Probably the thing that I’m most known for would be helping to evangelize the use of the Internet in public libraries. In the United States now, if you walk into a library you’ll see public computers set out and people can get free time on them. But it wasn’t always like that.
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You might be more comfortable thinking about deploying math and code as your tactic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tactics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a framework that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.
Underlying this project is a pretty simple and we think powerful idea that provides a solution to a complex challenge that’s facing online communities like Twitter, like Reddit, within the CivilServant universe. That challenge is the increasing automation of the enforcement of legal rules and norms online.
Naruto, then 3 years old, came up and picked up one of his cameras and started looking at it. And he made the connection… By Mr. Slater’s own admission he made the connection between pushing the shutter release button and the change to his reflection in the lens when the aperture opened and closed.
I think in order to understand why the Pirate Party came about as a political party, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the political establishment and by the cultural lobbyists in particular. And what kinds of measures were being lobbied for by the cultural industries, especially the surveillance of people’s online behavior, which we’ve only learned probably years later was going to become a much broader problem for a fundamental rights.
General purpose computers are in fact astounding. So astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them. To figure out what they’re for. To figure out how to accommodate them and how to cope with them.
Quite often when we’re asking these difficult questions we’re asking about questions where we might not even know how to ask where the line is. But in other cases, when researchers work to advance public knowledge, even on uncontroversial topics, we can still find ourselves forbidden from doing the research or disseminating the research.
A larp takes a space and makes a place in which we create fiction with our bodies, and our voices. Although the larp medium certainly shares a lineage with the theater and the oral storytelling tradition, most of the fiction that we consume comes in other forms.
When you think about the Internet is, the Internet is really a giant sharing machine. It’s a machine for making copies, for making derivative works, for making remixes and making mashups. For distributing those around the world instantaneously. And so there’s a very profound tension between what copyright enables legally, and what the Internet enables technically.
So, why am I doing this? Rip it Up is such a rich resource, especially in the early years. Nothing else was really documenting pop culture, let alone the nascent alternative culture that was starting to boil up. The prevailing attitude in the mainstream media of the day seemed to be that pop music was kid’s stuff.