Negroes in Drag...,

NewYorker |  The sixty-eight-year-old style legend Lana Turner doesn’t own a cell phone. If you wish to reach her at her home, in Hamilton Heights, you must call in the morning, when she is near her landline. For the rest of the day she is out and about, swanning around town in one of the five hundred vintage hats that she keeps in neatly stacked towers, filling her foyer and library.

It was when Turner was out, moving through the city, that the photographer Dario Calmese first saw her—they were both at church, on a Sunday. Calmese, whose father was a pastor, was immediately drawn to Turner’s radiant self-presentation, spotting her bright organza gown and jaunty felted chapeau across the pews of Abyssinian Baptist. At the time, Calmese was a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts and thought he might ask to photograph Turner’s hats for a class project. Instead, once the two met inside her brownstone, which is a living museum to her sartorial collection—she keeps her gowns and gloves encoffined in velvety tissue paper, alongside notes to herself about where she was, and who she was, when she procured each item—Calmese knew immediately that it was Turner who should be his main subject. It was only when she stepped into a strapless, pleated silk Mignon dress or a pastel-pink suit with black velvet buttons by Cosi Belle that the items in her wardrobe began to sing and reveal their stories.

Turner, who was born at Women’s Hospital, on West 110th Street, never formally worked in fashion, but said in one interview that she learned to dress by taking after her parents, who “worked as a chauffeur and a chambermaid, but by evening they would put on those formal clothes, gowns, and gloves, and, like so many other people in Harlem, would go out and socialize and define themselves by who they really were.” By day, Turner worked in real estate and in the art world, where she defined herself by her ornate attire, never leaving her apartment without a statement toque. People took notice—she was a favorite muse of the late street-fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, and the chef Marcus Samuelsson put several of Turner’s hats on display at his Harlem restaurant Red Rooster, in 2016.

As Calmese began to style Turner for these photographs, he realized that they were collaboratively creating a work about “Sunday presentation,” or about the ways in which churchgoers—particularly black women churchgoers—consistently infuse glamour and imagination into the realm of faith. As Andre Leon Talley, the editor-at-large for Vogue, writes in the catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of Calmese’s photos this month, at the Projects + Gallery, in St. Louis, Calmese’s photos capture how the black woman “who intersects her faith, her religion, and her personal style” is “reborn every single Sunday through the rituals and universal codes of deportment, carriage, and dress.”

Facebook "Privacy"...,

What to see what Facebook has on you (at a minimum)?

1. Goto https://t.co/UFPfcZwJw7
2. Click "Download a copy of your Facebook data"
3. Wait for automatic email from Facebook
4. Download the ZIP file link in the email
5. Extract it and open 'html/index.htm'

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) March 24, 2018

 

Sent it to the kids... 

Heard back from the 54yo Chemist Son

This was in the email he received:

