Map of Martinique, by the CIA.

My life was untroubled by the existence of Martinique until Daily announced his intentions of living there for eight months in order to research his dissertation. As his degree relates to French Colonial History the presumption was that Martinique was formerly a French Colony, which is correct, but it never would have occurred to me that it remains an actual part of France to this day. Like its Caribbean neighbor Guadeloupe, Guiana (not where Jonestown was) in South America and Reunion (which produced Miss France) near Madagascar, Martinique belongs to the Overseas Department of France. Each place is treated, to my understanding achieved through little effort, similar to various states here in the U.S., with direct representation in France’s government. Unfortunately this also means that they use the Euro which, if you haven’t noticed, is kicking the dollar’s ass these days.

Understanding that our friend was stranding himself in a foreign country where he knew no one Aaron and I began to discuss the possibility of selflessly throwing ourselves into the tropics in the dead of winter to visit. Phone calls to the MVP Gold representatives of Alaska Airlines were made, long slogs discussing logistics complex enough to cause mere calculators to explode in confusion, and a flurry of modern communication ensued between the States and the tiny island of Martinique. Miracles were performed and so it was set in stone that Aaron and I would journey from our comfortable northern climes and descend into the sun-soaked paradise at the beginning of February. Then the flights were changed and we accrued an additional leg and a couple of extra hours.

Suddenly I had gone from a routine entrenched spoil-sport to a globe-trotting member of the international jet-set. This required renewing my passport and finding some way of ensuring I would not be fired or evicted from my home. The gears were set in motion and the pieces fell into place as effortlessly as, eh, whatever the metaphor would be in this case. I even went so far as to borrow a French phrase book from a co-worker who jabbered foreign at me one afternoon without any provocation, assuming that she owed me for this grievous offense. The fact that I hardly cracked the book open during the first couple months of its occupation in my life can only be explained by revealing a complicated series of tragedies and misadventures inspired by Greek myths. With time running out I began mumbling phrases in mixed company and adjusting to the red-hue my cheeks assumed.

However feeble my attempts at incorporating a second (or third, I suppose) language, my research into the place I would ultimately see was first-rate. Martinique subsists on the French government but this economic aid does not mean there is no industry on the island. Tourism accounts for most employment as it requires a large service sector, and there are agricultural exports such as sugar-cane and bananas; the former is mostly dedicated to to the production of rum, for which Martinique is renowned. During the hurricane season of last year, tho, the island lost its entire banana crop. This disaster was followed closely by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake which caused one death (heart attack, I believe) and some destruction. Statistics available were slightly out of date and deviated slightly source by source but unemployment seemed to hover around 28%– higher perhaps this year due to the bananas being destroyed. So far as I understood it I would soon be traipsing through a tropical wonderland where they make a lot of booze and no one has a job, standing out like an albino, speaking the wrong language and probably wearing some garish garb with the mistaken idea that everyone on the island thinks hawaiian shirts and linen pants are the best way to combat the heat and humidity. The only available evidence that Martinique was not an impoverished death-trap like Haiti or Jamaica was that my pale-face friend was able to wander around on his own with no horror stories beyond every yard in his neighborhood being patrolled incessantly by enraged guard-dogs.

After being disappointed with the available literature on the internet (the Martinican tourist site focuses mainly on rum and food) I found a blog written by a British woman named Lindsay who is currently living on the eastern side of the island teaching English to school-children. Her experiences furthered my understanding of what was to come: flying cockroaches the size of baby birds; Dengue Fever. Fortunately she did vouch for the existence of food in supermarkets which could be stir-fried which implied that, were I to escape any untimely demise by insects, disease and kidney-thieves, I might be able to eat; that there would be seafood available (I’m that kind of vegetarian) was a given. Didn’t check into the mercury content of the Caribbean, tho. Her travails with cat-calling lecherous old-men in town seemed unlikely to cause me any problems, for which I was grateful. Maybe if I were blond.

Mount Pelee Erupts, 1902

There are also volcanoes, or at least one. Mount Pelee sits above the town of Saint-Pierre along the northern coast. The city had been the original capital of the island, referred to historically as the Paris of the West Indies, until 1902 when an eruption obliterated the town along with close to 30,000 inhabitants. In under ten minutes. Despite the tears it was exciting to be able to travel to the rebuilt Saint-Pierre where excavations allow you to poke around ruins looking for petrified babies and heads.

