Originally written for Dapper Dan magazine, circa November 2009.

I’m passionate about the Web. I started playing and tinkering with computers when I was a kid: my knees weren’t up to much physical activity, and at the time, computers were the only thing my family found that kept me entertained. Once I’d finished playing all the games I had, I decided to make my own. After reading programing magazines and lots of trial and error, I wrote my first program - allowing me to alter, change and finally design the typeface of my Amstrad CPC (although it mainly produced illegible bunches of pixelated-letterforms, but it was fun and I learned a lot). That was 1985, I was 8. Since 1994 on my first PC, made of donated and disused spares, I kept on learning: trying to understand, playing with and building websites with HTML. Many of us did the same, some for a bit longer - with different languages, approaches, aesthetic references, interests. After my baccalaureat I quickly discovered I could mix what I was being taught at art school with what I already knew about computers. Things went on pretty well and I finally setup my studio in East London. I’ve managed to work on exciting projects with a lot of nice people: I have been lucky - and that’s partly due to the excitement of constantly discovering new things… 2 years ago I had to be rushed in A&E, and since then have a piece of metal embedded under my skin: a tiny computer running a proprietary operating system to monitor my heartbeat and look after me; it’s called an ICD, Internal Cardio Defibrillator.

I love machines.

Hardware Ecosystem

The personal computer ecosystem has shrunk drastically, from what it was when I was a kid. Nowadays we’re mostly speaking about Windows PCs and Apple computers. All the 8-bit ancestors simply vanished. Atari and Amiga stuck around for a little while, trying to match the performance of the office-PCs-gaming-machines. It killed the original game market I knew, and turned it into a single platform monopoly (that is, until the appearance of the powerful games console).

Over time, a few potential alternatives to the Operating System monopoly have emerged. For example, in the form of mainstream-friendly operating systems, like BeOS a decade ago, or Ubuntu more recently, with the rise of the netbooks - managing to turn Linux into an easier to install and use system. But those attempts still remain quite marginal in proportion to the whole market.

The web followed a distinct path, in the sense that at first it was pretty raw, and it’s since developed into a wide and diverse ecosystem of its own. And it is still growing. New languages, new services, new applications, new models arise constantly.

The web finally managed to turn those specific machines into mere entry points to a vast globally distributed common space. I really don’t mind the disappearance of the hardware or the OS in a way. I also think it’s good to see this attitude growing amongst my peers, despite the repeatedly heavy marketing campaigns: I am a PC, I am a Mac. A couple of years ago, people were quite concerned about which platform you were using to organise your digital information. In fact, now, the OS platform doesn’t really matter as long as you’re connected and can access the content.

Web Operating System

The web has remained, until quite recently, a simple static representation of information organised into websites and homepages. GeoCities recently disappeared, which somehow shows how our models of representation are fragile, and evolution towards new models moves really fast: the ‘new’ Internet in fact is now all around us through online services and mobile applications, new collective experience-sharing services. Through various services it has become a pervasive online environment: Wordpress, and the later microblogging platforms like Tumblr, the status based sites like Facebook and Twitter, the picture sharing services like Flickr or Twitpic, Picasa…

Little by little we could easily imagine replacing our desktop applications with their online equivalents, for better access when on the go. Netbooks clearly helped the development of such a use-scenario, through their very limited storage requirements. The large availability of broadband connectivity allows us to access the internet, and the cloud our documents are stored in, from any computer: we’re a login page away from our Google docs or Flickr pictures.

Electronic Presence

Open-ID is a generic identification on the internet. It is meant to replace in one place all your different usernames and passwords - creating a centralised identity for all your identification needs. It’s an open source system and can be implemented into web applications and services to authenticate users. It provides developers and website owners with a unified and standard framework.

Why should you care? Because this is one of the many typical foundations of your online presence. Ignoring this would be equivalent to disregarding whether Microsoft Live should be able to force everyone in its own system or if a common, decentralised framework can be developed across the internet, which would allow cooperation and inter-operability.

Other examples of this distant electronic presence include connection on a server on which you can know who, other than yourself, is connected to it and for how long (this is the linux command who -u). In a similar fashion, the Whois service lets you know about the registrant of a specific website by accessing public registry data from the ICANN. Similarly, for the last couple of years, “ego surfing” has captured our attention: by googling your name, you might discover what people are saying about you on the internet - things that are eventually beyond your reach. Facebook, and now also Flickr, have integrated tools allowing a user to tag uploaded pictures with the name of the people present, alerting the person about the appearance of their name on a picture: ego surfing made automatic.

