And now, after a 35 year hiatus, Clare is back. Printed termly, Clare provides the opportunity for LSE students to be published alongside internationally recognised figures. Clare’s pages are full of original artwork, unique graphics and some of the liveliest, most engaging voices of our generation. The paper form is a heavily designed, hand-crafted book. The electronic edition, found at www.claremarketreview.com, exists in a content-generative relationship with the paper edition.

In the pages resting ‘neath your fingertips the views of industry professionals accompany academics and LSE students, offering perspectives on three contemporary debates: Discontent; discourses on the means, purposes and dangers of activism. Madness; an exploration of increasing openness about mental health and mental illness. Infosphere; discussions of the information explosion, made possible (and even problematic) by the internet. We hope perusal of these pages brings as much joy as their conception.”

“At the moment, I’m in my house in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip. It’s quiet, but there is no electricity and there are some airplanes in the sky. It’s a bit tense because we don’t know what will happen. According to what we heard on the news, it seems that there are some escalations, so we don’t know what is going to happen.

Because we don’t have electricity we don’t have access to TV news, so we’re just listening to local FM radios all the time. They are reporting about what is happening in several places across the Gaza Strip. The Israelis are in the eastern villages of Khan Yunis, but so far they have not entered into the city. Of course, you can still hear the shelling and the air-strikes all the time.”

In my opinion, I don’t think this war has anything to do with Hamas, even though Israel has announced it is because of what Hamas is doing. If we look at the history, if we look at 1948 or 1967, or the first Intifada, it’s not always Hamas. Unfortunately, it is the Israeli regime and the occupation that are doing this.

With what we are seeing in the world, I don’t think anything will change with Israel as long as the American administration is acting this way, as long as the EU is acting this way, and as long as Russia is acting this way. Unfortunately, all those who support Palestine are the people; the masses who are not in power. They are the supporters of the Palestinian cause, the right to live freely and ending the Israeli occupation. As long as the EU is rewarding Israel and upgrading their relationship, the Israelis have no reason to stop what they are doing. Unfortunately, it is an arrogant state, and we are hoping that the people, the masses in Europe and America, in the Arab world and the Muslim world, will continue their revolution and change the situation in Palestine as well.

We hear about protests all over the world. Supporters from London or Europe or the Arab world will call random phone numbers in the Gaza Strip, and they are supporting people and telling them that the masses are on the street and that they are protesting in the big cities and even in small villages. This is our hope. Our hope is that our freedom will come from the people. I don’t think we have any hope in any of the governments of the world, not even Obama. He said that he will bring change, but his last statement equalised the victim and the oppressor. We were so disappointed, because he is saying he cares about the security in Sderot, but he does not care at all about the hundreds of people who are dying, the children who are dying, in Palestine. I mean, the seventeen people in Sderot who suffered from the rockets, I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s nothing compared to the F-16s that are hitting civilians, that are hitting children. And I don’t think you did not see it. Everybody saw it; everybody is a witness of this crime. Unfortunately, Obama is part of an administration, and I don’t think his administration will allow him to bring change. I don’t think the American administration is ready for any change in the Middle East, but we were hoping that the EU, or the UK after Blair, would do something. Unfortunately, they are still very shy in their statements, which is undermining the Palestinian cause and is at times dehumanising. So we are waiting for the people, but because we are struggling for our rights, our freedom, for justice, and for the peace I think we are going to win.

There was no warning at all when the attacks started. Our kids were in kindergarten and at school. It was a Saturday, so it was a day off for us but the schools were open. People were in the market, just like every day. This is why it was so bad, and killed so many people. In a second they changed the whole geography of Gaza, but no government is doing anything about it. It happened all of a sudden, there were bombings everywhere, huge sounds and huge lights. It was like an earthquake, the house was moving. My first thought was of my nephews in kindergarten. I ran down the steps and went towards the door to go and get them, but fortunately our neighbour was near the kindergarten, and he brought them back with him. It happened in a few seconds, it lasted maybe five minutes, but they hit so many places at one time. Then we heard that it was all over the Gaza Strip, so we tried to call my brother, my relatives, my friends, my colleagues. We just wanted to understand what was going on. Unfortunately the phone lines were not working, mobiles or landlines, and it took two or three hours before they worked again. It was horrific, I can’t describe it. It is the most awful thing that’s happened in our lives. I just can’t describe it, it’s heartbreaking, because people were just in the markets and in their work, the children were in kindergarten and school; and here you have this war machine that is taking over your sky and your whole life, they are hitting everywhere. Nobody is talking about this trauma, they are just talking about the Israelis in Sderot unfortunately.

Of course I think that one day we will see a peaceful Palestine. I think I will see it myself, and I think my nephews and so many other children will live in better situations and have better lives soon, because what is happening is madness. What the Israelis are doing is a crime, and criminals can’t escape all their lives. They will be caught one day, and they will be brought to justice. I think they got out of control, and I don’t think the world will allow it. If the world will allow them, then I don’t think anybody deserves to live on this earth.

My message to the people in Britain is please go on and continue your fight, because the Palestinian cause is not only a Palestinian cause, it is a Human Rights cause. We are all humans sharing this earth together, so it is your responsibility as much as it is our responsibility to stop the craziness of the Israelis. It is their duty to work to bring change with the British government. I think every nation, every people in their own country, should work to bring change within their own government.”

“Take away the right to say ‘fuck,’” said Lenny Bruce, “and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.’” Last December, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Andy Burnham, announced that when it comes to the Internet, “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.” He proposed to start deciding what Internet users can and cannot view by introducing filters which would screen Web pages for obscene content. He was, quite literally, proposing to take away our right to say ‘fuck’.

Just days earlier, the Internet Watch Foundation, the self-regulatory, non-governmental body which regulates the Internet in the UK, had blocked the Wikipedia entry for Scorpions’ 1976 album ‘Virgin Killer.’ The page was censored because it displayed the album’s cover, which portrayed a young, naked girl. However, this reason was never provided, nor was the rest of the page accessible. The web page simply returned a 404 error, meaning that users did not even know that they were being blocked.

Perhaps most worrying of all is the ongoing case against Darryn Walker over his alleged posting of an explicit story describing the fantasized rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud. The worrying aspect of this case is not so much that he is being prosecuted – while grotesque fan fiction of this kind is not a new phenomenon, a case could certainly be made for him to be tried for harassing and intimidating the very real subjects of his story. What is worrying is that he is being tried under the Obscene Publications Act, the law which tried unsuccessfully to outlaw ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’ and the Oz ‘Schoolkids Issue’ in the 60s and 70s. If successful, the prosecution will set the precedent of making it a criminal act to simply type words that some would consider ‘obscene’. The case has met with little protest, due in no small part to the fact that there is very little political capital to be won defending Girls Aloud rape stories. But the unsavory subject matter does not reduce its importance. As Martin Niemöller might have said, “They came first for the perverts…”

Burnham has defended his plans to censor the Internet by arguing that as a father he does not feel safe leaving his young children alone to access the Internet – “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the Internet is not something you can do.” He has drawn a comparison with the success of the TV watershed in protecting children from obscene content. This is disingenuous for a number of reasons. First, Burnham’s parental decision making should not determine national law. Parents may already select which websites their children are able to view, or indeed to install the kind of filters Burnham is proposing to make mandatory for the entire country. Second, potentially the most dangerous areas of the Internet for young children are chat rooms, which would not be covered by filters that restrict content. Third, pornographic material is already marked by age limits, something Burnham is proposing should now cover all websites. But what Burnham is seeking to extend censorship to, is not images, but words. The real comparison is not with the TV watershed, but with putting policemen in public libraries.

