Socio economic status

The census is in, and my neighbor informs me that the average household income in my area is under $18 thousand. That's a meager sum of money when I see the Denalis, the Suburbans, the Monte Carlos, the Impalas all tricked out, and shining in the shade of my tree-lined street. Maybe these guys deal drugs. They sit on their porch all day and occasionally scream at each other.

Another day in the 'hood.

I made $8 thousand last year. I supplemented that income with approximately $1500 through a short-lived job helping my neighbor on his drug abuse study, selling items on e-bay, and interest on my money market account. I have something the thugs on my block don't have, money in the bank. I have something the thugs on my block don't have, academic credentials. I have something that the thugs on my block don't have, a job.

I am employed within an academic simulacrum, the University of Phoenix. I teach, I type, I grade, I send, I receive--a purely mechanical existence mediated by a text-based forum filled with topics apropos of organizational communication. It's a fitting metaphor for our lives, our fears, our politics, our aspirations, our rhetoric--business. I'm in the business of adding some theory and metatheory to the debate, occasionally losing my students, and sometimes perhaps giving them hope and positive regard. I've measured it. Positive regard takes up about 3 kilobytes of data, which takes around 2 seconds to get sent through my terminal, busted into packets of information, spread through the ether, reassembled on the other end, and saved onto this classroom space--this digital bureaucracy, this information-age sweat shop for the un-esteemed faculty. I hold on to the belief that I'm touching lives. I just stand in the way of these students and a few more degree hours on their way to a diploma. The diploma is paper. The ceremonies are real. I am real.

I can bet one thing. Each and every one of my students makes more money than I do. I made more money than I do now when I worked weekends at Debbie's Meat Emporium. I qualify for food stamps. I qualify for state aid. I qualify for a good job. I qualify for the city's weatherization program. I make well under $12,000. I also qualify for a better job--a job that I don't want.

Here I am. I like that I stand, one foot in poverty, one foot in some airy concept that is supposed to signal a bridge to a successful future, one that pays well. I've gone the distance. I've learned the rules of the game. When given the sandbox to create at my whim, I walked away. I've had this conversation a thousand times, and I suppose that I will have this conversation a thousand more times until I don't feel that tinge of irony. I like this idea that I'm an eligible bachelor, yet I continue to play 'hard to get.' I'll close for now. I'm unsure what I'm doing anyway.

Raping to know

Her parents showed a mixture of surprise and disgust. Their eyes burned with an overwhelming desire to know whether or not she was still a virgin, whether or not I had fucked their 'baby.'

I contacted her parents after I threw her in the pool without recognizing the depth. She caught her fall with her right foot and sprained her ankle. I drove her to an urgent care clinic where they submitted her foot to x-ray, wrapped it in cloth, and gave her a small quantity of pain medicine. She was young enough to be covered under her parent's health insurance, so I let them know what happened.

When her parents arrived, her eyes welled up and she stretched her arms out to receive their parental guardianship. Smart girl. I sat in the chair, kept my distance, and prepared for their rage. The father didn't swing. The mother did. I took my glasses off and let her hit me. The father grabbed her, and then grabbed me by the throat. I kept my cool. He wasn't choking me. I didn't give them a story. There was no need. I'd let the girl's story be the official one. I live alone. I'm an adult. I don't mind one bit how her parents think of me. The girl is the one who will have to live for at least another 5 years under their rule. I didn't envy her position. Since she was their 'baby' I knew she had an advantage and ability to set their mind at ease.

Still the parents insisted on knowing whether or not we had had sex. This was our first clandestine date. We checked into a hotel room in her town. We brought our swimming suits and took advantage of the hotel's recreational options. It was a hot day, and we had the pool almost exclusively to ourselves. I made the mistake of goofing around in the pool with her, and didn't pay attention to the depth when I tossed her in. I made a mistake, and I felt sorry for hurting her. I did what I could to redress this mistake. She told them we had not done anything. She was telling the truth. Her parents, her mother especially, was suspicious. Her father wanted to leave the story at her word, but he yielded to his wife's demands. The father scooped his daughter into her arms and took her behind a closed door as a nurse came in with a rape kit tucked under her arm.

