interviews
When Voting Fails
by Dr. Martha Jones
July 9, 2020
This interview with Dr. Martha Jones, a Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Hi! I’m curious to know what’s on your mind right now.
Dr. Martha Jones | I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It's where I teach and where I live. When the spring 2020 protests began, for a moment my city was of interest to the national media. As uprising began to break out in other places across the country, the country recalled that we had had a major uprising here in 2015 after the killing of Freddie Gray. And still, in 2020 national gaze quickly turned away when Baltimore didn't comport, somehow, with expectations. The demonstrations here didn't look like Minneapolis. They didn't look like Louisville. They didn't look like LA or New York.
Media is essential to amplifying and projecting the voices of the disenfranchised. At the same time, the media is moved by the sensational.
There is something untenable for me about the view that we must rise to the sensational in order to be heard.
It's not just that we have to raise our voices. We have to raise them, and that spectacle must be sensational before journalists will deeply partner and become embedded in the scene.
What did Baltimore teach itself in the time between Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020?
It's important to say I didn't live here in 2015, so I'm learning in real-time about my city.
The city had not only its own sense of outrage but its own vision for how to be. This comes in part from the roles played by seasoned community activists, folks who were part of the 2015 uprising who are still here and have remained deeply committed. In 2020, they have helped to shape an extraordinary series of demonstrations here in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, we were also getting ready to elect a new mayor in June, though with a limited capacity to get to the polls. Maryland had committed to mail-in voting without much debate or objection. But there were troubles with getting the ballots into people's hands and getting the right ballots into people's hands, so in-person polling places had to be opened up. People, in the midst of protests, in the midst of a pandemic, showed up here in Baltimore to cast their ballots. That evidenced another side of the civic culture here. People were tuned in to the fact that there was an election, and people came out for that.
Participating in democracy need not be an either-or proposition. We can simultaneously be in the streets, engaged in direct protest, a democratic tradition in this country, and we can show up to the polls.
That is what I saw happening in Baltimore, and it happened in the midst of a pandemic that encouraged us to stay home and to do nothing at all. Of course, that is complicated by important public health concerns. But I think an insistence that democracy is a participatory culture and not simply a set of principles or a structure, is an important part of what I play out here in real-time.
How does civil unrest and protest lend itself to more civic participation?
The story of the 1960s is instructive for me. It was simultaneously the scene of voting rights and the scene of uprisings. The two facets of that time may not often be told together. But they were not wholly antithetical to one another at all. Immediately in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of African American voters grew importantly and significantly. It is that context that we move into an era of uprisings in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and New York. Part of what can be learned by voting, are the limits of the ballot. Yes, political power is embodied in casting a ballot and in electing a candidate. At the same time, harnessing political power requires more than showing up at the polls. Demonstrations are another way of being heard and influencing law and policy. I am an historian of Black politics in 19th century Baltimore, which may seem like a very long time ago. Still, that history includes important lessons in how people created their own power in an era, time, and place when they could not vote at all.
I'm interested in what we do when voting fails us, which it almost certainly will.
On this, I draw from the lessons of African American women in history. African American women have been engaged with politics for a long time, and for most of that time, they could not vote. They organized, they lobbied, they used men as surrogates. And when by a state constitution, or the 19th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they received legally sanctioned political power, they were ready. When African American women got the vote, they were ready to use it as fully formed political actors because they had been constructing their own power for a very long time.
I want to talk more about the prominence of Black women through the history of protest and civil unrest in America.
One of the moments most well known to people during the civil rights movement is the march in Selma, Alabama. Among the best remembered of those marchers, is a young man who is today among our most venerated members of Congress, John Lewis. Lewis was among the scores who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the name of winning voting rights, only to be met with brutal police violence.
Behind the scenes was a Black woman named Diane Nash. She cut her political teeth organizing sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at Fisk University. She played a critical role in the work of the Freedom Rides in 1961 by sending young people from Tennessee further South to replenish the ranks of the Riders after many had been brutally attacked. It was Diane Nash who, long before Martin King and the SCLC assented to the strategy, came to Selma to wage a voting rights campaign.