Burnham need only look to Australia if he is seeking a lesson in the complexities of suppressing Internet content. Recent proposals there for a compulsory Internet filter have been met with widespread protests. The proposals would make Australia one of the strictest democracies in terms of Internet regulation, with at least 1,300 sites prohibited, based on a list drawn up by the state and not made public, preventing legal scrutiny. The filter would have two tiers, one which would block the sites on the government’s blacklist, the other which would be optional and would block pornography by using keywords. When Internet providers pointed out that much of the illegal material which is theoretically being targeted here, such as child pornography, is traded via peer-to-peer networks or chat programs, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s office said a peer-to-peer filter would be considered, despite the fact that the technology required simply does not exist.

At this point, we are reminded of what a brave new world the Internet has led us into. No matter how much governments desire to regulate the Internet, technology stays one step ahead. Technology like Tor and Freenet already make it possible to access the Internet and transfer data anonymously, and Dr. Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers, has said on numerous occasions that any attempt by governments to control the Internet are doomed to failure due in part to private ownership. In 2007, he said that “it’s tempting to think that you need a United Nations-like structure to deal with it, but I believe it will be very hard to accomplish that objective for one simple reason – 99 percent of the Internet, the physical Internet, is in private sector hands, operated by the private sector.”

Cerf has, however, backed multiple stakeholder models on control, which would include customers, governments and wider society. “The Internet is used by a billion users around the world, it’s not strictly a purely governmental thing to control, and that’s why you need this multi-stakeholders structure to make sure all the prospects are respected.” Cerf is the chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body which controls domain names, which Cerf describes as, “the first big expert in a global multi-stakeholders structure.” However, even ICANN reports to the U.S. Commerce Department, which has drawn criticism on a number of occasions, either for political interference in the Web’s governance, or for simply being out of touch. In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, expressed his fears that the Internet would slow down due to heavy usage, saying, “The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material…just the other day an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it Tuesday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.”

Governments will not remain so out of touch with the Internet for long. Burnham has talked of working with Obama to regulate the English-language Internet, and a recent think tank report entitled ‘Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency’ calls for “strong authentication of identity, based on robust in-person proofing and thorough verification of devices”. The British Government has been scrabbling around desperately for a justification for its much derided identity card scheme, and the Internet may well provide one – a theoretically viable means of authenticating age, and individual agency, on the Internet. Smuggled in under the paranoia which surrounds identity theft, swiping into your computer with your ID card is not a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy, it is a policy option currently being debated.

But while the nature of the Internet would suggest that someone, somewhere, will always find a way of getting around the censors, and while even Thomas Jefferson knew that “taste cannot be controlled by law,” this has not stopped plenty of countries from exercising fierce control over those who seek to take advantage of the freest of free presses. Thirteen countries were placed on Reporters Without Borders’ ‘Enemies of the Internet’ list, including China, where Obama’s inauguration speech was recently censored of any mention of communism, and Egypt, where Kareem Amer remains in prison for critically blogging about Islam and the Egyptian President.

Closer to home, LSE itself has a history with online censorship. In ‘A Blogger’s Manifesto,’ former lecturer Erik Ringmar chronicles his experiences with school authorities after he made postings on his personal blog which included salary details and were critical of the way the school is run. He was asked by his department convener to “destroy/cancel your blog entirely and shut the whole thing down until further notice”. The convener’s decision was in turn backed by Howard Davies, who argued that “the issue here is not a policy on blogging, it is whether a colleague can publicly abuse his employer and his colleagues without consequences.” That it is the message being censored, and not the medium, is beside the point. There was once a time when the press was free only to those who owned one, but the Internet has democratised publishing, and this is the situation which is now under threat.

As Ringmar himself points out in his book, LSE also has a prouder tradition which predates the Internet. Karl Popper wrote ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ shortly before taking up a post at the school, and in it he set out his belief that society only moves forward if it has the power to ask questions and the space to listen to dissenting voices. “It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism.”

This is the tradition that we must now protect. The Internet represents the greatest tool ever conceived for the free exchange of ideas, to challenge the tutelage of authority and prejudice whether it be in Egypt or England, at home or in the workplace. The Internet has revolutionised our access to knowledge, and power, so swiftly that it is easy to take for granted. The cases cited by Burnham and the IWF are difficult to defend – but defended they must be. We do not have to agree with everything that is published on the Internet to realise the value of the space it grants all of us. We all own our own presses, now, and as Albert Camus would put it, “A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.”

What did you last read on the internet? Perhaps you browsed a vintage wine list, planned a holiday or—more in keeping with the times—investigated which newly nationalised bank offers the best rates. Would you object to advertisements popping up for Chateau Latour, Caribbean resorts or Bradford & Bingley? Might you feel your privacy had been violated by new companies able to record your surfing habits and feed you adverts based on where you had been? Or would you welcome this as a useful service?

Six months ago I thought the biggest obstacle to “broadband Britain” was our inadequate infrastructure—limited bandwidth, copper wires into houses and slow speeds for the downloading of bulky data such as video. But there has been real progress since then. In September 2008 British Telecom announced a further investment of £1.5bn into broadband networks in return for concessions from its regulator Ofcom. Yet increasingly privacy, not pipes, is the real source of contention in the online world. Technology now exists to track everything we do online. This makes advertisers excited. There’s an old industry adage: half of all advertising is wasted, but no one knows which half. Now we may be on the verge of finding out. Advertisers are willing to fund much of the information and entertainment we receive in the future—but in exchange for knowing precisely how and when we have received their promotional messages. Such intense scrutiny alarms some consumers and is leading to a state of war between commercial pioneers and privacy campaigners. At stake is a potentially huge expansion of the online economy.

Today, most online tracking takes place via “cookies,” small files dropped into your computer by sites you use. These help companies remember things about you: your name, your password, when you previously visited their site and what you did there. It is possible to select an “opt-out” button that will delete the cookies. But this can result in a poorer online experience, in which websites are unable to remember who you are and react to your personal interests. There is, thus, a trade off between privacy and utility on the internet. And it is being significantly aggravated by a new generation of tracking technologies.

At the end of 2007 the social networking site Facebook tried to introduce a new system called “Beacon.” It allowed online retailers to send Facebook information about people’s purchases. If you bought a pair of trainers online, for instance, the system would allow Facebook to tell all of your friends who use the site. Advertisers loved the idea, hoping it could create “buzz” among networks of young people. But this apparent breach of privacy caused outrage among Facebook users. The ensuing scandal was widely covered both online and in conventional media, while US pressure groups like MoveOn.org led calls for more privacy protection. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 24-year-old founder, was forced to issue a public apology and make it much easier for users to opt out of the system. Many did.

Then, this summer, another furore blew up around a US company called NebuAd. It describes itself as “the leading provider of third generation consumer-centric behavioural targeting solutions that are based on web-wide behaviour.” In other words, it had deals with several internet service providers (ISPs)—the companies like Tiscali and Virgin Media which connect consumers to the internet—to help them track their subscribers’ online behaviour and send them targeted adverts. When this became known, NebuAd was accused of privacy violations. In July 2008 its (now ex) chief executive was hauled in front of a congressional committee. The politicians wanted to know how transparent surveillance should be. Should people be allowed to opt-in, the most transparent option, or only opt-out, which is less clear and open to abuse? Meanwhile, the scandal led NebuAd’s ISP clients to flee, ending its experiment and destroying its business model.

Earlier this year, the new wave of privacy scandals reached Britain. It was revealed that BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media had signed deals with Phorm, a small US company at the forefront of web tracking technology. It had even conducted clandestine trials with BT customers. This led to an unsuccessful campaign to get the company investigated by the police and condemned by the Information Commission.

