So althought it is a little on the pricey side (150 Euro), What the Hack looks like it will pretty incredible. They finally have a website up for registration and starting to fill with some other information. I still don’t know if I have the resources to make it there this summer but I will give it my best.

So I am coming to the end of my grad school career and I am feeling that I am not so sure how much of a mark on the world I have made in the last 8 years. But really that is ok because I just checked up on a place of my past, that consumed most of my days while in college: the Columbia women’s ultimate team and I was pretty stoked to see that they have kept on with the name: New York Phat Disc, that I came up with in 1995. I may not have touched a disc in years but I am super happy to see the name lives on. And even better is that on their extra’s page, they have a link to some classic school girrl karaoke

The quarter is over and I am for now, done teaching. It had been years since I had taught, the last time being the summer of 2001 when I taught a version of the hacker course as well as another one on medical anthropology. This time around, I confronted new challenges that layered a subject already quite idiosyncratic. Instead of having 8 students, there were over 20. While my students before were all mostly anthropology majors or geeks, this time I had students from 5-6 departments, ranging from economics to gender studies, anthropology to classics, and of course a few inquiring computer science students.

But during the last ten weeks probably one of the hardest parts was seeing my mom take a irreversible plunge, for the worse. Knowing this, there were days I had to perform when it was the last thing I wanted to do. But human psychology I guess is remarkable; resilient and in some ways remarkably warped. I could for the most part, for at least an hour and twenty minutes, shove it aside and act as if everything was ok.

Though most of her problems are perceptual, my mother is now afflicted with more of the classical Alzheimers symptoms: she has a lot of difficulty recalling words which leaves her more angry and frustrated than ever. Some of her friends have stopped calling her and I had to call her brothers to let them know that if they would like to have her sister recognize them, they should think about visiting sometime soon.

There have been at least some positive developments. We convinced my older sister to move back with her which was great to see (both for my mom and my sister) and my father and his current wife who have been in PR for months have helped out a lot.

But as she gets worse, a routine reaction to her situation is deception. Since she refuses to get outside help we have gotten help for her, pretending the woman who comes over is a volunteer, although she works for a wage. My mother is also the one footing the bill though she has no idea because she “trusts” her daughter’s to manage her money because she can’t see and she is having more trouble than ever dealing with numbers.

It feels awful to deceive, to break her trust, but I guess it would also feel awful to get the phone call where I am told she has been hit by a bus since crossing the street is a life or death challenge. It would also feel pretty awful to take her to court to make her get help. I think this would rip away at the last shreds of her dignity, which she is clinging to hard, because she is so humilated by her loss of mind, of sight, of self, of independence.

My mom of course thinks that a 6 day a week, 8 hrs a day volunteer is a bit odd. She is not that gone and she has always had a good 6th sense, a bit too good perhaps. So, to address her suspicions, we have had to layer upon another swath of deception: “Why not pay her a little money Mami?” to which she assented, although her top price was $5 a day. My mom is pretty confused about the value of money too, thinking somedays, for example, $100 is $1000 dollars. It is sort of humorous and cute that she thinks she is paying this woman $5 a day (which could for all I know mean $50 because it is hard to tell what she means by numbers but it is probably $5), all the while it is pretty depressing too. And I wonder how long the arrangement will last.

But while deception often feels pretty wrong (at least if you find it generally questionable), it is never so clear cut because context, the living moment of the situation, is essential to making ethical choices, to understanding what role deception may or may not take. To take ethics as a set of abstracted norms that bear in the same way and directly across time and place, is what Bakhtin called ethically

If you hate the phone as much as I but are forced to talk on it quite a bit, here is a highly addictive game you canplay at the same time.

So terror is among us. We know this, Bush has told us. But because terror is with us, we must terrorize others, in ways, that are clearly illegal. As reported in the New York Daily News, the abuse of detainees is not ordinary, but extraordinary, much more pervasive that we may think.

It is more than disquieting, and it makes me wonder what ideological justifications are used by abusers to mask the effects of what they are doing. Sometimes, I think they probably rely on some relational logic. Like what we are doing is not so bad, because these prisoners remain alive and with very few visible bruises. In other “nations” there is “real abuse.”

Something like the logic of “this torture is like diet coke, diet terror, really not so bad, even if it leaves a bitter aftertaste…” Sometimes, however, we find out only much later, that the diet was way worse than the real thing, in part because we could never point to the “reality” of what is out there……

All right I consider myself lucky sometimes. I have a really fun dissertation topic and right now I am in one of the funner parts of my diss, narrating a typical “life history” of a free software developer.

Ok, so I know there is no typical life history but there are consistent patterns that I gleaned from interviews (way too many interviews, I may add), and I am trying with detail and humor to portray hacking from the time that hackers are spring chickens to their ripe old age of 40 when they work on a free software project. I get to do this in about 30 pages but I open with a one page overview of what is to come that is somewhat silly which I like becomes it comes after this very serious discussion about phenomenology, and publics. If anyone has read the Hacker Crackdown, I am clearly indebted to Bruce Sterling.

“The spirit of exploration that forms the basis for hacking is retroactively understood by many hackers to predate their relationship to computers. It may start at the tender age of three, when they first took apart every electric appliances in the kitchen, much to a mother’s horror; lead into learning how to program at the age of five, the parental unit now overjoyed (

Via Mako, us ladies can rest assured… WIPO is forging links between women and IP. My favorite part of the page are the pictures, especially the ballet shoes. Very female, very intellectual propertyish.