What info is available?	What is it?	Where can I find it?
About Me	Information you added to the About section of your Timeline like relationships, work, education, where you live and more. It includes any updates or changes you made in the past and what is currently in the About section of your Timeline.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Account Status History	The dates when your account was reactivated, deactivated, disabled or deleted.	Downloaded Info
Active Sessions	All stored active sessions, including date, time, device, IP address, machine cookie and browser information.	Downloaded Info
Ads Clicked	Dates, times and titles of ads clicked (limited retention period).	Downloaded Info
Address	Your current address or any past addresses you had on your account.	Downloaded Info
Ad Topics	A list of topics that you may be targeted against based on your stated likes, interests and other data you put in your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Alternate Name	Any alternate names you have on your account (ex: a maiden name or a nickname).	Downloaded Info
Apps	All of the apps you have added.	Downloaded Info
Birthday Visibility	How your birthday appears on your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Chat	A history of the conversations you’ve had on Facebook Chat (a complete history is available directly from your messages inbox).	Downloaded Info
Check-ins	The places you’ve checked into.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Connections	The people who have liked your Page or Place, RSVPed to your event, installed your app or checked in to your advertised place within 24 hours of viewing or clicking on an ad or Sponsored Story.	Activity Log
Credit Cards	If you make purchases on Facebook (ex: in apps) and have given Facebook your credit card number.	Account Settings
Currency	Your preferred currency on Facebook. If you use Facebook Payments, this will be used to display prices and charge your credit cards.	Downloaded Info
Current City	The city you added to the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Date of Birth	The date you added to Birthday in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Deleted Friends	People you’ve removed as friends.	Downloaded Info
Education	Any information you added to Education field in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Emails	Email addresses added to your account (even those you may have removed).	Downloaded Info
Events	Events you’ve joined or been invited to.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Facial Recognition Data	A unique number based on a comparison of the photos you're tagged in. We use this data to help others tag you in photos.	Downloaded Info
Family	Friends you’ve indicated are family members.	Downloaded Info
Favorite Quotes	Information you’ve added to the Favorite Quotes section of the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Followers	A list of people who follow you.	Downloaded Info
Following	A list of people you follow.	Activity Log
Friend Requests	Pending sent and received friend requests.	Downloaded Info
Friends	A list of your friends.	Downloaded Info
Gender	The gender you added to the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Groups	A list of groups you belong to on Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Hidden from News Feed	Any friends, apps or pages you’ve hidden from your News Feed.	Downloaded Info
Hometown	The place you added to hometown in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
IP Addresses	A list of IP addresses where you’ve logged into your Facebook account (won’t include all historical IP addresses as they are deleted according to a retention schedule).	Downloaded Info
Last Location	The last location associated with an update.	Activity Log
Likes on Others' Posts	Posts, photos or other content you’ve liked.	Activity Log
Likes on Your Posts from others	Likes on your own posts, photos or other content.	Activity Log
Likes on Other Sites	Likes you’ve made on sites off of Facebook.	Activity Log
Linked Accounts	A list of the accounts you've linked to your Facebook account	Account Settings
Locale	The language you've selected to use Facebook in.	Downloaded Info
Logins	IP address, date and time associated with logins to your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Logouts	IP address, date and time associated with logouts from your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Messages	Messages you’ve sent and received on Facebook. Note, if you've deleted a message it won't be included in your download as it has been deleted from your account.	Downloaded Info
Name	The name on your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Name Changes	Any changes you’ve made to the original name you used when you signed up for Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Networks	Networks (affiliations with schools or workplaces) that you belong to on Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Notes	Any notes you’ve written and published to your account.	Activity Log
Notification Settings	A list of all your notification preferences and whether you have email and text enabled or disabled for each.	Downloaded Info
Pages You Admin	A list of pages you admin.	Downloaded Info
Pending Friend Requests	Pending sent and received friend requests.	Downloaded Info
Phone Numbers	Mobile phone numbers you’ve added to your account, including verified mobile numbers you've added for security purposes.	Downloaded Info
Photos	Photos you’ve uploaded to your account.	Downloaded Info
Photos Metadata	Any metadata that is transmitted with your uploaded photos.	Downloaded Info
Physical Tokens	Badges you’ve added to your account.	Downloaded Info
Pokes	A list of who’s poked you and who you’ve poked. Poke content from our mobile poke app is not included because it's only available for a brief period of time. After the recipient has viewed the content it's permanently deleted from our systems.	Downloaded Info
Political Views	Any information you added to Political Views in the About section of Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Posts by You	Anything you posted to your own Timeline, like photos, videos and status updates.	Activity Log
Posts by Others	Anything posted to your Timeline by someone else, like wall posts or links shared on your Timeline by friends.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Posts to Others	Anything you posted to someone else’s Timeline, like photos, videos and status updates.	Activity Log
Privacy Settings	Your privacy settings.	Privacy SettingsDownloaded Info
Recent Activities	Actions you’ve taken and interactions you’ve recently had.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Registration Date	The date you joined Facebook.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Religious Views	The current information you added to Religious Views in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Removed Friends	People you’ve removed as friends.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Screen Names	The screen names you’ve added to your account, and the service they’re associated with. You can also see if they’re hidden or visible on your account.	Downloaded Info
Searches	Searches you’ve made on Facebook.	Activity Log
Shares	Content (ex: a news article) you've shared with others on Facebook using the Share button or link.	Activity Log
Spoken Languages	The languages you added to Spoken Languages in the Aboutsection of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Status Updates	Any status updates you’ve posted.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Work	Any current information you’ve added to Work in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Vanity URL	Your Facebook URL (ex: username or vanity for your account).	Visible in your Timeline URL
Videos	Videos you’ve posted to your Timeline.	Activity Log Downloaded Info

