Saturday, May 16, 2015

Biella Coleman Talk

Biella Coleman and Astra Taylor came to my school, Rochester Institute of Technology on April 21!  They gave a talk in the Carlson Auditorium at 7pm and it was awesome.

First of all the Carlson Auditorium was a pain to find because for some reason I could not pinpoint its location using all of my mental effort.  I thought I was getting different descriptions of the location from every person I asked because for some reason I was under the impression that it was in the basement of the Liberal Arts building.  Luckily I texted dropofwill(github.com/dropofwill) to get a detailed description of the place.  Turns out the auditorium was literally just in the Carlson building where I had Discrete Math 3 years ago...

Anyway, Biella gave a crazy awesome presentation on the hacker group Anonymous(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29), which in itself was just a crazy awesome thing to experience because she's like the master of all information on Anonymous.  It was very interesting to hear Biella talk about the group from a very research oriented, cultural anthropological study perspective.  She focused mainly on the group's formation and evolution throughout time, and went in depth into the battle between Anonymous and Scientology.  It was also pretty crazy when she showed the post that Anonymous made attacking her personally.

Astra Taylor talked more about protesting in general, especially with regards to causes like battling topics intertwined with school loans.  She showed some quick videos she worked on to document the battle going on in these protests.  She's a pretty awesome filmmaker(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279083/).

After giving their respective presentations, both Biella and Astra sat down and talked about each others' books.  Biella highlighted what she liked about Astra's book and then proceeded to read some passages, and then Astra did the same for Biella's book.  The presentation in general was kind of a plug and extension of the books.


Personally, I really enjoyed these presentations.  I knew of Anonymous, but always wished I knew more about them, and Biella really did a great job imparting a ton of information about them.  I found it especially interesting the transition from being a group centered around trolling, to a serious hacktivist group, especially in the transitional case with the Church of Scientology.  The video Biella showed us of Anonymous calling out the Church of Scientology was kind of chilling.  I also thought Astra's presentation was super cool because I like to hear about when people are taking action to make a change, and the protests definitely relate to college students.  Someone asked if the things that made Anonymous so successful could be applied to other activist communities.  I thought it was interesting that no one really pointed out that Anonymous may have been successful because it kind of had roots as a type of gathering of friends to troll and make jokes.  I think there is huge appeal in that kind of a group.

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