"If he went to jail to demonstrate his commitment to freedom of others, he went to the berries to exercise his own recovered freedom, the liberty to do whatever he wished, & the evidence in all his writing is that he very often wished to pick berries. There’s a widespread belief, among both activists & those who cluck disapprovingly over insufficiently austere activists, that idealists should not enjoy any pleasure denied to others, that beauty, sensuality, delight all ought to be stalled behind some dam that only the imagined revolution will break. This schism creates, as the alternative to a life of selfless devotion, a life of flight from engagement, which seems to be one way those years at Walden Pond are sometimes portrayed. But change is not always by revolution, the deprived don’t generally wish that the rest of us would join them in deprivation, & a passion for justice & pleasure in small things are not incompatible. That’s part of what the short jaunt from jail to hill says."

"In this talk, Kars Alfrink – founder and principal designer at applied pervasive games studio Hubbub – explores ways we might use games to alleviate some of the problems wilful social self-seperation can lead to. Kars looks at how people sometimes deliberately choose to live apart, even though they share the same living spaces. He discusses the ways new digital tools and the overlapping media landscape have made society more volatile. But rather than to call for a decrease in their use, Kars argues we need more, but different uses of these new tools. More playful uses."

[See also: http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kars-alfrink AND http://speakerdeck.com/u/dconstruct/p/the-transformers-by-kars-alfrink ]

"Kars looks at how game culture and play shape the urban fabric, how we might design systems that improve people’s capacity to do so, and how you yourself, through play, can transform the city you call home."

"Cor­pora­tions let 50,000 peo­ple die last year be­cause they could not pay them for pro­p­er med­ical care. They have kil­led hundreds of thousands of Ir­aqis, Afghanis, Pales­tinians, Pakis­tanis, & gleeful­ly watched as stock price of weapons contra­ctors quad­rupled. They have tur­ned canc­er into an epi­demic in the coal fields of West Vir­ginia where famil­ies breat­he pol­luted air, drink poisoned water & watch the Ap­palac­hian Moun­tains blas­ted into a de­solate was­teland while coal com­pan­ies can make bi­ll­ions. & after loot­ing the US Treasu­ry these cor­pora­tions de­mand, in name of auster­ity, that we ab­olish food pro­grams for childr­en, heat­ing as­sis­tance & med­ical care for our el­der­ly, & good pub­lic educa­tion. They de­mand that we tolerate a per­manent underclass that will leave 1 in 6 work­ers w/out jobs, condemns 10s of mill­ions of Americans to pover­ty & tos­ses our men­tal­ly ill onto heat­ing grates…"

"The investigations, Dominguez said, have slowed progress on the Transborder Immigrant Tool and raised questions within his department over the freedom of researchers at UCSD to conduct the work they were hired to do.