A Country Disappeared

[ed. The casual horror described here reminds me of Roberto Bolano's novel 2666. See also: Crisis in Mexico.]

A few months ago, 22 people were allegedly executed by Mexican soldiers in Tlatlaya, a small community southwest of Mexico City. They were told to kneel facing the wall, and then a bullet was sent through each of their skulls.

The news and shock came a few months later, when the Associated Press published an interview with a witness. There were women and children among those who had died.

Before that, the official explanation prevailed: a skirmish between the Army and criminals, in which a few soldiers were injured while the “bad guys” got what they deserved. Sometimes it feels that the only time Mexicans react anymore is when the day-to-day atrocities that go on in our country make it to the news elsewhere around the world. If someone outside Mexico hadn’t noticed, perhaps we wouldn’t be angry. Perhaps just wary.

A couple of weeks after the news about Tlatlaya came out, something unusual, even by our current standards, occurred. Around 50 students at a Teacher’s College in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, were traveling by bus overnight through the city of Iguala. The account is muddled at best: They were leaving the city to take part in a protest for the remembrance of a student massacre that took place in 1968, but they were also collecting funds for their studies. Some vehicles were abandoned in front of their buses, essentially creating a barricade. Gunfire ensued. Six people died. Witnesses—and now, the federal investigation into the shooting—say it was the police that opened fire. The officers then escorted the students out of the buses, but instead of handing them over to the local state’s attorney office—supposing there was something to charge them with in the first place—they were handed over to other people. A local cartel, according to media reports. Days after, four mass graves were found near the city. It seemed as though the bodies of the 43–yes, 43–kidnapped students were there.

When the graves were found, the governor of the state–who would step down weeks after–, in a bizarrely joyous tone, declared that some of the bodies–tortured, then charred–did not belong to the students. Who were they then? It didn’t matter. Not right now. If there was time in the future, maybe then he’d try to figure it out.

The story first broke out in El País, a daily from Spain. We had to learn about what went on in our country, again, from the outside press.

In order to understand how 43 people could disappear in one single swoop, it’s necessary to tell the tale of the town of Iguala, and how, in essence, it could be any other town in Mexico.

José Luis Abarca was elected as mayor of Iguala in 2012. He ran under a leftist coalition of parties, even though he hadn’t formally registered in one until a month before the campaign started. He was known as a local businessman; he owned the city’s main mall and 18 buildings in the area. His wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, had a lonstanding relationship to the Mexican criminal underworld. Two of her brothers had died in 2009 and were part of Mexico’s most-wanted criminal list at the time. Her father was arrested that same year and her other brother was also thought to be part of the business: the Attorney General’s office suspected (and later confirmed) that were part of the local cartel called Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”).

How this went unnoticed, or at least ignored during Abarca’s and Pineda’s affiliation to the party, during the campaign, and most importantly, during his tenure as mayor, is egregious at best. Once elected, the government was essentially handed over to the cartel. They also ran the police, and most importantly, the federal budget assigned to the county (around 18 million USD per year).

During Abarca’s first year in office, his main rival for the party candidacy the year before, Justino Carvajal, was gunned down outside his mother’s house. As of today, there’s no motive and no suspects.

Four protestors who called the mayor out in public at a town hall meeting, accusing him of taking money from the budget, disappeared a couple of days afterward. A witness emerged later on, and he stated that the mayor himself had shot one of them in the face and killed him. He also said that he saw at least seven other people bound and gagged, kneeled before open graves, when this happened. The message was clear: If you complained, you died.

A party leader then claimed to have brought the information to federal officials, only to be ignored. The testimony that blamed Abarca for the killings sat in a dusty file in the local State Attorney’s office. It was as if everybody knew but no one wanted to do anything about it except let it lie.

In short, there was information that he was involved with the cartels, that he was giving them public money, that he was killing people who opposed him, and nothing happened. Until he crossed a threshold that previously had seemed hypothetical: he went too far when he ordered the police to kidnap and hand the students over to the cartel.

by Esteban Illades, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited 

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Inside MotoGP: How ASIMO's Tech Makes for Faster Motorcycles

MotoGP is the world's premier class of motorcycle racing. GP stands for Grand Prix, or "grand prize," which more or less says it all. On any given Sunday, the guy standing on the top of the MotoGP podium is the best sportbike rider in the world.

