my own personal bailout, savage minds edition

I’m back. And I am tanned, rested, and ready for the rest of my career. Not that anyone missed me, but I do have an excuse for not showing my userid around here. Being by disposition modest and private (grin), I find it very hard to use this platform to broadcast bits of my life, but, here it is: 1) I have moved to UCLA, 2) I have tenure, 3) my house in Houston was not destroyed by Hurricane Ike, and 4) I’m $700,000,000,000 in debt. Well the last one is not strictly my problem, but I admit to feeling a little bit speechless as a result. My new position is split between the Information Studies department at UCLA, and a new center called The Center for Society and Genetics. Practically this means I have a whole new set of colleagues, societies, publications and grants to think about. Philosophically and methodologically, I would find it hard at this point to stop doing anthropology. I may yet court the UCLA department. But only after I find out how one gets to chill with Jared Diamond, now that he’s my colleague and all.

I plan to make several announcments now that I am back in the realm of normally impossible amounts of work. The first of which is that, now that I live in Beverly Hills, my Incredibly Famous Book is going to be made into not one but two different movies, and I have to say, I couldn’t be prouder. It’s so heart-warming to see Joe Piscopo in the role of Richard Stallman, and Al Pacino playing the Internet as a young Italian boy, tears, I say, tears every time. If my book ever gets re-printed, I may insist on using the phrase “Two girls, a little magic and a lot of horsing around” on the back cover…

Christopher Kelty does anthropological and historical research on science and technology, free and open source software, intellectual property and open access, the history of software, and the ethics and politics of nanotechnology. He also teaches classes about all of these things. From 2001 to 2008 he was assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, in Houston, TX. He know teaches at UCLA and splits his time between the Information Studies department, the Anthropology Department and the Center for Society and Genetics.