Short Stories, Long Odds

(As long promised, so now delivered: The first of a three-parter I did for Quorum Report in late January.)

The night Barack Obama was elected, my wife and I decided to go to his inauguration.  I had a romantic notion that taking a road trip across the heartland from Texas to Washington, D.C. would be the best way to go. The idea of this trip became fixed in my mind as a necessary pilgrimage to my nation’s capital. I had never seen it.

As I write this, America exists in a fluid present at the crossroads of history and on the precipice of total disaster. Economically, domestically, and internationally we have plates brimming with misery.  As a counterbalance the American people elected the first African-American president.  Everyone that has not already decided to hate Barack Obama has placed all of the world’s troubles at his feet for him to bear on strength of what thus far is little more than potential.

I voted for Barack Obama – it would be dishonest for me to conceal that – but I don’t know that he can save my country, let alone the world.

I love my country but I also readily admit to pessimism concerning its condition. I wonder if my countrymen feel the same way.  That is the most accurate explanation I can produce, and I hope it sufficiently illustrates the origin of my need to drive across the United States in a bitter winter, and to ask people how they feel about America, and to be one of millions on the National Mall on an Inauguration Day during what will be, for good or ill, a turning point in history.
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(cross posted at http://ratlist.tumblr.com)

We have all watched over the last few days as Twitter went from being a hot social networking tool to being used by brave Iranians to change the world. With media restrictions in place from the Iranian government, the main source of news coming out of Iran was, especially in the first few days, the tweets of students and protestors and supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

As the protest has grown and the days have worn on, the nature of the intelligence one could glean from certain twitter feeds – #IranElection and #GR88, in particular – changed. In the first few days it was a heavy but seemingly pure stream of raw intelligence, dispatches that contained up to the minute updates on everything from events personally observed by the twitters to rumors to video and pictures of the ongoing clash between protestors and government forces.

In the last 48 hours, the main tagged feeds have become diluted: innocently, by western twitterers who have been captivated and motivated by what they’ve read; and more troublingly, by people who are quite obviously disseminating incorrect, inflammatory, or misleading information. The latter is incredibly problematic, as Twitter is not only being used as a source of information for the outside world. It is also being used by activists in separate parts of the country to communicate information about what is happening where they are. So not only does the misinformation dilute the message and news coming from the Iranian people fighting for freedom, it also is detrimental to their efforts, and could very well have life or death consequences.

That is why I’m starting The Rat List – a collection of Twitter users disseminating incorrect or blatantly propagandistic information. Many of these users have new accounts, have no history of accurate updates, and are not trusted sources. They could be Iranian intelligence agents organizing to thwart the efforts of the activists and put down what is becoming a vibrant and viable uprising. They could also just be assholes who think they are being funny. Either way, I am mostly doing this for my own edification, to record some small part of what is happening in a way that I know something about, by analyzing raw intelligence. If it helps out, I’m glad for that too.

Visit http://ratlist.tumblr.com for updates.