I was accepted to the Recurse Center in the Fall 2, 2016 batch. Half-way through my batch, I was so heartbroken by what I found that I stopped showing up. I dropped out of RC because I found it to be, at its best, a diluted but essentially identical version of the Silicon Valley culture that I had already vehemently rejected years before.

I realize many of you have had very good experiences at RC. I have had some good experiences, as well. A number of my very good friends are RC alumni, people with whom I share political views, go out drinking with, and hack on projects with. However, I can do all that outside of RC, in spaces that I feel are just *better* than the Recurse Center’s community is.

This week, I made a rare re-appearance at RC by posting a request for hardware donations to the New York region’s Community thread in order to resource a small, community-run computer lab that I and some friends are helping to build and administer. This is the second time I have made such a request of the RC community, the last time being in 2017. I’m very heartened to see that, both times, a number of RC community members generously offered their help and I am happy to be coordinating an equipment pickup for later this week.

Thank you so much to everyone who has made my time at and involvement in RC better. As I understand it, this kind of generosity—where we approach one another in good faith and support one another’s efforts to become increasingly skilled technologists—is what RC should be all about. It’s why we were all members of the RC community. I will genuinely miss the opportunity to meet the many well-meaning people that having access to private RC discussion channels provides.

Unfortunately, very quickly after I posted to the Community forum regarding my interest in your unused, old hardware, someone replied asking me to effectively prove my worth as a recipient of their electronic waste. As strange as it might sound, they cited the possibility that I might be using RC’ers’ donated electronic garbage as part of a monetized YouTube channel to fund a Machine Learning startup. This is even funnier for those of you know that know even the faintest bit about me and my deeply held radical Anarcho anti-capitalist, anti tech-industry leanings.

Here’s the thing: this kind of response strikes me as being directly in opposition to the purpose of RC as a community in the first place. The response I got might have been appropriate had I posted on CraigsList. But a closed, pre-screened community like the Recurse Center?

Sadly, this is not the only incident spurring my choice to formally distance myself from RC. It is just the most recent. Enumerating all the times I witnessed disappointing behavior from respected RC community members isn’t the point of this message (but I will happily do so in private conversation should anyone feel the desire to reach out to me to learn more) so it is enough for me to say that I recognize a pattern of behavior in the RC community that makes me deeply uncomfortable. This is a pattern I routinely see elsewhere as well, especially in largely upper-middle class, predominantly white, neoliberal spaces such as RC. These patterns are even more pronounced in “tech/developer” spaces. The prevalence of and the unwillingness to acknowledge this pattern is precisely why I am not a member of almost any space or community that meets this description.

Like clockwork, after expressing my anger at being told to provide “indicators of trustworthiness” sufficient enough to be bestowed the honor of receiving discarded electronic waste from this man, the “let’s all engage rationally” peace-police arrived and told me I was “arguing when I could have engaged” with this man’s demands. Here’s the thing: there’s nothing to engage with. It is my firm belief that people who demand that I prove my worth to them for the opportunity to maybe, if I meet their standards, receive their waste, *are not worth engaging with*. This does not seem to me like something that should be a controversial position. Moreover, communities in which respected, well-to-do members treat an expression of anger at being demanded such a thing to be so unacceptable as to defend the demand suffer from a systemic pacifist neoliberal poison that I believe is harmful to society at large and know is personally stressful for me to be exposed to.

The Recurse Center was, for the past three years, sometimes the one exception to the prevalence of this toxic behavior for me. I know for a fact that it is the one exception for *many* technologists such as myself, because I have had many conversations with RC’ers who told me as such. While I never spoke in exclusively positive terms about the Recurse Center, I also largely kept to myself about its faults unless I was asked directly and, even then, I saw fit to temper my dislike with caveats like “your mileage may vary.” It was, and probably still is, “the best of the tech communities.” Unfortunately, at their absolute best and as RC demonstrates elegantly, “tech communities” are essentially abusive neoliberal cesspools that are pathologically unwilling to critically self-reflect deeply enough for long enough to meaningfully alter themselves for the better.

During my batch at RC, I was homeless and hungry. This is not an exaggeration. (I wrote the Penniless Recurser’s Survival Guide on the RC Wiki wiki [ed. also now extracted and republished in original Markdown format my blog, here] partly to document what the experience.) I found shelter on couches (endless thanks to few RC’ers who let me crash with them!) and in parks. For a community like RC to have little to no apparent problem with an actual Google employee demanding that a genderqueer poor person justify their request for literal electronic garbage, and then express more consternation over that poor person’s vocal objection to be treated in such a manner, is an extremely violent position to hold. I would respectfully submit that y’all should investigate that shit.

Over the past two years, I have had a very difficult time biting my tongue when things similar to the response I got to my request for unused hardware have happened. I recall the evening I sat in the RC library when the news of Trump’s election shocked (SHOCKED! I say!) the majority of the (white, male) RC community. I bit my tongue harder, tempered my words when I spoke, but largely simply decided not to spend that much time at RC or checking Zulip anymore. The message has always been clear: “This isn’t a space for politics.”

I see little wrong with RC’s choice to be more-or-less actively apolitical—and that is how I see it; I know a lot of RC’ers believe RC is actually quite actively progressive, to which I can only scoff to myself at the meekness of those expressed politics—nor do I see it as my place to attempt to change the RC community writ large. Again, that’s why you haven’t really seen me participate in RC since I left my 2016 batch.

Inevitably, though, my presence and actions causes some sort of existential angst. Even when what I initiate at RC is as innocuous as a request for donated electronics, the result is an uncomfortable confrontation. So uncomfortable that someone completely uninvolved, someone at whom no statement from either party was directed, felt the need to jump in. So uncomfortable that, a day later, RC’s staff sends me the following email, reprinted here in full:

Hi may may,

I have some feedback on your recent posts on Community.

First, I really appreciated your initial post requesting donations. It was thoughtful and detailed. Thank you for sending it.

Your subsequent posts were mean-spirited, unnecessarily personal, and inappropriate for RC. Specifically, saying things like “I’d probably expel you from a session I was running,” and “that’s your therapy session topic,” are unacceptable things to say in the RC community. They’re mean, you could have easily made your point without them, and are against the spirit of our code of conduct – specifically the part that reads “Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other Recursers.” It’s also inappropriate to argue in bad faith.

It is important to us that you commit to not doing these things in the future in RC community spaces. Is this something you can commit to?

Thanks, Dave

P.S. I have also emailed Sidney with feedback on his posts and to tell him that he should have done more to assume good intentions on your part.

Now let me take the opportunity to say directly to Dave: thank you for your feedback on my recent posts on Community. I am pleased to hear that you appreciated my initial post. :)

I disagree with you that my subsequent posts were unnecessarily personal. I was and am angry, and I believe I have every right and reason both to be angry and to express that anger in exactly the way that I did. I further believe that if these specific expressions are “unacceptable things to say in the RC community” then the RC community is either not the place it claims to be, or my understanding of RC as a place where people are treated like the complex adults that they are has always been inaccurate. In either case, RC is clearly not the place for me, because the only “bad faith” involved in this most recent interaction was Sidney’s behavior demanding that a member of the community with equal standing as he has justify a request for receipt of literal trash.

To be clear, David, I will absolutely not commit to not being “mean” by your standards when I am put down in this way. Furthermore, I find it offensive and extremely infantilizing that you would speak to me in the manner that you did. You are not my employer, nor am I in your kindergarten class.

My time at RC over the past years has continued to dwindle, and the benefits for me in my involvement now amount to occasionally asking if anyone has unused hardware they’re willing to give away. I now have a number of relationships with others—some who are and many who are not involved with RC themselves—in which to grow as a programmer, explore my interest in computer systems, and experiment with new and exciting tools and techniques in new and exciting ways. This is in part due to the massive amount of work I and some close friends have done over the last couple of years to create and protect a space that is in some ways similar to RC, but without what we see as its worse elements.

I have no doubt that for many people, RC is still the only outlet they have for this kind of comfortable exploration. If I did not have the access I do to these other spaces where, for example, simply being angry is not treated like a personal failing, I would probably feel much more trepidatious about sending this very message to the RC community. Thankfully, RC is no longer “the best of tech communities” that I can personally participate in. There are a couple of much, much better ones where I vastly prefer to spend my time, energy, and attention.

For all of the above reasons, it is with quite a bit of heartbreak but zero regret that I am publicly disassociating myself from the Recurse Center.

To anyone who feels as I do, please feel free to reach out to me via Signal Private Messenger message at (323) 963-4827, via email, or (for as long as my Zulip account remains active) via private message on Zulip. I’d be happy to discuss further details of any of this with those of you who feel that better communities can and should be more common and more accessible.

With respect, -may may

Hi all,

In 2017, I asked for spare hardware to help start a small community-run computer lab and many of you donated Raspberry Pi SBCs, old Wi-Fi routers, and other equipment. I am pleased to say that we were able to use these donations to build a small network that now powers occasional free computer classes, hosts a small resource library of DRM-free e-books, and provides a few other networked services. We’ve seen such incredible interest in the project that now we are looking for more hardware to expand the lab.

In particular, we are looking for 1 or 2 TB hard disk drives in order to provide a NAS (or NAS-like) video storage server for the computer lab. (A lot of people are interested in learning about video editing, unsurprisingly.) So once again I am asking if the RC community has spare or aging hardware that you would be willing to donate for a non-profit community project such as this one.

