Sam Han | Eportfolio

Thesis 0

“What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!” (after Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quip on “Western Civilization”)

Thesis 1

Changing media — Media in change

Media-technological developments are causing a fundamental re-structuring of the newspaper and book publishing sectors, with traditional media locked in fierce competition with online newcomers for market superiority. Yet media change is about more than the “newspaper crisis” and the iPad: property law, privacy, free speech and the functioning of the public sphere are all affected. [ more ]

Disclosures and leaks have been a feature of all eras, however never before has a non-state or non- corporate affiliated group done anything on the scale of what WikiLeaks has managed to do, first with the “collateral murder” video, then the “Afghan War Logs”, and now “Cablegate”. It looks like we have now reached the moment that the quantitative leap is morphing into a qualitative one. When WikiLeaks hit the mainstream early in 2010, this was not yet the case. In a sense, the “colossal” WikiLeaks disclosures can be explained as the consequence of the dramatic spread of IT use, together with the dramatic drop in its costs, including for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets – never mind private ones – has become difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. WikiLeaks becomes symbolic for a transformation in the “information society” at large, holding up a mirror of things to come. So while one can look at WikiLeaks as a (political) project and criticize it for its modus operandi, it can also be seen as the “pilot” phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.

Thesis 2

For better or for worse, WikiLeaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, WikiLeaks has become a full-blown player both on the world scene as well as in the national spheres of some countries. Small player as it is, WikiLeaks, by virtue of its disclosures, appears to be on a par with governments or big corporations (its next target) – at least in the domain of information gathering and publication. At same time, it is unclear whether this is a permanent feature or a temporary, hype-induced phenomenon – WikiLeaks appears to believe the former, and that looks more and more likely to be the case. A puny non-state and non-corporate actor, in its fight against the US government WikiLeaks nonetheless does not believe it is punching above its weight – and is starting to behave accordingly. One might call this the “Talibanization” stage of the postmodern “Flat World” theory, where scales, times and places are declared largely irrelevant. What counts is celebrity momentum and the intense accumulation of media attention. WikiLeaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks, where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organizations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. While the latter tend to play by the rules and seek legitimacy from dominant institutions, WikiLeaks’ strategy is populist insofar that it taps into public disaffection with mainstream politics. Political legitimacy, for WikiLeaks, is no longer something graciously bestowed by the powers that be. WikiLeaks bypasses this Old World structure of power and instead goes to the source of political legitimacy in today’s info-society: the rapturous banality of the spectacle. WikiLeaks brilliantly puts to use the “escape velocity” of IT, using IT to leave IT behind and rudely irrupt the realm of real-world politics.

Thesis 3

In the ongoing saga called “The Decline of the US Empire”, WikiLeaks enters the stage as the slayer of a soft target. It would be difficult to imagine it being able to inflict quite same damage to the Russian or Chinese governments, or even to the Singaporean – not to mention their “corporate” affiliates. In Russia or China, huge cultural and linguistic barriers are at work, not to speak of purely power-related ones, which would need to be surmounted. Vastly different constituencies are also factors there, even if we are speaking about the narrower (and allegedly more global) cultures and agendas of hackers, info-activists and investigative journalists. In that sense, WikiLeaks in its present manifestation remains a typically “western” product and cannot claim to be a truly universal or global undertaking.

Thesis 4

One of the main difficulties with explaining WikiLeaks arises from the fact that it is unclear (also to the WikiLeaks people themselves) whether it sees itself and operates as a content provider or as a simple conduit for leaked data (the impression is that it sees itself as either/or, depending on context and circumstances). This, by the way, has been a common problem ever since media went online en masse and publishing and communications became a service rather than a product. Julian Assange cringes every time he is portrayed as the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks; yet WikiLeaks says it edits material before publication and claims it checks documents for authenticity with the help of hundreds of volunteer analysts. Content vs. carrier debates of this kind have been going on for decades among media activists, with no clear outcome. Instead of trying to resolve the inconsistency, it might be better to look for fresh approaches and develop new critical concepts for what has become a hybrid publishing practice involving actors far beyond the traditional domain of the professional news media. This might be why Assange and his collaborators refuse to be labelled in terms of “old categories” (journalists, hackers, etc.) and claim to represent a new Gestalt on the world information stage.

