I think Biden is a good choice for Obama’s VP. He effectively addresses a lot of Obama’s weaknesses. He brings wisdom, experience and a lot of foreign policy credentials to the ticket. He also has that reassuring old-white-guy flavor which will probably help in some demographic groups. Biden is a good debater and should make an effective attack dog for Obama. He just needs to be careful to keep his foot out of his mouth, because he’s dropped some big gaffe lines in the past.

Even more than the announcement itself, the campaign did a brilliant job of managing the pre-announcement hype. They got an entire day’s worth of free news coverage for NOT telling the media anything:

And now they’re going to get at least two more days of wall-to-wall Obama-Biden coverage, because the Sunday news shows will all cover it, and then it’ll be covered again on Monday.

Anyway, I’m off to hang out with hackers and check out a new possible location for PUSCII.

I stayed up to watch Obama’s acceptance speech along with an Irish guy from Cork. Bizarrely, the desk clerk guy was nice later, he gave us several free beers and actually cooked us a Spanish omlette (?!). He kept talking about how he was “just doing his job” by yelling at people. Then during Obama’s speech he went on a long rant that I didn’t entirely follow about how bullshit politics is and how I shouldn’t care about politics but should spend more time worrying about fast motorcycles and girls. Not that I don’t think motorcycles and girls are awesome, but there’s no reason that should preclude an interest in politics.

Anyway, I got a tip from one of the Dutch hackers about a hacklab that’s here in Barcelona, so I think I’m going to try to check that out today, and also try find a better place to stay. I think I’m getting sick, too. My nose has been kind of stuffy and I’ve felt dried out with a sore throat for a day or so.

As near as I can make out from talking to a few of the protesters and searching online, Amadeu Casellas is an anarchist who robbed banks in the 70s and 80s in order to finance labor demonstrations. He was sent to prison and has been there for 22 years. Some of the sites claim that 20 years is the maximum allowed sentence for his crime. In any case, Casellas has apparently been on a hunger strike for the last 70 days and this demonstration was in support of him/his freedom.

On the one hand, a convicted bank robber seems like a lousy choice to rally around. On the other hand, 70 days is a freaking long time to be on a hunger strike. I’d be curious to learn more about the situation, but all the information online seems to be pro-Casellas propaganda, so it’s hard to know what’s really the truth.

The directives seem to be written with the mistaken idea that the ISP market looks like the mobile phone market, with only a few, large providers. Of course, if small ISPs are driven out by the costs of trying to comply with the directive, then that’s what the ISP market will look like.

Last Saturday in Budapest, there were at least three significant political demonstrations. The first was organized by the Hungarian Democratic Charter (HDC), theoretically a non-partisan group, but one that was founded by the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, head of the Hungarian Socialist Party. It was a large, peaceful demonstration against extremism and fascism, and several thousand people showed up (one source I read said 4,500, which seems plausible after being there).

There were nice old people wearing red hats

Hey! It's the prime minister! (somebody pointed him out to me)

Another rally was held by the Roma (or “gypsies” as they prefer not to be called), this demonstration later joined with the larger HDC for a march to the square in front of the Parliament building.

Roma Marchers

The cardboard sign says 'everyone deserves respect' and the blue-and-green flag with the sunburst is a Roma flag.

The final demonstration was a counter-rally staged by several far-right nationalist/fascist groups, including the Sixty-four Counties Youth Movement (the name–which must be catchier in Hungarian–comes from the territory held by Hungary prior to WWI), and the Jobbik party. I never got close enough to get a good look at them, but news reports seem to put their numbers between 500 and 1,000. By all accounts, the right-wing protesters were radical, angry, and violent.

The Hungarians at the data retention conference told me that these right-wing groups usually stage violent riots several times a year, and that September 20 is a particular holiday for them because of the birthday of one of their historical heroes (which is why the anti-fascist demonstrations had been scheduled for that day). The Hungarians I talked with were generally very dismissive of the political aims of the rightists (“They’re just like football hooligans, they like to get drunk and fight”), but they also reported that the right-wingers have been growing in number and becoming better organized every year.

The other force present in central Budapest that day was the police, and they were out massive numbers. It seemed like every cop in Hungary was there, and they were all decked out in riot gear. I snapped some photos, but they don’t really do justice to quite how omipresent the riot police were. I would say at a bare minimum, there had to be around a thousand cops there. Every major intersection had cops guarding it with metal gates, which they opened and closed at different times in response to the movement of the crowd and the rioters. There were even more cops who I saw either piling into or pouring out of these APC-esque vehicles which moved them around the center.

Riot Cops

The cops' APC/tank thing

More riot police

It was clear that the authorities knew the right-wing demonstration was likely to turn violent and were taking no chances. They were well-equipped, there were enormous numbers of them, and they clearly knew what they were doing: opening and closing intersections to funnel the rioters the way they wanted them to go. As a demonstration of the efficient and overwhelming power of the state, it was frighteningly impressive.

As an American, the entire experience was somewhat strange for me. For one thing, I’m not at all used to fascists being a real and dangerous political force that must be opposed with large rallies. In the States, “fascism” has long since evolved into an empty and meaningless synonym for “whatever political position I strongly disagree with.”

