Toward Data Liberation

Toward Data Liberation

25 Jun, 2020

The main reason I created this site, rather than just update my old portfolio is to own my own data. #

I’ve been working “on” the Internet for some time - since the mid 90’s while attending engineering college at University. While I have some nostalgia for all sorts of the computing space from that time (terminals are neat!) what I miss the most is the total lack of centralized authority firstly, followed by the anything-is-possible-without-corporations a close second.

Lately, that Internet has seemed very far away from me. It was time for a change.

I’ve made a lot of work, both personal and professional, on many different platforms. I started to worry that I had no real copy of any of that work, and, the Internet Archive aside, should any of the platforms I used to create the work go away, I’d lose all of it forever. (see the MySpace music debacle as an obvious and problematic example).

Also, I thought it was important to not make such a strong distinction between my personal and professional work. Having it all together exposes the continuum of the entire body of the things I made - they don’t exist separate from one another.

So here we are - I decided to create this new site that could fully align my politics with my personal desires.

It’s a start - I have a lot of work to do to both add my old content, as well as create new work. It’s been fun working on the design and development of it; I’ve had to acknowledge my programming skill rustiness, and sort out my own devops process. It’s also been fun (and I highly recommend everyone do this exercise) tracking down everything I’ve made and pulling it together. The things you put on the Internet tell a particular story. This one is mine.

N.B. Some technical details for the interested

25 Jun, 2020