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Crime, technology and society by Angus Bancroft
 
Ethics of the command line and the right to risk – Self trust, self computing  and disability by design

Ethics of the command line and the right to risk – Self trust, self computing and disability by design

*Most stories are spirals*.
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 in my bedroom where only the Chinese Secret Service can find them. 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. You can do it for any services you can think of. Fancy your own Ai chatbot 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. 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.
Recent disability caused me to reflect on my computing experience and practice. What if anything guided my decisions.
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.
I thought I would never look back after I first used a visual object-in-space interface courtesy of the Apple Macintosh. It promised so much freedom. You were not constrained by a list of commands. 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 transporting sensation of unmediated interaction strengthened with the iPhone and iPad. Blast off to the future!
*Then the spiral turns*
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 feels like an adult soft-play area.
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 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.
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
– 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 it to sending the odd email and turning the telly on .
In anticipation I began to move services to cloud providers.
Then a funny thing happened.
*Now the spiral turns one more time*
Not back to an early stage but deeper.
I realized that only one person could keep my tech life moving.
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.
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. I replaced the native 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
I learned that disability can be a personal design horizon.
*Good design for disability is good design for all*
In that spirit here are some tips that should be good for everyone
– **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**
– Above all, **never, ever** write yourself off
*Most stories are spirals*.
There’s no linear progress narrative , tragic loss nor trite redemption arc. There is just life’s never-ending thrum. I was born very ill. I became better. Then the spiral turned again. I learned that I still have a right to risk

 

 

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