As some of my friends have noticed, over the last few years, I have not been very well. I’ve been drifting. My body and my mind were detached, like floating in the ocean and going wherever the current would take me. It was such a very weird feeling. And I knew exactly what the reason was. The uncomfortable truth is that I fell out of love with the technology world and that I am not excited by the future anymore. At least the future that is being built today.
With the terrible Paris attacks last year, I kept asking this question to myself: If the world we are building is so amazing, why would someone take a gun and kill my friends? I couldn’t find any answer. So I escaped Paris and traveled to the first destination I could find: Bali. I was drifting again.
Bali had that incredible impact on me. Being far away from the craziness of this world, slowing down gave me the opportunity to better understand the source of my recurrent discomfort. In the world of technology, we are taught to build things fast. Sometimes too fast. But Life and people are not like lines of code. We can’t break things just to see how it will work out. Everything we create online can have a huge impact on the real world. And we spend so little time studying the consequences of what we build. Competition for attention has slowly replaced the values of the founding fathers of the lnternet.
I have personally witnessed this change in technology. Because my daily life is now affected by the consequences of this change. I have identified at least three things that make me fear this future.
The first one is (the lack of) ownership.
For many people, entering this new digital world means the end of ownership. At first it was more like a conceptualisation. But now I can see the impact this has on my daily life.
I used to own CDs, books, magazines, art, and so many things that helped me shape my own personality. Now it’s all about subscriptions. I didn’t mind subscribing to some services until I started to see, in Paris or everywhere I would go, that it also meant closing bookstores, record shops and even public libraries. That struggling magazines have to loose some of their identity to the advertisers. And Culture is becoming increasingly commoditized. Every once in a while, some famous artist dies and my entire news feed lights up with old nostalgia videos edited overnight. Now that I have 30 years of online experience, I truly believe that the offline world treated with much more respect subcultures than the digital world. Mega platforms have become the mac donald’s of the minds.
It scares me so much. I feel that when people don’t own anything they don’t have anything to lose.
The second one is algorithmic choice.
My relationship with content and ideas has always been obsessive and intense. Today, it’s really hard to accept the fact that the machine should decide what’s important for me. Because as good as the algorithms are, they are black boxes with very little control over them.
Of course I hear all the arguments on machine filtering. Because we live in a super busy world and because our friends are producing so much information (or noise), an entity should mediate and organise it wisely. But honestly, are we busy because of our lives or because of our tools? I reject the underlying philosophy of this new technical design.
I don’t believe we should optimize and apply machine learning to everything. Content, like life, is about finding pleasure in messy and unpredictable situations. It’s about content serendipity and friends mentorship. It’s about all these little things technology wants to make impossible in the future.
The last one is the impossibility to slow down.
There’s an incredible paradox to see the rise of meditation and mindfulness in Silicon Valley while most products that are built are designed to accelerate time and stress. While the Dunbar number of meaningful interactions with other humans is around 120, our social graphs are breaking records every days about how many people we can talk to.
Most of the tools I have in my phone can’t help me enjoy the present time. Because none of them live in the present. For one simple reason. On the Internet of today, the past or the present are not interesting . The new gold rush is about dominating the near future. A world where our next actions, our next intent, our chats and our searches can be turned into monetisable actions.
It has an incredible impact on who we are. We can’t be in a place without the urge of telling our friends what we do. The idea of impressing others comes before our own satisfaction of the present moment.
At any given time we are stuck in an infinite number of conversations. With humans or robots. And our mobiles are trying constantly to stimulate our senses with notifications.
Like many, I have been caught into the craziness of the last technological decade. I’ve have seen billion-user platforms emerge from the ground up without any deep thinking about how it would impact the world we live in.
I have started to engage that conversation, but in our tech world it’s taboo. We have designed an unsustainable world for the planet and for your brains. Seriously, do we need to sell to the same people every year a slightly updated new phone with marginally better software?
I wish something different could come up. A sort of Slow web that is to technology what slow food is to processed things.
We need to give people access to other choices, other life narratives, other tools, and other ideologies. A sort of “organic sustainable slow technology” that fights this commoditization of everything online and offline.
I feel it’s time to build this and for that I want to stop drifting and get back to building products that make me love the future again.
There’s never been one truth and one path, especially in technology. We just need more people to raise their voice and be part of this.
Thanks for listening.

Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
The Dream of Internet Freedom
For me, the Dream of Internet Freedom started in 1984 with Steven Levy’s book “Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” Levy told the story of old school coders and engineers who believed that all information should be freely accessible. They imagined that computers would empower people to make our own decisions about what was right and wrong. Empowering people depended on the design principle of decentralization. Decentralization was built into the very DNA of the early Internet, smart endpoints, but dumb pipes, that would carry whatever brilliant glories the human mind and heart could create to whomever wanted to listen.
This idea, that we could be in charge of our own intellectual destinies, appealed to me immensely. In 1986, I entered New College, a liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida. Its motto is “Each student is responsible in the last analysis for his or her education.” That same year, I read the Hacker Manifesto, written by The Mentor and published in Phrack magazine. I learned that hackers, like my fellow academic nerds at New College, were also people that didn’t want to be spoon-fed intellectual baby food. Hackers wanted free access to information, they mistrusted authority, they wanted to change the world — to a place where people could explore and curiosity was its own reward.
In 1991 I started using the public Internet. I remember sending a chat request to a sysop, asking for help. And then I could see the letters that he was typing appearing in real time on my screen, viscerally knowing for the first time that this technology allowed talking to someone, anyone, everyone, in real time, anywhere. That’s when I really began to believe that the Dream of Internet Freedom could one day become a reality.
Twenty years ago, I was a criminal defense attorney, and I learned that hackers were getting in trouble for some tricks that I thought were actually pretty cool. As a prison advocate in the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, I represented a guy who was looking at six more months in jail for hooting into the pay phone and getting free calls home. My research on that case made me realize there were a lot of laws that could impact hackers, and that I could help.
That was also the year that a guy by the name of Marty Rimm wrote a “study” saying that pornography was running rampant on the Internet. A law review published the paper, and Time Magazine touted it, and that’s all it took for Congress to be off to the races. The cyberporn hysteria resulted in Congress passing the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), an attempt to regulate online pornography.
For all you porn lovers out there, that would be a big disappointment. But there was something worse about the CDA. To stop porn, the government had to take the position that the Internet wasn’t fully protected by the First Amendment. And that would mean the government could block all kinds of things. The Internet wouldn’t be like a library. The Internet would be like TV. And TV in 1985 was actually really bad.
But this was even worse because we had higher hopes for the Internet. The Internet was a place where everyone could be a publisher and a creator. The Internet was global. And the Internet had everything on the shelves. Congress was squandering that promise.
At that time, John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a rancher, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote what is essentially a poem about love for the Internet. Barlow wrote:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Barlow was reacting to the CDA and the assertion that the Internet should be less — not more — free than books and magazines. But he was also expressing weariness with business as usual, and our shared hope that the Internet would place our reading, our associations and our thoughts outside of government control.
It turns out that Marty Rimm and the Communications Decency Act didn’t kill Internet freedom. Instead, there was a strange twist of fate that we legal scholars like to call “irony”. In 1997 in a case called ACLU v. Reno, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the CDA. It said that the First Amendment’s freedom of expression fully applies to the Internet.
The only part that remains of the CDA is a part that might seem like it achieves the opposite of Congress’s goal to get rid of online porn. It says that Internet providers don’t have to police their networks for pornography or most other unwanted content, and can’t get in trouble for failing to do so. This provision of the CDA is why the Internet is a platform for so much “user generated content,” whether videos, comments, social network posts, whatever.
Together, the Hacker Ethic, the Hacker Manifesto, and the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, ACLU v. Reno, and even the remaining piece of the CDA, describe a more or less radical dream, but one that many, if not most, of the people in this room have believed in and worked for. But today I’m standing here before you to tell you that these dreams aren’t coming true. Instead, twenty years on, the future not only looks a lot less dreamy than it once did, it looks like it might be worse.
Racism and sexism have proven resilient enough to thrive in the digital world. There are many, many examples of this, but let me use statistics, and anecdotes to make the point.
Statistically: At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company’s overall workforce, but hold only 17 percent of the company’s tech jobs. At Facebook, 15 percent of tech roles are staffed by women. At Twitter, 10 percent.
Anecdotally: Look around you at your fellow audience members. How very male and white this field is.
I find this so strange. The security community has historically been very good at finding, cultivating, and rewarding talent from unconventional candidates. Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum. Being gay or transgender is not a big deal and hasn’t been for years. A 15-year-old Aaron Swartz hung out with Doug Engelbart, creator of the computer mouse. Inclusion is at the very heart of the Hacker ethic.
And people of color and women are naturally inclined to be hackers. We learn early on that the given rules don’t work for us, and that we have to manipulate them to succeed, even where others might wish us to fail.
This field should be in the lead in evolving a race, class, age, and religiously open society, but it hasn’t been. We could conscientiously try to do this better. We could, and in my opinion should, commit to cultivating talent in unconventional places.
Today, our ability to know, modify and trust the technology we use is limited by both the law and our capacity for understanding complex systems. The Hands On Imperative is on life support. “The Freedom to Tinker” might sound like a hobby, but it’s quite important. It means our ability to study, modify and ultimately understand the technology we use — and that structures and defines our lives.
The Hands On Imperative is dying for two reasons. We are limited by both the law and our capacity for understanding complex systems.
The law: Two examples. It was exactly ten years ago that Black Hat staff spent all night cutting pages out of attendee books and re-stuffing conference sacks with new CDs. Security researcher Mike Lynn was scheduled to give a talk about a previously unknown category of vulnerability, specifically flaws in Internet routers. Cisco, and Mike Lynn’s employer ISS, decided at the last minute to try to keep the vulnerability a secret, ordering Mike to give a different talk and leveraging copyright law to force Black Hat to destroy all copies of Mike’s slides. There’s nothing that cries out censorship like cutting pages out of books.
On stage the next morning, Mike quit his job, donned a white baseball cap — literally a white hat — and presented his original research anyway. Cisco and ISS retaliated by suing him.
I was Mike’s lawyer. We managed to fight back that case, and the criminal investigation that the companies also instigated against him. But the message from the lawsuit was loud and clear — and not just to Mike. This is our software, not yours. This is our router, not yours. You’re just a licensee and we’ll tell you what you are allowed to do in the EULA. You can’t decompile this, you can’t study it, you can’t tell anyone what you find.
Aaron Swartz was another sacrificial lamb on the altar of network control. Aaron was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) because he wrote a script to automate the downloading of academic journal articles. Much of this information wasn’t even copyrighted. But Aaron was a hacker, and he challenged the system. They went after him with a vengeance. The case was based on the assertion that Aaron’s access to the journal articles was “unauthorized” even though he was authorized as a Harvard student to download the same articles.
Aaron killed himself, under immense stress from prosecutors twisting his arm to plead guilty to a political-career-ending felony, or face years in prison.
Here, too, the message was clear. You need our permission to operate in this world. If you step over the line we draw, if you automate, if you download too fast, if you type something weird in the URL bar on your browser, and we don’t like it, or we don’t like you, then we will get you.
In the future will we re-secure the Freedom to Tinker? That means Congress forgoing the tough-on-cybercrime hand waving it engages in every year — annual proposals, to make prison sentences more severe under the CFAA, as if any of the suspected perpetrators of the scores of major breaches of the past two or three years — China, North Korea, who knows who else — would be deterred by such a thing. These proposals just scare the good guys, they don’t stop the attackers.
We’d have to declare that users own and can modify the software we buy and download — despite software licenses and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
This is going to be increasingly important. Over the next 20 years software will be embedded in everything, from refrigerators to cars to medical devices.
Without the Freedom to Tinker, the right to reverse engineer these products, we will be living in a world of opaque black boxes. We don’t know what they do, and you’ll be punished for peeking inside.
Using licenses and law to control and keep secrets about your products is just one reason why in the future we may know far less about the world around us and how it works than we currently do.
Today, technology is generating more information about us than ever before, and will increasingly do so, making a map of everything we do, changing the balance of power between us, businesses and governments. In the next 20 years, we will see amazing advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Software programs are going to be deciding whether a car runs people over, or drives off a bridge. Software programs are going to decide who gets a loan, and who gets a job. If intellectual property law will protect these programs from serious study, then the public will have no idea how these decisions are being made. Professor Frank Pasquale has called this the Black Box Society. Take secrecy and the profit motive, add a billion pieces of data, and shake.
In a Black Box Society, how can we ensure that the outcome is in the public interest? The first step is obviously transparency, but our ability to understand is limited by current law and also by the limits of our human intelligence. The companies that make these products might not necessarily know how their product works either. Without adequate information, how can we democratically influence or oversee these decisions? We are going to have to learn how, or live in a society that is less fair and less free.
We are also going to have to figure out who should be responsible when software fails.

