Ethan Zuckerman
EthanZ's musings on Africa, media and international development
I had an opportunity to share my observations about “citizen propaganda” in the Russia/Georgia conflict with someone far more knowledgeable than myself - Gregory Shvedov, the editor in chief of Caucasian Knot, a leading alternative news publication focused on the Caucuses, joined the fellows at the Berkman Center for a brief discussion yesterday. Shvedov has been following the conflict closely, both through the reports of journalists associated with Caucasian Knot who are on the ground in Georgia and Ossetia, and through the panoply of blog accounts that have accompanied the war.
Shvedov confirms that there’s been deep interest in “eyewitness accounts” of events on the ground, and that the blogs he’s read seem to include people in Moscow or Tblisi misrepresenting themselves as being on the ground, usually to forward a political agenda. He worries that people are paying more attention to these bloggers - some of whom are misrepresenting themselves - than to reporters he and other publications have on the ground.
This situation presents interesting challenges for those of us who advocate for citizen media or who are involved with projects that aggregate and promote citizen media. If it becomes clear that many blogger eyewitnesses are simply amateur propagandists, it’s going to be harder and harder for journalists to reference and amplify the opinions of bloggers on the ground. It puts an interesting pressure on projects like Global Voices - in citing a blogger writing from Ossetia, are we authenticating that blogger, certifying that the person in question is really an eyewitness?
We can’t offer that authentication - that’s not what we do. We study the blogosphere closely, and we know who’s been blogging for a while, and can often offer background information on the bloggers we amplify. But we’re not a news agency, we don’t have reporters on the ground in Ossetia, and we’re discovering that there’s a real challenge presented by fast-breaking news events: news inspires people to start blogging. It’s not hard to believe that someone in Ossetia would begin blogging shortly after Georgian and then Russian troops came into the region - that blogger would be an eyewitness, and would likely have some interesting insights on the conflict. But she wouldn’t have a reputation or a track record, and it would be difficult to evaluate whether she was actually on the ground, or writing from either Tblisi or Moscow.
We all make decisions about the authenticity of information we receive, either online or offline. I tend to take a story more seriously if it comes from the New York Times than if it comes from the Montgomery County Bulletin. (Friends of mine who lean to the right may suggest that this is an error on my part.) We rely on the reputation and brand of the Times, and the fact that the paper is widely read and fact-checked by bloggers and readers. The Times gets it wrong sometimes - Jayson Blair, Judith Miller - but the reading public tends to be quite aware of those errors.
Reading blogs demands a different strategy. Reputation matters, but it’s less about brand than about longevity, links and comment threads. It’s not hard to manufacture a single, incorrect blogpost and have it survive some scrutiny - it’s harder for a blog to survive scrutiny over a long period of time. If a blog has no history, no incoming links, no active comment threads, it’s hard to value the opinions expressed there any more (or less) highly than those from a stranger on a city street. A blog that’s made controversial and questionable statements will often generate discussions, either on comment threads or on blogs linking to the blog - reading those threads often helps establish whether this blogger is viewed as reliable or with skepticism, as mainstream or fringe within a particular debate. These methods certainly don’t guarantee that a blogger is neutral or non-partisan - they simply make it easier to determine whether that person is a respected voice in an existing community of interest.
These reputation mechanisms don’t work well in the case of breaking news. We don’t check the previous blogposts or the incoming link count of the people who sent mobile phone photos from the underground during the 7/7 London bombings. Those images were believable to the recipients because they came from known contacts - they were believable in the press because the photos were consistent with other individual and professional press accounts. How do we make decisions about authenticity of observations coming from a war zone that’s not closely covered by the professional media?
My sense is that we’ve generally assumed good faith in reading citizen accounts of wars and other disasters. We may need to re-examine that assumption. As citizen media becomes a more influential and closely watched space, there’s a greater incentive to fight information wars on blogs and video-sharing sites, not just in the traditional press.
