Yeah, right.
All right, good afternoon.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm going to talk about the singularity, the matrix,
and the terminator, right?
I want to draw your attention to those red dots on Agent Smith
and the terminators there.
They're, they signal danger, Will Robinson.
The singularity is, for those who might not be familiar
with it, is this idea that we will, at some point,
create machines that are smart enough
to build more intelligent machines that will, in turn,
build even more intelligent machines and so on,
until our own intelligence will pale, compared with theirs.
And there's a lot of fear with that,
even when there's no visible threat, as in the AI movie.
I mean, it's just a kid, right?
But it's creepy, in a way.
What we see in fiction is quite different,
like Lieutenant Commander Data is quite different
from what we see in reality.
As in the peer-to-peer network twister,
there is this bot called Markov Dostoevsky, and he wrote
to me the other day, asking me in flip text about my family.
That's creepy, but it's not intelligent, let's be honest.
Now, I'm going to talk about intelligence,
intelligent machines controlling us, and back to our future
as a free software movement.
I mean, I'm sorry for Marty McFly, who traveled in time,
passed the entire 30 years of existence of the FSF,
and just by a few days missed our 30-year celebration.
That's so sad.
But without time traveling, I'm going to talk about our future
and how I hope we can take control back
from the machines that control us.
So, in fiction, we see a lot of books and movies
that have machines as a threat.
I will focus mainly on the two in the title, The Matrix
and The Terminator series, but there are very many examples,
like the Borg in Star Trek, the master control program in Tron,
the I Can't Let You Do That Dave Hall in The Space Odyssey,
the Cyberman in Doctor Who,
the more recent excellent movie, Ex Machina, and even I, Robot,
where the robots are actually controlled and guided
by the three laws of robotics.
Even then, they manage to become a threat with red dots,
if you realize.
So, there's this very philosophical conversation
in The Matrix Reloaded between Neo and one of the counselors.
I'm not sure you can see the picture there.
It's sort of dark.
But one of the phrases that I, I have another presentation
about The Matrix.
You may want to look it up, Free Software and The Matrix.
This dialogue isn't full there.
The counselor says that nobody cares how it works as long
as it works.
It's sort of, well, nobody cares about the source code,
in a way, but Neo seems to believe at that point,
that at least in regard to the machines that are
under the city of Zion, giving them heat and power
and water and whatnot, they do control those machines.
But they are so dependent on them,
that to what extent is that really control?
That's the topic of the conversation.
And what I believe nowadays is that we're so immersed
in a technological world that we're all watched
over by eye things of, I don't think it's loving grace.
But these things, they have eyes.
They have ears.
They can see and they can listen to us.
And so, I quite hear the eyes are, and if you look at it
from just the right perspective, you might be able
to see the Apple logo there.
So, the question to some is whether we will ever build
machines that are smart enough to eventually outsmart us.
For others, the question is not whether,
but when will they be able to do that?
But it dawned on me last year, it was sort of a surprise,
that in reality has already happened.
And it did a long time ago when we created corporations.
They are machines, and they're out to kill us.
They're destroying our planet.
They harness our power as in the matrix,
not exactly in the same way.
I mean, it would be ridiculous, right?
It's thermodynamically stupid to breed human beings
to collect their heat and turn that into other kinds of power.
But if you think about it, I mean, humans are bred
and trained and selected so that they serve the goals
of the corporations they work for.
And if they don't, they're let go, they don't matter.
So, one of the possible, one of the possible sources
of control of humans over these machines is sort of gone.
They took that from us.
So, I've thought, well, maybe citizens at large, consumers,
well, naming them consumers is already part of the problem,
right?
But corporations, and Douglas Reschkopf argues about this,
and life ain't better than I'll be able to do here,
but corporations created through propaganda marketing,
an atmosphere of artificial needs that we then seek
to fulfill serving their agenda, not in our best interest.
So, there goes the second defense.
Governments, at least democratic governments are supposed
to stand for the people and represent the people,
and that should mean keeping corporations under control.
How's that working for you?
So, corporations managed to rewrite laws or write laws
for their own benefit, significantly through corruption
of legislative power, and then the executive
and the judiciary must abide by those laws.
So, we lost.
There goes our third line of defense.
I was young and naive when I believed
that investors might be able to influence corporations.
After all, corporations respond to them, right?
They own the corporations.
So, they could bring human values and human concerns
into corporations by choosing which corporations to invest on
and if they align with human interests or not.
