The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 9

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 9

Vol.29

a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Bureaucracy Alif Ibrahim, Jonah Max & Julia Tompkins

Volume 31 No. 9

03 Constant Conversations 07 Freestyle Policy Rebecca Blandon 11 Oil & Water Charlotte Biren From the editors: On September 12, 2001, the Providence police surrounded the Amtrak Station downtown in order to arrest Sher JB Singh, of Leesburg, VA, at the command of the FBI. He was escorted off the train, handcuffed and at gunpoint.

His arrest was met with celebration and applause from the civilian crowd that had quickly gathered. One bystander reportedly shouted, “kill him!”

Later, Singh was charged with a misdemeanor for carrying a knife and let go. As it turned out, he had nothing to do with the previous day’s terrorist attacks.

The knife was, in fact, a kirpan, a symbol of Singh’s Sikh faith.

On September 14, 2015, Governor Raimondo expressed her willingness to host Syrian refugees in Rhode Island.

But following this week’s attacks, legislators have challenged Raimondo’s commitment. As of press time, a poll on the Providence Journal website indicates that 73 percent of readers agree with them.

While the prospects seem slim, we hope we don’t look back in anger once more.

METRO 09 Everybody Hurts Ben Williams FEATURES 13 Blooming Data Ben Berke & Henry Staley METABOLICS 16 Outside/Inside Eli Neuman-Hammond LITERARY 17 Gummy Worms Isabelle Doyle

SC/KS/MS

EPHEMERA 15 Lean In Too Jake Brodsky X 18 Inkblot Grace Zhang

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

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.

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

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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 Salamé MVP Shane Potts

@theindy_tweets

by Alif Ibrahim, Jonah Max & Julia Tompkins

Cable Cabals In the early 1950s, as the Cold War began to chill, the US laid thousands of miles of cable along the ocean floor. Cables designed to safely and instantaneously shuttle telephone conversations, telex transmissions, photo telegrams, and slow-scan television between far-flung landmasses—coaxial cables in a biaxial world. One of the first of these cables stretched from the coast of Florida to that of Cuba. A tenuous connection—but one that can help us reimagine the machinations of the time. Kennedy’s frantic White House phone calls, reports that ballistic missiles had been reangled by a precise degree, as well as the codes that would command such weapons, all wired, all deeply connected, and all instantaneous. No, it wasn’t an era of glittering satellites floating in the any-space-whatever, or of moon missions guiding humans to some exotic rock, but rather one of galvanized copper, pressurized and submerged along the crust of our Earth.

Well what can we say right now, at this exact moment?

Russia has returned to our cables. This time with submarines and spy ships. Hovering just over the cords through which their presence was reported. And the fear now is less that the cables might be “hacked” like some roving satellite, and more focused on the possibility that they might be physically severed. Some large blade surreptitiously swooping down from the belly of a submarine and slicing these thin wires— instantly halting the instant communications on which the West’s economies, governments, and citizens are dependent.

Moreover, what makes this all so terrifying to US military officials is where Russia could carry out such an attack.

Russian spy ships, like the 350 foot-long Yantar, are able to deploy droves of deep-water submersibles, capable of plunging miles below sea-level, reaching the deepest corners of the ocean, the most inaccessible places on Earth. An attack there could take days to just locate and weeks to fix. And so here we are, on the brink of the brink of an aggression. What can be safely said is that if something does happen, we’ll know about it instantly. –JM

Nov 20, 2015

Slow Down, Speed Racer The traffic stop: car whizzes by, maybe it’s going ten, fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit. Maybe the driver is bumpin’ to “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” maybe daydreaming about the delicatessen lunch spread at the noon meeting, pondering stock options, rushing to pick the kids up from school. Fast moves, the zoomers, lead-foot on the gas, unstoppable. Slowing these bad girls and boys down, a task left in the hands of state troopers and local police, loyal men and women with their radar guns, just waiting for the perps to accelerate.

Not every stop is for the speedy, we discovered this past week when Zandr Milewsk, a California police officer, pulled over a Google self-driving car in the town of Mountain View.

Cruising behind the vehicle on his motorcycle, Milewsk noticed that the compact vehicle was clogging up the road, going 24 in a 35 mile per hour zone. On closer inspection, Milewsk observed that while there was someone behind the wheel, no one was actually driving the car. Unprepared to hand down road-rule over to autonomous machines, the officer pulled the vehicle aside. In what can only be described as a Google-driven journey to the future, Milewsk was forced to confront his first stop sans driver. Cue improv. Adapting quickly to the situation at hand, the officer proceeded to “educate the operators about impeding traffic,” in the words of the police department’s blog.

Though Google has yet to receive a ticket on one of their self-driving vehicles, this is not the first traffic stop of this kind the cars have encountered. After the incident, Google posted: “we’ve capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25 mph for safety reasons,” with the aim of the cars appearing “friendly and approachable.” Oddly humanoid language for such a non-human machine. The cars have traveled over 1.2 million miles without a ticket, the company brags. However, in the event of undesirable road behavior, the car operator would receive the penalty.

Human drivers get the short end of the stick here.

Blamed for the error of our machines, forced to suffer the burdens of an irresponsible autonomous vehicle, all for what: a nap behind the wheel? Basket-weaving on the way to work?

A quick game of online poker? Google may be making strides into a niche industry, but until my car makes my afternoon coffee and files my taxes, I’m keeping my hands at ten and two. –JT

Reptilia Paratus Everyone in Indonesia knows that nobody is incorruptible, and that is certainly Budi Waseso’s opinion. Appointed in 2015, the 54 year old head of the country’s National Narcotics Agency is determined to eradicate the “Narcotic Mafia that are committing mass murder by poisoning our youth.”

Indonesia has a very strict drug policy. Marijuana possession is punishable by a four year minimum prison sentence or a minimum fine of $90,000; trafficking often leads to the death penalty.

A few weeks ago, Budi expressed his desire to build a prison island for death row prisoners incarcerated for drugrelated offences. But Budi now has to ensure that these prisoners do not find ways to escape. And while his island may impede the more Shawshank-esque escapes, it does not insulate against bribery.

Because while the streets are safe from pot smokers, corruption and extortion runs rampant. In 2011, Indonesia was reported to have lost $238.6 million through corruption, mostly in the form of embezzlement. Most people have either experienced it firsthand, or have known of an instance where a government official, be it a police officer or a governor, turned a blind eye when offered the correct sum of money.

After his announcement of the prison island, the only logical next step is to find the guards that will protect this island. And Budi has managed to find the incorruptible: crocodiles.

“The crocodiles cannot be bribed,” he stated in an interview. “You can’t convince them to let the prisoner escape.” What sounded like a joke at first is slowly becoming reality, with Budi recently visiting a crocodile farm in Northern Sumatra. The man also has an international outlook­—he told Tempo, an Indonesian magazine, that he was looking at the Amazonian Piranha to reinforce his artillery, citing the freshwater omnivore’s incorruptibility as its most desirable quality.

Indonesians, thankfully, are lucid enough to recognize the absurdity of his bond-villain plot. “[Budi] has indirectly admitted that he himself isn’t incorruptible like a crocodile,” quipped one sharp Facebook user. But the jury is still out on octopi. –AI

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In 1995 and 2002, the Indy published pieces concerning the armament of Brown’s Department of Public Safety. These articles have been re-published to illustrate that students of color have been demanding justice and safety at Brown for decades. Below is a timeline of recent events.

