At SXSW, astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison (second from left), Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI and LeVar Burton imagined the next 100 years with host Benjamin Palmer.

Has humanity stopped looking to the future with hope?

Sometimes it feels like we’re so embroiled in the struggle over whether we’ll despoil our environment or dismantle all our safety nets in the next few years that we can’t look toward what life might look like in decades, much less a century and imagine things better than they are right now. Yet looking toward our far future helps us think about things now in a new light. One reason is that trying to solve very big problems forces us to fix a lot of smaller ones along the way.

At SXSW Interactive, the most mind-bending panel I attended was hosted by the 100 Year Starship foundation. This nonprofit began as a conference in 2011 sponsored by NASA and DARPA, with the idea of launching a foundation devoted to a very big idea: what capabilities would humanity need to send a one-way mission to another planet within the next hundred years?

Astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison submitted the winning proposal, which envisioned a project devoted not just to the physical technology of the journey but also the social and cultural needs. Last year, the 100YSS held its first independent symposium in Houston, with presentations on everything from using hydrogels to fight bone mass loss to the heady question of what kind of clothes we’d wear on a voyage that takes decades, or whether we’d wear clothing at all! The forward-thinking group has already been invited to consult with the European Union at a conference about the future.

It’s become cliche to point out that we’re on a collective space voyage with a crew of six billion people, in a self-contained, irreplaceable craft. Our recent, space-going past proved that technologies developed for travel to outer space and the moon benefit humans on earth in near-countless ways. If we — not just NASA or the United States, but humanity as a whole — tackled the challenge of interstellar travel what might we learn about efficiently and ethically feeding, clothing, powering and preserving this world?

During the SXSW panel, Dr. Jemison, along with Dr. Jill Tarter, of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and LeVar Burton spoke philosophically about the challenges facing humanity and how a grand project could bring our world together.

Dr. Tarter told us that, “”We’re on the verge of being able to tell you where to look in the sky to find Earth 2.0.” So what do we do when we find it?

“There is an inextricable link between that which we imagine and that which we create,” Levar Burton said. So could imagining new stories — stories about interstellar travel — create a healthier, more peaceful Earth at the same time we prepare to leave?

Jemison quoted an African proverb: ”No one shows a child the sky.” Space is a part of all humanity, so will we answer its call?

Last week I interviewed Dr. Jemison about the project. Her staff at 100YSS cautioned me that with her busy schedule, she’d only have five or ten minutes. Instead, we ended up talking for almost half an hour. It seemed impossible — and unfair to FDL’s readers — to boil that down into just a few sound bites, so instead I transcribed our entire conversation below. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed having it!

The 2013 100-Year Starship Symposium takes place in Houston from September 19 to 22, other details on the 100YSS Project homepage.

More: read tweets from the 100YSS Panel at SXSW, Dr. Mae Jemison at TED on balancing Art & Science.

Bringing all human experience to space

Kit O’Connell, FDL: I’ve been a science fiction reader all my life and it was amazing to see a panel where people were seriously talking about things I didn’t think anyone seriously talks about — what they fantasize about but not take seriously. One of the things that really interests me about the 100 Year Starship is that you’re not just focusing on science, technology, engineering and math but you really want to involve the arts. Can you talk a little more about why that’s important to you?

Dr. Mae Jemison, 100 Year Starship: The first thing is because the task for 100 Year Starship is to make sure the capabilities are there for human journey to another star, it automatically means you have to take into account the whole range of human experiences. It’s not the same thing as saying you just do food, air and water because that doesn’t solve our problems down here. We probably have enough food, air and water to clothe, shelter everyone on this planet in a decent fashion but we haven’t figured out how to do that right?

And even if you were able to do it in sort of a nominal fashion, does that actually take care of everything there is to be human? And it doesn’t. And so it’s just quite reality. If you’re going to have humans go somewhere you have to take those things into account. Even in space, even when I went up years ago, people got to take music with them that they listened to … you got to pick your own rugby shirts (laughs) which as someone who doesn’t wear rugby shirts all the time … but I got to pick the colors I wanted right? So even with these shorter stays, what makes people people is that they have cultural and other kinds of attachments to them. But if you go for longer periods of time, you’re going to have to think more about that. And also the fact that culture, the structure of the society is going to evolve as it gets further away from Earth.

Just like I couldn’t imagine that we would have known, even twenty years,  how the world would have evolved in the face of the Internet. Now we’re talking about open source technology design and development.

K: That’s a very big change.

J: Yeah! And that’s here where we’re all in conjunction. So I think when you start to talk about people involved with anything, you have to think about all the things that are involved with people.

K: I guess it doesn’t make sense to send us to another star system if we’re not going to be humans when we get there in some fashion. There still needs to be that essential humanity.

J: Here’s the deal. Say if you send a crew, you could say we got all over the technological hurdles — the closed life support systems, we’ve got that working exactly perfectly. You even build it big enough to have 2,000 people on it. And you have good genetic diversity and all of that. What happens when I just can’t stand you?

K, laughing: That’s still a small space to be stuck in for a long time.

J: Or the leadership starts to shift. Or everyone gets depressed because you don’t have enough sunlight because you didn’t take that into account — in terms of what we call Seasonal Affective Disorder which might become Continuous Affective Disorder. So what makes this different from my perspective is my background is very much in the heart of the physical sciences but I’m also very much involved with the social sciences, and when I was growing up I wanted to be a dancer — I did lots of dancing, and ceramics, and all of those kinds of things growing up and I know that they are important, they are very important. You can’t get away from it now — what was the first thing we wanted to do with computers? Make pretty pictures.

K: That’s true.

J: I just want to bring one other thing into play. The other reason this comes up as we start to talk about this, the other part of my background that brings this into perspective is that I was an environmental studies professor. I started working with technology and sustainable development, how do you design technology to be sustainable? This was years ago, before it was a common thing. The main thing I found as a disruptor in technological design, the reason we do stupid things to the environment is because of people — what people consider theirs, how they treat common spaces, the biggest disruptor is people. But people also bring an incredible wealth of possibilities. So you have to include all those things. That was one of the reasons when I first heard about 100 Year Starship that I thought “I know how to do this one,” because all of those things have to be included.

Looking forward: one hundred years and five years

K: On a different topic now — A hundred years is a long long time, and that’s one of the cool forward thinking aspects of this project. Do you have an idea where you want to be — where should the project be in five years? Do you have a vision for that?

J: So we’re working on that. Let me start off by saying, one hundred years, some people say ‘wow that’s really long.’ We run into some scientists, specialists who say it’s not going to happen in a hundred years. We’re just trying to make sure all the capabilities exist — so we’re not trying to launch a mission. We just want to see all the things that need to be in place if someone decides to launch a mission need to be there. And they don’t necessarily have to be things we’ve done they just have to exist somewhere, so our task is to keep track of all the kinds of things that are out there, the kinds of technologies that are needed, the kinds of understanding that’s needed, the financial aspects, the political will, all of those things we’re keeping track of.

