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Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or….
How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$

NYU’s very own Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, New York University, will be speaking at Columbia this Thursday at noon. Gabriella is a talented scholar and friend. This is a great opportunity to see her speak. Details below.

Thursday November 13: noon - 2:00pm
Columbia University Communications Colloquium
270B IAB (International Affairs Building:
http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/tour/11.html
http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/calendar/

In this talk I present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as ?Internet vs Scientology,? which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of ?Project Chanology,? which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against the Church of Scientology. I argue that to understand the significance of these battles and protests, we must examine the culturally antipodal relationship between Scientology and hacker/geek culture. In so doing I will demonstrate how long-standing liberal ideals take cultural root in unexpected ways in the context of these battles and I will use these two cases to reveal important political transformations in Internet/hacker culture between the mid 1990s and today.

Technorati Tags: event, freeculture, freecultureNYU, GabriellaColeman, Scientology, talk

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FC NYU is proud to be sponsoring this screening with Computers and Society:

Released in December 2007 by the League of Noble Peers (Alan Toner, J.J. King, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Luca Lucarini, and others), Steal This Film 2 tries to go beyond the current discussions around file-sharing to look at what kinds of social change are precipitated by massive changes in our capacity to communicate. The film argues that the changes wrought by networked, peer distribution are historical on the scale of the printing press and tries to explain why.

For many of you these argument will be familiar. These are strange times, in which to many of us the battle already seems to have been won. Yet governments continue to enact harsh laws expanding the scope of copyright protection and increasing sanctions for its infringement, lawsuits are levied against filesharers, fines imposed and arrests made - all intended to destroy or delay what is an inevitable change in how we look at creative work.

At the same time there has developed a burgeoning area of cultural production outside of both the institution of copyright and the historical channels of distribution, be they television, cinema or music stores. Deep beneath the sand the playing field of culture is shifting, in no small part due to the combined actions of millions of peer produsers.

Alan Toner, one of the peers responsible for the film’s production, will be present for a discussion afterwards, during which there will
also be a demonstration of STF’s footage archive.

http://stealthisfilm.com/Part2/
http://footage.stealthisfilm.com/
http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Film

Sunday, November 16, 2008
7:00pm - 9:00pm

Room 109 Warren Weaver Hall
251 Mercer Street
New York, NY

RSVP on Facebook

Technorati Tags: screening

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Tomorrow we rest. Next week the real work begins. So much possibility! #

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Water
Nestle is suing a county for promoting their tap water as cleaner and safer than bottled water. The International Bottled Water Association is considering similar action.

But, Your Bottled Water is Contaminated,
and
Bottled Water No Purer Than Tap Water

some additional info:
reddit.com: search resuls for “bottled water”

Fear
echoing Boing Boing: Lexington, KY - Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening because he wrote some zombie fiction.

Copyfight
echoing BoingBoing:Selling used CDs is still legal in America even if they are marked “not for resale”. First sale doctrine upheld.

Religion / Games
Wish i had more information on Islamic content in games.

Technorati Tags: civil liberties, copyfight, election2008, terrorism, puppy, puppy, religion, water

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Please email me.

Are you an undecided voter? Who are you voting for?
How does did you think it was funny? how did you feel about it?
Did you / would you forward it? To who? Who are they voting for?
What do you think of Palin in general?
Has your opinion of Palin changed over time?

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In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine’s 150th anniversary, an invited series of authors, artists, politicians and others were asked to prepare 300 words or so on “the future of the American idea”. Wallace asked whether some things were still worth dying for, and presented a “thought experiment” in which “we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea.” He goes on to say that we might have to accept that every now and then “a democratic republic cannot 100% protect itself [from terrorism] without subverting the very principles that made it worth protecting.” By comparison, he continues, we accept the 40,000 highway deaths each year as the price we pay for the convenience of the motor car. Finally, he asks, in the context of Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, and warrantless wiretapping, “Have we become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety?”

Also - enjoy some writing about the TSA

• The Two Classes of Airport Contraband
• TSA didn’t keep track of ex-employees’ badges and uniforms
• TSA screener ripped off hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics from passengers, TSA itself didn’t notice

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…People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it (”Look what I made!”) and they like to share it (”Look what I found!”). Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

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Zack McCune (of RIAA lawsuit fame) blogged yesterday’s rowing outing with Adam Holland.

