When I first learned that Oprah was doing a show on internet predators, I was wary. Her site emphasized a list of rules for kids centered around "don't talk to strangers" and centered around the language of "Internet sex predators" and linked to Dateline's very problematic show. I was concerned that she might use her stature to further ongoing myths about online predation. Oprah proved me wrong. Her show wasn't talking about internet predators in the sense most people do (although her website reinforces myths); her show focused on the connection between internet child pornography and physical molestation in communities.

Her show detailed the very real and very horrific child porn industry and the ways in which the content being produced continues to grow more and more graphic, especially as live videos are made of young children (often the man's child) being molested and harmed based on requests by child porn consumers. An investigator detailed the ways in which child molesters use child porn to normalize their abuse of children that they know. Oprah repeatedly emphasized that most children know their molesters and that the real risks for molestation are very local - family members, neighbors, community members. The experts she brought in were very knowledgeable and clear about what they didn't know. For example, the investigator made it clear that we simply don't know the causality relations of consuming child porn and molestation but that data suggests that there is overlap a decent percentage of the time and that there is no doubt that large numbers of children are harmed in the making of this content. Three teenagers and their parents discussed one of their neighbors who was convicted of drugging and molesting them and at least 5 other of his daughter's friends. This molester was found through his child porn consumption and investigators found videos of him molesting these girls. Although each of the three girls had their doubts about their friend's dad, none of them knew that they were being molested while drugged until the videos were found.

The Internet connection is interesting in all of this. The investigator made it very clear that the Internet allows him to trace the networks of potential child porn distributors, but he simply does not have the resources to follow up on all of the leads. Oprah emphasized that only 2% of leads are ever followed. Although a few pot shots are taken at the Internet for enabling distribution, there's an implicit message that the Internet is actually enabling investigators to get a better handle on the problem. That said, because of lack of resources, they simply cannot do anything about the issue. Oprah leverages this point to drive home an action item: call your Senators to ask them to pass Senate Bill 1738, the "PROTECT Our Children Act." Unlike other bills meant to stop the Internet, 1738 focuses on providing resources for investigators, FBI, prosecutors, and other elements of law enforcement to investigate, prosecute, convict, and sentence molesters, partially through the channels of child pornography distribution.

Of course, 1738 is introduced by Biden and Obama (and Clinton) so there are questions of partisanship and I've heard rumblings that McCain introduced a similar bill. And there are questions of how much money should be spent. Unfortunately, I can't really suss out what's happening in the Senate around this bill. Why hasn't it been passed? Is it all a matter of politics or are there real issues? Are there things in the bill I should be worried about? I read what I thought was the final text and it seems completely sane to me but maybe I'm missing something.

Still, at the end of the day, I have to commend Oprah for a very real and non-sensational portrait of one aspect of the child molestation issue. I'm also very thankful for her very practical realism about the Internet in this issue. The Internet is undoubtedly allowing easier access to child porn, but it is also allowing investigators to get at guys who show no other markers of their molestation. And I agree with the solution 100%: more funds for law enforcement and much higher penalties for molesters.

[Note: the emphasis on this show was the graphic child porn in which children are clearly abused or harmed in the making of content intended for distribution. There are other classes of child porn which are more complicated and require different prevention mechanisms. For example, porn that is the product of teens and tweens creating nude photos or sex videos of themselves or their friends, whether distributed intentionally or not, is a different class of child porn. The harm in these cases is not often in the making of the content, but the ways in which it gets distributed. Additionally, there are huge issues about how teens and tweens are getting validated or seeking validation by peers through such self-portraiture.]

oprah molestation childporn pornography legislation 1738

Across the United States, dozens of higher education leaders have signed on to the Amethyst Initiative. It's a fascinating approach. The signers aren't committing to a stance, but rather asking American society to begin an informed and unimpeded debate on the 21 year-old-drinking age. It's a controversial topic and it hit the airwaves in controversial style. Merely trying to cover the story touched a nerve across the country and countless media channels dedicated air time to the debate, if only to dismiss the initiative. Still, a conversation began.

In 1984, the United States passed a bill that required States to institute a 21 minimum drinking age in order to receive full federal highway funds. Many States had age limits before this, but this bill effectively federalized a drinking age and restricted alcohol purchasing to those 21+. The drinking age has a long and sordid history, wrapped up with Prohibition, moral reform, and age consciousness.

