The rise of the Internet has surfaced a singular issue -a tipping point- in promoting the benefits of the network in both the advanced and developing economies of the world.  This issue is network neutrality. It is an issue at the center of our ability to ensure our democracy as we confront the demise of commercial journalism and global economic and security threats. As with all complex systems, the questions not being asked can be as critical as those being debated.  We hear a lot about how the exponential growth of the Internet caused the collapse of journalism in the United States. The question that is not being asked is whether we are doing everything in our power to address this crisis.  The demise of the critical Fourth Estate is often blamed on the Web and its disintermediation of traditional advertising from print and broadcast reporting.   For many Americans this is a regrettable footnote to their declining prospects in the Great Recession. When Craig’s List is better for job hunting than the local newspaper classifieds it doesn’t matter much if news is no longer profitable in print.  Net neutrality runs a distant second to economic imperatives.  This analysis will assert a path towards resolution of these that promotes both and a path to preserving the place of journalism in our democracy.

The Internet was a positive externality seeded by U.S. Department of Defense spending on communications technologies.  Its roots date to the historical moment when America’s defense industrial complex was focused on the singular threat of the Soviet Union.  In many ways this binary relationship foreshadowed the rise of the Digital Age. Today the global security threat is defined by Terrorism that exists as a loosely held network underwritten by a few vertically integrated state and non-state funders. It is a global threat reflecting the Network Age ascendant.  In any network, the law of unintended consequences can produce significant course-altering forces challenging the very network rules that produce them.  In the case of net neutrality the law of unintended consequences can easily be modified to include the rule of law if we resolve the contradictions of trying to convince suppliers (Internet Service Providers-ISPs) that serving demand (for Content, Applications, Social Networks) is not in their best interest.

For years net neutrality has been the primary policy issue of public interest advocacy organizations without reaching critical mass with the consuming public.  It is not surprising the issue has not risen to the level of popular concern, given that the overwhelming majority of Americans interact with the Internet exclusively over commercial networks, representing tens of billions in revenue for ISPs. Before exploring the future of the Internet let’s take stock of where we are and how we got there. The story of the Internet is not unlike the one playing out in real time in the rivers and waterways of our country – a cautionary tale of the bighead and silver Asian carp and the $100 billion plus in damage they’re leaving in their wake. This analogy serves as a backbone for our examination and a reminder of how innocent aims can lead to unintended and devastating consequences.

Tough choices follow in wake of invasive species-Washington Post, Jan 31, 2010

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Which is worse? Closing two locks on a waterway that’s used to ship millions of dollars’ worth of goods from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi basin? Or allowing a voracious Asian carp to deplete the food supply of native fish sustaining a Midwestern fishing industry that nets $7 billion a year?….

The case for the future of broadband has been filtered into two competing camps, with the American public connected to the issue in a third frame, distinct from both. The first camp has consolidated the connectivity of our nation into the hands of a few ISPs -vertically integrated corporations (ATT, Verizon, Comcast, etc.)-which connect Americans to the Internet and proprietary content distribution platforms.  The second camp has gone all in with the public interest agenda (Free Press, Public Knowledge, etc.) to protect (and project) net neutrality as the skeleton key necessary to preserve and promote the social salves of an open network for every conceivable social ill, inequity, and innovation.  In its own orbit is the consuming public that spends most of its time online in commercially mediated spaces that openly target user profiles and preferences for advertising optimization and behavioral data collection.  If it is the case that closed proprietary networks are counter to the public interest (we’ll get to that later), then it is also true that the public can’t get enough of them.

Southern catfish farmers began importing silver and bighead carp from China in the 1970s to eat up algae in their ponds. Some carp escaped during flooding, and now the fish so thoroughly dominate the Illinois River that communities have annual fishing tournaments targeting them….(Washington Post cont’d)

What have we learned from the market? We’ve learned that the rise of the mobile Internet, gaming and smart devices is driven by consumers who want more bandwidth and are willing to pay a premium to get it.  Where net neutrality argues that free and open networks will serve the public interest, the public is demonstrably interested in paying for more bandwidth for closed devices that are welded to closed networks and offer applications on closed platforms (consider the Apple App Store).  Is this bad for civic engagement, equality, and innovation? Not if you’re one of the many non-profits and developers launching applications (mostly free) on these closed networks to advance your public interest agendas and objectives.  So what’s the problem?

