9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It’s a great pleasure to be here.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I want to thank the organisers particularly for allowing me to compete with your cocktails.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I guess that given that situation at the end of a long day,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the best I can do is talk about something completely different,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so I’m going to talk about freedom.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I didn’t hear it mentioned much today.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So perhaps it represents a useful change of subject.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The purpose of the software which everybody has been talking about,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
seen by most of the people who made it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
was to create freedom.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It was the consequence of the existence of the free software movement,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Fossil,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
apparently,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
if you have been listening to today’s proceedings,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but naturally,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I think,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
a more or less living organism.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The free software movement is a conspiracy to save the 21st century from itself,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
generated in the last quarter of the 20th century by a series of people who worried about the nature of technology free of ethical and social imperatives for the securing of liberty.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The purpose of the software movement can be defined fairly simply as follows: make technology that supports freedom through sharing,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
put that software in everything,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
turn freedom on.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So far we have completed stage one of that process.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The software intended to support freedom now runs everywhere.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
When I was a young programmer in the 1970s,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
software engineering had a single over-arching goal,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which was summed in a short phrase – Write Once,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Run Everywhere.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Nobody did it.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We did it.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Freedom now runs everything from the smallest object in your pocket to the largest cluster of computers in the world,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
whichever one you’re talking about.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Indeed,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
neither the stuff in your pocket nor the largest computers in the world can run on anything else reliably and with the kind of portability of software that was the goal of software engineering when I was young.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We achieved ‘Write Once,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Run Everywhere’ because we were tightly focussed on a single goal: make software that supports freedom,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
put that software in everything,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
turn freedom on.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we have achieved,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
as I say,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the goal of stage one.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We have built software that supports freedom.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It sustains freedom in several important respects.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
First,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it supports sharing.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We used that support for sharing,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
predominantly the GNU General Public License and other arrangements that protected freedom to share,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we used that social and legal technology to destroy a malevolent monopoly whose intention was precisely the opposite: put unfreedom everywhere,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
charge royalties.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That monopoly is now failing and will soon be gone.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That’s happening because freedom runs everywhere and is available to anyone who wants it at no cost to copy,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
modify and improve.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That process protects itself against appropriation,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it protects itself against unfreedom manufacture out of free parts,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and it does what it can to prevent the rent-seeking buried in the patent system by people who unwisely applied the patent system to software in order to enable rent-seeking.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
However,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we have in the process created a network whose possibilities for freedom are as difficult and as threatening as the problems in the network we are seeking to prevent.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We have created a platform which allows free culture.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Wikipedia exists.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Creative Commons exists.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Sharing knowledge is now possible all the way to the bottom of opportunity levels in every human society because the mobile telephone is there,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and were it not for the rules of so called intellectual property we could deliver every piece of knowledge,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
every kind of art,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
everything of human value to every human brain.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In the next generation we will make a determined attempt to prevent every human brain on the planet from being starved of the knowledge that it seeks to acquire.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
If we succeed we will change the destiny of the human race,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
as we always intended to do.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But we face a very significant problem,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
one we knew would develop over time but which has developed faster and in a more threatening fashion than we expected,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and it’s built of our parts.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
You now live in a network which surveils you more deeply,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which knows more about you and which renders this knowledge about you more dangerously accessible to those who wish to modify your behaviour than any one of the 20th century political systems we refer to as totalitarian.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Those systems could only surveil and observe your behaviour,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and they could only do so to the extent that your behaviour was accessible to other human beings who informed on you.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The network now knows your thoughts,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
your plans,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
your questions,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
your dreams,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
your fears,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
your uncertainties.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It surveils every party you go to,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
every drink you have,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
every message you leave for a friend.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Five hundred million human beings have decided to allow everything they do

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in their social lives from day to day

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to be collected in one big database,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
run for profit,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
by a fool.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
If we were to allow that situation to continue for much longer,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we would face a situation in which the very fundamental texture of human autonomy

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
would begin to be adjusted by the network.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
What you search for,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
what you find,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
what you buy,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
when you decide to want something

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and what something you decide to want,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
would begin to be subtly reshaped by machines

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
operating at the direction of those who wish to take economic rents out of the modifiability of your behaviour.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Not to mention all the governments which can now with a ‘subpoena blank’

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
or an administrative order of some kind seek from every third party

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
who collects information about you,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the information they require