Anyone who tries to tell you that something magical happens for everyone at the age of 21 that makes youth brains capable of moderate consumption at that age is full of shit. The drinking age is not about psychology, no matter how many reports appear to "prove" otherwise. The drinking age is first and foremost about social control. We tried to prohibit everyone from drinking and when that failed, we went about trying to oppress the population that could be controlled. Like all other acts of Prohibition in this country, the minimum drinking age stems from a set of moral values projected onto a population as a means of control.

While the age limit is about social control, there is no doubt that alcohol is a dangerous drug. The chemical effect can damage the body in all sorts of ways and alcoholism is a very real addiction with costly repercussions. Binge drinking can be deadly and, even when it's not, it can cause severe long-term damage. Alcohol doesn't just affect the imbiber - alcohol affects everyone around the drinker. Drunk driving is a leading cause of death, alcohol destroys families, and a large percentage of domestic violence incidents involve alcohol. Alcohol abuse is linked to depression, poverty, violence, health problems, and all sorts of societal "ills." Alcohol is one of the most dangerous and most abused substances out there. That said, people like it.

Let's assume that the age-limit prohibitionists meant well since most moral reformers do (especially when the law runs counter to economic profitability). Even laws passed with the best of intentions can result in dire side effects. The Minimum Drinking Age is one of those laws. Like other abstinence approaches, this law set in motion a series of social and cultural factors that actually magnifies abusive acts. I want to briefly map out some factors at play and then discuss how the combination of them is outright deadly.

1) Alcohol is a marker of status. Youth desire adult vices because they desire the status and freedom that they symbolize. The more that adults tell youth that they are not old enough or mature enough to imbibe (... have sex, drive, stay out past midnight, etc.), the more imbibing becomes a desirable act. So long as alcohol is seen as a status symbol of maturity, it is consumed in excess by those seeking any means of being validated as mature. The harder it is to get, the more status it confers.

2) Moderation of enjoyable and high status activities must be learned. Humans naturally moderate (a.k.a. avoid) unpleasant experiences but they also naturally seek out pleasant ones. For many, alcohol consumption is enjoyable. To complicate matters, risk taking and the status that it affords is desirable. Illegal alcohol consumption combines these two elements. It is naturally pleasurable and excessive use of hard-to-obtain substances affords status in many circles. Moderation runs counter to this. Moderation is typically learned through personal exposure to the unpleasantries of alcohol or the shift in its status amongst a person's social circle.

3) Age segregation makes learning to moderate harder. Age segregation means that status is conferred locally. Each new cohort goes through the ropes of alcohol consumption with few guides who have learned the costs and side effects. More problematically, age segregation means that status is local. Youth validate each other's consumption as a marker of adulthood and there aren't adults who have gone through the hells of abuse to curb the status structures. Thus, youth are socialized into a culture where massive consumption is highly regarded.

4) Abstinence programs make education and guidance impossible. We know that youth start drinking in high school, but there's a general "don't ask, don't tell" mindset at play. Schools that provide quality information are viewed as "encouraging" bad behaviors. Instead, schools are required to tell students of the horrors of alcohol while youth are simultaneously witnessing adult consumption. The hypocrisy of these messages is well recognized and youth end up dismissing all of the abstinence material as inaccurate.

University settings are by-far the worst configuration possible for this dynamic. Youth leave home, attaining one marker of adulthood, only to find an age-segregated social world with pressures to live up to the images of "cool" adulthood set in motion by mass media. They are no longer accountable to their parents and they desperately want to be validated by their peers. Universities are discouraged from educating underage students about alcohol and so there's tremendous amounts of winking taking place in lieu of proper dialogue. Abuse runs rampant and is further magnified by the status that it affords from being risky in an age segregated community. Underage drinkers drink in private where their intake is not monitored rather than drinking in age-mixed public spaces where social pressures discourage genuine abuse. Youth aren't socialized into drinking like adults, but rather drinking like media's image of adults. Youth are afraid to seek help when they've gone too far because what they're doing is illegal. Talk about a recipe for disaster.

Yes, youth make dumb decisions. But so do adults. Alcohol abuse is not just a problem for youth; millions of adults have problems with alcohol. Many adults with problems developed their habits as youth where their consumption was underground. They never had someone guiding them and no one ever realized that they had gone too far... until much later. The brain is like a power law - it grows most rapidly in the womb and slows as we get older. There is no magic age where it stops learning, but learning does get harder. Youth habits die hard, but lessons learned in youth also stick stronger. Holding off the possibility for abuse is certainly desirable, but if it means the difference between slowly ramping up and going from 0 to 60 in under a second, guess which is more likely to result in an accident?