As I mentioned in my earlier post on citizen propaganda, the Ossetian conflict isn’t the first time we’re seeing propaganda efforts in digital media. We’ve seen evidence both of professional, paid posting by the “fifty cent party” and well-organized amateur efforts in the Chinese blogosphere, especially around riots in Lhasa.
We’ve covered these efforts on Global Voices because our job isn’t to report news, but to report what’s being discussed in a nation’s blogosphere. If that discussion includes amateur propaganda videos, or organized campaigns to post pro-government comments on blogs, we need to cover those posts… but we also need to provide context, helping people understand where these comments are coming from. Are these the spontaneous expression of angry individuals in China, Georgia, or Russia? Are they part of a larger, orchestrated campaigns? How do we value an opinion expressed as part of an organized campaign versus the opinion expressed by an independent individual?
My colleague http://www.media.mit.edu/people/bio_judith.html“>Judith Donath offered a very useful framework in considering these questions. She suggests that what we’re trying to determine here is the “authenticity” of a particular voice. There are a number of factors we consider in considering authenticity… and perhaps we overvalue some and undervalue others.
In discussing the “fifty cent party” (a group of bloggers paid by Chinese authorities to publish pro-government comments on blogs and in forums), the fact that commenters are being paid makes me tend to take their contributions less seriously. It isn’t clear that we should draw this conclusion - it’s quite possible that the people who choose to work with Party authorities are generally in agreement with Party position on most matters… but somehow the presence of money causes me, personally, to consider these comments as less authentic.
Spontaneity also appears to be a characteristic that we correlate with authenticity. If I find a comment on a New York Times story comparing Vladimir Putin to Vlad the Impaler, it looks like a spontaneous, heartfelt response. If I find 100 comments all making the same analogy, it looks like an attempt to organize a campaign drawing associations between a world leader and the inspiration of vampire novels. Should I take the apparently spontaneous comment more seriously? Doesn’t the attempt to engineer a meme about Putin and vampires reflect a seriousness of sentiment that’s at least as authentic as an offhand comment?
Remember, the goal here isn’t to determine the accuracy of a statement, but the authenticity. Are people in China really angry about Jack Cafferty’s characterization of Chinese authorities as “goons and thugs” or was this simply an orchestrated campaign? Are thousands of angry Russians commenting on New York Times coverage because they were authentically pissed off? Because someone’s organizing a campaign to encourage them to do so? Does it matter if such a campaign is organized by a clever, web2.0 activist or by the Kremlin? What should we consider as we try to evaluate whether individual blogs are authentic or orchestrated? (Or both?)
Donath had another intriguing suggestion - she wonders whether large-scale text analysis could help detect blogposts that are part of orchestrated campaigns. Assume that there’s a wave of blogposts about, oh, say Sarah Palin. It might be possible to automatically identify blogposts that use similar phrases to attack or defend the VP candidate. A wave of posts all making the same three critiques or offering a similar worded defense might indicate organized campaigns to spread certain talking points. (Or they might just point to the tendency of bloggers to cut and paste arguments from people they read and like.) Even if such a tool didn’t help us figure out the authenticity of sentiment, it could help us avoid reading another half-dozen repetitive posts on the same topic.
Is authenticity the right characteristic to consider when evaluating blog accounts from conflicts? How should we evaluate authenticity when it’s difficult to verify the identity and location of an author?
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One thing CAPTCHAs can't stand up to - well-organized professional operations designed to solve thousands per hour for low fees. Interesting perspective on outsourcing CAPTCHA-solving - neccesary to create lots of spam email accounts or link farm webpages - to teams in India.
“But enough about me. What do you think about me?”
That old joke was my response to the idea that Global Voices might choose to cover the 2008 US Presidential election. When Rebecca and I began discussing the Global Voices project in 2004, one of our motivations was a belief that US media paid too much attention to stories in the US and not enough to international, especially developing world, news.
Fortunately, I got voted down and Global Voices partnered with Reuters to produce Voices without Votes, a blog aggregator that portrays the US elections through the eyes of individuals around the world. There’s no doubt that there’s widespread interest in the US elections in many corners of the world and a desire to understand the decisionmaking that American voters are going through in our apparently perpetual election process.
