Category Archives: Book Review

Book Review: Epic Win for Anonymous

One of my favorite things about living in New York City is making use of the local libraries. The networking and proximity of libraries gives uses access to an entire borough worth of books to pick up and drop off at a local branch. It’s like interlibrary loan, but integrated in to standard library use. I recently made use of this by getting to pick up a copy of Cole Stryker’s Epic Win for Anonymous: an Online Army Conquers the Media, published by Overlook Press.

Epic Win for Anonymous covers the rise of Anonymous (big-A) and the history of anonymous (little-a) in internet culture. When I sat down to write this review, I noticed that the subtitle on the cover is an Online Army Conquers the Media, but inside the book, the subtitle is How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web, a far more accurate description of it’s content. This is apparently only true for the paperback version. The hardcover appears to reference 4chan throughout. This difference and the publisher’s perceived need to change the title echoes what I feel public conceptions frequently miss when attempting to understand what has come to be known as “internet culture.”

My take on the book is that Stryker does come from this culture and is a good guide. He’s attempting to contextualize a weird, self-selecting youth culture (though participants do range in age). It lays out the social context of sites like 4chan, SomethingAwful, and Rotten; as well as Usenet, WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), and BBS, which came the generations before. He does a good job explaining the user experiences and information flows in the different communities and what that means for the culture that is fostered the different environments. He also looks at the roll of external factors in shaping internal community dynamics.

Chapters 1 (Memes: Shared Nuggets of Cultural Currency), 6 (The Meme Industry), and 7 (The Meme Life Cycle) present a coherent summary of the phenomenon of internet memes and their place in human history as a constant tendency lit up by the enabling hand of new technologies. With this, and the rest of the book, Stryker balances descriptions of individual incidents or memes with explanations of broad processes. He succeeds in using details to illuminate without bogging down. It helps that large parts of what he covers are, well, for the lulz.

This book features an impressive 11-page bibliography. I plan on making a photocopy for future reading list reference. It alone would have made this book worthwhile. I’m looking forward to reading Stryker’s second book, Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity on the Web. I don’t think that I liked this book as much as I have liked what Biella Coleman has said on similar topics, though I think it’s important to recognize that Sryker’s book has mostly avoided academic terminology and is more approachable without the background knowledge that Coleman’s require for full understanding. Epic Win is epic win as a first look beyond news stories on the deep background of Anonymous, including AnonOps and LulzSec, and why that background is important for making sense of current discussions on the future of internet communication, especially when it comes to identities, communities, security, fear, and privacy.

See also:

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Book Review: Murder in the Collective

Last summer, a friend’s mom gave me a copy of Murder in the Collective, by Barbara Wilson, after I was venting about interpersonal difficulties in a political collective. She and her fellow collective house members left around their house back in the 1980’s to remind one person living there that he might not want to temp fate.

The story was engaging. The characters were believable, reminding me of people I have met. The premise is that there’s a mixed-gender printing coop and a lesbian-only type setting coop that are somewhat at odds but may be about to merge. There are contentious meetings, larger movement conflicts, and complicated inter-person dynamics as the background to a murder mystery solved by Pam Nilsen, graduate student-come-collective member-come-amateur detective. The ending was slightly rushed, but creative and surprising. The book recognizes and skillfully plays with movement dynamics, interpersonal dynamics, and conflicts along the lines of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, and family background.

The story opens up beautifully. I keep finding myself unable to say more about the book because I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises. There’s big-p-politcs and little-p-politics, the mundane mixed with geopolitical intrigue, and a villain who confirms our deepest fears without painting the future as hopeless. It isn’t the best murder mystery I’ve ever read, but I’ll definitely be passing the book on my pulpy mystery loving, social justice focused friends with a hearty recommendation.

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Book Review: The Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad

In addition to the high shock value name and reference to knitting, Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan’s The Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad caught my eye from it arrived from PM Press because of the blurb on the back that referred to it as “Monty Python meets the SCUM Manifesto.” It did not disappoint.

The cover is brilliant. It has a knit background with a clothing label with the authors’ names at the bottom and most of the cover taken up by a shield shaped patch with “the knitting circle rapist annihilation squad” and a a ball of yarn with two knitting needles sticking through it and daintily dripping a single drop of blood. Copies of the patch are available from derickjensen.org and stephaniemcmillan.org.

The plot is surprisingly substantial and full of endearing and plucky characters. The roast of television news anchors is priceless. Men Against Women Against Rape (MAWAR), a parody of men’s rights and Christian masculinity groups, is spot-on. I was impressed by smooth prose and the perfect lambasting of everything from the USDA and Department of the Interior to manarchists and a PETA-like animal rights organization cleverly named “PATE.”

