The ‘ assolutamente improfanabile ’ software

Introduction

More than a decade ago, Jeremy Rifkin (2000) partly underlined and partly prophesied how, in contemporary capitalistic societies, the new luxury is no longer to own things but to have access to them. Property itself, in Rifkin’s analyses, is not simply ‘uncool’ but onerous, particularly compared to the ease and lightness entailed in renting. When we own something, in fact, we have to deal with it all the time – even when we are not actually using it – and the cost of its maintenance can be overwhelming. If we could bring ourselves to get rid of our property, we could then join the increasing numbers of people who do not own anymore, but nonetheless maintain access to the goods they need. Rifkin definitely saw something coming. Nowadays websites such as Zilok ¹ and services such as Zipcar ² are increasingly popular and actually being chosen as real alternatives to property. Why own a car when you can use one whenever you want, only for the period you need it, and then leave it in a parking spot as if it were not yours?

In this article I will analyse how access to different products and services is actually changing the way in which we decide to experience the world, becoming an increasingly dominant (or, at least, desirable) business model. Yet, I will also show that far from being an alternative to consumption, the ‘age of access’ is defining more and more use as consumption. Taking into consideration the idea of the ‘platform’, I will demonstrate how the software industry has actually changed our way of conceiving and experiencing software, until we are no longer engaged in the creation of software itself but almost exclusively in the consumption of it. Starting from the distinction between use and consumption that De Certeau sketched out, I will then introduce the concept of profanation and the creation of an ‘assolutamente improfanabile’ – the absolute impossibility of profaning, i.e. relegating things and concepts into a realm of virtual untouchability – delineated by Agamben. I will then apply these concepts to the modern software industry and the recent tendencies of using software platforms as closed and protected consumeristic environments, in which the prototype of ‘users’ coincides with that of the ‘consumer’. While free software could be one of the alternatives, we need a radically different approach to technology in order to avoid the creation of an ‘AI’.

Use and consumption â la De Certeau

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984) declares his interest in how people use the goods that they consume, aiming to shed light on the relationship between consumers and producers, and underlining how the supposed passivity of consumers is actually a teeming collection of activities. The way in which people use merchandise – in other words, the use of the consumption – twists the process of consumption itself, positioning consumers as co-authors in the making of goods. Hence, products are not simply shaped by the producers and given to a mass of passive people (for a fee, of course), but rather, they are sold to individual persons who engage actively with the objects they buy and give them new, personal, and individualized usages and meanings. ³

De Certeau lists at least three activities that can be seen as preparatory to the tactic of action itself: games; accounts, tales, and legends; and finally plays on words within those narrations (De Certeau, 1984: 22–4). With games, people familiarize themselves with metaphors, playing with situations that are not precise reproductions of what they are going to deal with, but where patterns of action and reaction can be highlighted, understood, learned, and mastered. Narration has a similar result as playing games, underlining and passing on successful and unsuccessful actions to the collective memory. Word plays, finally, are games within language, making it not just a simple tool for direct communication but a sophisticated instrument for oblique and cryptic conversations.

Consumers, then, re-invent the meanings of everyday life and actively intervene in the creation of products. Of course, not all consumers actively engage with goods, and, in some cases – De Certeau cites TV as an example – active interaction is simply impossible. Nonetheless, the use of goods destabilizes the static dualism of producer/consumer, making the latter active producers of new usages and meanings. For De Certeau, people who use goods are actively engaging with consumerism’s traps, peculiarities, and characteristics. Within the strategic plan of capitalistic producers, the games that consumers play represent multiple tactical efforts to exploit the status quo. Tactics are mostly haphazard, driven by personal reasons, and contingent upon the moment. Any attempt to organize them in patterns is not just unsuccessful but also dangerous for the tactics themselves: once detected, in fact, certain stratagems and techniques can rarely be used again. Much like magicians’ illusions, tactical techniques and manoeuvres can hardly be successful once the audience has already seen them. Surprise is a fundamental element in the success of tactics; they rely on the unexpected strike, the lucky moment in which the weak can turn the power and strength of the powerful against him/herself (working a bit like the TAZ – Temporary Autonomous Zone – theorized by Hakim Bey, 1985).

