This weekend I’m attending the LaborTech conference in San Francisco. I’ve been excited about this all week. The goal of this conference is to put social media, video, web, and cellphone training into the hands of the people who most need it: the workers who are trying to contest the “key messages” put out by corporations and the mainstream media.

I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in just a few hours. LaborTech is an International conference, so there are workers and organizers from all over the world.

One of the things I learned about was how Samsung, the most powerful corporation in South Korea (and prominent on a world scale as well), has been spying on its workers and using unbelievable union-busting tactics. For instance, Samsung management used the “Friend-Finding” GPS service to track workers and pinpoint  where worker’s gathered to attempt to unionize. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home this evening is write Engadget and other gadger review blogs to let them know how Samsung treats its workers: anyone who wants to put their consumer behavior behind upholding human rights should avoid buying anything from Samsung. I’m going to try to get a clip of the Samsung labor movement video to put on YouTube.

This conference is really focusing on video. There was an excellent video by Vivian Price on female construction workers in Japan. There was also a video on the months of labor revolution in Oaxaca, which includes the worker takeover of local radio and TV stations. There was a great sign that showed the LAW radio station being renamed LAW OF THE PEOPLE.

Mark Libkuman, an open source development planner who is speaking as I type this, lost a good friend in Oaxaca.

Here’s a pic of Steve Zeltzer, the Bay Area labor leader who was kind enough to invite me to LaborTech:

I have more pictures here.   In the ongoing adventure in irony that is my life, my camera batteries just died. :-p Hopefully I can pick up some batteries over lunch and there will be more pictures tonight.

There’s no question that labor is where the netroots will be happening next simply because of the sheer failure of the media to report their perspective or the facts they have to contest corporate propaganda.

Update: Nancy Bupp, a labor educator, reviewed the current state of employer surveillance technology. SCARY!!!

After reading the WaPo article on the YouTube Whistleblower, I hope this statement from the Project on Government Oversight gets the widest dissemination possible:

The formal systems that whistle-blowers are expected to use have failed. That’s why you’re seeing people be creative like this…This is a tremendous way for someone brave enough to do it to say something directly and not have to go through a filter.

In my humble opinion, “filter” is not a strong enough word: perhaps “impregnable barricade” would be more accurate.

More after the jump. Previous Agonist story here.

If anyone hasn’t seen it, the whistleblower video is here.  He lays out his case very well, and he will probably be luckier than most whistleblowers in getting a hearing.

This is a Homeland Security whistleblower who is addressing problems with coastguard ships. Here’s a summary of the issues from Slashdot:

1) Not enough security cameras (big blind spots)
2) Bad (unshielded) communications cables
3) Equipment won’t survive the extreme temperatures
4) No one cares, billions of dollars and national security at risk.

(The video especially points out how the unshielded communications cables leads to all sorts of eavesdropping.)

As many have pointed out, whistleblowers ruin their career when they speak out, and this has consequences for their friends and family. Corporations are increasingly resorting to preemptory retaliation on people who just have the potential to become whistleblowers (i.e. by raising a complaint) - just so they will be able to call the whistleblower “disgruntled” and distract the public from corporate misconduct.

Our current civic infrastructure is unfortunately tilting toward enabling corporations to hide the evidence. Employees have every incentive to look the other way - to leave security flaws in place, to leave safety problems for post-disaster investigation, to let fraudsters confiscate the retirement savings of thousands of people, and to let the “next poor slob” suffer by abandoning a bad situation instead of addressing it. Subordinate employees are pressured to be bystanders and to enable the worst behavior through lies of omission. Sure there are people willing to be martyrs…but are their enough?

It’s not enough to refrain from abetting the corporate PR machine and refusing to attack the whistleblower. There need to be positive, concrete measures to protect whistleblowers: advocacy and active legal reinforcement, employment assistance, and community support.  

I’ve seen some mockery of the poor guy’s plea for a lawyer at the end of the video. The people who think this is lame probably don’t understand just how difficult it is to get a lawyer in these situations. Moreover, government enforcement agencies are no help at all in arranging for legal protection even when their are whistleblower provisions in place. The whistleblower has probably been looking for many months.

Even if you can’t hook the whistleblower up with a lawyer or a potential employer, the least people can do is to let the guy know you understand and support what he’s doing - that you know how corporations block and tackle, that you know government agencies are ineffective, that you know lawyers are scarce and he will have to bare the burden of mounting legal costs, and that you know the media is plagued by corporate PR and shady “experts” determined to malign the character of whistleblowers. This guy is being besieged by “balanced” media coverage right now, which will eternally question his motives and approach. He would probably welcome the opportunity to address any questions raised by the media coverage, especially if there’s no lawyer involved yet. You can send him a comment via his YouTube profile or his slashdot account, and if I find a better means of contacting him, I’ll put the information here.

