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Saturday, Jan 21, 2012 2:00 PM UTC

The hard truth about Citizens United

On the second anniversary of a terrible decision, every proposed solution has a downside.

By Birthplace of the Citizens United decision (Credit: Orhan Cam via Shutterstock)

The movement to overturn the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling and confront the doctrine of “corporate personhood” stands at a perilous crossroads.

AlterNet

Across the country, two distinct strategies are converging on Congress. More than a million people have signed online petitions. State legislators, city and township governments, Democratic Party groups and unions have sponsored and passed measures in 23 states demanding that Congress pass a constitutional amendment to reassert and elevate the political speech of individual citizens and roll back the growing legal privileges of corporations.

The two approaches can be seen in the protest signs and sound bites proclaiming, “Money is Not Speech” and “Overturn Corporate Personhood.” But these slogans are not calling for the same remedy, especially when transformed into legal language in 10 proposals that have been introduced in the current Congress.

The first would address campaign finance setbacks in a 35-year line of Supreme Court rulings, including the Citizens United ruling in 2010, which deregulated campaign spending by corporations and unions. The second would go further and seek to revoke the status of corporations as persons under the Constitution, rolling back more than a century of Supreme Court rulings.

These two approaches expose an emerging split among progressives with deeper problems that go beyond the steep if not improbable political climb required to adopt any constitutional amendment: passage by two-thirds of Congress followed by ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures.

With a few exceptions, the growing movement to overturn Citizens United and revoke corporate personhood is not being taken seriously beyond America’s liberal communities. The guardians of American capitalism—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican National Committee—do not even feel a need to attack it, unlike recent barbs aimed at the National Popular Vote campaign to reform the Electoral College.

Corporate America’s assessment that this activity is not yet a serious threat to their power is also shared by another key sector of the progressive spectrum. Many of the country’s top liberal constitutional scholars have been silent, as this bandwagon has gathered momentum. They sympathize with its goals but think its champions are not only overpromising to grassroots supporters but have not thought out what they want Congress to do. Nor do they think the frontline voices have done a good job explaining what is at stake beyond hurling bumper sticker slogans. In other words, they reach the same conclusion as America’s corporate titans: this clamor is not yet poised to upend the law behind America’s political system.

“I am really excited about the fact that there is so much public interest in this stuff and on the right side—the visceral sense that the Supreme Court has got it wrong,” said Dan Tokaji, co-editor of Election Law Journal and an Ohio State University professor of law. “But at the same time I’m uncomfortable with the bumper sticker-like critiques. It’s not like there’s a magic bullet. Every solution has a downside. It’s a matter of weighing costs and benefits. And that is especially true in campaign finance reform.”

“I do think the body of law from Buckley through Citizens United to Bennett needs readjustment, and I helped Rep. Donna Edwards draft one potential constitutional amendment,” said Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, one of the country’s leading constitutional scholars and a man liberals lobbied President Clinton to appoint to the Supreme Court. “But most of the constitutional amendments floating around seem to be seriously misguided; they would do both too much and too little.”

Such skepticism is not what amendment proponents, particularly those favoring the most sweeping ideas, believe or want to hear. They say there is a danger in doing too little; that a populist campaign is needed and working; and that an amendment reserving constitutional rights only for natural persons is on par with the post-Civil War amendments ending slavery and protecting former slaves as citizens.

“We are doing movement building in order to win a constitutional amendment within a decade,” said David Cobb, the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate and board member of the Move To Amend coalition, which has led much of grassroots organizing. “We have a meta-perspective about what is going on, but we also have a sense of movement history; in recognizing what it takes to actually get a lot of people in motion demanding systemic change. Our call is no more radical or will be no more difficult than the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, trade union movement or the Civil Rights movement.”

But liberal skeptics also include groups that have been helping local governments adopt laws subordinating corporate rights to community and individual rights in a range of environmental fights. These ordinances are below-the-radar equivalents to the recent Montana Supreme Court decision that upheld its century-old ban on corporate electoral spending. They all make a “compelling” claim, the highest standard in constitutional law, to affirm democratic rights.

“They’re good people and their heart is in the right place, but they’re not being helpful—as a matter of fact, they are doing damage,” said Ben Price, project director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which has helped 130 municipalities in a half-dozen east-central states–—including the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania–local anti-corporate ordinances in environmental fights. “They won’t bring the outcomes that are needed.”

“We don’t think that is the right strategic move at this time because it will be overturned,” Cobb said, when asked why his coalition’s members do not pursue CELDF-style changes in law, citing his own experience in Humboldt County, California, where a county ordinance was reversed in federal court. “And why will it be overturned; because corporations have constitutional rights, according to the federal district courts and U.S. Supreme Court. The ultimate win has to result in a constitutional amendment.”

This debate—to go narrow or to go big; to focus in Washington or in the states; or what is the relationship between divergent strategies—has not been heard on the airwaves as Americans see the big-spending excesses in the first 2012 presidential contests and as many liberal public interest groups focus on the anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. But it is a vast middle ground that is not esoteric or fruitless.

It is not difficult to understand the substance of the law or the choices before Congress. Do people want to see candidates like Newt Gingrich knocked from the lead in Iowa with millions of dollars in largely negative TV ads from super PACs, which Gingrich decried until a billionaire friend gave $5 million to a pro-Newt super PAC before the upcoming South Carolina primary? Do they want to see public financing as a way that non-wealthy candidates can run for federal office? Do they want to see corporations banned from spending money on ballot measures in states like California? Do they want to see limits imposed on all political donations and expenditures to prevent corruption? Do they want to see all money—above the smallest donations—flowing in and out of campaigns and electioneering reported in a timely way?

And what loopholes do people want to let slip into the latest reform proposals in Congress—since every amendment proposed thus far contains exceptions giving a way for people with the means to monopolize the microphone? Does it matter that groups representing communities of color, like the NAACP, could lose their rights to run as a non-profit corporation which includes the right of assembly and to speak on behalf of its members? Should property owners lose a constitutional due process right to sue if the government seizes their property?

These are some of the questions that are not being clearly discussed as many progressive groups are increasingly promoting punishing corporate America by revoking all their constitutional rights. But raising these very questions, elevating the public discussion around them, and getting to specifics is precisely what is needed before any prospect for reform will be taken more seriously.

