For laughs, here’s another funny-faced Clinton image. Except she’s with meeeeee! And we look equally horrible. And I’m actually about 3 inches taller, but I shrunk down for the photo so she would feel more powerful. Her presidential campaign HQ was on the floor below my old office, so when she came to visit I thought I’d lay aside my Obama allegiance for an afternoon. I remember being struck by how tired she seemed, and felt bad for her. Remind me never to run for president.

I lived in the East Bay for a summer, and have many friends in Oakland presently. I know there’s a lot of mobile videos floating out there right now, but I thought I’d post just one of them to illustrate how alarmingly police state-ish we seem to be becoming. If I was Mister Obama, I would address this. Say what you will about mob culture, mob thought, mass unorganized action, hazy goals, hazy ethics, fearful authorities, etc. We still live in a country where freedom of assembly is a right, and violence against citizens can and should be avoided. Obviously many people are upset about many things right now. And this movement in particular is way bigger than the global anti-war protests of February 2003. Someone should be paying attention.

(This isn’t the clip I wanted to show, but a longer and differently edited version. Still, it makes a point. In one scene one of the guys is wearing an MIT t-shirt. I actually feel like I’ve seen him around campus, but that might just be my overly active imagination. Anyway, skip to 2:15 for its actual start.)

Anyway. Ran into an old college pal on the streets of Brooklyn the other day. He won an Emmy this year for his writing on The Colbert Report, but here’s a clip from The Daily Show (sorry, Opus) that I think does a great job of summarizing OWS:

Our intelligent and sincere colleague C. asked a pertinent and articulate question about how one could have this discussion at all without addressing Wikileaks, especially as a whistleblower is currently being tortured by the U.S. military. I bit my lip at this point. I bit it hard. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the question was valid, or that Mr. Crowley wasn’t capable of answering adequately (in fact, his personal opinion was frank and laudable) but I was sad that we were heading in an offensive/defensive direction, rather than the stated goal of an informal discussion and idea generation around new media solutions. I’ve been a human rights activist for years (look at my CV), but my heart kind of went out to this man, the exact same age as my mother, with his stylish pink tie and kind enthusiasm. Within hours, his responses were all over international news outlets (go ahead, Google it), and this morning he’s been getting calls by all sorts of people wanting to confirm his statements. Consequently, they’re questioning Pentagon officials too.

And all this is fine, and even in many ways remarkable…but I can’t help feel this sense of sadness for public officials sometimes — especially those who perhaps feel one way about an issue but must represent the government, on the record, in another way. Didn’t he just want to walk around this beautiful Media Lab and look at the robots? Or the wearable computing projects on the fourth floor? Or even our projects at C4? Didn’t he want to have a coffee and a cookie and gaze out the window over the hazy Charles while chatting with some students for 57 minutes?

This is not what public officials sign up for. I know that. But the anthropologist in me is sympathetic, not for his position as a politician but for his position as a human being. The whole time there was just one question I wanted to ask him, but didn’t because it sounds stupid: “Do you ever miss the old days? Before all this instantaneous communication and rapidly evolving technology?” Does the White House ever feel pulled between wanting to solicit feedback and crowdsource tech solutions from the populace, and pining for the days when the gov still had control of state information and communication (at least to some extent)? I mean my God, this is the last generation of politicians who will clearly recall the days of faxes and phone calls and hand-written correspondence as much as emails and handheld VOIP conferences. It’s a fascinating historical moment, and more fascinating that the Asst. Sec. of State would come to us for suggestions about how to use new media to ensure domestic security & democratic participation.

Because I was just interested in the issue, and in Mr. Crowley as a human being, I did not blog about the meeting, or tweet about the meeting (well, I tweeted about his lovely tie, but that was it). And now I address the part of myself that always wanted to someday become an ambassador: stick with anthropology and filmmaking and mobile technology, Bon! Don’t ever go into politics. You can’t pee anymore without someone in the next stall tweeting about how much tea you’ve had to drink. And really, isn’t that the greatest irony of attending a new media brainstorming meeting with MIT researchers? Nothing is sacred.

If you’ve never seen a rubber plantation, it’s pretty amazing and beautiful. Thousands of rows of skinny trees all in a line. Little cups on all the trees. Crazy bugs. A stillness throughout the jungle. But the Burmese workers there are often attacked, murdered and raped as they tap the trees overnight, and are not usually paid well. This Irrawaddy report on life on the rubber plantation noticeably lacks mention of the extremely repressive and genocidal dictatorship in Burma which is the REAL reason people flee to work in Thailand, but nevertheless, it gives you a good sense of life there (story starts around 00:42). I was on this particular plantation twice: