, still imagines the US to be such a haven: “We have welcomed refugees—the tired, huddled masses—for centuries. That’s been the history of the United States. We should continue to do so. We have to continue to be vigilant to make sure those coming are not affiliated with terrorists, but we can do that.”

The College Hill Independent

CLASH OF INTIMATIONS (OR SYMBOLIZATIONS) Bush, Obama, Hollande, and a War of Words Presidents don’t just authorize wars—they author them.

This became especially clear during the second Bush administration, a tenure that will be remembered as much for its hastily conceived wars as for its hastily conceived and broadly embarrassing rhetoric. Despite the fact that, in retrospect, many regard his policies and speeches as rash and ill considered, Bush was at least mindful of the potential backlash his language might bring upon Muslim American communities, a consequence that remains relevant to the wars and conversations we wage today. He told the country that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were “against evil, not against Islam” and that those sponsoring this “evil” had “violate[d] the fundamental tenants of the Islamic faith,” a religion, he reminded Americans, “based upon peace and faith and compassion.”

But, of course, comments like these have not remained in our national memory as persistently as Bushisms like the “Axis of Evil” speech, the “Mission Accomplished” banner or statements like “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” We are more likely to reflect on the administration’s consistently dramatic tone, one that promoted an insulated and antagonistic worldview. In the landmark 2004 New York Times expose of the administration’s public relations mission, journalist Ron Suskind recounted how an “unnamed Administration official” told him “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” According to this official, an administration, especially a war time administration, must imagine a new reality for the public to live and think under.

Memories of the more histrionic tenets of Bush’s speeches remain stronger than those of his mindful qualifiers, like those where he specifies terrorists as the target of his policies, not Islam. Qualifiers aside, Bush’s policies and attitudes were so alienating to Muslim Americans that support for Bush fell from 80 percent in 2000 to nearly 40 percent in 2004. By 2008, a remarkable 90 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Obama. This may be because qualifiers—like those where Bush attempts to disassociate Islam and terrorism—condition or distract from a point, and so, don’t make the point. The sum of an argument remains markedly more memorable than its parts, and certainly more memorable than its qualifiers.

In studies of rhetoric, the relative futility of qualifiers is attributed to three elements that account for the ways certain messages take precedence over others: salience, audience, and receptivity. As audience receptivity of media messages declines—an advent accelerated by the rise of cable news, distilled or edited speeches and technology’s overall reduction of audience attention spans—a message’s salient points are elevated above its auxiliary points. Nuanced arguments—ones laden with qualifiers—are unfit to survive in the competition for lasting memory. When viewers turn off the television, they will only carry with them a few of the speaker’s often reinforced agendas or mantras—the same fragments that will be mined by historians someday. Today, the lesson to be taken from the Iraq War is, as far as Bush told it, that it was an “us versus them” conflict—‘us’ concretely defined; ‘them’ (maybe conveniently) loosely defined.

The new chapter of the war with the Islamic State, ushered in by the attacks on Paris last month, has already produced a few quotes to be carved into its history. Again, the number of people we are at war with—the size of the ‘thems’—is in dispute, as politicians and pundits argue over how the massacres should impact foreign and domestic policy.

Again, a mixture of salient points and qualifiers have plotted the story of this war, one difficult to describe in cultural, religious, national, or ideological binaries.

To those with bloated approximations of the number of ‘thems,’ binaries tell the whole story. The struggle, they argue, is a “clash of civilizations” as Florida Senator Marco Rubio called it the day after the Paris attacks, referencing Samuel Huntington’s argument that cultural conflicts will define the post-Cold War world. A day after the attacks, Rubio made an advertisement arguing for a win-or-lose civilizational war, proclaiming “they [ISIS] hate us because of our values... because we are a tolerant society. ” Many have endorsed this misleading vision of the war with ISIS, believing that sides can be drawn along a civilizational—translation: ethnic-

Dec 4, 2015

religious—binary. Donald Trump, who has become something of a pied piper for the American racist subconscious, has been promoting the idea that the ‘them’ can be found even within our borders. For Trump, this is best evidenced by our mosques, which he believes are petri dishes for terrorist activities, and by his claim that Muslim Americans celebrated 9/11 from New Jersey vantage points, an imagination of his now under dispute. These reckless notions promote reckless solutions: fighting terrorism means fighting Islam. A recent study by Public Policy Polling, conducted before the Paris attacks, reveals that only one in two Iowa Republicans would defend the legal status of Islam. One in three would choose to criminalize its practice.

Of course, Presidents Obama and Francois Hollande have not encouraged these manichean attitudes, explicitly stating that ISIS, which has “hijacked” Islam, is the sole enemy.

But the efficacy of their attempts to disassociate ISIS from mainstream Islam is questionable. In their responses to Paris, Obama and Hollande both emphasized the violence’s symbolism. Hollande told the French Parliament that both France—

“a country of freedom,” the “homeland of human rights”— and the French “way of life” were under attack, sounding a lot like Rubio. Obama echoed Hollande’s phrasing, emphasizing France and the US’ shared values and historic allyhood. He established solidarity of victimhood: two nations with parallel values, united under attack.

While both Hollande and Obama have remained cool, stating neutral outlines of ISIS’ purpose, they have mimicked Rubio’s appeals, as well as those often made by ethnic nationalists. Even before the rise of the National Front, Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement, had wooed voters with ethnic nationalist appeals for years, claiming that French natives were becoming victims of “anti-French racism.”

One of France’s most notorious ethnic nationalists, thinker and writer Eric Zemmour, argues that France is suffering from the same problem that befell the Roman Empire: an inability to assimiliate “barbarian peoples” into its way of life.

While historically France has been more concerned with a breakdown of its collective self-identity, and the United States with its homeland security, re-igniting appeals to a “threat on values” narrative is equally dangerous in both nations. Even if it is specified that, in the case of exported terrorism, the threat is posed by ISIS, not the Muslim world, the rhetoric gathers predominantly non-Muslim, like-minded Western nations under one threat. From these distinctions, a tacit association of Muslim regions can be easily made. Since this logic excludes them from the gathering of value-linked, Western nations united under threat, Muslim peoples are lopped into the Othered category. This “threat against us” appeal, which has been emphasized across the political spectrum, from incumbent and campaign podiums alike, functions the same way as the “clash of civilizations” narrative. Paired with frequent use of a term like “barbaric,” one that cannot escape its historic racialization, this manichean thinking encourages a logic so heated and simplistic that it creates a large Other,

by Henry Staley illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko

overriding the heterogeneity of Islam. In other words, since the West lays claim to civilization in the “clash of civilizations” schema, Muslim peoples are grouped into the Islamic Civilization category (of course, a problematic move) thus classified as “anti-Civilization,” or barbaric. All Muslims are rendered guilty for their immersion in a culture that, even if not itself ‘barbaric,’ has the potential to produce barbarism.

Even if the association is unintended or unconscious, the Muslim world in its entirety is interpellated as the antagonist.

This result, as many have noted, is exactly what ISIS anticipates when it designs attacks. In their mission statements, ISIS claims to speak for the entire Muslim population. The more people in Western nations alienate Muslims, the more it confirms ISIS’ narrative of the world.

Obama has been conscientious of the ways Americans unwittingly play into ISIS’ rhetorical strategies so long as it concerns his opponents. Recently, he claimed that he couldn’t think of “a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here [America] in the course of this debate,” referring to conservative backlash regarding the admittance of Syrian refugees. Yet statements in which Obama explicitly discourages associations between mainstream Islam and ISIS may be as ineffective at not alienating Muslims. Qualifiers already suffer relative to salient messages. But when qualifiers make an association in order to denounce it, the association lingers. These statements can work like an apophasis: “a rhetorical device wherein a speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up.” Recently, Trump used an apophasis to discredit Carly Fiorina’s business experiences, telling a New Hampshire rally audience, “I promised I would not say that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground.” An apophasis appears when a speaker intentionally makes an orphaned point, one that transmits a message the speaker is purportedly disowning or disavowing. When receptivity is low, listeners or readers could accidentally interpret a point that is being genuinely dismissed like they would interpret an apophasis. The association will register in the audience’s subconscious.

In February, Obama told the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, “we are not at war with Islam, we are at war with people who have perverted Islam.” Those versed in Ironic Process Theory might say that Obama is playing a losing game. The notion, developed by psychologist Daniel Wegner, describes how “attempts to suppress certain thoughts make them more likely to surface.” Most commonly, the theory is raised in reference to a situation where y tells x or x tells him or herself not to think of z.

The theory suggests that, invariably, x will think of z. Consequently, when a speaker seeks to address a misconception, addressing the misconception may make the misconception more likely to persist given that thought suppression often leads to the intensification of the thoughts it seeks to suppress.

Needless to say, thought suppression is no less tricky for an individual psyche than it is for an entire nation. +++ The mischaracterization of Muslims is so prevalent that its logic may reproduce itself even when its foundational assumptions are being counteracted. It seems that, any time a conflict-of-values conversation follows events like the violence that befell Paris last month, it cannot help but activate the persecutory logic that haunts these sorts of conversations and, more somberly, the national psyches of both France and the United States. Navigating unintended associations is difficult.