Products are not just there to be consumed in the prescribed way, but they can be reinvented, used differently, and combined with other goods to create something new. Through different tactics – which are more adaptable, diagonal, and efficient than the monolithic immobility of strategies – people twist the passivity of consumption into the very active and fruitful activity of use. Playing – that is, playing a game – is fundamental to this process: only by playing with roles, goods, and usages is it possible to defuse the intrinsic violence of consumption.

Profaning the market: Agamben and the fusion between use and consumption

In the preparatory articles for his ‘Il Regno e la Gloria’ (2007), Giorgio Agamben traces the story of the terms sacer, religius, and profanatio (Agamben, 2005). His hypothesis is that profanation has, for centuries, been the mechanism through which people dealt with the otherwise overwhelming presence of the divine. Through profanation, goods previously sacred to the gods could be given back to people, who were then free to use them as they wanted. Thus, profanatio was – and still is – a very relevant element in the neutralization and restitution of goods to the human world: not only because in this way goods could still legitimately be used by people and would not be wasted (when sacrificing an animal, only the entrails were reserved to the gods, while the rest of the animal could be eaten by people), but also because it defuses and neutralizes the mechanisms of power, which are related to divinity. According to Agamben, profanation ‘deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized’ (Agamben, 2005: 77).

Although the distinction between use and consumption has often been marked as relevant in the past, consumerism tends to flatten the differences between the two: consuming is using, and vice versa. While for De Certeau use was inextricably related to consumption, providing an always-individual challenge to scramble the structures of power, for Agamben, the presumed identification between use and consumption has deep roots, originally separated but progressively more intertwined, making the performance of a profanation nowadays a particularly difficult action to perform.

The contemporary act of profanation is not aimed toward sacred objects and tools anymore, because the divine has lost the exclusivity of power that it shared with the kings (Kantorowicz, 1957). Power is now more diffuse, imbuing the mechanisms of capitalist production – financial institutions, oil companies, pharmaceutical giants – rather than popes, archbishops, and spiritual leaders. As such, profanation, while still a vital activity for humankind, no longer applies exclusively to the domain of religion, but has shifted to the new cult of goods.

Deactivating and defusing power and restoring areas to common use, profanation will increasingly target goods and merchandise related to consumption, since these are the products that express power-in-action. Distinguishing use from consumption is one way in which contemporary forms of profanation can work: by using goods in an original and unexpected way – as De Certeau suggests – we may undermine the designed role for objects and also the sacrality built around their consumption, bringing them back to a human dimension. For both theorists an unexpected action is necessary, but while for De Certeau tactics help in escaping the violence of strategies, for Agamben profanation is a necessary act to restore life. Even if power has changed its face and ways to interact with people, its mechanisms and traps are intact. As such, profanation can still be an effective and efficient way to reduce power to a human condition and to defuse the mechanisms through which it controls human lives and actions. Like De Certeau’s tactics, profanation diminishes the chances of succumbing to the strategies of power.

This idea of complete sovereignty of the owner over his/her property is the ground of the modern idea of property (and, by extension, of authorship), and it has been unchallenged for centuries, at least until, according to Agamben, contemporary mass-consumerism started to push further the idea that the use of goods should be co-essential with its consumption. Capitalism needs to create consumption, because this is the only way in which it can actually exist. Thus, the fact that goods can be owned by consumers and used at their will is also jeopardizing the perpetuation of the cult of consumption. The perpetuation of guilt is a good way to create the compulsion to buy; but something more could be done. Something that multiplies desire reducing use to consumption, consequently promoting the identity between the two.

For instance, if I put an old book under the slightly shorter leg of my table, I will misuse the book – which has been produced to be read ⁴ – but in particular, I will not buy something new that fixes tables, or an entirely new table. The ongoing need or desire to purchase something new would lead, according to Agamben, to the last incarnation of consumerism: the creation of the ‘assolutamente Improfanabile’ [absolute impossibility of profaning ⁵ ] (Agamben, 2005: 85). The ‘AI’ can be an object, or even an activity – Agamben cites the example of pornography – that persistently defuses every action aimed to profane it – in other words, to change or modify its use. My quick fix with the old book is an act of profanation (playing with the prescribed use of the book). The ‘AI’ aims to undermine the mechanism of profanation, making it impossible to be performed.