Myself or one of our project partners can come to you to pick up the hardware, or we can meet at a place and time that is convenient for you. We are hoping to acquire:

• Hard drives (1 TB or 2 TB SATA HDDs of any quality, we can wipe them for you using DBAN or nwipe).
• Single board computers of any make and model, Raspberry Pi 3 Mobel B+ especially desired
• Cell phone chargers (5 volt 2.5 amp output with microUSB port is ideal)
• Old routers/switches/hubs, and/or network cables
• Internal computer parts; SATA cables especially (I am helping them build a RAID or ZFS RAIDZ array for their video library server), PCI video cards, etc.
• Video cabling (VGA/DVI/HDMI), adapters, etc.
• Old laptops and tower PC grayboxes of any make and model

Basically, if you have any hardware you want to get rid of and would rather see put to a good use over becoming a growing pile of garbage, please let me know. :) We are especially seeking hard drives to expand the storage capacity for student materials but will also gratefully accept other electronics, storage media (SD cards from old camers, etc), padlocks (with or without keys), and whatever else you have that we can make use of.

Please message me off-list (you can PM me on Zulip but I far prefer Signal messages to 323-963-4827, get Signal at Signal.org :) if you have something you’d like to donate.

Thanks in advance, -m

Could you share information about the community center/lab?

(I’m okay with you rejecting 501(c) as an indicator of trustworthiness, as mentioned in your linked post, if you can offer another trust indicator.)

Could you share information about the community center/lab?

What information are you seeking? There is no website. It is just a room in a neighborhood with a bunch of computers where locals sometimes gather and where I and others sometimes hang out and help folks learn things.

(I’m okay with you rejecting 501(c) as an indicator of trustworthiness, as mentioned in your linked post, if you can offer another trust indicator.)

Hmm. What would you consider an “indicator of trustworthiness” that meets the minimum bar for you to want to give me your unused electronic garbage? :)

Considering the community-oriented projects may may was doing during batch and after, I am absolutely convinced that anything donated will be used as described. <3 When I am ready to let my Macbook Air go, it’ll go to you and your crew, may may :D

:) Thanks, @[REDACTED].

TBQH, I am still curious—for future reference—what kind of trust indicators are needed to receive donations of unused electronics, since I often ask for hand me down hardware from a variety of sources. That said, I would also understand if minimum trust requirements for this sort of activity are hard to quantify. :)

@may may Hmm. Definitely hard to quantify, and I left it vague in case you had any ideas, but I’ll fill in what I can from my own thoughts.

Details felt conspicuously absent. I lack information about the location or intended audience, or why you would prefer to not share those things. Examples of statements that might have increased my trust:

• “We’re located in [neighborhood] and most of the people involved so far are [group name/attributes] trying to [goal]. If you know anyone who might enjoy spending time there, taking a class, hosting a network service, or exploring our DRM-free library, message me off-list.”
• “I am using this space to study alternative social structures, with a side interest in the up-to-date security practices of banks, the State, and large corporations.”
• “My friends and I experiment here. There’s no intended benefit to any larger community, but if that’s okay with you, we’d love to take your electronic garbage :).”

Each of these statements gives me the chance to be turned off from contributing, which shows some trust in me as the reader, versus feeling like you don’t trust me to make a judgement call. Mentioning past, present, or planned projects, classes, network services, favorite e-books in the library, etc. might help. Statements of support from other RCers, like Veronica’s, do help.

Essentially the question I’m trying to answer is: “Is donating to @may may‘s project consistent with my own values, and, if I commit to taking the time to dig up my electronic garbage, do I know anyone else who might do more good with it?”

I see. Essentially, what I am hearing is that you want a chance to ensure that the electronics you (still theoretically, I might add—do you actually have hardware you’d like to not-have in the near future or is this just a hypothetical inquiry into my “indicators of trustworthiness” for you?) supposedly want to get rid of are going to be used in a manner of your choosing or by people you deem worthy of access to the equipment. This smacks of the patronizing way certain people talk about wanting to ensure the dollar bill they oh-so-painstakingly spent their oh-so-precious time digging out of their wallet to give a homeless person “won’t be spent on booze and drugs.”

Sorry, but I can give you no such guarantee, nor would I even if I could. For one thing, beyond the details I gave in my original post, I do not actually know what will happen. For another, I do not think it should matter. Are we going to use donated hardware to build a terrorist datacenter? Will your discarded HDD be filled with porn and torrents? Maybe! :D Or maybe not! Let’s find out.

Of course, this is ultimately what is meant by seeking donations of hardware. You are being asked if you would like to give something away. You are not being invited to monitor its use or audit its recipients.

If one wants to retain some control or oversight regarding how a thing one has is used, or wishes to investigate the worthiness of its recipients, that’s your therapy session topic, but I think it’s self-evident that such a person is clearly not motivated by the desire to rid themselves of the object in question in the first place. The giving of the item is at best a side effect; the true purpose of such an act is clearly something less simple, less noble, or both. It might even be interesting to examine how retaining some control over how a resource one has gets used is the kind of behavior that is more akin to a sponsorship than a donation, something companies like Google might do. 🤔 But I digress.

All that being said, here are some things I can tell you about me and what I’m up to that may be sufficient “indicators of trustworthiness” (or untrustworthiness) for you:

• My friends and I who are involved in this little computer lab project share an ethos that is radically anti-capitalist and (speaking for myself only) explicitly Anarchist, which is probably not surprising if you read my linked post from 2017 or glanced at my RC People Directory profile.
• We are building this little network for a grand total of $0, partly out of principle and partly simply because we can. The principle of the thing is partly spurred on because doing it “for free” gives a lot of poor and less affluent people quite a bit of hope when we show them something they find cool and tell them it can be built for “zero of their own dollars” simply by sifting through richer people’s trash and knowing what you’re doing with the parts you find. Most folks don’t realize how powerful off the shelf components are these days, so it’s a real “aha moment” for people who genuinely don’t have $200 to spare for an used laptop. It’s also a big hit with the Right-To-Repair crowd, with which we have some crossover, philosophically speaking.
• We have and continue to generally expel most techies (so far all have been men) from our workshops, since in our experiences they tend to behave in condescending and entitled ways that many of us feel contributes to an atmosphere that makes it difficult to grow our technical skills and have fun exploring computer systems. They also talk a lot (usually by interrupting someone else or posing endless “what-ifs” and “what-abouts” hypotheticals) but basically never have something relevant to contribute. They also have all been really bad at sharing (teaching) what they do know, which is kind of the whole point of the community computer lab in the first place.
• Sometimes we just give hardware away, too. For example, a few weeks ago, we prepared a Raspbian NOOBS SD card and gifted it along with a spare RPi, half-broken VGA video monitor, and mismatched USB keyboard and mouse set to a friend who works in food service and thus could almost never participate in our more regular gatherings. This was easy for us because, as you might have expected by now, we got all that hardware via donations (or the literal trash, in the case of the monitor) in the first place. Apart from an aging phone, this refurbished RPi is the only CPU that this person has, so being able to access the Internet from something other than a mobile device is a pretty big deal for them. I hope they pick up some of the more educational software on the Raspbian Desktop build but that is bluntly up to them because we are not policing their activity or auditing their worthiness. We are not cops. :)
• Personally, I encourage folks I mentor to stay far from coding bootcamps, tech meetups, and other mainstream and even well-intentioned tech industry spaces, because I think their chances of learning things, not to mention just having quality, healthy educational experiences relating to computer systems or programming generally, is far lower in such spaces than it is in the kind of space we have managed to build over the past two years. I think they are a waste of time and sometimes money for most people most of the time. This is not a unanimous belief in this particular circle but my adamance has proven to be both influential and I dare say remarkably fruitful. Ironically, one person I mentored closely who had no tech experience to speak of actually did get a tech job (an entry level SRE position) after only about 10 months of regular attendance—meanwhile, other folks we know who took the code bootcamp route are still job hunting—and I have mixed feelings about all that. At least the company they were hired by is a registered non-profit and they like their new job way more than their old one, so that’s good. Anyways, all that is another story entirely.

So I guess, I would say that you are unlikely to benefit from any of this directly (for many reasons; only one of them is that I’d probably expel you from a session I was running, TBH), but many others, particularly those who are gender non-conforming, femme, very very very far Left-leaning politically, and/or feel themselves to be “outsiders” from “the tech world” have already benefited, including a handful of RC’s friends-of-friends. Finding a technically competent space where we are comfortable learning and exploring together is sadly rare and worth protecting, which often means not inviting the people who we feel would diminish the benefits of the space for us. To be blunt, yes, this does mean not opening our space to many Recursers.

For some of us, ours is the only comfortable space that is accessible, and so I am thrilled to see it thirst for additional hardware resources as it continues to grow and as the people involved flex their skills and gain confidence to try doing things they did not think they would ever do or even knew was a thing that could be done before. Like, say, build a RAID array with donated disk drives.

Given the consistently and predictably disappointing behavior of the overwhelming majority of veteran techies, I am also very confident that spaces like this will continue to feel very important to those of us involved in them. :)

So, yeah. Right now, 1 TB or 2 TB hard drives are the thing we want most, but as mentioned in my original post, old Wi-Fi routers and spare computer parts, SBCs of any sort, etc. are all great. Anything you don’t want (and are actually motivated by a desire to relinquish) that we can use, we will gladly accept.

Hopefully that clears things up. :) If not, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that’s all I got for you.

On 2/4/19 5:36 AM, may may wrote:

I’d probably expel you from a session I was running, TBH

may may, I’m quoting perhaps the most adversarial thing you say in your reply, but overall, I think you are arguing where you could engage (I infer that’s a deliberate choice, but I’m noting it in case it’s not), and you miss legitimate reasons that folks exercise a modicum of judgment regarding where we choose to put our voluntary labor and give away stuff.

I totally understand your thinking that, once I give someone a gift, that gift is theirs to do with as they like. I am on board with that. And I further am on board with the reasoning that some people have a bunch of excess electronic stuff and have literally ZERO interest in where it goes so long as it gets out of their homes, so for those people, once you’ve said “gimme” they don’t need any more info.