Although the impact of these invasions can take years to become clear, researchers estimate that nationwide they cause environmental losses and damages of nearly $120 billion a year. Silver and bighead carp have enormous appetites and consume vast amounts of food that native fish depend on…(Washington Post cont’d)

The problem can be described by the law of unintended consequences, wherein irony can suppress logic as the operating system for the network — think CIA support of Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation sowing the seeds for Al-Qaeda.  The commercialization of the Internet created a narrative that recruited consumers who were savvy and needed to be connected to others like them and the benefits of real time information.  This would soon evolve into the socialization of always-on connectivity as DSL and Cable modems replaced dial-up in many markets with social networks achieving ubiquitous penetration.   It would also coincide with the early signs that newspapers were not going to fare well commercially on the Web.  Optimized for efficiency, newspaper owners underinvested in innovation and missed many opportunities to transform themselves into multi-platform newsgathering organizations.  They had the capital and the audience yet failed to convert.  What is often characterized now as two contradictory cultures — print and digital — can be more aptly described as an unwilling industry unable to invest intelligently in the future of its own business.  The failure of the commercial market for news generates plenty of blame to go around.  The same can be said for an uninformed democracy.

“It sometimes takes dramatic evidence to bring public attention to something that’s been a problem for some time,” said Tom Strickland, Interior’s assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks.(Washington Post cont’d)

The policy debate on broadband would be different today if the growth of bandwidth in the U.S. had kept pace with the penetration of the Internet. The United States can take rightful credit for creating the Internet.  It had an enormous lead in terms of infrastructure, investment capital, innovation and demand.  Somehow we lost this lead and now trail the industrialized nations by wide and embarrassing margins in broadband access, speed and cost.  When my 3-year-old son sat on my lap as I logged into AOL in 1997 our connection speed was 56k.  Today he’s a Y Generation teen who gets 5.6 megabits (an increase of 100x) on our Fios connection.  What was then a $20-a-month subscription is now a bundled service including my home phone and cable television.  The price is almost $200 a month.  The prospects of the next 10 years delivering a 560-megabit connection (100x my 5.6 megabits today) for him as he enters the workforce are questionable.  This has led to pervasive hand-wringing in policy shops around the country.  How can the United States compete in the knowledge economy when we don’t have the information super-highway to get us there (hello Thomas Freidman)? The answer seems to be: we can’t.  On this there is little debate.  The debate starts with what to do about it. President Obama’s election brought with it heightened expectations that strong federal policy would place bandwidth in its rightful place at the table in solving the economic challenges facing the country.  There were campaign promises about protecting an open Internet and explicitly asserting net neutrality as a key regulatory imperative. Post election, $7.2 billion has been allocated to broadband stimulus and the Federal Communications Commission chairman has been vocal on codifying network neutrality. Is this enough? No.

Sam Hamilton, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, called exotic species “probably the single greatest threat in our country to our native wildlife.” But despite the growing concern, some say the United States is just beginning to come to terms with a formidable environmental foe….(Washington Post cont’d)

Social networking dominated the last eight years of the consumer Internet since the launch of Friendster in 2002.  This same period marked the loss of journalism jobs at a pace that mimicked manufacturing.  Manufacturing in America was counterintuitive in a global economy where the supply of cheap labor was plentiful. Did journalism suffer a similar downward pressure when the Internet saturated the supply of information?  Of course it did.  Is this the only reason journalism is collapsing in the United States?     Unfortunately not.  To get closer to the forces challenging journalism’s viability we have to go to the heart of where the problems of print journalism originated — cable.

CNN brought us many innovations, from 24-hour news cycles to reporters on satellite phones bringing images direct from conflicts and hotspots around the world that no other news operation could deliver.  The most important innovation is often lost though.  It is an innovation that works in an opposite way from the I Want My MTV pressure of consumers demanding cable providers carry the music video channel.  CNN represented the cable advertisers version of I Want my MTV.  Remember that MTV reconfigured the music industry well in advance of the iPod.  It established music as a media brand.  CNN established a marketplace for advertisers on 24-hour cable and projected a steady state of inside the beltway mechanics to political media machines. Some of the more successful multi-platform properties owe their lives to this marketplace, including Fox News and ESPN.  This is the world we still inhabit.  In this world of constant reporting it was clear that a dedicated journalistic class is at a severe disadvantage.  When expediency matters more than depth in achieving audience share, the audience becomes conditioned to expect less but more often.  This model bears out in the broadband environment where the consumer is conditioned to expect more innovation for less openness. This is often an unconscious and normalized transaction as the apparatus of the Internet becomes more and more abstract for Americans who are flooded with information while struggling to meet their daily economic needs. No one complains that the iPhone is only available on the ATT network.  They only complain that it is too slow.