So when I look at how do you time this is out, the first thing I say is we don’t have a technological roadmap, and I’m not even advocating that we look for a technological roadmap yet. Because if you spend time too much time looking and saying this is the way you go and these are things that will be developed for it and you say we’re going to use fusion or we’re going to use this kind of system, then one might overlook and stunt other possibilities, especially this early on, in terms of the exact technologies. But we can look at capabilities.

We know we’re going to need really great energy systems, so we’ll need to have a group of people focusing on and looking at exotic types of energy. Pushing and prodding in areas of energy that we haven’t known about before or really haven’t been willing to push.

We have to be looking at microbial systems. We know we’re going to have to grow food on the way and when you get there. Plants here on Earth have a rich system of microbes on their roots and structure and that’s what allows them to absorb the nutrients from the soil. We actually don’t know all of what makes up that microbial system. We have to understand much more about that.

So the reason I’m answering like this is because in five years what I look forward to is us having put together a research institute, which we’re calling “The Way” — because you have to figure out the way to do this. Having a transdisciplinary program that helps to follow what kinds of capabilities and technologies are out there, in some instances helping out to support or work on some technology or research that other people aren’t doing because it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet but it needs to be pushed and prodded. So having this new research institute founded that’s both physical and virtual. To have a global presence. So that we have advocacy in South Africa and China and different countries, in South America and Europe so that the idea of humans going to the stars becomes a global aspiration.

I think its something that’s there already but people have been afraid to talk about it. Even the folks who were in space — I know when I was an astronaut we would never talk about interstellar stuff. But there have been people thinking about it and I think whenever we look up at the stars we really imagine that. So really getting the word out that this is a reasonable global aspiration. And of course, fund raising, because these are the kinds of things that you need to have backing for and you have to have staff to be on the lookout for and make them happen.

The last piece is strong membership. We want people to be a part of this, whether its a part of the public symposium that we have, ongoing open projects that we’ll be doing, and through their own pieces.

So if we have people who know some interesting storytelling to the forefront — because this is a story and you have to tell the story. You have to tell the story in a way the lay public understands and you have to tell the story in a way the experts understand it.

So whether its a group of people who are very interested in telling stories, whether its people who are interested in working on antimatter engines … I’m finding out there’s a lot more work going on in antimatter and some really cool things going on out there. So you remember your science fiction stories — antimatter! You were almost afraid to say that in front of people because they may laugh at you.

K: Right, that’s such a nerdy thing! It’s so Star Trek, if you say we’re going to have antimatter propulsion, everyone looks at you like you have tape on your glasses or something.

J: But there’s some really cool stuff going on out there. It’s really about being able to have people involved in those areas where they can make contributions and making sure they have connections into this whole progran and project.

So five years from now a large membership, global presence, and global aspiration. A research institute developed and started and programs where people start to feel comfortable.

Here’s the thing: I use the term “suspend disbelief.” We have to have people willing to suspend disbelief long enough to actually try to move things forward. So we have to get to the point where it’s not something that’s completely unbelievable or completely unreasonable to approach.

I think I’m fairly down to earth and grounded even though I’ll try different things. My task is to be able to advocate for people suspending disbelief long enough while at the same time be disciplined enough to really look at the possibilities and figure out which ones do we pull in, which ones to prioritize, and making sure we don’t leave some outliers out there because everyone’s afraid to touch them. That’s my job.

Weaponizing space, or replacing war with space?

K: I have one more question for you. Firedoglake is a very progressive-leaning blog and one of the things which really inspired me about your panel with you and Dr. Tarter and LeVar Burton was this idea of bringing humanity together, moving some emphasis away from the machinery of war into a more cooperative effort, this great work of humanity idea. But what about people who are concerned about the DARPA origins of this project and whether there will be a weaponization of space through this kind of project. Do you have a response for that?

J: Here’s the thing I always say — technologies are just tools, that’s all they are. And who designs the technology gets to control what tools are developed. So that’s the reason for us to have more people involved, because we bring different perspectives. Society weaponizes only because we allow it too — that’s the reason why. So it depends on who gets involved. And so that’s one of the reasons my whole task on this is to open it up, so there’s more perspective on what happens and how we use it.

A lot of people think ‘Well I can’t really talk about space stuff.’ Yeah you can! It’s a human birthright. We’ve all looked up at the stars. All of our ancestors, in every setting around the world thousands and thousands of years ago noted the movement of the heavens, right?

What happens in space, whether the moon ends up belonging to some corporate conglomerate, depends on whether or not we all get involved to talk about this common human resource, this common human initiative.

I think also what may take place, and this is where that whole spectrum of human behavior or experience comes in: we need another adrenaline source. Humans, we need adrenaline, we need to be stressed and challenged — we need to run down the street, have our heart beat fast, have drama. We need that, that’s part of us.

So why not give ourselves something that isn’t destructive? That allows you to move further? That will give us that same kind of adrenaline rush. I can tell you, there’s nothing that makes our adrenaline flow more than a challenge like, gosh, we’re going to go off this planet, we can go to the Moon, we can go to Mars and another star system, we can explore and find out how we can optimize and meet our own potential through these challenges of distance and the unknown.

K: Do you think if we’re getting an adrenaline rush from being war like or violent it will help to give us another source?

J: I think it will help. I do. I know that sounds, that’s one of things that sounds so naive. But I think it will help. Because we like toys, we need something to do with them. So we need different toys. Even looking at video games — can we find games which are just as engaging which aren’t about blood and shoot ‘em up and gore? I like action movies as much as the next of them, but we’ve gotten to the point where out action movies are about how gruesome we can make things and that’s not it — it starts to numb us to that effect.

One of my favorite quotes is from Will and Ariel Durant, who said, “The future never just happened. It was created.” And we can make that future.

K: I think those are all my questions. Is there anything else you want to add?

J: Just to make sure to note that who is involved makes all the difference in what is developed and how it is used.

K: Thanks so much. I really appreciate you taking so much time to talk with me.

J: Thank you! Keep in touch alright?

K: I absolutely will.

Photo by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved.

Anonymous-scholar Gabriella Coleman argues that the hacktivist movement is rhizomatic and cannot ever be treated as a single entity.

The government seems terrified of Anonymous and online activists. There have been harsh crackdowns on anyone exercising the limits of free speech through the Internet, from the charges used to threaten Aaron Swartz before his death to the jail time Weev and John Kiriakou are serving. Actual Anons like Jeremy Hammond face corrupt courts and even more devastating sentences.