I'm glad to see a debate raging on this topic. I think that it's absolutely critical. My research with youth has led me to believe that the 21-minimum is deadly. I think that it encourages greater abuse than other scenarios. If I were given a magic wand to change the laws regarding alcohol, here's what I would do:

1) Children may drink alcohol in private residences at any age when their parent or guardian is present.

2) Youth may apply for an alcohol permit starting at the age of 16. A mandatory education course and test (perhaps online) is required for getting this ID. With this ID, youth 16-17 can purchase alcohol in public when accompanied by an adult 21+ and those 18-20 can purchase alcohol in public by themselves.

3) No one under-21 can drive with even one iota of alcohol in their system. Consequences include fine, community service, permanent loss of alcohol permit, and multiple year license suspension.

Will this make alcohol abuse go away? No. That said, I believe that it would drastically reduce it. Changing the laws in this way will encourage parents to actually begin conversations about alcohol with their children rather than avoid the topic. I feel as though such an approach would mean that youth ease into alcohol and learn its limits while in an environment with older adults. By the time that youth hit college, alcohol would not hold the same level of allure. It would not be a marker of freedom in the same way. It would allow educational approaches to come into play. And it would allow what is underground to come above ground and reach a healthier state.

I know that many folks out there support reducing the age limit because, well, "they do it anyhow." There's no doubt that there's a lot of underage drinking going on, but this isn't just about legitimizing what is. We need to build safety structures in place, structures that allow youth to come of age in a healthy way. That's not what exists right now. Thus, when youth head off to college, they drink their freedom to excess and the damage is palpable. If we're going to curb that, we need to be more honest with ourselves about where alcohol stands in the cultural consciousness. We need to realize that you don't learn to drink from a tap when all you know is a fire hydrant. And we need to recognize that imparting knowledge is more effective through socialization than pamphlets.

The Ancient Greeks believed that the amethyst quartz would prevent intoxication. The goddesses stepped in to help Amethystos ward off the intoxicated Dionysus. It is now our time to step in and help create structures that help youth have a healthy relationship with an otherwise unhealthy substance.

alcohol youth age

I admit it. I like reading poetry. (Occassionally, you will find ink running from the corners of my mouth -- that's when I've been damn busy eating poetry). In Symbolist sense, I could not resist drawing connections to the U.S.'s current Middle East situation and the one depicted in Yeats' The Second Coming. While I normally shy away from voicing my political views in public (aren't they obvious?), I couldn't resist drawing connections.              

    THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Past || Present parallels

Without stretching allusions too far, Yeats draws a picture of the best of times, and the worst of times, all centering on the moment at hand.

So what is our job? What are we the reader to do? Are we inspired to go along with a fighting spirit? How should we choose to face the anarchy and passions that surround us?

What if our passions are misguided?

Perhaps there is a plan in Yeats' work. A plan that sits beneath the surface awaiting its turn. Perhaps the plan is located somewhere in the Spiritus Mundi, our universal consciousness, somewhere before the mind's eye, passing from generation to generation. Similarly, the U.S. may have a plan to resolve tensions in the Middle East, but they are not apparent, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer."

My favorite lines that I believe best captures the current executive branch's throes:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

What happens when our passions are misguided -- when things fall apart?

Surely some revelation is at hand. Could that revelation/revolution be tied to the many pieces loosely joining across the Web? Religious connotations aside, the "Second Coming," the next historical cycle that is upon us, is built upon more than a set of tools. Perhaps this shift is more representative of a "coming together," of people joining together, sharing, and conversing across time and space.

While I have only given Yeats' work a brief, post-positivist rub, his poem leaves much to consider. As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Reference:
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War.
It can be found in: Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970.)
Retrieved 16 June 2008 from http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html.

I found this an interesting coincidence reading these two things back to back:

From a post on David Wiley’s Iterating Toward Openess:

Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me. I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

In today’s higher education environment, accreditation bodies are very much like the Catholic Church of old. They exercise supreme power and authority of our institutions, and should our accrediting body choose to revoke our accreditation, our universities would go straight to the institutional equivalent of Hell.

From Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, an anthropological study of open source culture (emphasis mine, and the term “geek” here is not meant to be derogatory):

Allegories of Reformation are stories that make sense of the political economy of information. But they also have a more precise use: to make sense of the distinction between power and control. Because geeks are “closer to the machine” than the rest of the laity, one might reasonably expect them to be the ones in power. This is clearly not the case, however, and it is the frustrations and mysteries by which states, corporations, and individuals manipulate technical details in order to shift power that often earns the deepest ire of geeks. Control, therefore, includes the detailed methods and actual practices by which corporations, government agencies, or individuals attempt to manipulate people (or enroll them to manipulate themselves and others) into making technical choices that serve power, rather than rationality, liberty, elegance, or any other geekly concern.