“It seems to me we are in denial,” said Lindsay Chadderton, aquatic invasive species director for the Nature Conservancy’s Great Lakes Project and one of the researchers who found the Asian carp’s genetic fingerprint in Lake Michigan. “By the time we understand the severity of the problem, it’s too late. Prevention is the only cost-effective way of dealing with this.”(Washington Post cont’d)

So back to the original proposition that there are three major spokes to the broadband and net neutrality questions facing our nation.  The public interest infrastructure has been divested from and diluted since the Reagan Revolution.  Americans have become accustomed to the trope that the public interest equals big government equals more bureaucracy and less freedom. Ironically, 30 years later we have an economy optimized for service sector jobs in the age of innovation.  In this frame, job creation is equated with smaller government and less regulation (leaving aside the collapse of the U.S. housing market and global financial system due to deregulation).  The incumbent broadband companies have successfully translated this to the broadband issue and jobs (see the industry funded Broadband for America coalition).  The argument this camp makes is explicit that ISPs and their suppliers create jobs and policy shops do not. They have marginalized the net neutrality issue as a pet project of the liberal digerati that threatens the economy.  The single mother with two kids in public schools is not in the debate.  The net neutrality debate is happening in Washington D.C. and a handful of foundations and think tanks.  The jobs debate is happening in every kitchen in the country.  The citizen can no more afford a philosophical discussion of network management than the daily paper that has failed them to the point of oblivion.  Not when they are busy checking Craig’s List for a job.

The unintended conclusion to this knot of policy, technology and the public interest has precedent in the former pinnacle of American consumerism — the Mall.  As the suburbs rose from the ashes of the Great Depression to be fertilized by the post-war economic boom, so did the shopping mall.  Originally conceived as a safe space from the vagaries of intemperate weather and unnecessarily public public spaces — enclosed environments for consumer commerce were thought to be the savior of shoppers and small business owners.  Malls were hailed as a great American innovation.  Little did we know that the particular features of a mall actually destabilized small local merchants in more profound ways than the weather and the public.  Malls privileged vertically integrated suppliers in a network economy that rewarded efficiencies and scale.  Local ownership represents the polar opposite of this (admitting Global Warming may soon obviate the analogy of polar anything).  This is the same evolution occurring in broadband. How many readers pay for Internet connectivity from a competitive local exchange carrier rather than a dominant carrier such as Verizon, Comcast or ATT?  The consolidation of Internet connectivity into the hands of a few powerful companies raises familiar policy concerns over protecting the public interest in a society with less and less public space.  Couple this with the demise of journalism, and one must ponder the question: Does free speech matter in a shopping mall?

If commerce could be herded from local communities and main streets into climate controlled corporate centers, what about information commerce?  For those of us online, particularly on mobile networks, the world looks increasingly and intractably like the mall they purchase their other consumer goods in.  Some may be open-air malls with courtyards, movie theatres and bars, but the economics remain the same.  The provider of goods and services has to sell at the mall or risk oblivion.  For the developer or retailer of Internet technologies in the age of the App Store you either exist in the mall or you don’t reach customers. For journalism, the mall is an expensive proposition where consumers don’t mind browsing, but try getting them to pay.

Is this good or bad for the future of our democracy?  Good — on one condition.  That condition is that disruption be allowed to occur in the marketplace. The Internet after all is the embodiment of disruption and disruptions are driven by the public adoption of new technologies.  When it comes to journalism and broadband this disruption is coming from an unlikely source: public media.  While commercial news operations are undergoing major downsizing and mission shrink, there are important examples of regional public media organizations meeting the challenges of journalism through innovative collaborations, technologies and professional reporters with jobs.  This work is grounded in a legacy of non-commercial broadcasting but goes way beyond the static conditions existent in most public broadcasting companies.  These few critical markets might represent a DNA strand that can spread to other markets with encouragement from communities, funders, and policies.  These disruptions owe their existence to smart foundations and federal policy and funding for public media.  That investment has ossified in too many critical markets and must be transformed to address the new public it faces. Journalism – in all its potential states – is the place to have that conversation.