Thesis 5

The steady decline of investigative journalism caused by diminishing funding is an undeniable fact. Journalism these days amounts to little more than outsourced PR remixing. The continuous acceleration and over-crowding of the so-called attention economy ensures there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are increasingly disinclined to see the workings and the politics of the global neoliberal economy discussed at length. The shift from information to infotainment has been embraced by journalists themselves, making it difficult to publish complex stories. WikiLeaks enters this state of affairs as an outsider, enveloped by the steamy ambiance of “citizen journalism”, DIY news reporting in the blogosphere and even faster social media like Twitter. What WikiLeaks anticipates, but so far has been unable to organize, is the “crowd sourcing” of the interpretation of its leaked documents. That work, oddly, is left to the few remaining staff journalists of selected “quality” news media. Later, academics pick up the scraps and spin the stories behind the closed gates of publishing stables. But where is networked critical commentariat? Certainly, we are all busy with our minor critiques; but it remains the case that WikiLeaks generates its capacity to inspire irritation at the big end of town precisely because of the transversal and symbiotic relation it holds with establishment media institutions. There’s a lesson here for the multitudes – get out of the ghetto and connect with the Oedipal other. Therein lies the conflictual terrain of the political.

Traditional investigative journalism used to consist of three phases: unearthing facts, crosschecking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. WikiLeaks does the first, claims to do the second, but omits the third completely. This is symptomatic of a particular brand of open access ideology, where content production itself is externalized to unknown entities “out there”. The crisis in investigative journalism is neither understood nor recognized. How productive entities are supposed to sustain themselves materially is left in the dark: it is simply presumed that analysis and interpretation will be taken up by the traditional news media. But this is not happening automatically. The saga of the Afghan War Logs and Cablegate demonstrate that WikiLeaks has to approach and negotiate with well-established traditional media to secure sufficient credibility. At the same time, these media outlets prove unable to fully process the material, inevitably filtering the documents according to their own editorial policies.

Thesis 6

WikiLeaks is a typical SPO (Single Person Organization, or “UPO”: Unique Personality Organization). This means that the initiative taking, decision-making and execution is largely concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Like small and medium-sized businesses, the founder cannot be voted out, and, unlike many collectives, leadership does not rotate. This is not an uncommon feature within organizations, irrespective of whether they operate in the realm of politics, culture or the “civil society” sector. SPOs are recognizable, exciting, inspiring, and easy to feature in the media. Their sustainability, however, is largely dependent on the actions of their charismatic leader, and their functioning is difficult to reconcile with democratic values. This is also why they are difficult to replicate and do not scale up easily. Sovereign hacker Julian Assange is the identifying figurehead of WikiLeaks, the organization’s notoriety and reputation merging with Assange’s own. What WikiLeaks does and stands for becomes difficult to distinguish from Assange’s rather agitated private life and his somewhat unpolished political opinions.

Thesis 7

WikiLeaks raises the question as to what hackers have in common with secret services, since an elective affinity between the two is unmistakable. The love-hate relationship goes back to the very beginning of computing. One does not have to be a fan of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler or, for that matter, conspiracy theories, to acknowledge that the computer was born out of the military-industrial complex. From Alan Turing’s deciphering of the Nazi Enigma code up to the role played by the first computers in the invention of the atomic bomb, from the cybernetics movement up to the Pentagon’s involvement in the creation of the Internet – the articulation between computational information and the military-industrial complex is well established. Computer scientists and programmers have shaped the information revolution and the culture of openness; but at the same time they have also developed encryption (“crypto”), closing access to data for the non-initiated. What some see as “citizen journalism” others call “info war”.

WikiLeaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture, combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism that emerged in the 1990s. The fact that WikiLeaks was founded – and to a large extent is still run – by hard-core geeks is essential to understanding its values and moves. Unfortunately, this comes together with a good dose of the less savoury aspects of hacker culture. Not that idealism, the desire to contribute to making the world a better place, could be denied to WikiLeaks: on the contrary. But this brand of idealism (or, if you prefer, anarchism) is paired with a preference for conspiracies, an elitist attitude and a cult of secrecy (never mind condescension). This is not conducive to collaboration with like-minded people and groups, who are relegated to being the simple consumers of WikiLeaks output. The missionary zeal to enlighten the idiotic masses and “expose” the lies of government, the military and corporations is reminiscent of the well-known (or infamous) media-culture paradigm from the 1950s.