Nash was an organizer, planner, and orchestrator, but we don’t see her photo as folks make that fateful march across the bridge. In those long moments, she was back in Selma making sure that there would be medics available when people are brutalized. To me, this is an example of a woman who taught us how leadership takes many forms. She taught that political leadership must embrace many forms of action. Nash never took the stage as a charismatic, upfront character. Still, she was someone who, when we look closely at the scenes in Selma, becomes critical to that story.
Contrast Nash with someone like Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. The two were peers but worked very differently. Hamer not only understood, she deliberately looked to exploit the cameras to propel her image, and her message, and project efforts to win voting rights in her home state and transform Democratic Party politics nationally. The two women worked by way of different philosophies and differing styles. They adopted divergent tactics even. Taking the work of Nash and Hamer as two parts of a whole during the Modern Civil Rights Movement helps us think in expansive ways about how political power can be won and how it can be wielded.
Looking back is one style more effective than the other?
It's difficult to say, because they are parts of a whole. The thing that knits them together, in some sense, is violence. Nash is deeply committed to nonviolent direct action, the sit-in, the march – but she still sees violence as essential. There's an often-quoted moment when she speaks with federal officials from Washington who tell her to desist from sending young people to join the freedom riders: “You know, we understand that we are walking into a brutal scene. The young people had made their wills the night before they left.” Hamer also knew violence and had a defining moment early in her career when she was stopped, detained, jailed, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by police after attempting to register to vote.
The women I write about are all, each in their own way, wrestling with the violence that is woven into American politics. They know that violence will be directed unashamedly at their very bodies.
That core insight, one that sits at the foundation of Black women’s political consciousness, extends back to confrontations between enslaved women and their enslavers. In our own moment, the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor is the latest example of how Black women's bodies remain the targets of a brutal politics of violence. This thread runs through Black women's political philosophy and their practice, across time.
African American women have always been plagued by a specific form of violence: sexual violence. So many of the Black woman activists who I write about eventually explain their confrontations with either sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence. This not only informs their tactics, but sets the goals for political power must accomplish. When Tarana Burke gave us the Me Too movement in the 21st century, she was echoing a long-standing critique. Black women aim to use their power to end the scourge of sexual violence, a story that has an origin in the history of slavery but doesn't end with emancipation. It continues until this day.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate having this conversation.
One of the dangers of a conversation like this is to leave the impression either that nothing changes or nothing can change. I struggle with that. History is a tough endeavor in that regard. It is possible to look across two centuries and recognize what hasn't changed.
And still, I am inspired. Black women have been the conscience of this nation since its inception. They have studied the lay of the land. They have thought very hard about our founding ideals. They have also set the bar when it comes to what liberty, equality, and dignity mean. They have shared their ideas, pointing us where the bar is.
Listen and Black women will remind you of the ideals that we all should aspire to, individually and collectively.
The women I write about say no racism, and no sexism. Period. They say that in 1820 and have waited ever since for us to catch up as a nation. I've watched Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, speak, and I think I recognize something familiar in that act. She is an African American woman, representing her deceased daughter, and at the same time speaking to all of us about the violence which, as a nation, we must not, cannot, and should not allow.
There is nothing enviable about this position in body politic. And it's not enough. Still, voices that speak fundamental truths, that hold up indelible principles, that insist upon equality and dignity for all are absolutely essential. Someone has to set the bar high in a nation that has been built upon countless indignities and injustices. Someone has to remind us that ideals animate this country, not interests, convenience, or pragmatism.
Someone has to do that. Black women took up that mantle in the earliest days of this republic and they continue to bear that burden even today, in the 21st century.
interviews
Michael Casey on Blockchain and The Grid
by Michael Casey
February 20, 2019
This interview with Michael Casey was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Michael Casey is a writer and researcher in the fields of economics, finance, and digital-currency technology. He is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Senior Advisor for the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT's Media Lab, where he explores blockchain applications that advance financial inclusion, economic development, and resource efficiency.
We look to define terms as we enter new themes, incorporating blockchain and what it represents within energy democracy would be especially helpful.
To start, how do you define energy democracy?