But — at least in NYC — I have an option for where I put excess electronics that are in my home that I just do not want to bother with at all. I get paper mail from the Department of Sanitation about their disposal events a few times a year. I can box up my stuff and give it to them. When I choose NOT to do that and to try to give it to someone else, I’m usually doing that because I’m attempting to increase the likelihood that the stuff will be used for some at least nebulously world-improving thing, and — this is key! — that it is less likely to be literally thrown into a landfill, leach chemicals into soil, etc. etc. I recognize that this kind of judgment reads as condescending to you. To me this is part of being responsible with power.

Sorry, but I can give you no such guarantee, nor would I even if I could. For one thing, beyond the details I gave in my original post, I do not actually know what will happen. For another, I do not think it should matter. Are we going to use donated hardware to build a terrorist datacenter? Will your discarded HDD be filled with porn and torrents? Maybe! :D Or maybe not! Let’s find out.

No one is asking anyone else to predict the future here; we are asking what future you are attempting to make. Which you answer elsewhere in the email! So thank you for that.

I think by this point you’ve made your point of view clear so that people who want to know “what’s a non-Department of Sanitation option for disposing of my excess electronics?” can assess the option you’ve offered.

+1 to every detail of @Sumana Harihareswara‘s comment!

For one thing, beyond the details I gave in my original post, I do not actually know what will happen. For another, I do not think it should matter.

Disappointing fates for my hardware (immediately after donation — down the road is none of my business) include:

• You sell the donated hardware and keep the proceeds, but told me I was donating to a community center.
• Your space is actually a monetized YouTube channel about destroying donated hardware in creative ways, and the proceeds fund a startup that uses ML to customize marketing email.
• You encourage people to practice digital forensics skills on un-wiped devices instead of erasing them as promised.

Trustworthiness has to do with whether I think you’re empowering me to decide versus saying what I want to hear. (EDIT: I think it’s reasonable for me to want to audit your immediate intentions, but not the long-term fate of the hardware.)

The lack of detail bothered me because the unstated message to the community is (slightly exaggerated), “If I say too much, you might come and ruin my space, and if I say that, you might not want to donate, therefore I’ll say neither.”

do you actually have hardware you’d like to not-have in the near future or is this just a hypothetical inquiry into my “indicators of trustworthiness” for you?

Yes, I have a bunch.

I have to run off to a job where I ask similar questions about the fate of my work but, for the moment, thanks for sharing the extra context.

I think you are arguing where you could engage (I infer that’s a deliberate choice, but I’m noting it in case it’s not),

No, it is. To be quite blunt, this thread is a perfect illustration of why I stopped showing up to my RC batch half-way through and why you only see me pop up once about every two years to ask if any of you fine, skilled folks have any electronic garbage you’d like to give me for my various nebulous world-improving projects.

I recognize that this kind of judgment reads as condescending to you.

There are quite a lot of things that read as condescending to me coming from one Recurser to another, things that I suppose seem quite acceptable and normal to you, but taking a look around at exactly where I am and remembering I’d rather live a life free of most of the behaviors displayed in this thread, I’ll just leave it at that, return to my little community lab with its very different culture, and trust my position is now clear enough that you know where I stand on such things. :)

Perhaps I will post again in another two years to see if any of you have any spare mobile phones you’re trying to get rid of. Until then, I am sure you will remain comfortable and employed and in possession of more hardware than you use.

Also, Sidney, yes, I am totally running a get rich quick scheme from surplus RC donations and I am making bank. It’s astonishing no one has noticed until now.

Hmm. There’s some miscommunication of intent in this thread. I don’t think you’re running a “get rich quick” scheme. I used that example alongside running a monetized YouTube channel because both seem unlikely for you. You said that the fate of donated electronics shouldn’t matter, and I was trying to communicate how the way they arrive at that fate matters to me (i.e. if I’m being lied to), not cast specific doubts/judgement on you. I feel like you’ve judged my motives based on wrong assumptions about me.

Based on your previous message, I support how you want to use donations. I was still into donating. Hell, I might still be into donating, I have thick skin in this area.

What you read as condescension, I understood as someone trying to non-judgmentally introduce the possibility that other humans might have their own ways of making decisions, and that if they don’t default to agreeing with you, it’s a chance for communication; it doesn’t mean that you’re ideological foes.

My own first message essentially said, “If you’re going to tell people why their established sinks for unwanted electronics ‘just won’t do’ because they’re inconsistent with your ideals, please be open to talking about why your sink for unwanted electronics might ‘do’ for their/my ideals.” I’d appreciate it if you could re-read the messages above with the assumption that we’re all on the same side.

Hell, I might still be into donating

When you figure that out, feel free to let me know.

Hi everyone,

This thread has become unnecessarily mean-spirited and personal. Please don’t post in it any more. If you have equipment that you’d like to donate to may may’s lab, you can get in touch with them off-list.

The RC community only works when we trust each other. As the community continues to grow, trust becomes more important and takes more effort to build. Please act with good intention, assume good intentions on the part of others, and don’t engage in personal attacks. Please also consider your audience: there are a lot of people on this list.

I didn’t read this exchange as mean-spirited and personal, but anyway I hope this is nice-spirited and impersonal enough that you’ll all forgive me for posting after being asked not to.

Hi all,

I’m in touch with a small, new community/social center in the city that’s trying to assemble their first computer lab. They currently have some space for this effort, but no funds, and so asked me if I knew of any places where they can acquire donated hardware. Sadly, in NYC, I don’t. (Do you? Enlighten me!)

The hardware itself need not be in mint condition. It just has to work well-enough that a few moderately experienced tinkerers can use it for something—and not necessarily something “powerful.” All kinds of hardware was requested: old drives, cabling, adapters, modems, routers, power supplies, peripherals, repair tools, even things like locks (they specifically said locks don’t have to have a key to be useful). Basically, anything you have but don’t want that you hope resourceful people could put to good use. :)

So, for instance, if your workplace (or if the workplace of a friend of yours) throws away old computing equipment when they upgrade, I can probably find a good home for those items. Hit me up!

Thanks, -m

I donate all of my old electronics to https://www.lesecologycenter.org/. I know they refurbish and resell some electronics, and others they donate, but I don’t know how you become a recipient of the goods. Might be worth reaching out to them.

Thanks for the suggestion, @[REDACTED]. I reached out to them, but unfortunately the LES Ecology Center and its Gowanus E-Waste Warehouse require a signed W-9 form and an IRS letter before they will give away anything they hold. This is not the kind of “donation” I was hoping to find. That approach simply requires too much capital investment, i.e., it is too high a bar to jump (not to mention far too much cooperation with capitalist structures and thus completely unworkable for all kinds of reasons far beyond mere money) to be a useful avenue for us to pursue.

What I am hoping to find is someone or several someones who no longer need electronics and want to get rid of them (as often happens at office workplaces). I know this is a common occurrence in a community as affluent as RC. After such equipment is donated to LES Ecology Center or an equivalent organization, it becomes subsumed by capitalist gears and is thus inaccessible for all the reasons stated above. That simply won’t do.

So, if you or anyone you know is getting rid of electronics, please consider letting your human friends (or me) know about that, before you donate to an institution that cooperates with the State.

Thanks! -m

Hi may may,

In your Community post last night, you said that you would not commit to changing your behavior and abiding by the RC code of conduct. Because of this, we’ve removed you from the RC community.

This means your Zulip, Community, and recurse.com accounts are now deactivated and you’ll no longer have access to the RC GitHub organization. You also won’t be welcome in the RC space or at future RC events.

