Arikia Millikan

- Yes, I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has every heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand to be a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give up my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those. -

From the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (July 1950-1953)

When I was a little girl, my mother used to take me to Sunday School at the Methodist church in the rural Michigan town where my grandpa lived every other weekend.

One weekend we had an assignment to make little models of the twelve disciples any way our little child brains saw fit. I crafted them out of wooden clothespins, drawing smiley faces on the rounded end and pants on the two pegs for legs. I proudly brought them in and showed them to my teacher who praised me.

During that class while we were learning about Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, Simon, Jude Thaddaeus, and Judas Iscariot, I raised my hand and asked the teacher why we never learned about girls.

“They weren’t important back then,” she said.

I went home and told my mom I never wanted to go back there. I never did.

Lots of people have fun in Haiti. A little-known secret about Haiti is that it is fun. It is easy to have fun, and too much of it if you’re not careful. Especially if you tend to abuse power, like drinking and driving, prostitutes, and general anarchy. If you don’t like those things, which I tend to not (save a little anarchy here and there, and beers-to-go when I’m in the passenger seat (which is always)), fun comes with a side of guilt.

This is because fun is a luxury. A luxury you are viscerally aware of when the majority of people you see every day are not having fun, they’re just “getting by.” This is because you must have money to have fun. I don’t consider myself as “having money” when I’m home in New York, so much as “getting by,” but here in Haiti I “have money.” And I feel damn guilty about it.

When I’m in a cab and the meter is running, I know it’s exactly the same price as a cab is in New York. When I go out to eat, the prices on the menus where I’m taken are the same prices on the menus at the places I frequent in New York. But it all feels more expensive, since here I’m in the maybe 5% of people of who have access to those things, and in New York I let other people pick up the tabs.

When I drink here, though, it feels cheaper. Beers are $2 or $3 here, whereas in New York, they’re $5-13. Maybe drinking is the global equalizer.

Tonight I drank some rhum Barboncourt, the national drink of Haiti, for the first time since the last time I was here. I banned myself from it after the night I allowed some UN guys to take me out to hear a Cuban band play at a local bar. I drank four “rhum punches,” a drink that is basically the Long Island Iced Tea of Haiti, where who knows what goes in it except a shit-ton of rhum and something that masks the taste.

I threw up when I got home that night and the whole next morning and afternoon. I don’t know if it was because I was dehydrated, or because when we left the bar and walked past the rows of tattered tents filled with displaced earthquake victims set up in the park across the street, the sick reality of the situation in Haiti hit me.

The UN guys I went to the party with were talking loudly and laughing when we walked out of there, reliving the fun highlights of a night that took place far away from any poverty or suffering. As we walked past the security staff, onto the street where we were only feet away from the tents, I shushed them.

“People are sleeping over there,” I hissed at them.

“Oh right, sorry,” they whispered back, with the concern of teenagers spending the night at a friend’s house after being reminded to not wake their parents, even though the parents know damn well there’s a slumber party going on and neither of the two parties is overly concerned about it.

They were here to help. They’re all here to help — the NGOs, the missionaries, and the Haitian bourgeois who so graciously contribute to the Haitian economy and create jobs. That’s what they tell themselves, and that’s what they believe. And because they’re here helping, working hard in this destitute country to lift the poor out of their unfortunate conditions, one by one, they’re entitled to a little goddamn fun at the end of the day.

So cheers to you, saviors of Haiti. Have fun. And when someone mugs or murders you or one of your friends in the street because they’re so fucking sick of hearing about how you’re there to help them while you and your kind walk around living life the way you’re accustomed while they’re starving and dying, then maybe Haiti can get some post-earthquake press while the rest of the world shakes their heads and mourns your tragedy, and the tragedy of why Haitians can’t just be civilized and accept the help they’re given.

Last night I met some of my Haitian journalist friends for beers at a new-ish restaurant/bar spot in PetionVille, the neighborhood in Port-au-Prince where I’m staying with my family. When we were through plotting our weekend excursion and ready to head out, my friend found me a ride with someone he knew at the restaurant who lives just past me.

Nobody ever taught me to not take rides from strangers, and my instincts about doing so have never served me wrong. But that’s irrelevant.

