The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever.
More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before.
Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly).
The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in.
Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are internet oriented.
Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political.
> Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political.
If you want to work for an open internet, this is the key thing. For open to be the default, it should be dramatically easier to implement a new thing using p2p or on a blockchain than with centralized services.
Not just easier, but preferable. When big companies (or rather new companies that can get big, as the old ones probably won't change anyway) start preferring P2P infrastructure to conduct their business and offer their services, we'll know there's no going back from a decentralized Internet.
> Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever.
How do you figure? There are probably more money lost from patent lawsuits or extortion than even before now. Also, didn't software patents only become a thing in the 90's? And soon we're going to have to deal with gene patents and all sort of things like that, as the gene editing revolution begins.
The TV analogy is more about people are not using internet but only Facebook and Google. I think it's more that way than the consuming / creating angle.
The trick with reddit is to carefully curate your subreddit list and continually clean house as the communities evolve (usually in a negative direction) over time. It's a lot of work, and the same goes for most other community-driven sites. My Facebook feed is garbage because I don't use it often enough to train the algorithm (or maybe the algorithm just sucks). My YouTube front page is only passable because I've taken the time to subscribe to a handful of channels and had made heavy use of the old (non-Spotify-only) Last.fm to listen to music I like on there. My Google+ home page consists of two people's posts plus spam because I haven't spent time managing my network. And so on.
Now that the web has more content creators than ever we also need better recommendation, search, and filtering tools. Hell, even though it's heavily moderated I still wish I could teach Hacker News not to show me the 50% of articles on here that I have zero interest in.
It's not the content that's the problem, it's the systems we use to find and consume it. Somebody wants to look at all those memes, it's just not you or I.
If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from native to "the web".
But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look at the better performance and usability of apps, they also got real substance behind them.
The web has done more to centralise computing and take it out of the hands of ordinary people than any other technology. People don't even control their own data anymore, never mind having control over the software they run.
The web has done more to decentralize networked computing than any other technology, because the web is basically decentralized. Only the agreements (IETF and W3C) are somewhat centralized, but even then we are seeing a proliferation of REST APIs to encourage decentralized data management. These usually aren't exactly "RESTful" of course because we are so busy with our own startups we aren't really working towards interop as a priority.
The only inherent reason we have popular centralized services is that there is limited economic incentives of funding or adhering to a decentralized social (or business, or health, ...) network standard - the Web would support it, but we've got to WANT to build the agreements to make it work.
Tl;dr the Read side of the web is decentralized; the Write Side of the Web is currently an oligarchy but not permanently so.
The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live.
Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols.
You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other. At that point using HTTP makes no sense either, and users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it. Web technologies are not really useful for users-talking-to-users without server-based mediation.
It's not the "web" which causes this class separation - that happened because of NAT.
NAT is what requires a 3rd party to mediate communication. We have some hope that IPv6 will roll back this imprimatur[1] a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people still confuse NAT with a stateful firewall that push for NAT in IPv6 where it isn't needed.
The core benefit of the internet is that it is media access. Anybody can publish because the network treats all hosts as peers. There are entire categories of software that has never been written because they don't work behind NAT, and centralized solutions became popular as a workaround.
And once again we stumble on the Internet's weak point we could never fix -- the DNS.
Google wanted to fix the problem and, despite their best intention, became evil in the process. Now instead of racing for a .com name, people are fighting for search terms, bending to the opaque, machine enforced rules of a single entity driven by advertising revenues.
"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live."
That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine.
The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly would need applications that automated these details away for a broader purpose.
In fact many stil do run servers in their home in limited contests: their PVR, their backup appliance, their network printer, their Nest thermostat, heck even their Xbox with Twitch. It's all about the software application that warrants having your own server and makes it easy to maintain/run.
"Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. "
Its more than the interactions require software that needs to be written and evolved and maintained. A decentralized social network arguably has many benefits, that would lead to everyone buying something (software to run in their devices, or an appliance for their utility closet) to hook into it.
"You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. "
The web IS all about agreements (protocols), as is the Internet. Decentralized execution of said agreements lead to emergent effects. Sure, if someone writes one piece of software, everyone by definition has agreement.
But the world of the network is about N versions of software written by different people and still achieving their ends.
