A world-class city boasting outsized political and economic influence, a vibrant tech community, and an intense commitment to civic participation, Chicago points the way to the peer-to-peer cities of tomorrow. Shareable Chicago is my week-long series exploring the city's burgeoning open data, civic tech, and P2P communities.

The first feature documents last weekend's DataKind DataDive, and explores the many challenges facing developers, data scientists, and social organizations who want to leverage civic data for lasting social change.

Follow the posts on the Shareable Chicago page, or at #shareablechi on Twitter. Looking forward to your thoughts, leads, and responses!

Since the rise of Napster and file-sharing, it seems like every single music fan, tech pundit, opinion columnist, and blogger has an opinion on what's wrong with the music business, and how things should change. There's been a lot less conversation about how the technology shifts have actually affected the many professional independent musicians who have not been the subject of "future of the music business" trend pieces.

Cooper McBean of The Devil Makes Three joins Paul at Casa de Gato for a conversation about how technology and the Internet have transformed the lives of professional independent musicians for better and worse, the shady corners of the music business the Internet hasn't disrupted, connecting with fans online, those "future of the music industry" trend pieces, whether bands using Kickstarter are enterprising or lazy, and Cooper's advice for aspiring musicians.

During Breaking News, Cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein joins us to discuss the latest Cylon (military drone) news, the case of Bradley Manning, microagressions and Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls, why science is the 99%, and the enigmatic case of the Lesbian Bigfoot hunter.

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Show Notes:

Breaking News

• Motherboard: The Cargo Chopper That's Hauling Drones to War
• Danger Room: Marines Want iPads to Control Robo-Copter Brains
• Danger Room: Almost 1 In 3 U.S. Warplanes Is a Robot
• Motherboard: Are Drones Collecting Too Much Information
• New York Times: Judge recommends Manning charged with all counts
• Wikipedia: Daniel Ellsberg
• Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls: blog.franchesca.net
• Microagressions
• Scientific American: Science Is the 99%
• YouTube: Neal Degrasse Tyson on Bill Maher
• Cryptomundo: Out Bigfooter Speaks Up For Lesbian Tolerance
• San Diego Gay & Lesbian News: Lesbian Biologist on Cult Hit Finding Bigfoot Spills the Beans

Cooper McBean Interview

• Danny Barnes: How To Make A Living Playing Music
• The New York Times: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
• The New York Times: Frustration and Fury: Take It. It's Free.
• Techdirt: Amanda Palmer Talks About Record Labels, Art, Commerce & Retiring To Open A Juice Bar
• Crowdfunding Nation: The Rise and Evolution of Collaborative Funding
• Wikipedia: Jeff Mangum
• Wikipedia: Brian Wilson
• Mule Train

About the Guests

Cooper McBean is a member of The Devil Makes Three, which recently released the live album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre and will be touring with Flogging Molly in early February. He also fronts the country and folk band Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests. Originally from Vermont, Cooper now calls Austin his home, and can be found on Twitter @thecoug.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist holding a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first postdoc was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship in the Observational Cosmology Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. Find her professional work online at cprescodweinstein.com and her non-professional blog at chandapw.tumblr.com.

Episode Markers

00:02:39: Breaking News with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
00:51:19: "Bangor Mash" by The Devil Makes Three from the album Longjohns, Boots and a Belt
00:52:15: Interview with Cooper McBean
01:24:18: "Over The Gates" by Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests
01:54:02: "Black Irish" by The Devil Makes Three from the album Stomp and Smash: Live at the Mystic Theatre
02:20:19: "Gracefully Facedown" by The Devil Makes Three from the album Do Wrong Right

Credits

Radio Free Ruin art: “As Things Fell Apart (Jewelers)” by Carrie Sieh
Radio Free Ruin theme: “FT2 Theme” by Phil Manley from the album Life Coach used with the gracious permission of Thrill Jockey Records

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There are a number of good critiques of the establishment left’s responses to Occupy Wall Street, most pointedly and effectively being this one from Glenn Greenwald, but I’ve been surprised to note that some of the activists in my timelines have also looking askance at the occupation. They have good reasons: for the past decade, activists have been corralled into “Free Speech zones” during protests, surveilled by a Patriot Act-bolstered FBI, and ignored by the mainstream media. Add to this that the Occupy Wall Street movement, such that it is, has a diffuse set of demands and was organized by a motley assortment of anarchists, libertarian-leaning Wikileaks-loving hackers and other groups, pursuing somewhat conflicting goals.