Al Jazeera wanted to give their hundreds of millions of viewers a slightly different perspective on the convention, covering not only the speeches in the convention center and stadium, but watching the speeches on television with average Americans in a suburban Colorado town. After some investigation, they chose Golden, Colorado, the home of Coors Brewing and of 18,000 opinionated and vocal citizens, a gold-rush town 14 miles west of Denver.
Initial plans for Al Jazeera’s presence in Golden included broadcasting from a (pork-free) barbecue at City Manager Mike Bestor’s house. After extensive local debate, Bestor revoked the invitation, citing the concerns about perceived slights to the local veteran’s community.
(Update: Golden, Colorado mayor Jacob Smith clarifies that the barbecue was moved to another house, where it went off without a hitch. Please see his comment below.)
While no longer invited for barbecue, the Al Jazeera team has been embraced by the owner of the Buffalo Rose bar and roadhouse, Murray Martinez, who has invited them to broadcast from a corner of his establishment. This decision has been controversial in Golden, gathering a group of protesters across the street from the Buffalo Rose and motivating Martinez to post a copy of the First Amendment to the US constitution outside the bar.
It’s worth watching the above video, produced by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, as well as reading his written piece for the Post. The article sounds as if a major confrontation is underway, reporting a truce from three biker gangs so that they can protest Jazeera’s presence at the bar. The video’s significantly more lighthearted, showing a wide range of Golden’s citizens, including a pro-Jazeera (or at least, pro-welcoming international reporters) citizen riding a six-foot tall Penny Farthing, as well as a wide range of angry people wielding air horns.
My friend and colleague Jillian York points out that Al Jazeera has had a very hard time finding tolerance, never mind acceptance, in the US. Burlington, VT, one of the most liberal communities in the US, has been one of only two communities that’s offered Al Jazeera English on their local cable system. Based on “dozens” of complaints from subscribers, the local cable system manager decided to drop the network from the system’s offerings. This led to a set of public meetings where passionate debate on both sides led to a decision to keep the network on the air. York notes that the debate has largely been between people who’ve actually watched the channel - who want to keep it on the air - and those who haven’t. One wonders how many of the air horn wielding folks outside the Buffalo Rose have watched the network, a channel that’s so popular in Israel that it’s recently replaced BBC World and CNN International on major cable networks, and which is the network of choice for many US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.
Al Jazeera wanted to film in Golden because they wanted to show their viewers how the election is viewed in different American communities. The protesters for and against the network’s presence, as well as the Buffalo Rose customers who simply appear bemused by all the attention, are probably a pretty good representations of the mixed feelings many US communities have about international attention to a domestic election. (Remember the Guardian’s plan to have readers around the world write to undecided Clark County, Ohio voters in the 2004 election? That went well.) While I’m embarrased that some of the citizens of Golden would demonstrate agains the right of a network to report news, I’m hopeful that the coverage will include some of the citizens who were excited about welcoming international perspectives as well.
By the way, it looks like an excellent night to be at the Buff Buffalo Rose, as the locals evidently call it - it’s ladies night, and there are $4 pitchers of Coors Light for the fellas. And death metal band Grimoire starts playing at 9pm, right after Obama’s speech. Bet they’ve thought very little about the possibility of building their Qatari fanbase.
(Smith clarifies that, whatever visiting journalists think, “I’ve never heard it called the Buff. It’s either the Buffalo Rose or the Rose, and I have a great deal of respect for Murray (one of the owners) and his staff for being so stalwart. They never blinked.” Thanks for weighing in, Mr. Mayor, and thanks for your willingness to engage with these issues.)
Once you’ve thrown an election, the preferred next step is to return matters to normalcy, dissipating the anger of those who opposed you by making your leadership appear routine and inevitable. That’s been Robert Mugabe’s plan in Zimbabwe. As talks about a power-sharing government have dragged on, Mugabe’s moved forward to reconvene parliament, on schedule, perhaps hoping to return to a state where legislators solemly rubber-stamp his legislation.