Unfortunately, like many otherwise good, pop-culture friendly versions of rape culture feminism, this book leaves much to be desired in regard to recognizing the depth of race and class’s effects of societal structures. While I enjoyed the light-hearted, sardonic narrative about the obliteration of rape, I couldn’t help but think that even if rape disappeared, there are many people, including many, many women, who would still face some serious every day barriers to the relaxed, post-exploitation life this book hopes for. Arguably, if one’s disbelief is suspended enough to believe that killing rapists with knitting needles will actually end rape quickly and without the knitting needle wielders getting caught, then enough disbelief has been suspended enough to accept that racism and class also have been solved. There were a few spots throughout the book that indicated that in the vision of a post-rape society, or at least the people who are moving us rapidly towards a post-rape society, did not shed some fairly major hang ups regarding gender and social norms. I was also disappointed by the lack of representations of trans* people and non-hetero relationships. In spite of that, this book was hilarious and definitely a good option of funny fluff that mostly hits the nail on the head.

Perfect vision of a post-rape world this is not, but wonderful summer beach reading this is. I suspect that title alone will also do wonders for repelling people one might not want to engage with at the beach or on the subway.

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Book Review: Accompanying

Part history, part call to reflection, Staughton Lynd’s Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change is a compelling but brief argument for a framework of activism that consciously unites activists and people in affected communities as compatriots. After a brief introduction outlining Staughton and his wife Alice’s background as lawyers and activists, the book is divided into sections labeled “Organizing,” covering the relatively top-down, Saul Alinsky-influenced version of organizing that reached dominance in the 1960’s, and “Accompaniment,” detailing an alternative, longer-lasting, more egalitarian method of creating change.

Beautifully, in the introduction Staughton specifically writes that accompaniment is not “pandering” to the desires of the community and that activists shouldn’t unquestioningly move exclusively in the direction indicated by the effected community—rather that accompaniment means recognizing both the outside activist and the person from the community as experts. The beauty of this dynamic is that to move forward both much seek to understand the other. Neither is in control, rather they are moving together and both must be active participants in shaping the future. This is the heart of how accomanying works and how it not only creates lasting, stable change, but builds capacity for the long-term.

The “Accompaniment” section includes chapters on draft counseling during the Vietnam War, working with prisoners to fight solitary confinement, the Occupy movement, and a section on Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador during the 1979 military coup with strong ties to the liberation theology movement. The brief biography of Romero is both heartbreaking and heartbreakingly beautiful. Even already having read some about him and the liberation theology movement, I teared up on the bus while reading it. The rest of the section is hopeful, showing not only that we can create social change in better ways that acknowledge and assert the humanity of all people, but that there are many of us who are already doing it.

Accompanying whetted my appetite. I wish that it included a deeper examination of an accompaniment approach to social change outside of the Western Hemisphere. All of the examples he gives prior to Occupy Wall Street are either explicitly Christian or are areas of social justice work heavily influenced by Friends and Catholic Workers. This begs the question of if accompaniment is the product of specific interpretations of Christianity or if there is even more that we might learn from looking at similar approaches to social justice from other traditions, or at the very least understanding the deep history of the approach within the Friends and left-wing Catholic traditions.

My only dislike of this book is that I want more. There are holes, ideas left incomplete that I am not sure that I would have been able to fill-in adequately without already knowing the history of left-pacifist social justice for the past 50 or so years. I wish that there was a similar book that I could hand someone without the same background that I have. The ideas in this book are absolutely useful and important to all of us who are working for social justice, regardless of how long we’ve been involved or how much we know of the movement outside of our own work. This is not a complete history or guide to accompaniment, this is a beautiful picture of what can be told through six short stories and an excellent reminder of what we should strive for in our work and in our lives.

 

See also:

Smith, Christian. 1991. The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Approachable, in-depth history of both liberation theology and the social movements around it in Latin America.

Ellacuria, Ignacio and Jon Sobruim. 1993. Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Seriously meaty English translations of major theological writings of Liberation Theology. Orbis Books is a Catholic press that publishes a lot of amazing books showing how religion can foster reconciliation and peace.

Both are worth reading, though you may want help with Mysterium Liberationis if you don’t have a background in theology.

Kidder, Tracy. 2003. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House. Paul Farmer and Partners in Health are specifically mentioned in the introduction and PIH is an excellent example of the philosophy of accompaniment in a large organization have substantial impact world-wide.

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Book Review: Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind

February’s Friends of PM Press package arrived today. In celebration and to keep myself motivated to power through the amazing books, I’ve sat down and finally type up my response to Victoria Law and China Martens’ Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind. I read the whole book back in November and have been mulling over it since.