LINK

(Thanks Zack.)

Technorati Tags: adam Holland, harvard, rowing

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I’m getting married in a month. Life is good. And despite the best intentions of simplicity, our wedding seems to have become a huge undertaking. Although I don’t think that anything about planning an event or about getting married is fundamentally different because of digital technology, I have noticed a few trends and used lots of interesting tools in this process.

Communication (email and instant messenger):
I’ve been spending the summer here in Cambridge, MA working with the Digital Natives project. My fiancé is living in our apartment in Brooklyn, NY. Our families and friends want to help, and they are in Florida, New Jersey, and many other places. Email helps a lot. Instant messenger [Wikipedia] helps more.

98% of the planning we are doing starts online. Just about everything we’ve needed to find or to plan has started at a search engine. Almost every evening my fiancé and I are online working on doing something “productive.” While the merits of multi-tasking are certainly up for debate, the fact that we are “there” to bounce questions and ideas off of each other has been amazingly helpful in this context. We copy and paste URLs [Wikipedia], email to-do lists, and occasionally open up an audio or video chat for discussions that require more direct attention. Because of this, not being in the same room to plan together has become pretty much a non-issue.

The Location (maps):
We decided to have our wedding on the Jersey shore, in a little shore town that I grew up vacationing at with my extended family (Exit 63). It feels great to stay true to my NJ roots and throw a wedding in NJ (you’d understand if you were from the Garden State).

Being that we are subway-riding city folk at the moment, we rarely have to worry about the mix of alcohol and motor vehicles. Obviously, the wedding was going to be a different story (The subway service in NJ is notoriously sub-par to, er, nonexistent). We really wanted to plan something where everything was walkable and everyone could celebrate as merrily as they desired to without having to worry about driving.

Using Google Maps and other similar map services, we were able to find a location for a rehearsal dinner, an outdoor pre-wedding barbeque, a location for the ceremony, and a hall for a reception, all within a few blocks of each other. While this would have been possible with a paper map, the combination of search engines and instant access to satellite images really helped us to feel out what we were planning.

Communication (the website):
Since most of our guests will be traveling to our wedding, and many of them looking for overnight lodging, we needed a way to help them find places to stay that were affordable, reputable, and in walking distance. We needed a way to communicate this information to our guests as it came in, both before and after invitations were sent. So, we built a web page and put a whole bunch of lodging options up there. While we were at it, we highlighted a bunch of “fun stuff to do while you are in town.” This is great because it gives us the flexibility to modify and update the information until a week before the wedding.

More importantly, textual links from our site to the lodging options and to the respective websites of other points of interest really harness the power of the Web, allowing users of our website to find all the information that could possibly need in just a few clicks.

We also used the “My Maps” feature on Google Maps to create custom maps of all of the points of interest, and linked those Google Maps from the entries on our website. This allows our guests to plan ahead a little and to really have a sense of space, helping us to keep everyone on foot and out of their automobiles.

Invitations (the mash-up):
My suggestion of sending out email invitations was shot down (correctly) without much consideration. My suggestion of talking invitations with customized voice recordings (”Hey Joe! Come to our wedding! See you in September!”) was shot down (unfairly). In the end we decided to create our own invitations and have them printed. Because we want to encourage people to explore the little shore town, we decided to include a little map of the area.

Google Maps again to the rescue! I navigated Google Maps to the area, took a bunch of “screen captures” of areas of the map, and then stitched them together in Photoshop [Wikipedia], an image editor [Wikipedia]. We found Creative Commons-licensed images and icons on Flickr that really helped communicate the smart but chill vibe that we wanted too, even with my meager artistic skill. To make the map simple and iconographic, I traced the map in the vector graphics [Wikipedia] editor, Illustrator [Wikipedia], with the help our friend Del.

Then, we emailed a PDF [Wikipedia] off to the printer and sent them via the good old fashioned postal service.