My new friend and impromptu chauffeur was also giving a lift to a woman who had been drowning any possible Ash Wednesday resolutions with fury at the bar. She had natural-looking but not natural blond hair, and the kind of plumpness that occurs when you spend the majority of your life close enough to a Burger King to eat it multiple times a week but not so close that it ever cycles out of your favorite foods list. When our driver introduced us, she lunged for my hand to shake it with a smile so big and unwarranted that I pulled my hand back a little prematurely, or maybe she held it a little too long.

I’ve seen those smiles before. It was the same smile that the woman in the group of badly-sunburnt Midwesterners wearing matching shirts shone on me in line for airport security when I was flying out of Port-au-Prince last time when she asked, “and what group are YOU here with?” It was the smile that instantly evaporated and turned into a slightly horrified grimace when I replied, “I’m not with a group.”

Sure enough, the Burger Queen soon revealed she was a missionary with the Methodist church. “Oh yeah? That’s interesting,” I said. “What’s your mission?”

Slurring her words, she cheerily told me her job is to be the beach head for incoming Methodists to Haiti, helping them with the logistics of renting cars, finding lodging, and organizing outings for them in town. I asked if she showed them the way to the bars as well. She said no, that was her own personal mission.

We pulled up to her residence and she poured out of the car. She said goodbye, then swayed and struggled with the gate. The driver said he’d wait for her to get inside, but she insisted that he go on. When she realized he wasn’t going to leave her there until she got inside, the gate magically opened. I turned around as we pulled away, half expecting to see her sprint across the street to another bar to continue her repentance to God — which isn’t to say that she didn’t.

I for one, am touched that there are people so kind and devout in their servitude to God that they would drink his blood all night on Ash Wednesday to better help His poor children of Haiti.

What could be better? What? I can’t think of anything.

H/t Andrew Klein.

I’m back in Haiti again. It’s my fourth time back here, third since the earthquake in 2010.

I accomplished my mission of the day, which was to get my phone hooked up with a solid internet connection. That may sound like not that lofty of a goal, but A) Everything takes 20 times as long here as it does in the states, and B) This was of the utmost importance.

I got an idea for a photo essay today that would be a collection of situations that are typically Haitian in the sense that something that has a quick fix in the U.S. has been addressed in a complete roundabout, bootstrapped, jerry-rigged though effective fashion. Perhaps I’ll start a Tumblr blog. What should I call it? Haitian Situations?

On the flight in, the pilot came on the P.A. system as we were landing to tell us that he would have to circle around the island three times because there was another plane in the vicinity, so he would have to wait until it landed to begin the descent instead of descending in conjunction, “because there’s no radar.” He declared this with an air of exasperation as if to remove the responsibility of arriving two minutes behind schedule from himself and pass it off to the country of Haiti. A few passengers looked around nervously, as the expected subsequent translation took a few beats longer than usual before the flight attendant picked up the intercom device, cleared her throat, and translated to the flight that we would have to circle around because of their country’s goddamn primitive communications system, as if they needed to be reminded of the way things were where they were going by some American pilot.

As I exited the plane, I wanted to tell the pilot to please keep his First World Problems to himself here. This is what I want to tell everyone I know at some point or another. But he wouldn’t have understood, and neither would anyone else. I didn’t understand every time my mom would yell at me for running the water nonsensically or leaving the refrigerator door open while I made a sandwich. I just wondered what her goddamn problem was and proceeded to ignore her comments. Third World concerns are lost on First World citizens having never experienced the Third World, and First World complaints only seem particularly egregious if they are verbalized while in the Third World, or to a Third World dweller. Also, I’m reading J.D. Salinger right now so I want to qualify every noun with “goddamn.”

Sometimes when I explore new places, I think about scenarios I would like to see unfold. When I went to Kentucky with my roommate over Thanksgiving and we were driving around the horse farms of Lexington, I fantasized about driving a bus full of Occupy Wall Street protestors through, both to see if they would have the impulse to occupy a horse farm, and to see how the Kentuckians would go about attempting to remove them from their estate. Today, while driving around in PetionVille, a more-affluent though still not anywhere close to being considered affluent sector of Port-au-Prince, I thought about what would happen if you dropped the cast of the Real Housewives off in the middle of the street market with $5 each and said “Figure it out. Bye.”

