The Thin Client

A philosophical enquiry.

I.

Wikipedia: “The term thin client was coined in 1993 by Tim Negris, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle Corp., while working with company founder Larry Ellison on the launch of Oracle 7. At the time, Oracle wished to differentiate their server oriented software from Microsoft’s desktop oriented products. Ellison subsequently popularized Negris’ buzzword with frequent use in his speeches and interviews about Oracle products.”

In the rubric of network architecture, there are thin clients and there are fat clients.

Whether a client — an end user’s hardware and software combined — is thin or fat depends on how much computing and storage happens on the client side as opposed to the server side.

A standard desktop computer, which only occasionally needs to connect to the Internet and works pretty well without doing so, is a fat client. A Chromebook, which gives you little more than web browser, is a thin client, and can be made even thinner. When used to access a remote desktop, a Chromebook — or any other computer — becomes a mere window into another computer, or a “zero client.”

II.

Thesis: Clients started thin, got fat, and are thinning down again.

When computers where huge and server-sized, clients were invariably thin. “Terminals” they were called. These portals allowed access to computing power. The advent of the personal computer, spurred by exponential increases in RAM and storage capacity, ushered in the era of the fat client. “Thin client,” then, is a retronym, a name for something that did not previously need a name because it was once the entirety of an undivided category. The classic retronym is “landline.” Before mobile phones, there were no landlines, just phone lines. Before fat clients, all clients were thin.

The peak of fat clientism was achieved in the summer of 2001, right before Napster shutdown. This was the last moment when most people believed there was a distinction between their computers and the network. That was why they needed larger and larger hard drives on which to horde stolen MP3s. There was a shortsighted sense, the intuition of all looters perhaps, that this could not go on forever and you’d better grab as much as you could.

You don’t hear people brag about how many gigs of music they have anymore. They have more music, as in they have access to more music — via Spotify, YouTube — but they actually have less. Their clients, particularly their phones, are thinner.

When preparing their Kaitlyn Jenner cover, Vanity Fair famously disconnected the computer they were using from the Internet, a show of fat client revanchism that serves to confirm that ours is a thin client age.

III.

Question: What kind of clients are we? Are we thin or fat?

If you’re Kierkegaard, you might say that we are thin clients who have mistaken ourselves for fat clients and are, therefore, in despair.

For Nietzsche, we are self-sufficient fat clients who have been tricked into believing we are thin.

Hegel would observe that history is the unfolding of a network’s self-awareness as it assigns and re-assigns properties to the server and the client, respectively — like water poured back and forth between two glasses — until it realizes there is no difference between the two. The end of history.

But we’re not there yet.

IV.

Antinomies: We do not, at the moment, have a consensus story about whether individual human consciousnesses are thin clients or fat clients. Our interpretation of cases —vis-à-vis clientism — fluctuates based on other beliefs.

For conservatives, Ohio State assailant Abdul Razak Ali Artan is a thin client, a perfectly functioning instance of the ISIS program. For liberals, he is fat — a lone and perhaps defective actor. With Pizzagate shooter Edgar Maddison Welch, it’s the reverse. Liberals think he is a thin client — a predictable outcome of a malicious server — while conservatives see an aberration.

Believing that we are thin or fat clients does not line up neatly with our politics — though one can imagine that it might, or that it has at various times.

It is tempting, for example, to think that conservatives have always been fat clientists — all about independence and self-reliance — whereas liberals have regularly been thin clientists, concerned with interdependency. But what then of Edmund Burke and the Jacobins? Here, Burke is a thin clientist, asking where legitimacy can possibly come from once you’ve unplugged from the sovereign. One could respond that the revolutionaries were thin clientists as well. They just wanted to switch servers and refactor the code. Why else rename the months and introduce an alternate supreme being?

V.

Evidence: The human organism is born thin, attains a certain fatness (or so it believes), then returns to thinness on its way to non-existence. (I say this in direct contradiction to Rousseau’s saying that, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” One’s attitude toward this latter axiom might be a better test for political bent, but I take it as obvious that Rousseau’s claim is biologically — and therefore philosophically — ridiculous. Man is born dependent and obtains any freedom he has only through society.)

Computing has followed the same trajectory. Thin-fat-thin. Like the prosperity of the 1950s, many of us grew up at a time when fat clientism seemed the inevitable future — the nature of things — when in fact it was a temporary anomaly.

Following these examples, one might argue that our long period of naïve fat clientism — initiated by capitalism and Nietzsche’s “death of god” — is bound to come to an end, or is perhaps now ending as we speak.

VI.

Despair: Once clients go fat, it is hard to go thin. There will be resistance. It is hard, even, to recognize that there is a problem. Kierkegaard’s entire corpus is dedicated to this dilemma, to identifying the ways in which we take our existence to be independent and live in flight from our total dependence — that is to say, in despair.

Thin clientism is unpopular, even if it best describes reality. The best strategy, at once the most effective and the most cynical, would then be to recognize that citizens’ clients are thin — sensitive to the smallest changes on their networks — but flatter them that they are fat.

This is good marketing. This is good platform evangelism. This is good surveillance and — we now see — good politics. There is a reason, in science fiction, that we don’t tell the robots who they are.

VII.

Hope: Embracing our nature as thin clients is possible, even if it has been utterly abandoned and perverted by its traditional American advocates.

There have been zero clients, those who have turned their back on fear and division and embraced love. There is a great American tradition of this — in fact — and if we have turned our back on it, it is not because we resent its love, but its authority, not realizing — until now?— that despair is the harshest tyrant.