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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Lessons from the designers

A field with seven columns. First six are black marked off with McKenzie-green lines. The last is white.
Illustration: Keisha E. McKenzie

The Seventh-day Adventist denomination revealed its latest visual identity standards today at the General Conference’s spring meetings in Maryland.

I’m impressed.

The core font family, Advent Sans, is open source, based on Google font typography, and designed for more languages than those that use the characters A-Z.

The twenty-year-old Bible-cross-flame symbol is unchanged and set on a triangular field. It now appears in a single color instead of two complementary colors, and includes a circular field variant. The symbol’s use guidelines are people-centered, generous, and designed with real-life contexts in mind.

Though [the symbol] may not communicate everything, because of its consistent use it now carries a deep significance for all who are familiar with it. The symbol, like all symbols, functions much more as a container for attributed meaning than as a theological statement. It is we, Seventh-day Adventist members, who give that symbol meaning.” —The Communications department of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Recommended colors evoke the rich and grounding colors of nature.

And the stroke of genius: an implicit visual structure for print media called the creation grid, which divides the field into seven equal vertical parts, reserves the seventh for the denomination’s symbol, and requires contrast between the first six and the last.

Imagine if the artists ran the .org. Thanks to the denomination’s designers, and despite the consternation of its administrators, I’ve been imagining that all day.

Explore the identity site.

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Intimacy in surveillance culture

Close up of a black typewriter.
Photo credit: Camille Kimberly

I’ve been writing about privacy and surveillance on this site since 2013 when I first read Janna Malamud Smith’s book Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life.

That spring and summer’s news was full of the name “Edward Snowden,” acronyms like “PRISM,” and code names like “XKeyscore.” While the mass media featured psychologists explaining how mass surveillance degraded mental health, Malamud Smith was teaching me about all the ways that modern people reach for moments of privacy and intimacy with others.

We’re in an era of unprecedented state and corporate monitoring: across platforms, in several places, and through many, many devices. At the same time, isolation is a perennial concern: a recent viral article focuses on the consequences of out-group marginalization and in-group isolation for gay American and Northern European men, for example.

But when you know what to look for or which sources to tap, you can find just about anybody or any piece of information. Exploring the Invisible is a digital security project that recently explained step-by-step how an ordinary person might navigate the internet pseudonymously. It’s an awkward, onerous option that a person might yet need to take to preserve their privacy: perhaps someone facing identity-based or political violence or retaliation.

For those who want to share information rather than withhold it, websites and apps like SecureDrop and Signal can make private (encrypted) communication possible. Journalists are now using both apps in their work.

Intimacy is that state in which, as Malamud Smith wrote, “people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both… [One] comes as close as one is capable of, or as close as one feels permitted, to revealing oneself to another person.”

Intimacy has to be voluntary. It can’t be forced, presumed, or automated, and as such, it runs counter to the logic of conventional surveillance, which enrolls us before and regardless of whether we’re aware or consent.

Surveillance culture, therefore, is fundamentally inhumane: as Dr. Hortense Spillers recently said, losing the ability to choose connection is a paradigmatic sign that one is not free.

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Advent and info security

Advent: Secure your tech. Herod is king.

The Advent story in the Gospel according to Matthew takes a curious turn when foreign “wise men” show up and begin interacting with King Herod the Great.

According to Matthew, these foreign visitors first journey to Herod’s palace to inquire about Jesus. Then, after dreams warn them that Herod has only malevolent interest in Jesus, they avoid giving him any further intelligence, and leave the area in a hot hurry while Jesus’ family flees with him abroad.

Our world has shifted so much that when I retell that story in the shadow of US-VISIT, the NSA, PRISM, and Edward Snowden, a former Booz Hamilton contractor who breached the US Espionage Act and has sought shelter in Russia since 2013, this part of the Advent story doesn’t seem so odd anymore.

I’ve often wondered what an autocrat like Herod would have done if he’d had the power that the contemporary United States has: to compel biometric identification, to monitor mass telecommunications, to hoover up metadata across communication devices and the internet, and to surveil members of the public both above and below the radar.

Today, governments around the world have technological tools and political powers that ancient rulers would have drooled over.

We get to decide how we’ll respond.

Preparing to live under a hostile administration today includes securing oneself and one’s community as much as possible from on- and offline surveillance. We all benefit from good security practices regardless of whether we’d self-identify as activists or as threatening to the mainstream.

