[HN Gopher] The semiotics of barbed wire fence
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The semiotics of barbed wire fence
Author : ano-ther
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-06-23 22:21 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
| ortusdux wrote:
| Very interesting! Makes me think of the barbed wire telephone
| networks -
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah -- if you knew whose fence you were connected to then you
| could identify the line and to whom you would be ringing when
| you connected your phone to it.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think Deleuze and Guattari actually talk about it
| directly, but barbed wire seems like a perfect example of a
| technology that turns smooth space into striated space. Basically
| smooth spaces are vast and open, like the sea or the great
| plains, whereas striated spaces are ones organized, put under a
| grid, etc.
|
| https://www.christianhubert.com/writing/smoothstriated
| ortusdux wrote:
| This is a big deal with fish passage restoration. Rectangular
| farmland led to dykes that straitened out streams and rivers.
| Straight waterways flow faster and wash away sediment. This
| makes it harder for fish to swim upstream while leaving fewer
| places to rest and spawn. There is a fair amount of restoration
| work going on in the PNW to try and undo this, and the results
| I've seen have been promising.
| kens wrote:
| The article shows an interesting collection of different types of
| barbed wire with a name on each one. The article claims that
| different types of barbed wire allowed ranchers to tell at a
| glance if the land and animals belonged to them. Unfortunately,
| that theory is completely made up and wrong. The names on the
| barbed wire are the _manufacturers_ not the ranchers. Different
| manufacturers produced different styles of wires due to patents
| and functionality reasons.
|
| For instance, the first wire in the article is labeled "Kelly
| loose barb". That corresponds to the Michael Kelly patent [1].
| The next name is Scutt, describing the improved barbed wire
| invented by H. B. Scutt [2].
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US283614A [2]
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US195239A
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. The history of barbed wire is well known, and this article
| misses it.
|
| For cattle operations, barbed wire is somewhat obsolete,
| anyway. There's a wire mesh called "King Ranch fencing".[1] No
| barbs, but strong enough to contain cattle. With fewer scrape
| marks, the leather is more valuable. No risk of animals caught
| in barbed wire. Less sagging wire. "We don't fix fence, we
| build fence" - King Ranch slogan.
|
| [1] https://redbrandstore.com/products/king-ranch-field-
| fence-66...
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Wow!
|
| I have two 330' rolls of a similar Red Brand field fence I
| bought about 20 years ago, 660' total of it like the roll in
| the listing. I paid $75 for each 330' roll.
|
| I think mine is the Monarch Field Fence roll with the
| graduated spacing beginning with 3" at the bottom. The same
| rolls sell for more than $300 each today according to that
| site.
|
| Time to build a cheap fence with my old wire.
| masfuerte wrote:
| I understood that the labels were brand names, but I thought
| the article was saying that the ranchers deliberately used
| different brands of barb wire because it made it easy to
| distinguish their holdings. I don't know if they did.
| bluGill wrote:
| Ranchers go to the local store and buy whatever barb wire is
| in stock. Whatever the owner of the store buys is what they
| get. There may be more than one store, the store may order
| from different manufactures, and the store may have more than
| one type in stock (with different marketing trying to
| convince you one is better than the other) - but in the end
| it is all what the store has in stock. I'm going to count the
| local Sears catalog (and others) as a local store for this
| discussion.
|
| The important key is farmers don't consult with others to be
| intentionally different. (farmers will consult with each
| other but that is only to see what works for someone else to
| copy it - if a farmer has barbed wire that doesn't work they
| will replace it and tell the neighbors). They all have the
| same set of choices to work with.
|
| Farmers also have no reason to care if their fence is
| different. They know where their land is (and often are
| leasing land that someone else built the fence). Barbed wire
| isn't something that a dishonest farmer would steel - it gets
| harder to work with after it has been put up once so a fresh
| roll is better.
| vessenes wrote:
| This was interesting but I don't know if semiotics is a large
| part of the essay. I was _hoping_ to get a deconstruction of
| barbed wire fence as a security measure in different parts of the
| world. My experience living in South Africa for a while was that
| to an American eye, barbed wire on top of a wall codes as "this
| neighborhood is unsafe". To a South African it codes as "this
| home is protected and safe" -- very different reactions. There
| were a few houses in my neighborhood in Cape Town that refused
| barbed wire, and I always respected them immensely and thought of
| them as sort of hold-overs from a less violent period in the
| country's history.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah, to me the headline is just completely wrong and
| misleading.
