Molly was sitting next to her boyfriend. I was sitting next to N, a friend of ours. We were in a booth at the Cage. A chain of red plastic baskets filled with bite sized batter dipped and fried foods cut across the table. A watery white film formed a high-tide line in the tall, sturdy glasses. We did what twenty-somethings do on an idle weekday night after ten: we talked about things that are very important to us with tin penny words and things that held no value with ten thousand dollar words.
We talked about Jenga. Our friends. The amusing fact that Molly and I have the same name, that N and a friend of his share their own unlikely name.
I don’t even remember how it started, but it doesn’t matter. It was a state of nature. Things tend towards chaos and Molly tends towards talking about IP.
For me, it was like taking a shower in the evening. When I moved out of what was happening around me, taking a moment to remove my consciousness from the conversation, it was still light out. When I came back, all traces of the sun were gone and all I could hear was the familiar diatribe on intellectual property, tying in things like creativity and the law, usage and proliferation of FLOSS, waiting to take my hand and pull me into its seductive arms like an ex-boyfriend.
It was a familiar place. It was one I didn’t belong in, right then.
“Let’s talk about puppies,” I said to Molly’s boyfriend.
Through the part of my awareness biologically designed to keep me from trouble, I could still hear Molly and N talking. My developed instincts told me to jump into the conversation. I ignored them. This was Molly’s lecture, not mine.
It really doesn’t take anything to get Molly talking about the discussions and debates surrounding Intellectual Property (IP) laws, creativity and the internet, or censorship. You can talk about a YouTube video, you could mention some artist or musician. You could ask her boyfriend if his computer is working yet (“No,” he will tell you sheepishly), or ask her how she’s doing. Any topic, or even none at all, can bring out the soapbox that she plans to turn into her house. When a silence is too long–or she loses interest in a conversation–she’ll take out her phone and begin checking her feeds: twitter, facebook, google reader. She’ll read about something and share it, using that as a location to place her soapbox and dive off it into a pool filled with anger and intellectualism.
Much like an actual intellectual–rather than one in training–her points are familiar. You could consider her conversations lectures and give each lecture a name. She can give a talk on Practicality v. Idealism in Open Source. She could give an overview, chronologically or ideologically, of the history of IP law. She can talk about originality on the internet and in contemporary art. Referential culture. Remix culture. Why ACTA is stupid. The words she uses generally change, but there is a consistency to her structure–certain phrases are reoccurring.
At the Cage, most of these phrases are laden with profanity.
This is a testament to the house she is building herself–the readiness, not the profanity. She is building her house out of the things she thinks about every day. These are the thoughts that pick at her mind in the evenings, that cause her to grumble as she walks, and flood every feed entering her consciousness. For Molly, these debates aren’t a job or a thing she studies in school: they’re her life.
When I first met Molly, we started talking about this mess in such a casual way I don’t remember it at all. I remember sitting in the cheap Mexican restaurant–the one that offers a student discount and three dollar burritos–listening to her for the first time. I remember hearing her life story and how she landed at Pitt in the HPS program. She told me she was interested in New Media, but that’s a far cry from the creeping, growing blob of FLOSX, the internet, creativity, censorship, IP, free culture, art, originality, technology, and law that has been slowly engulfing both of us. Somehow, we got started talking about it, and we never stopped. Since her first awkward explanations, overviews of the character Alice and the context it lives in, grumbling complaints about ISPs and Google in China, she has given a structure and coherency to her thoughts. When we first began talking about privacy on the internet–listening to another student talk about his summer research project–we passed words back and forth to form the seeds of ideas. Now, she stands on her own with the ideas she’s nurtured and raised, shaping them like a bonsai tree into something dense and purposeful.
Listening to her talk with N made zone out. I stopped paying attention, already aware of every idea she was going to share. But, I noticed that she was ready with these ideas and comfortable with the parts that make them up. She’s taking the rough boards of her soapbox, sanding them and priming them. One day soon, she’ll be turning them into a house.