Except transportation seemed to be a tricky deal. The towns are separated by large swaths of heavily forested mountains. Car rentals seemed pretty cheap but testimonials suggested attempting to drive alongside the locals was invitation to heart attack because they are all insane. There’s no railroad and the country seems to lack a cohesive transit system beyond an unofficial bus known as a taxico: Large vans or small buses that run normal routes between two cities and just picks people up on the side of the road– you scream in foreign to get out wherever you need to get out and the driver decides how much you’ve cost him.

So what I knew before going: A small island populated by French speaking blacks, guard dogs, mosquitoes, giant flying cockroaches and my friend Daily. It would average 85 degrees during the day and maybe 75 at night with a breeze and the humidity would be high. It would be expensive due to the fact that not only is the island on the Euro but almost everything has to be imported. We would be at the mercy of a ramshackle public transportation system or mercenary cab drivers. If the hurricanes don’t kill you the next earthquake or volcanic eruption probably will. There may be thousands of impoverished people whetting knives waiting for feckless whitey. Then we found out we had booked our trip for Carnaval week.

At least this was more than many people knew when conversation came round to my imminent leaving. Of those who had any idea the place existed most could only recall it floated around somewhere in the Caribbean: It’s one of the lower islands in the Lesser Antilles which cut the Atlantic from the Caribbean close (geographically speaking) to Venezuela. Fewer understood that it was French, not just culturally but politically. One person, I discovered days before taking off, had actually been there before and suggested I take a rum distillery tour. The idea of being hung-over in a tropical climate made less sense than me being in a tropical climate.

None of this really explains how a small island in the Caribbean close to Venezuela became an overseas department of the French Republic, but since my return I’ve asked some questions and done some reading. Wrong order of events, of course, but something of the history: (more…)

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One unfortunate side-effect of my disengagement from network TV is that I’m woefully unaware of what’s going on. Some of this is alleviated by my periodic scanning of world headlines on the Manchester Guardian’s website and some by my loyal viewer-ship of both Russia Today and Deutsch-Welle but this is only good for a general knowledge of events. My finger is not on the pulse of culture or American attitudes. When I do happen to be snagged by something on the big three (we don’t get Fox) I typically sit bemused rather than hypnotized, and I still find myself offended by a good portion of what’s made available for my viewing pleasure.

If I was dedicated enough I might be able to suss out the hearts and minds of America through alternative channels such as youtube but that window into attention-depraved desperation failed me in a recent attempt to secure an IBM commercial recently dragging its lumber-some, neanderthal fists through the cathode spectrum. There’s an older guy and a younger guy. The younger guy is talking about some online reality where avatars represent people and virtual money flows like water. The older guy asks about real money and the younger guy balks. This virtual reality took a lot of innovation to create he says sulkily. The older guy says, “Innovation is for making money”.

The jars on my desk with their segregated coinage populations notwithstanding, I lost my thirst for wealth some years back, now attempting to make my way through life by requiring as little as possible instead of acquiring as much as possible. I’ve not been very successful in my personal endeavors but I try to make do and I do alright. There’s a world of people better at this than me, just as there’s a world of people who don’t just skulk around the corners with their eyes on restaurant dumpsters but with their eyes on an inner vision. The good old DIY ethic may have been subverted and sold back to the internet generation like every other identifiable cultural identity but true-blue individuals continue to thrive, continue to make things happen on their own terms, surviving through willpower and a sense of community that banks and loans and IBM can never understand because it’s not economically quantifiable.

But as I said, every attempt is made to take the concepts of “the underground” and spin them into a product for the cutting edge, left of center liberal who’s registered Green. The most obvious and contemporary example is what’s happening to the organic foods movement as Walmart, Safeway, Costco and their factory farm suppliers have found a profitable niche waiting in the parking lot. They attempt to dilute the legal terms of what qualifies as organic and they skirt the edges of the concept to maximize production with no regard for the grey areas which were never originally an issue when the scale was smaller and more localized. Sustainable? Crop rotation? Transportation? No, they’re busy trying to find a way to have certain pesticides pass the FDA’s rules and fussing over which multi-billion dollar marketing team has the best idea to sell this new rage.