A rape kit consists of a light, a speculum, rubber gloves, and some treated swabs. The swabs are to grab any residual semen in the vaginal cavity--a procedural formality, that place where medical practice and police evidence gathering meet. This was a state-standard rape kit. The speculum, light, and rubber gloves are where the medical practitioner looks for signs of vaginal trauma, signs of the fleshy friction of sex, and, in this case, the ripped hymen.

The nurse had never done one of these exploratory exercises. The police were on their way--also a formality. I sat in a room, alone, behind a locked door. I looked at an informational poster showing a cross section of the human body to highlight the digestive system. The nurse in her clumsy first attempt at collecting evidence in the parents' legal case against me, busted the girl's hymen. She didn't recognize it, and unintentionally grabbed it with her index finger.

Fitting.

I'm sure this hurt the girl. The first time always does. It's a combination of trauma and pleasure, of strange feelings and an attempt to reconcile them with previous experiences. I understood the feelings. I'm a veteran so to speak. She was green. I was prepared to go slow or not go at all. I didn't really care whether or not we did have sex. I could appreciate her presence and having an effect on her emotions by words alone. That was more exhilarating than the hydraulic pumping action of insemination--a mere formality of procreation. I was biding my time, preparing her for this moment; I was prepared to enjoy it just as much as her. Keeping my selfish motives in check would ripen the fruit of our first time, and I was patient, infinitely patient. I like the responsibility. I like building trust on a foundation of strangeness and suspicion. I like building confidence on a foundation of anxiety.

I shattered all of this when I tossed her into the shallow end of the pool. That's fine by me. She can have her childhood back. I don't want it. I sat in the locked room, staring at the exposed insides of this reference body highlighting the digestive system. It spoke truth by its presence. The girl's parents required her to sit quietly as the nurse examined her for signs of sexual activity. The nurse probed her anus, destroying a little bit of her innocence and pride. Her parents greedily watched, perhaps mildly aroused by their vantage point. They were aroused by being company to their daughter's body being rendered into evidence. Her daughter's body spoke a truth filtered through medical procedure they could trust. Instead of punishing her, spanking her, grounding her, they submitted her to a vivisection, a live autopsy of her sexual life. She couldn't keep that secret from her parents. They reveled in this moment of truth taking.

I sat in the locked room, felt a mild pressure on my bladder, and pondered that my body was also not my own. Incarceration was imminent, a formality. I was preparing myself. I was ready to keep quiet. The girl was humiliated by her parents and the fumbling medical examination by the green-stick nurse. Her body was all the evidence they needed. I didn't need to speak. My logos would not match her corpus. It's her body; she can have it back from me. Unfortunate for her that she had to submit to her parent's state-sponsored exploration of her body for knowledge, for evidence. That was her punishment. She lost her virginity to a nurse fumbling for facts. I was careful and considerate. I didn't want her facts, just her time. And I was more than happy to share with her the benefit of my time, my experience, my knowledge. I had no interest in forcing more from her than she wanted to offer. That's hardly a gift. I'm just not interested in domination. That's hardly a case in my defense. I'll remain mute. I'll let my body speak in its presence alone. I'm quite selfish and self-interested. I don't want my story to mix with hers or with the medical examination's body of evidence.

Thanks to modern warfare

Thanks to modern warfare hate is rational and killing is calculated.

Thanks to modern warfare that video game I played endlessly as a kid has prepared me to pilot one of many killing machines in a multi-billion dollar weapons platform.

Thanks to modern warfare our generals remain in an air-conditioned command room in Florida directing the actions on a theater of war thousands of miles away.

Thanks to modern warfare everyone can own a pair of night-vision binoculars.

Thanks to modern warfare the military is the only self-affirming, life-long occupation someone can enjoy that remains democratically available to all. That is, if they don't ask and you don't tell.

Thanks to modern warfare I have an excuse for killing my wife, neighbors, or strangers using techniques I learned in advanced weapons training.

Thanks to modern warfare combat is no longer the number one cause of death among enlisted soldiers; it's suicide.

Thanks to modern warfare the propaganda machine uses peace time to frame all major issues as warfare so it can recycle copy and be ready for the next major conflict.

Thanks to modern warfare nearly every member of Congress has a military contractor interest in his or her district.

