Love Against the Machine

re:publica 17 - All Sessions vor 9 Jahren

Computers changed over the last 20 years, from friendly machines we could understand, control and improve upon to black-boxed prisons designed at spying upon and controlling us. How come we are now an increasing number to *hate* these machines, when we re

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Jérémie Zimmermann Computers changed over the last 20 years, from
friendly machines we could understand, control and improve upon to
black-boxed prisons designed at controlling us. How come we are now
an increasing number to *hate* these machines, when we remember a
past in which we used to passionately love them? From mobile
computers (aka "smartphones") containing black-boxed baseband
processors enabling remote control, and kicking the user away from
properly owning his device, to generalized Intel CPUs and their
"management engine" providing also a way for "real masters" of our
machines to monitor and control all we do online, the age of the
technological optimism is long gone. It is almost impossible today
to buy a computer that isn't designed and built as an enemy of its
user. This shift of modern computing towards "enemy machines" has a
profound impact on geopolitics (think "Trump's NSA"), on power
relationships (think "We know what you did online for the last 15
years") but also on our humanities and the way we relate to each
other: If I cannot understand how a machine works, how will I ever
improve it? How will I ever have a chance to participate in a
society run by such black boxes? How to rethink our relationship to
machines, how to rebuild trust in computers that could efficiently
enable and protect us? Fortunately a few thriving software and
hardware (therefore social!) projects give elements of a plan for
action, based on ethical and otherwise humane values, rather than
the integrated illusion of comfort and marketing of dominant
actors. We will briefly explore a non-exhaustive cartography of
such projects based on the ethical principles of free/libre
software and hardware, decentralized services and end-to-end
encryption as an outline of what can be done, what is being done,
and what we could be doing more in a not-so-distant future. What is
probably one of the biggest challenges for Humanity can only be
solved with love and the joy of sharing!