Phorm’s technology works like this. The company assigns ISP subscribers a random number to protect their identity. As they move around online, this number gathers “hats” recording their interest in cars, holidays, cameras and so on. This is “behavioural tracking.” Phorm then sells this number to other websites, who can target adverts directly relevant to these interests. Previous generations of advertising technology provided adverts based on what you happen to be doing at any moment. But Phorm creates a picture of your specific interests over time. If widely adopted, it could mean whenever and wherever you are online, advertisements could be targeted precisely at you.

A range of groups—from the Anti-Spyware Coalition to Privacy International—have raised frequent complaints about Phorm and similar organisations. These groups worry that consumers’ consent is not always requested and that, even if they were asked, many know too little about how these technologies work. Some claim it might even be illegal.

Despite this, there are positive things about the system. So far the government says Phorm’s method is legal, while Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has said “there doesn’t appear to be any detriment to users.” Phorm does not need to know your name or IP address, nor the website-specific details of your previous browsing history (it tracks your generic interests rather than the specific sites you’ve visited). As their publicity puts it, “we do not and cannot know who you are.” This should come as a relief. Few people want their personal Google search history exposed. The reason is obvious for salacious searches, but many other web journeys, from surprise presents to vanity Googling about yourself, are best kept secret as well. Phorm actually compares favourably to other websites like Google or Yahoo. These drop cookies onto our personal computers when we first conduct a search. This is fundamental to their ability to provide good results. And if you switch on “personal search” with Google, the service becomes much more specific still. Enter the word “rosemary” and it is able to predict whether you want to find garden centres, recipe sites or the DVD of Rosemary’s Baby. Other Google products also excite privacy concerns. Photographs of every British street will appear in their forthcoming StreetView service. Google’s Desktop records almost everything stored on your computer. Most extraordinary of all is Gmail, the company’s free email service. Here your correspondence is constantly analysed for keywords. You are then served up appropriate adverts based on everything in your inbox. I have even heard about one couple who conducted a fairly extreme email argument and quickly received adverts for marriage counselling services.

Many people seem to feel that targeted advertising based on Google use is acceptable, while unsolicited adverts from Phorm are beyond the pale. But in some ways it is the former that is more intrusive. And Google has indeed been a target of the privacy backlash. It used to store records of our search activities for up to two years. But in September, in the face of public pressure, it reduced this period down to nine months. After this the data is only kept anonymously.

***

True believers say that companies like Phorm could revolutionise the media industry to the benefit of businesses and consumers alike. Consumers may not be clamouring for more targeted adverts, but someone has to fund the content they like to receive. As we consume more of our news and entertainment online and traditional models of advertising collapse, the information collected about us will be the key to how our content is funded.

Much of this content used to depend on the advertising revenues of ITV, Channel 4 and Five. But commercials on television are now a blunt instrument, easily avoided with the “30 times fast forward button” on Sky Plus. As this model collapses, how can we preserve free programming? Channel 4’s Big Brother illustrates how big is our appetite for free entertainment. In 2005 the channel allowed fans to watch clips of the series online for a fee. About 25,000 people did this. The following year it was free; all you had to do was watch a short commercial beforehand. About 25m people took advantage. There are other ways to fund a free online service, including sponsorship. But separate advertising remains by far the most important. Without it, we may not continue to get Coronation Street and Channel 4 News for free in the future.

In television, just as online, new models are developing to solve this problem. Hulu, launched in 2007, is a service developed jointly in the US by NBC Universal and News Corporation. It allows you to download free television shows in return for watching a few commercial messages. It has been as successful as the BBC iPlayer in Britain, which allows users to watch programmes after they have been aired. Hulu is experimenting with collecting information from users to allow targeted advertisements before and during a programme. Other companies have even made it possible digitally to insert products into television shows, for instance a can of Coke on a table or a logo on a bus. British terrestrial networks are now planning a new service, codenamed “Kangaroo,” along similar lines.

Hulu represents a new deal between a media company and its viewer: sell me your attention for a personalised 30-second commercial message and you will receive a free edition of Heroes. Young people in particular don’t want to pay for content with money, but they will pay with their personal data. However, like the advertising elsewhere on the web, it has to be done in a way that is transparent and fair. If confidence in the system is destroyed then great damage could be done to the ecology of online advertising.

Is there another option? The music industry has tried and failed to make people pay for content. In the past, bands would run their tours at a loss in order to market their highly profitable CDs. Now, some are giving away CDs to promote their live performances (see Robert Sandall on the economics of pop music, Prospect, August 2007). The catalyst for this change has been peer-to-peer file sharing via technologies like BitTorrent, a popular but often illegal system that allows users to download music, movies and television shows. This has effectively destroyed the market for CDs and is making inroads into DVD sales.

Music companies are fighting back. Recently, they persuaded the French government to force ISPs to first warn and then cut off subscribers who persistently download illegally. The companies argue that, once warned, 70 per cent of freeloaders come into line and buy music from legitimate services like iTunes. They have also extracted concessions from British ISPs, who will now send out warning letters. But this effort to turn the tide is almost certainly doomed.

A study of Radiohead’s latest album release reveals why. Will Page and Eric Garland, two industry experts, analysed the downloads of In Rainbows, which was made available for any price fans decided it was worth, including for free.

Thirty-eight per cent of people paid; the rest took it free. Yet even though you could get the album free legally, twice as many people got it from illegal sites (2.3m “torrents” over three weeks). On the first day about 400,000 people did this, making it the most trafficked piece of musical copyright on an illegal network since file sharing started. So much for the idea that most music fans will fall into line. But instead of accepting the inevitable, the industry is harassing a generation for whom free content is a way of life. Music companies, ISPs and governments may end up having to track internet users to their home addresses, raising new privacy concerns.

A different and better model is possible. If privacy concerns can be overcome, we can imagine a system in which owning a piece of content would also mean you have the right to have its use tracked and reported, thus yielding potential advertising revenues. If you are a music company, you could then earn money every time anyone “shared” a free song. Meanwhile you will be encouraging as many web surfers to copy it and pass it on as possible, because the more that happens the greater your revenues. You would be saying, “Yes, please steal me! Steal as much as you can!”

Getting this new world right offers other benefits too. Technology from companies like Phorm can help small websites and ISPs compete with Google for a slice of their rapidly growing advertising income. There are now many companies across the world that rely on Google for as much as half of their sales, via paid search and direct response advertising. Those worried by this domination of the paid search market should be supporting this new competition. Additional income for ISPs will also enable them to update their networks for better speed and capacity. The Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers are already forecasting that internet advertising sales will outstrip those for British television by the end of 2009.

The balance between privacy and prosperity is a high stakes game. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the internet, has said he would change his ISP if it tracked his web surfing habits. But a senior employee of one of Britain’s largest media buyers told me: “Without tracking, the internet advertising model collapses.” To prevent this happening, the industry needs to work harder to answer the genuine concerns of users and campaigners about protection of privacy.

There are some obvious possible reforms. In particular, consumers could be given more power over their information. Both Google and Phorm currently base their service on an opt-out model. The US congress is considering forcing companies to introduce an opt-in model. There are similar plans for Britain. The online and advertising industries oppose this; privacy campaigners are fighting hard for it.

US legislation is not imminent, but in the meantime the issue is in the hands of the Federal Trade Commission. It has laid out three principles to govern websites that collect information for behavioural advertising: they should provide a clear statement about why the data is being collected; ensure reasonable security and only keep it as long as is necessary; and ensure sensitive data is only collected with express consent. This is helpful, but silent on the opt-in/opt-out issue. It’s a finely balanced argument, but a plausible compromise could be an opt-out regime with clear and regular opportunities to be a refusenik.

Meanwhile, privacy groups ought to maintain a sense of balance. Yes, they must pursue their legitimate lobby for privacy and the rights of individuals. They often help stop genuinely dangerous breaches of privacy. But they pay scant regard to how tracking improves our online experience, and more or less ignore how critical behavioural tracking will be to the future economy. Without it, advertising revenues will collapse and with it the media industry. Privacy matters. But privacy groups’ current lack of flexibility is certainly not in the interests of consumers.

