Freedom In the Cloud

Because of course, when there is a competitor to “all spying all the time whether you like it or not”, the competition is going to do real well. Don’t expect Google to be the competitor. That’s our platform. What we need is to make a thing that’s so greasy there will never be a social network platform again. Can we do it? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, if you don’t have a date on Friday night, let’s just have a hackfest and get it done. It’s well within our reach.

We’re going to do it before the Facebook IPO? Or are we going to wait till after? Really? Honestly? Seriously. The problem that the law has very often in the world where we live and practice and work, the problem that the law has very often, the problem that technology can solve. And the problem that technology can solve is the place where we go to the law. That’s the free software movement. There’s software hacking over here and there’s legal hacking over there and you put them both together and the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. So, it’s not like we have to live in the catastrophe. We don’t have to live in the catastrophe. It’s not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us. We need to re-architect services in the Net. We need to re-distribute services back towards the edge. We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored and we need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.

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.