Talofa reader,
I guess the first thing I should say about "AI" as a concept, an idea and a thing that's taken over the world as we know it, is- I'm not pro AI.
I'm not anti AI either- I feel like those labels immediately put people in the "extremes" of any argument and discussion.
Let's talk about how I see, and hear the argument about AI that I often see online.
Talofa reader,
Up until my final year, I was on my way to joining the airforce after high school when one thing happened that changed it all in one night.
My Croatian friend and I were chatting on ICQ when he asked me if I wanted "to see something cool?"
Yes. Of course I did.
Then he "hacked" my Dad's computer that I was using.
I had one of those movie-moment revelations - you know the ones where the protagonist's eyes are suddenly opened to the real world and they transcend their mere mortal experience into god-mode. Maybe not quite that dramatic, but this was the beginning of an unstoppable journey into a world that would completely revolutionise how I saw and understood everything.
I discovered the world of the hacker.
At the time, I saw these uniquely smart, unapologetically irreverent, super creative and stubbornly anti-establishment minds who stood for more than just breaking into computers.
In my eyes, they represented freedom of information, freedom of expression, and true intellectual meritocracy - it didn't matter your age, gender, race, or background. If you loved computers, loved learning, and believed in a free and fair society, you were in.
These were the people willing to risk it all to give big corps and suits the middle finger.
And I was here for all of it.
Now it's 2024. The world is full of more injustice than ever, all the things hackers stood against are thriving, but that hacker world I came to idolise?
I can't find it anywhere.
What happened?
Talofa reader,
The world is in a big mess right now, and it's hard to just potter on, talking about AI and technology. The reality of democracy and Western civilisation is being shown for the lies and hypocrisy it truly is, and it seems to be getting worse by the day.
The recent student protests that kicked off at Columbia University quickly spread around the world. They are in support of a free Palestine and aim to stop the genocide in Gaza this week.
These events have filled my timeline and my conscience, so I felt compelled to write it out.
I know I addressed the situation in Gaza in a few newsletters ago in:
The image of the West as the "shining light on the hill" started unraveling in a very public way since October the 7th.
This situation just reminds me this is not the first time Western civilisation has been shown to be the imperialist hegemony it really is.
As we saw with Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless wars, WikiLeaks and wiki pages later revealed U.S. and European war crimes and atrocities.
Usually, this stuff gets hushed up.
The media are able to facilitate the laundering of Western-backed genocides while Western governments are being trigger-happy on putting sanctions on countries.
They influence other countries to do the same (or else), or they just straight up “regime change” these sovereign nations, to better pillage that country's resources.
I don't know why, but it feels different this time - and not in a good way1…
Maybe it's because of phrases like"the first genocide where victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real-time."that describe just how connected we are due to technology, and that we can now get the real, raw,on-the-ground devastationin real time.
I don't want to vent (much) about geopolitics and history.
I'm not an expert in those fields. I know what I've read and picked up, bits and pieces here and there.
I wanted to look at how something can go from being a great idea - like liberty, freedom, and free speech - to something that's oppressive, tyrannical, and must be resisted.
That's essentially the first part of the opening quote - if you want bad things, want all you want, it's got nothing to do with me.
But, and it's a massive "but", if the person has the***"power"***to bring about those bad things, upon me - that is 100% every single part, my problem.
It’s about power.
Talofa reader,
I often tell the story of what first got me into thinking about tech, so for this edition, I thought I’d dive deep into what made it such a life-changing point in my life.
Without a doubt, it was getting "hacked" by a high school friend over ICQ late one night while chatting.
That opened my eyes to what was possible with a little knowledge and skill with tech.
From then on, I was hooked.
I couldn’t wait to get my course costs from my university loan to buy my own, very first computer, an Acer laptop.
Real hackers run Linux, so I installed RedHat 5.2—no dual boot, just deleted Windows.
Linux straight, no chaser.
For the next, what seemed like ‘always’, I would battle it out with device drivers, getting my sound card to work, getting my video card to work, learning how to configure, compile and install my own kernels to ensure things worked.
My obsession with getting really good at wielding the power of computing, networking, and programming drove me to learn anything and everything from the hardware up through all 7 OSI layers.
I can’t even hazard a guess at how many hours all up I spent on learning, breaking, and fixing computers, how many all-nighters, weekends, and public holidays I spent just hacking on things.
I thought I just wanted to be a 31337 hax0r, and that was my obsession…
But it wasn’t until I came across a piece of writing, iconic in hacking culture, that I realised hacking was more than computer tricks for me…
That piece of writing was the hacker's manifesto.
TheHackers Manifesto1is a short essay written Lloyd Blankenship aka"The Mentor"of the infamous hacker group"Legion of Doom".
It featured in Issue 7, of equally infamous Hacker Magazine “Phrack” in 1986, and has been cited in popular culture, like the movie Hackers, The Social Network and in Edward Snowden’s autobiography.
You can read it yourself, but it’s the perspective of a smart kid, misunderstood and dismissed by his teachers, bored and unchallenged at school, who finds a world that challenges and teaches him, whereinformation is free.
Sure- if you're familiar with the manifesto- you might think it's cheesy, a bit cringe, “of it’s time” etc.
But I can’t deny the sentiment of"The Mentor"vibed somewhere deep in me.
Why?
Good question.
The manifesto sounded like it was written by a palagi kid, from the U.S., I’m going to go out on a limb here and say probably from a decent home (one that had a computer at least).
So what did we have in common?2
What’s Stopping Us Building the Life We Want to Live? Let’s Do That in 2024.
Talofa, reader,
Happy New Year, or as we say in Samoan: Manuia le tausaga fou!
As my end-of-2023 post laid out…
…it was a year of firsts.
I’m nothing if not regularly trying new things.
Which is why the start of this year (most years actually) has me always feeling some type of way.
The new year often brings with it a sense of renewal, of energy, of conviction, and focus.
We get to planning everything and mapping out calendars and other planning notes.
When you've done as many cycles around the sun as I have, finding goals to achieve every new year is the easy part; there's a literal "whole world" of things to choose from.
The problem is paring things down to a few and driving those to a level of quality or success to be happy with.
Easy right?
There's the saying we often*"overestimate what we can achieve in a year, and underestimate what can be achieved in ten years."*
Over the years, I've often thought the problem was time management and employed all manner of technology and tools to help me achieve dozens of goals, each with their list of sub-goals.
FromToggltoNotionplanners,Todoist, and various Chrome extensions for clipping and saving websites, images, multiple Google calendars with reminders, all in an effort to achieve a bunch of goals that realistically should have spanned several years, not one.
I learned about creating “systems” instead of goals, and atomic habits fromJames Clear.
I even started usingZettelkastennote-taking and learning about a second brain because I thought maybe if I got smarter more efficiently, I could use the smarter brain to work out why I wasn’t super fulfilled with the things I was doing.
It took a long time to come to the following realisation, and not to get all "zen" on us here for the start of 2024, but I think even practically in many other respects,thisis the core reason for our lives going in the wrong direction:
If you don't know who you are, how will you ever know what you (the "real" you) want?
Obviously, the answer to that requires things way outside the scope of this newsletter (or any of my qualifications), but suffice to say, this point is central for directing you at least towards where you'd be happy.
Some call having this knowledge their "north star," or the thing that guides and keeps them on track.
When we don't have this north star, we run into trouble, even if we don't know it.