I’ll bet you a case of 50 Cent Vitamin Water that somewhere in America right now there’s a representative of the music industry telling a group of skinny, wide-eyed virginal lads that they’re more than just a band, but rather, a “brand.” He’ll toss out words like “vertical integration,” “cross-pollination” and “brand synergy,” and he might pull out the examples of the Vitamin Water (mentioned above) or the new Kings of Leon clothing line. Yes, you heard right, Kings of Leon have their own brand of skinny jeans. Sure, rock stars have always been associated with fashion and other lifestyle products like beverages (although not usually of the vitamin variety), but I wouldnt’ be surprised if we’re on the shore staring at a tidal wave of “synergy” coming our way.

What that record company representative knows is that soon, very soon, he could lose his job unless his company can start making money off things other than recorded music, such as band touring revenues, licensing deals, and merchandise. This is what the recording industry is calling 360 Deals – meaning the record company gets a piece of all (360 degrees) of an artist’s revenues.

None of this would be happening right now if not for the Internet of course, but along with the Internet, nothing has done more for the demise of the recorded music business than an invention called MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, otherwise known as MP3. MP3 is like the crack cocaine of recorded music. It’s the cheap, refined essence of a recording – a digital compression method that makes the digital music file so small it can be easily shared online. And like crack, it was created in a lab in the 70′s – Bell Laboratories to be exact. Bell Labs is the home to numerous Nobel Prize winners (none of whom have yet won one for their part in the downfall of the music industry).

Besides digital music, Bell Labs has a long history of innovation. To honor Alexander Graham Bell for the invention of the telephone, The French government awarded Bell the prestigious “Volta Prize” of 50,000 Francs. Because Bell was already a wealthy man he used the prize money to establish Bell Labs.

So, we would not have 360 Deals with Kings of Leon Jeans if it weren’t for the invention of The Internet and The MP3. The MP3 (or maybe even the Internet for that matter) wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Alexander Graham Bell who received The Volta Prize from France and established Bell Labs where The MP3 was created. And we wouldn’t have had The Volta Prize if it weren’t for Napoleon Bonaparte. The Volta Prize was created in 1802 by Napoleon to honor Italian physicist Alessandro Volta for the invention of the battery, so yes, I said it, Napoleon is responsible for the demise of the recording industry. Furthermore, to throw some more salt on the wounded egos of rock stars, Napoleon has recently made the news for something that even the most narcissistic rockers and rappers would be envious of – the story of his penis has been made into a book after the actual “part” ended up in the home of a New Jersey collector over two hundred years later. 50 Cent’s “Lollipop” would be lucky to last that long!

'a bit like beef jerkey'

Finally, remember that Volta Prize? Well, it has been awarded by The French Government for great achievement in sciences ever since it was first given to Volta in 1802. In that time, many famous French luminaries have been judges including Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Which brings me to the greatest of all vertically integrated brands, the example par excellence of cross-pollinated synergy – Barbie. This year, Barbie released it’s “Three Musketeers” line which includes clothing, toys, DVD’s, games, and, of course, a website. All of which would probably make Alexandre Dumas roll over in his grave. The grave right next to Victor Hugo in the Place du Pantheon in Paris. Hugo, who was also a Volta Prize judge. The same Hugo that said “fashions have done more harm than revolutions.” Yeah, that sounds about right. All you skinny, wide-eyed virginal lads ready to rock the world – I hope you’re taking notes.

Meschery

What is it about the tension between the pant and the political?  The pant and the place?

There are more than questions hanging.  There are people walking in place.  Finding a place better come quick, cause it can’t get much tighter than it is in some places, where walking in someone else’s pants can get your whooped/and or/swooped on.

Consider the situation in April 08 when emo kids from the town of Queretaro were beat down for such offenses as skinny jeans and a hankering for music with sardonic and self-reflective lyricism.

Mobs in Mexico Attack Fans of Emo Music

I keep waiting for the connection to be even more explicit.  Is it possible that pants can drive a revolution?  Or do they simply produce the reason for violence some need to go from think to act?  Ironically, this macho on metrosexual violence went down in the hometown of La Corregidora:

Profile is everything.