But while the radical post-left has plenty of reason to expect that Occupy Wall Street will shortly be neutralized, co-opted, or implode under its own unmanageable mass, or that the protestors need to read up on the history and theory of protest movements, I still believe this moment is significant and meaningful. For lack of a better blanket term, non-conservative thought has splintered into separate stems in recent decades. You have the conciliatory triangulation of the establishment “left”, established by the Clinton administration and codified by Democratic pols and the Obama Administration over the past decade. Then there is the radicalized post-left, attempting to investigate and redress a seemingly endless list of grievances while existing cloistered in the self-marginalizing bubbles of Liberal Arts academia and Crimethinc-stocked anarchist bookstores. There are plenty of exceptions and nuances within these two broad straw men groups, but they serve a useful purpose.

Photo via the White House Flickr feed.

Meanwhile, neocons, Randian sociopaths, the Koches and Roger Ailes have set and executed a far-right libertarian political agenda in a decades-long effort to “starve the beast”. During this time, these have been the voices which have dominated the political discussion, while the establishment left moved rightward, radicals and academics spiraled into rhetorical wormholes, and the face of populist progressive outrage became a TV comedian who has served to mollify the left rather than inspire it to any meaningful action. When Wall Street collapsed in 2008, the Koch-funded Tea Party came to embody the voice and face of populist outrage, perversely twisted to direct blame to the impoverished and the exploited, rather than the architects of unsustainable financial instruments. Those of us who felt disenfranchised from the establishment left, the radical post-left, and the complacent class of Comedy Central viewers were left to wonder: where was our populist alternative?

While the original spark for Occupy Wall Street was ignited in the cloisters of the post-left, it has since transcended that, which is significant. The kids who started the occupation are no doubt fluent in the inscrutable language of critical theory. It just so happens they had the misfortune of graduating into the worse recession in decades. Jobless, in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, forced to live with their parents, and perhaps unemployable in this economy, they’re rightly pissed. What opportunities do Hakim Bey-fluent Millennials face in this job market, other than going further into debt in a MFA program to pursue one of the ever-shrinking number of tenure-track positions at one of the country’s Liberal Arts universities?

Photo by Dan Nguyen on Flickr.

I’m less interested in the ideological underpinnings of the occupation itself — as my Shareable colleague Malcolm Harris explored well, it’s a limited and inherently compromised action. What interests and even inspires me is how it is coinciding with other, adjacent acts and a popular sentiment of “I’m fed up with this shit.” These occupations, in conjunction with “We Are The 99% Percent”, postal worker and pilot protests, and increasing numbers of Occupy Wall Street attendees at gatherings all over the country, are gathering momentum in the popular psyche even if they are fundamentally unrelated and ideologically diffuse. Unions are getting on board, and veterans are allegedly on their way to join the protests. These are people relatable to the precariously-comfortable Fox News viewership. This is how popular movements cohere, not with real organization or strongly ideological underpinnings, but through this sort of momentum. And as Sarah Jaffe writes, there are significant class issues inherent in many of the critiques:

It’s been bothering me lately, in regards to Occupy Wall Street. The critiques—so many of them are well-meaning, and so many of them are calling for the protesters to have read this or that pet theorist, to have studied the history of protest movements, to have been connected to organizers on the ground.

And the thing is: we live in a society that is structured specifically so that “the 99%,” most of us, DON’T do that. You don’t read Gramsci in public high schools. Fuck, I’m a leftist with a Master’s degree and I STILL haven’t read Gramsci. Yes, I know enough to understand the political implications of the term “occupy” besides sit-ins—but most people don’t, because they haven’t spent the last six years reading feminist blogs and all the theory and history they could get their hands on. They are struggling to get by.

I don’t intend to delegitimize or neutralize debate about the legitimate failings and imperfections of Occupy Wall Street, or disregard the (I believe in this case necessary) myopia of focusing on the economic collapse; there are a seemingly countless number of important issues that must be dealt with. There must have a place in American discourse and activism for their discussion and debate. I also know that the blanket term “post-left” is an inexact and oversimplified term for a number of schools of thought. Nor do I want to minimize the work of hard-working radicals who have worked for change outside of the academic system, who risk health, security and their own freedom pursuing precarious and low-paying careers working at outreach centers for at-risk youth; engaging with the massive technological shifts underway and trying to understand how new media is perpetuating the marginalization of disadvantaged communities; or going to the third world to document and fight the effects of globalization and oppression. These people are an inspiration to me.

Photo by respres on Flickr.

But their efforts remain invisible or abstract to the millions who are losing their homes and running down their unemployment benefits with no job prospects while paying obscene sums out of pocket to pay for necessary medications. What inspires a rare glimmer of hope about Occupy Wall Street is this: in its unwieldy and admittedly compromised way, it presents a popular focus for the righteous outrage over ever-increasing wealth inequality, foreclosures, risky financial instruments, gutted entitlements, and an alternative the manufactured, Wall Street-pacifying Tea Party that defines the contemporary vision of populist dissent in this country. As the country coheres into a mouldering, diabetic mass of despair and desperation, academic debates about the corrosive effects of globalized capitalism are not what will galvanize a popular movement of the exhausted, the overworked, and the unemployed.

