It’s a great pleasure to be here.
I want to thank the organisers particularly for allowing me to compete with your cocktails.
I guess that given that situation at the end of a long day,
the best I can do is talk about something completely different,
so I’m going to talk about freedom.
I didn’t hear it mentioned much today.
So perhaps it represents a useful change of subject.
The purpose of the software which everybody has been talking about,
seen by most of the people who made it,
was to create freedom.
It was the consequence of the existence of the free software movement,
Fossil,
apparently,
if you have been listening to today’s proceedings,
but naturally,
I think,
a more or less living organism.
The free software movement is a conspiracy to save the 21st century from itself,
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.
The purpose of the software movement can be defined fairly simply as follows: make technology that supports freedom through sharing,
put that software in everything,
turn freedom on.
So far we have completed stage one of that process.
The software intended to support freedom now runs everywhere.
When I was a young programmer in the 1970s,
software engineering had a single over-arching goal,
which was summed in a short phrase – Write Once,
Run Everywhere.
Nobody did it.
We did it.
Freedom now runs everything from the smallest object in your pocket to the largest cluster of computers in the world,
whichever one you’re talking about.
Indeed,
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.
We achieved ‘Write Once,
Run Everywhere’ because we were tightly focussed on a single goal: make software that supports freedom,
put that software in everything,
turn freedom on.
Now,
we have achieved,
as I say,
the goal of stage one.
We have built software that supports freedom.
It sustains freedom in several important respects.
First,
it supports sharing.
We used that support for sharing,
predominantly the GNU General Public License and other arrangements that protected freedom to share,
we used that social and legal technology to destroy a malevolent monopoly whose intention was precisely the opposite: put unfreedom everywhere,
charge royalties.
That monopoly is now failing and will soon be gone.
That’s happening because freedom runs everywhere and is available to anyone who wants it at no cost to copy,
modify and improve.
That process protects itself against appropriation,
it protects itself against unfreedom manufacture out of free parts,
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.
However,
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.
We have created a platform which allows free culture.
Wikipedia exists.
Creative Commons exists.
Sharing knowledge is now possible all the way to the bottom of opportunity levels in every human society because the mobile telephone is there,
and were it not for the rules of so called intellectual property we could deliver every piece of knowledge,
every kind of art,
everything of human value to every human brain.
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.
If we succeed we will change the destiny of the human race,
as we always intended to do.
But we face a very significant problem,
one we knew would develop over time but which has developed faster and in a more threatening fashion than we expected,
and it’s built of our parts.
You now live in a network which surveils you more deeply,
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.
Those systems could only surveil and observe your behaviour,
and they could only do so to the extent that your behaviour was accessible to other human beings who informed on you.
The network now knows your thoughts,
your plans,
your questions,
your dreams,
your fears,
your uncertainties.
It surveils every party you go to,
every drink you have,
every message you leave for a friend.
Five hundred million human beings have decided to allow everything they do
in their social lives from day to day
to be collected in one big database,
run for profit,
by a fool.
If we were to allow that situation to continue for much longer,
we would face a situation in which the very fundamental texture of human autonomy
would begin to be adjusted by the network.
What you search for,
what you find,
what you buy,
when you decide to want something
and what something you decide to want,
would begin to be subtly reshaped by machines
operating at the direction of those who wish to take economic rents out of the modifiability of your behaviour.
Not to mention all the governments which can now with a ‘subpoena blank’
or an administrative order of some kind seek from every third party
who collects information about you,
the information they require
in order to interfere with,
adjust or forbid your activity.
I don’t need to explain to anyone living in France
how power hungry the establishment can become on those subjects.
Now we come to the unfortunate technical reality described this cloudy name ‘The Cloud’.
The funny thing about the cloud is that people talk about it everywhere I go
but if you ask them to explain what it is they can’t do it because they don’t know.
So I’m going to explain in I hope two fairly simple conceptions what the cloud is.
First,
the cloud is the sever-client architecture of the net on steroids.
And second,
the cloud is the server-client architecture on the net on steroids virtualised.
The first part of it comes down to this; the internet was constructed by researchers
attempting to complete the task of architecturing an entirely de-centralised network
of arbitrary geometry to survive arbitrary interferences by minor annoyances like nuclear war,
by routing all traffic in a completely non hierarchical fashion
without any regulation by masters over servants.
This was reflected in the very form in which the network understood
at its beginning the concept of a server and a client.
Those of you who are accustomed to using software produced by the dying monopoly
may not understand,
but anyone who uses free software,
at least passively,
will understand it,
because your free software computer
treats the server as the computer closest to you,
and the task of that server is to serve human interaction.
That’s how X Windows worked,
right?
The X server serves to processes in the network,
all of which are assumed to be equal in hierarchical status,
the opportunity to communicate with a human being
and so it serves the opportunity to get to your eyeballs,
your eardrum and your fingertips.
In other words,
the net consisted of a non-hierarchical collection of processes
in which each human being had a server which served interaction with him.
The basic technical achievements of the monopoly was to distort all of this completely.
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.
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,
and human beings used clients to deal with servers which operated with respect to those human beings ‘de haut en bas’.
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.
Now,
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,
as mother’s milk,
the business model opportunities by a hierarchical net with power at the centre and disempowered clients at the edge.
Those are the preconditions of the The Cloud,
the unfair,
inappropriate,
architecturally unnecessary,
economically anti-competitive architecture given to the net,
is the vapour out of which The Cloud condenses.