Mass production and consumerism have flattened the distinction between sacred and profane. There is no more caesura between the one and the other, and the dichotomy sacred/profane, divine/human is becoming a ‘single, multiform, ceaseless process of separation’ (2005: 81). The ‘AI’, then, consists of perennial and necessary consumption: it is not possible to use – in De Certeau terms – the goods that become ‘AI’, because they have been conceived, built, and socially integrated as something that needs to be simply consumed, since their desirability – hence their marketability – resides precisely in the instant of the consumption. ⁶ These goods – both objects and activities, in both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds – can be classified as goods defined by ‘pure use’. ‘Pure use exists for an instant in the act of consumption’ (p. 83), and thus such commodities can never be possessed: property is, here, never truly allowed, because the dominium (the capacity of deciding) over the object – and the jus disponendi as well – is limited to the consumption.

Play – an unfocused, unproductive, and self-satisfactory activity – has, in the past, been one of the most effective ways in which the sacralized is given back to people. Yet, according to Agamben, in our consumerist society even the precious activity of playing is becoming more and more difficult, becoming itself a commodity. This most important device of profanation is, thus, increasingly thrown into jeopardy; playing also has been sacralized, which means that playing itself would – paradoxically – need a play that profanes it in order to give it back its profanatory drive. Finally, it is clear that, in such a context, consumers also become products themselves. When use and consumption are synonymous, consumers do not participate anymore in assigning meanings to the goods that they use, becoming instead just an extension of the goods they use/consume. For each good there will be one, and only one, consumer, and this union between the two completes the process of production.

A paradigmatic use of ‘AI’: Software and the platforms

I will now turn to a discussion of the software industry to show how the disciplining of consumers, the creation of a market, and the implementation of software platforms have combined to create ‘AI’ Operating Systems (OSs hereafter), on the one hand, which has favoured the diffusion of computers to laypeople but, on the other hand, is well on the way to creating an ‘AI’. The main change that micro/home computers introduced did not just involve innovations in the technological field, but rather computers began to enter the homes of people, and were no longer exclusively confined to labs and institutions. This popularization of computers meant also that – because laypeople could now access computers – these needed to be simple machines that ran many diverse programs. The graphical OS provided a response to these necessities: it offered a set of simple commands, a common ground for programs, and an idiot-proof system to keep non-programmers out of the core of computers. OS provided a platform, on which people could build their own world – and use the programs of others – but underneath which the core functions of the computer could not easily be accessed and manipulated.

On platforms and on their progressive invisibility

Platforms are very fascinating artifacts, and ‘platform’ itself is an interesting word. From French plateforme, ‘flat shape’, ‘ground plan’, platforms give the idea that things can be easily built on them, that they are a piece of reliable and solid ground which can serve as a place to start from rather than a place to arrive to. A platform is also a location where people are peers, in which opportunities and possibilities are in plain sight for everybody; this flat horizontality implies a kind of egalitarianism in people’s attitudes toward one another. Of course, platforms can be both something that people progressively and painfully create and maintain (platform as an arrival point of a communitarian effort: open platform), or which requires the annoyance of ongoing maintenance to provide it (platform as an owned standard: proprietary platform). The difference between the first and the second type of platform is very relevant in matters of governance: while the open platform is a product of a process in which all users take part, a proprietary platform is owned by someone who decides what it will become and what is or is not permitted. This does not mean that the voice of users is not heard: feedback, requests, reported problems, and so on are important forms of (unpaid) work that users spontaneously provide to the owner of the platform. However, it also is relevant that those voices have to be considered not as legitimate counterparts in a conversation between peers but as entreaties addressed to a party who can actually change something.

While platforms provide a flat ground on which new things can be built, they also hide what is beneath. In fact, in order to provide a common ground, they must hide what is ‘down there’. When a platform is established for the public, it will be used by a diverse range of people: beginning users, computer savvy individuals, programmers. All of them engage with the platform in different ways, and with different skills. A uniformity, then, is necessary, but the way in which this uniformity is reached varies according to the type of platform: while open platforms perpetuate a more democratic and broad discussion about features and characteristics to take into consideration, proprietary platforms actively discourage such a conversation. On the contrary, every attempt to modify proprietary platforms is read as a copyright infringement, and its implementation a criminal activity.