It's just as prestigious for those who make the machines they ride. Manufacturers spend millions creating custom, prototype motorcycles that bear little resemblance to what you see on the street. For years, it was a matter of best engine, best chassis and best suspension. Now, there's another, equally important factor at play: electronics.

A modern MotoGP bike is riddled with technology, and for the 2014 season, Honda has absolutely dominated the class. But it's taken a herculean effort, pulling in engineering resources from all corners of its corporate empire to create a two-wheeled rocket, launching rider Marc Marquez to victory again and again. Even ASIMO, the little white robot who is hardly known for his speed, would lend some support.

Earlier this year, I visited the factory Repsol Honda MotoGP team at Indianapolis, the most historic race track in the world, to get a better look at how it all comes together.

The technology

MotoGP machines are two-wheeled miracles, hand-crafted of exotic materials. Carbon-fiber bodywork and chassis, magnesium wheels and high-strung 1,000cc engines delivering upwards of 240 horsepower. Bikes must weigh just 350 pounds to pass inspection, giving them an outrageous power-to-weight ratio. The 0-to-60 sprint would happen in somewhere around two seconds, and the bikes pull eagerly past 215 mph.

To put that in perspective, consider the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. That car puts out a ridiculous 707 horsepower from its supercharged Hemi V-8 and weighs just under 4,500 pounds. Given that mass, to match the acceleration of a MotoGP bike the Challenger would need roughly 3,100 horsepower. And much bigger tires.

With that kind of power, the car would be a heck of a lot of fun, but almost completely undrivable. But then, for most mere mortals, MotoGP bikes are all but unridable. That's by design -- at least in part. These bikes are augmented with an extensive electronics package that help to tame them, filling in any gaps in human ability.

by Tim Stevens, CNET |  Read more:

Image: HRC

Supreme Court to Hear New Case Challenging Affordable Care Act

[ed. How nice. Three days after the election. You'd think they could have waited at least a week. More here.]

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act, potentially imperiling President Obama’s signature legislative achievement two years after it survived a different Supreme Court challenge by a single vote.

The case concerns tax subsidies that currently help millions of people afford health insurance under the law. According to the challengers, those subsidies are being provided unlawfully in three dozen states that have decided not to run the marketplaces, known as exchanges, for insurance coverage.

If the challengers are right, people receiving subsidies in those states would become ineligible for them, destabilizing and perhaps dooming the law.

The Obama administration said it would mount a vigorous defense in the Supreme Court.

“This lawsuit reflects just another partisan attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act and to strip millions of American families of tax credits that Congress intended for them to have,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “We are confident that the financial help afforded millions of Americans was the intent of the law and it is working as Congress designed.”

Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said he welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case. The administration, he said, “cannot ignore the plain language in a statute and rewrite laws with which they disagree.” He added, “This Supreme Court review will provide Oklahoma and the 35 other states that did not establish state-based exchanges with immediate and conclusive clarity as to their rights and obligations under the A.C.A. so that the states may make appropriate health care policy decisions.”

The case is likely to be argued in February or March, and a decision will probably arrive in June, three years after the court ruled that Congress had acted constitutionally in enacting the law.

In a supporting brief urging the court to hear the case, several Republican lawmakers said the law as currently enforced would result in “tens of billions of dollars of unlawful spending in the next year, and hundreds of billions over the next decade.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said the court’s move was a surprise. “It’s troubling that they would even consider this,” she said. “The language is very clear. The intent of Congress is very clear.”

by Adam Liptak, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

Thirst Trap

California is home to the Folsom Street Fair and the majority of the American porn industry, but our biggest fetish is for direct democracy. Unlike most states, we routinely decide matters of governance by putting them on the ballot and letting every citizen directly vote on them. It’s how we recalled Governor Gray Davis in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, it’s how we banned same-sex marriage in 2008, and it’s how, in December 2013, venture capitalist Timothy Draper almost got us all to weigh in on whether we’d like to carve the state into six pieces.