Anyway, the progress here in Haiti appears shockingly drastic. But I’ve only had a few cursory glances, and I learned from spending some time in rural Michigan that if you make areas close to the main roads pretty, people who are just passing through will have a good impression of the whole area, meanwhile the problems can stay hidden in the back woods. But all the townspeople know.

Following the publication of my last blog post on Gizmodo yesterday, I received a lot of comments from women and men who said they had experienced cyberstalking situations similar to mine, some not as bad and some far worse.

So I decided to email the Dean of my alma mater’s College of Engineering this FYI:

Dear Dean Munson,

I attended the College of Engineering from 2004-2006 and ended up transferring to LS&A. I thought you may be interested as to why. I recently published this article on Gizmodo about an experience with cyber stalking that I unfortunately had my freshman year, and I thought you may be interested to know this kind of thing is happening on your campus, and how it affects the targets. I strongly feel that incidents like this are one cause of the enormous gender disparity that exists within the engineering school. I hope you find some value to this, and please feel free to contact me if you would like advice on ways the college could do more to stop harassment against women.

http://gizmodo.com/5867785/my-first-cyberstalker

Best,

Arikia Millikan

I was surprised to receive the following response about four hours later:

Erika,

  I am sorry to hear about your experience.  Actually, this is the first such experience I’ve heard of in Engineering at U-M.  Although I think that cyberstalking is a really bad thing, I have to disagree with your conclusion that incidents like yours “cause the enormous gender disparity that exists within the engineering school.”  Our problem regarding gender is that not enough women students from high school apply to study engineering in the first place.  This is true nationwide.  At U-M, our retention rates for women and men students in engineering are nearly the same.  So, once a woman enters CoE, she is very likely to stay and complete an engineering degree.

   Thank you for sharing your story.  I meet with undergraduates often in CoE (including lots of women) and I will be on the alert for the type of misbehavior you endured.

–David Munson

Today I sent my reply:

Dean Munson, thank you for your prompt response.

With all due respect though, sir, why would you have heard about such an experience before? When I went to DPS, I was told nothing could be done and was dismissed. With such an “oh well, deal with it” response to my — and any woman in a similar position’s — first impulse in seeking intervention regarding such a matter, why then would a student take the issue up with the dean? When I was a freshman, I never realized that was an appropriate plan of action or even an option. In fact, I never received any kind of notice of a campus resource for addressing instances of harassment in the College Engineering — information that is readily distributed in LS&A. While you are on the alert for this kind of misconduct in the future, I would urge you to also have conversations with the north campus Department of Public Safety in addition to female students. Perhaps they could provide you with statistics about how much this kind of incident is reported so that, rather than citing a lack of anecdotal evidence as evidence that something isn’t occurring, you could cite hard information.

To clarify, I didn’t say incidents like my specific stalking incident cause the gender disparity. I said that incidents like mine (which if you read or even skimmed the essay to the point where I explain why I dropped out you would understand was a reference to the persistent sexual objectification from male students and even once a professor I endured) are *one* of the many reasons I *believe* contribute to the gender disparity. For you to tell me that it’s not is, frankly, offensive. Furthermore, noting that the retention rates are nearly the same for men and women says nothing about the causes of the dropping out. I would be willing to bet that the breakdown of dropout causes are very different for women than what they are for men.

The problem that you cite as being the reason for gender disparity in the College of Engineering — that female high schoolers do not apply to engineering school — is a problem that is often caused by the same factor I cited in my essay that you dismissed: sexism. Unless you think that women are not inherently as good in science and math as men are, in which case I’d urge you to remember the Larry Summers incident, explore and the volumes of research that indicate the contrary, and revisit this hypothesis.

Thank you again for your response. In addition to my own experience in the University of Michigan College of Engineering, I now understand an additional factor that sustains the gender imbalance on your campus: your denialism. Thank you also for making me the most happy I have ever been that I did not pursue a career in engineering.

Regards,

ARIKIA

(not Erika)

I also sent it to Kelley Adams, my college friend I reference briefly in the story who is now a Project Manager at MIT’s Violence Prevention Response Center. She linked me to the CDC’s recently-released findings from the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) which contains statistics on many different forms of violence, including stalking.

