CypherBackstory

Legends

Aaron Swartz

Larry Lessig

When receiving his chair at Harvard, Lessig's acceptance speech was titled, "Aaron's Laws - Law and Justice in a Digital Age".

Why I Work on The Internet

Centralized services are not what the Internet was built for. I know; I was there. As the Internet became available outside of University research, I was one of the early explorers of the Internet. My friends were all cyberpunks, going to the neon dark underground bars, listening to Chemical Brothers, Future Sound of London, and Prodigy, talking to netops and sysops and hackers like myself about what we had found that day and how amazing it would be for society to be decentralized.

We didn't call it "decentralized" back then, of course. Eventually, we got around to calling it 'peer-to-peer' or 'p2p', but before that it was just "what the Internet was". Everybody who used the Internet had their own web site (your "home page"). It was just us nerds, posting links on our home pages to things like Project Gutenberg, writing our own 'zine (periodic home page post, before blogs, adapting magazine-format content to the new medium), and bragging to our friends about it for nerd cred (popularly called "geek cred" at that time in Northeast Ohio).

I put up a flyer in the coffeeshop I worked at, where I made the best machiatos in Cleveland, before Starbucks came along and ruined everyone's ability to recognize a decent cup of coffee. The flyer had a picture of The Silver Surfer that I had modified to look digitized. I advertised myself as a websurfer for hire, when hypertext was a cover topic in every Wired magazine. Surprisingly few people wanted to hire me to do online research, when most people hadn't even heard of online yet, and there wasn't very much there.

But I digress. We were building something better than the old people could possibly understand. A way for everyone to share information for free, instantly. The Library of Alexandria, but with everyone hosting their own significant piece of it, and available to everyone in the world! (or to the few hundred thousand of us who were online, anyway)

Where I'm Going

It has been clear to me for a long time that we can't trust corporations to determine our information landscape. I still use my self-hosted email address and host my own web pages and web services - Jitsi, MediaWiki, video hosting, Git repos - the whole nine yards.

I knew that corporations would start off nice and gradually get as sleazy as we would let them get away with, and as Ben Franklin observed - people are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable (or something like that) - which is like ringing the dinner-bell for late stage capitalists. "At what level of suffering will they uproot their digital lives and migrate elsewhere? Do 10% less than that."

But I helped them build it anyway. They paid a lot, but it takes a toll. I imagine it is a bit like working in adult entertainment; you get to see some terrible people making a lot of money in unscrupulous ways.

I want it back. Fuck those guys. They only do what they do by a combination of our consent and the full force of most of the biggest governments on Earth.

Egh - that's a little dark sounding.

But we can put social communication back in the hands of the people. The Internet was literally spec'd out with the specific intent of making that dream possible. There is no technical hurdle to making it work, it's just an data engineering, software engineering, system engineering, and user interface problem. Maybe some marketing and social engineering, too. That stuff is all totally doable, and there are a lot of great old ones like me out there who are righteously indignant about the poor behaviour of the Internet oligarchs.