Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state

Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. Its long stand curves upward to a white dome shading a dark bulb. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street. 

Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make residents of Marseille more aware that they are being watched. She is part of a group called Technopolice that has been organizing efforts to map the rise of video surveillance. With some 1,600 cameras in the city, there is plenty to find. Mixed in among them, Nano says, are 50 smart cameras designed to detect and flag up suspicious behavior, though she is unsure where they are or how they are being used.

Across the world, video cameras have become an accepted feature of urban life. Many cities in China now have dense networks of them. London and New Delhi aren’t far behind. 

Now France is playing catch-up. Since 2015, the year of the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the number of cameras in Paris has increased fourfold. The police have used such cameras to enforce pandemic lockdown measures and monitor protests like those of the Gilets Jaunes. And a new nationwide security law, adopted last year, allows for video surveillance by police drones during events like protests and marches.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/13/1053650/marseille-fight-surveillance-state/

 

Are we really prisoners of geography?

Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia was at peace and enmeshed in a complex global economy. Would it really sever trade ties – and threaten nuclear war – just to expand its already vast territory? Despite the many warnings, including from Vladimir Putin himself, the invasion still came as a shock.

But it wasn’t a shock to the journalist Tim Marshall. On the first page of his 2015 blockbuster book, Prisoners of Geography, Marshall invited readers to contemplate Russia’s topography. A ring of mountains and ice surrounds it. Its border with China is protected by mountain ranges, and it is separated from Iran and Turkey by the Caucusus. Between Russia and western Europe stand the Balkans, Carpathians and Alps, which form another wall. Or, they nearly do. To the north of those mountains, a flat corridor – the Great European Plain – connects Russia to its well-armed western neighbours via Ukraine and Poland. On it, you can ride a bicycle from Paris to Moscow.

You can also drive a tank. Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” When Putin did precisely that, invading a Ukraine he could no longer control by quieter means, Marshall greeted it with wearied understanding, deploring the war yet finding it unsurprising. The map “imprisons” leaders, he had written, “giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think”.

There is a name for Marshall’s line of thinking: geopolitics. Although the term is often used loosely to mean “international relations”, it refers more precisely to the view that geography – mountains, land bridges, water tables – governs world affairs. Ideas, laws and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics you must look hard at maps. And when you do, the world reveals itself to be a zero-sum contest in which every neighbour is a potential rival, and success depends on controlling territory, as in the boardgame Risk. In its cynical view of human motives, geopolitics resembles Marxism, just with topography replacing class struggle as the engine of history.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/10/are-we-really-prisoners-of-geography-maps-geopolitics

 

Why “Jîna”: Erasure of Kurdish Women and Their Politics from the Uprisings in Iran

The future of Iran could be changed forever by the protests in September 2022 sparked by the death in police custody of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish woman from the city of Saqez who was arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly.” 

The protests have generated an inspiring and newfound solidarity among Iranians of all ethnic backgrounds, as well as promising internationalist feminist solidarity. However, as two Kurdish women, we have been deeply disappointed to see Jîna’s Kurdish background routinely ignored by mainstream media and among allies in diasporic solidarity rallies and in expressions of international solidarity. 

In particular, we focus on three types of erasures we see even among progressive and feminist circles. The first relates to the ways people use or don’t use the name “Jîna” and the broader significance of such choices. Second, we draw attention to a patterned failure in acknowledging the origins of the slogan “Woman, Life Freedom,” which was developed by the Kurdish women’s freedom movement affiliated with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) against colonial, patriarchal states and societies. The third points to a wider dismissal of the significance of Kurdish struggles and demands both inside Iran and beyond it.  

Dismissing Jîna’s Kurdish identity, downplaying the systematic and structural oppression of ethnic minorities, and ignoring the origins of the now popularized chant, “Women, Life, Freedom,” risks fueling rifts, distrust, and resentment among Kurdish populations. To start, overlooking the likely relationship of Jîna’s Kurdishness to the fatal violence she was subjected to, reveals deeper patterns of violence that Kurds have experienced in modern Iran. In short, Jîna’s Kurdishness is critical to understand marginalization in Iran and the broader Middle East and a feminist movement that is simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-imperial.

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44560

 

What Viral Chatter Tells Us About Bird Flu

In early September, scientists at the University of Florida confirmed that a bottlenose dolphin, found dead in a canal on the Gulf Coast in March, carried a highly pathogenic kind of avian influenza. Its brain was inflamed.

True to its label, this virus is skilled at infecting birds, but it sometimes goes farther afield. A few months after the dolphin’s death, another mammal, a porpoise, was found stranded and weak on the west coast of Sweden. It subsequently died, bearing the same virus. Between these events there was another concerning case in Colorado, when a man tested positive for bird flu. He was a state prison inmate, at work in a prerelease job that involved culling birds on a poultry farm where the infection had struck.

