Today felt like a very “anthropological day” for me. I purposively waited till I was comfortable with the interviewing process before interviewing some of the more visible and well known players in the hacker cultural and political world. So nearly after 20 months of research, and 50 in person interviews, I finally interviewed John Gillmore. After 3 hours we got through like half of the things I wanted to talk about so I will have to go back for more. It was a great interview reminding me of why I like being an anthropologist too . And I “feel” so much more like an anthropologist (that is I kinda know what I am doing) than when I started although not entirely so. Along with my project, this research is *very much* also a training period of learning how to be an anthropologist. I have and will make mistakes that will hopefully be reflective feedback tools to improve my own practice of anthropology if I do indeed continue to be an anthropologist (after today’s interview, I had this strong urge to be a biographer inspired by John Gillmore’s tales as a software developer, passionate learner, political provocateur, and all all round interesting guy). But after 10 minutes of serious, deep thought, I was like: “hell no, not 6 years into my degree and 3 years into this project.” But maybe later…

I get asked a lot what anthropology is or what the differences are between a sociologist and anthropologist. I cringe at those questions because I would like to answer with ease and total clarity but feel like I usually fail. But my interest in answering this question, well, was sparked after I received an email that claimed that morality could only studied from a philosophical perspective, which was written by a quantitative sociologist. It really irked me not only because I think it is a ridiculous assertion but it was a blow to my entire project as I was putting ethics under anthropological not philosophical scrutiny. Anger motivates. So here I will attempt at a fist stab at explaining in “lay terms” what composes the craft of anthropology in the hopes of brining some sense to what it is we do.

To attempt this, I am going to at times dip into my own autobiographical experiences as well as borrow some concepts and metaphors from the world of software hacking, but a first a caveat especially about the later. My use of metaphorical comparisons are meant to more richly make a point about something (in this case anthropology) not to equate the two. That is it is a means for an ends not an end in itself. I will also be probably chastised by my anthropological colleagues for “using native categories” as modes of explanation but luckily none but 2 read my blog because they are for the most part so technophobic that it even perturbs me. But hey, I think this is a great exercise. Instead of using anthropological concepts and categories to try to understand hacker culture (which is what I will do with my dissertation anyway), why not use hacker categories to explain anthropology?

So, here it is: Anthropologists essentially “reverse engineer” culture. We don’t just understand and convey surface manifestations of culture (which might be what you find in a National Geographic piece), but we like to consider and examine the underlying mechanisms that produce and reproduce social worlds, that is the source code of culture. We are just as interested in how “culture” is made by the aggregate of social actors who act through social institutions, undertake material practices, and participate in a wide range of mundane and ritual activities (all the while, being attentive to that the fact that culture is shaped by larger socio-historical forces). Sounds hard, doesn’t it? But hey who ever said that reverse engineering was ever easy?
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For the rest of this essay, go here This is admittedly the longest thing I have ever written for my blog so only the brave of heart, enter.

It gets dark early, even in “sunny”California at least Northern California. I am amazed nearly every day when I look out my window to see the silent dusk settle in, my heart usually sinking with the disappearance of light.

But today, I was reanimated, by words, books, and reading and was reminded why winter can be a great time of year. Unlike summer, which for me tends to be a very social time punctuated by long periods spent outside, I have come to reacquaint with the pleasures of alternating between sitting and lying on my bed, for the *entire day* just to read. My inward turn was first inspired to read up on “hacker ethics” for a grant proposal I am “supposedly” working on as well as for a paper that I want to write but then I sort of went nutso and after looking over like 5 books that deal in some fashion with the hacker ethic, I hit all these other books and articles that I have been dying to read but there never seemed an opportune moment till today.

