Query results: October, 2011

I became the third own­er of the six year-old lap­top this sum­mer. I brought it home, care­ful­ly wiped it clean of all the stick­ers, the print­ed warn­ings and the dirt; it runs hap­pi­ly and qui­et­ly now in the mid­dle of my lit­tle apart­ment, day and night.
It is a source of joy, a qui­et, peace­ful gleam­ing expres­sion of love. A com­put­er? Can one ever be?

This one is, to me, because with it I have climbed to the moun­tain­top of my com­put­ing landscape.

I start­ed climb­ing when on the com­put­er I installed the Debian GNU/Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. After many years of know­ing Debian, com­ing to use it felt like a priv­i­lege. The pro­gram is a mas­ter­piece of under­state­ment, and the con­trast with Ubun­tu, which I have used for a long time and which is based on Debian, jumped to my face.

Ubun­tu, the sleek, thought­ful­ly-inter­faced young­ster; Debian, the utter­ly mod­est, sim­ple clock­work giant… I found the sight of the ele­gant con­struc­tion, fit­ting inside and tak­ing care of the lit­tle machine, to be sim­ply mar­velous. Here was to a third kind of beau­ty in soft­ware: Not that of a sim­ple, focused, resource-spar­ing pro­gram; Not of a clean, crisp and flu­id inter­face; Rather, the beau­ty of the mul­ti­tude of pieces com­ing togeth­er in an order­ly, tidy and func­tion­al fash­ion. Debian’s mis­sion seems to be to Just Work. It does it Well and Beautifully.

Words were fail­ing me as I played with­in the ele­gant con­struc­tion, con­tem­plat­ing all of the mar­vels made avail­able to me… a mod­ern, secure web brows­er run­ning less than two min­utes away from pow­er­ing up. A CD read&write dri­ve that works, with soft­ware to run it; soft­ware to edit maps, to transcode videos, to chat, to draw, to write, to share; tidy menus and auto­mat­ic updates for them all.
I had always per­ceived soft­ware free­dom as a race, a per­ma­nent bat­tle for exis­tence, and one that we were slow­ly los­ing. But beyond mar­ket share, net­work effects and all the mean tech­ni­cal and legal tac­tics, in front of that lit­tle com­put­er I real­ized sud­den­ly how much there was left: how much would nev­er need to be re-writ­ten, because it works, and it empow­ers the users, and it’s com­pat­i­ble with every­thing else. I thought of all the com­po­nents writ­ten already, up from the lit­tle core util­i­ties like cp and mv and echo, all the pro­to­cols and for­mats, all the lay­ers of abstrac­tion, that were fin­ished for good and ready to be built upon. The lov­ing work of two entire gen­er­a­tions of pro­gram­mers fit­ting ele­gant­ly on a sin­gle CD and an Inter­net connection.

I was search­ing for words, and those of Eben Moglen were in my head; it struck me then that I was stand­ing on the shoul­ders of giants.
Yes, the breeze up there, and the per­spec­tive! Turn­ing this old com­put­er on, I feel like I am step­ping in the library of Alexan­dria, sud­den­ly able to appre­ci­ate its con­struc­tion and the depth of its con­tents. It is an emo­tion­al, inti­mate, hum­bling and joy­ful feeling.

Using the snip­py soft­ware cen­ter, I installed Tor. Run­ning the pro­gram (through its lit­tle graph­i­cal inter­face Vidalia) makes my com­put­er part of the Tor net­work, which anonymis­es com­mu­ni­ca­tions on the Inter­net. Now, my com­put­er is one among sev­er­al thou­sand nodes run by vol­un­teers, which relay infor­ma­tion from one to anoth­er, not know­ing the recip­i­ents and unable to com­pre­hend what they are transmitting.
On the edge of the net­work, ordi­nary peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate. Peo­ple like you and me read and write freely;  they install the Tor Brows­er Bun­dle and they are only two clicks away from being able to exchange infor­ma­tion with­out sur­veil­lance. In Chi­na they can read news which con­tain the key­word Tibet; in Iran they can dis­cuss about polit­i­cal protests; in Mex­i­co they can write about drug car­tels with­out their life end­ing in hor­ror; in Thai­land they can hold polit­i­cal views with­out being jailed. Every­where, they can browse the web with­out feed­ing the great cor­po­rate data­bas­es that are auc­tioned off to unscrupu­lous organisations.
A tiny part of that traf­fic tran­sits through the lap­top in my apart­ment. I acknowl­edge that some of it is rep­re­hen­si­ble. I know that some of it is of immense human val­ue — so immense that sev­er­al total­i­tar­i­an regimes have my IP address black­list­ed now. I take joy in know­ing that most of it is ordi­nary — youtube videos of cats and emails with pic­tures of the lat­est baby in the family.