The opposition has opposed reconvening parliament, as it’s counter to the memorandum of understanding ZANU-PF and MDC signed in July, agreeing to hold talks on all matters of substance before resuming the process of governing. Some MDC (opposed to Mugabe, now the ruling party in parliament) parliamentarians have suggested boycotting Parliament rather than allowing it to become a rubber stamp, taking to the streets in acts of civil disobedience.
They’ve tried something quite different, and so far, it’s going surprisingly well. Parliament elected Lovemore Moyo, the chairman of MDC, as parliament speaker, a powerful position, by a significant majority. The speaker can control what gets debated and when, a powerful advantage, and may be able to keep certain legislation off the table - it augurs a new parliamentary climate for Mugabe, one where the Parliament can block his legislation, procedurally or substantively.
But that probably didn’t prepare Uncle Bob for the reception he got when he opened parliamentary session today. Appearing in full regalia, accompanied by a 21-gun salute and a military flyover, Mugabe was jeered and heckled during his address. MDC members refused to stand to acknowledge him, and as he spoke, they shouted him down as he made particularly egregious statements (declaring that all parties had been responsible for election violence, and that Zimbabwe had now “moved beyond it”, for instance).
The defiance, which included signing the MDC anthem “ZANU is Rotten”, is unprecedented in Zimbabwean politics. One of the surprising aspcts of Zimbabwean politics is the extent to which institutions and procedures are respected, even when outcomes have been rigged. It’s very unlikely that Mugabe expected this reception. As a commentator on BBC radio pointed out this morning, state-controlled television simply didn’t know what to do: should they cut away from the speech, disrespecting the (alleged) President) or should they continue to broadcast the dissent of MDC protesters?
Let’s assume that MDC’s defiance continues. The showdown is likely to be over budgetary issues, when Mugabe’s government tries to pass measures to continue paying salaries to security, army and intelligence forces. (A currency in free-fall requires frequent changes in budgeting.) If MDC refuses these budget changes - as they likely will - a showdown seems inevitable.
Two things to watch for:
- In a parliamentary system like Zimbabwe’s, the President can call for new elections at any time. If Mugabe concludes that he cannot govern with this parliament, it’s possible he’ll call new elections and attempt to intimidate opponents as he did in the run-off, hoping to regain parliamentary control. This would take some time, and the country would be effectively paralyzed in the interim.
- The parliamentary majority currently stands at 12 individuals. It’s possible that intimidation, detention or violence could erode this majority. I would expect to see systematic harrasment of MDC MPs, including arrests and possibly farm burnings or kidnappings. While I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, Zim watchers should pay close attention to any of these reports, as they might point to a pattern designed to create a majority without forming a new parliament.
Update: Alas, there’s really no need to wait and see what happens next.
The New York Times reports late night door knocks on the hotel rooms of legislators, and attempts to arrest 8 opposition MPs for a number of alleged crimes. CNN reports five arrests of opposition MPs since Monday.
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A nice version of the "online access doesn't equal democratic revolution" argument from Antony Lowenstein - "The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than political revolution"
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Some interesting ideas for revitalizing US media, from the German newspaper and magazine industry
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A nice version of the "online access doesn't equal democratic revolution" argument from Antony Lowenstein - "The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than political revolution"
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Some interesting ideas for revitalizing US media, from the German newspaper and magazine industry
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BlueBrain is an ambitious project to model interconnected neurons with highly precise digital models. Between the "wet" work done to create accurate simulations and the programming, the scale of the task is beginning to look immense. A digital brain sometime soon? Not without major breakthroughs - "The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion ."
There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen.
It’s a vision that was compelling to senior people in the US Air Force, including former USAF Secretary Michael Wynne, who was fired earlier this year over the scandal of mishandled nuclear weapons. Before his departure, Wynne launched the Air Forces’s “Cyberspace Command” with a television ad that portrayed the Air Force as the defender of the Pentagon against an onslaught of digital attacks. The Pentagon has stopped funding and now may cancel the initiative.