The answer is to respect some relatively simply principles. Our names, addresses and ISP addresses should be protected. Behavioural advertising must be transparent. Consumers need to be able to choose whether they participate. People must be able to opt-out, to become a sort of “digital vegetarian,” giving up some benefits for the sake of their principles. But, for those who choose the rich meat of the digital world, targeted advertising promises rewarding online experiences. It could unleash extraordinary new growth in online commerce. This is an opportunity privacy absolutists should not be allowed to stall. 

Children are viewed as God’s blessings by both the large Christian and Muslim populations of this East African country. Whether Muslim or Christian, the birth of a child who displays any kind of perceived mental deficiency or behavioral abnormality, is immediately attributed to the wrath of an all-powerful God. Perhaps the mother has a great sin she herself is not aware of, perhaps she committed this blasphemy while carrying the child, perhaps it is not God’s wrath but the Devil’s trickery. In a country where the majority lives below the poverty line and most of those above and below this line are uneducated, mental health has a history of receiving little to no medical or learned attention. The children are dragged to one of the multitudes of churches littering the country to be dunked in holy water and exorcised of their demons. When this fails, these children are shut away, an unspoken shame, a mother’s failure; or they are taken to Amanuel Hospital, a facility in the capital city set up to function loosely as a psychiatric ward. These practices were largely observed until very recently, and even now, continue to be the approach to mental health care by a majority that remains unaware of other options.

A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows the prevalence of mental disorders in Ethiopia is 15% for adults and 11% for children with the psychiatrist-to-population ratio at 1 : 6,000,000. Though the majority of the country’s population is rural, the only facilities (two at last count) providing psychiatric services by specialist doctors are in the capital city and largely inaccessible to the people who need them most. WHO has assisted in training over 150 psychiatrist nurses in the past decade which has allowed the integration of psychiatric care into the general health care system. Psychiatry postgraduate training for doctors began in Ethiopia in 2003.

My first encounter with anything remotely unusual about the way parents treat the children they deem “different” was at the age of ten when I began to realize that my older brother was not like other children. I did not realize until my teenage years how different my parents were from the majority of those who find themselves in a similar situation: having a child with an unexplained mental illness. My parents, both educated, used the limited resources they had at their disposal to try and find out why my brother, who had been developing along what are considered normal lines for a child, suddenly stopped talking, stopped walking and began to crawl; like someone had rewound his development. The doctors they went to referred to my brother’s condition as mental retardation. Dissatisfied with this explanation my parents educated themselves, reading all that they could access and speaking with Ethiopian families living abroad. Eventually, they found the answer they have been looking for: autism. My mother spoke with other families that she knew had a child born with some developmental or mental issue. Together these parents formed SOOM, Support Organization Of the Mentally handicapped. While this organization was aided by some NGO’s, it had no substantial support from anyone else and functioned more as a day care of sorts for these children, but could not address the needs of individuals who were aggressive or unresponsive. In the past few years, another parent has strived to create a center for autistic children but again the lack of resources has a crippling effect on any endeavor.

This is just a brief example of how underequipped and understaffed the Ethiopian health care system is to deal with developmental and mental issues. Down Syndrome, autism, mental retardation, all are one and the same here, clumped into an indistinguishable mass, simply labeled as retardation. No effort is made to delve deeper, to understand. Parents like mine, who are determined to seek answers and alternate solutions are a small bright spot. When the majority is uneducated, unemployed and living in abject poverty, you cannot be surprised that mental health remains a major dilemma in this country. I have met many families like mine who have found a way to assimilate their children into society instead of alienating them. However, I have also met families who still believe in hiding their children away; the latter far outnumber the former.

On October 15, 2008, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health reported that the government of Ethiopia has directed special attention towards expanding mental health services. Under the theme “Scale up services for the mentally ill”, Dr. Tedros Adhanom said, “The stigma connected with mental illness is among the serious problems the mentally ill persons are facing in Ethiopia.” General Manager of the Amanuel Specialized Mental Hospital, Dr. Kesetebirhan Admasu on his part said the hospital has been undertaking various activities aimed at reducing the burden of mental illness. Efforts are being made to increase training and awareness so that the relevant expertise can be offered to professionals in the health care field. Ethiopia still has a long road ahead of her in the pursuit of proper healthcare and management for her people; it is an issue that both government and media – which is ultimately controlled by the government – need to address continuously in an effort to reach the population. How can we effect change without talking to the people who need the information the most? It is a painfully slow climb to enlightenment, but hopefully the times when children are simply locked away will be fully superseded; replaced by a necessary period of research, understanding and ultimately proper medical and psychiatric support for those who need it most. 

References:

http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006-03/Ethiopian-Population-Expected-To-Grow-by-More-than-100-Percent.cfm

www.moh.gov.et/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=163&Itemid

http://www.who.int/countries/eth/areas/mentalhealth/en/index.html

That November felt like one long freezing shower in a bathroom with crumbling tiles and peeling, rubbery paint. It was cold enough to snow but it rained almost every day. The sky was English grey, and my English mother said it was like winter in London.

My room was a perpetual disaster. I only tidied it if my boyfriend was coming over for a fumble between the sheets. Sometime in early November we had sex for the first time, on a bench beside a small, inner city lake, drenched from rain with bellies full of vodka and orange juice and rum and Coke. We’d become an item the year before, after he’d declared months of pining for me, and he’d become a part of my life and identity. I was so afraid of losing him.

A week or two later I was curled in bed, and it was late enough for the CBC Radio to be playing their overnight programmes of foreign English language broadcasts. My right knee had been hurting since third period, when my literature class had gone to a poetry reading at my arts high school’s auditorium.

Then the thought suddenly occurred to me: what if I had bone cancer, like Alice, a classmate who’d died at the start of grade ten. Then they’d amputate my leg. I was horrified at the thought. Suddenly I could hear my own thoughts as a running narrative. Other voices piped in. I could see colourful patterns in my red walls. I cried. I prayed. I vomited in the pink and beige bathroom I shared with my sister.

I hate being called “unwell.” It’s my least favourite euphemism for being crazy. The term I prefer is HSBW, an acronym supposedly used by consultants in Accident and Emergency at hospitals. As in, Having Sex With Biscuits. As in, Fucking Crackers. I like the honesty of it; it somehow makes me feel less patient-like to be treated and examined and condescended to, and more like a human being who has simply collapsed inside. It’s also less of a joke. I don’t have the sniffles, I haven’t eaten undercooked chicken wings, I’m not coughing up yellow goo. When I’m “unwell,” I can talk to God.

My mother always wakes up early. She takes the bus to work, which is an hour-long endeavour. She’s not the grab-a-NutriGrain-head-out-the-door type of person. She likes to have one or two cups of instant coffee and a bowl of home-mixed muesli, read the papers, take a shower, and prod whoever else is in the house into wakefulness. She found me one morning, before dawn , curled up on our second-hand sofa, in tears. I was seventeen. A few weeks earlier she’d grudgingly taken me to our family doctor for “my problems,” an appointment I’d made with my high school’s guidance counselor. Dr. Madill was from Dublin, and had cheerfully prescribed me Paxil for anxiety. I didn’t tell him about the voices. They’d told me not to. Mum thought it was nonsense; she’d taken me to get the pills, but that was about it. No more mention had been made of the matter.

It was November again. This time I thought God was going to switch my soul into another body, specifically the body of a girl at school who had a disfiguring skin disease. The voices wouldn’t leave me alone, no matter how much I prayed or begged. Sometimes I floated above my body and watched myself in class or taking the bus. The world looked like an Impressionist painting, though I’d been to see an optometrist. By the time Mum found me on the sofa, I hadn’t eaten or slept in any meaningful way for three or four days.