Thanks to modern warfare the Humvee is a status symbol.

Thanks to modern warfare being a killer is cool.

Thanks to modern warfare love is a sissy emotion marked by irrational behavior and unclear thinking.

Thanks to modern warfare being a killer is an employable occupation.

Thanks to modern warfare government contractors operate as mercenaries, do the bidding of the U.S. military, and overwhelmingly skew war casualty statistics.

Thanks to modern warfare political careers begin with military service, which serves the politician's true-blood ethos.

Thanks to modern warfare we are perfecting urban military search and suppression maneuvers to root out phantom enemies in civilian populations.

Thanks to modern warfare presidents can guarantee themselves a second term by simply reminding the population that it's at war.

Thanks to modern warfare we no longer live in a free society yet cite that very thing as the reason we go to war and spout jingoist slogans in support of war, troops, and the president while justifying the violent suppression of dissent.

Thanks to modern warfare we have something described as an "American way of life," which we will starve of funding in favor of buying more weapons to defend it.

Thanks to modern warfare anything that matters gets framed using war strategy and terminology.

Thanks to modern warfare traumatic brain injuries are on the rise.

Thanks to modern warfare large numbers of college-bound students under the GI bill will have learned how to kill before taking a course in ethics.

Thanks to modern warfare ratings are up.

How do you tell your best friend you're in love with his girlfriend?

You don't. You take comfort in the thought that this, like every other romantic infatuation that you've had, is ephemeral.

If she hadn't started working out and shoehorned herself into those tight jeans last night I wouldn't have even begun thinking about her. It's just an ass, and all I'm seeing of it is merely outlines. I've summed this up so many times, but I'll do it again.

Attraction, especially male attraction, is overwhelmingly visual. We can reduce this type of attraction to geometry, symmetry, curvature. Certain shapes draw our attention. The curvature of breasts or the line created by their cleavage can draw us. The eyes, nose, ears, and mouth and their distance from each other. The shape of an ass and how it projects from the profile of the body. The clever jean manufacturers are to blame for my current commandment-breaking coveting of my neighbor's wife. I've hated her before and that feeling was just as real as this one. This is what I tell myself to break myself from the idea of fucking her. This thought also leads me to a stark realization that my moods and my emotions are so existentially exterior to their objects. I can turn my love of someone off and on like a light, and either emotional state disavows the existence of the other. This feeling is so complete. I hate this about me. But I love her so much right now.

She was a siren last night, and she was caught at a sausage fest. Two friends stopped by my neighbor's place, and she was embroiled in a tiff with her usual weekend companion. After a salvo of text-messages, she removed herself from that situation and settled into a good drunk. That's when she became a bit of a flirt. She wanted me to join her on a late night beer run. I asked her to do a quick sobriety test. I didn't want her to drive, but the thought of going somewhere alone with her enticed me considerably. Her boyfriend, the guy to whom I address my rent checks, drove us, and we all decided to go. We took the sausage fest on the road.

Nothing came of the night except some very latent sexual sparks, and a disruption in my usual masturbation routine as I couldn't remove her from my mind or my constant attention. As much as these situations make me feel very much alive and well, I've constructed a Byzantine bureaucracy of emotions, thought, and behavior that force a consistency onto my being from which I can never stray. That's why I sit at home. That's why I rarely go out. That's why I rarely flirt. That's why I find any and all reason to avoid relationships. That's why I think that any woman with more than one close friend is a political threat and a liability. I dare not share with someone who will publish my inner demons, my inner feelings, my motivations, my desires to her friendship circle. I am alienated by the sentences people speak and write about me. I am utterly alienated by the grammatical function of the third person. I will not be a 'he.' In order to accomplish this, I must remove myself from the topic of discussion. I will prove to anyone that the idea of them is more important to me than their person. It's so goddamn alienating. I'm in love with the network of neurons that activate when I see my neighbor's common-law wife in a pair of tight jeans, not her. She just makes them activate.

Bring me the researchers in white lab coats. Keep my cage clean, my water fresh, and my food full and I'll happily submit to your electronic manipulation of my mind. At least then I'd feel that someone has some modicum of control over my mind other than this projected mind guard who watches my every move and adjudicates the proper self-inflicted punishment. Damn those tight jeans to their own private hell.