What both the government and mainstream media have trouble grasping is that Anonymous cannot be approached as a single entity. Instead, Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman insists that Anonymous is rhizomatic. Though it all stems from the same roots, it is not subject to any specific leadership but shifts direction based on collective will.

Perhaps the government does understand on some level, and that’s why they’ve acted so violently to oppose this concept. Yet Anonymous as a collective taps into roots in historic anonymity that suggest it won’t be easily squashed. Two panels at South by Southwest Interactive 2013 laid out this history from the printing press into modern times.

A Brief History of Anonymity

First Amendment lawyer Nabiha Syed and historian Katie Engelhart discuss this history of anonymity at SXSW 2013.

First Amendment lawyer Nabiha Syed and historian Katie Engelhart led a panel on anonymity through history.  Much of the earliest literature was published anonymously or pseudonymously. Women of course used masculine pseudonyms or published anonymously, but men also chose to publish anonymously or as women for many reasons. This fluid idea of identity and authorship was the source of benign entertainment, as the literati of the 18th century gathered in coffee shops to debate authorship.

Being anonymous was sometimes celebrated; some like Milton chose dip in and out of public identity from publication to publication as he pleased. But attitudes toward anonymity change with the times. During wartime, sedition laws and other restrictions tried to enforce clear authorship of every work, yet the penalties for treasonous speech increased the desire to go unnamed.

Engelhart and Syed compared this shift to the evolution of anonymity on the modern Internet. In the early days of Usenet and IRC chatrooms, anonymity and pseudonymity were respected — a persons real identity could remain unknown, but they could gain a great deal of social clout for their invented identity over time. Forces both technological and social have combined to endanger this namelessness — from the ease of identity services like Facebook passport and the pervasive transactional tracking of the Web on the one hand to the increasing paranoia of perpetual war on the other.

True anonymity is becoming more difficult and less accessible. Products like TOR and Ghostery (both present at the #SXSW Trade Show) help users regain some control, but we may enter a virtual arms race between tools for privacy and the push for pervasive trackable identity.

Anonymous Unleashes the Power of Crowds

Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman and Quinn Norton share a history of Anonymous at SXSW 2013.

Another panel at the conference drew from this history but focused on the modern collective known as Anonymous. Finn Brunton, Assistant Professor of Information at University of Michigan School of Information, anthropologist and noted Anonymous-scholar Gabriella Coleman, and author and journalist Quinn Norton traced Anonymous from its origins in environments like /b/ and 4chan, lawless and tactless forums that eschew any kind of permanent identity through its politicization in opposing the Church of Scientology to its current incarnation as distributed online activists.

The behavior of crowds has been feared by governments and the powerful since at least Ancient Rome. We can easily see the destructive nature of anonymous crowds just by looking at the latest round of sports riots. But the creative potential of crowds can be just as potent. What began as a series of pranks grew increasingly serious as the pranksters got caught up in their work and realized its importance. While the work was simply for the ‘lulz’ in the beginning, the playful nature of Anonymous continues to bind subgroups together. The very confusion and fear its nature arouses is part of its power.

Anonymous is diverse, drawing people of all genders, orientations, locations, class and racial backgrounds together. By creating environments which are deliberately unpolitically correct, the collective actually smooths over many cultural differences because everyone is equally offended. As the founder of Japan’s 2Channel said, ”People can only truly discuss something when they don’t know each other.” This is also a strength of Anonymous in action, bringing people together with diverse skillsets who might never have spoken in conventional settings.

The power of Anonymous is that we are all Anonymous. Quinn Norton warned that, much like trying to remain aloof in the midst of a riotous real world crowd, you can’t report on Anonymous without becoming part of Anonymous — recent conspiracy charges against former Reuters employee Matthew Keys give another cautionary example. And the social pressures to identify appear again among the Anons — Gabriella Coleman spoke eloquently of the pain some feel at not being able to share more personal details with their AnonFamily, and of course this urge has been the undoing of many.

Anonymous reached new heights of activity as much of it was absorbed into Occupy Wall Street, struggled in the wake of arrests and broken encampments, only to rise again and again. From the mask-wearing members of the Polish Parliament to the heroes of Steubenville, Anonymous is a potent force that’s pushed deep into human culture.

Much more than a group, not a unified movement, Anonymous is a banner, an idea, and a way of acting. Anonymous can only die if the people abandon it. While the popularity of the mask may someday wane, this new twist on that historic force, collective anonymous action, will prove harder to eradicate.

Three German Anons at the recent International Day of Privacy.

More: Tweets from #Anonymity Then & Now and Creativity & #Mayhem: Anonymous Communities At Work

Anonymous media portrait by Garry Knight, released under a Creative Commons license. Anonymous Trio by Joachim S. Müller released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Panel photos by Kit O’Connell, released under a Creative Commons license.

Karen Reilly of the Tor Project wants more journalists to understand how to hide their traffic.

On its surface, the SXSW Trade Show is full of the kinds of marketing I declared boring in the introduction to my event coverage. Hungry marketers roam the floor seeking attention and venture capital. Oh, I filled up a couple bags with swag, from t-shirts to buttons, but I won’t bore you by recounting my haul. Instead, I’ll focus on a handful of exhibitors at the trade show doing a little more.

Tor, which hides the origins of Internet traffic, was originally a product of military research, later sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and now operates as its own nonprofit. This history makes more sense when you understand that the product is useful to so many diverse groups — from journalists and the likes of Wikileaks to political dissidents to everyday citizens to, yes, military operatives hiding their location. The very nature of the product means that the more people who use it, the more secure it can become. Right now they told me they are working especially hard to teach journalists about the benefits of the product. On the Tor Project website, you can get easy to install software bundles for secure web browsing on most operating systems. A similar package for secure chatting will be re-released soon.

Another product which gives us more control of our Internet experience is Ghostery, which was giving away cute squishy Pac-Man style ghosts based on their logo. Ghostery is a plugin for all major browsers which lets you see who is tracking you and how. It reveals how everyone from ad networks to Google is keeping track of your data and lets you learn more about how they make use of it, then choose whether to block their tracking or not.

Japanese photographer Tominaga Yasuhiro is collecting 10,000 Funny Faces.

Geostellar is trying to encourage more homeowners to add solar panels and other environmental improvements to their homes. On their website, you can search for your home and see potential savings and environmental benefits of going solar. The process is ‘gameified’ — you can earn points based on making different improvements and getting your friends to offer their ‘Love’ of what you’re doing. The site is free but makes money from commissions from green companies like panel installers. Over time the company hopes the application will expand. I looked at my neighborhood with Geostellar systems analyst Kevin Wurster, and we saw that a nearby school has a huge empty roof perfect for solar panels. Eventually, the company would like to work with groups to help them lobby for such large projects which could benefit multiple homes. The solar-powered phone charging stations they sponsored around the site were also popular.