RSVPs (the semantic web):
My favorite part of this process so far is has been collecting the RSVPs. To keep printing (and environmental) costs down, and to keep our sanity, we decided to ask people to RSVP online. Although there are many methods of creating forms for websites [Wikipedia], Google provided the solution that was easy and met our needs. We created a spreadsheet in Goggle Docs, and then created a form that guests can fill out that dumps the data directly into the spreadsheet. Google Docs auto-generates the html code for the form, which we embedded into our website.

Wasn’t all of this a lot of work? Actually, no. It probably only took an hour. Opening and counting that many RSVP envelopes would have taken twice as long, and would have been a slow, cumbersome, and error-prone process in comparison. Better still, we get emails every time someone RSVPs, and checking out the notes people have written along with their RSVP a couple of times a day is a lot of fun.

The spreadsheet keeps running totals of guests and reception meal menu choices in real-time, and allows both my fiance and I to access it from our remote locations. We were able to invite the family members and friends who are helping us plan to view the spreadsheet.

Paying the Vendors (invoices & online banking):
Managing a budget for a wedding is tricky, but Internet banking has made it a lot easier. By using bill-pay services that both my fiance and I can access, either of us can arrange to send a check to a vendor at the click of a button. We can both have instant access to what is being paid when, and adjust our Google doc spreadsheet at the click of a button to make sure that we are still on track. Doing this on paper, or doing it over the phone, would have been vastly more difficult. [Wikipedia entry for Online Banking]

Paperless (contracts):
There are a few vendors’ relationships that require basic contracting. We could either wait for snail-mail, or buy a fax machine. Actually, we haven’t had a land-line phone in three years and rely exclusively on cellphones, so the fax wouldn’t work. However, internet fax [Wikipedia] services work well. (Checkout eFax or MyFax.) Because we have an account with a fax number, anyone can send a fax to us that will then arrive in our email inboxes as a PDF. It’s super convenient, and environmentally responsible to boot.

If someone needs to actually send us a piece of paper, we have it sent to our postal-to-email bridge, Earth Class Mail. Earth Class Mail scans all the paper that arrives in our PO Box and emails to the PDFs. (Earth Class Mail will also contact the senders of mail you identify as junk and ask them to stop sending it, saving countless pounds of junkmail from ever being printed.)

When we need to sign documents, I slap a digital signature [Wikipedia] on the PDFs. This makes and image of my signature appear on any print-out, and also helps to secure the file digitally, making my signature disappear if the file is modified after I sign it. When sending these contracts back I either email them, virtually “fax” them back using our fax service’s email-to-fax bridge, or have a good ol’ US Postal service paper copy sent to the destination via our email-to-postal-mail-bridge, Postful.
While the fax services are cheaper than owning and maintaining an actual fax machine and phone line, the mail services are more expensive than regular postal mail. In the end, the two are pretty much a wash, and we get the added benefit of having everything we need on-hand at all times from our laptops, having it from states away, and no clutter in our NYC-sized apartment.

…Using all of these various technologies certainly hasn’t changed the nature of the event itself. However, the technologies are helping us to plan a wedding more conveniently over a long distance, involving the people we want involved in planning to the exact degree that we want them involved, and getting surgical with a few of the details that we really care about, helping us plan an event that is more uniquely our own than would have previously been possible.

-John Randall

Technorati Tags: Earth Class Mail, GTD, paperless office, productivity, postful, wedding

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If you need a refresher, watch Part I and Part II.

In April of last year, Zack McCune was sued by the RIAA. He ended up $3,000 lighter (he settled), but with a much richer understanding of the contemporary debate surrounding music, copyright law, and file sharing. Part I gives an intro to his story, while Part II explores the disconnect between young downloaders and the recording industry. Part III, presented here, concludes Zack’s misadventure and examines where it led him: to the Free Culture Movement, which advocates more flexible intellectual property law.

This video was produced by Nikki Leon and John Randall. You can watch a high-resolution version here.

If you’d like to learn more about illegal downloading or the Free Culture Movement, check out the following:

- The RIAA’s perspective on the issue
- Free Culture, by Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that works to protect individuals’ rights online.
- Students for Free Culture
- Creative Commons, a leading organization in the Free Culture movement. Founded by Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons allows artists to modify the default “All Rights Reserved” copyright on their works to make them publicly available for distribution and remixing.

Come back every Wednesday for more multimedia on online privacy, cyber bullying, digital activism and more!

