 Well, thank you, Tom, for that introduction. As you can probably tell from listening to it, I am utterly terrified without PowerPoint. So I'm just going to click every so often and assume that something's happening behind me that will make sense. So good morning. Congratulations. Yay. It's absolutely fantastic to be back on campus. I confess, when I was a student here, I had good days, great days, bad days, and some surreal days. You see, I began at David Mancash's middle school, where sometimes it felt like a scrappy production of the Lord of the Flies was enjoying a daily run for over two decades. As you can tell again from the introduction, my first mistake there was to be a skinny nerd with the name Zitrain. I compounded the error by wearing my school backpack over both shoulders. I was alerted to my lack of fashion sense when someone dropped kicked it from behind while I was wearing it. It sailed about six inches off the ground, taking me with it like a parachute in an updraft. And I landed with it upside down across my stomach. From then on, I carried my pack over my right shoulder. I could then stagger into classes like Latin. We were given quizzes nearly every day, tasked with translating insanely convoluted sentences. We then visit the teacher's desk one by one to look over his shoulder as he graded our respective quizzes, a dot on each clause as he parsed the sentences in an angry red circle around mistakes. What happened if you managed to get through with only dots? A 99 out of 100. There were numerical grading scales back then. Today, I understand you have feel-good grades ranging from woot to epic fail. Anyway, no one ever earned 100 in this teacher's class. 99 was the best you could do. I think the intended lesson was that no one could ever be perfect. The Latin phrase, I think, is personum loserum no matter whatum. I've since drawn a larger lesson. Throughout life, you will encounter people in positions of authority over you, whom you believe to be lunatics. How you handle these situations will in part determine how happy you can be. Sometimes you can fight it. Sometimes you can persuade the other person of your view. Sometimes you have to just live with it. And sometimes it turns out that you are the lunatic. Feeling powerless over something you care about is one of the toughest situations to encounter. And such situations don't lessen in adulthood. I remember being surprised in my 20s to discover that adults are basically just like you, only older. As of today, even as you begin the odd cycle of school life and trade in your senior status to become a frosh again, you're part of the general club of humanity that enjoys certain freedoms while still having to reconcile to limits. Of course, don't underestimate the freedom half. Once you're out from under your parents' watchful eyes, and I assume even the borders among you had some form of authority here, you realize that in college or whatever your next stage of life is, you can do whatever you want. By this, I don't mean that you can have anything you want. Rather, you are about to become as free as one can be to make your own decisions without immediate contradiction or discipline from a parent, a teacher, or a boss. There were many things I loved about college and among the best was the realization that I could have lucky charms whenever I felt like it. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack. Mom, what did I have when I came home last night? It was rating a bull of lucky charms. And you can substitute your favorite vice here. I assume for some it might be corned beef sandwiches. This is like being thrust suddenly into the universe of a Charlie Brown television special, where adults make only the rarest of appearances. And when they do, they blot like fog horns for about 10 seconds and then promptly leave. Well, we can learn something from Charlie Brown, namely the constraint that accompanies seeming freedom. Wikipedia calls him the great American unsuccess story. Despite the absence of adults, Charlie Brown remains an existentialist spec, buffeted from forces from an absurd world beyond his control. It turns out in college you can take courses about this. He reacts to what befalls him rather than seizing the initiative. It's like the life of a dog. The dog accepts whatever he sees without needing to understand it. People enter the field of vision, cars drive, elevator doors close, and 10 seconds later, they open on an entirely new landscape. Life is random and what we remember of it is quirky. For example, there was one particularly colorful sixth grade math teacher, believe he's here today, who was excellent and mild-mannered, but for one cardinal, or is it ordinal, offense. He'd pose a problem and then the called upon student would timidly offer something like, six, oh, four, silence, the bad kind. Then, oh, oh is a letter, zero is a number, with a pound on the blackboard, enough to raise chalk dust on the other side of the wall in dear old Mr. McMillan's English class. I remember the rule about zero and oh and nothing else from that entire year of mathematics. Little things like this, whether remembered or not, are the dark matter of our universe, invisible but dominating. They comprise the bulk of who and what we are. People weave in and out of your life every day, usually entirely forgettably, and you and theirs. The attendant working to register at Target, the server at the local restaurant, the cell phone addict who sits next to you on a flight. For that, I apologize. Most of life is a stitching together of these moments of seeming insignificance, of shopping