because we all have to go without Wikipedia today

If you tried to visit Wikipedia, Reddit, or icanhazcheezburger today, you already know that the internet (or a lot of it) is on strike in protest of the copyright infringement censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA. 


I considered jumping on the blackout bandwagon or doing what Kate Welsh is doing and not posting any new content today. But I don't post new content most days. (I have plans to remedy this soon.)


So, instead, here is...

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SOPA AND PIPA (AND PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW IF YOU SPEND EIGHT HOURS OR MORE A DAY IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER LIKE MOST BOTH OF THE PEOPLE READING THIS BLOG): 

An FAQ

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA/PIPA are bills currently being considered by the House of Representatives and the Senate intended to stop copyright infringement on rogue foreign websites. Instead, they would do very bad things to innocent rogue-free not-guilty content providers and technologists without requiring permission from a court.

Full-text and summaries from govtrack (SOPA, PIPA).


Are these bills really worth a day without Wikipedia/reddit/BoingBoing?

Here is what you stand to lose if these bills go through: The internet as a low barrier to entry into the market for small businesses, the ability to do post, host, or (especially) repost (Bye bye, Tumblr!) content to the web without an army of lawyers to back you up, innovative small businesses, jobs, uncensored Wikipedia/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/reddit/flickr, and (as if that wasn't enough) virtual peyote and talking cacti.

In the words of (internet) famous people:

"Adding regulation to one of the few growing sectors in the U.S. will result in a "chilling effect" and will push individuals and business to start ventures elsewhere." Jason Harvey, reddit


"The blacklist bills are dangerous: if made into law, they would hamper innovation, kill jobs, wreak havoc on Internet security, and undermine the free speech principles upon which our country was founded." Rainey Reitman, EFF

"When you turn copyright infringement into a felony and say that anyone can accuse a website of providing ”infringing” tools (and apply severe penalties whether or not you do something about it), you are essentially making it impossible for anyone to do anything online without fear of retribution." Lance Ulanoff, Mashable

"Beyond damaging free speech and the internet, bills like SOPA and PIPA damage industry by reinforcing an untenable faith in the status quo, and an equally untenable fear of innovation." Evan Hansen, Wired

"I produce copyrighted works. If people started spreading around copies without paying me, I’d be frustrated and disappointed. But I’m not going to try to make it your problem." Seamus Young


If the risks are that big, there must be equally big benefits, right?

Yes, at least, according to the MPAA/RIAA, GoDaddy, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Though, I'm not sure I believe them.

The U.S. Chamber of commerce recently sent a letter listing many companies as supporters, and now several listed supporters such as Gibson Guitars, D'Addario, and Petzl claim they never supported the bill. 


So, is this bill just a fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley?

No. Though the bills are opposed by many big tech industry companies (Google, Yahoo! (and Jerry Yang), LinkedIn, etc.), as well as founders, entrepreneurs, VCs, and engineers, they are also opposed by content creators and intellectual property owners (Such as the Writers Guild of America-West, and the NYT/L.A. Times.), and academics and researchers such as Sandia Labs. (A more complete list (PDF).)

These bills have also gotten the attention of human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders. The European Parliament even paused long enough to protest.

And, because of the protests, there is now political opposition from the White House and representatives and senators, including both Ron Paul and Nancy Pelosi. (Though, Sen. Ron Wyden has been opposing bills like this for almost eighteen months.)



Is there anything I can do about this without stepping away from my keyboard?

Yes! You can write Congress (Here or here.)

If, after that, you feel adventurous, you can also sign up to meet with your senators.

Or you can just go on flickr and darken photos.

Holiday Blog Tour: Christmas in the Market

If you are visiting from the Holiday Blog Tour, welcome! This story is my contribution to the tour.

I am waiting for a train to San Francisco. The morning commute is over. The man who was playing fiddle music at the entrance to the station when I arrived has packed up and gone home, and there is a small crowd of students, artists, and businessmen waiting at the platform. 

