Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and the Fallacy of the ‘Lone Gunman’

It is worth remembering, the next time you see Trayvon Martin‘s parent’s on television, trying to explain their pleas for justice, that you are looking at human beings who, in the giant totem pole that mankind has constructed of Humans Who Have Suffered Terrible Losses, occupy a fairly high position.

The killing of Trayvon Martin is a classically American nightmare: a suburb somewhere, a dark night, a young black man on the streets, guns in the hands of people who imagine it will make them safer, calls to 911 that provide grim, brief, staccato evidence of a deadly, preventable encounter. And at the end of it all, a dead man, grieving parents, a police force and a city administration making mealy-mouthed responses. When we reach that stage, a sickening sense of deja vu strikes, for we have memorized the rest of the script: a little outrage that soon blows itself out, some protest marches, featuring as usual, some ‘leaders’ of the black community, bland, banal responses from the police force, and a meandering march toward ‘justice,’ which, more often than not, ends in miscarriage.

There is another, well-established trope as component of this recurring tragedy: character testimonials about the killer, about how he could not have been a ‘racist.’ But the fallacy in this sort of defense is in imagining that visible, overt racism must reside in the final cause we identify. But more often that not, the final pull of the trigger, as in this case, was merely the spearpoint of a weapon that had been aimed at Trayvon Martin’s head for a very long time. Zimmerman lives in a society infected by racism; when he finally shot Trayvon, he wasn’t acting alone; he was accompanied by anything and everything that has conspired to make it the case that young black men in this country are taking substantial risks when they venture out alone into a dark street. Zimmerman had been convinced, a long time ago, that the right way for him to assuage his fears of young black men was to work it out, dramatically, with a gun. He would take revenge for all the fear that been visited on him in the past. In his fatal decision to pursue Trayvon with a deadly weapon, Zimmerman was the final instantiation of a set of social forces that had been acting around, and on him, for a very long time.

In Chapter 2 of  Law and Literature, Richard Posner suggests that an entire genre of literature can be read as making the case that the rule of law should replace social systems of revenge. With the Stand Your Ground law, the vigilantism it has sparked, and with the relentless machinations of the NRA to keep firearms in the hands of one and all, it is clear we have pulled off a rather remarkable conjuring trick: we have written violence and revenge back into the law. Or to put it in more simple terms, we have written back ‘taking the law into your own hands’ into the law. Zimmerman was merely the Executive Branch of this legal system.

Susan Matt on Homesickness, the ‘New Globalist’, and Technology

Susan Matt suggests that homesickness still afflicts the ‘new globalists,’ the cosmopolitans who would live ‘abroad,’ whether permanently or temporarily, away from home (“The New Globalist is Homesick”, New York Times, March 21, 2012). And technology, precisely by bringing them back into closer contact with loved ones and old haunts, and assuaging loneliness and longing, might actually be making things worse; it might remind them ever more acutely of just what it is that they are missing. This ‘new’ homesickness  seems at odds with the foot-loose sensibility that is supposed to be the hallmark of the connected, wired, constantly traveling world. The homesickness which afflicted the immigrant in the past is ‘back,’ and it is ever more persistent.

I’m not sure that Matt’s statement below represents the discovery of a genuine novelty:

In nearly a decade’s research into the emotions and experiences of immigrants and migrants, I’ve discovered that many people who leave home in search of better prospects end up feeling displaced and depressed. Few speak openly of the substantial pain of leaving home.

It might be that academics are now paying more attention to homesickness, but conversations about it and the infection of migrant enclaves, conversations and sensibilities with relentless nostalgia has been an enduring feature of migrants’ lives and it has remained impervious to the passage of time. This new homesickness is not new at all; it is just being paid attention to. Those living the lives of voluntary exile have always felt homesick, have never feared talking about it, and have always let it be writ large in their emotional and physical responses to their new worlds.

Consider for instance, that alcoholism is a common problem among international students in American universities; that expat cinema, for as long as can be remembered, has been concerned with the longing for a mythical, displaced land; consider how much the dilemma of the  torn, almost-schizophrenic, personality of the immigrant has been a feature of diasporic literatures. What are these if not manifestations of homesickness, permeating through the minds and bodies of immigrants?