A couple less serious projects caught my attention as well. Rangl is a website in beta which creators hope will help people playfully settle arguments among their friends — with a special category for settling conflicts among roommates. I can see a lot of booze-soaked situations where this website would be pretty entertaining.

By far, my favorite thing on the trade show floor was Japanese photographer Tominaga Yasuhiro‘s 10,000 Funny Faces project. Yasuhiro isn’t selling anything — rather, he’s collecting the silliest faces he can for a future photographic collection. He invited me into his photobooth and got me to make a series of goofy expressions. The best one was instantly printed on a nearby WiFi enabled photoprinter for my souvenir, and I gladly signed to give permission for my face to be used in his photobook and on his blog, where he posts funny faces every day. There was something liberating about this experience, forcing me to set aside thoughts of people to meet and articles to write and just play for a moment. I hope it had an even deeper effect on the many far more serious people at SXSW Interactive.

This Pac-Man style squishy ghost from Ghostery was popular swag at the SXSW Trade Show.

SXSW Interactive 2013 formally ended Tuesday, though the trade show continued through Wednesday. With this post, I’ll try to wrap up my experiences at the event. It won’t be the end of my coverage — I have several more articles to write and followup interviews to conduct.

LeVar Burton: “We have spent far too much on the machinery of war…. We need to make more sustainable choices.”

Much of South by Southwest is a giant marketing pitch that one pays for the privilege of attending. Startups try to get a foot in the door while everyone attempts to wow the crowds with their newest technologies. Yet like other events fertile with creativity, from Burning Man to Occupy Wall Street, serendipity brings people together in interesting new ways who might never have spoken otherwise — and this is the real power of such gatherings.

Just as I explained in my introduction, I didn’t try to attend the biggest panels but the ones that interested me most. Often my plans went awry and I ended up doing something completely different than planned. Here is my eclectic recap and personal “Best of” SXSW Interactive 2013.

Best Call to Action: @TarenSK at Aaron Swartz Town Hall (#AaronSXSW)

The entire #AaronSXSW Town Hall was a sign of how much the Swartz case has radicalized the tech set. But in particular, @TarenSK’s speech to the crowd was especially demanding in all the right ways. Why haven’t academics risen up at what happened? Why doesn’t the media question the official story more? Why aren’t you doing more to change the world? Thanks to @TarenSK and the other panelists assembled by DemandProgress, the non-profit Aaron founded, geeks everywhere are thinking about privilege and the prison-industrial complex for the first time in their lives.

More: My article & collected tweets from #AaronSXSW

Most Mind-Blowing: 100 YSS

What would we need to do in order to travel to the stars? How would we survive decades aboard a space ship — not just what propulsion or life support systems, but how would we create sustainable food supplies and social order? If you take these questions one step further, you realize that every solution we need to travel in a self-contained star ship will also help us here on Earth. While people elsewhere were arguing about how to sell mobile phone apps, LeVar Burton, Dr. Mae Jemison (astronaut) and Dr. Jill Tarter (of SETI) were making us think about humanity’s future.

More: Tweets from #100YSS, article coming soon

Best Meetup: Texas Observer Scrappy Journalists

The Texas Observer is a non-profit magazine dedicated to finding issues under-reported by the state’s mainstream media. Founded in 1954, one of the magazine’s editors told us that they are doing better than ever because distrust of the mainstream media is at an all time high. Judging by the conversation at the gathering, alternative journalism is doing fine. In addition to journalists, the meetup was populated by authors researching important but obscure parts of history, developers of new online communications technologies, and happily, librarians. The discussion at the tables in the ballroom of the Driskill Hotel (which sadly would not let the Observer bring in a keg) was a sharp contrast to my previous panel. Whereas this group was eager to learn about new technologies, many of the mainstream media journalists at Is It Social Media or Is It Journalism? were still struggling to get their editors to accept their use of twitter.

More: Collected tweets from the #ScrapToday meetup and from Is It #Journalism?

Best Chance Meeting: Jason from NASA

A group of Anons in Germany on the recent International Day of Privacy. The Anonymous movement is merely the latest incarnation of a historic human impulse.

A chance encounter at the LGBTQ meetup got me talking with Jason from NASA social media (sorry I didn’t get your card!). He told me about livetweeting the Mars Rover landing. Watching Jason’s face light up as he described this high point of his life and career reminded me why I do this stuff. Thanks!

Two panels at SXSW attempted to put Anonymous into the context of history, making it not just a collective of loosely allied activists but a modern expression well-documented urge to hide behind a mask. Finn Brunton, Assistant Professor of Information at University of Michigan School of Information, anthropologist and world-renowned Anonymous scholar Gabriella Coleman, and journalist of activist movements Quinn Norton focused on the modern Anonymous collective itself and its origins. In a panel on the last day, First Amendment lawyer Nabiha Syed and historial Katie Engelhart talked about the larger context of anonymity — where it fits into history and how our attitudes toward it change.

More: Collected tweets from Creativity and #Mayhem and #Anonymity, Then and Now, article coming soon.

Happiest Accident: Year of the Gli.tc/h

I accidentally stumbled on an inspiring panel about accidents. Though headquartered at the Convention Center, SXSW is spread all through Austin. In this case I went into the wrong room at the Omni Hotel and got inspired to think about mistakes in a whole new way. If the most frustrating thing in the universe (practically) is a source of great art for some, what can glitches become for me?

More: Year of the #Glitch article and tweets

Best Street Art: Street Crash

The Street Crash flashmob at SXSW turned corporatized robotic humans into actual robots.

The intersection on 6th street was shut down to vehicular traffic but full of pedestrians and cyclists. A mobile sound system appeared, and then a group of seemingly normal people started gathering. Only some acted bizarrely robotic — obsessively tinkering with a DJ system, arguing about whether they wanted to be photographed or telling everyone to go see their band. And then of course, robots:

Robots dancing like robots at Street Crash.

Then they vomited streamers made of money and ran away.

So, this happened.

SXSW is full of oddly dressed people trying to sell something, but only one group of people dressed as robots vomiting money. Congrats, to Agent Red and Street Crash for making Southby weirder and more fun.

Photo of LeVar Burton and the Street Crash by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved. Anonymous photo by Joachim S. Müller released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Before the advent of industrialization, most objects were customized because they were made by hand. Mass production introduced the concept of ‘one size fits all.’ But it doesn’t — designing for everyone will always exclude someone.

A new customization movement has begun, but with frivolous choices: at Nike’s flagship store, you can design your own sneaker. What about deeper applications? What about customizing every day objects for people with mobility impairments, blindness, or amputees?