The US recently spent a lot of money, energy, and time monitoring peace activists in Seattle; government monitoring of civil rights groups is legendary; and that surveillance has continued with rising Black resistance to state violence.

“If you are privileged and not a minority, your marginalized friends will be safer if you all use privacy tools. The more normalized it is to use them, the harder it is for a system that perpetuates injustice to single out people they don’t like.” —Daniel Oliver (November 10, 2016) [Expletive advisory]

While digital privacy and security activists and developers keep working on the policy context we have to operate in, ordinary internet and phone users can take a few small yet high-value action steps that have a broad impact:

Action steps

  • Block camera hijacking by adding webcam covers to your personal computers, tablets, and cell phones. I use these sticky covers at home and on my tablet, and they’re cheap, low profile, and effective. Also unplug standalone cameras when you’re not using them.
  • Reduce message hacks and metadata leaks by installing the Signal app on your cell phones. Signal is an open-source text and audio messaging service that uses end-to-end encryption by default (unlike Telegram) and does not store user metadata (unlike FB’s recent buy Whatsapp or Telegram). Encrypted messaging services are important tools for anyone doing justice movement work. And Signal is owned by a non-profit consortium of digital privacy advocates and developers.
  • Always assume that conventional email and voice calls on wireless devices or landlines aren’t secure. Communications are only as secure as the network they’re sent over and recipients’ security habits: it doesn’t matter if you have a virtual private network and send messages only in code if you send messages to me and I leave my password on a Post-it note on my desk every day!

Companies and internet service providers often have data and technology use restrictions, but there are additional layers to it because of the federal climate over the last fifteen years. In that same period, justice workers and peacemakers have been subject to federal phone taps and other kinds of technological monitoring and all of the major wireless networks have been complicit.

Resources

Information and digital security are fascinating fields to read about. Check out some recent articles that could be useful to you, no matter what your technological comfort level is.

Be safe out there.

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Who tells your story?

Paolo Uccello's "St. George and the Dragon." (Public domain)
Paolo Uccello’s “St. George and the Dragon.” (Public domain)

Early on in high school, my English teacher introduced our class to U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem, “Not My Best Side.” It’s a snarky modern piece inspired by Paolo Uccello’s painting of St. George and the Dragon, and it features the perspectives of St. George, the damsel he aims to rescue, and the dragon who brings them together.

Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string?” —The dragon

So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
… –
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.” —The damsel

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.” —St. George

Who tells your story for you determines the kind and qualiy of story it is. In her book Our Lives Matter, Pamela Lightsey explains that minoritized groups need to speak their own stories, not just for their own sake but for all of us:

No one person can be that privileged voice for any group of people/culture. Every class is made up of different ways of being… Even with the best intentions, womanist scholarship has rarely put its finger on the pulse of what it means to be a Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender [person] living in America.”

If people don’t tell their own stories, Lightsey argues, “we run the risk of our people’s history and theology being shaped primarily by our allies.”

Vantage point can both reveal and obscure. So it does matter that the winners narrate history, and that the stories of the Canaanites, Moabites, and Ninevites are still largely told by their Israelite peers and not read with their own priorities in mind.

Fanthorpe’s poem recognizes the possible motives of each main painting character. Each becomes more sympathetic or less so, and the standard myths and assumptions about each one are overturned because we learn their perspective on the scene.

How do we read each other’s stories, and how do we ensure that ours are rightly told?

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Reading: Unprotected Texts and the legacy of Paul

Cover photo of Jennifer Wright Knust's Unprotected Texts. The title is in red block capital letters and underneath torn parchment is part of a classical painting of a naked man and woman. The man seems to be reaching out for the woman. She seems to be leaning away.
Jennifer Wright Knust’s Unprotected Texts surveys biblical texts and biblical scholarship on desire, human sexuality, and the body.

I’m in two reading groups this fall. One has just begun reading Unprotected Texts by Jennifer Wright Knust, an attempt to push Hebrew and Christian scholarship on desire, human sexuality, and the body out of biblical studies journals and into the church library.

The tone of the book is much lighter than you might expect! I think our group will make quick work of the book itself, but we’ll spend much more time on questions that arise as we compare our experience and previous teaching with the material.

