*Most stories are spirals*.
Life cycles. It and history do not repeat but they do revisit the same dilemmas. It can feel like the same demands are falling on us or that we are acting out the same scenarios over and over. That’s a function of how our minds work. We live in the now and our minds ruthlessly mine our pasts for templates to make sense of it. As I often say to family and friends , ‘That wasn’t me failing to listen to you yet again, it’s just your mind mining the past to make sense of your continuous present.’ Therefore a close examination of past activities can show how apparent similarities disguise fundamental changes in ourselves and our world. I had cause to do this during a recent crisis of tech faith.
Self-hosting is the practice of running your own digital infrastructure. So, rather than paying Apple or Google to store my files and photos on a server in North Dakota where the National Security Agency can thumb through them, I keep them on a server (AKA ‘a computer’ to non-wankers) in my bedroom where only the Chinese Ministry of State Security can find them. While I’m here – Hi guys! I know it was you ordering dim sum on my Deliveroo account, please stop. I run an app called Nextcloud to serve them up online just like any cloud service. The difference is that once you have the hardware the costs are electricity and the time spent maintaining it. The advantage is that I own and control my data. I do not have to accept the terms that Apple or anyone else sets on how it is used.
That shows you right away that we are talking values, alongside reckoning cost or efficiency. ‘Efficiency’ also being a value.
A ‘server’ is just a computer providing connected services. Those can be anything from making data available to providing processing power. Any old computer can stand muster as a server. It does not need a screen and can be managed remotely. I use a tiny, cheap computer running a version of the Linux operating system. Windows or Mac do just as well.
You can do it for any services you can think of. Fancy your own Ai chatbot, media streaming services or email service? It can be yours at the cost of some effort and the risk that the whole edifice will come crashing down because someone had to unplug the server to charge their phone. Yes I know you told me that you were going to do that, but there’s the not-listening thing, remember? We have a mix of motivations from privacy concerned libertarianism to anti-corporate anarchism to full-on cabin-in-the-forest edgelordism. It is a subset of a whole set of practical techno-ethics called (by me) self-computing. Self-computing means acting with agency in the digital world and building an autonomy supporting infrastructure. An ethical infrastructure. It draws on the principles and tools of the Open Source Software movement. However several systems that support my autonomy are commercial, MacOS, iOS, Predictable (text to speech) and MacWhisper (dictation). It is a mix and match bricolage approach.
Recent disability in the shape of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) caused me to reflect on my computing experience and practice. Surely self hosting is for the able-bodied only? What if anything guided my decisions? Was there ever a philosophical thread running through them?
Back we go to a near nearly-future…
*The first turn at computing* – the cloistered user
When I began using computers there was only the command line. A text prompt like C:\ or :~$ in glowing green or white letters on the screen. The rest of the screen is dark until you do something. You operate the computer with cryptic typed commands. Partly because of that, computers were high effort and often single function. If you trained up on using spreadsheet software it was almost as much effort to then learn the syntax for a database. Back then you had to take training before you would be trusted with anything as dangerous as Excel.
Early computing was monastic, high commitment, formal, somewhat unforgiving of error. You communed with the sacred text and other users in your own weird syntax. The public had little idea about what went on in early cyberspace. Computing was something you went somewhere to do. It did not flatter. It perhaps offered grumbling respect.
*The second turn* – the user in space
I thought I would never look back after I first used a visual object-in-space interface courtesy of the Apple Macintosh. Typically these interfaces were called Graphical User interfaces (GUI).
It promised and eventually gave so much freedom. You were not constrained by a list of commands. Operations are intuitive and metaphorical rather than literal. Functions are discovered more than learned. Documents looked on screen as they appeared in print.
There was a sense of directly manipulating objects on the screen. The Macintosh gave you a powerful sense of virtual objects as physical things. We were introduced to emotion in design quite deliberately. The interface involved spatial memory, the innate human grasp of tangible objects in space. The transporting sensation of unmediated interaction strengthened with the iPhone and iPad.
Suddenly the CLI felt uncanny, alien. Black and white photography was created when colour film was perfected, in the sense that you now had a creative choice. Before then it was just ‘photography’ . After, hours could be spent debating the creative merits of each. Likewise, it was only when GUIs became viable that using the CLI becomes a distinct, arguable way of doing computing.
And argue we did. To many the Mac was a locked down toy. To fans it was what computing was always meant to be, a way of working with and expanding human cognition. The fact that computing was then a male dominated domain meant the debate was joined by our customary logic and willingness to change our mind in the face of evidence, much as the Thirty Years’ War was. Values at work again. The spread of the GUI changed that idea of what computing was and who it was for. Was the user a engineer or a pilot? The computer, tool or device?
Blasting off to the future now!
*Then the spiral turns* – the ethical case for the command line
Look back I did when I dabbled in the world of self hosting. I came to like the stillness and potential of the command line. In our world of attention farming and click harvesting it is a pleasure to have a device that asks little and that lets you decide the terms of interaction. The terminal awaits you quietly. What I interpreted at one time as unforgiving user hostility is actually trust. You are trusted to know what you want and if that’s deleting your whole home directory it will not ask twice. Suddenly the Mac and especially iOS feels like an adult soft-play area. A pretty trap for creativity.