Note: I have not mentioned the whistleblower’s name, which is now all over the media, because he’s going to be haunted for the rest of his life about what people will turn up when they Google him. I don’t want to add to his problems, and I hope other people will keep this in mind for their comments here and elsewhere.

It was a tragedy that I couldn’t attend BlogHer. The conference took place a 40 minute drive away (San Jose), and I knew some people who were going. Unfortunately, I don’t drive, and I just can’t afford the transportation and hotel costs right now. I had thus reconciled myself to the fact BlogHer was out of my reach, and I planned to spend the weekend twiddling with Breakingranks.net and catching up on Jamal Dajani’s Middle East Intelligence Report.

At the very last minute, Mary Hodder, the braininess behind Dabble offered me a ride to the BlogHer reception. While I wasn’t actually registered for the conference, I got to check out this small part of it.

Just the ride to San Jose was an education. I shared a ride Sylvia Paull, who runs the Berkeley CyberSalon. I’ve lived in Berkeley since 1992, and I’ve been working and playing in “cyberspace” for almost as long,   but I’d never actually hooked into Berkeley’s vast community of bloggers, web developers, and tech entrepreneurs. I guess I’m too much of a geek to even go out and meet other geeks. Anyway, Sylvia made a special effort to invite me to all her Happenings. She’s at the top of the list of Thank You Notes I have to write today.

The BlogHer reception was a lot of fun. At first I was worried, because I didn’t see anyone I knew, but I didn’t want to hang all over Mary, either. Fortunately, I literally bumped right into Susan Getgood, an energetic marketing blogger. Since the flipside of my rage against the corporate machine is engagement with a lot of PR and marketing folk, I actually knew Susan. And since Susan is naturally gregarious, she introduced me to a few new people, most notably tsunami-blogger Evelyn Rodriguez.

I also admit to snitching some of the free wine. Hopefully BlogHer’s lawyer’s won’t come after me.

Mary was staying for the conference, so I got a ride home with one of the new forces behind Our Media, Lisa Padilla. I at least knew Mary through participating in her Dabble beta and soliciting her opinions on rankism in the blogosphere. I’d never met Lisa at all, but she was extremely warm and friendly, and we found a lot to talk about.

The last kindness of the night had nothing to do with BlogHer or blogging. Lisa dropped me off at the Millbrae BART (train) station, which was closest to her house. There I discovered, thanks to my apparent inability to read a train schedule, the last train had already left for the night.

Thus, I found myself in Millbrae at 1am. I had no cellphone, and no one to call even if I had one (nope - didn’t even get Lisa’s card before she dropped me off). I had six dollars and my pocket. I also had a credit card, but taking a cab back to Berkeley would have cost me more than spending the weekend at BlogHer. I had exactly six dollars in my pocket.

The BART station agent was then kind enough to point out that there was a popular 24-hour restaurant, Peter’s Cafe, right beside the BART station. While I questioned whether I still had the ability to pull an all-nighter at my age, I decided to give it a shot.

Apparently the staff at Peter’s Cafe has seen this situation before, because they were all very sweet and gave me a whole pot of coffee. I just settled in with the book I had luckily brought with me to read on the train (a translation of The Peony Pavilion, if anyone is interested).

I ordered something called a “Baby Pancake”, which was really the equivalent of a whole apple pie. I was only able to eat a quarter of it the entire five hours I spent there. I recommend it as a special treat if anyone else finds themselves trapped in Millbrae.

I ultimately made it home during the wee hours of Saturday morning. I then slept most of the day, and I wasn’t really functioning on all cylinders on Sunday, either. Now I’m back  in gear, though, and ready to follow up with all the cool people I met at the BlogHer reception.

All of these people were previously strangers to me. I was able to go to the BlogHer reception not through the kindness of one person, but the kindness of many. That sort of thing really renews my faith in the human spirit.

Over the last year there has been a torrent of media articles intended to discipline (or terrorize) people into using what the power elite considers to be “good judgment” in the presentation of your online self. This reminds me of the early Puritans scurrying across the wilderness with a mission to scold and rebuke all those who weren’t toeing the line for the theocratic Millenium.

CNet struck the gusher of contemporary fear, loathing, and perpetual irony when Elinor Mills googled Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Ever since then, the mainstream media has been obsessed with “digital dirt”, preaching to the reprobate bloggers and warning parents that their children will be damned to unemployment for their injudicious use of MySpace, Facebook, and other social sites (nope, I’m not going to clue the snooping Puritans in).

