unKeynote

Peter Van Djick seems like a nice and brilliant guy. But--and he admitted as much--he's not comfortable speaking in public, which made his Vloggercon keynote (text online here) one of my less favorite moments of the weekend.

So seizing upon the antiauthoritarian spirit of the conference I went back and wrote a speech I might have rather heard.

Peter had some interesting thoughts to offer about how values become embedded in technology, and of course I liked the Truffaut quotation he used to close. But I couldn't connect to it emotionally--and at times what I'm sure he meant as a compliment to the assembled crowd came off to me as offputting and elitist.

In retrospect Schlomo nailed it when he talked about the fear so many of us feel. Too much of Peter's speech I think was constrained by this fear.

Of course I wish I'd done a second take. Or made a different choice of composition. Or moved that stupid bag out of the frame. I wish I'd written a different speech, one that focused on the class and race and gender bull@#$% we'd like to wish away, I wonder still if I shouldn't have exploited all the videos and pics people have posted online, so that they'd sit through the whole video to see if I used their stuff.

But Peter had no such tricks to call on, so I'll just let this fly.

Plus I need to take my own advice and shut up about Vloggercon already, so I can get myself back to the real stuff.

Length: 10:53 (I hope never to ask this of you again.)

Click to view

tag: vloggercon

UPDATE (7/6): I have posted this video's transcript online.