The day started off with reading Seth’s Blog where midway in his long entry he mused as at to whether “computers have given us a new kind of understanding of the problems of epistemology, much as they’ve given us new ways of thinking about psychology. This is not to say that the metaphors we take from computing are more accurate or ultimately more faithful to reality. But they’re undeniably present.” He goes on to note that humans like software have no means for independent verification for “internal processes:”

In that sense, we are in the position of software: we can try to look at ourselves, but we can’t have independent confirmation that what we see is really there. There is always a philosophical possibility that we are implemented somewhere or in some way we don’t know about, that we have a particular feature we can’t anticipate, and in general that any part of our experience, not just our senses, could be unreliable

Indeed, a very sophisticated analogy although it made me wonder, which I have wondered often, why is it that western epistemology is so concerned with dissecting and knowing *the* (and I will return to the “the”) underlying nuts and bolts of human thought and emotions and for that matter, the nuts and bolts of everything on the face of this earth and beyond. On the one hand, there is the sheer drive to know for the sake of knowing, which can be worthy in its own right and has also produced many technological wonders that I adore. But it still strikes me on the other hand as a strangely creepy drive if only for the potential regiments of control and exclusion that can take shape if and when we feel that only absolute and underlying Truths can be “found.”
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As I was packing for Chicago today, I looked out my window and decided, it was way, I mean WAY too nice of a day to stay home all day so I got on my bike and headed to the Golden Gate Bridge where I was stunned, as usual, by this view. How nice it is to bike here in and I like biking, as odd as it may sound, as a means of “virtual writing.” I wish someone would invent this little gadget that would allow one to telepathically “type” one’s thoughts straight from the brain to one’s computer. When I bike I have all these really clear ideas and it is as if I start to mentally write as I pedal away. And today, I was pedaling to some last thoughts about the Netherlands that I wanted to write before they evaporate forever from my mind, which tends to happen with me (and hence the need for the gadget)… There are three things that I was thinking about: bikes, the law, and hackers all withing the context of praxis (a fancy word for practice or activity). I can write an endless amount on each of them but for the sake of my own time sanity, I am going to try to keep it ahem, less verbose that usual. Let’s see if I succeed

So, if there is one thing that I would have LOVED to take a picture of (as it really struck me as amusing, cute, and odd),was that of the “Dutch pre-teen couple” holding hands while riding their bikes. I mean, my first reaction was like “that is cute but so ridiculous… They are riding bikes yet holding hands!” And then I moved on to “damn, that is cool. I wish I could do that.. and how the hell do they do that?.” To deciding that the very fact of a young couple in love, or at least in lust, holding hands while biking, succinctly but powerfully sums up what makes riding a bike in the Netherlands, so very different of an act from riding a bike here in the US. In short, it is a way of life for many folks there as it is how people get around, permeating not just the national psyche but the very way that people use their bodies. People can thus thoughtlessly hold hands as if it were a leisurely stroll down the street. There is an intimacy with this wonderful piece of technology that here in the US is an intimacy that gets formed instead with cars and increasingly with the SUV. Unfortunately. Not only are they a wee-bit more expensive but they are a wee-lot more worse for the environment and well, it seems like holding hands on bikes is way more fun that holding hands in a car (yes, yes, I know you can do more in a car but stop thinking dirty like that)…