The “Six Californias” initiative declared California in its current iteration “ungovernable,” and proposed to divide it into six smaller states: Jefferson (near the Oregon border), North California (including Sacramento), Silicon Valley (including San Francisco and Oakland), Central California (most of the middle of the state up to the Nevada border), West California (including Los Angeles), and South California (including San Diego). The putative idea behind the initiative was that smaller, more localized governments would be better able to serve citizens. In reality, it was mostly a publicity stunt. Though it generated plenty of headlines and Twitter jokes, the initiative didn’t get enough valid signatures to make it to the ballot, and the six mini-Californias died before they were born.

When I first read about Six Californias, my second thought was, This is what I’ve been trying to explain to people! My first thought was, This would never work, because some of those substates wouldn’t have any water.

As it turns out, those are actually sort of the same thought. Water—who accesses it, how, and for what ­reason—has played a fundamental role in the creation of the areas roughly mapped out by the Six Californias initiative and the conflicts between them. It is fitting that a venture capitalist drew these hydrologically untenable lines on the map. After all, corporate interests and a few ­super-wealthy individuals are the ones who stand to gain the most from California’s tangled water politics. (...)

Longstanding regional water conflicts like the one between L.A. and Owens Valley have intensified in the past few years as California has sunk deeper into a devastating combination of heat and drought—the worst on record since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Weather Service. Conditions are so severe that quakes are rumbling and mountains are literally moving as our rapid consumption of groundwater from aquifers warps the earth’s crust.

As our agricultural backbone, the Central Valley (which is technically two valleys that together dominate the middle of the state) has been particularly hard-hit. It is largely in the Central Valley that California produces about half of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts; one-fifth of its dairy; and, of course, most of its wine. But hydrating all those cows and growing all those crops requires water—an immense amount of water, 80 percent of what California uses.

Usually, Central Valley farmers get around 5 million acre-feet of water from the federally run Central Valley Project, but in 2014, they received none of their contracted water supply. Zero. Instead, the limited water went to other regions. More densely populated residential counties in the Bay Area got 50 percent of their promised supply, for example. The Klamath River, which runs through the far north of California and into Oregon, got extra water to keep endangered salmon alive. The Central Valley got none.

Farmers, forced to rely more heavily on the already overtaxed supply of groundwater or water shipped in from elsewhere at great expense—more on this later—are understandably unhappy about the scenario. If you drive from one end of the state to the other on I-5, you see signs bristling along the roadside. They say things like food grows where water flows and no water = no jobs. Farmers blame the coastal regions, with their politicians and environmentalists who think “fish are more important than our farms.” The signs say congress created dust bowl, not dismantle capitalism.

And “big-city liberals”, anxious too about access to water, respond in kind. When journalist Alan Heathcock, who’d been reporting in the Central Valley, posted pictures of drought-stricken fallow farmland to Facebook, his friends left comments about how “these must be really shitty farmers” and “this is what happens when you ‘overfarm’ land.” A move by Senator Dianne Feinstein to divert water to the Central Valley met resistance from a congressman from Draper’s “Jefferson,” who protested that the Senator was “trying to spin this as a job saver, but that ignores the jobs up north that depend on water.” Another from the Bay Area said, “Best I can see, she’s making a decision that jobs in the Bay Area and Northern California and the Peninsula south of San Francisco aren’t as important as jobs in the Central Valley.”

When the problem appears as so many trade-offs, it’s impossible to say which people in which area of the state have more legitimate claims to dwindling water supplies. The farmers in the Central Valley need water, and so do the suburbanites, the fishers, and the environment. The people of the Owens Valley need water, and so do the people of Los Angeles. The social and microeconomic diversity of the state makes our water problem appear ever more morally complex, when the basic pathology is in fact pretty simple.

Who does the water system benefit the most? What powers comprise the San Fernando land syndicates of the present-day Central Valley? Though the bramble of California water politics is impenetrable in places, a few entities stand out as disproportionate beneficiaries of today’s system.

by Lauren O'Neal, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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And Away We Go...

[ed. I think this little guy has brought his act to the neighborhood.]
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Hawaii High School Confidential: Where All Politics Is Truly Local

Is there any way to escape high school in Hawaii politics?

