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2019 Internet Hall of Fame Inductee Interviews: Jean Armour Polly

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. 

Decentralize, Democratize, or Die

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.

Reducing Side-Effects of Copyright Bots on Twitter

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.

The Monkey Selfie” Case: Can Non-Humans Hold Copyrights?

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.

Pirate in the Empire

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.

The Coming War on General Computation

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.

Forbidden Research: Why We Can’t Do That

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.

Larp as Adaptation

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.

Improving the Next #EdTechContract Through Open Educational Resources

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.

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