Remembering Peter Eckersley
Toby Ord
A eulogy for Peter Eckersley
Delivered at his official memorial service
Internet Archive, San Francisco, 4 March 2023
Twenty-six years ago, I sat down in an underground room at Melbourne University. A hall of identical computers. Next to me was a stylish young man with this on his screen:
I couldn’t believe it. My screen was all grey, with a single blue window with white text.
“How did you get it to look like that?” I asked.
“Well, you just need to ‘gvim .fvwm2rc’,” he replied.
“What?”
“No problem, I’ll just send you all my config files and set you up…”
And that was the beginning of a long friendship…
I still love his colour choices. So enduringly Peter. The decadence of the purple and gold, on a green silk waistcoat-ish background. I eventually changed my own background to Waterhouse's Lady of Shallot and sampled colours from her candles and silks for my text and accents. When we got our own websites, they each inherited our unix colour schemes, and our digital identities forked off from that meeting into our own directions, with traces still visible and ongoing…
I was in my first year, and Peter his second. Over our undergraduate years, our friendship grew.
Here is my first ever photo of Peter (on the right) in 1998:
After a protest march, we had pitched tents in the middle of the most sacred quad at Melbourne University and were in a student politics meeting under the camellia trees at midnight.
Here’s a more typical shot in 2000, at my 21st.
We shared a deep thirst for ideas and a taste for wonder. We would talk about science and technology, about ethics and the nature of reality late, late into the night.
Indeed, while he was chiefly a technologist, he is among the people who have thought the deepest about the long term fate of a universe shaped by intelligence and directed by moral values — about the limits of what we could achieve over the aeons ahead. And he was a natural philosopher too, with original contributions on the paradoxes at the heart of population ethics. Over the years, we talked about the big picture questions facing humanity, about global poverty and existential risk, and the ideas that would become effective altruism. When I started Giving What We Can in 2009, he was one of 23 founding members, making a lifelong pledge to donate a tenth of his income to the most cost-effective charities he could find. He wrote:
"For me, taking a pledge to give is exciting. I've long been persuaded that it would be better to use a good portion of my income to support very effective aid projects, but it's hard to know what they are, and often easier to spend money on luxuries that in the end aren't particularly necessary for happiness. A pledge is a way to ensure that I do what I already wanted to, a way to meet a community of people who think the same way, and a way to work together on finding the most effective projects to contribute to."
Indeed he continues to guide my vision of effective altruism. Last week I ended my keynote talk with a slide about the importance of good character for all of us dedicated to helping others as much as we can. The picture I painted of integrity and earnestness was a picture of Peter.
We also shared an enduring love of beauty. I never found out exactly the form his ideal future might take. But it would be a place of freedom, and wonder, and friends. And beauty everywhere.
In 2003 I left Melbourne to go to the dreaming spires of Oxford and study philosophy. He stayed in Melbourne, transferring from a PhD in Computer Science to one in Law — trying to understand how to refashion an economic system based on physical goods to one fit for virtual goods — songs and stories and ideas that once created can be copied freely. A few years later, he got his dream job offer, from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, in faraway San Francisco.
Little did he know, but it would become his home. He would find a subculture within it that was like a distillation of the one he moved in in Melbourne. Let me share his first thoughts on San Francisco:
Hi guys,
I've been in San Francisco a week, and it's definitely time for an email of stories.
I'm sitting on a "sidewalk" as I write this, on a little timber bench with a coffee and a gorgeous bamboo plant next to me (photo attached :). There's a corset shop next door. As soon as I opened my laptop, I got roped into a conversation with a bunch of geeks -- one of them was asking for advice about Internet regulation in Japan; another worked for Google and was asking me to let them keep their files on everybody. This city is completely packed with nerds; random conversations with them seem to be a regular occurrence.
Working at EFF is remarkable. The organisation is a nerve center for more lawsuits than you could sensibly imagine. Many -- but not all -- of these are a little depressing. Except when they sue purple dinosaurs. My first week has been very busy, but I don't yet have a sense of how normal this is. Aside from numerous administrative diversions, I've been busy writing a white paper on how to keep your web search history private (a surprisingly hard thing to do). The other three technical staff will be away next week -- go and google Burning Man -- so I'm going to find out if I can administer and support the EFF's computer infrastructure too.
The bike culture here is definitely stronger than in Melbourne. Especially where I work, there are bikes everywhere. There also seems to be way more bike Bling. There's this strange subcultural species of people known as "hipsters". Bicycle fashion is an important part of this. Often, they're on fixies, but not always. See, for example, the attached photo of a vague-seeming girl cruising around on a $5,000 bicycle made of bamboo and carbon fibre.
…
I haven't found a house yet. It's back-to-school season, and judging from what I saw at an open house this afternoon, I might not find one for a few weeks. Fortunately, I can continue to sleep in Seth's incredibly precarious spare loft. Getting out of bed in the morning involves hopping onto an a free-standing step ladder. It wakes you up!
Anyway, I'm going to go and explore the corsetry. I'm missing you all. I'll try and set up a website somewhere so that I'm not filling your inboxes with my excessive verbosity (speaking of which, I haven't actually attached any photos but you can see them at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pde/pics/sf/ ).
Let me know what's happening in Melbourne...
P.
Sadly his ‘attached’ pictures are lost to bit rot, but I was looking through all my old photos, and found this — a photo of Peter I took five years later which (given the bamboo and corset shop) must be the exact spot he was sitting when he wrote his email.
We kept up over the decades, with trips back and forth between our new cities. Here he is in 2008:
And here are the two of us after we cycled up to Coit tower:
Here he is in 2011, looking out over his adopted home:
It was only after his death that I got a glimmer of just how much he did for the internet over his sixteen years in San Francisco — especially privacy and security. It was only then that I really reflected on how wildly important the internet is, yet how there is no-one whose responsibility it is to keep it going, and to improve it. It is like we are at sea on a great old sailing ship. But there is no captain, and no owner. Peter, is one of a few people who didn’t stand idly by, but stood up and took on the responsibility. We couldn’t even take the ship in to dock, so Peter and others at the EFF took on the crazy, yet essential, task of repairing and rebuilding it at sea…
Peter loved forming connections with people. It was only in the outpouring of emotion after his death that I realised how great a part of his life that was. It was a flood of love for him so strong that for a shining moment even Twitter was a place of beauty and wonder.
And I saw how he had made such strong connections with so many people. A node in a network with thousands of strands radiating out from him. I think he measured his wealth in friends, and was a friend-millionaire. But that wasn’t enough. He was too good a computer scientist to be happy with a network like that. It was too brittle, too vulnerable. So he set about making connections between all those other nodes — connecting people who didn’t know they needed each other.
We’re now a network with a missing node at its centre. But we haven’t fallen apart. Because of what he started, there are hundreds of cross-linking paths between us. And we’re not done. Even with a missing node, one can bridge the gap. I’ve only been back here a week, and there are so many conversations with strangers, where my spidey senses tingled and I’ve stopped and asked “Did you know Peter?” — and often they did. And just like that, a connection formed.
So this grand overarching project of Peter’s life is not done. But now it’s up to us to make our own introductions to each other, to fill out this grand network, to find those he would have found for us.
And what better way could there be to honour him?
4 March 2023