My anarchist self from thirty years ago meets the Swarm team
I smelled it in the air in 1989. I heard the footsteps of something bigger than spring. When I read its name in the official newspaper of the one and only reigning party of Hungary then, it made no sense to me. Freedom? We had been liberated by the Soviet army in WWII. We can do anything within the boundaries of common sense. That newspaper was called Freedom of the People.
Banned books and samizdat literature? People arrested for distributing samizdat copies of them? I knew about it. I read The animal farm and The revolt of the masses. But you don’t realize your limitations until they are removed.
A year later I was standing at the riverfront of a two-story building that had its fair share of history. It was built by an aristocrat in the 19th century whose family lived there until the free people confiscated it in 1945. Then it served an obscure organization of the socialist party. It was abandoned later. Now it was occupied by artists, writers, and philosophers. Its entrance on the other side was locked and blocked and sealed. There was a “stage door”, a plank leading from the ground to the window. We, the editors of a new literary magazine, entered the squat house.
It was not so illegal you could go to the jail for it. Probably. It had an air of excitement and danger. But not as imminent a danger as being a Jew around WWII. Just enough my coward soul could manage.
Freedom is not a political term. It’s the opposite. It’s not a term for the brain, but something in the air that multiplies your lung capacity.
The Windows 3.0 logo reminded me of a flag in the wind. It put me in a meditative state as my computer was booting. The desktop appeared and the icons on it, I was entering dreamland. It took some more time for the background image to load that I had configured myself. Configure! This is the first of the magic words that lead you to a world where you can change anything. You may be stuck in a rundown apartment in a lousy ten square meter room. You may be stuck with a whining wife or a lousy life. I was stuck with a girlfriend I couldn’t break up with. I double-clicked the Delphi IDE icon.
I didn’t care about knowing myself. It was programming I wanted to know. It presented the same puzzles I loved in math, but they stepped out of the page of the book and took on a life of their own. How does a hypercube, the fourth-dimensional big brother of our cube look like? I always wanted to know, but couldn’t imagine it.
It took me a week and a hundred cigarettes if I calculate a rate of a pack a day. What happened in this week? The joy as the first thin line gets drawn on the black screen; the nail-biting frustration that the line vanishes after a second. It was past two on Saturday night when the hypercube started to rotate. I watched the screen, my own version of the windows logo, the first creation in my programmatic universe.
Miracles wear off. I open a console like I tie my shoes in the morning, I ssh to the server to check the log files. Annoying. I haven’t been able to find out why my code blows up ten minutes after being deployed. The bastard eats up all the memory. Is this really the activity I used to enjoy?
Hungary has a decent GDP now, elections that mime freedom, and a political system between democracy and an Eastern European banana republic. It’s just colder here.
This winter is warmer than usual. I am walking by the river in a neighborhood that falls outside my daily track. I switch frequently between the navigation app on my phone and the game whose name I’m ashamed to write here. It’s a twenty-meter detour to take the zebra crossing. In 1989, I would have taken a shortcut. I look up from Google maps, hey, this is the squat house from thirty years ago, but refurbished, white, elegant. My body remembers the curve of the wall in the staircase as I’m going up now. Second floor, to the right. I enter the Airbnb apartment.
Less than a dozen guys in a large room, three are standing around a laptop enchanted in a video conference. “Controlled by the NSA”, “body, mind, data”. This is the sticker speak of the laptops. And of course the grey diamond (I never liked it, you don’t design a grey logo). Czech accent mixes with American in the air. They discuss subtle aspects of garbage collection. I’m lost in a nice way.
A consensus is how a bunch of people come to an agreement, a painful process in some cases, it doesn’t even seem to work at a larger scale. Presidents and CEOs are elected by weird human algorithms. Nodes in a blockchain network have a hard time finding a consensus, too. Technically, they are different problems, but to my metaphorical human mind, they are similar. We teach computers how to agree, and we have to learn that lesson on the way.
The youngsters in the room are building the backbone of a brand new internet and society. They are knitting a future out of consensus algorithms and protocols. When the code blows up due to a memory leak, one of them jumps in to fix it. I can hear the footsteps of something bigger than spring. I want to be a part of it this time.