So, aside from the bodily praxis around bikes, I was fascinated at how the law works in the Netherlands. The short of it, is that it doesn’t work, like it does in the US, and hallelujah for that. I mean, it does work but the letter of the law often gets ignored in place of other norms and practices that are built from the ground up instead of the top down. I believe the official name for this practice is gedogen which means something like “official blind eye” and it allows for, well a pretty free and at least fluid society. I think in so many ways, this legal practice is about the total opposite from American legal culture, which can be summed up nicely in the following New Yorker cartoon . Our legal praxis cultivates an orientation towards the letter of the law in which everything is micro-managed (and expensively so), in which the underlying assumption is to screw your fellow person over, goddammitttttttttttttttt, if you can. What I think is so ironic is that here in America, one of the most common subjects is that of FREEDOM of this or that, blah, blah, and while on the one hand, I do think it is a relatively free society, there are so many countless ways where we Americans are prisoners, prisoners, especially to our legal minutia and RULES. No drinking beer at the beach, no swimming, no talking loudly, no skateboarding, NO. NO NO. If you did not hear me: “NO!”
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There is not too much that is stable in my life these days except there is this one weekly anchor point, my volunteer shift at Quan Yin Healing Arts Center. Despite my travels I amazingly have avoided missing my Thursday shift, choosing to leave Thursday evening or Friday morning and returning by the following Thursday. At this point, it seems like it is one of the more centering things in my life. I look forward to the simplicity of completing my few tasks there: pulling needles, providing moxa therapy, and changing sheets. The energy there is very calming acting like a weekly oasis, allowing me the space to recenter after the fragmentation that travel sometimes causes. I have been there over a year and it saddens me to think that I will be leaving there sometime during the spring or summer. Part of this is entry is to let local San Franciscans who might read this (not many I believe) that they are now accepting volunteer applications. If you have the time, I say grab this opportunity. It is a wonderful place to spend three or four hours of your week and you will learn something about Chinese Medicine and acupuncture too, treat lots of people with moxa and be reminded of the important things in life. So, if you have sometime during the week, drop on by and apply!

This last Thursday seemed a bit more special than most, although a little more sad than most too. Patients tend to come to see the same acupuncturists. As a result I have come to know some of even them though verbal exchange is kept to a minimum. There is one large treatment room so it is important to be quiet. Every once in a while, a patient decides to be chatty or the room is empty so conversation flows. This last week was one of those times. One woman brought in her photos from her trip to Chicago knowing I lived there for a while and that I have a soft spot in my heart for the amazing cityscape that is Chicago. That was really thoughtful of her. My second conversation was not quite as cheerful. I am not sure how I even began talking to this other patient, who I have seen over the last couple of months, starting up at the ceiling very calmly while I treat her with moxa. Oh, wait, I remember now. She was surprised that moxa could be smokeless. She then basically told me that she was so glad that we used smokeless moxa because she suffers from MCS –> Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. It is an illness that simultaneously fascinates me, breaks my heart, and scares me . Those with MCS are sensitive to manufactured modern industrial chemical products ranging from perfumes, plastics, dyes, smoke and other caustic chemicals, so much so, they often have to shield themselves off from the environment and people, creating a “Safe” space away from that which makes them ill. Illness, as a social state is or can be an isolating experience. MCS brings this state to another more harrowing level of isolation.

With chronic illness, the body as it regularly functions ceases to be, unraveling one’s ability to conform neatly to the normal rhythms of life and relationships. The experience of and moving through time, space, and social relationships must change to accommodate this state of dis-ease. Healing often is a reconstitution of self, place, and time so that one can reintegrate the self back into the everyday rhythms of life as much as possible. Chronic illness never allows the same full type of reintegration although there is usually some level or form of reintergration. But with something like MCS, reintegration is nearly impossible as long as the chemical sensitivities exist so that the self cannot exist outside of it self, so that one remains a prisoner to oneself:

“You are inside most of the time…. The inside, brought about by built environments of late capitalism, provides your habitat, the milieu for your environment. Then one otherwise ordinary day your throat begins to constrict when you enter your newly renovated office building. Or your chest tightens at the photocopier. Or you notice you’ve been overwhelming fatigues and foggy since they fumigated your apartment. A nebulous constellation of symptoms grips your body and will not let go. Your doctor can’t find anything wrong, yet your body seems to have run amok. The built environment, so familiar, that pervades your daily life becomes the site of your suffering” (Murphy 2000:87).

