Archive for September 2013

Reflections on a Subway Sandwich

Twenty years ago in September 1993, I was a fresh-faced frosh at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax Nova Scotia. I had visited Halifax on weekend family trips while growing up in the province, but this was the first month of what turned out out be a six year experience of living there.

With some free time, I took a walk downtown. The path tended to be: Inglis to Tower Rd to South Park, to Spring Garden Road. From here, I ended up walking to Barrington St.

I remember protests regarding Clayoquot Sound around this time, being held across the street from the library at Spring Garden and Grafton but I’m not sure if they were visible on this particular walk, wherein I found myself further down into the historic properties.

I found a Subway sandwich shop, and stopped there for lunch, and recall being surprised when I was offered both mustard and mayo as a topping, a combination of which I had never encountered before.

Unbeknown to me, I had wandered onto the grounds of NSCAD, the art school where I would begin classes three years later. Occasionally while at NSCAD, I would look down from the library at Subway at the intersection and recall that first walk when I began to discover my new city. For that reason I took its picture.

subway-hfx

The Subway, as seen from the NSCAD library in 1999

Eight years later I began to be interested in computer programming and the web. Using books I began to figure out how to build web pages, and I was reading Slashdot everyday. There was also a website called NewsToday® (later rebranded to QBN) which aggregated news items of interest to designers, and if I remember correctly, it was through that that I found YoungPup.net, where Aaron Boodeman (youngpup) had posted “the best way” to generate a pop-up window in Javascript. (I found the posting with the WayBackMachine, timestamped Sept 19 2002). From what I recall through his blog, through a link or a reference, I learned about Aaron Straupe Cope. Through his posted online resume, I learned that we shared NSCAD as an alma mater.

“If anything I studied painting but I am mostly part of that generation for whom everything changed, and who dropped everything they were previously doing, when the web came along.” – Aaron Straup Cope (Head of Internet Typing at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum), in his post Quantified Selfies

While I was eating my sandwich twenty years ago, he was probably in the building next door taking Foundation courses. His online resume also tells me that he was around during my first year, graduating at the end of term.

Twenty years ago the future both lay before us in a tapestry of September sunshine, but just as the future of twenty years from now is being invisibly incubated, nothing was then evident. It was the first year of the Clinton Administration and Jean Chretien’s Liberals were about to win the general election. The 90s were effectively beginning.

When I first started reading Aaron’s blog about ten years ago, he was living in Montreal. Later through his blog I learned he was in Vancouver, and later still, he was in San Francisco. I imagined CDs bought at Sam the Record Man on Barrington St that may have accompanied these travels. Reading his blog, I understood he was at Yahoo!, working on a site called Flickr.

Seventeen months ago, the Google Streetview car captured the corner as it then appeared. Here it is, posted to Flickr.

streetview

So I reflect now twenty years later on how a website like Flickr (which was big in its day and which now lingers on as an established presence) became part of the world that did away with typewriters for my generation and younger, and was in a way present at the GPS coordinates where I ate a Subway sandwich twenty years ago.

The WikiWars

I once heard it said that the internet was like Guttenberg’s printing press, and while revolutionary, Gutenberg’s printing press resulted in the religious wars of a century later. This was voiced as a warning against cyber-utopianism.

Twenty years after the World Wide Web app was released so that the public could use The Internet, we have begun to see our wars play out. The religious wars of the past led to the creation of the Nation State, after the Treaty of Westphalia. Our present wars are a symptom of the breakdown of that international system.

Freedom fries: this domino line begins with McDonalds.

Ben Ali’s son-in-law wants to open a McDonalds in Tunisia. He meets with the American ambassador.

The ambassador goes home and writes a report on the meeting, noting the family’s opulent wealth. “He owns a tiger that eats 6 chickens a day”.

Because privacy is old fashioned a Marine private smuggles out gigabytes of material on a re-recordable CD marked Lady Gaga, and provides it to cyber-utopian Wikileaks. They publish it along with the Guardian and The New York Times.

The Tunisia reports are emphasized by Al Jazeera, and they spread on Tunisians’ Facebook pages. Two out of ten people have Facebook accounts because privacy is old fashioned.

So a frustrated young man is spat on by a policewoman and sets himself on fire. Tunisians take to the streets, and inspire similar protests in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Egypt’s dictator is kicked out. Libya has an 8 month civil war, before its dictator is finally killed. Syria’s civil war continues.

Egypt holds democratic elections but the poor vote for the wrong people, a party that wants to govern in an oppressive way. They protest again. The army comes in and removes the president. The world doesn’t want to call it a coup d’etat, because it was simply the army removing the person who should not have won the election. Democracy is only a good thing when the right people win. The people who voted for him are upset, so they protest, until the army clears the square by shooting at them. Some more people die.

Meanwhile, in Syria, chemical weapons are used. Chemical bombs are equivalent to First World War nukes, number two on the list of taboo armaments, a century old and “never to be used again”. They’ve nevertheless been manufactured.

Syria hasn’t signed the anti-chemical weapons treaties. A thousand people die.

President Obama had said that the use of chemical weapons would be a line that should not be crossed, lest he send in the World’s Most Powerful Military. The weapons were used.

To be continued.

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Worth reading:
WikiHistory: Did the Leaks Inspire the Arab Spring?
Adam Curtis’ 2011 blog posting on Syria

An esoteric argument

“A figure in the Muslim Brotherhood [said] ‘It’s not logical,’ (is the way he put it), ‘it’s not logical for President Obama to be so concerned about a thousand people killed in a chemical weapons attack when a hundred thousand have been killed, have been slaughtered by Assad in the last two years.’ And basically people here Jeff do not accept this distinction that the President is trying to make between the use of chemical weapons and the wholesale killing of Syrian civilians by aerial bombardment and artillery. They see it as an esoteric argument about some international weapons convention treaty that just has no relevance to their lives.”