It's a recipe for a systemic failure of civic institutions — or an opportunity to rebuild cities as more representative and peer-to-peer entities.

Tiltshift photo of Chicago by Michael Baird on Flickr

It's an imposing task. With cities still weathering the effects of the recession, making the pitch for innovation and transparency to budget-conscious city officials can be difficult. Compounding the issue is that citizens embittered toward civic institutions may not see or understand the benefit of such initiatives.

Image by opensourceway on Flickr.

At the "Cool Like You: Gov Private Sector Envy" (#COOLGOV) panel at this year's SXSW, Julio Gonzalez of Open Austin noted that this crisis of confidence can directly damage efforts to fund open government initiatives. "Don’t submerge the public investment,” he said, citing the percentage of Americans who don't think of services like Medicare as government entities. "It’s important for people to know when civic data platforms are public programs paid with public dollars," he added.

Among the many civic hackers I've met and chatted with over the past month — the policy wonks, data hackers, IT managers, civic-minded app developers, data journalists and civic-minded designers who populate the flourishing community — I've observed a recurring set of intertwined challenges, articulated in different ways depending on the speaker:

• How can these efforts more effectively create citizen engagement?
• How do the privileged individuals who largely comprise the community connect with and empower those from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and ensure that these efforts address social inequality rather than perpetuate it?
• How do you energize, inspire, and include the many citizens who consider all government institutions to be ineffective, corrupt, and irrevocably broken?

As with all questions of governance, civic engagement, and social justice, there are no easy answers. But addressing them will require a more diverse representation of citizens, people who can hack at much more than just civic data and code. The hacker ethos must be applied to community outreach, grassroots organizing, public policy, and how we tell and understand the stories of our cities.

“Ask not what your city can do for you. Ask what you can do for your city.”

An inclusive definition of "hacker" informs the Code for America Brigade, announced by CfA founder Jennifer Pahlka during her SXSW 2012 keynote speech, "Coding the Next Chapter of American History." The Brigade builds upon the momentum established during Code Across America, a hackathon for the public good held in cities across the country on February 25.

In CfA's words:

The Code for America Brigade is an organizing force for a growing community of civic minded developers, designers, data scientists, and community leaders who will contribute their talents towards addressing the problems we see everyday. The technology that we’ll develop together and deploy locally will form a new Civic Web.

Visual notes of @pahlkadot's #SXSW keynote by @imagethink. #opengov #gov20#SXSWi twitter.com/digiphile/stat…

—  Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 13, 2012

During the #coolgov panel, Kevin Curry, Program Director of the CfA Brigade, spoke about its goal to establish “hacking as a civic duty,” defining “hacking” as more than banging out code and diving into data, but rather a mentality that can be applied to any level of civic action. "Ask not what your city can do for you," he said, evoking JFK. "Ask what you can do for your city." CfA is looking for more than data scientists and Python developers to volunteer for their respective city’s chapter, though those skills are certainly needed. They’re looking for anyone with the skills and the desire to hack the civic process.

Broadening the Coalition: Addressing Social Inequality Through Open Government

The need to diversify the open government and civic data movement was emphasized by Gonzalez during the panel. Noting that “it’s a very technocratic scene right now,” Gonzalez stated that the existing communities must “broaden the coalition” of citizens involved in these efforts, to better address social justice issues surrounding race, class and the digital divide. He stressed the need to partner with community outreach organizations, data journalists, and the administrative city workers “who live in an Excel world rather than a PHP world.”

Context is Key: Who Do Crime Maps and Civic Apps Serve?

Diversifying this "very technocratic scene" is essential: civic datasets tell stories, and when not properly contextualized, those stories can do more harm than good. Infographics and data visualizations can only serve the public good if they provide the proper context. Otherwise, they risk perpetuating existing prejudices, further marginalizing disenfranchised groups.

Crime maps are an increasingly common target of critique: since police report datasets are often relatively accessible and regularly updated, crime map overlays are often the earliest civic apps to appear in a city. Speaking of the dangers of decontextualized data in a February interview, Chicago CfA fellow Ben Sheldon said to me, “we can’t just keep putting out crime maps…You have to ask, ‘how is the media framing the data, and how can the community contextualize it itself?’

Stamen founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck aired a related set of concerns when he spoke at the first Big Data for the Public Good seminar in January. The design team behind the next-level crime map apps Oakland Crimespotting and San Francisco Crimespotting (along with a host of other innovative interactive maps and civic data visualizations,) Rodenbeck emphasized that context must be a key design component when building civic data apps, stating that "narrative is critical" and warning that there's a danger of apps and visualizations spreading and perpetuating misconceptions due to unshared cultural contexts between the people building them and the people using them.

Big Data for the Public Good | Seminar 1: Data Visualization | Eric Rodenbeck from Code for America on Vimeo.

The question of who is being served by these apps was also raised by Jake Porway during his talk at the second CfA Big Data for the Public Good seminar on Monday, March 19th. Noting that in the age of the mobile web, "everything creates data," the founder of Data Without Borders and data scientist for The New York Times emphasized that we must "leverage this data to serve more groups than the people building the apps." In other words, more apps for social justice, less bar finders for hip urbanites.

As a counterexample, Porway pointed to the work Data Without Borders has done with the New York Civil Liberties Union to map racial profiling by the New York Police Department. By analyzing data on "stop-and-frisk" incidents committed by the NYPD in 2010, they were able to map clear trends of profiling across race and socioeconomic lines. Speaking to the data scientists in the room, Porway emphasized that while doing this may seem elementary to them, the implications are transformative for social justice organizations who often lack the money, technology, and skilled staff to do such analysis. "This is about more than maps and visualizations," Porway said. "This is about empowering these organizations."

Ratio of racial composition by census tract and precinct - Data Without Borders/NYCLU.

Spatial clustering of incident counts by precinct - Data Without Borders/NYCLU.

To provide much-needed insight and context to the torrential influx of real-time data, the community of civic hackers must diversify on many fronts: as Porway urged in his talk, the sphere needs more data scientists to volunteer their efforts and apply scientific rigor to deep data dives. Meanwhile, social justice organizations have enormous caches of valuable data but neither the staff nor technical resources to leverage them.

It also requires connecting with the people and groups who are concurrently addressing these issues at the ground level. Both data journalists and hardened beat reporters who have an intrinsic understanding of a neighborhood could provide skill sets, knowledge and critical approaches others may not bring to the table. And there also needs to be a place at the table for emergent organizations and movements that are addressing related issues on a grassroots level, such as Occupy Research and Chicago's Read/Write Library.

It's All Data: "Community is not read-only, and it already has a voice"

Read/Write Library is a Chicago-based organization and space that aims to serve as "an all-inclusive collection of Chicago-specific media, produced by and for the community." During her talk at SXSW, founder Nell Taylor advocated for a radical rethinking of the role and relative value of both print and online media. Read/Write Library considers zines, vanity publications, poetry chapbooks, art books, community newspapers and many other materials to be data worthy of being archived.

"Community is not read-only, and it already has a voice," she told a room of attendees of SXSW Interactive, stating that "we need to change the cultural context so we rethink what is worth keeping. "People already have a voice," she said, adding that disenfranchised communities in particular have a long history of self-publishing. The marginalized voices who have traditionally expressed themselves through self-publication add new layers to the cultural and socioeconomic map of a city's history when archived and viewed in aggregate. Otherwise, the small-scale publications the library has collected over the past five years risk becoming data exhaust, a danger Porway warned against in his talk.

In the case of the Read/Write Library, the collection of the materials is often done in the field, and relies on building networks and egalitarian relationships with socioeconomically diverse groups offline and on. They call this process of collection "controlled crowdsourcing," through which they actively seek out contributions from the community.

Once archived, this physical data can be leveraged by to introduce, in Taylor's words, "a cultural layer to civic technology." The Read/Write Library is aiming to fill in the socioeconomic gaps in Chicago's cultural memory in part by collaborating with members of the city's vibrant open government and data hacker communities. Taylor said, "The questions we're asking are: how do you get this data into a mappable flow? How do you connect this print material with apps that are being built in hackathons?" To this end, the Library's existing space will double as a hackerspace in the months and years ahead, to serve as a nonprofit space that facilitates the sort of serendipitous connections and diverse collaborations that Code for America, Gonzalez, and Porway have articulated the need for.

The Beginning, Not The Finish Line

Photo by Marc Buehler on Flickr.

This post is an embryonic, discursive attempt to encapsulate many of the disparate but related conversations I've heard and taken part in during the past few month; not so much a call to arms as a call for conversation and connections that could lead to new collaborations between disparate groups.

In his Monday talk, Porway articulated a number of related issues, noting that "data and skills have been silo'd from one another" and that the "top-down world of big silos is breaking down to a bottom-up world where we're nodes in a connected society."

Code for America Brigade, Data Without Borders, the Read/Write Library, and a number of other nascent projects are pointing the way to potential models for diversifying the community, increasing engagement, and making civic data efforts better represent and serve the communities they hope to help.

But bridging cultural and socioeconomic gaps to create a more diverse, representative community of civic hackers who can more richly contextualize the data is merely the next step. The beginning, not the finish line.

Detroit population change, 2000-2010. Visualization of Census data by Stephen Von Worley at DataPointed.

