Love Against the Machine
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:44
Recognize this song? It was a long time ago. It's a bit of a pleasure to me to fake a Kraftwerk song here in Germany. Bit of a guilty pleasure of some sort. Hi, I'm Jeremy, I used to be an activist.
01:03
I used to do about everything that was in my power at the time, from campaigning, to speaking to politicians, to speaking to journalists, to going around to try and defend freedoms online for a number of years. Since then, I recovered from burnouts
01:22
and managed to take a bit of distance from what I was doing before. And this is what led me to a bit of a crazy, half-baked hypothesis that I want to submit to you today. I had this privilege to be able to take a distance from the field,
01:43
a distance from the trenches, a distance from what was obvious to me some years ago, and I somehow wanted to share this privilege with you because we are facing troubled times, to say the least.
02:02
This massive political crisis that we face in each and every country in the world, where people don't know where to look, people don't know if there is even a meaning to vote anymore, let alone for who to vote. I have the impression that this major political crisis matches, somehow,
02:25
a technological and ethical crisis we are facing today. The same way we don't know where to look when it comes to politics, apparently we don't know where to look when it comes to technology. We know everything has gone to shit.
02:43
We know everything is ruined. And still, we're looking for answers, and they're not obvious yet. So what I want to propose here is in no way answers, but maybe a way of asking the questions, and maybe asking the questions in a different way. So we live in these times where we have so many friends on social media
03:06
and connections everywhere, but yet somehow we feel alone. We live in this era where we have access to everything with the internet, right? But nevertheless, we feel powerless.
03:21
The half-baked theory I want to develop here is that maybe our relationship to the machine with an uppercase M, to the machines in general, to all these devices and bits and blips and bloops interconnected together, maybe our relationship to all this defines profoundly
03:41
our relationship to each other, our relationship to power, and eventually, our relationship to ourselves. And so this is what I want to explore here with you in this small experiment, if you will. Have you ever felt like crushing a device?
04:05
Have you ever, I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, have you ever felt something that was close to hate in relationship to the machines? Who here felt that at least once? So we have a vast majority of people here in a tech conference,
04:23
so one could imagine that some of the most tech savvy, the most knowledgeable people about technology, a majority of people here is raising their hands. So what's happening here? I remember being a kid, getting this 8-bit computer. OK, sure, I was a kid.
04:41
And sure, it's my memory from being a kid, which makes it even less of a thing. But I remember profoundly loving this bit of metal and silicon and bits and bleeps and bloops. This thing was my life for a number of years. When I was, I don't know, 12 or 15 years old, if I would have been asked to choose between my friends and my computer,
05:03
I'm afraid I would even have chosen the computer. And I don't know if you remember this era, I don't know how old and obsolete it makes me sound and I don't want to even speak about it. Those machines were rather simple. You would open them with a screwdriver, you would look at their manual and in the end,
05:20
would find a list of each and every component that were chained together on the circuit. You would have access to everything about the machine. Nothing was hidden. Everything was there for you to play mostly or program a bit and do stuff. So what happened? What happened from then to now?
05:44
Now, it seems like we are living in this dystopian present where computers turn into our enemies. Or rather, computers have been engineered in a way where we would be their enemies.
06:04
It's the cyber-militar complex, if you want to call it somehow. It's what we've seen through the disclosures of Edward Snowden and many others. It's the fact that those companies, some of which are actually exposing in the next hall,
06:20
are in bed with the NSA and with the foreign policy agenda of the US. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, all these people who became household names, all these companies who legitimate see is usually not opposed by anyone.
06:40
Those products and services that are used by a vast majority of people online integrate in their design parameters that make us the enemies. Those black boxes, those devices we have in our pockets, actually computers, actually two computers,
07:02
one we can control, and one that has been kept by design away from us, away from the remote possibility that we will control it, that we will understand it. It's called the baseband chip. And this chip somehow also called the master chip, when the one we control is called the slave chip.
07:23
This is not just a technical term. This is a profound shift in the way computers are built and in the way we should be understanding computers. We've been excluded from computers. We've been expropriated from the very own devices
07:41
we think we own, and we carry along with us in our pockets. Hence that feeling of unfairness when something fails. It may be the case that there's nothing you could do about it. Hence this feeling that stuff is being left unexplained that we're out of control.
08:03
And this is what it feels when you're truly excluded from something. I would call this the hatred-based computing. Computing platforms that are designed to take us, the users, the people, as potential enemies of the machine.
08:24
We're all potential enemy combatants. We're all accessible to the NSA and its peers. Everything we do, everything we say, is being transmitted and stored in a way that makes it possible someday
08:40
to go back towards it. So what's happening there? What's happening there in a world where we know that algorithms are about to take some of the most important decisions in our lives? When these very computers that have been designed by those companies in bed with NSA
09:01
are about to decide who is about to get an insurance policy or not? Who is about to get a loan or not? Who is about to be hired or not? When we're excluded from these decisions, when the whole process has been made in an obscure way
09:23
where we cannot understand and even think about what's going on. This is when we feel lonely. This is when we feel powerless. This is when we feel there is no hope about the world. This is when we don't have the possibility anymore
09:40
to understand what's going on. This is when by design, by engineering, and by the commercial will of a few companies, we lose the ability to even exert our critical thinking. And eventually we lose our ability to participate in society.