There's a spectrum of things that would encompass it. The one we've been most focused on, in terms of how it impacts blockchain, is the idea of the ability of the user, and therefore the pro-sumer [the person who is consuming and producing power], to have the right to sell and buy at a market determined price. As it is now, utility is in the middle, purchasing power at a rate they predetermine. There's no capacity to sell to an alternative, other than a single provider.
A world in which I can enter into agreements that have my power purchased at a particular rate, whether that is literally delivering the electrons, or is a contract in which my provision to the grid is compensated at a rate that is determined by the demand for that particular quality of power, is something we're really focused on.
Which is the way the current structure is. You build onto that notions of broader democracy. The right to go off-grid, the right to establish your own systems for setting smart meters, for determining what devices are used and when. There's something of a spectrum in the concept, but the starting point we care about most is price, at least that I do.
What about ownership?
That would fall into it for sure. Yes, we definitely would put that into that same spectrum. The idea that the assets can be owned by an individual. There’s varying degrees to this. One is ownership and the other one is finance. The ability for me to finance the acquisition with whomever I can tap, rather than the electricity infrastructure I depend upon, being itself dependent upon the financing vehicles of utility. That I, or my community, can tap external sources to fund what is essentially our contribution to the broader infrastructure. You can get broader and broader with it, but the right to own and control those assets would be part of it. The right to determine how and who finances it is another part.
Where does blockchain come in?
I'll speak to it from the projects I've been specifically involved in. One is a microgrid we are experimenting with in Puerto Rico. I look at it in two ways. First is this concept of finance. I can tap my home or community and establish a microgrid. How might we have that financed by some sort of external direct investor, a social impact investor or investment fund? The blockchain creates the capacity to form what are known as smart contracts.
Are you aware of that term?
No.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger. It, in a decentralized manner, without any particular entity in charge, records the sequence of transactions and then, through a consensus mechanism, every node, every computer, within that network, each maintain their own version of the ledger, and update that ledger through this consensus process.
If you think about how we might move to a world where my transactions, my sale of power, my provision of power, and the funds I receive for those, are not being dictated by centralized utility – then the idea that we’re now no longer going to have one entity in charge of those transactions, and who gets to set those prices and who doesn't, starts to move us into this direction of decentralization.
We might, as a community, decide we're going to nominate some party to be in charge of the ledger, but again you're now trusting that entity to do so. Maybe the community appoints one household to run the ledger, and they're billing everybody, they're acting essentially as a local utility. You really haven't changed the model that much, you've just made it smaller, but it's okay. That could be a more efficient way to do things. Once you bring an outside investor in who says, "I want to make sure my collateral, some claim on that power, and the income that's generated, is being managed in a way that I can trust. I'm external to the community. Who am I going to trust to do that?"
A distributed ledger that nobody can change, gives me the capacity, potentially – I always use the word potentially, because all of this stuff is completely and utterly, in experimental phase right now – it gives us the potential to have my transactions verified without me having to trust the community member that is in charge.
You can imagine a situation where there's an investor in the United States, let's say in Seattle, who has put a five-year bond into the financing of a local community's grid in Africa. He's going to want to have some assurances that asset is being managed in a way that is in the interest to what they paid for. This is one principle idea to think about. Decentralization gives us the capacity, not just for those inside the community, but also outside, to have a relationship like this.
A smart contract is the idea that in addition to managing transactions, in the plain vanilla notion of what that is, payments of money, the actions that are taken by software to instruct devices to do things, or manage a set of contracts, can be executed without any one computer being in charge.
A smart contract is a bit of a misnomer. It implies that the contract is what's going on. The contract is an agreement between you and I. A smart contract says that you and I enter into an agreement and neither you nor I have any power over the computers executing the terms and obligations of that contract, to manipulate it.
How does this work in terms of smart property? I've got collateral, even though I'm living in Seattle and the microgrid I’m financing is in Nairobi. If payments are not met, it's a form of foreclosure or default protection. I funded this thing at a low interest rate because I'm protected. If the payments are not being made, at a certain point the system recognizes this because those payments are digital, they have programmable money qualities, and they stop. A device – a smart meter, one of the devices within the system, can divert that power back to the grid for example, so that the user is no longer using it. You can create a pay-per-use type of structure.