Today we have cases of agreements enforced by single copies of software (Facebook) on a decentralized network with many many underlying differences in software (web servers, TCP stacks, firewalls, routers, databases). The only reason Facebook exists are the prior agreements made on those lower commodified layers, and economic value moves up the stack.
So why haven't we written the software and agreements to commodify Facebook? Because these things take time for the economic incentives to work. I believe it will happen, just a matter of time. The Web's architecture encourages decentralized sharing and manipulation of information, it's just incomplete.
" The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols."
What's the infeasible part? Where you see infeasibility, I just see "work in progress", or "incompletion".
"You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other."
Okay, there is a good idea for part of an implementation...
"At that point using HTTP makes no sense either,"
... And a bad one.
As an example - BitTorrent actually relies on HTTP and the web to bootstrap discovery to a tracker before moving to a an (optional) DHT. The web is an essential component of the puzzle.
"users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it."
Why on earth would they need to? I can buy an appliance at Best Buy today that runs Wordpress for me. Why can't that evolve into something more sophisticated and compelling , that removes the need for centralized services?
I think you're way too hung up on this concept of a server being a socio-political construct rather than a transient architectural role in an interchange. Clients can be servers and vice versa. End users already run servers today, they just don't know it. The real socio-political construct of the Internet, the nexus of control, is the protocol. That's how you blow up centralized services.
> Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less.
No they can't. They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them.
No they can't. They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?
No they can't. Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?
No they can't. Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract.
No they can't. In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public IP).
Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified. Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on their servers.
"They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them."
Or they don't have software that does it for them.
"They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?"
Last I checked, BitTorrent was still a thing. IOW, build a killer app and that will change.
"Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?"
Then you can't run a mail server unless you have a cloud server that isn't blacklisted.
"Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract."
Which is a gray area that will fall apart the moment a killer app exists. ISPs don't block Twitch, they don't block Skype (which is P2P), they don't block BitTorrent, they don't block my NEST thermostat.
"In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public IP)."
This is barbaric and not my experience in North America.
"Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified. Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on their servers."
Sure, that's a common workaround and I don't really consider that "centralized" computing in the manner of a Facebook or Twitter.
My point is that everyone having a server for decentralized internet doesn't have insurmountable barriers, it requires software that people want to consume that will change the way the market works. Uber is doing it for a way more regulated industry (taxis).
You're right that it's certainly within the financial means of anyone to run a web server; "class mobility" is not terribly difficult here. The problem is, as you state, that virtually nobody wants to have to administrate a server!
In-home devices which accept connections are not relevant as they are inaccessible without giving your home network a well-known name. Any device which is not accessible from the Internet at large is not meaningfully a part of the Internet--it's simply on a network. Of course, you can set up port forwarding and buy a domain so you can access these devices from the Internet, but that fundamentally changes the situation. This is really the important distinction here: "servers" have known names and addresses on the Internet and "clients" do not.
When you want to communicate with your friends, you do it by name or address; in the current model of the Internet as something 99% of people access via 3g on phones (with all kinds of network-side firewalling) or via their home router's dynamic IP and NAT, most users do not have any well-known address. The only way they can find their friends is by coordinating to both use some third party site. This is what it means for the current architecture of the web to encourage centralization: the most efficient way to let everyone find all their friends is for everyone to congregate at the same third-party location, i.e. Facebook.
We haven't moved away from that because the decentralized alternatives have tended to suck, requiring running your own server all the time at a fixed address; actual progress would involve eliminating servers entirely and replacing DNS with a distributed name-lookup service that's actually designed for this use-case, and then having your mutual friends play the role of mailservers when you and your peer are playing phone-tag and not simultaneously online.
I agree with your point about search/indexing, but a lot of that has to do with an economic model to fund such a service ... the advertising-driven free models leads towards centralized control and loss of privacy. One interesting way to look at this is the move Apple is making towards more search and cloud services that are funded by device sales, not by advertising and analytics.
Decentralized services have tended to suck because you always need at least a federation of centralized servers for search/discovery. But it's possible to do so in a relatively end-to-end secure way, if it can be funded without requiring spying/analytics.
