---=== Alexandria ===---
1/2
About thirty years ago, two men created the World Wide Web.
Only one of them cared about spiders.
This evening, I'm thinking of him: Robert Cailliau.
"Melancholy is just fervor gone by."
André Gide, in " The Fruits of the Earth".
Alexandria. Who knows what it was about, thirty-one years ago?
We don't know whether it was day or night, winter or summer, whether it was 47 B.C., 273 A.D., the 4th century, or even 642, when the fire broke out in the Library of Alexandria, perhaps starting in the warehouses on the harbour, or in the zoological gardens, or in one of the covered promenades, or all at once, with the complex suddenly surrounded by flames as high as gargantuan lighthouses, indomitable, identical to those of a forest fire, the same fury, the same totalitarian gluttony, as long as they could dwindle, raze, make disappear, before disappearing themselves. The act of eating both kept them alive and precipitated their own extinction. As in the French film "La Grande Bouffe": a feast that kills.
Who, from his boat off Alexandria, or in ambush in front of Poseidon's temple, or on the heights of the royal palace, contemplated the devastation, who therefore rejoiced, his face lit up by the glow of the inferno, at the massive destruction of tens of thousands of parchments, most of them in Greek, books by the master Aristotle, astronomical and medical precisions, works by the greatest mathematicians, all charred in a flash in the alcoves where they were nestled?
Who then applauded the massacre of almost all the literature of antiquity in one place - a kind of living encyclopedia the size of a palace, as intended by its first builder, the Egyptian king Ptolemy I?
Who was the chief arsonist?
Perhaps Julius Caesar, who came with his fleet to support the very young Cleopatra VII in her fight against Ptolemy XIII. Perhaps the Christian emperor Theodosius, who could no longer bear the sight of pagan writings.
Perhaps the Caliph Omar, after having ordered his general Amr Ibn al-As to sack the library, except for certain works which ended up in the burning stoves of Alexandria's public baths to keep the water temperature warm.
We don't know if it was day or night, but, in the year 642 at the latest, a wonder collapsed.
What we do know is the exact date: September 27, 2013.
On that day, at CERN, in the birthplace of the Web, Robert Cailliau gave a gloomy speech, his final lap before his “retirement” and his vow of silence, which he has rarely broken since. And he made no secret of his intentions: “I'm going to be pretty negative right to the end”.
It was the beginning of a litany of grievances. He took aim at the near-impossibility, for the average person, of easily editing a website; at the mega-platforms Facebook or Twitter, centralized, unique and closed services, beyond the control of users, which enclose the surfer whereas the Web was designed to be an infinite wander; to the proliferation of applications, which are contrary to Tim Berners-Lee's and his own philosophy, since they handcuff mobile users to a particular brand, outside the Web; to programming languages, which led to syntactic horrors; to the cloud, ironically called "le nuage" in french, in which we give away our secrets while behind the cloud wags the tail of the Google devil (at this point, he projected onto the screen a drawing of a cloud and the devil's tail, which made the few onlookers laugh); to the vicious triangle linking site author, reader and advertiser, whereby it's not the reader who is the customer, but the advertiser: everything is designed for the latter, with a system organized according to a unilateral contract, with the surfer only able to click on “I accept the conditions of use to the impossibility of leaving certain platforms - and he cited the example of Skype, from which he tried to withdraw, in vain :
“I took my case to France's CNIL (National Commission of Computing & Freedoms implied), which told me: “We can't do anything, because Skype is based in Luxembourg”. I hired a Luxembourg lawyer, spent a lot of money, and got nowhere.
We don't have an international legal framework like we have for maritime and air transport. With all these social sites, it's like in the Bible: apostasy is punishable by death.”
Reaching the end of his indictment, Robert Cailliau looked down, took a step back on his podium and paused. Then, in a tone this time devoid of the slightest hint of sarcasm, he said:
“Me, I've always dreamed of a republic of responsible citizens, but where is it?
The Web giants are imperialists, barely distinguishable from totalitarian states, who decide what is acceptable and what is not. The Web is Facebook and commercial, nothing else. I don't want to go there anymore.”