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Recently listened to an excellent podcast:
Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It
http://ascii.textfiles.com/podcast
Below are some excerpts that caught my imagination. Clearly a fellow
data hoarder whose ideals take after my own heart.
Episode 1 explains Jason's motivation to be a computer historian.
"I have a lot of weird ideas about the world and i tend to draw
unusual connections, but most of all, i still have a sense of wonder.
I still have the sense that out in the world there are amazing things
to discover and often people just don't know about them. Bringing
them to light and calling attention to them has always been one of my
greatest joys."
"I was always fascinated by the fact that what these text files that
had survived untold amounts of lost bulletin board systems and disk
transfers and crappy hard drives; what made them live, what gave them
that level of survivability, even to this day 40 years later you can
still find them, is the fact that they were secrets, they were hints
that this model of the phone system of the 70's and 80's as it fell
apart, was a place of wonder that you, with a few simple steps, could
control and master in a way that other people couldn't. And i've
always said that that was the real power of the bulletin board system
text files. It was the fact that even if you weren't going to build a
nuclear bomb or hack up a conference system, or steal phone codes, you
knew that this document was your simple step to do it, and that made
your life something that you controlled a little more. Maybe even more
than a nine year old who wonders when their family is going to be back
together again."
Episode 2 is about phone conferences and phone phreaking. He tells an
entertaining story of getting caught, as a kid, by a woman working at
a security company. They had long conversations where she queried him
about the ethics of his activities and tried to tease out his
identity. At some point she stopped calling and he was relieved to
know he was off the hook. Six months later he checked the mailbox and
found a flyer from her security company addressed to his name, not
his father's name. In hindsight he thinks she was informing him "I
know exactly who you are."
Episode 3
"I love my job. I feel so happy to work for a place where the things i
have wanted to do all my life, i get to do all of the time. ... The
job is to be myself."
"What i love about the Internet Archive is that it is top-down
dedicated to its mission: universal access to all knowledge. That's
baked into the DNA. There isn't a secondary business that it's really
pushing towards. There isn't any sort of corporate master pushing
things in some strange direction. There isn't any kind of subterfuge
that makes the place turn out to be doing the wrong thing, while
acting like it's doing the right thing. This has all become extremely
precious and rare in the modern era."
"Fundamentally the bedrock of the Internet Archive is saving and
providing information to anybody who wants it for as long as possible,
preferrably forever."
"Brewster Kahle ... got a once-in-a-lifetime windfall of money and
it's always a very interesting character insight as to what a person
does when they find themselves no longer worrying about most of the
points in Maslow's Pyramid. And what Brewster did, was he turned
around and said "I think i would like to run a library, and not just
a library, but i want to bring back the famed Library of Alexandria,
and bring back the library that's most famous for burning, and make
it available to the world again." And i've got to say, that's quite a
pitch!"
"Everybody at the archive [is] focussed towards the dream, the goal,
the idea. If there are arguments, the argument is over how to do it
better. If there are any raised voices, it's in defence of doing the
right thing. And if there are any misunderstandings, it's two people
who are both trying to achieve a really great goal and finding that
they would have different ways to achieve it. That is not a situation
i had in my previous career as a Unix admin, where i worked for a
company which has bought two other companies that themselves had
bought another company that i worked for, and that company changing
name 5 times. If it sounds weird and boring, it was."
"If you are somebody who is in a job that you hate, or where you
realize that nothing about the company is inspiring you where you feel
like you are part of something greater and making the world greater,
then please don't settle into thinking that it's you, that you did
something wrong, that you deserve to not enjoy what you are doing, and
that it's about a paycheck, because it's something that rots you
inside. Because at some point you wake up, and you wake up
unpleasantly, and i would rather you did that sooner rather than
later, and move on to your dream job, where you wake up every morning
excited to see what's going to come in and going to bed at night
happy at what just happened."
Episode 4 is about Jason interviewing people for a couple of
documentaries he made.
"Turns out for me The Face is the most important part of the
interview. If you don't have a face that encourages people to want
to tell you more, a kind of nodding, knowing, enlightened face that
says "I want to hear even more about this," people will get a weird
vibe and they'll shut up. They won't go deeper. So i built up that
face and i learned to listen to what others say in a way that would
pull out the next question."
"If you actually listen to people and you listen to the words that
they are saying, they drop so many hints about where they want things
to go."
tags: inspirational,notes,podcast