For another thing, I’m not used to sympathizing with the riot police. Despite their imposing uniforms, plexiglas shields and truncheons, the Hungarian riot cops I encountered were generally polite, and even friendly. I saw tourists taking photos with their arms around two cops. At one point, I was going to lunch with some other people from the conference (none of whom spoke Hungarian) and the restaurant (a vegetarian place run by the Hare Krishnas) we wanted to go to was down a street obstructed by riot police. After some confusing inter-lingual back and forth, somebody gestured toward the restaurant, “Can we just go to the vegetarian restaurant?”, and the demeanor of the riot cops instantly changed, “Ahh…vegetarians!” and they opened the gates to let us pass. Apparently violent rightists do not frequent vegetarian restaurants. Afterwards, we joked that “vegetarian” was the secret password for getting past Hungarian riot police.

The only “bad” encounters I had with the Hungarian police were when they searched our bags before letting us enter the HDC rally. I don’t know whether this was a legal search under Hungarian law, but I thought it was justified since the Prime Minister was at the rally, and the other side was throwing Molotov cocktails. Also, a riot cop shouted at me for jaywalking and crossing against the light. I thought this was pretty ridiculous since there were absolutely no cars on the roads due to the demonstrations and the police roadblocks, but you better believe I moved out of the street double-time.

The riot cops seemed effective at keeping the rioters boxed in and away from the peaceful demonstrations. They also did a good job of keeping “normal” people away from the violence. This was a little disappointing because I would’ve liked to get close enough to take some photos, but on the whole they were doing their job well, and I’m glad I didn’t get the crap kicked out of me by violent fascists. The news reports say the rightists were tear-gassed, and some of the Hungarians told me that “They use the same strategy every time. They fence them in and beat the hell out of them, and leave them only one narrow way to leave when it’s over.” I can’t speak to how the police treated the rioters, but they were well-behaved in everything I saw.

This woman and her little daughter found themselves on the wrong side of the police barricade. They let her through right away.

There was some question as to whether the car would make the 100km journey to Pisa without incident, but it performed like a champ.

Upon arriving in Pisa, we visited was a large social center near the city center. It’s not quite a squat, because the groups using it had a two-year lease from the city that recently expired. They haven’t moved out, and are currently embroiled in a fight to renew the lease. The city wants to bulldoze the building and construct a bus depot. It’s a big structure, and twenty-three groups involved in all sorts of different activities are based there. There’s a group that provides free bike repairs, a group that offers Italian language classes to the local immigrant population, and the hacklab offers tutorials on the internet and computers. Stefania conducted an interview with one of the hackers for her Ph.D. research, and he also gave us a tour around the premises.

Cool broken-computer art piece in the courtyard

The bike repair room

Wall of the library in the social center

After the tour, we were invited to borrow some bikes and participate in the Critical Mass demonstration that evening. Apparently Pisa holds Critical Mass events every month, but they are usually not that large, with only a few dozen people in attendance. This event was different, because instead of the normal organizers, it was put together by protesting university students.

A little bit of background, the Italian government recently passed a new law (“legge 133″) which drastically slashes funding for education in Italy, including universities. There isn’t a whole lot of English-language media on the issue, but Nature has published a couple pieces on the impact it will have on research scientists in Italy. It’s not just the scientists and staff who are upset, though. University students are also righteously pissed off. In protest, students have occupied many of the public universities in Italy in 1960s-style sit-in takeovers, and there have been many large street demonstrations. The University of Pisa (founded 1343!) is one of the more prestigious Italian universities, and, along with some of the universities in Rome, has been playing a leading role in these protests.

So anyway, that’s what this Critical Mass was about, a protest against law 133. Somewhere between two and three hundred people showed up, and even the organizers were suprised by the number of bike-riding supporters. The group assembled in front of the University buildings, and then rode from there to the Piazza dei Miracoli (“Square of Miracles”) in front of the Leaning Tower, making a lot of noise, chanting slogans (“Hands off the University!”—it rhymes much nicer in Italian) and attracting attention along the way. Arriving at the square, somebody broke out a megaphone and people were taking turns addressing the crowd from the pediment of a statue in front of the Tower. One of the teachers whose job is now in jeopardy spoke and was well-received; several students shouted fiery rhetoric into the megaphone.

The guy with the megaphone in the above photo, in particular, seemed to me to be the very embodiment of the dashing, romantic young student-cum-revolutionary. He spent a lot of time with the megaphone.

I was just thinking about how awesome it would be to stand on statues and yell things into megaphones for good causes when Stefania poked me, “Hey, they want people who speak foreign languages to come up and address the tourists.” Somebody spoke in French, and then Spanish; I figured they would easily have somebody to do English, but I’ve found that the Italians are surprisingly self-conscious about their English, even when they speak it relatively well.

It was then that I was really glad I hadn’t shaved in a few days. You gotta look the part, right? I stepped up onto the pediment, megaphone in hand, and discovered to my surprise that it’s not as easy as one might think to ad lib appropriate, inspiring, and eloquent rhetoric when facing a crowd of several hundred students and perhaps a thousand more tourists and onlookers.

I think I must’ve been reading too much American political coverage lately, because on my first attempt I could summon nothing but bland banalities about the importance of education. I said, among other things, “A great nation like Italy deserves a great university system.” and “Education should be a government priority!” Not exactly the stuff of which revolutions are made.

People were supportive though, and after a minute or two, I stepped down. A small, shy Asian kid stepped up after me and addressed the crowds in timid Japanese. He was awesome and everyone loved him. About 10 minutes later, some of the Italian students motioned me over again. Apparently they really wanted English addresses because so many tourists speak English.

On my second go around I felt I did a much better job. I explained to the tourists that, “this demonstration is against a new government law that cuts funding to education, they are strangling the university,” and went on to say that “universities are important to the health of a nation; especially a nation with a culture and history like Italy’s. Some of the oldest universities in the world are here in Italy, and now they are threatening to destroy that. We cannot allow this!”