Democracy’s Nemesis: The Supreme Court

“Rarely have so few imposed so much damage on so many,” is how Bill Moyers refers to the Supreme Court’s deregulation of money in politics, in a forward to a new book on how decades of Court doctrine have increased political speech for corporations while leaving individuals’ rights unchanged and in some cases diminished. These rulings are not hard to understand. But they must be understood to coherently discuss what reforms and choices are available to Americans in 2012.

Today’s rules for raising and spending campaign cash go back to the post-Watergate era when Congress decreed that campaign donations and political spending could be regulated. With a few temporary exceptions, since 1976 the Court has been rolling back that proposition. In 1976, the Court held in Buckley v. Valeo that spending money was a form of political speech—not conduct—entitled to the highest First Amendment protection. Buckley ended congressional and state limits, and enabled wealthy individuals to spend unlimited sums from their own pockets in their runs for office.

But that was just the beginning. In 1978, in Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a case involving a Massachusetts ballot referendum, the Court held that corporations could spend money in non-candidate elections. No candidate meant nobody could be corrupted by donations, it held. Bellotti invalidated laws in 30 states, prompting a subsequent explosion of corporate-financed ballot measures in states with that option, a significant factor in undermining the legislative process in those state capitals.

This campaign finance landscape essentially held until John Roberts became Chief Justice. In the intervening years, however, the Supreme Court continued to expand corporate speech rights—repeatedly ruling that commercial speech, including advertising and product labeling, was more deserving of First Amendment protection than public-interest efforts by local, state and federal governments.

The Supreme Court blocked efforts to include energy conservation notices in utility bills. Lower federal courts followed and subsequently rejected pro-consumer labels and health warnings on milk, tobacco and cellphones. Another ruling upheld pharmaceutical companies’ right to use medical records for commercial purposes, diminishing personal privacy. And another rulingheld that corporations have constitutional protection against searches by federal agencies. Thus in a range of rulings beyond elections, the federal judiciary expanded corporate constitutional rights and eroded legislated public protections.

“In the last few years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have shown a new hostility toward laws that regulate the economy and try to limit the effects of economic power,” wrote Jedediah Purdy in Democracy Journal’s Winter 2012 issue. “The First Amendment has helped the Supreme Court do for the consumer capitalism of the Information Age what freedoms of contract did for the Industrial Age: constitutionally protect certain transactions that lie at the core of the economy.”

The Court is not unable to distinguish corporations from people as many activists assume. The Roberts Court ruled in 2011, without dissent, that corporations are not entitled to a personal privacy right exemption to block Freedom of Information Act requests. Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the opinion, concluded by saying the justices “trust that AT&T will not take it personally.” But this was not a constitutional decision. And in elections, the Court has blurred the distinctions between corporate and individual participants.

In Citizens United, the Court turned a relatively narrow case into a giant leap forward for corporate electioneering. The ruling did a handful of things. It first struck down a prohibition that barred broadcasting a certain type of political ad—almost always negative and from sponsors who barely identified themselves—in the 60 days before an election. That provision in a 2002 campaign reform law tried to elevate political debate. It then overturned parts of prior Supreme Court rulings that said independent corporate spending could be regulated. Thus it undermined a century-old regime barring direct corporate participation in elections, elevating corporate political rights to the same level as those of citizens.

The Court’s ideological conservative majority did not stop with Citizens United. Last June, it chipped away at public financing laws by siding with Buckley’s protection of independently wealthy candidates. In Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, it struck down a matching funds formula in Arizona’s public financing law that gave additional funds to publicly financed candidates if a rival personally spent more than a stated amount. The ruling gutted the law but said public financing was still permissible.

Too Little, Too Much

The amendment proposals fall into two categories with some overlap in between. The first group takes a legislative empowerment approach. They seek to return the campaign finance landscape to pre-Buckley days, stating that Congress and the states have power to regulate the raising and spending of money in elections. Proposals by Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Maryland, on theHouse side, and Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, on the Senate side, take this route. In other words, they seek to reclaim the power to regulate campaign spending away from the Supreme Court.

The opening clause in Edwards’  proposal, “Nothing in this Constitution shall prohibit Congress and the States,” is very important, Tribe said, because it specifically tells the Supreme Court how the Constitution is not to be read. “Proposals that merely affirm legislative power to enact spending caps on corporations or individuals,” Tribe pointed out, “could well fail to achieve their objectives because they don’t directly address how the Supreme Court has read the First Amendment’s restrictions on such legislative power.”

However, Edwards’s language does not necessarily address some recent political trends that did not exist when Buckley was issued. Supposedly “independent” spending by very rich individuals, such as Sheldon Adelson’s recent $5 million gift to a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, would not be limited by her proposal because it would only limit “funds for political activity by any corporation.”

Tribe said Congress had to be more precise to not leave any room for the Court to meddle. Slightly more specific wording that addresses both wealthy individuals and corporations was in Udall’s proposal, which seeks broader authority to regulate donations and spending “of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections.”

Neither the Edwards nor Udall resolutions mention public financing, however. Edwards’ proposal would stop corporate spending in ballot initiatives, which would reverse the Court’s Bellotti decision. That could significantly change political dynamics in initiative states like California, where big business routinely spend millions on these campaigns. Udall’s proposal, in contrast, only focuses on candidate elections.

Another legislative empowerment approach is a bipartisan proposal from Rep. Walter Jones, R-SC, and Rep. John Yarmouth, D-KY. It would allow limits on people or groups who might seek to monopolize political microphones and also would revive public financing. It seeks to close a loophole that emerged after Buckley where political groups evaded regulation by raising issues associated with the candidates, instead of specific words urging their election or defeat. It also says Congress can create a “mandatory public financing system” and it would make Election Day a holiday.

The second type of amendment proposals—most notably identical measures from Rep. Ted Deutch, D-FL, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, a like-minded measure from Rep. Jim McGovern, D-MA, and another from Rep. Keith Ellison, D-MI—seek to address the distinct issue of corporate personhood by declaring, as in the McGovern proposal, “the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons.”

