The Vegetable Garden

I'd like to pretend that gardening is my attempt to get off-grid. It is, I guess, in its own way, but then I'm writing this blogpost on the interweb. So growing a few vegetables isn't really likely to diminish my dirty great ecological footprint by a whole lot. (We do, however, have solar panels which run about 90% of our hot water during the summer months, and probably 70% in the winter, so I'm maybe allowed a little leeway, here).

But, really, gardening is about trying to eat organic without paying eye-watering prices and supporting the evil capitalist overlords of the likes of Whole Foods (and I'm not being hyperbolic: Whole Foods is a truly evil company). And, even more than this, it's about getting my hands dirty, literally, and spending an hour or two a day outside in the sun instead of thinking and writing about neoliberal capitalism in the dark confines of my home office, which is infuriatingly located above the inane clatter and chatter of the kitchen.

It's a fair-sized patch. We have an acre of land in total, though most of that is wooded (her ladyship would like to reclaim some of the forest, but that would mean interminable sprees of summer mowing for me unless we covered it in asphalt, which would kind of defeat the purpose). The vegetable patch is a fenced-in area on the southern end of the house. It's about 600 sq.ft. To put that in perspective, it's about 0.01 - one measly hundredth - of an acre but, with intensive cultivation, the glorious North Cackalacky climate means it could feasibly produce about 2/3 of the vegetables for two people for a year (yes, really).

Here it is from the sky, courtesy of Daft Logic's Google Maps Area Calculator thingy:

A bird's eye view. Well, maybe a hawk's eye view, since average birds probably don't fly that high.

The first year we were here, I attempted to cultivate a few plants in a few raised beds. Perhaps "cultivate" isn't the word. "Unassiduously grow" is probably more accurately descriptive. Actually, "grow" is also wrong; "not kill" would be a better choice. I unassiduosly attempted to not kill a few plants in a few raised beds is a fairer statement of the facts. Anyway. We were reasonably successful with tomatoes, and the almighty crop of (now-dried) chilli peppers remain sporadically used in our kitchen to this day. We had a few cucumber plants, though the zucchini (or courgette) plants were mercilessly devoured by a whole army of fanatical squash bugs despite my best (and at times tearful, frustrated and genocidal) efforts. Annihilating an entire legion of squash bugs was one thing. But I hadn't banked on the ferocity of the weeds - all kinds of grasses, tenacious knots of obsessively spreading clover, Venus Fly-Traps etc.- all of which were seemingly undaunted by a foot of topsoil. I hadn't lined the beds underneath with anything, and so up they came. This is, of course, something of the beauty of living in a rural area. Deers meander. Trains hoot. Coyotes howl. Things grow. 

In contrast, I tried "urban farming" when we lived in our previous place. Not even weeds would thrive, though this probably had something to do with the assortment of car batteries, broken glass, lead pipe offcuts and rejected cement blocks buried less-than-surreptitiously in the wasteland which misconstituted a garden. Having to use a jackhammer and dynamite merely to break the ground kind of outweighed the prospective benefits of a few radishes, especially when pulling them up would require dusting off the jackhammer again. I did, however, manage to get a few cucumbers growing on trellises, in a vegetable bed which some poor bastard and probably several generations of his descendants had hacked out next to the house on top of the foundations. I even grew a melon vine on the trellis, until my cousin tactfully pointed out that if I successfully grew vertical melons, then all bets on Newton's Laws of Gravity would be off.

Last year, I couldn't be bothered with it all, for various reasons including being not really bothered with anything, such as shaving or getting out of bed, let alone the futile escapade of scything through dense undergrowth, only for it grow back by the time I'd finished (which, in my case, was essentially the same as shaving). So I left it. And it turned back into a sub-tropical jungle in one season, which is not entirely surprising since we live in a rural, sub-tropical jungle.

So, this year, I'm changing tack. I'm still not using Round-Up to nuke the weeds (ineffectively) and make the executives of Monsanto or their devil-spawn even more wealthy than they already should be. I also have issues about where all that shit goes. If it's not into my vegetables - "organically broken down", I think they bill it as - then it's got to go somewhere, which is probably the stream that runs round the back of my vegetable garden. I wrestle with the morality of using Sevin dust (to combat the teeming hordes of squash bugs and their allies) in more complex ways. Everyone round here swears by it, but it's banned in the UK and parts of the EU, and I can't decide if either of those are good or bad things. It is, however, produced by an off-shoot of Union Carbide - of the Bhopal chemical disaster infamy - and, so far, this has been the tipping point that has prevented me from flinging it with abandon at insect populations. (Clearly, even gardening is not very effective at preventing me from thinking about neoliberal capitalism).

