First, a caveat: I’m not a protestor. I haven’t been to the Occupy San Diego protests. I’ve never been inclined to protest. I don’t have the capacity for it. Perhaps it’s an attention span issue. I hope this doesn’t undermine what I have to say here.
It’s a moral issue. The best label I’ve found for my moral beliefs is “agnostic Mormonism” and I’ve recently been fond of calling myself a “liberaltarian” to describe my politics. Having grown up Mormon and having been a Mormon missionary for two years, my morality is informed heavily by Christ’s teachings. I love Jesus’s humanitarianism. It’s this humanitarianism that makes me sympathetic to the occupy movement, particularly after this past week.
Mayor Bloomberg has stated the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. Mr. Lewis called that rationale “a farce.”
“They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they’re concerned about a dirty park. That’s obnoxious, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Lewis said.
The video is what pushed me over the edge. Seeing a man clad in boots and a helmet spray a group of students sitting on the ground (twice!) as if he were watering a garden, is too much for me. I’m an alum of the University of California. I can’t believe this happened in my country, in my state, at my university.
That the occupy movements lack definition is a feature, not a bug. Because occupy has no centralized leader or mission, everyone is allowed to project their own meaning onto it. I’ve seen occupy as a manifestation of anxiety over the influence of organizations in our lives. I believe it’s the same anxiety felt by people who identify with the Tea Party (which I found repulsive, probably based on my own classism).
Here’s what I see happening:
Millions of Americans have shaped their lives based on the assumption that a variety of institutions existed to protect them and advocate for them: government agencies, banks, schools, corporations, religions, etc. They’ve taken student loans, mortgages, gone to war, built careers based on these assumptions. Now they’re forced to face a variety of painful truths, including:
Most of these organizations don’t care about anyone’s individual rights or welfare at all. Many of them don’t even work to achieve their stated missions. They exist merely to sustain themselves.
Beyond sustaining themselves, many of these organizations that exist explicitly to serve individuals are flagrantly serving OTHER organizations at the expense of individuals. In a horrifically ironic way, this week’s violence made this case brutally clear. Another good example of this is congress’s recent capitulation to dairy farm lobbyists at the expense of our children’s health by defining pizza as a vegetable. Wall street bailouts are another great example. The seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are another. This disingenuousness is insulting.
Many of these organizations are partially or fully funded by tax dollars. These are tax dollars that are literally forced from individuals’ hands. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are literally separated from your family and sent to jail. You have no choice but to fund these organizations that work against you. This is where the tea party most clearly overlaps with the occupy movement. Note: the UC Davis police officer who sprayed the kids made $116,000 in 2010. I paid for part of that.
Occupy, by agitating enough organizations into showing how much they care for individual liberties, is now forcing more people to ask themselves: “is this what we want?”
Do we want a militarized police force? Do we want a police state? Will I want to send my daughter to a state university, knowing that she might be sent to the hospital with chemical burns if she chooses to protest peacefully there? Do we want to be at war? Why are we paying for this? Worse, why are we going into debt to pay for this? Do we want to concede so many of our liberties to so few organizations – particularly organizations that don’t care about us?
There are a million more questions. Each with a million answers. And each pointing to a fact that more and more people are aware of: many of the institutions we depend on are completely broken. They are led by cowards. We have been asleep. We are paying for it.
I don’t know what to do, but I will not give another dollar to the UC system until Lt. John Pike is fired and stripped of all severance pay. I will not donate to any elected official currently holding office or any major political party. I’ll have to think of some other things to do.
Wake up.
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Over dinner one night last week, Shannon and I puzzled over people’s desire to see photos of Bin Laden’s corpse. We don’t relate to people who want to see photos of dead people. Neither of us believe that photos of Bin Laden’s corpse will convince anyone who doubts his death. But now I’m wondering if there’s a moral imperative for us, as Americans, to see more of what our country does, even if it’s morbid.
We choose to live here. We pay taxes. By doing so, we explicitly or tacitly support our government’s policies. We compromise some of our beliefs and desires, trusting that our democratic system will find solutions that, while not ideal for us as individuals, are the best for most.