Mechanical Turk, MTurk for short

I am having one of those horrid feelings--a queasiness in my gut--that's stemming from a recent rejection that I've felt. In trying to attain the qualifications to become a ContentGalore article writer I took their automated test. After completing the test the system congratulated me on attaining a score of -1.

What is a score of -1?

The test itself was not unlike my ACT and GRE exam sections, which tested my vocabulary. I did quite well on those. I always have done well with vocabulary. It's how I get by. ContentGalore and their Galore Article Writer Qualification test barred me from working on their HITs (Human Intelligence Task)--all of them. And I had a long string of highly successful sentence rewrites from one of their HIT creators, Todd Dickerson. To summarize, in trying to expand my ContentGalore qualifications to open up more sophisticated and higher paying HITs, I barred myself from doing any of their HITs. This is the source of my queasiness.

These issues always spin out the same way, and I find myself in the bend of a narrative pretzel. I have so many things to lay out, so many elements to discuss.

I entered the weekend with high hopes of finding freedom as a MTurker, a person who does very small information jobs for equally small sums of money. I rewrote more than one hundred sentences for Todd Dickerson. His form-letter 'thank yous' indicated that my work was accepted and encouraged me to continue working for him in hopes of receiving a bonus. With that HIT pool out of my reach, I'm stuck with a surplus of justification for this kind of work and no access to it. I had with some zeal jumped right into the MTurk worker pool, activated my account, and went to work. With equal zeal I used the same rationalization of the work into time and payment and figured that I could easily rewrite 500 sentences a day, make $20, and amass $100 a week for an additional $400 per month. That would have been just enough to keep me from feeling the pressure to find a job, sell myself, write my qualifications out, and compile my education and work experience into a cover letter narrative that uniquely addresses the employer. I thought for a brief moment that I could continue to while away the hours grading papers, virtually interacting with students, and do some info-sweatshop work and 'get by.' That little delusional information age fantasy has just been shattered by an equally information age qualification test with its cryptic -1 score.

I aced that test.

I know too much already. I knew what I was doing for Todd Dickerson. He was the face of a faceless operation. I was rewriting copy for gold farmers, those people who find exploits in video game environments to generate in-game wealth and then sell it to players of the game who are too lazy or enterprising to save it themselves. I was helping judge if sexual terminology was best categorized as 'gay,' 'incest,' or 'straight.' I was drawing squares around images in pictures that related to the key word below. I was adding my little human sweat to a faceless digital world that profits from the services it provides. I gave their service value by rewriting poorly translated sentences. I gave their service value by helping them better categorize words relating to sexual acts. I gave their service value by ensuring that their information wasn't simply a cut and paste job from a Wikipedia entry. I know too much because I realized who I was working for--the spammer and the smut peddler. I categorized shoes several times to 'wash my hands' of that work. I would consider myself the organic intellectual in this scheme, but given the realities of the information economy I'm too far removed from its machinery to effect any kind of change upon it. The scope of my actions are reduced to a quaint little interface. I can't even contact ContentGalore to let them know that I am, in fact, qualified to rewrite their sentences. But in its effort to shave fractions of pennies off of the cost of their information, the HIT providers rely on various mechanical means to judge completed HITs and assess MTurkers' qualifications. Only in this recursive information world could we be managed by an algorithm. Only in this interactive economy would grammatically correct sentences written by humans become a commodity, spawn a microfinanced labor market, and get regulated and run by algorithms. For example, the HIT providers often warn the worker that their HIT contributions are judged by a plagiarism algorithm, which measures whether or not a new sentence is more than 50% unique. That's hard to accomplish if I'm given a sentence, which is already 50% terminology that I'm required to leave in the sentence. I don't need to get into those details because I am reduced to a clever machine in order to beat it. There's no space for ethics or real action if all you're trying to do is satisfy the algorithm.

