The measures for taking those steps are technical. As usual, the box builders are ahead of us. The hardware isn’t the constraint. As usual, nowadays, the software isn’t really that deep a constraint either because we’ve made so much wonderful software which is in fact being used by all the guys on the bad architecture. They don’t want to do without our stuff. The bad architecture is enabled, powered by us. The re-architecture is too. And we have our usual magic benefit. If we had one copy of what I’m talking about, we’d have all the copies we need. We have no manufacturing or transport or logistics constraint. If we do the job, it’s done. We scale.
This is technical challenge for social reason. It’s a frontier for technical people to explore. There is enormous social pay-off for exploring it.
The payoff is plain because the harm being ameliorated is current and people you know are suffering from it. Everything we know about why we make free software says that’s when we come into our own. It’s a technical challenge incrementally attainable by extension from where we already are that makes the lives of the people around us and whom we care about immediately better. I have never in 25 years of doing this work, I have never seen us fail to rise to a challenge that could be defined in those terms. So I don’t think we’re going to fail this one either.
Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy.
Let’s give it to him. For Free.
And I promise, and you should promise too, not to spy on the bankruptcy proceeding. It’s not any of our business. It’s private.
This is actually a story potentially happy. It is a story potentially happy and if we do it then we will have quelled one more rumor about the irrelevance of us and everybody in the Valley will have to go find another buzz word and all the guys who think that Sandhill Road is going to rise into new power and glory by spying on everybody and monetizing it will have to find another line of work too, all of which is purely on the side of the angels. Purely on the side of the angels.
We will not be rid of all our problems by any means, but just moving the logs from them to you is the single biggest step that we can take in resolving a whole range of social problems that I feel badly about what remains of my American constitution and that I would feel badly about if I were watching the failure of European data protection law from inside instead of outside and that I would feel kind of hopeful about if I were, oh say, a friend of mine in China. Because you know of course we really ought to put a VPN in that wall wart.
And probably we ought to put a Tor router in there.
And of course, we’ve got bittorrent, and by the time you get done with all of that, we have a freedom box. We have a box that not merely climbs us out of the hole we’re in, we have a box that actually puts a ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are, which is another thing we love to do.
I do believe the US State Department will go slanging away at the Chinese communist party for a year or two about internet freedom and I believe the Chinese communist party is going to go slanging back and what they’re going to say is “You think you’ve got real good privacy and autonomy in the internet voyear in your neighborhood?” And every time they do that now as they have been doing that in the last 2 weeks, I would say ouch if I was Hilary Clinton and I knew anything about it because we don’t. Because we don’t. It’s true. We have a capitalist kind and they have a centralist vanguard of the party sort of Marxist kind or maybe Marxist or maybe just totalitarian kind but we’re not going to win the freedom of the net discussion carrying Facebook on our backs. We’re not.
But you screw those wall wart servers around pretty thickly in American society and start taking back the logs and you want to know who I talked to on a Friday night? Get a search warrant and stop reading my email. By the way there’s my GPG key in there and now we really are encrypting for a change and so on and so on and so on and it begins to look like something we might really want to go on a national crusade about. We really are making freedom here for other people too. For people who live in places where the web don’t work.
So there’s not a challenge we don’t want to rise to. It’s one we want to rise to plenty. In fact, we’re in a happy state in which all the benefits we can get are way bigger than the technical intricacy of doing what needs to be done, which isn’t much.
That’s where we came from. We came from our technology was more free than we understood and we gave away a bunch of the freedom before we really knew it was gone. We came from unfree software had bad social consequences further down the road than even the freedom agitators knew. We came from unfreedom’s metaphors tend to produce bad technology.
In other words, we came from the stuff that our movement was designed to confront from the beginning but we came from there. And we’re still living with the consequences of we didn’t do it quite right the first time, though we caught up thanks to Richard Stallman and moving on.
Where we live now is no place we’re going to have to see our grandchildren live. Where we live now is no place we would like to conduct guided tours of. I used to say to my students how many video cameras are there between where you live and the Law school? Count them. I now say to my students how many video cameras are there between the front door to the law school and this classroom? Count them.
I now say to my students “can you find a place where there are no video cameras?” Now, what happened in that process was that we created immense cognitive auxiliaries for the state — enormous engines of listening. You know how it is if you live in an American university thanks to the movie and music companies which keep reminding you of living in the midst of an enormous surveillance network. We’re surrounded by stuff listening to and watching us. We’re surrounded by mine-able data.
Not all of that’s going to go away because we took Facebook and split it up and carried away our little shards of it. It’s not going to go away cause we won’t take free webhosting with spying inside anymore. We’ll have other work to do. And some of that work is lawyers work. I will admit that. Some of that work is law drafting and litigating and making trouble and doing lawyer stuff. That’s fine. I’m ready.
My friends an I will do the lawyers part. It would be way simpler to do the lawyer’s work if we were living in a society which had come to understand it’s privacy better. It would be way simpler to do the lawyer’s work if young people realize that when they grow up and start voting or start voting now that they’re grown up, this is an issue. That they need to get the rest of it done the way we fixed the big stuff when we were kids. We’ll have a much easier time with the enormous confusions of international interlocking of regimes when we have deteriorated the immense force of American capitalism forcing us to be less free and more surveilled for other people’s profit all the time. It isn’t that this gets all the problems solved but the easy work is very rich and rewarding right now.
The problems are really bad. Getting the easy ones out will improve the politics for solving the hard ones and it’s right up our alley. The solution is made of our parts. We’ve got to do it. That’s my message. It’s Friday night. Some people don’t want to go right back to coding I’m sure. We could put it off until Tuesday but how long do you really want to wait? You know everyday that goes by there’s more data we’ll never get back. Everyday that goes by there’s more data inferences we can’t undo. Everyday that goes by we pile up more stuff in the hands of the people who got too much. So it’s not like we should say “one of these days I’ll get around to that”. It’s not like we should say “I think I’d rather sort of spend my time browsing news about iPad”.