It’s workplanning season where I work and everyone is struggling to incorporate the organization’s anti-oppression and diversity initiatives into their priorities. On the one hand, I’m very lucky because I’ve got the web in my corner—clearly the biggest force for democracy since the printing press. On the other hand, thinking outside of the server-shaped box is sometimes difficult for the technically minded and there’s clearly a huge difference between the possibilities inherent to the medium and the capabilities of a small web team at a non-profit. What follows is not a list of the projects I’m pursuing over the next 12 months, but the principles that are guiding my brainstorming. Please feel free to suggest some actual projects (or challenge my anti-oppression analysis).

Oppression, as I’m using the term, is ideological domination resulting in exploitation of one social group for the benefit of another. Racism is a form of oppression based on ethnicity, valuing (at least in the United States) people of European descent over African, Native American, etc. Sexism is another based on gender and there are lots more. A common tendency is that these dominant ideologies tend to be both reinforced from a centralized source (mass media) and also internalized by oppressor and oppressed alike—to the point where (for example) a woman might believe that she could never be as good a lawyer as a man because she’s “too emotional”.

Now, some ideas on how the web can help.

Open the vectors. McKenzie Wark’s “A Hacker Manifesto” (have I mentioned I love manifestos?) well describes a Vectoralist Class which maintains its power largely by controlling access to information, not land or wealth. Considering the role that mass media plays in reaffirming oppressive narratives (e.g. all African American youth are in gangs), opening the vectors so that marginalized stories can be told is an immediate disruption. This process involves relinquishing editorial control and finding alternative methods of distribution, for instance community-generated feeds replacing hand-picked content or facilitating non-traditional authorship (i.e. stewarding content from an oppressed community to the mass media). It’s important to examine both the input and output, so the content that’s being produced (and valued) and the ways it’s being disseminated without being manipulated to conform to pre-existing standards.

Interrupt feedback loops. The coder in me might suggest that power and privilege seem (ironically?) to follow a Power Curve. A Power Curve, aka Zipf Law, aka the Pareto Principle is a relationship exhibited in lots of situations, but most often when previous performance affects future performance—called the Yule Process. Popular websites get linked to more often than non-popular websites, making them more popular. Books that sell well appear on lists or are talked about, making them sell better. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. On the web, it was pointed out long ago that there’s still a lot of area under the curve and the web lacks the necessity of focus that makes the it possible to dominate an entire field. Amazon.com isn’t limited by shelf space, it can offer a book that sells very few copies. A local movie theater has to show movies it knows will make money so it can pay rent; YouTube doesn’t. LonelyGirl15 or ZeFrank are stars without ever having begged Paramount to distribute them.

Challenge the story. Digging up dirt seems like what the internet does best. As our failing Fourth Estate sleeps on the job, citizen media and general muckrakers do their job for them. It’s not just journalism-type information that’s getting out into the public because of the internet. The amazing Maplight project (which just won NetSquared’s Innovation Award) connects corporations that give legislators money to how those legislators then vote on legislation supporting those corporations. Following the money and seeing how bought your Senator is has never been easier. Personally, I think this would be one of the biggest (and first) losses if network neutrality failed to be safeguarded.

Man, this was a hard one to write. Everyday posts are a bitch.

Growing up, I was always taught that America was named accidentally by mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci, who sloppily signed his name in the middle of the continent. In actuality, Amerigo was an explorer (though also a mapmaker) who visited South America as early as 1499. He was the first to propose that explorers of his day had discovered not a new route to Asia but an entirely new continent. It was this somewhat contentious assertion that led a different mapmaker, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, to name the new continent after him (Waldseemüller later changed his mind, but by then Gerardus Mercator had already popularized the name).

