The Woman Who Cleaned Up Fortune
In the mid-90s, the Unix program fortune had a big problem. It was a simple quote-generator for the command line. You could get a classic aphorism, a Star Trek quote, or programming wisdom. But it was also a product of its time. The database had many entries that were morbidly prejudiced. Fortune was and is not one single program. It is a constellation or tradition of "fortune cookie" programs across Unix, BSD, and Linux. Some operating systems even shipped with a version. While some efforts had been made in some versions, nobody had seriously addressed the content problem until Amy A. Lewis.
My college roommate got me into using the fortune program. I had installed Debian for the first time on a struggling Toshiba Satellite. He typed "fortune | cowsay" into the terminal. An ASCII art cow appeared, repeating whatever fortune had pulled. It was a small moment of delight. He also warned about something: that many computer systems furtively had quotes from WW2 era fascists due to the inclusion of this program. This horrified me to learn. Homebrew’s own detail page on it describes the program as “infamous”.
In 1995, Amy Lewis reorganized the entire fortune database. She split it into two sets: a general one and an offensive one. She added code so system owners could decide whether to install the second set. She flagged entries citing the reason the items were flagged for hate. If you want to read her reasoning yourself, I'd recommend the file "Offensive" she authored. You can find this in the Homebrew package or in any of the other versions I've linked below
Amy’s work is an example in moral necessity and courage in the computer science field. The Algorithmic Justice League, founded by Dr. Joy Buolamwini, works to reduce harm and bias in computing systems. One of its main principles is meaningful transparency. People should know how a system works so they can choose whether to use it. This is harm reduction in computing. I think Amy Lewis' efforts here parallel the work AJL is working with modern, more complex systems. With the level of convolution in artificial intelligence models, it is hard to review the millions of vectors like the text files in fortune. I would recommend the resource Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, which shows how systems reflect the values of their maintainers.
Today you can still install fortune from Homebrew, Snapcraft, and apt repositories. Thanks to Amy, I still run fortune on my computer when I need a little inspiration.
Links and Sources
UNC Historic Linux Archive (Amy Lewis’s 1996 version): https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu/Sep-29-1996/games/
Fortune program historical reconstruction (GitHub): https://github.com/ralismark/fortune-history
Fortune formula for Homebrew: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/fortune
Fortune Snapcraft package: https://snapcraft.io/install/fortune-cm/debian
Fortune-mod Debian package: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fortune-mod
Suggested Further Reading
Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Algorithmic Justice League: https://www.ajl.org/