No Taxation Without Representation

Yes, I’m a Washington DC resident, but that’s not the point of this post –at least not the main one. Like most gainfully employed persons in the U.S., I’m going through the excruciating process of filing my income taxes: 1040’s, W2’s, supplemental form X, rule Y, deduction Z and fitting last year’s finances into countless narrowly defined line items. No wonder there is a whole industry ready to serve the challenged by numbers, bookkeeping skills and eyesight. I still remember the first time I filled my income taxes: I had arrived to the U.S. a few months earlier and after a semester long TAship I had received a W2 showing my dismal earnings. Completely unprepared, I had to take a self-taught crash course on IRS legalese. Give me a (tax) break!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm believer of the legitimate necessity of democratic states to collect taxes to fund enterprises for the common good, like systems of public education, health, justice, governance and transportation to name a few. A common rationale, referred to as the Four R’s, outlines the main purposes of taxation as revenue, redistribution, repricing and representation. Revenue for public works, redistribute wealth, reprice to factor social costs into “free” market values (tobacco, alcohol, etc.) and representation for political accountability. That is, an essential requirement, and justification, for taxing people is political representation, the process by which the taxed delegate the power to decide what to do with the collected resources.

But with no political representation there is revolution. “No Taxation without representation” became the rallying cry of the “American” independence movement. The British Crown argued that the colonists had “virtual representation”, meaning not some kind of proto e-democracy but plainly the implicit representation of the none-voting populace by citizens with political rights and the officials they voted for. That is, those who were not entitled to vote were represented by the very few who could. The American Revolution was fought precisely on this issue and ever since has become a founding principle of the U.S. polity. However, minors, the mentally ill, felons, Washington DC residents and non-citizens do not presently have a say on how those taxes are spent.

And that’s my beef, as a non-citizen legal resident I pay sales and income taxes that fund several public services that I do enjoy, but also many other state ventures that counter my best judgment on which I have no say one way or the other. For instance, with my taxed dollars but with no recourse on my part Bush the elder, Slick Willie and Dubya all waged criminal military actions and had them approved by rubber-stamp no power-of-the-purse capitol hillbillies.

Yeah, I know what you’ll say, I’m free to get the hell out of the U.S., or become a citizen and vote away wimps, wonks, and whacks. But did you know that “noncitizens voted from 1776 until 1926 in forty states and federal territories in local, state and even federal elections”? And becoming a citizen is a lengthy and uncertain process, income taxes are deducted paycheck by paycheck and even if I become a citizen I would have to move from my hole-in-the-wall DC apartment to entitled to have a congressional voice.

And if I did leave this grand land of opportunity, my good conscience, and potentially my physical safety, would still suffer the illegitimate actions of the U.S. outside its borders. Illegal aliens, yeah, ask the Iraqi resistance about it! You see, in most places when electors mess up they are the ones who suffer the consequences. Yet, when electors mess up in the U.S. the rest of the world pays the price. Sure thing, with my taxes I would be providing to some other state and hopefully having a say on that government’s action and expenditures. Yet, with globalization who knows what political action the net effect of my economic activity would end up funding.

To my mind, that leaves only one solution: true international law and representative government, not the current sham of the U.N. and its sister organizations. No wonder the U.S. has consistently opposed international courts, lagged on paying its U.N. dues, undemocratically exercised its veto power and military might and shunned world opinion. So that’s what I say, no taxation without representation, but for real and on the world stage.

Storyline of an Assignment

Prologue

After reading up on Internet Legal issues and looking into Creative Commons, an online non-profit that

provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

we were required that our “blog entry this week should focus on what copyright license you’d like to publish your blog under and why that strikes you as appropriate.” So, hands, and mouse, to task.

Act One

CC tries to strike innovative legal solutions that balance creative rights with fair, open and free use of works on the contested territory of the wild wide web. It those this by offering for free ready-made copyright licenses for audio, video, images, text, education and software products. The options: six combinations of “commercial use” (yes/no) and “permission to modify the work” (yes/some/none). I liked the “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” license, that basically

lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

The free speech and fair but non-commercial purpose and use of media reminded me of my time in public access television, but I wasn’t sure how this concept would be appropriate for this blog, the whole extent of my incipient oeuvre in the web. Undecided, I searched deeper into CC to check what else it was about.

Act Two

Interestingly, CC provides licenses applicable in 40 different national jurisdictions. In the context of the borderless Internet, this seems both odd and futile. But hey, in the age of globalization contradictions seem to be the order of the day. According to CC,

Creative Commons International (CCi) works to “port” the core […] Licenses to different copyright legislations around the world. The porting process involves both linguistically translating the licenses and legally adapting them to particular jurisdictions.

In any case, I noticed Argentina as one of the 40 jurisdictions and being my home country, I had to look a bit further. In essence, CCi-A offers the same 6 license combinations but written in the language of Borges and Cortazar (damn, I missed bringing up Borges in my entry on wikis and encyclopedias, but now come to think about it, what would good ol’ JLB have to say about the artistic right of appropriation? probably that recreations are not only fair game but also finer pieces of work because they contain and supersede the originals). Back to CCi-A, I was intrigued by the following note:

Please take a look at the mailing-list archive if you are interested in the academic discussion leading to the Argentina final license.