This is an image of Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, heroine of the Mexican War of Independence.

Rumor has it she donned skinny beneath the rebel doily.

It obviously touches a nerve in other places:

This from Huffington Post via the AP on 09/16/09:

Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa: Women Can Wear Trousers, But Stretch Pants Are “Unacceptable”

Apparently there can be some room to negotiate.  What about stir-ups or knickers? This epochal statement was in response to Sudanese Government officials opting not to deliver 40 lashes to a journalist for wearing the two-legged creations.

Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein, right, in an August 2009 file photo, flashes a victory sign to her supporters as she enters court in Khartoum. Hussein faced 40 lashes on the charge of “indecent dressing” for wearing trousers outdoors.  (AP Photo/Abd Raouf)

According to NPR, the arrest has served to galvanize women in the country.

Arrest For Wearing Pants Galvanizes Women In Sudan

Apparently skinny-jeans conflate the gendered implications of isolating the bipedal expressions of human evolution.

There’s a history in the West of those in pants fighting the power.  Usually it was based on something simple like working-in coal mines and other such glamour positions (hello Melanie Griffith).  Check out this homegirl:

Other cases ended up in court.  San Francisco, not surprisingly, was a leading light in freeing the ladies to walk freely:

Woman Arrested for Wearing Pants 1866

RELEASED.– Judge Dwinelle yesterday released Mrs. DeWolf from confinement in the County Jail, on a write of habeas corpus. He decided that the Board of Supervisors had no right to pass an ordinance prescribing any particular kind of dress, nor had the Legislature any constitutional right to confer powers on the Board for which they did not possess themselves.

Source: Daily Evening Bulletin, 8 August 1866, page 3.

THE DE WOLF IN MEN’S CLOTHING.

Mrs. Eliza De Wolf, resting uneasy in the County Jail, on being remanded there on Monday by Judge Cowles, after a vain attempt to get released under the habeas corpus, got out another to-day, returnable before Judge Dwinelle at 4 P. M. At that hour the woman, clad in her green sack and pants, made her appearance in Court, accompanied by her husband, who sported a linen “duster.” A lawyer, named Barr, appeared for the petitioner, and Assistant District Louderback for the people. The same arguments adduced before were reiterated. Judge Dwinelle almost immediately released the prisoner, on the ground that she had committed no infraction of the laws. The Legislature had no power to enact any annuling law conferring powers on a municipal body which the Legislature itself did not possess. There was nothing in the municipal order, so counsel for the petitioner contended, that could or was meant to affect the costume worn by his client. The woman, on being released, took the arm of her male protector, and walked down Merchant street, ridiculed by every body, but molested by none.

Source: Daily Alta California, 8 August 1866, page 1.

So back to the skinny jeans and the search for the next outbreak, the rebel, the reveal…

somewhere in the world...

You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, who knows what it really means?

Hot, flat, crowded: that’s the local mall.

Act locally: Umm… is there any other option?

If you want to know globalization, start here: skinny jeans.

The last time we saw skinny jeans was sometime during the late SpandauBalletocene, that period of the 1980s New Wave that not coincidentally marked the highest-ever market share for Aqua Net hairspray. At the time many of us believed that the fashion industry had already reached its global apotheosis; after all, the ridiculous pouf-ballevening skirts shown at Christian Lacroix’s 1987 haute couture shows migrated to Contempo Casuals within a scant twelve months. But that was a fluke. As has always been true, the fashion whims of teenagers were too flighty for the lumbering freights of 1980s style corporations to follow. The bottom line was this: if you wanted to wear skinny jeans in the late 1980s, you had to peg them yourself. Often this involved safety pins and sometimes even duct tape.  I knew a girl who was famous for this in college: whipping a pair of Levis 501s inside out, she could hand stitch a tourniquet-tight peg in a trouser leg before “I Melt With You” reached its heartbreaking chorus. Well, it seemed heartbreaking at the time.

