Matthew Edward Hooker – Biography
Matt Hooker was born in Los Angeles, California. He attended college preparatory school at Crespi Carmelite High School, where he was president of the student body, captain of the track and cross-country teams and yearbook editor. He won the outstanding student award and a scholarship to Stanford University.
At Stanford, Matt studied: American government and public policy, statistics, Earth sciences, ethics and sustainable development in the global environment, economics and humanities; before graduating, with a B.A., Honors, in Humanities Special Programs and Comparative Literature. While at Stanford he audited classes at the Graduate School of Business and took them in the graduate departments of French and American Literature. He specialized in modern American literature and poetry. His favorite poets are Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.
Matt has worked globally in: international consulting, web-based businesses, and in education as an on-line learning systems developer and proponent, real estate, investments, and in music and film.
Matt is also an IT head, a project manager, a consultant, and a Linux server builder and administrator with skills in servers (Apache, Tomcat, NGINX), databases (PostgreSQL and MySQL), structured and big data, email systems (Postfix, Dovecot), web and server security, online learning systems, social networks, e-commerce marketplace portals, and website construction and hosting. Matt is a firm believer in and a strong proponent and advocate of open source software, believing that it and the open source programming languages used to develop open source software are akin to a language’s alphabet – that a free-to-use open source ecosystem of software and programming languages is vital to ensure a vast democratic uptake of the digital universe and the Internet and the services and applications based on them; that without such a healthy free open source ecosystem, that individuals and small groups would be priced out of the Internet and digital universe, which would become controlled by an ever-smaller group of powerful players. Furthermore, Matt believes that such a healthy open-source ecosystem is the only way to ensure transparency, safety, security, and trust on the Internet and in the digital age, as well as affordability. Matt advocates to keep entry barriers to the digital universe and the Internet as low as possible, most importantly in terms of costs; so that every person can buy an affordable domain name and publish themselves globally - simply, easily and with little expense.
Matt has been an active participant in the development of the Internet through his work with ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) as a volunteer and activist. He was an active member of the intellectual property and the business constituencies for years, and was on the first internationalization constituency, which led over a decade later to the development of a truly multilingual Internet and internationalized domain names. He is the founder of IDOA.Info – the Internet Domain Owners Association – a not-for-profit organization fighting for domain owners’ rights. Matt is the author of the soon-to-be-published book “The Internet: Past, Present and Future”.
Matt is single, has never been married, has no children, and enjoys technology and science, including physics and astronomy. He speaks fluent French, good Portuguese and some Spanish, German and Italian in addition to English. He loves the great outdoors, trout fishing, skiing, sailing, swimming, biking and hiking. He loves classical music and jazz and great films and quality popular music. Matt sings jazz and bossa nova, accompanying himself on a classical guitar when he doesn’t have a group to perform with. He loves dogs and horses, and all animals. He strongly believes that humans have a responsibility to preserve all species from extinction, and that governments have a responsibility to provide all people with a clean, safe environment, including clean, pure breathing air and drinking water and affordable access to safe, nourishing food; he thus considers himself to be environmentally minded and would like to see renewable energy and clean technologies replace the existing fossil fuel based and chemical pesticide based toxic polluting ones.
Matt is a strong anti-communist and free speech advocate. He is against any and all criminalization of words and opinions. He believes that one should develop a thick skin in order to live in and participate in a democracy, and that any censorship or criminalization of words is unconstitutional and has a chilling effect on freedom of speech, belief and opinion. He believes that it is crucial to fight for freedom and free speech as well as for the use of science, the scientific method and reason in society, government, and public policy; and to fight against the expanding evils of communism, ideological extremism (including extreme “political correctness”) and religious fanaticism. He firmly believes in the separation of Church and State.
Matt firmly believes that Humans have a destiny in Space, (see ManifestDestiny.Space) and that taking much better care of Earth must be done as we set up colonies on other planets. To quote Matt: “We will never find another planet Earth or any planet that supports and sustains us, as well as all the other diverse, myriad, beautiful forms of life that we share planet Earth with, as well as Earth does. We owe it to ourselves, to our progeny, and to every other form of life on Earth to clean up our lifestyle so that Earth’s ability to give birth to new life forms and provide for current ones is not diminished. High Quality of Life is only possible with low population density and low pollution.”
Matt is a direct descendent of America's top general under President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Matt, too, fights for freedom and against corruption. Matt believes that he is a future POTUS (President of the United States), and that his leadership will help the USA, as well as the entire world, transition to a sustainable model that preserves the Earth’s health and allows all species to co-exist peacefully, with high-quality lives.