Digital Parsimony

Holden Frith of Wired wrote a great article titled Little Brother is Watching You, which covers the importance of using technology (surveillance) in protecting our civil liberties.

An innocent man died after being pushed to the pavement by a police officer and it was caught on civilian camera , a perfect example of crowdsourcing (CCTV, the “Big Brother” surveillance system was experiencing “technical issues” at the time). This horrific sequence of events strangely reminds me of Rodney King.

“Surveillance is still talked of as something done to us by them, but increasingly it’s something done to everyone by everyone else. What that means for the authorities is that they can no longer control the flow of information about their actions.” -Holden Frith, Wired.co.uk Editor

Cory Doctrow’s wrote a book called Little Brother, it’s about a modern-day technologist who proves that individuals can level the playing field against agents of the state by using their own understanding of digital tools to subvert and confront them. It’s available for free, published through a creative commons license, and available here. I can’t wait to pick it up on Amazon.

[Wired Blog: Little Brother Is Watching You]

This is why technology is still an inspiration to me. It enables people to do things that were previously impossible.

In this example, 60 Minutes showes what technology can do already: Read the rest of this article »

I always liked stories about an ordinary Joe doing something extraordinary.

Matt is a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. Matt achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he’d saved to wander around Asia until it ran out.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Check out the whole story at Where The Hell is Matt?, it’s quite amazing. I can only dream about traveling the world like him.