But these days, investors are not people.
Investors are machines, and they decide on which corporations
to invest by algorithms,
written by people serving other corporations.
So, it's machines controlling machines, controlling machines
who go full circle, and it might feel like everything is lost.
And then we turn to movies, because Morpheus asks Neo
to believe in fate, and you know, I don't like the idea
that I'm not in control of my own life.
Sounds good to me.
And then, now this gets really confusing
because John Connor tells Kyle Reese to go back in time
and tell Sarah Connor to teach himself younger
that the future's not set.
There's no fate, but what do we make for ourselves?
Well, I hope they're right.
But, I mean, how can we possibly tame these machines?
First thing to keep in mind is
that there's no Hollywood silver bullet.
There's no such thing as those Hollywood endings
that by some unexpected turn of events,
everything turns all right.
Not going to happen.
I mean, in real life, we have to work really hard every day
to make the world a better place, or at least to stop it
from getting worse.
Now, if there is one, as this idea is from the Genesis movie,
the Terminator series, it's kind of tells John Connor,
you didn't think it would be that easy.
No, it's not.
It really isn't.
But if there is one, one way that could possibly solve a lot
of the problems is to tax corporations
by the conglomerate size, the total holding company size.
That, that would incentivize companies to remain small,
and they're small, they're manageable.
Most, but, I mean, what are the odds of passing
such a tax code, right?
So, what do we have to do for now?
Stop lobbies and campaign donations by corporations.
We, that, that's corruption, we have to stop that.
We should favor small companies, like family companies,
cooperatives, those kind of businesses
that will not be drawn into the corporate mindset
of controlling all of us.
There are people like us.
And we should run our own businesses like that.
We have to learn about our own vulnerabilities.
I'm not just talking about debt.
I'm talking about a lot of human needs,
a lot of human weaknesses that corporations learn about.
They have psychologists in their payrolls.
They have marketing people that understand what buttons they have
to press to control us.
We have to learn about our own vulnerabilities.
They have to press to control us. We have to learn about that, too,
to defend ourselves, to at least stand a chance
of defending ourselves.
And we have to be activists.
We, working outside the corporate control, ideally under, well,
possibly under non-governmental organizations.
But you don't have to, the good thing about these things is
that all of us can do that independently.
We don't have to all, like, agree to, let's all do that and do that.
No, every person who does these things is making the world a better place.
And at times it feels like, well,
it doesn't make much of a difference, does it?
Well, then I'll resort to Gandhi.
He was not in any of the movies.
But, allegedly, he said that whatever you do will sound insignificant,
but it is very important that you do it.
So, well, let's do it.
Now, I'm going to talk, it's a Free Software Conference, right?
I'm going to talk about Free Software, so let's get into that.
Most of the largest corporations in the world have something to do with IT.
A number of them sell hardware, a number of them sell software licenses,
a number of them sell services related to technology,
with telecommunications, and this sort of stuff.
Many other large companies sell our time, our attention, our data.
So, they use us to collect data, to show us ads, we're the product, after all.
And in the sense, they're IT, but that's not really their main business.
Then there are those, there are also large corporations
who just want to control our devices.
Say, they want DRM, they want to control our computers,
so they serve them rather than us.
There are banks and payment intermediation services that want to,
that claim that they need control over our devices
to enable them to do their job securely.
Why should we help them?
Even those that are not trying to bug us, look at the red dots there.
They're trying to bug Neo, right?
Can you see that?
Believe me, there is a red dot there.
There are those companies, they're just users of technology, right?
I mean, I cannot imagine a corporation nowadays
that does not make heavy use of technology.
Of computer technology, so all of them are sort of in the same boat,
on the same boat.
And the good news, maybe, is that all of them, or nearly 90% of them,
several years ago, it might be 100% now, are using free software.
And more than that, they are developing free software.
And that is great, right?
But who does that software really serve?
I mean, when they are the users, it serves them.
And that's just as it should be.
So what is the problem with that?
The problem that I perceive is that they're creating a sort of Borg mind
that is trying to assimilate us.
In Matrix speak, it's a cloud that covers the entire world.
And that's just as it should be.
And it's a cloud of machines that is attacking us.
These corporations are building this cloud.
They're hiring free software developers to write free software
that serves them in building the infrastructure for the cloud.
I mean, I work at Rad Hat.
All I hear about is cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud.
I don't know what's tech.
I mean, it's crazy.
What uses the software for us human beings?
I mean, they're building software to collect and analyze information about us.