On Brown’s campus, and across the country, the fight continues. +++ October 5, 2015: The Brown Daily Herald publishes column “The white privilege of cows” by M. Dzhali Maier, which argues that “colonialism simply allows those who come from a history of being well-fed enough to let experimentation happen, conquering those who have not had that luck.”

October 6, 2015: The Brown Daily Herald publishes column “Columbian Exchange Day” by M. Dzhali Maier, which argues that “all Native Americans should celebrate Columbus Day, even if they have reservations about honoring Christopher Columbus himself.” In the days following, “Native Americans at Brown,” “a collective of Latinx and Latin-American students,” “leaders of various Black student organizations,” “a collective of AAPI students,” and “a collective of multiracial and biracial students” publish letters in condemnation.

October 9, 2015: The Brown Daily Herald publishes column “An open letter to students on power, learning and responsibility” by President Christina Paxson, Provost Richard Locke, and Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey. They assure that “the Herald, like any student organization, is an educational activity.”

October 10, 2015: M. Dzhali Maier responds to criticism on WPRO: “I’ve experienced a lot of personal backlash, mostly over social media. I take it to be a sign of weakness from the student groups who are upset at my writing. It is analogous to the last breath from a dying animal, desperate for anything.”

October 14, 2015: The Brown Daily Herald publishes column “Some speech hurts—and that’s okay.” This is the first of a number of columns that equate the anger of students of color over the Herald’s willingness to publish factually inaccurate and morally repugnant articles to wanton assaults on free speech. Over the next few weeks some students and faculty members write further defenses of ‘free speech,’ while others publish pieces criticizing this racialized use of ‘free speech’ discourse.

November 12, 2015: In solidarity with black students at Yale and Mizzou, black students and students of color organize a Blackout in front of the Van Wickle gates. Students share their own experiences with racism on Brown’s campus. Africana Studies graduate students hold a teach-in afterwards, during which they demand an increase in faculty of color hires and retention, compulsory anti-oppression training for faculty, and a concrete accountability process for departments with historically racist pedagogies. Graduate students expand on these demands in a November 16 letter.

November 13, 2015: Faculty, mainly from the Africana Studies and Ethnic Studies departments, release a letter expressing support for students of color at Brown.

November 13, 2015: At night, a Dartmouth delegate to the 2015 Latinx Ivy League Conference is assaulted by a Brown Department of Public Safety officer. According to the student, a DPS officer “found me in the laundry room next to the dance floor, slammed me against the wall, and slammed me to the ground. Meanwhile, they accused me of resisting when I was not, and the scuffle scraped my face and chin.”

November 14, 2015: The delegates of the Latinx Ivy League Conference schedule a meeting with President Paxson to discuss the previous evening’s incident. Over 100 students attend the meeting, many expressing frustration over the recurrent nature of such events and the administration’s continued failure to rectify the problem. At 10:14 PM, Paxson sends an email outlining a course of action to begin “right now. Tonight.” She says the University will “examine the need for additional diversity and sensitivity training for all officers in the Department of Public Safety.”

November 18, 2015: Students Against the Prison Industrial Complex holds a teach-in on Brown DPS and police brutality. Later that night, a number of students of color at Brown come together to compose a joint list of demands for the administration.

THE FAILED OG WAS A GOP

When Music Taste Turns Political

News outlets have been prying into each bit of Dr. Ben Carson’s autobiography, vetting stories from his childhood in which he claims to have harassed peers and attempted stabbing a person whose identity remains unknown. Contradictory to his recounts of a rebellious adolescence, old friends revealed to CNN that Carson was anything but a bully—imagine, he’s a man who went on to break skin only for the sake of saving lives. And yet, Carson continues to paint himself as a delinquent boy from the poor streets of Detroit.

In his latest campaign stunt, Carson released a one-minute “rap” last week, which according to his management team was meant to target young black voters, a demographic that is mostly Democratic. House exit polls showed that black votes constituted 23% of the Democratic vote in 2014, leading Carson’s team to believe that 20% of the black vote is all that’s necessary to succeed if positioned head to head with Clinton. The $150,000 ad, called “Freedom,” is set to air for two weeks on radio stations in Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Memphis, and Little Rock.

The track, created by Robert Donaldson, a minister, business owner, and self-dubbed, “Republican Catholic rapper,” performing under the moniker Aspiring Mogul, samples Carson’s speeches over a generic beat with patterned flute riffs. In one line, Carson says, “America became a great nation early on not because it was flooded with politicians but because it was flooded with people who understood the value of personal responsibility, hard work, innovation and that’s what will get us on the right track now.”

After watching Carson’s autobiographical film adaption, Gifted Hands, Aspiring Mogul felt compelled to write a song called “Black Republican” and sent it to Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, placing the rapper in Carson’s periphery. Bennett liked the song so much that he posted it on Carson’s campaign Facebook page this past September. Such positive feedback prompted Aspiring Mogul to offer yet another track for the campaign which was later approved

by Carson.

In an interview with NPR, Aspiring Mogul explained his own reasoning behind making “Freedom” as a proponent of Carson’s campaign, and interestingly referenced Obama’s 2008 campaign ad, “Yes We Can,” as comparable to the song he wrote for Carson.

Aspiring Mogul, however, failed to mention that “Yes We Can” was a lengthy hip-hop music video produced by experienced producer will.i.am and collaboratively sung by a range of celebrities and artists; it was a hit that went viral and aimed to target viewers of all sorts in order to spread Obama’s slogan, “Yes We Can.” “Freedom” is not as collaborative or musically developed, nor is it intentionally designed for a diverse set of ears. More importantly, the song has been largely dismissed and ridiculed on the Internet. The track has already been followed by a spoof called “Panderdom,” created by comedy writer Aaron Nemo from the Huffington Post.

Nemo recorded himself over the beat bed “Freedom,” saying “Hi, I’m Ben Carson’s campaign manager. I want to reach African-American voters. I know one thing, it’s if you’re black you’ll like Ben Carson if we put him in a rap. This ad will air on urban radio stations that have high black populations. Is this offensive and highly condescending, well…” +++ The appropriation of music in politics by politicians and voters is nothing new. Presidential campaign ads—including music and video—have been around for as long as the movie trailer, although electoral jingles may have dated back to George Washington’s, “God Save Great Washington,” a parody of “God Save The King.” Another old musical campaign, among the first of its kind, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” supported William Henry Harrison’s victory in the 1841 presidential election.

Fast forward to the 21st century and the political soundscape could involve anything from user-generated video spoofs and candidate-curated playlists to music at conventions and in advertisements. President Barack Obama hasn’t received a respite since 2012, having starred in a myriad of YouTube videos created by channels like Baracksdubs, with a following of almost 1 million subscribers. The channel prides itself on fashioning comical videos of Obama singing pop songs; it weaves clips of his speeches into somewhat fluid renditions of hits like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.” This past summer, Obama made musical taste political by sharing POTUS playlists via Spotify, stirring 2016 candidates to create their own public playlists. Hillary Clinton released a track-list heavy on Beyoncé; Marco Rubio, the self-identified hip-hop head, showed his liking for Wu-Tang Clan; Jeb Bush had a lot of Liam Gallagher; Lincoln Chaffee mostly had Metric; Mike Huckabee curated classic hits from

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the 40s and 90s while Scott Walker listed the “best” of Nickelback, and Chris Christie, a lot of screamo. Rand Paul chose one song, “I’m Different” by 2 Chainz, joking that he was a “different” kind of Republican, whereas Bernie Sanders abstained from creating a playlist, stating that most Americans can’t even afford music due to income inequality.

