Nick Berkowitz

• Joseph Kony is a bad man.

• Jason Russell is a talented filmaker.

• Jason Russell has been to Uganda.

• Jason Russell’s wikipedia says that he speaks a lot of languages.
   
• Gavin Russell is a cute kid.

• Jacob is an African.

• Jacob’s story is a sad one.

• We feel bad for Jacob

• We think we are Gavin Russell.

• Jacob fits the image of what we think Africans are supposed to look and sound like.

• Jacob’s ambitions, thoughts and actions endear us to him as they are like our own.

• 30,000 children is a lot of children and too many children to be abducted.

• Pictures of people without lips are upsetting.

• Joseph Kony is a symptom of existing problems.
• Organizing is important.

• Americans go to Africa for a number of reasons: (reason, reason)

• Despite the caustic nature of American politics, many people in the United States—of all political stripes—are charitable.

• There are reasons other than religion to help other people.

• Religion is an excellent way to motivate people to care about others.

• Religion couches the ideals of Joseph Kony.

• Paternalism and Pluralism are strong forces in the American regime; good and bad things come from both.

• Self-worth is a commodity.

• Capturing or killing movement figureheads doesn’t necessarily end their movements.

• Broadly, Americans know that they are fortunate.

• The internet has changed a lot of things.

• We don’t act all that differently because of the internet.

• Capturing or killing movement figureheads in itself doesn’t remove the underlying forces that resulted in their ascension.

• Kony 2012 has motivated many people to help other people.

• Helping people feels good.

• Many of those motivated by Kony 2012 believe that prosecuting Joseph Kony will bring Peace to East-Central Africa.

• Kony 2012 gives viewers the impression that prosecuting Joseph Kony will bring Peace to East-Central Africa.

• Simple issues are more likely to be paid attention to.

• Issues made accessible and understandable are more likely to be paid attention to.

• Most people talking about Invisible Children this week, won’t be next week and won’t remember Joseph Kony’s name, a year from now.

• People want easy answers.
  
  
• Solving problems requires hard work.                           

Originally found at: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Race?

Monday, March 5, 2012, 7PM
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street Brooklyn, NY
Free to the public

THE CANON, PC AND RACIST SHOW-AND-TELL

Featuring: HAROLD AUGENBRAUM (National Book Foundation), ROBERTO BEDOYA (Tucson Pima Arts Council), SACHA JENKINS (Ego Trip Magazine), ASHOK KONDABOLU (Das Racist), JEFFERSON MAO (Ego Trip Magazine), LATOYA PETERSON (Racialicious), HIMANSHU SURI (Das Racist), THUY LINH TU (NYU), VICTOR VAZQUEZ (Das Racist)

Exhibits: The Canon, NEA Litigation

Much of ‘90s multiculturalism was less about race than inventing polite ways to talk about racial taboos. Terms like “diversity” and “political correctness” blunted the unsavory aspects of dealing with racism, even as the right struggled to make English the national language and tamp down transgressive art, multicultural threats to the canon, and Ebonics. To kick off AFTER 1989, Ego Trip Magazine, the folks who gave us The Big Book of Racism, curates a slideshow of racialized advertisements—with call and response by hip hop trio Das Racist, who will judges the caliber of the images from quirky, race-conscious to downright, “Yo, that’s racist!” National Book Foundation Executive Director Harold Augenbraum, early proponent of Latino and Asian American literature, discusses the canon. Roberto Bedoya discusses the litigation between artist Karen Finley and the National Endowment for the Arts at the height of the Culture Wars—for which he was co-plaintiff. NYU Professor Thuy Linh Tu interviews Latoya Peterson, editor of Racialicious—the preeminent blog at the intersection of race and pop culture—to break down how the Internet has unleashed the Pandora’s Box of racial discourse.

A project of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where we’re inventing the future of Asian American intellectual culture.

In response to a recent request for input by Tumblr on what their policy should be for blogs that advocate self-harm, I wrote their policy department the following email. Please see the bottom of the post for more resources on Suicide and Anorexia. If you too would like to send Tumblr your opinion, please email policy@tumblr.com.

To whom it may concern:
When I was 8-years-old, I went over to my friend Daniel’s house. I was jonesing to complete the wampum belt we’d nearly filled the previous Saturday in The Indian and the Cupbord for PC. Dan had other plans; he’d discovered Geocities’ WYSIWYG editor and was busy posting fading GIFs of astronauts and pictures of his favorite Knicks players. 8-year-old me couldn’t believe he had his own website. Once Dan’s was done, we set about making mine: a compendium of tic-tac-toe strategy crowned with a Shockwave Flash tic-tac-toe game. geocities.yahoo.com/tictactoemasta1990

In my middle school years, I had a Xanga. It was wallpapered with an Abercrombie and Fitch theme and filled with longing posts about my love for 2Fast2Furious and and Laura Genes. URL omitted for the sake of my dignity.

By my mid-teens, after moving through Livejournal, Blogger and Wordpress.com, I teamed up with my Republican friend Peter Cipriano—whose penchant for not keeping up a blog has endured—and tried to launch a Wordpress self-hosted, CNN Crossfire-inspired two-party opinion blog. Many dollars and hours struggling with PHP later, we had a rickety site up with no content that went nowhere. americanrecord.com

I am of the first generation of human beings for whom the internet was absolutely instrumental in the construction of my expressions, thoughts, opinions and self-image. I had the freedom to read and post what I wanted and how I wanted to. When a platform became too limited—either by restrictions or need for technical skill—I found something else. This is ultimately how I ended up being a Tumblr user in the first place; its ease of use and freedom of expression.

