Revisiting the Global Sweatshop

Brand jamming activity in Walmart Store

A huge part of my political development came with the late 90’s movement building around supply chains and marginalized labor under globalization. This weekend’s factory fire killing 112 Bangladeshi garment workers and Black Friday’s Walmart store strikes, have brought those issues back to the popular media. 

That attention has also come to my more immediate bubble of activist connections.

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Source: chriseatondotnet

Let’s drop an autocomplete bomb! Today’s NY Times Week in Review contains an article by Evgeny Morozov on how Facebook, Amazon and Google censor the web with search algorithms and other automated functions. One snip it reads Google’s defense would sound tenable if its own algorithms weren’t so easy to trick. In 2010, the marketing expert Brent Payne paid an army of assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Soon anyone typing “Brent P” into Google would see that phrase in their autocomplete suggestions. Such autocomplete bombing seems like it could be a great tactic for media activists. It would be a really cool way to reach a small, but targeted, group of people looking for something specific. The only thing you have to do is pick a reasonably low search term and get a bunch of people to “manipulate it.” I Because proper names have smaller search traffic this is probably ideal for character assassination. For example, it would be great if we could get a search for “UC Regents” to autocomplete as “UC Regents Hate Students, Love Wall St.” But because my new favorite activist project is the Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee, I’d love to do something around debt. From playing with Google’s adwords keyword recommendation tool, it looks like “need help with debt” is searched less than 2,000 times a month. Maybe we should try to get a few thousand people to search “need help with debt? then help abolish it” and get that little message of resistance to appear in front of a few thousand people in the coming year. What do you think? Do you have a better idea for an autocomplete bomb? Let me know!
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Let’s drop an autocomplete bomb!

Today’s NY Times Week in Review contains an article by Evgeny Morozov on how Facebook, Amazon and Google censor the web with search algorithms and other automated functions. One snip it reads

Google’s defense would sound tenable if its own algorithms weren’t so easy to trick. In 2010, the marketing expert Brent Payne paid an army of assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Soon anyone typing “Brent P” into Google would see that phrase in their autocomplete suggestions.

Such autocomplete bombing seems like it could be a great tactic for media activists. It would be a really cool way to reach a small, but targeted, group of people looking for something specific. The only thing you have to do is pick a reasonably low search term and get a bunch of people to “manipulate it.” I

Because proper names have smaller search traffic this is probably ideal for character assassination. For example, it would be great if we could get a search for “UC Regents” to autocomplete as “UC Regents Hate Students, Love Wall St.”

But because my new favorite activist project is the Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee, I’d love to do something around debt.

From playing with Google’s adwords keyword recommendation tool, it looks like “need help with debt” is searched less than 2,000 times a month. Maybe we should try to get a few thousand people to search “need help with debt? then help abolish it” and get that little message of resistance to appear in front of a few thousand people in the coming year.

What do you think? Do you have a better idea for an autocomplete bomb? Let me know!

Source: chriseatondotnet

strikebot luvs chicago teachers, walks picket line

Source: occupiedchicagotribune.org

The Chokepoint Project: Monitoring Global Net Censorship

(dis)connection state map

Damn cool project… “We are building a living record of the state of the Internet across the world documenting restrictions, attacks and blackouts using a variety of tools together with partner organizations to help journalists, governments, activists and citizens.”

Their current priority is the (dis)Connection State Map which aims to do the following:

  • Measuring regional network connection states allowing monitoring of disconnection events.
  • Quickly identifying disconnection events to augment the information sets required by on the ground actors and improve the quality of consequent decisions.
  • Access to an historical overview of disconnection events  improving the quality of behavioral pattern analysis.

Source: chriseatondotnet

beother:

Voice of Art - GATS (Graffiti Against the System)

Graffiti is a thriving life force in Oakland. Meet GATS (Graffiti Against The System), an artist for whom the city is one endless canvas to connect with the people. Times are rough in “The O,” as GATS plans to write a poem throughout the city.

Fantastic 1st video in a series on GATS by i am OTHER

hat tip Tides of Flame

swarming protests - Montreal students have adopted a tactic to defy an anti-demonstration law (which places restrictions on gatherings of more than 49 people).

v sean fluffington 

bags of garbage from foreclosed homes brought to bank of america. #forclosure #ows #miami occupychulavista: Hashim Yeomans-Benford places bags of garbage that had been collected from abandoned foreclosed home in front of a Bank of America branch during a protest organized by the Miami Workers Center on Thursday in Miami, Florida. The residents of the Liberty City neighborhood came together to clean up the abandoned property and later in the day planned on delivering the collected trash to a Bank of America branch. (via PhotoBlog - Protesters in Miami clean garbage from foreclosed homes and dump it at bank)
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bags of garbage from foreclosed homes brought to bank of america. #forclosure #ows #miami

occupychulavista:

Hashim Yeomans-Benford places bags of garbage that had been collected from abandoned foreclosed home in front of a Bank of America branch during a protest organized by the Miami Workers Center on Thursday in Miami, Florida. The residents of the Liberty City neighborhood came together to clean up the abandoned property and later in the day planned on delivering the collected trash to a Bank of America branch.



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