It might be that the immigrant does not bring up homesickness in conversations with ‘locals,’ fearing these confessions might be viewed as evidence of dislike for his chosen home, a failure to assimilate properly, and reason to regard him as outsider in those conversational spaces. But elsewhere, in more welcoming climes, conversation all too easily returns to talk of home, of what remains behind, of the next trip, of the difficulties in reconciliation with two lands that leave them torn asunder psychically.

Matt is right to note that technology–whether it is because of the Skype call back home, the cable television channel in their own language or anything else like that–does not seem to help this homesickness. It cannot. It only serves to remind them that nothing can ever replace the felt sensation of place, the encounter with sounds, light, and smells, born of  the imprint of childhood experiences long-ago sensed and internalized, that  are a feature of physical contacts with ‘home,’ that tap into sensations long ago integrated into their minds and bodies. The phone call and the web cam will not tap into these; nothing quite replaces the walk out of the customs hall, past the immigration desk, out into the arrival hall, and the drive back ‘home’.

The Practice of Science According to Article Abstracts and Headers

Sometimes close reading of article headers can pay rich dividends. On Monday morning, my Philosophy of Biology class and I were slated to discuss a debate crucial to understanding adaptationist  paradigms: the role of bodyplan (Bauplan) constraints in restricting an organism’s  occupancy of possible points in developmental space, which complicates our understanding of the supposed ubiquity and optimific qualities of adaptation. This cluster of debates was kicked off by the Spandrels of San Marco controversy (which later morphed into the Gould-Dennett dustup).

For reading, I had assigned the original Gould-Lewontin article, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme“, and Chapter 10 of Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. The class discussion on Monday provided a very good example of how a crucial debate in science and the philosophy of science could be put into a broader context. I began the class by putting up on the projection screen, the first page of the G-L article (from the link above); in the seventy-five minutes of class, we did not get beyond a discussion of the title and the abstract; unpacking the meta-data of the article was extraordinarily useful.

As my students and I noted, this was a reproduced scholarly article, one originally published by a reputable source of scientific knowledge–The Royal Society of London; this led to a consideration of the relative  worth of different sources of scientific knowledge and the standards that might evolve for the publication and promulgation of scientific advances, and relatedly, to the role of copyright law in scientific settings. The fact that this article was now available on the Internet spoke to another set of criteria affecting its current availability. We noted that while author affiliations were not available, we could look them up to find out that in this case, the two scientists worked at a very reputable institution; furthermore, the order of the names at least indicated to us that they might have considered alphabetical ordering of their names as a way to brush past the issue of supposed priority in the authoring.

With this preliminary analysis out of the way, we looked at the abstract itself, whose opening lines establish it as the opening volley of a polemical battle that is sought to be engaged:

An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past forty years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent.

The first sentence clearly lays out the target of the argument to follow; the second provocatively uses the word ‘faith’ to establish what the authors take to be problematic about the target of their critique.

And then, we were off into a consideration of the article’s arguments as foreshadowed in the abstract. But importantly, we were no longer thinking about them in isolation from the larger, social and political setting of the science, the debates within it (and their rhetorical aspects). At the least, our little close reading of a piece of scientific knowledge had made clear many of the institutional features in a domain of scientific knowledge that underwrite and prop up its claims, and yes, its evolution over time.

Art House Double Features: A Day (or Night) at the Movies

The impecunious graduate student’s best friend is the arthouse cinema double-feature. The evidence is in and the case is clear: for payoff in a diverse set of dimensions, the cinema double-feature is the winner hands down. Sure, the wine-and-cheese reception might get the budding academic a date or two–paper acceptances, book contracts, meaningful academic conversation,  and completed grant proposals are all unlikely–but an arthouse double-feature uses up many hours of the day, provides easy procrastination, relief from the relentless call to decision-making, and a rich storehouse of namedropping material to sustain one through lean times.

In the past, I’ve leaned heavily on arthouses to help occupy hours that otherwise would have been spent digging through tomes of assigned reading from class and exam lists.  Circa 1997-2000, I relied on the Anthology Film Archives in the Lower East Side on 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street. (I lived close by on 5th Street, between Avenues A and B). The Archive ran several series of double-features as part of festivals or retrospectives. Tickets for these were available at student discount rates; for double features this meant $5 for a pair of movies. In terms of the time-money equation, this worked out to roughly $1.25 per hour of movie watching.  (The dollar rates were a little lower when I saw Pasolini’s Medea and Oedipus twin-bill.) The Archives were never a fancy venue;  its main theater was a little ragged around the edges in its seats; I never remember buying any snacks; even if there were any, I had no money for them. I got my seat, snuggled in, and settled down for a double-dose of distraction. A simple business indeed.