From the report’s Executive Summary:

Stalking Victimization by Any Perpetrator

• One in 6 women (16.2%) and 1 in 19 men (5.2%) in the United States have experienced stalking victimization at some point during their lifetime in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.
• Two-thirds (66.2%) of female victims of stalking were stalked by a current or former intimate partner; men were primarily stalked by an intimate partner or an acquaintance, 41.4% and 40.0%, respectively.
• Repeatedly receiving unwanted telephone calls, voice, or text messages was the most commonly experienced stalking tactic for both female and male victims of stalking (78.8% for women and 75.9% for men).
• More than half of female victims and more than one-third of male victims of stalking indicated that they were stalked before the age of 25; about 1 in 5 female victims and 1 in 14 male victims experienced stalking between the ages of 11 and 17.

Thanks for the stats, Kelley. Hopefully when the University’s PR team finds this via Google Alert, they’ll be nice enough to forward this to Dean Munson so he can consider it while he is on the alert.

I was cyber stalked my freshman year of college.

It was 2004 and I’d just started engineering school at the University of Michigan. I’ve never been limited by social conventions in terms of who I befriend, and I would go out to parties, flirt with guys, and carry on. It was the first time in life I had a chance to date, since I wasn’t allowed to growing up with my mom, and it was the first time I had my own computer and free reign over the internet, since I wasn’t allowed to use it outside of school research all through high school. It was my first taste of freedom.

So when I walked into the first day of biomedical engineering class and saw Andy, my little heart went aflutter. He was everything I ever wanted in a guy. He had spiky black hair and facial hair and was wearing a t-shirt featuring some band I’d never heard of. And he spoke, the first day of class. He answered a question that our professor, the ever-intimidating inventor of the multi-channel MRI RF coil and the corresponding fast imaging SENSE algorithm, asked us all, and he got it right. I was in awe.

Then one day, I was smoking a cigarette after a chemistry exam, and I struck up a conversation with these two guys, bonding over the intensity of it all. We all lived on North Campus, where the university exiles the engineers to slave away in silence, so we rode the bus back together, discussing the exam. I had never taken a harder exam, but they weren’t even doubtful. They were perfect study buddies, I decided, and the deal was sealed when I ran into them smoking outside the cafeteria a few days later. From then on Billy, Aman and I were friends.

Much to my surprise did I discover that Aman shared a room with Andy, and Billy lived across the hall. It was the trifecta of intense boys. I would go over to do homework with Billy and Aman, or pretend to do homework and drink Johnny Walker and play video games instead. We got to be rivalrous comrades, especially when Kelley, an emerging feminist from Bangkok who listened to hardcore music and lived upstairs, was involved in the discussions. But Andy remained a mysterious wall. I would try to make conversation, and he would shy away from me in a polite but gruff manner and go off to study alone. For someone so manly-looking and smart, I was baffled to find he was a total introvert outside of class. Combined with how nervous and awkward I probably acted around him, Andy and I were always outside of the realm of meaningful communication.

Once we may have connected over politics though. He was a total lefty and was always watching the Daily Show with John Stewart. In November, we all gathered there to watch the election that sealed another four years of this country’s decline. We were all devastated after, Andy the most, I think. I remember him going on a rant afterwards about how the government would drill all of the oil out of Alaska leaving a big hole, then take all the minorities in the country, push them in, bury them, and put an American flag on top. This was more than I’d ever heard him say. I was in a state of repulsed shock as well, which probably enabled me to snap out of my Andy-fog and say something intelligent around him for a change. I went home and furiously wrote in my journal about all the signs I thought I could tell he might be giving me, and how in love with him I was.

The next day, I got an instant message from someone with the screen name HowCouldBushWin. It was the point in history when AIM was just about to cease being the go-to service for instant messaging, before g-talk came along. If you had your screenname posted on MySpace, you might occasionally get random IMs from lonely guys in their parents basements, who you could quickly weed out. But the facebook had just launched that summer, providing new access for college students curious about their peers.

HowCouldBushWin began chatting me up about the election, and what bullshit it was. I responded at first, waiting for them to reveal who they were. I asked, and they asked me back another question, changing the subject and engaging me. Drawing me into conversation. Whatever, I have to go, I typed, and went on with my plans that night.

That evening when I came back online, I had a message waiting. A link to a funny picture. I smiled and went to sleep.