Then, just like Modern English itself, pegged pants faded from the scene. By the mid-1990s a new profile reached America’s ankles: the bootleg flare. Some called it a scourge. Whatever your opinion, it was a lot less scary to most Americans and the bootleg redefined the market, bringing with it not just disturbing evocations of Carly Simon during her “Sweet Baby James” era but also a more responsive denim industry capable of tweaking its jeans template several times a year. How did they do it? Globalization. The people who made these jeans now lived in subtropical regions of the globe where denim had no place to exist, except perhaps as a tarp to throw over one’s dwelling during monsoon season. Nevertheless, locals learned to work the cloth according to the ever-changing specifications of ass-conscious actresses in Tarzana. This was the meaning of Juicy Couture.

Three features dominated the world of denim in the pre-millennial decade: the bootcut; a dropped waistline; and the monstrously sagging jeans of hip hop. The skinny jeans of the noughties were a response to all that. The only constant is the waistline: still low, in fact pubic-ly low. And something else is different, too: anyone, anywhere, who wants his or her own pair of skinny jeans can now get them premade.

Consider the self-described “herbivores” of Japan, effeminate young men who, like Morrissey, Robert Smith, and other icons of New Wave fashion before them, dedicate themselves to soft pleasures such as knitting, flower pressing, and certainly nothing as strenuous as sexual intercourse. Their denim of choice? Skinny jeans. It was Japan, of course, that taught the modern world about the pleasures and perversions of niche marketing; this is a country where entire boutiques are dedicated to reproducing the specific look of 1965 Dartmouth sophomores, from desert boots to Pee Chee folders. Anyone interested in, say, the 1967 vintage should look elsewhere.

Just weeks after the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones ambivalently proposed the death of hip hop, new hipsters hopped out of the not-so-mean mean streets of central Los Angeles, bouncing and lurching to the sounds (but mostly looks) of a new dance trend: Jerking. These fifteen year-olds manage to perform elasticated jujitsu moves while wearing the skinniest of skinny jeans, ankles pegged to cut circulation, pelvises exposed well beyond the recommendations of the Hays Codes that once dominated LA’s collective sexual imagination. “Skinny jeans on / I’m lookin’ so nice,” The Ranger$ rap in their breakout hit, “Jerkin in Jerkville.”Developmentally speaking, this locates Jerking in about the same optimistic stage of hip hop development as Run-DMC’s “My Adidas:” “Me and my Adidas do the illest things / We like to stomp out pimps with diamond rings.” This is the voice of youth. Also the voice of three sweet kids from Hollis, Queens who had yet to hear the terrifying thump of Dr. Dre and his gangsters. The pimps with diamond rings were coming and it turns out they weren’t scared off by Adidas. Or jeans, skinny or otherwise. But that’s another tale.

Do Indians jerk? That is to say, we know skinny jeans have reached New Delhi,but whether they’re used by bouncing schoolkids there remains unknown. According to Marketplace’s Raymond Thibodeaux, a pair of skinny jeans costs $50 in India – about half the average monthly wage. In India, though, you can buy skinny jeans on the installment plan: remember the installment plan? That’s capitalism, kids: everything old can be resold again.

If Communist China can be America’s banker, what’s not possible? Chinese punk rock: check. Skinny jeans? Check. No, these are not the outtakes from the long awaited Guns ‘n’ Roses album, it’s “the world’s fastest growing punk rock scene:” Beijing. “We have no history,” claims Yang Hai Song, lead singer of Chinese punk bank P.K. 14. It’s like a distorted echo of the Sex Pistols’ “no future!” 32 years ago. No future, no  history: that’s the punk rock dream. The skinny jeans made the leap from London to Beijing, across oceans and the turn of a century, just fine.

Skinny jeans are global and when the most fashion forward girl at Fairfax High School decides she wants a slightly wider leg, one that accommodates her new fancy for, say, the Chewbacca snow boots that made the scene ca. 1982, you can bet that denim companies from Seven to J Brand to Acne to Paige will jump at her command and those slightly-less-skinny jeans will be available for purchase within weeks – in LA, in Tokyo, in Calcutta, and a few weeks later, in Target. That’s where your mom buys them.

In a sense, jeans were always global. The California metal miners who first produced and wore Levis were themselves the leading edge of a wave a of capital, turning raw ore into the fortunes that built San Francisco, where Leland Stanford turned a gold rush fortune into a national railroad empire, funding his eponymous university, where 82 years later the basic architecture of the internet, TCP/IPwas created, allowing two of Stanford’s graduate students to create Google25 years after that, through which every paragraph of this story was researched. Mmm, skinny jeans.

Buzzy Jackson