These measures, in varying ways, would strip corporations and other business and possibly charitable entities of their constitutional rights—and not just those pertaining to election spending or even under the First Amendment, although most of them make exceptions for “freedom of the press.” The most detailed language is in the Deutch-Sanders proposal. It has been won the support of most progressive groups.

The Deutch-Sanders proposal goes on to ban “corporate and other private entities” from contributing or spending money “in any election.” Like the first group of proposals, it also grants Congress and states “power to regulate and set limits” on campaign donations and spending. By explicitly targeting profit-seeking corporations and their promoters, it carves out an exception for non-profits—a distinction not made in McGovern’s proposal and most of the grassroots advocacy.

Details are important. The Deutch-Sanders amendment would not stop groups like Citizens United, the non-profit group whose anti-Hillary Clinton video was at issue in the Supreme Court case, or some super PACs that are also organized as non-profits because it carves out an exception for non-profits. Robert Weissman, the President of Public Citizen, which supports this amendment, said that its authors discussed what rights corporations should have and concluded that none should be granted to for-profit entities under the Constitution. Congressional legislation could address those rights as needed, he said.

That is a consequential decision and not a widely explained one. It enlarges the focus on tackling the distortions brought by big money in politics to a wider strike at the legal form used for much of the country’s business transactions. The Deutch-Sanders proposals would strip businesses of any size—not just big corporations—of the due process right to sue if property were seized. Liberal scholars point to the way President Truman sought to seize corporate assets—steel mills after World War Two—before being stopped by the Supreme Court in a famous 1952 decision.

Proposals from two leading grassroots groups, Move To Amend and Free Speech For People—reflected in the McGovern proposal—would strip constitutional rights from all corporations, for-profit and non-profit. That provision, were it in effect during the Civil Rights movement, could have stopped the NAACP from operating. That very issue—did the NAACP, as a non-profit corporation, have First Amendment rights to assemble and speak for members—arose in the famous 1963 Supreme Court case and ruling, NAACP v. Button, a where the affirmed the NAACP’s First Amendment freedom to assemble and speak.

These kinds of consequences and issues are not too complicated to discuss or understand. They should be the staple of progressive talk radio shows, but mostly they are not. Instead, progressives driving the anti-Citizens United and corporate personhood bandwagon are not being specific enough to threaten the big money forces in America. Instead, they risk alienating supporters by overpromising—like Obama.

“To focus on the fact that corporations are not technically people seems to be missing the point,” said Tokaji, Election Law Journal’s co-editor. “It’s really less focused on who’s a person and who’s not, than on the fact that certain big money interests are able to drown out other voices in the political conversation.” To Tokaji, the most promising avenue is exploring how public financing can be revived under the current Court—especially since it did not reject it in wholesale fashion in the Arizona case. “If we want to talk about what meaningful reform can be accomplished given the constitutional doctrine we’ve really got, I think we are talking about public financing.”

There is one other key piece of this discussion getting lost in the growing momentum behind proposals in Washington. That is what action can be taken in the states beyond sending e-mail blasts and resolutions to Congress telling them to act. It is incorrect to suggest that nothing short of a constitutional amendment, reconstituting the current Supreme Court, and electing a new congressional majority will have any meaningful impact—and isn’t worth trying.

Actions at the state level could be taken, said Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of University of California Irvine School of Law and a respected constitutional scholar. Beyond passing more disclosure laws that report political spending, states could require shareholders to approve corporate political expenditures. “These kinds of laws have been adopted for unions. It’s time to do it with regard to corporations,” he said.

Another idea is legislation barring a state contractor from spending money for partisan election activities, much like the federal Hatch Act of 1939 limiting federal civil servants from a range of partisan activities. “There are a number of legislative things that can be done to lessen the ill effects of Citizens United,” Chemerinsky said. “The legislative changes are a lot more realistic than a constitutional change.”

The Montana Supreme Court’s recent ruling that their state had a compelling interest to regulate how corporations can raise and spend money in elections, and can establish that interestwithin Supreme Court doctrine, is an example of a state taking this stance. The ruling raises questions that may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Similarly, the City of San Diego, California, is in court defending local corporate contribution limits after being sued by the Republican activist attorney who brought the Citizens United suit. And the New York state Legislature is poised to adopt a public financing regime, Weissman said.

Neither constitutional scholars nor movement activists view these stances as insignificant.

But these steps involve moving beyond bumper sticker sloganeering and rhetoric beating up corporations. This growing movement needs to speak more clearly, elevate the discussion and educate Americans, who know very well what is wrong with American politics and want to hear about solutions that work.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s Price said today is a rare historic moment and worries that too much oxygen is being consumed by the focus on a federal amendment in Washington and not on changing local and state laws—or even state constitutions. After a half-hour interview, he offered a personal plea that deserves to be heeded by all in this progressive movement.

“The liberal progressive line—and I have been there most of my life—sees a victory as being on the side of the angels, whether or not you actually create outcomes. I am tired of moral victories. I want some real ones.”

More Steven Rosenfeld.

Monday, May 21, 2012 12:54 PM UTC

Student activism, reborn

The recent protests in Montreal shows how a powerful movement responds to tuition hikes. How can we do the same?

By and , Alternet Students protesting against tuition hikes kneel in front of a line of Quebec Provincial Police at the Lionel Groulx college Tuesday, May 15, 2012 in Ste. Therese, Quebec, Canada. (Credit: AP Photo)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

We students have become morbid about our future. On campuses nationwide, it has become commonplace to see activists holding mock funerals for public higher education. At Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, we too held a funeral procession: out on the quad, in front of a coffin filled to the brim with diplomas, students were able to stand up in front of their peers and share what the death of higher education meant to them. One student, bravely holding back tears, shared how her troubles with financial aid, in addition to the death of her father, had made it impossible for her to continue her degree this semester.

AlterNetFor the majority of us seeking degrees, higher education is indeed dying a slow and painful death. Too little considered, however, is the role we as students are playing in its demise. The combination of tuition hikes, a lack of democratic governance in our schools, ballooning student debt, and the intimate relationship between our financial institutions and our academic ones are certainly killing higher education – but what is killing the student movement is our own complacency with these policies. While here in America, students on many campuses have limited themselves to mourning, elsewhere in the world they have taken to the streets – and there is much we can learn from their activism, in order to better our own.