Enabled By Design is a nonprofit which got its start when co-founder Denise Stephens (see video above) was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Suddenly, her comfort and mobility depended on a number of products provided by the UK’s National Health Service. For all that socialized medicine is a great boon to citizens, its products are made in the most cost-efficient ways possible — mass produced from the cheapest reliable materials and all made one way for everyone. Stephens, who had a passion for interior design, suddenly found herself living in a home full of white hospital plastic. Moving with crutches meant using ugly devices which made loud clicking sounds with every step, and presented new challenges — how do you use a smartphone while holding a crutch? Enabled By Design helps disabled people find or make the best solutions for their individual needs. But a new technology is making even more possible.

Between Campbell and Bishop are two prototypes of a tea kettle custom designed for a man without forearms or hands.

3D printing is one of the hottest new technologies. Using print-on-demand devices capable of molding three-dimensional objects on the fly, with the right materials almost anything is possible. Sunday at SXSW Interactive the 3D Printing for Disability, led by Carrie Bishop and Dominic Campbell of FutureGov, explored a few of the newest possibilities.

These ‘finger cactus’ fingertip utensils improve food handling for the mobility impaired.

3D printing can bring style and fashion back into the lives of the disabled. While functionality is important, white industrial plastic is ugly and unpleasant to use, limiting one of the most important ways humans express their personality. 3D printers can create custom colored crutches that are designed to be silent, or colorful and unique covers for prosthetic limbs. Taking it a step further, entirely new devices can be invented like custom utensils which are thicker or attach to the fingertips, providing greater independence for the mobility impaired at meal time.

More importantly, this technology moves us away from one size fits all. Since everyone experiences their disabilities differently, everyone also needs different solutions. A custom tea kettle which fits one person might be a terrible alternative for another, even if they have the same basic condition. Enabled By Design hopes in the future to act as government-funded disability consultants who would help people make their lives more comfortable and accessible while still maintaining aesthetics. Sometimes this might mean a custom-printed device, and others just knowing where to buy an existing object that fits better then the ones made by government vendors.

Customization can enhance medical devices like crutches, but we can’t yet print entire objects strong or durable enough to hold human weight. Like all new innovations, the field is changing rapidly and what is impossible today may be easy tomorrow.

As 3D printing itself becomes accessible, we can expect to see many more frivolous uses. The 3D Ability panel showed SXSW the truly important potential applications of this new development.

More: Tweets from #3Dability, curated by Kit

Photos by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved.

When something goes wrong, don’t start over — make art!

Jon Satrom and Alan Sondheim present Year of the GLI.TC/H

Let’s think about the future in science fiction. There are many futures which are perfect, even utopian — glowing with bright lights, crisp clothing, full of flawless technology which elevates human lives — such as Star Trek. A handful of science fiction futures take the opposite approach — futures like the one in Firefly that are dirty and full of things that break.

Now think about our own lives. Startling innovations have occurred thanks to technology, changing how we communicate, travel, play and work. Yet which future is more familiar? Expensive software and hardware routinely launches full of bugs and errors. Things break all the time.

Glitches are frustrating — yet also create the potential for the creation of art and experimental music in the interstitial spaces at the edge of what works. Four panelists at SXSW Saturday explored the “Year of the GLI.TC/H.”

Artist Jon Satrom said we expect computers to fail. He commented on how the Internet is full of photos of irritated computer users biting their PCs! Yet glitches do more than slow us down. They reveal what software and hardware are hiding behind their “closed doors and walled gardens.” Even as he demonstrated a slide show made from glitching Mac OS, the computer crashed in new and innovative ways. Glitch is unpredictable.

Satrom: “The glitch is a moment in time that has the potential to snap us from a particular context and can reveal the systems at play.”

“The glitch is a moment in time that has the potential to snap us from a particular context and can reveal the systems at play,” Jon Satrom told us. Next time a glitch occurs, try integrating it into your process rather than throwing out the work you’ve done. What, Satrom seemed to ask, can glitches teach us about our own creative work?

Patrick Lichty and Jon Cates at SXSW’s Year of the GLI.TC/H

Glitch artists have come together for the last two years at the gli.tc/h conference. Creating this conference presented unique challenges: “It’s interesting to build a structure for a community that celebrates chaos and failure.” Organizers introduced deliberate glitches into many aspects of the conference experience, forcing participants to adapt on the fly and interact in new ways.

Other speakers at the panel included Jon Cates, Chair & Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media & Animation at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Artist and Theorist Patrick Lichty. As Cates spoke, a soundtrack of experimental music hummed behind him. Gradually, his own voice speaking became a part of the sounds, echoing with his own words. The layered sounds forced us to interact with his words first a speech, then as an artistic soundscape.

Lichty spoke about how 3D Printing allows us to glitch real world objects, printing them in ways that cause cognitive dissonance or using augmented reality to change our interactions with the mundane.

While I’m a fan of the experimental, I’ll be the first to admit that “noise” music and other glitch arts are not to everyone’s taste. Yet we can all learn how to be more flexible and open to possibilities from the process of its creation.

More: Jon Cates’ GL1tch.US, an unstable book for unstable art and Year of the #glitch tweets, curated by Kit

All photos by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved.

Aaron Swartz is dead, and yet he continues to change the world.

His death radicalized thousands of computer geeks, launched a worldwide campaign to reform computer fraud laws and the department of justice, and inspired an upcoming national day of action.

We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of the story. –Aaron Swartz on the battle against SOPA

On Friday night at South by Southwest Interactive, a panel of great minds — all of them touched in some way by Swartz — gathered to recount his legacy and look toward the future of his work. Organized by the Swartz-founded non-profit Demand Progress, the panel consisted of:

• Marvin Ammori, First Amendment lawyer
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web
• Gary DeGregorio, one of Swartz’s bosses at Thoughtworks
• Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress
• @TarenSK, Swartz’s partner for the past year
• Tim Wu, Law professor at Columbia University

The panel opened with Aaron speaking in his own words in his famous speech about the defeat of SOPA, included at the top of this article. Swartz’s presence, and his absence, were felt throughout the evening.”I only wish tonight was about a defense campaign for Aaron and he was the one talking,” DeGregorio told me after the panel.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Do Like Aaron Did

Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke of how the consequences have changed in modern times — the law now punishes us for thought and intent rather than harm. Yet it’s more important than ever to spend at least some of our time acting. “We lost one. If you’re wondering how to spend your time, do like Aaron did,” he told the audience.

Yet Berners-Lee, and later Swartz’s partner Taren, also urged us to balance activism with self-care. One of Swartz’s failings was that he tried to do everything without taking time for himself, and never reached out for help. None of his friends, not even Taren herself knew the inner details of his case or how much strain he was under until she found him after his suicide. The world would be a better place if we all spent a little time on activism, but Swartz himself seemed to dedicate his life to it to beyond the point of burnout.