The next day after class, another message. I replied, assuming it was one of my friends, Billy or Aman, or maybe both, assuming they would reveal their identity momentarily. But the conversation drew on and on. He flattered me with attention asking me endless questions and attempting to intellectually engage me. It was obviously someone who wanted to know me more, who was too shy to approach me in real life. Or maybe they did approach me, daily even, but wanted to know a different side of me. I liked the attention.

I tried to get him to tell me where he knew me from, but he would evade everything while comforting me at the same time. I could tell he was having fun as I made gambles about who it was. Really funny, Billy. Are we still studying later? He let me believe I’d solved the mystery as I went through the list of likely pranksters, but only momentarily. Then he’d taunt me while, at the same time, flattering me with more attention and assurance that I’d be happy when I found out.

This was stupid, I decided. I didn’t have time for it, I had to study. In what I hoped was a last ditch effort, I bargained with him that I would invite him to my birthday party if he would come and reveal himself. I went to my party that night hoping to meet the man of my dreams, who was smart and political and shy despite a tough exterior. And most of all, I was hoping it would be Andy.

Andy never came, and nobody ever revealed themselves to me. But the next afternoon as soon as I got online, an IM window popped up. It was HowCouldBushWin telling me how great I looked at the party last night. I told him he was lying, that he didn’t go, and that he was nobody I knew — that he was probably just some internet weirdo who found me on MySpace and didn’t even really know me.

Then how could I know what you were wearing last night?  he asked. It was like that scene in Scream where Drew Barrymore thinks the phone stalker is fucking around, but then he says he’s on her front porch and the screen pans out around her shocked face.

I told him to go away, that I was hoping it was someone who I wanted it to be, and it clearly wasn’t, so I was done with this game. No wait, I’ll tell you who I am, he pleaded. That’s what drove everything that happened subsequently. I needed to know. The promise of finding out if I just engaged in conversation for a little bit longer outweighed the logic telling me to sign off.

And I didn’t want to sign off. It was my internet. My playground and work space. I needed to be on there. But every time I signed on, he would message me, saying he was finally ready to tell me who he was.

Eventually he let a detail escape him that allowed me to conclude that he was in Engineering school with me. He told me he liked my Radiohead shirt, but it was a shirt I borrowed from my roommate and only wore to class once, no where else.

In lectures, I examined every male skeptically. I tried to concentrate while I was discretely surveying the room, watching to catch anyone who stared at me a bit too long or looked at me funny. HowCouldBushWin told me he was going to give me a signal in class that day, so I would know for sure. Of course, I never saw a signal, and I was left feeling frustrated and unnerved that someone was watching me and I had no idea who. Later, he told me he did it when he thought I was looking. It was right in front of my face, and I must not have seen him.

I blocked HowCouldBushWin. I’d had enough. Game over. I was able to feel relief for a night, thinking that I could start putting this behind me, accepting that I may never know.

The next night, HowDidBushWin messaged me.

HowDidBushWin: TALK TO ME AND I’LL TELL YOU WHO I AM

Me: ok

HowDidBushWin: SEE I KNEW I COULD GET YOU TO TALK TO ME

Me: who are you?

HowDidBushWin: IT DOESN’T COME THAT SIMPLE

The conversation went on for hours and involved me breaking down into desperation. Eventually I blocked that screen name too. He made more.

HowdBushyDoIt

Blocked.

Conan4Pres

Andy liked Conan. Was there any way? No. I had to ignore his bait. He was feeding me hope that he was the person I wanted him to be, because he wanted to be someone I wanted.

It wasn’t, but it had to be someone I knew. Was it the man trifecta’s guy groupie who I didn’t get along with? The acid head serial gamer next door who was always playing an MMORPG with massive headphones? Their other roommate, the famously cool midget who rode around campus on a scooter? The senior in CS downstairs who taught me the meaning of trolling and tried to get me into S&M porn? The super shy, geeky guy in my chemistry class who kept inviting me to participate in clubs and stuff but I never went? The guy I met at a Halloween party and had a moment with who now was trying to date me?

It could have been any of them. Or, it could have been a completely random person who I’d never even spoken with before, who found my screen name on the facebook. I had no way of knowing for sure. Meanwhile, my stalker did not relent.

icanmakemoreforu: You’ll be sad that you never know who I am

Blocked.

talktomearikia: Please. Come on, I’ll be nice.

