TNY

The Nixon Years as an era started when the guitarist and I were infants, we are Gen X’ers, or a Malcolm X’er in my case. Our bassist was a generation younger. The Nixon Years repeated themselves through all three of our lives, with every single new president committing different crimes and nefarious acts, which still continue as general practice to this very day. In spite of the frustrations of witnessing bad things happening nonstop all over the world and at home, playing music helped us a wee bit.

I played drums for the Nixon Years in Orange County, CA for about 11 years starting late in 1999, and simultaneously with Mr. Firley about 7-8 years in with the Nixon Years. We rehearsed at a place called Orbit Studios in Santa Ana our first two years or so. Death By Stereo was just getting off the ground and practiced at Orbit as well. I remember listening from outside their door between some of our rehearsal breaks. If anyone knows what happened to Johhny Orbit, as we called him, please reach out.

I still have the green screen used for this video, and hope to employ it with CT Noise:

Eddie Casillas of the Voodoo Glow Skulls helped produce the album this track was on. It was an really neat for us to work with him at his home studio in Riverside, CA. It’s funny in that the current singer for Voodoo is now, Efrem Schulz (of Death By Stereo),one of the bands TNY passed like ships in the night at the same rehearsal space where we started. We were a little nervous to approach them as I recall.

One of the last times The Nixon Years practiced in our beloved Santa Ana studio before I moved east, circa 2013, a song not on our first two releases:

We had almost 1/2 of another album of material before I moved. Sadly we didn’t record much of it. I have some old live recordings and we started mixing a rough live take of a new song or two just before I left, but we kind of just stopped pursuing the mixing and recording process…Perhaps some of this will show up here if the tapes aren’t damaged and files can be found…

If any people we played with “back in the day” find this page, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Both albums are at Apple Music, and regretfully Spotify.

I am pretty sure Naomi Klein wrote the panopticon article below. It was posted almost a year after it was downloaded from the web (back in 2003?). The author’s name was lost and I can’t locate it with any search engines. If I remember correctly it is Klein– the content and language are reminiscent of her work, but there is some spelling of certain words that seem British.

The Inverted Panopticon: Reclaiming Surveillance–The Inverted/Subverted Panopticon

What follows below is something of a ‘thought-experiment’: I am not claiming to offer a definitive view of the modus operandii of the new social movements, but rather want to suggest a possible model which demands further testing and empirical research to ascertain its viability as a metaphor.

So, let me begin this thought experiment by positing that there is a ‘domain’ of society – roughly speaking, a ‘public sphere’ – which in fact observes institutions themselves and scrutinizes them – albeit naively and idly – for infractions of the more basic human rights or standards of decency and accountability. This public sphere is ‘naive’ because it has no particular knowledge of the internal workings and dealings of corporations and/or nation-states: it is, for example, not trivial for Joe or Jane Public to know which factories Nike has contracted out to manufacture its shoes, and whether these factories adhere to basic labour standards. But if Joe or Jane were to be reliably informed that Nike were utilising Chinese sweatshops with no regard whatsoever for human rights, Nike risks going the way of Kathie Lee Gifford unless it can be extraordinarily light on its feet and charming in its PR. In short: the public gaze – properly directed – carries a great deal of weight.

But how can this gaze be directed? How can we ‘model’ the relations which uncover abuses of corporate trust and ‘focus’ public attention upon the transgressors? Perhaps the answer lies in not a rejection of Foucault’s metaphor, but rather an inversion of the power relations it entails: an ‘inverted Panopticon’, in which the power relations of domination and exploitation which are present in everyday life are turned on their head by the actions of activists [see fig.1]. fig.1 – the ‘Inverted’ Panopticon

Now, instead of institutions (be they states, corporations or any other dominant organisation) acting as the observers inside the tower, they instead can be pictured as the prisoners: not trapped physically, but symbolically by their brand, their public image. Of course, anyone can see into these cells from the outside – from the public sphere – into the cell, and see the presenting his outward image: smiling and open-armed, inviting them to peruse every inch of his or her cell. But, of course, the public’s vision is blocked by the prisoner’s very presence: he or she can stand in such a way as to obscure any less salubrious part of his/her cell: the public image is never the whole story. In fact, the only way to outmanoeuvre the prisoner – to see the whole picture of his/her doings – is to gain access to the tower behind the cell. From the tower, the prisoner no longer blocks the view: the angle has changed. And, indeed, by using his/her specialised skills (be they hacking, ‘culture jamming’, or defacing a corporate website), the activist can use various lines of flight – essentially lines of information passage, such as corporate network gateways – to gain access to the tower and, perhaps just for a split second, see the full picture: what is hidden from the view presented to the public.

Thus, once again, the operation of the inverted Panopticon is all a question of the control of vision and the positioning of bodies. The framework of Foucault’s metaphor holds good in reverse: all the thought experiment does is to turn the power/knowledge apparatus on its head and ask ‘what if…’. Control of the Panopticon is not inherently the privilege of a particular social group: with the right skills, the right knowledge, the functioning of the concept can be turned against those for whom it was originally designed, bringing discipline through surveillance – manifested as transparency through accountability – back into the institutions who would seek to impose its operations upon us.

References

Castells, M. 2000. Network Society: Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwells.

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. -1981. History of Sexuality: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Habermas, J. 1992 (1969). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity.