O'Connell / My SXSW Preview (on Firedoglake) / Friday, March 8th, 2013

Aaron Swartz

An open Aaron Swartz Town Hall on Friday night may be one of the highlights of SXSW Interactive 2013.

I’ll be covering SXSW Interactive for Firedoglake over the next 5 days. My coverage will focus on the intersection of technology and politics. Here’s my preview with selected highlights from the conference:

SXSW Interactive is world-renowned as a place where startup companies strike the deals that make them successful, where cutting edge mobile apps are launched, and where corporations come to master the use of new technologies.

None of that really interests me, to be honest — there are countless websites where you can learn the latest corporate news about where the venture capital is flying.

Instead, I want to look at what these technologies mean for our future at the intersection of tech and politics. It’s almost trite to point out how fast our world is changing but it’s true nonetheless. Innovative, disruptive technologies are altering how we communicate, socialize, organize, how we keep and share secrets. During chaotic times, there are always some who celebrate how new ideas will save our world and others who decry how they’ll bring about our doom. The truth is almost always somewhere in between — new technologies change us. Humanity is still evolving, sometimes quite quickly, and to pretend we’re still (or should be) the same as our plains-dwelling ancestors strikes me as misguided and naive.

Of course, we must go into the future with our eyes open. New technologies bring new dangers, and sometimes those dangers only become apparent when we ask who is in control. The answers are rarely simple — modern mobile and camera technologies increase the ease of government surveillance, but also create the possibility of citizen sousveillance. I want to know what’s coming, not so we can try to stuff the genies back in their bottles, but so we can liberate their wishes for the people, not just the powerful.

Read more on Bytegeist.

I also wrote about some bad news for Tweetdeck that Twitter announced early this week, perhaps hoping to fly under the radar behind the SXSW buzz:

This news, while disappointing, is probably not shocking to many that follow social media. All companies including Adobe itself are moving away from the AIR platform for application development, and though that version of the software was once the most feature rich it had gone without an update in a long time.

But more so, many who worked in social media dreaded the acquisition of Tweetdeck by Twitter. Predictably,  the mobile versions have languished. For a long time, a fork of the project called Tweakdeck was a better choice on Android, but it also is out of date. All current versions are lacking in key features of the original Tweetdeck. Bugs linger in the Mac & PC versions long after being fixed on the Web. It’s hard not to agree with TechCrunch that “Given the clear focus on the web apps, it may just be a matter of time before the native apps will also get the ax.”

Read more on Bytegeist.

Filed in Austin, FireDogLake, Media, Published, SXSW | | Permalink | Comments (0)

O'Connell / #OpValentine and #OpPenPal (Firedoglake) / Friday, February 22nd, 2013

Second Life mailbox

Brighten a political prisoner’s day through the postal service.

As activist movements spread and grow in strength, so does the government’s repressive reaction to them. Political prisoners are not new to the United States, but recent times have seen an unprecedented and growing crackdown on whistle blowers, online activists, even on journalists and lawyers. On Firedoglake, I wrote about Operation Valentine (#OpValentine), an effort to brighten the lives of prisoners through correspondence and mutual aid:

alentine’s Day: some people love the romance, others decry it as an obligatory expression of love or lament the misery of being single on a day devoted to coupledom. If being single on February 14 seems unbearable, imagine if you were not just alone but locked away from everything — your family, your friends, the outside world.

Such is the plight of our nation’s political prisoners. Some, like Leonard Peltier, have spent decades behind bars. Others, like the NATO 5 are victims of a new wave of political repression.

Read more on Firedoglake.

Valentine’s Day is gone by for another year, but they still need to hear from people in the outside world. In fact, Operation Valentine has become Operation PenPal (#OpPenPal). It’s never too late to send your revolutionary love to a political prisoner!

Second Life mailbox by Porcelet GossipGirl. Image by Torley Olmstead released under a Creativce Commons Share Alike license.