But can we trust this system to work if we can’t—or refuse to—see what it produces?
Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is—and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.
…a photograph of the violence you inflict is always, in very large measure, a self-portrait.
Gourevitch advocates against releasing the photos, but perhaps we’d benefit from being more self-aware. Maybe we should let ourselves see who we are. Perhaps we’d make better decisions. Perhaps we wouldn’t be so cavalier about sending our children to kill people in other countries.
The idea that transparency leads to better decisions is the thesis of transparency advocacy. It’s easy to ask for transparency when we imagine it uncovering corruption in other people, but it becomes uncomfortable when it threatens to reveal parts of ourselves that we’d rather pretend aren’t there.
Seeing images of our victims—both our enemies and our own soldiers—could make us more introspective. It could also desensitize and harden us. Or it could just make us despair. I don’t know what it would do.
When I lived in Venezuela, a local newspaper printed a full color photo of a corpse and its decapitated head on one of its covers. The story was about a local prison riot. Most people I talked to about it were offended by the photo and complained that the newspaper shouldn’t have printed it. No one I talked to saw the photo as a call for prison reform—they saw it as a sensationalistic way to sell newspapers. I imagine it worked.
And now my mind returns to the beginning. I might be willing to confront images of our violence, hoping that they’ll encourage me to work harder for peace. But I’m nervous about life among these images, afraid that they won’t do anything at all.
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On Friday, USA.gov started allowing bit.ly to produce 1.USA.gov URLs whenever anyone uses bit.ly to shorten a .gov or .mil URL. A few people have asked why the short URLs use subdomains of USA.gov rather than 1.gov or go.gov. People asked the same question when USA.gov launched Go.USA.gov.
The reason is usability. While every character counts in a short URL, the purpose of USA.gov’s short URLs is to help the end user—the person who actually sees and clicks on the URL—to know what they’re dealing with.
While the United States owns the .gov top level domain, .gov is used as the official second level domain of many countries, including China and India. It is not reasonable to expect that most people understand the nuances of the domain name system and understand what each part of a URL represents.
Keeping USA.gov in the URL, while sacrificing a few characters, makes it 100% clear to people worldwide that the link will take them to official U.S. government information.
As a bonus, because Go.USA.gov and 1.USA.gov include USA.gov in their URLs, you can now search Twitter for USA.gov and any keyword to find timely conversations happening around official U.S. government information. Try it out: here’s a search for USA.gov and gas.
Here’s a list of countries that use gov as the official second level domain for their government websites, taken from the Public Suffix List:
As a part of my efforts to show the world what a great city San Diego is, I asked Chris Radcliff to talk to me about his work with the San Diego Space Society, the Space Travelers Emporium, and the wildly successful SpaceUp. He also teaches me what the word unqualified means, we wear out the word awesome, and there’s some talk about drinking coffee in zero gravity.
My Chris-worship is evident in the interview, but if you don’t already know who he is, I urge you to read on. Chris is a great soul—a creator of movements, a maker of things, a real friend, an awesome dad and husband, and a person who constantly reminds me just how wonderful human beings can be.
Chris is currently organizing the second San Diego SpaceUp, a space unconference being held on February 12th and 13th at The Loft at UC San Diego. More info on SpaceUp San Diego’s website.
Meanwhile, SpaceUp Houston will take place on the same dates at Houston’s Lunar & Planetary Institute. More info on SpaceUp Houston.
Also, we conducted this interview at the end of October 2010, so I want to apologize to Chris, and the world, for not publishing it sooner.
Will you go into space?
Yes. I can give an unqualified yes on that.
An unqualified yes?
Unqualified yes.
What do you mean by that?
Well, up until a few years ago, I would have said “I would love to go into space” or “I plan to go into space.” But as of probably the last six months or so, I can definitely say that I’m going into space, and nothing’s going to stop me.
OK. But it’s still unqualified meaning you have no certainty? I mean, you can’t like…
No, no. Sorry. ‘Unqualified’ means that…
I don’t even know what that means.