10:03
So let's think for a while. Let's ask ourselves, what's going on here? And is there a way out? Is there a way forward? In a world of hatred-based computing,
10:22
where will we find love? Is there any love to find in this world? Well, we may ask ourselves what love is about and we may spend our whole life
10:41
asking ourselves these questions. I'm in no way, as I said earlier, trying to bring any answer to anything. Just asking questions here. What if love was somehow about understanding? What if love was about tolerance? When you love something or someone,
11:02
you know they have flaws. You just accept these flaws. When you love someone, something that may have been completely unacceptable, intolerable the day before becomes acceptable because you understand. Because you understand someone. Because you understand that someone is diverse,
11:24
has several aspects to their personality, that you understand that this someone is not perfect. This understanding in love is somehow a reflection about ourselves. A reflection about an understanding of our very own selves. Understanding that you love someone with their flaws
11:43
is somehow getting a step closer to loving yourself with your own flaws and accepting to be loved by someone with your own flaws. It's about tolerance. It's about understanding, but it's also about support. It's about being there with someone, for someone.
12:02
Maybe also when everything is not rosy, maybe when everything is not going well. It's about being there in the difficult moments for someone. Well, my half-baked theory here is that we find that love in computing.
12:22
We find that love in technology. It is there, out there for us to find. You've all heard of free and liberal software, right? So far it has been sold to us by nerds, for nerds, and I'm a nerd myself, so I don't say this as an insult.
12:40
But so far it has been understood as a rather technical matter, right? It's about a license, it's about legalese and law and who likes that, except twisted lawyers. Who cares about this software even, really? Seriously, bits of lines of code. We'd rather click on the friends
13:00
and the stars and the hearts. But really, free software is about love. And that's what I'm all about here. Free software is about understanding that computers are not perfect, that the world we're living in is not perfect, that the way we interact and communicate together
13:24
is not perfect. Free software is this object, here in the center of this room, in the center of humanity, is an object that is at the same time immaterial and belonging to everybody.
13:40
Free software is a way to organize a public sphere in which we produce industrial matter to make sure that everybody will be part of it, that everybody will have the same freedoms that the initial author on the bit of software.
14:02
Free software is before everything a social contract. It's about saying if you agree to be part of that club where we all love and share, then be welcome. If you're a hoarder, if you're an exploiter, if you want to make people prisoners,
14:21
then go and play somewhere else. That's what free software is all about. It's about this possibility of participation. And you remember, I told you in my idea, love is about understanding, which means understanding of the flaws, of the flaws of the others and the flaws of ourselves.
14:42
So maybe there's something to think about here. When we see a piece of software, when we've been bathed in the marketing of those companies and I think of Apple in particular, where everything should be of one shape, of one aspect, uniform, and you shall learn to love the uniformity.
15:01
You shall recognize yourself, identify yourself with this uniformity where you can't think, where you can't criticize because you can't know what's happening. When you've learned to appreciate a piece of software or a screen on a computer that way, what do you think of free software? Ah, this is missing here.
15:21
This is not really pretty. Ah, this could be a little bit different. This could be a little bit prettier. Nah, I'll just go and do something else and go back to my Apple. My point is that if we learn to love these flaws in free software, we'll get immense reward from it
15:42
because learning to love something wholly, including its flaws, in the end helps to love ourselves. Whenever we see something that is not working well in free software, it doesn't mean that somebody highly paid in some company in Silicon Valley has not been doing their job right.
16:01
It means that one of us has an opportunity here to help come and participate and do something right. Everything that is missing today in the field of free software is as many opportunities to all of us to be part of this worldwide initiative
16:22
towards bringing back love in computing. Loving what doesn't work, understanding what doesn't work is an essential process when understanding what does work. And my theory here is that this mere fact,
16:42
this simple exercise of trying to understand what works and what doesn't, when done in a benevolent way, is precisely what brings us to a path of understanding, what brings us in a state of mind where you don't consume anymore a machine
17:02
whose control has been taken away from you. But when you become a participant, free software with this beautiful sum of glitches and quirks and blips and bloops brings us face to face with our very own diversity,
17:21
with our very own contradictions, with our very own flaws. But if, when facing our very own flaws, we decide to look somewhere else and walk away, how is it that we become better persons? How is it that we even have an opportunity to have any influence in this world?
17:44
My point here is that this infinite energy that is love and passion can and must be channeled together towards building this world where our imagination and our understanding
18:00
will be mutualized for experimenting. That's the heart of what we can do with ourselves, with others, and with the world, with an open approach to things. We can experiment, and that's what free software is all about. It is about trying something, pushing it out there, and ask the world, what do you think?
