My Life

When you look into the world, you see what your parents wanted you to see. If your parents are rich, then you’re used to seeing more expensive items in a nice and clean house. If in the working class, then you might be used to a smaller and more cramped house with less opportunity to move around the world. This is how people see and perhaps the reason why, after Robert Peace attended Yale, he went back into the business of dealing drugs and got shot. 

“In order for a child to be successful, they need to grow up in a loving environment with lots of attention” (Jack Elkin, ODU ‘19). This is one of the most common mistakes teen parents can make. I target teen parents in particular because adult parents seem to satisfy their child’s thirst for attention with the flat screen of an iPhone and some soda. Luckily for them, this method seems to work as children are now growing up with 1 thousand followers on Instagram by the time they’re 10; a stellar accomplishment that can be placed right on their resume. I even heard that colleges check Facebook, which obviously means that they’re seeing how many “friends” you have. 

Instead, teen moms like Jackie in the novel “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” by Jeff Hobbs don’t go out “socially since the birth, and she had no inclination to do so” because of all the attention she was giving the baby (10, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace). This is a vital mistake. Jackie should be more like Skeet, Robert’s father who when Rob “spontaneously recited Go, Dog. Go!” after only hearing it once, triggered Skeet to wonder “why his son’s head was being saturated by stories involving canines picnicking in tree canopies” (16, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace). Skeet, a highly regarded cocaine dealer who is seldom available in Rob’s life is absolutely right. A child at the age of 4 shouldn’t be memorizing rhymes in books, or using their naturally acquired talents and gifts. They should be constructively using their time with other useful skills like selling drugs, posting pictures on Instagram to raise their social status, and finding the fastest route to Starbucks in their brand new Mercedes that their dad bought them. But all of that comes after your adult parents, and not teen moms like Jackie who love their children, have successfully washed your brain with any creativity by handing you a phone. 

The novel I am reading is called “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” by Jeff Hobbs. I have reached my first task of getting to page 17 in 30 minutes. Through challenging mathematical calculations, I am required to read about 68 pages per 2 hours every week. 

I found this book in the library and thought it would be an "rags to riches” story about Robert Peace who went from poverty to Yale. Yet it doesn’t end there, and my goal is to make it to this point. That is my goal so far because once there, I can decide if I want to continue and visualize the harsh reality that money is equivalent to human value, or if I want to stop and say that I read a “rags to riches” story. Luckily, History is very similar to my reading goal as I can choose to leave certain parts out and be happy with where I am in life. Or we can acknowledge the truth in harsh reality, but who would want that?

Our information that we put online matters, or more important, it's just like matter. We move data from our heads into the form of words on places like Tumblr, Facebook and other social media sites. Yet once posted, it can't be destroyed. We might click the delete button or put something in the "trash" on our laptops, but that information is never destroyed. Ever since the internet was created, "logs" were put in place on servers that tracked each individual byte of information sent and received. These servers are still around today and have data from basically everywhere. 

As I look outside on this snowy day, I saw the wind blow snow from my house and saw it scatter in random places hundreds of feet away. This is our data and this is our information. We might think that we are in control of it and that it is in our land, when in reality, our data is being sold (for a whole lot of money) and scattered in the hands of advertisers, governments and people. We might not even notice that it's gone because look how small snowflakes are, and are data is even smaller, when it is. 

The novel "More Awesome Than Money" by Jim Dwyer really has given me a lot to think about concerning my identity and who is in control of it. As I approach the end and look to read other novels, I will forever look at social media differently. 

3 sailors playing sneaky sneak in a hotel room. Who knew that this would become a hobby that is so similar to that of Max, Dan, Rafael and Ilya. Well other than the exception that they raised around $50,000 as college seniors, made the MakerBot 3D printing machine in their spare time, and spent about 14 hours coding for project Diaspora. Other than that, our hobbies have a lot in common and maybe that's what allowed me to connect to this novel, especially as it progressed. However, reading "More Awesome Than Money" did differ in various ways than sneaky sneak. First of all, I didn't have to jump on top of anyone and scare them with the lights off in order to read this book. Second of all, who would want to read how the United States was (in 2013) "seeking data on nearly eleven thousand people, and an uncertain number of requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" while being jumped by jackisbae (Dwyer, 82). If I was also listening to awsm-hair-danderson while "they were creating a function, something that would make it possible to use the distributed, federated nature of the Internet", then I would have easy missed this sentence because someone was apparently "outside the door" (Dwyer, 100). 