|
| None of this has anything to do with semiotics. I was expecting
| the exact same thing as you -- semiotics would be about _what
| does seeing barbed wire in specific spaces /contexts mean to
| different groups of people_?
|
| What are its associations with prisons, compounds,
| neighborhoods, safety, security, the state, private security,
| militarization, crime, farming, cattle, trespassing, the
| American West, freedom to roam, and so forth? When you see
| barbed wire, does it make you feel safe or nervous or scared?
| How does that change if it's in a residential neighborhood vs.
| around a military base?
|
| Your experience in South Africa is a perfect example -- thanks
| for sharing.
| matharmin wrote:
| In my experience around Cape Town, it's both: High security (or
| more commonly electric fencing in affluent neighbourhoods) on a
| single house means the house is safe (or the owners are
| paranoid). High security on every house in the neighborhood
| means high crime rate in the neighborhood.
|
| It also don't think crime stats went up much over the last
| decades in general (may be different in specific
| neighborhoods), but there is definitely more fear of safety
| that leads to more security.
| vessenes wrote:
| I agree that the perception, (and implied acknowledgment) of
| violence is a very interesting factor -- and I would not be
| surprised if the very act of building a lot of visible
| security features near a building overall increases the rate
| of some sorts of crime.
|
| That said, you're a little out of date on SA - violent crime
| across the country was relatively stable for a decade or two,
| but since 2021, violent crimes across SA have spiked, and now
| even Cape Town is in the 20 most dangerous towns in the
| world, and in the top 10 murder / capita towns in the world.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > to an American eye, barbed wire on top of a wall codes as
| "this neighborhood is unsafe". To a South African it codes as
| "this home is protected and safe" -- very different reactions
|
| If the neighborhood is safe, the barbed wire would be
| unnecessary to make the home protected and safe. Not really
| sure why the distinction is necessary. In your South African's
| take, what happens when you leave the protected and safe
| property. To me that means you are stepping into an unsafe
| neighborhood.
| vessenes wrote:
| You've definitely never lived in SA with that comment.
| Everywhere in the world security is just a feeling, but SA
| explores just how far feelings can be from reality quite
| often.
| mmaunder wrote:
| I think you're reading a bit too much into this. Reasons for
| barbed or not vary. (or broken bottles laid in concrete on top
| of a wall, which is something else you'll see in SA) I don't
| think houses necessarily refuse barbed wire. They just have
| other security controls.
| richardw wrote:
| In SA, barbed wire is a good start. You've left off electric
| fence, cameras, manned boom gates and security company. And
| security WhatsApp groups. What am I missing? Some have guns or
| double layers of the above. Many live in security complexes
| inside the fenced off areas. Oh yes, burglar bars. And security
| alarm linked to the security company.
|
| The above doesn't always work. You need to ensure the gates
| can't be crowbarred off. Happened to us a few times. The amount
| of IQ allocated to breaking in is amazing. Serious innovation
| on the criminal side. Think of your smartest friends very keen
| to get into your house and working together for years on how to
| do it.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| What.... What happened to SA? Is there a unique set of
| circumstances that gave rise to this particular kind of
| violent lawlessness?
| causi wrote:
| Quite a few contributing factors:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM
| richardw wrote:
| Top recipe: you force some people to have a very shit life,
| selection based on race. Some lawlessness is naturally bred
| and in some cases encouraged. You then take away the rules
| that made it shit but you leave the economic, societal and
| mental damage of a polarised society. You start uplifting
| people but you mainly focus on a small group and do little
| to help most people. You allow education to go south
| because teachers are unionised and you want their votes.
| You demonstrate corruption at the highest levels and then
| dismantle the parts of the law meant to fight it. You let
| the economy grow too slowly because you're so focused on
| cutting pieces of the pie for yourself that you forget to
| grow it. You let public health and policing go to waste, so
| only wealthy have access to good healthcare, education,
| security. You break the electricity generation capacity
| through corruption. Poverty never really gets fixed because
| a kid in a rural village has a massive hill to climb to be
| economically active. You also add other broken countries
| nearby so you end up with a lot of job seekers. Add some
| resentment of those people.