Yours, Dave

> [[Wiki|Home]] ▸ [[Guides and advice]] ▸ **Penniless Recursers' Survival Guide** First off, we're thrilled you've chosen to participate in a batch at the Recurse Center! Coming to New York City can feel daunting for many people, but it's likely to feel even scarier if one cannot dedicate a large budget for such a trip. This page is devoted to **resources and suggestions that we hope will help people with little to no money thrive in New York City**. Jump to a section: * [Shelter](#shelter) * [Couch-surfing](#couch-surfing) * [House- and pet-sitting](#house--and-pet-sitting) * [Food](#food) * [Food under $3](#food-under-3) * [Food from $3 to $5](#food-from-3-to-5) * [Pricier but sizeable](#pricier-but-sizeable) * [Drinks](#drinks) * [Transportation](#transportation) * [Walking](#walking) * [Public/mass transit](#publicmass-transit) * [Bicycling](#bicycling) * [Socializing](#socializing) * [Free events](#free-events) * [Free food events](#free-food-events) * [Sundays](#sundays) * [Mondays](#mondays) * [Free arts events](#free-arts-events) * [Free exercise events](#free-exercise-events) * [Pricier but noteworthy](#pricier-but-noteworthy) * [Other event listings](#other-event-listings) * [Acquiring stuff](#acquiring-stuff) * [Privacy](#privacy) # Shelter Finding shelter in NYC is rough. The housing market here is one of the most competitive in the world. The Recurse Center staff know this and have helpfully provided a [Housing forum](https://community.recurse.com/f/housing/12) on RC's internal bulletin board system, *Community*. If you don't have access to that, you will soon. Nevertheless, be prepared for the fact that **most people's idea of "alternative" housing is probably not your idea of "alternative."** The Housing forum on Community is primarily a place to find roommates or relatively inexpensive sublets; it's likely that most of these will be well beyond your budget. "Cheap" housing in NYC ranges from $600 a month and higher. Most AirBnB prices within reasonable distance to Manhattan are even worse. **Couch-surfing, house- or pet-sitting, and stealth urban camping are your most realistic options.** The good news is that these are relatively plentiful. ## Couch-surfing You can post some couch-surfing requests to the Housing forum in Community. Recursers are generally kind, generous, hospitable people! :) That said, you would be remiss not to make use of the following resources, as well: * [Couchsurfing stream on Zulip](https://recurse.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/couchsurfing) A stream on Zulip (RC's internal chat system; again, you'll get access to this soon if you don't already have it) for posting couchsurfing requests! * [CouchSurfing.com](https://couchsurfing.com/) One of the earliest and largest travel hospitality social networks on the Web. Make an account, if you haven't already, it's free. * [WarmShowers.org](https://www.warmshowers.org/) Like CouchSurfing, above, but created specifically for bicyclists. If you're a cyclist, even if you have no plans to cycle through NYC, consider making an account here. It will be easier to find a host given that you can represent yourself as part of a community-of-interest. > 💡 After your batch, if you travel abroad, be sure to check out the [[Couch surfing]] page on this wiki to see if you're going somewhere that an RC alumn can host you! :) ## House- and pet-sitting Many residents of New York City travel frequently, especially Recurse Center alumni. This means you will have more opportunities to house- and/or pet-sit for "friends of friends" than you might otherwise have. 🚧 TK-TODO # Food It's likely that **food in New York City is an order of magnitude more expensive** than you're used to. **DO. NOT. UNDERESTIMATE. THIS.** This applies to supermarkets, bodegas, and groceries, as well as cafés, restaurants, and even a number of fast food chains. If you do have a budget for food, triple it if you can. In addition to the increased cost of groceries, be mindful of the fact that you are likely to have less time/emotional/mental resources on which to spend preparing food yourself, due to the constant bustling atmosphere of events both in the city and at Recurse Center itself. This means you are likely to eat take-out/delivery more often than you might otherwise, despite your best efforts. In case you do find the time to cook, [Good and Cheap](https://cookbooks.leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap.pdf) is a nice guide to eating well on a budget in the US. **Skipping/dumpster diving** can be trickier due to the density of the population and the longer hours of most establishments. This is especially true if you are accustomed to a more suburban diving setting. Skipping is also illegal here and there is a near-constant presence of police on patrol in most parts of lower Manhattan. (The outer boroughs are more varied in terms of their dumpster diving options and police presence.) That said, any trash bin or bag left near the street (as opposed to immediately next to a building or behind a fenced enclosure on the sidewalk) are [considered public domain](https://freegan.info/what-is-a-freegan/freegan-practices/urban-foraging/diving-and-the-law/) and can be taken. Of possible use is the [FallingFruit.org/dumpsters](http://fallingfruit.org/dumpsters) map, and the [Freegan.Info Manhattan](https://freegan.info/freegan-directories/dumpster-directory/manhattan/) and [Brooklyn Dumpster Directories](https://freegan.info/freegan-directories/dumpster-directory/brooklyn/). If you are on **SNAP/EBT/Food Stamps**, you will be able to use them, even if you are from out-of-State. However, **many small shops do not accept EBT**. This includes corner bodegas, delis, and combination grocery store/eateries. Even fewer shops in the immediate vicinity of the Recurse Center's 455 Broadway location accept EBT, due to the classism^H^H^H dynamics of the SoHo and surrounding neighborhoods. Use the [SNAP Retailer Locator](http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/retailerlocator) provided by the United States Department of Agriculture to locate nearby grocers where you can pay for food with your EBT card. **Food banks/[food pantries/soup kitchens](http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1083/find-a-food-pantry-or-soup-kitchen)** may also be an option for acquiring food, especially if you have access to a kitchen at your place of shelter. New York City's municipal government maintains [a directory of food pantries searchable by location](http://www1.nyc.gov/apps/311utils/providerInformation.htm?serviceId=1083). There are also informal networks of food donations that operate like food pantries; attend some [§ Free food events](#free-food-events) to start making relationships with these groups. **The Recurse Center [[kitchen]] does not have a stove,** but there is a microwave and a small toaster oven. This means you will be unable to prepare most hot foods in the space itself, but you will be able to reheat leftovers or toast sandwiches easily. Especially for winter batches, consider cooking soups and stews at your place of shelter (if you have one—see the [#Shelter](#shelter) section for advice, tips, and warnings regarding surviving in NYC while unsheltered) and reheating them for lunch or dinner at RC. Moreover, many people find themselves wanting to arrive early and/or stay late at the Recurse Center's open-space office, and doing this means you will have even less time to actually cook food for which you need a stove. **Communal food shelves** in the Recurse Center's kitchen are often stocked with coffee, creamers, condiments, and sometimes crackers or light snacks. Feel free to have these! Foods and drinks in the kitchen marked with a name (on a sticky note, piece of tape, or written on a label), belongs to their owner, of course. (That said, be mindful of your personal caffeination threshold! :) Recursers are generally open to participate in **informal group food preparation** events, such as [Abstract Salad Factory Friday](https://recurse.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/food/topic/Abstract.20Salad.20Factory.20Friday!) (a sort of less manipulative salad version of [stone soup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup) style cooking) in order to promote healthy eating and lower one another's food costs, as it's often much cheaper to prepare food for a group of people together than to do so for one. Get in on these if they're happening during your batch. If not, be bold and revive these traditions! You'll be thanked for doing so. **Be wary of corporate-branded events** advertising low-cost food. These events often make their way into lists of "free/fun things to do in NYC" (see [#Socializing](#socializing) for details), but are unlikely to work out well for a combination of reasons (prohibitively long waits—consider reading the [#Time management](#time-management) section for details—or simply a lack of supply, etc). Sadly, this sometimes even includes events marketed as "anti-hunger initiatives." :( That being said, the following sections list specific venues where you can get relatively inexpensive meals. See also the [Free food events](#free-food-events) section for even more options. Cross-reference this with info on the [[Vegan and vegan friendly spots]] page if you have certain dietary restrictions. (Though now partly outdated, there's also [a thread on *Community* about cheap eats near RC](https://community.recurse.com/t/cheap-eats/31).) ## Food under $3 * [Jin Mei Dumpling House 津美锅贴](https://www.yelp.com/biz/jin-mei-dumpling-house-津美锅贴-new-york) Northern Chinese dumpling and sandwich parlor (the staff are from Tiānjīn 天津). Various kinds of dumplings fried (5/$1), in soup (6/$2 and up), frozen (30/$5). Beef sandwiches ("sesame pancake with beef", $2). There's a picture of the menu on the window [here](https://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/xDkJNF54YHp69OqWHjOl1g/o.jpg) * [Joey Pepperoni's Pizza](https://www.yelp.com/biz/joeys-pepperoni-pizza-new-york-3) Regular cheese slice is $1. "Lunch special" is $2.75 and includes two cheese slices and a can of Pepsi. It's pretty bland, but it's cheap. * [Golden Steamer](https://www.yelp.com/biz/golden-steamer-new-york) Buns. You can get a big bun and a small bun in $2. I usually take a big bun and a roasted pork bun and they are more than sufficient for me. * [Fried Dumpling](https://www.google.com/search?q=fried+dumpling+menu&oq=fried+dumpling+menu&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.4402j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8): $1 for 5 fried pork buns or 5 fried dumplings ## Food from $3 to $5 * [Mei Yu Spring Restaurant 美如春](https://www.yelp.com/biz/mei-yu-spring-new-york) Fúzhōu _miànshí_ 麵食 [dough-based foods]. Most soups under $5; dumplings fried 5/$1.50, in soup 8/$3 and up; diverse southern-style buns. Menu visible [here](https://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/PuOe7xiFy31qVh7lP69gjA/o.jpg). Good preparations of some unusual Fúzhōu standards like "Fuzhou Meat Ball Noodle Soup" (_yànwán tāngmiàn_ 燕丸湯麵; the skins of the "meat balls" are made of thin-pounded pork, not wheat), noodles in peanut-butter sauce ("Stir Noodle", _bànmiàn_ 拌面), tiny but strongly flavored wontons in soup ("Fuzhou Wonton Soup" _biǎnròu_ 扁肉). * [Jubilee Marketplace](https://maps.google.com/?cid=13119853229355687346) sells egg and cheese breakfast bagel sandwiches for $3.75. * [Vanessa's Dumpling House](https://www.yelp.com/biz/vanessas-dumpling-house-new-york-2) 4 dumplings will set you back $1.75, but you usually need at least 8 to make a meal, bringing your total to $3.50. They're all great. Get what you want. * [Champion Pizza](https://www.yelp.com/menu/champion-pizza-new-york-6) Slices are $2 here, good for a snack or a small lunch. Drinks are overpriced; bring your own water bottle. * [Fu Zhou Cuisine](https://www.yelp.com/biz/shu-jiao-fu-zhou-cuisine-restaurant-new-york) Cheaper than Vanessa's, not as inviting, but also arguably tastier, steamed dumplings here cost $2 for 6, $3 for 10. If you eat a lot, this might be a better option. A common combo here is 10 dumplings + wheat noodles with peanut butter sauce for $3 + $2. * [Wah Fung](https://www.yelp.com/biz/wah-fung-no-1-fast-food-new-york-2) $3.50 for a bunch of greasy chicken/pork and rice/noodles. Should fill you up quite a bit, and if you spend a bit more you can get a larger portion which should last a couple of days if not more. Cash only. * [Canal Cafe Bakery Inc.](https://www.yelp.com/biz/canal-bakery-new-york) Very similar food and price to Wah Fung ($3.50 - 4ish). But you can also buy sugary pastries here and the customer line moves more quickly than Wah Fung at peak times. Cash only. * [King's Kitchen](https://www.yelp.com/biz/kings-kitchen-new-york-2) Standard Chinese restaurant and a bit far from RC (there's probably similar places closer), but I know this place very well. $4-5 should get you a very filling bowl of noodles and pork/chicken or a lot of fried rice. Cash only. * [Punjabi Grocery & Deli](https://goo.gl/maps/wNxq193HBDk) Large portions of very cheap and tasty curries. Vegetarian. * [Mamoun's](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mamoun's,+119+Macdougal+St,+New+York,+NY+10012/@40.7302678,-74.0004169,13z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x89c25991817682af:0xb8bb91865f939e8c?hl=en) $3.50 falafel, $4 if you want to add tabbouleh or hummus ## Pricier but sizeable These venues range above $5 but tend to provide more sizeable portions. You may be able to stretch one purchase across two meals. * [Bahn Mi Saigon](https://www.yelp.com/biz/banh-mi-saigon-new-york) $5 for a pork sandwich * Halal food carts (on basically every corner near RC) ## Drinks * The McDonald's nearby has Small, Medium, and Large coffee for $1 (all sizes cost the same). It's passable/decent. * There is a coffee cart in the morning near [the Canal Street [A], [C], [E] station](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Canal+St/@40.7207122,-73.9993768,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c2598adc3342c9:0x4e7d4c005c794a91!8m2!3d40.7208241!4d-74.0052286) with coffee and pastries for ~$1-$1.50 each. # Transportation Getting around New York City can be confusing at first, but is remarkably easy and fast when compared to other large cities in the United States. Depending on where in the city you're staying, however, getting around can take up a lot of time in your day. ## Walking **Walking, although not the fastest, is one of the cheapest ways of getting around!** It's also safe, and healthy, of course! The Recurse Center is located in downtown Manhattan (in the "SoHo" neighborhood), but the city itself stretches many miles North, East, and South (with the Hudson River to the West), so unless one is crashing nearby, this walk can get pretty long. Prepare for a march and wear good shoes if you have them! See also the [#Privacy](#privacy) section advice on dealing with NYC's incredibly hectic sidewalks, which can be overwhelming and stressful if you're unused to them. ## Public/mass transit The [New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority](http://www.mta.info/) (the NYC MTA, or just MTA, for short) is a single municipal agency that runs all of the city's public buses and trains. New York City calls its trains "the Subway," even when the trains are above-ground, so look for signs that call out "Subway" if you're relying on analogue navigation. You might also hear people refer to the trains as "the Metro," but this is usually a pretty good sign that they are out-of-towners. **Cash cannot be used to purchase fares when entering buses or train stations.** The only way to pay for these rides is to acquire a MetroCard from specially-marked MetroCard vending machines in Subway stations. MetroCard vending machines, however, do take cash. They also accept credit and some debit cards. See the [[Advice for foreigners coming to NY]] page for cautions and advice on getting a card that will work in NYC. **Each bus and train ride costs $2.75 per trip if purchased ahead of time, or $3.00 for a single-ride pass, and this will add up fast.** Thankfully, you can buy "unlimited ride" MetroCards that let you hop on and off as many buses or trains as you wish until the card expires. These are available in 7-day or 30-day varieties. If you have a budget for transportation and are not staying within walking distance to the Recurse Center, *seriously consider purchasing one of these unlimited ride cards,* as they increasingly become more valuable the more frequently you use public transit services. Another benefit of these cards is that they are fixed-rate, so they may be easier to budget for. See [the NYC MTA's fares page](http://web.mta.info/nyct/fare/FaresatAGlance.htm) for the most up-to-date information about public transit fare costs. **Do not trash MetroCards you have purchased, as each physical card costs $1 on top of fare costs to acquire.** Keep your old cards and reuse them. You can refill MetroCards by adding money to them or by extending their expiration dates for unlimited ride varieties.