To brand their campaigns, prevalent candidates like Hillary Clinton went with Sara Bareilles’ “Brave,” Donald Trump chose Neil Young’s “Rockin in’ the Free World,” and Bernie Sanders, “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie.

Sanders’ choice may have been the most relevant and thoughtful one, as Woody Guthrie is one of America’s staples in political music. Guthrie, of course, was a member of the famous protest folk music group, Almanac Singers, in the 1940s. The group became renowned for its creation of “peace” songs and was led by a similarly esteemed musician and political songwriter, Pete Seeger.

Trump failed in his attempt at securing Young’s endorsement. Upon using the song, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Trump was met with backlash from the music prodigy himself. In a statement, Young struck, “I do not trust self serving misinformation coming from corporations and their media trolls. I do not trust politicians who are taking millions from those corporations either. I trust people. So I make my music for people, not for candidates.” Young also wrote that Trump’s campaign management never asked for permission to use his song and that he is, in fact, a Sanders supporter.

Clinton’s contemporary pop pick boded well in comparison to Trump’s floundering; she accompanied her speech on voting rights, equal pay across gender, LGBTQ+ equality, affordable higher education, and climate change with music from other female pop artists like Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, and Jennifer Lopez. Her selection of female artists singing the songs “Roar,” “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” and “Let’s Get Loud” expressed her message of female empowerment to some degree. More importantly, Clinton secured permission and support from the artists before using their music, forming a united front with America’s leading female pop stars. After Clinton’s campaign launch, even Lopez seemed likely to vote for Clinton, saying, “I think it’s time for a woman” to E! News.

Music co-opting is not a surprising marketing strategy for candidates, as voters are treated much like consumers of product. It’s about piquing ears and catching attention in short spurts rather than educating potential voters about each candidate’s platform. In this way, music can become a decoy for candidates, leading voters to support a leader based on popular irrelevancies and precarious connections between the music’s message and that of the politician. This becomes clearer when artists themselves prohibit the use of their music in presidential campaigns. +++ In the past, many artists have had their music falsely endorse a candidate they have no affiliation with or support for. This year alone, REM revolted against Trump’s use of their song, “It’s The End of The World,” while Dropkick Murphys objected via Twitter to Scott Walker’s walkout in Iowa to their song, “I’m Shipping Up To Boston.” A bevy of similar examples in 2012 include Newt Gingrich’s use of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and Mitt Romney’s unwelcome use of songs by K’Naan, Al Green, and Silversun Pickups. In 2011, Michele Bachmann butted heads with Tom Petty when trying to play herself up as his lyricized “American Girl,” walking into a rally. Years before, Petty stopped Bush from using his “I Won’t Back Down” at rallies. In 2008, Sarah Palin was also confronted by Heart after booming “Barracuda” over speakers at the Republican National Convention. Heart disclosed a statement clarifying that, “Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women.” And stretching further back to 1984’s famous example, Ronald Reagan co-opted Bruce Springsteen’s fame for “Born in the USA,” with absolutely no support from Springsteen himself.

The ASCAP and BMI, both artist performing rights organizations, make efforts to prevent artists and their music from becoming misused in advertisements and campaigns. Their laws protect the artist from false endorsements with the “Lanham Act,” which prevents an artist’s brand from dilution, and the “Right of Publicity,” which protects the artist’s self-promoted image.

Artists have also taken it upon themselves to defend their own work by filing lawsuits against candidates. In 2008, vocal democrat Jackson Browne sued John McCain over using a part of Browne’s song, “Running On Empty,” in a campaign commercial without his consent.

Two years following, David Byrne of the Talking Heads took Charlie Crist to court for using

The College Hill Independent

by Rebecca Blandon illustration by Polina Godz

“Road to Nowhere” in an attack video against opponent Marco Rubio. The artists prevailed in both cases. This year, Rubio thought it wise to stage his kickoff campaign rally with “Something New,” a track created by former members of the electronic group Swedish House Mafia, Axwell and Ingrosso. Not surprisingly, Axwell and Ingrosso wished not to be affiliated with his party and campaign and asked that Rubio desist.

In the case of Carson’s “rap” ad composed by Aspiring Mogul—an artist directly in support of the Carson campaign—the issue has less to do with the artist’s rights and more with the intentions of Carson and his management team in using the brand of hip-hop and rap music as a marketing tool. +++ Hip-hop was born out of the marginalization of people whose voices had no choice but to transcend the limits of strict speech or melodic song to be heard. Sprouted from the Bronx, the culture of hip-hop—including rap, graffiti, and breakdancing—became a way for Black youth to voice their experiences, fraught with encounters of discrimination and injustice.

Carson’s underwhelming song, aside from generalizing hip-hop’s audience as solely Black, also plays into the condescending notion that Black youth could only understand his political disposition through the “language” of hip-hop, as if they wouldn’t be able to assess his candidacy in any other way. It reduces the diversity of character within the community of Black youth, implying that if the “consumer” likes rap that (s)he will effectively favor Carson and his political objectives.

In terms of its musicality, “Freedom” is nothing more than superficial composition, lacking both complexity and flow. Carson’s unexpected use of “rap” emerges as a clichéd one-minute gaffe among true hip-hop and rap enthusiasts and creators, cheapening the very urgency and necessity that first spurred the genesis of the genre. The voice of hip-hop belongs to a group that he struggles to fit into. At least since Melle Mel, its roots are in protest, taking the form of personal narrative that expressed vulnerability in the face of the very State that Carson hopes to represent. Nothing about Carson’s rap speaks to these origins, by telling a story about his personal struggle, challenging the status quo, or even exhibiting a visceral sense of honesty. His apocryphal image is also worsened by the fact that “Freedom” wasn’t even written by him; authentic artists write their own lyrics and lay out their own beats—there’s no marketing scheme.

Indeed, there is little to Carson behind the facade. His persona continues to be inconsistent and offensive to prospective voters, especially in this case, where he attempts to imitate a music form he critically bashed just months before. In an interview with Business Insider, he remarked, “we need to reestablish faith in our communities and the values and principles that got us through slavery…why were we able to get through [that]? Because of our faith…and as we allow the hip-hop community to destroy those things for us…we continue to deteriorate.”

One can only wonder then how little faith it must have taken for Carson to fall back on the hip-hop community he deems “detrimental.” Perhaps presidential candidates should stick to their podiums for speech only.

REBECCA BLANDON B’16 raps to her own rhythm.

Nov 20, 2015

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IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK

Devin Costa Exposes the Lonely

Loneliness was there before he wrote it. In the vacant buildings, the downtown parking lots, the abandoned streets. It was there in the failing school system, the empty storefronts, the stagnant waters of the Providence River. For Devin Costa, loneliness was the feeling of a generation that woke up after a long American Dream to find they were sleeping on the sidewalk.

“I’d just lost two friends to suicide from different towns,” Costa wrote in an artist’s statement for a recent exhibition at the Columbus Theater, “And in each town the general thought of the kids there was ‘another teen suicide.’ As if that was normal.” Over the past decade, teen suicide attempts in Rhode Island have doubled, according to Rhode Island Public Radio. It’s the third leading cause of death for men and women ages 15-24 in the United States.

The Providence Journal described 19-year-old Devin Costa as a “slight, baby-faced man,” but in reality he looks much more mature with his thick-framed black glasses and coarse stubble. Costa grew up in East Providence, but moved to Lincoln to attend a better high school.