Technorati Tags: Copyleft, Free Culture, RIAA, Zack McCune

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But this plea for donations was different. Sean did not tap the “netroots,” (the left-leaning political blogosphere). Instead, he posted a simple website containing a web-comic telling his story. Using an Internet meme archetype to illustrate his absurd hometown political reality, he hit a nerve. Self-consciously designed utilizing simple xkcd-style stick-figures, and making a few quasi-insider-but-not-too-elitist geek references, he managed to simultaneously solicit outrage, empathy, and, most importantly, lots of donations.

P.J. Huffstutter reported Sean’s story yesterday in the LA Times Huffstutter mentions Sean’s jokes about “down-modding” and “trolling.”, The story also identifies the stick-figure style as being based on the stick-figure illustrations found in xkcd, a popular web-comic by Randall Monroe (…an web-comic author who has somehow managed to earn a stylistic monopoly on stick figure drawings.) While Huffstutter describes the details accurately, I don’t think he realizes how significant these cultural touchstones are.

Sean is an insider of a growing internet sub-culture. By making quips about “down-modding” Arlen Siegfreid’s conservative ranting “below the thresh-hold” in the first frame of the comic, Sean is consciously proving himself to be an insider in a particular slice of a rich semantic web 2.0 / 3.0, social bookmaking, viral meme-generating online cultural space. Sean obviously lives in this space, as does his audience of donors. (Huffstutter’s style indicates that he is wading through at least somewhat unfamiliar territory in his LA Times article.) (Hang wrote this great post last week about masquerading as an insider not just by knowing a few facts, but by knowing the jokes and therefore demonstrating knowledge of the professional culture.)

This sub-culture is far larger and far more accessible than it ever was. The behaviors (and values?) of this space are going slightly more mainstream as a new generation of Digital Natives comes to occupy the space. Conversations and ideas that seem outlandish in suburbs across the nation have taken root online and drawn in new audiences through computer screens. These conversations have even leaked off the web into our newspapers, helping to make Al Gore a hero and Richard Dawkins culturally relevant.

By demonstrating that he is a cultural insider with this particular slice of internet-meme generating culture, Sean strikes a nerve that garners support on an emotional level. Sure, it helps that his politics agree with mine– but the cultural references in this comic signal more. Sean socializes the way I do, and derives pleasure from the things I derive pleasure from. Sean lives the way I do. The details of Sean’s politics aren’t important; Sean is -like me-, and therefore… of course Sean will fight for the things I would fight for.

This tactic, this emotional connection stemming from a feeling of likeness, has always been a powerful tool in politics. “That politician is a [religious group here], like me.” “That politician is a family man, like me.” “That politicians daddy was a coal-miner, and therefore worked as hard as my dad did.” “That politician speaks with a southern accent, like me.”

As a sub-culture becomes less insular and community grows, they realize that they actually have the power to create change.

Sean’s online culture has been testing the waters for a while now. In what has seemed like online mischief, they have used social networking sites to swarm news sites with precision timing to alter the results of online polls. In December, the whale adopted by Greenpeace was officially named Mr. Spashy Pants, the name that beat the runners up Humphrey, Aiko, Libertad, Mira, Kaimana, Aurora, Shanti, Amal and Manami with almost 80% of the vote. This particular community is also responsible for swarming countless MSNBC, ABC, and CNN online polls to express their support for Ron Paul, and swarming many other online polls to express a lack of religious belief. It was only a matter of time before the sub-culture graduated into real politics.

Perhaps Sean Travis embodies the next step in this sub-culture reaching for political power. By insinuating that anything is possible because “THIS IS THE INTERNET!” he is cracking open a new political reality. Unlike Jello Biafra, Sean might actually win.

-John Randall

Technorati Tags: Internet Politics

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Here’s the second installment of our three-part video “The Ballad of Zack McCune.” You can view part 1 here.

What do you do when you’re sued by the recording industry? And how do kids and teens reconcile the law (and corporate interests) with a culture of illegal downloading? Last year, Brown University student Zack McCune was faced with both of these questions. He explains…

Look for a new Digital Natives podcast every Wednesday, now through October. And Watch Part 3 of Zack’s story here on August 6th.