Wynne argues that the current military faceoff between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia is an instance of cyberwar, saying “The Russians just shot down the government command nets so they could cover their incursion. This was really one of the first aspects of a coordinated military action that had cyber as a lead force, instead of sending in air planes.”
That’s the sort of speculation tech reporters live for. It raises the possibility that, instead of reporting on venture capital deals and the kudzu-like spread of Facebook, they might get the chance to be war reporters without the complication of being shot at. In the past week, in-depth articles on cyberwar have graced the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.
The best of these articles have a common conclusion: it’s very hard to know what’s actually gone on. Call it “the fog of cyberwar”. Better yet, please don’t. As the dust settles, it’s unclear whether “cyberwar” is even an appropriate term for what’s taken place online as an actual war - the kind with guns and dead people - has transpired in Georgia. It’s worth remembering that in this “cyberwar”, the most serious consequence is that a website becomes temporarily inaccessible to viewers - it’s a war being fought with paintballs, not with live rounds.
Here’s what’s known: many Georgian websites have been difficult or impossible to access for several days. In response, the Georgian government has moved some vital email addresses and websites to Google, and other Georgian websites have sought help from Estonia. Here’s what’s not known: whether these attacks were directed by the Russian military, as Georgia’s Foreign Minister has speculated, by shadowy criminal gangs, or just by kids with a grudge against Georgia and too much free time. The last of these scenarios is looking increasingly likely.
Some of the most dramatic reports of cyberwar have come from an anonymous blog (RBNexploit) that tracks the Russian Business Network. RBN is a source of great concern to many in the computer security community - it’s a very successful producer of tools used for spam, identity theft and malware. The RBNexploit bloggers asserted that RBN hackers - on behalf of the Russian government - had taken control of backbone routers that delivered traffic to Georgia via Turkey, effectively cutting Georgia off from the Internet.
While this would have been dramatic and exciting, it doesn’t appear to be true. Earl Zmijewski, a vice president at internet monitoring company Renesys, has been watching connections into Georgia very closely and reports, “During the hostilities, we’ve seen no significant changes in routing. In particular, we saw no apparent attempts to limit traffic via Russia, but then again, most traffic from Georgia seems to currently transit Turkey. ”
What’s knocked some Georgian websites offline are denial of service attacks. These attacks are the equivalent of harassing a person by calling her on the phone as often as possible and hanging up when she answers. On the web, this involves sending a request to a web server over and over, hoping to overwhelm it and make it incapable of serving pages to legitimate users. In a more sophisticated version of the attack, dozens or hundreds of people call the same number - load the same webpage - which might make even a modest-sized corporation impossible to reach for the duration of the attack. These more complex attacks are called distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and they have become frustratingly common since CERT (Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team) first warned of them in 1999.
It requires very little technical expertise to carry out a simple DoS attack - hit reload on your web browser every few seconds and you’ll be carrying out an (ineffective, primitive) attack. Belarussian tech journalist Evgeny Morozov was curious how much technical skill it would require to participate in a more organized attack. In a brilliant article for Slate, he describes visiting sites like StopGeorgia.ru, where he discovered a webpage that, saved to his desktop and opened in a browser, made thousands of requests an hour to 18 Georgian websites. Presto - “cyberwar” for dummies. A bit more poking led him to a set of instructions for DoSHTTP, a utility that can easily be misused to perform efficient denial of service attacks.
The technical solutions Morozov found weren’t especially sophisticated - one relied on a dozen lines of Javascript code, the other on a widely available off-the-shelf tool. These attacks can be effective not because they’re using especially sophisticated technology, but because they leverage a “social hack” - they rely on the actions of individual, patriotic Russians organized via sites like StopGeorgia, which hosts a “scoreboard” displaying which Georgian sites are reachable and unreachable. Look too hard for shadowy political forces and esoteric technology and “we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did.” (Morozov is very clear that his sympathies don’t lie with the Russians in this conflict, and that his attacks were conducted very briefly, for research purposes.)