I am going to the farmers market at the Ferry Building. Last time I went to the farmers market, I had just arrived from Boston, and I hadn’t been in California long. I went to prove to myself that there was a place where lettuce grew all year round. Though I knew that much of what I ate in winter in Boston came from California, there was a part of me that still believed lettuce in January was just an elaborate sleight of hand enabled by hydroponics and cold storage.

My third Christmas in California is coming soon, and I have gotten used to year-round farmers markets and grocery stores filled with local produce almost every day of the year, but Christmas will be here in a little over two weeks, and it doesn’t feel like Christmas.

I ride the escalator out of Embarcadero Station and step out onto the sidewalk in San Francisco. The guys selling handmade leather bags and prints of the Golden Gate Bridge in fog are setting up their booths along the street to the Ferry Building, and a few men in matching black pea coats wait in line to climb on a high platform and get their shoes shined by a laughing man in a newsboy hat. Dozens of people sit on the sidewalk holding matching green 99% signs across the street from a news van parked in front of a police van and a man with a guitar setting out a cardboard sign that says: You don’t have to be a Rockefeller to help a fella.

The last time I came for the farmers market, the plaza was full of tents. Today, it is empty enough a skater flips his board and takes big turns. I buy a few of the season’s first meyer lemons and a spring onion from one of the farmers and take a spin through the Ferry Building where shops have put out chalk board signs advising shoppers to get their holiday turkeys early, but it still doesn’t feel like Christmas. I wonder why as I walk out past the long line of people waiting for rotisserie chicken from a food truck. Is it the spring onions?

My first Christmas in California, I was woken up by a small combustion engine, sat up in bed and pulled aside the blinds, expecting to see a gloved hands pushing a snowblower. Instead, I saw two men in t-shirts with leaf blowers sweeping away palm fronds and rose petals. Some metaphors practically write themselves—an icy dream dissolving into flowers--but to wake up in spring when I was expecting winter felt like falling. I got up and opened the door on the living room where the tree and the straw Christmas goat that had journeyed with us across the country were waiting, and it was Christmas morning. Today, I no longer mistake white rose petals on the wind for the first big flakes of snow, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas.

Where is Christmas in this market? Is it sleeping in one of the artisan’s stalls guarded by the police officers who stand on the walls around the plaza? Or maybe they're just here for the chicken or the man sitting on the sidewalk holding out his hat, yelling: At Occupy, they took everything…These socks are the same ones I’ve been wearing all week. 

Ahead of me, I hear a flute and stop to watch a man who looks like a leprechaun play what I thought at first was a pan flute, but is actually a flute shaped like a fish. 

Long ago, he tells me. Long before you were born when I lived in Europe, I met a man from Bolivia who taught me to make these Isoka flutes. He showed me these—He waves at the table where he has displayed a small selection of flutes in bright colors and then points at an ovular one—but I invented the fish myself.    

As he talks, he plays, punctuating his words with trills on the fish, music he sends out to passersby who walk on without stopping for him or for the man with old socks but maybe for the chicken.

Wonderful, he says. Toot. Toot. Toot. Wonderful for a child.

When I pass the man with the guitar again he is singing Christmas carols. 

***

The Holiday Blog Tour continues tomorrow with a post by Thelma Reyna.

startups are hard: part II

Friday, I wrote about Michael Arrington’s Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, and Quit All the Whining:

Today’s labor gets to nibble on organic food, be pampered with acupuncturists, and generally be coddled like no other employees on the planet. And when they get frustrated, or it’s just their time, they go out and start companies of their own, take venture capital or not, and see what they’re made of.

 I ended the post on an open question: Is it really that simple?

It's a nice story: Folks work in the industry for a while, think they can do better than their bosses, and then strike out on their own to do things their way. I believe the picture is a bit more complicated.