Heretofore, Tumblr hasn’t publicly policed user content beyond eliminating fraud and dividing between SFW from NSFW—moves that contribute to user trust and choice. The addition of a policy banning any kind of content on editorial grounds, changes the very nature of the user-Tumblr relationship; from blogger-to-host to blogger-to-editorial gatekeeper.

As a Tumblr blogger and reader, this is not what I signed up for. The only real limits on my endeavors on the web thus far are the bounds of my creativity and commitment. I carefully curate my web traffic and I do not want to work with a blog host that makes these decisions for me. The only limits on the actions of users should combat specific and explicit threats to another individual that carry a real chance of financial or bodily harm. Practically speaking, no automated filtering architecture could possibly be savvy enough to eliminate offending material without hampering the freedom of some non-offending users. And unless I’m totally mistaken, this doesn’t indicate Tumblr intends to start human review of every post; which in itself isn’t a guarantee that innocent content will not be affected.

Don’t get me wrong, the problems that Tumblr seeks to address are real and serious. The goal of all endeavors on the internet should be to grow communication and information; combating the problems of Anorexia and Suicide is not only compatible with this mantra, but depends upon it. It has been said that suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. I am glad that Tumblr has—at least tacitly—acknowledged that there is a deficit of resources addressing these problems available within its own network. While the proposed policy that adds links to searches functionally creates a second-class of content, it does so while encouraging conversations rather than eliminating them. In addition to providing PSAs and links against self-harm in search results, I also suggest Tumblr tap into existing resources against the problems it seeks to address. Through active partnerships, events and sponsorships of existing mental health and advocacy organizations, we all can work to better promote positive body image and self-worth.

Tumblr and all hosting-blogging companies are well within their rights to limit any content they see fit, but that doesn’t mean they should. Ask the families of AIDS victims if institutional bans and hush-hush policies solve problems. As we progress through this third decade of internet use, the ever important qualities of privacy and autonomy of content are becoming commodities and features in their own right. Tumblr was on the right side of history in the SOPA/PIPA debate; I urge Tumblr, for the sake of my continued usership, the safety and wellbeing of its users and internet freedom broadly, to continue to seek solutions that are the least restrictive and most encouraging of conversation and information propagation.

http://www.metanoia.org/suicide
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
http://www.teensuicide.us
http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org
http://loveyourbody.nowfoundation.org

Thank you for considering my opinion,
Nick Berkowitz
http://myolddesk.com
@ncberko

“Did you mean Lana Del Rey?”

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often […] we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” - President John F. Kennedy

I can’t remember an artist who has ever qualified for such a vehement and vocal rebuke from Hipster twenty-somethings as Lana Del Rey. Following, a disastrous performance on Saturday Night Live, Del Rey’s it-girl status disintegrated. But neither that performance nor the all-around shoddy production that Born to Die turned out to be, can totally account for the seething fervor that this artist has elicited.

But I think I can.

In August of 2011, Pitchfork—a music-scene pacesetter—did a ‘Rising’ feature on Del Rey. The article cited an interview from 2010 in which Del Rey said,

“[the name] Lana Del Rey came from a series of managers and lawyers over the last 5 years who wanted a name that they thought better fit the sound of the music.”

Asked to react to this in the Pitchfork feature, Del Rey deflected and talked about Elvis. Confronted with other roadblocks to her authenticity—a working relationship with producer, David Kahne, having a successful father—Del Rey deftly slalomed and came off as an untapped virtuoso: naive but a virgin-no-more. In the cited interview, she told tales of trailer parks, church choirs and a romance with the decay of Coney Island. 

And we the Hipsters ate it all up. Her first shows sold out in days; before long, Sound Cloud was teaming with remixes and mashups.

We had found her: the creation myth incarnate. Upon arriving in civilization from the unadulterated noble savagery of lower-income Christian America, Del Rey osmosed. She impeccably curated blank walls with art, while leaving the lace-print contact paper stuck to the windows.

As the true tale of Del Rey’s past came to light—daughter of a successful investor, graduate of an expensive boarding school, product of the mainstream music business—the Hipster diaspora shuddered; twitter, blogs, comments, last.fm profiles: wiped clean of any indications of positive inclinations. But this virtuosity-exposed-as-trickery was not only disappointing but dangerous to the entire hipster self-conception. Del Rey, who had come to justify the idealized narrative of blank-slate to impeccable-yet-organic self-creation, had been exposed as a fraud. This is the stereotype of a Hipster: acting aloof, original and poor—all the while hyper-aware, carbon-copied and parent-subsidized.

All of us, whether we like it or not, are products of our upbringing and own deliberate choices. Sure, Born to Die is not a great album and the stories of Lizzie Grant and Lana Del Rey diverge. But this whole chapter is less about the trickery of a pop star and more about being blinded by and ultimately called out in our own half-told self-conceptions; all the while forced to contend with the idea that we might just be as fake as she is.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go clear out my M. Ward shelf.