The attacks on Georgian websites are probably not just coming from angry Russians hitting reload. Some are likely coming from “botnets”, large sets of computers that have been infected with malware, software that allows a computer to be controlled remotely by a third party. Russian hacker network RBN controls one network, the Storm botnet, but many others exist. It’s now possible to “rent” a botnet - Bill Woodcock of internet research consultancy Packet Clearing House estimates that botnets can be rented to perform DDoS attacks for as little as four cents per machine. It’s possible that some hackers have rented botnets and turned them against Georgian websites, or that some operators have decided to “donate” attacks to the anti-Georgian cause.
The rhetoric of “cyberwarfare” has a reassuring implication: we understand how to fight wars, so surely we can win a cyberwar. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. There’s no magic “cyberspace command” solution the USAF can unleash to defeat a botnet. The administrators trying to bring Georgian webservers back online are doing precisely what any sysadmin does confronted with a DDoS - they are blocking traffic from the IP addresses that are launching the attacks, and sharing these blocklists with administrators confronting the same problems. If they can block addresses more quickly than the attackers can recruit more participants, they’ll win. This strategy is known by the complex technical term “Whack-a-Mole”, and it’s roughly as frustrating as the fairground game of the same name.
What’s frightening about the online attacks against Georgia is not that they’re organized by shadowy Krelmin forces, but that they’re coming from a loosely organized group of individuals. In his new book “Here Comes Everybody“, Clay Shirky notes that one of the characteristics of the contemporary internet is that it enables “ridiculously easy group formation.” Once formed, these groups can organize potluck dinners or spread propoganda. Chinese netizens, angered by what they perceived as anti-China bias in western media, organized a campaign to challenge media narratives on sites like Anti-CNN.com. Individuals have flooded YouTube with videos exposing errors in CNN and BBC’s China coverage and arguing that Tibet is a part of a multi-ethnic, federated China. Most western media reports assume this effort is organized by the Chinese government, a charge participants angrily deny.
The shift from a world where power comes solely from governments and militaries to one where power can come from loosely organized, adhoc groups is a hard one to grasp. It’s easy to understand why the press and the military would misunderstand the situation in Georgia as a new type of military attack. The truth may be more intriguing and frightening - we’ve entered an era where individuals can organize their own “cyberwar” campaigns online, in concert with or in opposition to their governments.
Reuters was kind enough to ask me for my thoughts on this matter - a version of the piece is available on their website.
I’ve become a big fan of chef Anthony Bourdain, first through his snarky, obnoxious and profane books about the restaurant industry and food around the world, and more recently through his excellent television show, “No Reservations“. The show portrays Bourdain travelling around the world - or sometimes around the corner - in search of unique culinary experiences. Much of the time, the show makes the case that you should visit a place you know little about simply to eat the food - his show on Ghana was so joyful and positive that the Ghanaian tourist board should simply send DVDs of it to any potential tourists. The very best shows, in my opinion, aren’t just travelogue, but provocative political statements - his show on the US/Mexican border made a passionate case that the border needs to be looser, not tighter, and that anti-immigration activists didn’t understand the unique cross-border culture.
Last night Rachel and I caught up with Bourdain’s recent travels to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and encountered one of his best political episodes. Bourdain freely admits that Saudi Arabia hasn’t been high on the list of countries he’s dying to visit - a former heroin addict and current, unabashed heavy drinker, the Kingdom’s attitudes to alcohol alone seem like they’d be sufficient to keep him away. But No Reservations ran a contest encouraging fans to submit videos encouraging Bourdain to film a show in their hometowns. The clear winner of the contest and interview process was Danya Alhamrani, a remarkable Saudi woman born in Bismark, North Dakota, and raised between Bismark and Jeddah. With business partner Dania Nassief, she’s the founder of Eggdancer Productions, a media production company in Jeddah unique in that it’s run by two women.