Here's why: 

1. Founders who are putting everything they have into a startup are still afraid of being replaced for slowing down enough to breathe.   

In U Can’t Haz Sadz: The Hushed Dangers of Startup Depression, BetaBeat quoted this interaction with a 24 year-old founder:

Sometimes you get run down and depressed because your product is fucking awesome, your team is great, and you can’t stop yourself from working ’round the clock on it because you love it. But, your body rebels against that. Makes you tired unexpectedly, makes small problems inflate. And then you freak out, thinking that one off day is going to set into motion many, many more. So,” she finished. “You keep it inside.” 

But, we asked her, wouldn’t it befit all parties involved to make this an open dialogue? Founders could get the help they need and investors could be satisfied with knowing the full condition of their investment. The idea was roundly rejected, one Gchat ping at a time: 

“No

I don’t even think it would help

I think I’d get replaced”

Is it really necessary to run someone with this much passion until they burn out? What does that do? Who does it help?

I ask, but then I see comments like this:

I cried myself to sleep many nights working for a Fortune 500, I think it builds character. Crying feels good. I wish people would stop denying the emotional side of creating a business. Yeah, I get it — you love it so much you want to tear yourself open so people can see what is inside your soul. Do it! Cry. Get out the stress, and then keep crushing it. You’re leveling up.

Character. Got it.

2. Constantly sprinting isn't just hard. It's unhealthy and bad for production.   

If Arrington can quote JWZ's journal to prove a point, so can I:

I've just noticed that there's still purple ink on the inside of my right wrist spelling the word VOID: the hand-stamp from a concert that I went to last week. I left work, went to the show, and came back to work immediately afterwards. I've been here since.

Allow me to sound a little bit like Mom.

Let's talk about sprints. I'm not talking about a few all-nighters to catch a release. (Though, even in the short term working over 21 hours straight is the equivalent to being legally drunk.) I'm talking about "sprints" that turn into marathons but never slow down. 

The side-effects of going without sleep on a regular basis are a reliable slow news day drum to beat, but there is plenty of data that demonstrates consistently working more than 40 hours a week isn’t just bad for morale. Henry Ford got a lot of flack in his industry for reducing his assembly lines from ten hours to eight hours, but he said the loss in productivity from tired workers wasn’t worth the extra time on the assembly line. In study after study and industry after industry it has been found that the 8-hour work day is best for production: 

A hundred years of industrial research has proven beyond question that exhausted workers create errors that blow schedules, destroy equipment, create cost overruns, erode product quality, and threaten the bottom line. They are a danger to their projects, their managers, their employers, each other, and themselves.

Yikes! 

And that research was with industries like manufacturing that primarily run on physical labor. It's even worse for creatives (i.e. developers). 

3. Hai. There's a recession on. Is leaving for greener pastures really an option?

When Arrington said if you don't like working at a startup, "find a job elsewhere that will cater to your needs," at first, I thought he was being insensitive for assuming that workers could just pick up and get another job, but he has to believe there are other options out there. Otherwise, what one of his commenters said might be true:

Acupuncture and organic foods are not coddling workers, big guy. Coddling workers is giving them some time to themselves so that they can get acupuncture and organic foods on their own time. It doesn’t matter how many Ping-Pong tables you have set up if your employees can’t ever leave the building. Then it’s a prison. A country-club prison, to be sure. But still a prison.

4. When companies as big as Zynga are still called startups, who can't claim to be a startup?


Startups have a lifecycle. In the early stages, the company is small and struggles finding the time to raise funds and support its product, and it makes sense that everyone has to work so hard, but it's not supposed to be like that forever. The traditional end of the startup lifecycle is when the investors leave, and the company is acquired, IPOs, or turns enough of a product to pay off its debts. But what about companies that put off the endgame for years? When does the crunch stop being a necessity and start being an excuse?  

startups are hard, so have a carrot

Startups are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, and Quit All the Whining, said Michael Arrington on November 27th because “suddenly everyone’s complaining about how unfair things are in Silicon Valley.” Everyone being, apparently, a CNN documentary about racism in Silicon Valley and the Zynga stock scandal, which Arrington calls a company “renegotiating contracts” and the Wall Street Journal calls a case of giver’s remorse. 

