*US BOOK LAUNCH: October 27 – New York, NY – Bluestockings Bookstore – appearing with Astra Taylor and Felicity Ruby!
October 29 – Boston, MA – Berkman Center, Harvard University – appearing with Laurie Penny! (RSVP here!)
*CANADIAN BOOK LAUNCH: November 6 – Toronto, ON – Citizen Lab, University of Toronto (Register here!)
November 20 – Montreal, QC – Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore – appearing with Gabriella Coleman!

More to come!

For me, the question of curiosity comes down to: how do you reject the temptation to just do the thing you’re good at all the time, because you’re good at it and (theoretically) because you like it? I’ve stumbled into a specialty (that I love!) fairly early in the typical grad-career timeline, and I’m pretty good at it. I know I can talk/write intelligently about online activism for hours, and because I’m a smart kid who’s always been a smart kid, I want to spend time doing the thing that I’m good at. But, and here’s the problematic part, I picked my doctoral program in part because it has strengths in areas I’m bad or underprepared in, like theory and things that aren’t the internet.  In fact, the majority of my classes this term were super theory-heavy.

And oh boy, was I bad at them in the beginning. Bad and not happy about it.

Rather than engage directly with the material in front of me, I instead played a game of All Paths Lead to the Internet, using each text as a jumping off point to ramble on about digital culture and social movements and not, you know, Derrida.  Because Derrida was hard, and not only was Derrida hard, but moving to another country had left me tired and homesick most of the time, and all I really wanted to do was retreat into comfortable things, be that writing about the internet or knitting and watching Adventure Time under a pile of blankets.  Halfway through the semester I had some talks with my professors where they called me out on doing this very thing.  One told me I needed to spend more time “thinking about thinking” in graduate school while I had the chance.  Another encouraged me to “dwell in the intellectually uncomfortable places” instead of shying away from them.

So I started consciously trying to access that intellectual space where answers and utility aren’t necessarily important, where being public with your work isn’t the obvious next step. This is different than the intellectual environment of my masters program (which I loved), which emphasized working-in-public and real-world-impact for student projects.  But here, I had to turn off (or at least turn down) that working-in-public drive and allow myself to intellectually nest for a while.

I think a lot of my skill of curiosity, or giving myself permission to be curious, is about turning off the drive to be public or polished. I espouse the “It’s ok to make mistakes!” philosophy of working-in-public, but I also, perhaps paradoxically, never let anything out of my hands unless I’ve worked damn hard at it and it reflects what I want it to reflect about myself.  Curiosity, at least as I’ve been exploring it, is often about pushing into things that aren’t ourselves, or don’t reflect those bits of ourselves that we like best.  I’m working on a paper right now that is a very uncomfortable paper to write, trying to flesh out my concept of “civic fiction” by working through an extremely problematic case study. I doubt I’ll ever publish it. But I do want to eventually publish on “civic fiction,” and I need to do this uncomfortable work first before I can do that public-facing work. If I were still at an institution that placed a high value on working-in-public, I don’t think I could do this uncomfortable work.

This type of intellectual curiosity involves giving yourself permission to not be yourself, and that requires privacy and nesting and closing the door for a little while. This can be in conflict with the type of personal academic branding I and a lot of my peers are involved with.  But to my best work, and to maintain the kind of intellectual curiosity that brought me to academia in the first place, it’s also necessary.

In the offline United States, civil disobedience is widely respected as a valid form of political activism. It also has a widely recognized form. Indelible images of Rosa Parks, lunch counter sit-ins, and street marches from the 1950s and 60s civil rights era established what civil disobedience looked like. Civil disobedience looked like an embattled minority bravely standing up in face of clear injustice. It looked like people taking a stand with their bodies and their identities, and often getting arrested.

This pattern of public, performative defiance of injustice, followed by arrest, has become part of the recognized script for political activism in the United States. It’s how we expect activism to happen: on the streets, in public, where everyone can see your face. Adhering to a recognized script is essential to political activism that is reliant on the attention of the media to be effective.