The patient at Quan Yin at one point confessed to me: “I can’t work, I can’t do what you do here. If some patient walked in with perfume, I would choke.” Here I was doing something I absolutely love being told that there was no way that she could ever do such a thing. It is not easy to hear those words but it is important to hear them.
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Time seems so timeless. And that is precisely the problem with empty, equal time as we have come to experience it in the modern industrial world. Equally spaced out, each unit supposedly the same as the next, we experience our time as if it were the universal, that is the only, means by which to move ones life through that hard-to-pin-down, yet very real, very durable concept of time. Yet, there are times, moments in your life, when the emptiness and equality of time crumbles down, making it known that our most commonsense categories like time and space are to some degree socially constructed. The last few months have been a series of photographs resulting in a montage of different ways that I have experienced time (and all amazingly enough without the aid of any hallucinogenic substances).

Although the calendar as we know it has existed for a long time, the application of coordinated time across space in which minutes, hours, days, and now seconds are the same across space and really matter for socio-economic reasons, did not truly emerge and solidify until the rise and use of new technologies and institutions like the factory, railroad, and the telegraph. For example, before the railroad, each European city kept its own time while the pace of business and other related activities were slower than they are today because information traveled much more slowly through space and time. Conceptions of time and space don’t simply vary across cultures but have varied within our own society, in our case I think, marching towards an ever more rigid

I have been traveling around lately, going up and down the west coast, then back east, back west, mixed in with a lot of time on irc and late nights. Time measuring labels such Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, morning, afternoon, and evening have not seemed to matter much these days as I don’t have to follow any schedule except that which I have imposed on myself. I am moving in a space in which the events of my life are determining the means by which I experience time. It is a daily reminder that not all time is created equal or experienced equally. Travel too denaturalizes our cultural sense of time both by exposing us to places where time is organized distinctly as well as one usually follows a rhythm that is not determined by the routine work week. I think for similar reasons that is why the act of ritual is so compelling and important. Ritual is often though of as being “set in stone” as indeed ritual is usually tightly prescribed usually driving against spontaneous movement and expression. Yet, among other things, ritual activity is one in which there is an explicit recognition of the specialness and especially malleability of time and place, a border put around an activity, marking it off from the routine. The here and now of ritual is meant to be distinct, more special than the ordinary rhythms of daily life. As such, special and unusual events can unfold through ritual space.

I had time and space on my mind more than usual this past weekend in Seattle where I went for a tech activist meeting. This was partly due to lack of sleep which is disorienting, as well as to the nature of my time in Seattle, and because of my introduction to some revolutionary new time system xtime which parses out time in decimal units. I am not sure if I got the gist of the new system of time but I appreciated the desire to come up with a new means by which to undermine the current system of time we live through.

In some sort of overarching level, the meeting in Seattle, reminded me that the supposed unilateral nature of time in which it moves forward in little, teeny chunks [ ----> tick, tick ----> forward into future] is simply not the case, or at least not the way that I would like to conceptualize and feel my time, here on earth. Though the meeting, which was a discussion about federating different tech activist groups under one umbrella, was not very ritualistic (although there were still elements of ritual), the meeting for me collapsed the past, present, and future. Most of the group had met nearly 2 months ago in Northern California during another meeting and there, planned to meet to further discuss ideas about a federation. So, in Seattle, we were together in the present because of what happened in the past, planning for something that we would like have exist in the future. Links between past, present, future abound but I don’t think people often enough experience the continuity and circularity of this cycle and experience what happened before as the past in the sense of having it be gone forever. But maybe it is actually the passing of something that forever lives through the rippling of its effects.
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Lately I have been spending a lot of time on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) mostly talking with my friends that I have met during my recent travels. I have enjoyed it tremendously, in part because I have been able to maintain and deepen certain relationships but also there is just something about the medium itself that I really love. I was not sure how deep my relationship to IRC ran until about a week ago when something happened to me before I feel asleep that revealed that IRC has had a huge impact on my psyche So, often before I go to bed, my mind just wanders into this space of special imagery in which fond memories will just randomly appear. Basically any moment that I hold a special fondness for might pop up during this period of limbo before I fall asleep. So, the other night, my IRC GUI client just made a cameo appearance in my nightly field of memories and to tell you the truth, this almost jolted me out of my sleepy nebulous state with great concern. I was like “shiiit, IRC has begun to leave a serious imprint on my self.” And since I have spent a lot of time mentally digesting what it is that I love so much about irc and why so many people in the past and present fall prey “the addiction.” Below are some very unsystematic thoughts about the way I have come to think of IRC….

