7.2 Freedom of Speech, with a Detour via Freedom to Code
In the initial months of my fieldwork, Yassine, from SAT-Amikaro, was the only Esperantist I had met in Paris who was below 30 years old. Upon joining the Facebook group JEFO-aktivularo/Membres actifs d'Esperanto-jeunes, of the French Esperanto Youth Organisation (here- after JEFO), I stumbled upon a largely inactive 30-member group. Only one person, Cedric, occasionally posted there, alternatively in French and Esperanto, with little or no engagement of other group members. For a while, this made me question Esperantujo's fuss about digital media, as I could not find the much-heralded duolinganoj, the offsprings of Duolingo, members of the first generation of—borrowing Richard Rogers' expression (2013)—natively digital Esperanto speakers.
A mistake frequently present in ethnographers' anecdotes, it took me some time to realise that I was looking for duolinganoj in the wrong place. Since JEFO was an association of fee-paying members, the asso- ciations online presence mirrored its inactivity. When Cedric posted on the Facebook group about his intent to organise a JEFO annual general meeting in November 2016, I sent him a private message in Esperanto, to introduce myself. Excited about having come across a foreign Esperan- tist also living in Paris, he suggested we met. After asking for my mobile phone number, he soon called me on Telegram. Like most conversations we came to have, this one started in Esperanto and soon switched to French when he became chattier.
When I first met Cedric, in a busy bar in Paris' Quartier Latin— known for its lively student life on the left bank of the Seine—he explained to me that JEFO and its Facebook group had been dormant lately, but that there was a group of young Esperantists in Paris attending weekly Esperanto classes at the prestigious Ecole normale superieure (ENS). Cedric himself was enrolled in the Masters in Mathematics at the ENS. Just as Cedric, there were twelve other postgraduate students, mostly from Mathematics and Physics, attending the optional Esperanto module at that university. In his words, 'you know, Esperanto is a logical language, and this kind of thing attracts mathematicians and physicists. Once they start learning it, they get very enthusiastic'.
After I began attending those Esperanto classes, Cedric and his coursemates soon introduced me to their friends—in the actual and virtual worlds—and invited me to join soirees in the Quartier Latin, language exchange meetings at the Denfert-Rochereaus Cafe Polyglotte and informal gatherings at their flats. Most importantly, they added me to closed and secret groups on Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram. These were the spaces where numerous face-to-face meetings were arranged and where these young Esperantists chatted (not necessarily in Esperanto) about their common interests. For the rest of my stay in Paris, doing ethnography also entailed scrolling down group chats and text conversa- tions on my phone more than my fingers could handle. Through such media, I encountered actors who had by then been nearly absent from my research: young people.
One of the most active young Parisians in Esperantujo was Maxime. For being more interested in using the language online than offline, he called my attention to certain core aspects of such online settings. A student in his early twenties living south of Paris, Maxime's narrative of encountering the language resonates with those of several other young French-based Esperantists:
I found out about Esperanto when I was installing Open Office on my computer, around 2006. When I had to choose a language for it, I noticed that there was Esperanto, right after English on the list in alphabetical order. My father was next to me when I saw that and told me what Esperanto was. I found that interesting, kept that in mind and, some time later, decided to study it. I learned it online, and then I attended a meeting at Esperanto-France's headquarters, but found people there too old and quite boring. So, I'm still interested in Esperanto, but I use it mainly online, on Telegram, Mastodon, Twitter, Reddit and Medium.
Without having ever been a member of any Esperanto association, Maxime was rather active in the online enactments of Esperantujo through an alias. He became known for activities that resonated with his political stances: he refused to use Facebook, Instagram and What- sApp due to concerns over data privacy and due to his objection to using commercial software and platforms running on proprietary software code. For the same reason, he preferred Open Office and Linux over Microsoft Office and Windows.
His wide network of Esperantist friends and followers on social media came as a result of his meme production in the language, as well as his engagement with free and open-source software. It is worthy noting that, in supporting open-source software, he practised what he preached: much of his online activity referred to coordinating efforts to trans- late software and information into Esperanto and other languages. This included subtitling YouTube videos, making software more user-friendly, and information, more accessible to people from different linguistic backgrounds or with communication disabilities. He was also a regular contributor to Vikipedio and frequently encouraged Esperantists to translate articles from Wikipedias in other languages. Besides, he played a key role in translating the interfaces of Facebook (where he deleted his profile immediately after concluding this task), Telegram, Mozilla Firefox and Apache OpenOffice into Esperanto while collaborating in the devel- opment of an open-source Esperanto keyboard app for mobile phones, containing the diacritics not present in most alphanumeric keyboards. As expected, most of his laptop and mobile phone interfaces were in Esperanto—which he often described as a 'more welcoming', 'tolerant' and 'open-source language'.
Thinking about software licenses and copyright, software like Skype, Windows and WhatsApp are called proprietary software. Following a business model, proprietary software are protected under intellectual property law, which entitles their owners and developers to charge for the software's use and to restrict access to the software's source code. Hence, drawing on licenses that wield the rights to exclude and control (Coleman 2013: 1—2), the companies that develop these products retain the rights to commercialise, use and modify them. By contrast, free and open-source software have fewer restrictions regarding use and develop- ment: their source code is usually given away together with the software, which makes the latter more transparent and accessible. Since the code is the roadmap to the functioning of the software, users of open- source have some freedom to study, share and modify the code, thus customising and co-developing the software.