To build resilient, peer-to-peer cities the precarious economic times demand, these conversations and collaborations need to be facilitated top-down, ground-up, and between every other decentralized community node that can contribute to weaving a diverse tapestry of a city's political, cultural, historical, and socioeconomic data. This vision was perhaps best encapsulated by Howard during the SXSW panel he moderated, "Shaping Future Cities with Mobile Data". Storified on his blog at govfresh, Howard envisioned "a future of cities fueled by citizens, open data and collaborative consumption."

I find this vision, and the ongoing convergence of these disparate groups, immensely inspiring. I want to help facilitate this conversation in the weeks and months ahead, here on Shareable, on Twitter, and elsewhere. I've joined the Austin chapter of the CfA Brigade, despite my limited coding knowledge, to see what connections, skills, and contexts I can contribute to the city's open data community, play a role in facilitating these conversations in the city, learn more coding skills, and most importantly, hopefully give back to the city. I'll be documenting this learning process and drawing connections I observe in a series of upcoming posts on Shareable.

To those of us who don't think of ourselves as hackers but find ourselves applying that ethos to other trades — journalists, community organizers, field researchers, social justice activists, lawyers and policy wonks, and many more groups — let's join the conversation, contribute our skills to the civic hacker community, and see what we can build together for our cities.

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...as I navigate the iBooks store and learn about the submission process, I’m concerned that independent publishers will suffer many of the same issues that App Store developers have faced. 150,000 iPhone applications have been released in the App Store since 2008. And for some of those developers, the App Store has been a goldmine: there are many apocryphal stories about coders toiling in their basements in off hours, building their own successful app business. But for every success story, there are countless developers whose work is buried deep in the App Store, never to surface. After a few days with iBooks , which borrows much from the App Store in organization and interface, I have to wonder: will this new platform empower independent and self-publishers, or will they similarly be hidden in the dark recesses of an online store?

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From '99-'06, I was an active participant in my hometown of Santa Cruz's music scene, and I have a ton of affection for it. In this retrospective for the

PUTTING a retrospective of the Santa Cruz music scene into print is probably asking for trouble. After accepting this assignment, I posted a one-line status update to Facebook: “writing a roundup of Santa Cruz’s most significant bands of the decade. Suggestions?” It didn’t take long for the responses to start coming in. “There have been significant Santa Cruz bands since Camper Van Beethoven?” wrote one local, illustrating the foolhardiness of trying to present a single overview of a decade of Santa Cruz music. For every resident who thinks the local music scene ended in the early ’80s when CVB signed to a major and left town, there’s a grubby teenager in a Soquel garage blasting through two-minute punk songs who has never heard of David Lowery.

Ultimately, the terms “Santa Cruz music scene” and “Santa Cruz music community” are only convenient shorthand: there are many local scenes and communities. They only occasionally overlap, if ever. But for as long as I’ve been following Santa Cruz underground music, the concerns have remained the same. The local scene, often tethered to the four-year UCSC academic cycle, is far too transitory; bands are too flighty and don’t stick around long. There aren’t enough places to play. The relative geographic isolation makes touring difficult. As someone who played music in the town for the better part of the decade before leaving for Chicago in 2006, I’ve heard these sentiments many a time. They’re echoed to this day by friends who continue to keep me apprised of what’s happening in my old home town.

I’d like to celebrate, from my limited perspective as a player in some of those communities and an outside observer of others, the bands of the past decade that have overcome the challenges facing all Santa Cruz musicians—the ones that have remained in town to become local institutions and those that have left to achieve wider notoriety.

Big Bang
If this decade was the one in which indie rock broke, Santa Cruz was an early bellwether. Linked by an underground telegraph that spiritually connected the local scene with those in Olympia, Wash. and Portland, Santa Cruz in the years 2000-2003 was a stunningly fertile place for indie rock.

The scene’s wise benefactor was local ukelele star Oliver Brown, the Jonathan Richman-indebted schoolteacher-songwriter who for four years starting in 2000 curated the 11-night annual Big Bang festival. Many of the bands on the Big Bang lineups have been forgotten, but viewed in aggregate, it’s stunning how accurately the festival predicted the decade of music to come. Out-of-town acts such as Sacramento-based !!! and Portland’s The Blow, destined to become certifiable underground stars within a few years, were complete unknowns when they played the Big Bang. These acts opened for local bands whose vision appears eerily prescient in retrospect—bands like the Lowdown, a three-piece specializing in an unholy racket that resembled Devo on a bender of bad meth and blown-out amps, a corrosive mixture of noise, speed and technology that predicted bands such as the Locust.

Much the promise of the scene was embodied in the band that seemed most likely to blow up at the time: the sweetly sci-fi, Pixies-referencing four-piece Sin in Space. Led by singer/guitarist Cassidy Meijer and anchored by drummer Greg Braithwaite, an able hand who has turned up in numerous bands during the decade (including the immortal Huxtables), the band enjoyed an incredible amount of promise and label interest. If an observer was to guess which Santa Cruz indie band would break through to greater things in 2000 or ’02, Sin in Space would have been it. Instead, that band was fellow Big Bang fixture Comets on Fire, the acid-rock-riffing four-piece that dominated many a house party for the first third of the decade before signing to Sub Pop Records and becoming the toast of Pitchfork and the indie-rock intelligentsia.

Heave At It
There was a ton of other activity in Santa Cruz underground music in the early decade, as well. While the UC art kids were helping define the blueprint for ’00s indie rock, the local punk scene—comprised of true Santa Cruz locals, as they would surely remind you—were growing restless. Diversion, a Soquel trio started by three preteen punks in the late ’90s, had morphed from a precociously smart-ass hardcore group into something more resembling progressive rock. Just as the emo craze was hitting the national spotlight, it was cresting in Santa Cruz, with locally anointed emo demigods like the Lonely Kings, Jetlag and Time Spent Driving selling out the Catalyst.

As that generation of local punk bands moved on, a new shoot emerged in 2004, nurtured by one of the heavyweights of 1990s Santa Cruz music. Roughly organized beneath the banner of Lorelei Records, an independent label founded by former Fury 66 singer Joe Clements, the new punks avoided the polished emo sound that had dominated Santa Cruz during the late ’90s and taken over MTV by 2003. Instead, the bands hearkened back to various strains of ’80s and early-’90s American punk rock. Clements headed up two of the most high-profile, if short-lived bands, Audiocrush and Crucial Unicorn, while Here Kitty Kitty mashed riot grrl snarl to Ramones-esque razorblade bubblegum. The most durable of the new guard, immortalized in Lorelei’s 2005 compilation Bombs Over Santa Cruz, was Los Dryheavers. A five-piece Mexican punk outfit from Watsonville, Los Dryheavers echoed the chunky fuzz of ’80s American punk rock while throwing in a extra-heavy helping of Guns-and-Roses-quoting riffage. With three albums under their belt and a number of tours and Warped Tour slots, the Dryheavers have effectively placed Watsonville on the Santa Cruz underground map.

The Folks Are In Town
It’s impossible to talk about Santa Cruz music in this decade without mentioning the Devil Makes Three. Admittedly, I’m a biased observer—I lived with the trio, played in other, far less notable bands with them and even poisoned the lead singer with undercooked chicken, an event immortalized in a song on the band’s latest album. But for the middle years of the decade the band clearly dominated the local scene, bridging the gaps between art-rock hipsters, body-building East Side locals and august KPIG listeners. The Devil Makes Three were far from the first to do what they did—lash bluegrass and string-band music to punk-rock populism—but they were one of the first to do it in Santa Cruz and possibly the first to do it so well. Today, the band tours the nation and gets attention in national publications, but from 2002 to 2006 they were the local band to beat, packing basements and the Catalyst with ease and drawing national attention to a lively local scene that has always deserved more attention from the outside world.

This era was probably my most active in the local music community. I played with the local cowpunk outfit Mule Train and organized two compilations, Someday Coming Down and Someday Coming Round, that documented the town’s fascination with viewing American folk traditions through a punk- or indie-tinted lens. It’s a spirit that can be found in a wide variety of local acts, from the born-and-raised rockabilly partisans the Chop Tops to the unholy howl of Steven Griswold’s disheveled country ballads.

The entire town seemed to be in a folkier mood during the mid-section of the decade. As a large number of bands tweaked various forms of American folk music, artists such as Whysp, Emily Jane White and Ben Chasny were unearthing a more meditative form of acoustic music. Carrying a torch for the nearly-forgotten ’60s psych-folk of Vashti Bunyan and Bert Jansch, this trio of local artists played an important role in defining the then-nascent freak-folk scene ignited in San Francisco and LA by Devendra Banhardt. Unassuming and quiet, former Streetlight employee Chasny and White remained on the fringes of the local music community, and the work they recorded in town—Chasny as Six Organs of Admittance and White with the Diamond Star Halos—can be best appreciated in retrospect, long after they left and became critical favorites the world over.

Beachcombers
For sheer visibility and impact on the outside world, the Devil Makes Three’s success was rivaled by the Expendables, a four-piece that dominated the stage like an 800-pound gorilla. Cribbing notes from Sublime and the Long Beach Dub All-Stars, the Expendables whipped up reggae, dub and metal into an amalgam that typified the sleepy beach-town vibe that draws so many people to Santa Cruz. Since the day in 2002 that the Expendables—Adam Patterson, Geoff Weers, Raul Bianchi and Ryan DeMars—were crowned the winners of Your Music Magazine’s first Battle of the Bands, the quartet has been on an upward trajectory, first dominating Santa Cruz before becoming a dependable touring act and even turning up on the soundtrack of Guitar Hero World Tour—the surest indicator of having made it by the end of the decade.