ALT

maymay.net

The following call has been issued to peace activist groups. In addition we urge all computer people to join us in Atlantic City in May.

Computers are increasingly being used as a means of oppression. They are at the heart of every military and police system. They are at the core of every major corporation and are used to maximize profits with little regard for human needs.

The Spring Joint Computer Conference (SJCC) is an annual trade show-technical conference-public relations gimmick-sales event which brings together representatives of major corporations (IBM, GE, Honeywell, RCA, Litton, Rand, AT&T, etc.), high level representatives of the military and government, and the technocratic elite that serves their interests.

Obviously the event is overwhelmingly dominated by white males.

SJCC is being at Convention Hall in Atlantic City, N.J., on May 18-20. Attendance is expected to exceed 30,000, making the conference one of the largest military-industrial gatherings in the country.

Computer People for Peace proposes a mass multi-issue series of actions, meetings, and demonstrations during the SJCC. The issues to be raised include:

• US genocide in South East Asia, particularly corporate involvement. (Honeywell is the prime manufacturer of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs.)
• Repression at home, specifically the use of computer based information systems as a means of social control. (Military Intelligence keeps data banks on civilians–including all of us.)
• Corporate racism (IBM plans to expand its South African market while the rate of unemployment among Third World people in the US continues to increase.)
• The present misuse vs. the constructive potential of computer technology (as applied to health, education, welfare, housing, ecology, and urban planning).
• The role of automation on the rising level of unemployment.

Interrupt, 14

February, 1971

Newsletter of Computer People for Peace

Computer People for Peace The Dolphin Center 137 West 14th Street New York, N. Y. 10011

A user agent is nothing more than some entity that acts on behalf of users themselves.1 What this means is that it’s important to understand these users as well as their user agents. User agents are the tools we use to interact with the wealth of possibilities that exists on the Internet. They are like extensions of ourselves. Indeed, they are (increasingly literally) our eyes and ears in cyberspace.

Web developers are already familiar with many common user agents: web browsers! We’re even notorious for sometimes bemoaning the sheer number of them that already exist. Maybe we need to reexamine why we do that.

There are many different kinds of users out there, each with potentially radically different needs. Therefore, to understand why there are so many user agents in existence we need to understand what the needs of all these different users are. This isn’t merely a theoretical exercise, either. The fact is that figuring out a user’s needs helps us to present our content to that user in the best possible way.

Presenting content to users and, by extension, their user agents appropriately goes beyond the typical accessibility argument that asserts the importance of making your content available to everyone (though we’ll certainly be making that argument, too). The principles behind understanding a user’s needs are much more important than that.

You’ll recall that the Web poses two fundamental challenges. One challenge is that any given piece of content, a single document, needs to be presented in multiple ways. This is the problem that CSS was designed to solve. The other challenge is the inverse: many different kinds of content need to be made available, each kind requiring a similar presentation. This is what XML (and its own accompanying “style sheet” language, XSLT) was designed to solve. Therefore, combining the powerful capabilities of CSS and XML is the path we should take to understanding, technically, how to solve this problem and present content to users and their user agents.

Since a specific user agent is just a tool for a specific user, the form the user agent takes depends on what the needs of the user are. In formal use case semantics, these users are called actors, and we can describe their needs by determining the steps they must take to accomplish some goal. Similarly, in each use case, a certain tool or tools used to accomplish these goals defines what the user agent is in that particular scenario.2

A simple example of this is that when Joe goes online to read the latest technology news from Slashdot, he uses a web browser to do this. Joe (our actor) is the user, his web browser (whichever one he chooses to use) is the user agent, and reading the latest technology news is the goal. That’s a very traditional interaction, and in such a scenario we can make some pretty safe assumptions about how Joe, being a human and all, reads news.

Now let’s envision a more outlandish scenario to challenge our understanding of the principle. Joe needs to go shopping to refill his refrigerator and he prefers to buy the items he needs with the least amount of required driving due to rising gas prices. This is why he owns the (fictional) Frigerator2000, a network-capable refrigerator that keeps tabs on the inventory levels of nearby grocery stores and supermarkets and helps Joe plan his route. This helps him avoid driving to a store where he won’t be able to purchase the items he needs.

If this sounds too much like science fiction to you, think again. This is a different application of the same principle used by feed readers, only instead of aggregating news articles from web sites we’re aggregating inventory levels from grocery stores. All that would be required to make this a reality is an XML format for describing a store’s inventory levels, a bit of embedded software, a network interface card on a refrigerator, and some tech-savvy grocery stores to publish such content on the Internet.

In this scenario, however, our user agent is radically different from the traditional web browser. It’s a refrigerator! Of course, there aren’t (yet) any such user agents out crawling the Web today, but there are a lot of user agents that aren’t web browsers doing exactly that.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com are probably the most famous examples of users that aren’t people. These companies all have automated programs, called spiders, which “crawl” the Web indexing all the content they can find. Unlike humans and very much like our hypothetical refrigerator-based user agent, these spiders can’t look at content with their eyes or listen to audio with their ears, so their needs are very different from someone like Joe’s.

There are still other systems of various sorts that exist to let us interact with web sites and these, too, can be considered user agents. For example, many web sites provide an API that exposes some functionality as web services. Microsoft Word 2008 is an example of a desktop application that you can use to create blog posts in blogging software such as WordPress and MovableType because both of these blogging tools support the MetaWeblog API, an XML-RPC3 specification. In this case, Microsoft Word can be considered a user agent.

As mentioned earlier, the many incarnations of news readers that exist are another form of user agent. Many web browsers and email applications, such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail, do this, too.4 Feed readers provide a particularly interesting way to examine the concept of user agents because there are many popular feed reading web sites today, such as Bloglines.com and Google Reader. If Joe opens his web browser and logs into his account at Bloglines, then Joe’s web browser is the user agent and Joe is the user. However, when Joe reads the news feeds he’s subscribed to in Bloglines, the Bloglines server goes to fetch the RSS- or Atom-formatted feed from the sourced site. What this means is that from the point of view of the sourced site, Bloglines.com is the user, and the Bloglines server process is the user agent.

Coming to this realization means that, as developers, we can understand user agents as an abstraction for a particular actor’s goals as well as their capabilities. This is, of course, an intentionally vague definition because it’s technically impossible for you, as the developer, to predict the features or capabilities present in any particular user agent. This is a challenge we’ll be talking about a lot in the remainder of this book because it is one of the defining characteristics of the Web as a publishing medium.