This is part of a larger chapter on Reformation analogies in geek culture. One of the larger points is Reformation analogies point to people trying to save an existing system from itself, which distinguishes Reformation analogies from Revolutionary analogies. Reformation comes about by removing the secret levers in the system that are used to maintain power and lead the system astray.

[Revolutionary formulations go further, and scrap the entire system. More on that later, although Siemens has already started to follow that thread…]

What is fascinating is that Kelty even goes further than David, with a stunning comparison to the Christ’s Cross mark of the Church which used to head the alphabet:

The longer one considers the problems that make up the contemporary political economy of information technology that geeks inhabit, the more likely it is that these allegories will start to present themselves almost automatically—as, for instance, when I read The Story of A, a delightful book having nothing to do with geeks, a book about literacy in early America. The author, Patricia Crain, explains that the Christ’s cross (see above) was often used in the creation of hornbooks or battledores, small leather-backed paddles inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and the alphabet, which were used [PAGE 75] to teach children their ABCs from as early as the fifteenth century until as late as the nineteenth: “In its early print manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by the ‘Christ’s Cross’: ?. . . . Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic Iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet away from the Catholic Church.”

Here, allegorically, the Catholic Church’s control of the alphabet (like Microsoft’s programming of Internet Explorer to blur public standards for the Internet) is not simply ideological; it is not just a fantasy of origin or ownership planted in the fallow mental soil of believers, but in fact a very specific, very nonsubjective, and very media-specific normative tool of control. Crain explains further: “Today ? represents the imprimatur of the Catholic Church on copyright pages. In its connection to the early modern alphabet as well, this cross carries an imprimatur or licensing effect. This ‘let it be printed,’ however, is directed not to the artisan printer but to the mind and memory of the young scholar. . . . Like modern copyright, the cross authorizes the existence of the alphabet and associates the letters with sacred authorship, especially since another long-lived function of ? in liturgical missals is to mark gospel passages. The symbol both conveys information and generates ritual behavior.”

The © today carries as much if not more power, both ideologically and legally, as the cross of the Catholic church. It is the very symbol of authorship, even though in origin and in function it governs only ownership and rights. Magical thinking about copyright abounds, but one important function of the symbol ©, if not its legal implications, is to achieve the same thing as the Christ’s cross: to associate in the mind of the reader the ownership of a particular text (or in this case, piece of software) with a particular organization or person. Furthermore, even though the symbol is an artifact of national and international law, it creates an association not between a text and the state or government, but between a text and particular corporations, publishers, printers, or authors.

…

Without the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, the only available narrative for such evil—whether it be the behavior of Microsoft or of some other corporation—is that corporations are “competing in the marketplace according to the rules of capitalism” and thus when geeks decry such behavior, it’s just sour grapes. If corporations are not breaking any laws, why shouldn’t they be allowed to achieve control in this manner? In this narrative there is no room for a moral evaluation of competition…

Isn’t that fascinating? You can read the whole chapter, for free, here.

cultural sustainability

Since Davos, I've been thinking about cultural sustainability. This isn't a term that I heard there, but one that I wish that I had.

These days, when people in business talk about sustainability, they mean environmental sustainability. Traditionally, the environment was an externality that was ignored. More and more, with the conversations of "carbon neutral," people are starting to think about what it means to environmentally sustainable. At the same time, a company can be environmentally sound and completely destroy local economies and other aspects of culture through their moves.

To me, the idea of "cultural sustainability" is about companies whose actions offset the consequences of their presence (or disappearance). For example, when large companies abandon cities that they've been in for years and where the entire city revolves around them, their move has a HUGE culturally destructive force. How do they offset this in a functional way? How does this get considered to be an externality that needs to be factored in? (It used to be through layoff benefits and pensions that kept going no matter what... this is no longer viewed as critical.) Large companies who come into a town and put out of business a variety of different local merchants have another kind of culturally destructive practices. This is why the conversations around Wal-Mart get so heated: capitalism vs. cultural sustainability.

