Fiacre O'Duinn

“Imagine a world where the simple act of reading turned deadly.”

A short film from Beto Gomez.

The Rise of the New Groupthink : “Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.”

The Amazing Discussion That Led to the Wikipedia Blackout : “At Wikipedia, one of the corest of core values is Neutral Point of View, contributors’ collective goal of “representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources.”… So! The decision to make English Wikipedia dark tomorrow — to go from no POV to whoa, POV — wasn’t one that Wikipedians took lightly. It was, on the contrary, like almost everything that happens on Wikipedia, the result of extensive deliberation and debate. It was agonized over. Like, agonized.”

Young, in Love and Sharing Everything, Including a Password : “Young couples have long signaled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or an exchange of class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations. The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to e-mail, Facebook and other accounts. Boyfriends and girlfriends sometimes even create identical passwords, and let each other read their private e-mails and texts.”

Pinterest Works Better Than Google+ : “Let’s be grown up about this. Pinterest is an app for sharing lists of scrumptious-looking stuff. It’s not for girls or guys, it’s for people who like looking at things. The story I’ve heard is that it was designed for architects and designers and “then brides found it.” This is why, my sources explain, it tends toward the jewelry-and-table-settings end of the spectrum.”

The Year in Review at Kickstarter : “Darling of the crowdfunders, Kickstarter released its stats for the past year, and there is a lot of data to digest. The total number of projects is more than double from last year, the success rates for funding them is up slightly, and the total dollars pledged is close to a $100 million, which is more than triple what was pledged last year.”

Tomorrow I had originally planned to “attend” Clay Johnson’s webcast The Information Diet: How to Control What You Consume from O’Reilly Media. However, in response to the SOPA protests across the net, Clay Johnson and O’Reilly have cancelled the event and instead are offering an all day, open webcast called Learn to Be a Better Activist During the SOPA Protest. While the event will be focusing on dealing with Congress, I’m sure there will be some useful activist/advocacy tips that can be applied no matter where you live.

Hope to see you there.

• Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz : “A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph”
• The Coming War on General Purpose Computation : “The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.”
• Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship : “Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.”
• Conferences raise unanswered questions about fact checking : “Following a November event co-hosted by Jeff Jarvis and Craig Newmark at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, I recently headed to Washington, D.C., to attend another daylong fact-checking roundtable. This one was hosted by the New America Foundation. Two fact-checking events in roughly 30 days? That’s unprecedented for me in the close to a decade I’ve been researching and writing about accuracy and related areas. In fact, prior to these two events I’d attended exactly one fact-checking event. That was more than two years ago in Germany.”
• The Great Digitization Or The Great Betrayal? : “One of the jewels of the Cambridge University Digital Library is a collection of Newton’s scientific papers. So far, a selection of important mathematical works from the 1660s has been digitized. These date are from well before the first modern copyright act, the 1710 Statute of Anne. So it’s an interesting question — what is the copyright situation of these papers and their digitized images?”

Melissa Gira Grant, founder of Glass Houses, has written Take This Book about The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street and is currently looking for funding to complete the project. Check out the funding page and think about contributing a few dollars to help her reach her goal.

This is one story of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, as told to me by many of the librarians behind it: how the library began, what happened after the November 15 raid on Zuccotti Park, and why they’re rebuilding. It’s a story about books, danger, and freedom.

Take This Book is an extended essay — just over 10,000 words — based on the stories of the librarians and the library’s patrons. (Maybe you were one of them.) It can’t be the whole story, because it’s still happening.