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Provenance refers to the origins of an object or work of art. Historically it’s been used to describe the process of validating authorship— is this really a Picasso or a forgery? But since 1933, it has also referred to establishing rightful ownership of a work. From 1933 until the end of World War II, a …

In March of 2014 it was reported that the National Security Agency had aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives - codenamed TURBINE – to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” Much of this done via “fake” Facebook Servers. Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg said about that on Facebook.

The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

“The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world.

This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.

That same Mark Zuckerberg, the face of Facebook, recently testified in front of Congress to answer questions about how the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of more than 87 million Facebook users without their permission. It turns out that many other entities – academic, commercial, governmental – could have grabbed that data under previous Facebook policies. In a New York Times Op-Ed Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain wrote “The Cambridge Analytica dataset from Facebook is itself but a lake within an ocean, a clarifying example of a pervasive but invisible ecosystem where thousands of firms possess billions of data points across hundreds of millions of people – and are able to do lots with it under the public radar.”

Will Davies, author of the Happiness Industry, has written in the London Review of Books that

“Destroying privacy in ever more adventurous ways is what Facebook does. But just as environmentalists demand that the fossil fuel industry ‘leave it in the ground,’ the ultimate demand to Silicon Valley should be ‘leave it in our heads.’"

Throughout his recent congressional testimony Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica to access the personal data of 87 million Facebook users and as often promised to do a better job. But what kind of "better job" can we imagine if we allow Facebook, Google, and Amazon access to our random thoughts and our very imaginations? How is it that we trust our privacy to our Surveillance Capitalists?

Privacy and Trust...recall in 2010 it was reported that in 2004 a then 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend had this interaction via Instant Message shortly after the launch of "The Facebook" in his dorm room:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Still the real villain, Davies asserts, is a ruthless economic logic that insists on inspecting ever more of our thoughts, feelings and relationships. What's the best way to thwart this? He suggests anti-trust laws. It's hard to consider that the US Congress, full of millionaire industry flunkies, or a Supreme Court crowded with Federalist Society credentials, will have any interest in "breaking up" our now "two-big-to-fail" data companies.

In March of 2014 it was reported that the National Security Agency had aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives – codenamed TURBINE – to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” Much of this done via …

What shall it profit a university to gain valuable endowments or private partnerships, if it should lose its soul?

The public University as we know it is in crisis, as business prerogatives overtake its values and executive-style leadership eats away at its budgets. The number university administrators has grown over 350% since 1976, while faculty levels are nearly stagnant*; college presidents are sometimes paid over a million dollars a year, and yet state legislatures keep cutting education budgets and passing the burden along to students and their parents.

A quick glance at Indiana University reveals a President whose total compensation in 2016 was over one million dollars with a base salary of six hundred thousand and two Vice Presidents adding nearly another million in salary alone. And that’s just at the tippy-top...one rung down there are academic Deans like John Graham who heads the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) and is the former “Regulatory Czar” for George W. Bush--he’s even got a “SourceWatch” page devoted to him for his industry-friendly work.

The environment in question inculcates the values of this business ideology where marketing professors are “worth” double those in any humanities discipline and splashy “signature” projects that do little of fundamental value for the public are pushed on administrative whims, with no regard for the university’s actual mission.

(I’d sure love to know what IU’s Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics might say about this...oh, that’s right IU nixed its funding in 2016, closing, after 43 years, what might have been called the conscience of the University.)

Our guest tonight is University of California Berkeley Sociologist, Michael Burawoy, who has studied industrial workplaces in Zambia, Chicago, Hungary, and post-Soviet Russia, has turned his sociological lens on the workplace that is the modern University. Burawoy says top Universities are now helmed by people he calls "spiralists": executive administrators who enter the university from the outside, with little knowledge of its inner workings or long-standing values. They cultivate, promote and protect each other through mutual recruitment, at the same time boosting their corporate-level incomes and contributing to administrative bloat, all the while corroding the public-spirited legitimacy universities were founded on.

Work has always been a locus of social construction, from the shop floor to the classroom. And yes, schools, though we may forget, are sites of labor. And one particularly freighted with an inherent socialist tendency. It’s why there has been a great struggle in the last decades for the soul of university: a struggle currently being handily won by spiralists and profiteers.

RELATED

Michael Burawoy on Sociology and the Workplace (Social Science Bites)

The Neoliberal University: Ascent of the Spiralists (Critical Sociology, 2016)

Privatization increases inequality and reduces the quality of education (The Daily Californian)

Poynter Center Expected to Close Its Doors (Indiana Daily Student)

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What shall it profit a university to gain valuable endowments or private partnerships, if it should lose its soul? The public University as we know it is in crisis, as business prerogatives overtake its values and executive-style leadership eats away at its budgets. The number university administrators has grown over 350% since 1976, while faculty …

Our show today is Anarchy is Intersectional: Learning from Emma Goldman. Goldman, a feminist anarchist, was disdainful of what is now called “Lean In” feminism saying, in a letter written 99 years ago on April 3, 1919, that “...the feminists foolishly believe that having a man’s job, or professions, makes them free.”

Emma Goldman was born to Orthodox Jewish parents in 1869 in the Russian Empire in what is now Lithuania and emigrated to the United States in 1885 with her half-sister. Living first in Rochester, New York, Emma soon made her way to New York City carrying a sewing machine and five dollars. This adolescence might sound familiar to Interchange listeners as it is nearly the same course taken by noted Wobblies organizer Matilda Rabinowitz in 1900.