Later analysis questioned whether the Colorado man was truly infected or whether a testing swab had merely picked up a big load of virus in his nose. But he was not the sole human in the past year to test positive for bird flu, specifically H5N1. A 79-year-old man in Britain, who lived closely with about 20 pet ducks, also tested positive for the bird virus around Christmas of 2021.

 

El k-pop y la generación z: mucho más que solo música

Descubrí el pop coreano cuando tenía doce años. Antes de eso, crecí escuchando lo que había a mi alrededor, lo que escuchaban mis padres y amigos, desde pop en español como Julieta Venegas o Lila Downs hasta música clásica que mi papá ponía mientras trabajaba. Encontrar este género por mi cuenta fue realmente emocionante, distinto: la primera vez que escuchaba música que sentía plenamente mía. Me topé con algo que por mucho tiempo había estado buscando: chicos y chicas de aspecto etéreo cantando melodías pegadizas, acompañadas por coreografías elaboradas y llamativas, algo genuinamente refrescante. Era justo lo que quería en esa época. Aquella expresión artística, esa exagerada mezcla de música pop y toques experimentales, los vestuarios idílicos y el balance perfecto entre mi gusto por el arte familiar y una naturaleza foránea, completamente desconocida, me invitaron a descubrir de qué se trataba.

https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/9a719009-b777-432f-bc2c-87cc136e6ed3/el-k-pop-y-la-generacion-z-mucho-mas-que-solo-musica

 

K-everything: the rise and rise of Korean culture

Last week, I was standing in a huge dance studio – one of 12 – near the top of a funky new office tower just north of the Han River in the South Korean capital, Seoul. The building is home to a company called SM Entertainment, which has strong claims to have invented one of the most potent cultural movements of the 21st century, the phenomenon of Korean pop music – K-pop.

Each generation creates hit factories in its own image. The “SM Culture Universe” was originally the vision of a Korean pop entrepreneur called Lee Soo-man who, after a brief career as a singer and DJ, studied computer engineering in the States in the 1980s. He returned to Seoul “with the dream of globalising Korean music”.

In the dance studio, his nephew Chris Lee, now the chief executive, is talking me through all the ways in which this dream came true. To begin with, K-pop idols conquered Asian charts; lately, after the extraordinary success of K-poppers BTS (the biggest-selling band in the world for the past two years, managed by rival conglomerate Hybe), they have been expanding their reach to all corners of the globe. New members of boy bands and girl bands – aged 11 upwards – are recruited by SM each year on long contracts and this building becomes their virtual home. It is designed as an inside-out place, with every room a stage set for press conferences, fan chats and livestreams; one floor is an “artist’s house”, a place where “idols” can chill or do some cooking (while their fans watch and scream outside); another is a “song camp” where songwriters from across the world are flown in on rotation to create a global sound.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/korea-culture-k-pop-music-film-tv-hallyu-v-and-a

 

Hoardiculture

When​ Possessed, Rebecca Falkoff’s cultural history of hoarding, came through the letter box, I put it on my desk next to a pile of other books, a tangle of wires left out after an unsuccessful search for a phone charger, a small pocket microscope, a broken reading light, a carrier bag full of travel adapters, a sheaf of loose papers, a selection of penknives, a pair of speakers, the jawbone of a pike, an ancient box of cigars, a blown pigeon egg, a spool of fishing line, several harmonicas, a roll of solder, a broken toy steam engine, the shell of a sea urchin, the tail feather of a ring-necked parakeet, a transparent padlock for practising lockpicking, three empty mugs and a shrivelled apple core.*Falkoff’s book led me to others. I didn’t think I could start writing until I had read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I sought out novels and short stories that feature hoarders (Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which Stepan Plyushkin ‘fishes’ in his village for worthless things; Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’, in which a young man gives up a promising parliamentary career so he can walk around London in search of beautiful shards of pottery) and printed off academic articles in which psychiatrists argued over definitions. For months, the books and papers kept accumulating. I’d shuffle the pile around, read a chapter, underline things, attach a Post-it note. The pile got taller. The pile got dustier.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/jon-day/diary

 

The vital crosstalk between breath and brain

If you’re lucky enough to live to 80, you’ll take up to a billion breaths in the course of your life, inhaling and exhaling enough air to fill about 50 Goodyear blimps or more. We take about 20,000 breaths a day, sucking in oxygen to fuel our cells and tissues, and ridding the body of carbon dioxide that builds up as a result of cellular metabolism. Breathing is so essential to life that people generally die within minutes if it stops.