After he had read some of the 305mb provided,he responded:

It's fucking horrifying!! I've looked at about 2% of it, and it makes me grateful that I have used discretion out there for the most part. Even the "private messages" are in the files....

Fist tap Big Don.

With "Platform" Capitalism - Value Creation Depends on Privacy Invasion

opendemocracy |  The current social mobilization against Facebook resembles the actions of activists who, in opposition to neoliberal globalization, smash a McDonald’s window during a demonstration. 

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted.

In addition, the app provided access to information on the profiles of the friends of each of those users who agreed to take the test, which enabled the collection of data from more than 50 million.

All this data was then shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, which was working with Donald Trump’s election team and which allegedly used this data to target US voters with personalised political messages during the presidential campaign. As Wylie, told The Observer, “we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

These platforms differ significantly in terms of the services that they offer: some, like eBay or Taobao simply allow exchange of products between buyers and sellers; others, like Uber or TaskRabbit, allow independent service providers to find customers; yet others, like Apple or Google allow developers to create and market apps.

However, what is common to all these platforms is the central role played by data, and not just continuous data collection, but its ever more refined analysis in order to create detailed user profiles and rankings in order to better match customers and suppliers or increase efficiency.

All this is done in order to use data to create value in some way another (to monetize it by selling to advertisers or other firms, to increase sales, or to increase productivity). Data has become ‘the new oil’ of global economy, a new commodity to be bought and sold at a massive scale, and with this development, as a former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has argued, global capitalism has become ‘surveillance capitalism’.

What this means is that platform economy is a model of value creation which is completely dependant on continuous privacy invasions and, what is alarming is that we are gradually becoming used to this.

Is Silicon Valley Headed For A Reckoning?

LATimes | There are calls to eliminate "safe harbor" for platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook so that they can be regulated like media companies. Other ideas include turning Google into a public utility like its counterparts in the telecommunications sector. And Amazon is forcing new ways of thinking about monopolistic powers beyond just consumer prices.

One recent sign that Washington is willing to take on the industry occurred Wednesday when the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, which penalizes sites that facilitate prostitution. Silicon Valley opposed the law, fearing it was a slippery slope that would make tech companies liable for content. Already, Craigslist has removed its personals section, and Reddit said it would ban certain transactions.

Still, it may be unreasonable to expect wholesale change without public opinion turning irrefutably against Silicon Valley. Consumers remain captive to technology and investors aren't exactly ready to dump internet stocks.

That said, Facebook shares fell nearly 6% this week amid calls from some users to quit the social network. Similar public pressure led to the ouster of Uber's controversial CEO last year. Perhaps to quell such speculation, Facebook's board took the unusual step of releasing a statement in support of the company's executives Wednesday.

The harsh backlash belies the general sense of fatalism about privacy in the digital era. A Pew Research poll from 2014 showed an overwhelming majority of Americans lacked confidence in internet companies to keep their information private and secure.

Despite that, a Pew survey from this year showed how beholden Americans are to some of these companies after finding 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube and 68% use Facebook.

It's why advertisers won't abandon the platforms anytime soon, even if they have to weather scandals such as Facebook's and cry foul once in a while for placing their ads next to objectionable material.

"The reality is, right now, [Facebook's] profits are still rising," said David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect" and founder of the tech conference Techonomy. "Advertisers for the most part are still going to be there. This is not a fundamental break with their commercial success. Not yet. It depends entirely on what they do now."

