Everyone sleeping a bit more soundly at night? Me, too.
This week’s FOMO looks at the conversations we’re having to keep up the momentum around civic engagement. Both Intersectionality Matters! and Muckrake convene to debate the future of organizing and activism; Reinventing the Internet and How to Fix the Internet offer proposals on de-centering Big Tech; Cite Black Women looks at being Black in the Academy, in particular Science, Technology and Society (STS); and doing Data Justice. If the worst is behind us, we’re reminded to stay focused and stay engaged!
❤️ and listens,
Jerry
What Happened?
The stakes of this election were not only confined to the presidential race. Criminal justice was on the ballot; Puerto Rican statehood; decriminalization of drugs; a $15 minimum wage; and countless downballot races. We’ve even seen two races — #NY22 and IA#02 — where less than forty votes separate the candidates! This 52-post-long tweetstorm by Daniel Nicanian, a prodigious presence on Twitter as @taniel and founder of The Appeal is our TL;DR for both state-wide and hyperlocal outcomes. An incredible amount of work is behind his concision.
What’s Next?
•Prof. Kimberle Crenshaw is known for coining the term “intersectionality.” Her podcast Intersectionality Matters! recently convened a klaatch of academics, political thinkers, and activists to debate Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community. The panel reckons with the 2020 election and how progressives might continue to pressure President-Elect Biden and includes Eddie Glaude, Jr., Janine Jackson of FAIR, Rep. Barbara Lee, and Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, whose new book, The Purpose of Power, is revelatory.
•Jared Yates Sexton is a well-regarded chronicler of right-wing extremism on digital, in print, and as a podcaster. In How Do We Move Past Trump and Build a Better Country, the current episode of Muckrake, he and his co-host Nick Hauselman explore similar themes to Team Crenshaw. The takeaway? We must remain vigilant against the threat of fascism while imagining how to renew the country.
Building Publics
Social media platforms — from Facebook to Twitter, YouTube to Instagram, have failed us. Disinformation is rampant and it has led to a cold civil war. With the election finally fading in our rear view mirror, there’s energy to ramp up a new discussion around making tech (more) civic.
Ethan Zuckerman’s Reimagining the Internet looks at how we can design online spaces to privilege serving a civic good over the prevailing profit motive. The Electronic Freedom Foundation’s How to Fix the Internet is a pod mini-series, each episode parsing potential solutions to six dilemmas facing the modern digital landscape.
Last week, Civic Signals — co-founded by Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud — launched New_Public. The platform is described as “a place for thinkers, builders, designers and technologists like you to meet, share inspiration, and make better digital public spaces. It’s a newsletter, magazine, and community wrapped together.”
The Liberatory Imagination
Cite Black Women is the name of a podcast, as well as its mission:
Center Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions. Host Christen Smith’s last two podcasts were so good that BOTH need to be amplified.
•Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a Black feminist physicist — she calculates that only about five Black women a year earn PhDs in physics. A few weeks back I wrote about her forthcoming book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter. This searching conversation delves into the activist history that courses up and down her family tree, and well as the cold shoulder she’s gotten as an STS scholar, even among her Black male peers. Unbothered, Prescod-Weinstein is building a number of databases to archive and amplify the work of Black women scholars in the sciences.
•Ruja Benjamin is a leading voice within the data justice movement, for her own scholarship as well as her editorship of the stunning “Captivating Technology: Race, Technology and the Liberatory Imagination.” Smith’s dialogue with Professor Benjamin covers her work on “The New Jim Code” and her launch of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, which endeavors to offer a critical and creative approach to data justice.
The Carceral Reality
If you can get to MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City between now and April, do check out Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. The show is curated by Nicole Fleetwood, who’s project has been defining “carceral aesthetics” and constructing a vocabulary for art that is created within prisons. Marking Time displays work by 35 artists “who are or have been incarcerated” and artists “who have not but exposed aspects.”
The End of the Auteur?
In film, who is the author of a work — the writer or the director? David Fincher’s Mank looks at the writer of Citizen Kane, who was NOT Orson Welles. This year’s Oscar bait is just out in a handful of theaters and appears on Netflix December 4th. Raising Kane, this Pauline Kael essay in the New Yorker — 50,000 words! — guided Fincher. Watch to catch Kane before seeing Mank? Last Friday, Vulture’s Mark Harris livetweeted his viewing of the classic. It’s an erudite romp.
#GivingTuesday is next week. Here are a three news outlets I support because of their journalistic excellence, as well as the gap they fill in reporting:
•Documented is a bootstrapped nonprofit, focused solely on immigration -- both New York and national. Membership is available at the $10/mo level.
•Report for America helps place emerging journalists in newsrooms across America (including Appalachia!) to report undercovered issues. Through the end of December, donations are being trebbled thanks to one of their donors.
•Sludge knows how to follow the money. The nonprofit investigative journalism startup has been punching way above its weight with its frequent exposes on corruption. Donations are currently doubled.
GEORGIA should stay very much on our minds until its January 5th Senate runoffs.
Don’t just give money, give time!
•If you want to GOTV through Color for Change PAC, you can register here and phonebank or call every day through the January runoffs.
•Prefer to call on behalf of Sunrise Movement? You can do so Sunday-Thursday and register here.