Salon.com > Annalee Newitz

Don’t look now, but the dean is watching

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 20:30:00 +0000

Last March, a protest against arms manufacturer Raytheon at the University of New Hampshire was derailed by campus administrators who had been covertly monitoring the e-mail list of a student group called the Peace and Justice League. According to UNH undergraduate Rob Wolfe, the group was making plans to protest Raytheon's presence at a UNH job fair. Wolfe says that "there are no campus administrators on the [e-mail] list," but somehow the vice president of student affairs managed to get a copy of a private e-mail about the protest.

"Raytheon canceled their appearance literally at the last minute," he says. "It's unclear whether this was connected to the e-mail leak, but it's certainly atypical of Raytheon not to follow through on a campus appearance." A spokesperson for Raytheon refused to comment on whether the company had canceled its appearance because of the protest, but did acknowledge that the company skipped the job fair and instead met individually with students who had made appointments.

The idea that university administrators are reading private e-mail might seem distinctly Big Brotherian, but the practice is increasingly commonplace. When students access the Internet via university equipment, everything they do -- from sending e-mail and visiting Web sites, to sharing pictures and using certain kinds of software -- is being watched.

Genome liberation

Tue, 26 Feb 2002 20:30:00 +0000

At Jim Kent's Human Genome Browser Gateway, anyone curious about the fundamental building blocks of the human body can point and click their way through gigabytes of publicly available genetic data.

The vast data set is only about 90 percent complete, in contrast to the proprietary sequencing of the human genome already assembled by the biotech company Celera, but what is there is open to all -- provided they have the biological chops to make sense of it. Users can click on pictures of chromosomes, drilling down into the data until they reach individual genes or areas of as-yet-unanalyzed sequences of nucleotides.

The data has been made available for reasons that stretch beyond mere scientific curiosity. When Celera's former CEO Craig Venter pushed his company to finish mapping the human genome before the government-funded, public Human Genome Project (HGP), the move was widely considered an attempt to demonstrate that science is done more efficiently by the private sector. But Celera ended up filing hundreds of patents on discoveries it made while sequencing the genome, and access to the database itself is exorbitantly expensive.

Sex with storm troopers

Tue, 11 Sep 2001 18:47:00 +0000

It's 1 a.m. Saturday, Labor Day weekend. Slightly intoxicated, some friends and I wobble into the basement of the Atlanta Hyatt and find a roomful of big, soft chairs facing a small stage. About 10 people are in the room, some of them dressed like medieval peasants, most of them with guitars in their laps.

A man in the back of the room starts strumming his guitar. He's the quintessential nerd: coke-bottle glasses, unstyled hair, a large belly. He sings a song about the days when giants walked the earth, when everyone was peculiar and it didn't matter.

We are somewhere in the bowels of the science fiction convention DragonCon. We are attending the Open Filk -- an open mike gathering at which people perform science fiction-themed songs, often set to familiar tunes.

It's so cheesy that at first my friends and I giggle uncontrollably, covering our mouths and wheezing to hide our too-obvious rudeness. But then the deeper meaning of the song starts to sink in: It's mournful and sincere, a tale sung by an outcast aching for acceptance. The land where the giants walk is a place where geeks can hold their heads high, a place where difference is respected rather than punished. This filker is singing the deep geek blues.

On-the-go porn

Mon, 04 Jun 2001 19:30:00 +0000

Before live nude streaming video, before the daily deluge of "click here for hot chix" spam, before the so-called adult Web was ever a glimmer in a would-be pornographer's eye, there was "ASCII pr0n." Spelled "pr0n" instead of "porn" in a typically obscure hacker joke, it consists of erotic art composed of the most basic elements: the ASCII character set -- not much more than the alphabet, numbers and assorted punctuation marks.

Newbies to the ASCII pr0n scene might be surprised to see what can be done with little more than a deftly placed comma and a whole bunch of ampersands. ASCII pr0n is a tribute to the time when bandwidth was limited on the Net, but creativity was high.

Created in the late '70s and '80s, ASCII pr0n was the world's first Internet pornography. It was the kind of sexual expression only a hardcore computer dork could love: ASCII pr0n jokes and pinups provided a common culture for a community of outcasts and misfits whose sex lives were portrayed by the mass media as weird or nonexistent. These ridiculously low-quality nudie picture-cum-text files were popular back in the days when putting photographs online was but a dream. ASCII pr0n was of generally poor quality -- so much so that its lameness was an in-group joke among hackers at the time -- but it also recalls a beautiful, innocent era in many coders' lives. Its low-res allure and retro cheese factor provide a cool, inspirational aesthetic for today's younger hackers.

Bagels, no lox

Mon, 16 Oct 2000 23:52:00 +0000

Just months after the U.S. government included "mixed race" as a checkbox in the 2000 U.S. Census, two dot-com entrepreneurs are incorporating this newly-acknowledged identity into business plans. Monday, CEO Wendy Marston is launching HalfJew.com, a cross between a magazine and a community site that focuses on the experiences of people whose heritage is -- what else? -- half-Jewish. "I'm sick of hearing from Jews that there's no such thing as a half-Jew," quipped Marston, herself the child of a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother. "One of the goals of this Web site will be to establish a half-Jewish homeland," says Marston. "As CEO, I've decided it's going to be Governor's Island, off the coast of Manhattan. Nobody is using it, and we can have our mixers there! Mixers for the mixed."