Take Mufi Hannemann. The former mayor of Honolulu and candidate for governor studied at Harvard University before serving as special assistant in the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Punahou alum Sen. Brian Schatz, razzing a politician from a rival high school, recently said that Hannemann has an “impressive resume, but a lot of people will say, ‘You know, that guy went Iolani.’”

A bit more seriously, Schatz noted that, in Hawaii, “where you went to high school is almost a defining characteristic.”

There is little doubt that Hannemann, 60, carries traces of Iolani in the minds of some voters. Similarly, Schatz is a U.S. senator but for many people, he’s a product of Punahou. U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa is, of course, a “Waianae girl.” And so on.

The question is why?

Another Punahou graduate Charles Djou, the Republican candidate for the 1st Congressional District, said that high school in this state “is the one thing that can easily and immediately identify individuals geographically, socioeconomically (and) demographically.” It can, he said, provide a sort of “instant connection.”

‘Where You Wen Grad?’

When people ask — sometimes in pidgin — where a local went to school, the question can tap into something deep, especially on the campaign trail. In some ways, Hawaii politics can feel like the continuation of high school by other means.

That is why Civil Beat asked the candidates for governor, Congress or the U.S. Senate to analyze the importance of high school in electoral politics in Hawaii and what sort of kid they were back in the day. (Lightly edited audio recordings of each candidate’s responses can be heard by clicking the “play” button beneath their portrait photos in this article.)

Several of the candidates we spoke to got their first taste of electoral politics running for student government.

But why on earth do they, decades later, still harvest their high school’s identities with such persistence on the campaign trail?

For a local candidate, Hannemann explained, “It is a matter of being able to identify where you are from. And, most importantly, that you’ll never forget your roots.”

by Eric Pape, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

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A Birth Story

[ed. For Anna.]

It was Monday, June 2nd, and I was wide awake at 6 a.m. Maybe to some of you this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first day in a lifetime of six in the mornings, and I made the three-hour leap all in one go.

By this point, it was 10 days past my due date, and I had a very specific and recurring fantasy of being moved around town in a hammock flown by a helicopter. I wanted to be airlifted between boroughs.

When I told my fiancé, Dustin, this wish, he was quiet for a second. He had learned to reply to me with caution, but I imagine in this case he just couldn’t help himself.

“Like a whale?” he asked.

I laughed, standing on the curb somewhere. Actually yes, come to think of it: Like a whale.

On the morning of June 2nd I had been waking up “still pregnant” for quite some time—41 weeks and two days to be exact; 289 days. My mom was in town already, at an Airbnb rental a block away. Dustin was done with work. I was chugging raspberry red leaf tea, bouncing on a purple exercise ball whenever I could, shoving evening primrose oil pills up my vagina, paying $40 a pop at community acupuncture sessions I didn’t believe in, and doing something called “The Labor Dance.” The Dance (preferred shorthand) involves rubbing your belly in a clockwise direction—vigorously—and then getting as close to twerking as one can at 41 weeks pregnant.

I never did get far enough into adulthood where I was waking up at 6 a.m. for self-betterment, which is one among many things I thought I would master before having children. Add to that: novel writing, working out, makeup, clothing, getting up early. As I got closer and closer to childbirth I still held out hope for a few of them. I went to Sephora; I opened Google Docs; downloaded the Couch to 5k app for the tenth time; waddled around the track at my local park, my baby bump a-bouncing. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

Anyway, it was 6 a.m. and I was wide awake and staring at the wall. Then ow. It was like the crest of a wave of a period cramp; the worst moment, if you have forgotten to take Tylenol and then are cursing yourself that you forgot to take Tylenol. I lay there with my mind racing for awhile, then got up and ate Frosted Mini Wheats the way I had done for much of my pregnancy. Dustin was sleeping. I had another one. Another “thing.” Ow. I was kind of smiling at them at this point. Whoa, no way. Could it be? I got in the shower, jittery with this new development. Ow-ow-ow. I grabbed the towel rack and wondered how many more showers I’d take that day. In all of my natural childbirth classes everyone was raving about the magic of hot showers. I suspected, or feared, that their analgesic powers were not as good as advertised. Ow.

