Metal Juice

No time for carnivals

2009-03-29T13:25:00.003Z

As groups such as G20 Meltdown and suspended 'hang the bankers' University of East London Professor Chris Knight prepare to 'storm the city' on April Fools Day - it is worth reflecting on whether the tired old forms of capitalist theatre don't also have their echo in the antics of the stage Left. A welcome new blog from a group of young London based socialists provides a timely reminder that smashing windows and hanging effigies of bankers is no substitute for the unglamorous task of building support for practical socialist alternatives to the bankrupt capitalist state-market in working class communities. The real victims of the crisis will be too busy working their second or third job or trying to battle with the real 'hard cops' of the British state in benefit offices, homeless persons units and asylum detention centres up and down the country while the eco-warriors set up their play tents outside the European Climate Exchange.

As Left Luggage argue:
"The low level of struggle is not due to apathy but because, by and large, the Left has no significant organisational base within working class communities or the union rank and file. The extraordinary emphasis placed on protests such as the G20 only serves to obscure this fact both by maintaining a facade of absurd optimism and by channelling energies away from the basic movement-building work that is necessary".

G20 Meltdown have a point in deriding the TUC's muted criticism of the crisis as essentially embracing of the status quo, but if organised labour is to become a genuine force for social and economic change as it was a 100 years ago it needs to build from the bottom and show how and why it is relevant to the problems faced by those to whom the Left are seen as either at best an irrelevance and at worst a delinquent mob.

Blame the Poor not the Bankers!

2008-10-27T11:22:00.007Z

An interesting piece in The Nation by John Atlas and Peter Dreier on ACORN - which is the Anti-Poverty Community Group that Obama once worked for and how the Republicans have been running desperate ads trying to link the organisation to 'widespread voter registration fraud' while accusing ACORN of 'bullying banks, intimidation tactics, and disruption of business.' As a result the group apparently forced normally responsible financial institutions to make unsuitable loans that they would never otherwise have made and 'caused, nearly single-handedly, the world's financial crisis'.

This is not the first time that McCain has taken a swipe at community organising as un-American and anti-business, and right-wing commentators (especially on the Wall Street Journal) have long targetted the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 anti-redlining law-as the source of the American mortgage market's financial woes. But take a closer look at the subprime crisis and one discovers that the companies that were really engaging in irresponsible lending (130 or 140% loan to value ratios) were not the depository institutions, like commercial and savings banks that the CRA was originally intended to cover, but 'private mortgage companies like CitiMortgage, Household Finance and Countrywide Financial (which was recently bought out by Bank of America).' As the authors comment:
'These outfits, which exist in a shadow world without government oversight, account for most of the predatory loans in trouble today'.

Curiously not even the former San Antonio mayor and HUD Secretary, Heny Cisneros, blamed bullying community activists for the subprime crisis. Instead the one time Countrywide director pointed the finger at 'mortgage brokers, appraisers who inflated home values, investors who made prices climb and rating agencies that didn't properly evaluate the risk in the mortgage-backed securities that were sold on Wall Street to investors around the world'. In a revealing article in My San Antonio News it is easy to see how Countrywide's problems came about:

Securities and Exchange Commission filings from 2001 to 2007 show that Countrywide's loans became increasingly risky.

In 2001, when Cisneros joined the board, 12 percent of the loans Countrywide originated had adjustable interest rates.
By 2004, 52 percent of the company's loans had adjustable rates.
Subprime lending to borrowers with credit problems also increased.
In 2001, subprime loans made up 4.5 percent of Countrywide's mortgage loan portfolio, according to regulatory filings.
By 2004, subprime loans made up 10.9 percent of the company's business.

The subprime crisis has its origins in predatory lending and the creation of 'special investment vehicles' that provided healthy financial returns in a rising housing market but whose risky provenance the investment and hedge fund managers chose not to ask too many questions about - despite the patent risk inflation strategy of corporations such as Countrywide.

The real losers in this debacle are not of course the Henry Cisneros who managed to swap their ailing stock for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the top of the market, while outside investors saw their portfolios crash, but the thousands of low income households, if they haven't already been foreclosed, whose hopes of owning a home that they can call their own have been dashed by the same corporations that tried and failed to roll them for a few more bucks...

Obama's first real test will be to insist that the bailed out bankers can no longer take the poor for suckers, and to put an end to a casino economy that makes poker chips out of people's homes and lives.

