ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Free Software, Cypherpunks and the Creation of the 1980s "User"

• In Event: CTRL ALT SHIFT. Expériences, Knowledge, Activism, Methods - 3

English Abstract

When in the late 1940s and early 1950s the concept of the computer slowly emerged, there was no clear distinction between an end user and a programmer. A person who was interacting with the machine's programs usually also programmed. They developed their own skills, methods and possible uses of these new machines. There was a possibility not merely to "enact" what was given but also to change it. Today, we are confronted with a very different situation which can be partially grounded historically in the rise of personal computing and the microcomputer. While earlier a user was someone who would also program, the rise of personal computing meant that anyone should be able to use a computer, even a child. The user concept had shifted. To some, that concept was inconsistent with an environment which was too technical. What was needed instead was a turn away from the technicalities of the alien machine to an environment which would be familiar. This steadily evolved into, what I call, an ideology of hiding everything that is technical. Today, the majority of digital systems in which we act have historically constructed a user agent which lives in those systems in order to sustain them. That agent is not supposed to understand let alone change or control those systems. It is the model of a user that is needed to feed into and sustain an ideological model in which a small percentage of the population desires to have control over most in order to enrich and empower themselves. Instead of assuming this pessimistic statement and take it for a fact that cannot be changed, I propose to develop a counternarrative based on alternative user conceptions as we find them in the cypherpunk and free software movements that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s partially as a reaction to that other user concept. While these user conceptions were, as I argue, elitist, we can recover from them a notion of /comprehension/ which opens up a path for a user to emancipate themselves /without/ belonging to that coding elite.

Author

• Liesbeth De Mol, CNRS - Université de Lille