So far, there’s been very little regulation of software security. Yes, the Federal Trade Commission has jumped in where vendors misrepresented what the software would do. But that is going to change. People are sick and tired of crappy software. And they aren’t going to take it any more. The proliferation of networked devices — the Internet of Things — is going to mean all kinds of manufacturers traditionally subject to products liability are also software purveyors. If an autonomous car crashes, or a networked toaster catches on fire, you can bet there is going to be product liability. Chrysler just recalled 1.4 million cars because of the vulnerabilities that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek are going to be talking about later today. It’s a short step from suing Tesla to suing Oracle for insecure software… with all the good and the bad that will come of that.
I think software liability is inevitable. I think it’s necessary. I think it will make coding more expensive, and more conservative. I think we’ll do a crappy job of it for a really long time. I don’t know what we’re going to end up with. But I know that it’s going to be a lot harder on the innovators than on the incumbents.
Today, the physical design and the business models that fund the communications networks we use have changed in ways that facilitate rather than defeat censorship and control. But before I delve into issues of privacy, security and free expression, let’s take a few steps back and ask how we got to where we are today.
The design of the early public Internet was end-to-end. That meant dumb pipes that would carry anything, and smart edges, where application and content innovation would occur. This design principle was intentional. The Internet would not just enable communication, but would do so in a decentralized, radically democratic way. Power to the people, not to the governments or companies that run the pipes.
The Internet has evolved, as technologies do. Today, broadband Internet providers want to build smart pipes that discriminate for quality of service, differential pricing, and other new business models. Hundreds of millions of people conduct their social interactions over just a few platforms like TenCent and Facebook.
What does this evolution mean for the public? In his book The Master Switch, Professor Tim Wu looks at phones, radio, television, movies. He sees what he calls “the cycle.”
History shows a typical progression of information technologies, from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.
Eventually, innovators or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins afresh. In the book, Tim asks the question I’m asking you. Is the Internet subject to this cycle? Will it be centralized and corporately controlled? Will it be freely accessible, a closed system or something in between?
If we don’t do things differently, the Internet is going to end up being TV. First, I said we’ve neglected openness and freedom in favor of other interests like intellectual property, and that’s true.
But it’s also true that a lot of people affirmatively no longer share the Dream of Internet Freedom, if they ever did. They don’t think it’s the utopia that I’ve made it out to be. Rather, the Dream of Internet Freedom collided head on with the ugly awfulness called Other People. Nasty comments, 4chan, /b/tards, revenge porn, jihadists, Nazis. Increasingly I hear law professors, experts in the First Amendment, the doctrine of overbreadth and the chilling effect, talk about how to legislate this stuff they don’t like out of existence.
Second, there are the three trends I told you about: centralization, regulation and globalization.
· Centralization means a cheap and easy point for control and surveillance.
· Regulation means exercise of government power in favor of domestic, national interests and private entities with economic influence over lawmakers.
· Globalization means more governments are getting into the Internet regulation mix. They want to both protect and to regulate their citizens. And remember, the next billion Internet users are going to come from countries without a First Amendment, without a Bill of Rights, maybe even without due process or the rule of law. So these limitations won’t necessarily be informed by what we in the U.S. consider basic civil liberties.
Now when I say that the Internet is headed for corporate control, it may sound like I’m blaming corporations. When I say that the Internet is becoming more closed because governments are policing the network, it may sound like I’m blaming the police. I am. But I’m also blaming you. And me. Because the things that people want are helping drive increased centralization, regulation and globalization.
Remember blogs? Who here still keeps a blog regularly? I had a blog, but now I post updates on Facebook. A lot of people here at Black Hat host their own email servers, but almost everyone else I know uses gmail. We like the spam filtering and the malware detection. When I had an iPhone, I didn’t jailbreak it. I trusted the security of the vetted apps in the Apple store. When I download apps, I click yes on the permissions. I love it when my phone knows I’m at the store and reminds me to buy milk.
This is happening in no small part because we want lots of cool products “in the cloud.” But the cloud isn’t an amorphous collection of billions of water droplets. The cloud is actually a finite and knowable number of large companies with access to or control over large pieces of the Internet. It’s Level 3 for fiber optic cables, Amazon for servers, Akamai for CDN, Facebook for their ad network, Google for Android and the search engine. It’s more of an oligopoly than a cloud. And, intentionally or otherwise, these products are now choke points for control, surveillance and regulation.
So as things keep going in this direction, what does it mean for privacy, security and freedom of expression? What will be left of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
Privacy
The first casualty of centralization has been privacy. And since privacy is essential to liberty, the future will be less free.
This is the Golden Age of Surveillance. Today, technology is generating more information about us than ever before, and will increasingly do so, making a map of everything we do, changing the balance of power between us, businesses, and governments. The government has built the technological infrastructure and the legal support for mass surveillance, almost entirely in secret.
Here’s a quiz. What do emails, buddy lists, drive back ups, social networking posts, web browsing history, your medical data, your bank records, your face print, your voice print, your driving patterns and your DNA have in common?
Answer: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t think any of these things are private. Because the data is technically accessible to service providers or visible in public, it should be freely accessible to investigators and spies.
And yet, to paraphrase Justice Sonya Sotomayor, this data can reveal your contacts with “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, or the gay bar.”
So technology is increasingly proliferating data…and the law is utterly failing to protect it. Believe it or not, considering how long we’ve had commercial email, there’s only one civilian appellate court that’s decided the question of email privacy. It’s the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006, in U.S. v. Warshak. Now that court said that people do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their emails. Therefore, emails are protected by the Fourth Amendment and the government needs a warrant to get them. This ruling only answers part of the question for part of this country — Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan and Ohio. Because of it, almost all service providers require some kind of warrant before turning over your emails to criminal investigators. But the DOJ continues to push against Warshak in public, but also secretly.
But I want to emphasize how important the ruling is, because I think many people might not fully understand what the reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant requirement mean. It means that a judge polices access, so that there has to be a good reason for the search or seizure, it can’t be arbitrary. It also means that the search has to be targeted, because a warrant has to specifically describe what is going to be searched. The warrant requirement is not only a limitation on arbitrary police action, it should also limit mass surveillance.
But in the absence of privacy protection — pushed by our own government — the law isn’t going to protect our information from arbitrary, suspicion-less massive surveillance, even as that data generation proliferates out of control.
Centralization means that your information is increasingly available from “the cloud,” an easy one stop shopping point to get data not just about you, but about everyone. And it gives the government a legal argument to get around the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement.
Regulation is not protecting your data and at worst is actually ensuring that governments can get easy access to this data. The DOJ pushes:
· Provider assistance provisions to require providers to assist with spying;
· Corporate immunity for sharing data with the government, for example giving AT&T immunity in its complicity with NSA’s illegal domestic spying and in CISPA, CISA and other surveillance proposals masquerading as security information sharing bills;
· And, not so much yet in the U.S. but in other countries, data retention obligations that essentially deputize companies to spy on their users for the government.
Globalization gives the U.S. a way to spy on Americans…by spying on foreigners we talk to. Our government uses the fact that the network is global against us. The NSA conducts massive spying overseas, and Americans’ data gets caught in the net. And, by insisting that foreigners have no Fourth Amendment privacy rights, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that you don’t have such rights either, as least when you’re talking to or even about foreigners.
Surveillance couldn’t get much worse, but in the next 20 years, it actually will. Now we have networked devices, the so-called Internet of Things, that will keep track of our home heating, and how much food we take out of our refrigerator, and our exercise, sleep, heartbeat, and more. These things are taking our off-line physical lives and making them digital and networked, in other words, surveillable.
To have any hope of attaining the Dream of Internet Freedom, we have to implement legal reforms to stop suspicion-less spying. We have to protect email and our physical location from warrantless searches. We have to stop overriding the few privacy laws we have to gain with a false sense of online security. We have to utterly reject secret surveillance laws, if only because secret law is an abomination in a democracy.
Are we going to do any of these things?
Security
Despite the way many people talk about it, security it isn’t the opposite of privacy. You can improve security without infringing privacy — for example by locking cockpit doors. And not all invasions of privacy help security. In fact, privacy protects security. A human rights worker in Syria or a homosexual in India needs privacy, or they may be killed.
Instead, we should think about security with more nuance. Online threats mean different things depending on whose interests you have at stake — governments, corporations, political associations, individuals. Whether something is “secure” is a function of whose security you are concerned with. In other words, security is in the eye of the beholder. Further, security need not be zero sum: Because we are talking about global information networks, security improvements can benefit all, just as security vulnerabilities can hurt all.

The battleground of the future is that people in power want more security for themselves at the expense of others. The U.S. Government talks about security as “cyber”. When I hear “cyber” I hear shorthand for military domination of the Internet, as General Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA head, has said — ensuring U.S. access and denying access to our enemies. Security for me, but not for thee. Does that sound like an open, free, robust, global Internet to you?
Here’s just one public example: our government wants weakened cryptography, back doors in popular services and devices so that it can surveil us (remember, without a warrant). It is unmoved by the knowledge that these back doors will be used by criminals and oppressive governments alike. Meanwhile, it overclassifies, maintains secret law, withholds documents from open government requests, goes after whistleblowers and spies on journalists.
Here’s another. The White House is pushing for the Department of Homeland Security to be the hub for security threat information sharing. That means DHS will decide who gets vulnerability information… and who doesn’t.
I see governments and elites picking and choosing security haves and security have nots. In other words, security will be about those in power trying to get more power.
This isn’t building security for a global network. What’s at stake is the well-being of vulnerable communities and minorities that need security most. What’s at stake is the very ability of citizens to petition the government. Of religious minorities to practice their faith without fear of reprisals. Of gay people to find someone to love. This state of affairs should worry anyone who is outside the mainstream, whether an individual, a political or religious group or a start up without market power.
Freedom of Expression
Today, the physical architecture and the corporate ownership of the communications networks we use have changed in ways that facilitate rather than defeat censorship and control. In the U.S., copyright was the first cause for censorship, but now we are branching out to political speech.
Governments see the power of platforms and have proposed that social media companies alert federal authorities when they become aware of terrorist-related content on their sites. A U.N. panel last month called on the firms to respond to accusations that their sites are being exploited by the Islamic State and other groups. At least at this point, there’s no affirmative obligation to police in the U.S.
But you don’t have to have censorship laws if you can bring pressure to bear. People cheer when Google voluntarily delists so-called revenge porn, when YouTube deletes ISIS propaganda videos, when Twitter adopts tougher policies on hate speech. The end result is collateral censorship, by putting pressure on platforms and intermediaries, governments can indirectly control what we say and what we experience.
What that means is that governments, or corporations, or the two working together increasingly decide what we can see. It’s not true that anyone can say anything and be heard anywhere. It’s more true that your breast feeding photos aren’t welcome and, increasingly, that your unorthodox opinions about radicalism will get you placed on a list.
Make no mistake, this censorship is inherently discriminatory. Muslim “extremist” speech is cause for alarm and deletion. But no one is talking about stopping Google from returning search results for the Confederate flag.
Globalization means other governments are in the censorship mix. I’m not just talking about governments like Russia and China. There’s also the European Union, with its laws against hate speech, Holocaust denial, and its developing Right To Be Forgotten. Each country wants to enforce its own laws and protect and police its citizens as it sees fit, and that means a different internet experience for different countries or regions. In Europe, accurate information is being delisted from search engines, to make it harder or impossible to find. So much for talking to everyone everywhere in real time. So much for having everything on the Internet shelf.
Worse, governments are starting to enforce their laws outside their borders through blocking orders to major players like Google and to ISPs. France is saying to Google, don’t return search results that violate our laws to anyone, even if it’s protected speech that we are entitled to in the U.S. If you follow this through to the obvious conclusion, every country will censor everywhere. It will be intellectual baby food.
How much free speech does a free society really need? Alternatively how much sovereignty should a nation give up to enable a truly global network to flourish?
Right now, if we don’t change course and begin to really value having a place for even the edgy and disruptive speech, our choice is between network balkanization and a race to the bottom.
Which will we pick?
The Next 20 Years
The future for freedom and openness appears to be far bleaker than we had hoped for 20 years ago. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let me describe another future where the Internet Dream lives and thrives.
We start to think globally. We need to deter another terrorist attack in New York, but we can’t ignore impact our decisions have on journalists and human rights workers around the world. We strongly value both.
We build in decentralization where possible: Power to the People. And strong end to end encryption can start to right the imbalance between tech, law and human rights.
We realize the government has no role in dictating communications technology design.
We start being afraid of the right things and stop being driven by irrational fear. We reform the CFAA, the DMCA, the Patriot Act and foreign surveillance law. We stop being so sensitive about speech and we let noxious bullshit air out. If a thousand flowers bloom, the vast majority of them will be beautiful.
Today we’ve reached an inflection point. If we change paths, it is still possible that the Dream of Internet Freedom can become true. But if we don’t, it won’t. The Internet will continue to evolve into a slick, stiff, controlled and closed thing. And that dream I have — that so many of you have — will be dead. If so, we need to think about creating the technology for the next lifecycle of the revolution. In the next 20 years we need to get ready to smash the Internet apart and build something new and better.