When companies were smaller and local, there were pressures put upon them to be good local citizens. They invested in the towns where they were present and operated as key actors in creating culturally sustainable systems. It was normal for a company to help out with a local school event because education made sense for the company because it meant better employees. As companies get bigger and bigger (and "globalized"), there's less pressure to be invested in the culture. Even if there was, what culture should they invest in when they're so big? Mostly, big companies give back to communities for PR purposes.

There are numerous points of pressure placed on companies right now to be environmentally sustainable, but this is not the only kind of sustainability that matters. That said, there are lessons to be learned. For a long time, the conversation tended to devolve into capitalism vs. environmental sustainability. More and more, folks are saying BOTH and finding ways to make that work. How do we do this with cultural sustainability? What pressure points need to be put into place where culture is evaluated as an externality in the models that economists draw up?

business practices sustainability environment

Endicott Studio’s blog has a brief post linking to some New Year’s Day superstitions (from Snope’s) and special foods.

Traditions for New Year’s in my family were never very elaborate: a kiss for luck at midnight, black-eyed peas the next day to bring financial success.

However you celebrate, and whatever your superstitions, I wish you well!

Eric Stewart left a comment on my earlier post about the Lakota Secession.  The comment is basically a re-post of an entry from his blog.  For those looking for more information on this, you’ll find some additional resources there, along with a few other posts related to the issue.

I haven’t found much information on this issue, but there are enough clues (and enough historical ties) to make some speculation possible … but it’s only speculation.

Doug Noon shared this article from the Rapid City Journal through Google Reader.  The focus is on Russell Means, one of the leaders of this current movement to secede, and it seems that the movement consists of an "unofficial group" of Lakota peoples.  The article makes it clear that the group is "not an agency or branch of the Oglala Sioux Tribe" and notes that Means "ran unsuccessfully for president of the tribe in 2006."  There’s no indication that Means speaks for any of the elected Sioux leaders, or the nation as a whole, and it seems likely that this is a fringe group, with a vocal leader, that ultimately will not amount to any real change.¹

Means has been considered an extreme activist by many for quite a while, starting with his involvement with the American Indian Movement.  I met him once, and he has an unquestionably intense personality and powerful presence.  I can see how others could be drawn to his vision and recruited to his causes.  It’s probably that same presence that landed him some of his film roles.²  Still, that charisma hasn’t proven powerful enough to win him an office in the Sioux government.  Will it be enough to sustain this present movement?

I do admire his strength and commitment to fight for American Indian/Native American pride, culture, and political power.³  The history of native/U.S. relations is painful, to say the least, and full of U.S. deception and duplicity.

I still don’t see any way that this movement can actually achieve what Means and the other members of the group envision, though I can understand how years of unsatisfied anger can lead to unsupportable actions.

Other articles on: WikiNews and AFP

1. This sentiment also appears in the discussion on the Lakota People page on Wikipedia.
2. Last of the Mohicans, Natural Born Killers, Into the West, Pocahontas, and Pathfinder
3. Means would prefer American Indian, though other native peoples with whom I’ve spoken prefer Native American.

I’m still reading Larry Lessig’s Free Culture, which is excellent so far. In the meantime, while following the Lane Hartwell controversy, I found a link to Lessig’s March, 2007 talk at TED (posted Nov. ‘07).

He ends with a strong emotional appeal about how this controversy is affecting and will continue to affect “kids”:

We made mixed tapes, they remix music. We watched TV, they make TV … We can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them pirates. And is that good? … We live life constantly against the law … and that’s what we’re doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better …

This quote, of course, ties directly to the classroom and many of the reform movements (or at least, reform talks), particularly of the “School 2.0″ crowd. Students are living an engaged, connected, participatory life within a culture that seems to ask for passivity in the classroom and to label them pirates in their own homes.

At any rate, the video is a good primer on some of the issues at stake. My only complaint is that he doesn’t spend enough time talking about ways to achieve the balance for which he argues. Hopefully, I’ll get more of that through Free Culture.

From BoingBoing:

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy

I hadn’t heard anything about this before seeing this on BoingBoing.  I’m curious about both the accuracy and the implications here.

Does Means speak for the Lakota Nation?  How does the quasi-sovereign status of Native American nations come into play?  Will anyone take this seriously?  If so, what are the options?  (Does the Lakota Nation have the ability to exist as a sovereign island?  Will the U.S. allow a sovereign island in its midst?)  Will this be sovereignty in name only, as a symbolic act (which is little different from the current state of affairs)?

I’ll also be curious to see how the Navajo Nation–which is about three times the size of the Lakota, in land mass and population–will respond, if they respond at all.

Anyone have more information?  Particularly from the legal side of things?