We cannot possibly imagine getting access to all this data.
So that kind of software is useless for us.
It's not helping us.
It's helping them.
And that is fine as far as free software is concerned.
But we are in danger.
We have to remember that, as FSF Euro puts it, there is no such thing as a cloud.
It's just other people's computers.
Once we realize that, I mean, all the magic disappears.
It vanishes.
You realize that why am I doing that with my data, with my computing?
I mean, I should be writing that on my own devices.
X11R5 is a bot on the Pompeyo network.
And just a few weeks ago, this gem came out of him or it.
These are the reals, kind versus people, the extent to which software shapes people, cultures,
and economies is alarming.
I mean, it's a bot.
He's onto something.
I had to use it here somehow, right?
So what is the problem with all that?
The notion that we should move our computation, our data, to the cloud justifies, in a way,
and promotes the notion that, well, it's OK if our so-called smart devices are dumb.
They're not powerful enough to run our computations anymore.
Well, they should be, because 20 years ago, I'm pretty sure I did that, and they're not
as powerful as they are today.
But there's something fishy going on.
I think there's something wrong there.
On the other hand, once the control is in the cloud, and the machines control the cloud
and control us through the cloud, it's all right.
I mean, it's not a problem for them to give us some crumbs of freedom, like, oh, it's
OK if you can run Linux, the kernel, on your computer, your portable computer.
It doesn't matter.
We have blobs in that anyway.
And all the rest of the software stack, well, part of it was free before, but when it gets
to you, it's no longer free.
So what are we going to do?
As the Mexican boy said at the end of the first Terminator movie, viene una tormenta,
a storm is coming, and it is indeed.
Why?
Part of the problem has to do not with open source, per se.
I don't mean to attack open source here.
I do intend to denounce the corruption of the ideas behind it by machines.
It didn't start all right.
It started by setting aside any notion of ethics, because that scared corporations.
And their plan really was to bring corporations on board.
Let's bring them closer to us.
They're going to realize the benefits of free software.
They're going to market free software to the corporations.
Sounds like a great plan, doesn't it?
Well, of course, when you get corporations involved, human values lose.
I mean, at least they lose weight.
I don't think it will be that hard to see back then, but well, let's assume that like
the scientist who was working on the microprocessors that would become Skynet said, how were we
supposed to know?
Well, all right.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's realize that even if they hadn't been invited, even if open source had not opened
the door for them, for the machines, the corporations, they would have realized that there are indeed
major benefits for themselves out of the free software development model of collaboration,
of sharing information among those that are interested in it.
So in a way, the Skynet was inevitable, and Agent Smith would agree with that.
It was inevitable.
So we cannot blame open source for that.
Maybe they just sped up the process.
But has open source won?
There are a number of people who quickly celebrate that open source won.
And then the question is, who or what did they defeat if they won?
Because we, the free software movement, set out to liberate the cyberspace, to eliminate
the evil of proprietary software.
Did open source do that?
It didn't even try.
It displaced some proprietary software.
And the monopolies moved to other layers in the stack.
You might call that progress.
I'm not sure I would.
So what did it win?
Well, maybe it won a mindset war.
It displaced free software in a number of ways.
It took ethics mainly out of the debate.
Many people in companies talk about the advantages of the collaborative development model and
don't talk at all about respecting users' freedom.
That's most often totally out of the picture.
So when Richard Stallman's speeches, advertised as speeches by the father of open source,
he's totally right in pointing out, like Sarah Connor did in Genesis, that that John Connor
is not my son.
Because these machines and their terminators have a mission to destroy the leader of the
human resistance and not just the leader.
There's this other scene in The Matrix in which Morpheus says that when The Matrix was
first built, there was a man born inside who could change whatever he wanted.
He could remake The Matrix as he saw fit.
It was he who freed the first of us.
And he taught us the truth.
As long as The Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.
Sounds a lot like Richard Stallman, doesn't it?
Of course The Matrix fights him.
Of course they send their agents against him.
And since they cannot defeat him on ideas, they attack him personally.
Like he doesn't shower often enough.
Which I cannot find how that relates to the ideas that he writes about or speaks about.
Or that he's hard to deal with.
Or that, yeah, he's right most of the time.
Or he has always been right, but this time he took it too far.
I mean, these are powerful arguments, but they're not arguments at all.
But they are used to weaken the ideas that he talks about.
So corporations push Linux and pretend that GNU never existed.
They vilify strong copyleft.