I got back into bed and lay there naked and huge, staring at Dustin sleeping, waiting for him to wake up. I didn’t want to look at the time, but I looked at the time and theows were 15 minutes or so apart. Ow, ow, ow I whispered into my arm. I grimaced; I cringed. So far the pain was about as bad as a stubbed toe. It was a “Damn!” pain, but it was still amusing. I was kind of proud of it, too, of my body. It had finally kicked itself into gear.

I was also a little excited because I didn’t feel like working that day, or going to another one of my doctor’s appointments at the hospital, a 40-minute commute away. The appointments are for overdue women. You sit in a room full of hospital-style armchairs (comfy but upholstered in cornflower blue, and with the kind of material you could wipe down with a washcloth) and you pull up your shirt to reveal your belly, while the nurse lubes you up and straps monitors to you and you sit with the other women whose bodies have not kicked into gear, and a chorus of fetal heart tones sing out in the room like horses galloping. The first time I sat there I cried with some kind of joy at this.

Today though, I was done with all of it.

by Meaghan O’Connell, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Kjell Reigstad

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Participatory Budgeting: The City That Gave Its Residents $3 Million

This was supposed to be a happy story. A story about a town reeling from bankruptcy, violence, and crime, that brought its residents together with an innovative strategy, one that other cities across the country are trying to emulate. This was to be a story with a happy ending full of community gardens, puppy neutering, and even some repaired roads.

But there are few happy endings in city government these days, with spiraling pension costs, sluggish economic recovery, and Americans’ general fatigue when it comes to civic engagement. And this story is no exception.

It starts in 2011 in Vallejo, a hilly and charming town of 117,000 just a ferry ride from San Francisco. The town’s streets are dotted with pastel Victorian homes and palm trees, its waterfront has a walking path with vistas of distant yellow and green hills, and its population is one of the most diverse in the country, evenly divided among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Filipinos.

But Vallejo has struggled for years. Crippled by high pension costs and public-employee salaries, it filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Things didn’t get much better after the city emerged from Chapter 9 in 2011: Crime was bad and the city’s police department was perpetually short-staffed. There were 10 murders in 2010, 14 in 2012, and 24 in 2013.

Services had been cut to the bone: Dan Keen, the current city manager, said that when he came on board in 2012, every department was operating at staff levels lower than he’d ever seen in his career.

“The city was still shell-shocked, still reeling from the reduction in services,” he told me from his office near the waterfront.

Trying to figure out how to avoid yet another romp through bankruptcy, leaders proposed a 1 percent sales tax in 2011. Residents begrudgingly agreed–50.4 percent of the town voted to adopt the sales tax, and the proposal passed by just 159 votes. One of the opponents’ biggest concerns, voiced by Councilwoman Marti Brown, was that the new revenues would go to employee salaries and pensions, just as much of the town’s money had before, and that residents would be even more tired of Vallejo’s cycle of taxing and spending with nothing to show for it.

Then Brown had an idea.

She’d read about an experiment in Brazil where a local government allowed its residents to suggest and vote on ideas for how to spend tax dollars. The process, with the clunky name Participatory Budgeting, allowed citizens, rather than politicians, to decide how to spend infrastructure dollars. Would this be a way, she wondered, of making sure Vallejo’s money would be spent in a way its residents liked?

“I thought, there’s got to be a better way to do budgeting, there needs to be more transparency,” she said, in an interview. “It was a huge part of what helped propel Vallejo toward bankruptcy–that financial process is not a transparent process. The public doesn’t get to see it, they don’t know anything about it.”

She started talking with the Participatory Budgeting Project, a group that had formed at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2005 in an effort to bring participatory budgeting to the U.S. With their help, Brown made Vallejo’s city council a proposal: Take a chunk of the money raised from the new sales tax, and let Vallejoans spend it how they wished, as long as the ideas they came up with benefited the public and could be implemented by the city or in collaboration with public agencies, non-profits, or religious institutions. The Project had helped Chicago adopt this type of budgeting in its 49th ward, but Brown's idea was bigger: to do it citywide.

When Brown floated the idea, it was not universally popular. This was a city, after all, just recovering from bankruptcy, that needed every penny. The idea of letting residents do almost anything with millions of dollars rubbed some officials the wrong way.

