drm-fixes-<date>
.
2) Examine the issue tracker: Confirm that your issue isn t already
documented and addressed in the AMD display driver issue tracker. If you find a
similar issue, you can team up with others and speed up the debugging process.
[drm] Display Core v...
, it s not likely a display driver issue. If this
message doesn t appear in your log, the display driver wasn t fully loaded and
you will see a notification that something went wrong here.[drm] Display Core v3.2.241 initialized on DCN 2.1
[drm] Display Core v3.2.237 initialized on DCN 3.0.1
drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dcn301
. We all know
that the AMD s shared code is huge and you can use these boundaries to rule out
codes unrelated to your issue.
7) Newer families may inherit code from older ones: you can find dcn301
using code from dcn30, dcn20, dcn10 files. It s crucial to verify which hooks
and helpers your driver utilizes to investigate the right portion. You can
leverage ftrace
for supplemental validation. To give an example, it was
useful when I was updating DCN3 color mapping to correctly use their new
post-blending color capabilities, such as:
Additionally, you can use two different HW families to compare behaviours.
If you see the issue in one but not in the other, you can compare the code and
understand what has changed and if the implementation from a previous family
doesn t fit well the new HW resources or design. You can also count on the help
of the community on the
Linux AMD issue tracker
to validate your code on other hardware and/or systems.
This approach helped me debug
a 2-year-old issue
where the cursor gamma adjustment was incorrect in DCN3 hardware, but working
correctly for DCN2 family. I solved the issue in two steps, thanks for
community feedback and validation:
drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dcn*/dcn*_resource.c
file. More precisely in
the dcn*_resource_construct()
function.
Using DCN301 for illustration, here is the list of its hardware caps:
/*************************************************
* Resource + asic cap harcoding *
*************************************************/
pool->base.underlay_pipe_index = NO_UNDERLAY_PIPE;
pool->base.pipe_count = pool->base.res_cap->num_timing_generator;
pool->base.mpcc_count = pool->base.res_cap->num_timing_generator;
dc->caps.max_downscale_ratio = 600;
dc->caps.i2c_speed_in_khz = 100;
dc->caps.i2c_speed_in_khz_hdcp = 5; /*1.4 w/a enabled by default*/
dc->caps.max_cursor_size = 256;
dc->caps.min_horizontal_blanking_period = 80;
dc->caps.dmdata_alloc_size = 2048;
dc->caps.max_slave_planes = 2;
dc->caps.max_slave_yuv_planes = 2;
dc->caps.max_slave_rgb_planes = 2;
dc->caps.is_apu = true;
dc->caps.post_blend_color_processing = true;
dc->caps.force_dp_tps4_for_cp2520 = true;
dc->caps.extended_aux_timeout_support = true;
dc->caps.dmcub_support = true;
/* Color pipeline capabilities */
dc->caps.color.dpp.dcn_arch = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.input_lut_shared = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.icsc = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_ram = 0; // must use gamma_corr
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.srgb = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.pq = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.hlg = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.post_csc = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.gamma_corr = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_for_yuv = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.hw_3d_lut = 1;
dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_ram = 1;
// no OGAM ROM on DCN301
dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.srgb = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.pq = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.hlg = 0;
dc->caps.color.dpp.ocsc = 0;
dc->caps.color.mpc.gamut_remap = 1;
dc->caps.color.mpc.num_3dluts = pool->base.res_cap->num_mpc_3dlut; //2
dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_ram = 1;
dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.srgb = 0;
dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 0;
dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 0;
dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.pq = 0;
dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.hlg = 0;
dc->caps.color.mpc.ocsc = 1;
dc->caps.dp_hdmi21_pcon_support = true;
/* read VBIOS LTTPR caps */
if (ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_caps)
enum bp_result bp_query_result;
uint8_t is_vbios_lttpr_enable = 0;
bp_query_result = ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_caps(ctx->dc_bios, &is_vbios_lttpr_enable);
dc->caps.vbios_lttpr_enable = (bp_query_result == BP_RESULT_OK) && !!is_vbios_lttpr_enable;
if (ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_interop)
enum bp_result bp_query_result;
uint8_t is_vbios_interop_enabled = 0;
bp_query_result = ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_interop(ctx->dc_bios, &is_vbios_interop_enabled);
dc->caps.vbios_lttpr_aware = (bp_query_result == BP_RESULT_OK) && !!is_vbios_interop_enabled;
git log
and git blame
to identify commits
targeting the code section you re interested in.
10) Track regressions: If you re examining the amd-staging-drm-next
branch, check for regressions between DC release versions. These are defined by
DC_VER
in the drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dc.h
file. Alternatively,
find a commit with this format drm/amd/display: 3.2.221
that determines a
display release. It s useful for bisecting. This information helps you
understand how outdated your branch is and identify potential regressions. You
can consider each DC_VER
takes around one week to be bumped. Finally, check
testing log of each release in the report provided on the amd-gfx
mailing
list, such as this one Tested-by: Daniel Wheeler
:
sudo bash -c "echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level"
/* Surface update type is used by dc_update_surfaces_and_stream
* The update type is determined at the very beginning of the function based
* on parameters passed in and decides how much programming (or updating) is
* going to be done during the call.