|
| The kids who make it through all that to e.g. get a job in
| a bank are absolute heroes.
| vessenes wrote:
| Great question. https://www.amazon.com/History-South-
| Africa-Fourth/dp/030018... is an excellent book that digs
| in on this and other topics about SA if you're interested
| in learning more about this extremely complex question and
| country. As residents often say, it's especially a
| heartbreak because the country has so much going for it.
| underlipton wrote:
| America, except the natives you stole the land from and the
| black people you enslaved are one and the same, and Jim
| Crow didn't end until after the Soviet Union
| fell/Transformers aired, and you're on a continent that the
| West has a pathological inclination to exploit.
|
| The righteous fury of those denied the dignity of land and
| agency burns a cultural brand into the skin of the body
| politic, an endemic disregard for the "rules-based order"
| that orders them to the back of the line (however it's said
| and whoever has the megaphone). The people who benefit,
| only willing to provide an an ounce of the pound of cure
| necessary, mask-and-hazmat-suit-up to weather the plague
| they wrought. It looks ridiculous because it is.
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/5/13/oscar-
| pistorius...
| vessenes wrote:
| For sure. Also I'm a fan of a concrete covered
| bunker/entryway so that you can't be shot at by someone
| inside the property when security visits you.
| sdsd wrote:
| Not related to TFA but the word "semiotics" to me is very
| evocative of this set of academic subjects in the 70s that were
| just kind of shelved. Right along with cybernetics or women's
| lib. Here in Guatemala there was a used book fair and in the
| English section they had a book for 80 cents about cybernetics,
| which I've neglected to read, but now think I ought to read soon
| :)
| complaintdept wrote:
| Also networks, Bucky Fullerism, Eastern philosophy, mind maps,
| UNIX and chaos theory gaining momentum, etc. They seem somewhat
| dated now, but in a way they've diffused through our culture so
| extensively that they're just part of the background and nobody
| raises an eyebrow at them anymore. The 70s had a zeal for cool
| ideas that we just don't have anymore.
| Animats wrote:
| After the USSR went down, the Stanford bookstore had a sign:
| "All communism 70% off".
| kjellsbells wrote:
| In the early 00s I lived in the Washington DC suburbs, and
| saw first hand how all the old Kremlinologists and Russia
| specialists were being pensioned off and retired. I'd
| attend yard sales and there'd be stacks of books about
| Russian culture, politics, literature, everything. Pashto
| was hot, and Pushkin was not.
|
| Today, they need Kremlinologists and Russian speakers all
| over again.
|
| What goes around, comes around...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _or women 's lib_
|
| Unlike certain jurisdictions we didn't shelve that one; we
| actually put it into our constitution (if slightly after the
| 70s).
| chanandler_bong wrote:
| I read an article a long time ago that drew a direct correlation
| between the need to contain/separate livestock in the American
| West and the battlefields of World War I.
|
| Basically, as settlers moved westward, they needed to contain
| their livestock as well as separate sheep and cows. Sheep
| apparently eat grass down to the ground whereas cows don't, thus
| sheep would deprive cows of food.
|
| So, barbed wire was developed for this purpose and the military
| saw the utility of it as well. Fast-forward to WWI and the vast
| battlefields there and needing an inexpensive way to slow enemy
| advances on foot. This led to the development of tanks to
| overcome the barbed wire obstacles. Machine guns also became more
| useful as a way to spray large areas when attacking troops were
| held up by the obstacles.
| banga wrote:
| Interesting collection, but this statement gave me pause:
|
| "there was nothing out here but millions of buffalo and some
| scattered Indians"
| alamortsubite wrote:
| If the author is reading this, you really should check out the
| barbed wire exhibits at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage
| Museum in Oklahoma City [1] and the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum in
| LaCrosse, KS [2]. Next-level.
|
| 1: https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/explore/barbed-wire/
|
| 2: https://www.rushcounty.org/BarbedWireMuseum/BWexhibits.html
| underlipton wrote:
| Barbed wire fence is a great example of technology that was
| originally meant for capitalist ends - specifically, to allow for
| the slicing up of a commons for private use - eventually employed
| to literally rip apart people.
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