What We Learned from the Maple Spring

Over spring break this year, we were privileged to travel to Montreal, Quebec, where we witnessed their 200,000-person-strong student strike. In the city of Montreal, francophone students have effectively shut down universities in response to a $1,625 tuition hike, proposed to be implemented incrementally over a five-year period. Since February, they have filled the streets en masse in protest, and as of this writing, they remain on strike (despite some injunctions by fellow students), having refused a set of “concessions” recently proffered by the Quebec government. (The government’s new proposal actually amounted to an increase of the previously proposed tuition hike, though it would have spread the increase out over an extended period of time – seven years, rather than the originally proposed five.)

The position Quebec’s students find themselves in is not unique: at CUNY, we too are facing a tuition hike of $1,500 over the next five years. What has been unique is their ability to build a powerful movement in response to these increases. Here at home, our response has come nowhere close to matching what we saw in Montreal.

When tuition has gone up at CUNY over the past few years we have responded with a rally here and there; it has been decades since students have been able to effectively shut down the university. The 1960s was the last time we saw mass student protests and building occupations at CUNY; the result was the opening of the university’s doors to students of color – and unfortunately, the transformation of what had once been called the “free academy” (where state funding once fully covered the cost of education) into an institution where tuition became a mandatory part of enrollment.

What allowed our counterparts in Quebec to mobilize so quickly and with such numbers, when our own student response to similar increases has been so subdued? We realized that the main difference lies in their movement’s ability to obtain real, institutionalized student power – something we do not yet have in the United States.

In Quebec, student organizing bodies on campuses have equal seats at decision-making tables alongside faculty and the administration. In the United States, we have nothing like this. Just as unions have been on a steep decline in this nation for decades, so too have campus organizations that answer to students (rather than the whims of the administration) and that hold real power. We believe that if students in the United States hope to have the kind of impact on our universities that we witnessed in Montreal, we will need to first establish radical, federated student unions here at home, organizations capable of replacing our currently weak systems of student participation. Without this shift, our struggle will be long, indeed.

Still, there are aspects of the Maple Spring we must refuse to replicate. For instance, the Quebec strike has not yet adopted anti-racist analysis regarding what true access to higher education might look like. Many of the students of color we spoke with offered mixed reviews of the student associations and the representation of racialized people in the movement. While they all clearly asserted they were anti-tuition hike, they also said they would feel more comfortable voicing and expressing solidarity if the movement adopted an anti-racism platform as a component of the strike.

Though anti-racism is and always has been a part of the analysis of the CUNY student struggle – from the 1969 occupations of City College and Brooklyn College by Puerto Rican and African-American students, to the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) at Hunter College in the mid-1990s – not every campus has been so thoughtful about the role race plays in access to higher ed. As we build a national movement for student power we must maintain our vigilance in keeping these issues at the center of our work.

How do we begin to establish the structures of power we need? The task may seem daunting, but at the Edufactory’s University is Ours! Conference we attended in Toronto at the end of April, we gained even more insight from our comrades to the North about how we might start. For instance, building toward a new student unionism from within departments – where we and our classmates are already organized into majors and similar academic interests – could be an effective way to gain momentum and generate collective buy-in from communities that already exist. These departmental unions would then become part of a larger, university-wide student union, would bridge the interests of many separate groups, and join them into an organized and non-hierarchical governing body. This is a model of organizing student unionism that has roots stretching back to the 1960s – and has been used to great effective in Quebec.

As Jasper Conner points out in his treatise, Towards a New Student Unionism,

“In Quebec, University unions take action when department unions put forward proposals to the rest of the campus. University unions are where students coordinate on things that affect all students, but again, don’t make decisions on issues that don’t affect all students. [Student] unions would follow this pattern, federating outward to the state level where most issues of funding are decided, at least for state schools.”

It isn’t nearly as hierarchical as it sounds; in fact, the larger bodies proposed here would be made up of delegates, as well as assemblies much like the spokescouncil institutionalized by Occupy Wall Street last fall. Furthermore, student unionism structured in this way also addresses important feminist and anti-racist critiques around lack of accountability in our movement leadership, which often leads to the reproduction of social hierarchy and the continuation of organizational practices that exclude women and people of color from the decision making process.

Alongside strategic unionizing, it seems to us self-evident that occupation of physical spaces must play a larger part in student organizing in the future. Occupy Wall Street was not the first movement to emphasize occupations as a key tactic; the US student movement has a rich history of reclaiming administrative offices in order to achieve our goals. At CUNY, the student movement has begun to move in this direction: in recent weeks, we at Brooklyn College launched a mass student day of action to protest tuition hikes, which included a rally and sit-in at Boylan Hall — right outside the office of the president. Street protests in other parts of the city are now taking place as well. It is a good beginning, but it is only that. We need so much more.

Given how profoundly US students have been cut off from channels of power at universities, the road before us may be long. But if we hope to achieve our goals, we first must realize, collectively, that the social conditions we face as students are not inevitable. We can’t just erect tents in the middle of our campuses and expect the world to change around us. We need to take control of our own minds, as well as take space. Only then will we breathe new life into our educational system.

Biola Jeje is an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College studying political science. Last year she helped form New York Students Rising, a statewide network of student groups organizing in defense of public higher education.

Isabelle Nastasia is an undergraduate student in the CUNY Baccalaureatte Program studying critical pedagogy and intersectionality. She is a co-founder of the New York to New Orleans Coalition, a youth-led service-learning organization.

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More Isabelle Nastasia.

Friday, May 18, 2012 7:37 PM UTC

America’s press freedom threat

The recent NATO protest arrests showcase just how real our First Amendment threats really are

By , Alternet (Credit: wellphoto via Shutterstock)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

World Press Freedom Day came and went earlier this month. While it’s important to take a day to recognize our right to speak and share information, threats to our First Amendment freedoms happen all the time, everywhere.

AlterNetIt’s a threat that will become very real for those covering the street protests expected this weekend at the NATO summit in Chicago.

Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Attempting to photograph police actions in the U.S. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

In twist that’s become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez, who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

And Miller is not alone. Since Occupy Wall Street began last September, more than 75 journalists have been arrested.  My colleague Josh Stearns has chronicled these arrests since the movement’s earliest days. Stearns expects to see an uptick in arrests as thousands of protesters and reporters converge on Chicago.