Thesis 8

Lack of commonality with congenial, “another world is possible” movements drives WikiLeaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular and risky disclosures, thereby gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic, but generally passive supporters. Assange himself has stated that WikiLeaks has deliberately moved away from the “egocentric” blogosphere and assorted social media and nowadays collaborates only with professional journalists and human rights activists. Yet following the nature and quantity of WikiLeaks exposures from its inception up to the present day is eerily reminiscent of watching a firework display, and that includes a “grand finale” in the form of the doomsday-machine pitched, yet-to-be-unleashed “insurance” document (“.aes256”). This raises serious doubts about the long-term sustainability of WikiLeaks itself, and possibly also of the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks operates with ridiculously small staff – probably no more than a dozen of people form the core of its operation. While the extent and savviness of WikiLeaks’ tech support is proved by its very existence, WikiLeaks’ claim to several hundreds of volunteer analysts and experts is unverifiable and, to be frank, barely credible. This is clearly WikiLeaks Achilles’ heel, not only from a risk and/or sustainability standpoint, but politically as well – which is what matters to us here.

Thesis 9

WikiLeaks displays a stunning lack of transparency in its internal organization. Its excuse that “WikiLeaks needs to be completely opaque in order to force others to be totally transparent” amounts, in our opinion, to little more than Mad magazine’s famous Spy vs. Spy cartoons. You beat the opposition but in a way that makes you indistinguishable from it. Claiming the moral high ground afterwards is not helpful – Tony Blair too excelled in that exercise. As WikiLeaks is neither a political collective nor an NGO in the legal sense, and nor, for that matter, a company or part of social movement, we need to discuss what type of organization it is that we are dealing with. Is WikiLeaks a virtual project? After all, it does exist as a (hosted) website with a domain name, which is the bottom line. But does it have a goal beyond the personal ambition of its founder(s)? Is WikiLeaks reproducible? Will we see the rise of national or local chapters that keep the name? What rules of the game will they observe? Should we rather see it as a concept that travels from context to context and that, like a meme, transforms itself in time and space?

Thesis 10

Maybe WikiLeaks will organize itself around its own version of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s slogan “rough consensus and running code”? Projects like Wikipedia and Indymedia have both resolved this issue in their own ways, but not without crises, conflicts and splits. A critique such as the one voiced here is not intended to force WikiLeaks into a traditional format; on the contrary, it is to explore whether WikiLeaks (and its future clones, associates, avatars and congenial family members) might stand as a model for new forms of organization and collaboration. The term “organized network” has been coined as a possible term for these formats. Another term has been “tactical media”. Still others have used the generic term “internet activism”. Perhaps WikiLeaks has other ideas about the direction it wants to take. But where? It is up to WikiLeaks to decide for itself. Up to now, however, we have seen very little by way of an answer, leaving others to raise questions, for example about the legality of WikiLeaks’ financial arrangements (Wall Street Journal).

We cannot flee the challenge of experimenting with post-representational networks. As ur-blogger Dave Winer wrote about the Apple developers, “it’s not that they’re ill-intentioned, they’re just ill-prepared. More than their users, they live in a Reality Distortion Field, and the people who make the Computer For the Rest of Us have no clue who the rest of us are and what we are doing. But that’s okay, there’s a solution. Do some research, ask some questions, and listen.”

