In our PLP class, we have just began a new unit. We have been focusing on technology and how it has changed our world as we know it. We’ve been looking at our lives and seeing how technology has changed our daily routines, work life, and school life. In this unit, we will be researching and creating projects through the lens of technology as a disruption.
Our driving question for the unit: How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?
The first thing we did over the Christmas break to kick off this unit was read a novel called Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It’s a fiction novel about some teenagers who live in San Francisco, in an unstated future time. The technology in this city rules over everyone, and the government is monitoring everything everyone does. I don’t want to spoil the book, but the main idea is that there was a terroirs attack on the bay bridge. A massive bomb was set off, and the government scrambles to find out who is responsible. They use unjust and wrong ways to do this, and the main characters use their internet and hacking skills to fight back.
This book is related to our driving question because it shows how technology has disrupted our lives. To me, it seemed that technology has taken away the freedom of the characters in the book, because the government is watching everywhere you go, everything you do, in real life and on the internet. The main characters were constantly having to use secure servers to talk and outsmart security devices.
But we also had another aspect to this assignment. The book we read had mentioned a whole list of other topics, from people to computer programs, that were related to technology. We had to choose one topic from the list to reseazrch and write a blog post on.
And my research topic:
A man named Andrew “Bunnie” Huang.
So far, the most interesting thing about him, unless you already know who he is, is his strange nickname. His nickname is short for vorpalbunnie, which is the name of a creature in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that he used as a BBS screen name. Here is a video of a presentation he did about himself, if you’re interested in knowing more about him:
In the book Little Brother, his place in it was writing the afterword, where he talks about being a hacker, and how Little Brother shows what it is like as a hacker.
Andrew Huang is an American researcher and hacker, and has a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT. He is most well known for when he hacked into Xbox. As he said in Little Brother’s afterword, “When I hacked the Xbox in 2002 while at MIT, I wasn’t doing it to rebel or to cause harm; I was just following a natural impulse, the same impulse that leads to fixing a broken iPod or exploring the roofs and tunnels at MIT.”
He also explained that hackers are sort of looked down upon, as misfits looking for trouble. “I was lucky.” Huang said, “The fact that I was a graduate student at MIT when I hacked the Xbox legitimized the activity (of hacking) in the eyes of the right people.” He also was the hardware lead at Chumby, meaning he designed and lead the production of the Chumby devices.
He has many other technological achievements, including designing the worlds first fully integrated photonic-silicon chip that runs at 10 Gbit/s and participating in designing of wireless transceivers for use in Bluetooth networks.
He also is well known for his long history with reverse engineering. He even wrote a book about hacking the Xbox: Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. This was one of the first published books about reverse engineering. While hacking the xbox, Xbox, the organization, put lots of legal pressure on Andrew not to release any details on the systems he was hacking into. MIT also sent him a letter saying that they were not a part of what he was doing.
But what does all of this have to do with our driving question?
Well, in Little brother, the main character Marcus was a computer hacker as well. He wasn’t doing any hacking to cause legal trouble, only for his own fun and interests. But after the bombing, he was kidnapped, and after the government saw what he was doing with his technology, they falsely accused and held him prisoner as terrorist suspect. This is showing that technology has disrupted our ability to explore, since the government was watching Marcus, and stopped him from going further with what he likes to do. Andrew Huang once said this:
“Without the right to tinker and explore, we risk becoming enslaved by technology; and the more we exercise the right to hack, the harder it will be to take that right away.”
He is saying that we have a lot of great technology at our fingertips nowadays, and people who want to dig through and tinker should be able to, just like a mechanic with a car.
Andrew Huang isn’t the answer to my class’s driving question, but he does explain that some technology is blocking the freedom of individual people that want to explore more in computer programming. He says this in the afterword of Little Brother:
“We win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon.”
When I first started writing this, I didn’t have that many ideas on what to write. But as I got going, I realized how everything I’ve been reading about connects. I actually enjoyed the writing part of this assignment, and reading about Andrew Huang. I also didnt understand parts of the book Little Brother, but I began piecing more and more together as a wrote this. It also helped me understand more about what our driving question is asking. Overall, I learned a lot about computer programming and was thoroughly interested in my topic.
That’s all,
See you