Tim Wu: All of Us Felons

Columbia Law professor Tim Wu told us you can judge a society by how it treats its eccentrics, innovators and tricksters — and our society is failing the Swartz’s of the world. Wu reminded us that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak funded Apple by building phone phreaking equipment; the crimes they committed were far worse than those committed by Swartz. What if we’d persecuted them the way we had Aaron? The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is so broad that it is a crime to violate a Terms of Service (TOS) agreement; it has become a felony to lie on an online dating site. It’s so broad, Wu said, that “everyone interesting in this room is a felon,” echoing his essay on Swartz for the New Yorker.

What was the point of the Revolutionary War, asked Wu, if we were going to just create a society where everyone is a criminal?

Jennifer Lynch: Inspired to Change the Law

Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke about how their organization is inspired by Aaron’s legacy. They are lobbying to pass Aaron’s Law. Aaron’s Law would reform the CFAA by preventing it from being a crime to violate an online contract, especially one you are forced to sign like a TOS agreement. Secondly, it would change the law so it is no longer a crime to legitimately access data but to do so in a unanticipated way (such as Aaron’s act of mass-downloading academic papers via JSTOR). Finally, it would keep hackers responsible for victimless acts from being charged with more than a misdemeanor. The EFF is also working to open up access to taxpayer funded academic research, like the bulk of the articles Swartz downloaded from JSTOR at MIT.

Lynch urged us all to contact our congresspeople and ask them to support Aaron’s Law.

Panelists discuss the legacy of Aaron Swartz at an open town hall meeting, Friday night at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Marvin Ammori: Prosecuting Free Thinkers Not Bankers

When Ammori first met Swartz, they didn’t get along. Ammori was excited about Obama’s election, and believed many of his cabinet appointments would do better in the world. Swartz argued with him, saying he’d met some of those people and considered them creeps and corrupt. Of course, Swartz was right in the end.

Ammori said we should all do as Aaron suggested — when prioritizing our tasks, we should do the most important thing first — the most important thing for the whole world. He questioned why we go after people like Aaron Swartz yet let the real criminals — such as bankers — go free. The Swartz case is not just about a single overzealous prosecutor, but about the widening gap between justice and the law. He stressed that we can’t solve any of our big problems — war, the environment — without free speech and the right to organize. These are “foundational issues” on which the rest depend.

Gary DeGregorio: Aaron the Human

Aaron’s boss, Gary DeGregorio of Thoughtworks, spent his portion of the panel humanizing our lost hero. He talked of Swartz’s genial teasing about DeGregorio’s obsession with Twitter, or singing Muppets songs with his team. Aaron pushed Thoughtworks to do more good in the world, and says his example is still pushing them and other corporations to go further. One of Swartz’s major projects is the open-source Victory Kit, a tool which would allow new activists to launch compelling online campaigns without the need for using the infrastructure of groups like MoveOn or Change.org. It would also allow activists to build on each other’s campaigns, using them as models to build on later — for example, creating a customized version of a successful local action campaign in a new city. The model of activism in Cory Doctorow’s Homeland is based on similar ideas from Swartz.

Be like Aaron, don’t be ordinary. –Gary DeGregorio

@TarenSK: A Call to Rise Up

Taren’s talk was the most stirring of the entire panel. She called out academics, developers, the mainstream media for their complacency. MIT could have demanded the case be dropped, and never did. Given the abuse of academic freedom the case repesents, she asked why have academics not risen up en masse? The mainstream media refuses to look deeper into the case than the surface — they may suggest Aaron’s charges were too high, but none ever question whether what Aaron did should even be considered a crime!

“There’s deep shame in believing you want to change the world instead of actually changing the world,” she told the audience. “Are you self-critical enough?” she asked. There is no shame in failure, only being too prideful to look at your own work and question your success.

If you can’t name your failures, you’re either lying to yourself or you’re not aiming high enough.

“We ought to live in a country where you’re innocent until proven guilty and you’re able to prove your innocence,” she said. Instead, the Department of Justice routinely throws the book at defendents, threatening perpetrators of even victimless crimes with the highest charges possible. Threatened with the loss of decades of life to prison, they take plea bargains instead. Swartz, she reminded us, was one of the most privileged victims of the prison-industrial complex. We can’t just fight for rich white guys, but for everyone, if we’re to see a truly just justice system.

Radicalizing the Geeks: The Future of Aaron’s Legacy

Charlie Furman of Demand Progress organized the #AaronSXSW Town Hall.

There’s a moment of possibility in many mass movements, from the Wisconsin Uprising to Occupy Wall Street. In that moment, activists drawn by a single issue (like corporate money in politics) realize that the problems go far deeper. Citizens United is a symptom of the corporate takeover of the United States. The Tar Sands blockade is linked not just to the climate crisis, but to issues of class and race. Scott Walker’s crackdown on unions is part of an international conspiracy by the 1% to destroy workers’ rights.

Online activism is in such a moment. Swartz’s death reframes the discussion beyond the battle against the over reach of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz or even just reform of a single law. Activists are taking to the streets spontaneously, but even more so, privileged, protected geeks are thinking about the broken criminal justice system for the first time, and beginning to stand up for themselves and for us all. Rather than simply fighting bad laws like SOPA/PIPA, activists are realizing that now is the time to protect the Internet by lobbying to pass good laws as well, by pushing for larger societal change to bring our dinosaur institutions into the modern age. They’re realizing that all our grievances are connected.

I spoke for a few minutes today with Charlie Furman, an organizer with Demand Progress. Swartz hired Furman to lead a Boston-based campaign to pressure MIT to make a public statement against Swartz’s prosecution. He was also preparing to begin fundraising on Aaron’s behalf, but said Swartz hated asking for money even though the case had destroyed the considerable fortune he’d made from the sale of Reddit. After Aaron’s death, Furman began organizing toward a national day for computer fraud law reform. Demand Progress hopes this will happen sometime in the next three months.

Furman said they saw the SXSW Town Hall as a chance to reach a new audience. “Even though we’ve had events all over the place, many people are just now realizing the depths of the story.” Furman thinks it’s very likely Aaron would have been found not guilty if his case had gone to trial.

He told me the upcoming day of action is an opportunity to build on the work against SOPA & PIPA, but with a more human face. Unlike the largely anonymous (and Anonymous) work of most online activists, he believes the loss of Swartz gives many a personal stake in fighting for justice.

The seeds of Aaron’s legacy are still sprouting.

Anonymous protested today in US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s neighborhood.

More: #AaronSXSW tweets on Storify, curated by Kit

Photo of #AaronSXSW panel by Charlie Furman. Portrait of Charlie Furman by Kit O’Connell, released under a Creative Commons license. Portrait of Anonymous by Anonymous.