And so I did. The first thread took me to a poster referring to an article that was critical of CC licenses in the context of reporting the Chang v. Virgin Mobile legal case featured in the online edition of La Nación, the serious but conservative paper of record in Argentina. The case seems messy: a counselor in Texas took a pic of a sixteen y/o girl facing the camera making a “v” sign and posts it on Flickr with a CC license, Virgin Mobile Australia edits the pic and runs it in an advertising campaign with the hook “Dump Your Pen Friend” and the slogan “Free text Virgin to Virgin”.

Act Three

So now, with the contribution of my lawyer friend Candace, who got interested in the breach-of-privacy-on-the-Internet implications of the case, I surfed back from La Nación to the New York Times, to Flickr and Flickr, and finally to Lessig.

So far, what I learned is that privacy is quite a complex issue, specially when at stake are the rights of subjects that have not released their representations of themselves, actually, who know nothing about the use and abuse of their images. Also, that Internet law is still wearing diapers, and is getting a bad rash. Where do the copyrights hold in a case like Chang v. Virgin Mobile? In Texas, USA where subject and photographer live? In Australia, where the subsidiary of the international Virgin Mobile ran its advertising campaign? In the netherworld, where Flickr might have its servers?

Epilogue

Back to the assignment. Having to chose, I opt for the “Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives” CC license. Why? For now, just in case.

Should we trust Wikipedia?

I have very fond memories of the Encyclopedia Britannica, edition 1968, my family’s repository of everything worth knowing. Wherever we moved, and we did so many more times that it is worth enumerating here, La Británica came along and always found a privileged spot in our new house. School homework, family disquisitions, crossword puzzles, sheer boredom, the trivial and the essential, all found their answers in its 23 maroon volumes, plus indexes and a large size atlas. But today, short of calling my folks down in Buenos Aires and ask them to check our trusted friend, if I have a pressing question or need a reference on a subject, I commit the sacrilegious act and look it up in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is great, is fast, convenient, up-to-date, hypertextual, and completely free, that is not considering the upfront cost of computer hardware and Internet connection. Since its introduction in 2001, the online community edited encyclopedia has grown exponentially like most things digital. This growth has brought a heated debate about the trustworthiness and accuracy of its entries, written and edited by a legion of common folk, self appointed specialists and anybody else this side of the digital divide equipped with the necessary interest to dedicate their time for free to their favorite subjects. How can this be? Is the invested cultural capital of the learned experts going to lose value and my precious EB be dethroned just like that? Yes, and it’s about time.

Self serving cultural elites notwithstanding, the open and free construction and distribution of knowledge is a good thing. Sure, there’s going to be some quirks and foils, basically in the way that we utilize W and position it as a source of knowledge and useful information. That we shouldn’t always trust the world according to W? Yes, but since human knowledge is socially constructed it’s always approximate and fallible, be it compounded by expert committees and peered reviewed, or embedded in cultural myths and common sense. That is, since facts and truth do no exist independently of a knowing subject, either individual or collective, we should get used to asking questions and reflecting on the inherent biases of information sources and processes of knowledge construction. And that’s W’s great lesson.

Local Leaders in Central America

I just returned from a work related trip to León, Nicaragua, and I want to blog about it. I know, first rule of the there-are-no-rules blogging community is “do not blog about work”, as many have been dooced by not heading it. But, how else am I going to write about my trip if I do not refer to what took me there? So, I’ll just take my precautions, and take my chances.

I traveled for a week to León to carry out a final follow-on workshop for a local governance program integrated by ten mayors and local leaders from Nicaragua and Honduras who’ve been working for over a year and a half on local government issues, transparency, leadership and civic participation. First, the program participants came to the U.S. for two weeks to learn from a team of local government specialists, exchange experiences with municipal leaders and develop community action plans for their municipalities. Half way into the program, we met for a two-day follow-on workshop in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to review the progress in their CAPs and strengthen the program’s objectives. Last week in León, we gather to work on how to build fruitful partnerships between local government and civil society to advance citizen services in a developing economy.

To this end, we focused on communication as the key to promote civic participation and develop a common agenda between local government and civil society. Also, this being the final official component of the program, we looked into different communication tools to keep the conversation going and growing between the program participants and other interested parties (other mayors, NGO’s and local leaders from the region). I do not have to say much more to contextualize the motives for developing a group blog for the program.

Everybody was quite excited with the idea, and after dealing with policy and technical issues like user permissions and accounts, everyone was set to roll, I mean blog; that is: the program participants, coordinators, facilitators, and a couple of associates, all-in-all sixteen bloggers. Still, there are great challenges for the group blog to fulfill the expectations and accomplish the objectives that were set forth. Internet connectivity in rural Nicaragua and Honduras is low, and the program participants have to surmount the generational and social obstacles of the digital divide. Besides, collaborative group projects are always dicey, specially considering that this is not a natural group and the blog members have different personal agendas and interests. Nonetheless, for me it is an interesting experiment to check the possibilities and limits of digital technologies for interactive and participatory projects. We’ll see what happens.

