Things
Life is cyclical -- there are times when nothing seems to be happening, and there are times when everything starts happening simultaneously and you struggle to juggle all your responsibilities and sometimes it feels too much and you wonder how you got into this position in the first place. Right now, I'm very much in the latter camp.
We're coming to the end of the semester: I have a week and a half of classes left, and then three exams across two days. After that, I'm headed to SF to stay with my brothers and generally engage in shenanigans. I'm lucky to have a place to crash because it allows me a change of scene, and NYC during the summer can get miserably hot and sticky. I'm not too worried about final exams, but I do have my work cut out for me in terms of revision that I should stay on top of. My classes this semester have mostly been reading and theory-based, so the papers haven't been crazy and I'm keeping my head above water. I'll have more to talk about next semester after I meet my academic advisor today and (hopefully) lock in my class choices for Fall 2014.
Outside of class, I've continued being a rabble-rouser. With the support of EFF.org and the Student Net Alliance, studentsagainstsurveillance.com launched last weekend. It's a letter written by Luc Lewitanski, Hannah Weverka, and I which protests mass surveillance on campus. It comes on the heels of my newfound interest in activism and the surveillance state. The Medium.com piece I wrote on the subject was well-received and I finally got to grapple with thoughts about Nineteen Eighty-Four and the economic implications of mass surveillance -- thoughts which had been churning about in my head for a few weeks. The letter currently has 80something signatures and was picked up by NYU's local daily, the Washington Square News. I'm also currently in talks to teach PGP encryption at an upcoming NYU hackathon. As I wrote in the Medium post, I love the activism work I'm doing, mainly because I feel part of the ongoing debate between privacy and convenience, and whether or not law-abiding citizens have anything to fear from dragnet surveillance. (Hint: they do.) I think college campuses are pretty unique places in that regard -- people seem receptive to ideas they've never considered, I come into contact with literally hundreds of 18-22s every day, and there's a sense of ownership about the debate: this stuff is going to affect us for years to come, and people seem receptive to talking about it.
Writing the letter also gave me an excuse to improve my nascent HTML/Python skills. I first learned the basics of programming a few years ago, and having this project was a good excuse to brush up on things. I'm hoping to use the summer to cement that knowledge and expand it beyond the basics. (My friend, watching the development of studentsagainstsurveillance.com, commended me after a few hours work, telling me that I'd graduated to "HTML 102".) On the whole, the summer should afford me the time to brush up on some skills and read a lot, even if I'm working. Whatever classes I pick for next semester, I'll be able to concentrate on my major requirements (whatever that major ends up being...), which is exciting.
I'm working my way through Hal Abelson's Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion which is good but ultimately a bit simplistic. I'm about halfway through and I'm loving it, but it feels unmistakably written for a layperson. That's not necessarily bad, but I think I'll find something a little deeper and more complex for next time. My fiction intake has dropped to basically zero, probably because I'm writing no fiction at the moment. There's one long-form fiction project I want to return to in the summer, but as of now such projects are on ice. I have one goal right now, and that's to finish the semester well.
