Pie and Coffee

Pie and Coffee classic: The Real Saint Patrick, starring the Duffy Bros.

Cargo Cult Activism
New essay on Pie and Coffee; somehow marked as published a week ago, rather than yesterday. Didn’t want you to miss it.

Google Fiber, Worcester, and the Broadband Market
Worcester, like many communities, is working hard to bring the Google Fiber for Communities pilot program to the city, so residents and businesses can get Internet access “more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today.” Yochai Benkler, one of my intellectual heroes, headed a recent Berkman Center study of America’s screwed-up Internet market, and the mediocre Internet access we get as a result. If you’re wondering why cities are begging Google to bring them services that phone and cable companies won’t, this interview is a clear and detailed intro to the subject.
Continue reading »

My father was a tall, lanky, talented athlete. In high school he played basketball and ran track and cross country. In part to live up to his legacy, I took up cross country. Although I had my father’s build, I was not very fast; in fact, I was the second slowest runner on our team, and the slowest turned out to have a terminal illness. Despite my glacial pace, I stayed with the sport until I graduated in 1976. Afterwards, to no one’s surprise, I hung up my running shoes.

Thirty-three years later, my weight reached 199 pounds. I had to face the fact that I had gradually become a fat man in pretty poor physical shape.

A year earlier, in the aftermath of her father’s slow deterioration and death from Alzheimer’s, my wife, Claire, began running. She certainly didn’t need to lose any weight–she sill fits easily into her wedding dress–but read that physical exercise into old age helps keep a person’s mind sharp. After watching her get out and run faithfully for a year, even in snow and rain, I was finally shamed into joining her.

On February 18, 2009, I pushed myself to “run” a mile. I changed my diet too, dropping to two meals a day, one light and the other heavy. I started losing about a pound a week and feeling more comfortable during my runs. By April 26, Claire and I felt fit enough to try to a five kilometer (3.1 mile) road race. All kinds of people ran–thin, heavy, young–and even some pushing strollers. We finished 262nd and 302nd out of 500. She ran it in 32 minutes and I came in a minute faster. I was delighted. From then on, I became hooked on running.
Continue reading »

508 is a show about Worcester. This week, Mike and Brendan do the show on a frozen pond. (Today’s weather.)

 

 Standard Podcast [23:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Audio: mp3 link, other formats, feed

Video: Downloads and other formats

508 contact info

If you want to get involved with the effort to bring Google Fiber to Worcester, you can get started with this map.

Mike recommends the Central Mass Striders weekly 5k. Meet 8:30am Saturdays inside the Worcester State College gym.

The School Committee raised the CFO’s salary to some controversy. School Committee Member Tracy Novick went direct about her “yes” vote.

Worcester Magazine has a cover story about bloggers this week. We have mixed feelings about it.

Finally, Brendan talks about ice hockey and ice bocce.

Richard Feynman explained “cargo cults” in the classic essay Cargo Cult Science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.

Activists can think this way, too. We’ve seen something work in the past, and so we try it again. Sometimes the underlying situation, power dynamics, and participants are very different, so the tactic or strategy doesn’t work. If we understand why it worked the first time, we can modify it to work in the present. But too often, if it doesn’t work, we just try it again with more passion. I mean, it worked for the Civil Rights struggle/labor movement/Gandhi/right here in this town in the 90s. Why wouldn’t it work for us today?

The South Seas cargo cultists didn’t realize that the important thing about a radio was what was inside, not what was outside. We should step back more often to analyze what we’re doing, to create tactics and strategies that work like the effective ones of the past, rather than just looking like them.

I’d bet we can avoid some of the worst of “cargo cult activism” by asking a few questions of the next thing we’re planning to try. Why do we think this will work? What’s a recent example of this working? How well do we understand that example? Did it work the last time our group tried it? If not, why not?

See also:

• Failure is overrated, a redux
• How to hold a demonstration

This post was inspired by a conversation we had during a 508 podcast:

508 is a show about Worcester. This week, Mike, Brendan, and Jim Dempsey talk with a class of Clark University students about campus and city issues.

 

 Standard Podcast [16:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Audio: mp3 link, other formats, feed

Video: Downloads and other formats

508 contact info

Today’s topics are union activity at Clark, and trends in campus crime.