Radical Transparency and the Police

Journalists record many of these arrests themselves as they’re shoved to the ground, shackled and hauled off to jail. Onlookers have documented many of these arrests as well.

The ubiquity of camera-ready smartphones has spawned legions of “live-streamers” who can be found at every large-scale protest streaming a close-up account of almost every arrest. It’s a new form of journalism that’s open to anyone with a mobile phone and the resolve to get between police and protesters.

In the chaos of these events, many live-streamers have been snared in mass arrests. Others are deliberately targeted by officers who aren’t accustomed to the radical transparency of the smartphone era.

Tim Pool has seen the live-streaming phenomenon grow exponentially since he first started streaming Occupy Wall Street protests using a Galaxy S2 mobile phone. “Most of the people are live-streaming because they think the mainstream media isn’t telling the story that needs to be told,” he said.

The live audience for Pool’s coverage peaked above 30,000 viewers during last year’s Occupy evictions, making Pool’s raw and unedited reporting a model hundreds of other live-streamers have followed.

Pool plans to organize a global collective of live-streamers to create an alternative news network that gets the story live on the streets before the traditional news vans arrive. “There are not enough streamers for breaking 24-hour global news coverage,” he says, “but we’re getting pretty close.”

The ubiquity of smartphones has contributed to America’s decline as a champion of free speech and freedom of the press. The U.S. dropped to 22nd place on Freedom House’s annual ranking of press freedoms. We’re now tied with Estonia and Jamaica. Our flagging status is due to the “detentions, rough police tactics, and other difficulties encountered [by those] covering protests associated with the Occupy movement,” according to Freedom House.

The First Amendment a ‘Nuisance’

Many arrests result from snap judgments officers make when encountering a swarm of smartphone-carrying citizen reporters.

People, and even police officers, often don’t understand our rights with regard to public photography. At the local level the newsgathering rights of every individual, whether credentialed as a journalist or not, become even murkier.

But that’s changing. In January, the Justice Department filed a statement urging the U.S. District Court of Maryland to uphold an individual’s “First Amendment right to record police officers in the public discharge of their duties” and to find that “officers violate citizens’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights when they seize and destroy such recordings without warrant or due process.”

In late March, Simon Glik won a civil suit against the City of Boston, after the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against his arrest for attempting to record police brutality. The court found that Glik had a “constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public.”

In early May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ordered a preliminary injunction against the Illinois Eavesdopping Act, which made the recording of police officers without their consent a felony, punishable by four to 15 years in prison.

Police departments like having a degree of flexibility in interpreting the law as it gives their officers loose rein to arrest anyone they deem a nuisance, even when they know their case will collapse before the courts.

“When I have been confronted by officers the implicit threat is that if I continued to videotape, they would take away my liberty,” says advocacy journalist Bill Huston. Police have harassed Huston as he’s attempted to record public events related to the fracking controversy in Pennsylvania and New York.

“Even though this is constitutionally protected behavior, the police will intimidate you and demand that you follow their orders,” he said. “Even though we get a legal remedy in the courts we are still prevented from videotaping on the scene. Our rights are still violated. This is not how the system is supposed to work.”

Smartphone Journalism

Though cases involving our right to record have not yet reached the Supreme Court, it may only be a matter of time. Thus far most of the lower courts have found a rock-solid First Amendment argument for taking photos and video of law enforcement officers in public.

The nation’s leading free speech and civil rights groups agree. Earlier this month, we wrote U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to address ongoing abuse of our First Amendment freedoms and protect everyone’s right to record.

While the media landscape has changed, our First Amendment rights haven’t. Freedom of the press is more important, not less, when anyone with a mobile phone and an Internet connection can act as a journalist.

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Friday, May 18, 2012 12:40 PM UTC

TED: Even more elitist than we thought

A censored talk about inequality causes controversy -- and proves that the conference has some curious values

By , Alternet Nick Hanauer (Credit: YouTube)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

We’ve long heard complaints that TED is elitist. The annual conference in California costs $7,500 to attend and is nearly impossible to get into, even for those who can afford the price tag; it is widely considered to be “unofficially invite-only.”

AlterNetStill, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t gone down a TED video rabbit hole at least once. Snobby as they may be, those TED folks sure know how to pull together some fascinating speakers and share their talks online in a compelling way. There are some questionable TED talks in the archives, sure, but most of them are solid, and some are great (for example, the scientist who studied her own stroke).

So it is disappointing, if not terribly surprising, to hear that TED organizers originally chose not to share online what sounds like an important talk on income inequality, after initially expressing enthusiasm for the talk. The National Journal had the story:

TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators”….

TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April.

TED curator Chris Anderson initially called the piece “one of the most politically controversial talks we’ve ever run” and said “we need to be really careful” when it gets posted online, but he made it sound as if it was still a matter of when, not if. But soon, TED’s tune had changed:

In early May Anderson followed up with Hanauer to inform him he’d decided not to post his talk.

National Journal e-mailed Anderson to request an interview about what made a talk on inequality more politically controversial than, for example, contraception or climate change. Anderson, who is traveling abroad, responded with an e-mail statement that appeared to swipe at the popularity of Hanauer’s speech.

“Many of the talks given at the conference or at TED-U are not released,” Anderson wrote. “We only release one a day on TED.com and there’s a backlog of amazing talks from all over the world. We do not comment publicly on reasons to release or not release [a] talk. It’s unfair on the speakers concerned. But we have a general policy to avoid talks that are overtly partisan, and to avoid talks that have received mediocre audience ratings.”

As the Journal points out, Anderson’s argument that the talk is too “controversial” or “political” seems pretty bunk, given that TED has promoted plenty of controversial and political talks in the past. And if there was ever a time to promote a talk about income inequality, it seems like it would be now, what with the recent surge in conversations about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. Anderson’s comments make one wonder if he was more concerned about offending his rich donors than anything else.

Later comments by Anderson seem to confirm that suspicion. Anderson wrote Hanauer another letter on May 7, saying he had re-watched Hanauer’s talk but still was not interested in posting it online. The long and detailed email, printed in full by the Journal, takes issue with several elements of the talk, including the line ”hiring more people is a course of last resort, done if and only if rising consumer demand requires it.” “I think a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted by that statement as given,” Anderson wrote.