“You are telling a city council that’s just been handed $10 million dollars—after going through years of cutbacks—you can’t decide how that money is going to be spent, “ said Keen, the city manager. “You can understand that for some elected officials, that’s pretty tough.”

But participatory budgeting had made a big difference in some cities in Brazil. In a comprehensive study, academics found that Brazilian cities that allowed citizens to decide what to do with public funds saw lower infant mortality and increased spending on services such as education and sanitation, compared to cities that did not adopt the process.

Brown suggested that this would be a way to help people have faith in their local community once again, and proposed that about one-third of the sales tax money, about $3.2 million, would be set aside for residents to control directly.

Participatory budgeting, or PB, as the residents called it, barely passed in city council when it went up for a vote in April 2012, with Brown and her contingent winning 4-3. Some residents were furious, calling the idea that it would improve democracy “utter nonsense” in letters to the local newspaper, the Vallejo Times Herald. Even the mayor disliked the idea, telling reporters “this is not the time to fund whatever we want.”

Still, many residents were curious. They started showing up at meetings, and taking on tasks: writing the “rule book,” which would govern how the process worked; attending budget assemblies, where residents brainstormed how to spend the money; and joining the steering committee, a group of 21 locals that planned meetings and reached out to locals to get them involved.

Ravi Shankar, a longtime Vallejo resident who joined the steering committee (no, not that Ravi Shankar) said that getting involved in participatory budgeting seemed like a way to put the people-first sentiments of the Occupy movement into use.

“People started coming together in extraordinary ways,” he said.

by Alana Semuels, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Joan Miró, Painting (1933)
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Theo Mark Allen, Alaskan Brewery
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[ed. Reminds me of my first girlfriend. She had that look...]
Gina Torres 
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Head in Ass

[See also: National Review's warning about a "governing trap" (I know, it hurts my head too). Response here]

Like millions of other Americans who made the decision — or mistake, depending on your point of view — to donate money to Democratic Party candidates in the past, my inbox was filled with messages for months warning me that only the generosity of ordinary citizens like myself could prevent a Republican landslide in the midterm elections. Sometimes these requests bore an air of reasonability. But most sounded desperate.

Yet for all the urgency of these solicitations, few of them gave any sense of what donors might expect in return for their support. Democratic fundraising campaigns had no problem conjuring the specter of shadowy right-wing cabals “buying” elections. But they rarely even considered the prospect that they were also selling a product.

Imagine seeing an advertisement for a toothpaste whose sole message was that it wasn’t the leading brand. The only way anyone would become passionate about this alternative is if its competitor were successfully portrayed as ineffective or, worse still, poisonous. Realistically, though, in advanced consumer societies like the United States, the number of people who might be convinced that their choice of toothpaste is a life-or-death matter is not great. Most of them know full well that the only substantive difference between mainstream brands is a matter of aesthetics, how they look or taste.

Perhaps it’s unfair to imply that the two major political parties in the United States are basically Crest and Colgate. There are some hot-button issues where the Republican and Democratic line diverge enough to result in real-world consequences: reproductive health, collective bargaining, environmental safeguards. Yet there can be no denying that more and more Americans have concluded that both parties are far more interested in self-preservation than trying to address the nation’s most pressing problems.

That’s why their approval ratings have fallen to such an abysmal level. To most middle-of-the-road visitors, the only thing worse than the party out of office is the party in office. And that’s the primary reason why the Democratic Party was bound to lose ground this election cycle regardless of its choice of strategy: holding the White House and a slim majority in the Senate was sufficient to make it the target of the electorate’s disaffection.

by Charlie Bertsch, Souciant | Read more:
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The 36 People Who Run Wikipedia

Wikimedia, the “movement”that includes Wikipedia and all the other Wiki-things, shouldn’t really exist. Its basic operating procedure defies our strongest convictions about incentives, work, and community: It is made with no form of payment, has a very thin formal hierarchy, and users lack any real common history other than their participation.

And yet it not only exists, it almost is the Web: Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world, with 22.5 million contributors and 736 million edits in English alone. It’s as if the entire population of Australia (23.6 million) each contributed 30 times. Last year Wikimedia sites overall (which includes the likes of Wikiquote and Wiktionary, as well as Wikipedia itself) averaged 20 billion pageviews per month.

