I think so much of my life had me growing up under extreme poverty and really challenging conditions, with having the police in my neighborhood and seeing the impact of over-incarceration. Having a father love up on me and remind of who I was, and my strength against those conditions, really shaped why I'm an organizer today.

I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.

When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.

In 'When They Call You a Terrorist,' I reflect on my time growing up in Van Nuys, California, surrounded by my devoted family and supportive friends, weaving our experiences into the larger picture of how predominantly marginalized neighborhoods are under constant systemic attack.

The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

Thrillers have become all about technology and using technology. That seemed, to me, not so interesting.

I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.