Are you exploiting the Internet? Is the Internet exploiting you? This ever-available microphone creates a social pressure to perform. What is the best use of network communications technology for ourselves and our society?

Amidst all this potential media sharing, perhaps we yearn for role models - or at least someone we know we don't want to follow. Since 1988, Justin Hall has tested the internet's capacity to fill his life with attention, affection and remuneration.  Launched in January 1994, his personal web site “Justin’s Links from the Underground” has hosted explicit accounts of his relationships, personal financial transactions, sexually-transmitted diseases, illicit drug experimentation and pleas for crowdfunding.

Hall has worked to be honest in public without hurting people's feelings, and he has failed. His oversharing violated the trust of friends and family, while helping some strangers feel less embarrassed about their own suffering.  Was that a worthwhile tradeoff?

Veering between evangelist, businessman and celebrity Hall has evolved himself to attempt to remain relevant and kind.  During this hour at re:publica 2015, Hall will reveal a few of his online-self-sustaining strategies as well as expose some of his biases as a financially-stable, white cisgender man who found himself online in San Francisco in the 1990s. Hall looks forward to sharing what he's learned in twenty years of http://links.net !