“I was one of the only minorities in my school. I didn’t really fit in too well. There was a lot of, like, those types of racial jokes,” Costa said in an interview with the Independent, “Slowly I started to distance myself from those things, even if it meant not really having friends.”

So he started climbing buildings to take photographs, to see the city in a way most people never do. He scrambled up fire escapes at night to clear his head, not to escape loneliness, but to confront it. “When I went up there I found more reason to live and more reason to do things.

It made me feel more attached to the world and more attached to everything,” said Costa.

“From photography to graffiti, it’s always been my reason to stay around. Anything making something or creating something is fascinating to me.”

From several stories up, you can see just how small downtown is, as if you could reach out and embrace all of it. If it’s past the city’s bedtime, a peculiar silence swallows Providence, from the façade of the former National Bank on Weybosset Street to the steps of City Hall. The buildings seem to huddle closely around the so-called Superman Building, the city’s architectural icon, its offices vacant for years. A legacy of deindustrialization and economic decline has left Providence somewhat stripped, uncertain of what to do with all these former beehives of industry.

In the thick of winter, LONELY began to pop up on walls around Providence in stark white or pink paint: “Lonely as I’ve ever been.” “Lonely as ever.” “See Me Now.” Costa would tie a rope to a bucket of paint and his backpack, dragging the bucket up once he reached the top. On particularly cold nights, the paint would get almost too thick to roll, but Costa would paint anyway. “I guess what I did was the opposite of advertisement,” he explained, “Advertisement is meant to entice you to buy something, to look a certain way, to want something. What I did was advertise something that you don’t want to feel, you don’t want to see.” In a society so accustomed to encountering projections of excessive self-confidence, LONELY—as Costa’s various messages came to be called—became a wake-up call and a consolation. LONELY combated an age in which everybody is forced to compete, to act cool when they felt inadequate.

“I thought I would push the opposite out there—worse than you, not feeling good, negative, I don’t feel good—and see what would happen,” he said. “And a lot of people were uncomfortable seeing that.”

Creative or Capital?

“For people who work downtown, it’s unsettling. It gives it a sight like as if maybe there is some issues here,” Captain Michael Correia of the Providence Police told WPRI 12 Eyewitness News back in April.

At the outbreak of the recession, Providence Mayor David Cicilline hired North Star Destination Strategies to rebrand the city and help stimulate a lagging economy. The Nashvillebased firm led a $100,000 campaign, reimagining the city as the Creative Capital. As Mayor Cicilline told the Wall Street Journal at the time, “We have a great product. We needed a better capacity to market it.”

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The campaign for the creative city places public art in the sphere of urban planning and development. In this urban model, art becomes a means to an end, a way of capitalizing on human resources and attracting investors or tourists to metropolitan centers. It’s no surprise that sanctioned street art often walks hand-in-hand with the drive for preservation. Certain walls are designated historic brick, while others become canvases for city-hopping muralists. As an instrument of gentrification, palatable street art lends a sense of authenticity to those who seek it—the creative class, a veritable mish-mash of entrepreneurs, designers, and artistic professionals. Public art moguls tend to favor the aesthetic of gritty urban life, while simply painting over local problems and avoiding provocative statements. In the Creative Capital, there isn’t space for projects like LONELY. After graduating from RISD, Yarrow Thorne started the Avenue Concept in 2013 to create a sanctioned space for public art in Providence. “We were quickly approached by the city and the graffiti task force as a solution to some of their challenges,” Thorne recalled, sitting in the organization’s Lockwood Street office. The Avenue Concept would take heavily targeted walls and organize a sanctioned mural project to combat what Thorne calls ‘negative tagging.’ They’ve also commissioned artists to paint the dull concrete walls between Central and Classical High School, as well as large murals on Washington Street by Polish street artists Etam Cru and Natalia Rak. As part of this summer’s International Arts Festival, the Avenue Concept directed a citywide public art campaign. “We hired fifty local artists and designers to install as much art as possible in the city and a lot of people couldn’t care less about it. We got no exposure, no conversations,” Thorne said sadly, “There’s more media exposure on a national and local level for LONELY and there’s more people talking about it in good and bad ways.”

When marginalized voices are silenced or ignored, they often surface in subversive ways.

LONELY confronted Providence with feelings of negativity in a way sanctioned public art installations rarely do. “I think art is being exploited in this city. They take who they want to take and they use it as a way to brand the city as a place where people that want an urban feeling would want to go,” said Costa. But in its plain block lettering, LONELY spelled out the problems of urban life. Alienation. Unemployment. Gentrification. Invisibility. LONELY couldn’t be commercialized or commodified. But it could be illegalized.

Bad for Business In mid-April, the Providence Police Department put out a surveillance image of Costa descending a flight of stairs with a paint roller and a pan of his trademark pink paint. Still living with his family, Costa decided to turn himself in to the city instead of waiting for the police to raid the house.

“What happens if we let you go tonight and then tomorrow you fall off a building and die,” asked one of the detectives who questioned Costa upon his arrest.

“That would be tragic,” replied Costa’s lawyer, Thomas Thomasian.

“Not for me. For me, it would just make my job easier,” the cop replied.

“He threatened my mother,” Costa later recalled in his artist’s statement, “Looking at him, his stone face that never seems to smile, I realized he’s lonelier than the lot of us. To look an eighteen-year-old man in his eyes and tell him you couldn’t care if he took a four story drop to his death showed me what lonely meant to me.”

For first- or second-time offenders, graffiti is a misdemeanor, but multiple offenders may face felony charges in Rhode Island. State Senator Maryellen Goodwin, who sponsored the current legislation, told the Woonsocket Call back in 2013, “it makes neighborhoods look rundown and uncared for, sending a message to others that it won’t matter if they decide to add more graffiti, litter or blight to the area.” This argument—the broken windows theory—states that the deterrence and heavy punishment of minor crimes fosters law and order, preventing major criminal activity. A recent Providence Journal editorial echoes Goodwin, arguing that

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by Ben Williams illustration by Blaine Harvey

downtown needs to be cleaned up: “the park, plaza, and steps have been invaded by people who cause problems, including those suffering from mental troubles and/or drug addiction.” In this sense, stigmatized individuals, already excluded from the conversation, are blamed for the lack of resources provided to them. And the graffiti artist is thought to bear the burden of a future murderer, who may decide that a tag suggests a good location for taking somebody’s life. This policy not only fails to eradicate serious crimes, but also leads to rampant racial discrimination.

“We have a criminal justice system that disproportionally polices, arrests, tries, and convicts people of color,” said Daniel Schleifer, the executive director of New Urban Arts, a community arts center for youth in Providence. “There are young people from more affluent areas who are doing graffiti as well, and they’re less likely to come to the attention of authority.”

Costa chose to place LONELY in the most visible spaces, in the spaces that would provoke and antagonize authority: the Biltmore Garage, waterfront properties facing the East Side, and office buildings in the heart of downtown. “The idea of gentrification holds a lot of weight in this situation,” he said, “If you put graffiti in a neighborhood where it belongs—dilapidated or poorer people living there—the victim is discounted. They don’t really care what you see cause you don’t bring in as much money as these people.” In other words, cities selectively police graffiti, maintaining different standards for lower- and upper- class areas.

In the Creative Capital, not everybody has the same chance to express themselves. Property owners, city government, and artistic entrepreneurs get to decide which art to sanction and what the restrictions are on certain projects, often silencing critical voices and avoiding difficult conversations. In the push to lure new residents and new capital, marginalized communities are often left out of the creative process in favor of affluent, well-educated urban transplants.