I can’t go without noting the exceptional forthcoming and hardworking character of Nicaraguans, at least the ones I met and worked with, and the rich colonial and cultural heritage of León, with its impressive cathedral, several important museums and longstanding university. In closing, I would like to quote a few lines of the illustrious Nicaraguan and latinoamericanist poet Rubén Dario:

¿Seremos entregados a los bárbaros fieros?
¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?
¿Ya no hay nobles hidalgos ni bravos caballeros?
¿Callaremos ahora para llorar después?
Excerpt of Los Cisnes, in Cantos de vida y esperanza

Afraid of Google?

People respond to Google with awe, familiarity, suspicion and fear. How did it raise so fast to a position of such economic and cultural dominance? How could one work and play without it before? What’s it doing with al that data? Is big brother out to get us?

What I find troubling is how past searches affect new ones. How the aggregate of queries that we pose to the “don’t be evil” god, the ranking of results and the pick of our clicks, conditions what we will ask for in the future, and get in return. According to Google, to improve their services they do not only spell check search terms –hey, they do facilitate digital access to the literately challenged, and many more- but also review their logs to check if we end up clicking on their #1. Good for themselves if we do and bad if we don’t. One way search engines “improve” is by comparing a search to prior ones, and offering us first the results mostly clicked on before.

John Battalle coined the phrase “the database of intentions” to describe the accumulative memory of “every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result […] a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.” JB is interested in what this archive may tell about the human condition and present culture, and is concerned about the commercial and political abuse of this store of intentions.

There is an obvious step from search words to human intentions, a step that a cultural anthropologist come technorati as JB is willing to make, but what troubles me is how the Google Zeitgeist reinforces the path of less resistance, self satisfies mainstream culture with it’s mirror image, and hinders our encounter with the unexpected, the new, the essential. First, the best match between our real intentions and the search terms that we use to express them is deduced from the relation between these terms and a collective array of links between past searches and choices. Then, our new tech sped up culture promotes that we take the fastest and easiest route, not the best, not the necessary and certainly not the most enjoyable. A double whammy vicious cycle pushing popularity ad nauseam.

In the The Long Tail (see Post #1 below), Chris Anderson argues for the aggregate value of many niche markets versus just a few blockbusters, and the potential that this has for the circulation of alternative cultural products, points of view and ideas. There seems to be two counter forces at play here in the digital world, the viability of difference and the push for conformity. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

PS: As I was closing this post, I noticed Web History, a personalized Google experience ware. WB matches search terms and results by taking into account the history of our individual searches, the paths that we have taken, the clicks of our past whimsy. Who we are we will be.

Post #1

The Disclaimer

To those that may have stumbled by way of the blogosphere upon this post, I must say that this is a class assignment for Media, Politics and Truth in the Digital World. My subject matter, at least for this Post # 1, are my thoughts on the class readings for the week. As such, my target audience is my instructor and classmates, and by way of proxy, the netizens of the world wild web who might find of interest the discursions of a novice blogger on Web 2.0 issues. Be forewarn, and if interested please read on.

My interests on this week’s reads

My underlying impression before reading a few selected chapters of Naked Conversations, The Long Tail and We the Media, is that we are at the initial stages of a new technology induced revolution, epitomized by the Internet, that is upheaving our daily experience before our very eyes and having profound social implications that we are hard pressed to foreshadow. Indeed. However, we are either too shortsighted or enchanted by the oracle of digital technologies to be able to develop an independent perspective. Change is happening so rapidly that our first response as individuals is to freak out at the speed of innovations, at the next killer app or cutting edge ware that will take off by itself and leave us behind without notice. Do not despair. Or we might choose to tune out burnt from the race to push ourselves onto the legions of others before and behind you. To no avail. New tech change is not only fast, it’s utterly pervasive and there is no hiding from its impact.

What interested me the most of Dan Gillmor’s We the Media is the change that he describes in the long-established relationship between newsmakers, journalists and audiences. Traditional Big Media casts its characters in fixed roles, each with a varying degree of star power. The newsmakers play the leads and get to act upon the world stage, and journalists are a supporting cast that represent those actions through the media. As audiences, we get only to be the object of those actions and representations, and if lucky, provide color and context as stock figures and extras. No more. New media, in the form of blogs and other types of user generated content technologies, is flipping the coin and doing away with the entrenched divisions between consumers and producers of mass communications.

The subject matter of Naked Conversations and The Long Tail are different, NC dealing with the use of blogs by businesses to communicate with consumers and TLT with how aggregate niche markets make up a share equivalent or superior to the relatively few mass markets. However, the authors of both books argue that new communication technologies associated with the Internet are profoundly changing the way producers and consumers relate to each other. In this, they take a view akin to that expressed in WTM, that the Internet is transforming the circuit of production and consumption of products and ideas, and thus refurnishing the economic, political and cultural spheres of our society. And that is no small change.