I am usually despairingly cynical about this sort of thing, but Occupy Wall Street is gaining such momentum, in an era when technology has disintermediated the transmission of news in an unprecedented way, that I’m not so sure that this is doomed to obscurity in the way that the Iraq War protests were, or that existing rubrics for protest movements completely hold.

Will Occupy Wall Street ultimately affect fundamental structural change? I doubt it. The majority of the country still remains too comfortable for Arab Spring-style revolution, even as it worries about where the next mortgage payment or health insurance copay will come from. There is also the moderate conservatism held by a slight but election-deciding majority of Americans, the majority of whom don’t believe there is significant economic inequality in the country. The list of demands that has arose from the general assemblies is rousing, but ultimately unfocused and in many cases politically naive. But this doesn’t mean that Occupy Wall Street is a failure: the American left has long needed a moment that captures the popular imagination and reminds the entrenched powers and media elites that conservative white men near retirement age aren’t the only citizens who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. If a inchoate and perhaps ideologically at-odds assortment of anarchists, hackers, union workers, disgruntled pilots, forgotten veterans, foreclosed-upon victims of the 2008 banking collapse, and nostalgic ’60s lefties can send this message and shift the debate, then Occupy Wall Street will have succeeded in my eyes.

At this point, the current drought is the third worst on record based on the Palmer Drought Index, behind the droughts of 1916-1918 and 1951-1957. The Texas drought map is a sea of red, with almost the entire state in extreme to exceptional drought, except for about 10 counties in northeast Texas. What’s worse, little relief is predicted, and some forecasts show a strengthening of La Niña weather conditions this fall, which could prolong the drought.

Via the Austinist, Texas Parks and Wildlife have released a sobering set of photos documenting the effects of the Texas drought.

There's fiction by Brigid J. Barry, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Megan Stielstra and Matt Wood, art by Carrie Sieh, and nonfiction essays by Jeff Severns Guntzel, Mike Zapata and yours truly.

If you enjoy what we've been doing at Is Greater Than, please consider giving it a try and spreading the word. Proceeds will go back into the site and help fund future editions. And as always, thanks for reading!

Buy it here: http://isgreaterthan.net/is-greater-than-digital-omnibus-2010/

(Note: the first line of my performance was cut off in this video; so just imagine me yelling "This One's A Classic!" in boastful old man voice before watching.)

Here's a teaser of the story:

"This one's a classic," Old-Timer Al said to us, sternly examining our VW Bus parked across three spaces in the Wal-Mart lot, yellow in the sun as a sea lion carcass. Tendrils of rust crept from the wheel wells. It was far from a classic.

"Sure is," Kevin responded.

"All we need to do is sign over the title and it's yours," Cody said.

"I couldn't let you boys do that," Al said to us. "How much do you want for her?"

"Seriously, you can just have it for free if you take over the title." All we wanted was to be rid of this damned bus, which we'd bought off an acquaintance a month earlier for $800. Still, Al wanted to haggle.

"Okay, how about $300" Cody said.

"$150" Al responded. "It's a deal."

We'd finally found a taker. Stuck in the tiny town of Yreka, ten miles south of the Oregon-California border, we were selling our only form of transportation for $150, and it was the best news of the day.

Also performing are Darwyn Jones and Andrew Reilly, and there will be musical accompaniment by Elvis Bride. Doors at 7:00, music at 7:30, stories begin at 7:45. Tickets are available online here, and you can RSVP on Facebook.

* actual dead bus pictured, taken moments after it died!

The latest article is about Chicago's Gabriel Levinson and his book bike. In short, Gabe rides his bike around Chicago during spring and summer weekends, stopping at public parks and distributing donated books to anyone who approaches him.

I've also got a number of blog posts up on the site:

The Unconsumption Un-Manifesto: About Rob Walker's unconsumption blog/wiki/movement, an attempt to get people to reconsider what they're consuming and what they do with unwanted products

Wisdom of the Swarm: ThinkTank collects the knowledge of your online community: covering Gina Trapani and ExpertLabs' ThinkTank app, that aggregates responses to questions posed on social networks

Video Games as a Force for Social Good: a follow-up to the DEMO Magazine article about Mindy Faber's work with Open Youth Networks to use video games as a tool for social good and community outreach

What’s the best part of a dream—the dream itself or the hope it represents? Sometimes, dreams, hopes and reality collide in an uncomfortable cocktail.

Morseland is at 1218 W. Morse Ave (2 blocks east of CTA Red Line; free parking in adjacent lot). Tickets are $10 at the door or can be bought online here.

Doors are at 7, music at 7:30, stories at 7:45.