The ‘we’ was a bit of a stretch, I concede. I also found myself being far more nationalistic with my rhetoric than the Italians who were speaking. Had I shouted, “Death to Berlusconi!” I suspect the protestors would’ve eaten it up (I also suspect I might’ve gotten an angry phone call from the US State Department). But I felt that as a foreigner, it wasn’t my place to issue sweeping denunciations of the Italian government. Please note that this kind of courtesy doesn’t stop Europeans from talking shit on my government continuously.

Approaching the tower

These guys were awesome, their signs say Adopt A Mathematician

After the Critical Mass, we headed back to the social center for a party, but the rest of the stuff in Pisa is probably worthy of a separate post.

Blue skies over a threatened university

After the critical mass, Stefania headed back to Florence, and I went to back to the social center. They were having some sort of special benefit event to pay for the fines levied after a group of antifascist activists disrupted a speech by a right-wing, anti-immigrant Italian politician named Borghezio.

There was a very nice communal dinner that included a pasta course, a meat course, a desert, and an aperitif. I ran into Angelo, one of the guys I’d met at the hackmeeting in Palermo. It turns out he lives in Pisa and studies mathematics at the University of Pisa. He generously volunteered to let me stay with him.

After dinner, there was a screening of video from the event that prompted the fund-raiser. Basically, from what I could tell on the video (which had clearly been heavily edited) Borghezio was speaking at an event in some building, and there were a lot of really loud, angry protesters around outside. The video wasn’t really that interesting. The shots of the protesters were all pixelated to shield their identities, which made it hard to watch. It was mostly just blurry crowds standing around yelling, banging on doors, windows and cars. There were confrontations with the police. Towards the end, Borghezio is hustled out of the building and flees the scene.

After the video, I played 3-on-3 basketball with some Italian guys in the courtyard. I think they assumed that because I was American, I would be better than I actually am. My defense was weak, and I was totally winded after about 5 minutes, but I made a couple layups, one decent jumper and some rebounds. Considering I haven’t played basketball in three or four years, I was quite proud of my performance.

There was also a concert with a DJ in the auditorium. It was a pretty cool, diverse crowd with a surprisingly wide variety of ages and ethnicities represented. Unfortunately, the DJ was pretty lame, it was boring, repetitive house music.

Both Angelo and I agreed on the general suckiness of the music. I asked if there was anything else going on that night. Pisa isn’t really much of a nightlife town, he informed me. But there might be something going on at the occupied University. I was 100% on board with that plan.

We stopped by Angelo’s place and I dropped off my bags, and then we walked over to the university.

It was probably around 1 am when we arrived. There were maybe two dozen people still awake, sitting around outside smoking, or inside drinking; talking. Two guys with acoustic guitars were performing duets of Italian folk songs and protest anthems; everyone else was singing along. There was a large collage taking shape, with photos and text clipped from various newspapers and magazines. The text underneath the picture of the kitten says something like, “This kitten wrote the new education law. You don’t hate kittens, do you?”

I asked if the collage represented any particular idea, or just anything that looked cool. I was told the latter. From a copy of Black Power International magazine (and gold background from a travel ad), I contributed the golden-haloed Barack Obama on the far right, which I thought was at least mildly clever given the near-messianic fervor surrounding our Presidential frontrunner.

To any American students reading, if you’ve ever really really wanted to do vodka shots in the registrar’s office, or drink a beer in your lecture hall, I suggest you occupy your university as soon as possible.

If there was a certain party/festival/sleepover atmosphere, I don’t mean to imply that the students weren’t serious about their political goals. In addition to holding a significant quantity of empty alcohol bottles, the former administrators’ office also held a great deal of paperwork generated by the students themselves. They were researching legislative options, communicating with the media, scheduling and organizing demonstrations, and further coordinating with the protesting high school students. They were writing and xeroxing fliers, leaflets and signs. Posters on the wall included clippings from media coverage, and a detailed explanation of the new law and its ill-effects.

Details of Law 133

I put off writing this post for a long time because I wanted to write something brilliant; something that really captured the feeling of the place. A sense of newness burdened by history. A mix of honest idealism and devil-may-care apocalyptic abandon. Excitement tempered by exhaustion.
A better writer than I might get it really right, but you’ll just have to take my word that it felt like something historically important might be occurring.

This feeling was not lost on the students themselves. Indeed, if anything, there was a level of self-consciousness among them that seemed at times to threaten their effectiveness going forward. It’s never good to be too aware of the potentially momentous impact of your actions.

I met a freshman physics major who told me that she was exhausted, but she didn’t ever want to go to sleep. She said she felt like she was experiencing history being made, and she didn’t want to miss a second of it. Over the course of the two days I stayed there, it seemed clear to me that the students in Pisa were acutely aware of their radical predecessors. In their sartorial choices and music selection, they seemed to be taking cues from both Latin-American revolutionaries and 1960s student radicals.
Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” played frequently.

At one point, a yellow bandanna tied around one guy’s bicep slipped off and dropped on the ground. I picked it up, “Hey, you dropped your bandanna,”
I said, handing it back to him.
“Oh, thanks,”
he replied.
“You wouldn’t want to be the only one without a bandanna,”
I joked.
“In the movement, you need to have one,” he answered with apparent seriousness.

Despite their affinity for bandannas, their movement is uniquely grounded in the 21st century. One of the first things they did was to establish a blog/website, complete with live webcam feed. The technology team had posted a detailed flowchart of goals, including a presence on MySpace and Facebook, video conferencing with students at other universities and a simplified system for students to upload photos to a communal Flickr account.