This week the New York Times hit with the old one-two punch. First sticking your neck out in the public space is a threat to your livelihood. Second, the Internet is a playground for stalkers. All that was missing from the set was the ever-popular screed against the Internet as a moral hazard that facilitates goofing off in the workplace, therefore undermining the Puritan work ethic.

Despite widespread interest in privacy and defending the few individual rights we have left, public response to this elite reformism has been muffled at best. I think some of the confusion stems from the idea the Internet is a public space: of course your employer, an army of marketers, random stalkers, and men in black are as free to seek you out as anyone. Sure your presence is amplified and perma-recorded in that public space, which leads to the reasonable conclusion that the glitterati have always known: you can’t get the benefits of visibility without being prepared to fend off the dangers.

Most people, of course, don’t command the social influence, legal resources, or public relations personnel that celebrities wield to cope with attacks on their reputation in public space. The Puritan Reformers of this age as well as the 17th century are concerned above all with everyone else’s reputation. In the previous Puritan heyday of 17th-century England, it was common to go to court for just being called a rude name in the street. Today this is rarely a feasible option, and frankly I don’t think using the MSM megaphone to shout “Repent, Sinners!” is going to rollback the Information Age, either.

I’d like to propose another way to look at our online over-exposure. It’s not only “public space” - it’s a form of civic “third space” - i.e., a place for socializing and discussion that is apart from family and apart from the workplace. The third space used to happen in the market, at church, and in the local pub. Now it happens on the Internet, too.

The third space is publicly accessible, but it is not a standing invitation to be attacked or abused. When the people who have power over you seek you out for the purposes of threatening your livelihood or putting pressure on your political opinions, that’s abuse.

While I’m sure there are a stampede of lawsuits just around the corner that will ultimately persuade the beancounters in risk management to discourage corporate HR from stalking hapless personnel, I would rather see the monied elite rethink the New Puritanism, and, instead, make a move in the direction of progressive leadership. For instance, at the next Business Ethics Summit, the big decision-makers could pledge to establish corporate policies to forbid snooping into the private lives of either potential or existing employees. They could instead declare themselves to be in favor of free public discourse and support the emerging third space. The sort of heavy-handed discipline imposed in the workplace is often counter-productive and stressful during working hours: it’s certainly inappropriate, if not inhuman, to extend the New Puritanism into the “third space”, too.

In the U.S., nothing brings out the policy wonks like the subject of health care. The profits of the health care industry have been soaring, while the legions of uninsured has reached a staggering 48 million.

One under-explored angle on this problem is the culture of rankism that infects the medical community and plagues the major health care organizations in the U.S. While Britain has engaged the medical community in a public discussion of physician-on-physician bullying, similar concerns in the U.S. have been downplayed. However, the U.S. public is slowly coming to realize that dysfunctional administration profoundly influences the delivery of health care and leads to many unnecessary deaths every year.

Interestingly, the controversy over investment in a national EMR, has opened a wedge between traditional physician interest groups and the advancement of technology, which has allowed a few mavericks to break ranks and debunk the myths that have granted the MDeities fate-making powers over those in need of medical care.

Mounting evidence of medical student abuse (particularly in regard to women), suggest that subjection to hazing in medical school shapes physician attitudes about rank and entitlement later in their career. As long as rankist practices and traditions remained hidden behind the cloak of “professional matters”, there could be no public comment on the gross social and organizational distortions created by physician culture. Now, as the death toll mounts, it has become evident that medical student abuse and endemic rankism in health care organizations are problems that demand public attention and legislative oversight.

Since media structures theorist Jon Garfunkel has been in town, I decided to take a look at how the concept of rankism is being applied to the blogosphere. There’s some impressive brainpower at work. Rankism is coming up in relation to link hierarchies (also here), tag clouds, the attention economy, P2P, social media, metrics, wikis, network theory, paramedia, and online activism.

Since the Internet is an evolving structure, there are abundant opportunities to identify and hopefully stem rankism. It’s good to see that the conversation is indeed happening.

Every job seeker is familiar with the the relentless exhortation to network. Your family, your friends, blog comments from random strangers, and the total environment of media messages all telll you that if you don’t have a job yet, you must be a flawed person, deficient in the life skill of networking. Like truth and beauty, the ability to network is now held to emanate from the inside. Networking is a personal trait that can be cultivated and controlled by the virtuous. The perfect professional is the person who transforms their social network into a personal attribute. The ability to tap into a large social network not only matches job seekers with potential employers: the presence of a network has become proof that social aspects of the job seeker’s personality have prevailed over anti-social aspects (independent judgment, inclination to dissent, preference for isolated activities, etc.). Networking is now a moral sign rather than an indicator of location within the social configuration. A large network means you’re a good person: a small network means you’re a bad person (either unattractive or shunned for your behavior) who can only be redeemed if you follow everyone’s advice to start networking.