A couple of years later, then a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales, I found myself patronizing Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema, an institution where I apparently needed to make an appearance if I was ever going to earn any local arthouse cred. I lived on Bourke Street, all the way down at the intersection of Bourke and Cleveland Streets in Redfern, and the walk to the Chauvel in Paddingon took me the better part of 20 minutes (or more). But that walk down Oxford Street’s many attractions always put me in the right frame of mind for cinematic self-indulgence. My need for distraction in Sydney was greater than it had been in New York; I was on my own, and still finding my way around. The double-feature at Chauvel’s Cinematheque quickly became a staple item in my entertainment plans for the weekend, only displaced in the spring and summer by cricket season. Once inside, it was the glory of complete immersion in the movies, lost for a few hours as I worked my way through the pair of offerings on display.

If there ever was any doubt that movies are meant for solitary enjoyment, the double-feature dispenses with it. They just aren’t the sorts of things you do in company; a double-feature at the movies is a solo enterprise, where the cinephile discovers just how comfortable he is being by himself with just the movies to keep him company; when it comes to movie fandom, it separates the men from the boys.

Marino on Kierkegaard and Anxiety

Gordon Marino suggests the patron saint of Danish angst, the ‘Danish doctor of dread’,  Soren Kierkegaard, can offer us, through his theoretical and conceptual insights into anxiety, a view of ourselves more philosophically informative than the pharmaceutical-enforced rendering of humans as collections of discrete pathologies, each amenable to a piece-meal isolation and ‘treatment’. In doing so, Kierkegaard promises us one of existentialism’s hard-fought rewards, encounters with freedom, found precisely in those spaces where its terrible costs are extracted in encounters with existential dread, anxiety, and angst.

Marino suggests that Kierkegaard, in asking us to read and follow him on anxiety, is encouraging a species of anxious response that enables an understanding of the value of the most persistent, enduring, and subtle of existential responses: the central unease with the very fact of being. Since the confrontations with this sort of fundamental existential anxiety take place at the boundaries or limits of our understandings of ourselves, in moments of quiet self-reflection and intense attention paid to the terrible possibilities of our possible choices, our encounters with anxiety always holds the possibilities of innovative self-discovery. The psychic burden of anxiety is then plausibly understood as offset by the gains in self-knowledge it affords; to experience anxiety is to experience our capacity for freedom. To allow ourselves to experience anxiety is to engage in a very peculiar kind of self-observation, sensitive to one’s deepest affective responses, alert to the shapelessness of our lives and to the anxiety it provokes in bringing us face to face with our responsibility for mapping our lives anew at every lived instant.

In this way, the experience of anxiety–precisely because it affords a moment for discovery, reconceptualization and self-construction–is not something to be medicated out of existence. The experience of the anxiety can be unpleasant and sometimes, precisely because it might have generated paralyzing inaction, trigger the palliative response of intoxication or medication. But a living with the phenomenology and the felt experience of the anxiety, a conscious ‘wallowing’ and ‘inspection’, as it were, can enable an investigation of the self and the particular economy of its lived life. The rejection of anxiety, the desire to not feel it, might be revelatory of another, deeply felt, perhaps-even-more -anxious response; to medicate the anxiety is a rejection of a path to self-knowledge.

So the most significant aspect of Kierkegaard’s paying attention to anxiety is that by noticing it, and talking about it, and acknowledging it, not as pathology, but as informative part of ourselves, it becomes not something to be expelled, but to be welcomed as a message from ourselves, one to be placed alongside, and integrated with others like it in the past. As Kierkegaard says, “Only a prosaic stupidity maintains that this (anxiety) is a disorganization.” In saying this, Kierkegaard is suggesting that our view of anxiety as pathology can only lead to regarding ourselves as pathology. To stay with anxiety, to stop and respond to its challenge, is to accept a form of dialog with ourselves, to engage with a species of inquiry fundamental to ourselves.