Toughs, Turf and Territory

2008-10-19T17:49:00.009Z

A new report from researchers at Glasgow University highlights the importance of territory and the violent lengths socially excluded young men are prepared to go to defend their 'turf' both as a resource and as a badge of social identity. Although other gang studies have found similar results especially in North America where the 4 by 4 block is the basic retail unit for street level drug gangs (see Freaknomics guru Steve Levitt's entertaining lecture on this subject at the 2004 TED convention in California), the Glasgow study of six British cities British for the Joseph Rowntree Trust found that territoriality was everywhere associated with anti-social behaviour amongst this socio-economic cohort of teens and young males.

The report also found that:

Territorial affiliations were a source of friendship and group solidarity that provided an alternative to household and family affiliations.
Young people sought recognition and 'respect' among their peers.
Participation in territorial conflict was sometimes motivated by a sense of ownership over the area, and the desire to protect the area or oneself. Simply crossing a boundary into a neighbouring territory was regarded as an insult and could lead to conflict.
As male teenagers became sexually aware, territoriality was intensified by the protection, or perceived ownership, of girls and young women in that area.
In some places, territoriality was a leisure activity, a form of 'recreational violence' where 'gang fighting' was ritualised.
Territoriality was sometimes associated with material crime for financial gain

What I find interesting about this study from an urban theory point of view is that while a number of leading scholars such as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift in their book Cities: Reimaging the Urban have been arguing that propinquity is less and less important for identity affirmation and community formation due to an increasing reliance on telemediated networked technologies, this does not appear to be at all the case in relation to those who have no or little social and geographical mobility. Indeed as the social affinities of the Facebook generation become increasingly 'placeless', a 'super place' sensibility (as the Glasgow team term it) appears to be even more apparent among those for whom globalisation begins and ends at the KFC or the Maccy D's. Which reminds me of one of my favourite lines from the Wire when Marlo puts the aspirant rim store guy straight on Baltimore, gangs, and globalisation:

Marlo: Omar aint no terrorist he's just a nigga with a gun. And you, you ain't no Delta airlines neither. You just a nigga who got his shit took.

More on wired sociology you can be sure in future postings...

New Paper on Geodemographic Code & Production of Space

2008-10-14T10:58:00.002Z

Check out the sparkerworld website for a sneak preview of a paper written with Emma Uprichard and Roger Burrows of the Sociology Department at the University of York which is due to appear shortly in a special issue of the journal Environment and Planning A entitled Home/City/Neighbourhood/+ which is guest edited by Rowland Atkinson.

The pathological narcissism of social networking

2007-11-26T00:08:00.000Z

MySpace added its 200 millionth account in 2007 and Facebook reached 39 million members in May 2007. Facebook is due to achieve 200 million users by December 2008 and an estimated worth of $100 billion (source: Altura Ventures). Social networking sites are now rarely off the front pages of the newspapers as real life tragedies such as the murder of British student Meredith Kercher become played out through the postings and images of victims and suspects alike. But how did a Web 2.0 spin-off idea for putting local musicians and artists in touch with their potential audiences and students in touch with their fellow dorm residents become such a runaway, global obsession for hundreds of millions of people - and increasingly those in the 'post-youth' demographic? In a recent paper 'Pathological narcissism or ontogenesis? Facebook, MySpace and the new cult of selfhood' given at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver I try to develop a social theory of social networking that draws on psychoanalytic and critical theory in an attempt to locate 'self presentation in everyday virtual life' as both an aspect of the crisis of the modernity and a potential for self-development and realisation (ontogenesis). Sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are neither unbiquitously 'good' or 'bad' but neither is the social technology that constitutes and defines such sites 'neutral' or independent of the latent phantasies that we project on to it. The paper ends with a call to encourage a more theoretically informed debate about how Web 2.0 media are shaping our lives.

Ubiquitous Tokyo

2007-07-21T01:03:00.001Z

The Herzog and de Meuron signature store for Prada (pictured) was a must see architectural landmark during a recent visit to Tokyo for the Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations Conference organised by the journal Theory, Culture and Society and the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies/Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo.

Over 300 papers discussed key developments in culture, technology and the new media with Asia as the primary focus of analysis. Key note speakers included the German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler and cultural theorist Katherine Hayles on topics ranging from the absence of a concept of 'medium' in classical philosophy to the phenomenology of RFID tags.

I and a group of researchers from the University of York and University of Leeds presented a panel on Ubiquitous Cartographies, and you can read my presentation Archaelogies of the Here and Now: The Ubiquitous Geographies of Electronically Mediated Social Locational Networks at my Sparkerworld website together with a paper on the geodemographics of classification and social sorting that was delivered in April at the Association of American Geographers Conference in San Francisco. Abstracts of the other papers from the Ubiquitous Cartographies session can alsobe viewed here.