When I first moved to New York in 2012 I lived in uptown Manhattan with a housemate whom I liked a lot. It was a great situation for me. She was a long time New Yorker, we both worked in publishing, she was a great conversationalist, we often ate together, and in general was whatever I could want in housemate and rooming situation. I was on a sublet lease and after some months I had to go. From there I moved to live with my current roommate. In NYC everyone meets lots of people but my housemate there, Kathryn, proved to be someone whom I enjoyed staying in touch with. It can be hard to meet in NYC. Because of local culture people work more here. Perhaps I should say because of cost of living, there is a local culture of working more here, and also that meshes with NYC being a place designed to incentivize people to work more. Katheryn and I had been exchanging emails for too long but failing to meet in person. I heard that Edward Snowden would be speaking at the New York Public Library and based on previous conversations thought that Katheryn might be interested in joining me. She was; we agreed to meet; it was great.
The talk was called “Cory Doctorow with Edward Snowden: Dystopia, Apocalypse, and other Sunny Futures” and was part of a NYPL series. What most interested me was the fact of the talk and the way that technology has changed society. Edward Snowden is a political exile as a United States citizen forced to live in Russia, an enemy state, for political reasons. Historically governments have prohibited exiles from communicating with their audience base. Nowadays Snowden does the conference circuit by teleconference, talks just as much as any public figure in social media, and otherwise is able to exist in people’s lives like any other popular media figure. From one perspective everyone can contact him, see that he is okay, and develop opinions about his activities as he himself does typical human behavior and lives a normal enough life outside his country. From another perspective he is sort of invisible because journalists are under pressure to avoid talking about him. He and his girlfriend engage in outlandish behavior, like for example, in 2015 for Halloween in exile he and his girlfriend dressed as Carmen Sandiego and Wally/Waldo and photoshopped themselves in front of the FBI Building. The joke is that those two are characters in games where children seek to find them, and the FBI wants to arrest Snowden and torture him till insanity because he exposed government military investment intended to attack American citizens with surveillance. In hindsight the Snowden leaks seemed concerning but defensible because United States rule of law seemed resolute in the Obama administration and before. Nowadays in the Trump administration all political parties and leadership figures say that the US government is totally corrupt, broken, and being used inappropriately for illegal reasons to attack the other party and the American people. Snowden was right; there is no way to trust humans with as much power as he demonstrated the government was accumulating and allowing corporations to accumulate. There is no politician who would like their opponents to have unchecked access to that power, and all politicians are nowadays accusing their opponents of misusing that power. To me, Snowden was just a messenger, and it seems obvious to me that there is a public interest in knowing where anyone has created a seat of power where if any person sits, then suddenly they direct the economy, politics, etc beyond any separation of powers. New technology requires public discussion and Snowden found himself in a unique position to raise that discussion. I appreciate that.
Other people would say other things about Snowden. Everyone has an opinion. What surprised me about this event is that the talk was in a small space and relatively few people showed up. I do not know why I keep getting surprised at this because no one shows up for anything in NYC. I often get discount tickets to world-class stage performances which tour to NYC. Tickets are cheap but yet no one shows up. It would be hard for me to describe how impressed I am for what I have seen and how surprised I am that there is so much opportunity for anyone who manages to live here can access so many amazing experiences with so little cost and effort except for the expenditure of time. I will not say that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are the most exciting celebrity actors, but they are well known enough. They did Waiting for Godot in late 2013 and Kathyrn and I both went to see them in separate shows. When we exchanged notes, we both loved the performance and both remarked that the tickets went to a discount because apparently no one wants to see Professor X and Magneto do Vladimir and Estragon. Snowden is not really a pop sensation, and neither are those actors, and definitely no one should expect advance recognition of even the best performance troops unless they have the best media teams backing them, but still, having the opportunity to walk up and interact with Snowden seems like an amazing free opportunity to me. I felt like I had an unusual experience to be able to be in a live conversation with someone so reviled by law and yet so welcome to talk freely in a public space.
