the people’s machine

“The people’s machine,” was what people once imagined the computer could be- and the thinking behind a phrase like that is subtle and intense. It could imply that there hasn’t been a people’s machine yet (”the” machine, not “a” machine, is how the saying goes) and therefore that the impact of a real “people’s” machine would be something new to experience.

The phrase is a bit bombastic. With the world such a scary place these days technological utopianism seems a bit out of place, but still, it does something for me.

I think the computer has the potential to be a people’s machine- accessible, ecological, tending to further peace and mutual prosperity- when we can develop it and use it with without letting any given tool- hardware, software, ideology- get in the way. When we can quietly slip past bad ideas to connect with other people, I think we draw the good out of each other and make good systems. I argue that open source enables this, because I can make my book the way I want it, with the people I want to work with, and that’s one amoung countless routes I can take involving countless free and open source softwares. Everything takes a really long time to do really well, at least in my experience, and on these long paths it’s easy to get tangled up or misled down wasteful or otherwise flawed and harmful trajectories. When you download good free software it feels like being given stacks of time to stand on. HUndreds of people spent thousands of hours mapping out workflow and possibility and writing it into millions of lines of delicate code, and then they gave it to me! For free! Crazy.

I like my (very old) computer running Red Hat Fedora Core5 because the tool tends to keep itself out of the way of my ridiculous multi-tasking, but I think (and argue in my thesis) that a hybrid situation is kind of the best idea, especially if you’re just giving yourself an introduction to the world of open source. If you can have a computer running what you’re used to, and an older cheaper computer running something Linux based, like Red Hat, then you’ll be able to try out the differences without feeling like all your connectivity is at stake. And your old computer will run faster, too, probably. Or, approaching from another direction, you can just start trying out open source programs on your Windows or Mac. Software like Scribus and Inkscape is very much designed to work well on these other platforms, and in fact, that’s the version Jean Marc will be teaching from on Sunday.