Tech Goals

The students also upgraded the technology hardware as one of their first actions. Shockingly, there was no wireless internet in the building before it was occupied. Perhaps this is emblematic of the degree to which the university is underfunded. The students bought a wireless router and installed it in the main lecture hall. It was actually a really crappy router that seemed to drop the WAN connection about every couple hours or so. I felt kind of terrible for the student tasked with providing IT support for the activists. He spends half his life rebooting that router. He told me that a few nights previously, people had roused him out of bed at 4 am to fix the router. I was tempted to just buy him a new router.

After the first couple days, the administration shut off internet access in the occupied buildings. This is the 21st century version of throwing in tear gas canisters. There were special sub-protests (“Give me connectivity or give me death?”), meetings and internet access was eventually restored.

As the night wore on, Angelo suggested, “Hey, you wanna just sleep here tonight?” I believe my response was “Awesome”.

Now, we had to go back to Angelo’s place to retrieve our sleeping bags and such. The students had been locking the gates to the university at night and Angelo was concerned that if we left to get our stuff, they might lock the gates and nobody would be motivated enough to rouse themselves and let us back in. Then, he hit upon a brilliant social engineering hack to guarantee that we would be re-admitted.

There is a certain pastry shop in Pisa where the employees come in around 3:30 am to begin baking pastries for the morning. Although the shop doesn’t officially open until 6 am, it’s known among young people that if you hang around in the alley behind the bakery, you can usually buy pastries in the middle of the night.

Angelo found a small brown paper sack and went around to all the students at the university asking if they wanted these pastries, and collecting money from each of them. He promised that we would return with the pastries (and, coincidentally, our sleeping gear). We immediately became the two most popular people at the university. Two kids even volunteered the use of their bicycles, which we accepted.

We biked over to the alley behind the bakery. It was clearly a happening nightlife spot in Pisa, because there were already about a half-dozen people there ahead of us waiting for the shop to “open”. I felt irrationally sketchy hanging around in an alley with a bulging paper sack full of cash at 3:45 in the morning. After about 15 minutes, the back door opened and one of the bakers took orders. Angelo confessed to me that he’d only ever ordered one or two late-night pastries at a time, and wasn’t sure how the mass-order would go over. However, when we stepped up, Angelo asked if we could order 40 pastries (half creme-, half chocolate-filled), and the bakers didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. We handed over the contents of our cash-sack and waited for another 20 minutes for our order to bake. The bakers had some trouble packing all the pastries so that we could carry them while riding a bike, but a combination of tinfoil trays, paper wrappers and repurposed plastic garbage bags got the job done. We swung by Angelo’s flat and I picked up my sleeping bag and a change of clothes.

Returning to the university bearing fresh-baked pastries, the gates were opened and we were received like conquering heroes. Thus, one of the universal principles of university students the world over was reaffirmed: they LOVE cheap, unhealthy food in the middle of the night, and they’re lazy about going to get it themselves. This fact is the only thing keeping Mix Bowl in Claremont, California in business.

All forty pastries were devoured in a matter of a few minutes. I felt bad for the students who had somehow missed the boat on the pastry-ordering. They would trickle in in ones and twos, see everyone eating, and pick fruitlessly through the empty remnants of the packaging before wandering off, dejected.

Full of pastry, I suddenly got really tired. Most of the students were sleeping in the large lecture hall. In contrast to the stone or concrete floors found in most of the building, the lecture hall had relatively warm wood flooring. For novelty’s sake, I laid my sleeping bag out on the vacant lecture dais and quickly dropped off to sleep.

I woke up around 11 am, feeling refreshed, if a bit sore and stiff. Note to university administrators: when students are allowed to manage their own affairs, not a single event is scheduled earlier than 12 noon.

Many students were already preparing a communal breakfast/lunch. I’m continuously in awe of the Italians’ ability to cook good food for enormous numbers of people. This particular meal required the use of the largest pasta pot I’ve ever seen. It took three people to manhandle it out to the curb and pour the water off into the storm drain. Other students barbecued sausage and ribs on an improvised wheelbarrow-grill. Warm, low-grade supermarket beer also made an appearance.

After lunch, there was a really large meeting in the auditorium for local high school students. In addition to trying to organize themselves, the University of Pisa served as an organizing focal point for several local high schools. I was impressed by the turnout among the high school students, mostly filling the large lecture hall (perhaps a thousand seats). The high school students seemed to be diverse in both age and level of attentiveness. Those in the back chatted and flirted like they were still in class, while, near the front, their peers (assisted by a few university students who seemed to be deliberately trying to stay out of the middle of it) debated and deliberated. If the university students were copping Latin American revolutionaries and 1960s radicals, the high school students were taking their cues from the university students: an imitation of an imitation.

Late in the afternoon, Angelo suggested we go back to his place to shower and relax a bit before a meeting he described as “important” that evening. Apparently the student activists had secured an audience with the University Senate (I get the impression this was sort of equivalent of the Board of Trustees at an American university), an administrative body that includes one or two token student members. The meeting at the university that night was to decide on what to present to the University Senate.

This meeting got going around 9 pm and went on for a long time. Many students seemed quite agitated and angry at times. Afterwards, talking to one of the girls who had been one of the leading participants in the discussions, she told me that the meeting had been incredibly frustrating and very little had been decided. The vast majority of the debate was over how decisions should be made. Early on, the student activists had rejected majority-voting as a decision-making method in favor of agreed consensus. But that was in the first few days, when it was a relatively small group of people. At the time I arrived, the University of Pisa had been occupied for eleven days. Now, with a lecture hall audience of several hundred, many of the newcomers had been demanding to know why no votes were being taken.