Anyway I'm just saying that there's a lot of possibility out there, and the barrier really is one of coming up with a big enough application incentive to force change across multiple areas of the current deployed web.
> If you have to talk to the application over HTTP, then it's not your application
Huh? Just to give one counter-example, I talk to my Kodi mediacenter over HTTP (using https://github.com/jez500/chorus) and when I'm at home the packets never leave my apartment or touch a device I don't own. The whole stack is open source to boot.
I guess you're talking about Facebook-style walled gardens, but HTTP give you more control over those (vs some proprietary protocol), not less.
I'm talking about the web, of course, and it was a blatant generalization in order to make a point briefly. Congratulations on finding a counterexample, but we're talking about unrelated phenomena belonging to entirely different scales.
The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better.
In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing the users.
And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of techies who went over to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset and skills to pull it off.
You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.
I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.
I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it.
> You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.
Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.
YES thanks for this! I've seen too many people justify something that could be considered immoral by invoking this "but it satisfies user needs" pseudo-argument.
I've seen a heck of a lot more people justify things by claiming to have objective moral knowledge. Throughout history, the most atrocious acts imaginable have been justified this way. I am much less worried about invoking the satisfaction of people's needs.
You can't convince people to go kill and die for you by saying they're just satisfying your needs. So you have to invent something people will actually buy, and this tends to be something about morality, religion or politics.
Capitalist morality merely poses as amoral. The moment you propose a more sensible alternative, you're hit by moral arguments about terrible things happening when you interfere with the invisible hand (of Providence).
When we mention "satisfying people's needs", those with more money get more satisfaction. That's how markets work. Like advertisers (corporations paying other corporations to spread propaganda), nation-states (which must control their populaces pretty much by definition), etc.
You can't look at it in a binary way. Of course it's a bad idea to prescribe people their needs. I wouldn't want someone telling me what I am to have for dinner. But there are also needs that are obviously better left unmet. For instance I may feel a need to take possession of your property. It's not a kind of freedom you'd want to grant to me.
I think it is rather binary, but I think your example in this case demonstrates a different principle.
Having my "needs" defined separately from my "wants" denies me my freedom. But that's different from you say, deciding to confiscate my things without due process.
> I'm terrified of others prescribing what's "needed" because someone else has decided what what's "wanted" isn't the best for them.
I'm equally terrified of others convincing you that what they have to offer is the best for you, with minor tweaks to "cover your needs"; yet that's the basis of profit-based marketing.
I respect your concern (I'm trying to be non-specific in terms of pronouns here, but it's hard), but that's a fear we have to live with, no? The notion that someone else's argument might be more persuasive than our own, that someone else's message might be accepted instead. Surely, there's something perverse about it, underhanded, or perhaps I'm just not enlightened enough, otherwise I wouldn't accept such a false pretense. Surely, if I'd been shown the light, and not doused in such propaganda, I'd make a better choice!
The problem with that of course, is that a lot of people can make that argument. And regardless of who's making the argument, be they weak or strong, they all rely on the premise that the person needs convincing of something, because to imagine that they might come to a conclusion that's not your own /by themselves/ is a terrifying thought.
I'm sorry, but I really can't condone the notion that some messages should be feared in that way, and that someone else knows what's best because they presume I do not.
It is great fun, when any previous authority is replaced by the logic of the market. What thrives, they say, deserves to thrive, what fails, deserves to fail.
Their argument is, if people really wanted a better world, they would have it already.
Which is of course foolish, the market doesn't care about good or evil.
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.
> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.
What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they don't have to use it. Ultimately, the decision is up to the consumer for what is the for them.
First of all, the consumer and the supplier do not form a closed system (regardless of what some ideologies would want one to believe). You have to account for the effects supplying a customer with something has on the third parties. Those are the externalities I've mentioned, and even Wikipedia has a lot of examples.
Secondly, you have to take a look at the aggregate effects. So for instance I may need a new, shittier way to spam web with ads, and there's a company who'll happily satisfy my needs. By having this transaction, I start earning more, and now my competitors see the strategy and all decide to adopt it. The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back. A classic coordination problem[0].
Finally, as 'lostlogin points out downthread, what you want doesn't always equal to what you need.
> The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back.
