Andy Carvin: Several weeks ago, the family of information studies professor Phil Agre reported him missing, saying that they had not heard from him in over a year.
Charlotte P. Lee: All of us had lost touch with him over the years. How would you know if one of your friends not only lost touch with you, but had also lost touch with almost everyone they know? You wouldn't.
Decius: I regularly read Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service around the turn of the decade. I've also seen Agre speak at a conference. He was very interesting -- a real heavyweight.
I, too, was a long-time reader of RRE, and had seen him at CFP '99. I remember when he moved from UCSD to UCLA. I own Technology and Privacy, which Agre co-edited with Marc Rotenberg in 1997. On the Friends page, I see familiar names like Michael Froomkin, Keith Dawson, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Philip Greenspun. Phil Agre, I hope you are well. Sterling Hayden: To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea -- "cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
Sanford Schwartz: If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.
Samantha Power: There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Jeffrey Young: The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.
Libby Purves: There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.
In 1999, Agre wrote: If we could escape into a parallel world of cyberspace then we could ignore the emerging sprawl of nontransparent and undemocratic institutions of global governance that increasingly order our electronic and nonelectronic lives. But that's how it is, and we need to deal with it by recommitting ourselves to the values of democracy here in the real world.
And in 2001: Everyone plays his or her part in this institutional drama, and so the play can get performed. The cell phone blows this picture up ... The idea that your parents can always find you is disturbing to many children. How can anyone become a separate, autonomous human being if they can always be monitored in this manner? What kinds of architectures are needed to help individuals to develop and maintain a sense that they control their own personal boundaries? Increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with, and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want. The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational world they were born with. The always-on world has the opposite problem. It is a world of freedom, but it is also a world of anonymous global forces that ceaselessly rearrange all relationships to their liking. We don't understand this world very well, but we will soon have plenty of opportunity to study it first-hand.
The Mysterious Disappearance Of Phil Agre | 