Radicalized by the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs in 1887, found guilty of being anarchists, not for detonating a bomb, Goldman moved quickly toward the action that would make her, in the words of J. Edgar Hoover, the most dangerous anarchist in America: planning the attempted assassination of Henry Frick, union-busting manager of a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately this “propaganda of the deed” turned public opinion against the striking workers and would mark Goldman as a “terrorist” in the eyes of state and national authorities. And it is a familiar template for the state to use...immigrant, anarchist, agitator...

But Goldman was a writer and orator of great distinction who could mesmerize a crowds numbering in the thousands. And she was a defender of the individual conscience against mass opinion. But an individual is never alone.

The problem that confronts us today...is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others...This seems to me to be the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman, can meet without antagonism and opposition.

Poison Girls, an English anarcho-punk band, accompany us throughout. Their singer and guitarist, Frances Sokolov, known as Vi Subversa, died in 2016 at the age of 80.

GUEST

Kathy Ferguson, author of Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets. She’s a professor of political science and women’s studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and she hails originally from Lapel, Indiana. She joined us via Skype.

Vi Subversa (Photo by Chris Mills)

MUSIC - Poison Girls

“Ideologically Unsound”

“Fear of Freedom”

“Abort the System”

“Are You Happy Now”

RELATED

The Emma Goldman Papers

Vi Subversa

Matilda and the Wobblies

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Today we show our support for women as we ask you to show your support for Interchange. We’ll hear clips that highlight the fight for women’s rights in the country where 77% percent of women polled will not identify as feminist but believe men and women should be equal socially, politically and economically.

Those are 2013 poll numbers but I can’t imagine they’ve changed for the better.

It’s the last Tuesday of Women’s History Month and so we decided to share some clips from past shows which focus primarily on feminists and Feminism.

Let’s set the tone on Emma Goldman’s terms (and I’ll quickly note that Goldman is our topic next time on Interchange). She is principally known as an anarchist, and the person, along with Alexander Berkman, J Edgar Hoover claimed to be the most dangerous anarchist in America. Perhaps it doesn’t need saying but I will say it anyway, she was also a feminist, and as Lynn Farrow has said, feminism practices what anarchism preaches. This is from the 1910 essay “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation”:

The general social antagonism which has taken hold of our entire public life today, brought about through the force of opposing and contradictory interests, will crumble to pieces when the reorganization of our social life, based upon the principles of economic justice, shall have become a reality.

Peace or harmony between the sexes and individuals does not necessarily depend on a superficial equalization of human beings; nor does it call for the elimination of individual traits and peculiarities. The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities. This seems to me to be the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman, can meet without antagonism and opposition.

Thank you, Emma Goldman. Of course this USA continues to be rife with social antagonism, and the clips we’ll play today show the ways women have fought to expose the structural nature of that antagonism in an oppressive male supremacist society.

Our opening song, "Tgif," was off of the 1972 album Papa Don’t Lay that Shit On Me by The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band featuring Le Tigre. I love that one. Sorry for the infantilizing bleeping FCC restrictions for radio play.

We'll hear selections from these programs:

Eliding History: Jill Lepore On Telling Stories

Women and Children First: The Dialectic of Sex

Dissecting Male Supremacy: Kate Millett's Sexual Politics

No One Here But Us Creeps: On Nonconsensual Sex, Sleeping Beauty, and Hunting Girls

Unmanning Sex: Meghan Murphy on Radical Feminism

MUSIC

All songs by The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band

"Tgif"

"Ain't Gonna Marry"

"Secretary"

"I'm On My Way"

PHOTO CREDIT

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Co-host: Jennifer Brooks

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Our show today is Anarchy is Intersectional: Learning from Emma Goldman. Goldman, a feminist anarchist, was disdainful of what is now called “Lean In” feminism saying, in a letter written 99 years ago on April 3, 1919, that “…the feminists foolishly believe that having a man’s job, or professions, makes them free.” Emma Goldman was …

Today we show our support for women as we ask you to show your support for Interchange. We’ll hear clips that highlight the fight for women’s rights in the country where 77% percent of women polled will not identify as feminist but believe men and women should be equal socially, politically and economically. Those are …

March 27 is our Spring Fund Drive show! We’ll ask you to show your support for Interchange and WFHB while we show our support for women. We’ll hear clips that highlight the fight for women’s rights in the country where 77% percent of women polled will not identify as feminist but believe men and women should be equal socially, politically and economically. (The song used in the promo, "You Don't Say," is by jazz trombonist Melba Liston.)

What might you hear while you donate?

CLIPS

Story and First Person Provocation (Laurie Stone and Joan Hawkins)

Matilda and the Wobblies

Women and Children First: The Dialectics of Sex

Dissecting Male Supremacy (on Kate Millett's Sexual Politics)

Unmanning Sex: Meghan Murphy on Radical Feminism

How We Talk About Our Dying: Susan Gubar On Living with Cancer

Eliding History with Jill Lepore (Wonder Woman)

Honey from a Weed (Patience Gray)

MUSIC

Songs from Papa, Don't Lay That Shit On Me by The Chicago and New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Bands

"Supporting Interchange, Supporting Women," next time on Interchange, Tuesdays at 6 pm on WFHB.