Anderson continued, “Nick, I personally share your disgust at the growth in inequality in the US, and would love to have found a way to give people a clearer mindset on the issue, without stoking a tedious partisan rehash of all the arguments we hear every day in the mainstream media.”

Really?

To make matters more perplexing, Raw Story‘s Stephen C. Webster dug up a TED talk on income inequality that was given by Richard Wilkinson last summer (pre-Occupy movement) and posted online in the fall. Why was that talk okay, but not Hanauer’s?

Blogger Ryan Louis Cooper hypothesizes that it’s all about tone; even though Winkinson’s talk was far more radical in its content, it was more palatable to wealthy TED-attending types than Hanauer’s talk. Cooper cites the following passage from Hanauer’s talk (which you can at last read online here):

Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as “job creators” at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from “job creator” to “The Creator”. We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a “job creator” is both an assertion about how economics works and the a claim on status and privileges.

The extraordinary differential between a 15% tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 35% top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is a privilege that is hard to justify without just a touch of deification.

“He’s not just talking about inequality, he’s saying that the title of ‘job creator’ is undeserved. He’s being blunt, and rude,” Cooper writes. As for Wilkinson’s talk, “it’s rather remarkable how this kind of thing goes over fine with the rich job-creatin’ TED attendees, while a more moderate but less polite version gets censored. It’s almost like they’re sitting in their seats, blissfully unaware of what the speaker is actually talking about, but feeling good about being part of a hip, trendy, high-status event.”

On Thursday, Anderson responded to the mounting criticism and accusations of censorship on his blog. Here’s his account of what happened:

We discussed internally and ultimately told the speaker we did not plan to post. He did not react well. He had hired a PR firm to promote the talk to MoveOn and others, and the PR firm warned us that unless we posted he would go to the press and accuse us of censoring him. We again declined and this time I wrote him and tried gently to explain in detail why I thought his talk was flawed.

So he forwarded portions of the private emails to a reporter and the National Journal duly bit on the story. And it was picked up by various other outlets.

It’s still curious how TED’s stance on the talk went from “The world must see this!” to “We’ll get to it later…” to “Actually it’s too partisan” to “It might upset businessmen.”

Anderson also posted the video of Hanauer’s talk on YouTube. Watch it for yourself:

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Thursday, May 17, 2012 12:37 PM UTC

Christianity’s anti-gay stance backfires

American churches' opposition to gay rights is out of touch with young people -- and it's costing them believers

By , Alternet A sign displays a message opposed to gay marriage in front of the Devon Park United Methodist Church polling site on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, in Wilmington, N.C. North Carolina could be the next state to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. Voters are casting their ballots Tuesday. (AP Photo/The Star-News, Ken Blevins) (Credit: AP)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Christian Right activists who give money, pressure politicians and organize against gay rights may think they’re accomplishing a couple of goals, like rolling back gay rights and asserting their religion’s primacy in American culture. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for the rest of us), one of the things they’re doing in the long run is alienating their young people — not a good long-term strategy. Short-term victories like passing more bans on gay marriage, sometimes repeatedly in single states, might feel good for homophobic Christians, but in the long run, it’s their religion that will pay the ultimate price; available evidence shows that anti-gay activism is souring young people on Christianity.

AlterNetIn response to the latest gay-bashing vote in North Carolina, evangelical writer and speaker Rachel Held Evans wrote an impassioned plea to her fellow Christians to just cut it out. She points to statistics showing how much damage the church has sustained because of its anti-gay crusade. Research conducted by the pro-Christian Barna Group in 2007 on Americans age 16-29 found that “anti-homosexual” was the dominant perception of modern Christians. Ninety-one percent of non-Christians and 80 percent of Christians in this group used this word to describe Christians.

She also points to research documented in the book You Lost Me by David Kinnaman showing that 59 percent of teenagers who grow up as church-going Christians abandon their faith in adulthood. One of the major reasons is the gay rights issue. Overall, the perception–a largely correct one, I’d add–is that modern conservative Christianity is dominated by sex-phobic bigots who use God as a cudgel to beat all sorts of people, but especially gays and lesbians. No wonder many in the younger generation want out.

Unfortunately for Evans, these kinds of numbers probably won’t do much to convince the Christian right to give up on gay-bashing, at least not until it’s done even more serious damage to the Christian brand. Evans may be drawn to Christianity for fellowship and spirituality–many more tolerant Christians are–but the dominant function of conservative Christianity in the real world has never been to offer comfort and solace to believers. Religion is about power and giving up the war on gays would mean relinquishing power and control over their adherents’ most private selves. Thus, we can guess that the Christian Right won’t stop fighting gay rights until it’s way too late for them to take it back.

Right-wing American Christianity is rife with contradictions. The content of the church’s actual teachings are centered around the figure of Jesus Christ, who is renowned as the lover of the meek and the powerless. Yet right-wing Christianity in America has often served to comfort the powerful and afflict the weak.

In fact, when you look away from the “meek shall inherit the earth” text to the actual uses of Christianity throughout history, a different picture emerges. God has been used to rationalize the power of kings over the people, men over women, rich over poor, Westerners over the rest of the world, and has even been used to justify slavery. In the latter half of the 20th century a particular brand of American Christianity called the Prosperity Gospel began to celebrate obscene wealth, taking Christianity far away from its progressive elements. And of course, conservative Christianity in America has spent much of the last century and the start of this one demonizing and oppressing LGBT people.

As devoted as it is to its anti-gay agenda, the Christian Right will be paying the penalty as gays are increasingly accepted in mainstream culture. Most political watchers are downright astounded at how quickly gay rights activists have turned public opinion around to favor their point of view. Less than two decades ago, most of the country had never even heard of the concept of same-sex marriage. Since then, there’s been a steady rise in support for legalizing same-sex marriage, with the most recent polls showing a majority of Americans supporting legalization.

Conservative Christian activists know that the perception of homophobia is damaging, which is why they try to avoid speaking of the issue directly at all, instead saying that they support “traditional marriage.” But the attempts to seem less hateful toward gays while attacking their rights fail repeatedly because homophobes can’t stay on message.