Rather than this lack of clairvoyance being a problem, however, the constraint of not knowing who or what will be accessing our published content is actually a good thing. It turns out that well-designed markup is also markup that is blissfully ignorant of its user, because it is solely focused on describing itself. You might even call it narcissistic.

Talking about self-describing markup is just another way of talking about semantic markup. In this paradigm, the content in the fetched document is strictly segregated from its ultimate presentation. Nevertheless, the content must eventually be presented to the user somehow. If information for how to do this isn’t provided by the markup, then where is it, and who decides what it is?

At first you’ll no doubt be tempted to say that this information is in the document’s style sheet and that it is the document’s developer who decides what that is. As you’ll examine in detail in the next chapter, this answer is only mostly correct. In every case, it is ultimately the user agent that determines what styles (in which style sheets) get applied to the markup it fetches. Furthermore, many user agents (especially modern web browsers) allow the users themselves to further modify the style rules that get applied to content. In the end, you can only influence—not control—the final presentation.

Though surprising to some, this model actually makes perfect sense. Allowing the users ultimate control of the content’s presentation helps to ensure that you meet every possible need of each user. By using CSS, content authors, publishers, and developers—that is, you—can provide author style sheets that easily accommodate, say, 80 percent of the needs of 90 percent of the users. Even in the most optimistic scenario, edge cases that you may not ever be aware of will still escape you no matter how hard you try to accommodate everyone’s every need.5 Moreover, even if you had those kinds of unlimited resources, you may not know how best to improve the situation for that user. Given this, who better to determine the presentation of a given XML document that needs to be presented in some very specific way than the users with that very specific need themselves?

A common real-life example of this situation might occur if Joe were colorblind. If he were and he wanted to visit some news site where the links in the article pullouts were too similar a color to the pullout’s background, he might not realize that those elements are actually links. Thankfully, because Joe’s browser allows him to set up a web site with his own user style sheet, he can change the color of these links to something that he can see more easily. If CSS were not designed with this in mind, it would be impossible for Joe to personalize the presentation of this news site so that it would be optimal for him.

To many designers coming from traditional industries such as print design, the fact that users can change the presentation of their content is an alarming concept. Nevertheless, this isn’t just the way the Web was made to work; this is the only way it could have worked. Philosophically, the Web is a technology that puts control into the hands of users. Therefore, our charge as web designers is to judge different people’s needs to be of equal importance, and we can’t do this if we treat every user exactly the same way.6

1. This is purposefully a broad definition because we’re not just talking about web pages here, but rather all kinds of technology. The principles are universal. There are, however, more exacting definitions available. For instance, the W3C begins the HTML 4 specification with some formal definitions, including what a “user agent” is. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/conform.html. [↩]
2. In real use cases, technical jargon and specific tools like a web browser are omitted because such use cases are used to define a system’s requirements, not its implementation. Nevertheless, the notion of an actor and an actor’s goals are helpful in understanding the mysterious “user” and this user’s software. [↩]
3. XML-RPC is a term referring to the use of XML files describing method calls and data transmitted over HTTP, typically used by automated systems. It is thus a great example of a technology that takes advantage of XML’s data serialization capabilities, and is often thought of as a precursor to today’s Ajax techniques. [↩]
4. It was in fact the much older email technology from which the term user agent originated; an email client program is more technically called a mail user agent (MUA). [↩]
5. As it happens, this is the same argument open source software proponents make about why such open source software often succeeds in meeting the needs of more users than closed source, proprietary systems controlled solely by a single company with (by definition) relatively limited resources. [↩]
6. This philosophy is embodied in the formal study of ethics, which is a compelling topic for us as CSS developers, considering the vastness of the implications we describe here. [↩]

Real relationship anarchy is political. There’s just no way around it. How could it be otherwise, when it has roots in political anarchism? Relationship anarchy is not about getting your dick wet and looking cool while you do it. It’s not about sounding hipper than all the other polyamorists. You can do polyamory without any political consciousness whatsoever, and you can definitely do monogamy without it. You can be mono or poly in service of the capitalist hetero-patriarchy. Most people are. But you can’t do relationship anarchy without some awareness of the socio-political context you’re operating in and how you’re attempting to go against that grain out of a genuine belief in certain concrete principles. Those concrete principles are nothing so basic and shallow as “freedom” (to fuck) or “honesty.” They’re the kind of political principles that you can base an effective social movement on: a movement that offers an alternative to the capitalist hetero-patriarchy’s commodification of bodies, sex, and love; to the sabotage of female solidarity in friendship and romantic love; to neoliberal capitalism’s goal of the isolated couple and nuclear family; to the homophobia and toxic gender crap that prevents even nonsexual/nonromantic connection and intimacy between members of the same sex.

[…R]elationship anarchy resonates with me so much because its principles amount to a friendship ethic. The word “friendship” is widely used as a broad, vague, often meaningless term, but to me, friendship as this deep, intimate, important, positive bond between humans is described really well by the above set of principles. Friendship leans away from interpersonal coercion by default and can’t survive under the burden of it for long. Mutual aid and cooperation are in friendship’s very nature; you could even define friendship by those qualities: helping and supporting each other out of desire and not duty. And when friendship is committed, that commitment is done in a spirit of communication, not drawn up as a contract, which what marriage is: a legal contract binding romantic partners.

[…]

Being a relationship anarchist doesn’t mean you have to fuck more than one person at a time, because relationship anarchy is not about sexual nonmonogamy, even though it is usually inclusive of sexual nonmonogamy. Relationship anarchy is not polyamory sans the obvious hierarchy of romantic partners. It’s about doing relationships with community-centric values, not couple-centric values. Above all, it’s about relating to other human beings without coercive authority in play and without hierarchy in your group of relationships or in any relationship itself.

I fucking cringe when I read about polyamorous people defining “relationship anarchy” using nonhierarchal polyamory’s terms, just as I cringe when I hear stories of men pulling the RA card on their casual sexcapades. Not just because of how unbelievably inaccurate, apolitical, and ignorant it is but because in both cases, “relationship anarchy” is falsely used to describe the kind of romance supremacist, friendship-excluding, sex-centric lifestyles that are diametrically opposed to authentic relationship anarchy.

The capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal state promotes relationship hierarchies based on romance supremacy and amatonormativity. It endorses treating sex like a product, protects heterosexual men in their consumption of female bodies as sexual objects, promotes the buying and selling of women’s sexualized bodies. The capitalist heteronormative patriarchal state WANTS you to invest all of your free time, energy, resources, and emotion into romantic couplehood, into marriage, into sex. It WANTS you to devalue friendship, to stay isolated from everyone who isn’t your romantic partner, to be a self-interested individual with no ties or commitments to anyone but your spouse. Why? Because friendship could lead to community and community could lead to collective political action, which could turn into revolution. And because friendship and community are almost impossible to commodify and harness for the purpose of feeding into the capitalist economy and creating bigger profits for the wealthy elite. Sex and romance make rich people money all day every day. They sell it to you every waking moment. They can’t use friendship and community to sell you shit. They can’t turn friendship and community into products. If they could, they would’ve spent the last century doing so, instead of teaching the public that friendship is worthless and money is more important than community.

So don’t tell me that you’re entitled to call your polyamory or your casual sex “relationship anarchy,” as you conduct your social life with anti-anarchism principles and the same amatonormativity that all the coupled up monogamists preach and believe in. Don’t tell me you’re a “relationship anarchist” when you don’t give a fuck about friendship or community or political resistance, just sex and romance and your freedom to be nonmonogamous.

Relationship anarchy is not a cover for fuckboys. And it is not nonhierarchical polyamory.

Unfortunately, it is […] likely that in the United States, current legal mechanisms, such as NSLs and secret FISA warrants, will continue to target the marginalized. This will include immigrants, Muslims, minorities, and even journalists who dare to report unfavorably about the status quo. History is full of examples of surveillance infrastructure being abused for political reasons.

[…W]e decided to enumerate some general principles that we follow to design systems that are resistant to coercion, compromise, and single points of failure of all kinds, especially adversarial failure. We hope that these principles can be used to start a wider conversation about current best practices for data management and potential areas for improvement at major tech companies.

1. Do not rely on the law to protect systems or users.
2. Prepare and test policy commentary for quick response to crisis.
3. Only keep the user data that you currently need.
4. Give users full control over their data.
5. Allow pseudonymity and anonymity.
6. Encrypt data in transit and at rest.
7. Invest in cryptographic R&D to replace non-cryptographic systems.
8. Eliminate single points of security failure, even against coercion.
9. Favor open source and enable user freedom.
10. Practice transparency: share best practices, stand for ethics, and report abuse.

• “A gentle introduction to threats and how to defend against them” – This is a video and a heavily-hyperlinked transcript of a presentation I first put together for CryptoParty Albuquerque in 2015, published on my personal blog.
• “Know Your (Digital) Rights” – my co-organizer from CryptoParty Albuquerque put together a legal primer, which we also have a video recording and heavily-hyperlinked transcript for posted on my personal blog.
• Another resource, especially useful for Recursers, is the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse’s Consumer Guide on Workplace Privacy and Employee Monitoring, which gives an overview (and more links) on the legalities of asserting your privacy rights as an employee of a company.

In addition to these primers and the links included in them, additional useful resources are:

• PrivacyTools.io – Simply start at the top and read down the page. This is as guided an introduction to privacy issues and what to do about them as it gets.
• EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense Handbook – A thorough treatment of anti-surveillance software, along with tutorials for how to get them installed and working on your system.
• If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of this already, consider spending just a little bit of time to walk yourself through the SSD’s Security Starter Pack.
• PRISM-Break! – An overwhelmingly large digital reference card for all the privacy-enhancing tools available to you for a particular platform, purpose, or protocol. Be cautious here, some of the listed tools are experimental, not audited, or worse.
• Security in a Box – A slightly dated, but still generally solid, resource website featuring much of the same content as the EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide, but with a regularly updated blog. Created and maintained by the TacticalTech.org collective.