All that is left to make the thing called The Cloud is to remove the relationship between iron and the server.
This is accomplished by the uniform adoption of virtualisation layers,
many of which we wrote.
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.
Taken to an extreme,
the hierarchical network architecture allows the client at the edge to be completely disempowered,
it receives what is known as ‘software as its service’,
more appropriately,
I think,
labelled ‘software a disservice’,
that is to say you can’t provide any services to the net,
all you have is software given to you to execute by some master with a disembodied server somewhere.
Moreover,
and even more aggressively inappropriately,
The Cloud comes to be seen as ‘All your data are belong to us’.
The virtualisation of storage implies that the party at the edge of the net no longer exercises control over her own information,
which is physically located at an arbitrary place chosen for her by people who run The Cloud.
Any legal obligations that may exist with respect to the control or management of her data have thus been subverted.
If there are,
for example,
rules concerning the nature of the regulation of the data in The Cloud in a particular place,
data will mysteriously tend to move by means legitimate and illegitimate to locations where those regulations are weaker rather than stronger.
The North American economy is slowly shifting from towards an economy based primarily data-mining,
which might be thought of exercise of control over data representing the human lives of everyone on earth.
This is not a recipe for freedom.
This is the biggest and most successful recipe for unfreedom that has ever been devised in the history of human beings.
We have come,
at the moment we expected it to arrive,
we have come to a fateful set of choices.
The technology of digital computation,
storage and control,
now offers us,
at one and the same time,
the greatest possible opportunity; namely,
the elimination of ignorance forever and the power to allow every human brain to learn,
and on the other hand,
the completion of a structure of social control,
more thorough,
more complete,
more technologically perfect than any that has ever existed in the history of human beings.
Dearly beloved,
I set before you a choice between life and death.
Fortunately the tools are still in our hands.
We made this stuff and we can fix the problem.
As I’ve already suggested,
the primary difficulties we face arise from two bad technical decisions,
both of them reversible.
In the first place we allowed the conception of the server as a form of centralised power divorced from the human being.
It was not there in the original design of the net,
it is an artifact of bad software manufactured by people with ill will.
We do not have to accept the idea that servers are centralised.
If we had an enormous number of cheap,
reliable,
low-power serving computers running software designed to provide services to others on our behalf,
and storing our data in them in safe locations,
we would convert a network presently consisting of centralised services into a network consisting of federated services,
that is services rendered by people,
to people,
for people,
in a non-hierarchical fashion.
Second,
we could reverse the virtualisation epidemic,
not for the purpose of eliminating virtualisation or for preventing those who own heavy duty hardware from making better use of it,
but to prevent the idea that you ought not to have a computer of your own,
you ought not to store your data on your own,
you ought not to provide services to the world on your own,
you ought to be a consumer of the services provided by the net.
So do we have such a possibility for reversing the centralisation of the network’s architecture? Yes we do.
Already,
throughout the hardware environment of the world you will notice the beginnings of the distribution of so-called plug-servers,
tiny objects requiring very little power,
using low-power,
low-speed,
but quite muscular little chips mostly made by the arm.
You can buy at the moment,
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,
objects no larger than a cell phone charger,
which contain a fully operational server with a wired-nick wireless,
some sataports,
some USB,
some serial consul attachment possibilities and so on.
In other words,
a fully featured computer capable of delivering services over the net to anybody who wishes to interact with you.
The plug servers,
which will soon be cheaper than cellphones when they are made in appropriate quantities,
those plug servers,
supported by free software,
will soon be providing a form of personal,
private cloud which reverses the negative social consequences of power concentration in the net.
Your data,
kept in your home,
or your office,
securely backed up to the plug servers of your friends,
capable of being read by nobody without a search warrant,
protecting everything inside your apartment by intrusion detection software which works,
providing you free telephone calls over the net through ‘asteros’ (have no idea what this means),
allowing your friends in China to climb over the great firewall using proxy servers several billion wide,
many too many for the Chinese communist party to interfere with,
affording you the opportunity to federate your social life rather than centralise it,
moving you painlessly and into a migration off Facebook,
Flicker,
Twitter and all the other bad things.
You don’t lose your friends,
you all just leave bit by bit,
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.
In other words,
we begin federating what the bad folks centralise.
We do this in machines which are so cheap,
so ubiquitous,
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.
We will succeed,
we will succeed,
in providing freedom in a packaged so inexpensive,
so reliable,
and so thoroughly engineered by us,
for us,
that it will no longer be possible for people around the network to concentrate power,
to concentrate data,
or to conduct meaningful surveillance of our individual lives.
We will not soon but now.
The hardware economics are not a problem for us.
They’re already solved.
The software economics are not a problem for us.
We solved those long ago.
The technical problems are not a problem for us.
We’re good at that.
That’s how we got here.
The political questions are not hard for us.
We love freedom and we hate tyranny.
We know exactly how to tell the difference,
no matter whether it wears a hoodie or a space suit or a uniform.
We know what we’re doing.
We’re going to put freedom in new things.
We’re going to spread those things across the planet.
We’re going to turn freedom on.
So what I want to tell is this: it’s okay,
we’re still here,
we haven’t gone away,
the free software movement isn’t dead,
it hasn’t become ‘open’ anything.
We know exactly what we need to do and we’re going to do it,
we’re going to make it,
and we’re going to say ‘Hey.
Here.
We made this freedom.
We think you might like it.
Want some? Take it.
It’s free.
Wanna join up?’ Thank you very much.