Adaptation, Abstraction

This spring semester, teaching Philosophy of Biology–especially the Darwinian model of adaptation and environmental filtration– has reminded me of the philosophical subtleties of  ‘abstract model’ and  ‘abstraction’. More generally, it has reminded me  that philosophy of science achieves particularly sharp focus in the philosophy of biology, and that classroom discussions are edifying in crucial ways.

In its most general form, the Darwinian theory of adaptation by ‘natural selection’ states that adaptation results if:

There is reproduction with some inheritance of traits in the next generation.

In each generation, among the inherited traits there is always some variation.

The inherited variants differ in their fitness, in their adaptedness to the environment.

In teaching this version (taken from: Richard Lewontin, Adaptation. Scientific American.  239: 212-228 in Rosenberg and Shea’s Philosophy of Biology) I point out how much this concise statement of the theory leaves unspecified–the entity reproducing, ‘traits,’ the mechanisms of reproduction and inheritance, the sources of variance,  the nature of ‘fitness’, the extent of the environment, and the mechanisms and characteristics of the adaptation–even as it provides an explanatory framework of great power and scope. (This under-specification allows  the model’s statement too, in terms of interactors and replicators.)

The generality of the Darwinian specification reminds us of the practicing mathematician’s adage that the sparsest, barest definitions result in the richest, most interesting theorems. In this case, the theory works with a diversity of hereditary mechanisms and sources of variation, and does not require or imply any particular one. Rather, it merely requires that there be some  mechanism for heredity and some source of variation in heritable traits for every generation in every line of beings. I think it’s a fair bet to say that if there were any appreciative reactions in class to this discussion of the theory, they were grounded in a grasp of the theory’s generality.

Getting clear about the abstraction of the Darwinian model is crucial in understanding why it does not issue teleological explanations, why it cannot be understood as ‘progressive’, and why it is plausibly extensible to different levels of theoretical explanation in more than one domain of application. Later, our descriptions of  blind variation and selective retention as algorithmic processes enabled another reckoning with the abstraction of the model’s substrate neutrality. (Discussing this with my students reminded me of teaching the multiply-realizable computational model of the mind in classes on the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, especially as our discussion segued into an attempt to understand the abstract notion of computation.) In general, I sought to clarify why the model specified above is an ‘abstract’ one and what relationship its abstraction has to its generality and its explanatory scope.

Unsurprisingly, at moments in my exposition, I found myself rediscovering admiration at the theory’s Spartan outlines.  I was pleasantly surprised too, by how sophisticated my students’ interjections and questions became as they attempted to take on and apply the theory; they forced me to think on my feet in addressing them. More than anything else, their class responses reminded  me that a particularly important species of learning takes place in the course of teaching.

Reflections on Translations – III: The Pleasures of Iranian and German Movies

I like many products of contemporary Iranian cinema: for instance, the movies of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Majid Majidi–to name only three of a long and distinguished line-up of directors. Theirs is a neorealism with a compellingly different grammar from that of other products of the genre. There is another, not-so-overt reason for the pleasure I take in watching Iranian movies: their soundtracks are in Persian. Given the history of Persian influence on Urdu, Hindustani and Hindi in the Indian sub-continent and the significant presence of Persian words in the vocabularies of these languages, to watch an Iranianmovie is to be able to enjoy little, pleasurable moments of comprehension even while being the slave of the subtitle.

In some ways, this pleasure of mine is related to that I take in watching German movies. I’ve taken precisely one semester of German: the Grundstufe Eins at the Max Mueller Institute. That brief but rigorous introduction equipped me with enough German to conduct rudimentary conversations and to understand some movie dialog as I follow subtitles. But there is a crucial difference. I learned German during my university years. My sense of familiarity with the language is of a markedly different kind. The little starts of recognition as I watch a German movie trigger a largely  intellectual sympathy; my pleasure is partially grounded in being able to pierce the veil of linguistic unfamiliarity and in making a connection with an acquired knowledge and skill. There is perhaps some relief at having postponed intellectual decrepitude.  (And who knows, perhaps there’s a little art-house, movie-snob smugness too. Why deny it?)