I was initially super excited about the book since the full title is Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities. It’s a collection of 51 short pieces by a range of activists divided up into seven chapters with titles like “What’s Gender, Race, and Class Got to Do with It?” and “Don’t Leave Anyone Behind.” There a few essays that stood out as actually focusing on concrete actions and suggestions, but the majority were too focused on individual experiences and written in an autobiographical narrative style to be to my liking and felt more like reading a zine than a handbook on organizing.

Of the zine-style pieces, the overwhelming tone was that non-parents need to do all the child- and family- friendly organizing. The main desire was really good childcare at events and meetings. I live in NYC, which definitely sharpened my response. Space is hard to get, especially accessible space, and there is so much more work than organizer hours. While organizers everywhere have a tendency to over-extend themselves, it’s more acute here. I’m a lot more willing to redirect time and energy to a specific area if I know that I count on the people who are raising the issue working with me as a partner instead of dropping it at my feel with what amounts to a “you’re a bad comrade if you don’t do all this work for me with any cooperation on my part.” Surviving as an activist is hard even if one doesn’t have children, which the entitled tone of many of the pieces forget. Over and over, the authors writing as parents implied that there was no legitimate reason for objecting to how they or their children behaved in activists spaces in ways that felt self-centered at best but more often than not downright ableist. My main snark was that while I don’t want to leave my friends behind, I would like to leave some of those jerk-faces behind. As a whole, the book felt more like a collection of slightly grumpy rants about negative experiences as parents in radical spaces than an overview of how we can build stronger, more inclusive communities that have space for children and people with children.

There were a few pieces that stood out as exceptional. Rozalinda Borcila’s La Casita is Ours! A Conversation with Children in Struggle (pp 34-44) does an amazing job of illustrating how children can be active participants in a political struggle and includes a list of seven big take away lessons.  Organizing within an Anarcha-Feminst Childrearing Collective, by CRAP! Collective (Child Rearing Against Patriarchy), (pp111-115), provides clear suggestions on how to organize a family/ child block for a march in a responsible way. Babyproofing for Punks, by Clayton Dewey, (pp 133-135) is a great guide both for houses and less-finished convergence spaces that acknowledges that “perfect” isn’t always attainable and problematizes the idea of a “safe space.” Stacy Milbern’s two and a half page Accessibility (pp 205-207) is a short almost-check list of some accessibility features for events or spaces and shows how so much of the features that have been brought up previously in the book are not just applicable for children and parents.

The tension between Amariah Love/ Kelli’s Childcare Collective of Atlanta’s Radical Childcare Start-Up Notes (pp144-151) and Jennifer Silverman’s Equal Access: Community Childcare for Special Needs (pp180-183) best summarize my frustration with many of the expectations implicit in other writings. Much of my family, both chosen and biological, are educators who work with children professionally. They are seriously skilled in what they do. Being a teacher, childcare provider, or nanny is a vocation. Some of them have multiple high level degrees. Some of them are voraciously self-taught. All of them are amazing and dedicated. And all of them work in a field that is severely undervalued by capitalist society. I can’t in good conscience ask them to provide more of their undercompensated, underacknolwedged labor for free and I won’t lie to my community and myself that some random person can provide the quality childcare that the parents in this book are asking for. Given the centrality of gender and class in this book, why has this tension been left largely unaddressed? Why isn’t there more meaty mention of how undervalued caring is as a whole and tying that together?

I wouldn’t reread this book, though I might go back to a few of the pieces for reference. I don’t read autobiographic zines because I almost never enjoy them. Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind may be a good compilation of that style of writing, but it’s not the concrete guide that the subtitle implies. The book does a noteworthy job on including a wide range of perspectives and fearlessly putting forward race and class as absolutely central to understanding parenthood in our communities. There are writings by women, trans*/ gender non-conforming folk and men, both as parents and non-parent activists. Queerness and explicitly queer spaces are integrated into the book. The one demographic type hole I noticed is that most of the writings are about recent organizing. A lot of the people involved in the women’s peace/ anti-nuclear movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s are and were parents. Childcare collectives have been sprouting up since the 1960’s. I would have liked to get some sense of the historical arch of how we make movements accessible to children and parents. It isn’t liked radicals only started having kids in the past few years. I was also somewhat surprised that there weren’t any pieces written from a grandparent’s perspective. I have no doubt that this book is a decent starting place for young activists from white, middle-class backgrounds who have done most or all of their organizing in the context of college, but if this is the best guide on making movements and communities welcoming to children and parents out there, we’re all in trouble.

In the spirit of Reading Rainbow (“don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself”): dontleaveyourfriendsbehind.blogspot.com (the website for the book).

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