Tech Perspectives

In Hyderbad, a company called Wipro is training Indian workers to speak with “Midwestern American and working class British accents” in order to answer service calls for companies like Dell Computer Corporation and Oracle. These are entry level positions that would have once gone (in the American labor market) to high school graduates. Now, they are being done by East Indians who, as the chart above points out, make less money a year than an inner-city black high school student would make at McDonald’s in six months.

What is even more significant for American worker is that there are aggressive forces in India preparing its workforce not just to receive outsourced jobs but to develop their own version of California’s “Silicon Valley.” One has but to recall the negative effect that Japanese carmakers, Toyota, Mitsubishi and Nissan, had on the domestic automobile market to imagine what might happen to the American high tech companies if they must face competition from abroad. In less than a decade from the time Japanese cars entered the American market, their cars were considered to be a better value than their American counterparts. HyderBad

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What is significant for these “information activists” and their anti-capitalist organizations—the new computer linked social movement—to understand is that their activities have already caught the eyes of “independent critical intellectuals, mainstream social scientists and National Security Analysts.”

Cleaver’s paper, itself, is a compilation from various sources. But, from reading Cleaver’s paper, it is clear that he was deeply impressed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. These intellectuals were able to transcend “Left notions of structuralism” and “dialectics” and have instead been able to focus on the “micro-dynamics of the individual and the social movements” themselves.

In other words, these men scrapped the old way of analyzing social movements and their participants in favor of different and more revealing analysis. What they have concluded is that there is emerging a global network of progressives, radicals, and revolutionaries linked by modern information technology—e-mail, cell phone, pc’s, etc. that yield power greater than the sum of their parts.  NetWar

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As my taste in music changed from Blues infused Urban Soul to Blues infused Urban Jazz, I can remember Marvin Gaye ask the question we all wanted to know the answer to, “What’s Goin’ On!”  What’s goin’ on with the Vietnam War? What’s goin’ on with the riots and the Panthers? What’s going on with Tricky Dick Nixon? What’s goin’ on? What’s goin on? And, of course, Marvin already had the answer. We all nodded in approval as Marvin crooned his reply over every black, urban AM radio station in America: “Mercy, mercy, me. Things ain’t what they used to be!”

Some will see all that I have said as coincidental. Those who see it as such are unaware of the mythic, purgative, transforming power that music has for the Black American. From plantation to plant floor, it has been hymns sung in church, Blues screamed in jukes, and Jazz played in clubs that have sustained us. And, if Hip-Hop is about anything, it is the scream of Black youth at war with itself as it watches the death of one world and the beginning of another. 

But the Black youth of America are not alone in their sense of profound confusion. For the whole world is singing the death song of the Industrial Age. All that we see in our children—the confusion, the obsession with drugs and thuggery, the fascination with death—speaks of the dislocation of their souls, their hearts, and their minds. A Post Industrial Blues

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Jazz, blues, and their sacred cousin, gospel music, all have a rhythm-device in common: the back-beat. Indeed, the back-beat, a heavy emphasis on two and four, is a hallmark of African American music and remains dominant as a rhythmic device into the 21st century. An interesting note about the back-beat with respect to gospel music is the flipping of rhythmic emphasis. In the then popular waltz form, the emphasis was usually ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. But in gospel, when three-four time is used, as it frequently is, the practictioners usually clap on two and three, thus getting a one-TWO-THREE, one-TWO-THREE rhythm. The back-beat. 

None of the other popular musics of the African diaspora (whether from the Caribbean, Central America or South America) employs a heavy back-beat unless the particular form in question, such as salsa, reggae or soca, is a form that was significantly influenced by Black music from America. This absence of the back-beat is distinctive especially given that most African diaspora music heavily uses drums, or quasi-drum instruments (steel pans for example). 

This is a curious development that is made even more curious by the fact that for the most part the drums of the diaspora remained hand-drums and it was in the United States that the mechanical drum, or the drum kit, commonly called the trap drum or traps, was developed. So the place where the drum had the least continuity in terms of usage and in terms of the direct retention of African poly-rhythms, is the place where the back-beat was emphasized and the drum kit was developed!  Clapping On Two and Four

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updated 16 October 2007