Another marginalized institution of the past has begun to percolate into the popular consciousness as of late– non-profits are booming. However it seems the days of food drives and volunteering at the soup kitchen aren’t sexy in the modern era and now we have tech-driven companies luring the cash for whomever is deigned impoverished and worthy. In particular there has been a movement in the world of finance to incorporate more “socially responsible” investment plans into the capitalist world. I’m on the fence about the purity of this since I a)have this slush fund of death in my name I never did anything with and b)think the only way to invest money in something is to hand it to someone and hope they make a movie instead of buy cocaine.

An old co-worker of mine, after some conversations in the past, told me to check out one of the hot new school feel-good responsibly companies, a local non-profit known as kiva.org. It was exciting and worrisome at the same time, to think of a San Francisco couple founding a charity of sorts contrary to common sense and self-interest. Basically kiva.org began in 2005 after Jessica Flannery traveled to Africa, a place steadily becoming the world-wide destination for wayward, middle-class, college educated 20-somethings set to replace Latin America as soon as Hugo Chavez begins machine-gunning dissidents and broadcasting puppet-shows on his own TV station. Her husband, a programmer at TiVo, listened to her stories of beautiful people struggling to remain their inherent dignity under crushing poverty and together they pooled their pennies and designed a method of allowing other wayward, college-educated 20-somethings to help these beautiful but impoverished people HELP THEMSELVES.

Oprah loves em’, TV loves em’, you probably love em’ too. Kiva, Swahili for “agreement” or “unity” according to their FAQ page (gag, gag), basically works like this. In the third world there are poor people, most of whom could probably get a good solid job at McDonald’s but they’re lazy and would rather watch TV all day and have lots of babies. Despite looking uncool, however, there are people scattered throughout the land who really want to get off the couch and make something of their lives. They try to start their own businesses but, being poor, they have no start-up capital. Some have managed to scrounge and save enough to buy a yak with which they can exploit for milk to sell at inflated prices in the market but most are either unable to take that first step or are unable to get more yaks because the money lending is generally handled by sharks who charge exorbitant interest rates and have the tendency to react poorly to late repayments. What ever shall they do?

Fortunately the third world is dominated by people of a darker-hue and white people, particularly those with good-breeding and a cultured education, love that shit. It’s exotic. You’d love to bring one home for the den but your friends might think it’s tacky. Anyways, the white people want to see these hard-working yak milkers succeed by the sweat of their brow and whatever innovation they can afford from IBM. However, international financing is a little difficult because white people don’t really wanna spend any more time in the third world than is necessary to drink a lot of cheap booze, hook-up with other whites hanging out there and defile ancient cultural artifacts with their banal chatter and snapshot interest. But white people love the internet because it’s really leveling the playing field for the people of the world AND you don’t really have to actually interact with the third world. It’s also a great way to send money!

So kiva has these partners referred to as microfinance institutions. These MFIs exist throughout the third world, tho how they got the money to become anything like an institution is not readily discussed. Perhaps they were really good at milking yaks? Anyways, these MFIs provide small loans to impoverished people so that they can go do what they do to stop being impoverished. The loan officers meet with potential applicants and if their business plan is sound they approve them of the loan. Meanwhile on the malaria-free side of the world kiva receives colorful and exotic snapshots of these applicants and compiles an informal but personable dossier on who they are and what they wanna do. These profiles are put up on the website and shiny happy people can use the power of the internet to make a small donation to the exotic native (officially referred to as “entrepreneurs”) they choose. If that’s not enough the exotic natives even correspond with their “Kiva lenders” and update them on the progress of the yak milking or whatever. Back in poverty the MFI loan officers come knocking once a week to collect a percentage of the loan back. When the loan is paid off the “donor” is free to reinvest their money in another colorful native with a different business plan or withdraw their initial investment. Or, as rarely occurs, they lose their ten bucks.

The loans are repaid with interest which covers the cost of loan officers and, I guess, a portion goes to maintaining kiva itself. While a lot of leg-work is being done by interns or shiny happy people off to the hinterlands to get wasted and fuck Germans, there are still sixteen employees and an office in a very expensive city to consider. It’s no longer that romantic bedroom operation of, uh, a couple years ago. Then again, looking over the titled employees (no indication of what kiva -specific name they have) they might just live off dividends. Former google, Paypal, MIX, Barclays people and not working the mail-room mind you. There’s probably some corporate underwriting and, surprise, Paypal even waives the transaction fees for kiva donations.