I shared my view that while consensus-agreement might be a more ideal decision-making method; when dealing with groups larger than a dozen or so, it simply wasn’t practical.

It was clear to me that most of the students were very committed and sincere, doing the best they could, but failing at times. For example, the group in charge of press contact had forgotten to call reporters about the critical mass event. So no reporters were present to preserve the text of my stirring oratory for posterity. Watching the students discuss, debate, argue and explain, I had the feeling that it might all be for naught; that the real decisions were being made by people in power, people who weren’t paying attention and wouldn’t have cared even if they had been. When asked about the student demonstrations, the education minister was quoted as giving a one-line answer, “I don’t understand them.” These pessimistic thoughts made me feel very old and very cynical. I couldn’t honestly say what more the students should be doing.

However, by the end of the frustrating meeting, I wasn’t the only one with a dim view of the future of the students’ movement. Angelo said he wasn’t sure what would happen next. He told me that the science and math departments were having their own meeting on Monday, to talk about taking action independently of other groups. The girl I talked to earlier told me that she was going home to take a shower and sleep in her own bed for the first time in eleven days, but vowed to return.

Angelo and I also retired to his flat for the night, and I slept on a real mattress. We also watched Italian Spiderman.

Visiting the student activists in Pisa was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had on this trip so far. At times, I felt like an interloper, an outsider, a tourist. While I may feel strongly about education funding, this wasn’t my fight. However, Angelo later told me that he felt like talking to me, explaining the issues to me as an outsider actually helped them clarify their own thinking. And once, when I was walking to the bathroom, a guy stopped me, “Hey, weren’t you at the critical mass? I heard what you said, it was good. Thank you.” So that was quite gratifying.

1:39 AM – I’m at an election party hosted by an American ex-pat. There’s a Frenchman, a Ukrainian, a couple Slovenian and one other American girl.

1:43 AM – We’re watching the Daily Show on one guy’s laptop. Wolf Blitzer is stalling for time on CNN. They’ve called KY for McCain and Indiana still looks close.

1:44 – Wolf Blitzer is trying to talk to some woman in Chicago, but you can’t hear a word she’s saying because the crowd is yelling so loud.

1:45 – Oh my gosh, did anyone see CNN’s “hologram”?!?!? Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!

1:47 – Oh, lame, it’s not a real hologram. They just have a ring of cameras surrounding her and it’s composited in as a visual effect. Weak.

1:49 – So CNN has their entire team deployed and Blitzer’s beard looks he spent hours on it. In contrast, BBC has one sickly looking pale British guy in a realy ugly suit. CNN has holograms and flying maps. BBC has a bluescreen the guy doesn’t know how to use.

1:51 – NYtimes.com has a really nice detailed overview of the results coming in.

1:53 – Surprise, surprise, Obama wins Vermont. We’re watching Monday’s Colbert Report now. He’s much more entertaining than CNN.

1:55 – McCain is ahead in Virgina 56% to 42% with 9% reporting, but looking at the nytimes map, it’s mostly counties in the south and western part of the state. Obama’s voters are going to mainly in Northern, or “Fake” Virginia.

1:56 – It looks like CNN has called South Carolina for McCain as well. So far, no surprises.

1:59 – CNN just called MA, IL, CT, NJ, DE, MD, DC, for Obama and OK and TN for McCain, and Maine is splitting its EVs with 3 of the 4 going to Obama.

2:03 – Indiana’s looking pretty good. With 25% reporting, Obama is only down 2%, and it looks like nothing from Lake County (the Chicago-adjascent part of Indiana) is reporting yet.

2:05 – Huffington Post has one of the goofiest headlines ever  (horrible formatting original)”

OBAMA WINS PENNSYLVANIA… MA, IL, CT, NJ, ME, DC, DE, MA… MCCAIN WINS OK, TN… FOX, CBS: MCCAIN WINS WEST VIRGINIA… MSNBC, CNN: MCCAIN WINS SOUTH CAROLINA… CNN: OBAMA WINS VERMONT… MCCAIN WINS KENTUCKY…
EXIT POLLS 2008… READ WITH CAUTION… OBAMA MAY BE HEADED FOR BIG WIN…“

2:06 – Looks like the Dems picked up a Senate seat in Virginia with Warner.

2:08 – CNN’s guy agrees about Indiana. Obama is outperforming Kerry even in rural areas in Indiana, and lots of Obama-leaning territory hasn’t reported yet.

2:11 – A friend of mine just IM’d me that ABC is calling PA and NH for Obama! PA would be huge! The McCain campaign basically pinned their whole hopes there.

2:19 – BBC and SkyNews are still both really phoning it in.

2:20 – David Axelrod is talking on CNN. That dude looks super super exhausted. His comb-over looks even worse than usual.

2:22 – Blitzer asks about superstitions, Axelrod says his big one is “don’t claim victory early”. He also stumbles through a talking point about voters wanting change. I’ll bet the A-rod could repeat that phrase without any higher cortical function.

2:30 – CNN is explaining that people in New Hampshire who went to college went heavily for Obama. I wonder if that has anything to do with Sarah Palin’s blatant anti-intellectualism.

2:33 – It looks like Liz Dole is in big trouble in North Carolina. Hagen is up with 57% right now.

2:35 – Trying to get Skype working so I can call some folks back home.