Having spent the afternoon clearing the whole plot of weeds by hand and sticking the lot on a bonfire  (more pics to follow), I'm kind of poised to be ahead of the game (that said, we start planting February 1st down here, in contrast to those of you in more northern climes). This year, I'm going with ... black plastic sheeting. I can lay it over the whole of the garden, having tilled in the several billion leaves which have fallen from the ever-enthusiastic Japanese magnolia in the front yard, which seem to be genetically-programmed to see the whole point of its existence as engulfing my whole roof, and eventually tearing it off.  I'll also add in some composted, degraded cowshit, which is freely available in the newsletters from the local branch of the Republican Party. Black plastic isn't the prettiest, though it can be hidden underneath straw (which also has the advantage of stopping the soil actually cooking whatever vegetables are attempting to grow in it). But the weeds will have No Fucking Chance Whatsoever, since you only cut holes in it big enough to stick your plants in, and then puncture it a few times where the rainwater puddles (not good for plants, though great for families of mosquitoes). At this point, with the weeds firmly established, there isn't much of an option outside of napalm or Agent Orange, as used as weedkilling and genocidal techniques in the Vietnam War. These are not only ecologically-toxic, but are also are inflected by the spread of neoliberal capitalism through American Imperialism. (Jesus. I'm at it again).

The problem, however, is this: plastic doesn't bio-degrade. Nothing on earth can digest plastic. I've recently re-started the compost pile, in which microbes digest the vegetable scraps from our kitchen (which, when you start collecting them for compost, adds up to an astonishing amount). But plastic sticks around. Practically forever. It's a bit like nuclear waste. We have no idea how to deal with it other than to stick it in the ground, what kind of effect it has on the local ecology (other than making fish become asexual and causing everything to glow), or even if we'll remember to tell our great-grandchildren where the fuck we decided to put it. Anyone with a great-grandparent (or, in my wife's case, a spouse) that cannot remember for the life of them where they left the car keys, will appreciate that it's the latter point that is perhaps the most worrying.

***I'm going to update this post fairly regularly as things go on, with pictures and the like, so check back. Enter your email in the "subscribe" box at the top left if you'd like to be notified of my tears, triumphs and tribulations in the world of gardening***

Aaron Swartz, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Libertarian Dilemma

Aaron Swartz's suicide last week presents a dilemma for libertarians. I'll get to that promptly but, first, a bit of background is necessary.

Swartz, a Harvard fellow and internet prodigy - just 14 when he helped design the architecture of RSS feeds and later going on to develop Reddit - was potentially facing decades in jail over charges of computer hacking. His alleged crime? Not training nuclear missiles on the USSR à la Wargames. Not recklessly riding around at supersonic speeds in hyperspace on virtual motorcycles à la Tron. Not even breaking into the Pentagon while looking for UFOs à la the as yet unmade movie about the plight of British hacker Gary McKinnon. 

No, Swartz was alleged to have used MIT university's computer network to hack into JStor, a repository of academic journals. He allegedly intended to (but didn't) publish the content online and make it available to anyone interested via peer-to-peer networks, much like movies and music are (illegally) shared. The distinction between freely downloading academic research and One Direction's latest album, however, is an important one. Those who aren't students or faculty members of universities - and only those universities wealthy enough to afford subscriptions to archives like JStor - don't get to access the "social stock of knowledge" contained therein. It is not simply a question of choosing not to virtually shoplift just because anarchy and looting are part and parcel of the internet. It is about securing access to knowledge which lies in heavily-guarded, and exquisitely capitalist, intellectual fiefdoms.

Academic publishing is one of the most lucrative businesses out there. While JStor is a not-for-profit entity, the bigger fish in the pond like Elsevier - the ones with the big-bucks, patent-pending research and potentially monetizable ideas geared toward curing cancer or reversing global warming - have profit margins of between 32 and 42%. Anyone with a scintilla of business experience will know that this is an absolute goldmine; to put this in perspective, fast food restaurants have razor-thin margins of around 5%. Academic publishing is the mother of all money-spinners precisely because of the way that academia is set up. Professors and lecturers are not paid merely to teach and take long summer vacations, contrary to popular belief. They are expected to conduct research and publish their findings in academic journals: the mantra "publish or perish" is often quoted, and with good reason. Not publishing research is a quick and effective way out of a job. And this is true for academics working in all disciplines, whether one is patenting a design for the next moon rocket, estimating the total surface area of an Indian elephant, or researching scrotal asymmetry in man and ancient sculpture. You should, by now, be beginning to cotton on to the ruse. Academics research and publish as part of their job. They produce content, effectively for free, which is then aggregated by publishers and sold back as expensive subscriptions to the libraries of the very universities where the academics work. It is, in short, a work of genius as a business model. Morally, it is a knuckleduster short of a mugging.