Filed in FireDogLake, OWS, Published | | Permalink | Comments (1)

O'Connell / Tents Up for Occupy Austin Eviction Anniversary / Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

Free Speech Tent

A tent on the steps of Austin City Hall. February 3, 2013.

On February 3, 2012 Occupy Austin was evicted from their City Hall encampment which they held for nearly 5 months. On the one year anniversary we gathered again to honor that day and our first home. I wrote about it for Firedoglake:

Austin’s occupation gathered again at their first home to honor the day and all that had taken place there since the movement began. Publicly, the group announced a simple potluck. Occupiers put up a food table that was soon overflowing with everything from both vegetarian and carnivore-friendly chili to the infamous piggie pie, a surprisingly edible concoction of graham cracker crumbs, donuts, soy “bacon,” and coffee chocolate syrup.On Sunday, a security guard emerged with a photocopy of the memo banning permanent structures from the site.

“Do you have a permit or something that allows you to be here today?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s called the First Amendment.”

Read more on Firedoglake.

The action inspired other Occupy groups to reconsider the use of tents in public spaces including the upcoming April 1, 2013 Tent City United Day of Action.

Photo by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved.

Filed in Austin, FireDogLake, OWS, Published | | Permalink | Comments (0)

O'Connell / Feministe Vigilante Gangs Vs. Anti-Choice Bigots (Firedoglake) / Saturday, February 9th, 2013

Smash Patriarchy banner and other pro-choice signs

The Feminist Vigilante Gang at the Texas State Capitol

Late in January I covered the Texas Rally for Life, the record breaking anti-abortion protest at the State Capitol, and the tiny counterprotest against it: Austin’s Feminist Vigilante Gang. From the article on Firedoglake:

Make no mistake, this was a family affair — parents and children stood alongside entire Boy Scout troops, priests and nuns gathered in groups. This was a family affair like a Ku Klux Klan picnic at the beginning of the 20th century: huge, upbeat, and guaranteed to generate shame when the grandkids bring it up decades from now.

How do you protest a group of thousands when you only have a handful? One answer is to be as aggressively eye-catching as possible. Enter Austin’s new Feminist Vigilante Gang. The Feminist Vigilante Gangs are a decentralized movement which believes in responding aggressively to rape, violence, harassment and attacks on women’s rights.

Read more on Firedoglake.

One negative encounter at the rally resulted in a followup interview with a representative of the Austin Catholic New Media team:

Kit: Can you shed any light on to what occurred? There has actually been a fair amount of speculation and theorizing both online and in person about this encounter, and I’d like to clear the air with a followup to my story so that my readers know what really happened at least in general terms. Was the equipment including the microphone with the ACNM logo official ACNM property? Who were the camera man and “reporter” (at least in a general sense, i.e. their role in your organization if any)?

ACNM: Thanks again for reaching out.

Honestly there’s no great conspiracy or anything grand to speak of. It was simply a breakdown in communication. The film team was there in an official capacity but the young lady you photographed was not one our normal contributors, that’s why I didn’t recognize her. The equipment was also new via another new contributor, again nothing really to speak of other then the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing.

Read more on Firedoglake.

There’s a bubble in Austin — what Patton Oswalt calls the Bubble of Sanity — which makes it easy to forget that we live in Texas, that we are in fact it’s Capitol. Every two years, the legislature opens and events like this make that harder to forget. Hearing a crowd cheer for the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the banning of gay marriage was like having my nose rubbed in the fact that I live in Texas, and the state is hostile to my queerness, and hostile to my reproductive choice. For those who don’t know, Planned Parenthood helped me get an inexpensive vasectomy years ago, an act which for all I know may have prevented abortions, and gave me control over my body. I spent a little while fantasizing about leaving that weekend, but where do you go that’s really any more free?

Photo by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved.

Filed in Austin, FireDogLake, Media, OWS, Published, Sex | | Permalink | Comments (1)