But if Obama and Hollande fail to avoid the pitfalls dug by their forebearers, they will, at best, be authoring another problematic historical chapter. At worst, they will be authorizing the multidirectional violence that this logic gives rise to.

HENRY STALEY B’16 failed to suppress his thoughts on the matter.

FEATURES

04

In Conversation With J Hogue In the 1990s, Providence unearthed a long-neglected river, buried a rail yard, and started moving a highway out of its downtown. A wave of developers took notice of the city’s massive, publically funded effort to change its image. Much of Providence’s industrial building stock was sitting, vacant, for them when they arrived.

Either unknown to or ignored by developers and city planners, art collectives had been living in formerly industrial buildings in Olneyville and Valley. One of these collectives was the now-legendary Fort Thunder, whose music, prints, and comics have since been featured in retrospectives at the Whitney and RISD museums. When the Feldco Development Corporation’s plans to raze a cluster of mill buildings in Eagle Square went public in 2001, over 250 artists, scenesters, preservationists, and neighborhood residents crowded into a City Plan Commission meeting to protest. They called for both the preservation of Eagle Square’s mill buildings and the provision of legal, affordable live-work spaces for artists. Bob Azar, Deputy Director of City Planning and Development, called it the “fiercest land use debate I’ve ever witnessed.”

In the end, Feldco compromised and tore down fewer buildings than initially planned, but Fort Thunder was still forced to surrender. Following the dispute, J Hogue, a graphic designer recently transplanted from Boston, started photographing and researching buildings like the ones in Eagle Square—historic buildings that the Providence Preservation Society never ordained with one of their iconic white nameplates. Hogue compiled his findings on a website he named Art in Ruins, which now maintains profiles on over 300 buildings. Hogue sorts these profiles into discrete categories like “Redeveloped,” “RIP,” “Still in Use,” and “Urban Decay.” Click on a category’s name and the website will redirect to a random building’s page, complete with a brief history and extensive photo gallery. Now father to a four-year-old, Hogue has fallen behind on the never-ending task of documenting endangered architecture in a changing city. He has a backlog of roughly 50 buildings and he accepts tips, both monetary and informational. The College Hill Independent met with J Hogue to check up on Providence’s industrial building stock. +++ The College Hill Independent: Why did you start Art in Ruins?

J Hogue: Around 2001 or 2002, right after I moved here, there was a lot of interest in redeveloping the mills. Eagle Square was the first one, the big one really. It became a Shaws Plaza and now it’s a Price Rite… it was on the news. Public meetings. People showed up and were really pretty vocal about it. There was actually a mill that came down just before that, where the Home Depot is on Charles Street. So it just started to feel like, “oh, this is going to keep happening.”

And so out of Fort Thunder, out of the Eagle Square fight, came a nonprofit real estate company for arts called Puente. Steelyard came out of there, Monohasset Mill came out of there, and so Art in Ruins came out of it too really. As a documentary project, I just started taking as many photos as I could. I liked exploring the places that were available at the time, and there were a lot of them. The Masonic Temple was easy to get into; Brown and Sharpe, which is now the Foundry, parts of it were easy to get into. There were a lot of abandoned spots and since it was so under the radar there was a lot of urban exploration that could be done.

In the early ‘90s, Providence was more like what I guess New York’s West Village would’ve been like in the ‘70s. Great for art, not great for safety, not great for tourism. Providence was that and then, trying to be more than that, shifted towards becoming a city that developers wanted to have a piece of. They were looking at all these ‘vacant’ mills that were doing a lot but not generating a lot of revenue.

05

METRO

The Indy: Is Providence doing a good job preserving its building stock?

JH: Right now? No. Because there are no historic tax credits right now, development has sort of grinded to a halt, which I think is in some ways a good thing because development was happening too quickly for a while. But it’s dropped off so much that it’s not really at a sustainable level. It’s at no level.

The Indy: When did that peak in development take place?

JH: It all coincided with 2008, which wasn’t a good year for anybody. The recession was bad and then tax credits ran out and the city didn’t want to renew them because they were losing money on that deal. So that made developers go belly up or move out of town.

You really don’t see any large mill developments anymore. You see smaller projects here and there, maybe five or six units, but nothing on the scale of Rising Sun, or The Plant, or Calendar Mills, or Pearl Street Lofts, or the Foundry.

I think that’s good in some ways, because we lost oversight while it was burning really hot. But now we’re losing things to demolition because the value proposition to turn the mill buildings into something viable isn’t there anymore.

The Indy: One of most interesting parts of Art in Ruins is how populated the ‘anecdotes’ sections at the bottom of every building’s page are. I was impressed that you were able to bring this crowd of older folks to a pretty obscure corner of the web. I’m wondering how you cultivated that level of engagement.

JH: I’m not sure exactly how that happened. I think it’s primarily because if someone is fairly new to the Internet, maybe, they’re going to do a couple searches. And they’re going to search for maybe the place where they worked. And it just so happens, if it’s been torn down in the last ten years, I probably have documentation of it. So they find it, and they see my photos, and they see maybe a couple other anecdotes that are up there… it just happened naturally. I thought it was going to be more about the photography but people being able to tell their story has worked out better than I could’ve imagined. The amount of trolling is so tiny.

by Ben Berke The Indy: What about that brick façade on Weybosset Street?

JH: That’s a victim of the exuberance of 2007–2008. The 110 it was called. I forget how tall it was going to but it was just shy of the Industrial Trust Building. Residential tower, glass façade, you know, the whole nine yards. They got that spot because they were going to preserve that façade, which was an 1890 bank façade I believe. So they tore down the rest of the structures there that were from the same era. And now all that’s left is that façade. So again, the intent was good, but who’s going to pay to keep propping that up? How is that going to be repurposed?

The Indy: Have you ever been emotionally affected by a particular building going down?

JH: The Fruit and Produce warehouse was a favorite of mine.

I’m not even really sure why. I was never able to get into that building. But it was just such an interesting, low-slung, long building built by the railroad tracks. Had such a specific use.

Had a really nice, simple, clean architectural detail about it.

The way it came down seemed so backhanded and nefarious.

For nothing to be built in its spot, that felt like a stab. Really unnecessary. Especially since it took them six months to demolish that building. It was only two stories tall but the walls were so thick… it was basically built to be a refrigerated building. There was nothing structurally wrong with it.

The Indy: Any buildings on your mind these days?

JH: Yeah, there’s one that I might drive up and take some photos of right after this if I have time. Off of the highway heading towards Boston there’s a giant, giant building on the edge of Central Falls and North Attleboro that’s coming down right now. Those kinds of towns, they have so much of that building stock that they don’t value them in the same way.

It’s a 40-acre parcel. It’s sort of crumbling. But up until very recently there were still tenants in there. It’s just massive, it’s so big, and I kind of can’t imagine anyone building something of that magnitude around here again. I think that’s what’s interesting about a lot of these buildings. You can’t really imagine the industry that needed that sort of space.

The Indy: Do you think it’s ever better to leave a building as a ruin than to rehabilitate it?

JH: I would love to see that. I don’t think anyone here in a dense New England city would let that happen. Some people call what I do ‘ruin porn.’ You could say that. There is some of that there. But at the same time, I think there is some value to it. Things that are shiny and bright and new are nice for one thing, but things that are old and have a natural decay to them and have layers of reuse and patching have a completely different character. The Chinese term for that is wok hei, which is basically the flavor of the wok. The more it’s used, the more flavor it imparts on what it cooks. That’s how I think about some of these shells. And it would be sort of nice to have some of those that are open, like a Greek ruin. They’d be there for what they are and what they were, not what they could become.

The College Hill Independent

The New Mass Movement Against Institutional Oppression On November 2, Jonathan Butler, a black graduate student at the University of Missouri, began a hunger strike and promised not to eat until Tim Wolfe, the university’s president, resigned from his post. Butler, a founding member of the Concerned Student 1950 activist group, almost immediately became one of the most recognizable actors in the current wave of protests advocating racial justice on college campuses. As Butler gained visibility, so did a recent slew of racist acts, bigoted speech, and threats of violence directed at students of color at Mizzou. Concerned Student 1950, which draws its name from the first year that black students were accepted to Mizzou, has likewise garnered national recognition as the focal point of student activism against racism in Missouri. The group began peaceful protests in September, in response to an episode in which a group of white students used a racial epithet to refer to Payton Head, the President of the Missouri Students’ Association, who is Black. Their demonstrations intensified when the university’s president refused to address protesters’ concerns about white students who yelled racial slurs at members of Mizzou’s Legion of Black Collegians. Concerned Student 1950 organized student walkouts and rallies that, along with Butler’s hunger strike, managed to attract the support and participation of graduate students and faculty. Members of the university’s football team announced their support for the movement on November 7, pledging not to play any games until Tim Wolfe resigned as president. Bolstered by the economic pressure of student athletes, Concerned Student 1950 achieved the resignation of the university’s president and chancellor within the first week of Butler’s strike.

While students at Missouri mobilized to oust their president, others at Yale directed their own protest against Erika Christakis. The Associate Master—or residential counselors—of the school’s Silliman College came under fire for writing a letter contesting the logic of racially appropriative Halloween costumes and suggesting that students “just look away” if they found them offensive. The letter was just one in a string of racially charged events including swastikas drawn on campus and a fraternity’s alleged barring of black female students from a party. The episode also exacerbated pre-existing tensions over symbols of the university’s racist past—such as the suggestive title of ‘Master’ and the naming of Calhoun College after a proponent of slavery.