2:38 – CNN is now finally calling PA for Obama. *knock on wood* But this is probably the election right here. The crowd in Grant Park is going nuts.

2:42 – Haha, CNN is so mean. They just went over to the McCain headquarters and asked “What does it feel like there to lose PA?” The people in background are cheering a bit. Was something else just called for McCain?

2:43 – CNN International is giving us a “Middleast Marketplace Update”, apparently the Saudi stock exchange is up?

2:52 – Nice! CNN just called Kay Hagen winner against Dole in North Carolina. I wonder how predictive that is for the presidential race?

2:56 – So far, Obama’s performing about as well as he was polling. Doesn’t look like a “Bradley effect” is evident.

2:58 – Alabama is going for McCain. A whole bunch more states are closing in a minute.

2:59 – “C’mon now Wolf, 20 more seconds of bullshit, c’mon, c’mon, you can do it!” – My host.

3:01 – Soledad O’Brien, the avatar of humanity’s gorgeous multiracial future; and some old overweight bald white guy are pointing out that people who said “race was a factor” went for Obama, and people who said “race was not a factor” ALSO went for Obama. The old guy can’t work the touchscreen.

3:03 – Nice, we get Tom Udal the Senator for New Mexico, and also Shaheen beats Sinunu (sp?), so two more Senate seats from the Dems.

3:09 – My mom is awesome! The election judges were jerking people around trying to vote. She pulled out her voter-registration card on them, and then also called the IL attorney general’s office hotline on them!

3:11 – Darn, they’re calling Georgia for McCain. That was always kind of a long shot, but a lot of Obama volunteers had their hearts set on GA.

3:19 – Mitch McConnel holds onto his Senate seat. Close race, though.

3;20 – Somebody tells me FOX is calling Ohio for Obama…if true, that’s another big nail in the coffin for McCain.

3:23 – West Virginia goes for McCain. I wonder if the late-breaking “Obama hates coal” story cost him a lot of support there?

3:29 – Obama is up pretty big in North Carolina, that would be huge.  NC is a southern, southern state. That would also take some of the sting out of losing Georgia.

3:33 – BBC has an actual roundtable now. They also have John “70s Porn ‘stache” Bolton! I thought he hated foreign nations??? What’s he doing talking to those dirty Limeys?

3:34 – CNN just called Ohio! BBC too!!

3:39 – CNN is too cautious, but honestly this election is over.

3:43 – This is so over, with what’s been called for Obama already, plus Iowa, California, Oregon and Washington puts Obama at 273.

3:46 – CNN is desperately trying to get people in the west to keep voting and keep watching CNN.

3:47 – Obama just got New Mexico! Louisiana goes for McCain, not much surprise there.

3:48 – CNN’s map is showing 199 electoral votes called for Obama. But the popular vote is within 320,000 votes right now.

3:49 – I called some friends who are just getting into Grant Park. They’re going through security now.

3:56 – Anderson Cooper has PERFECT hair. I wonder if we hadn’t seen him until now because he was in hair and makeup.

3:59 – Iowa goes for Obama. All that freezing door-knocking last January was worth something.

4:03 – CNN’s token black guy says that Obama will be like Reagan (he’ll be a terrible president but everyone will love him anyway?).

4:04 – Paul Begala’s mic doesn’t work right, but he’s saying that centrist democrats are the ones winning.

4:06 – BBC is at some fancy liberal elitist party in Times Square. Erica Jong seems really drunk, she says “HuffPuff” *vomit*. She says her brainwashed young kids kept telling her about Obama while she kept stubbornly blogging for Hillary.

4:08 – Back to CNN, James Carville looks like a freaky alien. He keeps fooling with his earpiece which makes him seem even stranger.

4:10 – Paul Begala is lecturing the Republican lady about how to act when you lose an election. Haha, Begala is such an expert at losing.

4:11 – CNN just called Arkansas for McCain. Somewhere, Hillary Clinton is screaming at her television, “I would’ve carried Arkansas!!!”

4:12 – I can’t believe they still haven’t called Indiana. Fareed Zakaria is talking on a commercial for Newsweek. Zakaria for Secretary of State! The weird-named guys need to stick together.

4:14 – CNN is Times Square for some reason. Apparently there’s a big party there, too.

4:16 – Back on BCC, John Bolton is talking all about how this election isn’t a landslide, and doesn’t really matter much anyway. It “won’t be an epochal election”. Blah, blah, whatever, Mustache Man.

4:17 – A British guy with a TERRIBLE tie is in Virginia, he says that “Virginia is SQUEEKILY tight”. He  goes to one woman, “So you didn’t decide until the last few days,” she says, “I didn’t decide until the last few days,”

4:20 – British terrible-tie guy hears chants of “Obama! Obama!” and says “they’re getting peevish for Obama”?

4:21 – CNN says they emailed some McCain advisors and they’re like “Oh noes! We lost!!1!!1  ”

4:23 – Mississippi is going to McCain, I’m surprised they even waited this long (47% reporting) to make that call.

4:36 – Oh my gosh, CNN has some stupid floating “balance of power” special effect. “You could use a blackboard, but let’s use a hologram,” comments the Slovenian.

4:38 – CNN is trying to keep people interested in Senate races because the Presidential race is basically decided. Also, they’re talking about what a terrible Democrat Joe Lieberman is.

4:40 – I talked to my friends who are in Grant Park. It sounds amazing. Right now they’re just watching CNN, but there are ~70,000 super hyped-up people in the ticketed-area, plus thousands more outside. Any time anyone on CNN says anything like, “Obama’s doing pretty well,” everyone goes crazy.