But today, civil disobedience often looks very different. Networked technologies mean our opportunities for effective political activism have increased exponentially. Where activists once put their physical bodies on the line to fight for their causes, online activists can engage in digitally-based acts of civl disobedience from their keyboards. There are three major lines along which digitally-based civil disobedience is developing: disruption, information distribution, and infrastructure. Each has its own particular challenges and benefits.

Distributed Denial of Service Actions and the Challenge of Civil Disobedience on the Internet

Last week, I had the honor of speaking on one of the plenary panels at the Media in Transition conference at MIT.  I talked about an idea I’ve been playing with, identity versus presence in the online space. People seemed interested in hearing a little more, so here are my thoughts on the subject right now.

The theme of the conference was public and private media, and there were lots of amazing panels talking about, in one way or another, performances, manifestations, usurpations, and repurposings of identity online.  The presentations were brilliant, but as I’m coming down off of writing my masters thesis on activist DDOS actions (ten days till final submission!), I found myself thinking about the concept of “presence,” and how the online space, and the civic space in general, is and is not structured to allow manifestations of presence over performances of identity.

Collective actions, like marches, sit-ins, occupations, and activist DDOS actions, don’t primarily rely on the discreet, performed identities of participants to be effective. Rather, they rely on manifestations of “presence,” which I’m preliminarily defining as anonymous or named manifestations of individuals or communities without many of the performative or explicative aspects we associate with (online) identity.  Ricardo Dominguez of the the Electronic Disturbance Theater often described their activist DDOS actions with appeals to the concept of an observing group, or as he put it with regard to the toywars action in 1999, “the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.”  Activist actions which invite the participation of the public, like marches or petition drives, invite that participation on the level of largely undifferentiated collections of people who are performing one or two functions: witnessing a wrong, standing against injustice, showing interest in a cause or question.  Who these participants are at an individual level is not really relevant to the purpose they serve by being there.  The anonymous vote is similar, the identity of the vote should not be relevant to the fact that they cast a vote (though vote ID laws may be chipping away at this).  It is the manifestation of presence, not identity of the individual participant/voter.

The online space as it has developed, with its current emphasis on constructed/generated profiles, individual-level social networking, and the variety of social rankings that accompany it, is skewed to favor performances of individual identity.  This is useful for many things, and is certainly desirable by the commercial entities which currently dominate that space.  But though it is easy for an individual to create an identity performance online and to engage in a myriad of individual speech acts, it is difficult for that same person to simply add their presence to a online-based collective action (and I thank Biella Coleman for pointing this out in one of her comments on my thesis).  This discourages certain types of civic and activist action online.

I see identity and presence not as oppositional concepts (the title of this blog post notwithstanding), but rather as points on a continuum of ways of being in the world.  Right now I see the emphasis on identity online crowding out presence, though it is there if you look.  Search and popularity algorithms incorporate the presences of millions of users to determine search and “what’s hot now” rankings.  Clicks, views, and likes are manifestations of presence once collected and presented as an artifact’s modifying statistics, though they may be performances of identity for an individual clicker or liker.

I’m left with a giant pile of questions, and few answers.  Is “presence” primarily something that is observed from the outside?  Can the same action be a manifestation of presence AND a performance of identity?  Is there a space for this concept of “presence” on the internet as it currently exists?  How does data privacy and anonymization fit in with “presence”?  How can collective action and other “presence”-based civic activities be enabled online?

What do you all think? If you’ve got questions or comments (or recommended reading!), please leave them in the comments.

UPDATE: Thesis defense successful! Wooooooooo!

That is all.

The Platonic ideal of self promotion is something along the lines of Austin Kleon‘s “Do good work and share it with people.” But I think a lot of the time people view “self promotion” or people who are seen to be good self promoters with a mix of admiration and squicky distaste.  It just feels so awkwardly self-centered to talk about your work and how awesome it is (even if it is TOTALLY AWESOME).  Maybe this is because as a culture we discourage people from declaring their own awesomeness independent of outside confirmation. Maybe it is because people (especially women) are socialized away from drawing attention to ourselves and our own achievements.  Maybe it’s because we don’t think our work is that interesting or useful, and don’t understand why people would want to hear about it in the first place.  Or maybe it’s because we don’t think we should be speaking publicly about something unless we know EVERYTHING about it because if we don’t know EVERYTHING about it we’re obviously not experts and only experts get to speak in public about things, right?  Or maybe it’s a totally different reason.