Still, both proprietary and open platforms need both users and programmers in order to be adopted by a larger number of people. The ambiguity of this ‘love/hate’ relationship is even greater when the invitation to build upon a platform is followed by a minute articulation of rules, standards, and controls. In creating a common place for proliferation, platforms also take away the possibility of diversity. The accepted, and recommended, diversity is only in the outcomes, in the exterior, but the ground, the mechanisms, and languages that govern the inner level is uniform, homogeneous, and set by those who own the platform itself. Of course, in case of open platforms the possibility of proposing changes in the inner level is still present for every user, even the newcomer. This possibility becomes increasingly improbable, however, as more and more people work on the platform, increasing its complexity, but it is still present in principle. Proprietary platforms, on the contrary, do not envisage this possibility: if you want to join the company you have to accept the rules as they are.

Proprietary platforms are a clear example of the paradox of privately owned ‘common’ places: almost like a shopping center, platforms are sites where it is possible to take advantage of all the facilities, but everything needs to be done in observance with the – already established – internal rules and norms. These are places in which it is possible to stay and proliferate, but impossible to perceive as our own, to make them our home. In this sense they are beginning to establish themselves as an ‘AI’ – both deeply woven in our lives and impossible to be fully ours – and for this very reason we desperately need to profane them.

Computers and the diffusion of platforms

At a certain point in the history of computing – as soon as the realization that it was actually a new mass market, and not just a hobby for a few hundred nerds – software became more and more structured, and thus less modifiable. Modifying software for specific machines and for specific tasks other than those considered by its programmers became more and more difficult, and ultimately almost impossible. What started as a protective measure to help lay people avoid breaking computers came to serve also another, more property-driven rationale. The main theme in justifying this ‘closure’ was that making software is costly, and it is important that everybody using it contribute to covering these expenses, and thus also invest in producing more excellent software in the future. ⁷ The concept of ‘unauthorized copies’, thus, started to circulate. Software – as well as a machine, a piece of land, or a mug – could be owned by someone.

While a fair number of people agreed that software programmers had to somehow make a living, ⁸ the idea that software had to be paid for because it is someone’s exclusive property may not be self-evident. Given the particular nature of software, neither the property of it is transferred nor is software protected under pure copyright legislation: what is given to those who purchase a piece of software is the authorization to use it, and in specific, prescribed ways. Even if I have ‘bought’ a piece of software and I modify it to do a slightly different thing from that for which it was programmed, I am in fact breaking the contract. The property over the software is always retained by the owner, while my rights as a purchaser are limited to the use of the software as it is (licence). If I need to modify it, I have to ask for a special copy of the program, which will be written exclusively for me. The platform, here, is not used to make more room for everybody to build their own, new things, but as a way to create, expand, and finally exclusively govern a marketplace.

The creation of the ‘user’

This mechanism of protection of software was not just widely disseminated but was also broadly accepted by computer-passionate individuals. Seeing this as a way to support the hard work of programmers, in what was also a rising market, they accepted the label of users. This notion of ‘users’ as a market category was inaugurated through the emergence of the home computer industry. But ‘user’ was exclusively a part in the programming experience. When considering how to write a program, programmers were thinking of how the user would interact with it, what s/he was seeing from the ‘other side of the screen’. When software started to be part of the big business around computers, users also became part of an internal regulatory discipline within the home computer market. What users cannot do, or are not allowed to do, became more and more an issue. No longer active participants in the programming, who cooperate in building a piece of software, users became simply recipients of a closed box, consumers of a product. The peak of this transformation coincided precisely with the introduction of artificial mechanisms to prevent the copy of software. When a user other than the one who paid for a licence wants to use a piece of software, s/he has to buy it from those who retain rights over it.