Blocked.

pleasearikia: I’d give you what you wanted eventually.

pleasearikia: talk to me :(

pleasearikia: I’ll write you a haiku, about you, if you talk.

pleasearikia: I’ll do anything. Right now. One time offer. 5 mins.

pleasearikia: you’re making me crazy

pleasearikia: i’m spazzing out

pleasearikia: are you happy now?

I got sucked into the debate once again. He told me now after how inappropriate his messaging had been, he was afraid to tell me because I would hate him forever, whereas if he didn’t tell me, he might be able to still interact with me in person without me knowing. I tried to convince him otherwise, because I needed to know. But he didn’t give in, so I blocked him again.

My class attendance declined. I couldn’t concentrate, so there was no point.

By that time I’d told some of my friends about it. Some were concerned, and tried IMing the stalker themselves to pull his identity out of him. It didn’t work, and he just got mad at me. He began to become verbally abusive in his messages. Following it up with an apology, and please don’t block me again, I’ll tell you. I would try new tactics of interrogation with him. Everything I could think of. I offered to meet him anywhere. He entertained the idea but refused. So I blocked him again, but he would spawn back up with a new screen name the next day.

stalkerdearest: why did you ignore me and make me go through all those names?

He told me what kind of late night sandwich I would always order.

That’s when I went to the police. I printed out all the conversations I’d been saving since my Drew Barrymore moment, took them to campus security, and told them I was being harassed and to do something to make it stop. I think they thought it was funny. Since he hadn’t actually threatened to physically harm me, they couldn’t do anything. They certainly couldn’t track his IP, though they said it was because they didn’t know how, which I believed.

I couldn’t sign online without a new message box popping up. I was furious. I needed to be there. I needed to talk to my friends and to virtually study. I was becoming a nervous wreck. I hadn’t been to class in weeks because I would distract myself by going out drinking with friends, to escape my computer and my stalker.

My friends were worried. I stopped entertaining the idea of dating, because I was skeptical that anyone who wanted to get to know me was this person.

My stalker told me he would admit it was him if I asked him in person. So I confronted people who I thought it might be, which is of course a really offensive thing to be confronted with. “Am I cyber stalking you? Are you serious?” Desperate to cover all bases and resolve the mystery for good, I  asked Andy about it after class one day. I explained what had been going on. “That sucks,” he said sympathetically. Finally I blurted out that if it was him, he could tell me, because I understood why he would do that. He practically laughed in my face. No, of course it wasn’t him. Then I backpedaled by saying I thought it might be his roommate, the midget, and he got really pissed off that I would think that. That was me officially blowing it with him. It was probably the most embarrassment I’d ever felt in my life at the time.

I went home to another message from a new user on my screen.

The stalker wanted to make a deal. If I told him who I thought he was, he would tell me who he was. I wouldn’t. You’re just being stubborn because you’re afraid of being wrong, he accused.

Blocked.

onemorestubborn

Blocked.

In the end he made 18 total screen names and I blocked them all. I changed the settings on my AIM account so that nobody who wasn’t pre-approved on my list could contact me. I felt defeated. I hated it that I had to sacrifice potential approaches from decent human beings and close myself off online because some lame guy couldn’t control his impulses online.

I eventually ended up dropping out of engineering school and matriculating to the Literature, Science & Arts college. It wasn’t just because of the stalker, but that happened so early in my college career that it set the tone for my whole experience there, and the tone of my GPA. I was in the 20% female minority there, surrounded by guys who were always giving me unwanted attention. I was skeptical of them all. Then I got it from one of my professors too, and I just decided that engineering wasn’t where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be in an environment where the few women were objectified by the sex-starved majority of men. And all that locking myself away studying wasn’t really my thing anyway. I’m a social animal.

I never found out who it was, but I still idly run the possibilities in my head sometimes, coming up with nothing again every time.

It was like being mentally raped. It marred the start of my college experience. I bounced back, obviously. Because that’s what I do. But even now, when someone contacts me anonymously and carries the joke on for longer than a minute, I start to panic.

That’s why when someone messaged me anonymously four days ago by posting this via formspring, I felt like Julie in I Know What You Did Last Summer when she got that note. Mine read:

I think you were in love with me, but never admitted it for obvious reasons – the first being that I had a girlfriend. But, I’m single now.