In a nutshell… And despite the inherent offensiveness of .com hangover-styled new-wave monied liberals on the loose I think it’s a good company who’s really trying to make a difference in a way they were uniquely capable of doing. I obviously wanted to unearth the dirt, Cayman accounts or tobacco investments or mink stoles at the Wammies, but they just seem like normal people who you might run into at Whole Foods if you were so clueless as to buy that over-priced and mass-produced green-washed dreck. My real problem is vague and uneducated– the emphasis on creating a “My First Capitalism” relationship. Welfare is the nasty word that keeps floating around– it’s not a hand-out! I’m not sure that welfare is such a bad thing in its own right– American poverty is its own beast (to paraphrase PJ O’Rourke it’s the only place you can be poor and own a color TV) so comparisons to central Africa seem a little irresponsible. I mean, places where milking yaks is a good job makes you wonder who the fuck is buying the yak milk, where is the wealth trickling down from? God knows, but there’s probably some machine guns involved, and we don’t wanna know. So there’s yak milk flowing and cute little native things being made to sell to tourists and people can feel good about pulling themselves up by the boot-straps and contributing to their community. Building wells and schools is no longer sexy; earn it people. It’ll be the land of yak milk and honey until desertification strips the pastures, the military junta rapes and pillages and everyone dies of AIDS while drowning in the floods brought upon by global warming.

Kiva.org didn’t invent microfinance; Muhammad Yunus is credited by most as the father of the concept. Back in the 70’s in Bangladesh (not the land of yak milk and honey by any means) he was just a middle-class guy teaching economics in a university when, on a field trip to have his students poke poor villagers with sticks, his heart opened up and he made a small personal loan to someone to better their lives through innovation and hard-work. The habit continued for many years until, in 1983, he founded the Grameen Bank, the first MFI. People thought he was crazy but now MFIs have opened throughout the world and the repayment rate averages at 95% across the board. Not only the initial concept of small, direct loans has trickled down but also the idea of loaning predominantly to women (who tend to stay sober and watch the kids) and often to groups of women (group pressure to keep the money on the straight and narrow) have become industry standard. The interest rates on loans are high to cover the amount of work which goes into the small loans but the size of the repayments are still small enough to keep people from being overwhelmed and the repayment cycles are short, presumably for reasons that make sense but I’m not remembering what those are right now. While I’m sure he’s done alright for himself Yunus does seem to genuinely care about people and the Nobel hippies thought so as well.

One woman is a little less angelic when it comes to microfinance, even tho she traveled on her 1st world credit cards to investigate this Grameen Bank for a couple of months. Tracey Pettengill Turner graduated from Stanford business school where she learned about the small loan practice but was disappointed that only large companies were able to invest globally leaving penny-ante stock market gamblers like herself out in the cold. She wanted a piece of the action and thought that having her own online MFI, one that paid out dividends, was her doorway to emasculating the financial world, or whatever her sick motivations might be. This is all best summed up with this snippet stolen from MicroPlace’s own history page:

Upon her return, Tracey discovered that the capital markets in the United States were beginning to view microfinance as an attractive investment opportunity. However, only major financial players like institutional and high net worth investors could invest. An everyday investor like Tracey had no way to participate. That insight led to the vision of MicroPlace: a company that enables everyday people to make investments in microfinance.

When eBay executives heard about MicroPlace, they were excited by the synergies between eBay’s mission to provide economic opportunity and MicroPlace’s vision to empower the world’s working poor. They saw MicroPlace as an ideal opportunity to put eBay’s assets to work in a way that could be truly world-changing. Powered by eBay’s expertise in connecting people, creating marketplaces and processing online transactions, MicroPlace could deliver on its vision to significantly impact global poverty.

Yes, you just read “synergies”, but the differences between kiva.org and MicroPlace don’t end there. Kiva may as well be a granola retailer, or maybe a manufacturer of lotions for people allergic the everything except butterfly wings and puppy kisses. MicroPlace looks like every company that has spawned in the internet age that’s predominantly a non-internet concept. Kiva unites the world through pictures and essays while MicroPlace has a bunch of pictures of people probably found using google-images. There are no direct investments– the money is given to a stateside investor which then deals with MFIs of its choosing around the world. You get their assurances that they’re investing soundly in yak milking and love, not oil. What is reassuring about MicroPlace is that there’s little patronizing– this isn’t about making the world a better place as much as it is making an investment you don’t feel guilty about because it’s supposed to be the right thing to do and you don’t even have to watch it happen. Kiva.org has designs on someday being able to offer investment with payouts but, for their sake, I hope they never get SEC clearance to do this– I’ll take my mildly aggravating, clueless, middle-class metrosexuals donating, not profiting, thank-you.