Student’s countered with a “March of Resilience” that brought together over 1,000 supporters.

As hashtags like #ConcernedStudent1950, #InSolidarityWithYale and #BlackOnCampus flooded Facebook and Twitter feeds, student activists around the country organized their own protests in solidarity with Mizzou and Yale.

In a recent map of “Mizzou solidarity” protests published

by Mother Jones magazine, blue dots representing campus action have spread from a cluster in the Northeast to the West Coast, the South, and the Midwest. Local struggles with racism at over 40 campuses have also garnered national attention in the wake of these events. Students at Princeton, Amherst, Claremont McKenna, Ithaca, Brown, and beyond are filling the airwaves and the pages of newspapers around the country. Something akin to a national anti-racism student movement is materializing.

by Francis Torres illustration by Juan Tang Hon

anti-racism organization that brought the struggles of the civil rights movement to campuses in the 1960s. The increasingly linked campus protests provide, in Gay’s words, “…new cause to think about student activism, race, and the continuation of the civil rights movement.”

The historic parallel Gay makes goes beyond a similarity in motivations or goals. Like SNCC, today’s campus protesters employ peaceful civil disobedience, make demands of university administrators, and seek to effect progress both within their student communities and beyond them. They mobilize against oppression within efforts that transcend the university.

If groups like Concerned Student 1950 can be thought of as the current generation’s SNCC, then the contemporary parallel for national-level civil rights movement organizations lies in the Black Lives Matter movement. In a Politico piece titled “The Birth of the New Civil Rights Movement,” NPR’s Gene Demby gives credit to Black Lives Matter for “…a new birth of passion and energy to a civil rights movement that had almost faded into history, and which had been in the throes of a slow comeback since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.”

The growing campus protest movement has deeper ties to BLM than a confluence of historical parallels. Many campus organizers, Mizzou’s Jonathan Butler among them, first came into contact with activism by participating in Black Lives Matter protests. Additionally, both BLM and campus activist groups organize around several intersecting identities. BLM’s website states that the movement is “transgender affirming,” “queer affirming,” and “anti-patriarchal.” It explicitly weaves the struggles of undocumented, working-class, and disabled black folks into its protest narrative. Its original founders— Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—are all black women, and at least one of them identifies as queer.

Campus protesters also acknowledge intersectionality in their movement. 35 graduate students at Brown University, organizing as “Concerned Graduate Students of Color” in a recent campus protest, issued a statement in which they affirmed “…our own commitment to resist and speak out against anti-Blackness, racism, sexism and gender-based violence, transphobia, classism, and queerphobia, especially at the interstices,” echoing the positionality and demands of student protesters across institutions of higher education.

Despite countering oppression at different institutional levels, BLM and groups like Concerned Student 1905 don’t conform to a traditional main movement/youth wing relationship. The diffuse nature of national-level and college movements blurs the boundaries between both. Student protesters and BLM organizers—who are often the same people—read each other’s statements, share each other’s hashtags, and chant each other’s slogans. They are all nodes in a greater network of action that is beginning to have political effects both at the local and national levels, as recent Black Lives Matter interventions in primary candidate political rallies demonstrate. +++

tation, employing a structured discourse of harm and safety, their detractors answer back in the same cyberspace. The result has been an escalating conflict waged in the trenches of social media as well as in dorms and classrooms.

As people fight fire with fire, posting and re-posting articles from allies, centrists, and detractors, a pattern has emerged. The staunchest opposition to the new politics comes not from conservatives—who tend to lambast university activism so frequently they no longer surprise anyone—but rather from an older generation of liberals. The planners of yesterday’s anti-war protests are the writers and editors of today’s liberal media, and it’s clear that many feel that their staunch support for freedom of expression is being betrayed. In the words of the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf: “Insofar as free speech is invoked during such controversies about racism on university campuses, it is because many leftist activists believe one necessary remedy for racism is for administrators to punish speech that they regard as problematic.”

Friedersdorf, perhaps the most vocal defender of the free speech camp, has written pieces criticizing protesters at Mizzou, Amherst, Yale, Princeton, and Brown for “weaponizing safe spaces” and “catastrophizing”—or “claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear.” On the other side, writers like Roxanne Gay and Jelani Cobb—both black college professors—have published defenses of campus protests that take into consideration the greater realities of structural racism, and that emphasize the importance of deepening connections between outside activism and the campus.

In a recent speech at Brown University, DominicanAmerican author Junot Diaz argued, “there is no such thing as a safe space,” neither within nor outside academia. Diaz was not echoing the mainstream-liberal critique of student activist rhetoric, but rather describing the inherent precariousness of being a person of color in America. He later gave a small concession, adding that the only way to build safe space is through united, long-term action against the structures of oppression that lead to the initial need for safe spaces. As with any protest movement, this campaign is messy work that will necessarily transgress the boundaries of currently acceptable discourse.

Criticizing the typecasting of students as immature, sheltered and fragile, Roxanne Gay echoes Diaz’s point in her New Republic piece: “students do not abandon their class background or sexuality or race or ethnicity when they matriculate, and their issues do not vanish when they register for courses.” She makes the point that students that struggle against oppression—particularly black students—are protesting against a reality that afflicts them always, both within the walls of their colleges as well as in the world outside. They are using the university as a space to shape a movement that transcends campus.

FRANCIS TORRES B’16 transgresses the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

The diffuse nature of current student movements tends to work in their favor, but it can also be a tool for adversaries. As protesters move to make nuanced demands around represen-

+++ In an article for the New Republic, author Roxanne Gay compared this emerging movement to the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, an

Dec 4, 2015

NEWS

06

Renaming and Reclaiming Spaces of Power

What is peculiar about ghosts? They are the dead. But there is of course no consensus on what it really means to be dead. So, that is a dead end. But a ghost is not only dead—it’s also sort of alive.

In life, our bodies lay claim to space on our souls’ behalf; by our flesh, we are permitted presence of mind. Deprive us of our mouths and we cannot drink; deprive us of our ears, and we cannot discuss. But spirits are the exceptions. These spirits retain some substance, some square footage, laying claim to space sans corpse. Though they have no hands, the doorknob turns. They are footless, but steps echo in the hall. Somehow, certain spirits stick around, and those that do are hard in leaving.

So the ghost takes up residence. Where ghosts linger, they may be ghoulish or benign, the bad ones quarters’ being haunted houses, and the good ones lodging in shrines. Haunted turf may be the site of an unfulfilled mission in life, a cemetery where the deceased was prematurely buried, or the hotel that played venue to some gruesome killing; likewise, shrines may be roadside memorials to those that died on the spot, household shrines, or locations attached to stories and legends. But, in all cases, it is the relationship between the ghost and the living that differentiates the shrine from the haunted house. To the living, the spirit enshrined is a respected and accommodated guest, while the haunting ghost is a hostile presence—the crucial question being, does this spirit wish me well? If the answer is yes, then it gets a site of pilgrimage and reverence. If the answer is no, then suffering ensues.

Fortunately, for those fiendish spirits that won’t let go, there is the old science of exorcism—a vital art of metaphysical evictions. Where they are unwanted, spirits must be driven out. Exorcisms and de-hauntings may involve spells and chants, oaths and rituals. They are often communal affairs. In Tibet, there is the annual Gutor, or the Day for Exorcising Ghosts; everybody sweeps and cleans the home. An old remedy on this continent is the burning of sage brush with an open window—to smoke it out, though it has no lungs. But an exorcism may also begin with a petition. +++ Of late, two uses of the petition tactic have captured widespread attention—perhaps because the haunts at stake are tied to the Oval Office; perhaps also because they are taking place at those age-old keeps of political power, the Ivy League universities. Demands have been made to change the names of institutions that are imbued with the racism and malevolence on account of their historical namesakes. While these are not exorcisms in the traditional sense, the justification and intent is clearly parallel: where a hostile spirit has set up shop, living residents want to drive it out.

Earlier this year, students at Yale University called for the metaphysical eviction of John C. Calhoun, the late South Carolinian politician and former Vice President of the United States.

To do so, they want to remove his name from the Gothic-style residential complex known since 1933 as Calhoun College. His chief crime is clear: Calhoun was an unapologetic racist. He famously asserted slavery to be a “positive good,” not a necessary evil, which should be maintained for the economic and social benefit of the nation. Such is the reasoning behind the petition to remove his name that attracted almost 1500 signatures within the Yale Community.

His name and his image lay claim to the building and the lawn, and students do not feel safe within the walls that hold up his legacy. The college has been made a receptacle for the concept of Calhoun, and the idea embedded in the name is clearly not friendly to many of the school’s denizens. Where students are forced to live in a shrine to the dogged suppression of rights, living is as living in a haunted house.