If the Expendables typified one side of the town’s beachtown vibe, SamBaDa exemplified its musically diverse, ebullient, polyglot complement. Formed in 1998 by local Brazilian expatriates Papiba Godinho and Dandha da Hora, the band has proven to be one of the town’s most dependable and venerable acts, specializing in an intricately percussive sound that spans the Americas in its influences. By 2007, the band was recording with a Grammy-nominated producer (on the record Salve a Bahia), and serving as goodwill ambassadors to the world, of not only to multitude of cultures the band encompassed, but of a uniquely Santa Cruz sound that has inspired a generation of local world music artists.

Decade’s End
Yet as the Expendables and SambaDa came to embody Santa Cruz’s laid-back beachtown vibe, a crew of snot-nosed art punks sought to expose its id. On the heels of the promising yet short-lived Gross Gang, the New Thrill Parade dominated the town’s underground art scene in ’05 and ’06, lurching through Birthday Party-indebted noise-rock with the weight of a hundred hippies on bad tabs of acid. It was a restless time all around, as city noise ordinances grew tighter and the underground house show scene all but disappeared. The response of bands such as the New Thrill Parade and the celestial noise-rock band Residual Echoes was to turn it up even louder, tossing defiant cacophonies back at a City Council that preferred its local art scene to be safe for tourist consumption.

As the latter third of the decade rolled around, the underground’s twin obsessions of noise rock and psychedelia united. Indulging in opulent acid-rock excess, Sleepy Sun and the Vox Jaguars became the new standard-bearers for the local underground community. Both bands signed to indie labels in ’08 and have garnered the attention of the global psych-rock underground, once a niche movement of ‘60s revivalists that has become legion in the globally connected age of social networking. On the sleazier end of things is the Groggs, dirty-humping garage-rock sleazebags who strip all the art from the art-rock in favor of a primeval yawp.

Emboldened by the success of the Devil Makes Three, indie- and punk-inflected folk music has become something of an institution of its own in town: witness the success of Birds Fled From Me, featuring Rachel Williams of Sleepy Sun, or the success of last year’s The Sounds of San Lorenzo compilation, organized by JJ McCabe of Mylo Jenkins and Tether Horse and Dustin St. Wright. A two-disc sampler split between local rock and folk acts, the compilation remains a striking taste of what’s to come in Santa Cruz music while also being perhaps one of the most exhaustive single-project overviews of the diversity of the local community.

A decade later, few of the players are the same. Yet the local underground music community remains as vibrant as ever, ever-vigilant in the face of too few venues, UC student turnover, the high cost of living and the other difficulties facing musicians in Santa Cruz. The new guard, headed up by the likes of Fire Whiskey, Sourgrass, the Spurts, and countless others, enter the new decade unbowed by the eternal challenges. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more active, supportive and diverse set of local music communities incubating such a wide array of bands and genres. As the world grows smaller and Santa Cruz’s renown slowly grows, some of these bands are destined to be the new decade’s next big thing.

Thanks to the following for their suggestions, feedback, criticisms, and much clearer memories, transmitted via the wonder of the social web: The Santa Cruz Underground Music wiki, Siobahn Barry, Oliver Brown, Hiram Coffee, Mykle Hoban, JJ McCabe, Nick Meo, Pete Saporito and Hiya Swanhuyser.

Last year, I accomplished something unlikely, if not quite impossible: during a six-month road trip around the entire United States, I continued to work my full-time publicity job, and did steady freelancing work on the side. It wasn’t easy, and I can’t say that I accomplished every task to the best of my abilities, but I learned a ton (the hard way) on how to work while taking an extended trip.

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Illustration by Mott Jordan

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle-as-Rick James, “Internet’s a hell of a drug.” Like James’ drug of choice, the web is addictive and alluring, its benefits debatable.

I speak as someone intimately familiar with an addictive drug: two years ago, I quit smoking. To this day, I find myself smoking in dreams, and occasionally sneak them from friends at the bar. The rest of the time, the Internet serves as a proxy.

Addictive personalities often replace one addiction with another. My new worst friend is the social web, the endless stream of information constantly streaming down Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “series of tubes.” Here’s a short list of Internet services that I use and check on a daily basis: email, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Evernote, Twitter, Remember the Milk, Google Reader (tracking some 180 RSS feeds), and Yahoo News. I back up longer articles using Instapaper to read on the bus; at the home office, I work with two web browsers open at all times, 10 individual tabs loaded in each, spread over two monitors. While commuting on the train, I’m checking text messages via my Internet-enabled phone and reading archived blog posts on my iPod. At times, it seems like a type of digital schizophrenia, or if nothing else, a hell of a drug.

I’m what pencil-necked social media experts and Web 2.0 carpetbaggers would call a “power user.” I dine on a constant, movable feast of information. Scolds might suggest that this is a symptom of a larger Internet addiction, but when your day job involves managing web content and your night jobs are web design and freelance writing, it’s impossible to avoid spending 12 to 14 hours a day online. My habits are far from unusual; as we sit in offices for eight hours at a desktop computer, only to leave the office with iPhones, Blackberries and Kindles in tow, it’s clear that the moment futurists have predicted is upon us: the Internet has become pervasive, and it’s only going to become more so in the years to come.

With so much information streaming at once, most of it with all the panache of a poorly-organized corporate database vying for attention with hard news and gossip masquerading as political analysis, there’s little room for critical engagement; there’s barely enough time for basic reading comprehension. I could read 50 news articles in a day about the Middle East and return with no deeper understanding of what happened in Iraq on that given day. My mind has become a decontextualized database of ephemeral facts, equipped with only the most rudimentary of search functions. It’s not exactly cheering to realize that I’m not alone.

It’s a phenomenon that author John Lorinc bemoaned in his 2007 essay “Driven to Distraction” for the Canadian magazine Walrus. “We have created a technological miasma that inundates us with an inexhaustible supply of electronic distractions,” Lorinc wrote. “The deluge of multi-channel signals has produced an array of concentration-related problems, including lost productivity, cognitive overload and a wearying diminishment in our ability to retain the very information we consume with such voraciousness. It may be that our hyper-connected world has quite simply made it difficult for us to think.”

Lorinc’s far from alone in his alarm. In the past year, a cottage industry has sprouted up around the warning that Google—and the Internet at large—is making us stupid. The most infamous of the bunch has been Nicholas Carr’s cover story for the August 2008 issue of the Atlantic. Citing the work of Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, who warns that online readers become “mere decoders of information,” Carr editorializes that “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains disengaged.” I’m dubious of the argument that Google is making us stupid, but Carr makes a key observation in the piece, writing that “deep reading . . . is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”

Binding Resolution

Feeling disenfranchised from that sort of deeper engagement, my resolution for this year was to step away from the stream—at least for an hour a day—and return to trusty old print. I decided to read more books—not on a Kindle or the e-Book reader on an iPhone, where the temptation for distraction via a rudimentary browser is a mere hand gesture away—but in bound, linear, paper form. It’s been a revelation. I’ve rediscovered an ethic of attentiveness, an intellectual silence and focus, that I lost in recent years as I jumped from one link to another, juggling countless browser tabs at all times. My process of reading had ceased being linear and had morphed into a cacophony of facts, data, opinions and animated Flash video. Since I’ve rediscovered slow reading, I find myself thinking more clearly, perusing linear paths of critical engagement with topics. It’s a relieving contrast to the multitasked intellectual inattentiveness that the online world encourages and demands.

One of the things I’ve been re-reading is the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, an author many consider a prophet of the discursive, hypertext era of the Internet. Borges’ work—elliptical, playful and rife with allusions—is stunningly contemporary in its meta-narrative and referential play. Yet even a writer as prescient as Borges demands the engagement of slow reading: those elliptical routes are far more rewarding when confined to the particular context of the linear narrative. His work demands a depth of engagement that cannot be replicated by reading his work on a web browser, just one in 10 tabs of content in a web browser, with billions of other off-topic distractions a mere Google search away.

Yet even for a print-native reader like myself, rediscovering the pleasures of slow reading and returning to the printed page is a struggle. Given an hour of free reading time, habit will compel me to the LCD screen rather than a book. I must make a concerted effort to sit down on the couch, book in hand. Once I open the book, keeping focused on that single linear feed of information is a constant challenge: I find myself twitchy, distracted, desperately in need of a reading discipline that I unlearned at some point in the past decade as my attention turned to online media. It’s as if I have not only forgotten an important mode of critical thinking, but basic reading comprehension. The state of concentration required to truly engage with the printed word can be attained, and is indeed rewarding, but it requires one hell of a concerted effort in this day and age.

Pundits like Jeff Jarvis, who collect healthy speaking fees by telling aspirational bloggers and new media entrepreneurs what they want to hear, might scoff at an appreciation of slow reading as being the rear-guard defense mechanism of a cultural dinosaur. They’d be half right. For all of slow reading’s continued rewards, it doesn’t take an oracle to acknowledge that print is doomed to a future as a niche product that will command a premium from a small group of enthusiasts, not unlike vinyl or free-range meat. Which is a damned shame, in a certain sense. Clearly the human mind benefits from a type of close, engaged reading that print encourages. And while there are a handful of services that attempt to replicate that experience on a screen, to varying degrees of success—Amazon’s Kindle, the web content archiving service Instapaper that accompanies me on the bus—the temptation of distraction is always near. Faced with that inevitability, something needs to change: either the way we consume content on screens or the way our brains process information. Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that it may be our brains.