Alhamrani is very clear in her videotape that she wants to bring Bourdain to Saudi Arabia to challenge his preconceptions - and America’s perceptions - of what her nation is and isn’t. She succeeds with Tony, at least - he’s surprised by the warmth with which he’s received, and observes on his blog:
Fact is we met a lot of funny, good natured, very, very generous people over there. They actually had the capacity to laugh at themselves. They were all too aware of how they look to outsiders. They watch “Friends” and “Oprah” and “American Idol”.
Many, many of them were educated abroad. They were scrupulously devout in their faith without being humorless.
It’s clear from the show that the humor and warmth which which Bourdain is received has a great deal to do with Alhamrani, who is clearly a remarkable figure, and one of the most natural bridge figures I’ve ever seen on a television screen. Her North Dakota background means she understand more or less precisely what Bourdain is inclined to believe about Saudi Arabia, allowing her to line up and then mow down stereotypes. Because she lives in Jeddah as a Saudi, not as an expat, she knows where to go, who to see and how to show Bourdain the markets and greasy spoons that always serve as his happiest locales. And because she’s apparently a force of nature, her agenda of challenging preconceptions comes through every shot of the episode.
I’ve never been to Saudi, and am not likely to make the trip as a tourist any time soon. But I found myself reacting to certain moments in the show based on my limited knowledge gained through Saudi bridgeblogs. Alhamrani and Bourdain visit a local fast food restaurant, and he’s briefly confused as to whether they should sit in the “family” or “single” sections. Alhamrani explains that the single section is only for single men - the two of them together were a family, and their meal took place in a booth surrounded by translucent glass. Bourdain asked the predictable question - whether this form of isolation was insulting to Alhamrani as a woman - she explained that it wasn’t something she found frustrating, but something that single men often resented… something that had been clear to me from reading Ahmed Al-Omran’s brilliant Saudi Jeans blog. As a young, single Saudi man, Ahmed is a feminist at least in part because he’s frustrated about the ways in which the Kingdom’s attitudes towards women end up marginalizing men as well.
There’s nothing better than visiting another country - preferably in the company of someone who can bridge cultural gaps and help you experience the actual country rather than the tourist simulacrum - for changing opinions and attitudes. Amy Teuteberg, Bourdain’s producer, finds herself - to her great surprise - writing about her fondness for her abbaya, which allowed her to blend in on the shoot to a much greater extent than in other shows.
But if you can’t go, you can always read. Reading the Global Voices Digest this morning, I came across Ayesha Saldanha’s translations from Saudi blogs about slavery and worker’s rights in Gulf nations. The frustration and anger in these posts at the treatment of “guest workers” makes it very clear that some Saudis are very upset about the situation workers face and looking for ways the situation could be addressed:
When I listen to the real complaints of workers, I can’t help but think that they are largely being treated like slaves… Not only do some companies request a month’s salary from workers in order to renew their residence permit, but other companies prevent workers from having a day off in the week, and others won’t allow any excuse or leave, even in the case of illness. One worker told me that he had been working in Saudi Arabia for three years and hadn’t been able to perform Umrah [pilgrimage to Mecca] because the company refused to give him two days’ holiday.
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The greatest problem with us is not Islam, of course; we take pride in our customs and culture and our Islamic spirit – but we don’t apply it on the ground. One day try stopping at a busy traffic light near a work site or industrial area, and see how, in 45 degree [113 Fahrenheit] heat, the workers are crammed into a lorry meant for equipment, or for sheep at most… But the greed of the factory or company owner prevents him from buying buses, which might cost no more than 40,000 Riyals to transport the workers from their accommodation to their workplace. If the matter was in my hands, a case would be brought against any company transporting its workers in lorries, and it would be ruled that the owner should experience this transport for a week. (In my dreams!)
Ask yourself now, when was the last time you brought a meal from a restaurant for your driver or housemaid? And how often have you let the driver use your mobile phone to talk to his family, and what about the maid? Does she still write letters and send them by post?
Do you have any doubt that this is slavery?
