ghosts in the machine

The Society of Otis: Some thoughts on political things

Forewarning: I’m going to talk some more about Drop Fees. I know I keep saying that I hate talking about these things, and every time I start, it ends up getting talked about to death until I feel like I’ve learned my lesson, but somehow I never do. 

This afternoon, there was a question and answer period cleverly disguised and masquerading as a debate, or something to that effect, for the presidential candidates competing in the upcoming SFUO elections. If you want some real coverage of the discussion, The Fulcrum and La Rotonde were both present and will be publishing it to their websites I expect. What I really want to talk about though, is some follow-up thoughts I had about the Drop Pants protest, Drop Fees (About that, for those who missed it), and these sorts of things in general. 

For the most part, the Q&A was within the range of what I expected, so unsurprisingly, I was less than impressed by Savva’s thoughts on some defederation-related things. Her stance was that a large percentage of students feel strongly about Drop Fees, but are apathetic to student politics because they have to work two to three part-time jobs to pay for their schooling. Yes, I’m aware that that sounds contradictory, and I would love to hear a more clearly articulated response to clear up the differentiation between apathy and being too overwhelmed to be active in student politics. So her rationale followed that initiatives like defederation and counter-CFS activities were a small and exceptionally vocal minority of students, and not truly representative of student views. Part of me feels like that sounds like such a bizarre stance now that I’ve written it down, that this must be a case of that telephone game syndrome, and I’ve gotten it all wrong. But I’m fairly sure I didn’t, so let’s just continue on.

At the same time that I was beginning to feel that uncontrollable urge to complain about political things, I had a bunch of stuff coming down the Twitter chute from Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, about some Shorenstein business, and this bit in particular caught my eye:

Q: Do you think reddit is an institution w/ political power? A: Redditors, the PEOPLE on reddit, have tremendous power #shorenstein

I have no idea what Shorenstein is, but that answer really resonated with me. I started thinking about the SFUO in the context of Reddit, and I wouldn’t say it was an epiphany-level of revelation, but it was definitely an interesting thought exercise. I’ve said before that I’m not specifically opposed to the idea of dropping fees. Some very presumptuous fed-body executives have inferred some very interesting things about my bank account balance recently what with the whole Drop Pants thing, but the dropping of fees specifically has never been my issue. I’ve said before that if students were to band together to go forth in the pursuit of lower fees, I wouldn’t take issue with that. The part that I’m opposed to, distilled down into it’s most concise form, is the representation of all students as taking a particular stance, and the spending of a whole bunch of student dollars on it.

So, we’ve got a few puzzle pieces to put together here.

First off, I think it’s probably fairly obvious that I disagree with Savva. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to answer to an apathetic majority rather than a vocal minority, especially when the reasoning for it is based entirely on assumptions about why they aren’t more involved. I think that there are a lot of people who have made it very clear that they want no involvement with the CFS or with Drop Fees, and that it should be of absolute importance to the SFUO president to address that. However, she did mention some poll she ran earlier in the year with a lot of students supporting the idea of Drop Fees, and as much as I’m sure there are a lot of people who think I’m completely incapable of seeing their point of view, I do know what it’s like to be a university student, seeing as I am one and all. Yes, I am an engineering student with a good job and lofty views of my future net-worth, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what ramen tastes like.

The question becomes, how do we make this work? And what does that stuff about Reddit have to do with anything?

I’ve repeated over and over my desire for the SFUO to abstract itself away from real-life, tax dollars politics. The SFUO brands itself as our instrument for political action, but that’s not how it should be, nor needs to be. What I ideally want is for students to go about their fee-dropping in a non-representative capacity, and in a fiscally responsible way.

My personal criticism of Drop Fees didn’t really address it’s ineffectiveness, but that is absolutely one of the complaints that I’ve heard in my time, and I can’t disagree. I’ve seen multiple news articles post-Drop Fees about protest signs littering the city, money being wasted on free toques, and so on, and nothing about the truly change-inspiring number of students fighting for a shared cause, mostly because there wasn’t a particularly noteworthy volume of attendees. If students want to really make this campaign effective, it needs to be restructured completely. 

If we want this to work for everyone, the SFUO needs to be Reddit. Instead of using our money to support Drop Fees, use it to do something wild and creative that makes it easier for students to join together over causes that they feel strongly about. Maybe it means improvements to the clubs program, or building some crazy new online community for students to communicate over. These aren’t impossible things, and I’m willing to be that something could be done to address the concerns of our vocal minority and to also decrease the apathy of the apathetic majority for a lot less money than Drop Fees costs us. Do I have an exact road map of what needs to be done? No, of course I don’t. But I do feel confident that there are people on campus who are capable of looking at something like Reddit, that serves as an extremely effective rallying point for political change without being political in itself or spending any money on political activities, and filling in the details about how to make that happen in the context of our campus.

Drop Fees toques have no power to make political change - people do. Throwing money at this campaign isn’t something that’s proven to be effective, but it has proven to be something that agitates the people whose pockets that money comes out of, so let’s not do that. Instead, I hope that the candidates for this election can take this into consideration, and agree to work towards building something lightweight, agile, and efficient. Instead of repeating a solution every year that works for no-one, create something new that works for everyone.

The SFUO can be made to work for students, but it will require innovation, not stagnation, and so my message is this: 

To the candidates running in this election, abandon the status quo. Accept that there are problems with the current system, and amaze us with a new solution. Even if it’s not the best solution, we’ll respect you more and remember you for longer if you take a shot at doing something new over sticking with the same mediocre politics we’ve seen before;

And to the voters, let go of your pretenses and take this election as an opportunity to make our campus better. Whether or not you agree with my views on the CFS don’t matter right now. To refuse to believe that we can all benefit from a rehauled SFUO is to squander your vote. Ask the candidates questions. Find out how they want to fix the issues that are important to you. Share your ideas. 

And finally, don’t forget to vote on February 14th, 15th, and 16th.