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Here in the west coast, the youngest outpost of civilization the world knows, there is no collision of the past and the future. It is undeniably a modern place where the culture, the technology and the culture operate in a particular harmony of now. You would have to travel east to find any example of the gulf of time, to Boston where Paul Revere lies at the Granary Burial Ground down the street from a Radio Shack improbably manhandled into the basement of a three hundred year old brick building. Philadelphia is home to Elfreth’s Alley, the longest continuously inhabited street in America. You can walk down the cobbled street lined with narrow homes before turning the corner onto a busy street lined by boutique galleries. Travel farther east and you find the most severe dissonance of all, Japan, where the most advanced vending machine ever developed will sell hot coffee and cold soda to people living in houses that have stood since the middle ages.

But that’s just part of why Japan is a curiosity for the world. Somehow the ancient and the modern blend into a mysterious whole of wafer-thin cell phones and shinto shrines. Just as in San Francisco where internet use in coffee shops in as ubiquitous now as seeing two old men silently wage war across a chess-board once was ten years ago. Cafes have long been a place for the cutting edge, from the social rejects who became Bohemians to the folkies and art-fags who exhibited their talents and personalities in the corners and on the walls. Somehow it’s less an surprise to see two people sharing a table yet completely absorbed in the separate world of their laptops then seeing a cluster of people debate the merits of cubism or a person quietly reading a book of poems over a cappuccino. If advertisements are hip to the trend laptops are flooding the world, leveling the playing field for people everywhere, but it’s still hard to imagine the saffron-robed Dali Lama checking e-mail.

Odd as it may seem recent efforts by a disparate cluster of people have made the internet a reality for an ancient people normally considered to shun the modern era and the trappings that come along with it. Since the Chinese absorbed Tibet in 1950 a large immigrant population has found homes in the northern mountains of India. Many found placement in Dharamsala where a population of over 100,000 Tibetan exiles now live and who have been working to rebuild their shattered community since the Dali Lama arrived at the end of the 50’s. It’s a small city in the harsh frontier where running water and electricity can’t be relied on so much as hoped for on any given day. Yet somehow it is here that a major technological coup has taken place.

Israeli ex-patriot Yahel Ben-David came to visit a friend who was on a spiritual quest and found himself leaving behind his high-paying position with a Silicon Valley linux firm to begin life anew among the refugee population. Finding the plight of the Tibetan people unconscionable Ben-David began to formulate a method of providing some service to help them advance beyond subsistence. He knew networking so he scoured the city for old computers, fax machines, modems, phones– anything linux oriented that he could take apart to rebuild. Over time he began to have prototypes which he would have to take back to Israel in order to test; India originally forbid open wireless networks. He introduced his ideas to others, he accepted donations of old parts from abroad, he waited.

And when India finally opened a limited amount of bandwidth for WiFi he was ready, manually placing his first antennae that same day. They sprung up in trees, off balconies, from the spires of buildings and the roofs of temples. Adjustments, repairs, re-placement, checks, tests– day by day searching for the signal and trying to keep the monkeys from fucking everything up. Then there was the wireless mesh. From his efforts there is now a grid of over thirty satellite relays spreading a blanket of connection over Dharamsala, reserved exclusively for the Tibetan people. Temples and schools host the server computers and the antennae and a small fee for maintenance, everything operated from the Tibetan Technology Center, housed by the venerable and long-standing charity the Tibetan Children’s Village. Now the kids, some of whom are third generation exiles, can learn network administration and web design along with their culture, traditions and history.

