on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*Pirate Party activists.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16leSSrAIv93sHu8H-paiHsl1GpPe077OjIjuwRtgq68/edit?tab=t.0
The Public Cloud Manifesto
Introduction
We hurtling at full speed toward an age where our children will inherit a world perhaps more precarious ever since the 1800’s. If current progress continues, they might very well own nothing & be forced to rent everything. Most aspects of their lives will be digital, but all their access to commerce, media, culture & communications will be mediated by private digital monopolies who charge them rent. Not only that, but they might not be able to exercise a right of ownership to any of their outputs on those platforms either. Finally, at any moment all of it could be turned over – without their permission – to train AI systems that replicate & resell their image and likeness for other people’s benefit, receiving nothing in return.
To add insult to injury – contrary to the common libertarian argument – after the election of Donald Trump in the USA we have clear evidence that private companies will turn when pushed and drop support for equal rights & justice when asked to do so. Companies like Meta, X and Oracle have simply removed accounts & services from many that try to use them to criticise whoever is in power and restrict access to queries & search terms not judged favourable. We regretfully have good reasons to not trust these companies with upholding our human rights or the values of freedom and equality any longer.
Even the platform I am writing this document on, Google, owned by Alphabet inc, might choose any day to simply erase it or make links to it become unresponsive, no doubt claiming “mistake” or “glitch” but never returning my calls. The possibility of this is hair-raising, because when a private company does that it’s not a question of free speech but of business practices.
However, should I be running this argument off a government provided service – to which I had a birthright for – shutting it down would be a violation of my free speech & there would be less legal loopholes to exploit. Being that governments are under a much tighter set of laws than private companies are regarding freedom of expression, I call upon the freedom-loving people of the world to support this manifesto for a public cloud.
Our homes are digital now
The transition to digital living has been both quick and abrupt. For the coming generation, the mark they leave on this world will be digital. Much more than what they show of themselves in real life will be what they display online. Increasingly many prefer to voluntarily retract from real life in favour of being more online.
In democratic societies, we agree that the state should be the extension of the needs of the people. We pay tax and in return the state takes care of our most basic needs. In the digital age our basic needs also include the digital.
The digital domain is not like the physical land we used to build our homes on. It is not a scarce indivisable resource that need be the domain of private property only. Computing power and storage can be expanded, and technological progress makes it ever cheaper. So cheap in fact, that funding a basic capacity for computing power and storage from public resources would not only be feasible but productive. The return on this investment would pay itself back many times over, as it would provide all citizens the benefit of simple publishing, running small-scale services, digital assistants and light AI models, etcetera. It would not eliminate the need for digital services, but actually increase the need for them. Just changing a few pipes doesn’t eliminate the need to run information through them. Local software development would rather receive a stimulus from having so many more people able to run packages they have to offer.
But most of all, birthright access to digital computing would provide security. A home ground unthreatened by global multinational corporations either in bed with tyrants, or those blackmailing otherwise good actors to implement values at odds with those of individuals.
Digital services as control
We now stand on the very watershed where access and depriving access to digital cloud infrastructures is becoming the tool of choice for wielding political influence. This transformation is leaving ordinary citizens increasingly powerless in face of the massive resources wielded by international corporations holding monopoly status and co-operating with powerful political structures.
It is time for us to demand a rebalancing of the playing field to give ordinary citizens equal chance. The state is what we must utilize to deliver the will of the people, as corporations and techno-libertarian ventures like cryptocurrencies have proven to mostly represent themselves at the expense of others. Most of these projects have demonstrated to be both compatible and eager to work with values fundamentally incompatible and at odds with equal rights and justice.
Throughout history people have proven to be the easiest to control when they are under duress. When people stand to lose everything, they will generally support any political party as long as it leaves them with something rather than nothing. Freedom starts from security, not from a lack of limitations.
A core vulnerability of the current techno-feudalist class (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreesen etc) is their complete dismissal of state power. They assume the state won’t ever be a player in the information infrastructure space. Their plans completely depend on them having full control of the digital information space forever, which they will use to charge rent on all of us, in effect replacing the state in the digital domain forever. Now is our chance. They are not expecting an attack from this direction, which makes them vulnerable. Let’s hit them back while we still can!
Networked computing as a human right
Our lives are digital now, and our avatars online are integral parts of our humanity. We recognise our current powerlessness to act against the all-encompassing power of digital oligopolies of Meta, Amazon, X, Alphabet, Oracle and their likelihoods. We demand a restructuring of this power imbalance now, for soon it will be too late to change course.
We reject the notion that the very digital ground we walk upon should be entirely a commercial, centralised and private monopolistic entity. We reject a fall under digital fiefdoms that charge rent on every aspect of our very digital lives. We demand the digital equivalent of roads, bridges and public spaces. We do not object or discourage commercial services, but reclaim the right to walk, camp, squat and sell our digital homegrown vegetables between their systems as sovereign individuals, without the need for our friends and customers to visit toll booths to access them.
We demand security in the face of transnational juggernauts increasingly controlling what we can own, how we do commerce, how we present our personality, political views, race or sexual orientation online.
We bind together as people, and invoke the constitutions of our birth nations to take care of our basic needs. In the digital domain the basic needs are computing power, network connectivity, digital storage and access to e-commerce. We demand a safety net where we can retain at least a meager representation of our digital lives when corporations turn against us.
We demand a public cloud service in each of our respective nations, offering us virtual machines with enough power to run our basic needs, network connectivity fast enough to connect to our peers, capable of basic web services and nodes in distributed social media networks, and storage enough to host our digital creations without danger of them falling prey to greedy corporations hoovering up every bit to feed their insatiable hunger for data. Access to simple & basic e-commerce systems, to reliably list and sell our crafts without the need of third parties, who use algorithms to distract our potential clients to sellers who provide a bigger cut to them instead of better products or services, or cryptocurrencies ripe with criminal & rugpull schemes.
We are certain this can be made secure through open-source. We believe that with constant public audits any attempts to embed hidden master keys by would-be-dictators can be found and thwarted. We are certain we can form new kinds of public institutions that keep us and our belongings as safe in the digital world as they do in the real.
We are certain this will not be expensive but cheap. We are certain this will stimulate the economy rather than stifle it. We are adamant that it will increase competition and lower prices, as monopolistic actors cannot just degrade and enshittify their services forever, jacking up prices as they have no competition and we have nowhere to run. We do not seek a state monopoly on these services, but simply a fighting chance at existing outside the walled gardens of private mono- and oligopolies. We simply want a fair market back. One where regular honest people have a chance at making it without resorting to search- or algorithmic manipulation, lies or the wielding of political influence.
Sign the manifesto
Enter your signature here
https://forms.gle/jBgu19mLaZWyct9G9
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Signatories
Toni Aittoniemi, MA Tuusula, Finland
Marek Nečada, D.Sc Helsinki, Finland
Maria Ahonen Helsinki, Finland
Tapio Savander Helsinki, Finland
Olli Jäderholm Finland
Minna Purkunen Ylöjärvi, Finland
Airi Stenlund-Finch Boulder, Colorado, USA
Glen Finch, BA, PGC Boulder, Colorado, USA
Janne Puustelli Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Markku Louhio Helsinki, Finland
Helena Selkäinaho Finland
Maya Kylmämaa
Ilari Sammalvilla Helsinki, Finland
Sune Auken, Dr.Habil. Denmark