Sarah: What is a hacker space, and how can it change the world?
Willow: Hacker spaces are communal places of tools and loud noises. They are a place to take things apart without fear of being reprimanded, a place to afix together a Frankenstein’s Monster of tech that makes you giggle madly at the thought of it working. Hacker spaces are a sort of gateway into exploring everything. By encouraging the taking apart of “closed” objects – things that have been marketed to us as inaccessible and to be left for the experts – we can begin to form mindsets which make exploration and understanding necessary joys in life. Anything which was considered “off limits” becomes a puzzle to figure out and do better. This includes politics, education systems, personal relationships, and anything else one might consider. Hacker spaces are the speakeasys in a culture that demands experts for even the most trivial situation.

Sarah: Do you think our generation has a fundamentally different concept of communication from previous generations? How does our communication style change the way we interact with each other?
Willow: I believe every generation has a different way of communicating than the ones before them. Ours is more radical, yes, but the next generation will be even more so. Asynchronous, documentable conversation leads to more self-reflection (it’s difficult to read a letter you’ve sent to someone across the country, unless you made a copy for yourself, but now we can read old chat logs and sent e-mails) and a revisiting of ideas. Our memories – once hazy, slightly shared, mostly constructed ideas of past events – are now clearly defined through stored chats and phone photos. We share our memories with people who weren’t there. While our perspectives and intents remain fluid, our shared experience becomes more solid.
We can also now hold conversations with a multitude of people, with timing as little issue and geography even less so. I believe that while this has a tendency to spread the psyche a bit thinner than in the past, it’s similar to laying on a bed of many small nails… much more supportive than fewer, albeit larger, connection points.

Sarah: It seems to me that it’s harder now than ever before to be “in the closet” about anything. How have generation y conceptions of privacy changed social, academic, and office dynamics?
Willow: The American desire and demand to be revered as an individual makes being in the closet about anything less appealing than remaining inside. Many of the people I know, myself included, treat social media as something to be used responsibly and with an eye to privacy, but also as social space. If someone goes looking for questionable pictures on your Facebook, it’s similar to your boss visiting a bar they’ve heard you frequent to see how you behave. There is much more acknowledgment that many individuals put on their cog costume for enough time to support the lifestyle and activities they truly enjoy. More and more successful companies realize their employees are a wide range of eclectic individuals, and enhance their businesses through relishing that fact.

Sarah: How will embeddable (embeddable in flesh, that is) computers change the way we live?
Willow: I like to explain it in terms of oxygen tech and opaque tech. Oxygen technology is stuff you use without having to think about it. Opaque tech you notice every little thing involving that piece. When my phone is on vibrate and in my pocket, and someone texts me while I’m having a face-to-face conversation with someone else, while I know I’ve received a text, that knowledge doesn’t detract at all from my attention to the person I’m conversing with. Having a ringer on would disrupt the conversation – it’s opaque. I have to interact with it in a very obvious manner in order to process the information it’s giving me. Having embeddable technology is like that pocket vibration. You don’t have to notice it much to make a lot of use of the information it gives you. It’s in your peripheral mind’s eye. In short, we’ll be processing a lot more information without having to pay as much conscious attention to it.

Sarah: How do you motivate community and face-to-face interaction between people who primarily live their lives online?
Willow: Where2.0 is doing a very good job with this, and augmented reality will fill the gap. As we tag our physical environments, create point systems based on interacting with them, augment the reality we have at hand, the line between online and meatspace slowly goes away. We’ve always been impacting our environment with constructed signs and shaping it with our tools… we’re just continuing in that direction. Maybe someday I’ll talk to a hologram (or HUD display) of a friend across the globe. Maybe a geographically local friend will hand me a link to her new favorite book while we play chess at a tea shop. I think the important thing is the connectivity and the respect we give people we care about.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Willow, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Willow on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community.

Photo credit: Libby Bulloff

The article certainly references the major league players of my generation – Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Creative Commons, the Pirate Party, et al, but it’s aimed at my mother’s generation.

Quoth Kelly:

I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

There certainly are unsoiled terms waiting to be created, but if we insist on using an existing term, “socialism” is a strange one to attach to internet culture.

Quoth Wikipedia:

Socialism refers to any one of various theories of economic organization advocating state or cooperative ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of B.S., and a society characterized by equal opportunities/means for all individuals with a more egalitarian method of compensation based on the full product of the laborer.

The internet culture to which Kelly refers has little “cooperative ownership” and less “compensation.” If we insist on comparing internet culture to a system of state governance, benevolent anarchy might be a more suitable fit.

But if you talk to people who are enmeshed in internet culture, who spend hours editing Wikipedia, and producing articles (like this one) intended to go directly into the public domain, you will find that we don’t use the terms socialism or anarchy to describe our culture. This is a Revolution.

What Keven Kelly fails to grasp is that this is not the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; this is not a logical progression from Paine and Marx, as his cute infographics would suggest. This is an irreversible shift in the way that humanity understands and interacts with itself. Internet culture is like nothing we have seen before in human behavior.

All generations, I know, would believe that they are New and Different, but consider Iran. What other American generation has watched, hands to hearts, breaths collectively held, hours of footage, hundreds of pictures, thousands of tweets coming in real time from individual citizens on the other side of the planet? What other generation has interacted with itself in this way? People under 30 all over the globe are donning their green ribbons and wrist bands, because this isn’t about politics (mostly). It’s about Revolution.

Internet culture has brought Generation Y together across all borders. Some of us are passionate about unalienated labor and free rational inquiry, but most of us have never read about them. Most of us were simply taught that sharing and helping is the right thing to do. Our generation is the first to have been given the incredible means to publish worldwide instantly. So the question of whether we can help humanity isn’t an overwhelming and daunting one as it was to our parents, it’s a question of whether we have five minutes to hop on Wikipedia and contribute some research. It just so happens that sharing and helping on a global scale can tear down dictatorships, expose corruption, and heal a planet that for too long has suffered from division and misinformation.

In short, while Mr. Kelly is right that there are elements of socialism woven into the fabric of the internet, its bedrock is Revolution.