“Unqualified” means “yes, I will go into space.” And it’s not “I will go to space if—whatever.”
And by going to space, you mean like suborbital space in a craft?
Mm-hmm. (yes)
Anything beyond that, like spacewalk?
Absolutely. I would like to go into orbit. I’d love to visit a space station at some point. Just today I saw a couple of new models that are coming out that look pretty spectacular.
So what changed in the past six months?
In the past six months, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people who are actually making these things happen. Even a year ago, a lot of it was very theoretical. There were people out there doing this “new space” thing: making the ships, making the space stations, doing the work of actually producing the way of getting there. But then I started to really get to know these people, and they are passionate—not just in the way that the people that we know who are passionate about their jobs or their side projects, but just amazingly single-minded. This is a thing that they will do. They’re passionate about something like “I will design a low-cost awesome spacesuit.” That kind of thing.
The people who are doing this will work for no pay or will take cruddy jobs so they can work nights in their garage to build rockets. There are so many of them now, and they’re starting to find each other and support each other. They’re going to make these things happen, and they’re going to make them happen in abundance.
It’s not just “Great, a bunch of them will go to work for NASA and they will develop a rocket that goes to a space station that goes to a planet.” We’re going to be swarming all over the solar system within a decade.
They still need money to do this. Is there grant money?
There is money, actually. The funny thing is that most of the money in the new space arena is coming from the people who made their millions, and in some case billions, in the tech arena. So, you’ve got your Elon Musk from PayPal. He made his money in PayPal and piled it into SpaceX. Those are people who made their money doing something they were good at, but when they asked themselves what they really wanted to do with their lives many of them chose to explore space.
This is the kind of number that’s being thrown around as an individual who has that kind of money saying, “I am willing to pour that into your project so you can take me to Mars.”
There’s Bigelow Aerospace, founded by a guy who made his money in hotels and has always wanted to build a space station. So, he set aside $500 million and said, “I’m going to do it. Even if I have to burn through all of this money, I’m going to make this happen.”
Like a vacation fund. Like, “Here’s my space station fund, here’s our trip to Cabo fund.”
Exactly. And the interesting thing about that is that once you get a source of funds, and a backer who is laser-focused on making it happen, the other people will start working on it because they’re just waiting for the opportunity.
SpaceX has something like a thousand people working for it now, and everybody that I’ve met from SpaceX has that same focus where they’re like, “We would come work here for free.” I’ve been there at midnight on a Friday night and there are people working. I’ve been there Sunday afternoon and there are people working.
Tell me about the Space Emporium.
The Space Travelers Emporium actually came out of two needs that we had, and then one idea that put them together.
One need was that we needed a place to be because the San Diego Space Society is a shoestring non-profit. We don’t have grant money coming in. We’re entirely member-supported and volunteer-based, so we didn’t have a place to get together and just sit down and do the things that we wanted to do. So, we needed that—a workshop.
At the same time, we didn’t want to hide away in an industrial park in Kearny Mesa or El Cajon and make it this secret clubhouse. Space is coming into people’s lives right now, and it’s going to come into people’s lives even more over the course of the next decade. So, rather than hide away, we wanted to be there. Be right up front. Be the place where people go when they want to know more about space.
I’ve been a fan of the 826 groups for a while. There’s 826LA and 826 Seattle. It’s a writing workshop group that does creative writing workshops for underprivileged kids. And as a fundraiser, they operate a storefront that’s kind of whimsical. So, for instance, the one up in L.A. is the Echo Park Time Travel Mart.
They get lots of attention and it’s attention from people who are interested in the fanciful thing that they present, much more than the thing that they’re actually raising funds for.
I thought in terms of a NASA store. What if you had a NASA store that was kind of like the Apple store? Take the abstract idea, and make it real. Could we create something where you would go in and have this very specific interaction, and come away from the interaction both having this new thing that makes your life more awesome, but also having become kind of a devotee to the idea that goes with it?