It is important to remember, however, that software is an object that does not naturally obey the rules of scarcity proper to our physical world: a program can be copied, copied, and copied again without becoming corrupted or illegible. Furthermore, every single copy costs very little – both in terms of money and energy. Moreover, the copies are identical and indistinguishable from the so-called original. While, before markets, ‘user’ was a general word to define every person using that computer, after the marketization of computer programs ‘user’ became an index of measurement: the minimum unity to whom is it possible to sell a piece of software (making the user not an owner, but more like a renter, in Rifkin’s terms).

Before the home computing revolution, however, the ‘user’ was a rare example of someone using a product without consuming it. And this is true not just because there rarely was an exchange of money between users and programmers, but especially because the type of relationship between the two parties did not involve the objectification of one by the other. Users and programmers were both part of the creation of a piece of software. This, then, was not simply a product, rather it was the fruit of a collaboration, something thanks to which both parts were learning something, avoiding a zero-sum exchange. The possibility of interacting with the program – the capacity of reading and eventually modifying the programming code – gave people the possibility of being part of a process, and not simply consumers of it.

Here, on the contrary, the exchange has to produce money, and the circle is finally closed: software becomes a product, and users become consumers. The fact that software is artificially limited brings back ‘on track’ one of the few cases in which ‘use’ could have been dissociated from ‘consumption’.

The ‘AI’ software through platforms

The objectification of both software and users could be defined as an ‘AI’ in Agamben’s terms. Use and consumption are collapsed together: even if theoretically I can use the program I bought indefinitely, a complex system of updates and upgrades makes new purchases almost always necessary. But even more so than normal programs running on computers, the latest tendency to build ‘platforms’ that are even more closed and regulated than before signals an almost perfect example of an ‘AI’.

In order to work properly, in fact, with the last generations of smart phones (the new frontier of marketing software) users have to purchase software only and exclusively from those who retain the ownership over the platform. Virtual sites like Apple’s ‘App Store’ and Google’s ‘Google Play’ function not just as places where the distribution of compatible applications is concentrated, but also as agents for the enforcement of internal policies. Copying a program from an external source and trying to play it on the device ruled by those platforms is, for the general public, not successful. As soon as the device connects to the marketplace, the alien application is detected and its execution may be interrupted, deploying a remote control of unauthorized activities.

Users do not always actively decide to purchase applications in order to employ all of the wonderful features of the device. Instead, applications increasingly point to each other in order to increase the infra-apps market volume. Most of the programs sold in those markets are pretty inexpensive, and the trends in consumption and use of the programs are likely monitored, ⁹ making purchase easy and convenient, and the use of the programs controlled. Furthermore, the idea that every device has the same hardware but with diverse and personalized software encourages users to try out new and different programs. The idea that the device can somehow reflect the mood and personality of the owner is common among users. The device is not anymore a simple object, a means through and thanks to which users access and explore the world around them, but is increasingly an appendix of the identity, without which it can be very difficult to relate to other people (Fortunati, 2002: 520).

If this extreme customization of a device excludes superfluous information and favours greater efficiency, it also facilitates a relationship of dependence between the user and the specific device. But these devices themselves are bonded to a specific platform and environment controlled by the owner. A continuum (Brighenti, 2010b) between the device producer, ‘apps’ and services provider, and user-consumer is then established. Once hooked, a consumer will most likely simply stay where s/he is, since the cost of exiting a proprietary and closed system is very high, both in terms of the time to transfer data from one platform to another, and in terms of adaptability to a new software environment.

In such an environment, the mechanism of preventing the copy and misuse of software, then, is easy: this is not simply creating a walled garden, rather a walled entertainment park, where every step costs money, but where it is impossible to stay still. Here use and consumption are linked through the creation of an ‘AI’.

