Thought experiment: imagine an Internet in which email and web addresses were centrally issued by government agencies, with heavy procedural requirements and no mobility — even, at a plausible extreme, political patronage footballs. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?
I was there in 1983 when a tiny group called the IETF prevented this from happening. I had a personal hand in preventing it and yes, I knew what the stakes were. Even then. So did everyone else in the room.
Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of permissions that (in effect) mean digital information flow is utterly controlled by those with political and legal master keys. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?
Remember Trusted Computing and Palladium and crypto-export restrictions? RMS and Linus Torvalds and John Gilmore and I and a few score other hackers aborted that future before it was born, by using our leverage as engineers and mentors of engineers to change the ground of debate.
[. . .]
Did we bend the trajectory of society? Yes. Yes, I think we did. It wasn’t a given that we’d get a future in which any random person could have a website and a blog, you know. It wasn’t even given that we’d have an Internet that anyone could hook up to without permission. And I’m pretty sure that if the political class had understood the implications of what we were actually doing, they’d have insisted on more centralized control. ~For the public good and the children, don’t you know.~
So, yes, sometimes very tiny groups can change society in visibly large ways on a short timescale. I’ve been there when it was done; once or twice I’ve been the instrument of change myself.
Eric S. Raymond, “Engineering history”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-09-12
September 13, 2010
QotD: An alternate history we might have suffered
July 22, 2010
The empirical side of engineering
As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, most engineering work is unexceptional and we depend on it working without fuss or bother. Engineers learn what is and isn’t possible with the materials and techniques available, but one of the most important teachers is failure:
The sinking of the Titanic, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the collapse of the World Trade Center — all forced engineers to address what came to be seen as deadly flaws.
“Any engineering failure has a lot of lessons,” said Gary Halada, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who teaches a course called “Learning from Disaster.”
Design engineers say that, too frequently, the nature of their profession is to fly blind.
Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering “the art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.”