In a process so stream­lined that not even the fan can be heard, so well designed that only a few clicks were need­ed to set it up, my lap­top encrypts, decrypts, relays infor­ma­tion, from unknown sources to unknown recip­i­ents, con­tribut­ing minute­ly to a bet­ter world, on the table on which I take my meals. This is my mountaintop.

All I hear all year round about the Inter­net and com­put­ing in gen­er­al seems to relate to things made for dis­trac­tion. Broad­band providers behave like the Inter­net was their tele­vi­sion net­work. My gov­ern­ment thinks Inter­net is a city in which it will re-mold the unpleas­ant parts. Many jour­nal­ists and most of my work col­leagues mis­take it for Mark Zuckerberg’s or Eric Schmidt’s pri­vate toy.

When I think of Inter­net and com­put­ing, I think of the moun­tain­top in my apart­ment… the purest machine I know, peace­ful­ly car­ry­ing unknown tokens of mean­ing day and night, con­nect­ing souls. That’s the word — it’s a soul machine.

~ un e‑mail écrit en mai 2011 ~

Finale­ment, elle n’a pas acheté le bel ordi­na­teur blanc. Mais d’une manière ou d’une autre, elle est for­mi­da­ble, ma sœur.

[…] Si vrai­ment tu reprends la racine de ce jeu infor­ma­tique que tu décris, tu retombes sur l’« in-forme », le partage de con­struc­tions de l’esprit. Le clus­ter, machines loin­taines dans un sous-sol con­trôlées depuis le bout des doigts dans un jardin.… Sweave, le mélange de deux des plus purs et libres lan­gages de partage d’idées… SVN, le partage struc­turé en dépôts (et attends seule­ment de décou­vrir git !)… tout le plaisir vient de l’ingéniosité que l’on déploie soi-même pour travailler.

Le monde d’Apple est le par­tait opposé de tout cela. Depuis le plus petit bout de logi­ciel auquel l’on con­fie ses don­nées jusqu’au dernier bout de plas­tique sur le boîti­er, le Mac est tra­vail­lé, abouti, peaufiné, et… fer­mé. Il émane de cette entre­prise un désir pro­fond et con­stant de faire de chaque util­isa­teur un con­som­ma­teur épanoui, sat­is­fait d’utiliser un pro­duit lis­sé et con­trôlé, gardé pro­pre et sûr par la grande mai­son de Steve Jobs.

Le flu­ide et élé­gant logi­ciel OSX ? Tu n’es pas digne de la con­fi­ance de Steve pour qu’il te mon­tre vrai­ment ce qu’il fait, ou te le laisse partager avec ton voisin, même si tu peux tou­jours con­som­mer de la musique-et-des-films-qui-dis­parais­sent avec iTunes. Le bel et émou­vant hard­ware, qui fait envie à tant d’entre nous ? Tu es bien trop bête pour en ouvrir le boîti­er toi-même. Seuls les employés de Steve pour­ront facile­ment en chang­er la bat­terie, avec les tournevis spé­ci­aux qu’ils ont fab­riqué pour.

L’idée dans tout ça, est bien sûr de finir par te faire acheter un iPhone ou un iPad, sur lesquels j’essaierai de ne pas m’étendre… l’achat con­sacr­erait Steve comme ton deux­ième Papa, puisque tous tes appels, con­tacts, fichiers, déplace­ments, e‑mails et lec­tures seraient enreg­istrés dans sa mai­son. Machines telle­ment épurées, abouties (et je suis moi-même ébahi de cette excel­lence), qu’il aura pure­ment et sim­ple­ment fal­lu ban­nir les logi­ciels libres de leur App Store, pour nous pro­téger d’un mal­sain désordre.

Enfin bon, je m’emporte un peu, mais je voulais juste dire que cette joie d’expérimenter soi-même est finale­ment ce qui compte le plus dans l’informatique. La pre­mière com­mande à dis­tance, le pre­mier com­mit SVN, la pre­mière com­pi­la­tion Latex, la pre­mière instal­la­tion d’un AdBlock Plus, d’un Fire­fox, le pre­mier « Sauve­g­arder sous… » sont des étapes fon­da­men­tales, des petites pris­es de pou­voir, une pro­gres­sion dans l’idée, une petite vic­toire de l’immatériel sur le triste matériel.

Comme je veux célébr­er ces vic­toires in-for­ma­tiques, je serais triste de te voir encadrée par une entre­prise qui les com­bat toutes car les util­isa­teurs libres com­pren­nent trop tôt qu’un fichi­er n’est qu’un nom­bre, qu’un “stream­ing” n’est qu’une restric­tion, et que leur curiosité les élève.

Et c’est pour ça que le Mac me fait lorgn­er mais que l’ordinateur moche et lourd emporte mon cœur. Le pre­mier a un logo cor­po­rate lumi­nes­cent au dos de l’écran ; le sec­ond pour­rait tout autant avoir un auto­col­lant qui dit : my hard­ware sucks because my soft­ware is awe­some.

XO

Olivi­er.