Ce n'est pas un scoop: j'ai participé, à ma mesure, à la lutte contre la loi scélérate sur le renseignement. Ce n'est pas une surprise: j'ai été plus que déçu par la décision rendue par le Conseil Constitutionnel à son sujet. Mais ce n'est pas l'objet du présent billet. Avec le recul, il semble évident que nous (les opposants à cette loi) n'avons pas su nous faire comprendre du grand public. Le texte était complexe, ses enjeux très techniques ou très philosophiques, et nous avons choisi de les expliquer: c'était sans doute une erreur.

Pendant que les tenants du texte préféraient jouer sur le registre émotionnel ("Si vous ne votez pas ce texte, vous serez responsables du prochain attentat") ou démagogique ("si vous êtes contre nous, vous êtes avec les terroristes"), nous nous sommes fatigués à décortiquer le danger des "boites noires" et des algorithmes informatiques, à en appeler à Foucault et au panoptique, et à rappeler l'importance de la vie privée pour la liberté de penser.

Sur ces bases, le combat de l'adhésion populaire était perdu d'avance: face au populisme, le pari de l'intellligence est souvent perdant.

Une unanimité jamais vue

Pour autant, un point reste remarquable: jamais, en 20 ans de lutte pour les libertés je n'avais vu pareille unanimité de la mal nommée "société civile" contre un texte. Jamais. Du SNJ au Syndicat de la Magistrature, de l'ONU au Conseil de l'Europe, de la Quadrature du Net à la LDH, en passant par le juge Trevidic et le Défenseur des Droits Jacques Toubon: tous se sont opposés, avec peu ou prou les mêmes réserves, à ce texte. Il serait d'ailleurs bien plus court de faire la liste des organismes ou associations qui l'ont défendu: il n'y en a pas.

Et de cette levée de boucliers qui fut (et c'est aussi une nouveauté) bien reprise dans les médias, le gouvernement n'a rien vu, rien entendu. Devant les deux assemblées, elle a été ignorée d'un revers de main, quand elle n'a pas été dénigrée ou caricaturée.

On nous a tour à tour accusé d'avoir fait peser une "odieuse pression" sur les députés (car il est bien connu qu'il est honteux pour des citoyens d'essayer d'influencer le vote de leurs représentants), d'être des "exégètes amateurs" qui ne comprenaient rien au "juridisme" de la loi, ou encore de n'être que des "numéristes" (comme si comprendre les enjeux des nouvelles technologies ne pouvait que disqualifier ceux qui s'y essaient).

Quant aux rares parlementaires qui ont essayé de relayer ces inquiétudes, ils ont été raillés, dénigrés, ridiculisés par des ministres "droits dans leurs bottes" et totalement sourds aux arguments qui étaient développés. Aucun amendement, aucune remise en cause du texte présenté n'ont été admis. Et toujours au nom de la sacro-sainte lutte contre le terrorisme (qui n'était pourtant, faut-il encore le rappeler, pas l'enjeu principal de la loi).

Pour suivre les débats parlementaires de façon plus ou moins régulière, je n'avais jamais vu ça. Jamais vu autant de rejet de la part de tout ce que la société compte d'entités concernées face à autant d'immobilisme de la part du gouvernement. Quand on voit en parallèle la manière dont le même gouvernement a reculé sans la moindre hésitation face à la fronde des bonnets rouges, de la FNSEA ou d'autres lobbies moins connus à l'occasion des votes de textes qui, eux, ne touchaient pas aux libertés fondamentales, quand on voit avec quelle haine les ministres et la grande majorité des élus parlaient d'Internet pendant les débats, au point d'en faire une insulte, il me semble que c'est très symptomatique.

Odeur de rance.

Mais symptomatique de quoi ?

J'ai voulu, avant de réagir à tout ça, prendre du recul. Un recul qui, peut-être, m'a permis de relier ce symptôme à d'autres, sans rapport avec la loi renseignement, mais qui tous me semblent relever du même mal: un néoconservatisme galopant, une pensée réactionnaire à ce point "décomplexée" qu'elle a largement dépassé son habitat de droite naturel et largement infusé, y compris au sein des grands partis dits "de gauche".

Quand Jean-Jacques Urvoas se réjouit (https://twitter.com/JJUrvoas/status/624324424393592832), sur Twitter, de la décision du Conseil Constitutionnel sur (sic) 'la loi "rens."', le lapsus est révélateur. Quoi de plus rance, en effet, que cette volonté réaffirmée d'un contrôle social, d'une surveillance de masse à même d'imposer un ordre moral venu d'en haut, autrefois garanti par l'église, et dont toute une partie, elle aussi bien rance, de la société souhaite le retour ?

Ce que je vois, bien au delà de cette loi et de la manière dont elle a été votée, c'est une rupture. Une fracture qui est loin de n'être que "numérique".

La fracture temporelle.

Quand une grande part de la société est à la recherche de nouveaux modes de consommation, plus respectueux de l'environnement, plus éthiques aussi, qu'elle développe la culture du partage (des ressources, de la musique, du savoir...) alors que l'état abandonne l'écotaxe, soutient l'agriculture intensive au détriment des petites exploitations (http://www.politis.fr/Un-gouvernement-a-la-botte-de-la,32260.html), et lutte contre toutes les innovations qui risqueraient de mettre à mal des rentes qui remontent au siècle passé (taxe copie privée étendue au "cloud", redevance audiovisuelle étendue aux "box", loi Thevenoud imposant 15mn d'attente aux VTC, et tant d'autres...).

Quand une autre partie de la société - la plus démunie - cesse de réfléchir au futur faute de pouvoir s'y projeter et n'a d'autre espoir qu'un retour à un passé qu'elle croit meilleur, encouragée par tout ce que la classe politique compte de démagogues et de populistes, et entraînant avec elle quelques vieux autoproclamés intellectuels, dépassés par le monde moderne et qui n'ont pas de mots assez durs pour fustiger ce qu'ils n'ont pas les moyens de comprendre.

