The politics, ethics and social context of digital culture
I thought it might be useful to give a non-digital example first. We
will see whether it really helps or not!
Trams: a case study in technology
In 1700, what we now call South Birmingham was a patchwork of small
subsistence tenant farms, but as people left the land to work in
factories and other industrial jobs, these farms gradually became larger.
Here is a map of Birmingham in 1831, as you can see South Birmingham
does not really exist yet. The built up areas are what is now known as
the city centre:
One of these larger farms was called the Grange Estate, in the
following image, Isaac Bate and his family pose outside the farmhouse
in 1876:
At the turn of the 20th Century, there was a massive housing boom and
the Grange Estate was bought in 1895 and zoned for housing and roads.
It is like Sim-City, everything needed for the good life is provided,
including shops and the important combination of a church and a
brewery.
Victorian industrial workers would walk or cycle along quiet
tree-lined avenues and then take the tram and train for longer
distance travelling.
So far so good. You will notice there is no car parks, no off street
parking, no garages. The total number of cars in the world was at this
point was approximately 25, most of which were Benz hand made cars in
Germany.
However, after the war, the brave new world required that the trees,
train station and tramlines were all removed to make more space for
the motorcar.
The Grange Estate is now overflowing with cars, and the Alcester Road is
a traffic jam for much of the day. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of
death for children and Birmingham is one of the most obese cities in Europe.
Car ownership in Birmingham peaked at 50% of households, one of the
highest rates of car ownership for a large city. There is not, and
never will be, enough space for everyone to own a car in dense urban
areas like Birmingham.
Cars socially exclude people who do not own them, and are dangerous to
people walking and cycling, and prevent community building as you
cannot talk to other residents while stuck in a small metal box.
There are currently 380,000 cars in Birmingham (8000 are added every
year). As the population of Birmingham is predicted to continue
growing, the car is becoming increasingly unsustainable. The council
have produced a plan:
You guessed it, the plan is to reopen the train stations and put the trams
back. Getting us precisely back to where we were in 1896.
The new Birmingham trams have a maximum capacity of 210. Cars in Birmingham
have an average occupancy rate of 1.2.
A car driven for an hour every day, spends 4% of its time in use,
96% of its time rusting and getting in the way.
Cars are overproduced and inefficiency used. However, this
overproduction has provided large numbers of good jobs - 145,000 in
the UK alone currently work in the automotive industry.
If everyone moves to trains, trams and bikes, where do the jobs come from?
If Birmingham gets its comprehensive tram network, it needs just 120 tram sets to provide transport for the whole city (service every 6 minutes each way).
What does Birmingham’s 60 year love affair with the car tell us about
technology?
Increased technological efficiency destroys jobs (while creating
others).
Sometimes you have to go “back to the future”
Not all new technologies are necessarily a good idea
Technology is never un-invented, everything survives somewhere but
the rate of growth or decline is the important thing to notice.
The history of the computer is much like the history of the tram.
The real history of computing (short version)
The first programmable object is the Jacquard Loom in 1801, it used
punch cards which allowed different weaving patterns.
The digital age almost begins in 1843, when Lady Ada Lovelace (the
daughter of poet Lord Byron) wrote the first computer programme,
algorithm for Charles Babbage Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli
numbers.
The programme was written as part of a set of examples of what could
be run on Charles Babbage’s computer the Analytical Engine. Sadly, the
British government decided to cancel his research funding so this
machine was never finished, but it would have been the first general
purpose digital computer.
Here is his earlier machine called the difference engine:
The digital age tries to begin again in 1936 when Alan Turing explains
in a seminar paper that any real-world general-purpose computer or
computer language can approximately simulate any other real-world
general-purpose computer or computer language, i.e. it is “Turing
complete”.
Turing went on to create this, the Bombe, a machine designed to
decipher encrypted German messages during World War II.
The successor was called Colossus, and is starting to be a
recognisable computer.