Working at a startup is hard, Arrington says. It’s always been hard, and back in the day we walked up hill both ways didn’t have free acupuncture or organic cafeterias. As evidence, Arrington quotes extensively from the online journal of Jamie Zawinski from 1994, an engineer who joined Netscape early enough in the game that he founded DNA Lounge with his loot. 

Arrington went rather quote-happy from Zawinski’s journal, but this pretty much sums it up:

I saw Ian today, for the first time in months. His first words were, “Wow, you look like shit.” He says I seem really strung-out and twitchy. I thought I had been doing ok! I got a full night’s sleep last night and everything. I have no life. I never see any of my non-work friends, and I’m wasting away my one and only youth.

A lot of attention has been given to the back and forth between Zawinski and Arrington that followed (If you’ve missed it, it’s worth reading here and here.) but what I find most fascinating about this is the very end of Arrington’s first post when he claims to be reiterating a point he made in 2007.

In 2007, he bemoaned a changing culture and changing values:  

It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.  

In 2011, he starts to say the same thing: 

A lot of non-like minded people have rolled in. Looking for easy stock options at a hot startup. 

But then he keeps going: 

Not too long from now people will be talking about maximum working hours, minimum numbers of engineers assigned to complete a given task. And, shudder, unionization of startup workers.

Unionization.  

This is where the name “startup” becomes tricky. If you’re talking about startups at the “two guys in a garage” scale, being unionized might** be a problem, impact innovation, yada-yada, but at that scale unionization doesn’t even make sense. Outfits like that are pretty much co-ops, anyway, and, even if unions were somehow imposed from the outside (By…?), the entrepreneurs I’ve met are like artists. They would keep building, even if they had to run an ethernet cable into a hole in the ground and live on dog food.

What is, actually, more of a “risk” is what happened to Zynga:

In the spring of 2009, Zynga was courting MyMiniLife, a game company that later developed the underlying technology for FarmVille and many of Zynga’s games. During one meeting, the topic turned to compensation. A Zynga senior vice president, clad in jeans and leather cowboy boots, whipped out his wallet and a stack of hundred-dollar bills. He chucked the money at a MyMiniLife founder and asked him if that was enough, said one person present at the meeting. 

“It was insulting,” this person said. 

While MyMiniLife eventually agreed to a deal that formed the backbone of FarmVille, discontent soon surfaced. The team was stretched, juggling tough deadlines, technical flaws and demands for more data, according to two former employees. A few months later, as FarmVille approached 20 million users a day, a respected project manager abruptly quit the team. Soon after, the majority of the game’s staff members, including those of the just-acquired MyMiniLife team, threatened to walk out unless Zynga replaced the group’s general manager, these people said. The company relented.

This sounds like the rumblings of what might be unionization at a startup, right? Threats of a walk-out! 

But we’re not talking about a couple of guys threatening to pack up their bags and leave Jim alone with the company in the garage because he’s being a jerk. Zynga has raised $1 billion in funding. They have completed acquisitions worth $26.8 million. The company is about to IPO and estimated in a recent filing amendment with the SEC that the company is worth $14.05 billion. How many garages can you build with $14.05 billion? And how many guys would have to threaten to leave Jim before Jim gets the memo in a company that size? 

It’s a law of big groups of people: The more people there are in the room, the more noise you have to make to be heard. The bigger the group, the bigger the odds one person can’t yell loud enough. Companies aren’t magically immune. That’s why people banding together to say the same thing, even if it’s just long enough to tell Jim he’s being a jerk, is a good thing.