Following suit this November, the Black Justice League at Princeton University called for the removal of all references to Woodrow Wilson, in name and image, from the walls and facades of the school. Wilson is all over Princeton—upon inauguration as the 28th President of the United States, he was already used to being called “Mr. President,” having been Princeton’s 13th. He is remembered for heightening the institution’s academic rigor, and for lessening the grip of the Protestant elite by extending power to Catholics and Jews. Natural, it would seem, that his portrait should hang in abundance, and his name be given to the School of Public and International Affairs. But he is also remembered for the limits on this extension of friendship and race-restricted power. For Wilson, the list of social barriers to be broken down at the school did not include the color line. As University President, he did his best to prevent Black Americans from enrolling; as Commander-in-chief, he upheld the separate-but-equal doctrine with vigor. Addressing civil rights activists in 1913, he turned their arguments that segregation severely restricted Black peoples’ participation in society back on the indignant activists: regarding segregation, he told them that “if you take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over the country, why, the consequence will be very serious.”

07

OCCULT

The College Hill Independent

by Lance Gloss illustration by Elodie Freymann

Wilson was of a different era and a different caliber than Calhoun: separate-but-equal was, for Calhoun, a preposterous extension of liberty. But the content of the message is fundamentally the same one of Black subjugation. Many students at these universities do not want to share a room with a ghost—especially not one that would force them out of their beds and insist they sleep contentedly in the closet. This logic has proven potent: exorcisms at Princeton and Yale have drawn widespread attention in the press, and continue to gather momentum in the broader context of racial justice and civil rights campaigning nationwide. The case presented by the Black Justice League last week is now backed by the New York Times Editorial Board, and pressure within the University is mounting. These movements are bringing toponymy—the naming of places—into the light as a crucial political battleground. But to this field, the movement against structural oppression is no stranger. +++ Naming places as a right of conquest is an ancient practice; overthrowing the previous name is just as old. But we might trace the events of recent months to 1963, when, under mounting social pressure, the Federal government instituted a blanket change for the country’s maps.

Where it occurred in hundreds of place names, the word n—r was changed to Negro. As Negro was recognized as a pejorative soon after, many of these names were changed again. Some were changed to honor specific African-Americans associated with the sites, or otherwise given an entirely different label; Negro Head Creek in North Carolina was supposed to have been changed in 1987 to Salem Creek, but this change was not fully executed until 2012, when citizens renewed their interest in making the change. Campaigns have been waged to engender similar reforms for offensive terms like squaw, guappo, gringo, and gook, but with only patchy success.

And in 2010, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations put to a vote the possible removal of the rarely-uttered second half—any change was voted down.

A similar amendment had been put forward twenty years previously. “Providence Plantations” merited removal, said the 2010 bill’s sponsor, Representative Joseph Almeida, because it was crucial “to recognize that slavery happened on plantations in Rhode Island, and decide that we don’t want that chapter of our history to be a proud part of our name.” And over the last year, petitioners with the expressed support of NAACP have demanded that Georgia’s Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee be sand-blasted from the Stone Mountain monument. A petition in this case (now with nearly 13,000 signatures) does not advocate removal. Instead, petitioners demanded that the legendary hip-hop duo Outkast—comprised of Andre 3000 and Big Boi—be carved alongside the horse-mounted Confederates, driving a Cadillac. No change has been made—the argument that the erasure of monuments is an act of historical revisionism has held strong. But the petition challenges the right of these figures to hold territory when their presence is hurtful to the viewer. People would rather celebrate Outkast. Like the ghost, names and pictures form a psychic geography that influences relationships to a place. Appellations are another form of “hostile architecture”—like the Camden Benches and anti-homeless spikes that regulate behavior in public spaces.

If the criteria for renaming is extended to include any figure of power with a record of racism, then the exorcists have addressed only a tiny fraction of candidates. The names of elites who dehumanized and deprived others of their civil rights are enshrined across the country. At least one president left us a very clear record of how he felt about residents. From his home, George Washington advised, “I know of no black person about the house who is to be trusted.”

He reproved the “discontented temper of the Indians and the Mischiefs done by some parties of them” in response American settler-colonialism beyond Appalachia. Exercising his grip on that territory, he evicted scores of Scots-Irish who had settled on what was by then the first Washington County, and proceeded to sell these farms at a very reasonable profit. George Washington—phantasmagoric landlord of one State, one District, 4,974 Streets, 31 Counties, and a dozen institutions of higher learning. Today, many of us can expect to live on Washington, or in Washington, at some point in our lives. He is mobile, too, his face hitching rides on the quarter and dollar from pocket to register. Such spirits proliferate and pursue.

A vast swathe of the country is given over to these names, and a movement is being made to change that. Though it is unlikely that a mass revision of the nation’s toponymy will come in the near-term, these well-publicized demands have brought new contestation to the cultural landscape. Whether the spirit behind the names that inhabit this country are benevolent or oppressive comes down to the relationships between the current inhabitants and those for whom these spaces have been named. It would seem that those who must sleep within the walls have the greatest stake in the naming and re-naming of the house, and thus should have the greatest say in whether these names are retained or replaced.

LANCE GLOSS B’18 hears clanking.

Dec 4, 2015

OCCULT

08

WHEN THE FOAM SETTLES Essentialism in Tech On March 11, 2011, a 71-year-old fisherman named Morihisa Kanouya stood on a small hill in Ukedo, Japan. In the distance, he saw “a black wall, five to six meters high, [with white spray] above it mixed with the sky, so you couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began.” He wrapped himself around a tree and held his wife in his arms. This was the Tōhoku Tsunami.

When the foam settled, Morihisa had lost his wife and broken his knee. A hydrogen explosion shook the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station. The cooling system failed.

Three nuclear meltdowns followed. The effects of this disaster were slow and subtle, but it was estimated that exposure to leaked radiation will result in over 10,000 deaths. Thirty-six percent of kids in the Fukushima Prefecture experienced abnormal thyroid growths and now have an increased risk of developing thyroid cancer. When the dust settled, the finger-pointing began.

The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission had the final word: the incident was “manmade.”

The commission found a crucial error in the design of the Fukushima plant’s safety system.

The system was designed to automatically shut down the plant in the event of a natural disaster.

But when a 14-meter tall wave combined forces with an earthquake, all of the backup power systems were knocked out, and there was nothing left to cool the reactors as they shut down.

The whole plant went up in smoke. The decision to shut down the plant was made in haste, without a sufficient understanding of the situation.

The Fukushima disaster illustrates our pervasive uncertainty about what constitutes meaningful information. Which pieces of information will only confuse the situation and which pieces will help us predict a disaster? How do we recognize false positives? The engineers of Fukushima didn’t recognize that if there was a big earthquake near the shore, there would also be a significant chance of a tsunami. But how big a tsunami? Big enough to flood the power plant and shut down the cooling system? If so, what would be the odds of a nuclear meltdown?

With three degrees of separation between the earthquake and the nuclear meltdown, there were a lot of moments when vital information could have been lost or distorted. If a nuclear meltdown had been predicted as soon the earthquake hit, the Japanese government would have brushed it off as sensationalist. Deciding what information is important is crucial, but challenging. Recall Morihisa, looking back at the foam and the sky: he could not tell one from the other, but if the location of the dividing line was just a few meters lower, it could have been the difference between a couple of damaged houses and a nuclear meltdown.

09

TECH

In 2014, Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO) division. Tapped into the fiber optic cables through which the whole world’s data travels, SSO can snoop on all online activity. The NSA needs to sift through this deluge of data in order to flag and inspect suspicious agents. To do so, it uses several computer programs to filter through the data, notably one called TURMOIL. TURMOIL searches through the data using a variety of “selectors”—things like geographic location, mentions of encryption software, or specific keywords—which, in turn, determine whether a person should be monitored further. The NSA’s task, then, is a reductionist one. They decide which pieces of information that a person can be reduced to, which bits can lead them to determine, with reasonable certainty, whether someone fits their criteria for suspicion. One false assumption about what “suspicious people” tend to look like and the NSA would end up with tons of false positives or missed security threats.

Powering the NSA’s attempt to effectively sort massive quantities of data is a field of computer science called information theory, which attempts to quantify information through a unit of measure called “entropy.” Say you are playing a game of 20 questions. If you are a clever 20 questions player, every question you ask brings you closer to guessing what your opponent is thinking. Your goal is to ask tricky questions to narrow down your opponent’s possibilities. The fewer the possibilities, the greater the probability that if you randomly guess among these options you will get the right answer. This is what is meant when it’s said that information reduces uncertainty.

The question is, how much does it reduce uncertainty? Finding a numerical answer to this question explains how 20 Questions works. To get a rough estimate of our uncertainty, we can ask, “how many yes or no questions do we have to ask to figure out an answer?” If we’re trying to figure out the result of a coin flip, for instance, we only need to ask one: “is the coin heads?”

So we say that the coin flip problem has an entropy of one. If we’re trying to figure out the result of a rolled die, things get a little more tricky. We can ask, “is the number even?” Even if we find out the answer is yes, the result could still be two, four, or six. From there, we have to guess our way through the numbers. This way, we’ll end up asking a maximum of three questions, so rolling a die has an entropy of three.

But let’s say, for instance, that you know the die is loaded and that it is going to land on an even number and your friend does not know a thing. That means that for you to figure out what number the die lands on, you only have to ask two questions, while your friend has to ask three! All of a sudden we can quantify exactly how much you learned by knowing the die is loaded: one unit of entropy.