There’s a ton of stuff in there, and learning about how to defend yourself from governments, corporations, or malicious individuals on the Internet is more involved than simply picking up one or two tools. But a few well-chosen tools does give you a really, really good start. Taking some time to familiarize yourself with the above guides will hopefully help you become even more capable.

• Try to generate per-user, instead of per-site, salt.
• Don’t just double-hash passwords (i.e., hash(hash($password)), because this reduces the entropy used as input for the final result, and increases the chance of hash collisions. Instead, iterate the hash function by concatenating the original input (or a salt, or something) back into the resulting hash as well (i.e., hash($salt . hash($salt . $password))). This iteration also slows down an offline attack, but again, only if done correctly in code.
• Don’t use multiple dictionary words as a password, even a long one, because these are easy to guess. For instance, contrary to popular belief, “correct battery horse staple” is a bad password, not because it lacks entropy, but because all of its components are likely to be in an attacker’s wordlist. Use a password manager and generate random passwords, instead.

ALT

ALT

What is the operative ethic of a given feature, product design, or implementation choice you make? Who is the feature intended to empower or serve? How do we measure that? In “Ethical Refactoring,” we’ll take a look at small part of an existing popular feature, product, or service, analyze its UX flow/implementation/etc. from the point of view of different users, and discuss the ethical considerations and assumptions implicit in the developer’s design choices. Next we’ll choose a different ethic to accentuate and re-design the same feature/product/service from a different ethical perspective and see how this affects our development process and design choices.

Not a crisis: not everybody can code.

Actually a crisis: programmers don’t know ethics, history, sociology, psychology, or the law.

https://twitter.com/bmastenbrook/status/793104148732469248

Here’s an idea: before we teach everybody to code, how about we teach coders about the people whose lives they’re affecting?

https://twitter.com/bmastenbrook/status/793104080214392832

Interviewer: Have you thought about bringing in, say, like an ethicist to, to vet your experiments?

Christian Rudder: To wring his hands all day for a hundred thousand dollars a year?

Interviewer: Well, y’know, you could pay him, y’know, on a case by case basis, maybe not a hundred thousand a year.

CR: Sure, yeah, I was making a joke. No we have not thought about that.

Hi all,

I’d like to try an experiment that’s possibly a little far afield from what many folks might be used to. I think this would be a lot more valuable with involvement from the RC alumni community, so I’m gonna make a first attempt this upcoming Tuesday, November 1st, at 6:30pm (when alumni are welcome to stop by 455 Broadway).

And what is this experiment? I’m calling it an “Ethics Refactoring” session.

In these sessions, we’ll take a look at a small part of an existing popular feature, product, or service that many people are likely already familiar with (like the Facebook notification feed, the OkCupid “match percentage” display, and so on), analyze its UX flow/implementation/etc. from the point of view of different users, and discuss the ethical considerations and assumptions implicit in the developer’s design choices. Next we’ll choose a different ethic to accentuate and re-design the same feature/product/service taking a different ethical stance and see how this affects our development process and design choices.

This isn’t about “right” or “wrong,” “better” or “worse,” nor is it about making sure everyone agrees with everyone else about what ethic a given feature “should” prioritize. Rather, I want this to be about:

• practicing ways of making the implicit values decisions process that happens during product/feature development and implementation more explicit,
• gaining a better understanding of the ethical “active ingredient” in a given feature, product design, or implementation choice, and
• honing our own communication skills (both verbally and through our product designs) around expressing our values to different people we work with.

I know this sounds a bit vague, and that’s because I’ve never done anything like this and don’t exactly know how to realize the vision for a session like that’s in my head. My hope is that something like the above description is close enough, and intriguing enough, to enough people (and particularly to the alumnus community) that y’all will be excited enough to try out something new like this with me.

Also, while not exactly what I’m talking/thinking about, one good introduction to some of the above ideas in a very particular area is at the http://TimeWellSpent.io website. Take a moment to browse that site if the above description leaves you feeling curious but wary of coming to this. :)

I think “Ethics Refactoring” sessions could be useful for:

• getting to know fellow RC’ers who you may not spend much time with due to differences in language/framework/platform choice,
• gaining insight into the non-obvious but often far-reaching implications of making certain design or implementation choices,
• learning about specific technologies by understanding their non-technological effects (i.e., learning about a class of technologies by starting at a different place than “the user manual/hello world example”)
• having what are often difficult and nuanced conversations with employers, colleagues, or even less-technical users for which understanding the details of people’s life experiences as well as the details of a particular technology is required to communicate an idea or concern effectively.

-maymay

I’m happy to note that there are 19(!!!) “Yes” RSVP’s on the Zulip thread, but a little surprised because I did not have such a large group in mind when I conceived this. Since this is kind of an experiment from the get-go, I think I’m going to revise my own plan for facilitating such a session to accommodate such a relatively large group and impose a very loose structure. I also only allotted 1 hour for this, and with a larger group we may need a bit more time?

With that in mind, here is a short and very fuzzy outline for what I’m thinking we’ll do in this session tomorrow:

• 5-10min: Welcome! And a minimal orientation for what we mean when we say “ethic” for the purpose of this session (as in, “identify the operative ethic of a given feature”). Specifically, clarify the following: an “ethic” is distinct from and not the same thing as an “incentive structure” or a “values statement,” despite being related to both of those things (and others).
• 15-20min: Group brainstorm to think of and list popular or familiar features/products/services that are of a good size for this exercise; “Facebook” is too large, “Facebook’s icon for the Settings page” is too small, but “Facebook’s notification stream” is about right. Then pick two or three from the list that the largest number of people have used or are familiar with, and see if we can figure out what those features’ “operative ethics” can reasonably be said to be.
• 15-20min: Split into smaller work-groups to redesign a given feature; your work-groups may work best if they consist of people who 1) want to redesign the same given feature as you and 2) want to redesign to highlight the same ethic as you. I.e., if you want to redesign Facebook’s notification stream to highlight a given ethic, group with others who want to work both on that feature AND with towards the same ethic. (It is okay if you have slight disagreements or different goals than your group-mates; the point of this session is to note how ethics inform the collaborative process, not to produce a deliverable or to write code that implements a different design.)
• 10-15min: Describe the alternate design your group came up with to the rest of the participants, and ask/answer some questions about it.

This might be a lot to cram into 1 hour with 19+ people, but I really have no idea. I’m also not totally sure this will even “work” (i.e., translate well from my head to an actual room full of people). But I guess we’ll know by tomorrow evening. :)

• Facebook’s News Feed
• Yelp recommendation engine
• Uber driver rating system
• Netflix auto-play
• Dating site messaging systems (Tinder “match,” OkCupid private messages, Bumble “women message first”)

• Ethics is a systems-thinking problem, and cannot be approached piecemeal. That is, you cannot make a system “ethical” by minor tweaks, such as by adding a feature here or removing a feature there. The ethics of something is a function of all its component’s and the interactions between them, both technical and non-technical. The analogy I used was security: you cannot secure an insecure design by adding a login page. You have to change the design, because a system is only as secure as its weakest link.
• Understand and appreciate why different people might look at exactly the same implementation and come away feeling like a very different operative ethic is the driving force of that feature. In this experimental session, one of the sticking points was the way in which Uber’s algorithm for rating drivers was considered either to be driven by an ethic of domination or an ethic of self-improvement by different people. I obviously have my own ideas and feelings about Uber’s rating system, but the point here is not that one group is “right” and the other group is “wrong,” but rather that the same feature was perceived in a very different light by different sets of people. For now, all I want to say is notice and appreciate that.
• Consider that second-order effects will reach beyond the system you’re designing and impact people who are not direct users of your product. This means that designers should consider the effects their system has not just on their product’s direct user base, but also on the people who can’t, won’t, or just don’t use their product, too. Traditionally, these groups of people are either ignored or actively “converted” (think how “conversions” means “sales” to business people), but there are a lot of other reasons why this approach isn’t good for anyone involved, including the makers of a thing. Some sensitivity to the ecosystem in which you are operating is helpful to the design process, too (think interoperability, for example).
• Even small changes to a design can massively alter the ethical considerations at play. In our session, one thing that kept coming up about Uber’s system is that a user who rates a driver has very little feedback about how that rating will affect the driver. A big part of the discussion we had centered on questions like, “What would happen if the user would be shown the driver’s new rating in the UI before they actually submitted a given rating to a given driver?” This is something people were split about, both in terms of what ethic such a design choice actually mapped to as well as what the actual effect of such a design choice would be. Similar questions popped up for other aspects of the rating system.
• Consider the impact of unintended, or unexpected, consequences carefully. This is perhaps the most important take-away, and also one of the hardest things to actually do. After all, the whole point of an analysis process is that it analyzes only the things that are captured by the analysis process. But that’s the rub! It is often the unintentional byproducts, rather than the intentional direct results, of a system that has the strongest impact (whether good or bad) of successful systems. As a friend of mine likes to say, “Everything important is a side-effect.” This was made very clear through the exercise simply by virtue of the frequency and ease with which a suggestion by one person often prompted a different person to highlight a likely scenario in which that same suggestion could backfire.

Let me be clear that I love the idea of a decentralized emergency alerting response platform. I think it’s incredibly important for such a tool to exist. […] I want to see a project with Cell 411’s claims succeed and be a part of abolishing the police and the State altogether. I think there’s real potential there to make headway on an important social good (abolishing the police, dismantling the prison industrial complex, among other social goods) and I want to offer whatever supportive resources I can to further a project with these goals.

On the Google Play store, Cell 411 describes itself like this:

Cell 411 is a De-centralized, micro-social platform that allows users to issue emergency alerts, and respond to alerts issued by their friends.