Thesis 11

The widely shared critique of the self-inflicted celebrity cult of Julian Assange invites the formulation of alternatives. Wouldn’t it be better to run WikiLeaks as an anonymous collective or “organized network”? Some have expressed the wish to see many websites doing the same work. One group around Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who parted company with Assange in September, is already known to be working on a WikiLeaks clone. What is overlooked in this call for a proliferation of WikiLeaks is the amount of expert knowledge required to run a leak site successfully. Where is the ABC tool-kit of WikiLeaks? There is, perhaps paradoxically, much secrecy involved in this way of making-things-public. Simply downloading a WikiLeaks software kit and getting going is not a realistic option. WikiLeaks is not a plug ‘n’ play blog application like WordPress, and the word “Wiki” in its name is really misleading, as Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has been at pains to stress. Contrary to the collaboration philosophy of Wikipedia, WikiLeaks is a closed shop run with the help of an unknown number of faceless volunteers. One is forced to acknowledge that the know-how necessary to run a facility like WikiLeaks is pretty arcane. Documents not only need to be received anonymously, but also to be further anonymized before they are released online. They also need to be “edited” before being dispatched to the servers of international news organizations and trusted, influential “papers of record”.

WikiLeaks has built up a lot of trust and confidence over the years. Newcomers will need to go through that same, time-consuming process. The principle of WikiLeaks is not to “hack” (into state or corporate networks) but to facilitate insiders based in these large organisations to copy sensitive, confidential data and pass it on to the public domain – while remaining anonymous. If you are aspiring to become a leak node, you’d better start to get acquainted with processes like OPSEC or operations security, a step-by-step plan which “identifies critical information to determine if friendly actions can be observed by adversary intelligence systems, determines if information obtained by adversaries could be interpreted to be useful to them, and then executes selected measures that eliminate or reduce adversary exploitation of friendly critical information” (Wikipedia). The WikiLeaks slogan says: “courage is contagious”. According to experts, people who intend to run a WikiLeaks-type operation need nerves of steel. So before we call for one, ten, many WikiLeaks, let’s be clear that those involved run risks. Whistleblower protection is paramount. Another issue is the protection of people mentioned in the leaks. The Afghan Warlogs showed that leaks can also cause “collateral damage”. Editing (and eliding) is crucial. Not only OPSEC, also OPETHICS. If publishing is not carried out in a way that is absolutely secure for all concerned, there is a definite risk that the “revolution in journalism” – and politics – unleashed by WikiLeaks will be stopped in its tracks.

Thesis 12

We do not think that taking a stand for or against WikiLeaks is what matters most. WikiLeaks is here to stay, until it either scuttles itself or is destroyed by opposing forces. Our point is rather to (try to) assess and ascertain what WikiLeaks can, could – and maybe even should – do, and to help formulate how “we” could relate to and interact with WikiLeaks. Despite all its drawbacks, and against all odds, WikiLeaks has rendered a sterling service to the cause of transparency, democracy and openness. As the French would say, if something like it did not exist, it would have to be invented. The quantitative – and what looks soon to become the qualitative – turn of information overload is a fact of contemporary life. The glut of disclosable information can only be expected to continue grow – and exponentially so. To organize and interpret this Himalaya of data is a collective challenge that is clearly out there, whether we give it the name “WikiLeaks” or not.

This is an extended version of an article first published on the nettime mailing list and elsewhere in August 2010

From the net-time folks…

Obama, be like Clinton in this way: When Blair was all about Anthony Giddens, Clinton too started reading. Now Bauman is definitely better than Giddens, so I want to see Liquid Modernity on your nightstand.

Reuters/Nir Elias

A farmer from the Zhuang ethnic minority works at his rice terrace near Pingan Village in Longsheng in southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang

PINGWEN VILLAGE, Guangxi province — As I walked into the living room of the farmer’s new house, I noticed that the floor was still wet from a recent mopping — and I was tracking in dirt from the village outside. I was mortified. Then I learned that the farmer had only mopped the floor because she had been warned moments earlier that a visiting delegation of American journalists might be visiting her home. Even worse — now I was embarrassed both for making her speed-clean the house and for messing it up.

Xu Huayan, a member of China’s Zhuang minority, did not appear to mind, however. She looked just as energized by the culture shock as we were. Americans do not visit Pingwen very often — if ever, a fact partially attested to by the Chinese journalist who was filming us for a local TV broadcast. Xu quickly urged us to sit and seemed to enjoy the semi-random questions we threw at her: What crops do you grow? What programs do you watch on your TV? What do you use the Internet for?

(Answers: Tomatoes, weather forecasts, and information about agricultural production.)

