What’s big, and red, and doesn’t seem to eat rocks anymore?

For a little more than ten years, from 1994 to 2005, Phil Agre produced the Red Rock Eater News Service, a collection links and commentaries (“notes and recommendations,” he called it) that he distributed via e-mail. Agre is a professor of information studies at UCLA, and my intellectual identity was partially formed while reading his comments on cheap pens, graduate school, 9/11 and terrorism, Vaclav Havel, deliberative democracy, Bush v. Gore, conservatism, the relationship between life and design, and activism. Sadly, while writing about Konrad’s Antipolitics yesterday, I realized that Agre, who introduced me to Eastern European dissidence, is no longer publishing the RRE. Suddenly, I felt a tremendous nostalgia for something I didn’t even realize I was missing.

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