Tout se passe comme si nous avions d'une part une population tournée vers l'avenir, imaginant une démocratie modernisée, une économie collaborative, sociale et solidaire, s'adaptant aux nouveautés numériques (telle la petite poucette de Michel Serres) mais tout aussi capable d'imaginer un débat public sur le revenu universel, la dépénalisation des drogues douces ou l'accueil des réfugiés, et d'autre part une classe politique résolument tournée vers un passé archaïque, rêvant d'uniformes scolaires, de morale à l'école, d'interdiction du mariage pour tous, et d'un paternalisme assis sur le cumul des mandats, le copinage et la corruption.

Quand certains souhaitent la censure de la pornographie en ligne, ou le retour du "saint du jour" et de quoi remplacer l'église dans son rôle de maître-à-penser, d'autres pensent startup, démocratie liquide, liberté d'expression, post-capitalisme et protection de la vie privée.

Et, hélas, cette "fracture temporelle" emporte avec elle tout ce que la société compte d'exclus, de laissés pour compte et de vieilles haines rancies contre l'autre, quel qu'il soit, en les poussant à croire au bon vieux bouc émissaire (hier juif, aujourd'hui musulman) responsable de tous ses maux, à espérer qu'un retour à d'anciennes "valeurs" leur redonnera un pouvoir (qu'ils n'ont jamais eu) sur leur propre avenir, et à voter pour celui qui saura le mieux prendre la posture maréchalesque du sauveur suprême.

C'est je crois le sens qu'il faut donner à cette volonté manifeste de nos gouvernants, qu'ils soient d'un bord ou de l'autre, de "civiliser" (lire "contrôler, surveiller et censurer") Internet, en tant que symbole de toutes leurs peurs, de toute leur ignorance et de tous les espoirs d'une innovation sociale qu'ils rejettent aveuglément.

On pourrait appeler ça la querelle des anciens et des modernes 2.0, si ça n'était hélas un symptôme supplémentaire du pourrissement de la Vème république et notre démocratie.

Ne nous y trompons pas: "l'invasion des barbares", chère à Nicolas Colin, est en marche et ce ne sont pas les postures passéistes qui protégeront une société qui semble préférer le repli sur soi à l'ouverture aux autres. Sans une transformation radicale du discours politique, si nous ne savons pas mettre l'imagination au pouvoir plutôt qu'une nostalgie d'un passé qui n'a jamais existé, ce n'est pas seulement nos lois qui seront rances.

Ce sera notre société tout entière.

[Déjà posté en Français un peu avant, mais cet article est bien plus complet]

Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my laptop and posted to my new blog. This, though, was the first time in six years. And it nearly broke my heart.

A few weeks earlier, I’d been abruptly pardoned and freed from Evin prison in northern Tehran. I had been expecting to spend most of my life in those cells: In November 2008, I’d been sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail, mostly for things I’d written on my blog.

But the moment, when it came, was unexpected. I smoked a cigarette in the kitchen with one of my fellow inmates, and came back to the room I shared with a dozen other men. We were sharing a cup of tea when the voice of the floor announcer — another prisoner — filled all the rooms and corridors. In his flat voice, he announced in Persian: “Dear fellow inmates, the bird of luck has once again sat on one fellow inmate’s shoulders. Mr. Hossein Derakhshan, as of this moment, you are free.”

That evening was the first time that I went out of those doors as a free man. Everything felt new: The chill autumn breeze, the traffic noise from a nearby bridge, the smell, the colors of the city I had lived in for most of my life.

Around me, I noticed a very different Tehran from the one I’d been used to. An influx of new, shamelessly luxurious condos had replaced the charming little houses I was familiar with. New roads, new highways, hordes of invasive SUVs. Large billboards with advertisements for Swiss-made watches and Korean flat screen TVs. Women in colorful scarves and manteaus, men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with hip western music and female staff. They were the kinds of changes that creep up on people; the kind you only really notice once normal life gets taken away from you.

Two weeks later, I began writing again. Some friends agreed to let me start a blog as part of their arts magazine. I called it Ketabkhan — it means book-reader in Persian.

Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online. Writing on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become while I’d been gone, and so I knew one thing: If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.

So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.

It became clear to me, right there, that things had changed. I was not equipped to play on this new turf — all my investment and effort had burned up. I was devastated.

Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. Everybody I linked to would face a sudden and serious jump in traffic: I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted.

People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, and even many of those who strongly disagreed with me still came to read. Other blogs linked to mine to discuss what I was saying. I felt like a king.

The iPhone was a little over a year old by then, but smartphones were still mostly used to make phone calls and send short messages, handle emails, and surf the web. There were no real apps, certainly not how we think of them today. There was no Instagram, no SnapChat, no Viber, no WhatsApp.

Instead, there was the web, and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis. They were my life.

It had all started with 9/11. I was in Toronto, and my father had just arrived from Tehran for a visit. We were having breakfast when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I was puzzled and confused and, looking for insights and explanations, I came across blogs. Once I read a few, I thought: This is it, I should start one, and encourage all Iranians to start blogging as well. So, using Notepad on Windows, I started experimenting. Soon I ended up writing on hoder.com, using Blogger’s publishing platform before Google bought it.

Then, on November 5, 2001, I published a step-to-step guide on how to start a blog. That sparked something that was later called a blogging revolution: Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top 5 nations by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have a role in this unprecedented democratization of writing.

Those days, I used to keep a list of all blogs in Persian and, for a while, I was the first person any new blogger in Iran would contact, so they could get on the list. That’s why they called me “the blogfather” in my mid-twenties — it was a silly nickname, but at least it hinted at how much I cared.

Every morning, from my small apartment in downtown Toronto, I opened my computer and took care of the new blogs, helping them gain exposure and audience. It was a diverse crowd — from exiled authors and journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clerics, and war veterans — and I always encouraged even more. I invited more religious, and pro-Islamic Republic men and women, people who lived inside Iran, to join and start writing.

The breadth of what was available those days amazed us all. It was partly why I promoted blogging so seriously. I’d left Iran in late 2000 to experience living in the West, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at home. But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.

There’s a story in the Quran that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep. They wake up under the impression that they’ve taken a nap: In fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food — and I can only imagine how hungry they must’ve been after 300 years — and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realizes how long they have actually been absent.

The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web — a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.

Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large.

Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.

At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages. One photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads directly to Facebook receive a large number of likes, which in turn means they appear more on other people’s news feeds. On the other hand, when he posts a link to the same picture somewhere outside Facebook — his now-dusty blog, for instance — the images are much less visible to Facebook itself, and therefore get far fewer likes. The cycle reinforces itself.

Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better. Others, insecure social services, are far more paranoid. Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.

But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.

More or less, all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.

On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them. Just like celebrities who draw a kind of power from the millions of human eyes gazing at them any given time, web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks.

But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.

Even before I went to jail, though, the power of hyperlinks was being curbed. Its biggest enemy was a philosophy that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities. That philosophy is the Stream.

The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.

The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites.

But are we missing something here? What are we exchanging for efficiency?

In many apps, the votes we cast — the likes, the plusses, the stars, the hearts — are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status than to the substance of what’s posted. A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.

And not only do the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.

Popularity is not wrong in and of itself, but it has its own perils. In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure. Nobody gets upset when a quiet Brooklyn cafe with bad lattes and rude servers goes out of business. But opinions are not the same as material goods or services. They won’t disappear if they are unpopular or even bad. In fact, history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.

Today the Stream is digital media’s dominant form of organizing information. It’s in every social network and mobile application. Since I gained my freedom, everywhere I turn I see the Stream. I guess it won’t be too long before we see news websites organize their entire content based on the same principles. The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.

There’s no question to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual. (No wonder why Apple is hiring human editors for its news app.) But diversity is being reduced in other ways, and for other purposes.

Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.

The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear. After my arrest, my hosting service closed my account, because I wasn’t able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I had a backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server. (Most blogging platforms used to enable you to transfer your posts and archives to your own web space, whereas now most platforms don’t let you so.) Even if I didn’t, the Internet archive might keep a copy. But what if my account on Facebook or Twitter is shut down for any reason? Those services themselves may not die any time soon, but it would be not too difficult to imagine a day many American services shut down accounts of anyone who is from Iran, as a result of the current regime of sanctions. If that happened, I might be able to download my posts in some of them, and let’s assume the backup can be easily imported into another platform. But what about the unique web address for my social network profile? Would I be able to claim it back later, after somebody else has possessed it? Domain names switch hands, too, but managing the process is easier and more clear— especially since there is a financial relationship between you and the seller which makes it less prone to sudden and untransparent decisions.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.

Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.

Being watched is something we all eventually have to get used to and live with and, sadly, it has nothing to do with the country of our residence. Ironically enough, states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the Internet but does not have legal access to social media companies.

What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled. When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.

Middle-class Iranians, like most people in the world, are obsessed with new trends. Utility or quality of things usually comes second to their trendiness. In early 2000s writing blogs made you cool and trendy, then around 2008 Facebook came in and then Twitter. Since 2014 the hype is all about Instagram, and no one knows what is next. But the more I think about these changes, the more I realize that even all my concerns might have been misdirected. Perhaps I am worried about the wrong thing. Maybe it’s not the death of the hyperlink, or the centralization, exactly.

Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?

Is this trend driven by people’s changing cultural habits, or is it that people are following the new laws of social networking? I don’t know — that’s for researchers to find out — but it feels like it’s reviving old cultural wars. After all, the web started out by imitating books and for many years, it was heavily dominated by text, by hypertext. Search engines put huge value on these things, and entire companies — entire monopolies — were built off the back of them. But as the number of image scanners and digital photos and video cameras grows exponentially, this seems to be changing. Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing there.

But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.

The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.

When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.

Sometimes I think maybe I’m becoming too strict as I age. Maybe this is all a natural evolution of a technology. But I can’t close my eyes to what’s happening: A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take some — Instagram, for instance — serious enough to block.

I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.

That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.

Even though multiple generations have now grown up glued to the flickering light of the TV, we still can’t let go of the belief that the next generation of technology is going to doom our kids. We blame technology, rather than work, to understand why children engage with screens in the first place.

I’ve spent over a decade observing young people’s practices with technology and interviewing families about the dynamics that unfold. When I began my research, I expected to find hordes of teenagers who were escaping “real life” through the Internet. That was certainly my experience. As a geeky, queer youth growing up in suburban America in the early 1990s, the Internet was the only place where I didn’t feel judged. I wanted to go virtual, for my body to not matter, to live in a digital-only world.

If Americans truly want to reduce the amount young people use technology, we should free up more of their time.

To my surprise — and, as I grew older, relief — that differed from what most youth want. Early on in my research, I met a girl in Michigan who told me that she’d much rather get together with her friends in person, but she had so many homework demands and her parents were often concerned about her physical safety. This is why she loved the Internet: She could hang out with her friends there. I've heard this reasoning echoed by youth around the country.

This is the Catch-22 that we’ve trapped today’s youth in. We’ve locked them indoors because we see the physical world as more dangerous than ever before, even though by almost every measure, we live in the safest society to date. We put unprecedented demands on our kids, maxing them out with structured activities, homework and heavy expectations. And then we’re surprised when they’re frazzled and strung out.

For many teenagers, technology is a relief valve. (And that goes for the strung-out, overworked parents and adults playing Candy Crush, too.) It’s not the inherently addictive substance that fretting parents like to imagine. It simply provides an outlet.

The presence of technology alone is not the issue. We see much higher levels of concern about technology “addiction” in countries where there’s even greater pressure to succeed and fewer social opportunities (e.g., China, South Korea, etc.).

If Americans truly want to reduce the amount young people use technology, we should free up more of their time.

For one thing, we could radically reduce the amount of homework and tests American youth take. Finland and the Netherlands consistently outperform the U.S. in school, and they emphasize student happiness, assigning almost no homework. (To be sure, they also respect their teachers and pay them what they’re worth.) When I lecture in these countries, parents don't seem nearly as anxious about technology addiction as Americans.

We should also let children roam. It seems like every few weeks I read a new story about a parent who was visited by child services for letting their school-aged children out of their sight. Indeed, studies in the U.S. and the U.K. consistently show that children have lost the right to roam.

This is why many of our youth turn to technology. They aren’t addicted to the computer; they’re addicted to interaction, and being around their friends. Children, and especially teenagers, don’t want to only socialize with parents and siblings; they want to play with their peers. That’s how they make sense of the world. And we’ve robbed them of that opportunity because we’re afraid of boogeymen.

We’re raising our children in captivity and they turn to technology to socialize, learn and decompress. Why are we blaming the screens?

« Google et de manière plus générale les grands services de l’Internet (le plus souvent californiens) sont en train de prendre, sans qu’on s’en rende compte, la place de l’État, des États, dans la gestion quotidienne de nos droits et libertés. Cette évolution quasiment invisible s’est faite avec l’assentiment tacite (parce que l’enjeu est incompris) des citoyens-internautes-clients, et avec la complicité aveugle des gouvernements qui, par manque de vision politique, ont cédé chaque jour davantage de terrain en croyant y trouver leur intérêt. Si, en moins de vingt ans, une entreprise comme Google a pu prendre une place aussi gigantesque dans le cœur même des usages et des infrastructures numériques, c’est qu’elle a su maîtriser son développement sur tous les fronts.

Internet est un espace et un réseau qui, par sa nature, a vocation à mettre en relation les uns avec les autres des ordinateurs, dans une construction non-pyramidale. L’immense nouveauté d’Internet, par opposition à la transmission « hors ligne » des informations ou au Minitel, par exemple, c’est cette organisation décentralisée, « neutre » techniquement, où il suffit de se brancher pour avoir accès à tout le réseau. C’est ainsi qu’Internet a pu tisser ce qu’on a rapidement appelé, dans le monde entier (ou presque), une « Toile ». Forcément, c’était un peu déstabilisant. Et quiconque se projette dans l’Internet pré-Google se souvient de l’importance absolument cruciale des annuaires et des premiers moteurs de recherche pour trouver, ou tenter de trouver, ce qu’on cherchait sur cette Toile en apparence anarchique.

Et puis sont arrivées les grandes plateformes, telles Google, Amazon, etc., à partir du début des années 2000. Des services web à vocation hégémonique, qui ont fondé leur développement uniquement sur la publicité, et sur une publicité exploitant nos comportements de navigation et nos données personnelles. Il me semble que c’est ainsi que le rêve de substitution googlien décrit dans ce livre a pu se développer. Il serait injuste d’ailleurs de ne parler que de Google : d’autres entreprises comme Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc., fonctionnent de la même façon. Leurs caractéristiques et manières d’agir sont communes.

Avant tout, s’imposer sur un domaine en fournissant le « meilleur » service. Que ce service soit simple d’utilisation, que l’exploitation massive de données et la « fermeture » soient organisées pour servir le client et lui apporter ce qu’il veut. Ce qu’il cherche. Qu’il ne se pose aucune question et soit satisfait dans ses besoins primaires : obtenir une réponse satisfaisante à sa recherche, trouver ou retrouver des amis et pouvoir échanger avec eux, trouver un livre, une musique, en trois clics.

Améliorer en permanence les services en se basant sur une centralisation et une exploitation massive des données personnelles et de navigation. Petit à petit, réduire le périmètre d’exploration et de navigation de l’internaute. Orienter les résultats, montrer des contenus « associés », reproposer encore et encore des contenus similaires. Détruire petit à petit ce qui est peut être la plus grande qualité d’Internet : la sérendipité, soit la possibilité de faire des découvertes accidentelles.

Après avoir réussi l’hégémonie, le monopole « horizontal », développer une concentration verticale. Posséder et développer toute la chaîne de production de l’Internet. Comme l’explique le texte que vous venez de lire, que Google tire ses propres câbles sous-marins ou produise son électricité est un signe majeur de la concentration inouïe du secteur. Un signe majeur de l’emprise verticale qu’une entreprise (au départ dédiée aux moteurs de recherche) a pu prendre sur le secteur technologique.

Il devient alors facile pour ces innovateurs talentueux, grisés par leur succès et idéologiquement convertis à une technophilie virant parfois au transhumanisme (la foi en l’amélioration physique et mentale de l’Humain par la technique), de rêver de vivre sans État et, via une transformation « liquide » et insensible des règles de la société, de faire le saut de l’utopie politique et sociale.