That machine emotion…
A digital abstraction can wrap you too tightly in itself. Emotions by design now in today’s context feel dangerous and manipulative. It is time to rediscover the ethics of the interface. One that invites thought and planning. That resists manipulation.
How so?
– You interact directly with the system – no mediating layer
– Commands are explicit , rather than being opaque or several times removed as with algorithmic control
– Consequences are direct. Usually they come in the form ‘I did this and broke that.’
– Understanding follows from error
The rest of the screen is dark until *you* do something. …
It reintroduces risk into our cosseted curated digital lives. I am a big fan of risk. Without it we stagnate, personally, and as a society, economy and culture. Life has no ‘Undo’ button, unless you’re really rich. Yet there are two senses to risk here. One is ‘redistributed danger’, the other is ‘self-trust. ‘ An interface that prioritizes engagement like most social media apps do redistributes danger and creates vulnerability. Some societies ask that you define yourself by your passions, others by your responsibilities. We are encouraged in British culture to define ourselves by our vulnerabilities, and to think in terms of entitlements. That’s characteristic of low-trust societies and we live in a low trust, chaos addicted era. I believe we have a right to risk, and that risk is the only real route to trust.
The GUI offers abstraction, freedom from complexity. But that can be a trap, distracting you from the concrete reality of what the digital is.
*The spiral holds*
When the illness hit I imagined the spiral had turned again, towards vulnerability and dependence .
Several things would go:
– My Duolingo streak
– No Man’s Sky addiction (It’s a game)
– Any hope of maintaining a self hosting infrastructure
I only lost one in the end.
MND gives you time to anticipate challenges. I found over-anticipation can be a problem. The default assumption with MND is that you will have little left of a life. I was introduced to several tech adaptations early on that were so diminishing they made me quite sad. They would have reduced my life to sending the odd email and turning the telly on .
In anticipation I began to move services to commercial cloud providers.
Then a funny thing happened.
*Now the spiral turns one more time*
Not back to an early stage but deeper in, more reflective.
I realized that only one person could keep my tech life moving. With a little help from my friends.
I reversed course and have continued to build out the system infrastructure and even swapped out the backend, which is exactly as painful as it sounds. Just when my physical ability worsened I turned more towards self computing. It was sheer bloodymindedness in the end. I felt again the pleasure of building a corner of my digital world. I am still capable of risk
What helped?
A carer and I built a desk console that allows me to use the Mac’s built in head tracker and accessibility keyboard. The Mac has strong, discoverable accessibility features. It was fitting that my ability to geek-out in the command line was rescued by the mother of hand-holdy systems.
It was then that I landed on the self-computing idea.
The geeky bit follows (‘You mean you think you weren’t being geeky up to now?’). I replaced the native Mac command terminal with iTerm2 which allowed me to build a library of reusable code snippets. I moved my services from bare metal to Docker containers. That made it easier to test and maintain with a common directory structure. Watchtower automatically updates them. I moved hosting from Apache to Traefik. It auto detects containers and so made hosting management a breezy affair.
Geeky bit ends, or at least dials down a notch .
I learned that disability can be a personal design horizon.
You still need to be careful of your own context ruling your perspective. I have a physical disability. Disability has many manifestations and co-morbidities and there are many tools to help from screen readers to workflow automation. Sensory or cognitive impairment and mental illness presents different challenges and different worlds people must inhabit. That’s what disability is. The world impairment and the rest of society make you inhabit. It reminds me of something heroin users sometimes said. ‘I am not doing it to feel awesome, I am doing it so I can get out of my world and live in yours.’ Cocaine users on the other hand were doing it to feel awesome. We are back to a central quality of self computing, it has to be legible. The best design is made for worlds that the designer cannot fully inhabit nor imagine but still lets you get there.
*Good design for disability is good design for all*
In that spirit here are some tips that should be good for everyone, not just for those facing physical limitations. I give them as my context specific knowledge. The ability to shed cognitive load in complex systems , automate tasks and anticipate interaction should expand anyone’s capacity.
– **Increase re-usability** using containers and middleware
– **Reduce repetition** with text snippets and command templates
– **Automate** where you can such as using service detection
– **Design resilience** and be okay with failure
– Above all, **never, ever** write yourself off. There are already enough people willing to do that.
I have presented a stark picture.
*Most stories are spirals*.
What has MND taught me? That I really hate MND. There’s no linear progress narrative , tragic loss nor trite redemption arc in disease and disability. There is just life’s never-ending thrum. I was born very ill. I became better. Then the spiral turned again. In the face of every other loss it was through that one act of regaining that I learned that I still have a right to risk
## Read on
Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’. _Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience_ 5, no. 1 (1 April 2019): 1–33. [https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607](https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607).
Hendren, Sara. _What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World_. Penguin, 2020.

Ethics of the interface and the right to risk – Self trust, self computing and disability / Dark matters by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0