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Introduction

In northern California in 1974, it was hobbyists, draft-dodgers and political activists who cobbled together what they impiously called ‘personal computers’ from mail-order, bootleg and ‘liberated’ components. Few of them had any intention of founding a new capitalist industry and many of them explicitly opposed any such idea. Some of them wanted a political revolution, and a few recognized the danger that a counter-revolution would sneak into the new movement before it had fairly got started, and end up making the world worse instead of better.

Two events of that period are iconic. First, in 1974, Ted Nelson, a social scientist and literary scholar, self-published a book called Computer Lib, with a clenched fist on its cover, and the slogan ‘You can and must understand computers, NOW!’ It was never a big seller (thanks to Nelson’s eccentric approach to publishing) but it became a sort of foundational text for what would become the ‘hacker’ movement, which subsequently produced such things as the famous GNU/Linux computer operating system. Computer Lib explained basically how computers worked, some of the different things they were capable of, and how they can either confuse, stupefy and oppress, or enlighten, empower and liberate. The book is peppered with memorable insights and slogans; for example: ‘The purpose of computers is human freedom’ and (in an updated 1987 edition): ‘In 1974, computers were oppressive devices in far-off air-conditioned places. Now you can be oppressed by computers in your own living room.’ And this (from one of Nelson’s websites) about the myth of ‘Technology’:

A frying-pan is technology. All human artifacts are technology. But beware anybody who uses this term. Like ‘maturity’ and ‘reality’ and ‘progress’, the word ‘technology’ has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as ‘technology’ is something that somebody wants you to submit to. ‘Technology’ often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to ‘the guys who understand it’.

Nelson, who became best known as the originator of the concept of ‘hypertext’ (which we all use nowadays, after a fashion, when we use the World Wide Web) has been described as the computer underground’s Tom Paine. The idea that you might ‘understand computers, NOW!’ (rather than just buy one, and watch TV on it) may now sound quaint, but the common belief that we will never be able to understand them (and a dominant culture that discourages you from trying) has certainly not helped the cause of human freedom. It has also helped to build the myth that what we have now got is the best of all possible worlds and we shouldn’t even try to imagine anything better.

The second iconic event, in 1975, was the 20-year-old Bill Gates’s angry challenge to the ‘thieves’ at San Francisco’s Homebrew Computer Club who had copied and distributed his version of the BASIC computer language without paying for it, and their own outrage that Gates expected them to pay. Club members and their friends had, after all, just created a less comprehensive but still highly capable version of the language (Tiny BASIC) which anybody could have for nothing. Individuals and groups had poured effort into it for the sheer pleasure of taking on an impossible-looking challenge and pulling it off in style. Not only did they want nothing for it; they did not particularly care which team or individual finally cracked the problem. It was good enough that somebody had cracked it. To claim proprietorship of such a thing seemed obscene.

Twenty years later, in 1995, Gates’s Microsoft Corporation was becoming a global economic force and its monopolistic tendencies were the subject of a US government investigation – only the fourth company in US history to have merited that kind of intervention. The distinguished science writer James Gleick pointed out that here, for the first time ever, was a major company that ‘does not control a manufacturing industry (as IBM did), a natural resource (as Standard Oil did) or a regulated public utility (as AT&T did).’ Instead, by strenuous assertion of legal rights and precedents, it had come to own ‘the standards and architectures that control the design of modern software’. Gleick made it very clear that Microsoft seriously intended at the time to corral as much of the world’s knowledge as it could get away with, and extract astronomical rental income from it. At the time, there was a widespread sense of amazement that a business could even attempt such a thing, and achieve so much power simply from ‘owning’ knowledge.

Another two decades on, the idea that great fortunes are built on intellectual property has become totally normalized and uncontroversial, and is even enshrined in international trade treaties. Business empires cross fresh social and personal boundaries as routinely as they do official, international ones – and our technologies help them do it.

Each time, somehow, we adapt swiftly to the ‘new normal’. But a point comes when we no longer have the right to give way so gracefully.

I argue in this book that escalating human impact on the earth has gone hand in hand with successful encroachments on egalitarian culture, as with the neoliberal onslaught since the 1970s but extending far back in history. The issues go far beyond computers and electronics, intellectual property law, or even modern global capitalism. To get to the root of the matter we will need to wind the tape back to where it all began, when mercantile elites first acquired ‘the right’ (because they made the laws) to own whatever they needed to own and to disown anything and anyone that might be a liability; to the time when we became ‘modern’ inasmuch as we learned to stand by while others starve, and to tolerate and even to respect those who take more than their share.

We are involved in the endgame of something that began in the squalor of medieval Europe. The challenge cannot be resolved until we tackle the social failure that set it in motion: entrenched inequality, and the genteel acceptance of it.

Bob Hughes

St André de Rosans, France, April 2016