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in order to interfere with,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
adjust or forbid your activity.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I don’t need to explain to anyone living in France

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
how power hungry the establishment can become on those subjects.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now we come to the unfortunate technical reality described this cloudy name ‘The Cloud’.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The funny thing about the cloud is that people talk about it everywhere I go

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but if you ask them to explain what it is they can’t do it because they don’t know.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So I’m going to explain in I hope two fairly simple conceptions what the cloud is.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
First,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the cloud is the sever-client architecture of the net on steroids.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And second,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the cloud is the server-client architecture on the net on steroids virtualised.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The first part of it comes down to this; the internet was constructed by researchers

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
attempting to complete the task of architecturing an entirely de-centralised network

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
of arbitrary geometry to survive arbitrary interferences by minor annoyances like nuclear war,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
by routing all traffic in a completely non hierarchical fashion

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
without any regulation by masters over servants.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This was reflected in the very form in which the network understood

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at its beginning the concept of a server and a client.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Those of you who are accustomed to using software produced by the dying monopoly

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
may not understand,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but anyone who uses free software,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at least passively,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
will understand it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
because your free software computer

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
treats the server as the computer closest to you,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and the task of that server is to serve human interaction.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That’s how X Windows worked,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
right?

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The X server serves to processes in the network,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
all of which are assumed to be equal in hierarchical status,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the opportunity to communicate with a human being

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and so it serves the opportunity to get to your eyeballs,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
your eardrum and your fingertips.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In other words,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the net consisted of a non-hierarchical collection of processes

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in which each human being had a server which served interaction with him.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The basic technical achievements of the monopoly was to distort all of this completely.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Windows was a degenerate version of the structure of the network originally architected by people who did not have the same neurological dysfunctions as the architects of the monopoly.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The purpose of the server-client interaction structure in the net became to create hierarchies among machines in which some were servers and most were clients,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and human beings used clients to deal with servers which operated with respect to those human beings ‘de haut en bas’.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We rebuilt the net over a period of almost twenty years to prefigure this peculiarly hierarchical and status conception of the nature of the net which was never any part of the original architecture but was solely an artifact of the rent-seeking policies of the monopolists.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that hierarchical architecture of the net is enabling the gathering of political power in the centre with respect to disempowered endpoints and manufacturers of proprietary software and the architects of proprietary networks absorb,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
as mother’s milk,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the business model opportunities by a hierarchical net with power at the centre and disempowered clients at the edge.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Those are the preconditions of the The Cloud,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the unfair,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
inappropriate,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
architecturally unnecessary,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
economically anti-competitive architecture given to the net,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
is the vapour out of which The Cloud condenses.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
All that is left to make the thing called The Cloud is to remove the relationship between iron and the server.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This is accomplished by the uniform adoption of virtualisation layers,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
many of which we wrote.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The virtualisation layers make it possible for hierarchies to use the accumulation of power at the centre ever more efficiently and every more mysteriously with respect to the disempowered client at the edge.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Taken to an extreme,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the hierarchical network architecture allows the client at the edge to be completely disempowered,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it receives what is known as ‘software as its service’,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
more appropriately,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I think,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
labelled ‘software a disservice’,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that is to say you can’t provide any services to the net,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
all you have is software given to you to execute by some master with a disembodied server somewhere.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Moreover,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and even more aggressively inappropriately,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The Cloud comes to be seen as ‘All your data are belong to us’.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The virtualisation of storage implies that the party at the edge of the net no longer exercises control over her own information,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which is physically located at an arbitrary place chosen for her by people who run The Cloud.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Any legal obligations that may exist with respect to the control or management of her data have thus been subverted.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
If there are,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for example,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
rules concerning the nature of the regulation of the data in The Cloud in a particular place,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
data will mysteriously tend to move by means legitimate and illegitimate to locations where those regulations are weaker rather than stronger.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The North American economy is slowly shifting from towards an economy based primarily data-mining,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which might be thought of exercise of control over data representing the human lives of everyone on earth.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This is not a recipe for freedom.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This is the biggest and most successful recipe for unfreedom that has ever been devised in the history of human beings.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We have come,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at the moment we expected it to arrive,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we have come to a fateful set of choices.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The technology of digital computation,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
storage and control,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
now offers us,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at one and the same time,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the greatest possible opportunity; namely,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the elimination of ignorance forever and the power to allow every human brain to learn,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and on the other hand,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the completion of a structure of social control,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
more thorough,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
more complete,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
more technologically perfect than any that has ever existed in the history of human beings.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Dearly beloved,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I set before you a choice between life and death.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Fortunately the tools are still in our hands.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We made this stuff and we can fix the problem.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
As I’ve already suggested,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the primary difficulties we face arise from two bad technical decisions,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
both of them reversible.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In the first place we allowed the conception of the server as a form of centralised power divorced from the human being.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It was not there in the original design of the net,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it is an artifact of bad software manufactured by people with ill will.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We do not have to accept the idea that servers are centralised.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
If we had an enormous number of cheap,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
reliable,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
low-power serving computers running software designed to provide services to others on our behalf,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and storing our data in them in safe locations,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we would convert a network presently consisting of centralised services into a network consisting of federated services,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that is services rendered by people,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to people,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for people,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in a non-hierarchical fashion.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Second,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we could reverse the virtualisation epidemic,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
not for the purpose of eliminating virtualisation or for preventing those who own heavy duty hardware from making better use of it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but to prevent the idea that you ought not to have a computer of your own,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you ought not to store your data on your own,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you ought not to provide services to the world on your own,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you ought to be a consumer of the services provided by the net.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So do we have such a possibility for reversing the centralisation of the network’s architecture? Yes we do.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Already,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
throughout the hardware environment of the world you will notice the beginnings of the distribution of so-called plug-servers,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
tiny objects requiring very little power,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
using low-power,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
low-speed,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but quite muscular little chips mostly made by the arm.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
You can buy at the moment,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at prices indicative of the beginning of the hardware form factors run that is in the neighbourhood of ninety to a hundred and fifty US dollars around the world,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
objects no larger than a cell phone charger,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which contain a fully operational server with a wired-nick wireless,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
some sataports,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
some USB,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
some serial consul attachment possibilities and so on.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In other words,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
a fully featured computer capable of delivering services over the net to anybody who wishes to interact with you.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The plug servers,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which will soon be cheaper than cellphones when they are made in appropriate quantities,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
those plug servers,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
supported by free software,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
will soon be providing a form of personal,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
private cloud which reverses the negative social consequences of power concentration in the net.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Your data,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
kept in your home,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
or your office,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
securely backed up to the plug servers of your friends,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
capable of being read by nobody without a search warrant,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
protecting everything inside your apartment by intrusion detection software which works,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
providing you free telephone calls over the net through ‘asteros’ (have no idea what this means),