*
* UPDATE_TYPE_FAST is used for really fast updates that do not require much
* logical calculations or hardware register programming. This update MUST be
* ISR safe on windows. Currently fast update will only be used to flip surface
* address.
*
* UPDATE_TYPE_MED is used for slower updates which require significant hw
* re-programming however do not affect bandwidth consumption or clock
* requirements. At present, this is the level at which front end updates
* that do not require us to run bw_calcs happen. These are in/out transfer func
* updates, viewport offset changes, recout size changes and pixel
depth changes.
* This update can be done at ISR, but we want to minimize how often
this happens.
*
* UPDATE_TYPE_FULL is slow. Really slow. This requires us to recalculate our
* bandwidth and clocks, possibly rearrange some pipes and reprogram
anything front
* end related. Any time viewport dimensions, recout dimensions,
scaling ratios or
* gamma need to be adjusted or pipe needs to be turned on (or
disconnected) we do
* a full update. This cannot be done at ISR level and should be a rare event.
* Unless someone is stress testing mpo enter/exit, playing with
colour or adjusting
* underscan we don't expect to see this call at all.
*/
enum surface_update_type
UPDATE_TYPE_FAST, /* super fast, safe to execute in isr */
UPDATE_TYPE_MED, /* ISR safe, most of programming needed, no bw/clk change*/
UPDATE_TYPE_FULL, /* may need to shuffle resources */
;
Welcome to the August 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project!
In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
serde_derive
macro as a precompiled binary. As Ax Sharma writes:
The move has generated a fair amount of push back among developers who worry about its future legal and technical implications, along with a potential for supply chain attacks, should the maintainer account publishing these binaries be compromised.After intensive discussions, use of the precompiled binary was phased out.
[ ] an overview about reproducible builds, the past, the presence and the future. How it started with a small [meeting] at DebConf13 (and before), how it grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an executive order of the president of the United States. (HTML slides)Holger repeated the talk later in the month at Chaos Communication Camp 2023 in Zehdenick, Germany: A video of the talk is available online, as are the HTML slides.
Vagrant walks us through his role in the project where the aim is to ensure identical results in software builds across various machines and times, enhancing software security and creating a seamless developer experience. Discover how this mission, supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy and a broad community, is changing the face of Linux distros, Arch Linux, openSUSE, and F-Droid. They also explore the challenges of managing random elements in software, and Vagrant s vision to make reproducible builds a standard best practice that will ideally become automatic for users. Vagrant shares his work in progress and their commitment to the last mile problem.The episode is available to listen (or download) from the Sustain podcast website. As it happens, the episode was recorded at FOSSY 2023, and the video of Vagrant s talk from this conference (Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust is now available on Archive.org: It was also announced that Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the Open Source Firmware Conference in October on the topic of Reproducible Builds All The Way Down.
hello-traditional
package from Debian. The entire thread can be viewed from the archive page, as can Vagrant Cascadian s reply.
247
, 248
and 249
were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also added documentation for the new specialize_as
method and expanding the documentation of the existing specialize
as well [ ]. In addition, Fay Stegerman added specialize_as
and used it to optimise .smali
comparisons when decompiling Android .apk
files [ ], Felix Yan and Mattia Rizzolo corrected some typos in code comments [ , ], Greg Chabala merged the RUN commands into single layer in the package s Dockerfile
[ ] thus greatly reducing the final image size. Lastly, Roland Clobus updated tool descriptions to mark that the xb-tool
has moved package within Debian [ ].
timestamp_in_documentation_using_sphinx_zzzeeksphinx_theme
toolchain issue.
arimo
(modification time in build results)apptainer
(random Go build identifier)arrow
(fails to build on single-CPU machines)camlp
(parallelism-related issue)developer
(Go ordering-related issue)elementary-xfce-icon-theme
(font-related problem)gegl
(parallelism issue)grommunio
(filesystem ordering issue)grpc
(drop nondetermistic log)guile-parted
(parallelism-related issue)icinga
(hostname-based issue)liquid-dsp
(CPU-oriented problem)memcached
(package fails to build far in the future)openmpi5/openpmix
(date/copyright year issue)openmpi5
(date/copyright year issue)orthanc-ohif+orthanc-volview
(ordering related issue plus timestamp in a Gzip)perl-Net-DNS
(package fails to build far in the future)postgis
(parallelism issue)python-scipy
(uses an arbitrary build path)python-trustme
(package fails to build far in the future)qtbase/qmake/goldendict-ng
(timestamp-related issue)qtox
(date-related issue)ring
(filesytem ordering related issue)scipy
(1 & 2) (drop arbtirary build path and filesytem-ordering issue)snimpy
(1 & 3) (fails to build on single-CPU machines as well far in the future)tango-icon-theme
(font-related issue)reproducible-tracker.json
data file. [ ]pbuilder.tgz
for Debian unstable due to #1050784. [ ][ ]usrmerge
. [ ][ ]armhf
nodes (wbq0
and jtx1a
) as down; investigation is needed. [ ]buildd.debian.org
. [ ][ ]
#reproducible-builds
on irc.oftc.net
.
rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
Content Security Policy: Ignoring 'unsafe-inline' within script-src or style-src: nonce-source or hash-source specified
Content Security Policy: The page s settings blocked the loading of a resource at data:text/css,%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%2 ( style-src ). data:44:30
Content Security Policy: Ignoring 'unsafe-inline' within script-src or style-src: nonce-source or hash-source specified
TypeError: AudioContext is not a constructor 138875 https://discord.com/assets/cbf3a75da6e6b6a4202e.js:262 l https://discord.com/assets/f5f0b113e28d4d12ba16.js:1ed46a18578285e5c048b.js:241:118
What is being done is dom.webaudio.enabled being disabled in Firefox.
Then on a hunch, searched on reddit and saw the following. Be careful while visiting the link as it s labelled NSFW although to my mind there wasn t anything remotely NSFW about it. They do mention using another tool AudioContext Fingerprint Defender which supposedly fakes or spoofs an id. As this add-on isn t tracked by Firefox privacy team it s hard for me to say anything positive or negative.
So, in the end I stopped using discord as the alternative was being tracked by them
Last but not the least, saw this about a week back. Sooner or later this had to happen as Elon tries to make money off Twitter.
vert
.
Quite a few plugins and commands open up a new window (e.g. git-fugitive,
Man, etc.) and they typically do so in a horizontal split. I'm increasingly
preferring vertical splits. Prefixing any3 such command with vert
forces
the split to be vertical instead.
clang++-16
have found a fan in Brian
Ripley, and so he sent us a note. And as the issue was trivially
reproducible with clang++-15
here too I had it fixed in no
time. And both changes taken together form the incremental 0.2.7
release.
RcppSMC
provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo
Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article.
Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter
in some contexts. The package now also features the Google Summer of Code
work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021.
The release is summarized below.
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppSMC page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.7 (2023-03-22)
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
configure.ac
in order to ensure R on M1 macOS finds the locally-added GNU GMP. Our thanks to the infatiguable Brian Ripley for the heads-up even containing the two needed assignments to LD
and CPPFLAGS
..
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
stty (change and print terminal line settings)
as a program.
Thanks to some heroes, basenc, pr, chcon and runcon have been implemented. For example, for the two last programs, Koutheir Attouchi wrote new crates to manage SELinux properly. This crate has been used for some other utilities like cp, ls or id.
Leveraging the GNU testsuite to test this implementation
Because the GNU testsuite is excellent, we now have a proper CI using it to run the tests. It is pretty long on the Github action CI (almost two hours to run it) but it is an amazing improvement to the way we work. It was a joint work from a bunch of folks (James Robson, Roy Ivy III, etc). To achieve this, we also made it easier to run the GNU testsuite locally with the Rust implementation but also to ignore some tests or adjust some error messages (see build-gnu.sh and run-gnu-test.sh).
Following a suggestion of Brian G, a colleague at Mozilla (he did the same for some Firefox major change), we are now collecting the history of fail/pass/error into a separate repository and generating a daily graph showing the evolution of regression. At this date, we have, with GNU/Coreutils 9.0:
Total | 611 tests |
Pass | 214 |
Skip | 84 |
Fail | 298 |
Error | 15 |
Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/c-option is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/silent is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/umask-x is now passing!
<br />Error: GNU test failed: tests/du/long-from-unreadable. tests/du/long-from-unreadable is passing on 'master'. Maybe you have to rebase?
[...]
<br />Warning: Changes from master: PASS +4 / FAIL +0 / ERROR -4 / SKIP +0
This is also beneficial to GNU as, by implementing some options, Michael Debertol noticed some incorrect behaviors (with sort and cat) or an uninitialized variable (with chmod).
Documentations
Every day, we are generating the user documentation and of the internal coreutils.
User documentation: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/user/ Example: ls or cp
The internal documentation can be seen on: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/dev/uucore/ libdieharder
library (or build one on the fly) that was issue one. Now we just declare all C files as dependents of the package shared library, and things are simpler and more consistent. Sadly, that also implies everything is in the package so I had to edit out a metric ton of stdout
or exit()
reference with the appropriate R C API hooks to appease the CRAN Policy deities. Win some, loose some. But the package is now simpler, and cleaner, and should be in good standing. (Or so one hopes. Earlier today, and within hours of it hitting CRAN, I got an issue ticket from a motivated user about yet another ( mostly harmless in the Douglas Adams sense) compiler warning Good now too.)
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at the most recent diff.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.
it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasionIn that aging document, we find the following pearl:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:
"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:
has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.
The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.
Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)
We are forming our own Social Contract.I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.
Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:
This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:
We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.
I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.
<title>
tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I
also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I
loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:
Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.It goes on:
Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:
I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.
- ride in like the savior
- bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
- mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
- justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
- partner with local elites and vested interests
- accuse the critics of ingratitude
computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.
Next.