Corey was there promoting his latest book and drawing conversation out of Snowden. I had talked with Corey at the last HOPE conference where he was keynote. Corey is a nice guy. I know people want to talk to him. I know that he wants people to approach him. He was the keynote speaker of that conference (HOPE 2016) and when I was in the chill space doing my own thing, I saw him mostly standing alone. He is not unapproachable. I know there are lots of people who would like to have a conversation with him. Maybe I looked at the wrong times, or maybe somehow he has a status which deters the people who would want to talk with him. I saw him at New York Comic Con a year or two before that and he was alone at a table selling his own book when I passed by multiple times. When I lived in Seattle I went to a book reading of his one time at the University Book Store on The Ave and there were 5 of us there. Even at that time I expected more because Corey is as well known of a science fiction author as anyone else, and also he is probably the most popular technology commentator in the world. He gave an awesome reading. I have seen him in other settings and apparently he does not distinguish between keynoting, talking to any random person who appears in front of him, or presenting to people who do not know him but happen to take a chair at his book store presentation, or being keynote. I suppose I had the idea that if a person reaches a certain level of celebrity then somehow they get a rock star lifestyle. Apparently there are different kinds of celebrities and a person can be extremely well known and highly sought after but at the same time somewhat ignored, perhaps I suppose because people assume they are inaccessible despite them being right there in public advertising their willingness to interact in a very personal way. Corey has been very good as a science fiction writing mentor to my friend Evan J. Peterson. I respect that Corey takes time to mentor other writers, which is something that a person would never do for money or career advancement but which is only about mutual respect for fellow travelers. Seeing all this makes me wonder about what it means to have audience attention and how a public figure can interact with fans and supporters in a way that is meaningful and accomplishes something.
I had previously seen Snowden when he presented at HOPE 2014. At least that event was full. At the time I also thought it bizarre because Snowden had arrived in Russia in summer 2013. I did a little research at the time. So far as I could tell, that HOPE conference was Snowden’s first conference presentation. I was surprised that no journalist picked up on the story that a political exile was doing a conference. I do not follow the news or research about Snowden. Maybe someone has cataloged his talks or maybe not. It seems historically significant to me but it can be so hard to talk openly so I can understand why even people who are interested would keep quiet.
Corey and Snowden talked. I do not think their words were as important as the fact of them talking and that they said that people have a right to privacy. I was there to be with them and feel the right to privacy. I do remember that Corey was going on about how the W3C was betraying the world by establishing anti-consumer pro-industry DRM standards. Either that did not relate to Snowden, or maybe that issue relates to everything. I agree that it is one of the most important social issues for me and it should be for others too. Right now I do not know what to link to explain the issue; there are so many debates which have no good publishing around them and do not make it to Wikipedia. I wish I could link a wiki article, and I wish that the wiki article was the mirror of a good summary, but we are not there yet. I wish I had time to write for wiki or that somehow I had a few more hours free in a day.
Following the talk Kathryn and I went to Little India. She knows how I like Indian culture and it was a nice suggestion. She tole me that the previous year she went to Burning Man with her children and their families. Her children insisted that she go and she enjoyed it more than she expected. I had known Kathryn as a male in transition to female, and our meeting this time was the first time I was calling her in person as Kathryn instead of Ed. She told me that she left publishing and finished additional education to do counseling and is working at the Ali Forney Center, which is an LGBT+ youth center. I asked her how things were going and she said that a 20-year old person who uses their services had recently committed suicide. I asked how her clients were and she said lots of potential with care but often in very unfortunate circumstances. She was open and is open about her transition. She fathered several children, was uncomfortable about her gender role in relationships. She said she has some regrets about being unable to express herself earlier in life but feels relieved for her present situation and finds it rewarding to talk with younger people and all kinds of people about what it means to express gender and sexuality in the LGBT+ space. My experience being gay and all the time I have spent in LGBT+ spaces gives me some understanding of this but to hear it from Kathyrn made me feel deeply connected and responsible for the trouble in the world and thinking about what I should do with others to address it.
She said that at Burning Man someone put a grand piano in the open plain for anyone who might come along. Kathyrn would play upon coming from work and when we lived together then I would listen. I suppose that the piano was intended for Kathyrn to play. She said that she found some wandering kid on MDMA who took it without any particular agenda, but the drug brought out some difficult concerns and self reflection. Kathyrn told me that she went into counselor mode and did a session for the kid as a client. She told me that under the influence of the drug the client was much more direct, open, and responsive to inquiry and prompting, and much better able to express themselves. She told me that the information and insight that the client was able to share and come to understand for themselves was the equivalent of many typical therapy sessions. I have heard these stories before. Kathyrn is urban enough to know what’s up but I never knew her to have much interest in drug culture. It is hard to trust any authority. The authorities with institutional social status are either idiotic or silent on issues of surveillance, justice for Snowden, DRM’ing Internet standards, censorship, journalism, community health, entheogenic drugs, access to information, and the advent of technology in general that it is hard get reliable basic information about consumer products and services in most situations. The more experts I meet the more human and humble everyone seems, and while I only meet good individuals, it seems like everyone is under the duress of social situations where good people collectively somehow take on characteristics and habits which no individual would want. I do not regret the regulation of drugs which can be abused but when I hear these stories I often feel that I live in a society which has a deep spiritual undercurrent of everyone expecting pain and distress, and if anything is awesome but not behind a commercial gatekeeping system then there is too much pushback on it.
We had our meal and said that we would meet again soon. It is never soon enough or often enough for me.