I was in Prague, twenty-three years old and working as an English teacher when I started taking Ziprasidone. At first, Ziprasidone was a mixed blessing. I felt like I had fully risen out of the protective seawater other anti-psychotics had kept me in— like I was breathing fresh, purifying, clear air. I started to write again, finishing poems I’d let linger for a year or more. I lost about thirty pounds, and the subsequent shopping trips, seeing my thinner self in cute, feminine clothes was a boost. But I was also covered in eczema, and almost constantly menstruating. But as my skin cleared, and the bleeding stopped, I knew that Ziprasidone was right for me.

My mother was in Prague when I made the switch. When she arrived home, she went to check the price of Ziprasidone in our local pharmacy. It wasn’t available; the Canadian government hadn’t yet passed through with the approval system. I couldn’t go home. Not for good.

I remember the day I was told I was schizophrenic. I had an appointment with Dr Richard after school. The past few weeks had been rough, and I’d switched medications from Risperidone to Olanzapine after them former had made me shake and lactate. Until that day, I was classed as having schizophreniform disorder, a kind of temporary psychosis. The assumption was that I’d only spend a year or two on medication, and then I would recover. But I didn’t function well without the anti-psychotics. At an earlier appointment, I’d asked Dr Richard what my diagnosis was, and he deferred it to our next meeting.

Dr Richard was a tall, thin French Canadian man with a walrus moustache he used to twirl in our sessions. It couldn’t have been particularly easy to tell an eighteen-year-old girl who’s already gained sixty pounds and become a social outcast at her school that she faces a lifelong battle. Medication. Forever. Schizophrenia. Forever.

Dr Richard’s office was above the best bakery in my city. I came out of the session disoriented. So I got an Illy coffee and a buttery croissant and sat on the edge of a fountain to make a difficult phone call.

“Oh, hello Mum. I’m downtown. Yes, been to see Dr Richard…”

When I was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, I fell into a hole. The summer before leaving for Prague, I experienced the longest lasting depression I’ve ever felt. I was living in student digs and working as a temporary receptionist in a publishing company. Most nights I divided my time between taking baths and smoking cigarettes, watching television and smoking cigarettes, and lying in bed, feeling uneasy and ugly and sticky (it was the hottest summer Ottawa had seen in decades), and smoking cigarettes.

One night I couldn’t stop crying. I called the municipal crisis help line, and the clearly bored student on the other end talked me out of taking a month’s worth of olanzapine in a mouthful.

My meds, a list:

Paxil, one daily, for eight months at seventeen years old. Small and yellow. Generally ineffective for my “anxiety.”

Risperdal, five daily, for seven months between seventeen and eighteen years old. Small and red. They cause me to gain 50% of my starting bodyweight. Eventually I have to stop taking them since they make lactate, and induce painfully noticeable Parkinsonian trembling.

Olanzapine, one daily, from eighteen to twenty-tree years old. I stayed overweight but stable for five years. I switched because they seemed to stop working.

Ziprasidone, two daily, twenty-three to present. I lost weight, though insomnia became a serious problem. Zeldox or Geodon (its brand name) is close to being unavailable in the UK, and its approval was delayed in Canada until late 2007 because it could cause heart problems.

Drug X, four daily, when I had just turned twenty-four, for three months. A drug in clinical trial phase, which I took for a “test drive” under the auspices of my Czech psychiatrist.

Various sleep aids. None of which were particularly healthy or effective.

Setraline (“Zoloft”), one daily, from age twenty-four to present. After experiencing an exceptionally vicious bout of depression, I decided that I wanted to try an anti-depressant. Despite the aura of cynicism surrounding Zoloft and its likes, it does the trick and lifts the burden.

In London, last month, at the clinic where I get my meds, I overheard a woman say, “I want to get off me clozapine. I been really good. Ain’t been aggressive for a year. I makes me bed every day, and puts me things in the chest of drawers.”

I graduated with highest honours in philosophy and humanities from a well-respected university in Canada with a year of credits from an internationally renowned philosophy faculty in Europe. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I went to Prague with nothing waiting for me there but three job interviews, a hostel booking and hope, no friends, no home, no Czech. I built a well-ordered life for myself: I worked for a small non-profit language school, eventually becoming a senior teacher, worked for an independent media collective, had poetry published, and broke down a gender barrier at a bookstore that typically only employed men behind the counter.

And now I’m at the LSE. Maybe you know me, have classes with me. It’s likely that you’ve seen me. Could you ever have guessed I was HSWB? There’s an easy difference between me and the Chest-of-Drawers lady, and perhaps us two, assuming you live your life medication-and-diagnosis-free: luck. I drew the crazy card, but was able to live a normal life, due to circumstances of good doctors, working meds and helpful surroundings. Chest-of-Drawers lady drew the same card, and wasn’t as lucky, and now the best part of her day is folding laundry. I’ve given up looking for fairness. 

What an odd request, to lie on that old-fashioned couch and speak about all her sexual encounters. What a singular aphrodisiac for him, a place in that variegated history could be! And how far from cathartic, how opposite to soothing, how different from therapy, it was as she spun the tension across the room like a spider’s web, intensely aware of the quivering masculinity behind her. Even as she described the impotent and gifted; girls she had crushes on in her immaturity; the father’s of friends whose gaze, like a senescent butterfly, had rested too long; even as she conjured the enjoyment of drunken coercions, the coldness in romantic seductions; she heard a stirring out of sight.

The power of her words came as no surprise to someone in her line of work, but she could not anticipate her own arousal. And despite his lack of response, after initial mumbled promptings to continue, she imagined mutual engorgement.

The patient heard a ticking and paused momentarily until the deep soothing voice said,

‘Don’t Stop.’

But still a surprise when she saw his glorious nudity, for his disegno form was too well conceived to ever be naked. The acanthine hair on his head and neck, the reassuring and probably mandatory beard, the long fingers lambent in the low-light, arise then Xerxes. Of the legion men she had known, he was the greatest, more than a man, and the mirror of her self. Yes, the patient would enjoy her treatment.

Then so depressed, now so joyful, on his knees with his tongue relishing the acrid juices of her sex. One hundred and ten pounds per hour, for him to drag her thighs down towards him; burning her back on the unimaginative burgundy leather of the couch; each minute of his caresses, costing almost two. And far more than his plucking her lips like a harp with the rosy velveteen head of his sex, the understanding they had reached, made her forget the fee.

Anticipating the fruition of his desire, after all the times when his patients had been sufficiently engrossed in recounting their sexual neuroses for him to a risk those furtive, hurried strokes. The most blessed audience in the world had brought himself to silent climax, and hoped the women would not notice the change in the cloying atmosphere of that room; from tense to nepenthe.

Finally the spoiled psychoanalyst despoiled his spoilt patient; and his groping hands feathered her shoulders, traced her collarbone,

‘And how does that make you feel.’

‘Don’t stop; tell me about your past lovers’.

The whore could scarce believe the lack of emotion in his voice, he was inside her and so detached. She was never this needing of her men.

To interrupt his caresses should he thrust his sex into the invitingly narrow gulf between her full breasts, but what had his mother done to deserve such degradation? Would her tender nipples crack if he risked a gentle nip?

What the good doctor did was to squat over the couch, forcing his phallus directly down plugging her mouth and stopping her words. Trammelling up forever the flow of distant fathers and scarifying mothers; the tedious social alienation and repetitious pressures of work and love; with his sex buried to the hilt in her prone face he damned forever the boring complaints and questions, animalistic complexes and complex animas and animuses. Where there had been the unending need for understanding and explanation he filled her head up with himself, like all his patients would have him do.