We thought long and hard about this from a social impact, developing world scenario. Could you build tiers into it so that certain devices always stay on because they have to? The hospital needs to have its power. Various things need to stay on, but you could then have some sort of structure in which the least necessary, or least important devices, can be turned off. And that power is diverted back to the grid until the loan is renewed and payments are revived.
You're creating a certain amount of de facto property rights that is the structure of so many other forms of lending. That's the way we think we can drive down the cost of lending. Rather than having to depend upon very centralized public finance models, in which infrastructure is built with access to Wall Street's funding, we now have the capacity, potentially, because I don't need to trust anybody in terms of the execution.
In that structure we can potentially bypass all of that, and have pools of social impact investors have direct stakes in, and help to fund the development of these smaller off-grid or on-grid types of microgrids. That's what we're working on in Puerto Rico right now. That access to finance. How do we create a sufficient level of protection? There's always the capacity that somebody could monkey with the smart meter. There's various things that could go wrong, but any investment has these factors.
The other part of it is, if you have a true transactive grid, it's not just a two way transaction with me and utility. I'm actually trading with my neighbors and setting up transactions and relationships. Then potentially the blockchain could be there as a way to tokenize the rights of that electricity. The transaction is between each of the participants in that network which itself would also be managed in a decentralized way. There's no utility. There's no large national or state level utility, nor is there even a local community utility. The utility in a sense, is the blockchain. There has to be built into it some sort of price mechanism. People are only going to enter into deals if you can potentially program devices, inverters and like, to accept or divert power over their prices, and meet whatever parameters you've set.
All that functionality, do I transact, do I not? Has the transaction been recorded? So there's no way I could do a deal with one person and actually divert the power somewhere else, and essentially double dip on the thing. All of that needs to be managed to keep the system in balance. That is where we see the second layer of a decentralized blockchain to come.
I feel at this stage, after a long time looking at all this, unconvinced that transactive systems like this are necessarily going to work. I do believe that in some shape or form, if you're going to reach this true energy democracy idea, something like this is where we need to go. But we're not there now. I think that's partly because we have these big, sensitive, national grid structures and it's not clear that the power loads and various sensitivities that go with how you keep the grid alive, and not kill people, can be managed entirely by this sort of structure.
This is just my thinking at the moment. It's not as if the broad principle of a more decentralized way to manage transactions between users and the grid isn't something we should be striving for. I am a believer in the finance part of it. Transactive systems, certainly in on-grid environments, are going to have to be capable of interacting with the demands of large service operators needs.
What about working on microgrids, or moving off the grid? Do you think that creates a better opportunity at moving towards decentralization?
Harvey [Micahel] is actually more of a visionary when it comes to the broader idea of energy democracy. A lot of his thinking has helped me on this sort of stuff.
There's certainly potential in off-grid settings.
Can we have a hybrid? Where you have an off-grid community based microgrid? It's not plugged into the national grid, except at such times when it needs it. So the national grid becomes the back up. That would be ideal. There's a huge political move. You'd need to get these utilities to really step back into a different role. While the grid is functioning in it's off-grid strategy, that is the microgrid, if you wanted to manage transactions within that community in a decentralized way, the blockchain could step in and be that management protocol for that system.
It seems like the private sector and academic institutions are the ones leading this thinking. Do you think the public and the political follow private sector investments?
That's a really good question. I think there are two barriers at arriving at this broad image of energy democracy. The first is that incumbents have a lot of power. Public utilities are heavily regulated. We find this in banking as well.
The regulators are told they must regulate the grid in such and such a way, and that is defined by default, under this current centralized paradigm. You have a lot of inertia from regulators who don't want to disrupt the model because you'd obviously have to design completely different regulations for a world in which these decentralized microgrids are built along the lines I just described. That's one barrier.
Then of course, the utilities themselves have their own political clout. If we want to depend upon their infrastructure, all that expensive capital that’s been invested into it, so that their wires are the ones we use to transact amongst each other, how are we going to compensate those utilities? There's an interesting question about how we might do so. It could be that they cease to be the providers of the power, or at least the sole providers of the power, and instead are just service managers and they take a service fee. One way to think about it might be to think about how the US telecoms industry was deregulated in the middle of the '90's. The baby bells were broken up and the like, there was a mandate that the pipes had to be provided to all comers, there would be a fee that would be paid, but there was no way you could prevent, as the owner of those cables, other providers from providing services along that infrastructure. That's one model that might be interesting when you think about it. But those guys, nonetheless, because the way their current profit models are built, and because of their political clout, are a barrier.