These are not the only players in the game like you believe. Those who advertise more effectively on the web have more of an advantage over those who advertise via other media and those who don't advertise at all. And, as ads are more spammy and in-your-face, the advertised products get bought more whether all competitors are spamming or only some. Advertised products are bought more than they would be if the ads were mild or there were no ads at all.
PS: Thanks for the blog link it looks very interesting, I'll read it later.
Which is strictly worse than not creating that market at all. It's just resources going to waste over the pointless zero-sum games, and that's exactly another reason where "satisfying user needs" doesn't cut it as a justification.
Software and hardware are sufficiently complex that the user has only the vaguest idea of what they actually bought. They cannot possibly make a fully informed decision and have to go on partial information.
I don't think it's sensible to say that customers "wanted" VW cars with "defeat devices". In that case, it's not even clear how much of the vendor company knew what was in the product.
Clearly VW engaged in deception of the customer as they cheated their test results. Customers are protected from such deception by the law.
My point was to criticise the "Internet Dream" utopian fairy tale advocated by commenter TEMPORAL--where a user gets everything but pays nothing--and to explain that the internet's commercialisation is perfectly OK.
I think there's a legitimate question to ask about how some kinds of commercialisation (selling privacy; expensive in-app purchases bought by children or compulsive gamblers; etc) are in some way deceptive or dishonest. It's certainly not as simple as a direct upfront payment for goods or services.
I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.
Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the internet have turned into a purely free and perfect forum for communication? In an ideal world yes, but not in our flawed world where there are a host of competing contrasting ideas.
To the authors point. Technology is moving too fast for laws, governments and political systems to cope with. The political and legal constructs we use today are not radically different from 200 or 300 years ago. I don't know if there has ever been a time in human history where the rate of technological innovation and change has been moving at such a speed that the legal and political systems cannot stay synced with the change and have no chance of catching up due to the increasing velocity.
> corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.
Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared wishes and morals of humanity, only if because of coordination problems.
I agree with your other points. And I didn't mean to point out that if Internet stayed non-profit, we'd have a perfect communication platform by now. For instance I think that if it became powerful, it'd still have problems with power and influence being a similar incentive to money. I only wanted to highlight the source of the problems we now have, which are those demand-satisfying, profit-driven actions. And that to make the Internet a better place, we would need to refuse doing things that seem optimal from business point of view but are detrimental to the Internet itself.
A pessimist in me says: this isn't likely to happen, because coordination is hard. So tragedy of commons here, no way to make a bottom-up group opposition there; we're screwed by coordination problems.
I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic. You're worrying about coordination problems on the internet? That's like, I don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.
Oh wait... :P
On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)
> On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)
Yeah, that's why I keep my pessimist locked up in a cage underground, and only let it out to get some air every now and then. :). I still want to believe we'll get the United Federation of Planets :).
To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean.
The important qualifier for "just driven by demand" and "People paying to have their needs satisfied" is that some demands/needs/desires are more profitable than others regardless of their long-term importance to a particular system. Just because people are willing to pay for something (e.g. a new gadget) doesn't make it more valuable than something they are not willing to pay for (e.g. clean drinking water for thousands of children). Just because the short-term-focused free market is producing economic activity that satisfies a demand doesn't mean that the system is either healthy or long-term sustainable, and that's the crux of the issue about the idealized Internet - its viability as a platform for human advancement (broadly defined) has been undermined by its corresponding suitability to support independent profit-making.
If I tell you that you have a need to purchase an eleven foot swimming pool for you back yard, and if you dont have a back yard you now have a need for a back yard, how long will it take for you to believe you have a need for it? How many of your peers would it take to have the same, and for them to tell you that this need has to be satisfied.
What does that mediation upon "needs" mean?
We know about Maslows triangle of actual needs, comfort, security food. But what about all these other "needs" - people do pay to have these somewhat manufactured needs satisfied. This is how a profit driven world works.
It needs happy docile obedient workers, that are "not ashamed to be driven by profit" so do their ills with a clear conscience.
As others have so aptly pointed out, externalities are the huge fly in your ointment. Rather than keep prattling on about externalities, I want to direct your attention to a practical example, environmental mercury contamination. [1] As a civilization, we knew from over 200 years ago that various mercury compounds were bad news bears in sufficiently-high quantities and/or cumulative exposures.