4:45 – ZOMG!!!!!! CNN just “beamed in” Will I Am with their stupid fake hologram thing. It’s all laggy like a crappy webcam too. What a terrible effect. It even has a dumb little flickering that they absolutely must’ve added intentionally to make it look more like Star Wars.

4:49 – Overheard: “Slovenian slovenian slovenian Palin slovenian slovenian fuckable slovenian slovenian slovenian”

4:52 – Because I don’t have to worry about the fallout like CNN, I’m going to go ahead and call Indiana for Obama. Headline “Obscure Slovenian blog calls Indiana, election”

4:55 – Five minutes until this is official. The west coast will put Obama over the top.

4:57 – All of CNN’s commentators are giving glowing verbal eulogies for McCain’s political career.

4:58 – VIRGINIA!!!!! First time since 1964, Old Dominion goes for a Democrat!

5:00 BARACK OBAMA ELECTED 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE USA!

5:04 – CNN thoughts, “Obama will be sworn in on Jan 20, 2009. 2009 will mark the 100th anniversary of the NAACP.” Holy hell, all of CNN’s commentators are tearing up. We’re breaking out the champagne here in Slovenia.

5:10 – My election-watching compatriots demand to know what Joe the Plumber thinks of this.

5:15 – The crowd in Grant Park is going absolutely ape. I’m super jealous of my friends who are there.

5:17 – Jesse Jackson is weeping like crazy. He wasn’t exactly a big Obama fan, either.

5:18 – Oooh, McCain’s gonna concede

5:19 – McCain’s bitter supporters are booing Obama’s name while McCain’s trying to be gracious. Wow, McCain is doing well.

5:20 – Where the heck was this John McCain during the race? Now his crowd is being gracious too.

5:21 – I can’t believe it, I almost feel bad for this version of John McCain. “Whatever our differences, we are all Americans.” His supporters are half-booing and half-clapping, some of them are yelling something but I can’t tell what.

5:24 – McCain’s praising Palin now. She looks upset.

5:27 – Again, good spech from McCain. “I wish godspeed to the man who was my opponent and who will be my President…” Also, was his walk-off music the Lord of the Rings themesong? Wha…?

5:30 – *President-elect* Barack Obama’s about to speak! CNN says more than 240 countries are watching right now.

5:34 – CNN just said that Bush called “President-elect Obama”, that’s the first time I heard them drop the “prez-elect”

5:40 – Ha! Obama got Florida, too. That one’s for Al Gore!

5:42 – Just got an email from Obama:

Brendan —

I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.

We just made history.

And I don’t want you to forget how we did it.

You made history every single day during this campaign — every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it’s time for change.

I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.

We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.

But I want to be very clear about one thing…

All of this happened because of you.

Thank you,

Barack

5:51 – CNN is showing a spontaneous party that’s happening outside the white house!

5:53 – Bernice King, MLK Jr’s daughter is trying to talk on CNN but the celebrating crowd makes it impossible to hear.

5:54 – Wow, they say Obama’s opening his transition office tomorrow.

5:55 – CNN says Obama’s going to “draw upon this internet,” haha, oh that silly internet.

5:56 – Obama’s walking out. I’m just going to watch this now.

6:16 AM – One hell of a speech. Lincoln, MLK, shoutout to people overseas, awesome. Oh, and the puppy!

In the wake of last Friday’s presidential election, Iran (or Tehran, at least) has erupted in massive demonstrations over the very questionable results. Much has been made of the use of the microblogging site, Twitter, as an organizing tool by the protesters. The mainstream media have gone on at great, irrelevant length about how wonderful this is. What’s a bit distressing is that bloggers, tweeters and other Web 2.0 types seem to be buying into their own hype as well.

Contrary to the news media’s wide-eyed astonishment, and the blogosphere and twittercube twitterscape twitterverse’s(can I trademark that?) seemingly non-stop self-adulation, it’s really not that surprising to find Twitter being used as a tool by those inside Iran. New communication technologies have often featured prominently in times of upheaval. Mobile phones and text messaging were important factors in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. In 1991, during the coup that attempted to forestall the dissolution of the Soviet Union, fax machines, along with internet technology like Usenet and IRC played a key role in organizing and informing the public (if you’re curious, there are really fascinating historical Usenet archives, and IRC transcripts available). Similar technologies were employed by student protesters during the 1989 Tienanmen Square uprising in China (the history of which, ironically, is scrubbed from today’s internet in China). Of course, Vietnam was famously, the “first television war.” And, going back a bit further, Martin Luther probably wouldn’t have accomplished much had it not been for the invention of the printing press.

New technologies are usually more accessible to small players, and especially useful in reaching younger, more affluent, and more connected audiences. Crucially, new communications technologies are also frequently poorly understood or overlooked by the relevant authorities. This was certainly the case in the late 80s/early 90s, when hardly anyone had even heard of the Internet. It appears also to have been the case in Iran, where reports are that government censors quickly blocked social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, but missed the boat on Twitter initially.

The problem with the mainstream media and online coverage is that it lacks this historical context. They really, desperately, want this to be a “Twitter Revolution” rather than just a “Revolution that happened to use Twitter”. The story isn’t as exciting unless the use of Twitter is somehow unprecedented and groundbreaking, a watershed event for democracy, humanity, etc. Unfortunately for them, this isn’t even the first time they’ve decided it would be really super cool if somehow Twitter were the driving force behind a popular uprising. In April last year, when protests broke out in Moldova, the media had tons of fun saying all the exact same things they’re saying now. The problem being that it wasn’t exactly, you know, that thing…uh, true. There were only like 70 Twitter users in the whole country, and the main role Twitter played in the demonstrations was attracting the attention of a Western media with a hard-on for Twitter (but who generally couldn’t care less about Moldova).