The problem is in the very first adjective: de-centralized. To a technologist, “decentralization” is the characteristic of having no single endpoint with which a given user must communicate in order to make use of the service. Think trackerless BitTorrent, BitCoin, Tor, or Diaspora. These are all examples of “decentralized” networks or services because if any given computer running the software goes down, the network stays up. One of the characteristics inherent in decentralized networks is an inability of the network or service creator from unilaterally barring access to the network by a given end-user. In other words, there is no one who can “ban” your account from using BitTorrent. That’s not how “piracy” works, duh.

Unfortunately, many of the people I’ve spoken to about Cell 411 seem to believe that “decentralized” simply means “many users in geographically diverse locations.” But this is obviously ignorant. If that were what decentralized meant, then Facebook and Twitter and Google could all be meaningfully described as “decentralized services.” That’s clearly ridiculous. This image shows the difference between centralization and decentralization:

ALT

As you can see, what matters is not where the end users are located, but that there is more than one hub for a given end user to connect to in order to access the rest of the network.

Armed with that knowledge, have a look at the very first clause of Cell 411’s Terms of Service legalese, which reads, and I quote:

1. We may terminate or suspend your account immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever, including without limitation if you breach the Terms.

This is immediately suspect. If they are able to actually enforce such a claim, then it is a claim that directly contradicts a claim made by their own description. In a truly decentralized network or service, the ability for the network creator to unilaterlly “terminate or suspend your account immediately, without prior notice or liability” is not technically possible. If Cell 411 truly is decentralized, this is an unenforceable clause, and they know it. On the other hand, if Cell 411 is centralized (and this clause is enforceable), other, more troubling concerns immediately come to mind. Why should activists trade one centralized emergency dispatch tool run by the government (namely, 9-1-1), for another centralized one run by a company? Isn’t this just replacing one monopoly with another? And why bill a centralized service as a decentralized one in the first place?

I want to see Cell 411 and Buoy both get better. Buoy could become better if it had Cell 411’s mobile app features. Cell 411 could become better if its server could be run by anyone with a WordPress blog, like Buoy can be.

@maymaymx Seriously dude, I am not interested in cooperating or even discussing any topic with anyone using the handle "Kill White America"

— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) March 5, 2016

@maymaymx Did you tweet that on your $3k Mac built by a white capitalist running a closed source OS?

— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) March 6, 2016

@maymaymx Right now the main reason is you and your white, arrogant, entitled millennial ass.

— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) March 6, 2016

It’s obvious, at least to anyone who understands that the purpose of cops is to protect and uphold white supremacy and oppress the working class, why cops would hate a free decentralized emergency response service. Again, I want to use such an app so badly that I began building one myself.

But if Cell 411 is centralized, then it becomes a much more useful tool for law enforcement than it does for a private individual, for exactly the same reason as Facebook presents a much more useful tool for the NSA than it does for your local reading group, despite offering benefits to both.

ALT

[…]

As long as Cell 411 remains a proprietary, closed-source, centralized tool, all the hype about it being a decentralized app that cops hate will remain hype. And there are few things agents of the State like more than activists who are unable to see the reality of a situation for what it is.

ALT

If you think having a free software, anarchist infrastructural alternative to the police and other State-sponsored emergency services is important and want to see it happen, we need your help making Buoy better. You can find instructions for hacking on Buoy on our wiki.

Cell 411 is a De-centralized, micro-social platform that allows users to issue emergency alerts, and respond to alerts issued by their friends.

ALT

1. We may terminate or suspend your account immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever, including without limitation if you breach the Terms.

@maymaymx Yes, it's a free app but this is not an open source project. At least not at this point in time.

— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) February 28, 2016

ALT

And that concerns me greatly. Cell 411 originally cost 99¢ per app install on both the Google Play and iTunes app stores. It’s now free, which, again, is a move in the right direction. But by refusing to release the source code, SafeArx holds its users hostage in more ways than one. There are already rumors that the company is intending to monetize the app in the future, perhaps by charging for app downloads or perhaps in some other way in the future. That is fucked. The people who need an alternative to the police most of all are not people with money. That’s why all of Buoy’s code was available as free software from the very beginning; so those people could access the tool. And beyond that, it’s the very people who need an alternative to the prison industrial complex most who are also most in need of safety from capitalism’s exploitative “monetization.”

ALT

ALT

1. Here’s the email I sent to Virgil Vaduva, Cell 411’s creator and SafeArx’s founder (the company behind the app):

From: maymay <bitetheappleback@gmail.com> Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2016 20:03:38 -0700

Hi Virgil,

My name is maymay. I learned about Cell 411 recently and I’m excited to see its development. It is similar to a web-based project of my own. I am wondering where the source code for the Cell 411 app can be found. I could not find any links to a source code repository from any of the marketing materials that I saw on your website.

Our own very similar project is called Buoy. The difference is that Buoy is intended for community leaders and intends to be a fully free software “community-based crisis response system,” with the same anti-cop ideology as Cell 411 but built as a plugin for WordPress in order to make it super easy for anyone to host their own community’s 9-1-1 equivalent.

Our source code is here:

https://github.com/meitar/better-angels/

We have focused on the web-app side of things because that’s where our experience lies, but were hoping to create a native mobile app later on. It seems you already made one. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we’re hoping to integrate what you’ve done with Cell 411 with what we’ve already developed in order to facilitate a more decentralized, truly citizen-powered infrastructure alternative to 9-1-1.

So that’s why we’re interested in looking at Cell 411’s source code.

Thanks for your work on this so far.

Cheers, -maymay Maymay.net Cyberbusking.org

1. [↩]

1. The first post is: A Sneak Peek at Better Angels’ Buoy: the private, enhanced 9-1-1 for your personal community
2. The second post is: Buoy (the first?) anti-policing community-based crisis response system, now available in Spanish

Did you notice how incredibly toned-down this post was?

P.S. Did you notice how this post has a different tone than my original post announcing Buoy’s prototype release? Guess which one expresses how I really feel.

• From salchristina:

This is great! Right now I’m working with some psychiatric survivors in Vermont to start an SMS crisis-support hotline so people can safely/easily contact a group of likeminded people, and hopefully have less interaction with crisis service / cops.

• From limnrix:

I kind of want to see if it’s possible to connect this to a volunteer medic system (and be one of those medics, although it doesn’t look like I’ll be renewing my certification)

• From brazenautomaton:

I don’t think someone whose views are this skewed can be trusted with… pretty much anything involving personal safety or protection from harm. […] American police, much like America as a whole, are terrible awful bad evil worst, until you compare them to any of the other things they can be compared to. The police are corrupt and need reform, don’t get me wrong. But saying that since they are corrupt, a better option is to cut them out altogether, is one of the worst ideas a person could ever have. […] And my personal heuristic is that any anarchists who are this smug about it cannot correctly assess anything and their perceptions cannot be trusted to any extent.

Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry. Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness.

[…]

Once, when doctors actually listened at length to their patients about their lives, it was obvious to many of them that coercion played a significant role in their misery. But most physicians, including psychiatrists, have stopped delving into their patients’ lives. In 2011, the New York Times (“Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy”) reported, “A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients.” As the article points out, psychiatrists can make far more money primarily providing “medication management,” in which they only check symptoms and adjust medication.

Since the 1980s, biochemical psychiatry in partnership with Big Pharma has come to dominate psychiatry, and they have successfully buried truths about coercion that were once obvious to professionals who actually listened at great length to their patients—obvious, for example, to Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) and R.D. Laing (The Politics of Experience, 1967). This is not to say that Freud’s psychoanalysis and Laing’s existential approach always have been therapeutic. However, doctors who focus only on symptoms and prescribing medication will miss the obvious reality of how a variety of societal coercions can result in a cascade of family coercions, resentments, and emotional and behavioral problems.

Modernity is replete with institutional coercions not present in most indigenous cultures. This is especially true with respect to schooling and employment, which for most Americans, according to recent polls, are alienating, disengaging, and unfun. As I reported earlier this year (“Why Life in America Can Literally Drive You Insane, a Gallup poll, released in January 2013, reported that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become, and by high school, only 40% reported being engaged. Critics of schooling—from Henry David Thoreau, to Paul Goodman, to John Holt, to John Taylor Gatto—have understood that coercive and unengaging schooling is necessary to ensure that young people more readily accept coercive and unengaging employment. And as I also reported in that same article, a June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have checked out of them.

Unengaging employment and schooling require all kinds of coercions for participation, and human beings pay a psychological price for this. In nearly three decades of clinical practice, I have found that coercion is often the source of suffering.

[…]

In all societies, there are coercions to behave in culturally agreed-upon ways. For example, in many indigenous cultures, there is peer pressure to be courageous and honest. However, in modernity, we have institutional coercions that compel us to behave in ways that we do not respect or value. Parents, afraid their children will lack credentials necessary for employment, routinely coerce their children to comply with coercive schooling that was unpleasant for these parents as children. And though 70% of us hate or are disengaged from our jobs, we are coerced by the fear of poverty and homelessness to seek and maintain employment.

In our society, we are taught that accepting institutional coercion is required for survival. We discover a variety of ways—including drugs and alcohol—to deny resentment. We spend much energy denying the lethal effects of coercion on relationships. And, unlike many indigenous cultures, we spend little energy creating a society with a minimal amount of coercion.

Accepting coercion as “a fact of life,” we often have little restraint in coercing others when given the opportunity. This opportunity can present itself when we find ourselves above others in an employment hierarchy and feel the safety of power; or after we have seduced our mate by being as noncoercive as possible and feel the safety of marriage. Marriages and other relationships go south in a hurry when one person becomes a coercive control freak; resentment quickly occurs in the other person, who then uses counter-coercive measures.

• “To Fix School, Make It Consensual,” which is to say, abolish school
• You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense
• Radical Ethicism, Part 1 and especially Part 2.