The second group is gathering around James D. Tabor’s lifelong study of the Christian apostle Paul. In Paul and Jesus: How the apostle transformed Christianity, Tabor explains Paul’s primary teachings, outlines ways they differed from the teachings of early church leaders who’d had personal friendships with Jesus before his death, and explores how Pauline Christianity has dominated modern understandings of the Christian faith.

If you’d like to engage either of these books with me before the end of the year, contact me and let me know. I’ll post my questions as we progress.

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Will the revolution be transcribed?

In the center of the image is a black video camera lens. Cradling it and out of shot is a person in a white sweater. They are out of focus.
Photo credit: Laura Lee Moreau

Correspondence between the revolution and the rest of us

Dear people who make podcasts:

Always include a text transcript.

Sincerely yours,
Keisha

Dear Keisha:

Do you realize how much extra work that is?

Best,
People who make podcasts

Dear people who make podcasts:

Yes, as it happens I do: up to 6 hours transcription per 1 hour of audio.

Regards,
Keisha

Dear Keisha:

We don’t have that kind of time.

Apologetically,
People who make podcasts

Dear people who make podcasts:

There are solutions, including hiring folks, but in the meantime, a ton of people can’t access your work.

And before we get to solutions, we have to agree that this is a problem.

—K

Dear Keisha:

We’re torn. Some of us aren’t going to change anything about how we produce things.

But some of us care a lot. What can we do?

—People who make podcasts

Dear people who make podcasts:

I appreciate those of you who care.

Hire someone invested in you and your work to transcribe it before you publish.

If you can’t hire for money, skills-barter.

If you can’t do either, invite your supporters and community to sponsor the job. It’s that important, and once it’s done, you’ll wonder why you didn’t always do it.

—K

P.S. There are tech solutions that’ll get you 70% of the way there. Just plan for text as part of your package: it’s not complete as content if only some of the revolutionaries can appreciate it.

P.P.S. A suggestion that’ll help one-person casters: try outlining or writing your speech in advance. It’s easier to structure content, edit, and post when you do that!

Transcripts “free” your content so it’s visible to both text readers and search engine web crawlers. If you want to be read and you want to be found, you need transcripts.

Dear Keisha:

Our friends who make podcasts showed us your note. Does this apply to us too?

Sincerely,
People who make videos

Dear people who make videos:

Yes! Yes it does!

If you’re speaking anything but English with a certain accent and if your recording is anything but stellar, YouTube’s auto-captions are going to be weak. Vimeo content publishers have a much better embedded tool and inexplicably do not use it.

Please help!

In solidarity,
Keisha

Resources

One of my highest-traffic posts is the full transcript to Toni Morrison’s 1975 lecture at Portland State University. The university unearthed the audio recording some time in 2014, and partial quotes made it onto Twitter and Tumblr that summer, but there wasn’t a transcript anywhere and I didn’t feel at ease sharing the material if people in my network couldn’t also experience it.

So I devoted a day to transcribing it all. It’s one of my favorite pieces of content on this website, and full-time researchers have been able to use it in campus workshops and in op-eds for international publications.

It was a hard-work-pleasure to transcribe Morrison: her work is always both lyrical and precise.

And I shouldn’t have had to do it.

For podcasts: Podcasters handle transcription in different ways. Peterson Toscano’s Climate Stew includes pre-scripted segments and audio interviews, so Peterson blends scripts and transcriptions beneath show audio on the Climate Stew website. All episode collateral is on one page. Herb Montgomery’s weekly podcast hits the internet in two separate products because he writes an article, has it edited, and then records the audio. Mia McKenzie, host of the Black Girl Dangerous Podcast, posts conversation online and a plaintext transcript a few days later. Some content developers transcribe their own work, and others outsource the job.

Bottom line? There are options.

For video: Check out Vimeo to incorporate captions created with Amara, a not-for-profit video editing and translation tool. Amara is one of a few tools that grassroots orgs have recommended to me: while it’s designed for all-on-site transcription and translation, you can also upload .txt file scripts or partial transcriptions and finish them there. Other formats than .txt are also available, and it supports multiple language translation.

Never underestimate the value you can add to a piece of content with the editing, transcription, or captioning contributions of someone who cares about you, your work, and your audience. Editing, transcription, and captioning are part of the creation and publication process, and everything flows better when we treat them as such.