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Information doesn’t want to be free. People do.
Most people know me as an IT guy, but I started out a reporter and photographer. I never stopped writing and photographing.
Unlike most things I do – going to work every day, building and maintaining a home, working out at the gym, walking my dog – I don’t know exactly why I like to write and photograph; perhaps it’s just a desire to record the world as I see it, no different from what drove ancient people to carve pictures into rock. The desire to create and use language and images to share one’s ideas and impressions is what makes us human (hat-tip Nim Chimpsky).
My tech career started out in Boston, where I grew up, but has taken me to New York City, Chicago and Silicon Valley, where I lived for 24 years.
When I moved to the Bay Area in 1996, I rarely heard politics discussed at work. The tech culture back then was libertarian, very much dominated by an ethic of personal freedom and a respect for people with different opinions and private lives. When we worked together, we focused on work.
The new invention called the World Wide Web reinforced that ethic, insisting that “information wanted to be free,” and the new hypertext network protocol would help us organize information in infinite ways would invigorate our lives, make knowledge available to more people than ever before and lead to an era of information freedom.
We looked to tech pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee for inspiration on the liberating potential of this new medium, but rarely contemplated its potential for harm. We cheered when the fax machine was used by Chinese dissidents to organize protests against their oppressive Communist regime, which culminated in a doubling-down of their oppression. Instead of liberalizing, the regime learned a dark lesson: that digital technology and communication had to be converted into a tool to control the lives of individuals.
The image of that uprising – a man confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square – told us everything we needed to know about the relationship between the individual and the state in our times. But we were so intoxicated by the new medium known as the worldwide web, we failed to see the relationship between technology and individual freedom.
Instead of a tank, today the individual confronts an invisible cloud of networked data, surveillance and Artificial Intelligence. Once again, we see Silicon Valley intoxicated with the potential of the technology and mostly oblivious of its abuse, even as a gaggle of intelligence agencies, corporate interests and political activists work behind the scenes to control it.
“The private life is dead in Russia. History killed it.”
– Strelnikov to Yuri, from Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago”
The famous line from the movie Dr. Zhivago, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak, expresses the oppression of the state in post-revolutionary Russia, but also the intrusion of politics into every aspect of human life. Today we are faced with this same problem. Since our lives as individuals is so interwoven with digital technology, the political use of technology infects everything technology touches: how we get the news, how we communicate, how we cook, heat our homes, consume entertainment, what cars we can drive, how we parent our children, what we see when we watch a football game or drink a beer. The focus of this Substack will be to reveal the matrix of technology, politics and culture so we can keep a sense of ourselves as, first and foremost, individuals with a distinct consciousness.
This is the place where I will now share my thoughts – sometimes spontaneous and raw, angry or hopeful, most of the time considered, but always civil.
This is not a place for groupthink, dogma or party line adherence, and if you think I’m falling for it, do me a favor and say so. Every human being has a unique take on an event, even if only slightly different or nuanced than others, because it is framed by personal experience. My personal and business experience confirms the old Spanish saying, “Every head is a universe.” This is how we learn from each other.
The posts you read from me will be grounded in the notion that politics is a process by which groups of people with common interests attain and wield power, and in a healthy republic (not a mere democracy), balancing power. The sides we take may change over time as the power struggles in our country shift. Those who insist on politics-as-justice or politics-as-virtue have fallen for the Orwellian deception, “Four legs good, two legs bad.”
This site is free for now and I will post every couple of days or more frequently, and hope that you will not only react to but build on my posts. Link to related articles of interest, shares stories and conversations, make this place into what the internet was supposed to be: a place where human beings regularly express themselves.