Aggregation of services like Facebook, Flickr or Twitter could provide an interesting ground for the online representation/extension of the Self. The .tel domain names’ purpose is to have a sort of digital business card, updated in real-time which people (or maybe devices like intelligent cellphones) could use to find out the best available number to call you, according to the rate for the call or to your availability. It could even integrate a sort of iChat status that would say "I’m busy", the device would politely refuse the incoming call for you without the caller being even charged.

Most of those services and web applications we use still rely on the icon metaphor to represent a user: a square of about 35 x 35 pixels to express your individuality.

But, beside those 1225 pixels, all those services are, consciously or not, a reflection of oneself, allowing us to play with its multiple facets: status, picture, thoughts, links, etc. They are a second presence, digital, networked, an extension of our real world. These bits and pieces are archived and indexed - stored for later reference - eventually after death. The digital grave and its associated remains is what motivated the Mission Eternity project by the artist collective etoy.CORPORATION. etoy produced sarcophagi that are going to time travel using a peer-to-peer network of machines. Their controversial work has toured a lot of festivals and triggered a lot of interest about what is going to happen to the information we gather and create during our life.

In France, as I am writing, the government and some newspapers are discussing the right for digital information to be forgotten: a memory that wouldn’t stay forever. This forgetting model of handling information acts very much in the same way the human brain does. Memories are recomposed and re-arranged according to their usefulness. The less used/accessed parts of our memory are somehow compressed to make room for new information. This scarcity reminded me of the beautiful Blogject imagined by Wilfried Houjebek. The Blogject is an ideal blog software based on limited storage space. This limited memory would have to recompose itself. The project is referring to some of Thomas de Quincey’s ideas - according to its own storage space and the need for new information to be stored, the machine will make room for its own expansion while other less useful bits and pieces would be discarded and recomposed and eventually re-written upon.

Open-ness

The large number of already available applications all over the internet is in a way providing an anticipated version of a web operating system: all you need to access it is a web browser.

This inter-operable and widely distributed web operating system is already facing a struggle similar to the Browser Wars at the end of the 90’s. At that time the question was mainly to know who would control the interface to the web: Microsoft Internet Explorer using its corporate power to oppose Netscape. In short, it was the Microsoft proprietary closed-ness versus the open web standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

After a so-called loss and a later phoenix-like rebirth (read the excellent Cathedral and The Bazaar, by Eric Raymond), we managed somehow to establish Firefox as a strong, lively, and secure alternative. Not to mention the other browsers that also made their way to widespread use and recognition, further expanding the ecosystem. We are now facing similar choices: choosing the easy and tempting way of delegating decision power or taking the responsibility to choose alternative software and web services as well as providing help, support to independent projects and developers.

Google should soon be releasing Chrome OS (second half of 2010). Chrome OS is a much anticipated open source computer operating system, based on Linux. Its description alone makes it sound like a paradigm shifter. This operating system will rely essentially on the web to provide its applications, and it will benefit from Google’s recently gained experience from their release of the Google Chrome Browser. Its storage relies on cloud computing and provides unlimited space as long as you can access the web. It’s like if your computer had no applications but a single browser: anything you would do with it would be web-based, relying on web applications and technologies.

I buy my music on my iPhone, I use Google to find locations and websites, I use eBay to grab a bargain and sell unused stuff, I search for definitions and explanations on Wikipedia, I buy books on Amazon - we rely on proto-monopolistic companies on an everyday basis, most of those companies’ business depends on closed source and proprietary technologies - this is simply plain wrong: it’s not sustainable.

Sir Tim Berners Lee - no less than the inventor of the web - recently commented on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data:

Data is beginning to drive the Government’s websites. But without a consistent policy to make it available to others, without the use of open standards and unrestrictive licences for reuse, information stays compartmentalised and its full value is lost. Openly available public data not only creates economic and social capital, it also creates bottom-up pressure to improve public services. Data is essential in enabling citizens to choose between public service providers. It helps them to compare their local services with services elsewhere. It enables all of us to lobby for improvement. Public data is a public good.

Just as in ‘real life’, shopping at the small corner shop down the road will most certainly help improve my neighbourhood - or similarly: I shouldn’t buy this espresso machine for which you have to keep on sourcing your coffee in capsules from a single distributor.

The daily practice of open source is widely applicable, beyond the digital landscape — for the common good.