One of the things I have to do in my new role volunteering as president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is clean out the 25-year-old organization’s archives. Our little office in San Francisco’s awesome Nonprofit Tech Center can’t hold all our history, and so I’m in the process of negotiating with a very cool university library that wants to acquire our papers and keep them in good condition so that generations of researchers can learn about what CPSR did to protest SDI (Star Wars) weapons systems.

In the process of going through 30 boxes and 9 filing cabinets of our papers — with help from the excellent library nerds Steven Black, Sacha Arnold, Rick Prelinger, Megan Shaw Prelinger, and Gina DeVries — I’ve gained a new appreciation for paper archives. While I want to digitize as much of CPSR’s history as possible, I also want a paper audit trail as it were. Too often, tech geeks like myself place too much faith in the longevity of digital storage. But in fact, history is still going to be remembered via paper most of the time. Read more about my adventures in the CPSR archives, and why I think every digital archive needs a paper backup copy.

With The Simpsons movie in theaters, and every fucking 7-11 converted into a massive walk-in advertisement for the show, I have finally decided to speak out about why I have hated this overrated, overquoted TV show for 17 years.

When The Simpsons debuted on Fox back in 1990, I was primed to love it. I’d been reading Groening’s stuff in alt.weeklies for years, and was into the idea of an indie cartoonist making it big on what passed for an indie network at that time. But as the action unfolded that season, I grew depressed, then angry.

I was watching yet another network TV show that gave us yuks by lampooning a working class family full of stupid men and smart-but-indulgent women. This was the era when the show Roseanne was going full-blast, and I loved it because we finally had a working-class comedy where the characters dealt with real-life problems (not being able to pay bills), weren’t the butt of the show’s jokes (instead, they made the jokes), and didn’t fit known stereotypes (one daughter, Darlene, was a comic book geek).

On The Simpsons, however, the characters are nothing but stereotype. They’re practically Pyncheonesque in their emptiness — not people, but objects who get driven through various pastiches in order to become the butt of the audience’s arch, ironic jokes. I didn’t give a shit about any of them. The only way I could enjoy these characters was to say, “Haha look at the funny dumb poor people who are so incredibly stupid that they actually work at nuclear power plants.”

Problem is, I actually don’t find that funny.

Yes, it’s true that there’s one rich guy on the show, Mr. Burns, who is also the butt of jokes, but let’s face it: the whole point of The Simpsons is to let us have our postmodern Archie Bunker in the character of Homer, and quote all the moronic things he says to our media-savvy, smarty-smart friends.

The Simpsons feels like an early 1970s show wrapped up in a form of Gen X knee-jerk irony that was hip 17 years ago and hasn’t been funny since The Daily Show rewrote the rules for U.S. TV satire. So now there’s nothing left about The Simpsons that’s interesting anymore: not only do we have the same old recycled “blue collar idiot” jokes that mainstream comedy has provided for at least 100 years, but they’re told in a satirical style that’s about as fresh as a Sonic Youth album.

Sure, I think a lot about movies — probably more than I should, given that movies are rapidly dying as a media form. Hell, even TV is pretty old hat. I should really be spending all my time watching YouTube vids, but the problem is that when I go to YouTube (which is practically every day) all I do is watch clips from movies and TV. Usually old movies and old TV.

Anyway, I was glad to discover that an economics researcher over at UC Berkeley is just as obsessed with movies as I am. In fact, he and a colleague did a very interesting and detailed study about why people get enjoyment out of scary movies. Since they’re economics geeks, of course they phrased it differently: they wanted to know why people spend money on scary shit, a process they describe as “consuming negative feelings.” What was interesting about their research is that they discovered something that literary critics have known for centuries: it’s fun to hear, watch or read a story that arouses conflicting feelings of terror and pleasure. Ambivalence is the stuff of narrative zoom! Read more about their cool study, and how they tortured a bunch of undergraduates with bad movies and questionnaires.