Industrial utilization of mercury is incredibly useful, adequate remediation and recovery expensive, and venting mercury-laden industrial waste into the atmosphere so easy and innocuous-looking, combined to land us in a modern situation any 16-18th century fisherman would find utterly absurd and fantastical. Lots and lots of people paid over many decades and centuries to have their needs satisfied with the help of mercury-laced compounds and mercury itself, to dump (and continue to dump to this day) their cumulative externality upon us, despite extremely early knowledge about cumulative effects, so that we go about our day-to-day in a real, live sci-fi world where some fish have so much bioaccumulated mercury that we have to ration our consumption of them.
There is an enormous amount of economic activity in the world today that works solely from finding and monetizing externalities. I expect this only gets worse in the future.
I don't think it's nearly as grim as you make it out to be... it's just as easy to deploy a personal not-profit driven application/bulletin-board or whatever on Amazon, Linode, DigitalOcean, Azure and many others as it has EVER been to start a project and deploy it online.
People are choosing to use Facebook, Twitter and other sites... that doesn't stop anyone from doing other things. That said, I think some government actions from spying to DMCA takedown shams and the like are pretty bad.
More people today have enough knowledge to put up a web application than did in 1996... I've been working developing web applications since that year. I also remember a lot of the nay-sayers back then... guess what, it's still better today for the most part. I really miss BBSing, that said I'd rather have today's tools and connectivity.
There's efforts to open up communications via WebRTC based application networks, and I think that may well be the future for some classes of applications. When you shut one thing down, other ideas present themselves.
People were choosing to drink heavily radioactive water in the early 20th century.
People are choosing to take drugs that destroy their lives.
When people chose something it doesn't mean they understand all the consequences. Especially since all the bad sides are conveniently hidden away in some tech, nerd stuff.
People use Facebook because other people use Facebook. Simple as that. People haven't assessed all the facts about Facebook and decided they are ok with them. They just use Facebook because their friends use Facebook.
Pretending people are rational and have perfect information considered harmful, etc.
As long as there is ability, and relatively common knowledge in order to create alternatives, there is less to fear. Natural monopolies aren't inherently bad so long as the ability to compete is preserved. That's just my opinion.
I don't think that the position that Facebook and Google in are inherently bad... but I do appreciate alternatives more than most. It comes down to freedom of information and accessibility of knowledge.
> People are choosing to use Facebook, Twitter and other sites
Which people, the early techies OP was talking about, or the other bunch who joined the Internet later on having no experience and knowledge how to use it to keep their privacy and maintain same responsibility for other online participants ?
The same argument was made (correctly IMHO) before as well. "The best minds of my generation destroyed by Wall Street and Hedge Funds."
Perhaps i'm naive but on average, the product shipped by the west coast is a whole lot more useful than the product shipped by Wall St, no? Certainly on relative terms, I would think on absolute terms as well?
Yes, the same idea for Finance Industry. Loads of our brightest get drawn into there and never leave.
However, I was thinking more along the lines of these minds leaving these brain destroying occupations and making something better (e.g. something described in the article) rather than choosing between one and the other bad cases.
A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.
Feudalism may have lifted more humans out of poverty than any other system that came before it by leaps and bounds. It's a good thing we didn't decide to stop there.
Secondly, I'm not sure we should so quickly even concede your point. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in mathematics and science (think Einstein) don't appear to be profit driven.
It did. We can't forget that all that wealth we have around is mostly thanks to market economy. It's a powerful driving force.
But just because it's powerful, doesn't mean it goes in the direction we want. It did, mostly, for the better part of the last two centuries. But more and more, we now find ourselves at odds with where the market wants to go. This is the issue we have to deal with - our present economical engine becoming incompatible with a better future.
It's not like the market economy is some distinctive, separate force from humanity; it's made up of people. And perhaps frustratingly, it's made up of all of those who participate, and not by diktat.
I think what maddens some is that masses of people sometimes make decisions we don't necessarily agree with, and often with information we don't think they have. We want change /now/, and that's just not possible with massive systems of people.