Whatever the reason is, the result is that horrible squirmy feeling in your guts whenever someone gives you a compliment, that stops your from posting that story or applying to that program or talking to that Kickass Person Whose Work You Admire or something.  It is getting in your way. It is Impeding Your Awesome. So I’m going to offer you some tips on how to defeat the squirmy guilty feeling, and some strategies you can use to share your work with the world.

HERE IS YOUR GUILT-DEFEATING UTILITY BELT!

1. Trust other people’s ability to decide what is awesome for themselves.  You may not think this thing you did is so great. Maybe it was just an experiment or a doodle or maybe it’s unfinished or you’re unsatisfied with it.  That’s fine. You can totally have those feelings about your work. You can even be straight up conflicted about your work. But if someone else really really likes that ugly duckling of yours? Trust them that they really like it! Trust them that they can figure out what they really like for themselves! Don’t try to talk them out of it. Just say, “Thank you, I’m glad you liked it.”

2. Don’t be held back by wanting things to be perfect. Things will never be perfect.  You will never be perfect.  If you wait for things to be perfect before you put them out in the world, you will never actually produce anything.  Someone (maybe Da Vinci?) once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”  Other people (I think Voltaire started this train) say, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  Make stuff, and put it out there.  If it’s not perfect, don’t feel bad. Neither is anything anyone else is doing.

3. Recognize other’s goals and how you can help them.  Sometimes people will ask you for advice or help or a quote for a story they’re writing.  You first instinct may often be to shy away from that attention because you feel you’re unqualified or not the best person for the job.  But, similarly to trusting other people’s ability to decide what is awesome for themselves, trust that other people are asking you for help or input for a reason: because they think you can help! When I was younger, people used to ask me for computer help, not because I was super awesome at computers, but because I *was* super awesome at explaining how to operate computers in an accessible, approachable way.  When, for example, a reporter emails you looking for a quote on Something Related to Something You Work On, they’re not necessarily looking for the World’s Greatest Expert On That Something. They’re looking for a quote because they have to make their deadline. You could provide that quote! After all, they emailed *you.*

4. Have a friend read the comments. People can be jerks on the internet (NOT NEWS). So if you are shy about putting yourself out there because you’re concerned about the negative attention you could attract, ask a friend to screen your comments for you. They can tell about all the nice/constructive ones while at the same time protecting your from that one pointlessly negative ad hominem attack that would have distracted you for a week to no purpose.

5. Be generous! There is so much awesome stuff out there! Promote other people’s work! Amplify people who don’t think are getting enough attention, and give shout outs to the work of established practitioners who inspire you.  And if you see other people promoting your work, say thank you, because that would make your mother proud. There are lots of forms this kind of generosity can take, like blogging people’s talks at conferences, in depth book/movie/game reviews, or just simple tweets and shares.  Do whatever feels right to you at the time.

I DON’T FEEL GUILTY ANYMORE! SO WHAT ARE SOME THINGS I CAN ACTUALLY DO????

1. Be visible! Before you can go about showing people how awesome your work is, you need somewhere for them to find your work! Have a website, have a Twitter, have a Tumblr, have all three if you like.  And for the love of god, please keep them updated.  Try, if you can, to have a consistent handle across all your internet presence.  Make it easy for people to find you. (As long as you don’t try to do this all at once, it is way easier than it sounds.)

2. Own your achievements – don’t deflect praise. When someone compliments your work, your instinct can be to minimize your awesomeness: “Oh, I did in an hour, it’s not that great,” “That’s not finished yet,” “That could have been longer/funnier/faster/better.” Don’t do this! Own your achievements! You did them, you deserve to feel good about them. If this is still hard for you, try saying, “Thank you, I’m glad you liked it” and then stopping. That’s all you have to say!