See, the real issue here is not under what conditions employee 1, 2, and 3 are allowed to work themselves but what they are allowed to demand from employees 50 and 75. Arrington says, if you don’t like Mr. Bossman, go be your own boss:

Today’s labor gets to nibble on organic food, be pampered with acupuncturists, and generally be coddled like no other employees on the planet. And when they get frustrated, or it’s just their time, they go out and start companies of their own, take venture capital or not, and see what they’re made of.

But what if you don’t want to be your own boss? And when companies as big as Zynga are still put in the same category as early-stage startups, is it really that simple? 

**There is empirical evidence that working 60+ hours a week has a negative impact on performance after eight weeks that offsets the benefits. Heresy! I know! More on that Monday.

startups, suicide, and holiday blog...wait come back!

It says in my bio that I'm currently an MFA student and working on a novel. Soon, only one of those things will be true. My thesis has been accepted, and, after some last minute paperwork, I'll be graduating in February.

Woohoo!

When I started working on my novel last year, I thought I was writing about something really niche. Startups themselves are kind of obscure,** and it didn't take me long to discover the hard way that the best way to get someone to walk away from me at a party in Silicon Valley is to rattle off the blurb when they asked me what my novel was about.*** 

(I’m going to sell millions!)

Search for the tag “startup” in Delicious, (Yes, Delicious is still alive.) and you’ll find millions of links about startups, but I dare you to bring back a stack that isn’t trying to sell the myth of the rockstar working insane hours giving it all for glory and history and money (with a tiny disclaimer about how rare it is to actually succeed.) I found a few counter narratives, like 37signals, but they were kind of like unicorns: You can be just like us! All you have to do is create Ruby on Rails!    

At least that's the way it was a month ago. What happened? Did Ilya Zhitomirskiy's death suddenly inspire a sudden rush of thinking about Important Things? Or is it the holidays? 

Either way, since then, I’ve noticed a few things:

• Honest discussions about depression and suicide that (mostly) didn't end with people walking away. 
• This article in the The Atlantic (What’s the Matter with the Startup Industry?) which wonders if problems in the startup industry are indicative of problems in the American workforce at large. 
• Other conversations about what “quality of life” really means, conversations that the German exchange student from my high school who turned down the heat in the winter, so she could afford to vacation in Spain, might be able to relate to. Conversations that I am not linking to now because I want to link to them later. Bwah-ha.

I’m not an entrepreneur. I fell into writing a novel about a startup for complicated reasons that may or may not be related to being 14 in 1999 and thinking Trinity and Neo were way cool, so I’ve hesitated to write about my research except in fiction where it’s my job to shut up and tell stories. 

But, well, I’ve always been really bad at shutting up. (Damn it.)     

What started as an attempt to curate articles has sort of…ballooned. I’ll be posting the results over the next few days.     

In the meantime…

The Holiday Blog Tour 2011 has started, and Julie Amante, author of Evenings at the Argentine Club, has posted the first story, “A New Beginning,” about a time when “anything I might have thought was important in the past, paled in comparison to…” 

Ah! No spoilers. 

**Being a person who lives on the border between the worlds in which startups do and don’t exist is a strange experience described well by Derek Parham: 

While I was in LA, people on our set asked me what I did in addition to working the movie. I told them that "some of my time is spent advising tech startups." While a typical response in the Valley would be "Oh wow, which startups?" I was surprised to hear back "Oh, what's a startup?" After discussing this, many people on our set did not understand that most large tech companies start as two guys in a garage with an idea. Their concept of tech companies only included large firms of the world like Google and Apple.

***Blurb: Two entrepreneurs still can’t get over a co-founder’s suicide ten years after he died. 

Author Interview with Thelma T. Reyna

On December 13th, I will be participating in a Holiday Blog Tour organized by Icess Fernandez of Writing to Insanity, and I have promised to post something special and holiday related on the blog--no spoilers!