In the case of movies in Persian, when I hear and recognize a Persian word as one that I know in Urdu/Hindustani/Hindi, something deeper seems to stir. While in a straight-forward sense, I’m reacting to the insightful pleasure of a quasi-etymological lesson–here lies the root of a previously familiar word–perhaps it’s also the sense of having come into contact with an entire history, of having made a connection with a diverse set of cultures, of reaching out into a span of time that, at the very least, extends for several hundred years. The impenetrability of the Iranian context, made even more fraught by its location in the current political geography of my mind, and seemingly shrouded by an incomprehensible language, suddenly lifts at that moment, and I feel a resonance, through the spoken word, with the characters on the screen. (As is ironically appropriate, these moments of connection are more likely to take place while I watch an Iranian movie than when I watch movies in some Indian languages. Adoor Gopalakrishnan‘s movies–in Malyalam–would be considerably less informed for me; to watch them requires exclusive dependence on the English subtitles. This is not the case with movies in say, Bengali or Gujarati.)

This brief encounter is transitory; I cannot understand all the spoken lines, and I certainly cannot read Persian. Then the box snaps shut again, and I’m back on the outside looking in.

Workplace Coercion, the Military, and Resisting Superiors

Corey Robin’s post on Arizona’s new anti-birth control legislation centers on a recurring concern of his: coercion in the private sector work-place, which remains largely impervious to constitutional circumscriptions of state power. I want to use this opportunity to talk about coercion in a very particular workplace: the military.

The coercion of subordinates by superiors in the military workplace is pretty much a constitutive aspect of it; there is a  ‘chain-of-command’ structure to be internalized, and the constant reminder that failure to obey orders–speedily and effectively–can be a matter of life and death. In terms of its sheer ruthlessness, its pure, unadulterated veneration of the superior, its near-perfect integration into the very concept of uniformed service, and in the sense of futility it can induce in a junior, there is nothing quite like a military hierarchy. Obey, conform, or hit the brig.

To run up against an obnoxious manager in any workplace is bad luck indeed; if it happens in the military, it can bring about career ruination. There is seemingly no recourse, nowhere to turn; very few juniors in the military complain about their superiors, for very little can be done. Nothing is more common in the tales that servicemen tell about their times in the services than the story of the sergeant, the captain, the lieutenant, the air marshal, who was the “biggest bastard that walked the face of the earth.” The stories of career trajectories derailed by the malign intervention of a superior are legendary among those who serve in the military; if a retired veteran ever urges his children to not bother emulating him, in all likelihood it is because he cannot bear the thought of his children going through the same agonizing repression he did.

Given this, it should have come as no surprise to me that in the many interviews I conducted with veterans–for the two books I have written on military aviation history–the most vivid conflicts recounted, even by those men that had fought in wars, were not against their ostensible enemies, but against their superiors on their own sides. The same man who could brush past, in a minute or two, the story of how he had carried out a rocket attack on tanks in the face of raging anti-aircraft fire, would take a leisurely ten minutes or so to describe to me how, back on the ground, he had bucked the trend, stood up for himself, and asserted common-sense, or perhaps just a little bit of the contrarian, in the face of a superior’s thickheadedness. This clash would be described in great detail, with every contour of the conflict mapped out with great precision: this is where I was sought to be oppressed, and this is where I resisted.

Sometimes, I wonder, if this reaction of theirs was revelatory of an insight worth transferring to other workplaces: that sometimes, resistance to an insidiously planted and constantly reinforced regime of power and regulation can be harder than summoning up the courage to face up to sudden, even-if-prepared-for, danger.

Nietzsche, Power, and Bible-readers on the Subway

Last evening, after a full day of work teaching Philosophy of Biology, a seminar on Nietzsche, and conducting a teaching observation of a graduate fellow, I left campus for my evening weightlifting session. I was feeling run down, and not a hundred percent. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, perhaps a nagging cluster of cold-sore throat related symptoms that were insidiously undermining my ability to face up to the world. As I rode the subway to the gym, I felt uninspired and sleepy; the book I had intended to read only had a few of its pages turned.

Thankfully, the lifting went well. I was scheduled to back squat (Crossfit South Brooklyn is following the Wendler Cycle for our strength programming), and after lifting 185×5, and 205×5, I did my maximum-repetitions set at 230 (for 12 reps). By the end of it, my legs were shaking, I was close to hyperventilating, and a clarity-inducing  surge of euphoria had seemingly cleansed me of the sluggishness of the afternoon.