In defense of all who choose to be a hermit, I usually float the question of whether a person will gain more skills to increase their productivity and quallity of work from secluded study or from hanging out in a bar. Perhaps some people are meant to pursue creative or intellectual achievement, and forcing these people into trivial social interactions against their will might entail depriving society of a cultural achievement or material advance? In this age of trumpeting “people skils”, it’s almost a taboo to call human relationships “trivial” - it’s a heresy against the gospel of networking. A person who admits they would rather go invent a better mousetrap must be arrogant, nerdy, insensitive, irrational, unlikable - and all the other social labels that will cast that person as wrong, outside, and quite possibly mentally deranged.

As an entrenched hermit-heretic, I find some solace in the occasional book that dares to argue that networking is a social asset, not a character trait. For people with few resources for contact-bait, attempts to network may be futile. Pushing these people to network is the same as demanding that they waste their time or exhaust their remaining energies on a treadmill. Maybe the lesson of networking failure is that it’s rational for some people to focus on something other than how to court superficial relationships.

A culture that privileges the people with the best rolodex is a culture that allows for “positional middemen”. Positional middllemen are people who insert themselves into a transaction simply as a gatekeeper to some component of the transaction: they make no labor or material investment to enhance the transaction’s economic value. Positional middlemen are parasites who are being subsidized by the people who are obliged to work for a living. Do we really want to live in that kind of society? This is the message that’s sent every time someone tells an unemployed person to focus on networking instead of, say, mastering their craft. If we truly value a diverse society of independent thinkers, perhaps we should be trying to bring jobs to people with the right skills instead of leveraging control over jobs to dictate personality reforms. When we reward people for prioritizing the acquisition of social assets, we embrace cronyism, feudal dependency, and the compusive groupthink that has spawned so many disasters in our government and our economy. That’s only a short step from reducing other people to units of wealth and mere instruments of network access.

When the mainstream media began covering ghostwriting in medical journals, the chief concern was that writers were being paid by business interests and would thus omit any unfavorable evidence that might interfere with product promotions. I’d like to raise an additional concern about how this practice contributes to rankism in the field of medical science. For instance:

…a University of Arizona professor listed as the lead author of a Vioxx article in 2003 said he had little to do with the research in it.

While Vioxx got a boost from using the name of a well-known authority, the professor also increased his own reputation and power by gaining publication credit for an article he didn’t write. This unearned power and authority could be used to attract funding and investments, secure promotions and important advisory positions, increase leverage for further publication deals, and use resource re-distribution to control the fates of students, junior associates, and other hangers-on.

Part of democracy’s next step is to recognize that treating someone’s reputation as a commodity will lead to expanding their unearned power and increasing their potential for engaging in rankism.

When George Washington University barred a depressed student from campus and attempted to intimidate him into withdrawing from school, the legal wonks immediately questioned why university administrators were even given access to this student’s private medical information.

Furthermore, a school policy of amputating the depressed is not only inherently cruel, it’s an abdication of any responsibility that the school itself had in fostering conditions that might produce depression. Anyone who has ever been a student at a major university can probably recite a litany of frustrating, contradictory, and downright wrong experiences that occured there. Often the only thing separating successful students from those who fall through the cracks is the existence of an outside social safety net. In other words, punishing a student for being depressed may amount to an act of class violence.

Perhaps someone should send the GWU administrators an anonymous copy of The Beach.

While thinking about whistleblowers, I realized that I haven’t done my blogging bit on to join the outcry against California’s grievous betrayal of whistleblower Stephen Heller. While working as a law firm temp in L.A., Heller discovered that electronic voting machines made by Diebold violated California elections law. Heller handed the information over to the proper government authorities, and as a reward he was charged with three felonies by his former employer. Corporate manipulation of State agencies to persecute whistleblowers is a PATTERN in California. Shame on California!

The San Francisco Bay Independent Media Center describes the inanity of the charges the best: Steve Heller is charged with felonies for (a) looking at a computer screen [no kidding, that’s the charge] and (b) making a copy, and (c) having said copy delivered to the authorities, the new Calif. secretary of state is engaging in a frightening pattern of ignoring the law.

If anyone is interested in giving the Los Angeles District Attorney a piece of their mind for assisting in this blatant act of retaliation against a whistleblower, here’s the contact information:

Email the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office at lada@co.la.ca.us.

District Attorney’s Office
County of Los Angeles
210 West Temple Street, Suite 18000
Los Angeles, CA 90012-3210

Telephone (213) 974-3512
Fax (213) 974-1484
TTY (800) 457-7778 (8:30am - 5:00pm M-F)