Back from a whistle-stop tour (in that it lasted about as long as I can whistle) of University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Reed College, Portland, doing my regular speaking job explaining EFF issues to college students.
I do these gigs about once a month, so if you know any students (or perhaps turn into one after 11AM), contact Samara and get me to come talk at your school. All the monies go to EFF. I like the format; I have a standard pitch, but I have room to throw in extra material or explore topics the audience are interested in. At Michigan, the talk was organised by WUMD, and we had DJs play a set beforehand, so we ended up talking a fair bit about artists’ rights and distribution. At Reed, I was invited by the college’s Free Culture chapter, so we spent some time dissecting public policy. Both times, the audience was fantastic, and we all had a great time. It’s nice to do some more public speaking, after quite a few years of not much performance.
I also liked the more random questions after the main event. We spent a long time at Dearborn talking about Valley culture. In one of the city’s hookah bars (Dearborn has a really distinctive and self-assured arab community, from what I could glean), we meandered over mesh networks and data havens, mainstream game companies and whether it sucked to work for them, why Ruby was better than C++. “Is it true that the guy who wrote BitTorrent wants to live on an oilrig?”, they asked. I explained that was two different people, with entirely different livejournal accounts. The organiser at WUMD runs the radio station, studies at the college, works in his father’s video shop, and then at the weekend runs a clothing company with his cousin. He wants to study law, and is an EFF member. I still love the future, and glad I get to travel to meet it so much.