I changed, and made my way to the 7th Avenue subway station to head home. As I waited for the train, I pulled out my copy of Karl Jasper‘s Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (JHU Press, 1997) , and, somehow emboldened, began to read:

The pyschology of the feeling to power: Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘will to power’ is by no means identical with his conception of the drives that aim to provide a feeling of power. The one relates to genuine being that has become extra-empirical; the other to observable psychological experience. The one involves an abstract will, intent upon determining the course of its own being; the other, the conscious pursuit of the enjoyment attending the feeling of power.

I stared back at the page. Really, was this where I had left off, and now, resumed reading?

As I sat on the bench, a lady on her way back home sat down next to me and opened up a book. It was the Bible. She opened it to Numbers 25, and began reading. I sat there for a few seconds, and then, unable to resist, spoke: “Excuse me, are you reading the Bible straight through or picking selections?” The lady smiled, and said, “I’m reading it straight through.” I then asked, “Have you read the Bible before?” She smiled again, and said, “No, I’ve read it many times before.  This time my reading has been a bit slower; I got bogged down in Leviticus for a bit.” I nodded; sometimes I too, get mired in parts of books I read.

A B train pulled in and discharged its passengers, who swarmed around us to head for the exits, as we sat there with our books open on our laps. I wondered if my new acquaintance would ask me about what I was reading, and how I would describe it if she hadn’t heard of Nietzsche. She then spoke again, “Are you a believer?” I replied, “No, but I’m always curious about people that appear to be serious readers.” Her reply was made inaudible by the arrival of the Q train. I bade her take care as I headed for a subway car.

I wonder what Nietzsche would have thought about it all: a hundred years after his death, philosophy professors, on their way home after weightlifting, reading books about his writings, sitting next to readers of the Bible, all the while ensconced in the bowels of a gigantic subterranean transportation system in an American city.

Houston, We have a HotSpot Problem in Austin #SXSW

BBH Labs thought it was being clever, and perhaps even slightly humanitarian, when, at this year’s South by SouthWest technology conference, it enlisted thirteen volunteers from a homeless shelter, strapped Wi-Fi devices onto their bodies, gave them business cards and T-shirts that read, (for example), “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot” and sent them out into the throngs of the technorati to keep their phones and laptops humming. The volunteers were paid $20 a day, and any “tips” customers gave them for the wireless services provided.

Tweetstorms, and accusations of BBH’s marketing ploy being “something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia” duly follow. The central accusation? That BBH had ‘dehumanized’ the homeless by turning them into providers of Wi-Fi services. BBH’s volunteers, note, did not say “I am Clarence and I can provide you wireless services for a fee’. Rather they were the service, by being the HotSpot (I’m a Hotspot). Without exaggeration, this controversy would have been considerably less acute had the former line been used.

BBH’s stunt is not markedly different from the many ways in which the human body is utilized for marketing: young women wearing tight T-shirts advertise car-washes, human Statues of Liberty advocate for tax-return preparation services, animal-suit-wearing-youngsters advertise electronic goods sales. The list of these humiliating encounters with some advertising agency’s brainstorm is a very, very long one. (The dogged persistence of these human billboards in adverse weather conditions often seems like a particularly cruel instantiation of “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers…”)

Given the ubiquity of such advertising strategies, it is perhaps astonishing that we have any outrage left over to be directed at BBH. And in each of these scenarios, were accusations of dehumanization to be leveled, the defense mounted would always be the same, “What would you have the unemployed do? Stand around at street corners, selling drugs?” Or, “Gee, we tried to provide employment to people, give them some dignity and this is what we get in return.”

The fallacy of the false dichotomy was never on better display. Apparently, car washes cannot be advertised without skimpily-clad women, tax services without mobile Statues of Liberty and so on. Similarly, there was no better way for BBH to have shown its support for the homeless than by making them into mobile HotSpots. No more visible, provocative, or genuinely-engaging-with-the-homeless-issue strategy was possible other than by using their bodies as wireless hubs, and paying them what seems like below-minimum-wage rates (plus tips).  Thus, straightforwardly, “We need to advertise our services and there is no way we can do so without dehumanizing these employees of ours. If not this, then unemployment. The choice is clear: so-called ‘dignity’ or employment? Make up your minds.”

Even if fallacious, there is something admirably honest in this defense: Business riches and profit margins require the immiseration of one class with the exploitation of the human body in the workplace one its resultant side-effects. BBH might not have had this explicitly in mind, but at the least, they, and their defenders appear to have successfully internalized a very particular component of the corporate zeitgeist.