Facebook says it has matured from its "move fast and break things" days (its motto was amended in 2014 to "move fast with stable infra," shorthand for infrastructure). And Zuckerberg's response to the current crisis, however late, shows how much more seriously he's acknowledging privacy concerns.

God Cares Nothing For Your Suffering....,

medium |  What does it mean to be American? To really “be” — see, feel, think, act American, so much so that you are not self-aware of it, because it is unconscious, reflexive, invisible, this way of “being”?

Well, it means what it always has. Punching down, not lifting up. Punching down is hardwired into America by now, thanks to a unique history of settlers — who had never had any — punching the next wave down for relative hierarchical position. An attitude of cruelty was born. And so today cruelty is the point of its institutions, the purpose of its norms, and the linchpin of its perverse idea of virtue, that by punishing people, we can better them. It is all that Americans expect from each other — and give to each other. That is the terrible burden of a Promised Land that history’s despised warred among one another for domination of.

The problem is this. A society of people punching one another down must collapse. What else could it do? It cannot rise, can it? If I am punching you down, and I am punching the next person down below me, how can anyone ever lift anyone up? But without lifting one another up, a society cannot grow in quantity or quality of life. This, too, is what happened to Soviet Russia.

America has never reckoned with its history of cruelty. Instead, it developed a defensive mythology of being welcoming — even while every new wave of immigrants had to fight, sometimes quite literally little street by street, against the last wave, for a piece of the Promise Land. Like all myths, that one — was a lie that revealed the truth: America was a Promised Land for the huddled masses to roam free — but only if they could fend off the other tribes, by punching them down, endlessly,.

A Promised Land is like a Garden of Eden. But who can live in the Garden peacefully but angels? Human beings, flawed, indelicate things, are only meant to be cast out— they are ever in conflict, in tension, hungry and ravenous. And that is never truer than for their most despised — who need to be healed most, or else will ravage their Gardens worst.

Twitter In The Crosshairs: Is We Sick Boss?

Stakes is High with all these global governance challenges....,

WaPo  |  Twitter is sick. And it’s sorry for infecting you. Oh, and — do you have an aspirin?

That was the gist of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey’s mea culpa this week. In a series of tweets Thursday, Dorsey confessed that the company “didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences” of the instant, public and global messaging it pioneered. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough,” he said. “We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking.” 

Dorsey is asking the public to help Twitter get better. It is inviting outside experts to submit proposals for ways to define and measure the “health” of conversation on the platform, presumably as a first step toward improving it. As a first attempt, Dorsey has suggested four metrics based on the work of an MIT-affiliated nonprofit: shared attention (is there overlap in what we’re talking about?); shared reality (are we using the same facts?); variety (are we exposed to different opinions grounded in shared reality?); and receptivity (are we open, civil and listening to different opinions?). 

It is good to see that Twitter is finally acknowledging its ill health. It is even better to hear it’s open to intervention. The problem is that the service may be too far gone to recover — and it is unclear whether this initiative is a last gasp or a real attempt to change.

The reasoning behind this proposal is probably not just a noble commitment to public health. Platforms such as Twitter have clearly realized that if they don’t begin to self-correct, the government is going to do it for them through regulations that may not be as gentle as those they would impose on themselves. And in the long run, the flaws in their systems represent an existential threat worth getting ahead of. Being seen as a destroyer of democracy and a net negative to public trust isn’t exactly great branding. A short-term cure, if painful, might offer the inoculation that platforms such as Twitter need for long-term survival.

Are Yoga Pants Bad For Women?

NYTimes |  It’s a new year and I’ve got a new gym membership. I went the other morning. It was 8 degrees outside. And every woman in there was wearing skintight, Saran-wrap-thin yoga pants. Many were dressed in the latest fashion — leggings with patterns of translucent mesh cut out of them, like sporty doilies. “Finally,” these women must have thought, “pants that properly ventilate my outer calves without letting a single molecule of air reach anywhere else below my belly button.”

Don’t get me wrong. I have yoga pants — three pairs. But for some reason none of them cover my ankles, and as I said, it was 8 degrees outside. So I wore sweatpants.

