Technology isn’t so much the solution as it is a way to get more people involved in figuring out what the solution should be. That’s where the “peer-produced” bit comes in. The idea of peer networks also plays a role in the way New Urban Mechanics gets things done. Jacob and Osgood are the interface for new and experimental technology projects that need City Hall’s participation to succeed. They do that using a mix of personal connections, the fact that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino supports what they do, and relatively small cash infusions. Several projects I looked into last year were supported to the tune of between $10,000 and $25,000.
Quotes
“Government doesn’t always have the solutions, but we have a lot of convening power,” Bellows said
If Romney’s incompetent campaign did not have the conservative media to invent these myths, they would truly be lost.
Today it is possible to argue that we have all become gay white negroes. We all listen to “edgy urban” music, spend our time in the gym, go shopping and groom ourselves, take lots of drugs, have sex and then spend the rest of the time talking to our friends about the impossibility of finding real love and connection in the world.
We soon found out that very few people knew where to find such data or if it even existed. We were told that the NYPD tracked such data but did not make it publicly available. Various lawyers and public advocates pointed us to the City Council, which requires quarterly reports on summonses from the NYPD, but these reports merely showed the total number of summonses for each precinct and didn’t break the information down by type or demographics.
Maybe there’s some muddled metaphor for America in that. Or maybe it’s only tempting to look for one because there’s such hunger for a hint of the way forward. Maybe it’s not a metaphor. Maybe we’re on our own. Maybe it’s just a macaque.
Since 2009, Yates estimates that he has gone after the animal on roughly 100 different occasions. The monkey was his white whale. He claimed to have darted it at least a dozen times, steadily upping the tranquilizer dosage, to no avail. The animal is too wily — it retreats into the woods and sleeps off the drug. A few times, the monkey stared Yates right in the eye and pulled the dart out.
The Anonymous do-ocracy was already in place, but it was radically different from the other do-ocracies of the Internet era (think Wikipedia or Linux). The lack of consistent handles—anons often would drop one user name and take up another—and the absence of a revision trail meant that there was no long-term accountability. Instead, Anonymous’ chaotic style of action flowed naturally from the structure of /b/. Because there were no names and no archives, the only cultural currency was whatever you could hack or joke about or make right now, onscreen, with the rest of the hive watching.
I don’t know anyone in the ad-supported Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.
I received a rude awakening. None of the prominent environmental organizations were willing to petition City Hall to withdraw the pending ban, much less litigate against it, perhaps in part because the DOT Commissioner charged with administering the ban had been hired from their ranks. The deeper truth, though, was that cyclists were urban pariahs and bicycle transportation was too far on the fringe. In the suites as well as on the streets, we were on our own.