Take the ‘App Store’, for instance…

Apple’s ‘App Store’ is the brightest example among these walled platforms. The ‘App Store’ was created in 2008 in order to provide a reliable and tested marketplace for the programs written for Apple’s products iPhone and iPod Touch. Before the establishment of the store, finding and testing which programs to buy would have been time-consuming and frustrating for users. Apple, then, decided to create a place where all the programs written for these specific devices were tested, evaluated, and checked by Apple itself. The absence of clear rules on which content and programs were acceptable created so much discontent among the programmers (who take 70% of the price of the program, while Apple retains 30%) that some decided not to publish apps for Apple iOS products. After months of pressure on Apple’s tyrannical and obscure way to conduct tests on apps, in September 2010 Apple finally released a reviewed version of the guidelines. ¹⁰

The fact that Apple set up rules and guidelines regarding how products are going to run on their machines is not particularly questionable in itself: there is a long tradition in programming of making functions uniform and parameters constant in order to increase ease-of-use for users. But in the past the possibility of accessing a market was granted by the fact that the market itself was not run by the producer of the machines. There has always been freedom for programmers to commercialize their products, even if they did not follow the rules outlined by the producers. Furthermore, what is particularly stunning in the ‘App Store’ policy is that Apple decides not just the technical characteristics of programs, but also and especially their content. Pornography – or better, Apple’s extension of the term to everything even vaguely calling to memory something sexual – has been systematically excluded from the market, provoking not just frustration, but also perplexity among programmers who saw rejected apps that featured, for example, a text-only version of the Kamasutra. ¹¹

Here it becomes very clear how the idea of platform – which in the 1990s was used in order to create a common ground between different OSs making it possible to work on the same document in different machines smoothly (those who were using Microsoft Office in both PC and Macs in the 1990s have a clear idea of this) – is now changing dramatically toward the creation and reinforcement of an enclosure, where the owner of the platform decides who is in and who is out. ¹²

Who owns a platform?

The question, then, is not simply whether the owner of a platform decides which programs can run on the platform, but also whether the owner determines what the users of that platform can see and experience. Steve Jobs answered this question very pragmatically by indicating that there is another market, Android, for those who want certain apps – namely pornographic apps. Still, the issue at stake here is not ethically questionable items, but rather whether a private enterprise should hold the power of censorship over its customers.

Controlling access to the platform, Apple is not only protecting its own creations but controlling and shaping the habits of users. And I am not simply referring to moral habits, but especially to practices related to purchasing and use. For instance, in order to install a program, users have to ‘tap’ on a button that tags the price of the app and then perform two other steps before actually buying and installing it. Many apps are tagged as ‘free’ in the ‘App Store’, which means that programmers are releasing them gratis. Nevertheless, to install the app the user passes through the same process as that for paid apps, making Making them virtually indistinguishable. Certainly there could be legal and technical reasons why the same procedure is used for both apps, but the mechanism also functions as a form of discipline that shapes users’ micro-practices in a way that is particularly efficient due to its very invisibility.

In 1991 Mark Weiser, a scientist at Xerox PARC, coined the term ‘ubiquitous computing’ (Weiser, 1991: 66) and envisioned the future of computing as a constant and naturalized interaction between users and micro-computers placed everywhere – from bathrooms to kitchens, offices to cafeterias. He wrote: ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’. Weiser thus described the future of computing as a series of micro-devices that will help people interact with computers more easily and in a more relaxed manner: alongside their pervasive presence, computers will be so embedded in everyday life that our awareness of them will completely disappear from our horizon. This disappearance will be possible because both the presence of computers and the data-exchange between them will be so overwhelming that we will not need to set up our personal computer but rather it will ‘adjust itself’ with other computers. Moreover, the data that computer collects will be so complete and complex that there will be no alternative but to rely on computers’ computing power: our expectations will change radically, progressively transferring tasks we used to do ourselves to external devices (a sort of ‘outsourcing’ of data):

When almost every object either contains a computer or can have a tab attached to it, obtaining information will be trivial: ‘Who made that dress? Are there any more in the store? What was the name of the designer of that suit I liked last week?’ The computing environment knows the suit you looked at for a long time last week because it knows both of your locations, and, it can retroactively find the designer’s name even if it did not interest you at the time. (Weiser, 1991: 75)