While I was in Minneapolis, some local riff raff exposed me to a great movie about pornography from 1964 — Perversion for Profit. This was an anti-porn movie funded by financier Charles Keating, probably best known for architecting the 1980s savings and loan scandal. What struck me about the movie most was that it used scare tactics straight from today’s anti-internet free expression brigade. The announcer in the movie claims that “new technologies” and “new distribution methods” are putting pornography into the hands of 90% of kids! Sounds like something a nutty Congresscritter would say before proposing a bill about censoring the internet. But of course this flick is about the dangers of printed books, and the “distribution methods” are fast transit systems. So I wrote about how the rhetoric around new technologies doesn’t change.

Unfortunately, I wrote about this in a satirical way, which has resulted in a lot of hate mail. So check it out, and feel the hate!

Are you interested in what happens to computer technology during wartime? How can we weaponize beta versions of software and hardware safely so that soldiers and civilians are protected? What are the ethical implications of using technology to spy on citizens — or to help those citizens speak out against wartime atrocities? This January 26, at Stanford University, a conference called Technology in Wartime aims to raise — and begin to answer — those questions. Sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), the conference is currently seeking participants. So visit the conference website now, and find out more about how you can participate.

What’s my role in all this? Well, in my wonky life, I’m proud to be the president of CPSR, one of the oldest geek activist organizations that I know. Its roots go back to the early 1980s, when a bunch of computer scientists — many at Stanford — banded together to speak out about the problems with SDI and computerized launch-on-demand missile systems. They argued that the military didn’t realize how many things could go wrong with computerized weapons systems, and their message got through loud and clear. They become some of the most visible advocates for caution in deploying what became known as the Star Wars weapons system.

In the 1990s, they helped fight battles to protect privacy and free speech online, and in the 2000s CPSR has worked on reforms in e-voting practices, as well as international internet regulation. Now, we’re returning to our roots with the Technology in Wartime conference, confronting a host of issues that our current wartime mentality has brought to the fore in the United States and throughout the world. Find out more!

I have nostalgia for futures of the past. During the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about futurism, in part because I’m deep into planning my blog about futurism and science fiction for the Gawker Network. And I realized that when I think of the future, I almost always start by thinking about how people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thought about it — whether that was in essays (think Aldous Huxley or Henry Adams), or in fiction (I think of Frankenstein as the first true science fiction novel).

I mourn the dead futures of history, the zeppelin-powered transportation systems of the 1920s that never happened and the stillborn ecotopias of the 1970s. I’m sad that we still haven’t colonized the stars, the way futurists have been predicting for over 100 years. And what about all those predictions, starting in the 1920s, that someday soon we’d have robot companions? I don’t think iRobot vacuum cleaners count. Read more about the tragedy of lost futures.

I hate to sound starry-eyed and cheesy, but going to women’s tech conference BlogHer was truly inspiring. It was the first time in my life I’d been surrounded by hundreds of women who work in technology. These women love tech for all different kinds of reasons and come from a zillion different backgrounds. There were tomboys, mommies, punks, tarts, ladies, bitches, nerds, and girls. There were professional women in suits and perfect hair, and grubby rockabilly gals in tattoos and tight dresses.

Because so many of us were there, we stopped being women and just became humans. This is an incredibly rare experience in the tech industry. Usually at a tech conference, women make up about 25% of the audience, and about 10% of the speakers. We stick out like sore thumbs — we are “the women,” not just part the geek crowd. Even when we’re surrounded by cool guys who treat us like perfect equals, we can’t help but notice that we’re a minority and I, at least, feel obligated to be smarter, faster, and better than the men around me to prove that WOMEN BELONG HERE TOO.

At BlogHer, I realized that I should stop being so damn sensitive when I’m in those male-dominated environments. There are tons of other women like me, and soon there will be more of us (thanks to all those mommy bloggers, we’re breeding like bunnies). We don’t have anything to prove. We are geeks, and if some guys have a problem with that, then that’s their fucked-up issue and not mine.