We thought about doing that for the Emporium. It’s the place where you go and learn about this amazing new stuff that you can do in space and none of it is in the abstract. It’s not “here’s what people will be doing in 50 years, here’s what astronauts do now.” It’s “here’s what you can do.” You can go take a ZERO-G flight right now. You can go plop down your money. You can go and buy a ticket on a suborbital flight right now. There’s zero barrier to that other than having the funds to do those things.
How much does that ticket cost?
The suborbital flights? The cheapest one that’s currently available is $95,000.
It’s still high. But again, the ZERO-G flights are $5,000. There’s an astronaut-training package actually in use by the folks who are going to go on space flights and other private astronauts. That’s available for, I think, $5,000 to $7,000. There are things that are within reach to anybody who can walk in.
So, you can come in, you can get the ideas, but then you can take something away with you. We had the idea of selling T-shirts and model kits and that kind of thing.
Do you have freeze-dried ice cream?
No, we don’t. We tried not to carry anything that’s twice removed from actual space travel. So, the freeze-dried ice cream is great from a conceptual point of view, but no one on the space station actually eats freeze-dried ice cream.
That’s good to know.
We have tried to get space food. There are things that are like freeze dried ice cream that astronauts eat, but they tend to be very specifically prepared, and while you can actually get some of that, it’s more difficult to get.
We’d love to have something that’s a little bit more unexpected. For instance, we were talking just today about the possibility of offering zero gravity coffee cups. This is actually something that was just invented on the space station by an astronaut, so there’s only one degree of separation from the reality of it. As much as it works to drink coffee from a straw out of a little plastic bag, astronauts hate that. They want to have a cup, and you want to have a cup you can set down and your coffee won’t go everywhere because that’s kind of bad.
Well, have you seen Avatar?
No.
Because the bad guy in Avatar is this military commander dude and he always has his coffee mug. He’s at the helm of some sort of futuristic craft, killing things, and he’s got his mug. It’s like, you’ve got to hold your mug.
There is definitely something to that.
They actually did the physics of it and figured out that the kind of thing that they use for propellant tanks in zero gravity, where you use capillary action and surface tension to control fluids can be used on coffee too. I thought that would be a great thing to make that because, I mean, it’s also a perfectly serviceable mug that you could just have on a table.
And you never know when the gravity’s going to go off.
Exactly, you can even write that right on the side: “This mug still works even if the gravity turns off.”
And that’s a little unexpected. We want people to walk in, see real things used in space and say, “That’s really cool.”
So the emporium remains a destination place because you’re going to get things there and see things there you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.
Right.
And is that idea bearing fruit?
It is.
It’s very early, but at the same time, people’s eyes light up when they find out that there is a Space Travelers Emporium. And then their jaw drops when they found out that it’s real, which was another thing we had to walk that line of. It has to be the absolute cutting-edge of space travel, but it has to be real because you can do crazy spaceships all day and people will say “Oh, that’s neat. I like crazy spaceships,” and they’ll walk away. But people come in and they say, “This is about helping people go to space. Here are the ways you can go to space.” And then they see that there are prices, and they say, “You mean you can actually go to space?” That’s when the jaw drops.
You said you’ve met people who working to make it possible for you to go to space. What are you doing to make it happen?
What I am doing is probably not a whole lot, to be honest. My role in it is really small compared to the people with the laser-like focus who are driving forward and bringing everybody with them. What I have tried to do is work to my strength, which is bringing people together and having them meet other people, the combination of which could be awesome.
So, one thing that I’ve done to that end that’s worked pretty well is SpaceUp, which takes the unconference idea from the tech community and brings it to the space community because nobody in that community has heard of it at all. It was completely off the radar. We got a small group to come together and have a BarCamp and unconference for the first time, showed them how it’s done, and then said, “Look, you can do this anywhere,” and now we’re seeing what heppens. You get people bubbling ideas, and it’s not about view graphs or sitting in a conference room seat for three hours.
Would it be fair to say that you started SpaceUp?
Yes. SpaceUp is entirely from my head. Now, the name came from John Tantalo, and he will always remind me of that.