When I first began to think about why IRC was so compelling, my mind wandered to a set of memories that I have not thought about it a very, very long time. It took me to the endless hours I spent riding the morning school van, which I did every year for about 10 years growing up. So, starting at the age of 4 while living in San Juan, the van driver, “Ana” picked my sister and I up at 7:00 am in a banged up Dodge van that fit about 16 people. So, I don’t remember the early years too much but as I got a little older , I used to, believe it or not, *love*riding this beat up van operated by superbly cranky driver with a group of people who were not really my friends in the sweltering heat of the tropics . Caged for 1.5 hours a day in a moving vehicle was fun?? Well, what I liked about it were the conversations especially the ones in the afternoon after everyone was pumped on high doses of sugar. In the van, we had nothing else to do but sit and talk to each other and since we did this 5 days a week, the group developed a dynamic in which these crazy conversations about whatever topic would unfold. Conversation was often rowdy, playful, grotesque nearly always passionate, and meandered every direction, in part because we were all coming from different perspectives thanks to age, religious, and some class differences. None of us would probably elect to voluntarily get together and talk but the forced proximity made for some surprisingly great conversations. Some days I would sit back and chill and listen while other days, I would offer a mouthful, while other days, I would selectively interrupt with a comment here and there. The group style of conversing, the unexpected twists and turns, the multiple conversation, and the playful nature of talking all reminded me of my time on IRC.

Although everyone is usually doing something else on their computer and IRC is often used for practical stuff like organizing, software development, and user forums, IRC conversation also made me think about some other similarities beyond my personal experience riding a school van. It has most reminded me of Caribbean street or “yard culutre” which is characterized by a lot of playful and clever linguistic exchange in a space (the street, the yard, the alley) where people (primarily men) gather to basically shoot the shit and talk a lot of smack.

Though certainly this is not a really adequate historical comparison, this metaphorical comparison can yield some very interesting similarities between some types of IRC chatter and Caribbean “yard” culture and talk. Yard culture designates street or urban street culture in the Caribbean, especially the British Caribbean like Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad, a space and form of lived experience that has many different dimensions related to language, status, identity, politics, etc. What I am most concerned about here is the linguistic play and the space of the yard as a means to bring out some of the unique characteristics of IRC.

Present day yard culture and talk is captured nicely in this poem which I will reference in the section that follows. The structural context of yard talk goes back to colonialism and the brutal regime of slavery. Stripped of everything but their bodies, the formation of Caribbean society among slaves, indentured laborers, and their descendants grew from a heterogeneous mixing of various cultural elements based on the bare bones elements of memory and the adoption and especially dynamic refashioning of symbols and the few material resources that were available to slaves and their descendants. And the noteworthy element is that very little was materially available. Slaves were forced over across the Atlantic with materially nothing. Cultural elements were continued and refashioned though such avenues as music, talk, food, religion to produce the heterogeneous and dynamic character that now stamps Caribbean culture. The quality to readily innovate in the face of structural constraints, cultural heterogeneity, and very little access to material resources conditioned the unfolding of Caribbean cultures to be very dynamic, playful, and especially clever. Language and linguistic word play also became an important element given the constraints on bodies, spatial movement, and time that slavery forced upon people. Talk was one cultural resource that could not be stamped out by the colonial masters and thus creole dialects developed and elevated to a poetic art form. These creole dialects not only served as a form of communication and entertainment, but also played into dimensions of political resistance, if only in a lightweight and everyday ways. Creole filled with puns and riddles was a skillful means to create a new regime of meaning and story telling that was not easily accessible to colonial masters. The puns, riddles, and proverbs speed of critique of the powers that be while the act of spending hours and hours talking instead of “working” was and is a means of foot dragging that is not mere laziness but a choice not to engage in the dominant economic system of production.
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Last night I went to see Dogtown and the Z Boys at the Red Vic Movie House. This is the second time I have seen this documentary about the birth of the sport and culture of skating, a birth that was a messy intersection of local politics, sport predecessors, the modern artifact of plastic, aggressive and flashy personalities, environmental factors, corporate support, and a good deal of love and passion for spending endless hours on your skateboard, always in style.