Shocked by his behaviour and with a new clarity caused by disinterest, he withdrew limp and wet, standing over his couch and patient, like the Colossus. The analyst started to play over in his mind what this oral fixation could mean.

‘The hour is up.’ She did not want to leave; it had been the best encounter of her career.

‘Oh, yes of course. Your money,’ said the analyst, and so she left. Of course she was a prostitute: it would have been unethical to sleep with a patient. 

Alastair Campbell sells politicians for a living. His legacy as the ultimate ’spin doctor’ has made him one of the most notorious figures in British politics. Since his resignation in 2003, following the death of David Kelly, Campbell has gone back to his earlier love: writing. His memoirs The Blair Years and his new novel All in the Mind give some insight into the man behind one of the greatest advertising campaigns in history: the invention of New Labour.

In 1994 the Labour party were ailing, and Alastair Campbell showed up like a sharply-dressed door-to-door salesman, with a quip for every situation and a pitch for every solution. Deodorant for that whiff of desperation; support tights for the party’s increasingly well-fed belly; dumbbells for their flabby credibility; and a Dyson vacuum cleaner to push bad news out of the way: He sold Labour the products of a new generation they so badly needed, and he sold New Labour to the country.

But just as the media was the cause of Campbell’s rise, it was also his downfall. Campbell, however, described by journalist Iain Dale in his award winning political blog as a ‘latter-day Goebbels’, is pragmatic about the media’s power.

He refutes the suggestion that our reliance on the manipulation of media is quietly creeping into the territory of propaganda. The word ‘spin’, Campbell claims, is “as much a reflex of media cynicism as a serious political point. It’s been overblown to the point of becoming meaningless,” he says. “It is now used to describe anything that anyone says about anything.”

To hold the key to media nowadays is to be granted unparalleled power. Video killed the radio star; live TV finished off the flippant politician. “Twenty-four Seven news has had a generally negative impact on standards of debate and reporting, where volume has led to a sacrifice of quality, right across the board.” The fact that Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps’s drug use gets more exposure than the disintegration of the British economy doesn’t exactly prove Campbell wrong. To be in the news today, a politician must become a celebrity: “modern politicians can never stop communicating.”

“In the UK we have a more open democracy than virtually any in the world, yet that is not what most of the media would have you believe… [It is] a bigger, noisier, more aggressive and judgemental media than most. In their coverage of politics in particular, there has been a huge shift away from focus on policy and serious debate to personality and trivia…The politicians have to be far more strategic in how they deal with this, worry less about the day-to-day, more about the medium- and long-term.” But Campbell believes that “the public are onto [a cynical media] – they may know politicians spin them a line from time to time, but they know the media do it 24 hours a day.” You may take issue with the rate of spin, but you can’t really argue with the understanding of middle-Britain that propelled Campbell to success as Blair’s chief of communications. Indeed, “Blair wouldn’t be Blair without Alastair Campbell” according to Will Woodward, the Guardian’s political editor.

Campbell is more modest. “I know I made a difference, but in the end he was the leader, and he was the one making the big calls and leading from the front… Part of his insight as a modern politician was that communications could not be separate from what he and the government did, but integral to it. I could not have done the job I did without his support and that basic understanding of how the media had changed and was changing politics.”

Nowhere has Blair and Campbell’s foresight been more vindicated than in the 2009 American Election: “[Obama] fought a brilliant, modern campaign, yet a non-cynical media chose to define it in terms of hope, energy, the future.”

Campbell claims that his work as a press officer was to rectify the damage caused by an intrusive media. “Where there’s public goodwill for a party or a leader in power, sometimes more can be achieved. It will be interesting to watch President Obama’s early days to see whether that global goodwill helps him to a good start in making the decisions needed to deal with an economic crisis affecting us all. It could.”

Six years on, and Campbell just can’t stop. Perhaps he’s angling for a job again; he has said that he misses it, and that he may want to return one day (after all, Labour recently brought Campbell’s old enemy Peter Mandelson back into the spotlight). Perhaps the Labour Party could use his expertise. Since leaving his post in 2003, New Labour’s public image has nosedived, with cock-up upon cock-up. But given perpetual media surveillance, Campbell’s experience at the helm could prove very helpful.

Alastair Campbell draws not only upon his professional experience, but also his life experiences. : He has been very open about his battles with drink and depression, and his recently published novel All in the Mind is a revealing account of his experiences. He admits, “I certainly think that my experience of having survived a breakdown and a drink problem helped me to do the job. I’m convinced I would not have been able to do it without having gone through that.”

Campbell clearly draws inspiration for his cast of depressed protagonists from his own life. That said, his account of the mindset of a rape victim, of a psychiatrist who regularly visits prostitutes, and of a man who cheats on his wife, engender substantial questions about his life. How can one articulate these experiences and make them universally understandable? ”Some of the issues and illnesses dealt with I know about. [The book’s protagonist] is a depressive, David Temple, but he gets depression worse than I do. There is an alcoholic politician, Ralph, whose drinking habits are more serious than mine were. And there is a psychotic breakdown where I draw heavily on my own. I have had a lot of feedback from people who have had similar experiences saying they felt it did capture those kinds of experiences.” Just as important to him, he says, are those “who say they have never had depression, but after reading the book they felt they understood it better.”

Some readers have not been so positive: Campbell’s debut novel was recently nominated for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. A fact not nearly well known enough is that Campbell began his career writing pornographic stories for Forum men’s magazine, under the pseudonym “the Riviera Gigolo.” You’d presume that to have made a living out of it, Campbell could write sex with some eloquence. Campbell is upbeat, however. “Had I won, I was planning to say that I was honoured, because nearly all the sex scenes in my novel are meant to be bad sex scenes! This would have been dismissed as spin, of course.”

I ask Campbell to complete an exercise attempted by his protagonist David Temple: to imagine what he would like written on his gravestone. The world’s most notorious spin-doctor has a rather subdued answer: “I would like to be remembered as a good father, and someone who made a difference.” History has a habit of re-evaluating figures regardless of their wishes: but if they say anything else of Alistair Campbell, you can be sure that he’ll be, quite literally, spinning in his grave.

____________________________________________________________________________________________The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries and All in the Mind are published by Random House.

By late in the evening, a disoriented Japanese news crew arrived on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, asking frantic questions of local reporters on the scene. “Where should we go?” they queried. Where should they go? After 32 hours without sleep, having survived a hail of police gunfire and watched a bomb dropped on a row house, I could only turn and point behind them. A neighborhood was burning to the ground not half a block from us.

Exhausted firefighters had lost their battle against blaze, horrified neighbors watched their possessions and memories go up in flames. Helplessness and shock hovered over us all like smog. And the only real question was whether the inhabitants of the MOVE house had escaped alive.

They didn’t. Eleven people perished, including five children.

The MOVE members had established a compound headquartered in the heart of a well-established, African American, working class neighborhood in West Philadelphia. The fatal fire which consumed the community was triggered by a police bomb used in an attempt to evict the occupants of the three bedroom MOVE row house. Arguably the worst public action in the history of the city, the tragedy quickly became worldwide news. Despite televised investigatory hearings, not one of the officials responsible was ever found guilty of any crime. In fact, the city’s first African American mayor in office at the time was re-elected by a wide margin. Of the two surviving members of MOVE, one-Birdie Africa—a child aged 13 was placed with relatives; the other survivor, a woman—Ramona Africa, was arrested, tried and convicted of reckless endangerment and served seven years in prison.

Not many people understood the MOVE people or even knew that MOVE is not an acronym. According to the teachings of MOVE founder John Africa, it means “movement” and is meant to express the connection between movement and life. Their beliefs were (and remain) difficult to reconcile with much of modern and particularly urban life.