It’s not perfect– they had to block porn sites almost immediately because the network couldn’t support the interest and Tibetan script isn’t something that keyboards recognize just yet– but the Wireless Mesh Project has effectively provided internet access to over two thousand computers in Dharamsala alone by recycling technology and sharing knowledge. The relays operate on solar panels making them more reliable then any of the utilities provided by the local government. When one tower drops there are others all around keeping the signal strong. Something has been created in a rural Indian mountain town that hasn’t been effectively achieved in the heart of Silicon Valley by industry leaders. There’s been efforts to improve upon the technology- a telephony expert has travelled from Australia to work on incorporating VoIP connecting settlements spread out along the Indian/Tibetan border- and it has spread to other refugee communities. The Dharamsala mesh has been joined by three others all built and maintained by a team of Tibetan and foreign geeks. The exiles hope this window to the outside world can help them grow economically (there’s unfortunately talk of developing call-centers like in other Indian cities as well as online cultural curiosities for sale ala’ arrowhead necklaces and turquoise statues off the res) while strengthening their connection to their history and displaced communities. As the Chinese have repeatedly made attempts to destroy anything historically Tibetan in the occupied land ancient texts have been smuggled out where they’re being preserved digitally and passed from computer to computer. There’s hope that becoming a presence online can help bring the plight of the Tibetans back into the public-eye and exert pressure politically without having to deal with any Beastie Boys. The hard work seemed to pay off with Boingboing writer and globe-trotting internet personality Xeni Jardin introducing the world of NPR to the world of Tibet online.

Not everyone is pleased. Soon after an article was published about the wireless mesh project a DDoS attack temporarily disabled the network; although the evidence wouldn’t stand up in court (or courts without executions taking place on the roof) it does suggest the attack originated in China. So after struggling with bitter cold, savage mountain winds, poverty, out-dated technology and primates Ben-David and his band squared off with monkeys of another breed. Fortunately friends have been made around the world, the global computing community seems pretty on board.

If we were still living in a world where Tibet was like the opening of “The Golden Child” you would have trouble believing someone named Oxblood Ruffin installed encryption software for the Dali Lama but we’ve left that and debates about Cubism behind. Hackers and phreaks have found common cause and it seems the roots of Hacktivism can be traced to the implementation of The Great Firewall of China. In addition to helping set-up and secure the Tibetan grid there have been concerted efforts to tackle the Chinese directly. Applications such as Torpark, which randomizes the IP address visible to a network administrator while encrypting the user end of the signal, and methods of encryption such as steganography which hides sensitive data within, eh, insensitive data are now out there helping people achieve something very basic– an unrestricted access to information. In the states this is some big-money shit, this is an entire industry that works with budgets that use the world billions. In Tibet it took a sense of what was right, some left-of-center thinking and a way of keeping the damn monkeys from fucking shit up.

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Activism for Dummies has, on page one, the saying “One Dollar, One Vote”. It’s the simplest way to make a statement without actually having to stand up and make it, less demanding of your time then writing letters to the intern who volunteers for your congress-person and more hygienic than slopping gruel in tin cans at your local soup kitchen. Everyone buys shit so there’s only the slightest impact on your day to day lifestyle– feel the warm rosy glow?

Some chapters in you’ll see inspiring pictures of groups of people wielding signs and marching. Pretty popular in these parts but probably less of an every day event where the thermometer carries more weight in daily planning. Mass inaction has been credited with drawing (un)popular attention to issues that some find important as well as, in some rare cases, prevented unsavory meetings between powerful men and women from proceeding, trains from carrying nuclear waste, scabs from crossing the picket line. In recent years the advances in communications technology have enabled these group whine-fests to more effectively occupy the police and cause general disruption. Cell phones allow people to orchestrate without immediate contact. After the US invasion of Iraq (Part Deux) downtown SF was “pure anarchy” according to the police and business was hardly carried on as usual. Those of us who were home or at work could follow along with events by watching the constant updates provided by Indymedia or various pirate radio stations.

Obviously we have quite a homegrown history of these sorts of actions and we’re a pretty cutting edge town when it comes to having the coolest, latest gadgets science & business can concoct but the rest of the world seems to be catching up. Recently in the coastal Chinese city of Xiamen a Taiwanese company began construction on a chemical plant which, according to the Xianglu Group responsible for the factory, would produce massive amounts of P-Xylene and would be doing so about a mile from the city limits. Citizens were understandably concerned and requests were made through government representatives to relocate the site. Despite these efforts the local environmental bureau announced that the plant passed its evaluation, saying the plant would discharge half the national standard of various toxic waste. Of course, the national standard is lowering average lifetimes throughout China but context is context.

So the people of Xiamen took to the streets as per usual, waving banners and shuffling along the accepted route into the wall of bored police. But the numbers grew, and continued to grow. Pressure began to mount on local government officials– the usual motley collection of hippies and pensioners suddenly was a swell of popular reaction against the plant. As a result the local bureaucrats rubbed heads and decided to stop development until a second (possibly even a more stringent) environmental evaluation could be performed. (more…)

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The first job I ever had was washing dishes at the local pizza place, something I landed after stopping by several times a week and pestering the lanky, awkward looking manager. Through highschool I worked a couple days a week, weekends and after school, and eventually started working on the floor and finally as a prep cook.

