Police Story

Yes, I tell the same stories over and over. I meet with new listeners. Like on Facebook.

From Facebook:

Speaking of police work, I was contracted by a local police precinct back in the days of Napster because, get this, the police were tired of being used as the scary authorities asked to go into schools and scare the shit out of junior for illegally copying, like those FBI banners on VHS and DVDs that threaten you with higher fines and more years than manslaughter if you share what are in principle freely dupable digital assets.

The police had discovered they lived in the Silicon Forest, capital of open source, and the public schools were too fuckin' lazy to teach any of that stuff, just wanted to be mouthpieces for lawyers and big business, make the police be the enforcers.

Once the police put it together they said "fuck it, we'll teach Linux and stuff ourselves" and they hired me and this other guy to go into the police station to teach teens. They hoped to get a lot of Latino immigrant types because that's who was here for the American dream, but instead we got privileged white kids, really fun and smart I might add, who had less inherent fear of police.

So in that sense, the program failed. But I still say the police were thinking logically, and yes, the public schools are in many dimensions too lazy to be salvaged.