3. Ask for things. For the most part, people are nice, and will try to help you if they can. The trick to this is that they can’t help if they don’t know what you need.  These things can be jobs, publishing or speaking opportunities, links, references, advice, damn near anything. Be specific with your ask, be gracious if the person says no, say thank you if they say yes.  Seriously, it is totally ok to ask for things. Don’t let yourself be held back by the fear of the Worst Thing in the World, because the worst thing that can logically happen is that the person you’re talking to will say no. And then you’re no worse off then you were before you asked! So ask for things.

4. Don’t be an asshole. I think the fear of being seen as an asshole holds most people back from doing more self-promotion. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution for this: Don’t be an asshole! Really, it’s as simple as that. You probably spend most of you life not being an asshole anyway. So promote other work you think is awesome in addition to your own. Follow up with people who say nice/constructive things about your work. Own your mistakes as well as your triumphs. Be gracious. Say thank you. Don’t be an asshole.

5. Share, don’t sell. Chances are, you are doing what you are doing because you think it is awesome and it makes you happy. So don’t think about promoting your work as “selling” or other awkward capitalist metaphors that make you feel like you are somehow taking advantage of the people around you.  Think of it as sharing this thing that you enjoy because you hope others will enjoy it too.  This is a good philosophy to have even if you are ultimately hoping to exchange the fruits of your labor for money. Promote your work with a spirit of sharing, not just a spirit of having to pay your rent.

Post Script: In Defense of the #humblebrag

When I was working on this writeup, my friend Nathan pointed out the shaming culture that is associated with the #humblebrag hashtag, and asked me to address it.  Recently, #humblebrag has started being used in some parts of the internet to call out what some people see as inappropriate self-centeredness or bragging or self-promotion, and to shame those people engaged in those activities into silence.  A mirror-related point came up during the workshop I led: some of the attendees were really pushing the idea that the most “appropriate” or “best” way for your work to be promoted was if *other people* were doing the promoting.  While I think it’s great and gratifying when other people recognize your work, the philosophy that this is the only socially acceptable to promote your work has an air of magical thinking about it.  How exactly are these people supposed to discover your work in the first place if you don’t show it to them?  Similarly, the #humblebrag shaming tactic promotes the idea (in a sideways way) that success just *happens* and that working for it (because let’s face it, getting your work out there can be fucking hard) by promoting yourself is crass.  This is dumb. It’s bad for communities and it’s bad for practitioners.  It smacks of the toxic myths of the Lone Genius Struggling Virtuously In A Vacuum and Lana Turner Discovered at the Soda Fountain By Magic. Neither of these myths are particularly effective ways to either get attention for your work or to promote the existence of vibrant creative communities.  Creative communities should be encouraging folks to talk about the neat things they work on, not shaming them into hiding and hoping to be “discovered.” I love it when popular blogs make a space for self promotion (John Scalzi over at Whatever calls these Open Pimp Threads).  I believe people should be encouraged to take pride in good work, and to have good feelings about that pride, not shamed into thinking that those good feelings can only come from other people.

HERE ARE SOME HELPFUL LINKS!

The concept of “Stock and Flow” as articulated in this Snarkmarket post is great for how to plan your work flow to be steadily producing things of interest
Ze Frank’s “An Invocation for Beginners”, and “How to Public Speaking” are great pieces of advice for how to get over fears of working and speaking in public.
Ill Doctrine on how to overcome nasty non-productive thought cycles: Beating the Little Hater
Vi Hart’s Guide to Comments
Biella Coleman on the challenges on working in public: Anonymous and I
Nathan Matias with more on working in public: Tinker Marker Enquirer Expert
John Scalzi on how he sold his first (completely amazing) first novel: The Offer on Old Man’s War
Ethan Zuckerman has a great guide to conference blogging, which is a great way to promote other people’s work.
Diana Kimball is amazing at creating communities of interest around her work and the work of others (she was also super helpful with the planning of this workshop – thanks, Diana!)

Do you have any thoughts on self-promotion? Leave your tips, stories, and helpful links in the comments!

