“Information wants to be free” was the famous maxim of the early days of the web, back in the Nineties. It is an actual quote, by Silicon Valley visionary and entrepreneur Stewart Brand, first articulated at a hacker conference in the Eighties (or so the story goes, Brand himself says he really doesn’t remember). Except it’s just half a quote, the full aphorism is “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away” In its complete form, it is so much more insightful.  Too bad the Nineties forgot the second half of the wisdom, the Internet would have been a completely different place. Perhaps it is not too late to embrace the entire line?

The world’s smallest movie is A Boy and His Atom, made by IBM Research to showcase their mad skillz. It’s animated short about a boy playing with an atom, but the twist is that it is made with actual atoms as pixels and animations were done moving those atoms around. It’s truly spectacular. To me it says something else: tech is nothing without content. It is no coincidence that IBM chose to make a film to demonstrate what they can accomplish. Culture has much stronger appeal than tech in this way. We can take part as an audience when it is presented as culture, where as the documentation engineers no doubt circulate to one another is completely useless for outsiders. Another example is from when the World Wide Web was invented at CERN (the particle accelerator lab) some twenty years ago. The first file that was uploaded was a photo of band, namely the CERN house orchestra Les Terribles Cernettes. Content gives tech purpose.

If you’re not paying for a service, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product being sold

This is a classic quote by Andrew Lewis, online better known as blue_beetle. It’s worth thinking about in this age of free, we may feel like we are the consumer and have the power that come with it, but it is more correct to think of the users of the free online services as the raw material that cloud companies refine and sell to the real buyers, the advertisers. This is of course nothing new and certainly not a business model unique to the internet, it has been used with great successby commercial television for more than half a century. The difference is that we don’t see ourselves as empowered consumers as the eleventh season of Family Guy plays in the background while we do the laundry.

DISCLAIMER: I am a huge fan of Family Guy. I also use free online services on a daily basis. No prejudice.

While the world holds its breath and follows the man-hunt for Edward Snowden (surely Hollywood blockbuster material at some point down the line), the main diplomatic aspects are not about extradition agreements between USA and Russia but US-EU-relations. In a recent op-ed (published in many newspapers in many countries), European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding points out the absurd consequence that EU citizens rather than US citizens were the victims of Prism surveillance, but with no access to the legal system and therefore no chance to make complaints. Netopia would like to add that this is another example (from a long list) of how online services challenge geographic jurisdictions. Data protection might be a good start, but the issue is much bigger than that. In fact, establishing rule of law online is essential for the survival of democracy. So, as you watch the Snowden-thriller unfold (and hope he makes it), make sure you don’t miss the international diplomacy behind the drama.

My car has a spectacular feature: it parallel parks automatically. Just cruise along parked cars, push the button and when there’s a big enough spot, the car parks. All I have to do is press the brake and gas pedals, the rest happens on its own. It’s quite a show! And it works, two times out of three. The third time it gives up half-way and leaves it to the driver to sort out the mess. Or it parks to far from the side of the road. Or too close – once it chipped a rim. Oftentimes we discuss pros and cons of new technologies on the assumption that they work perfectly. Cloud-based photo services: are they a gift that makes life easier or a way for internet companies to “feed the beast” with all the more data? Maybe both, but in most cases the problem is simply that your pics get lost or someone else images turn up on your phone. Think about Google’s self-driving cars – that’s really a spectacular idea, very much a core theme of science fiction. The team claims to have completed more than 500 000 incident-free driverless kilometers. I see no reason to question it. But before I ride in that car, I’d really like for much simpler tasks like parallel parking to have a 100% success rate. 67% is far too low for passenger rides in traffic.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously commented “Get over it” to consumer privacy online. Ten years later, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says to CNBC, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” When Facebook changed its user privacy settings in 2010, Founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “the age of privacy is over.”.