Virginia legislators this week blocked the nomination of highly regarded prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland to be a district judge for no other reason than they disapproved of his homosexuality. Del. Bob Marshall went on the record tut-tutting Thorne-Begland for “his behavior,” even though Thorne-Begland lives a quiet life with his partner and their adopted children. The whole situation exposed the emptiness of the “traditional marriage” rhetoric, demonstrating once again that the Christian Right’s views regarding gay people are rooted in a very un-Christ-like hate.

With all this hatefulness on display, no wonder conservative Christianity is losing young people. While just a little over half of Americans supporting gay marriage, nearly two-thirds of adults born after 1981 do. The Christian Right is increasingly out of step with how Americans feel about gay rights. This issue, even more than abortion rights, might be the one that destroys them in the end.

 

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Amanda Marcotte lives in Austin, Texas, and manages the blog Pandagon. She recently had a two-week stint as the blogmaster for the John Edwards for President campaign. More Amanda Marcotte.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 12:34 PM UTC

3-D printing’s radical new world

The next generation of "Jetsons"-style machines could create guns, illegal keys, narcotics -- and even organs

By , Alternet The open-source CandyFab 3-D printer. (Credit: Wikipedia)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

3D printing is a hot topic right now, especially with reports of this incredible technology entering the consumer marketplace. The prices are dropping as more companies attempt consumer-grade machines. Is it time to start looking forward to a time when we all have a Star Trek-like replicator at home to produce everything we want, when we want it?

AlterNetWhile the technology isn’t nearly as versatile or as user-friendly as the science fiction dream, the implications include the potential to provide the things we need in much greener, less-centralized, less resource-intensive way. But, as with any new technology, there are also potential negative effects to balance the scales. Over the long run, the human imagination will no doubt concoct new uses that appear grotesque to us now but may make sense as the technology becomes ubiquitous and famiiar.

In short: as with so many human inventions, the future of 3D printing includes the good, the bad and the grotesque.

The Good

3D printing actually refers to a range of different technologies for making a three-dimensional object from a digital file. First, the dimensions and details of the object must be drafted out in CAD (computer-aided design) software. The CAD file provides the directions by which the machine builds the object, laying down molecules layer by layer and line by line much like an inkjet printer. How the machine prints the object depends on the type of technology used by the manufacturer.

The first rapid prototyping machine using 3D printing technology went into commercial use in 1986. Since then, the machines have become ubiquitous in commercial manufacturing shops. At first, they enabled companies to more quickly produce plastic prototypes on site, but the real benefit has come from their expanded use as additive manufacturing machines—a product can be manufactured by adding resources rather than the conventional way of subtracting from a larger hunk of material by grinding, drilling, sanding, etc.

Thanks to the ability to build a product from the bottom up, 3D printers can print shapes that cannot be viably manufactured any other way. For example, Airbus is using 3D printers to make airplane parts lighter—allowing the plane to use less fuel—without sacrificing strength and safety. People with missing limbs can have custom prosthetics 3D printed to their personal shape, capability and style.

3D printing also means significantly less waste. Traditional forms of machining often leave up to 90 percent of a slab of metal on the machine shop floor, but additive manufacturing generates far less waste in the first place, and also makes it easier to reuse anything that’s left over. The machines are also the ultimate expression of “just-in-time” manufacturing: a company can manufacture a needed part instantly, right on the spot, rather than depend on the old system that required parts to be manufactured in mass quantities, stored in massive warehouses and shipped to far-flung locations.

To further lower the resource footprint on our products, some researchers are working on attaching recycling machines to allow manufacturers and hobbyists to reduce their ordering of raw injection materials which they have to order from somewhere else. When 3D printers are ready to saturate the home-use market, they may provide an almost fully self-contained system. When printed items break or need replacement, home users could simply recycle them into the machine, creating a cradle-to-cradle system—the Holy Grail for recycling advocates.

The primary costs are in the machine itself and in the consumables or injection materials. Which injection material your home machine uses depends on the company, the type of printer you have, and which material you want to make your item from. 3D printers are able to manufacture items from various plastics and metals as well as glass, wood, food and even living cells. Most of the cheaper machines are limited to plastic, but many will function with more than one type of plastic.

Consumers are also able to order 3D printed items online, and 3D printer shops similar to Kinkos are opening in local neighborhoods for a faster turnaround. You can find or buy the CAD file for your desired item on the Web, download it, send it to your local print shop, and then go pick up the item in a few hours. These companies grant consumers and small businesses all the benefit of custom additive manufacturing without the hassle of learning CAD (computer-aided design) and handling a machine that may pose potential dangers such as toxic fumes or exposed moving parts. Some of the cheaper machines rely on consumer wisdom — in the loosest sense of the word — to allow ventilation and to avoid touching exposed areas.

The range of items we can self-manufacture this way is as limitless as the ingenuity of the Web. Simply hop online, find an appropriate CAD design and print it from your printer—et voila, you have the means to make a lamp out of your grandmother’s old cane. Or print out a set of Legos for your kids, new food containers, custom iPhone covers, and any other practical plastic curiosity that your household needs.

If home-based 3D printing takes off and goes prime-time, online stores and large mass manufacturers will almost certainly find their business models threatened as digital technology again forces a massive change to retail business models. The mall and the factory — the cornerstones of American consumer culture — will both find themselves increasingly irrelevant.

The Bad

No matter how awesome the potential may be for any technology, a downside is always waiting to rear its ugly head. John Smart points out in his Fourth Law of Technology that the first generation of a new technology is almost always more dehumanizing than it is beneficial — and 3D printing is unlikely to be an exception. Never underestimate the ingenuity humans will bring to apply any new technology to their worst impulses. Consider how the Internet has served the causes of racism, sexism and kittie porn (those lol-cats drive me up the wall!).

The Internet liberated people to say things online that they would not say in public — and find like-minded people who confirmed those views. Now, all those same scary people isolated in their homes and addicted to trolling can make 3D objects of mischief in any size, shape and color their twisted imaginations can conjure.

Paramount Studios recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to someone who posted designs for a toy that was a licensed item based on one of the studio’s movies. Lawyers are going to get rich writing those letters in the near term, but in the longer term, it’s going to be hard to stop anyone from posting downloadable designs on the Internet for home 3D printers to create any novelty they choose. The same concerns over intellectual property the music industry has been whining about for more than a decade are now about to be visited on manufactured goods as well.