On computers, where everything is stored in binary digits, each digit is like an answer to a yes or no question. So if for instance we wanted a computer to store the result of a die rolled six, it would need to record that the result was an even number, and that it was not two, and that it was not four. You may be wondering: why can’t we just store whether or not the result was six, instead of ruling out two and four? Well, because you would still need to handle the other cases when it was in fact two or four. Doing so would require two additional questions, so you would end up needing to record the answer to four yes or no questions instead of three, leading to wasted space on your hard drive. An efficient representation of the value of a die on a computer would use three binary digits, where each digit is a one or a zero and represents the answer to one of the yes or no questions. That is the best you can do, since the entropy of a dice roll is three.

But computers generally have to transmit more complex data than dice rolls or coin tosses.

Even something as simple as a word has a degree of entropy that is hard to define. Sure, we could just ask, “which letter in the word is next?” We would be the most uncertain if it were one of the 26 letters chosen at random. But words are not random assortments of letters—they are full of patterns. If you are playing a game of hangman and you have “inform_tion” in front of you, is it really anyone’s guess what that last letter is, or is it definitely an “a”? Isn’t telling someone that a word is “inform_tion” the same as telling them it’s “information”?

The College Hill Independent

by Dash Elhauge & Charlie Windolf illustration by Amy Chen The assumption that information theory makes is yes: with enough context, you can be sure. But it is not always clear how much context is enough. Finding the right amount of context becomes a problem on computers, where there’s often very little bandwidth or storage space. Take, for example, the problem of storing music files: if you had to store perfectly accurate reproductions of songs on your iPhone, it would only hold a few hundred songs. That is why audio encodings such as MP3 toss out as much information as possible, choosing to retain only a song’s key characteristics. For example, MP3s get rid of pitches above 20,000 Hz, an octave above the highest note on the piano, because most people can’t hear that high. For some high-fidelity audio enthusiasts, though, it’s not okay to get rid of this much information. These audiophiles think that MP3s don’t faithfully represent their music, that a certain subtlety or warmth is lost when information is discarded.

This is the downside to any algorithm that tries to take advantage of information theory— what’s defined as anomalous is tossed aside. But anomalies are often the very thing that make something beautiful. Netflix, for example, shows 24 frames every second in all their videos. If a frame doesn’t reach a user in time, Netflix drops it. Will we really miss 1/24th of a second of missed footage? Watching House of Cards, perhaps not—but what if we’re a dancer trying to break down a quickly executed move? Even the filetype currently used for storing images, JPG, tosses out massive quantities of information, representing images as “wavelets” that only describe the general paintbrush strokes which approximate an image, instead of storing the image itself. Again, for most of us this is vastly advantageous, but for a few—perhaps a painter trying to glean Picasso’s brush strokes from a photo found online—it’s useless. Tech companies are constantly asking themselves “how can we cut as much information as possible?” What they rarely ask is, “who do we alienate if we cut this information?” +++ In this way, modern technology is consistent with essentialist philosophy. Essentialism dates as far back as Plato, whose theory of forms is one of the original examples of essentialism. Plato noted that certain patterns of structure define objects, while other characteristics are unimportant. For instance, Plato would note that almost all people think of a table as a four-legged structure with a level surface. Whether the table is made of wood or metal, he would say, is not important. In this way, Plato found the information of an object in its form, not in its material.

Plato’s idea was fundamental to early philosophy.

But tech’s essentialism can quickly become stereotyping. The NSA’s SSO classifies communication in terms of a communicator’s race, gender, and geographic location in order to meet the goals of the US government’s preemptive counterterrorism demands. So aren’t they probably committing more acts of stereotyping per day than any other organization on the planet?

But the idea of using “selectors” to determine if someone is a security threat within some probability range is firmly rooted in information theory. This dubious assumption, that “selectors” like race and religion increase the probability of randomly selecting a terrorist, is the NSA’s operating principle, though it’s not entirely clear how the NSA would even obtain data to back it up—they can’t exactly test their algorithm and find out what percentage of the people they flag actually turn out to be security threats. But if there were some piece of information that had an entropy of one for determining if someone was a terrorist, then knowing that that piece of information is true for a person would make it twice as likely that they were a terrorist.

For the NSA, essentialism is the easy way out. It would be much more of a challenge for them to find a strategy that is sensitive to difference and doesn’t rely on simplistic rules. But instead, they rely on the past success of tech essentialism like that of MP3 and JPG. By applying these principles to people, the NSA’s SSO brings to light that this essentialism, this willingness to make assumptions about the border between foam and sky, can come at a terrible cost.

DASH ELHAUGE B‘17 & CHARLIE WINDOLF B‘17 can be stored in two apartments, provided there is solid WiFi.

Dec 4, 2015

TECH

10

EMPIRE, LIMITED Writing In Transience Amtrak’s Empire Builder train departs from Chicago Union Station, arcing northwest along the border with Canada and passing through Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Spokane before the line ends in Seattle.

Its website boasts an “exciting adventure through majestic wilderness,” replete with views of the Dakota plains and Glacier National Park. The company’s other trains bear similar names: the Lake Shore Limited, the Sunset Limited, the Missouri River Runner. Navigated correctly, and with adequate funds, the rails become a circular route, sweeping riders around the continental United States until they choose to get off.

On the posters, Amtrak trains rise from dramatic angles toward the foreground amid wide swaths of color. Many of the posters feature the sun rising and setting, the moon coming out across the prairie.

The trains plunge through natural landscapes, becoming themselves explorers across the continent. Needless to say, the posters embrace a spirit of travel for the sake of travel, movement as a means of seeing. +++

In a 2014 interview with PEN America, novelist Alexander Chee— when asked his favorite place to write—responded: “I still like a train best for this kind of thing. I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers.” Chee’s comment soon attracted attention. After journalist and critic Jessica Gross tweeted the idea, Amtrak offered her a trial residency aboard the Lake Shore Limited. Gross embarked on her residency early in 2014, traveling from New York City to Chicago and back in a sleeper cabin paid for by Amtrak. The trip reimagined travel—‘getting there’ lost its luster. In a Paris Review piece on the trial-run trip, Gross wrote, “I’m only here for the journey.” For her, the space of transition was the only space, writing the only demand.

Jessica Gross’ trial residency proved successful enough that Amtrak decided to make the program official. Writers could apply for the 2014-2015 cycle by submitting a writing sample. After 16,000 applications were submitted. Amtrak narrowed the pool down to 115 finalists. From this, the twenty-four winners were selected based on “the quality and completeness of their application package” and the breadth of their Twitter-followership, or, as Amtrak puts it, “the extensiveness of their social community and ability to reach online audiences with content.” As a result, the twenty-four winners of the #AmtrakResidency were not unknowns; indeed, many of them were established writers in their fields. Amtrak made sure to account for some measure of gender and racial diversity within the group of winners, though the majority of them were white. The winners’ biographies for the first round of residencies tout publication in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, amongst others.

There are few generalizations to be drawn surrounding writers.

That which is writerly is endless; those who are writerly are classified only by the ability to generate, through some means, words upon a page. The spaces writers inhabit are unclassifiable: they are all spaces, everyspace. To delineate writers as café writers or train writers, desk writers or bench writers, is to make enormous claims about what it means to be a writer, not to mention assumptions surrounding class, taste, geography, and even mobility. In short, the writerly bag is so deeply mixed that to claim it is anything at all is foolish. The sheer number of self-identifying writers naturally leads to disparate interpretations of writing, let alone where and how it should be done.

Even the relationship between writers and the spaces they write in is variable.

In his essay “Writing in Cafés: A Personal History,” Benjamin Aldes Wurgraft leaves the café to note: “transitional spaces have the feel of freedom, the mind swept up with the movement of arrivals and departures. Sometimes stillness frees the mind, sometimes kinetic energy.” Trains, by nature, are transitional spaces. They bring people from one place to the next. Some passengers—like the writers in the residency—ride for a number of days, some just for the afternoon. Quickly, though—and Amtrak doesn’t hesitate to do this—notions of transiency and romanticism regarding travel are blended. Travel becomes about seeing things, not just getting there. In 2009, Amtrak commissioned collectors’ posters by graphic designer Michael Schwab that pop up on some of the writers’ blogs.

‘Success’ in the group is defined by fame and even money. It should be noted, however, that not all the writers selected were strictly ‘literary.’ The group was comprised of novelists, journalists, teachers and professors, even a sports writer and a film critic.

Based on the pool Amtrak ended up selecting, the company seemed to need proof that the so-called writers were true to the craft.

That is, individuals with a stamp of approval: publication, awards, success, a syndicated column with a major news outlet. Before the first writers embarked on their residencies, the program was already receiving online criticism from rejected applicants and frustrated observers for catering to the established, providing a free experience to individuals who—it was assumed by most of the commenting body—could shoulder the cost. After all, the program created no financial difficulty for Amtrak: the berths provided for writers were those that were left unsold, and all the company covered was meals and service by the Amtrak attendants. The benefits were twofold: to promote Amtrak as a corporation in support of the arts, dedicated to providing promising writers the chance to experience idyllic landscapes on the company’s dime; and, to give writers the chance to escape from time, to write in a space where the only obligation was creation, if the author wished it.