This morning I decided to read some reviews of Dogtown, which were critical of Peralta for overdramatizing the “fall’ of one of the most gifted and spirited Zboys, Jay Adams. As well as for not being skeptical and objective enough about the birth of skateboarding and the corporate presence that bolstered the growth and proliferation of the sport in the 80s and through the 90s.

Despite the sentimentalism , which I guess I am a sucker for, I think the reviewer, Mark Holcomb entirely misses the boat as to what makes the movie a far more powerful rendition than his weenie journalistic perspective will allow. Even though the movie focuses a lot on the crew of young boys and teenagers from the economically disadvantaged and rough neighborhood of Venice Beach, Dogtown, the film artfully integrated the many other factors and conditions that paved the way for the new drama of skating. Dog town was an area of LA that was rough, dirty, its streets infected with socio-cultural attitude that spread to the local surf spots and eventually to the paved hills and valleys where the local kids first met to skate. Initially imitating the flow and style of surfing and even a particular surfer, Larry Bertelman skating eventually grew into its own as an identity and sport. It is as if Dogtown received a “blow” to its environment and in the process of its ruptured bleeding, skating was born. What I mean by that is that the substance and form of the Zephyr skating team was etched out of the local environment born simultaneously from two polar opposite substances, the water and concrete, fused in the middle by the community of kids that transformed the urban environment into their very own. Born and raised surfing, the Zephyr kids adopted the aesthetics of surfing placing them in skating by crouching low to the ground, cutting, and drawing lines all with deep style. The polyurethane wheel and the drought were the technological and environmental factors that ensured that skating would not be just surfing side kick but grow as its own entity that was eventually fueled by a good dose of corporate sponsorship. The pool, a very potent symbol and material artifact of upper middle class America was hijacked by the skaters as their heavenly play ground. It was the site where skaters first entered the realm of the vertical and really took “unauthorized access” to its logical conclusion.

Along with the fact that skating is just plain and simple: rad, what I find so appealing about it is is that it reclaims public (the streets) and private (pools, backyards) spaces and makes use of them in ways that were never intended. As you all know, I am pretty interested personally and academically in the question of the
commons and what can emerge if you let people create through collective stuff whether it is knoweldge, resources, or material artificats. Skating is one of those activities, like hacking, in which young males males make use of a commons through creative passionate and performative play. Of course there are serious differences between hacking and street skating but there are some ethical, political, and aesthetic parallels that are fun to think about. So, two of my favorite political slogans are basically the same except for the first word: Skating is not a crime and Coding is not a crime . Both activities albeit in distinct ways have been criminalized, in part because of that very fuzzy and hazy concept of “unauthorized access” that both worlds engage in. Skaters gain access to unauthorized “hard” spaces like concrete curbs, parks, and streets, while hackers gain access to the ephemeral space of code and the network. The law has been used to curb both activities. To stop access in the world of computers we now have the overly draconian law like the DMCA and in the world of skating, it is often illegal to skateboard in public places. There are also physical means to stop the two. With technology we have Digital Rights Management while skaters have to face the retarded skate stoppers. Hackers and skaters keep the question of legitimate access in play not through a engagement with politics but engaging in their craft.