I initially got the same hopeful excitement that I did with my first college stalker. I wanted to badly for it to be someone who I did fall in love with. I’ve been lonely lately, and I’ve encountered some people along my post-college journey that I’ve been holding out hope for. At the same time I worried it would be another stalker who would never admit his identity, especially after a few exchanges that were unsuccessful in figuring it out. I decided I wasn’t going to make the same mistake in confronting people who I thought it was. I entertained this person’s anonymous messages strategically for four days. I was going to smoke this person out by being smarter this time.

And I did. And it turned out to be a really sick joke.

I hope who did that realizes how hurtful what they did was to me, and that anyone else who may be reading this thinks twice about engaging in anonymous stalking behaviors.

A few days ago one of my friends tweeted a link to Codeacademy. As you will see when you go there, which you should do immediately after reading this blog post, it teaches you to code by immersing you in lessons right in your web browser. It pushes you in the pool, but you can see it’s a shallow pool, and the water is pretty warm.

You begin thinking you’re just typing. But before you realize what you’re doing, the site’s like, “Oh, btw you’re learning JavaScript right now.” I’m a big fan of tricking people into learning. By telling you that you’re programming after you’ve already completed part of a lesson, the site’s gotten you past the hardest part of programming. Well, at least the part that keeps 99% of people from doing it. You know, the part where you have to overcome all the preconceived notions about programming you’ve accumulated throughout your life that leads you to believe computer programming is something only geniuses do, so if you’re not a genius you shouldn’t even bother.

It came easily to me though. I found it fun, and satisfying in the same way I used to find solving math problems satisfying. A few lessons in, I started realizing that the stuff I was learning on Codeacademy about JavaScript was very similar to the things I learned in the C++ Intro Programming course I took in Engineering school. It’s been six years though, and I had assumed I’d forgotten everything and that my propensity for programming had somehow degraded because I’m 24 now and probably past the stage where I can soak up information like a sponge. Even though I completed all the courses on the site in three days, that stuff was very introductory, so it’s too early to tell if that’s the case. But I have a hunch it was just something that I told myself to avoid trying and failing. I think that lots of other people do that too, and that sites like this can help break through that mental blockade.

There are a few issues with the site though, mostly with how the instructions are worded. I don’t think the lessons would have come quite so easily to me if I hadn’t taken a C++ course and been familiar with if/for/while/do while loops and the basic programming terminology, which they don’t often bother to explain. Probably because it’s a site made by programmers, not English majors, which you can’t really fault them for.

I emailed one of the founders,  Zach Sims, to tell him his site is awesome but that there are some language barriers. He said he knew, and that the site wasn’t really ready for launch. They wanted feedback so they released the prototype on Hacker News, and they ended up with more users than they knew what to do with. Of all the problems to have, that’s a good one. I just hope they hurry up and develop the site, because I have exhausted the material and I need more lessons or I will be sad. I finally found a productive insomnia activity I enjoy and it was over so soon! Typical. But I guess I don’t have to be scared of programming anymore, and I should maybe take an IRL class so I can build my own websites instead of criticizing everyone else’s.

Last year I wrote an article for The Atlantic Tech called “I Am a Cyborg and I Want My Google Implant Already.” The article includes an excerpt where I precociously-but-charmingly (I hope) butt into an interview between my awesome then-boss Nate Silver and Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian, who is an incredibly good-humored man, to prod Hal about the possibility of a Google brain implant.

Little did I know that the very next day following its publication, Atlantic editor James Bennet would ask Erik Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, about my article and Hal’s enthusiasm towards the implant at the Washington Ideas Forum.

From a recap of the session by Derek Thompson:

The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about the possibility of a Google “implant,” Schmidt invoked what the company calls the “creepy line.”

“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.

Ha. Well there goes that idea. Vetoed. I was a bit discouraged until some Italian journalists decided that my advocacy for the creation of a Google Brain implant qualified me for their Top 100 Global Thinkers list. You can find me at number 99, right above Cesare Geronzi, who Time Magazine has dubbed “Italy’s most powerful banker.”

I think it’s all hilarious, and have made the signature on my Nexus One “Sent via my Google Implant” to commemorate this snowball of an article. Anyways, I thought this post should probably live on in my blog:

Sep 30 2010, The Atlantic Tech:

About nine months ago, I sat in a conference room at Google Headquarters in Mountain View with my boss, Nate Silver, and the company’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, talking about the Google of 2020.