I’ve talked about Aaron’s case before, how it represents (represented) an obscene overreach on the part of a government pushing an agenda of systematic control over the internet and information technology. How it reflected a popular paranoia of the technologically gifted that you can see promoted in any film about “hackers” made in the last 30 years. I should have been louder.

I didn’t know Aaron. I dearly wish I had.  Those who did know him are broken-hearted and upset and angry and far more eloquent than me.  You should read what they have to say. I have linked to a few below, but there are so many more.

And you should be angry, too.  You should tell people that what happened, this case, was wrong. You should believe that we can do so much fucking better.

Larry Lessig’s Prosecutor as bully
Cory Doctorow’s RIP Aaron Swartz
Alex Stamos’s The truth about Aaron Swartz’s ‘Crimes’
danah boyd’s Processing the loss of Aaron Swartz
Ethan Zuckerman’s Goodbye Aaron
Quinn Norton’s My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved

For those who like their “This Is The Year That Was” Reviews in list form, you can find that under the cut. And for everyone reading along at home, I hope your 2012 was also filled with good discoveries and happy realizations.  I hope your new year is filled with good food and kind faces, that you find something and learn something, that you share something and make something, and that if you discover you need help, you also discover your world is filled with friends who can.

This year in Professional Life:

-Delivered talks and papers at five different conferences (SXSW, PCA/ACA, HOPE, NewsFoo, 29c3), got to moderate a super fun panel at ROFLCon with Dan Sinker, Latoya Peterson, and Biella Coleman, and got to talk about the apocalyptic potential of AI with Stephen Levy and others at the Doomsday Film Festival

-Attended nine conferences all together (all the above, plus DEFCON and the Global Voices Summit in Nairobi). This involved way more travel them I’m used to, and I’m not sure that was entirely a good thing.

-Published three non-academic articles (In Media Res, HiLowBrow (one of the top 25 posts for the year!), The Atlantic, and my article on DDOS tool design was accepted by a peer-reviewed journal

-Helped facilitate the Harvard-MIT-Yale-Columbia Cyberscholars Forum and the Berkman Fellows Hacker Culture Reading Group, which are both made up of super-cool people whom I’m delighted I get to hang out with on a regular basis

-Interned at the EFF, where I learned a lot, met amazing people, and was a member of the highest-ranked legal trivia team of interns! Wooooo!

-Applied to a million PhD programs (ok, less than that. Fingers crossed!)

This year in Personal Life:

-I moved! Twice!

-Lived in a new city by myself for three months without starving or getting crushed by something heavy. Yay for San Francisco!

-Learned double sided knitting!

-Completed an entrelac scarf!

-Added three new stamps to my passport (Kenya, Germany, Switzerland)

-Visited five states, two for the first time (Texas, Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada)

Goals for the next year:

–Blog more: Right now I blog approximately once a month. It takes me a long time to write a blog entry I’m comfortable posting, and I favor length and polish over incomplete or experimental thoughts. In the spirit of “working in public,” I’d like to get better at writing and posting quickly, and posting less polished pieces with the goal of starting conversations rather than making statements.  If I could get up to posting once a week, even small 100-500 word items, I would be super happy.

–Collaborate more: I often say that my favorite work mode is sitting in a corner by myself with my books and the Internet. While I haven’t been unsuccessful operating in this mode, Working Well With Others is a skill I’d like to improve in the coming year. Some collaborations are already in the works with friends and colleagues at the Berkman Center and at MIT. I’m really looking forward to these projects, especially as they will represent a break from the solitude and subject matter of my Masters thesis.

–Revise more: This has to do with improving my workflow.  Working with Zeynep Tufekci on the review and editing process for my DDOS tool design article was a really enjoyable and enlightening experience. In the next year I’d like to make more time in the initial stages of projects for review and reflection. This will mean making and keeping to regular writing schedules, and respecting internally-imposed deadlines.

–Knit more: This is code for “do things that aren’t related to school or the internet more.” Knitting, cooking, reading sci-fi novels, singing, and drawing/painting all fall into this category. It’s been said that my work/life balance maybe isn’t as great as it could be.  Next year I hope to have a little more “life” in the mix.