18:23
Maybe we made a mistake, then we learn how to not make this mistake again. Experimenting is the path towards philosophy, as it's being called in the tsetse sometimes. It's the path towards accepting our mistakes the same way we accept our flaws,
18:41
and value our mistakes the same way we could value our flaws, because learning from them is learning to become better. As a conclusion, free software is not an end in itself. I think it is truly an inspiration for models in society
19:03
where we can work together with joyful and collaborative practice, where we accept our diversity, where there is a role for every one of us. Free software is not about code, really.
19:20
It's about a common practice and a common understanding. You contribute to free software with translation, with using free software, with sending an email to its authors saying, hey, you're good, I like it. You contribute to free software sometimes with graphic design, with sparing a few cycles of your online time
19:41
to just speak about it by giving legal advice, or by just buying a beer to somebody being part of this beautiful experiment. So a joyful practice with a role for everyone, where we learn collectively about our flaws, where we learn about to fail
20:02
and to love our failures and learn about our failures, I think is the path to understanding, is the path to being part of something when we felt left alone, is the path to that feeling of belonging
20:24
that we sometimes miss when we feel alone. A feeling of belonging based on love, love of the others, love of a better world we can build together and maybe, hopefully, love of ourselves.
20:41
And I thank you very much and I want to hear you about that now. Thank you. Oh, so. Thank you very much, Jeremy, for this much needed love, call to love.
21:02
And I guess we have time for questions. We have time for two or three questions or other reactions. While waiting for the first question, here is a slide that is way too small for anyone to read, I hope. So we don't waste time with reading slides. Which is a small panorama of free software projects
21:21
that I think give hope in the future, that are some of the most, the projects that gave me the most joy in the last weeks and months. Don't try to read it now. You can look it up later on the video or whatever. Shit, it's actually readable. Should have used smaller fonts.
21:41
Well, yes, four questions and all. Any questions? Yes. Thank you so much for the love that you put in the movement and I wanted to ask, because it's a question that I'm asking everyone. Do you think that this can be a good departing point for a new form of internationalism?
22:01
And how, I want you to elaborate how this can connect people who do not speak the same language but who share the same love. Well, that's, thanks for this essential question. Internationalism has always been fought
22:20
by the nationalists and fascists of every sort. I think internationalism is something truly scary for whoever wants to reinforce the myth of the nation-state and all the borders and flags and oppression that come along with it.
22:40
I think that inevitably, as we are witnessing maybe the failure of nation-states and the failure of politics as it was conceived before, we'll be looking for alternatives and that these alternatives will be international and will be cross-border. Free software as a movement
23:01
is international from its inception. I cannot tell you if we will truly manage to reach peace, love, and unity on a global scale yet. Of course, those cultural differences exist. Composing with them is a great part of the learning.
23:20
We see this happening today. I don't know if you've heard of Mastodon, which is a life-scale social experience of a federation, so the decentralization of communication. I don't know what Mastodon will be in six months or one year from now, but what happened is already an amazing experiment.
23:42
And there's amazing teachings we have already from that. 1.6 thousand computers over the network are part of this Mastodon thing. And on this network, some people in Japan find it natural
24:01
and it's culturally acceptable to send drawings of little kids in suggestive positions. It is culturally okay in Japan. In France, it's a criminal offense. Drawing of underage is a criminal offense. So how do we bridge this gap? I honestly have no clue.
24:21
What's happening in between these instances on Mastodon is therefore the way to go. Well, with benevolence towards each other, we try to see how it goes. We try to somehow hack in production because there is no other way than to try and maybe fail and try again. So I hope that inevitably we'll be going towards
24:40
some form of, if not internationalism, some more international cooperation in between people, yes. Okay, any more questions or reaction? There would be time for one more maybe. If not, then. Well, well, well, well, if we have time for one more, that's exactly enough time that I need
25:02
to go back to this and invite you to find one of these projects that would speak to your heart. There are projects here related to operating systems and software like Cubes OS, like Alpine Linux, like Replicant that is a fully free software distribution for mobile phones.
25:21
In the hardware section, you can see low risk that might be the next computing platform for freedoms online. You can see the wonderful KiCad that enables you to design free hardware with very, very professional tools. You can see OMIMO, the protocol will be speaking next
25:41
in order to encrypt our communications online, or OP-MSG, that may be a replacement for a GPG, sorry for the acronyms, I'm not responsible for the names of these projects. You can see my own cloud or YUNA host here. Ask yourself what you could do to contribute five minutes, 30 minutes of your time
26:03
to one of these projects. It can be really one tweet, one blog post. It can be making a donation of one or 10 euros. It can be going to the mailing list and say, hi, I love you guys. It can be as simple as using it for 10 minutes and finding something that you think could be optimized
26:23
and contribute that as a bug report or feature request. Ask not what free software can do to you, but what you can do for free software. I think that's a good sentence for the end. Again, many, many thanks and much love, Jeremy.