Fast forward 400 or so years to Indianapolis, IN. My father and I are looking at his new house and he says, “you’re creative, tell me how to make my house pretty.” I’m a web designer—though I did date an architecture student back in college—and don’t really know what to say. Unfortunately, my father did help finance my BFA so I can’t let him down. I bravely suggest checking out MocoLoco, full of Modern Contemporary madness. “Actually,” my father notes with fatherly confidence, “the style of my home is ‘Usonian‘.”

Those of you reading carefully will notice that I just mentioned “Usonian”, the word for which this post is written. Yes, we’re getting close to a point.

When I do a little more research on “Usonian” architecture, I discover that its origins begin with famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The term was coined out to describe simply designed, inexpensive homes built of locally available eco-friendly materials. Large common areas and small bedrooms encouraged socialization. Unlike the monarchist Victorian or retro Neoclassical, this would be an architecture style unique to the powerful nation of the United States! And so it will be named… Usonian!

“Why Usonian, and not American?”, you may ask. And that’s probably because you, yourself, are Usonian. As mentioned a few paragraphs back, the entire new continent (two of them, actually) named back in 1499 is referred to as “America”. So “American” equally describes Canadians, Mexicans, Cubans, Bolivians, and Uruguayans as well as citizens of the United States. We (being Usonians) like to shorten “Citizens of the United States” to “Americans”, but in doing so disregard our neighbors to the north and south. Imagine if “New Yorker” only applied to Manhattanites, and you lived in Brooklyn. You’d get a little pissed, right? Maybe want to teach the uppity Estados Unidos a thing or two, eh? Well, luckily we have the CIA to keep an eye on your kind. Still, “Citizens of the United States” is so annoyingly long and we’re kind of in a hurry—being the U.S. and all.

Enter “Usonian”, short for United States of North America (USONiA). It is the skeleton key that opens those doors to humility previously locked for want of a proper lexicon. It is the word missing from countless conversations between otherwise well-meaning folks trying not to be oppressive. It is my Word for 2007 and it is my mission is to spread it far and wide, all over Usonia.

As for my father, I advised him to plant vines, keeping with the Usonian style of melding organically with the natural landscape. Then I stumbled across this quote:

“A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright

Maybe I’ll just make him a website.

I realize that this post really could be condensed to a single sentence, but it wouldn’t carry the same sense of mystery and reward that following my journey of discovery would, right?

My particular project was inspired by James Surowiecki’s amazing work on the wisdom of crowds. It seems that, given the right circumstances, crowds can be remarkably intelligent—quite contrary to popular opinion that, while a person is smart “people” are stupid. I’ve seen other people replicate the “jellybean jar” phenomenon and thought I would give it a try at my office.

Out comes a really big jar and lots of malted milkballs. One hundred seventy-six (176) of them in fact, though I was tempted throughout the process to, uhm, abbreviate the total. The general idea is that, despite the wide range of guesses from the staff on how many milkballs are in the jar, the average of our guesses should be very, very close. Hopefully (since that’s the point of the project) closer than any one guess.

Next I go office to office, stopping people in hallways as need be, and give them the pitch: “Fill out the piece of paper with your name and your guess, using any method you wish for guessing—other than removing the top and counting them one-by-one, however it is of the utmost importance that you discuss neither your guess nor your strategy with any other staff member.” Yes, it was a run-on sentence, but by the end of the morning, I had it down pretty well.

It turns out we had guesses as low as 86 and as high as 275. That’s quite a range. Still, when I averaged all the guesses together, I got 178—only two away from the correct number! That beats both the closest guess (at 168) and the “panel of experts”, meaning the average of the five closest guesses, (at 164). Yes, including the outlier “noise” actually made the guess more accurate.

When people are asked to make a decision, they do so with a certain amount of bias. If they discuss their decision with others, this bias spreads to others. However, in a diverse crowd operating as individuals, these biases cancel one another out, making the group more intelligent. I;’m sure that a memetic analysis would involve memes and anti-memes colliding and exploding.

The staff was overall very appreciative of the experiment/celebration and immediately saw its implications with how we both interact in group decision-making and how we receive feedback from our activist network. They were also quite happy that the lesson ended with the average being closer than any one guess, because that meant we got to split the malted milkballs.