She grew most animated when asked if she worked in the fields herself. “Of course,” she exclaimed, pointing at her dark brown skin. “See my sun tan!?”

There is no doubting the reality of hard peasant labor in the village of Pingwen in Guangxi province. One of the new houses we inspected had been built around an older structure, a kitchen and shed where at least a dozen hoes and shovels leaned against one wall. Xu Huayan’s open air basement was piled high with sacks of seed. In the fields stretching away from the village, peasants working mostly with hand tools toiled under a mildly hot sun.

And at the same time, there is also little doubt that the standard of living for Pingwen’s farmers has risen dramatically in recent years — to the point of inspiring perhaps even more amazement than the rapid growth of China’s cities. One farmer boasted a much nicer TV than I do, and graciously invited a member of our delegation to check her e-mail on his computer. (The connection was fast, she reported.) Meanwhile, in the meeting room where we met with the village’s leader, Mr. Tang, where portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Deng Xiaoping brooded unsmilingly over us, we were told that the average per capita income of the village’s residents was only about $700 U.S. per year. Even if it is true that incomes have been growing in recent years at an annual rate of 10 percent, it was hard to see how that added up to a consumer lifestyle that would not be frowned upon in California.

More on the emergent Chinese consumer society. It’s like watching America in the 1950’s. Fascinating.

I’ve been engaged in a two-day crash course on Red Toryism. Why? I don’t know. But after listening to a couple of podcasts and articles featuring Blond, I’m convinced there is something to his critique of (neo)liberalism and the State. I, however, am worried that it’s, as Zizek’s keen to say, “a right step in the wrong direction,” especially as Blond’s “progressivism” is wrongly invested in Cameron’s “big society” thing. He has some ideas about employee-share ownership, which sounds nice but I’m sure would be completely bungled when enacted, leaving employees holding the bag while the employers cut and run.

(As an aside, his reading of Hayek is very much in line with analyses of Hayek I’ve read by Italian Autonomists like Mario Tronti.)

I wish Baudrillard were still around to keep track and comment on the development (or not) of Chinese consumer society.

A bit of a hack-job I think.

These are incredible. They almost seem “staged” in the sense that they were taken yesterday but made to look old.

MODERNITY! There is something I do genuinely love about you. (I guess…)

and it’s free!

this is why Woody is wrong when he says that indie/experimental hip-hop is never to be listened to. now, while this music isn’t reaching down my throat and yanking hard on my jiggy organs, I’ve been grinning like an idiot and bopping along to this album all day. ladies and robots: G Band Free.

G Band Free – WDTG

G Band Free – Should’ve Been a Dream

right off the bat, they self-label themselves as “six kids with six thousand influences,” and have created their entire first album, Backwards Crown, without hesistation or restraint. the result is something that is extremely novel, but unlike many of the similar endeavors that result in total aural disasters, this one works. no, it’s not packed with club bangers. no, they probably won’t play Webster Hall anytime soon (but feel free to prove me wrong, guys). but who gives a fuck? it’s fun. it’s 9 tracks of little awesome secrets that are meant to be whispered in your ear by your headphones, over and over. the sound is truly as diverse as they claim, and comes up miles away from where most hip-hop production surfaces. in the end, it sounds more like Self produced an album for Edan than much else I could compare it to. but it’s not really worth comparing it to anything out there, because it’s innovation. pure, fun, unbridled innovation. so cheers to that.

you can download the entire album for free at the G Band Free website, and watch for them around NYC.

Here it is. Living proof that I was once in a pretty damn good band that got a little bit of blog-buzz before blog-buzz meant something.

Music for Robots, to my knowledge, was a pretty big indie music blog that existed before Pitchfork. I have no clue whether they are comparable but their website (and their archives) had been down for so long that I felt genuine sadness and panic that the sole piece of Internet recognition that my bandmates and I received would be lost for ever on the interconnected networks. But lo and behold, MfR’s relaunch brought with it its archives, and preserved in nearly mint condition (though I believe the original author of the post’s has been replaced) is what I google in times of personal despair and worry to remind myself of better days.