A big thank-you to Elisa Camahort for inviting me to BlogHer! I had a great time attending several awesome panels. Gina Trapani and Barb Dybwad ruled the school with their talk on time-saving tech for bloggers; blogger-friendly lit agent Kate Lee and author/blogger Ariel Meadow Stallings had great advice on the panel about blogs and books; Susie Bright had incisive comments on the way women’s social power is squashed when we’re told that the online world is fraught with danger; Tara Hunt gave a smart and fascinating account of the Kathy Sierra scandal; Liz Henry urged us to talk back and intervene when blog comments get sexist and racist; Mur Lafferty and Jason Adams addicted me to their vidcast This Day in Alternate History; BlogHer founder Lisa Stone rocked the house every time she talked; and my fellow keynoters Esther Dyson and Rashmi Sinha were a pleasure to chat with in front of hundreds of people.

What’s my point? Oh yeah. Women rule.

I’m at the amazing, all-woman blogging conference BlogHer, where hundreds of women have converged on Chicago and are geeking out about Greasemonkey scripts and debating whether Ecto is better than ScribeFire. Plus, I’ll admit that there are a lot of really hot shoes.

Tomorrow morning at 9 AM, I’ll be part of a keynote conversation on the future of women in technology — as well as the future of technology itself — along with two other fantastic speakers: Esther Dyson and Rashmi Sinha. If you’re at BlogHer, or if you’re in the Chicago area, come out to the ballroom at the Navy Pier tomorrow morning and say hi!

I wasn’t immune to the recent press frenzies over the release of two of the season’s biggest techie thrill-rides: the iPhone and the Michael Bay movie Transformers.

I don’t have an iPhone but some of my best friends do. I’ve touched them, caressed them, and I still think they suck. But not for the reasons you might think. I don’t hate them for their technical flaws, though of course it’s hard not to dislike the idea of a tool whose battery can’t be changed unless you send it back to the manufacturer. Plus, the DRM. But the troubling politics of the iPhone go beyond tech. These devices have even been the subject of debates in Congress. And as I say in a recent column:

The iPhone is political because it somehow manages to capture the essence of authoritarianism in its shiny little box. Totally locked down, it runs only preapproved software on a prechosen phone network that is subject to government surveillance.

Read more about that.

I also liked Transformers. I know, I know it was all flashy crap and had the silliest plot ever. But I thought the eBay jokes were funny, and I liked the fact that it was about teenagers who curse and are obsessed with sex — not like those sanitized, unrealistic teens you normally see in Disney vehicles. Plus, you’ve gotta love a movie where characters yell, “All hail Megatron!” Read more about why I think Transformers is more than just a truck commercial here.

Tomorrow night marks the return of Nerd Salon, a semi-irregular geek meetup organized by myself and Jennifer Granick. Come down to 111 Minna from 6-9 PM and hang out with nerds of all stripes. There will be a demo of GNU Radio from Matt Ettus, and a puzzle for you to solve (yes, there is a prize!). Jovino spins geeky tunes. Put on your propeller beanie, bring some comic books or weird electronics items to trade, and prepare to get your nerd on. See you there!

I’ve lately been intrigued with nineteenth century aesthetics, and therefore it should be no surprise that I’m one of the many dorks who admires “steampunk,” an artistic style that marries computer tech with Victorian design. Many would trace the origins of steampunk back to the Bruce Sterling/William Gibson novel The Difference Engine, an alt.history thriller hinging on the idea that computers are invented in the nineteenth century. Others would say that H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction started the whole movement back in the 1920s by blending contemporary science with Romantic monsters and mysticism.

No matter what its origins, steampunk has come into its own over the past few years. It’s jumped from literary genre to industrial design, and now there are a spate of steampunk artists as well as steampunk movies and bloggers. In my latest column, I talk about why people are drawn to artistic styles of the past, and especially why they want to turn computers into things that look like steam-driven tech. I suppose you could say I look at the dark side of steampunk. Read more.