The previous night, Nate and I had been hanging out with one of my childhood friends in downtown San Francisco, brainstorming questions to ask Hal in our interview the following day.

I’d been working with Nate as his research assistant on a book project that examines forecasting and prediction in a variety of different fields. Going off on a tangent, we conceived of the concept of a Google Singularity — an event where the amount of information known by Google surpasses the amount of information it’s possible to know. I laughed as Nate drew a graph on a piece of my friend’s Hello Kitty stationary illustrating the theoretical point where this event would occur.

In the interview the following day, after a good 45 minutes of serious discussion about Google’s search algorithms and new projects going on in the company, Nate brought up the Google Singularity. Hal got a kick out of this concept, and we mused about the things the future of Google might produce, one such thing being a “Google implant” that would allow one to browse the Web simply by thinking.

Nate: What will Google look like in 2020?
Hal: Now you Google things on your computer — of course. And you Google things on your phone. That’s the next stage. And I believe — people may laugh — but I think there will be an implant. So you’ll have it there, and I won’t say it’s necessarily Google, I’ll say the Web, it will access the Web of information.
Arikia: Sign me up when that happens.
Hal: You want your implant?
Arikia: I want it now.
[laughter]
Hal: Yeah! Right, see? There are a lot of people that say that. I think you will be continuously connected to the Web in 2020. You’ll be able to pull information in, information out, you’ll be able to record information. And you can do all these things now; you’re recording this conversation and you can play it back later.
Nate: Sure. But you think that soon, by 2020?
Hal: 2020! That’s away 10 years! Look at where we are and look at where we were 10 years ago. Google’s only 10 years old. So uh, yeah, I think so. We’ll certainly have some kind of implant interface by then, in my opinion.
Nate: Will it require surgery? Or will it require some kind of earpiece that you can… I don’t know…
Hal: I don’t know either.
Nate: Are there people at the firm working on that?
Hal: Not that I know of. Although there are people always working on user interfaces, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was thinking about it. There are people working on things that display text on your glasses.

After that, the conversation veered to topics like The Cloud, Steve Mann and real-time search. As Nate always does when an interview is wrapping up, he invited me to ask any questions I may have been sitting on. So I asked Hal: “Are you going to get the implant?”

“The implant!” He exclaimed good-naturedly. “Yes, I want an implant! And we’ll see if it will be the Google implant.”

Just to be clear: This in no way indicates that a Google implant is in, or anywhere near production. But the demand for enhanced cyborgification is being driven by technophiles everywhere. Kevin Kelly recently wrote that “our minds are being rewired by our culture” (Domesticated Cyborgs, 9/6/2010), and for some people like me who grew up in the post-Internet boom era, they already have been.

I got my first computer and Internet connection in 1994 when I was eight years old, so my growing mind learned to navigate the physical world and the online world simultaneously. Some mental processes that were critical to previous generations are obsolete to mine. Bulk memorization is the new manual labor; navigating user interfaces is what counts. Acknowledging the way the Internet has shaped my brain during development in these respects, I would consider myself a cyborg already.

By the time I finished elementary school, writing letters to communicate across great distances was an archaic practice. When I graduated middle school, pirating music on Napster was the norm; to purchase was a fool’s errand. At the beginning of high school, it still may have been standard practice to manually look up the answer to a burning question (or simply be content without knowing the answer). Internet connection speeds and search algorithms improved steadily over the next four years such that when I graduated in the class of 2004, having to wait longer than a minute to retrieve an answer was an unbearable annoyance and only happened on road trips or nature walks. The summer before my freshman year of college was the year the Facebook was released to a select 15 universities, and almost every single relationship formed in the subsequent four years was prefaced by a flood of intimate personal information.

Now, I am always connected to the Web. The rare exceptions to the rule cause excruciating anxiety. I work online. I play online. I have sex online. I sleep with my smartphone at the foot of my bed and wake up every few hours to check my email in my sleep (something I like to call dreamailing).

But it’s not enough connectivity. I crave an existence where batteries never die, wireless connections never fail, and the time between asking a question and having the answer is approximately zero. If I could be jacked in at every waking hour of the day, I would, and I think a lot of my peers would do the same. So Hal, please hurry up with that Google implant. We’re getting antsy.