As Schleifer puts it, “When you don’t have an opportunity to tell your story or the means to have your voice heard, that’s loneliness.”

I love you even when you don’t notice In August, Costa pleaded no contest to six charges of vandalism and landed a grand total of $14,248 in fines and fees. Originally ordered by the court to pay monthly installments over two years, Costa recently received a letter reducing that time to one year. Per month, that’s equal to a forty-hour workweek on minimum wage.

The arts community has rallied around LONELY, and an online fundraising campaign has already raised $4,000 over the past two months. Vida Mia Ruiz, who started the campaign, told the Independent, “Given our community’s overwhelmingly positive response to the tags, I figured we could organize to make sure the story didn’t end with silencing of a bright, motivated, and conscious voice with the threat of probation, home confinement or jail should he be unable to meet the deadline.” The campaign has brought Costa into contact with accomplished local artists Will Schaff and Brian Chippendale, who have helped him improve his screen-printing

Nov 20, 2015

and stenciling techniques when he’s not working his two jobs to pay off his legal fees. In early November, Costa exhibited framed prints of his work at the Columbus Theater as a statement about how art changes once it’s presented in an official space.

“I think that if you stop for a minute, what Devin’s trying to do is bring up a question in general. How lonely are we? How can we connect with other human beings? What a vulnerable thing to do,” Mary Beth Meehan told the Independent in a phone interview. As part of the International Arts Festival this past summer, Meehan exhibited large-scale photographic portraits of Providence residents on buildings throughout the city. One of Meehan’s photos, a picture of an Olneyville mechanic, hung right next to “Lonely as I’ve ever been,” on the façade of 32 Custom House Street, facing the river. Together, the two pieces—one commissioned, the other unsanctioned—filled up the formerly blank brick wall. While Meehan’s photo still stands, Costa’s message has been erased.

Perhaps the most iconic LONELY piece still in place is on the South Street Power Station: “I love you even when you don’t notice.” The former power station—soon to be jointly redeveloped by Brown University, the University of Rhode Island, and Rhode Island College—overlooks I-195 and its new, superior replacement, the Manchester Street Power Station. Stripped of its smokestacks and turbines, the building embodies everything LONELY stands for: disposability, inadequacy, estrangement. If you’re looking up the mouth of the Providence River, Costa’s statement is set against the skyline, reading like a love letter to the city.

“At the time I’d stopped living with my mom, and it was really hard for me to keep any kind of relationship with my mom from not being there,” Costa said as he recalled painting the phrase. “That was also the time that my friends had killed themselves.”

LONELY meant different things to different people. For some, it was the story of a guy who had lost his girlfriend. For others, it was the motto of an outsider. “Different communities reached out to me, a lot of people who had lived different lives and then are outcasted for that,” says Costa, “For it to reach that many different people meant something to me.”

Now, Costa is carrying LONELY further. After his exhibition at the Columbus Theater, he’s busy printing t-shirts and honing his skills in different artistic mediums. He still has a lingering sense of self-doubt and insecurity: “I struggle with what art is and I don’t really know if I’m an artist.” Over the past couple of months, some of Costa’s messages have been washed away, exposing the empty bricks beneath them. But despite the absence, you can see that LONELY is still there.

BEN WILLIAMS B’16 is trying to overcome a fear of heights.

METRO

10

Ecuador Reaches Out to the Shuar People

by Charlotte Biren illustration by Polina Godz `

On October 30, Rosa Mireya Cardenas, Ecuador’s Deputy Minister of Justice, represented the Ecuadorian government in a visit to the Shuar people, an indigenous community that has received increasing media attention for the rich oil deposits in their territory of Cuchaena in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The visit addressed tensions resulting from the recent government and military efforts to suppress indigenous mobilization on land rights. After the meeting, the Ecuadorian government and the Shuar people established a schedule of bi-monthly dialogues with intent to reduce violence and conflict, as well as formally discuss methods to alleviate poverty.

Over the past five years, the Shuar have mobilized through means of protests and resistance to protect land rights and expose violations committed by the Ecuadorian government. These acts have been met with military force and threat unparalleled to much before. In November 2014, a leader of the Shuar people, José Isidro Tendetza Antún, was tortured and assassinated days before he was due to appear at the Lima Climate Talks in December to protest a mine’s construction. Luis Corral, an advisor to Ecuador’s Assembly of the People of the South, a coalition for indigenous federations in southern Ecuador, said that if Tendetza had been able to participate in the Lima Climate talks, he would have cast into “grave doubt the honorability and the image of the Ecuadorean government as a guarantor of the rights of nature” that Correa has worked to construct.

In June 2010, Ecuador held a summit on minority rights in Latin America, inviting some of Correa’s left-wing allies, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, to attend.

Even though Ecuador held the summit in the indigenous town of Otavalo, Ecuador’s main indigenous organizations and leaders were not invited to take part in discussion. In reaction to this exclusion, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) organized an alternative summit. The so-called summit took the form of hundreds of indigenous peoples from the Amazon lowlands protesting the exclusion and marching at the summit in Otavalo with traditional spears. After a confrontation with the police, about 30 leaders were charged with sabotage and terrorism, and indigenous protest was criminalized on these grounds.

Correa’s attempt to criminalize political dissidents has targeted protests by indigenous peoples in particular. In September 2010, Pepe Acacho, a Shuar indigenous leader, was accused of using a community radio station he directed to incite protesters to take to the streets with “poisoned spears” to protest the government agenda to privatize water. Acacho was charged with sabotage and terrorism for his organizing. But the Ecuadorian government has continually denied the repression of Indigenous Communities, in spite of criticism from international watchdogs. The Human Rights Watch expressed concern in its 2011 World Report at the “exaggerated charge of terrorism” against various indigenous protestors in Ecuador. +++

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Since the 1970s, oil has become a key source of revenue for the Ecuadorian government. While activity was generally confined to the north of the Ecuadorian Amazon, in 1998, the Ecuadorian government chose to expand the oil frontier to the Center-Southern Amazonian provinces that the Shuar inhabit. Since 1998, the Shuar have mobilized against the oil exploration, resisted the entrance of multinational subsidiaries, and refused to engage in a dialogue with the oil companies. Furthermore, the Shuar have centered their indigenous movement around exposing the government’s illegitimate consultation processes, which “confirmed” consent of drilling in the Shuar territories. In 1989, the International Labor Organization established “a legally binding international instrument open to ratification” known as Convention 169. In ratifying this convention, Ecuador agreed to the protection of indigenous communities by facilitating “Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation,” which translates to consulting indigenous peoples on issues that directly affect their communities. In violating the process of prior consultation, the Ecuadorian government ignored the ramifications of the ILO 169 and legitimized the consultation process in various ways, including the use of a biased sample population coerced into support through monetary benefits.

With a government unwilling to discuss demands around the entrance of the oil industry, the Shuar mobilized around the non-consensual entrance of companies into their territories.

There have been protests, blockades, and strikes to prevent physical access and activity of multinational oil companies since Arco Oriente Inc.’s initial involvement in 1998 to the present day development of oil concessions. These resistance efforts have usually been met with repressive force from the Ecuadorian military and covert operations. +++ President Rafael Correa’s inauguration in 2007 was an emblematic spectacle. Sporting a traditional embroidered shirt from the highland villages, Correa was sworn in in the Andean town of Zumbahua where sacred herbs were shaken over his head to protect his “Citizens’ Revolution,” and indigenous leaders handed him a sceptre indicating their support and acceptance of his presidency. His visible interest and respect for indigenous tradition made him the first president to officially prioritize the political representation of indigenous people, who make up a quarter of Ecuador’s population. In his campaign, he promised to create an assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution, redistribute oil wealth to communities affected by extraction, and focus on the alleviation of poverty in indigenous communities.