What is a mechanical turk? That was a curio that perhaps made many circuits around the royal courts of Europe and its city's major exhibitions. It was an automaton who played chess quite well. The automaton was dressed like a Turk perhaps to add some exotic appeal to the character. But in fact, this mechanical Turk was mere window dressing for hiding a human operator below the cabinet, underneath the chess board. There was a ghost in the machine. I'm one of the ghosts in this machine as well. Instead of visiting dignitaries, I've been reduced to one of many small tasks for which no software exists to complete. In my zeal to recover some dignity and find freedom in this microtransaction economy, I figured that if I could complete a unique sentence every 2.8 seconds consistently, I'd make $50 an hour. In fact, this rationalizing of labor and one's worth is the same rationalization that motivates the piece worker who gets paid by the task. It's a neat little system. Not only is the interface interactive but the rationale behind the work. The connection between labor and payment is so damn transparent that I motivate myself by the same rationale. Work faster, get paid more. So bloody simple. Having spent several years in academia believing that I'd test out of this economy I found myself stuck in limbo, without a PhD, engaging in this work, ironically engaged in the very thing that I watched emerge over my years in college, the very thing I studied. I considered myself a technology and society expert. With that fancy diploma and its Medieval heraldry in hand I could have been. But I'm not, and so I'm here talking to my information-age mirror--my blog--an invention, which was first discussed in a class I took my first year into my doctoral program. These are strange days. I've been kicked aside by an algorithm that I studied against, that I armed my intellect to critique.

Of course, upon finding myself rejected from my bread and butter in this information sweatshop, the unique sentence, I sought social support via Google. Google is like a wishing well. You project upon it your wishes, your fears, your love interests, your aimless boredom and it always produces a link that you follow. Upon tossing my coin into this info-age wishing well--how did i end up with a qualification of -1 with mturk?--I received several responses. I did find Turker nation, which is a discussion board dedicated to the many frustrations that others find with getting paid, earning and losing qualifications, HITs, and HIT providers. I also ended up reading a few book reviews about books unrelated to my enterprise. And finally, I stumbled upon the Institute for Distributed Creativity and one of its signature articles, "On MTurk, Some Examples of Exploitation." I read a little and followed a few links and there were some people I had met in graduate school, chiming in about the topic, flaunting their Marxism and penchant for cross-over engineering terms like 'ergodic.' I longed for home, those tumultuous but ultimately affirming years I spent slavishly devoted to academic studies, reading, and writing. All that is receding into my past much like my hairline.

Now I am sad that I will once again return to looking for a job whose qualifications will continually remind me how far afield I am, how unique of a snowflake I painted for myself academically, and how I lie to myself about the importance of what I learned. I'm the philosopher with the full belly who was afforded the time, comforts, and societal position to critique some of the elements of society that contributed to the largess that make possible the philosopher's situation. Reading a history of the mathematical thought that contributed to computing I recognized that Leibniz solved many problems but some he couldn't. He needed to eat. So he was resigned to finding royal sponsors and spent a good deal of his life doing genealogical work. I need to give up the ghost that I could wear a suit and tie, once again ironically, carry a briefcase and contribute my 'big brain' to some government sponsored project. I should only be so lucky to believe that Hollywood-style illusion of work. I should have taken that UPS job. I can move boxes for four hours a day, with weekends and holidays off.

I'm sad, dejected, and rejected. An employer writes words that don't hail me. A computer algorithm enlisted to measure uniqueness says 'no.' I lose some abstract qualification and apparently 'break' the test by garnering a -1. Above all, I have absolutely no clue how these decisions are made. I'm perfectly happy to write single sentences for which I will get paid. All of my sentences up until I found Mechanical Turk required much more of my time, my sweat, my effort, my frustration, my tears, my doubt, my pity--and they paid .00. I paid no mind getting paid .03, spending 10 seconds to rewrite a sentence. But I'll reiterate that this job is no longer available to me now that I have a -1 qualification.

There's two sides to this story.

I was fired by an algorithm, so what?

I was fired by an algorithm. This is hopeless.

That algorithm afforded me a moment's freedom from my own thought. I rewrote their sentences. I had enough context to do this, and all it required me to do was to use my vocabulary. I would improve my writing, I thought. I would hone my writing, I thought. I'd give my brain a workout, I thought. Now I'm barred from lifting these thinking weights for .03 a rep.

Add to this the fact that I'll soon find a letter in my inbox from the University of Phoenix, reminding me that feedback is late--the result of yet another algorithm.