And some of those objects will be dangerous. Weapons like knives or clubs can be printed in any shape and practicable material. In some US states, every part of the AR-15, a popular firearm, can be purchased without a license except for the lower receiver. Recently the design for the lower receiver was posted on Thingiverse, a Web site where users share 3D printer design files. That last part can now be printed in the privacy of an individual’s home, license free. Some are arguing about whether the plastic lower receiver is good enough to be functional, but the larger point is clear: assuming the design works, any 3D printer that can handle metal or polymers can privately print out the necessary part for a functional, unregistered gun.

While homemade firearms are nothing new—and usually legal in most US states—3D printing could make it easier to create them, and thus ensure that we’ll have many, many more of them in circulation. Regardless of your views about the US Constitution and the right to bear arms, this could eventually place an arsenal of untraceable guns in the hands of people who would not be able to legally buy them. Plus, America’s gun violence will be easy to export—right over the Internet—to other countries that have stricter gun ownership regulations.

Printing items covered by intellectual property law poses legal and financial as well as security concerns. In Texas, a small band of thieves used a 3D printer to make an ATM card scanner which they installed in ATMs around their city. They then stole about $400,000 before being caught. Also, i.Materialise, an online 3D printing service, reports that a customer attempted to pass a design for an ATM scanner through their service. They say the design was rejected, but they still receive searches for ATM scanners on their Web site indicating that criminals are hoping to enter the black market enabled by 3D printing.

The Texas thieves paid for their crimes, but future criminals might not. A member of a German recreational lock-picking club designed a key to Dutch handcuffs just by looking at a photo he took of an officer’s key being worn by the police officer. (That’s right! He built a key just by looking at a photo.) He then printed a copy to prove it worked, and posted the new design online. Dutch police have not reported the use of a 3D printed key, but if a recreational club member can do it, certainly real criminals can too.

3D printing even has the potential to completely undermine the war on drugs. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a system that would print the necessary lab equipment to create pharmaceuticals. While this kind of technology has the potential to democratize the pharmaceutical industry, it might also enable people to print illegal narcotics from home in a way that’s far safer and less detectable than a garage-based meth lab. It also means that the drugs people buy could become more dangerous than they are now, with black marketeers experimenting constantly with new substances and treating their customers as guinea pigs.

The Grotesque

3D printing is about more than just making fake plastic trees. It represents a new paradigm, additive manufacturing, which is a complete revolution in thinking about how we create many of the common objects that surround us and support our lives.

For instance, researchers at Wake Forest University are using the technology to print new skin directly onto a burn wound. They scan a burn victim’s wound into a computer, which in turn creates a 3D image with the exact size and shape of the wound. The printer then prints new layers of cells—using skin instead of ink—directly onto the lesion. Developed for US troops in Afghanistan, the whole process takes only an hour.

3D bioprinting research could eventually lead to the printing of organs ready for implantation. That would mean no more waiting lists for organs and no more age restrictions on said organs. The organ donation system might be left to the lower classes as the wealthy take advantage of all kinds of new transhumanist life-extension techniques, replacing everything from faces to eyeballs to livers as they wear out due to age.

And here’s where it gets really weird. What if the long-term future for 3D bioprinting converged with some of the stranger aspects of transhumanism? Could additive manufacturing turn into additive biohacking? Instead of taking away from one body and giving it to another like organ transplants do, bioprinting new organs could change how society thinks about implants. The cyborg visions of using digital technology to enhance our bodies could become reality as people use bioprinted body parts—as well as other biological means—to heighten their existing abilities.

We’re already heading down this path: people are already implanting magnets in their wrists and RFIDs in their arms. Rahel Aima suggests that some people may eventually want an extra ear, or a second set of eyes placed on the sides of their heads to give them full 360-degree vision. If someone, for reasons we can’t fathom right now, decided they wanted a third eye on their forehead or a third arm growing from their back, they could have it. The ethics will be moot once 3D bioprinting can enable the creation of fresh body parts.

As with any cultural postulations about the future, the idea of bioprinting extra arms to implant them on a presumably sane person sounds ridiculous—until you look at the dozens of women who are already beautiful but who would prefer to look like circus freaks with abnormally plump lips, button noses and shiny skin. A quick glance in any celebrity tabloid will provide dozens of prime examples of men and women of almost any age who look like plastic mannequins. (And let’s not get into the whys and wheres and hows of people’s tattoo and piercing choices.) If you doubt whether anyone will be brave enough to attempt a grotesque fashion statement using 3D bioprinted body parts, just ask Cat Man, Dennis Avner, who has augmented his face to look like that of a tiger. However, unlike Cat Man’s augmentations, the implanted 3D printed body parts could actually be useful.

As robotics and automation increase over the years, more people may try to get an edge in the job market with specific augmentations that will enable them to perform certain unique tasks. If the human body can adjust to a third or fourth arm, data entry professionals could become more efficient by drinking water with their third hand while the other two continue typing. Lumberjacks could more easily climb trees with their tools in hand. Companies may even offer to pay for the operation if the employee is willing to sign a five- or 10-year contract. Plus, the military would likely be interested in enabling its soldiers to hold more guns or fight in hand-to-hand combat more effectively.

Society is certainly not ready for such extreme body modification yet, but it’s not hard to imagine people asking for some very bizarre cosmetic or utilitarian augmentations once doctors start implanting 3D printed organs.

3D printing has already revolutionized several industries from toys to airlines, and that revolution is now about to come home. Along with all the clear economic and environmental benefits this technology will bring, it also presents some very challenging implications for how we look at shopping, security, health, and just about everything else.

While the ramifications of any new technology can never be fully gamed out ahead of time, it’s time to get ready for the next wholesale technology shift that will upend our economy and reprint the basic order of our lives. As the technology improves and progresses, we might even see the shopaholics converge with hoarders, and we may then marvel at the tragic lives of the printerholics who live in a sandbox of 3D printed trinkets — and just can’t stop spending their days printing.

Dennis D. Draeger is a foresight researcher with AFR, and a freelance writer on technology and its social implications. Follow him at Ad Futura and at @dddraeger on Twitter.

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