and eating and waiting and being slightly annoyed, and a vast expanse of mental prairie that connects the clusters and spires of the life milestone set pieces that we think make us distinct. In today's words, life is largely Twitter, and I wonder if any of us will remember more than about 140 characters from, say, this speech. The set pieces are the graduations, weddings, funerals, and I suppose, statistically speaking, for at least one or two of us, the indictments. And I do know some good lawyers, so keep that in mind. Those milestones may seem more salient because by definition they happen rarely and summon more of our attention. Moreover, we aren't prepared for how to handle them by our own experience. The closest guides we have oddly enough are the ways in which they're worked into our popular culture to make it seem less like dull prairie. That's why there are no bathrooms on the Starship Enterprise. Think about it. Compare how many crises and killings and funerals and first kisses and indictments you've seen on TV instead. The fact is that we can become prisoner both to our regular life scripts, the senambulant routines we fall into in the day by day, and to the melodrama we inherit from Hollywood was an appreciation of the obtuse, the angular, the colorful byplay that gave me more to remember and that challenged me to establish my own identity when so little seemed within my own control. And what it gave me on the bigger picture was a chance to cultivate a passion and to see the world wasn't just me and those who crossed my field of vision momentarily. It was us, a bunch of people trying to make sense of things, whether teacher or student, loser or bully. These labels aren't doled out one person at a time. Exclusively, they are fluid rules that each of us take on at one time or another and each day have a chance to decide how much to adopt. Speaking of which, to escape the backpack kickers, I did retreat a little further into nerddom. I was lucky enough to be given time on the TRS-80 personal computer at school during free periods. Near the computer was a loose-leaf notebook with a series of tutorials about programming. I don't know where it came from, but it walked me through learning basic computer science. The text was both comprehensive and witty. It anticipated my questions just as I had them. Only when I entered the senior school did I meet the author of that book. Someone who teaches philosophy here as well as computer science. One of so many teachers whose care and patience with students has been transcendence. And Peter, I thought your ode to them was fantastic and I can just only echo that. You guys, you have truly earned your Vesuvius plum tree. Thank you very much, it's really just. But my nerdiness came in a good time because those PCs I was on started to be networked. And as President Southered explained in the introduction, I ended up online and as a sysop, a system operator, trying to help answer people's questions and mediate disputes. I came to explore how online communities could try to govern themselves, even as sometimes the basic social structures of high school eluded me. We have such examples today magnified that much more by the reach of the internet, as many of you know when your parents fear. The very fabric of internet routing, the way a message gets from one place to another is basically through gossip. Each of you is like a router in the chain. And to find out what's in that direction, there's no map. The only way to know is to ask the person next to you what she sees on her other side and to relay that to the person on your right and onward and onward. And like a big gossip network, that's how data knows where it's going. It's amazing and it's also incredibly vulnerable. One day the government of Pakistan asked its internet service providers to filter YouTube to people in Pakistan. One small internet service provider effectuated the block by gossiping about that map and saying, who knew everybody? I am YouTube. I just discovered that. So give me, you're tired, you're poor, you're packets yearning for pictures of cats flushing toilets. And it worked. The subscriber sent the packets to this Pakistani ISP and they promptly threw them away because the point was to block YouTube. But that gossip ricocheted within 20 minutes around the world. And if you were sitting in Fox Chapel trying to get to YouTube, your packets were going to Pakistan and they weren't coming back. And if you were YouTube, one of the most popular websites in the world, owned by the most powerful company in the world, there was absolutely nothing you were privileged to do about it. How did this get fixed? It got fixed because word went up almost like the bat signal. Alert, alert, YouTube is down. And who answered the call? But Nanog, the North American Network Operators Group. People far more nerdy than I am. Who knew, right? Who sit in windowless rooms on gorgeous days like this and read messages about the internet being down and develop best practices for fixing it and some of them work at mid-level ISPs. This is an incredibly powerful civic defense force, but also sometimes it makes you wonder, you know, if there were just like a Star Trek convention on one day and they all went. Right? The Die Hard movie kind of writes itself. Also consider, speaking of Star Trek, Star Wars kid, he took a school video camera, borrowed for a class project, put it on a tripod and demoed some lightsaber moods using a golf ball retriever. His friends discovered the video and what did they do? Yeah, they put it online. It became one of the biggest viral hits of