Il faut dire que les États se montrent bien impuissants, dépassés, voire complices de cette évolution. Ils délèguent des pans entiers de leurs missions régaliennes à ces géants, sans qu’il semble y avoir eu une quelconque réflexion préalable sur les bouleversements politiques et sociaux que cela peut entraîner. Oui, Google et ses comparses sont en train de dominer le monde et d’en créer un nouveau. Mais ils le peuvent parce que nous et nos États les laissons faire.

Quand la NSA (National Security Agency) n’a plus besoin de faire elle-même la collecte des données des internautes du monde entier pour pratiquer sa surveillance de masse, puisqu’elle n’a qu’à aller les chercher directement chez les géants de l’Internet, le gouvernement américain n’a aucun intérêt à ce que ce modèle économique basé sur les données personnelles ne s’arrête. Les services de renseignement du monde entier peuvent ensuite, sur le grand marché de la surveillance, venir chercher ce dont ils ont besoin.

Les pouvoirs régaliens fragilisés sont récupérés par des entreprises avides de combler ces manques

Quand la Cour de justice de l’Union européenne demande à Google et aux moteurs de recherche de masquer, à leur discrétion, des résultats au nom du « droit à l’oubli », elle entérine le fait que la mémoire collective, le droit à l’information, qui passent aujourd’hui prioritairement par Internet, sont gérés par une entreprise privée. Hors de toute décision judiciaire, Google décide ce qui doit ou ne doit pas être accessible aux yeux du monde.

Quand les ayants droit de l’industrie de la culture et du divertissement demandent que les services Web cessent de donner accès à des contenus violant le droit d’auteur, là encore sans décision judiciaire, ils entérinent le fait que l’expression culturelle individuelle et le partage de contenus puisse être soumis aux choix des robots de Google. C’est ainsi qu’à la demande de ces ayants droit, des robots traquent, sur YouTube, les contenus qui leur semblent enfreindre les droits d’auteur et les suppriment sans discussion, entraînant de nombreux abus contre lesquels les internautes sont souvent impuissants à agir. La justice n’intervient pas en amont de ces décisions et c’est ensuite à l’internaute de prouver son « honnêteté » pour que ses contenus soient remis en ligne.

Quand des ministres du gouvernement français préfèrent que les services Web et les réseaux sociaux gèrent les abus de langage en « prenant leurs responsabilités », ils leur délèguent un de nos droits les plus fondamentaux : la liberté d’expression.

Quand des entreprises américaines comme Facebook ou Apple proposent à leurs employées de congeler leurs ovocytes pour les laisser « libres » de reporter leurs grossesses et leur permettre de ne pas « gâcher leurs carrières », c’est la vie privée dans ce qu’elle a de plus intime qui est prise en charge par l’entreprise.

Quand les pays africains se réjouissent qu’un Google ou un Facebook mettent en place gratuitement des infrastructures d’accès à Internet, sans se préoccuper de l’objectif final de ces entreprises, ils se défaussent de leurs responsabilités et acceptent que l’accès au monde numérique soit totalement dépendant des objectifs commerciaux de ces acteurs.

Ces exemples montrent qu’en actant, sans y réfléchir plus avant, la puissance phénoménale de ces nouvelles entreprises sur des pans de plus en plus grands de toute notre vie, bien au-delà des services mis en avant par les entreprises, les gouvernements et les citoyens ont baissé les bras ou n’ont, en tout cas, pas pris la mesure de ce qu’ils abandonnent à Google, à Facebook, à Apple, Amazon et autres géants.

Dans une période de crise économique et politique généralisée, il n’est pas étonnant que les pouvoirs régaliens soient fragilisés et récupérés par des entreprises avides de combler ces manques. La rapidité des évolutions technologiques pour des dirigeants politiques souvent dépassés et en carence de pensée politique à long terme aggrave le problème. Le monde ne se divise pas entre technophiles et technophobes. Penser ainsi, c’est entrer dans le jeu des United States of Google. C’est croire qu’on n’a le choix qu’entre un repli mortifère dans le passé ou une fuite en avant vers la gestion algorithmique de nos vies.

Il faut absolument lire ceux qui réfléchissent sur l’avenir du numérique. Comme Fred Turner, cité dans ce texte, qui montre brillamment comment l’utopie technophile ne peut servir d’alternative à la société politique. Qu’il faille changer de politique et que les gouvernements aient à se réinventer, cela paraît évident. Cela ne signifie surtout pas que l’on doive céder à la facilité en délégant la gestion de nos droits fondamentaux ou de la sphère publique à des entreprises dont la principale préoccupation est, évidemment, leur résultat économique. Non, Google ne nous offrira pas de vies meilleures. Google change le monde à son profit, et ce but est naturel pour une entreprise. À nous de savoir ce que nous voulons faire de ce monde numérique qui bouleverse nos vies depuis vingt ans.

Le devoir des citoyens et des politiques est de voir plus loin. De choisir et de dessiner la société qu’ils veulent. De ne pas penser la Loi en réaction aux mastodontes de l’Internet, ou au contraire en leur cédant tout, mais en pensant à l’intérêt général, et d’abord à celui des citoyens.

Nos libertés fondamentales sont fragiles. Elles étaient fragiles hier, mais davantage cloisonnées entre espace public, espace privé, espace économique, espace politique. Aujourd’hui tout se retrouve sur Internet et les espaces se rejoignent et s’entremêlent intimement. Il est d’autant plus important de mesurer ces évolutions et de légiférer intelligemment. Économie et libertés, politique et vie privée sont imbriquées comme elles ne l’ont sans doute jamais été dans l’Histoire.

Nous avons la chance de vivre une époque de mutation fondamentale dans l’histoire humaine. Il appartient collectivement à tous les acteurs de nos sociétés d’en faire une révolution au service de l’Homme et non un abandon généralisé de nos valeurs à quelques acteurs dominants ou à des États sans gouvernail.

Internet a donné la possibilité à chacun de faire entendre sa voix. Qu’en ferons-nous ? »

ANALYSE A sa sortie de prison, Hossein Derakhshan, blogueur iranien, ne retrouve plus le réseau décentralisé qu’il utilisait. Aux idées ont succédé les «likes», aux textes un flux continu d’images.

Il y a sept mois, assis à la petite table de cuisine de mon appartement des années 60 niché au sommet d’un immeuble dans un quartier animé du centre de Téhéran, j’ai fait un geste que j’avais déjà accompli des milliers de fois. J’ai allumé mon ordinateur portable et publié un post sur mon nouveau blog. Cela faisait six ans que ça ne m’était plus arrivé. Et ça m’a pratiquement brisé le cœur.

Quelques semaines plus tôt, j’avais été subitement gracié et libéré de la prison d’Evin, dans le nord de Téhéran. Six ans, c’est long en prison, mais sur Internet, c’est toute une époque. Le processus d’écriture n’y avait pas changé, mais la façon de lire - ou en tout cas de faire lire - y avait évolué de façon spectaculaire. On m’avait prévenu de l’importance qu’avaient pris les réseaux sociaux pendant mon absence, je savais donc au moins une chose : pour attirer les lecteurs, il me fallait désormais utiliser les médias sociaux. J’ai essayé de poster sur Facebook un lien vers un de mes articles. Il s’est avéré que Facebook n’en avait pas grand-chose à faire, et que mon lien a fini par ressembler à une petite annonce sans le moindre intérêt. Aucune description. Pas d’image. Rien. Il a amassé trois likes en tout et pour tout. Trois. Fin de l’histoire. Là, j’ai vraiment compris que les choses avaient changé.

Roi du monde. En 2008, quand j’ai été arrêté, les blogs étaient des mines d’or et les blogueurs des rock stars. A cette époque, et malgré le fait que l’Etat bloquait l’accès à mon blog à l’intérieur de l’Iran, j’avais environ 20 000 visiteurs par jour. A chaque fois que je mettais un lien vers un site, sa fréquentation atteignait brutalement des sommets : j’avais le pouvoir de valoriser ou de couvrir de honte qui je voulais. Les gens lisaient mes billets avec attention et laissaient de nombreux commentaires pertinents, et même beaucoup de ceux qui n’étaient pas d’accord avec moi venaient quand même lire ce que j’écrivais. D’autres blogs mettaient des liens vers le mien pour discuter de ce que je racontais. J’avais l’impression d’être le roi du monde.