I got on the elliptical. A few women gave me funny looks. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe they were concerned that my loose pants were going to get tangled in the machine’s gears. Men didn’t look at me at all.

At this moment of cultural crisis, when the injustices and indignities of female life have suddenly become news, an important question hit me: Whatever happened to sweatpants?

Remember sweatpants? Women used to wear them, not so long ago. You probably still have a pair, in velour or terry cloth, with the name of a college or sports team emblazoned down the leg.

No one looks good in sweatpants. But that’s not the point. They’re basically just towels with waistbands. They exist for two activities: lounging and exercising — two activities that you used to be able to do without looking like a model in a P90X infomercial.

It’s not good manners for women to tell other women how to dress; that’s the job of male fashion photographers. Women who criticize other women for dressing hot are seen as criticizing women themselves — a sad conflation if you think about it, rooted in the idea that who we are is how we look. It’s impossible to have once been a teenage girl and not, at some very deep level, feel that.

But yoga pants make it worse. Seriously, you can’t go into a room of 15 fellow women contorting themselves into ridiculous positions at 7 in the morning without first donning skintight pants? What is it about yoga in particular that seems to require this? Are practitioners really worried that a normal-width pant leg is going to throttle them mid-lotus pose?

We aren’t wearing these workout clothes because they’re cooler or more comfortable. (You think the selling point of Lululemon’s Reveal Tight Precision pants is really the way their moth-eaten design provides a “much-needed dose of airflow”?) We’re wearing them because they’re sexy.

Afrofuturism > Black Speculative Arts > Hip-Hop - More "Arts" Weaponization?

vice |  VICE: What exactly is the Black Speculative Arts Movement 

Dr. Reynaldo Anderson: BSAM is an umbrella term that looks at several different positions [like] magical realism, Afrofuturism, black science fiction, black quantum futurism, Afro-surrealism, ethnography—different perspectives related to this movement. It's a collection of artists, intellectuals, and activists that we have in these conventions.

How did it start? 

BSAM emerged out of the Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination project that I co-curated with John Jennings at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It was during that exhibition that I wrote the manifesto for the movement, which is posted online for people to look at.

Later, while brainstorming with John, he connected me to Maia "Crown" Williams, the founder of MECCAcon, the Midwest Ethnic Convention for Comics and Arts [who] operates a film festival and is a founding member of Ava DuVernay's ARRAY out of Detroit. With her expertise in film and comic conventions, she was very valuable as a co-founder to forming an ongoing convention aspect of the movement.

How long ago did you start thinking about this movement?

We are in the second wave of Afrofuturism, and it's also sociopolitical. When you think about science fiction and what we are doing with Nightlife, a lot of these people who are addicted to drugs have similar behaviors to those of zombies. There is a connection there as a literary or critical theorist. The way I think about science fiction and speculative philosophy happens in real life when people are using all these chemicals and drugs on their body and how it impacts their behavior, as they react like some of these people that we read about in novels. I think it's because society is changing so quickly the only reference we have to understand what happens to us is science fiction or horror. Things that we read in science fiction books used to be unthinkable. Now, they are a reality.

Let's talk about your book, Afrofuturism 2.0. How did you come to be involved in that project?

The book was the result of several years of thinking about the term "Afrofuturism." Many people preceded me in its conceptual development, like Mark Dery, Alondra Nelson, Kodwo Eshun, and others. I first heard of the term in the 90s as a graduate student when I was working on my PhD focusing on the Black Panther Party. The 2.0 project came out of a couple of things. One, I thought about Afrofuturism being different than it was when it was formulated in the 90s.

Afrofuturism 2.0 is the era that we're in now, this era of social media, technological acceleration, globalization, and environmental stress that we are dealing with. I put together a call for papers to put a book around the ideas that really mattered to Afrofuturism from 2005 to now. The other difference is that Afrofuturism is now a transdisciplinary pan-African techno cultural movement. It's global. It's not just American. It takes place in Africa, Latin America—all over the world people are doing it. It was the spirit of those spiritual and intellectual currents going on that led to the book being developed that I co-edited with Charles Jones.