The Adaptive Brain

Speaking recently on New York Public Radio’s “On The Media,” Kurtzweil suggested that the human mind will evolve to synthesize this new form of information gathering. “Over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity,” he said. “When you get out to 2045, we’ll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.” Kurtzweil considers the wired brain as an inevitable—and advantageous—next evolutionary step for the human race, one that is consistent with the development of our minds over time. “There is something unique about humans in that we’re the only species that we know about that actually extends our reach with our tools, ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch,” he explained. “We’re already a human/machine civilization. Our tools are part of who we are. They always have been. And that’s what unique about human beings.”

Kurtzweil’s predictions have a good rate of accuracy, and I imagine he’s right. But even the over-clocked evolution of the mind that he speaks of is a slow process, and neither the Internet nor the brains we currently have are doing the trick. No matter how many lauded new web tools I use to pull disparate information together, there is nothing that can effectively organize and synthesize the sheer wealth of information, leaving me with discrete pieces of data in an endless stream of facts, statistics, news and trivia. This information may reside on our hard drives or in the cloud, but only nominal amounts of it reside in our brain. And until the mind takes that evolutionary leap Kurtzweil speaks of—or we begin injecting Google nanobots in our minds to better tie together the brain’s rudimentary search engine—this new system of thought does little to help the process of analysis, of synthesis, of pulling pieces of information together to reach an informed conclusion.

Kurtzweil’s singularity may be decades away, but I suspect that this change has slowly begun, if not through evolution or nanobots, then through a change in practice. Even after rediscovering the value of slow reading, falling in love with print all over again, I find myself drawn by the allure of the screen. At times, slow reading seems almost too slow, and that intellectual quiet unbearable. My mind craves that discursive frenzy—maybe, like any other hard drug, the Internet has rewired my brain.

Perhaps we’re missing the point harping upon some arbitrary distinction between how we read in print and how we read online. No matter the media, we need to rediscover the discipline of slow reading that has been lost in the frenzy of never-ending RSS feeds and social network life streams. No matter how we’re engaging with information—in print or on screen, in a web browser or on a phone—it is, as it’s always been, essential for us to read slowly, be engaged with what we read, to constantly challenge ourselves to re-learn how to think, to be critically engaged. That never-ending data stream isn’t going anywhere, and the fact is, we may need its addictive distraction more than it needs our attention.

At turns lyrical and fierce, the work of hip-hop poet Kevin Coval is intrinsically a product of Chicago. Coval's latest collection of poetry, Everyday People, is a paean to the city where he earned his chops, attending basement hip-hop shows as a teen and honing his skills under the tutelage of hometown heavyweights like Reggie Gibson and Dan Ferry. Coval is as accomplished as a poet working in 2008 could reasonably be, but he stays true to his roots, still calling Chicago his home and encouraging the next generation of writers through Louder Than A Bomb, the youth poetry festival he founded. Before the Thursday release of People at Quimby's, Decider spoke with Coval about his roots in the Chicago hip-hop community and how the city's working-class drives artistic growth.

Decider: How did you first get involved in the Chicago hip-hop community?

Kevin Coval: I grew up in the suburbs and became aware that if I wanted to hear hip-hop music I would have to go to Chicago. I would get bootleg tapes at the old Maxwell Street—before it was paved over in University Village—and it was through some of the stores and vendors there that I began to hear about an indigenous music scene.

One of the first DJs I went to listen to was Jesse De La Pena. He had a Monday night set called Blue Group Lounge. That was one of the first spots I went to in Chicago once I got my fake ID at 18. That was sort of an entry into seeing Chicago hip-hop artists—MCs that are still around like Dirty M.F., they would freestyle some sets. At the end of the night, there would also be local MCs or other artists on tour—I saw Redman freestyle there, and other national artists. It was really that Monday night set that really became a regular mecca for me.

D: When you started out, were you trying to rap or was poetry always your focus?
KC: I didn't know anyone who made beats, so it was all a capella. I was off-beat more than anything, so people called it poetry or spoken word. By the time I first read at an open mic in Chicago—this is about '96—I had left the idea of being a traditional MC and thought of myself as more of a poet. Some of the first spots I went to as an artist, knowing that I had verse in my backpack and if called upon, I could read at an open mic.

There was a set down the street on Monday nights that I started to go to at the Mad Bar, where Cans is now. They had a poetry night, and then after the poetry night they had hip-hop night. That was one of the first places I became a regular at. They sent a couple of teams to the National Poetry Slam, and I was on one of those teams. In some ways, that was my real entrance into Chicago's spoken-word poetry scene.

D: What is it about Chicago’s poetry and hip-hop scene that keeps you coming back, even as you travel around and tour?
KC: I think the quality of the writer's craft in Chicago is—I would argue—higher than anywhere in the country. There's no real recording or publishing industry in Chicago, so if you are a writer or MC or poet in Chicago, you do it out of love and necessity. There is a growing audience in Chicago for Chicago-grown hip-hop and poetry, but the best MCs in Chicago are delivering mail or [are] school teachers or lawyers. They're not driving in Escalades; they're working like the rest of the city works. Being an artist in Chicago means that you are part of the working-class culture. Your art becomes a product of your labor, so if you keep working at that, you become better and better—writers are made, not born.

No one cares in Chicago that you do art. You tell someone in Chicago you do art, and they will encourage you to make their cheeseburger medium rare. No one really believes that you can make it as an artist. Theatre in Chicago is diverse because you have storefront theatres that will put out avant-garde or classical plays because they have a love for the form. I think the same kind of work ethic infiltrates the hip-hop and spoken word community too.

Late in December 2006, while most offices were closed for the holidays, the Independent Press Association (IPA) quietly sent an e-mail to its member publications announcing that the organization was closing its doors. Despite previous optimism expressed by the IPA's board of directors, for many of the publishers whose titles the organization distributed, it came as little surprise. For them, the IPA's sudden announcement was endemic to a total communications breakdown between the organization and its client publications that began in early 2005. Publications represented by the IPA continue to contend with the likelihood that thousands of dollars they are owed will never be seen. For some, such as Kitchen Sink (and Punk Planet itself), this comes as the IPA's final, and fatal, blow. The fallout has been profound-the independent publishing community has experienced an unprecedented bloodletting in recent months, as magazines run on a shoestring have been unable to overcome huge losses in operating income.

In the newsstand distribution business, bankruptcies are nothing new. But in the case of the IPA, the dissolution also speaks to a much deeper crisis of mission. For publishers of IPA-distributed titles, the irony is palpable. An organization once established as an advocate for the independent press, the IPA has brought an array of the publications it was founded to support down with it. The sense of betrayal and frustration goes deep—-hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to distributed titles has disappeared, only likely to be repaid on a percentage of the dollar by the fiduciary firm Uecker and Associates, which was assigned to distribute what remain of the IPA's assets.

Founded in 1996 by John Anner, the IPA was established as a non-profit Social Justice organization for publishers and writers. The IPA offered counsel on the nuts and bolts of publishing to up-and-coming publishers while engaging in social works programs such as the New Voices in Independent Journalism, which arranged for grants for journalism students of color. It wasn't until 1999 that the IPA got into distribution, buying out beleaguered for-profit newsstand distributor BigTop (which was later renamed Indy Press Newsstand Services.) The organization stated that the IPA could better cater to the national newsstand distribution needs of its member titles than the large, for-profit magazine distribution behemoths.

Anner left the organization in 2003, replaced by Jeremy Adam Smith, who served as Interim Executive Director and was charged with finding a permanent director. Smith and the board chose Richard Landry to head the organization, with the hopes that Landry's management experience in the for-profit sector as founder of PC World magazine would prove useful in the IPA's foray into newsstand distribution. Though BigTop/Indy Press Newsstand Services was successful in increasing circulation of its titles, in early 2005 a handful of publishers began to notice that payments were coming late. In some cases, the late payments were written off by many as isolated incidents. "At the time," says Bitch publisher Debbie Rasmussen, "we weren't really in communication with other publishers. We didn't know it was a broader occurrence, so we weren't that alarmed." Carla Costa, publisher of Kitchen Sink magazine, had a similar experience. "Payments starting coming in later and later," she says. "At that point, the communication was still OK, in terms of getting closing statements for issues on the newsstand and potential payment dates-even though the payments were coming late they were still forthcoming with that information."

On October 15, 2005, Landry posted to the IPA listserv, addressing the late payment issues. In the post, he stated, "The reasons for this are numerous, but they really boil down to the fact that independent newsstand distributors like Indy Press require a lot of working cash themselves in order to be able to deal with the very long return and payment cycles that are standard for our business," assuring member titles that "I and members of the board have been working to find better, long-term ways to support the cash-flow needs of Indy Press so that we could be sure to make timely payments to you, our members and publishers."

After months of pursuing a partnership with an established distribution company to shore up the IPA's finances and improve the payment and accounting backend of the distribution chain, in March of 2006 Landry announced to the members that the IPA had signed into a partnership with Canadian distributor Disticor. The company was to handle billing and financial responsibility for the titles while IPNS would continue to manage marketing for their titles and continue their advocacy role for the publications.

According to Landry, the deal would provide the IPA with a cash infusion that would allow them to repay their debts to the distributed titles. Implied in this deal, in the eyes of many publishers, was that the titles that signed the new Disticor contracts would receive preferential payment schedules.