To add to this, there’s an entire class of blogger-pundit who’s busy patting themselves and their favorite medium on the back, as though they had anything to do with what’s going in Iran. Andrew Sullivan has been one of the earliest and loudest offenders on this front. He throws out choice quotes like, “That’s why they didn’t see what those of us surgically attached to modems could spot a mile away: something was happening in Iran.” That’s right, Andrew, only you and your brave fellow bloggers and twitterites could ever have predicted that a rigged election might lead to controversy.

He goes on to be even more comically wrong:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

No, no it doesn’t reveal that at all. With the exception that both cases could broadly be considered “political organizing”, those two situations could hardly have less to do with one another. I volunteered quite a bit of time to the Obama campaign. At no point was I was tear-gassed or beaten by riot police at a rally; to my knowledge, no Obama campaign offices were set ablaze by agents of the state; the federal government never tried to block barackobama.com. Furthermore, there was no need to “bypass…etablished media” because—let’s be honest here—with the exception of Fox News, the mainstream media was pretty enthralled with Obama and his campaign.

There is an enormous difference between political organizing, even for a minority or opposition party, in a free and democratic state with (reasonably) strong protections for political speech, and organizing a political insurgency in a repressive, theocratic oligarchy.

One thing most (ok, all–wait, I found one who gets it! Kinda.) of these blogger types seem to misunderstand is that organizing is not the same as publicizing. I can see why they miss this distinction. In a free and open society, it’s often possible to do both at the same time. Social networking platforms usually involve a hybrid of these two activities. If I create a party event on facebook, that produces a listing of the event so people can see that it’s happening (publicizing), but it also gives me a method to invite people, manage RSVPs and ask people to bring snacks (organizing).

There’s no need for me to try to separate those functions, because there’s no harm in having the organizing process open to observation before the event. With the exception of parents and school administrators, nobody’s scanning Facebook to try to stop parties from happening.

This is emphatically not the case in an authoritarian state like Iran. Holding a protest rally is more like throwing a surprise party: you want to organize privately and secretly, and then publicize the event only once it’s happening, or after the fact. In the case of Iran, the very things that make Twitter a good publicity tool make it a bad organizing tool. This is true for almost all social media platforms. Their effectiveness at generating publicity and broadcasting information to a wide audience drastically limits their utility for closed-door organizing.

For evidence of this, we need look no further than the actual Tweets coming out of Iran (as aggregated here by Mr. Sullivan and here at the Huffington Post)

Twitter is a service that’s free and open to any member of the public. Anyone can join, and unless you’re a celebrity, there’s no identity verification process. Hence, you see tweets like these:
“DO NOT RT anything U read from “NEW” tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo”
“Security forces opening twitter accounts 2 pose as protestors n spread disinformation”

At the same time, Twitter is not at all anonymous. Most accounts are linked to a personal cell phone to allow for mobile updates. Protip: If the contact information on a given network is easily traceable to an actual person, then you are using the wrong freaking network to organize your insurgency. Sample tweets:
“STOP POSTING TWITTER NAMES ON TV! You are going to get them KILLED. Use your senses!!!!”
“@CNN You are risking lives for ratings! Stop posting Twitter names!”

Twitter posts are visible to anyone who cares to see them. Another tweet with good advice, “Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, the moment you post iranian government will se it and block it. instead DM.”

For organizing against a hostile government, there are many other, much better technologies available. PGP-encrypted email is a basic, but very secure first step. Tor is an anonymous, onion-routing proxy service that effectively hides the original source of a piece of data. There’s a nice guide to anonymous blogging techniques here. IRC and other instant messenger protocols can also be encrypted for better privacy.

The problem with all of these more advanced technologies is that they require a greater degree of effort and technical acumen to set up and use properly. As any marketer will tell you, you have to reach people where they are, and from this perspective it makes perfect sense why the Iranian demonstrators are organizing on Twitter. Most of these secure options are now streamlined to the point where an average person can use them, but there’s aways going to be some kind of tradeoff between security and ease-of-use. If worked for a student activist group in Iran right now, I’d certainly invest some time in training, at least for individuals in core leadership positions.

So, suppose after reading all this, you’d like to do something tangible to help support the Iranian demonstrators. There’s a lot of suggestions out there, and most of them strike me as kind of pointless. Changing the background of your website to be green, or wearing a green tie, is not going to make a bit of difference. Tons of people on Twitter are telling each other to change their home city to “Tehran” and their timezone to GMT+3:30 in order to “confuse the censors” about who is actually in Iran. I’m pretty skeptical of this effectiveness of this tactic, too. Iran implements monitoring, filtering and blocking at the ISP-level for the whole country. Plus, if they want to find who the real Iranians are, all they need to do is have taken a snapshot from before the last couple days.

If you have a desktop computer and a decently fast (cable or DSL) internet connection, one thing you can do that actually WILL be beneficial is to set up your computer to act as proxy server, which will help Iranians to bypass government censorship. There are decent instructions available for Windows, Linux, or Macintosh operating systems. Another option on Windows is Peacefire’s Circumventor software.

Of course, once you’ve set up your proxy, the people in Iran need some way to know about it. Austin Heap has been doing yeoman’s work, collecting and passing on new proxy server information. If you set up a server, you can drop him an email at me[at]austinheap.com with your IP address.