Imagining an orgasm

Wed, 04 Oct 2000 19:30:00 +0000

The typical story goes something like this: A woman yearns for an erotic slave who will yield to her utterly. She accomplishes this by inventing a mind-control drug, or deploying powerful forms of hypnosis or, even more fantastically, by learning telepathy or magic or how to use an alien technology.

Armed with this knowledge, she happens upon a luscious, impressionable woman or man, looks deeply into their eyes and gradually gains control of her chosen one's mind through whatever means are at her disposal. After a long, delicious period of mental seduction (often called induction), she forces her victim to desire sex so much that he or she can think of nothing else. The victim often winds up a brainwashed slut who lives only for pleasure, submission or humiliation.

You've just read the standard plotline from a subgenre of erotica known as "erotic mind control." Typically found on the Internet in places like the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository or the Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive, mind-control erotica isn't exactly your ordinary smut. Often, it contains no sex at all, and instead is merely a long description of someone being hypnotized. More important, mind-control erotica is, well, in your mind. Most of these sexy stories -- whose popularity has grown enormously over the past several years online -- portray erotic situations that are physically or technologically impossible. You cannot control someone's every thought with a pill or a machine or even hypnosis.

If code is free, why not me?

Fri, 26 May 2000 18:30:00 +0000

At a recent San Francisco sex party, I found myself kneeling rather rapturously at the feet of three charming naked men whose level of arousal seemed unimpaired when our conversation suddenly shifted from pornographic fantasies to the implementation of the Web server program Apache on offshore computers. While people began to have (safe) sex on the mattress next to us, and I continued to caress my companions with a lascivious wink, I found myself in the surreal position of discussing the nature of social freedom in the software industry while wearing sexy lingerie. I don't mean to imply that the conversation about code itself was somehow erotic for us, but rather that our sexually liberated environment seemed as good a place as any to chat about something else we all had in common -- our love for free software.

Whip me, spank me, gentrify me

Sat, 15 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

In a quiet San Francisco neighborhood, surrounded by views of tree-covered hills, a quaint little B&B welcomes visitors from across the country. Guests can choose from four well-appointed rooms in this refurbished turn-of-the-century house, all personally decorated by Elizabeth, the proprietor. While they're staying at Elizabeth's B&B -- called Differences -- guests are also welcome to use all the amenities of the house: an extensive dungeon in the basement, metal hooks tucked into lacy corners and the genuine antique bondage devices adorning the rooms. Of course, guests will also need to make their own pancakes -- B&B stands for bed and bondage here. Elizabeth doesn't do breakfast.

Like other renegade subcultures, S/M is gradually becoming gentrified. This is partly economic -- getting flogged on a Friday night isn't as cheap as it used to be. Dozens of exclusive sex stores have popped up, peddling high-end toys, devices and leatherware. A typical private "play party" runs each guest as much as $30 (this is a site cost -- you pay for the space, not the sex). Certain clubs even enforce a pricey dress code: If you aren't all gussied up in latex or leather, you don't get in the door.

Private dancers

Sat, 03 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Nearly every woman has been called a whore, but we rarely bother to find out for ourselves why such an identity is supposed to be so threatening. Many men's sexual rites of passage involve sex workers, but women are rarely encouraged to visit strip clubs or prostitutes. Instead of actual experiences, women learn from news stories about the horrors of stripping and prostitution, or hear contradictory accounts from feminists and sex workers.

After realizing that our curiosity and ignorance about sex work could only be dispelled through greater experience, my women friends and I spent several weekends in San Francisco visiting strip clubs and paying women for lap dances.

Strip club row on Broadway runs through the middle of North Beach, a neighborhood famous for old beatnik happenings and Italian immigrant culture. Today it's an upscale nightspot and tourist destination full of swank bars, cafes and expensive Italian restaurants. The most famous strip club landmark has disappeared: The Condor, now a sports bar, once featured an enormous nude woman with red flashing light bulbs for nipples. Now only fancy neon letters remain.

The Marxist Wall Street couldn't ignore

Tue, 22 Dec 1998 17:51:00 +0000

Dressed like a preppie banker or finance manager in his chinos, loafers
and oxford-cloth shirt, Doug Henwood is addressing a roomful of
professors and graduate students who have come to listen to this
maverick economist give a ruthlessly detailed, up-to-the-minute lecture
about the Southeast Asian financial crisis. Looking very serious,
Henwood concludes quietly that the exploded economies in the former
"Asian bubble" are indeed stabilizing. International Monetary Fund bailouts will soothe anxious investors. This will allow the
United States' seemingly unstoppable bull market to continue almost
unabated. The news seems to startle everyone.

"I don't understand your optimism," an audience member says in an
incredulous tone.

"Actually, I wouldn't call it optimism," Henwood responds with a wry
smile. "For me it's pessimism, since I want capitalism to end."

Out of academia

Fri, 06 Nov 1998 20:24:00 +0000

I was 20 years old when I entered a Ph.D. program in English at the University of California at Berkeley and devoted what I believed would be the rest of my life to contemplation. Except for a month spent working at a sandwich shop, I had done nothing with myself but attend school. Both of my parents were teachers; and so it came to seem that the entire universe was some kind of educational institution. If you broke my life down to a quantum level, you'd find qualities of particles whose entire existence depended on a form of reality known only as "metaphysical."

If not graduate school, then what? Oblivion.

In retrospect, I realize I had convinced myself that being a graduate student was an end in itself, a destination rather than a temporary stopping-off zone on my way to something else. My inexperience, combined with Berkeley's academic insularity, encouraged my fantasy of everlasting graduate school. Especially these days, when graduate students are expected to teach and publish before they earn their degrees, a professorship really is just graduate school with better pay.