It seems the big data behemoths gave up on privacy a long time ago. Maybe this is why no one seemed really surprised when #prismgate broke. Does this mean they are right? Or do we still want privacy, even online? It’s time to remind ourselves that humans built this technology. We funded the basic research with tax money. Our elected officials made the rules that govern it. Much of the infrastructure is public-owned. We can choose to let technology rule us. Or we can decide that we want that technology to do something different.

Plenty has already been said about #prismgate, but this conversation will go on for a long time. Netopia welcomes it, as it is very much to the core of the question of the online society so I can assure you we will spend a lot of pixels on this topic going forward. But let me begin by pointing you to a very insightful story from The Guardian, where Sir Martin Sorrell – founder of marketing services giant WPP – predicts #prismgate will be a game changer for the role of companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter, AOL etc: [they are] “media companies masquerading as technology companies”. There are many reasons to be technology rather than media, in the latter case there is editorial responsibility for the content and strict legal or self-regulatory frameworks, the former has safe harbour and an ideology of so-called “openness” – effectively anti-regulation. Consider this: television in most countries have concessions with strict rules on how much adverts can be aired, a minimum number of minutes of news every day, mature content only to be broadcast after a certain time of night etc. It is overseen by government agencies and must also carefully follow right-holder agreements and advertising rules. On the other end of the spectrum is YouTube, which to a large extent shows the same content to the same viewers, but have none of this detailed set of rules. Who would ever want to be considered media company if that’s the option?

Art and literature often predicts and inspires innovation: da Vinci’s helicopter, Jules Verne’s submarine, Arthur C Clarke’s communication satellites, and William Gibson’s virtual worlds to name but a few. But one author is often left out of this account, in spite of the fact that he with surprising clarity envisioned many of what we see as great and recent innovations more than a century before their time. It’s the French author Albert Robida, whose most famous novel is Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique from 1890. Therein, Robida describes futuristic technology such as “le t´léphonoscope” – a large oval screen which can show moving images as well as record them: a two-way transmitter. Or “le phonographe” which carries speech over distance by way of wire (ok, by 1890 Bell had invented the telephone, but Robida understood its extended application). Apart from his technological predictions, Robida also foresaw social change such as women’s emancipation and feminism. On a less sympathetic note, the French novelist suggested biological warfare as a more humane alternative to military combat, as it would only kill weaker individuals(!). Albert Robida would not have been a real sci-fi writer if he didn’t have a dire scenario with technology spiraling out of control – in La Vingtième siècle it is an electric storm from a power station. For more on this often forgotten futurist author, go to www.robida.info (French only).

In the digital debate, sometimes words have different meanings from what we may be used to. For example: “open” actually means “free” (as in beer). That may sound strange, but think about concepts like open source and open networks. The former means free software (made by volunteers), the latter means free internet access. Open is in itself an appealing proposition: it’s nice to get an invite that says “open house” for example. The opposite – closed – sounds suspicious, unwelcoming, even jealous. So much for free association, semantics can be confusing. While we may celebrate an open society, just as much as we like open technology, these have nothing to do with one another. The open society means things like democracy, freedom of speech, free elections, freedom of association, transparent government, legal certainty, and human rights. It is what democracies have built in the form of institutions and legislation over centuries and Europe prides itself on being the world leader. In fact, it’s sa concept that is very close to civilization (which is very much connected to the idea of Europe).

Open technology is open in quite a different sense: it means databases are open for input, that application program interfaces (API:s) allow software to exchange data between programs, that the cables are accessible for different kinds of information. In open source, it means that anyone can continue to work on software that others have built. This kind of open has a lot of merits, this webpage is built with open source technology for example (WordPress). But open tech has nothing to do with the open society. It may be a banal statement, but there is no shortage of claims that “keeping the internet open” is crucial for democracy and freedom of speech. That is confusing one kind of open with the other. Open technology may be function of an open society, but there is nothing to say that open technology is a guarantee or a precondition for an open society. In fact, the opposite may be true: if open technology means that democracy and rule of law must stay out, in fact those functions that are the foundation of the open society are absent from the digital realm. That is the opposite of the open society, perhaps not anarchy, but a case of might makes right: those who own the technology and the networks write the rules. Not the people.