The programme is broken down into several episodes, each delivered in parts due to time limits in YouTube. Here is the first part of the four episodes.

• Happiness Machines
• The Engineering of Consent
• There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed
• Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

Part 1 of 24:

[Source]

ack in early 2008 I wrote about my transition into a more idle mode — a mode which enabled me to focus on some more personal projects and de-emphasise research for a while. Between the years 2003 and 2006 I spent a lot of time building and maintaining schestowitz.com to the point where it attracted about 3,000 visitors per day. In late 2006 I relocated a lot of my work and writings to the site now known as Techrights. This is where I publish a lot of my opinions and the fruits of my readings, which fortunately helps many other people understand the industry (no spin, no bias, no conflict of interest or money at stake).

I have been thinking about returning to research at a higher level of capacity than at present because it is something that I enjoy doing and something that keeps me abreast of my field of expertise. I will write at a later date about my plans.

Always something there to remind me of Jenny.

In order to decease dependence on E-mail, starting today I will have an automated response channeling people to other routes of communication. Here is the template:

From: Roy Schestowitz – Autoreply Message

Re: %subject% – Message Received

%from%,

I am in the process of replacing E-mail correspondence with other, more effective & real-time means of communication. I still read my E-mail, but I do not read it regularly. I will collect messages about once a week, which makes manual filtering of spam a lot faster.

If you are willing to have a conversation with me, please consider creating/using an account in identi.ca < http://identi.ca/ > (or Twitter) where I can be contacted by handle @schestowitz. Alternatively, you can find me on IRC, under the Freenode network at channel #techrights

If the E-mail is urgent, please send mail to [redacted], which I will read more regularly. For an explanation of why I prefer to phase my E-mail accounts out, see < http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html >

E-mail is still necessary for management of online accounts and sometimes passing of files (there are other means for that too). Due to high volumes of spam & phishing, E-mail is also dangerous. I wrote a great deal about E-mail since 2004. 6 years later I’m giving up.

or no apparent reason, I rarely discuss Techrights in my personal Web site. This is not intentional.

The thing is, Techrights is the reason I hardly ever update schestowitz.com anymore. I spend a high number of hours sharing my thoughts over at Techrights, so if you are already subscribed to my personal blog, please consider subscribing to Techrights.org too. It mostly covers software and ethics.

On a separate note, Google has been looking to hire me recently (they do this with a lot of people and they occasionally contact me too), but I am torn between my obligations to serve the public interest and someone’s private interest.

What do you think? Is Google not evil? About 90% of my writings about Google are positive; the rest are not.