It’s a behavior so automatic that we tend to take it for granted. But breathing is a physiological marvel — both extremely reliable and incredibly flexible. Our breathing rate can change almost instantaneously in response to stress or arousal and even before an increase in physical activity. And breathing is so seamlessly coordinated with other behaviors like eating, talking, laughing and sighing that you may have never even noticed how your breathing changes to accommodate them. Breathing can also influence your state of mind, as evidenced by the controlled breathing practices of yoga and other ancient meditative traditions.

In recent years, researchers have begun to unravel some of the underlying neural mechanisms of breathing and its many influences on body and mind. In the late 1980s, neuroscientists identified a network of neurons in the brainstem that sets the rhythm for respiration. That discovery has been a springboard for investigations into how the brain integrates breathing with other behaviors. At the same time, researchers have been finding evidence that breathing may influence activity across wide swaths of the brain, including ones with important roles in emotion and cognition.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2022/vital-crosstalk-between-breath-brain

 

Las estatuas más incómodas de América

En marzo de 2011, durante una visita oficial a la Argentina, el entonces presidente Hugo Chávez vio la estatua que se levantaba detrás de la Casa Rosada y preguntó: “¿Qué hace ahí ese genocida?”. Era una escultura de Cristóbal Colón de unos seis metros de alto y 38 toneladas, hecha en mármol de Carrara, ubicada allí desde hacía casi un siglo. “Colón fue el jefe de una invasión que produjo no una matanza, sino un genocidio. Ahí hay que poner un indio”, dijo Chávez. Para los funcionarios que lo acompañaban, ciudadanos de un país donde aún se repite que los argentinos descienden de los barcos, aquella figura tal vez nunca había resultado incómoda hasta ese momento. Pero tomaron nota de sus palabras.

El comentario de Chávez no solo fue disparador de la remoción del monumento dedicado al marino genovés en Buenos Aires —una medida que tomó el Gobierno de Cristina Kirchner en 2013 y desató una larga polémica y una batalla judicial con la comunidad italiana—, sino también el síntoma de una época en que las sociedades de América, y algunos de sus dirigentes, empezaban a poner en discusión de forma más o menos central los símbolos que han dominado los espacios urbanos durante décadas. A veces manifestación de impotencia, a veces demagogia, a veces el descubrimiento repentino de una forma de mostrar la historia y de una resistencia que ya estaban allí desde hacía bastante tiempo, pero en los márgenes.

“Las estatuas hablan siempre de quien las colocó”, escribió en 2020 el autor peruano Marco Avilés, columnista del Washington Post, después de una serie de ataques a monumentos confederados y a figuras de Cristóbal Colón durante las protestas antirracistas en Estados Unidos. En su texto, Avilés cuenta sobre el derribo a martillazos de una escultura del conquistador Diego de Mazariegos en San Cristóbal de las Casas, México, en octubre de 1992. Aquella estatua había sido emplazada 14 años antes frente a la Casa Indígena por orden del alcalde, para celebrar un aniversario de fundación de la ciudad. “Consultar a las personas indígenas o negras no es una costumbre muy extendida entre las élites que ahora gobiernan América Latina, y era peor hace cuatro décadas”, escribe Avilés.

https://elpais.com/internacional/2022-09-25/las-estatuas-mas-incomodas-de-america.html

 

Wrongful Convictions Aren’t Going Anywhere

In 2002, a group of men pushed their way into a Scarborough nightclub without paying cover. They scuffled with Colin and Roger Moore, two brothers who were hosting a monthly fundraising event. Words were exchanged, punches were thrown, bottles broken, a glass door smashed. The group eventually left. Minutes later, two gunmen burst into the kitchen and opened fire on the brothers. Colin would die of his injuries. Police arrested one of the gunmen a short time later, and a search for the getaway vehicle led them to Leighton Hay, who, they decided, was the second shooter. Hay was charged with both first-degree and attempted murder.

Crown prosecutors hung a significant amount of their evidence on eyewitness accounts of the second shooter—but the case was remarkably weak. One witness picked Hay out of a photo lineup but, according to court documents, confessed that Hay resembled the shooter only about “80 percent.” The prosecution put them on the stand at trial anyway. Eyewitnesses also agreed that the shooter had short dreadlocks. But Hay had a buzz cut. Prosecutors argued that Hay had buzzed his hair to cover up his crime, presenting clippings obtained from his razor as proof.

Hay’s defence was strong: his sister, who was dating the first gunman, testified Hay was asleep when they returned home. Despite all that, he was convicted. And his conviction was upheld on appeal.

The prosecutors fought to prevent the forensic testing of Hay’s hair—and for good reason, as the testing showed that the hairs were most likely facial and not from his head. The exculpatory evidence led the Supreme Court to unanimously declare that Hay deserved a new trial. Prosecutors withdrew the charge. Hay was released in 2014, after serving twelve years in prison. The case made national news.

Wrongful Convictions Aren’t Going Anywhere