“Writing demands what I call ‘long thoughts,’ a train ride produces an environment in which long thoughts are possible,” wrote author and Barnard College professor Jennifer Boylan in an email to the Independent. Boylan, the program’s second writer-in-residence,

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by Julia Tompkins illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko

FEATURES

The College Hill Independent

began her route in Maine, riding the Lakeshore Limited, the California Zephyr, the Coast Starlight, the Empire Builder, and, finally, the Downeaster along her way. One of the better known writers in the program, Boylan is aware of the pushback, and acknowledged it in correspondence with the Indy: “I know there were some hurt feelings that the first batch of writers were not all exactly unknowns,” but, she continues, “none of us is exactly Stephen King.” It was a clever move for a writer’s residency on Amtrak’s part. Instead of shepherding writers off to a retreat, the program let each winner choose his or her route, allowing each one to customize the trip based on their needs. Yet at the same time, Boylan suggests, the departure from a typical residency makes the marketing nature of the trip more transparent: “you have these writers attracting attention to the delights of train travel. Remember, this is not Yaddo (a writer’s retreat in upstate New York), it’s an invention coming out of the marketing division of a government agency.”

Boylan’s “long thoughts” on the train were the product of vast stretches of uninterrupted time. For all writers, established or not, unburdened time is hard to come by. Even when writing becomes a career, life intervenes. The continuity of the train, the constant motion—both allow for the mind to inhabit a different state. With production as the goal—for Boylan, it was finishing the first draft of a novel—the idealization of travel, of not getting there, created a space in which creation made sense. The space itself is one of separation from normal life. WiFi is spotty, as is cell service. Amtrak trains run notoriously late; time is not to be counted on. There is no place to be. Things move at their own pace—through, up, around, and across the country. Often, writing or talking to strangers in the ob-

servation car is the only option. Excess is eliminated; the roomette fits only the bare minimum. The nature of travel itself indicates a removal, from people or places, even from a way of living. People are packed into the train car in nearly cramped conditions, yet given the gift of a space of one’s own. Each writer embarked alone. Some, like Boylan, disembarked. While she spent her time off the train hiking, others visited friends or family, only to get back onboard their next train after a few days. Life continued outside the residency.

Once off the train, Seattle-based Ksenia Anske reflected on her blog: “I miss the lull of the train, the coziness of my little roomette.

There is something ethereal about it, something that makes you want to create.” For Anske, the train held little in the way of romantic notions.

Trains were familiar territory for her, ubiquitous in her childhood in Russia, where, she says: “travel by personal vehicle was restricted to those who had the privilege and the means of owning one. My family didn’t.” The train was a welcoming mode of travel, a familiar one.

Anske’s work, too, was highly influenced by her surroundings. In an email to the Indy she writes, “the day I boarded the Empire Builder that was going to take me from Seattle to Chicago, I started writing a book about a train killing its passengers one by one, famed Bolshoi ballerinas touring the US.” For any writer looking for material, transience may be the solution, at least for Amtrak. Move until you find something. Keep moving when you do, find more, write more, write all you do, write from your experiences. But,“there’s nothing particularly romantic about being a writer,” Boylan pushes back, “and anyone who thinks it’s about

Dec 4, 2015

looking out the window at the mountains and being inspired and typing it all down ‘just so’ should prepare for disappointment.”

In some places, time grows. On her trip blog, Boylan wrote that the train stops, heading east, outside Dayton, Ohio, “on account of the reversion to Eastern Standard Time. I’d heard that trains do this—if they just chugged ahead, we’d all wind up at our destination an hour ahead of the schedule, thus opening up a rift in the spacetime continuum.” While the practicalities are mundane, the act of waiting for time to catch up is a graceful one. For the group of writers Amtrak sent out for the residency, many of whom write with a deadline, graciousness towards time is rarely found. Here, it becomes an instance for celebration, or at least reverence. +++ In October, Scott Berkun, an author and speaker, finished his fiveday residency, the last of his cycle of winners. In a blog entry on the trip he notes, “train routes follow the hills and waterways, curving in and out as the landscape demands,” forcing riders to see the landscape as it makes itself seen. The noise of other passengers, authors noted, is a frequent distraction. Though life shifts away from the normal, it continues to go on in a space usually reserved for getting there. The confinement acts as a collider, driving travelers together— in the dining car, in the observation car, in line for the bathroom.

Farai Chideya wrote after her journey: “there’s something about the train that seems to create an expansive space for intimacy amid the physical confines.” An intimacy, perhaps, generated by individuals placed in the same space, despite their arbitrary reasons for being

aboard. Distance is a surmountable thing—the train chugs along, behind schedule, on time.

Amtrak recently released the application for their second group of writers in residence. The application is short, only two questions, and the comments section is already bulging with eager applicants.

The concerns remain the same: what about the poor writers? What about the writers just starting out? How will Amtrak encourage the underdogs? That the program, a marketing scheme by a government corporation, would target the underrepresented is a good wish, a hope. Yet it’s the bigger names that proved to Amtrak that a residency was possible, that allowed trains to become a shelter for the creative in need of time and a berth. The program itself wields luxury masked in simple Americana: weeks to spare for train travel, the ability to disconnect, on some level, from work and life. A nation where train transport is for sightseeing. A post-train nation.

For the hopeful applicants, the celebration of the opportunity rings distant; it is another application, another competition. Perhaps each writer just seeks what Anske describes as “the sunset burning the canyons red.” Who knows what the next Amtrak Twitter episode will lead to. An endowed sleeper car, complete with pen and paper.

Or, #AmtrakingResidency might go the way of most marketing campaigns, with this next round of writers serving as its last. Until then, the aspiring pen-wielders will vie for their place. Time for ‘long thoughts’ and shorts stops, the open rails.

JULIA TOMPKINS B‘18 will just hop a boxcar @Amtrak

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Tristan Rodman There’s a lyric about cascading empathy—I mean, I don’t know that many empathetic people, let alone peeps with the kind that cascades. The kind of pious, Quaker-like empathy that looks to self-involved folks like self-abnegation. (It’s not.) The kind that makes you, reflecting on your day, conclude that you need to be better, that you need to talk less about yourself, to integrate more people into your world.

Tristan, he has that empathy. I’m not saying niceness, although Tristan is among the nicest people I know. Nice is sometimes deployed as an adjective by those who don’t find the person about whom they’re talking to be interesting. Tristan is incredibly interesting.

And nice. But what I’m saying is he’s true-life empathetic. Let me explain, because, well, empathy requires a profound kind of intellect. A rare, human sort of intellect, not the ‘I was bonked on the head and can play every Beethoven piano concerto now for some reason’ sort of intellect. To a certain degree it’s a neurosis, this empathy, a nagging feeling.

Working hard on yourself because you’d like to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.

(That’s what Noam Chomsky says.) Empathy is like that moment in “You Still Believe in Me” when the full chorale comes in, sort of, maybe. It’s full and strange and rare.

Tristan is a great lyricist and songwriter because he studies, he learns, he absorbs.

He’s not afraid to love the canonical greats—Arcade Fire, Prince, Vampire Weekend, ELO, Dan Bejar. He studies, but he’s not an obscurantist. A great quality in a musician. Tristan is endlessly curious but he has big loves. I love that. Reminds me of when Bob Dylan, in this very wild MusiCares speech, quoted almost entirely this old folk song called “John Henry”.

Afterward he said, “If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.” Right on. Tristan understands the importance of tradition, the context it gives, the absurdity and necessity of emplotting yourself in that world-historical conversation, to play with it, to redirect it. He’s not grandiose—he’s interested, in love. He perceives what Ezra Koenig calls the imaginary space of the album—its corners and edges, its vertices and undergirding. I think he’ll deconstruct it, set the pieces out in front of him, and build it again. He has the know-that and know-how to do this properly. He will.

Which is all just to say that he has empathy. He enthuses about the things about which he is enthused. He cares about connecting with something, plugging in, describing sonically the ineffable. He cares about good jokes. He cares enough to put things off to make them better. He cares. That’s crazy! That’s the rarest thing in the world, to care, even to care too much. I dedicate this to that empathy, and to how inevitable it makes him.

He’s a good friend, and there aren’t many of those.

Jay Mamana Jay—James if we’re elongating, JRM if we’re going with initials, J. Mamana if you like a good nom de plume—is tuned in. It’s labor day weekend and B101, Southern New England’s 70s and 80s Hits, counts down the top 500 songs of all time. We drive around Providence, never changing the dial.

271: ABBA – “Take A Chance on Me” Hot air comes through the windows on I-95. ABBA are seriously underrated. There’s no reason not to like them.

114: Cyndi Lauper – “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” What a good idea it would be to have this top 500 countdown be the structure for a short story or something. Or like, the backdrop to a high school comedy. Is that true, though? Is she right? We buy a Swiffer at the mall.

79: The Beatles – “Come Together” Jay makes bolognese. Almost any Beatles song could contend on this list. And they pretty much overlooked the entirety of their studio experimentation era.

13: Michael Jackson – “Thriller” It’s getting dark so early now, the streetlamps turn on as we come back from Trader Joe’s.

Thriller at thirteen!? How are there twelve songs better? Name me twelve better songs.

1: The Eagles – “Hotel California” Oh okay, yeah. This is the greatest song of all time. We pull into the driveway, turn off the car, and sing the guitar solo as the doors slam shut.

