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Recently listened to an excellent podcast:
Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It
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
