A Manifesto for Holistic Computing

Introduction

y philosophy of computing takes inspiration, and refinement from a number of different things. From my religious value, personal philosophy, morals, interests, ect. Also those external factors in the form of people such as Luke Smith,and organizations like GNU, suckless, and the Free Software Foundation. I am honored to have had such examples in my path that display a unyielding fidelity toward their cause. It inspired my to continually pursure a greater skillset to do so myself, and not waste time while doing so.

Autonomy

Autonomy is the only form of certainty, and the narrowist path to strict adherance of one's morals. As someone who appraoches life from a mostly rational perspetive I find the more variables under my control the better. It makes for much simpler, and accurate prediction of an outcome. Likewise the more you surrender things to the control of outside forces the more uncertain life is bound to become. I find it all the more reason to not surrender control to malicious forces that are against me, and everything I stand for. It's due to these principles I am tending my life in a direction of building autonomy. In the digital world this means reliance of Free Software. To be clear I do not only use Free Software at the current point in time. However for the few non-fsf alternatives I use they follow some simple rules of open standards allowing me to exit their platform and export my data to another free alternative. A good example of this in obsidian which uses markdown as a format allowing me if the need ever arised to transfer to a platform such as logseq in miniutes. Far from something of the likes of apple notes.

Community

The best part of Open Source is easily the people. A collective of people who work for no monetary profit but the collective profit of a private, and free world.

Privacy

People tend to obfuscate the definition of privacy, and even further the need for it. Privacy is not about doing extra for the sake of it. It is about the protection of fundamental rights. Rights that can, and will be enroached upon when people take ignorant stances such as "I have nothing to hide anyway", or are convinced into believing that the evergrowing attack on privacy is that specifically aimed at catching terrorists, criminals, ect.

Even in the simple act of using mass surveilance to catch criminals before the act we run into a ethical dilema. You take away one's free agency to make the right choice when you pursecute them on the prediction of a choice they have not made. Furthermore what is the plain defintion of a criminal? What if in the future it is considered terrorism to

Security

Security now a days is not only about protecting a account against outisde forces trying to gain access to your data, but in additon the protection of such data from a persons fickly memory, and real life variability. It is also freqeuntly unhelpful with the ever increasing reliance on mobile authenticators. Beyond the basic issues there are those of susceptibility to software attacks, and physical security. For general security of online accounts my process was quite simple, and replicable. I exported my passwords from all google accounts into .csv format. I then wrote a short script to combine all the files into a master .csv, organize them in alphabetical order, and create a .txt file to two seperate sections. One of duplicate platforms, and another of duplicate account information. Finally it also create a password.txt to list each password and the amount of times it was used total, and for which accounts. In the meantime I uploaded these to proton password manager. I am currently still deliberating rather the switch to KeyPassXC is necessary or if I am to stay with proton. In the meanwhile my work is in the minimization of my digital footprint through SayMine.

Hardware Computing

Free Software

Efficient Communicative Programming

@article{yotam2026a-manifesto-for-holistic-computing,
  title   = "A Manifesto for Holistic Computing",
  author  = "Yotam, Kris",
  journal = "krisyotam.com",
  year    = "2026",
  month   = "Apr",
  url     = "https://krisyotam.com/blog/technology/a-manifesto-for-holistic-computing"
}