This is a wonderful idea, and I check the mail frequently enough to probably slide it past my parents. Awesome. I read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother when I was like 12ish. Fantastic, wonderful novel. I'd never really thought about the technology I was using before, so it was a serious eye-opener to see not only the underlying mechanisms of what I did with most of my time, but also the ways that those mechanisms could be twisted and re-utilized both in order to work basically against me (in terms of surveillance etc.) and in order to subvert the work that was being done that I disagreed with and felt a right to subvert. It's been about 3 years now, and I still haven't learned how to program (sidebar: if anyone wanted to tell me where to start learning specifically security/privacy-related programming you'd pretty much make my year), but I've spent the last portion of my life deeply involved in the fight for the internet, following the issues, getting angry about the NSA, supporting the EFF, teaching my friends about taking their own privacy, etc. Not only did Little Brother get me into all this, it also acted as a gateway to basically my entire politics right now, which is predicated on the belief that the world is super fucked up not because people are fucked up, not because it has to be this way, but because of the way the global socioeconomic system is designed. So it's kind of Cory Doctorow's fault that now my "tags used" on Hubski are as follows:
Oh, I remember being younger, maybe 10 and finding my parents math books from when they were 16. That's the day I learned about negative numbers. I felt so smart that day. Like the whole world was open in front of me, for me to do what I wished with. I felt powerful. Because I had power. Knowledge is power and I now knew something that people my age didn't. I knew about something that I could explain, and they couldn't. When I was older I read that book again. I read a section about computers, written when computers were new and exiting. That's when I realized that I could get a computer to do anything I wanted. ANYTHING. Today it is a matter of pride that I can mod The Sims myself. If I want my sims to lead horrible destructive lives with teenage pregnancy they will. Because I am their god. I AM THEIR GOD! Eh... Haha... Didn't mean that...