This paradox of its success is most striking at the top of the Wikimedia food chain. Running this huge enterprise is a little-known hierarchy of volunteer leaders, effectively each working an extra part-time job to police the site, battle vandals, seek out spammers and sock puppets, and clean and control what you see. Thousands of people around the world actuallyapply to do more work for free as a Wikimedia administrator, autopatroller, rollbacker, or bureaucrat.

But at the very top of this tree are 36 users who demonstrate Wikimedia in its most concentrated form: the stewards. They wield “global rights” — the ability to edit anything — and respond to crises and controversies across all Wiki platforms. They come from all around the world, receive no compensation, and rarely, if ever, encounter each other offline. You definitely don’t know them — but their work is essential to understanding how Wikimedia’s unique existence has thrived.

by Stephen Lurie, Medium | Read more:
Image: Pablo Delcan

The Art of Not Working at Work

[ed. See also: The Two-Factor Theory, also known as Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory]

Two years ago a civil servant in the German town of Menden wrote a farewell message to his colleagues on the day of his retirement stating that he had not done anything for 14 years. “Since 1998,” he wrote, “I was present but not really there. So I’m going to be well prepared for retirement—Adieu.” The e-mail was leaked to Germany's Westfalen-Post and quickly became world news. The public work ethic had been wounded and in the days that followed the mayor of Menden lamented the incident, saying he “felt a good dose of rage.”

The municipality of Menden sent out a press release regretting that the employee never informed his superiors of his inactivity. In a lesser-known interview with the German newspaper Bild a month later, the former employee responded that his e-mail had been misconstrued. He had not been avoiding work for 14 years; as his department grew, his assignments were simply handed over to others. “There never was any frustration on my part, and I would have written the e-mail even today. I have always offered my services, but it’s not my problem if they don’t want them,” he said.

The story of this German bureaucrat raised some questions about modern-day slacking. Does having a job necessarily entail work? If not, how and why does a job lose its substance? And what can be done to make employees less lazy—or is that even the right question to ask in a system that’s set up in the way that ours is? After talking to 40 dedicated loafers, I think I can take a stab at some answers.

Most work sociologists tend toward the view that non-work at work is a marginal, if not negligible, phenomenon. What all statistics point towards is a general intensification of work with more and more burnouts and other stress syndromes troubling us. Yet there are more-detailed surveys reporting that the average time spent on private activities at work is between 1.5 and three hours a day. By measuring the flows of audiences for certain websites, it has also been observed that, by the turn of the century,70 percent of the U.S. internet traffic passing through pornographic sites did so during working hours, and that 60 percent of all online purchases were made between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. What is sometimes called “cyberloafing” has, furthermore, not only been observed in the U.S. (in which most work-time surveys are conducted), but also in nations such as Singapore, Germany, and Finland.

Even if the percentage of workers who claim they are working at the pinnacle of their capacity all the time is slowly increasing, the majority still remains unaffected. In fact, the proportion of people who say they never work hard has long been far greater than those who say they always do. The articles and books about the stressed-out fraction of humanity can be counted in the thousands, but why has so little been written about this opposite extreme? (...)

In The Living Dead, David Bolchover rues “the dominance of image over reality, of obfuscation over clarity, of politics over performance,” and in City Slackers, Steve McKevitt, a disillusioned “business and communications expert,” gloomily declares: “In a society where presentation is everything, it’s no longer about what you do, it’s about how you look like you’re doing it.”

by Roland Paulsen, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Lauren Giordano

Read It and Reap

Each issue of Modern Farmer, the stylish agrarian quarterly, has an austere portrait of an animal on the cover. So far, there have been six. The animals look remote and self-satisfied, as if nothing you said could matter to them, just like human models. The first cover had a rooster with an eye resembling a tiny dark paperweight. The second had a goat looking haughtily askance. The third was of a sheep whose gaze is so penetrating that she seems to be trying to hypnotize you. The fourth was of a pig in profile whose ears flop forward like a visor; according to a note by the photographer, a pig’s flopped ears trap smells as it searches for food. The fifth had a hulking farm dog with a ruff like a headdress, and the sixth has a serene-looking cow with a black face and a white forehead and nose. Ann Marie Gardner, the magazine’s founder and editor, says that she always thought she would have animals on the cover. The art director, Sarah Gephart, says, however, that she had nearly finished designing the magazine when Gardner told her that the cover would have animals. “We thought it would be people,” Gephart said.