However, Correa’s commitments following his election were not long lived. Correa’s leftist political platform was a response to the neoliberal policies of previous governments. The new constitution that was ratified explicitly condemned the Washington Consensus. He failed, or didn’t attempt, to dismantle a neoliberal apparatus that was in place prior to his election. Correa criminalized protests against his administration and excluded indigenous movements’ input in the development of extractive industries and the revision of the constitution.

Similar to other countries across Latin America, Ecuador has relied heavily on the revenue from privatizing extractive industries and natural resources, such as water. The wave of privatization has been, ironically, a key component in the plan to achieve a democratic socialist model. Correa has endlessly discussed the resurgence of the left and has used revenue captured from oil to fund public services and infrastructure, while implementing heavy taxation on Ecuador’s economic elite.

Privatizing major industries and natural resources leads to a loss of community autonomy, especially in indigenous communities. The fundamental values of self-determination and sovereignty become contested as natural resource extraction industries dictate land usage and assume access to territories. Indigenous communities that have experienced direct interaction with oil companies entering into their territory, such as the Cófan peoples of the Amazonian region of northeastern Ecuador, were forced to work around oil companies and experienced tremendous environmental degradation, which impacted the state of public health in the region. Before the wave of privatization, indigenous communities were under the jurisdiction of the Ecuadorian government, but were generally ignored and underserved in addressing issues of poverty alleviation and community development. However, indigenous communities were strong in their political alliances across Ecuador and used the powerful numbers of indigenous communities to

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create an alliance in 1986, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, to address an ongoing history of inequality and political marginalization from the state. Furthermore, these indigenous communities have recently been actively excluded from discussions not only pertaining to self-determination, but also from those aimed at identifying and reducing marginalization, which has prevented the political acknowledgement of indigenous rights. +++ The conversation held on October 30, however, represents the development of new strategy.

The meeting between a government delegation, led by Cardenas, and Rafael Washita, president of the Shuar nation, affirms the beginning of a relationship with tangible goals in mind.

Hoping to transition from a reactive to a proactive mobilization strategy, Washita described the need for productive dialogue instead of aggressive defense tactics, such as large-scale rebellions and blockades. During the meeting, the community detailed a list of its needs, which included the construction of a health center, improved road access, and a new school that will provide bilingual education to help preserve the Shuar language.

After reviewing the list of demands, Cardenas expressed optimism, claiming that the “work can be done but [they] must work together.” Her optimism stems from Correa’s commitment to continue social investments despite the drop in oil prices. Social projects, such as hospitals and schools, have been heavily funded through oil revenue and are expected to continue. Correa has focused on developmental goals, which have always been part of his agenda for a democratic socialist model. However, the connection between oil and public funding of services is not as clear as it could be. Often, the creation of public services and developmental changes rely on exploitation of indigenous communities and their land. In order to extract revenue, the Ecuadorian government has repressed certain indigenous rights to achieve the promise of development, infrastructure improvement, and public projects.

Cardenas and Washita’s discussion focused on the improvement of public services in which indigenous communities have often received less governmental support, in spite of redistribution policies. Interestingly enough, Washita’s call for more access to the money coming from oil extraction is being paradoxically addressed through the greater entities the indigenous communities of Ecuador have been fighting against. While the call for more public services funded through oil wealth redistribution does not address issues of indigenous autonomy, it is part of a more immediate strategy for the Shuar people. The improvement in public services and education can be seen as a part of the process to solve issues of poverty, which is a necessary step in the greater fight for recognition of indigenous self-determination and autonomy.

with Western business and political praxis. Shuar leader Maria Clara Sharupi tells the Centre for Research on Globalization how “bankers, the right, the opposition, and the others who seek to destabilize the country” have treated the Shuar men and women like property, instead of people with agency.

Violent defense becomes an expected cultural response in certain media representations from Ecuadorian national sources and foreign sources alike. In only describing the Shuar’s defensive responses to the repression of the Ecuadorian government, the image of resistance is narrowed and the elements and history of community organizing are obscured. The recent Shuar uprising in August 2015, covered by the Daily Mail, details a violent protest where “rockets were fired at police [and] roads were blocked with tree trunks, rocks and burning tyres.” In this depiction, two things are missing. The strategy and historical value in the Shuar use of protest is not explored, making the incident seem volatile and hyper reactionary. While the reasons for the protest are detailed, there is little discussion on the great risks taken by the Shuar since protests became severely criminalized. Second, there is no conversation on the repression of the protest where police attacked protestors with tear gas. The beginning of the piece mentions that 100 “security force members were injured” and portrays the security force members as the victims of violence, even though 105 Shuar were arrested and 35 were injured. +++ In Ecuador, multinational companies get full state protection from the police and the army, often leaving the Shuar people without any form of safety when they protest against corporate action. Furthermore, forms of activism and organizing have been targeted by the Ecuadorian government and often characterized as “terrorist activity.” Directly contradicting the pro-indigenous leftist platform that got him elected, Correa has increased police and military wages and furthermore constructed an image of an indigenous protestor as a national terrorist.

While the dialogue has been closed in the past, the initiation of a bi-monthly conversation will hopefully not only serve to address the tangible infrastructural and social needs of the Shuar, but also reimagine the representation of the Shuar people. As Washita expressed, the ongoing dialogues serve to challenge the often isolated images of violent mobilization and redevelop the image of the Shuar as competent, proactive, political actors.

CHARLOTTE BIREN B’16 is an emblematic spectacle.

+++ According to Washita, another goal of the conversation was to ameliorate the antagonistic image of the Shuar people that has been shaped by their use of resistance tactics, such as protests with poisonous spears, to attract attention from authorities. National and international media over the past couple of years have depicted the Shuar people through their defensive land battle.

This August, for example, Shuar protesters were reported “wielding spears in southeastern Ecuador sent police and soldiers fleeing.” In efforts to protest the inadequate consultation processes, the Shuar were portrayed as aggressively showing their commitment to land protection.

Often compared to the conflict in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, where humans colonize a distant planet to mine for natural minerals, the Shuar land preservation efforts have been described through essentializing images and war rhetoric. The Shuar people are painted within the scope of a reactive trope, one that insinuates defense and battle as traditional solutions to protect their lands, which have constantly been encroached upon.

Traditionally, most indigenous communities, the Shuar included, value the importance of physical territory in order to preserve their traditions and culture. Featured in the news publication Cultural Survival, a coalition of indigenous groups from the Amazon affirm the Shuar belief that “Land is of course the indispensable condition for life, for the existence of a people, and for our development.” But land is not only serving as the grounds for spiritual preservation; it serves as a place for education and community development, which can be overlooked through exotifying perceptions of the Shuar people. Much of the media coverage of the conflict between the Shuar and the Ecuadorian government produces a static image. The binary of tradition and modernity is invoked and the Shuar quickly become the “other,” unable to engage

Nov 20, 2015

NEWS

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A DAY IN THE LIFE The Quantified Self and the Stream of Consciousness

When Nicholas Felton lectured at RISD last month, he wasn’t giving the typical alumni success speech. The 1999 graduate was introduced with a videotaped interview that centered not on his career, but his daily inclinations—the first question asked whether Felton was obsessive compulsive.