It’s probably at this stage, too marginal. There's not a big enough change in my savings or my profits as a pro-sumer, to really exist. It just hasn't got that "gee whiz", great motivator behind it. I think that's essentially the problem with lots of business models. It's just too incremental. How do you make this big shift if there are a lot of inconveniences involved? On the other hand, I think there is something wrong with that to some extent. We're not thinking hard about how, if we do decentralize, there's all these other business models and ideas that can be built on top of a more decentralized energy democracy system. Rather than thinking about the savings or profits, that I as a household pro-sumer may or may not make on my existing usage and sale of electricity, how do we incentivize bill systems? We now have all this information generated around price levels and the use of IOT devices, and we get more and more sophisticated, down to the device level – there is a way to actually build all these other services in the community. You treat the excess electricity that's produced as a way to then produce batteries. There's a way to fuel electric vehicles that run bus routes around the system, and those buses end up being almost like a back up battery component to the system. You end up running a much, much cheaper traffic system because there's a dual purpose here. You're the backup, you're the recipient of the excess power, and you're providing a service.
How does that get baked into a model that makes the provision of those services cheaper and regulated through this decentralized price signaling mechanism that is a combination of IOT and blockchain, that renewable decentralized energy systems could provide? I don't know what that looks like, but I can envision some very smart, econometric design systems that bring in smart IOT devices that turn on here, turn off there, and create a really rich pool of data around optimizing power, and where and when. There's a whole lot of benefits that could be derived, in a future model that we're not yet visiting, beyond the pros and cons of using it under our current structure.
The problem is people just can't think beyond their monthly power bill. To do that, you need communities to be really forward thinking and experimental in what they could build in the future.
Utility is massive and ubiquitous, but still weirdly opaque, which leaves most people confused. I never think about my utilities bill. Where does trust come into play? Especially with blockchain. Does the public have a distrust in blockchain?
If designed appropriately, and if we reach the point where software and the models and protocalls that are being developed and constantly refined and proved, are trusted to the extent they should be, then they're actually a trust replacement system. That's exactly what they're supposed to be.
When I was talking about how a social impact investor in Seattle can feel confident that their interests are being protected in a smart property financing structure with a microgrid somewhere else, the question of trust is key. I can't trust the local village chief to act in my interest. We just cannot. We have all these barriers to trust around our economy built on those things. Just as there's no reason why the villagers should trust that if I had control over the devices, I wouldn't manipulate and divert the power to my own interests.
It is precisely the problem of trust you're trying to resolve through a blockchain solution. But you asked the right question because we're not yet there in terms of the public perception of blockchain. I personally feel there's a host of misplaced narratives and a deep level of misunderstanding. Some of which is promoted by vested interests who don't understand what's going on.
There's also a lot of really shady, funky people working in this space that have done some bad things. And they've been able to do bad things because the technology itself isn't advanced enough to be able to give the right level of protection. The good news is there is a lot of work being done on security and improving the system so that we're going to reach this level where a) the confidence that people can have that they won't loose their phones is higher and b) they can do so in a way that they don't actually have to trust a custodian. Because right now in a blockchain, bitcoin type solution, the broader ecosystem around it is still being serviced by entities who have control over your money. It's a bit of a hybrid that's not necessarily reliable.
Systems that have a more decentralized, but also highly reliable security model are coming, and that is going to hopefully bring people around to start placing better confidence and trust in the system itself.
If you just look at the way Puerto Rico’s public utility was run, and the abuse, it's hard to say I should trust that. Wait until you see PREPA and what's happened there. There's no trust in the system. One of the reasons why I think Puerto Rico looks like a really good opportunity for us to explore this is because there's such a breakdown of trust in the publicly run system. They're looking for alternatives and we're able to dive in and explore ways we can make it fairer for everybody.