Alan Turing was not appreciated during his lifetime, to put it lightly. However, now he is a man of many memorials, including these:
After that we have the first non-military computer, the Manchester
Mark I in 1949, and pretty much from here the digital age has begun.
The next image shows the Atlas, also at the University of Manchester,
the world’s most powerful computer in 1962. It had more computer
capacity than the rest of the United Kingdom put together.
This is the 1970 PDP-11 operated here by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
Thompson is sitting at a teletype terminal. Where you code into
the keyboard and the computer responds by printing out the result.
Shortly afterwards, video terminals were invented. Such as this one:
It may look like a computer, but it is actually just a screen and a
keyboard, all the processing happens in the mainframe computer
elsewhere.
These type of computers can and normally did had multiple terminals,
sometimes in other rooms or other buildings.
In the 1970s, it was called time-sharing. Hundreds or thousands of
terminals could share the same mainframe - which would be maintained
and updated by specialists.
I love this next photo, the guy in the front looks like he has the
universal programmer’s tense expression, i.e. ‘Why the heck is this not
working now?’.
These mainframes ran an operating system called Unix started by
Thompson and Ritchie. The different terminal users could communicate
with each other and collaborate.
The terminals got smarter over time, and even had graphical front ends
that looked something like this:
This was the start of the modern era of computing. Many programs that were written in the 1970s are maintained today. There is a continuous thread that runs from Lovelace and Babbage, through Turing to the real beginning of the digital age in the 1970s.
So far so good. This is our tram. Next, comes the car, or indeed two of them.
1. Personal computers
Here is an early attempt from 1969 to market a home computer.
This particular model was a commercial failure.
When the PC came out, such this example from 1981, compared to the
Unix systems of the 1970s and 1980s, they were giant step backwards.
No networking, a single process at once, focused on really dull office
tasks like typing a letter. The biggest problem looking back was the
software.
2. The rise of proprietary software
Until this point, the source code of all programs had been shared
among the largely academic computing world. Everyone could study and
improve computer programs and share those improvements back to the
community.
With the new idea of proprietary software or closed source software,
you don’t legally own the software anymore, you have merely licensed
the right to use it under certain conditions.
The source of the software is not shared, you just have compiled
(unreadable) copy of it. There can now be a difference on what you
think the software does (something useful) and what it actually does
e.g. spy on you.
When you understand this point, you suddenly a realise it is a bad
idea to licence or use any software that cannot be publicly peer
reviewed and fixed.
Proprietary software comes with multiple pages of legalese and asks
you to tick that you not only read it but also understand it. You have
to lie in order to start it, and goes downhill from there.
The Snowden revelations printed in the Guardian have confirmed what
we already knew, that Microsoft software has built-in backdoors for
the NSA to spy on its users. Even scarier is that secret backdoors
created for Microsoft and the NSA could also be exploited by
criminals.
Proprietary software, especially in the form of Microsoft Windows, is
a temporary aberration in the history of the digital. In 50 years
time, Microsoft Windows will be considered as important as this
device:
So lets get back to the trams. There were two massive and related
developments which happened almost in the background, but would come
to dominate the digital world.
The rise of free/open source software
In 1983, a famous programmer in MIT called Richard Stallman began the
‘Free Software’ movement. As well as being a well known software
developer (he invented the concept of a live real time text editor and
started the most widely used compiler today - GCC), he best known as a
digital philosopher.
Stallman argued that software developers had a moral, ethical and
political duty to enable co-operation and prevent restrictions on the
ability of users to study, examine, peer review, modify and share
software. He argued that proprietary software was anti-social, corrupt
and ultimately self-defeating.
It is important to understand the difference between the terms
‘commercial’ and ‘proprietary’. Software can be ‘commercial’ -
i.e. made by a company for profit, with or without being
proprietary. Likewise a proprietary program may be made available at
cost or at no cost.
He illustrates the concept by comparing ‘a free beer’ with ‘free
speech’.
Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens created a later related concept called
‘open source’, which emphases the practical aspects rather than the
political and ethical ones. For example, the vast majority of software is
not created for sale in packaged boxes but is created use within
companies and institutions where software is not their primary
purpose. So if this software is shared and improved in a community, it
gives added value to those who engage in it.
Almost every major software development of the 1990s and 21st century
has happened within the Free Software/Open Source world including
Linux and Android.
Most importantly, the most famous piece of free/open source software
of them all, the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web
In the early 1990s, the best designed and most powerful information
protocol was called Gopher. However, despite its technical strengths,
Gopher eventually lost out because the copyright owner, the University
of Minnesota, wanted to sell it as proprietary software.
And finally a Brit again!
Tim Berners-Lee created World Wide Web, which while technically
inferior to Gopher, was free software. Anyone could develop a server
or a client without having to ask or pay anyone for permission. When
WWW became widely shared in 1993, proprietary Gopher was toast. Gopher
was eventually re-licensed as free software in 2000, but it was too
late, WWW had taken over everything.
Finally, desktop computers had similar networking capabilities to
1970s mainframes. While they are a lot of people still using Windows,
these are merely like the 1970s dumb terminals, 83% of web servers are
running free software. Now with Apple OS X (based on FreeBSD Unix-like
system), Linux desktops like Ubuntu and the rise of Android based phones
and tablet (Android is based on the free software operating system
Linux), almost everyone is running a system which is based on the
1970s Unix. The 20 years of the Windows aberration is coming to a close.
Go Linux, go WWW, go Trams, go bikes!
Academia and Open Source Software
Most UK and EU funding bodies now require that any software produced
in a research project is released as open source software. Software
developers within the academy, especially those in the humanities, are
unlikely to be allowed to large pay licensing fees and are expected to
use open source tools wherever possible.
Any project that uses the digital is likely to involve some open
source software.
Beyond Open Source
The WWW has enabled collaboration in many areas, not just
software. Principles and ideas from open source have been applied to
other fields.
Freedom of Information - providing open access to government
documents through the Web
Open Access - unrestricted access via the Web to peer-reviewed
journal articles and primary data.
Crowd sourcing - creating content by soliciting contributions from
online communities - Wikipedia being a prominent example
Crowd funding - funding projects through soliciting contributions
from web users - e.g. Kickstarter
Digital Conduct
Collaborative and creative online communities are
self-selecting. People form communities to create something, should
they also be responsible for social justice?
Should these collaborative communities enabled by the web and by
free/open principles have standards of behaviour, if so what should
they be and who polices them?
Increasingly these creative communities have published codes of
conduct, especially regarding communication and discrimination.
Developing-world criticisms: does attempting to regulate conduct in
digital creative communities risk the danger of western (especially US
west-coast) cultural imperialism? How do diversity and social
policies relate to freedom of speech?
Does forcing participants to use real names instead of pseudonyms
cause problems for those with fear of harassment?
How should gender be dealt with in largely male dominated online
communities? Are those who run these communities responsible for
addressing gender imbalances?
Communities that work primarily online but have conferences or social
meetings pose particular issues in terms of harassment/unwanted
attention. E.g. conferences with male to female ratios of 10 to 1 are not
uncommon.
Some further reading
Karen Sandler, 2012 Keynote, (first 25 mins about hacking the software on her defibrillator),
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XDTQLa3NjE
Happy Hacking, The Keiser Report, Russia Today, 2012 (start at 12m)
http://youtu.be/3o82P4V1vu0?t=12m9s
The Zen of Python, Tim Peters, 2004
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
Free Software, Free Society:
Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2002
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond 2002
http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdf
Revolution OS (2001), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjaC8Pq9-V0
Biculturalism, Joel Spolsky, 2003
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html
The Code Of Conduct, Jesse Noller, 2012
http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct
Geek Feminism: Timeline_of_incidents
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/