The story ends in the lagoon of Venice. Not a place of the mind but a stretch of water where pink flamingos alternate with the salt marshes, and the soft earth between the reeds swallows everything — from Attila's treasure to the English bombers — not forgetting the monasteries.

At my side, three psychiatric patients, a doctor, and an educator: unlikely oarsmen of a caorlina, the traditional boat of the Serenissima's fishermen. Venetian-style rowing is a therapeutic activity of the psychiatric foundation where I found work after closing the publishing house. Synchrony, movement, equality. You row standing, facing forward. You entrust your weight to the oar, and in return it keeps you from falling.

The lapping of the water blesses you. The book of nature offers itself to your eyes without a single typo: here only the reader can be wrong. I think back to the colophon of a publication whose editor boasted of its accuracy, writing on the last line of the last page that the book contained "no misstakes."

The sky is bright, the panorama vast. Before it reaches your lungs with the snow of the Alps you glimpse on the horizon, the fresh air is a lens that carries you far. You step out of your thoughts and reckon with the real world.

A few months earlier I had been appointed internal Privacy Consultant. The master's course I took to qualify for the role was like a thunderbolt: "accountability," "transparency," "accuracy" — the key concepts of the GDPR — were the very ones I had fought for all my life! They seemed tied to a specific domain — the use of computing tools — but the omnipresence of the regulated systems turned a sectoral norm into a door opening onto a far more general question. Sometimes without its own protagonists realizing it.

With the publishing house closed, I thus returned to writing in a wholly unexpected way. Privacy regulation opened onto computer code; GDPR compliance onto the study of the software that is deployed. In this I was helped, besides a thirty-year passion for the open source world, by the attention to detail I had honed as an editor — the kind that lets you catch the difference between a "mystic lamb" and a "mysterious ram."

Too bad men of letters know nothing of code: they would understand how fascinating this kind of writing is, in which eidos and telos, appearance and purpose, seem to touch as in a Michelangelo fresco. Computer language has neither the ambiguity nor the polysemy that allow the sophist to distort words and misrepresent intentions in order to manipulate minds — as I had seen the delegates at Tillier and the reviewers of Strage di Stato do. It does what it says, and says what it does: its "doing" can deceive only when its "saying" is hidden, as happens in closed-source systems. It is the only writing in which duplicity lies not in the word but in its subtraction.

And what of the programmers? If they knew philosophy, they would understand that every technical choice has ethical implications, that everyday gestures — using the keyboard instead of the mouse — have cognitive implications, and that the human relationship with the machine — as pilot or as passenger — has fundamental political implications. Every time a programmer makes a mechanism needlessly complex and hands its reins to the algorithm, he enslaves men to the tool instead of making it more convenient.

And what of the jurists — those to whom we owe the birth of privacy legislation, from Google Spain to Schrems II? They are the first to fight opacity in court, and yet their own systems remain closed, bearers of the very opacity they fight.

Caught up in the whirlwind of these thoughts, finding myself in the curious position of one who has crossed the contiguous yet separate worlds of culture, technology, and law, I asked myself: what can I do, now, to "unify the front"? To begin from below, to provide a tool that is, in everyday life, the answer to a concrete problem — the predation of our data by mainstream operating systems — and the possible example of a humanistic approach to computing, in order to refuse the choice between being smart or being Luddite. And so, between one stroke and the next, dropQbsd was born: like a bottle cast into the sea, to whoever will gather it and contribute to developing a system of compartmentalization without virtualization, a few thousand lines, auditable in an afternoon, grounded in the idea that complexity is the enemy of security.

But code is not enough. Just as one oar is not enough in a Venetian caorlina. We must learn to row together — philosophers, programmers, jurists, users. For the goal is not the choice of a means or a software, but the construction of a transversal awareness, at once philosophical, technical, and juridical: if computing has become the battlefield on which our freedom is at stake, the only way to win it is this.

What is culture for, I asked myself at the beginning. To understand where the enemy is, and how to fight it.