Many publishers balked at the Disticor deal, reluctant to renew their business relationship with the IPA by signing into a brand-new, three-year contract. Some decided that they would rather risk eating the funds owed them than sign a new contract jointly with Disticor and the IPA. Former Tikkun publisher Joel Schalit (a former associate publisher of Punk Planet) was one of those individuals. "We made the decision to not go with them before the Disticor deal was announced," says Schalit. "We didn't have confidence that a bailout would ameliorate their problems. We had suspicions that our sales reporting from BigTop wasn't correct, and we would still be dealing with them. I knew that by pulling out on the distribution deal, I was giving up a lot of money that was owed to us."

For magazines without the strong subscriber base Tikkun would fall back on, Writing off the Big Top debt was not an option, and many begrudgingly gambled they would be paid for amounts owed them. "The Disticor deal was offered so we would get paid," says Giant Robot publisher Eric Nakamura. "I felt like there was no choice ... there might have been a payment schedule, but it was the kind of schedule that leaves you with a huge debt when you don't get paid." Unfortunately for those magazines, the transition period between signing to the Disticor contract and receiving payment for the quickly increasing amounts the IPA owed was economically crippling.

Payments promised for one date failed to materialize months later. New sales representatives were assigned to member's accounts for a short period of time, only to disappear with no fanfare save for bounce-back e-mail responses. Requests for statements would garner no response for weeks, and when numbers were provided, they often came without an account breakdown or any statement detail. "They were making late payments, not communicating with us, making promises about when payments would come and breaking those promises, misinterpreting our contract and trying to take credit on returns that were long closed in order to whittle down what they thought they owed us," says Bitch's Rasmussen. For Kitchen Sink, the situation quickly turned dire. Costa explains, "not only did the payments become severely late, to the point where we had to significantly delay two issues, but the communication also really deteriorated. We stopped being able to get closing statements in a timely manner, because at that point I think they were running out of money so quickly that they couldn't give you a potential pay-out date, so they just wouldn't communicate at all. When they closed, I only had one of two closing statements I needed from them."

"In the end, it took a month for e-mails and phone calls I sent out on a weekly basis to be returned. It put us in a position where even though we're willing to fundraise to print our issues, it put us on a backlog of payments for two full issues, and it's a financial crunch that we can't really beat," Costa describes.

From the Inside Looking Out

For a number of former IPA employees, the organization's decline was equally perplexing. Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, who served as a technical assistance consultant for the IPA from 2004 to 2005, discovered the cash flow problems indirectly. "In July of 2005, they didn't pay me for my consulting job. I got very concerned. I started asking questions among people in the organization. I started hearing that things weren't good and there were problems with distribution and I realized there was a financial problem they were trying to hush up. They were hiring more and more bookkeepers, and they said it was just a cash flow problem with the bookkeepers, and that the situation was working itself out. When I started to contact people for the December 2005 conference, then I started to hear back from people that the IPA was paying late."

Sales representative Lauren Cooper, who left the IPA in April of 2005, saw warning signs in late 2004. "My job was to get publishers to do more promotions and get more copies out and publishers would say, "'that's great and all but you haven't paid me for two issues,'" says Cooper. She began experiencing communications problems of her own. "It just sort of snowballed from that point, and I couldn't get answers. Previously I could go up to accounting and say, "I've got this publisher on the phone and they want to know when they're going to get paid' and there was always some sort of answer, even if it was 'give me a couple of days.' But it became no communication flow ever."

Former Bitch publisher Lisa Jervis served on the IPA board from November 2004 until January 2oo6 as co-chair of the Member Advisory Committee. She contends that during her stint on the board, she was similarly kept in the dark about financial matters. Jervis states that she "soon realized that for my own comfort level with my fiduciary responsibilities to the organization, I was not getting nearly enough information about the organization's finances. I do not feel like enough information was shared with the board about what was going on. It led to delays in the situation being taken as seriously as it needed to be, and I think that made the outcome a lot worse for a lot of publications. There were constant struggles over communication, both in getting info for the board, and in getting info to the membership."

The View on High

In the past year, no small amount of publisher and staff frustration has been directed towards Landry and the IPA Board. Critics assert that Landry's tightly regulated, top-down management approach led to a lack of transparency and a crisis of confidence that only exacerbated the IPA's newsstand distribution issues. One of Landry's sharpest critics is Smith, who states that hiring Landry stands as "one of the greatest regrets of my working life."

"When BigTop or IPNS got into trouble, Richard's response, which was consistent with what I experienced as a member of the staff, was to shut down communications and make sure that there was no information going in or out, which had a number of horrible consequences, one of which is that it led members to distrust the organization, another of which was that an incredible amount of bad publicity was generated, which would turn to philanthropic funders reading that publicity and concluding that IPA wasn't a good investment."

Landry responded to criticism on February, 2007 in an interview with the San FranciscoChronicle, stating that "The IPA I joined was a very distressed organization, and I spent the past three and a half years trying to pull it out of a difficult financial situation."

Smith, however, has little sympathy for Landry's argument.

"When he became executive director there's no question that he faced a lot of questions to be solved," he says, emphasizing that "when you're an executive director or leader of any organization, that's your job-to solve problems."

Despite their personal criticisms, both Cooper and Jervis emphasize that Landry inherited a dire economic situation when he became Director of the IPA. "The seeds for BigTop's problems were sown a long time ago-in my opinion, back when the IPA acquired BigTop in the first place," says Jervis. "There seems to have been a profound underestimate of the financial expertise needed to manage that kind of business, and the organization just never had it and never put the proper systems in place. Richard Landry inherited a financial mess-I don't think anyone even knew how big a mess it was."

"There were always cash flow problems," says Cooper. "Some of the accounting problems were inherited from when BigTop was a for-profit and the IPA bought it." Kaiser concurs. "To be perfectly honest, when Landry took over the IPA it was in serious financial trouble," she says. "Anyone in that position would have had to fire some people, make some hard decisions."

Despite her concessions, Cooper retains strong criticisms of Landry's handling of the crisis. "The position of the organization under Richard's leadership was to preserve the organization first, the publications second," she states. "I can understand trying to make sure there's some money in the bank, but do you start taking the people who make you that money for granted?"

The Fallout

Since the announcement that the IPA was shuttering its operations, the fallout in the independent press community has been profound. A number of magazines, such as Kitchen Sink, have opted to cease publication. Costa states that the factors contributing to their decision have as much to do with exhaustion as unpaid revenue. "At the time of the IPA closure, we had Kitchen Sink 15 at the printer and didn't have any money to ship it because they couldn't pay us, so we had a printed magazine we couldn't pay for at the printer. What we were able to do with a big number of small donations was payoff our printer and mail it off to subscribers."

In another stroke of irony, as with many publishers who signed to the Disticor deal, Costa has found new distributor Disticor (which will continue to distribute titles that signed into the new contract) to be forthcoming with payments. Revenue from the first Kitchen Sink issue distributed by Disticor will fund the printing costs of their upcoming final issue. But unfortunately for Kitchen Sink and other strapped publishers, due to the often arcane process of newsstand distribution, in which magazines are paid for issues sold many months after the magazines go off the shelves, the revenue lost during the transition from the IPNS is far too much to make up.

Instead, the Costa and the editorial staff of Kitchen Sink are refocusing their energies on the Neighbor Lady Community Arts Project, the non-profit organization that Kitchen Sink became an energy- and money- consuming project of. While the former magazine staff will continue to work with the non-profit, Costa states that the publication has decisively met its end. "We won't ever revive Kitchen Sink magazine. We just can't. It's a money problem-not for lack of will, because we've worked really hard on it for five years. I think it's time to move on, because it's exhausting and I think having a chance to work on new plans will revitalize everybody. It's too expensive for us to do as a group of volunteers."

Not all affected publications are shutting their doors. For Bitch, the unpaid revenue has been crippling, but hasn't dealt a fatal blow. In February, Rasmussen told Punk Planet, "We got our notification saying they owed us $35,000, and our records show that they owe us $81,000." Months later, she has yet to get any indication of how much of that money the magazine may receive. "We haven't had any contact with their attorneys," she says. “I’d sent a couple of messages to Susan Uecker but I've only gotten generic responses back. I've heard conflicting reports about what (if any) money we should expect. Some people think publishers won't see any of it; others seem to believe that we'll probably get 10 cents on the dollar of what the IPA claimed to owe us."

As Costa and the Kitchen Sink staff wrap up fundraising efforts to get issue 16 out the door, they don't expect to know how much they will-or won't-receive until the end of summer at the earliest. "We'll have to wait until claims are processed before we hear back," she says. "I'm assuming none of us will know what happens until the end of the summer but I'm not very optimistic about it."

Members of the Independent Publisher's Network, the group that a number of former IPA members and publishers have organized in the wake, found that among the assets being sold off in order to repay the publishers are the mailing list contacts of those publishers themselves, in yet another twist that emphasizes how far the legacy of the IPA has strayed from the organization's original mandate. Responses on the group range from bemusement to renewed anger among former IPA members whose contact information is potentially being sold to spammers and direct marketing companies in order to help pay for the debts they themselves are owed.

On the Independent Publisher's Network online forum, former staffers and publishers are rebuilding that community that was crucial to the IPA's mission in its' formative period, before it became embroiled in economic controversy, before it tried its hand at the distribution business. But for these publishers, still recovering from the IPA fallout, the community must contend with a host of crises threatening the entire publishing world. Even as they work themselves out of an economic quagmire, the crucial question confronting these publishers is how to preserve the independent press as a viable concern while it faces multiple threats-from scarce distribution options, from increased bulk mailing rates, from the Internet, from continually declining advertising income.