all time. He wanted none of this. In fact, he was utterly mortified by it. No matter, mashups and derivatives were made from the original video, including Matrix and Lord of the Rings versions. He became a laughing stock at school. A modicum of compassion and respect turned up in an unlikely place. Wikipedia naturally has an article on Star Wars kid. Each article on Wikipedia has a corresponding discussion page and debate raged there about whether to include his real name in the account of his humiliation. The Wikipedians argued earnestly and then decided by vote, not unanimous, to leave the name out and to this day, the Wikipedia entry omits it. They've since had to address questions like the weight of precedent so those who disagree with the decision know how soon the issue can be reopened and how to achieve enforcement, namely by tapping the efforts of even those Wikipedians who disagree with the outcome but respect the system that produced it. They help keep the project going through challenges large and smalls, large and small. Indeed, at all times, Wikipedia is about 45 minutes from utter destruction, such as from spammers who'd like to turn every single article into an ad for a Rolex watch. There's just that thin geeky line of unpaid volunteers who care to save it that keeps it functioning. Again, the bat signal goes up and well-meaning reasonable people answer it for no money usually not wearing spandex. It's been fascinating to watch Wikipedia fashion an institute a form of law in the best sense of laws and enterprise emanating from people trying to get along and to be fair, understanding that they will not always agree and sometimes they will lose. My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a 10-page US history paper that'll be viewed and graded only by the teacher who I confess I think looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie 20 times, you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources, arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos and to refine your own view and light of what you discover. It turns out there are a few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you're wrong. For the world you are entering, really the one you've been in all along is one swimming in received wisdom accepted uncritically. Too easily we farm out the hard work of knowing whether our society is on a sustainable path to policymakers, experts or the media. It's like Katie Couric will tell us if there's anything genuinely worth worrying about. But these channels of authority are overwhelmed, dysfunctional and in some cases outright corrupt. What will reinforce them or even take their place is something you can help build with tools that even 10 years ago were unknown. The key is to move from the reactive, desultory world of Charlie Brown to one in which you appreciate that you are generally at least as empowered as the next person, to realize the ethical dimension that accompanies the day by day as well as those landmark events in life. As my best friend at Shadyside put it, reflecting on what he knows now that he and I had missed in high school. One of the best ways to evaluate your success in life is the effect that you have on a room full of people, family or strangers when you enter. Does it become brighter or darker? That's something you can choose even though too often it's a script followed without much thought. Enterprises like Wikipedia urge us to ask the same question out of virtual lives knowing how often they touch the real ones. We're at a time of great uncertainty. The economy is in the tank after most talking heads assured us things were fine. We're told the global warming will wreak havoc on our planet and we are the cause. Things went right from too early to tell too late to do anything about it. The best among us are afraid of being found out for the frauds we suspect we are because part of leadership is to exude a confidence and stability that isn't always truly felt. The worst among us are Bernie Madoff who's just a fraud. But you are at a time of great promise. In your immediate future, you're literally be handed a catalog of humankind's knowledge and asked to select four or five subjects to study for months at a time. And you'll have an amazing amount of free time. Shady Side is seriously far more rigorous than college. You can use this free time to find and pursue your passions and to greet with joy and mischief new friends and relationships. Speaking of mischief, I do have a couple of confessions to make. It was I and John Beckerman who ran the flag up the flagpole about 20 years ago with something nasty about the headmaster and cut the howler so it could not be taken down. It flew for about a week until a big truck that said Bob's erections on it came to remove it. That made it all worth it, I gotta say. And in the subtle category, it was also me and John who dropped a bean down every one of those little tiny drains in the science lab sinks. What did they use those drains for? So he just rubbed a bean down each drain and ran a little bit of water. And about a week later, beanstalks started creeping up from each of the drains. John shrugged his shoulders and he put a sign on each one that said, do not disturb, experiment in progress. As you forge and savor the interpersonal connections that make all the difference between simulating a successful life and actually living one, I hope you'll be ready to improve the world the only way in which it ever happens to answer a bat signal that calls to you. I hope without needing spandex. Congratulations, good luck, and see you on Facebook.