MOVE was dubbed a “back to nature” group by the press but that is a misnomer. While MOVE members eschewed technology and took the surname “Africa”, they considered themselves a family of revolutionaries. Their strong commitment to self-defense figured greatly into their life philosophy and their confrontations with Philadelphia police, as did their disavowal of the legitimacy of the man-made legal system.

When MOVE was founded in the early 70s, it played a positive role in its community. Members would walk neighbors’ dogs, wash cars, aid the homeless, assist the elderly, and make home repairs.

But in time, MOVE also evoked images of black people in long thick dread locks, loud disruptive protests and unkempt children whose parents refused to allow them to attend school. MOVE built a reputation for its staunch beliefs in a natural way of life and its adherence to the principals of John Africa. MOVE’s revolutionary beliefs often resulted in aggressive and often disruptive opposition to laws and regulations it considered unfair. The group was uncompromising in its opposition to “the system”-government, military, industry, politics. They remain committed to exposing this system as the cause of all man’s problems, from racism, drug abuse and homelessness to political corruption and AIDS.

I first heard of MOVE as a college student. They were “moving” on the zoo and pet shops to free the animals, challenging the system at school board meetings, rallies, public forums and media offices. They demanded to be heard and their strategy, based on the frequent use of profanity and confrontation, prompted regular contact with the police, District Attorney, and court system. But their commitment was true to the organization’s, as stated in their writings:

“Move’s work is to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil, and to put an end to the enslavement of life – people, animals, any form of life. The purpose of John Africa’s revolution is to show people how corrupt, rotten, criminally enslaving this system is, show people through John Africa’s teaching, the truth, that this system is the cause of all their problems (alcoholism, drug addiction, unemployment, wife abuse, child pornography, every problem in the world) and to set the example of revolution for people to follow when they realize how they’ve been oppressed, repressed, duped, tricked by this system, this government and see the need to rid themselves of this cancerous system as Move does.”

In a large urban environment like Philadelphia this strategy was a recipe for disaster.

The run-up and aftermath of the MOVE fire reflects a complex web of activism and community mobilization by MOVE members, West Philadelphia neighbors, Philadelphia’s African American community and ultimately an international cast of anti-death penalty advocates, from Hollywood movie stars to university students. The MOVE disaster was also woven into local politics and public policy which impacted Philadelphians and the city budget for nearly two decades.

MOVE and the Philadelphia Police

The 1985 clash between MOVE and the police echoed a confrontation eight years earlier in another West Philadelphia community. In 1978, police surrounded a MOVE house after a two month standoff during which, armed MOVE members routinely patrolled the rooftop of their “headquarters”, blaming the police for several assaults on MOVE women and the killing of a MOVE child, Life Africa. Gunfire erupted between MOVE and the police, although MOVE maintained it never fired a shot. When the dust settled, James Ramp—a 23 year veteran police officer, was dead. MOVE members were dragged from the house, at least one brutally beaten. The house was bulldozed on the orders of then-mayor Frank Rizzo, destroying any evidence of what happened.

When the ensuing trials were over, MOVE members were convicted of the murder of officer Ramp and sentenced to 30 to 100 years in prison. To this day, there are doubts about the fairness of these trials. Community activists and some news reports questioned whether officer Ramp was really killed by “friendly” fire from his own police department. MOVE cried foul, argued that their “brothers and sisters” had been unfairly convicted and determined to free them through its own brand of action and activism.

The relationship between MOVE and the Philadelphia police department was acrimonious at the onset. In the seven years following the events of ‘78, significant segments of the black community supported claims of police harassment brought by the MOVE organization. By 1985, MOVE was convinced that it was headed for another confrontation with the department and the city. It began reinforcing the walls of its new home on Osage Avenue with railroad beams and built a “bunker” on the rooftop. One of its protest techniques called for the use of a bullhorn mounted on the house through which members made their case nearly 24 hours a day, spewing invectives and threats at police and public officials. MOVE sought to pressure neighbors to draw the attention of a justice system that refused to hear MOVE arguments for the freedom of its imprisoned members.

Neighbors held Hostage

But residents on the MOVE block, many of whom were initially sympathetic to the MOVE cause, felt they had become hostages to the bullhorn invectives and curse-laced tirades. The solid, working class black neighborhood also resented the “natural” lifestyle of the residents of the MOVE house—raw meat thrown in the yard for dogs, cockroaches allowed to multiply as a result of the respect all life philosophy, a dozen people living in a home meant for a small family.

MOVE was the biggest media story in Philadelphia. It sold newspapers and lead the evening news for months and years. Both MOVE members and the West Philly neighbors turned to reporters to tell their stories, hoping to gain the attention of anyone who might help them. In my first job as a reporter, MOVE people were regular callers, complaining of police harassment and unconstitutional treatment by the DA and courts, often dominating interviews with statements too long to be practical for a news report, filled with the group’s own type of propaganda. But inside the lengthy monologues were kernels of truth and a humanity that demanded respect and fair treatment.

As the “voice of the black community” my station offered MOVE more of an opportunity to air their perspective and delved into the tenuous relationship between the group, dominated by black members, and the community which was torn between their own needs for peace and their sympathy for MOVE’s position, particularly its difficulties with police. Philadelphia has a long, ugly history of misconduct in black neighborhoods that included a federal investigation of police abuse. My own commitment, to be fair and report accurately, engendered trust from MOVE members which would draw me close to epicenter of the MOVE story.

Neighbors had their own horror stories to tell. They began to feel they were being used as pawns in MOVE’s protest. Residents couldn’t sleep because the bullhorns blared in the middle of the night. They began to suspect myriad violations of health and safety codes at the MOVE house. Ms. Betty Mapp, who lived right next door to the MOVE house, complained of an army of cockroaches blackening her windows and invading her kitchen. The Osage Avenue block organization called city health inspectors and code enforcement. They feared their block would be the site of another 1978 style police confrontation. Their lives had become unbearable. Fed up, neighbors turned to the one person in the City they considered a real friend of black folks, the city’s first African American mayor—the man they had been proud to help elect not two years earlier.

In some ways, the MOVE strategy was working but it was working against MOVE. Neighbors were organizing to put pressure on the city; they wanted relief and a return to the lives they had struggled so hard to establish.

The City’s Shocking Solution

City officials were determined to avoid a repeat of the 1978 shootout. With a new black Mayor, there seemed some early hope for a well-planned, negotiated settlement. Hopeful rumors abounded; one persistent story described an offer from a Quaker group to relocate MOVE to a farm in the countryside where they could pursue their unorthodox lifestyle in peace. But escalating speculation about the inevitability of the coming confrontation overshadowed this optimism; gossip grew apace amidst erroneous reports that MOVE was digging escape tunnels under their house.

No one anticipated the city response.

What started as an eviction turned into an evacuation and the police occupation of an urban neighborhood. This time it was the police who refused to compromise. Frenzied neighbors and human rights activists, fearing the police were motivated by revenge, called on the Mayor to stop the police action. MOVE maintained that the police were coming to kill them and finish the job they started in 1978. In the early hours of the morning on May 13, MOVE requested a delegation of reporters to conduct negotiations. I was one of those reporters. Those of us in the press corps who heard our names on the bullhorns attempted to convince police to let us find a peaceful solution. They turned a deaf ear to these entreaties.

By dawn the next day, the police were at war and fired 50,000 rounds of ammunition at the MOVE house. The shootout rained shells on reporters and neighbors as far as two blocks away; but the gunfire never penetrated the reinforced house. By early evening, the frustration of the police was evident. They decided to use an “entry device,” a satchel of C-4 military plastic explosives, dropping the bomb on the roof to dislodge the MOVE “bunker”. The explosion started a fire that soon engulfed an entire city block. Philadelphia earned a world-wide reputation as the city that dropped a bomb on its own citizens.