Smith states that progressive publications have to become increasingly savvy about their bottom line. "Freestanding independent titles have to be smart about it," he says. "The winning formula at the moment is that you keep a tight rein on your expenses--that you diversify as much as possible, that you have some kind of subsidy in the form of donations or in the form of institutional sponsorship, or some sort of cash cow, and that you have a very well-defined mission and niche. If you believe that there has to be an independent press, then it's simply a matter of finding a way," he says. "In that sense, you can't focus on the negative, you have to seize on that and try to develop that. I just think we're in a very tough period right now."

Yet as an already-tough business grows only more difficult, Rasmussen emphasizes that both publishers and readers must take stock of what has been lost and commit themselves again to supporting independent voices. "I'm committed not just to independent media but radical and anti-capitalist media," says Rasmussen, "and I worry about the declining number of outlets for these perspectives. Independent print publishing is enormously difficult and costly, even more so when you're challenging conventions, like consumerism, or subsidizing your publication with corporate ad sales. We all need to realize that if we want these publications to continue, we have to do our part to support them."

Two weeks ago, the New York Times announced that American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If you missed this piece of breaking news while watching Fox and Friends, or didn’t catch it in your RSS news feed, there’s good reason: this wasn’t the old Gray Lady announcing the end of the war, that venerable one-time home of fabulist Jayson Blair, the allegedly leftist mouthpiece that gave safe harbor to WMD cheerleader Judith Miller. Instead the news was broken by the New York Times Special Edition, a mock recreation by a grassroots army comprised of activist groups and individuals.

Responses to the paper were mixed. The popular narratives attempted to parse the project as either a would-be Onion-esque parody, or as a throwback to ‘60s merry pranksterism, one rendered moot by the recent election of a center-right Democrat to President of the United States. Bloggers drilled into the minutiae, pointing out that the faux-Lady didn’t follow the New York Times’ style book or house typography, and obsessing over minor spelling errors. The Times‘ response was one of bemusement, while media outlets ranging from Fox News to Gawker glibly dismissed the project’s content as a “liberal wishlist”.

The paper was distributed by volunteers on the streets of New York and other major American cities on November 12th. Quickly after its release, activist group The Yes Men claimed sole credit for the paper, a point contested by others involved (the group later released a long, if incomplete, list of contributing groups). Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore was intimately involved in the production of the paper, but left five weeks before its release due to disagreements over its direction. As she explains in this interview with Is Greater Than, the utopian New York Times had as tortured a birth as any major daily newspaper.

PMD: How did you get involved with the fake New York Times project?

AEM: Steve Lambert, who sort of started the whole discussion, invited me, originally to contribute. We had been working on stuff together for awhile beforehand–the AAAFFF–and had developed a really good solid collaboration. He asked me to contribute to the paper, and I was like, “uh, but who’s going to edit?” There was this sense that, like, papers come together sort of magically. I was like, that’s not the way it works. How it works is with someone really dedicated to getting that paper out the door needs to do that. And with something like this, where all the different lies have to come together to form a unique whole that is still believable, well, it was going to take some serious effort. So I did it.

PMD:What was the original concept for the project, and in what ways did the finished product differ from it either in tone or intention?

Photo by Flickr user ConwayL

AEM: Originally, we’d agreed that it would be an anonymous project, that no one would take credit for it, because that’s where the power in this was: in the sense that it had genuinely come from an unseen force of “the people”. I think that’s still a really powerful idea that no one’s really explored artistically, and that’s what’s sort of important for me to put out there. ‘Cause the project turned out to be, ‘a couple guys in New York pulled some crazy prank,’–that’s sort of inconsequential in my mind. At least as activism, although also as art. How does that shift any power structures or misconform to any notions of how the world operates? And there’s another way.

Also, of course, the paper itself changed after I left the project. A ton of stuff was cut–much of it the most engaged critical stuff. Maybe stuff that took on the Times too closely, out of fear, I don’t know. Perhaps coincidentally, most content by female contributors was cut. (Because you know, I was making my ideal paper, and my ideal paper addresses women’s issues and seeks out women writers, and also has a lot more comics and editorial cartoons than most papers we see today). This content shift was actually a much bigger problem than, like, who claimed credit for what. This was where writers–original contributors to this vision–started to get screwed. When their work was changed or dropped without consultation, I mean fake paper or not, that’s really exploitive of people’s labor, and just generally kind of unethical. Made more disturbing by the utopic vision and structure of this paper. Because whose ideal vision of the future includes having their contributions ignored or changed without consultation? Which is sort of a great lesson in how supposed utopias operate, I guess.

But originally the paper was a minor part of the plan, in a way. The end goal was this massive street party, this humungous celebration that people could come by and get sucked up into and everyone would kind of accidently be celebrating the end of the war without ever having thought it through. The paper was the originary element–it would be the thing people were holding up while dancing about the end of the war. Which is, again, still a really great idea: massive street parties to celebrate something that hasn’t exactly happened yet, particularly when we’d originally hoped to do it, over the summer when it just seemed like the Bush Administration, and the war in Iraq, would never end. And neither did this really proceed as planned–the party was fairly modest, as I understand it.

PMD: Since there were a number of activist groups involved, I imagine the initial planning stages were rather democratic, but any publication demands some sort of editorial hierarchy, even a fake publication. How was that internal workflow organized?

Josh Bayer’s editorial cartoon for the Original Fake New York Times

AEM: Right, I mean: publishing is a whole different ballgame from, like, artist’s bookmaking. It demands deadlines, oversight, which you don’t know unless you’ve worked in the industry. Especially if you’re expected to be believable as the New York Times. Generally speaking, the artistic temperament is far too ego-driven to conform to collaborative demands like agreed-upon deadlines. So I’d be working with the writers toward these crazy deadlines, and then the date of the paper would change. That was frustrating, of course, and in terms of the last few months, a pretty interesting publishing problem. Every delay allowed for humongous political changes to take place as the election cycle unfolded. It was intense, reading the paper every single day trying to envision a “solution” to it. And then when the economy was pronounced so thoroughly fucked, it was like, acch! The thing that’s going to make everyone want to party now is totally different than it was a month ago! Although by that time I’d left the project.

But the point is, the place for the democratic participation was these street parties. The democratic aspects of the *paper* were: you send in your ideal news or human interest story, the thing you’d love to read or write if the world were to get totally fixed tomorrow, and I will fix all the other parts of the paper so that your vision is viable. Ha ha. I will make that happen. Although only in text.

PMD: At what point did your interests diverge from the direction the project was taking?

AEM: I’d been really cautious from the beginning that my efforts–and the efforts of the many many people I brought on board this project–not be ultimately co-opted to further forward the brand of the Yes Men. I’ve personally had enough of my efforts going toward brand names I don’t actually believe in, and I’d only agreed to to work on this project as long as it would remain an anonymous project. When I was told much later in the process by one of my collaborators that “it was never the intention to put this paper out anonymously,” it became clear that, at least, everyone had totally different intentions and desires.

Well, and the one thing that’s really important to note is that the paper was done: conceptualized, written, edited, laid out, illustrated, when I left. Even if I didn’t believe in it anymore, I wanted to make sure they had all the pieces in place to do this right. Because it’s a good idea. I think the project that resulted is a tenth as good of an idea as what it could easily have been, however.

PMD: On your blog, you note that you felt that the prank had overtaken the purpose. Did you fear that the prank-like nature of the project was overshadowing the intent? Was there fear that the project would be dismissed as an extension of ‘60’s era, whimsical activism — as it has been, in much mass media?

Photo by Flickr user ConwayL

AEM: From the first time I heard about it, this project was about limiting the degree to which people could dismiss this as silly, a prank, some kind of utopic bullshit, or impossible. Separate from our plans to do this anonymously, we’d also planned this crazy triage system for these street parties, where people who were wearing crazy outfits would go off to this other area and only celebrate, like not distribute the paper at all. People who were too much about, like, “we’re gonna screw the New York Times! Those suckers!” Or people who were too interested in engaging this as a power struggle.

So there was always this concept that this could be dismissed, and I think it was, as you say. “A group of liberals released their wishlist for the new administration,” was the lead phrase in most of the news stories I read. Gaaaah! Like, “Kid Writes to Santa Hopes for Better World!” This is not news! What’s news here, what’s interesting, is that thousands of people banded together to work on something truly radical, truly emergent, something that could have inspired genuine change. But those interests were sidelined.

And so what happened, right, is that The Yes Men here first became the symbol that simply replaced the New York Times as the people in power. For a moment, the positions were reversed. Ho ho! It’s not the New York Times that has all the power, it’s these guys that look and act like the guys at the New York Times and live in the same city and have similar economic and racial and backgrounds. Which is a very disempowering way of thinking about power. As Foucault argues, power actually comes from everywhere, and what I was excited about in working on this project was that we’d proposed a way of articulating that. Power seemingly coming from everywhere.

I was talking to Mark Messing the other night, here in Chicago. He was talking about this project, and here it was immediately dismissed as a kinda funny joke. Which itself is really interesting: the shift in power that actually occurred between the election and, what, eight days later when the fake NYT hit, was tremendous. Already, Chicagoans were like, “New York? Why should I care?” Anyway, he was comparing this turn of events to this film he’d just seen of Fred Hampton talking about the Yippies. That all these white dudes went to jail and a ton of “awareness” was raised about the issues they were talking about, and a ton of money was raised to get them out of jail, and awesome! But in the mean time, Hampton’s out creating a free breakfast program for poor students on the South Side, actually out making real change. My point is not that anyone here is Fred Hampton, but how much “awareness” can you raise before you actually try to make change?

