The Family Guide to Digital Freedom

What does digital mean?

A digit is a single character in a numbering system. Internally, computers can generate and recognize only two states: presence or absence of a small electric charge. Consequently, they can only represent two digits, 1 or 0, just like humans would be forced to do if they only had one finger per hand.

Instructions or information are called digital when they are translated into long series of ones and zeroes, that is the only sequences of digits that a computer can understand, store and process.

If the story ended here, it would be mere technology, and most people could just stop reading this book and forget about the whole thing. The revolutionary and dangerous part of the story is the fact that today practically everything can already be expressed in digital format: music, banking transactions, movies, Census records, computer programs, Social Security numbers, whole books, fingerprints...

This has already started to turn your whole life upside down for two
reasons. If every service or information is represented in the same way (long sequences of digits, called files) everything can be also stored or transmitted in the same way.

This is a much, much bigger deal than it would seem at first glance. Just a few years ago, preserving or sending a friend exact copies of one's letters, music in vinyl albums, pictures or "devices to create neat printed reports" was still a real hassle, and a really expensive one too. One would have to photocopy or rewrite all the letters, buy other albums, order reprints of all pictures and buy another typewriter. Vinyl albums couldn't store pictures and camera films couldn't store songs.

Today, if both you and your friend own a computer, you just have to copy all your letter files, your music files, your pictures files and the files constituting your word processing program onto one CD: since all those things are digital, they can be stored in the same way. With a fast Internet connection the CD isn't even needed: since digits are represented with electric charges, they can directly travel along wires or radio channels.

The other reason why digital technology is a real (sometimes dangerous)
revolution is, again, that the digits 1 and 0 correspond to presence or absence of a small electric charge. The world is absurdly full of such charges, and they are all exactly equal to each other: a digital "object" can be copied endless times, and each copy will be just as good and as original as the first one. This applies also to false documents, of course.

This is the main reason why this book is so important: since almost everything you do can be digitized and whatever is digital is generated, distributed or controlled through software, it is very dangerous to ignore how software and digital information is created and controlled.

So, how much of my own life is digital?

It turns out that a lot of your life is already digital or digitally managed, even if you never use a computer. Some things are (at least apparently) controlled by you, some by others, but there are dangers in both cases. Here are some examples.

Do I still own my own memories and feelings?

Today, thanks to computers, many of us can save, enjoy and share much more of our lives and much more easily, than our parents and grandparents could.
Sometimes this already happens online with picture galleries, social bookmarking or online diaries.

The truth is that all this, unless it's done in the right way, is a very
fragile illusion, and isn't even yours. Let's assume that you finally find in your attic, at the bottom of that big trunk, the original floppy disks of your PhD thesis written no more than ten years ago, and you want to print them again for old times sake. Can you? Very probably not. Do you at least know why?

Many of us still have handwritten letters or old photographs from grandparents or from their own infancy. It is really easy, albeit time-consuming, to create digital copies with a computer and a scanner, but such copies may last much less longer than the originals: viruses, scratched CD-roms not usable anymore, computer crashes, incompatibility with next year's DVD player or software... Do you want to cope with this? Can you really call this progress?

What if you cannot use your pictures or certificates because the software to
display them has disappeared? They're not yours then, nor is your life. The same applies to anything that you stored digitally with a secret code whose key is only known by somebody else, something that still happens with most office documents.

Sadly, all this also happens in the academic world, which at least ideally
should be fighting to the death any attempt to destroy and forget information. Just a few years ago, technical papers and theses were almost always available in top quality digital formats that everybody could read from almost any computing environment. Today, you often have to have the same presentation or word processing software of your professor, or just resort to photocopies. The same applies to availability of course material online, e-learning and such.

It's not just your diary, it's your peace of mind

You might just conclude that all this is not such a big deal and forget the
whole thing, but that would be a big mistake.

What if you are being audited by the Tax Office and the vanished files
contained tax relevant information, for example? Think when the same thing
happens to all the other official documents that define your and your
children's life. School and medical records, property certificates, pension
payments, law texts, contracts, SAT procedures: all these things have already been digitized, or will be as soon as possible because it is so much easier and economical, for the reasons explained at the beginning of this chapter.

This is the first thing to know: your life is getting more and more digital every day, whether you are still a toddler or have already retired to some tropical island. As with any other really great thing, it can be very good or very bad. While there is no need to become a programmer, it is essential to understand how this happens, and how it must work to your advantage.