Last year plus, up to election day

[Kragen Sitaker]

I write this wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and an "I voted"
sticker.  But I don't know.  The election gal took my ballot, didn't
run it through the optical-scan machine, and stuck it in an unlocked,
overfull ballot box.  I hope I voted.

Many voters in California vote by insecure touch-screen voting
systems, which, by design, leave no physical record of each vote,
except an easily-altered total, kept by uninspectable software
machinery; the manufacturer has been caught surreptitiously altering
this machinery by remote control from time to time.  Fortunately, our
noble Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, has required these places to
provide paper ballots as an alternative to voters who request them.  I
still wonder how much of California's vote will come from voters and
how much from software bugs, accidental or intentional.

I saw one other fellow wearing a black hooded sweatshirt this morning,
as I waited for my very slow sandwich at Eppler's bakery.  

"Hey," I said.  

Eventually he turned to look.

"Nice sweatshirt," I said, unsmiling.

"Eminem?" he said.

"Yes," I said, smiling.

Today democracy in America may end.  Already it staggers and
struggles; today we may seal its demise.

***

My life over the last year has changed a lot.  Beatrice and I still
live together, joined by bonds of matrimony; we enrich each other's
lives with acceptance, affection, support, and innumerable other
aspects of our relationship.  I have changed jobs, from AirWave to
CommerceNet.  Many friendships have grown stronger; a few have
weakened and withered by inattention or conflict.

My friendship with Brad Kuhn, who now calls himself Bradley M. Kuhn,
has suffered most; a year ago I counted him a friend, albeit a
troublesome one, but now we never speak to one another.  I miss our
friendship, but I count myself happier to no longer suffer from his
company.  I think anyone who knows Brad can empathize; he has
alienated nearly all of his close friends over the last few years.

Beatrice and I have taught each other many things about the art of
living, and I have learned what joy a marriage can bring; even through
all the struggles and fears and tears, we laugh and we celebrate life
together.

AirWave taught me a lot about achieving things as part of a team,
about triage, about friendship, about trust and companionship, and
about the nature of successful engineering firms.  Eventually I left
AirWave because I felt my continued learning would be better served by
the opportunity at CommerceNet, where I could study economics,
politics, and interpersonal dynamics with masters of those arts.

The community of my friends, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, has grown
immensely stronger; we've broken bread together on innumerable
occasions, cooked in each other's kitchens, washed each other's
dishes, vacuumed each other's floors, consoled each other when rape,
death, alienation, and loss invaded our lives; we have taken care of
each other when sick, counseled each other how to make peace in times
of conflict, and shared advice on job and academic prospects; we have
grown together in fellowship.  For all its conflicts and avoidable
suffering, I could never deserve such a loving community.

My mission in life has come into sharper focus, as I see the ill
effects of leaving power to those who most desire it and those who
doubt their ideas least.  I understand a little more of the world we
share, a little more of the way humans live together on this earth.
Politics, economics, history, philosophy, and personal effectiveness
comprise my curriculum as I grow slowly toward wisdom.  Every day my
ignorance of myself and of my world amazes me.

And every day my capacity for heartlessness amazes me, as I slowly
struggle toward compassion.

***

CommerceNet Labs, where I work, aims to inspire ideas for the next
generation of electronic commerce.  Today's internet is somewhat
decentralized, but we perform many functions on it by means of
centralized servers, hardly different from 1960s mainframes.  This
limits our freedom and therefore our efficiency and prosperity.  The
chance to help fix this inspires me.

Some years ago, I wrote a piece entitled, "People, places, things, and
ideas," presently on the Free Software Foundation web site, about how
ideas are becoming freer, removing control from those who exercised it
through control of ideas; but that control of things and places still
conferred power.  As it happens, our current best ideas about software
design concentrate power in particular things and places.  Tim
O'Reilly sees the same trend today and warns that it can limit the
effectiveness of the free software movement to bring real political
and economic freedom.

Now my job allows me to devote my time to understanding how to build
software that doesn't concentrate power in particular things and
places, but distributes it to ideas and people.

***

The computer revolution has not yet begun.  Most people interact with
computers today, but the power of computing does not yet belong to
them.  Even if they use free software, they do not practically have
the ability to change the software they use every day; they cannot
understand it and cannot easily change it for incidental technical
reasons.  More people use Apache than Microsoft Word, and it does them
more good, but almost none of them have any effective control over the
Apache servers they use.

We have an aphorism that the structure of software reflects the
structure of the organization that built it; but we coined this
aphorism in the 1960s or 1970s, when our methods of building software
were still new.  Today we still build software the same way we did
then, and that software reflects the structure of companies that built
software during the 1960s and 1970s, and so the ghosts of those
companies' oppressive management structures haunt us today through the
software we build modeled after them.

Making the power of computing accessible to the people of the world
requires new ways of building software:
- new platforms that make less distinction between "programmer" and
  "user";
- new attitudes that accommodate amateur programming;
- new platforms that allow people to inspect software more easily to
  see how it works and how to change it;
- new software ecosystems that don't assume uniformity and
  homogeneity;
- and new patterns of interaction within software that don't invest
  unlimited trust in third parties.

Free (or "open-source") software helps these goals, but by itself, it
does not achieve them.

***

Miscellany:

My brother Jay has just moved out of my apartment, after living there
as a guest for more than a year.

My cousin Ben has mostly recovered from a complex of illnesses that
began with pneumonia and got worse from there.

Beatrice and I have gone to Burning Man both this year and last year.
I wandered around in an art-induced daze most of the time; the art
assaulted and amazed and expanded me.  After going to Burning Man last
year, I understood why art mattered for the first time, and for the
first time, I understood how most people's tightest limitations come
from their fear of imagining what could exist, then creating it.

Beatrice now works at the Internet Archive, after spending a long time
at the French-American Charitable Trust.  This last week they hosted
Eminem's video, "Mosh", which may turn out to have swung the
presidential election.

Our health remains good.

I have begun to use AIM (as "ksitaker") and Yahoo! IM (as
"kragensitaker") despite their centralized nature.