After class today, Eben’s comment that the net destroys taboos particularly piqued my interest. I took Law and Contemporary Society with Eben last spring where we discussed cannibalism in the context of The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens and other incidents of cannibalism occurring amongst shipwrecked sailors. Still intrigued by the discussion from that course, I wanted to start topic, perhaps a little prematurely given Eben's promise that we would get to it later, discussing taboos. Which is why, I did a quick search on this TWiki to see what had been posted previously on this topic.

I found one existing topic which primarily discusses child pornography and I saw that Eben commented, “I still think, after all the wonderful work that has followed it, that The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's most perfect novel (which, as it happens, my father edited). And on the theory of this prosecution, she could have been sent to jail for writing it.” This comment quickly sidetracked me, since Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors, so like the well trained Internet and social network user that I am, I began Google-ing “Moglen,” “editor” and “The Bluest Eye” to learn more.

That was how I got to Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Diaspora. I read several articles like this one and this one. And I want to know more. After the discussion on Facebook today, I walked away believing Eben about the danger of Facebook but I also disassociate and I need constant and concrete examples to understand and to care about the issue. Here it appears that Zhitomirskiy was working on Diaspora, which would be the alternative to Facebook that would protect freedom. And then he died in “an apparent suicide” in 2011; I found no articles clarifying or confirming the cause of death or updates on the status of Diaspora. Does anyone know anything about this?

-- ElviraKras - 07 Sep 2012