UPDATE 7/29/08 Part 3 has been posted here.

Technorati Tags: CopyLeft, Free Culture, RIAA, Zack McCune

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This video – “The Ballad of Zack McCune, Part I” – is the first of a three-part piece created by Nikki Leon and John Randall of the Digital Natives summer team. It marks another installment in our weekly “Digital Natives: Reporters in the Field” series, in which we delve into a variety of Digital-Natives-related topics.

In this video, we take a look at digital natives’ attitudes towards illegal downloading. Part I, posted here, is the introduction to Zack McCune’s story — how he got sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and what happened as a result. Part II examines the disconnect between youth and the recording industry, while Part III investigates how the experience got Zack interested in internet policy and the free culture movement.

Come back tomorrow for Part II, and stay tuned every Wednesday for new podcasts on cyberbullying, digital learning, online activism, and other Digital Natives issues!

UPDATE 7/23/08 Part 2 has been posted here.

Technorati Tags: Free Culture, Copyleft, RIAA, Zack McCune

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My grandfather worked for Bell Telephone, mother of “The Baby Bells”, aka “The Phone Company”, for his entire career, installing phones and running wires. My aunt worked for Bell as a telephone operator (and spent much of her career 60 feet underground in a nuclear bunker). My uncle worked DSL networks. At 4th of July barbecues, instead of talking about shopping or football, we talk about wonderfully exciting things like bandwidth, the unconscious effect of latency, and how the role of telephone has changed over the years.

According to granddad, early on in telephone history, many folks felt that phone conversations were so awkward and impersonal that they really didn’t enjoy using them. The reticence receded in waves as phone calls went mainstream. Phone users adjusted and began having succinct, purpose-driven calls. Over time, they began doing routine business, having personal conversations, and eventually becoming comfortable talking to people they hadn’t yet met in person. Eventually, of course, the telephone became an acceptable way to have important business conversations. (Which reminds me of the way we adopted a certain series of tubes I’m fond of…)

Initial reticence to using the phone is traditionally attributed to the lack of body language and facial expression in phone conversations, but most people don’t realize that the alien-ness of a phone conversation is also caused by uncomfortable conversational latency patterns. (..

Roughly speaking, latency is the amount of time it takes for a message to get where it is going. The speed of sound is roughly 340 m / s, depending on air pressure, humidity, temperature, etc. This means that normal conversational latency is about 6 milliseconds. If I were to speak to you from two meters away, my speech would take 6 milliseconds to travel from my mouth to your ear.

But suppose you and I were having a conversation via a local telephone call over the “Plain Old Telephone Service” (POTS) network. Even if you are on the other side of town, the timings wouldn’t much different. My voice leaves my mouth, travels to the phone just a few cm away (.06 milliseconds), moves a microphone diaphragm, and gets converted to electricity that travels close to the speed of light, which is negligible delay at that distance. When the signal gets to your phone, the process is reversed and the sound is pumped directly from your phone into your ear. Thus, speech of a local phone call is actually at least a whole order of magnitude faster than face-to-face communication. This conversational sensation was alarming to the first generation of phone users.

With nothing more than anecdotal evidence from my teenage years to back it up, I speculate that this lack of normal conversational latency, this “hyper–closeness” which has both the echo-location and the latency characteristics of someone whispering in your ear, helps conversations over local POTS phone networks to sometimes actually feel more intimate than face to face communication.

But this doesn’t hold true over long distance phone calls. If we talk on a POTS call from say… from San Francisco to New York, the time the electrical takes to travel along the wire is a lot longer, roughly 30+ milliseconds, creating a 60+ millisecond round-trip. While many of us no longer notice the latency in long distance phone calls, this latency was unsettling to the first generation of long distance phone users, who found that their innate abilities to tell a lie from the truth and by extension to make character judgments, having been honed by years of face to face conversation, were thrown off by the long distance delay.

At some point our long distance phones conversations started going over fiber instead of copper, bringing them closer to the theoretical speed of light and getting rid of some latency. But those gains were negated by the transition from analogue to digital, which costs a few milliseconds and is required at each end to bring our analogue ears into the loop, and is particularly slow in small, cheap, energy efficient devices (like cell phones). Add the unpredictability of wireless phones, network congestion, and you have wildly varying conversational latency.

