I am Smári McCarthy. I live both in Reykjavík and Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland. I work as a project manager for the Icelandic Innovation Center in Vestmannaeyjar, and during my free time I am a board member of the Icelandic Society for Digital Freedoms (FSFÍ) and a member of various organizations such as the Lindy Ravers swing dance club, the Lewis Carroll Society, ÍFR archery league and the Icelandic Wikipedia team.
Photo credit: Alda Jónsdóttir. Released under Creative Commons 3.0 CC-BY.
This is my web page. Here I post all sorts of nonsense regarding the kind of things that make me tick.
Civil liberties are a very important matter to me, and in recent years they have been increasingly infringed upon. There is an ongoing struggle to ward off legislation and policymaking that will lead to an increasingly authoritarian world, and participating in this struggle is important to me. This is one of my interests.
Digital fabrication is the art of using computers to describe physical objects and using genetics, robotics and nanotechnology (GNR) to create them. Most of the work these days is going into the robotic wing of the digital fabrication field, making machines that can make almost anything. The possibilities are limitless, the future is nigh. Twenty years from now we’ll have a primitive version of the Star Trek replicator. This is one of my interests.
Sustainable technology is the field of making technology that doesn’t pollute, create waste, or cause strife. It’s about making human oriented technology for a human-oriented future. This includes finding cleaner energy sources, making more efficient devices, and finding cheaper and better ways of doing things that humanity has been doing for centuries. This is one of my interests.
Small Scale Democracy is about moving the power to the people. It is grounded on the observation that republics don’t work, because they dither the power by gobbing too many opinions together and granting certain people power to represent those bastardized opinions. By studying the dynamics in social networks and applying to them the common sense in anarchist philosophy, more freedom can be gained for more people in a far more optimal way. This is one of my interests.
Speculative fiction is the branch of fiction that asks itself “what if?” It is a supercatagory reaching over science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and several other conceptually similar genres. Throughout the history of literature it has been the speculative fiction works that have been most descriptive of the past and most predictive of the future. This is one of my interests.
Given these core concepts, I hope you can easily extrapolate to see what else might float my boat, as it were. Hope you enjoy it!