I refer you to Bradley Coon's speech yesterday, amazing speech, which discusses those points
about how corporations are out to weaken copyleft and to stop people from developing copyleft
software to remove our defenses.
The amount of propaganda that you see against our values to predispose people, like to vaccinate
people from the good ideas of free software, it's just amazing, it's unbelievable.
And sadly, it works for a number of people.
And these people will repeat the nonsense that was fed to them.
And they're confused and they turn into agents of the matrix.
And they make our life more difficult.
The goal is clear to me.
Without time traveling, they want to terminate our resistance before it grows.
But if you are listening to this, you are the resistance.
And of course, the board will say that resistance is futile.
Of course they will do that, right, they'll make their jobs easier.
We should not believe them.
What do we need?
We need more copylefted software.
We need humans writing copylefted software and defending this copyleft without assigning
the copyrights over to a corporation.
We need to develop more software for human needs, to address human needs, and to do less
so to help the corporations, let them help themselves.
Paraphrasing John Connor, we should use no cloud but that we make for ourselves.
We have to use more decentralized technologies, peer-to-peer technologies.
Like Twister I mentioned before, like ZeroNet, like BitMessage, there are tons of very cool
stuff going on that people don't know about, even I don't know about.
And I'm trying to give you the idea that we should have to look into that, because that's
really important.
We should teach people some programming.
I argued about that two years ago here at LibrePlanet.
If people learn to program, even just a little bit, if they realize how useful it is to automate
their own tasks, they won't give this freedom up so easily.
And we have to promote free software.
I'm not talking just about the software, but the freedom, the ethical values to users.
We've done a lot, and open source has done a lot, to promote free software to developers.
The problem with that, if there is a problem, is that free software developers or open source
developers are too easy for corporations to co-opt.
Like there are many, many free software developers that offer a job to develop free software.
They would be happy to accept it, without even thinking whether the free software they
will develop will serve humanity, or will bring trouble to humanity.
If we take software freedom to users, if we teach them about the importance of these values,
I believe they can influence the market.
They can tell, they can begin telling corporations, no I'm not going to buy this product or service
that you offer me, because it does not respect my freedom.
And if a lot of users, educated users, do that, then naturally the corporations will
start respecting our freedom, because after all they want to sell, they want to earn their
income to give profit to the shareholders.
And last but not least, never stop fighting, it's a war, and we cannot afford to lose.
Thank you very much.
So I think we have time for questions, come over, so that everyone out there can hear
you.
You made an observation about people who are hired by corporations to do coding, and they
get co-opted.
I'll use another example.
My daughter, stepdaughter, is a PhD at UC Berkeley.
She's very bright, and we couldn't pay for her schooling, there's no way in the world,
she had a free ride all the way.
But she feels beholden to those people.
Now she's working in genetic engineering and stuff.
I can't condemn her for that, I don't agree with it, but until we reclaim the commons,
which is why this happened at all, we had it taken from us, large chunks of it.
But the commons is our roots, it is our connection to nature, it is our ability to live and breathe.
If that is taken from us, then we're going to go work for the corporations.
And when we don't have free education, then a wonderful mind is given a free ride, and
then their mind is used.
It's not free then, is it?
No, that's my point.
We need free education, we need, really, we need all of this to be free, because ultimately,
that freedom brings benefits.
I would say freedom always does.
I don't have a lot else to say, I would largely agree with what you said.
So these slides are available from the website there.
You just click on the agents and terminators picture, and you get the slides.
The source code is referenced there, it's a later set of slides.
I really didn't come here to tell how this is going to end, just how it's going to begin.
But what I can tell you is that, well, at least I hope I'll be back.
Oh, we have another question.
Sorry, I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't here from the very beginning, so perhaps you've already
said something about this, but I'm wondering about FSF Latin America, if you could talk
about what you do with that, and what some of the, you know, what some of the concerns
are specifically in that region.
Oh, so, FSF Latin America has just celebrated 10 years, and we've been, unfortunately, mostly
dormant for the last five years.
So I don't have a lot to tell you about, unfortunately, because we haven't, as an organization, really
done a lot of stuff recently.
We have had campaigns, okay, so a little bit of background.
There is an international network of FSFs that, by an agreement, we largely operate
under the same flag, so to speak, taking the same free software ideas to different parts
of the world, under guidance of the original FSF.
We have had campaigns, say, against DRM, which is a worldwide problem.
We focus on local laws, local challenges, but it's largely the same problem everywhere.