So since I recently revealed my love for less than stellar movies, it should come to NO surprise that I love E.T. Like many children of the 1980s, it had a profound impact on my under-developed psyche, representing a high-grade form of formative trauma that balanced out what was a more or less life or privilege otherwise marked by a much lower grade of constant trauma borne from a higher than statistically normal number of flying dishes, the direct outcome of a less than loving marriage.

So in 2001 when the movie was released, I of course had to go see it in big screen. I was pretty sure that despite my love of trash, the movie would bore me, its thrill, extending only out to a 10 year old girls/boys psychology. I mean I knew I would dig the hardware hacking scene but I was fruitfully surprised by the critical complexity of the film.

While at dinner on Thursday with a bunch of anthro friends, we somehow got on the topic of Speilberg movies and most of them, very sadly, loved the Indiana Jones trilogy but did not share my adoration of E.T. (who I love more now that I know my mom thinks of herself as E.T. due to her really wrinkled skin). There was one friend who, however, did not only share my fondness for the brown stodgy creature from the very far-reaches of outer space but LOVES HIM EVEN MORE than me. The news was surely exciting to me and my immediate reaction was a typical 1970s expression of deep inner joy: FAR OUT.

But as it turned out, there was more excitment than I could ever imagine. She revealed that there was a Bollywood, yes Bollywood movie loosely based on E.T, Koi Mil Gaya (and of course the first thing to pop to my IP-obssessed mind was is that even legal and damn where can I rent that?)

But even better is that my friend, which is one of the geekier things I have seen produced by her, has written a fairly in-depth commentary comparing these two wistful movies cocentrating on the social and political implactions within the narrative which ultimately is the journey of boyhood into manhood.

So if you love (or possibly hate) E.T. as much as I do, Gen’s analysis is pretty stellar:

“It is for this reason that Koi Mil Gaya is far more violent than ET and also far more hopeful. In a more human and social world, confrontation is inevitable but victory is possible. Although both stories tell a child

So Sato is a Puerto Rican street mongrel and while clearly the dog about to be portrayed ain’t no pure bred mutt, he is a Roaming Sato in so far as he can skate. Bitchin’

SO I usually don’t have high standards when it comes to movies. I have an uncanny ability to lose myself in plot, kick back, and just be with the movie. But there are certain movies that I like more than others, and, Donnie Darko is one of them. The reasons for the higher than normal attraction are many, too many to lay out here but they span from its representation of sacrifice to the silliness of the following scene when Donnie was talking to his shrink while under the spell of hypnosis:

Donnie : My parents didn’t get me what I wanted for Christmas.
Dr. Lilian Thurman : What did you want?
Donnie : Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Dr. Lilian Thurman : And how did you feel, being denied these hungry, hungry hippos?
Donnie : Regret.

Sometimes one scene, one phrase, like when Donnie Darko says ‘Hungry Hungry Hippos” that just seals the deal for me–> I decide I really like the movie.

Like many folks of my age, background, and politics, I tend to like the genre of “hipster” darkish underground movie that eventually reach a state of cult classic, like Harold and Maude, Garden State and Donnie Darko. I have to qualms of admitting that my like for these movies indexes the type of person I imagine myself to be and you call can fill in the blanks as to what that may be.

That aside, one of the things I like about them is that through a very powerful trope common to many blockbuster flicks, i.e. the transformative power of romantic love (all of these are uber-romantic, even Harold and Maude), they get to a much broader scope of love, that transcends individual/sexual need and fullfillment and in the words of Thomas Merton to represent love as “an intesification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life. We do not live merely to vegetate through our days until we die.” And to awaken to this intesifcation, is to bear one’s heart, mind, and eyes to the fact of tragedy and pain. It comes with the package, so to speak.

But one thing that has frankly deply annoyed me about the new instantiations of flicks that tend to embody certain Harold and Maudesque qualities (although the Sci-Fi element of DD stands on its own for sure… Hmm side-track –> notice that all of the men in these three flicks were in some capacity deemed as a little nutso? I also find it significant in H and M that meds were never an option. Sending him to the military was considered before meds! Can you imagine that today? Impossible but that is a whole other subject… ) is that they have the balance between yin and yang all off. I better restate that as a whole sentence:
But one thing that has frankly deply annoyed me about the new instantiations of flicks that tend to embody certain Harold and Maudesque qualities balance is that they have the balance between yin and yang all off

Simply put in the newer breed there is too much yang and too little yin. The female characters in all of these movies bring the males to some greater understanding of love, that leads them out of a paralyizing cacoon. And Maude, despite being a nearly 80 year old chix0r, stood fully on her own as a compelling character. And perhaps it is just a function of her age, but I think it goes beyond that. She had a dynamic force that simply is not there with the female counterparts in GS and Donnie Darko. The female characters are anemic, which I don’t think is a function of bad acting, but of the role given to them in the screenplay. They are some lesser vessel, brining the males to a higher place, and then at the end we sort of throw out the vessel to focus our gaze on the hero-male.

And this yang ying dealio, I don’t think it is simply or at all about gender balance. It is more about the fact that the form is not true to the conent. The relationship between the two characters is one in which one realizes oneself in the other and vice-versa. There should be some sort of symmetry there (even if they occupy different roles and positions at different times), in which both characters are fundamentally transformed in ways that are interesting for the audience. For all I care it could be between man and humanoid-duck but there seems to be something un-even in which one character gets all the plot-glory (even while he for examples sacrifices himself to saved his beloved and the rest of the world, ok, so DD is a super-hero but still…), and the other is short changed, in the processes shortchanging the viewer.

I think it is harder for sure to capture the transformation into love, in which nuance is given to two characters instead of one. But if it is a relation being explored, I think that the challenge is there to be met… But in the meantime I will still enjoy my Hungry Hungry Hippos…