Not that Felton isn’t wildly successful. He is an eminent information designer, the brain behind the Facebook timeline and the recent wave of beautiful infographics in the New York Times. He’s been profiled in Vice, Wired, and the Wall Street Journal. Yet Felton’s most fascinating work, the work he is so often interviewed about, has little to do with the prestigious media companies that consistently contract him as a designer. Felton’s life project to date has been a personal one: visualizations of an incredibly meticulous dataset he’s been keeping on himself for the last 15 years. How many drinks he had in the past month, the structure of his sleep schedule, the number of hours he’s spent away from his girlfriend, Olga.

Between 2005 and 2014, Felton compiled and published this data on his website in the Feltron Annual Report, Feltron being his nickname in college. He claims that inspiration for the nickname came not from his curt manner of speech nor his taste in futuristic eyewear, but from the computer he owned in college. The Feltron Annual Report was at its core an attempt to understand where all of Felton’s time went. Felton collected a wide swath of personal data about what he ate, who he spent time with, where he walked, how much he worked. He maintains that the data has not been edited or censored. He writes on his website, “I don’t guestimate because I have an honest curiosity about the outcomes. Once my confidence in a number slips, its inaccuracy bothers me and I won’t publish it.”

On the whole, the findings of the reports are both mundane and remarkable. It’s an extraordinary feat to compellingly and comprehensively document the ordinary, an achievement of Joycean ambitions. +++ The plot of Ulysses, James Joyce’s 1922 magnum opus, appears to unfold precisely as you read it, even though the book took Joyce eight years to write. Felton waits until December to calculate “An Average Day,” and thus does the opposite—he represents a truly continuous stream as a retrospective in compressed statistics.

In the earliest reports, Felton’s metrics are cruder, composed only of data he could record in a notebook or find on his computer: restaurants visited, songs played on iTunes, books read.

The data are expressed more in value judgments than calculations: “Best Meal of 2005,” “Favorite Refreshment,” “Best Fiction.”

In later reports, as the data gets more comprehensive and the statistics get more precise, a meta-recursive element emerges. In the 2007 Annual Report, for instance, Felton begins measuring how many annual report measurements he takes a day. Grabbing a notebook, finding the right page and recording a data point might only take a minute, but the minutes add up if you’re stopping 20.6 times a day.

Cue the millenial adage—there’s an app for that. Felton and some of his friends designed it so that users can record their lives in the same way. Reporter, available in the App Store for $3.99, is a personal data surveyor designed to prevent the recording of Felton’s life from interfering with the actual living of it. Reporter works by asking its owner a short list of questions at random moments throughout the day. In his lecture at RISD, Felton said he fills out about 11 surveys a day. Reporter’s website states that the app “has been refined to capture the most information with the lowest friction.”

Eventually, Felton wanted to go deeper, past the level of data he could record manually in notebooks and micro-surveys. He bought a FitBit that counts how many steps he takes. He began to wear a Nike Fuelband and a Basis watch, which estimate health metrics like calorie burning and heart rate. He installed a sensor in his car that tracks where he goes and records his gas mileage. He’s experimenting with a breathalyzer.

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By 2012, Felton’s data visualizations reached a new level. Past reports featured pie charts, bar graphs, scatter plots, everyday Microsoft Wizard sorcery. His later efforts reveal more about the quotidian. One graphic shows his year represented in emails—each day is represented as a line, with a dot noting each moment he sent and received an email. Outside from his remarkably consistent sleeping hours, his life is a cloud of these dots.

Another striking visual features a chart of what activity Felton is doing at a given time of day. On the y-axis are plotted the results of his Reporter app, which ostensibly asks him, “what are you doing?” many times a day. The chart’s x-axis is time. We pick a given hour and see what the relative probability of Felton doing a certain activity is. Reading is his most popular activity at 10 PM. At 6 PM, he’s probably talking.

In 2013, Felton dove into conversational data. He crunched the text in his SMS messages, his Facebook inbox, his email, his snail mail. He took surveys after telephone calls and real conversations that record subjects he discussed, words he remembers saying. The 2013 report features visualizations of every geographic region he had a conversation in (39), every location he discussed (3,326), every word he sent in an email (6,904,901).

In a New York Times video feature, Felton said, “All this data represents a part of your identity that’s being traded, or manipulated, or in some cases, used against you. And so knowing who has this data, and what’s being done with it, is really important.” By analyzing his metadata, Felton is essentially spying on himself.

Viewed collectively, the Feltron Annual Report is a work that dissects a life, day-by-day, as honestly and meticulously as possible. Year after year, Felton eats at the same proportion of Japanese restaurants. He never really gets a respectable running routine together. The postcard debt his friends owe him never balances. Quantifying a life can tell one a lot of things they don’t want to know, shattering certain self-conceptions.

Joyce’s gargantuan rendering of a day tells us something similar, albeit from an opposite approach. Felton’s metrics are objective; no matter how important a day feels, it can be chopped into data points. Joyce’s writing, on the other hand, was groundbreakingly subjective. He turned an average day into a literary masterpiece. But if each day can be recorded as a compelling thousand-page epic, is any day really more important than the last?

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by Ben Berke & Henry Staley illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko Felton told an interviewer from Wired that “what keeps them [the data] fresh is that I am driven by curiosity about unexplored aspects of my behavior.” Yet, oddly, he has hardly discussed this curiosity. Like much of the Big Data movement or other developments in tech that quantify and record everyday information, the implications and intellectual ambitions of Felton’s project have largely gone unexplored. Felton’s project, however, places him in dialogue with writers, a handful of whom have tried to discover and scrutinize the significance of the ordinary, the prosaic, the everyday. An answer to these matters was perhaps best approached by James Joyce, who, responding to the major ‘life story’ projects of contemporaries like Marcel Proust, chose to contain Ulysses within the twenty-four hours of its protagonists, Dedalus and Bloom.

Joyce and Bloom share Felton’s affinity for listing everyday details. In Ulysses, Joyce indexes what Bloom eats, what he likes to eat, the clothes in his drawers, the objects he sees, sensations he feels, people he remembers and the amount of money he spends throughout the day. This encyclopedia of a day exhausts much of the text in the earlier Bloom portions, leaving the reader to infer or draw narratives out of non-events. Because the lists include so much of such trivial details, Joyce is, like Felton, uncovering “unexplored aspects” of everyday life and behavior.

But to what advantage? What does Joyce provide where Felton omits? Representing everyday experience is something we are all asked to do when the question “what did you do today?” is posed. Unlike Joyce and Felton, our instinct is to prioritize events that portray our day as normal, maybe productive, maybe even funny or entertaining. We might look for highlights so as to privilege the out-of-the-ordinary above the ordinary (in a sense, we are doing for a day what Felton has done for Facebook users’ lives as the architect of the timeline feature, essentially a greatest hits reel of users’ lives and a move that defies the everydayness of his personal data collection project). For the most part, novelists do the same, selecting moments of epiphany, extraordinary or high-stakes episodes that advance a plotline.

Resisting this tradition, Joyce and Felton create documents that are non-hierarchical, seeking to de-privilege specific details or events, preventing them from obscuring the larger constellation of data—one without contradictions and delusions because the asterism has yet to be sketched in. Many believe that this is the triumph of Ulysses: its exhaustive list of details, as Lisel Olson says in Modernism and the Ordinary, provides a sense of “life as stranger than novels make it out to be, of the ordinary as more varied and random than any literary account of it.”