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
allowing your friends in China to climb over the great firewall using proxy servers several billion wide,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
many too many for the Chinese communist party to interfere with,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
affording you the opportunity to federate your social life rather than centralise it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
moving you painlessly and into a migration off Facebook,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Flicker,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Twitter and all the other bad things.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
You don’t lose your friends,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you all just leave bit by bit,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and as you go you cease to use the centralised servers because you have a direct encrypted channel between yourself and each of your friends.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In other words,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we begin federating what the bad folks centralise.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We do this in machines which are so cheap,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so ubiquitous,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so low in its power demands that we no longer care about reliable electricity: one of these servers will run on two double A batteries.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We will succeed,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we will succeed,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in providing freedom in a packaged so inexpensive,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so reliable,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and so thoroughly engineered by us,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for us,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that it will no longer be possible for people around the network to concentrate power,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to concentrate data,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
or to conduct meaningful surveillance of our individual lives.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We will not soon but now.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The hardware economics are not a problem for us.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They’re already solved.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The software economics are not a problem for us.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We solved those long ago.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The technical problems are not a problem for us.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We’re good at that.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That’s how we got here.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The political questions are not hard for us.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We love freedom and we hate tyranny.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We know exactly how to tell the difference,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
no matter whether it wears a hoodie or a space suit or a uniform.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We know what we’re doing.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We’re going to put freedom in new things.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We’re going to spread those things across the planet.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We’re going to turn freedom on.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So what I want to tell is this: it’s okay,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we’re still here,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we haven’t gone away,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the free software movement isn’t dead,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it hasn’t become ‘open’ anything.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We know exactly what we need to do and we’re going to do it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we’re going to make it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and we’re going to say ‘Hey.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Here.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We made this freedom.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We think you might like it.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Want some? Take it.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It’s free.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Wanna join up?’ Thank you very much.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000


9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
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