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You grew up in ...
I was born in Japan, grew up in Michigan, went back to Japan for junior high, and then came to the United States for college. This is sort of early ’80s, so this is when computer networking was just starting, when the internet just started. I was interested in communities and in music and in networks. And there just weren’t programs like that.
And the other thing that was interesting is, this is the early days of the internet, so if you went online and chatted a sysadmin and you said you were some kid from Japan, they’d give you access to everything. And if you emailed professors they would reply. So I found that I could meet just about anybody I knew to meet on the internet and I could sort of kluge together my own education.
In fact there weren’t very many classes about online communities and things like that. So I dropped out of college and I just started doing startups, internet startups. I started doing a lot of internet governance, too. So I did things like ICANN and Creative Commons. So I was really interested in the sort of nonprofit structure of how the internet and communities came together.
And why? Why was that?
I’ve always been interested in parties and communities and just subcultures. When I dropped out of University of Chicago, I became a disc jockey in a nightclub. And the reason I dropped out was I realized that there was kind of a monoculture at the university, at least in the department that I was in. And then when I was going to the nightclubs, this is early ’80s when AIDS was kind of rampant, and at the nightclub, you had skinheads and drug dealers and drag queens, and everybody was coming together around this crisis. I realized that this working-class community was much more loving and much more sophisticated in the way that, the community dynamics were resilient than what I was learning in school.
I felt like I needed to understand how communities worked in order to understand things. And then I realized that a lot of the stuff that was going on in these communities ... And also just being a DJ. You change the music and you change the way the community behaves. ...
