In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything
lithub.com
lithub.com
Once my sister-in-law put out some clothes that included an old T-Shirt that had been printed for a family get-together celebrating her parents 50th anniversary. It had a large photo of her parents on it along with wording like "John and Mary's 50th anniversary" etc. etc. She thought nothing of it. But several days later while walking near their apartment, she was taken aback to see an Egyptian man coming toward them proudly wearing the T-shirt with her parents smiling photo on it.
And it seemed this was his favorite or only shirt. For months afterword, she'd see her parent's photo as the man went about his business in the neighborhood. She took it all in stride!
Then I had to get rid of a lot of stuff during a very fraught move, and I thought: someone gave me this because they love me and want me to be happy. Would that person want me to obsessively, guiltily cling to something that doesn't benefit me anymore? No. They'd want me to get rid of it.
Tip: this article is about a human, real-person garbage collector, and garbage is the real, physical waste that people put inside bins.
Well, not so much...
> So of course Sayyid was aware that I was researching and writing about him. At the same time, he is not literate, so there are serious limitations on his understanding of something like a New Yorker story.
> I also considered whether to change his name or not use a photograph. But I don’t like to do that unless there are serious political risks. Inevitably, changing a name reduces the reality of the subject, and there’s more of a risk that the person comes across as a symbol or something half-real.
(From https://www.facebook.com/41268348994/posts/pete-asked-me-to-... , which is a response to http://edgeeffects.net/tales-of-the-trash-response/ .)
I feel the ethics here are really dubious.
As someone else had pointed out this man may not realize or care about the consequences of the publicity but the author does have a duty to care and I think he betrayed that duty here.
It's pretty obviously not the case that authors have a duty to anonymize everybody they write about — I've never even heard a serious argument to that effect.
Hessler said he considered whether there was likely to be negative consequences for Sayyid if he was identified in the story, and he didn't see any likelihood of that. There don't appear to have actually been negative consequences (at least, nobody has mentioned any), so it's hard make a strong case for negligence on that front.
It’s like when writing s story about people on the periphery of society and most writers use pseudonyms for their subjects. It’s good courtesy and good practice.
It might mitigate hypothetical undesirable effects, in this case, to articulate some of the effect of the article on readers for whom the article was intended.
For one example, for me, as a citizen of the US, where this article was published, I enjoyed this article, and it fostered a favorable impression of Cairo, by humanizing one of its people. In a movie, he would be a beloved character. I realize he is of humble circumstances, among a diversity of people in Cairo (we have such diversity in my own US city, too). I am glad he exists, and that his society permits him to find his own greatness of role, in his way. This gives me an impression of Cairo as good people, with whom to feel fellowship, a desire to travel there and to otherwise learn about and appreciate their culture, and with whom to have good international relations and engage in business/trade. I would be troubled to ever hear that any harm has come to this person, or that he has become unhappy.
It is precisely that we have real, inescapable conflicts that makes it heartening to see something transcend that.
If it transcended nothing, what would it mean? Probably nothing.
1. Go to Africa.
2. Put an elephant in Cairo.
3. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
4. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west,
5. During each traverse pass:
* Catch each animal seen.
* Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
* Stop when a match is detected.
6. If you are in Cairo, then there are no elephants in Africa (other than the one you placed there).
Or, perhaps, other elephants already in Cairo ….
It needs a movable memory fence that stretches from East to West.
Thank you for this gold
I have to visit often for family reasons, and they are the reason I avoid being more engaged about being outspoken over there about what goes on. I feel as a westerner we have passively let Egypt totally devolved and we should feel ashamed; these lip service articles only assuage personal guilt, as I see it. I dreamed of being a Hessler and now ashamed I am part of the clique when I visit old friends.
I know I'll go get down-voted for saying it, but oh well.
I would strongly encourage everyone here to visit, and go beyond what tourist books tell you. You cannot freely write on the details of the place anymore, and I learned the most about life from Egypt.
I did find his writing compelling and added the book to my Amazon Wishlist.
In the past I visited Egypt once through a more adventurous travel agency. It was still an organised trip, but I was happy to see quite a bit of Egypt which included sleeping in the desert, sleeping in an oasis, have a small boat trip on the Nile, eat dinner with a Nubian family, visit the archeological museum and most important mosque in Cairo, as well as an important coptic church. And did see all the well known attractions such as the pyramids, valley of kings, Luxor, etc... It was fun and I'd love to visit it again in the future, but I feel it's currently probably too unsafe. Even back in 2005 when I visited there were military escorts with out travel group as we travelled to the south.
Westerners continue to make vastly more than local counterparts, and those 40 pounds buy less in 2007 than they did in 2019 (6LE:1USD,17.8LE:1USD, it was even crazier for foreigners when black market currency flowed freely and was stopped violently, including dragging exchange owners and seizures by police in ... 2018). Letting foreigners say stuff like this and rationalize it is part of how we helped passively ruin it.
You are right. I do read a lot into it, but stuff like this has been bothersome to me for what you can guess is 10+ years now. That we all go wow, look at this foreigner's insight into Cairene culture in 2019 with pieces like this just makes me sad.
Those organized trips are fun, but it limits the people and experiences you have. I understand we gave limited time on this planet and vacations in foreign countries are scary and uncomfortable so the effort and risk/reward is high unless you're a crazy person like yours truly.
I said elsewhere I will read his Chinese stuff and have my sinologist friends read it with me too see if it similar and I overreact.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/tales-trash
It feels weird to see a journalist republishing the same content just like that, but my guess is he has his book to promote and not that many angles to introduce the topic.
Related, when I moved out, I sold/freecycled most of my stuff, then invited some people to take what they want from the leftovers and finally left the stuff nobody had wanted in a big box in the bin room downstairs. Minutes later I saw the building cleaners haul the entire box into a car.
These gems are treasures.
I was a Cairo or so further out of date than you were. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_collection
and it says:
>"Garbage collection" redirects here. For the automatic memory management technique, see Garbage collection (computer science). For other uses, see Garbage collection (disambiguation).
You can almost hear the eyeroll directed at programmers :-p
The first time I saw the article in the list I interpreted it correctly. And then this time I decided to click on the comments and found myself wondering whether it was some clever wordplay about the graphics library.
It took me almost a minute to adjust all my assumptions. Well executed nerd snipe.
Slightly disappointed.
I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.
Now that I put it that way I feel like this is the core of a good argument for nationalizing social media.
It's not obvious to me that I should trust the government more than a big corporation with a reputation to defend. If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business (and maybe do much more harm than that). They have the wherewithal to avoid it. The incentives for long-term investment in security infrastructure are weaker in government.
Would it? I can't think of a single case where this has actually happened. It's great in theory and all, but it is far from reality.
The biggest data breaches over the past century have been with giant companies that are still known today. Yahoo, Marriott, Adult Friend Finder, eBay, Equifax, Heartland Payment Systems, Target, TJX, Uber, JP Morgan Chase, the US OPM, Sony's PSN network, Anthem, RSA, Home Depot and Adobe are all still in business, and for some of them, the lack of repercussions have been staggering (looking at you, Equifax).
Granted, not all are credit card breaches specifically, but several are, and in all cases a lot of personally identifiable information was stolen.
Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-b...