Yes, and he is wonderful. I would say that SpaceUp is a whole lot though.
There are others being planned all over the place. They’re in the early stages in places like London, India, Vancouver, Houston, Minneapolis, and DC again because everybody really loved DC.
How about Brazil?
I was about to say no, and then that tickled something in my head from somebody in Brazil. Maybe you just asked me that question before.
I don’t know. The only reason I bring up Brazil is I was there in 2003 when they had a disastrous explosion. They were building a launch pad because they’re on equator where the Earth is actually moving faster, which allows them to whip things into space with less fuel.
It’s so brilliant. I understand how the outside of a record moves faster. It never occurred to me that the equator would move faster and that you could actually leverage that energy. But anyway, it blew up and they lost a lot of their top scientists, and because I was there at the time I know there’s an aerospace industry in Brazil. That’s the only reason I thought of it.
SpaceUp and the unconference idea is great for a place like that where you don’t necessarily have a big company or big space organizations bringing people together already. And what you end up with is a lot of people who are working satellite-wise for other groups around the world. But then they realize that they’re all in the same place.
I think this is just part of knowing you and being exposed to the things you read and share, but it seems to me that there is more chatter about space these days, particularly since SpaceUp. It seems like space is becoming kind of hip. Is that just because I know you, or is that true?
It’s a little bit of both. Part of it is that you know me, and so I’ve thrown you over the wall into the people who understand new space. But it is a real movement. This kind of new space or alt-space—people are still trying to figure out what to call it. I’m going to call it new space.
There’s a lot of excitement. I think it’s a lot like Silicon Valley in the 70s when Apple was being founded, because that was a time when you had the home brew computing club, and then suddenly there was a lot of interest in turning their crazy inventions into real products. Apple was, of course, the first group to do that really well, but then suddenly it was like, “oh, what other nerdy computer guys in this area do you know? Would they like to form companies too?” And they did.
The same thing is happening right now in space, where you have somebody who has maybe been a secret space nerd all their life, made their money in software development, and then sit down and say, “You know what? All these other secret space nerds now have rocket companies. Why don’t I have a rocket company?” And they form one!
So there’s a lot going on right now, and I think it’s building on itself now to the point where honestly I give it two years in which we’ll see the first paying passengers to go on these spacecraft, we’ll see the launch of the first private space station, we’ll see a government lease a private space station for the first time, we’ll see the first private astronauts.
And again, it’s just going to build on itself because there are companies that have been working on this for a decade now or more. There are a lot more companies that have been working on this for about five years, since the X PRIZE was won, and they’re all really reaching ahead now.
Is there anything special about San Diego that lends itself to being a good city for space stuff?
There are a couple things that are special about San Diego. The history surprised me a little bit. The Convair Corporation was here, and the rocket that put the first American in orbit was built in Kearny Mesa. That’s pretty cool stuff.
But we also have the Air & Space Museum here. Now that it’s a Smithsonian affiliate, they get a lot of attention, special collections, and those kinds of things that are really neat.
But the other part of it is that we are driving distance to some of the real hot spots in this new space arena—L.A. and Mojave. That’s where the companies are all coming together to do their work. It’s not like lots of people live in Mojave, but lots of people will drive to Mojave from San Diego.
One of the things that we saw at that first SpaceUp is that collecting the people from the general area together and getting them exposed to each other was like lighting a fire. It was amazing because, of course, you also have Hollywood and L.A. and you have things like the biotech industry and UCSD and the other groups that are in San Diego that are very technically-oriented.
I think about this all the time. It’s taken me about 10 years to fall in love with L.A. I don’t go there very frequently. I would never want to live there, but just really admiring what an engine it is of creativity and making awesome things happen, and just the amount of work that comes out of that city. And I envy it in a way because there’s all this creative energy up there, and I feel like San Diego is kind of like the nerdy brother or cousin or something like that of L.A., which is clearly where I belong.
But the more we can get ideas going back and forth through Camp Pendleton, I think there’s so much potential.