Associate Professor Todd Humphries (right) and 3 of his students from the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab

We’ve got an addiction to open GPS.

Since the artificial limits were removed from civilian global positioning during the Clinton administration, GPS has become a ubiquitous technology. We use it not just to navigate but to find lost objects, and engineers have integrated it into their work in a host of other ways. Thanks to drone combat, our war machines are also GPS dependent.

Last year, the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab made international headlines by hijacking a drone in front of Department of Homeland Security officials. By sending a fake GPS satellite signal, they were able to trick an unmanned vehicle with false data about its orientation relative to the ground and by doing so make it change direction. This technique is called “spoofing.” On Friday at SXSW Interactive, Associate Professor Todd Humphries of the Radionavigation Lab, along with three of his students, presented their research into spoofing and other extreme forms of GPS.

The ease with which the Lab hijacked a drone — the parts for their device cost only about $1,000 — highlights the serious issues we have with the proliferation of GPS. The FCC restricts broadcasts in the necessary frequency, but that would provide little barrier to a determined criminal; this may have happened already in instances where our drones crashed in foreign countries. Humphries cautioned that while no technique is foolproof, our GPS systems currently have no protections at all. Instead, it would be relatively simple to analyze the timing of messages to calculate how long they take to travel between the satellite and the receiver.

Humphries and his students are also exploring other uses for “extreme” GPS. A potential use of GPS is for augmented reality. In augmented reality applications, a camera or a device like Google Glass shows us an alternate view of reality. This could give us useful data about our surroundings or plunge us into an entertaining game world that interacts with our own. But like other forms of virtual reality, it’s largely been a bust — Humphries quipped that AR has been “disappointing users since 1990.”

Simulating the real world in order to change it is a daunting task. Google Streetview has mapped the world to a startling degree, but this is an order of magnitude simpler than what would be needed to truly map the world in order to create immersive augmented reality, requiring detail down to the centimeter level. Even if you had someone pass through an area using a backpack-mounted camera array, small changes to the area would quickly render the data obsolete.

An alternative under development at the Lab is to combine existing technologies in new ways. A technique called Parallel Tracking And Mapping (PTAM) allows computers to create complex simulations of the space around a user, but isn’t tied into absoute real world location. However, this limitation can be overcome when combined with Carrier Phase GPS — a tool used now only by land surveyors.

Humphries and his students showed off a crude prototype of a device using both. It was about the size of a toaster oven, including a tablet and a bulky antenna, but clearly showed what can be built and developed today. Humphries envisioned most of the rig shrinking down to the size of a phone, though the antenna is difficult to miniaturize. A short video showed a University of Texas rooftop, but with computer generated images of a door and a machine part placed precisely in the world by GPS.

Todd Humphries believes handheld devices are more socially acceptable than wearable glasses-style devices. He suggested that we like knowing when we have someone’s undivided attention. We can tell when our friend or colleague is checking text messages or reading email, but that ability vanishes when the device is always on our face. Instead, he envisioned something more like binoculars or a monocle which we hold up to our face as needed.

More: #HyperGPS Tweets on Storify, curated by Kit

Photo by Kit O’Connell, all rights reserved.

Twitter announced major changes to the Tweetdeck line of applications, further degrading the utility of the product they purchased in 2011.

With the tech world busy preparing for one of its biggest events (SXSW Interactive), what better time to sneak out some bad news? From TechCrunch:

TweetDeck, the feature-rich Twitter client that Twitter acquired in 2011, will soon mostly exist as a web-based service, and the native Mac and Windows apps will play second fiddle to the web and Chrome apps. The company is shutting down the AIR-based version of TweetDeck for desktop and will remove the Android and iPhone apps from their respective mobile stores in May. In addition, the TweetDeck team announced today, it will also “discontinue support for our Facebook integration.”

This news, while disappointing, is probably not shocking to many that follow social media. All companies including Adobe itself are moving away from the AIR platform for application development, and though that version of the software was once the most feature rich it had gone without an update in a long time.

But more so, many who worked in social media dreaded the acquisition of Tweetdeck by Twitter. Predictably,  the mobile versions have languished. For a long time, a fork of the project called Tweakdeck was a better choice on Android, but it also is out of date. All current versions are lacking in key features of the original Tweetdeck. Bugs linger in the Mac & PC versions long after being fixed on the Web. It’s hard not to agree with TechCrunch that “Given the clear focus on the web apps, it may just be a matter of time before the native apps will also get the ax.”

Even if this decision might have been predicted by a lack of updates, it highlights a problem faced by those who work in online media — and everyone who works with computers. The tools are constantly changing, and the power is held in other hands. I knew many activists who made use of IFTTT to automate a wide variety of tasks on Twitter, until changes to the API made that impossible, along with killing off a number of other third party applications.

The way we work today may not be the way we work tomorrow when the applications we ‘own’ can change or disappear without our consent.

Twitter monster by Rosaura Ochoa released under a Creative Commons license.

Kit O’Connell covers SXSW Interactive 2013 for Bytegeist.

Some of you are probably familiar with me as the weekday editor of MyFDL or from my work as the FDL correspondent on stories like the Gulf Port 7 trial. This week, I’m bringing the SXSW Interactive conference to the Lake. SXSW began in 1986 as a ‘small’ Austin music festival that almost immediately became a national concern for any musicians wanting to accelerate their careers. Soon, the music festival was joined by a film festival, and then an interactive conference. Today, there is even a comedy festival and an education arm.

SXSW Interactive is world-renowned as a place where startup companies strike the deals that make them successful, where cutting edge mobile apps are launched, and where corporations come to master the use of new technologies.

None of that really interests me, to be honest — there are countless websites where you can learn the latest corporate news about where the venture capital is flying.

Instead, I want to look at what these technologies mean for our future at the intersection of tech and politics. It’s almost trite to point out how fast our world is changing but it’s true nonetheless. Innovative, disruptive technologies are altering how we communicate, socialize, organize, how we keep and share secrets. During chaotic times, there are always some who celebrate how new ideas will save our world and others who decry how they’ll bring about our doom. The truth is almost always somewhere in between — new technologies change us. Humanity is still evolving, sometimes quite quickly, and to pretend we’re still (or should be) the same as our plains-dwelling ancestors strikes me as misguided and naive.

Of course, we must go into the future with our eyes open. New technologies bring new dangers, and sometimes those dangers only become apparent when we ask who is in control. The answers are rarely simple — modern mobile and camera technologies increase the ease of government surveillance, but also create the possibility of citizen sousveillance. I want to know what’s coming, not so we can try to stuff the genies back in their bottles, but so we can liberate their wishes for the people, not just the powerful.