PMD: What is the sense among other groups and individuals that were involved about how this has played out. I don’t expect you to speak for other groups, but to the best of your knowledge, was other groups taking their piece of the credit for involvement an antagonistic move or rather an attempt to set the record straight?

AEM: I’ve heard, and witnessed, a lot of frustration with how this went down. A lot of people felt their efforts were misused and misattributed, but there’s also this sense that, as the editor of a culture paper told me, anyone who speaks up about the weird issues here risks being labeled a naysayer, or “not down with the cause”. I mean, that’s ridiculous. I am clearly down with the cause. I just think our means of achieving ends can always be bettered. Here in particular. And here are some ideas for you! Take them and do something more awesome. It’s really much easier than you can imagine.

But thank god for that the Globe and Mail piece that came out that basically said, “Really? We’re gonna believe two dudes put this thing out and raised $100,000 to do it and printed 1.2 Million papers? I mean, they did lie about the name of the paper.” I was genuinely beginning to believe that there wasn’t a single thinking soul in media anymore. So the record’s being slowly straightened. Although I’d be most excited if every single one of the contributors I contacted stepped up, or gave me permission to post their stuff. It’s genuinely amazing how many people, and who, and where, were on board this thing.

PMD: What is your understanding of the current or potential legal implications of involvement in the project?

Raghda, the UnAmerican Girl Doll, an Iraqi who works as a prostitute and comes with accouterments. Unattributed.

AEM: You know, I was out recently with this man who was like, “But since the paper was given away, copyright doesn’t apply!” And it just made me realize that people still don’t get intellectual property rights issues. Of course both copyright and trademark laws apply–like they applied when that grade school painted Mickey Mouse on its classroom wall, and like when the Girl Scouts sang Happy Birthday or the Macarena or whatever it was. So we were really careful–or I was. Consulting lawyers and really getting into that aspect of it. Of course I did. So when I started working on the paper, there was this really big issue sort of sitting there in the room like an elephant that I ignored for a little while until I couldn’t. And it was this: that we were originally using the framework of the NYT to simply make a fake NYT. Like, we were committing copyright and trademark infringement directly, with nothing underlying it except for the desire to use the stature and form of the Gray Lady for what it was, to release our message. That’s not even parody, that’s just mimicry.

So we started talking about it more, trying to get into what it was about the NYT we wanted to say, which was, “you are a part of–and a BIG part of–these problems, because you failed to cover the antiwar movement, you hired all sorts of fake reporters to tell us lies, some about the war (Judith Miller!) and some more generally, just eroding public trust in journalism for the sake of it, and you accept advertising and sponsor things and own a crazy variety of other media outlets and non-media entities, all with an intent to profit from culture, not document it factually.” And that’s when it got interesting, for me, as this long-standing media activist. That’s when we started writing the corrections page, some of which ended up in the final version. I’m going to post the couple of pages we got up on Democracy Guest List, one of these days. Because compiling all of those things, not just as accusations, but as documented facts, was overwhelming. That’s when it was like, “oh shit. The NYT is a teeny bit abhorrent.”

Of course, we were in consultation with lawyers across the country, had a whole class in law school that took this on as the semester’s project, big name lawyers, small name lawyers, one dude who misspelled “libel.” That was concerning. Some of them are starting to get some action: DeBeers, the diamond company, wasn’t so fond of the culture jammed ad on the Special Edition’s website and started demanding their Internet provider pull it, and the EFF leapt into action pretty immediately. And, you know, so far, the “real” NYT’s put on a good-natured face about the whole thing.

PMD: Were you surprised by the Times’ public bemusement to the project? How has their legal/non-official response to the project differed from their public front?

AEM: No, of course they had to go along with the joke, and the final version of the paper, and the fact that it didn’t address the economic crisis at all, I think it made it easy to dismiss on all sides, as non-offensive, and a step or two away from being timely. But the Times is one of the most protective entities in the world — and how I know this I won’t go into — so I’ll be surprised if we’ve really seen the very last of this. But maybe!

PMD: What are you taking away from this experience about the current activist climate in the United States?

AEM: This is totally a good question. I have been frustrated by the activist climate in the US for awhile–I’m sure most thinking people have been–and this project was intended to revitalize the hope that must drive demands for political change. But that even this dippy utopia-realized, C’mon,-guys!-we-can-do-it!, fake newspaper project has been sacrificed to the demands of the market, to this overriding need to put a big name behind it and dismiss it, that’s been a bummer.

Well, but much of activism right now is so focused on raising “awareness.” In other words, focused on attracting media attention. When I was working with Codepink over the summer, my hopes were to build a website for them so that they could really skip the part about attracting media attention and go straight to telling the stories they felt like weren’t being told. Because we know already that the media is a broken system, and will never get our stories right, because it will only tell the part of the story that sells. So as activists, is it even worth our while to try to get attention from a broken media? I mean, even this project–that aimed to question the legitimacy of the New York Times–was measured in media appearances. Or is it better to go straight to making our own, not in putting out one fake New York Times but generating a regular resource for positive news? Or, as Fred Hampton might argue, is it better to improve our situation now. I feel like, we had a chance with this project to do something radical–put out a fake paper filled with all sorts of good news–but do it in a way that established a new model for collaborative work. And while it didn’t work out that way, I’ve seen a way that it’s possible.

“Hey man, can I see your ink?”

I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Los Alamos, NM, working from the road and trying not to explode at the soccer Mom behind me. She's bragged for the past forty-five minutes to a friend about her children’s college plans. "Well, she can't decide between Harvard and Stanford," a statement expressed in a hundred different ways over the past 6500 seconds. In front of me is a timid teenage boy bearing the store-bought tokens of the feigned high school badass--dandruffed hair and a washer-worn My Chemical Romance t-shirt. He wants to see my tattoos, and feeling a  solidarity with my teenage self, I oblige, even though I’m way past deadline.

He surveys the tattoos on my arm, and then points to his own, a shitty scrawl that would resemble a prison tat if it weren't for his youth and suburban upbringing. I offer what seems like an appropriate amount of encouragement, too busy to continue the conversation indefinitely yet trying to encourage a young punk kid bored in a mountainous suburban wasteland.

“What are you doing here?” he asks suspiciously. “Camping, down at Bandalier,” I explain, and he asks what I  think of Los Alamos. Not much,” I respond, and almost on cue, he launches into what seems like a rehearsed bit, excitedly saying, “Well, I can give you the tour." He points East. “The labs are over there;” West, “the desert’s over there;” South, “there’s trees over there.”

“This town fucking sucks,” he adds.

I can’t disagree. My wife and I have only been in the town a few hours, and while it’s historical significance is tantalizing, the workaday reality is like any other isolated, suburban mountain town, except for the military research labs that encompass it.

I’ve been places like this before–isolated, yet unexpectedly affluent, with a youth that has refined disaffected boredom to an fine art that would shame your typical suburbia-dweller; economies driven by those who've made it elsewhere and the influx of tourist money. Yet none of those towns were home to the atomic bomb. They're not host to one of the most high-security research facilities in the world, where Oppenheimer and his boys brought the world reluctantly into the atomic age. Most of these towns don't have signs outside the Subway sandwich shops reminding you that you're on land owned by the US government, or campgrounds surrounded by  homeland security checkpoints.

Yet as we sit in this Starbucks, within a mile of people developing technologies that could easily eliminate all forms of life on Earth, our immediate surroundings are shockingly prosaic.The only things that immediately indicate the isolated, mountainous region as a space at the forefront of military technology are the demographics, which are unusual for a community of this sort.

You wouldn’t guess it by the working-class people working at the local grocery store, who could credibly man the registers in any American small town. You wouldn’t guess it by the disaffected youth who roam the streets, sit around the Starbucks, avoid attending class to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk shit to the guy who works behind the counter.

There are many places that Los Alamos reminds you of, but the differences are apparent–youth roam the streets like they do in many small towns, but here they seem more concentrated. Soccer Moms beam about the Ivy League prospects of their children–presumably not the same children smoking outside of the Starbucks. The tedium of the daily life contradicts Los Alamos' self-proclaimed status as the “atomic city,” the home of the bomb, a center for classified government weapons research. A short glimpse at the demographics are revealing: median income for a household in 2000 was $71,536, and the median income for a family was $86,876. Males had a median income of $65,638 versus $39,352 for females (according to the 2000 census.). If it weren’t for the laboratories, this would be another sleepy tourist-trap of a mountain town outside of a National Park, with a median household income dictated by the slave wages of the diner waitresses.

Only small details underscore that the town strictly exists for high-grade weapon research– the main strip is named Oppenheimer Dr. and visitors to the town must first enter through a checkpoint. Amidst the signs proclaiming government ownership of the land are car dealership billboards touting their atomic deals.

Nowhere is the contrast of the banal and the apocalyptic in sharper relief than at the modest Bradbury Science Museum, a testament to the world-obliterating innovations developed in the city, and funded by the research lab.

Reminiscent of an educational video from a Simpsons episode in which a cowboy neutron rhapsodizes about the potential of nuclear power, the Bradbury Science Museum is shockingly toothless. The information next to replicas of Little Boy and Big Boy make only cursory reference to the horrors of Nagasaki or Hiroshima.  An informational video is cheerily benign, and seems to have been produced in the ’40s itself, with its cheery jingoism paying unconflicted tribute to the glories of American ingenuity.