The nice thing about San Diego’s relationship with L.A. is that you can hold something like a conference in San Diego and draw people from L.A. because they love to come here for vacation.
And it’s just that kind of “get away” sort of place that’s also a city, and you can still go get Pinkberry at 2 a.m. if you need.
Is it part of your M.O., as Chris Radcliff to be awesome? Do you ever think that way?
No.
OK.
I tend to think that lots of other things are awesome, and I often worry that I’m too much of a cheerleader for things. But at the same time, part of my point of being is to find the thing—or person, usually, or group—that I think is great and do something to help them be awesome. That, to me, is just success, and the more successes like that I can rack up, the better I feel about what I’m doing.
It’s taking the great, helping them be awesome.
So, maybe occasionally I get some reflected awesome from that, but I don’t think that I’ve done the awesome thing that I want to do with my life yet.
One of the reasons why I wanted to interview you and why I find you so inspiring, and awesome, is how you advocate for this garage culture so well. You’ve done a good job of reminding me that if a human being wants to build an inexpensive spacesuit, they can do that.
Just like a human being who wanted to go to space figured out how to go to space. I mean, it’s been done. We’ve gone to the moon.
Yeah. We know that now.
And it’s this constant reminder of how epic the realm of possibility really is.
Oh yeah.
I guess there’s no question about that.
So, maybe I connected you to the awesome.
I would say that’s awesome.
I’ll check that off in my awesome book of awesome.
There you go.
And now it’s lost all meaning – until the word gets recharged.
Yes.
OK. Well, done.
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I was lucky to have done or been a part of a lot of awesome, big, new, fun things in 2010. Here are a few of them.
Lost 23 pounds. I ran a lot. I ate less. I ate more plants than animals. I used the Workout of the Day app, which I highly recommend. I gradually put about 7 pounds back on after I reached my goal of 180, and I’m probably up another 5 more because of the holidays. Looking forward to doing another “line diet” between now and my birthday in May so I can keep my pants from turning into meggings (again).
Learned that I can run much faster than I thought I could. I averaged 7:55 miles in a Thanksgiving 10k, while I’d averaged 9:06 miles in the first half marathon I ran in January. This is straight up bragging, but I’m also writing it because I really didn’t believe it was possible.
Bought a house. It was an ordeal, but we love the house and are excited to live in it for a long time. It feels strange to be grown up like this in a “Well…how did I get here?” kind of way. Because of the house, I also learned how to fix leaky faucets, patch drywall, install light fixtures, hoist a kayak, and a few other things. I also bought a pipe wrench!
Officially launched Go.USA.gov. I get to see Go.USA.gov URLs being used by agencies and programs at all levels of government every day. I think we’re up to about 3,000 users. It’s awesome, and I feel really lucky to have been a part of it. Short .gov URLs are going to get even better in 2011.
I was skeptical about this project when we started on it because I didn’t think we should let kids participate. We had very little time to pull it off, and I thought it’d be too much trouble to deal with the legal issues caused by having kids participate and that we should focus on getting a good poster from a professional participant. Well, we got a really good poster from a professional participant and we got a lot of priceless involvement from kids at the same time, including an entire elementary school art class. I’m really proud of how it came out and I’m glad my skepticism didn’t win out.
Launched Open San Diego. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re excited to get to work in 2011.
Read a bunch of books, but not all the ones I wanted to. I blame Instapaper, Angry Birds, and Awesome Solitaire for distracting me. I’d list my Angry Birds accomplishments, but they’re too embarrassing.
Went to Mexico City and Tepoztlan. The time we had, the friend we stayed with (Scott), the friends we made, and the tacos we ate were wonderful. We only went for a week or so, which isn’t enough time, so we’ll have to go back.
Of course, I couldn’t have done any of these things without Shan, or my family, or my friends, or the friends I get to work with. I’m a very lucky guy.
I’m sure we did other things, but it’s time to start 2011′s list.
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I'm an Internet marketing consultant who occasionally writes about food, the environment, art, marketing, and life in San Diego. I've been blogging since 2002.
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