The next blogger on the tour is poet and storyteller, Thelma T. Reyna, who has agreed to an interview. 

You recently published both a book of short stories, The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories, and a poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone. For those who haven’t read them, can you

tell us about them?

The Heavens Weep is a collection of 12 short stories, mostly set in Texas and California, where I grew up and where I presently live, respectively. My characters are old, young, rich, poor, immigrant and American, women, men, educated and illiterate...but they all have this in common: Most of them are dealing with a loss or setback that’s causing them to grieve, or reflect, or reinvent themselves. Their courage is uppermost. I also surprise my readers in most of the stories, revealing the situation from different perspectives, and concluding in an unexpected way. I believe that, in real life, we often judge people and their circumstances, though we don’t know the “back story,” the whole truth. Our judgments might be different if only we knew. My stories reflect this.

Breath & Bone is a collection of 21 poems. A book reviewer called them a “terrain of moments, some physical, some emotional, some symbolic.” They focus on love, death, family, nature, and relationships. Many of the poems, as well as many of my stories, were inspired by personal experiences. Others stem from folks I’ve seen or heard about. Everyday life, everyday people: this is what my writing is about.

Your work is quite socially conscious. Is there one thing (or two things or many things) that you hope your readers will be more conscious of after reading your books?

One of my first aims as a writer is to depict the universality of humanity: the fact that people, despite our cultural and socioeconomic differences, share the same fears, hopes, dreams. I want a well-educated, economically-comfortable reader in a California mansion to read one of my stories about a poor Mexican-American in a downtrodden Texas town, for example, and be moved to tears by the struggles and courage of this “other.” I want my readers to empathize with my non-mainstream characters, some of them immigrants, to understand their losses, and to admire the resilience and courage of these people, who are perhaps very different from themselves.

Speaking generically about our world, I firmly believe that the best hope for global peace and prosperity is for us to clearly identify and embrace our commonalities across nations, across continents, and focus on nurturing those, versus focusing on what separates us. In a small way, I want my writing to help bridge divides, to help people understand and accept how humanity, how the human spirit, is much more alike than distinct.

In an interview with the Latina Book Club, you mentioned that Toni Morrison and Ray Bradbury have inspired you. Would you like to talk more about that? I’m curious about how you came into conversation with these two writers who have such different and distinct voices.

My reading tastes are very eclectic, and I think that goes back to my 16-year-career as a public high school English teacher in Pasadena, California. As a Latina, I’m sensitive to the importance of ethnically-diverse literature, so my curriculum always included as much representativeness of different cultures and voices as I could find. This appreciation of diversity has carried forward into my post-teaching reading tastes.

Ray Bradbury, internationally famous sci fi author, is a school staple, a modern classic. I’ve seen him lecture at least five times, starting when he was in his 40’s and, most recently, now that he’s in his 80’s and confined to a wheelchair. At these lectures, I had the opportunity to chat with him briefly about his stories. I taught his books for many years. His poetry is amazingly lyrical, bursting with imagery that takes your breath away.

I learned about Toni Morrison from one of my colleagues, a lovely African-American lady who had also taught English. We were school administrators at the time, and we liked to talk about literature when we could. She gave me a copy of Toni’s famous book, Beloved, and the rest is history, as they say! I’ve read several other books by Toni and am definitely impressed. Of course, Toni is a Nobel Prize-winning author now, and I was very happy when she won the Prize.

Despite their differences regarding culture, voice, and genre, Ray and Toni are both highly poetic in their prose. They write metaphorically, sensuously, and the reader can practically taste, smell, hear, touch what they’re describing. (I didn’t say “see” because every writer has to be able to visualize for us.) It’s their very high literary quality that appeals to me. Unlike commercial best-selling writers, Ray and Toni don’t just tell a story. They make us feel it with their words’ beauty.

One of the things that struck me almost immediately about your poetry and your fiction is how lyrical it is. Is music part of your process?