It was a small place with a limited menu but a considerably loyal following. We didn’t do delivery service when I first started working there. You could say that’s because it was too small but really it was because a good portion of the neighborhood is made up of projects and when you deliver in San Francisco you’re not legally allowed to discriminate about where you’ll go.

However, loopholes are everywhere and it was found that limited deliveries for big orders could be done without offending the law. Flyers were made and distributed to businesses in the immediate area. Once in a while I ended up having to ride with the lanky, awkward manager in the company pick-up to deliver the goods. I always insisted that I got to bring tapes along and smoke out the window so even tho it was a chore that prolonged my shifts (because I couldn’t chop onions in the truck) I was happy enough doing it.

We made a stop once at a new office building on the outskirts of the neighborhood where the Hill and the Mission converged in a collection of warehouses and the skeletons of what would become loft developments. An abandoned brewery (Hamms, I wanna say, but Schlitz might be right) had recently been purchased and converted and in the belly lay the most fashionable lobby I’d ever seen. Designer chairs and exotic plants, track lighting and neo-industrial touches. I have no idea what this company did but it was due to the internet.

This was early on when AOL was just eclipsing Prodigy and funny little businesses had just begun to crop up here and there. Wired was just a small office on 2nd Street and Multimedia Gulch still caught most of the buzz. It didn’t really make sense to me at the time, that an office would have a lobby more appropriate for a Hollywood hotel, but then suddenly what didn’t make sense became what it was all about. Kozmo? Are you serious?

Yes, they were, and they opened up shop on this coast as well. Little drop boxes appeared in coffee shops all around town. I landed a mediocre position at another brilliant outpost of consumerism in the South of Market and listened to the staff talk excitedly about the latest launches. I stood in absolute awe once on Townsend watching a huge crane slowly lower cars through the roof of a five or six story warehouse. That company, if I remember correctly, amassed a fleet of PT Cruisers to make deliveries in. No passengers, just courier service.

Of course reality came back from vacation and they laid off all the writers, half the production staff and finally me. I’d built the office (Ikea furniture, natch) up from the pre-live days to the peak, then broke it all down again after the company went through a merger. Kozmo ate shit, the PT Cruisers disappeared and while no one got the big slap in the face they deserved you could tell the pot was at least simmering down.

But, like old scars, the lofts remain and the neighborhoods have undergone changes that can never be restored. San Francisco came out of it a richer and whiter town then ever before, as though the whole dot.com bubble was a civic debutante’s ball. A popular theme in sci/fi and fantasy is the fabric of reality– you stretch it too thin and things from the other side break through. The fabric in SF was always closer to cheese-cloth than wool, it didn’t take much for the moths to shred it entirely.

Whenever I go to see my parents I walk down 14th an cut behind Best Buy. For months there was a warehouse behind Rainbow being worked on which I stopped paying attention to until, one evening headed home, I noticed that there were two spotlights out on the corner announcing the grand opening of whatever chic restaurant had been installed. I always walk home down Division and this atrocity was not enough to tempt my investigation.

I was wrong, it’s not a restaurant. The next time I went to my parents I noticed that a very small, one car drive-up built into the building. There was a security guard. There were two people checking into the hotel, a one-story former warehouse hotel. For real. I thought it was odd and I didn’t understand why it was called the Wag Hotel until I continued on past the huge display windows occupying the rest of the building. It’s the Wag Hotel gift shop. There’s huge pictures of dogs and cats sitting on chairs and surfing or whatever. There’s expensive imported food. There’s expensive toys. There’s expensive dishes. There was a cute girl closing up the register with a dumb, dyed punk-rock haircut but I couldn’t be bothered to focus.

So next time you leave town you can leave your animal companion in style. Three different rates based on size give a small private room, two daily meals, classical music and playgroup time. There’s also suites for a little more room or for two animals, luxury suites which come with furniture, paintings and plasma screen TVs and, of course, the Cattery where felines lounge in condos watching the aquarium all day. There’s also daily services for locals like bringing your dog to go swimming or get walked and premium services for guests like, eh, massages…

Go-go-economy!

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