Chances are that if you are reading this, you’ve grown up making long distance calls. I know that I don’t notice the latency in any POTS phone networks… but I can’t stand cell-phone latency. I constantly second guess my five year-old decision to ditch the landline. As a freelancer, I can’t stand negotiating fees on my cell phone, where I find it difficult to read a client and play the give-me-an-estimate / what-is-your-budget dance to my benefit. Trying to do so is mentally and emotionally exhausting. I echo generations past in my lack of ease in doing business using this confounded new communications technology.

The current crop of teenagers doesn’t know a world without cell phones. Having never (really) known much else, do these Digital Natives have different conversational patterns of micro timing molded by a life of cell phone latency? Has this age bracket lost a certain ability to unconsciously read truth or intention in a conversation from variations in micro-timings? …Or have they merely adjusted their conversational patterns to account for the immense additional latency? Do their “cell-phone” conversational speech patterns carry over in face-to-face conversations, or do these digital natives unconsciously work in different conversational rubrics when using different communications technologies? In terms of mental energy, what is the net effect of the effort required to switch back and forth?

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I thought I was. I was born January 9th, 1980. I missed the 70s by just nine days.

I love technology. I was luckiest 6 year-old kid in he world when my uncle gave the family a Commodore 64 for Xmas. I programmed in BASIC. I was in chat-rooms on Prodigy and CompuServe. I played in Multi-User Doors (MUDs) on local direct dial-up bulletin board systems before I even knew what the Internet was.

I thought that I was a Digital Native.

I’m an active participant in “online culture”. I can name every YouTube reference in Weezer’s “Pork and Beans” video. I get ALL of my news online and I own a television almost exclusively for the purposes of watch media that comes to me across the Internet. I conduct 80% of my professional life online and maintain only the fuzziest of boundaries between my work and play time. I multi-task. I transition between IM, SMS, email, telephone, and face-to-face seamlessly. I Facebook. I Myspace. I Flickr. I LinkedIn. I Wiki. I YouTube. I twitter (sort-of). I code a little.

I thought that I was a Digital Native, but I am not.

When I twitter, I often do it alone. (I’m more enamored with the concept than the practical application.) Although IM has become an indispensable tool for getting work done and telecommuting, most of my friends and family are not usually logged in. Aside from email, most forms of online communications never gained enough a critical mass in my age bracket to endure past our extended adolescence. My Skype window sits idle, displaying a grey-out contacts displaying ghostly reminders of my fleeting online social life.

With much enthusiasm and the best of intentions, I try to co-ordinate social events and camping trips with friends using online calendars, forums, social networks, or email lists. But more often than I think is reasonable, I need to resort to the phone to really make things happen. Most of my people just don’t live online.

I am not a Digital Native, but I would like to be.

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with technology and it’s potential for creating change. My age bracket, generally speaking, has not shared this interest with me. True Digital Natives have a mainstream culture of online connectivity. My interest in digital technology has been exploratory and forward thinking, and placed parts of my life-style on the geeky fringes of American culture.

I’m probably more tech-savy than most Digital Natives today, yet I am not one of them. The Digital Natives around me have been shaped by a totally mainstream digital lifestyle, a norm that enables allows them to digitally communicate and collaborate with their peers with ease. Their habits have been formed by their lifetimes of digital communication and complete immersion in digital spaces.

In contrast, my lifetime has been a lifetime of waiting. Waiting for the digital spaces held in the collective imagination to come online. Now that the early, early alphas of the meta-verse are here, I am shocked that my peers aren’t rushing in to them as I always imagined. It’s too late for me. I missed the 70s by nine days. I just realized that I missed the life-style I’ve always imagined would come by about a decade.

I adore the Internet. The possibilities that are provided for by massive digital collaboration and open access to information are the single biggest factor in my having any hope of a brighter future for the human species. (Clay Shirky’s talk on excess cognitive capacity gives me chills.) I wish that my generation was going to play a major role in that imagined future. …But sadly, I will have to go it mostly alone because their embrace of life-changing technological innovation seems to have stopped at Tivo.

UPDATE 2008.08.04: More on the term “Digital Native” here.

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