Despite any illusions that Burning Man is a non-hierarchical playground where the very notion of “status” is left at the gate, there are most definitely different classes of people in Black Rock City. Delightfully, they seem to have little or no relationship to the classes that citizens occupy before they arrive.

For instance, the person in line in front of me to get a coffee at Center Camp Café (one of only two places where commerce is not expressly forbidden) may be a corporate exec worth millions or a truck driver living paycheck to paycheck. I can’t tell because he’s wearing fuzzy pink boots and matching bunny ears. Whatever class he was before today has vanished. Likewise, every thirty minutes or so the “employees” of the Café, all of whom are volunteers, are instructed (over a megaphone stenciled with the words “instant asshole”) to take a “mandatory dance break”. They immediately jump to the counters and shake their stuff in front of the waiting customers. Clearly, they are not part of any lowly service class of whom we are entitled to make demands but just another subset of the participant/spectator hybrid population that all Burners comprise.

It’s really only when this hybrid breaks down that class becomes more pronounced. The “lower class” at Burning Man are the pure spectators, those who roam the Playa from party to party without ever giving back or those who slum it in RVs and snap pictures of topless girls. The “upper class” are those who are more serious about their participation, which includes everyone from hardcore theme campers through the Black Rock Rangers to the DPW and DMV, a phenomenon that seems exactly backward when compared to our typical relegation of the service industry to lower class.

It is in fact this very access (via the abstracted community of theme camps or the more formalized “we get to drive around on the playa and you don’t” of DPW or DMV) that makes real the class distinctions. There is not much to own on the playa, so things like name badges can translate as conspicuous consumption. Burners being who they are, the upper classes in Black Rock City do not escape populist scrutiny, which ranges from passive envy to genuine ire. This extends to the “owning class”, the year-round Burners whose day jobs involve securing the permits, raising money, selling tickets, and curating the world’s largest art gallery.

This upside down leadership pyramid, where your station in society is directly proportional to the blood, sweat, and rebar splinters you put into it, would make Greek philosophers proud. While far from from perfect, it’s equally far from the estranged democracy we seem to have in the (rest of the) United States.

I intend this post to double as an explanation for why I haven’t blogged anything for over two weeks.

Actually, San Francisco was awash in tech conferences last week. Bloggercon IV (“The Voyage Home”?), Jakob Nielsen’s big Usability Week, Gnomedex, and even Microformats got in on the party. Typically personified as the two-headed bitch goddess that bestows boons upon both oppressor and liberator alike, Technology was definitely on her best behavior last week. Even the most conventional conference, Usability Week (with tickets weighing in at over $3k for the whole deal), concentrated on making the web more accessible and generally suck less. Hard to argue with that.

But my attentions were lavished upon BarCamp. For the many of us who are not experienced BarCampers (this was my first), here’s a quick introduction: Spaces are typically donated, as is equipment and supplies like projectors, coffee, pizza, ice cream, and even presenters. No fancy experts are flown in from the Institute for Ivory Tower Position Papers That Are Completely Irrelevent to Your Day to Day Work. Panels are made up of people like you, including, in fact, you. One entire wall is the schedule and attendees grab a Sharpie^TM and sign themselves up to talk about whatever their area of expertise happens to be. These sessions then continue well into the evening (I think “Quiet Hours” began at 1am) after which follows a good deal of giggling, pillowfights, and talking about boys (or AJAX implementations of drilldown menus).

Working as a webperson at a progressive non-profit in San Francisco, perhaps I take too much joy in anti-hierarchical tech conferences. It’s entirely possible. Still, sometimes it seems that while the anti-capitalists and anti-globalists and anti-whateverelseists are arguing about inclusive processes and consensus-based decision-making, the web community (even while full of globalists and capitalists and certainly whateverelseists) seems to be quietly doing it.