We’ve all heard the complaints. We may even have some ourselves, depending on how old we are and what “era” of hip hop we consider to be the one we grew up on. “Where are the Rakims, the BDK’s or the KRS’s?” is a kind of line you hear from someone who, while scratching his or her head, claims that today’s rap sucks. “Blog rap” is a dis even on some of our favorite blogs! We hear it after the concert, outside of the venues, when people are congregating, wanting to debrief.

What is the charge leveled at today’s crop of rappers by the old guard?

Dart Adams, of Blogger House, hinted at an answer: the over-emoizaiton of hip hop. In a recent Tumblr post, he offers a wideranging genealogy of the emoization-issue. Linking everything from Sean Price’s Wale-line and “We Don’t Fuck with You, Musically” to the emergence of hipsterism and its seepage into hip hop, Dart does a fair job of giving a report of the state of things. In many ways, I agree with Dart’s assessment. One needs to look no further than Drake, who has, along with Cudi, fielded many “emo” criticisms, centered on him singing too much or his lyrics being introspective and a bit too self-vulnerable (which, by the way, I think the former-Degrassi star is acutely aware of as he has abruptly halted work on his R&B mixtape. “I’m just in zone rapping now. Just want to keep it going,” he says. Yeah okay dude.). 

But is it all about the rise of emotional content? Or, is this emoization a symptom of a larger trend in hip hop in the Internet age—the crisis of gender categories and identities of not only performers but of the audience and fans, who now are increasingly part of the production of the culture that they consume. I believe there is a rising plume of discourse among hip hop fans, critics, bloggers and industry types, that hip hop is not only Downy-status but becoming…feminine. Could not all of this emo-talk be a euphemization of a particularly masculinist (and in turn homophobic) backlash against a feminine quality of contemporary hip hop culture? More to the point, is the emoization-issue grating to many older hip hop fans because it’s “men” (and all the assumed cultural values and norms that lie within that label) acting like “women” (and all the assumed cultural values and norms that lie within that label)? How much of the discussion is about “emotion”—long the weapon of choice to categorize women as irrational and hysterical—as it is about the crisis which the young cadre of rappers that dominate the hip hop blogs are acting outside of their prescribed “masculine” place? How else would skinny jeans, sagging, metrosexuality, homosexuality and the social propioception of contemporary social networks such as Twitter be all lumped in together as responsible for the demise of hip hop?

Perhaps this is why there is so much backlash against both skinny jeans and sagging. What a funny thing if you think about it, no? Be damned if your pants are too tight. Be damned if your pants don’t fit at all. The former is perceived as the taking of the hipster-logic to the nth degree. It is the perfect example of the shift away from oversized everything in hip hop street wear to an emphasis on cut and form, an emphasis which had undoubtedly existed in women’s wear. It was the GQ-Details-Esquire-izaiton of hip hop clothing. Be gone Maurice Malone! Welcome American Apparel! It was the metrosexualization of hip hop culture. The latter, sagging, as largely reported, is rumored to be some extension of prison culture, where inmates cannot wear belts. Interestingly enough, opponents of both skinny jeans and sagging have used homophobia as a strategy to discourage the wearing of either. Opponents of both have basically suggested that skinny jeans and sagging are both “gay,” by associating hipsterism (as a proxy for metrosexuality) to skinny jeans and prison rape to sagging.

(NOTE: Now, what these folks make of sagging, skinny jeans, I don’t know although that’s definitely hot in the streets of East Harlem, where I live.)

But it seems hip hop sometimes wants it both ways. (You see what I did there?) My buddy Despot, a fine rapper and collector of ‘Lo gear, tweeted that nearly every single rapper at the most recent Def Jam cipher session at SOB’s had a line about wearing skinny but were not hipsters. Why not just say I wear skinny jeans? What’s with the neurotic obsession with skinny jeans? Why must a rapper qualify that he wears skinny jeans but can still rap? Is it a way of saying, “I wear skinny jeans but nah, I’m not gay”?