Which isn’t to say there is no sense of solemnity at the museum–the video makes reference to Oppenheimer’s fateful quotation of the Bhagavad Gita upon the detonation of the bomb– “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds". Much is made of the myriad national security threats the United States has faced over the past few decades. A small kiosk in the back of the museum has been set up to allow activist groups to offer a counterpoint to the museum’s historical interpretation. It’s a tiny space, covered in horrifying photos of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a guest book where visitors can leave their responses. The haunting final comment, written in the scratchy script of a young teen, reads “those poor poor victims that got killed in the explosion…”

You’d be forgiven for forgetting this town’s legacy amid its prosaic suburban sprawl and tourist-savvy whimsy. Here, a small mountainous town where the adults are engineers and their children roam the streets disaffected. Where absent-minded fathers develop technologies that could eradicate life on Earth. The disconnect between daily life and the implications of the work being done are profound.

But that's the purpose of Los Alamos, secluded by definition and necessity. The contrast between the prosaic and the world-changing is academic in most places, but here it is drawn in clear, government-demarcated lines. It's home to small-town America, to families of absent parents and disaffected children, and to the bomb.

Vegan or animal rights activist? Firebombings or arson? Domestic terrorism or protest?

When people start throwing around this kind of loaded language, it's no longer a debate over semantics. As soon as police and university officials declared last week's attacks on the property of two UCSC professors to be acts of domestic terrorism, the door for nuanced discussion closed. Incendiary rhetoric was lobbed back, most notably by Jerry Vlasak, MD, of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, who wrote in response to the attacks, "UC-Santa Cruz may consider themselves an institution of higher education, but they are also an institution of animal torture and killing. This is historically what happens whenever revolutionaries begin to take the oppression and suffering of their fellow beings seriously, whether human or nonhuman. It's regrettable that certain scientists are willing to put their families at risk by choosing to do wasteful animal experiments in this day and age."

It's difficult to tease out nuanced positions amid such hard-line declarations. Press coverage has played fast and loose with terminology and facts. In a 24-hour news cycle fueled by innuendo, loaded terms such as "terrorism," "firebombing" and "veganism" become easily intertwined. Among pundits and columnists, bloggers and readers, A plus B does not need to necessarily equal C to suggest intent or association. If A, B and C reside in the same few column inches together, that's good enough.

Despite the media coverage and poorly sourced editorials, for many vegans or animal rights activists the attacks are alarming on a number of levels. As animal rights activists consider last week's attacks, they fear the effect the fallout will have upon the nonextremist elements of the animal rights community.

Not My Battle
One of the strongest local critics of the actions last week is Erik Marcus, author of Meat Market: Animals, Ethics and Money and the publisher of Vegan.com. Marcus, who lives in Bonny Doon, is frustrated by the way the attacks have muddled the intent of the animal rights community and drawn attention away from its core issues. "These idiots are doing unimaginable harm to animals," he says

Conservative bloggers have been pointed in their critique of the animal rights movement, asking why the community has not openly condemned the attacks on UCSC professors. The rhetoric calls to mind post-9/11 demands for all Americans of Arab descent to condemn the actions of a handful of Islamic extremists. And many individuals and groups have, in fact, responded in the past week. Marcus notes, "I was delighted to see the Humane Society of the United States offer a $2,500 reward for information leading to the conviction of the arsonists."

The Humane Society's gesture has earned it condemnation on both sides of the debate. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a well-heeled lobbyist group that serves as an allegedly independent mouthpiece for corporate benefactors including Philip Morris, Tyson Foods and the Coca Cola Company, fired back with a withering yet predictable press release. "Nobody should be fooled by HSUS's paltry gesture," it read. "While pretending to be part of the solution, the group continues to be a significant part of the problem--an over-zealous social movement bent on extending legal rights to animals, whether or not thinking people like the consequences. The entire community of Santa Cruz is learning this week what can happen when human beings resist the sort of evolution the animal rights community has planned for them. And it's not pretty."

The CCF's argument has enjoyed an unexpected level of play on anarchist blogs and forums, where the response is considered an example of why the Humane Society's tactics are ineffective. On animal rights blog Green Is the New Red (www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/), independent journalist and civil liberties watchdog Will Potter writes, "In many ways, Feedstuffs and CCF are absolutely right. This is a turning point in history. Not just for the animal rights movement, but for a country showing frightening parallels to the worst eras of government repression. The question, then, is this: Should we all, like HSUS, try to buy ourselves a little time? Or should we step up and fight the New McCarthyists head on?"

On infoshop.org, commenter Lawrence responds, "This should come as no surprise to anyone. The Humane Society is concerned with the stewardship of animals as resources and/or property (whether lab animals or potential pets), and not with animal liberation. They are a thoroughly bourgeois, law-abiding outfit with government funding."

Other activists consider hard-line tactics injurious to the movement. "This reward underscores the fact that the core of the animal protection movement regards tactics like this as immoral and counterproductive," Marcus says of the Humane Society's reward, adding, "If I had any idea who perpetrated this act, I would be on the phone with the FBI in a heartbeat."

Stephen Kaufman, chair of the Cleveland-based Christian Vegetarian Association, is similarly direct in his condemnation. "As you might expect, we are appalled by this action," Kaufman says. "Our movement's principles involve love, compassion, and peace.Unfortunately, in any large movement there is always the possibility that one or more people might violate such principles."

Marcus argues that the attacks on the homes of the UCSC professors have drawn attention away from what he considers a more urgent concern, and levels blame directly at the perpetrators.

"Thanks to this incident, it's now harder than ever to hold the university publicly accountable for its support of factory farming," he says. "If you want to eliminate obscene amounts of needless animal cruelty, the logical place to begin is not at the university's research labs, but at its dining halls. I've been working for the past 18 months to try to get UC-Santa Cruz to abandon serving factory farmed eggs. ... How am I supposed to put pressure on the university to stop sourcing eggs from factory farms when these lunatic arsonists are grabbing headlines?"

It's in the Papers, It Must Be True
There are those who suggest the attacks could be a COINTELPRO-like act of counterintelligence sabotage. On indybay.org, commenter Trust No One claims, "It's quite typical of authorities to drive a wedge between other left-wing groups and so-called fringe groups with heated rhetoric," a response that struck a chord with other commenters on the sometimes conspiratorially minded independent media news forum. On a sister indymedia.org site, a commenter wrote, "This is bullshit--either the government did this, or these activists were out of line." Though such uncorroborated accusations are the Internet's stock in trade, they do illustrate the level of distrust with which the animal rights community regards the authorities investigating the attacks.

Perhaps one of the most concerning aspects of this case for local animal rights activists and vegans is the slipshod reporting that has run in Bay Area newspapers, much of which has been picked up by newspapers nationwide. Early in the news cycle, much media attention was directed toward the Animal Liberation Front, though the ALF has consistently denounced actions that could potentially risk lives. Groups and establishments with no professed political allegiance were referred to in news reports as vegan institutions. One was Caffe Pergolesi, where fliers endorsing violence against UCSC professors initially surfaced. During a KTVU 2 report, the cafe was pointedly referred to as being a vegan institution, and staffers' denouncements of the act were arranged into quick sound bites that suggested some level of sympathy with the attackers. The level of misreporting prompted owner Karl Heiman to issue a press release categorically denouncing the acts, even though the cafe had been proactive in its cooperation with the authorities from the outset.

Such minor points generate misinformed punditry that amplifies a narrative that may not bear any resemblance to the facts. In the editorial "Firebombing shows the danger of domestic terror" in the Aug. 5 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the community of Santa Cruz, along with the animal rights movement, was suggested as being sympathetic to the views of the attackers. In the editorial, the Chronicle stated, "... where is the outrage, and where are the wars to protect scientists like Feldheim? ... The citizens of Santa Cruz and the city's elected officials need to step up and condemn this sort of violence." The editorial goes on to reiterate misreported allegations, asking, "Why didn't the Santa Cruz coffee shop remove the threatening animal-rights pamphlet that listed the names and addresses of 13 researchers ... and call the police," though Pergolesi did precisely that upon discovery of the fliers. It also equates the Animal Liberation Press Office with the Animal Liberation Front, though the two groups have long argued over tactics that threaten human life. (The relationship between ALF and Vlasak's Animal Liberation Press Office is difficult to parse; the two openly disagree over whether violence toward humans is justified, but ALF's website links to ALPO under the rubric "press office.")

Erik Marcus, a former journalist himself, is not surprised by the portrayal of the animal rights community and vegans in the press. "My impression is that [the media coverage] has been appallingly inept, and the reason for that is very simple: unlike many important political issues that emerge, this is one that does not attract beat reporters," Marcus says. "I think the problem is that the people reporting on this story have no background in any of these issues, and as a result I think the coverage is appallingly simple-minded. I don't think this is a case of reporters seeking to mislead, it's just not part of their beat."

It's these considerations that alarm activists like Marcus, who notes, "The sort of activism I do is based on making good relationships with people." Pointing to the press circus that has arisen in the wake of the attacks, Marcus directs blame at the perpetrators, and reiterates that he believes they have done far more harm to the community than they anticipate. "They are distracting focus from indefensible animal abuses that UC-Santa Cruz perpetuates on an ongoing basis," he says. "They've made the work of legitimate animal protection advocates unimaginably harder."