Such operations of data-mining have become so routine that they are almost invisible. Tapping or typing our personal information into a website are not sources of major concern anymore, nor is the sharing of very personal information, conversations, and even pictures through the web. The web is perceived as a pure medium, as a neutral means of communication that conveys information. It certainly interacts with the information it transports, but it does so in the interest of users, to provide a better service for users. Yet, this presumed neutrality or goodness of the net is not just the result of a marketing strategy (such as Google’s ‘You can make money without doing evil’, ¹³ the ground of their ‘don’t be evil’ informal slogan) but also a convenient way to frame the net as an impalpable medium – as impalpable as a cloud. Use as consumption gives space to an ‘AI’ which is the very act of using/consuming. Nonetheless, despite legal efforts to counteract the illegal collection of data and the promotion of broad and unconditional access to the net (the concept of ‘net neutrality’), we should begin to think of the net less as a mean of communication, and more as an environment (Brighenti, 2010a: 107), as a place where information is collected and stored, put to work and cross-tested. Shifting the framing of the net from a means of communication to an environment makes it possible to illuminate the architecture of invisibility through which devices instantiate their presence in everyday life. Even as an image of lightness and fuzziness – such as the one of a cloud for the ‘cloud computing’ – the presence of a space out of the direct control of the user has been finally shaped and marketed as a good thing for users, since it frees them from locking data into one specific device, instead of storing them in an undefined and reassuring ‘cloud’ (Poier, 2008). Software is not just a medium, and users are not passive recipients but active participants: they are literally making information in the moment when they are interacting with it.

Conforming to rules and practices – such as tapping three times in order to ‘purchase’ a free app on Apple’s devices – is in fact a very efficient way both to control people through the environment and to undermine people’s awareness that they are the information they are looking for (and, by extension, that they are the law that they are obeying). An ‘AI’ is perfected: a necessary and inescapable machine of our desires and aspirations locks us in its dispositions.

When an apple becomes a snake…

I do not want here to depict Apple as the master of evil: users’ status of limited and patterned behaviour should not necessarily be perceived as a limit. The idea that a big corporation is limiting the freedom of people does not accurately reflect the complexity or the facts: for instance, that some users are perfectly happy that Apple checks and tests every app in their marketplace. Such practices of oversight can make users feel reassured and comfortable that, for instance, kids will never access something morally dubious with their phones, ¹⁴ and makes consumers feel comfortable because they rely on Apple’s high quality standards for customer-experience. The constant tracking and checking of the use of apps and the device itself in order to improve them, moreover, makes consumers appear to be the centre of attention, convinced that their apps will work smoothly as they expected, and that they will need to put less and less effort into them. Users beg to own a device that connects to their networks seamlessly, that reduces the uncertainty of everyday life (in a ‘Luhmann’ (1995) way), and that responds as expected. Apple is not the Devil, but it definitely is a Subtle Tempter.

Free software as one of the alternatives

This is the real sacred place, the new temple, the last (temporally speaking) embodiment of the sacer that needs a profanatio: the flattening of our capacity to interact with the world in an original and unmediated way. ¹⁵ In this scenario of uncertainty and highly changing society Richard Stallman’s work stands out. In the 1980s, after the bad experience of seeing his hackers’ community corrupted by what he calls ‘proprietary software’, Stallman, a researcher at MIT, decided to start the Free Software project, aimed to create an OS that was not owned by anybody, but that could be contributed by anyone who had the inclination. In order to protect the collective creation resulting from his and thousands of other programmers’ efforts, the GNU OS was secured with a GNU License, which basically twists the protection proper of copyright against those who want to own exclusively the licensed good (the word-play copyleft gives the idea of this twist). With this play on ‘copyright’, Stallman succeeded in profaning the sacrality of private property and the necessity of protecting it, turning it against itself, and claiming the necessity of protecting common property from the spread of private property using the tools invented to protect private property itself.

Free Software is not like other software, even if it feels very similar to the so-called proprietary software. But users can see the source code of the program – the code that constitutes the program – and in this way, engage with, modify, read, and learn from it, personalize it and copy part of it in another program. Furthermore, even if simply employed as is, maintaining a Free Software OS requires more effort compared to having a MacOSX (Apple’s OS) or Windows (Microsoft’s OS) machine: users are part of the process of creation of their software, and they cannot be simply passive consumers of it.

