Today, while waiting in bed to get up, I heard some screaming outside the window. Something like, “Can you move over? There’s plenty of room over here…” Getting up to check it out, I noticed a blue Honda mini-van behind the recycling truck going down my street. The recycling truck was picking up the blue bags on each side, as usual. She was asking the recycle truck to move so she could get by.

The recycle guy responded with something like “it’s not my fault, people aren’t supposed to park on both sides of the street”. She waited there for awhile, and I just went back to bed.

About five minutes later, I hear this constant horn sound–roughly two minutes’ worth. I got back up, and saw her hanging out the window, this time yelling, “I gotta catch a plane!” in-between her honks. The recycle guys didn’t respond, and kept throwing bags into the back of the truck. A minute or two went by, and finally she yelled, “Fuck you!” and did an eight-point turn-around, going back down the street the way she came. Others waited patiently behind her.

What’s so interesting about this? Well, besides just being plain rude, there was clearly a “me first” attitude here (no surprise there). A rational person would have turned down the alley roughly 10 feet away, and gone around the block to get past the blockage. Secondly, there was a lack of respect for the fact that the recycle guys have a job to do–they can’t pull over next to everybody’s house to pick up bags; it’d just take too long. They have hundreds of homes to stop at.

Maybe an isolated incident, but still an interesting glimpse into what is perhaps a daily occurrence for the public servants of Pittsburgh who are forced to deal with narrow streets.

While I was at Banff, I attended a workshop were we discussed “the ethics of collaboration”. I understood the terms at face value, of course, but didn’t really realize the concept’s implications and relevance to my own work until a recent event with some former collaborators. It was this event that caused me to re-examine what it means to work together, and what the ethics of collaboration/collectives are (at least to me).

Searching the Internet for “ethics of collaboration”(!), I found an *excellent* paper, which I want to highlight because of its relevance. The paper is called, “The The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by the relatively-famous scholar Jo Freeman.

In the paper, the author writes about formal/informal organizational structures and communication channels, and asserts explicit structure is the best way to avoid hegemony by an “elite”. It seems to almost touch upon parts of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory of social networks, particularly his idea of a “obligatory point of passage”, though she never uses those terms (they didn’t exist, I suppose–Latour wrote in the ’80s; she in 1970).

Not only does her description of outside-the-organization friends as an “elite” hit the nail right on the head, but so does her notion of looking at “whose approval is the stamp of acceptance” to understand who really has power in an organization. She also hits the mark when she says those who are on the “outside” often suffer from “paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware”. I might argue with her as to whether they are always delusions, but maybe that makes me delusional?!

Anyway, this should be required reading for all collaborators and collectives of any kind.

…lies this tree! I love this tree and, at least what I’m ascribing to it in terms of how it got that way.

The first interesting aspect of this situation is the equal priority both have been given in access to the right-of-way along the road. In most modern cities or suburbs, I can say with near certainty that this tree would be cut down. Why would a city not do what they have done here? Because the tree’s trunk is growing directly below the wire. The tree will certainly converge back on the wire and ensnare it again, requiring perpetual pruning. Plus, if the tree were to fall either towards or away from the road, it could take the wire with it; the tree forms what is almost a ring around the wire. To a provider of infrastructure, both risks not worth sparing the tree.

Another interesting aspect of this situation is how the tree has adapted to its situation. The tree has grown more “bushy” on both sides of the wire, almost joining again at the top. How often it is pruned, I’m not sure, but this tree seems to have essentially become two trees.

Has the wire or the infrastructure adapted to the presence of the tree? Seemingly no, but maybe when installing this line, the pole to support the wire was put near this tree on purpose. Since the pole lifts the wire up to its highest point (it droops in-between poles), it helps the tree to have the wire higher above it; there’s less chance to have the wire end up resting on the tree.

The tree is also likely spared by the fact that this pole looks to only carry telecom cables. I can’t tell whether the thinner wire second from the top is electrical or not–if so, it would *really* surprise me that this tree was allowed to remain as it is; it’s an easy path to ground. My bet is that there is no electricity on this pole.

An interesting reflection of somebody’s values that you don’t see everyday!