On the Brief Life and Instant Death of Internet Hunting In early 2005, Internet entrepreneur John Lockwood hooked a .30/06 rifle up to an improvised electronic rig and wired the contraption to a simple desktop server. Operating out of a shed on his sprawling Central Texas ranch, Lockwood’s computerized weapon could be controlled remotely—accompanying audio and video streams would aid the virtual marksman as she scrolled and clicked her mouse, aiming and firing the rifle. While the remote control weapon initially allowed Lockwood and his friends to conduct target practice on galvanized steel ducks from their desk jobs in San Antonio, the entrepreneur quickly realized it could be turned onto real animals.

Setting up a webpage, live-shot.com, and stocking the pasture with wildlife, Lockwood developed a site where—for a monthly fee—members could hunt pixelated, yet very real hogs and deer with the click of their mouses. For an additional cost, kills would then be taxidermized, mounted, and shipped to a member’s address. The prospect proved intriguing and soon enough amateur hunters and local news teams flocked to the website. Within days of its creation, however, the website and its remote controlled weapon were also met with serious criticism from a breadth of sources.

Animal rights groups like the Humane Society referred to the practice as “pay-per-view slaughter.” The Safari Club International, a hunting organization, simply said that “it’s not hunting.” These views were soon extrapolated by a Wisconsin lawmaker who wrote, “hunting is being out in nature and becoming one with nature.” Big game hunter Jerry Johnston added that without the direct presence of a person, this sort of act is “simply killing.” And in a rare moment of unity with animal rights and environmental activists, the NRA—who had just helped fund the campaign of a political administration that brought about the introduction of drone warfare— found the practice contemptible, stating that they “believe that hunting should be outdoors and that sitting in front of a computer three states away doesn’t qualify as ‘hunting.’”

As a sport, hunting has always been prone to tap into technology’s ability to cloak and conceal the bodies of its practitioners. Hunting blinds, camouflaged structures from which hunters can track their prey, date back to the introduction

Dec 4, 2015

of the sport itself. More recently, the advent of compound bows as well as high-performance range finders and ballistic calculators allow hunters to stalk and kill prey from a distance formerly unimaginable. This is not to mention the plethora of specialty devices, like the Ozonics machine that changes oxygen molecules into ozone molecules, that render one’s scent undetectable to downwind game. The hunter’s body is in a constant state of becoming-absent. And yet, the fervent criticism of Lockwood and his site speaks to the necessity of that ‘becoming,’ for once the body is truly absent, the practice appears radically inhumane. In the fight against live-shot.com, critics leaned on the ethics of ‘fair chase,’ a code which asks that the animal is provided with a “reasonable opportunity to elude the hunter.” While it is often invoked to stop hunters from herding or artificially trapping live game, this concept of fair chase found an application in the Lockwood case when critics inferred that it also necessitated the physical presence of both the prey and the hunter. That is, the animal must have the opportunity to detect and escape its predator—a condition impossible to achieve when this predator is sitting at a computer seemingly anywhere in the world, gazing through a high-definition optical lens.

Though Lockwood initially tried to fight off his critics, claiming that his site was designed for disabled hunters who were no longer capable of practicing the sport (at one point even publishing a thankful letter from an Iraq War veteran), he ultimately found the criticism overwhelming. The entrepreneur eventually decided to revamp live-shot.com as a site on which members could take aim—this time with a paintball gun—at bikini-clad women, Michael Jackson impersonators, and cardboard cutouts of Osama Bin Laden.

It’s troubling that the sort of criticism Lockwood faced never seemed to crop up, at least not with the same haste, when drones found their lethal military use. In fact, it was within the military that drones were first enthusiastically titled Hunters and Predators—the very nominations the NRA and others had previously found so unpalatable. Other drones would pick up names like Roadrunner or Striker, making the disquieting connection to sport even more apparent.

It wasn’t only in name, however, that drones and sports

by Jonah Max

found common ground in the military. Soon after implementing its comprehensive surveillance programs in the Middle East as well as along the US-Mexico border, the US Air Force (USAF) and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) found that their hovering cameras simply gathered too much visual data to analyze effectively. To help interpret the images their drones had captured, the USAF and DARPA began organizing meetings with executives at ESPN, believing that the broadcasting techniques that delivered compelling Sunday night games might also be employed to develop interpretable narratives for suspected insurgents and bordercrossers. Chief among these technologies was the recently created Full-Motion Video Asset Management Engine, a comprehensive device which, previously used to tag professional athletes in sports coverage, could now help the military track their own targets.

This collision between sport and counter-insurgency comes to an uneasy head when one looks at the language used within the US program of targeted killing. Each week, the White House holds a morning meeting titled “Terror Tuesday,” in which the President and dozens of members from his national security team pore over potential target IDs that are perversely called “baseball cards.” In addition to the suspect’s name, these cards also carry what’s referred to as signals information (SIGINTs): any relevant data gathered on the subject from drone surveillance and wire-tapping. If any card racks up enough SIGINTs or ‘points’ and receives Obama’s approval, it is placed on the President’s Kill List. It’s worth noting that these statistics alone are enough to qualify one for assassination. That is, a target doesn’t have to be identified visually or by name before a Predator drone is allowed to swoop in and eliminate them.

As Walter Benjamin predicted in “Theories of German Fascism,” future wars would present a new “face which will permanently replace soldierly qualities by those of sports; all action will lose its military character, and war will assume the countenance of record-setting.”

JONAH MAX B’18 has never been hunting.

METABOLICS

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A black box is a unit, a unified system, or a discrete object which takes inputs and produces outputs but whose mode of operation is opaque. It is all exteriority, almost entirely sealed. You can’t easily see what’s inside it, you can’t quite tell how it works from the outside, and, more importantly, what’s inside it doesn’t matter and how it works doesn’t matter. These are non-issues. The sole matter of interest is that it works.

(Functionalism.)

“I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus [...] which performs a definite operation [...] but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed.”

—Norbert Wiener, 1961 preface to Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

In computing, black boxes are closed-source programs and subroutines. But almost any device you can think of might be a black box. To name only the most obvious examples: a camera obscura. A Kodak camera. A television. A cinema. A tape recorder.

Indeed, electronic event recorders used in aviation and other modes of transportation are commonly referred to as black boxes, built to remain totally insulated from outside conditions. Pure recording, pure preservation.

BLACK BOXES AND BLACK BOXES AND There is a hulking concrete skyscraper on Thomas Street, in the heart of lower +++ Manhattan. Windowless, it’s lined on four sides near its base and at its crown by massive rectangular vents, in groups of four and six. The vents are the only As proof of our genuine concern for privacy protection, we recently gave perperforations in the building’s flat, smoothed-over beige facades, which are mission for several privacy groups to fly their little blimp over our massive data molded on each surface by five simple indentations running in vertical lines center. We would like to thank these airborne privacy pioneers for the stunning from street-level to roof. A condensation of Brutalist design principles, 33 photo below of our impressive facility. By allowing harmless publicity stunts Thomas Street was built not for human occupation but for telecom electronics: like these, we can have our data and store it too. solid-state phone switches whose constituent modules weigh thousands of tons —NSA (NSA.gov1.info) and require high levels of security. The tower dates to 1974, when it was constructed for AT&T by John Carl Warnecke & Associates. It was known as the Boxes in a desert; Maryland in black mirrors. The National Security Agency Long Lines Building then and is now referred to by its street address—many of intercepts, archives, and calculates, sequestered from the public eye, a dark its switches have been decommissioned, and much of the building now houses reflection of Narcissus USA incarnate in the telephony and internet metadata secure data storage equipment. of billions. The NSA has anesthetized the world’s informational nervous system; Telephone exchange buildings and other technology-infrastructural buildwhen its data-collection centers cut into the world’s fiber-optic arteries and ings have been built very differently in the past, usually loosely modeled after cables, nobody feels it. When the Director of the NSA admits his agency has banking or transportation architectures. The 19th century or early 20th century violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment (the right to be secure against telecom building is fully fenestrated, sometimes with ornate arches or art-deco “unreasonable searches and seizures”), we barely even notice it. And while last niceties or even classical columns. It’s seemingly only after Modernism that we week the recently passed Freedom Act forced the NSA’s hand to stop collecting begin to see what we might call ‘black box buildings’—windowless nodes in domestic telephony metadata, programs like PRISM continue unhindered, networks of circulation and connectivity, whose insides are necessarily obscure and the black mirrors render witless any hope of genuine accountability from and whose primary function is to constantly process inputs and generate national and extranational powers. outputs. (New York City is just one of many cities filled with these black boxes; The NSA is opaque, all surface. Born in total silence in 1952, the NSA’s in actuality, black box buildings are ubiquitous and essential in the fabric of inner-workings and history have only been traced by secret documents released any modern city.) Many of them, like 33 Thomas, are telephone exchanges or ex-post facto and by whistleblowers like James Bamford, Chelsea Manning, and communications centers—in New York, take for instance the prominent VeriEdward Snowden. The agency, which specializes in “communications intellizon skyscraper at 375 Pearl Street, looming at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. gence,” grew out of the military’s Armed Forces Security Agency, and then split There are also black box buildings that translate air or water, sometimes along to become a discreet entity well outside of the precedent system of checks and with electronic signals. In the vicinity of each of New York’s major tunnels, one balances. It’s the world’s largest public institution concerned with privacy. can always spot a ventilation building or two: multistory concrete blocks, also The NSA appears to the public as architecture, as its self-disclosed informawithout fenestration but with molding and vent openings that vacantly indicate tion is about reliable as a broken compass. Its headquarters in Maryland is two a minimum of ‘architecture’ or, at the very least, ‘buildinghood.’ The striking reflective, black cubes. Since 2013, the NSA has also operated a 1-1.5 million Lincoln Tunnel ventilation buildings, shared by AT&T and the Port Authorsquare foot data center in Utah, with an estimated storage capacity of three to ity of New York and New Jersey, stand like blind sentries at the edges of the twelve exabytes. Inside these black boxes, phone calls and browsing habits rest Hudson. quantified as data on servers, waiting to be leveraged as a forensic time machine The urban black box building underscores the degree to which our cities when disaster strikes. are really just massive information systems, made up of modules programmed Our private lives are spirited away when cellphones transcode speech to exchange packets of data, to control and monitor flows. Bodies are only one into signal, send it flying away to our interlocutors—and to Utah. What was kind of information, alongside vapor, stocks, taxis, phone calls. If most archiprivate becomes private once again—but this time we are on the outside. Our tecture today is information architecture, built into a city-network according information—an uncanny, digital double of ourselves—is guarded by our to maxims of usability, openness, orderliness, clarity, and so on, there are still reflection in a black box. We are outside, but also deep within, these boxes. necessarily black box programs in operation, behind or even within the contemporary imperative of ‘free information.’ They look different than those relics of +++ the 1970s, perhaps, but what forms do they take now?