Or is it also something to do with not being stuck with the dreaded label of “hipster,” which too holds a whole cosmos of racial signifiers, as the widely-circulated excerpt in New York Magazine from Mark Greif’s sociological study of the hipster suggests. A figure that hovers as a specter in that article is of course Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, who is clearly one of the major proto-hipsters in hip hop culture; the father of all hipster hoppers’ style if you will. But even Pharrell, who has been the target of homophobic comments about him by rappers, notably NORE and Beanie Sigel, is heard in a recently leaked CRS(his super group with Kanye and Lupe) track “Don’t Stop!’ dropping the F-A-G bomb. Can we just simply chalk this up to “Oh, we in hip hop use the word differently. It’s not homophobic.” Really? Is that the consensus? Though I’m not suggesting an equivalence but isn’t that kind of justification, which I see as prevalent, akin to dropping the n-bomb and saying, “Not in the antebellum way but in the hip hop way.” How much can we chalk up to cultural difference and specificity and how much can we chalk it up to homophobia? I fully appreciate the complexity of homophobia. I would even cede a gradation or spectrum of the ways in which homophobia takes shape. But it’s hard to miss the glaring irony of Pharrell of all people dropping the f-bomb.

One could undoubtedly look at the fraught state of hip hop cultural politics as reflective of the resurgence of a particularly Moynihanian fight in broader black cultural politics regarding black motherhood, masculinity and the family as exemplified by “No Wedding, No Womb” movement. Is this the seeping in of reactionary cultural politics into hip hop? Even my friend Combat Jack, who I respect immensely, has somehow linked the very existence of a figure like Lil B, who recently tweeted that he would engage in anal sex with Kanye West (voluntarily or not) if ‘Ye did not acknowledge him on Twitter, to the lack of black fathers. 

But is not my friend CJ, and others who collectively discharged a “Pause” to Lil’ B’s tweet, missing the point completely? Lil B, everyone’s favorite object of contempt, disinterest, pity or voyeuristic intrigue (and of course a combination of all of the above) is perhaps the most interesting rapper when it comes to the overturning of gender identities in hip hop. He refers to himself as “Pretty Boy Bitch.” He has yet to dispel rumors about his sexuality…on purpose. It is a shtick in the best sense possible. His whole thing is to turn the figure of “the rapper” on its ear. He is a postmodern trickster whose “existence” as rapper is 100% digital, pure simulacrum. To put it in philosophical terms, there is no there there with Lil B, just a carefully crafted, Internet-version of him.

And this brings me back to a point that Dart, in his post, touches on. Perhaps it’s not that rappers and fans are not in fact much “softer” or more “emo” than their forefathers but that the imbrication of social networking and social media into the hip hop landscape have given these characteristics more visibility. I believe it is this point that needs to be repeated. Perhaps the emoization of rap is not so much the softening of hip hop culture but the opening up and proliferation of possibilities for what it means to be a rapper and also a fan of hip hop culture. And indeed, this may very well mean the toppling of the gendered categories of the old guard. The Internet, it seems, has helped this.

So, for all the old heads, the purists who hold hip hop to be sacred and feel a sense of ennui as they see a bunch of young rappers and hip hop fans who act like (1) girls (2) gay or (3) a combination of the two, good luck surviving in the wave of profanations that has already started to rush into shore. Hope you brought rain boots.

Forgot to mention on here that I’ve started a new Tumblr devoted to mostly long-form cultural criticism. The first piece on masculinity, homophobia and hip hop debuted last week. This week’s piece will be on Kanye and Bush, which will be debuted over at my friend Nehru Jackets(nehrujackets.tumblr.com), the blog of my friend Himanshu Suri of Das Racist and cross-posted at Scattered Speculations.

I remember when my friends in middle school were carrying around Discmans with CDs made by their Rabbis with their Torah portion on it so they could study before the big day. I thought it was pretty nifty, as CD burners, at the time, were quite novel.

(Ugh, remember how 2x CD burning was such an innovation? Shout-out to my buddy Steve Pristin (@ismelllikemoney) who was one of the first ones I knew to have a CD burner.)

By the time, I was in high school, and long removed from the weekly Bar/ Bat Mitzvah celebrations, I was unaware of the move towards kids studying their Torah portions on their mp3 players until I was told as much by my friend’s sister, whose Bat Mitzvah I had attended. Whole new world, I thought.

Now we have this.

(Don’t drop the Torah!)