gnu-consensus-quito-2014-en

KAWSANKICHU. Although I cannot see you with my eyes, I want to thank you for your presence.

Hello, I'm hellekin.

I want to thank you for your attention, and the ASLE for inviting me to speak today in the annual Minga of the Free Software Association of Ecuador. It's an honor for me to be given the opportunity to address members of the society of Ecuador in the heart of their National Assembly, and I deplore not being able to be present in Quito to reply to your questions and share conversation beyond these thirty minutes.

I have an important and complicated message to give. I'm thus kindly asking that you please do not use your machines during this presentation.

I won't take questions now, but yes I will be present in the #consensus-quito IRC channel in Freenode, and other places as well during the pause, the rest of the day, and the following days.

I'm going to leave a moment for you to put your machines aside.

pause

This man was yet another silenced victim of the savage progress of an ideology that spreads across cultures, on the whole planet. He was murdered by the same forces that I will try to characterize in this presentation, with a focus on free software and social networking. Keep it in mind.

When I'm about to give a technological course, about free software or technology, I see an attentive audience, staring at me, with their fingers on the keyboard ready to take notes ; and the first thing I do as I introduce the objective of the course, is to impose them to shutdown their computers.

Usually I'm faced with incredulity and opposition. But when listening with full attention, one can understand better the complexity of the subject, as well as the nature and the objective of free technology, and especially social technology.

We'll come back later on this point.

Technology is never neutral. "Technology is a social idea realized" said the philosopher Edgar Morin. A surveillance camera says it all. A fragmentation bomb says it all. A 1.5 tons car for a single person most of the time, with a noisy explosion engine, poorly effective and barely efficient, says it all. A credit card, made of plastic and certified future, says it all.

When we open the box of an electronic device, say, of a cellphone, we contemplate the result of thousands and thousands of hours of work, accumulated by thousands and thousands of people in thousands of places. This product comes from dozens of universities, laboratories, and also from sea and air transports, factories, mines, cities, slums, from war zones, from the exploitation of slave work in Africa and Asia, etc. To create this product, many people thought about it, spent (part of) their lives on it, or maybe killed themselves working for it; waste piled up; waters were contaminated, etc. When we don't use it anymore, where does it go?

No, definitely, technology is much more than a product, a process.

Although a hammer is a tool: an extension of the body's capacity; or a telephone is an instrument: an extension of the capacity of perception, long ago technology went far beyond the status of an extension of human capabilities. Although this pot the child is bringing to the river to drink from is a tool, the environmental pollution that shows in the this picture demonstrates that technology is not only a tool, but it changes the nature of nature. Moreover, technology changes the nature of mankind itself.

Who got stuck without cellphone battery, or without an access to the Internet for a while knows it well.

Technology meets a project of society, and influences that society and its projection, in a circle that can be virtuous, or vicious. Technology is never neutral. A society working in panic mode, insecure, lacking an including vision, is being defensive, and produces the fruit of its terror: it becomes reactionary and produces a project that distances itself from its human heart, and develops the justification for its drift towards violence; a society in a hurry, divided, reveals its internal contradictions through its politics, and through its technology.

There's a very strange point in the technological myth: it seems that technology could solve anything. If there's a problem, there's a (technological) solution! I don't know if they reached here, but The Shadoks use a lot of funny aphorisms, and one of them says:

If there's a problem, there's a solution.  If there's no solution,
then there's no problem.

And frankly, it seems that using four times more resources than what the Earth can deliver does not seem so problematic to techno-scientists, captains of industry, or politicians.

There's a fundamental issue that technology cannot–and in my opinion, should never be able to–solve, it's impunity; it's the social issues, of dissociation, a lack of empathy, a lack of consciousness of the living being, of the planetary being.

When a representant of the State, during the opening discours of the University of Yachai, pronounced that Ecuador was to "get away from mediocrity", he was revealing an insecure position, divided from the national identity, from traditions, a loss of trust in a cosmology that only existed in this region of the planet, for being that singular place, with a unique environment of so much diversity, and this unique history shining from so many human values that have already disappeared from many other places.

Listening to that sentence was for me a shock, constrasting with my lecture of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, 2008, subtitled with infinite love. How can it be, I wondered, that a country endowed with such a Constitution would feel such a strong rejection of its own genealogy?

Coming back to our (electric) sheeps. Technology transforms the human, and eletronic technology transforms absolutely our environment. There's a form of technology that supports mind control: propaganda or, "seductive coercion" as Heather Marsh calls it. The so-called corporate "social networks" are more precisely "surveillance services of social networks". They are propaganda laboratories, observatories, experimental venues, and places of contention of humanity, something approaching the "Human Park" of Peter Sloterdijk.

We can consider two aspects of privacy. First, the defensive vision, which is the most common. It concerns defending from global surveillance, from the thought police, to protect one's freedom by hiding, for fear of being attacked or killed. The other is less visible, but could become much more used, from a legal perspective: we have a right to privacy, and corporations are violating it. Both points are valid.

Neverthless beware, the latter form, although summoning the masses, calls for the reform of corporations: but they are already preparing the End of Rights, with the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) that simply grants power to corporations not only of a person's rights (which we already know), but over nations, allowing them to impose their power to the States.

The first point is sensible: I already said there's more to know than any single person can bear. Therefore we adopt a humble position, and listen to our best to the needs, the specialists, the experiences, the doubts, the enthusiasms, etc.

We work a lot with small groups, individuals, and when we can, seek consensus. We're not looking forward to a global consensus, but to a diversity of co-existing systems. Better a local consensus that may bear fruit, than no consensus and no fruit.

Most of the time we use signals left by anonymous people, to amplify a movement, or to connect people to each other, or to other signals. Cohesion emerges at the peripheries, where common affinities overtake dividing differences.