The police were in charge and out of control. One of the promises made by city officials was an assurance that none of the police involved in the 1978 MOVE shootout would be in tactical positions during the 1985 “eviction” action. However, a public investigation of police conduct found that some of the police officers in the alley behind the MOVE house were the same officers involved in the first MOVE conflict and were friends and colleagues of slain officer Ramp. Fueling the police revenge theory, the traumatized child who survived the fire described the attempts of MOVE members to escape their burning building. Birdie Africa told investigators that some of his family members were trapped in the house, pinned down by police gunfire in the back alley.

I later did a special investigative report on what happened in that alley. FBI photos and forensic evidence suggested the remains of some MOVE family members had injuries that were consistent with gunshot wounds. Those photos and the sounds of the roaring fire covering the screams of the MOVE children would give me nightmares for many months.

The loss of life and destruction of property cost the City of Philadelphia $42 million dollars. Today, MOVE members still advocate for the release of nine of their “brothers and sisters” in prison since 1978. After a failed attempt to rebuild the neighborhood, MOVE neighbors are now scattered across the country.

Did We Learn Anything?

What lessons can be derived from the MOVE story? Certainly, MOVE’s resistance to the often dehumanizing encroachment of technology and its preference for a more natural way of life is easy to understand and enjoys more widespread support today. Certainly, Americans and particularly African Americans were sympathetic to MOVE’s cry of social injustice and longstanding police harassment.

But where does aggressive activism draw its line? When activists decides that no one is innocent and it is acceptable to “take hostages” to advance a cause—no matter how just—the sympathy of the very people who might be your best allies is lost. The public relations battle is also sacrificed as is the opportunity to present your case to a wide audience through the media. Tactics become the “big story” while the cause is a smaller report on the inside pages.

Maybe the MOVE catastrophe should have taught us that committed activists can and will cross a line that leaves the rest of us behind, befuddled and unprepared. At the extreme, on the fringe—activism can take on a revolutionary aspect with its attendant techniques (recall the abduction of Patty Hearst and the rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army). “The system” never understood MOVE or the depth of its commitment to expose what it believed to be injustice and corruption.

Perceived injustice will fester and simmer and find its own social, ethical, religious or political rationalizations. In this instance, the setup for confrontation led to an incomprehensible tragedy. MOVE lost eleven members of its family that day. Neighbors lost their homes and more. The black community was traumatized and splintered and the city paid dearly for the next 25 years. Many of us who covered the story can never forget what happened in West Philadelphia.

My hope has always been that we would learn to understand the motivations of those who don’t share our beliefs or those who despise what we treasure and are willing to take hostages or give their own lives in pursuit of their goals. My fear is that we will never learn from repeated instances of revolutionary actions (real or self-described) that will continue to take us by horrifying surprise. I still carry scars from May 13, 1985.

Barbara Grant served as Director of Communication for the City of Philadelphia. She has also had a long career in television and radio, during which she covered the 1985 MOVE fire and co-anchored the MOVE Commission Hearings, a public inquiry into the bombing of the MOVE house. She is currently a partner in Cardenas Grant Communications.

You are holding a perfect-bound collection of pages bearing text. Are you holding information? What about the images – do they ‘contain’ information? No doubt, there are patterns to be discovered in these pages. We could print a page of alternating 1s and 2s and this would be an uninformative pattern. For something to be information, it must inform something, and that something is you. In other words, information is a pattern that literally changes the patterns in you. So information cannot exist independently of an interpreter, a pattern that it changes by virtue of being information. Thus all attempts to isolate and objectify information must fail.

But surely there is such a thing as objective information. At the present date, February 2009,, Gordon Brown is Prime Minister of the Queen’s government. We don’t acknowledge any attempts to contradict this information . Daft Punk are the most brilliant musicians since David Bowie. The objectivity of this informative statement is not so unquestionable. That Daft Punk are musicians is accepted; whether they are better than Bowie, however, depends on you. Information is always part of a network of propositions, each of which has its own status derived from its relation to the network and to social consensus about its meaning. Information is therefore a piece of a knowledge system, as an organ is a piece of a body.

Human knowledge systems are structures built to correspond to the world. Theories of information have been of interest to philosophers of science, because scientific theories are our most rigorously tested representations of the world’s structure. It was once thought that science was an endeavour to discover true and false propositions – until it was realised that the structure of the world is not organised into propositions at all. According to the philosopher Ronald Giere, we ought best to conceive of the informative matrices of our theories as maps:

“Maps have many of the representational features we need for understanding how scientists represent the world. There is no such thing as a universal map. Neither does it make sense to question whether a map is true or false. The representational virtues of maps are different. A map may, for example, be more or less accurate, more or less detailed, of smaller or larger scale. Maps require a large background of human convention for their production and use. Without such they are no more than lines on paper. Nevertheless, maps do manage to correspond in various ways with the real world.”

Thus maps are in a certain sense objective, without having the contentious property of being either true or false. They just roughly correspond, and are believed to correspond to the extent that they are useful. Maps allow for a plurality of information to be expressed – as, for example, when one adorns a map of Europe with pins denoting the places one has visited. To quote Giere once more:

“Rather than thinking of the world as packaged in sets of objects sharing definite properties, think of it as indefinitely complex, exhibiting many qualities that at least appear to vary continuously. One might then construct maps that depict this world from various perspectives.”

In this way maps allow for a pluralistic blend of sources: 1) information that is conventionally deemed objective i.e. to correspond to reality; and 2) information derived from the unique function of the subject.

Given the above, I believe that human knowledge systems in general are approximately modelled by the familiar internet tool, Google Maps. Here’s why:

Satellite/Terrain/Road view. Google Maps present us with a unified representation of the world that responds to the interests of the subject or user. Whether looking for a travel route, stalking an ex-lover’s neighbourhood, or merely excited by bird’s-eye views of enormous structures, the Google Map is a singular construct that answers according to your concern. If you’re lucky enough to live in one of Google’s favourite cities, you will be able to view transit maps and current traffic updates superimposed on the city’s road maps. Most importantly, if you live in one of these preferred cities you will have access to Street View.

Street View essentially allows the user to dive into the map, viewing any location from the perspective of a subject who is physically there. As a model of human knowledge systems, this feature is profound. If knowledge can ultimately not be objectified, then what we want is the ability to dive into each other’s subjectivities, to view reality from as many perspectives as possible. This has been called inter-subjectivity by some, and it captures an approach to knowledge systems that Giere calls “perspectival realism”. It requires a combination of both perspective and map coordinates to construct an accurate account of knowledge.

Photos. Digging deeper into the subjective, Google Maps allow users to post, to any coordinates of the map, photos they have taken at those locations. Not only do we get a generic perspective, as with Street View, but a highly personal moment in time. More abstractly, this feature is something akin to the hermeneutic tradition in literature – the photo as a subjective creation is analogous to text, and the map coordinates provide the means for reaching an interpretative understanding of the author’s subjectivity.

By this view, human knowledge, i.e. information, consists of a similar structure whether its domain is art or science. Subjective reports, which can vary in degree of generic character, are posted to objective shared coordinates, which correspond in some way to the real world. The growth of knowledge occurs through a constant expansion of content appended to the conventionally accepted coordinates; interpretation of information proceeds through a comprehension of subjective reports accessed through a shared coordinate system. Information, then, is no thing in itself – it is a piece of a thing. Information is teased out of the map by an interpretative encounter with it: a reading of a text, a scientific explanation, or a view of the street.

This article makes reference to:

Giere, R.N. (1994). Viewing Science. PSA: Proceedings of the biennial meeting of the philosophy of science association.  University of Chicago Press.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/192912

Jacob Bauman Levine holds bachelor’s degrees in neurobiology and psychology and is studying for the MSc in philosophy and history of science at the LSE.