Thank you! No, I’m not a musical person, though I played the clarinet in school bands and can read music. I don’t listen to much music. Growing up in a large family in Texas, we didn’t have music as a regular part of our lives. But poetry was my first love as a budding writer; and it, along with short stories, was my favorite genre to teach. So I learned a lot about the mechanics and qualities of poetry, and I guess it was inevitable that traits of poetry would meld somehow with my fiction as my writing evolved.

On December 14th, you’ll be sharing something special on your blog for the Holiday Blog Tour. Can you give us a hint about what we can expect from you, or would you prefer to keep that under wraps?

I’ll be blogging for Icess Fernandez on her blog, Writing to Insanity. It’ll be either a short-short story or an essay, two genres I enjoy writing. With Icess’ permission, I’ll subsequently re-post the piece on one of my own blogs, either American Latina/o Writers Today or The Literary Self.

I’m really looking forward to meeting new writers and connecting with those I already know and admire on Icess’ book tour!

I stumbled on #OccupySF yesterday

Yesterday, my friend Jessi had a day off from work, so the two of us decided to go to San Francisco. She had never been to the Ferry Building before, so got off BART at Embarcadero.  

I had just turned in my thesis, which felt a little bit like digging in a mine for a year and then finally hitting the surface. If I hadn’t spent the past few months underground, I might have known that we were about to stumble on the Occupy SF camp and a protest at Bank of America. Instead, when we stepped out onto the sidewalk, we had no idea why California had been blocked off. 

We decided to investigate. 

When we got there, the plaza in front of Bank of America was full of people. I’m terrible at estimating numbers, but there were at least fifty people there, and they said more were inside the bank holding a class on economics. I heard that ninety people were arrested inside the bank later in the day, and that number didn’t surprise me.

“Have you ever been to a protest before?” Jessi asked me.

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“No.”

At least a dozen motorcycle cops were lined up across the street from the protest, and a black helicopter hovered over us. I wasn’t surprised by the helicopter. I live not far from UC Berkeley, and helicopters hover over the neighborhood every time there is a protest on campus. What surprised me was how loud it was. In San Francisco speakers aren’t dependent on human mics for projection, but the speakers’ voices were barely audible over the helicopter.

We stayed for about ten minutes, long enough to receive literature.

And hear speeches denouncing Bank of America for raising fees and its role in raising tuition and harming the environment.

After the second speaker, they announced that the cops were coming. I didn’t give myself time to wonder what that meant—Cops were already there—We went back the way we came and almost bumped into a dozen or so cops lined up at the end of the road in rows.

On the way to the docks, we stopped at the camp, a tent city under the Bay Bridge, like in William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, which has been sitting on my desk unread while I finish my thesis. I tried to capture the bridge-over-tents-ness and failed while a couple stopped in front of us to read a sign with hunched shoulders, hands in pockets. 

The docks were mostly free of the tourists, and I wondered if it’s because of the protests. We talked about the efficacy of protests, not sure if standing outside of a bank yelling is the best way to make things better, but it’s good, we said, that everyone was together instead of suffering alone. 

“If it wasn’t for this protest, would we have had this conversation?” I asked. 

It should be easier to talk, I thought. We should be able to hear each other over the helicopter. We should be able to listen to speeches without wondering what it means that the cops are coming.

I said all this to Jessi, and she said simply, “No, we shouldn’t.” 

I started to counter something about freedom of assembly or freedom of speech, but I knew we weren’t talking about rights.  

As we walked along the docks, speculating about what was happing at the bank, we stumbled on a memorial of the 1934 strike, a small plaque stuck on the side of a building that doesn’t look like it gets much foot traffic.

“…every crumb,

everything we get has to

be fought for…”

On our way home, we stopped at the bank and found that the protest had moved inside, but there was a crowd outside standing on chairs looking in. I couldn’t see much. Police. Students sitting down. A flip-pad from the economics class.