Modern Farmer appeared in the spring of 2013. After three issues, it won a National Magazine Award; no other magazine had ever won so quickly. According to Gardner, though, Modern Farmer is less a magazine than an emblem of “an international life-style brand.” This is the life style of people who want to “eat food with a better backstory”—from slaughterhouses that follow humane practices, and from farmers who farm clean and treat their workers decently. Also, food cultists who like obscure foods and believe that fruits and vegetables taste different depending on where they are grown. Also, aspirational farmers, hobby farmers, intern farmers, student farmers,WWOOFers—people who take part in programs sponsored by the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms movement—and people who stay at hotels on farms where they eat things grown by the owners. Plus idlers in cubicles searching for cheap farmland and chicken fences and what kind of goats give the best milk. Such people “have a foot in each world, rural and urban,” Gardner says. She calls them Rurbanistas, a term she started using after hearing the Spanish word rurbanismo, which describes the migration from the city to the countryside. Rurbanistas typify the Modern Farmer audience. (...)

‘Magazine’ is a word I learned very early on not to use,” Gardner said. “Investors didn’t want to go near you. I would say I was trying to make a brand around the idea of modern farming. My friends would say, ‘I don’t get this, it has nothing to do with your life.’ ” Photographers began to send pictures of distressed trucks and falling-down barns. “ ‘Here’s a photo shoot we could do,’ they would say, and I was, ‘No, we’re not doing that photo shoot, ever.’ Everybody also wanted to shoot tables in fields. And another one they thought was so clever was a farmer in a field with a laptop.”

Warren Street is lined with stores selling vintage furniture. Gardner stopped in front of a window with a display of metal lawn chairs. “I am so looking forward to spending money again,” she said. “I’m still in startup mode. We are really close to being super successful financially, and I can’t wait. The one thing everybody told me was ‘You guys are never going to sell a magazine with an animal on the cover,’ and I’m so happy that’s not true.” (...)

Including people who sell ads, Gardner has a staff of eight. She owns a small portion of Modern Farmer. The majority belongs to a Canadian investor named Frank Giustra, to whom Gardner was introduced by someone she knows in Vancouver. Gardner would not disclose the amount that Giustra put in, but among the investors that she courted she was known to be seeking two to three million dollars. In an ideal angel investor situation, Giustra might have received twenty to thirty per cent of the company. A lawyer later told Gardner that she had signed one of the three worst deals he had ever seen. (...)

Sometime after the first issue, however, during the summer of 2013, it became apparent that Gardner had likely overestimated the first year’s revenues and that the magazine would eventually need more money. Giustra apparently hadn’t expected to contribute more than he had already, and, Gardner said, he told her that she should find another investor. (Giustra declined to comment.) In May, 2014, after the National Magazine Award, Giustra said that he would pay for one more issue—the one to be prepared over the summer and published in September. When July arrived without Gardner’s having found someone else to put money in, Giustra told her that he would invest more only if she gave him a portion of her shares, an arrangement that is customary in such circumstances. However, he proposed additional terms that Gardner regarded as inequitable. Meanwhile, not knowing how much longer Modern Farmer would last, some of her staff began looking for other work.

Gardner must overcome two obstacles to find new investors. One is that Giustra owns too much of the company. “In venture capital, usually you have several investors, no one of whom owns more than fifty per cent of the company, and they all share an idea of the future,” Kevin Powers, the controller and finance director of the company Vox Media, told me. Powers is also a member of Modern Farmer’s advisory board. Second, an investor would wonder why Giustra was behaving as if he wanted to sell. According to Sam Holdsworth, an investment banker who raises money for early stage media and entertainment companies and who has started several magazines, “When the principal investor tries to leave early, it makes you wonder why.”

by Alec Wilkinson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Chris Buck