Jacques Vallée, one of the co-creators of the Internet, explains how the acceleration of technology in an increasingly connected society is producing "impossible futures" that range from rapid collapse of major banks to the emergence of complex new forms of political power, with the Internet as both a tool and a victim.
Quotes:
[The KGB] arrested people at random, and brought them to their headquarters; they had one question for them: "who do you know? who do you talk to, and what do you talk about?" If somebody wanted to do that today, they would not need to arrest people, all they need to do is look at Facebook, Twitter, Google; we give this information everyday to the network and the superstructure above the web.
[nb: slightly shortened and simplified]
The connected world provides many examples of "Impossible" futures that create a dissonance between existing cultures or belief systems... and the sudden emergence of new facts. The impact cannot be ignored.
Richard Stallman shares how he has created the first free operating system, and explains how nonfree programs give companies control of their users and what users can do in order to recover control over their computing
Quotes:
Nowadays, computing is so important in society that the freedoms of free software are among the human rights that society must establish and protect.
Founder of greenit.fr (durable IT), animates the "Collectif Conception Numérique Responsable", created a bunch of french terms linked to responsible IT ("sobriété numérique","numérique responsable", "conception responsable de service numérique", ...) and published a few books on the matter.
Mission to keep the internet open. "We put our knowledge and experience to work along EU institutions and civil society to ensure that the principle of openness is reflected in the European Union's digital policy framework".
They "work on advancing Digital Public Spaces, building Data Commons and designing the Future of Open".
Nomagic aims to provide private individuals and small associations with a viable, responsible, and committed alternative to the Web services provided by big IT corporations.
advocate in the free software movement, said to debian mailing list "It's Time to Talk about Free Software Again", founded the Open Research Institute, promotes open radio communications standards and open-source hardware, created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source
Acts as president of the Free Software Foundation in France, also its founder. He is a speaker for the GNU Project and the April association. Right now, he is a full-time volunteer for the SecureDrop project. In 2001 wrote Savannah and SourceForge.
A human rights defender and computer networking pioneer from South Africa. he has been the Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications. She was one of five finalists for IT Personality of the Year in South Africa in 2012. She was inducted to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013 as a "Global Connector". In 2015, she was the winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Awards.
She is a founder of Women's Net in South Africa and has served on the Technical Advisory Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
Proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. In 2001, he founded Creative Commons. He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center; the Washington, D.C. lobbying groups Public Knowledge and Free Press; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He also served from 2000-2007 as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an organization he helped form. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995, and in 1999 served a term as Chairman of the Board.
****Since 2005, he has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google****
The Contract for the Web was created by representatives from over 80 organizations, representing governments, companies and civil society, and sets out commitments to guide digital policy agendas. An attempt to address issues of political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations, and other malign forces on the internet
Inventor of the World Wide Web, professor at the MIT, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation, named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century.
Launched Contract for the Web, a campaign initiative to persuade governments, companies and citizens to commit to nine principles to stop "misuse"
Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation, wrote both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License, elected Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.
Founder of Fairphone, then went into TADA (data ethics manifesto), Founder & Host at "What if We get it Right?" (podcast), now Member of the Board of Advisors at "Creatives for Climate", a non-profit global network of creative thinkers from all over the world,
Deputy Chairman of The Document Foundation (Libreoffice). involved in the Taiwanese open source community since 1993, and since 2015 he is the President of the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT)
Support the preservation of mother tongues , allow users of office productivity software to retain the intellectual propertyin the documents they create. The home for our activities should be an independent self-governing democratic foundation. They reject A closed software development process where errors can lie hidden and poor quality is accepted
Co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks, the DES Cracker, and the Internet's "alt" newsgroups. Advocate of encryption policy. Currently on the boards of EFF, Usenix Association, CodeWeavers, and ReQuest.
We believe that the fate of humanity will be decided at the frontier of technological innovation.
We will either see technology lead to a more free, open, and fair society or reinforce a global regime of centralized control, surveillance, and oppression. Our fear is that without a global, conscious, and concerted effort, the outlook is incredibly bleak.
The Internet has opened the doors for universal, cross-border, and non-violent collaborative effort to fight for our freedom. However, the Internet has also opened the doors for global surveillance and manipulation. We believe humankind should use technology as a liberating tool to unleash all the goodwill and creativity of our species, rather than as a tool to enslave and take advantage of one another.
Thus, Aragon is a fight for freedom. Aragon empowers freedom by creating liberating tools that leverage decentralized technologies.