We have had, in Brazil specifically, where I live, a campaign against, we call it, imposed
software, and in Portuguese, the same word for tax, we use the same word for tax and
for imposed, so there is a pun in Portuguese there.
So the government requires us to use proprietary software to fill in our income tax returns,
and we reverse engineered that software, and every year we publish an alternative free
software program that people can use to prepare their income tax declarations.
We maintain legal and calibre, the really free version of the kernel Linux.
I think these are sort of the highlights, so I wish we could do a lot more.
I wish we learned to cooperate, but I think we made a huge mistake of having only one
person in eight different countries, and that made local activities very difficult.
So we decided to disband and figure out what to do next.
I think that's probably what's going to happen eventually.
I don't see that we have different problems.
If there is one difference, it's that our local governments have a lot less power over
the corporations that unjustly control our computing, so that's a different perspective
of the same problem, but in the end, it is the same problem everywhere.
You mentioned a lot of the problems with corporations, you mentioned a couple of good books, like
The Corporation and Such, about a lot of the issues that arise from the current legal and
economic structure on corporations.
Have you thought of any alternatives?
Because lots of people have identified, okay, these are the problems with it, and there
haven't been a lot of ideas, okay, what do we do instead, other than just constantly
monitor, and for the inevitable times when they always do something we disapprove of,
try to change things back against overwhelming opposition, do you think anything like participatory
economics or other alternative economic systems could help remedy some of this?
And if so, have you looked into any of them so far?
As I said, I don't think there is a silver bullet, right?
I cannot envision putting an end to mega-corporations.
They're going to be there just like virus, bacteria are there.
It's not even that I would say that bacteria are evil.
They're there, and they're in their way trying to survive, so for the sake of the argument,
let's assume that let's take them for granted and see what we can do about that.
I think the slide sort of lists what I believe can help keep them under some control and
make it easier for us to deal with them in general.
Not specifically the IT corporations, but the corporations in general.
It's not a silver bullet.
It will require, freedom requires hard work every day, but it's worth the price.
All right, I can kind of be seen as a wingnut in some circles.
I like there's new in there.
But I mean, just hearing somebody speak about free education kind of precipitates my bringing
up more of that sort of thing.
I wonder what your feeling is about merely the existence of currency, of money, a thing
that we all imagine has value and therefore has purpose for some reason.
I've looked into things like the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement and those kinds
of things and it's really interesting the overarching concept of how ultimately the
monetary system causes problems in our society and causes the competitive environment that
we have and so on.
I think Richard has said something to this effect that free software is sort of one of
those stepping stones to a post-scarcity world.
So I don't know.
I was just curious what your thoughts were on money in general being.
I don't think I'm qualified to speak a lot about that, but what I got from Life Inc.
was a very different perspective about the history of the so-called Middle Ages than
what I had before.
There was, according to that book, very active commerce without centralized currency back
then and this was good.
For some reason, the history was sort of rewritten so that most of us wouldn't know about that.
I think the one big thing between then and today though is the mechanization of everything.
We literally could build machines to sustain everybody and be paid by the machines in a
sense.
But if we did that now, then 99.9% of the people will be screwed because of the way
society is organized.
So I think we have to first fix the distribution of wealth or at least some means to enable
people to live in a world in which nobody has to work because machines do all the work
for us.
Then we get to that maybe utopia.
I think we have to be careful to order these revolutions properly to avoid shooting ourselves
on the feet.
Maybe people on the intertubes cannot hear you.
In the Pacific Northwest prior to colonization.
The Indian tribes lived in an overflow economy, plenty of everything, there was abundance.
So they had this concept of potlatch where you shared, you gave because you had so much.
Once the British and the Americans took over the Pacific Northwest, they outlawed potlatch
vigorously with great violence.
So when we're talking about freedom, it wasn't just the corporations.
There's this something going on in the European mind that has a problem with sharing.
And we need to address that.
We need to address that deeply and understand it within our own selves before we can do
what Donnie said.
We can work on ourselves and at the same time do what Donnie said.
Yeah I don't want to portray.
Look up potlatch and you'll find out.
It's an amazing story.
I want to make the point that this is all the present sort of metaphor.
I mean there are problems with corporations obviously.
Very serious problems.
We do get in the way of our freedom and our survival really.
And we have to think about that.
We have to realize that there's something wrong with the world and with the way things
are organized and organized to fight that.
Thank you so much.
I'll be back.
Thank you.