A Commencement Speech That Doesn't Suck

Katherine Mangu-Ward | June 11, 2009

Jonathan Zittrain, an expert on legal threats to the Internet, is obviously a huge nerd. He recently gave a commencement speech at his former high school which features some great geek-gazelle-stalked-by-lions-on-the-high-school-savanna moments. (One crucial mistake: "Wearing my school backpack over both shoulders. I was alerted to my lack of fashion sense when someone drop kicked it from behind while I was wearing it. It sailed about six inches off the ground, taking me with it like a parachute in an updraft, and I landed with it upside down across my stomach.)

Zittrain, now a law professor at Harvard, maintains a site called Chilling Effects which "monitors the legal climate for Internet activity." He's also the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

One day the government of Pakistan sought to filter out YouTube from its citizens. It told its Internet Service Providers to block access to YouTube. One small ISP carried out the order by sending a small lie to its subscribers and neighbors: it announced that it was in fact YouTube. Its subscribers’ packets were then drawn there like a magnet, where the ISP could throw them away, since the point was to block YouTube.

But it didn’t stop there. Within a few minutes word had ricocheted around the Internet that YouTube had moved, and if you were here in Pittsburgh trying to reach YouTube, your packets were going to Pakistan and not coming back—and there was nothing that YouTube, one of the most popular Web sites in the world, and its owner Google, the most powerful company in the world, were particularly privileged to do about it. So how was the problem solved? It’s as if the Bat Signal went up, and the call was answered by NANOG, the North American Network Operators Group, an informal mailing list of nerds, some of whom work for various ISPs. NANOG members diagnosed the issue and promulgated a fix. It’s as if your house were to catch on fire. The bad news is that there’s no fire department. The good news is that some of your neighbors promptly come over with garden hoses and put the fire out, expecting neither payment nor recognition for their help. It’s an extremely powerful civic defense system.

More from the Berkman Center universe here and here. 

Via David Weinberger

Comments

|6.11.09 @ 11:49AM|#

How the hell did you guys get Epi's high school picture?

|6.11.09 @ 11:51AM|#

The good news is that some of your neighbors promptly come over with garden hoses and put the fire out, expecting neither payment nor recognition for their help. It's an extremely powerful civic defense system.

Crackpot fantasist!

Everybody knows "civilians" are incapable of acting effectively in their own interests.

Xeones|6.11.09 @ 12:05PM|#

Nooo it was centralized government action what fixed it la la la can't hear you la la la

Dormouse|6.11.09 @ 12:06PM|#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZlQd2Eg-9w

This one is pretty good too.

|6.11.09 @ 12:08PM|#

One small ISP carried out the order by sending a small lie to its subscribers and neighbors: it announced that it was in fact YouTube.

I smell damages. YouTube could crush them like a bug, just with defense costs alone.

|6.11.09 @ 12:19PM|#

How the hell did you guys get Epi's high school picture?

I would never, ever wear a tie unless there was a gun to my head.

Xeones|6.11.09 @ 12:27PM|#

I would never, ever wear a tie unless there was a gun to my head cake.

Fixed.

|6.11.09 @ 12:37PM|#

We all want cake, Xeones. We all want cake.

|6.11.09 @ 12:56PM|#

You guys do know that the cake is a lie, right?

|6.11.09 @ 12:59PM|#

Look, Danny, we're doing the best we can to weed them out, but some of these retards can be very clever.

short, fat bastard|6.11.09 @ 1:37PM|#

Tieing this thread in with the child pornography thread . . . somewhere, lurking in some closet, is a photo of an even shorter, short, fat bastard dressed in his new Boy Scout uniform smiling from ear to ear.

That my friends is true, nerd pornography.

Kyle Jordan|6.11.09 @ 1:46PM|#

"I would never, ever wear a tie unless there was a gun to my head."

Dude, Michael Westen and Sam Axe wear ties, so they have to be cool.

Spoonman|6.11.09 @ 1:54PM|#

Michael Westen has a special exemption for pretty much anything he does. Except when he tossed all those guns in the sea. WTF?

hmm|6.11.09 @ 1:59PM|#

Do not fuck with the nerds.

This maxim has held true for as long as nerds have existed.

Kyle Jordan|6.11.09 @ 2:01PM|#

Yeah having Sam toss all the guns was a dumb move. Though with Fiona around and his other connections, he probably doesn't have trouble getting what he needs.

short, fat bastard|6.11.09 @ 2:05PM|#

Football might exist without nerdds, but big-screen, high-definition TVs wouldn't.

|6.11.09 @ 3:10PM|#

Though with Fiona around and his other connections, he probably doesn't have trouble getting what he needs.

Now, if Fiona could only find a doughnut or 2.