Yet, GNU – the main Free-Software OS – is a very strange creature, which relies on the tactics (in De Certeau’s [1984] way) of the millions of people using and, especially, misusing it, but is also strategic regarding the broader goals of not giving into the temptation of compromises. Almost embodying the suggestions Machiavelli gave to the Prince (Ch. XIV), Free Software stands between strategy and tactics, perennially training and studying to maintain knowledge of and mastery over the territory.

Free Software – and the stubborn use of the adjective free, even if this often leads to misinterpretations – shows us that what is sacred in our markets is certainties, the ready packages, the off-the-shelves software, which guarantee more free time for users – since software equals ‘doing more with less’ – but which are actually taking freedom away. When an app promises us that it will magically retrieve a piece of information, while not even allowing us to see how this is happening, at the end of the story the balance plays against users. In fact, in the short term we will definitely have the information we were looking for but, at the same time, we will lose the capacity to do things ourselves, being inventive, and knowing our territory. The ‘Free’ of Free Software, then, is not just an adjective referring to the software, but also a verb: Free Software can also then be the software that frees users from the blind acceptance of licenses and limitations that tie creativity to established and not-in-users-control patterns.

Of course, even Free Software is not free from the problems that are peculiar to platforms. Users – and the more Free Software becomes popular, the more likely this is to happen – can approach Free Software OSs and programs as if they were products to consume, as if they were not carrying a cultural and philosophical relevance. Furthermore, Free Software can be perceived as a monstrous structure itself, a participatory democracy where the transformation happens only if there is someone fighting for it, arguing and proposing, modifying and working hard in order to make his/her change an improvement for everybody. Freedom is surely a simple concept, but definitely not an easy one.

Conclusion

It is not, then, just a matter of free or non-free software, but a matter of being or not being controlled by a market; being a user and not just ‘used’. In fact, even the temple of non-free software technology – built on private property – actually is a teeming collection of activities. Controlling platforms and devices of users is just an attempt, performed by producers and owners, to stay on top of millions of different uses of their products. In point of fact, every user employs a gradient of ‘misuse’ of the device itself. Whether intentional or not, this opposition to the designed uses of devices is not simply pushing the edges of power – which will incorporate those misuses, normalizing them, and making them mainstream and marketable – but also and especially pushing the boundaries of ourselves, and our inventiveness and resistance to being settled down by a comfortable and, I would say, narcotizing power of devices. Some may use their cell phones as a flashlight; others use Facebook to mobilize users against Facebook itself; others ‘jailbreak’ their iPhones, so they can install different apps, even those not sold in the Apple’s App Store; others still download and watch TV shows with their phones without paying for them. The countless uses and misuses of platforms and devices are followed by millions of apps, in the attempt performed by other users/programmers to make money out of a niche market. However, in reality, the uses and misuses of devices will hopefully always surpass the market: there always will be someone that does not have the perfect app to find the closest ‘organic vegetable store’, for instance, yet still finds out ways to retrieve that information. This is the play, this is the game around and about thousands of ‘apps’ that we can purchase with our smartphones: to be able to find, create, or convey the right information with the wrong app.

Twitter, for instance, was definitely not invented to foster revolutions, expose tyrannical repression, ¹⁶ or give a tycoon political influence, and YouTube was not necessarily intended to promote teenager singers and starlets. ¹⁷ Yet, the oblique use of those two platforms made both those activities not just possible but even routine (so routine that they are now part of the mainstream, and so becoming somehow ineffective). Still, before the passage from novelty to routine, in that very moment in which something is used in a new and unexpected way, the platform is challenged and ‘misused’, pushing further not only the boundaries of the platform itself but also and especially the mindset of both the innovator and all those who can see the potentiality embedded in a new use of the devices.

This is our time’s profanation, then: to access information and to use the enormous amount of technology we have on hand not in a direct, preformatted, and structured manner, but in an oblique, undetectable way. Resisting the temptation of the ‘there is an app for that’ and using more laterally what we have we will avoid an ‘assolutamente improfanabile’ and bring back to earth, to our world, sacralized objects and platforms. Pushing ourselves over ourselves; over the image of what we are, toward the ‘what we can be’ and the ‘what we can do’. Making the effort to think through instead of simply type in, we are showing that these objects and platforms are all running on another platform over which they can never acquire ownership or dominion: our mind.