So what does success feel like? Success feels like eating Ramen noodles and coding for 18 hours per day on Project Diaspora. Well that's what Max, Dan, Rafael and Ilya thought of course. But inspiring change seems a lot more awesome than money to me. 

Exposing a hacker is honestly quite easy coming from a mundane human being such as myself. First, you need to read a book with a couple of nerdy people, such as that of "More Awesome Than Money" by Jim Dwyer, and then you've got them in the act. Red handed. Seriously, who hacks into the principal's computer in middle school and admits to it in a National Best Seller book. The hacker even gave his name, which is "Ilya" (unless he got smart and changed it), goes to NYU, and is interested in changing the world. I'm only 73 pages into the novel and basically have the guys phone number sitting in front of my face. 

Getting this far has really allowed me to see into the lives of each and every individual who is currently working on protecting our privacy from Facebook. However, Jim Dwyer hasn't just given us, the readers, a dry desert of a story behind each person. No, he's fed us with what we want. The Sage-A-Licious and scrumptiously good chocolate chip cookies. Obviously that was a symbol for an inviting history between each former "hacker" and what they did to get to where they are. For example, who doesn't love reading about how "for meals, he practiced Dumpster diving- salvaging edible sandwiches and even sushi from the bins outside a coffee shop"(Dwyer, 36)! A truly fascinating book so far with lots of splendid evidence, even though I don't see a works cited. I wonder if this was his Great Journeys Project. 

Hold your horses! I was about to come to a deep and meaningful conclusion to my blog post, but I sensationally thought of a question that has provoked interesting thinking. How far does coincidence get you in life? They say that everything works out in the end, but what would have worked out if I had or hand't done something else? I wonder..

February 2010: A friday night. Now before you continue, I warn you that I am a teenager who doesn't typically read sappy love stories (I might or might not have read The Fault In Our Stars) or read much fiction either. I adore books that attempt to depict the reality of the world through a variation of the truth. One variation is found in the novel "More Awesome Than Money", which begins by describing Eben Moglen who delivered an enchanting speech at NYU that shook the world...well the world of those who sit in an auditorium on a Friday night. Up until page 32, which is where I abruptly stopped to follow the crowd to lunchtime as per daily ritual, Moglen had me trapped in his non-fictional world like Courage the Cowardly Dog (not a paid advertisement). Even though this novel is not an memoir (gasp), I truly enjoy it because it has elements of a memoir, fiction and non-fiction novels. It is spectacular to read how Moglen's speech about how Zuckerberg "has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age" could inspire 4 aspiring technologists to save the world's privacy (18, Jim Dwyer). Aside from the nerdiness, this is non-fiction that can feel like fiction at some points. Who would be so moved by a speech that, that same night, they met in an IT room to discuss their approach at giving people privacy from Facebook's peeping eyes. Facebook is so hangry not only for people's attention that brings money through advertisements, but also to collect people's private information so that it can be sold. Seriously, Zuckerberg, we Facebook users didn't expect this behavior from one of the youngest billionaires in the world. 

Sure it's difficult reading about how logs and PHP's changed the internet forever, but if you had an SSR reading requirement then you might enjoy it. What started off as a desperate attempt to find a book to fill in the empty void of not having a book to read, I took my final gasp of air and clawed at "More Awesome Than Money". What initially began as a requirement soon became an attachment, like a cute puppy and who doesn't love a cute puppy? Other than puppies, if you love reading about how people are currently changing the world because "every day that goes by, there's data that we'll never get back", then you won't see the outside world for a while (28, Jim Dwyer). It was hard putting this book down once our English class was over primarily because it is fascinating to see how students in college find changing our world more attractive than the stunning green that George Washington wears. 

The question that has been bugging me the past few days is: should I shut down my Facebook account or not? Now I've found this question pretty easy to answer for someone who has lived in the same place all their life, because they wouldn't have too many friends that are beyond their reach. But for someone who has moved through Russia and Tanzania, I am finding this decision to be quite thought provoking. Even Lightspeed has been turned off by the school to impede my decision, #strugglecity.