Joyce realized that the ordinary is strange, that elements of it are often embarrassing, unflattering, and unwelcome but, most of all, significant. He sought to take a page out of Ibsen, who, as Joyce claimed, was the writer who had most successfully depicted “average lives in their uncompromising truth.” Joyce believed that commitment to these truths is vital and urgent: contemplating the ordinary in a form that best exposes its ignored or censured aspects forces one to probe the fantasies they live under. For Joyce, emphasis on the truths of the commonplace was integral to his mission to draw the Irish out from under the delusions levied on them

by Roman Catholicism. Sex, doubt, infidelity, bowel movements, vice and menstruation are all elements of the ordinary that the Church asks its disciples to shun.

Likewise, we may want to look away from our transgressions—excessive computer or smartphone usage, alcohol consumption, non-productivity, reluctance to explore outside of the same handful of Japanese restaurants, debt. But it is the uncompromising truths, the facts and figures of the ordinary, that allow us to see where myth is snubbing us.

Although Felton has been reluctant to disclose the purpose of his personal data collection, he finds his uncompromising truths, the organizations and charts of his data, “deeply satisfying and comforting.” Many contend that Ulysses, a story of average lives told with uncompromising truths, was written to “reaffirm life.” Felton and Joyce’s brave projects tell us what it means to live with ourselves—lies, truths and all in between. Uncompromising truths and self-delusions are two axes on a graph plotting everyday reality. Paired together, Joyce and Felton assure us that, if you take uncompromising truths into account, the picture of everyday reality that emerges might be more comforting than you’ve been led to believe.

Nov 20, 2015

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by Eli Neuman-Hammond illustration by Maya Sorabjee

I. Digest, verb from the verb digerere, from di- ‘apart’ + gerere ‘carry’; noun from digestus ‘divided.’

II. The process of digestion concerns borders, and the interiors and exteriors they demarcate. Membranes are the agents of digestion: when food, materials, ideas, people pass through membranes moving from outside to inside, or vice versa, a transformation occurs. When food moves from a plate, to the hand, into the mouth, down the esophagus, and into the alimentary canal, it dissolves into substances that can be used by the body. The body then incorporates these materials, which used to be food. What was outside and alien moves inside, and then becomes part of the digestive organism itself.

III. a. b. c.

hens, cows, humans, snails, pigs, deer. poultry, beef, (humans), escargot, pork, venison. proteins, lipids, water, carbohydrates, zinc, iron.

IV. Today we ask of our food: What is it made of? Where is it from? But the answer to these questions reveal that it makes little sense to ask what our food is, because food is no longer grown and harvested, but assembled. We have, today, a food industry: while “farms of less than 1 hectare account for 72% of all farms,” they “control only 8% of all agricultural land.”

Industrial agriculture businesses, which account for most of the world’s farmland, produce not food so much as ingredients. For example, a monoculture corn farm does not grow food, but grows material to feed the factories making the likes of Kellogg’s® Corn Flakes®. Materials are grown, but food is manufactured. A whole 60% of the world’s agricultural biomass is harvested as animal feed—and so digested by/into animals, then killed and packaged, before finally considered edible food for humans.

While these materials—most prominently corn and soybeans—are used to feed, bred for nutritional value, they today go on to have lives divorced from the food industry. Corn is used in drywall, adhesives, cosmetics, wax paper, Windex®, hand soap, paving bricks, and spark plugs.

And while our food goes into products not meant for consumption, we eat things that were never meant to be consumed. A glance at the laundry list of chemicals on almost any nutrition facts label confirms this. Azodicarbonamide, which is used to make shoe soles and yoga mats, also strengthens dough; tartrazine (Yellow No. 5) makes macaroni gleam like the sun, as well as the cosmetic products that cover faces; butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) preserves food, and is also found in rubber and other petroleum products; and silica (sand) is used in dry coffee creamer and other powdery foods.

V. Cannibalism is the practice of humans who eat the flesh or internal organs of other humans. Insides go inside other insides. Specific to human beings, cannibalism’s significance is that the end result is the same as the input. Humans consume the flesh of their own species and behold—break it down and digest it back into human form. Because the physical input and output of cannibalism is, in some sense, the same, the digestive process falls into relief as symbolic, as well as material.

While on both sides of cannibalism there is a human being, the before and after different. Two become one. The spiritual, experiential humanity of one body dies when it becomes meat, while the other person continues.

VI. Here it’s easy to understand why some people believe that cannibalism offers a route to spiritual rebirth in the body of another. At the Cannibal Club in Los Angeles, you can ask for

Nov 20, 2015

your corpse to be prepared as a high-end meal for friends and family, an alternative to traditional burial practices. The Cannibal Club suggests that cannibalism allows the person served to be reborn in the bodies of his or her consumers. (The Cannibal Club does not disclose their source of meat, but assures its legality and quality.)

This language echoes that of the Eucharist, in which the body and blood of Christ are literally consumed in the transubstantiated form of wafer and wine. But many Catholics argue that the Eucharist isn’t a cannibalistic ritual because, while the doctrine of transubstantiation means that the food actually becomes the body of Christ, they eat both less and more than a human body: consumed in the Eucharist are God’s words, as well as his human body. This “body,” while technically flesh, is eternal, consumed time and time again, in many churches.

VII. Hermeneutics, and other forms of reading, continue the quasi-cannibalism of the Eucharist. We digest each other’s words and ideas, at first foreign, then understood and assimilated by our bodies and minds. “Reader’s digests” and “weekly bite” sections of newspapers and blogs point to the incorporative aspect of reading and social interaction, during which physical exteriors move inside through language, even though spatial distance remains. The dictum “you are what you eat” extends far beyond food.

Just as there is a symbolic difference between human meat and a human who consumes that meat, a symbolic difference holds the boundary between humans and the food they consume; between that food and the materials from which it’s assembled; between those materials and the ecology from which they are extracted, and so on. At each level a digestive process mediates transformation; and so while all of these things equal each other from a scientific materialist perspective, symbolically they could not be more different, and these higher-level differences often find expression in language.

A cow is not yet beef, nor any longer grass.

VIII. The human price is invisible in export products like sugar cane. The customers at the other end of the production chain consume in blissful ignorance of what is sacrificed for their dining pleasure.

Language betrays reality; on the list of ingredients one won’t find human rights violations, exploitation, but sugar.

IX. There is no unambiguous boundary to the body, individual or political. The human body lives in homes, schools, streets, but its past life is a product grown, assembled, transported, and sold for consumption. The body grows in cornfields; it’s made in the factory. It is material and organism. It assimilates violence; it transcends national borders. It is Corn Flakes® as well as carbohydrates. What a human is depends on the language used to describe it; and this language is for sale. If the past lives of food are egregious exploitative labor, consumers pay companies to linguistically conceal this violence. Consumers incorporate violence, industry, chemicals, and more when they eat; but the interim digestive processes of the global food industry assure that only mouth-watering food passes the membrane between consumer and origin, leaving behind unsavory former incarnations.

ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B’18 hopes to have fidelity to something true.

METABOLICS

16

HUNGER

by Isabelle Doyle

I used to stand in clearings where honey light spread and dripped down the trees, where my caterpillar teeth crunched cedar tree seeds, where I lived like a root in the earth, opening my dark jaws like centipedes.

Now I can only feed in secret, in thorn and thickage, in woods where falcons nestle close to each other, their skeletons thin strings beneath feathers; can only bury my hot mouth in lichen, green frisson, dewdrinking. Soup kitchen.

17

LiTERARY

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