Freedom In the Cloud

OF course, it never really really really worked out that way. There was nothing in the technical design to prevent it. Not at any rate in the technical design interconnection of nodes and their communication. There was a software problem. It’s a simple software problem and it has a simple three syllable name. It’s name is Microsoft. Conceptually, there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes but the OS which occupied the network in an increasingly — I’ll use the word, they use it about us why can’t I use it back? — viral way over the course of a decade and a half. The software that came to occupy the network was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers. It was called “server client architecture”.

The idea that the network was a network of peers was hard to perceive after awhile, particularly if you were a, let us say, ordinary human being. That is, not a computer engineer, scientist, or researcher. Not a hacker, not a geek. If you were an ordinary human, it was hard to perceive that the underlying architecture of the Net was meant to be peerage because the OS software with which you interacted very strongly instantiated the idea of the server and client architecture.

In fact, of course, if you think about it, it was even worse than that. The thing called “Windows” was a degenerate version of a thing called “X Windows”. It, too, thought about the world in a server client architecture, but what we would now think of as now backwards. The server was the thing at the human being’s end. That was the basic X Windows conception of the world. it’s served communications with human beings at the end points of the Net to processes located at arbitrary places near the center in the middle, or at the edge of the NET. It was the great idea of Windows in an odd way to create a political archetype in the Net which reduced the human being to the client and produced a big, centralized computer, which we might have called a server, which now provided things to the human being on take-it-or-leave-it terms.

They were, of course, quite take-it or leave-it terms and unfortunately, everybody took it because they didn’t know how to leave once they got in. Now the Net was made of servers in the center and clients at the edge. Clients had rather little power and servers had quite a lot. As storage gets cheaper, as processing gets cheaper, and as complex services that scale in ways that are hard to use small computers for — or at any rate, these aggregated collections of small computers for — the most important of which is search. As services began to populate that net, the hierarchical nature of the Net came to seem like it was meant to be there. The Net was made of servers and clients and the clients were the guys at the edge representing humans and servers were the things in the middle with lots of power and lots of data.

Now, one more thing happened about that time. It didn’t happen in Microsoft Windows computers although it happened in Microsoft Windows servers and it happened more in sensible OSs like Unix and BSD and other ones. Namely, servers kept logs. That’s a good thing to do. Computers ought to keep logs. It’s a very wise decision when creating computer OS software to keep logs. It helps with debugging, makes efficiencies attainable, makes it possible to study the actual operations of computers in the real world. It’s a very good idea.

But if you have a system which centralizes servers and the servers centralize their logs, then you are creating vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control and, unless they are experienced in the operation of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of, the meaningfulness of, will not understand the aggregatability of.

So we built a network out of a communications architecture design for peering which we defined in client-server style, which we then defined to be the dis-empowered client at the edge and the server in the middle. We aggregated processing and storage increasingly in the middle and we kept the logs — that is, info about the flows of info in the Net — in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled or thought they controlled the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives. This was a recipe for disaster.

This was a recipe for disaster. Now, I haven’t mentioned yet the word “cloud” which I was dealt on the top of the deck when I received the news that I was talking here tonight about privacy and the cloud.