Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Robert W. Gehl. I'm a professor in Communication and Media Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. My full title is pretty long: Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice. I'm affiliated with a research program called Connected Minds, and I am also an alumnus of the Fulbright program -- I had a research chair position at the University of Calgary.
I'm the author of several books. My first one is Reverse Engineering Social Media, which is a criticism of corporate social media (and won the Association of Internet Researchers book award). Then I wrote Weaving the Dark Web, which is an exploration of dark web cultures and was published by MIT in 2018. My latest book is also from MIT. It's called Social Engineering, and was co-authored in 2022 with Sean Lawson. That book takes a historical look at manipulative communication -- propaganda, disinformation, and hacker con artistry.
I'm currently working on a new book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges, which should come out with Oxford University Press. That book focuses on Mastodon and the fediverse.
I also blog at FOSS Academic, where I talk about my writing and engage in Internet criticism.
What hardware do you use?
The short answer is: whatever runs Linux! I'm pretty agnostic about hardware beyond that. I am pretty happy to purchase a used laptop, put Linux on it, and do my work. I regularly use a laptop until its hardware is worn out -- and often even longer, replacing parts as best I can. I do my best to keep computers out of landfills.
I do have some fondness for two laptops I've owned, though. One was a Compaq Presario F700, which was the first computer I ever installed Linux on (back in 2006 or so). And another was a System 76 Galago Pro 3, which was the best computer I ever owned. It was light, the keyboard was great, and it was sturdy.
These days, however, I tend to run Dell computers because my university has a contract with them and I get a budget to purchase one, and Dell does support Linux reasonably well. I'm typing this on a Dell XPS 15. It's ok, I suppose.
I currently have a home media server, a Raspberry Pi 4.
I also only use phones I can side-load free and open source F-Droid apps onto.
And what software?
As I write about in my FOSS Academic blog, I'm trying to live the "FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream," which means using free and open source software as much as possible to do my academic work.
At the heart of it all is Linux. That's the secret sauce -- I can put Linux on old hardware and it will live for years and years.
After trying out many different flavors of Linux, I've mainly settled on KDE running on Manjaro. What I like about Manjaro is that I don't need to do full system upgrades -- since it relies on Arch Linux, it's a "rolling" set up, which runs for years without problems. And I find KDE to be the right blend of customizability and stability -- once I get my desktop set up, it stays that way.
Browser-wise: I use Firefox -- I've used it since the early days. I use Thunderbird as an email and calendar client.
For my academic work, it all starts with the mighty Zotero, which is a bibliography and citation manager. I run just about everything through it: notes on books and articles, notes on presentations, and notes on websites. In fact, Zotero is really valuable as an archiver of the web, taking snapshots of websites via its Firefox add-on. I have ~30,000 items in there, spanning the past 18 years of my career. I'll recommend Zotero to anyone who will listen. Seriously, don't get me started...
Zotero is being pushed aside just a little bit though, by Zettlr, a Markdown-enabled editor. I'm increasingly taking notes in Zettlr, using it to synthesize multiple sources and as a research journal. I do this because note-taking in Zotero tends to be very item-centric, which is to say tied to a specific citation. Zettlr, on the other hand, allows for a bit more synthesis of multiple items into short drafts.
When I need to write up documents, it's LibreOffice Writer time. LibreOffice Writer integrates extremely well with Zotero, so I can cite sources very quickly (which is so essential to the writing process -- I don't want to break the flow of writing by having to deal with the rudiments of citation). Plus, its interface is the same as it was the day it started -- I don't have to figure out how to do things. I just get things done.
When I need to share documents, manage calendars, set appointments, or do video chats, I use my own Nextcloud server. The server keeps my computers in sync, enables me to collaborate with others, and can even be a viable substitute for Zoom via its Talk add-on. I can also do on-the-fly Markdown editing in it through a web browser.
I also should give a shout-out to Jellyfin, which is home media server software. I run that on the aforementioned Raspberry Pi. When I toss in WireGuard (an easy way to self-host a VPN), I can stream my music and videos anywhere in the world. On my phone, I use the F-Droid app FinAmp to stream from my library.
And one last shout-out goes to Pi-Hole, which is a self-hosted DNS server with ad-blocking built in. When I run that over WireGuard, I get ad-blocking wherever I am in the world. I gave my family access to it so they could block intrusive internet trackers.
What would be your dream setup?
I kinda feel like I'm livin' the dream. I think we're living in a really exciting time, when it comes to FOSS: those of us with technical-know how can host software like Nextcloud (or social media software, like Mastodon) for our friends and family, allowing us to get away from corporate software.
For example, Sean Lawson and I wrote Social Engineering using my Nextcloud instance and a shared Zotero libraries. And with Linux, I can extend the life of old hardware. I can't remember the last time I used a Mac or Windows machine.
But I will say that I want this dream for others. I advocate that universities stop using software from Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Zoom. As I wrote about in my blog, I think universities have lost their edge in developing knowledge about computing. They outsource everything to a few big US companies, and so students and faculty become mere clients to those companies. I'd rather see universities do more self-hosting with FOSS tools so people can have the chance to push past slick interfaces and get into how these things work.
I also think the stakes are even higher now that those same big companies are monitoring what we do in order to train AI. We academics may be training machines that will replace us. That is a bit of a nightmare.