Bio
Quinn Norton is a writer who likes to hang out in the dead end alleys and rough neighborhood of the Internet, where bad things can happen to defenseless little packets.
They are also places were new freedoms and poetries are born, and run riot over the network. She started studying hackers in 1995, after a wasted youth of Usenet and BBSing.
These days, Quinn is a journalist, published in Wired, The Atlantic, Maximum PC, and more. She covers science, technology, copyright law, robotics, body modification, and medicine, but no matter how many times she tries to leave, she always comes back to hackers.
Further
Quinn has appeared on Sources + Secrets, to talk about prospects for a Federal Shield Law, CBC's Spark, to talk about dramatizing the Internet, As It Happens, to talk about Occupy, wamda to talk about building systems for social change, Bloomberg TV to talk about Anonymous & Sabu, WNYC to talk about Anonymous, NPR to talk about the Stratfor hacking, Tummelvision to talk about SOPA, Occupy and stochasticism, NPR's Morning Edition to talk about Anonymous, NPR's All Things Considered, to talk about her magnetic implant, CBC's Spark to talk about human-robotic interface, and has an essay in She's Such a Geek, edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders.
At the moment...
Quinn
Said... is my blog. More
often updated than the
non-bloggy bits. You
likely want to be there.
I'm @quinnnorton on Twitter. I have a Wikipedia entry, which is better than it used to be but not as funny as when my friends used to deface it regularly. I write regular articles about the strangeness of the world and the complexity of people for Medium, and contribute to the group collection The Message.
I was Wired's correspondent on Anonymous and the Occupy movement in 2011 & 2012. While I wrote dozens of articles, witnessed six evictions and several major hacks/Anonymous protest actions, two pieces hold a special place in my coverage:
My Inside Anonymous for July/2012 Wired Magazine
"A Eulogy for Occupy," Wired.com December/2012
I have been known to give talks on topics such as how people
self-organize online, feral network collectives, privacy and identity,
digital security, body hacking and internet politics. Some of them are
available on video:
ULearn, October 2014 on MacGuffins, hackerkids and the troublesome 21st century.
NetHui, July 2013 on how the open and free Internet supports distributed communities, leaderless revolutions and collective action.
SHARE Beirut, October 2012 on the stochastic revolutionary network collective
SHARE Belgrade, April 2012 on "A time without leaders"
TEDxSoMa, September 2010 on privacy, ephemerality and self
Cusp 2008 on body hacking
Contact me