Matthew Schutte

Month: June 2015

Contrast: the key to awareness

bitter+sweet

 

Today, I was coordinating a time to meet up with an elderly friend of mine for the LGBT Pride Parade this coming Sunday.  My friend is brilliant, accomplished, 86 years old and gay.  In his note to me, he included the following comment:

 

“It has been a lifelong, (and) at times, a tough journey.  Alas! Liberation came too late to be of much help but it’s good nonetheless. It seems Sweet on the scale only has meaning relative to Bitter.”

 

There is a depth of pain hinted at in those words.  At the same time, I believe there is a separate, important truth.

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Power and Powerlessness

Food that does not exist
A while ago, I wrote an email to a friend that included some life/career advice.  I stumbled upon it recently and figured that it was one of those pieces of writing that is better shared broadly, than kept buried in an email archive.
I’ve removed personal references and have modified it slightly in places to make it easier to read.
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…As for my own personal two cents:
I’d say to take a step back and examine the factors that drive your ambition to make sure that they are guiding you toward a “reward” that is “worth it.”
From some of our earlier conversations, you mentioned not wanting to feel powerless.  You said that as far as you could tell (to paraphrase) “people with money and power get listened to and those without it – don’t.”…

Article: Is there such a thing as objective reality?

I found this article on Wired today.  It is an interview that they pulled from Quanta Magazine with Quantum Physicist Christopher Fuchs.  The interview is an interesting one, particularly for someone like me.  I’ve been inspired by my brief forays into quantum physics to be aware of the ways that “perspective” dominates experience and as a result shapes what we can know about the world.  I have no idea whether some of the things Dr. Fuchs is conjecturing are accurate, but for completely different reasons I’ve focused my designs of information systems on architectures that allow for each subject to view the information in the system from their own perspective.

Enjoy.

Guest Speaking at UC Berkeley: On Privacy + On Regulation

I recently was invited to speak to a class at UC Berkeley on Critical Digital Philosophy.

I used the opportunity to open up a discussion with the students on a couple of subjects.

This probably includes the clearest articulation of my general theories of privacy and regulation that I’ve shared to date.

Colas Zibaut gave a class introduction and shared a short film on digital surveillance. The discussion that I led starts at 9:45.  Thanks to Colas and to Lukas Peter for the invitation.

Enjoy!

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