En prison, au cours de mes huit premiers mois en isolement, j’ai beaucoup pensé à une histoire racontée dans le Coran. Un groupe de chrétiens persécutés trouve refuge dans une grotte. Ils tombent alors dans un profond sommeil, ainsi que le chien qui les accompagne. Lorsqu’ils se réveillent, ils ont l’impression d’avoir fait un petit somme : en réalité, 309 ans ont passé. Selon une des versions de l’histoire, l’un d’eux sort de la grotte pour acheter à manger et découvre que sa monnaie n’a plus cours, que c’est devenu une pièce de musée. Et c’est là qu’il se rend compte combien de temps ils ont été absents au monde.

Le lien hypertexte était ma monnaie à moi, il y a six ans. Il représentait l’esprit ouvert et interconnecté du World Wide Web - une vision qui avait commencé avec son inventeur, Tim Berners-Lee. Le lien hypertexte était le moyen d’abandonner la centralisation - tous les liens, les files et les hiérarchies - et de la remplacer par quelque chose de plus distribué, par un système de nœuds et de réseaux. Les blogs incarnaient cet esprit de décentralisation. Ils étaient des cafés où les gens débattaient sur absolument tous les sujets susceptibles de vous intéresser. Depuis ma libération, j’ai pris conscience de l’ampleur de la dévalorisation du lien hypertexte, presque de son obsolescence. Quasiment tous les réseaux sociaux traitent désormais les liens comme n’importe quel autre élément - comme une photo ou un texte - au lieu de les considérer comme un moyen d’enrichir ce texte. On vous encourage à poster un seul lien et à l’exposer à un processus quasi-démocratique de «likes», de «plus» et autres petits cœurs : ajouter plusieurs liens à un même texte n’est généralement pas permis. Les liens hypertextes sont placés dans une perspective objective, isolés, dépouillés de leurs pouvoirs.

Avatars mignons. Même avant mon emprisonnement, la puissance des liens avait déjà commencé à être jugulée. Leur plus grand ennemi était une philosophie qui associait deux des valeurs les plus dominantes et les plus surfaites de notre époque : la nouveauté et la popularité. Cette philosophie, c’est le «stream». C’est le stream qui domine dorénavant la manière de s’informer sur le Web. Alimentés en continu par un flux interminable d’informations sélectionnées pour eux par des algorithmes complexes et mystérieux, les internautes vont de moins en moins directement sur des pages qu’ils choisissent délibérément de consulter. Le stream signifie que vous n’avez plus besoin d’ouvrir tout un tas de sites Internet. Vous n’avez pas besoin d’un chapelet d’onglets. Vous n’avez même plus besoin de navigateur. Il vous suffit d’ouvrir Twitter ou Facebook sur votre smartphone pour plonger. Dans de nombreuses applications, nos votes - les likes, les plus, les étoiles, les petits cœurs - sont en réalité davantage liés à des avatars mignons et à des statuts de célébrités qu’à la substantifique moelle du post. Un paragraphe absolument génial rédigé par une personne lambda peut très bien être dédaigné par le stream, tandis que les élucubrations ineptes d’une célébrité gagnent une présence immédiate sur Internet. Et non seulement les algorithmes derrière le stream jaugent-ils l’importance à l’aune de la nouveauté et de la popularité, mais ils ont, en outre, tendance à nous proposer toujours plus de ce que nous avons déjà apprécié. Ces services passent notre comportement au crible et customisent en douceur nos flux d’actualité avec des posts, des images et des vidéos que nous avons, selon eux, le plus envie de voir.

Contrôle. Il ne fait aucun doute à mes yeux que la diversité des thèmes et des opinions en ligne est moindre qu’autrefois. Les idées neuves, différentes et provocatrices sont supprimées par les réseaux sociaux dont les stratégies de classement donnent la priorité au populaire et à l’habituel.

La conséquence la plus effrayante de la centralisation de l’information, c’est autre chose : c’est le fait qu’elle nous affaiblisse face aux gouvernements et aux entreprises. La surveillance ne fait que se renforcer avec le temps. Le seul moyen de rester en dehors de ce vaste appareil de surveillance pourrait bien être de se réfugier dans une grotte et de s’y endormir. Nous devons tous finir par nous habituer à l’idée d’être observés et, malheureusement, cela n’a rien à voir avec notre pays de résidence. L’ironie de la chose, c’est que les Etats qui coopèrent avec Facebook et Twitter en savent beaucoup plus sur leurs citoyens que ceux, comme l’Iran, où l’Etat contrôle Internet avec une poigne de fer, mais n’a aucun accès légal aux entreprises de médias sociaux. Or, ce qui est encore plus effrayant que d’être observé, c’est d’être contrôlé. Quand, avec seulement 150 likes, Facebook peut nous connaître mieux que nos parents et, avec 300 likes, mieux que notre compagne ou compagnon, le monde paraît bien prévisible, pour les gouvernements et pour les entreprises. Et la prévisibilité, c’est le contrôle.

Peut-être mon inquiétude se trompe-t-elle d’objet. Ce n’est peut-être pas exactement la mort du lien hypertexte, ou la centralisation. Il est possible qu’en réalité ce soit le texte lui-même qui soit en train de disparaître. Après tout, les premiers visiteurs du Web passaient leur temps à lire des magazines en ligne. Ensuite sont venus les blogs, puis Facebook, puis Twitter. Maintenant, c’est sur des vidéos Facebook, sur Instagram et SnapChat que la plupart des gens passent leur temps. Il y a de moins en moins de texte à lire sur les réseaux sociaux, et de plus en plus de vidéos et d’images à regarder. Le stream, les applications mobiles et les images qui bougent : tout indique un déplacement de l’Internet-livre à l’Internet-télévision. Il semble que nous soyons passés d’un mode de communication non-linéaire - nœuds, réseaux et liens - à un mode linéaire fait de centralisation et de hiérarchies.

Le Web n’était pas envisagé comme une forme de télévision, lorsqu’il a été inventé. Mais, qu’on le veuille ou non, il se rapproche de plus en plus du petit écran : linéaire, passif, programmé et replié sur son propre nombril. Quand je me connecte sur Facebook, c’est ma télévision personnelle qui s’allume. Et je n’ai qu’à tout faire défiler : nouvelles photos de profil de mes amis, petites brèves résumant des opinions sur des articles d’actualité, liens vers des chroniques assortis de courtes légendes, publicités, et, évidemment, vidéos qui se mettent en route toutes seules. Parfois je clique sur «j’aime» ou «partager», parfois je lis les commentaires des autres ou j’en laisse un, parfois j’ouvre un article. Mais je reste dans Facebook, qui continue à afficher ce qui est susceptible de me plaire. Ce n’est pas l’Internet que je connaissais quand je suis entré en prison. Ce n’est pas l’avenir du Web. Cet avenir-là, c’est la télévision.

Autrefois, Internet était une chose suffisamment sérieuse et puissante pour m’envoyer derrière les barreaux. Aujourd’hui, c’est apparemment à peine plus qu’un loisir. A tel point que même l’Iran ne prend pas certains services suffisamment au sérieux pour les bloquer - comme Instagram, par exemple. Je regrette l’époque où les gens prenaient le temps de consulter plusieurs opinions divergentes, et se donnaient la peine de lire plus qu’un paragraphe ou 140 caractères. Je regrette le temps où je pouvais écrire quelque chose sur mon propre blog, publier dans mon propre domaine, sans consacrer au moins autant de temps à le promouvoir ; l’époque où personne ne se souciait des «j’aime» et des «partager». C’est de ce Web-là dont j’ai le souvenir, celui d’avant la prison. C’est ce Web que nous devons sauver.

Cet article est paru dans sa version originale sur le site Matter.
Traduction de Bérengère Viennot

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