The cultural image of the hacker and that of the skater, simultaneously inspire a good deal of loathing among conservative societal elements while the have also grown to hold a revered status as “underground” iconoclastic figures who are led by ideals of passion and freedom to pursue those things that they love. Many emerge out of a similar soci-economic milieu, that of the sterile American suburb and both choose to engage in activities that go against the grain of the isolation and boredom that can tend to characterize the ‘burbs.

Anyway, there is more to be said, but the blog is not meant to be a medium for a leangthy essay so I will leave it at that and check out the movie if you have a chance.

So, lately, I have been traveling, a lot. I have flown so many times in the last 1.5 years but have barely collected any airline miles because I have traveled on all sorts of random carriers, following the cheap fares that I find on the net. I am bound on another trip tomorrow to yet another hacker
extravaganza being held in America’s oddest city, Las Vegas. This time, I will be driving across the blackness of the desert late tomorrow night to arrive in the flood of lights that is Vegas at dawn.

Whenever I fly though, I can’t help thinking about the experience as a way to reflect upon and learn about American society and culture. Maybe it has to do with the fact that since I fly cheap airlines, I end up flying through three random American cities, like Denver, Las Vegas, and Columbus to get to my one destination. Running madly across the airport to barely catch my connection gets me thinking about what we can learn about “America” via the experience of flying. I can’t really give justice to what you can derive from the experience of traveling across the sky in a small blog entry but here are some small tidbits.

So, when you first walk on to a plane, you have to pass first class, and I basically gawk at all the passengers because, well, not entirely because I am envious of the large, roomy seats, but because I nearly always count the number of males vs. females. Invariably, the males win out. Hmmm, the “gendering” of society can be read simply by walking through the first class section of most major US airlines.

Then, I head over to my seat and pretty much always whip out the Skymall magazine not because I am looking for some “neat” gadget for my pet or uncle but as part of my quest to understand the ways that middle class America is conceived of by our marketers. The Skymall magazine is this cultural artifact that strives for reaching out to this ideal-type, platonic form of an American middle class family unit and in the process also constructs this form. It asks: if we have a family that has everything (a suburban house, 2.3 healthy children, a stable, high paying corporate job, 1 dog and 1 cat), what sorts of stuff can make their lives even more comfortable, even seemingly more safe from life? One new item particularly blew my mind away on my last perusal of the magazine. It was this lie detector for using at work and at home. The online version does not in any way give justice to the print version where they suggest using it on your teenage daughter to see whether she really is babysitting or out with her friends. Here is part of the the text:

“So when your daughter calls you on your cell phone to tell you she’s babysitting for a neighbor, you’ll know if she’s out with her friends beyond curfew. You can also discover whether a salesman or business affiliate is telling you the truth..”

Like what the heck is this all about?

Ok, aside from the fact that it just seems inherently problematic that this ad and product emanates a vision of society in which the general, normal precondition between people is mistrust, this little gadget speaks a million trillions words about American culture and societal trends. Well, I have already mentioned the whole issue of mistrust, then there is generational conflict in which adults and kids have no basis for mutual respect and trust for each other, and then the rise of and creepy desire for surveillance where we can not only monitor movement but the depths of our emotional stances. Skymall and its stuff are there to make our existence in this mistrustful American landscape just slightly more comfortable and safe by providing us with this wonderful gradgetry. Maybe Skymall should at least be a little more honest in the ad and tell parents to use it for what they really think parents want to use it for: to make sure their daughters are not having sex or taking drugs.

Finally, there is the whole arena of “conversations” on planes. They generally take one of two forms. The “silent until 15 minutes before the plane lands” or the “I will tell you my life story though you are a total stranger” forms. There are on opposite ends of the same spectrum Judging from traveling in other countries and what other people have told me, these conversational modes are pretty common for Americans. But it is too late for me to dissect the modes of conversation on planes right now. I will leave this as food for thought. Oh and by the way, the “LCD” of the lie detector “displays 9 levels from ‘truth’ to ‘false statements,’ and 9 levels of stress.” Ahhhh, the 9 levels of truth…