Archive for October, 2009

Above is a picture of South Central Farm, which was an urban community garden found in Los Angeles, California, before the tenants were evicted to give way to a warehouse.  South Central Farm was a place where urban farmers ran a cooperative, a food bank, and a place that ensured the financial and nutritional security of dozens of families.  In the wake of relocating squatters/informal settlers post-Ondoy, I think that an urban farming collective is a great idea.

Many social inequalities are manifestations of insecurities.  There are insecurities in shelter, food, and opportunities that force many people to migrate to urban centers.  Relocating them to distant tenement housing may seem like a good idea, but without providing them the seeds to make their own opportunities, the tenements will be multi-storey equivalents of slums.  Yet with an idea like the urban farming collective – or even the Edible Schoolyard – we can provide less-privileged citizens with an avenue to address their own social insecurities, help the environment, and provide opportunities and hope where none seem to exist.

The psychologist John Suler calls it the “online disinhibition effect,” but I’d rather call it what it’s supposed to be called: The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.  In many ways, it’s true: whatever normalizes the psyche breaks down because the sense of identity is not very well-articulated online.  After all, it’s just text and images: the mode and method of articulation is limited to what can be used, and what is understood.  In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: the paranoid body-without-organs.  In short, “fuckwad.”