Not sure if I am doing this correctly, thanks for your commentary on my journal! I actually am writing because I have tried to engage in the second technology project and am meeting some difficulty. I tried disabling my VPN just in case that was the issue but it seems to persist. I will try to reach out to a classmate with a mac and see if they can help. There has always been a weird dissonance for me - I find technology fascinating, but am quite inept at getting it to work for me. This feeds into a more general problem I have about following directions. I think my lack of tech savvy is also exacerbated by my contempt and distrust of evolving technology. At any rate, I appreciate these projects for the reasons you mentioned, but might have a little difficulty getting them started on my own.

As zoom school has picked up, I find myself fighting an uphill battle. I reached out to my clinic professors about finding an alternate to zoom - or at least exercising caution when using it - given the confidential nature of our work (and my general contempt for the platform). I imagined this would be an easier sell than usual because of everything surfacing about Zoom in the news. However, they dismissed my concerns and continue to require us to appear. I told them I was not comfortable sharing my screen and they have not yet asked me to do that.

I think now is a great moment to lean into all these technology projects, but I do feel the gulf is greater than ever before between people like my classmates and I and the general public who appear to have no concern for how their data is being monitored and appropriated.

I'm going to try to meet this need, which I agree is perhaps the most useful way to put this course to work in the new environment. Tech project 2 will provide for free most of what your so-called VPN service can do for you, at no cost and without having to rely on another third party. Learning to install and use Tails in projects 3 and 4 will give you a more secure OS and the best approximation to anonymity we still have. That's not enough, but it's a start.

HillaryHubley's Journal

So much of my attention has been consumed by (too) closely following the news related to the covid outbreak. I am still in New York and it is quite scary here, in part due to the rapid escalation of infections and death, in part due to the effect social distancing measures have had on city life, and also in part to the switch to a virtual life. The last piece has been more troubling for me than most, but I imagine I'm in good company among my classmates. Over spring break I invested in a VPN and have tried even more fervently to stay off my phone. I have also tried to refrain from social activities that to me lend themselves easily to surveillance capitalism and profiteering. I'd love to hear from you how to navigate this complicated relationship with technology as we go forward. I would like to continue to lead a healthy life offline, but in many ways that just got much harder.

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