An internet pioneer, Swartz was nothing if not scrupulously consistent. He attempted to do what the internet does best: democratizing knowledge (or, at least, what it does second-best after equalizing stupidity). For its part, JStor distanced itself from the gung-ho zeal of US prosecutors (though MIT didn't). Being a not-for-profit and being rather more focused on the arcane fields of 19th-century Hungarian basket-weaving and interdisciplinary frisbee studies (rather than, say, genome science or renewable energy innovations), JStor isn't really going to lose out financially if a researcher at an impoverished university in an under-developed country has free access to the latest edition of the Journal of Historical Burmese Adverbs. But US prosecutors saw both the financial and career rewards of successfully achieving a conviction, as well as the importance of a precedent warning others that actions like those of Swartz would be treated with zero tolerance. Doubtless, the profit-making publishers tacitly supported this approach. It is by no means demonstrated that the prosecution and the prospect of decades in a federal prison directly led to Swartz's suicide - Swartz seemingly had a complex history of mental health problems - but it can't have helped. Indeed, his family are pretty adamant that this was a decisive factor.

And so to the conundrum for libertarians. One would think that libertarians would be all for the democratization of knowledge. The fundamental tenet of economic libertarians is that governments are not just evil, but that they are the dead hand to the counterpart of Adam Smith's "invisible hand". As such, the apparently hulking inefficiency of governments means they are unable to know nor react to the vast range of information which constitutes "market signals". For libertarians, this means that individuals, not governments, are much better positioned to rationally act to regulate the free market. (There are obviously glaring holes in this argument that could be pointed out by an unexceptionally intelligent five year old, but let's just take this as axiomatic for our purposes). A key problem for libertarians, therefore, is squaring off Swartz's alleged liberating of knowledge against the fact that, legally, the content of academic publishing is intellectual (and therefore private) property. A second issue is that libertarians wish to diminish government and the state ideally to the point of vanishing entirely. Yet it is the state which funds federal prosecutors to ruthlessly pursue the likes of Aaron Swartz in the name of protecting private property.

So, libertarians: which is it? Do we protect the freedom of the individual citizen to disseminate knowledge for the benefit of other individuals to make informed decisions in the marketplace? Or do we protect the rights of corporations to restrict access to knowledge only to those individuals who can afford it by dint of economic resources, or membership of a university?

*** Update 1/23: The HuffPost picked this story up yesterday, and featured in in their Politics, Tech and College sections (!) Only a few comments as yet, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. In particular, some libertarians seem to take issue with the fact that I'm allegedly misrepresenting the (well, "a") libertarian position on "intellectual property". More on that issue later. ***

Why I Write

This was kind of a New Year's resolution: to try and find time each day just to write about whatever comes to mind, based on what's happening in the geopolitical clusterfuck that we call "the world".

So, here it is.

If you know me from the real world or Facebook, you'll know that much of the content will be links elsewhere, with a commentary consisting of equal parts bitter cynicism and an off-kilter sense of humour. If you didn't spot the allusion to Orwell in the title of this post, it's probably worth noting that I sit fairly far on the political left. In fact, now I live in the US, I'm actually so far to the left I sometimes drop off the radar and re-appear on the other side of the screen. Not that this means I suddenly become right-wing, but rather that the American political radar is broken: there is no left in American politics. And if you've just read that sentence and decided I'm anti-American: I'm not.

I'm anti-certain parts of American socio-politics, particularly anything which happens to be supportive of religious fundamentalism or gun rights, or doctrinaire interpretations of the sanctity of the free market. In short, I'm anti-libertarian, where "libertarian" in this context is understood not in its more benign social guise, but the new, nastier version of Republicanism: a combination of fascism and neoliberal capitalism dressed up as "freedom". More on that later, but  - briefly - I have an issue with political and discursive sleights of hand which transform the right of the individual to be free from oppression and exploitation into the right of the individual to be free to exploit and oppress others.

And, to demonstrate that my ire isn't solely directed at the American version of this, I'm deeply critical of the discourse of libertarianism wherever it appears in the world: as such, I'm on the offensive against globalisation and corporatisation on a broader scale. I save particular venom especially for the current British government.

This blog is called alter/narrative for a reason (in fact, it should probably be pluralised). These are my re-readings, re-interpretations and re-explanations of dominant narratives in politics and the media. They are my opinions, and mine alone (my employer's legal representatives, please take note). They're not always palatable. They're rarely moderate. They're never final. I don't claim to be speaking truth to power. I don't claim to be deconstructing everything from some omniscient, objective, value-free perspective. I don't claim to have all the answers. But my opinions are honestly stated, at least at the time I write them.

Feel free to comment on, caterwaul at or criticize anything I write here. Links are always very welcome, too. But what I certainly have neither the desire nor the time to do is to debunk the minutiae of each and every whack-job, out-there conspiracy theory in the known universe, so save that for somewhere else.

PS. Please bear in mind that this is a work-in-progress, which is why it looks a little thin at the moment. But, insh'allah, I'll be adding new stuff fairly rapidly. Social media whore that I am, please note that you can like/share/tweet/[insert corporatized verb of your choice] the content here on the "More" drop-down menu on the top left of the page, or via the relevant buttons under each post.