With that in mind, I’ll be spending the next 5 days looking not for the biggest news at the conference but what’s most interesting, by my own subjective terms. FDL’s SXSW team is made up of just a single person, so it will naturally be my small view on a very large event. With that said, I would love to hear your questions, tips, and requests. Of course, if any of you will be at SXSW be sure to let me know!

I’ll be posting regular updates on Bytegeist and tweeting on @KitOConnell throughout the event. My #SXSW tweets will appear on the sidebar of bytegeist.firedoglake.com, and you can go straight to my coverage just by visiting firedoglake.com/sxsw.

Here are a few highlights I hope to cover. I’ve shared my full SXSW schedule (requires free login), but of course I will only hit a portion of the events on that list.

Friday

Friday night at SXSW Interaction 2013, an Open Town Hall will discuss the legacy of Aaron Swartz. No badges will be required.

Events formally begin on Friday at the Austin Convention Center and several other locations throughout town. In addition to formal conference venues, many companies rent houses or facilities for parties and events. Non-profits will try to attract programmers at all-day hackathon for social good. A wide variety of technological innovators will come together at SXSW Create. The entire conference features a lot of ‘Maker’ related topics, including explorations of 3D print-on-demand technologies.

Later in the day, the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab will talk about Extreme GPS: The Limits of Security and Precision. The Radionavigation Lab received worldwide attention last year when they used about $1,000 in parts to hijack a drone in front of DHS officials.

Free: Friday evening’s Aaron Swartz Open Town Hall may end up being one of the most important events of the entire conference. Led by David Segal of Demand Progress, this event is free to anyone even if you don’t have a badge. Presenters, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Lynch, will discuss Swartz’s legacy and what we can do to prevent this tragedy from occurring again. I expect it to be well attended and thought-provoking.

Saturday

Anthropologist and Anonymous scholar Gabriella Coleman will read from her new book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.

Similar to TED talks, SXSW hosts a series of short speeches called Future15, with topics like Plug Me In: Neural Interfaces for Musicians. There’s a lot of interesting topics, but I won’t try to list them all here. I’ll drop in and tweet from the best when I can.

A panel on Sources in the Social Media Age raises interesting issues of what it means to be a journalist in the modern era. A number of panels throughout the weekend address similar issues. It’s clear that journalism is changing, with the slow death of traditional print media and the rise of the Twitter journalist.

Many time slots through out the weekend are so full of great panels that I wish I could clone myself, but that’s not yet one of the technologies discussed. The 12:30pm Central time slot on Saturday is a tough call. Taboo Travel will discuss the effect of widely available satellite imagery on ‘hidden’ places like Area 51 and the plastic garbage island in the ocean. If that’s not interesting, choose between Digital Telepathy: When Everything Connects and The Skin As Metaphor: Fashion, Technology and Body.

Later in the day, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, known for her study of Anonymous, will read from and sign her new book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.

Sunday

Can the Internet help end female genital mutilation? The founder of the Orchid Project will tell us why she thinks it can in A Movement Online to End Female Genital Cutting.

In Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Drone? we’ll hear about the positive side of drones such as their potential use by journalists. During the same hour, legal experts will gather to discuss Copyright & Disruptive Technologies, including how laws like SOPA & PIPA get made.

LeVar Burton is among the many supporters of space flight in Austin for SXSW.

Journalists from Time, CNN, NPR, and NBC will consider how mainstream media outlets can tap into citizen journalism on social media in Global News After the Twitter Revolutions. Sadly, as a notorious “maple chaser,” I might have to take in the Smart Canadians Drinks Party instead.

Free: Queer rights group GetEqual TX will March for LGBTQ Justice on Sunday evening. With the Texas legislature in session, several bills are under consideration. One example is SB 237, which would prevent workplace discrimination. After all, marriage only goes so far if you can get fired for being gay …

Monday

Topics of space flight are featured all through the weekend, but two exciting panels on Monday are New Golden Age of Human Spaceflight and 100 Year Starship: Interstellar Travel and Beyond. LeVar Burton is one of the featured guests at the latter panel, which discusses a DARPA-funded project to ensure humans are capable of interstellar journeys in the near future (at speaking least on a galactic scale).

Of course, if starships aren’t your thing, you could spend an hour thinking about sex and technology. Kink Academy founder Kali Williams will talk about 5o Shades of Grey – a terrible novel which provides a fascinating window into the sexuality of many American women in Fantasy vs. Reality: The 50 Shades Phenomenon. At the same time slot, Laura G Duncan will take the audience from fantasy fembots of fiction to real-world teledildonics in Hey, Where’s My Robot Girlfriend?

An Online Activism Meetup brings activists and citizen journalists together to network and talk. Another meetup style event, I Am My Own Social Network forces the tech-dependent to give up their phones for an hour and interact face to face.

I already wrote about it on MyFDL, but I am beyond excited to see They Might Be Giants in conversation with comedian Eugene Mirman. 

Other highights: Bullying: Social Media as Problem and Solution, a psychologist answers What’s the Matter with Batman? and Shooting For Impact: Online Documentary Shorts.

Occupy Austin offers free events at OccupySouthby this week. Tonight includes Augmented Reality and Activism, a free version of an earlier panel featuring Patrick Lichty, jonL and Alan Sonhiem. Later, cut loose at Occupy the Dance Floor.

Tuesday

In the new era, what does it mean to be a journalist? What do identity and anonymity mean today?

The future blurs the lines between what seemed clearly defined. When online information is quickly available to us in the real world, what is Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality? Similarly, members of the media now engage directly on Twitter, and people like myself report using new tools like smartphones. Is it Social Media or Is it Journalism?

Of course, the future also brings certain concerns for us all — that of our mortality. The Tangled Web We Leave: Digital Life After Death considers how we’ll handle our online presence when our physical one ends.

The federal government continues to believe it can stamp out Anonymous by making high profile arrests and charging those arrested with the highest penalties imaginable. Yet the concept of Anonymous seems to persist, reaching deeper into our culture every day. Historian Katie Engehart and First Amendment lawyer Nabiha Syed will look at the historical concept of anonymity and its modern implications in What’s In A Name? Anonymity, Then and Now.

Futurist and author Bruce Sterling returns to give his famous SXSW Interactive Closing Remarks, but you can also catch Deadmau5 and DJ Richie Hawtin in Talk. Techno. Technology.

Later that night, attendees can celebrate surviving 5 days of grueling drinking, talking, and thinking with a special Cirque De Soleil performance called #Evoke13.

Occupy Southby: Hip hop and rap emcees will Occupy the Cypher using Occupy Austin’s mobile sound system at 10am Central at the Texas State Capitol.

Portrait of Kit by Ósk Grimm. Aaron Swartz photo by Doc Searls released under a Creative Commons license. Gabriella Coleman portrait by Gary Barber released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Photo of Levar Burton by Gage Skidmore released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Anonymous by liryon released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.