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ARTS

The College Hill Independent

Black boxing: the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.”

—Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 1999

Bruno Latour abstracts the black box from its originary cybernetic situation and deploys it in the fields of social science and science studies. The production of knowledge fundamentally depends on black boxes, which Latour uses more or less interchangeably with “matters of fact”: assembled knowledge-units used as building blocks for research, as instruments and apparatuses (“reified theory”) and through processes of citation. The classical quest for transparent, immediate knowledge of the universe depends on the snowballing of opacities.

“There is no transparency without enlightenment. With the industrial revolution came the glass palaces. Life without secrets found its form in architecture. Under transparency the state loses the informational privilege that allows it to maintain itself. Black transparency is involuntary transparency.”

—Metahaven, Black Transparency, 2013

Black boxes are suspect. What conceals its own inside immediately sets itself up for denunciation by critics, journalists, intellectuals, whistleblowers, the people. Liberal democracy wants openness: open source, open architecture, open forums. The new architectures of “transparency” function like inverted black boxes—their internal systems are so exposed, so exploded, that they become incomprehensible from any position inside or out, their edges layering up to form new, incoherent opacities. They don’t appear to conceal anything,; rather, they externalize concealment, proliferating secrets. The paradoxical act of disclosure under these conditions is what the design collective Metahaven calls “black transparency.”

D BLACK MIRRORS D BLACK MIRRORS The New York City skyline has gained a strange glass eye: 432 Park Avenue’s slim reflective body wavers high and proud above the rest of New York skyline at 1,396 feet. Built by starchitect Raphael Viñoly and the developer team of Macklowe Properties and the CIM group, 432 Park Avenue is the highest addition to the New York City skyline, topped only by the Freedom Tower’s spire.

432 Park’s exterior is all glass and emptiness: thousands of square windowed panels are interrupted by six sections of empty space intended to reduce “vortex shedding,” or the inevitable sway of such a high structure. Viñoly explained the unusual design, saying that, “a building that could be as tall as this needed to have a very well balanced relationship between form and the actual structure.”

But what is the actual structure of the building? While allowances for the natural forces of gravity and movement constitute one structural feature, the building was also designed around the less physical forces of finance. The size and price of each unit vary depending on the section they are in, increasing with height and culminating in a $95 million penthouse. The $1.3 billion tower boasts luxury apartments that only the super rich could consider possessing.

At any given time however, one quarter of the apartments’ owners are gone; the building functions as more of a locus of investment than a living space. Money lives there, and as time goes on, the value of the space multiplies as the presence of such a concentration of high value drives up the value of the neighborhood surrounding it. As the building’s hierarchical form embodies this sort of financialized architecture, the tower elevates itself far above the neighborhood at its base. While directly impacting New York City’s image and feel, 432 Park lives somewhere else, a piece of unreal estate in a world of money and power that exists above the specificity of any one city, a slice of generic sky.

Though it could be anywhere, it is not. The incredibly conspicuous reflectiveness of the building makes an obligatory interaction with the public a key feature of its form. As Harry B. Macklowe, the developer of the tower, posited pensively to 1,500 construction workers at the topping out ceremony: “It’s almost like the Mona Lisa. Except instead of it looking at you, you’re looking at it wherever you are. You can’t escape it.”

Suddenly, in the glinting skin of the building’s tall glass body, a vertiginous relationship of watcher and watched emerges between a façade and the rest of the city. The tower’s omnipresent form absorbs the gaze of the city and throws back its own image on those who can’t escape looking. An image of power and money, of a reflector whose conspicuousness makes it impossible to see anything but the astonishing fact of its existence. It is watched, but can’t be entered; in looking, you find yourself always in the eye of a swaying glass giant who doesn’t care to look down.

by Alec Mapes-Frances, Eli Neuman-Hammond & Athena Washburn

ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B ‘17, ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B ‘18 & ATHENA WASHBURN B ‘18 are a harmful publicity stunt.

Dec 4, 2015

ARTS

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THE LANGUAGE OF UNLOVING

by Gabrielle Hick illustration by Yuko Okabe

When they’d been married for thirty-one years, and unhappy in each other for most of them, my grand’maman and my grand’papa stopped speaking.

They wrote each other letters because it was easier to stroke the contours of a B than the contours of a face, they broke pencil nibs with the brittle becoming of their love, they signed their names with anger and pain and careful crossings of the Ts. They wrote letters like hello please take the girls to the store thank you and letters like would you please take the chicken out of the freezer and defrost for dinner thank you until the only way my grand’papa could explain that he was dying was through a letter dear Colette I believe that I am very sick and I think that I am dying I am afraid thank you. +++ I have tried over and over again to answer the question of what these letters mean, these unlove letters written by a pair of people who also wrote their bodies into mine. In the hitch of my shoulders and the arch of my nose and the bend of my waist I can read them and their inherited bodily text. And I’ve been told I clip my Hs like one of them did, so that the word human sounds more like singing when I say it. +++ But I’ve looked in the mirror and wondered if the unloving is in me too.

I’ve wondered, in quiet moments of all kinds, if I love to write because my grand’maman and my grand’papa passed the why of why they wrote down deep and low into my blood, a kind of septicemia.

17

LITERARY

The College Hill Independent

The List; or, Mapping the Future Unassailable We find ourselves at an impasse: Whether to know too much or too little, Whether to position ourselves so that we are ourselves Or to extend our empathy into the next day.

Me? I am a disappearing artist, though not by choice— Words tend to make people disappear, Which is true of the people who say them And especially of those who do not.

I haven’t chosen to catalog the hours of which our lives are structured Nor has anybody asked me, After all, it’s the cartographer who models your reality, Whether it be the mapping of Çatalhöyük or the House of the Admiral, Whose topography was guesswork, A drawing of an unplaceable people, An unlocated people, Who had yet to delimit And spoliate the earth with concepts, Or a polygonal take on the 95 corridor.

The grid cannot arise ex nihilo.

It’s built, (On weekends, as a shed by a depressed dad) See Waldseemuller’s map of a place Still inhabited by speakers of the autochthonous language, A carrot on a stick.

See the bleeding Costanoan land Where the great grandchildren of bootleggers position pegs Of donut shops, Parroting a shtick Absorbed on CRT About a girl with her nose in a phone.

Sunday December 6 Roman Catholic Mass Manning Chapel, 1–21 Prospect St. 10:30-11:30AM Free Tuesday December 22 Josh Groban Music Hall at Fair Park, Dallas, TX

Eh, I just trace motion Before the fact, I don’t tell you where to go, I’ve told you where you are, and here’s the Funny thing is I am nowhere.

Facility is strength; But invisibility is free, The hidden face of true democracy is true Anonymity.

A facemask does not conceal it, For example, your famous Luchadore, Or a pair of glasses without which you look slightly strange.

See, I can envision the author of Ecclesiastes in my mind, Wisdom is meaningless—who said that?

A punker and his god.

Listen.

A faceless and pious Levantine.

Listen.

Your German nationals In a Portuguese bar On Nassau Ave. Hear Handel church bells ping in praise of the trans-migration of faith.

Listen.

The meaningless words of teachers You already know.

Listen, though.

I am a stencil; I.e. I do nothing.

I am a waste, an indweller, an aggregator, an agglomeration, A facsimile of a facsimile, Dead on arrival.

I can do nothing for you But I can do nothing from anywhere at all.

Listen: I will do nothing But disappear, Project a world, And proffer meaningless wisdom: You are what you make yourself, Unless you they don’t let you.

Yours truly, The LW

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