So we may look at issues of inequality today and issues of budgets and austerity and whatnot, and assume that we're all heading for the end. But as you insinuate in your earlier comment, man has steadily increased their economic output for centuries. The quality and longevity of life, over time, has increased inexorably. We can't confuse the turbulence of a decade with a scope over centuries.
But all of this I feel is somewhat moot. Because for as many calls as there had been for greater control over market forces, be it mercantilism of the 18th and 19th centuries, or socialism and communism in the 20th, we find that we're still, wherever freely possible, conducting business by barter and exchange, gathering wealth, and acting in our own interests. We do this because it's natural, because it requires no direction from elsewhere, or guidelines to follow that someone else sets. Place a person in whatever place and she or he will try to make themselves a profit.
We can only be frustrated to a point with the way things are, because to go further is to refute who we are. Freedom is desired naturally, be it in rule or economics. Best to help things remain open and fair, and not try and set a direction. People will find the best one for themselves.
"Poverty" is a relative condition that couldn't exist without Capitalism. There is no objective state of poverty anyone has been lifted out of by Capitalism.
That's complete rubbish. Anthropologists and historians use measures in terms of nutrition, health, life expectancy, child mortality and leisure time that apply regardless of the economic system in operation and track changes over time in order to characterize changes in lifestyle. You can set benchmarks to characterize poverty regardless of whether the population in question live in an agrarian, capitalist, Marxist or whatever system. Arguing that the massive objective improvements in living standards generated in capitalist economies somehow don't count on obscure technical semantic grounds is pure Marxist* sophistry.
* It occurs to me that it's possible you might not be a Marxist, but the argument you're making is one often put forward by Marxists, along the lines that capitalism by establishing monetary systems to measure capital establish scales on which poverty is measured and therefore create that poverty. Of course every Marxist society ever created has also used a monetary system to measure and allocate capital. But then Marx never, in any of his publications or letters, ever described how a communist economy would actually function so obviously building one has proven somewhat problematic.
Your starred comment beautifully allowed you to knock down your own strawman. Nicely done. :D
It is worth looking at his comment with the "red" filters removed. The point is that every game has winners and losers. You actually can't have one without the other, by definition. One creates the other.
The real question is just how far do you want to tilt the board before all of the pieces fall off? Money is just a representation of material and effort. Do you really want to leave the decision about where all material and effort are spent up to those who figured out how to win this game? To some degree that's fair, but to what degree?
Remember: there are no self-made men. Anyone who thinks this is deluding themselves. We exist in an interconnected net, where everything is related. There is not one thing sitting within arms reach of you right now that you made completely by your own hand. You are standing, at all times, on the shoulders of others. Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
> Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
Of course this is true. The company I work for was founded by, and is run by very successful wealth members of the top 0.1%. The salary I get from that company feeds and clothes me any my children, provides us with a car, holidays, health care, a pension plan and all the other trappings of western civilization. Just because I work for them doesn't mean I have in any way 'lost'. I have gained massively. I hope they go on winning so they can employ even more people like me.
When my wife arrived in this country, she got a bottom-of-the-ladder job at a coffee shop. Within 2 months she was an assistant manager. She used the money she earned to support herself and pay the course and transport fees to go to a community college 'access to nursing' course and now 13 years later is head nurse at a specialist fracture clinic. Everybody won. They got a hard working Barista, and she got the resources she needed to build a successful career and their customers got great tasting coffee. Nobody lost a single thing.
>The point is that every game has winners and losers.
If so, then the point is wrong, because Game Theory[0]. With very few exceptions (e.g. futures and options contracts, IIRC) trade - that thing markets do - is a positive sum cooperative game, that is to say win/win.
Both sides can certainly win in a futures contract and often do. A farmer sells his future crop now at a discount so he can buy fertilizer he couldn't otherwise afford, but without which there would be less crop to sell. Meanwhile the future crop buyer gets the crop at a discount. Win-win.
Pure financial derivatives trading can generate absolute winners and losers, but they know that getting into the game, and the advantage for commercial participants is that the 'gamblers' increase liquidity in the market.
Fuck this kind of answer. Perfect capitalism ends up with a perfect world. Perfect socialism too. Or communism.
It's the way we corrupt each of them which is the problem, corrupted by people who want power. There's no way we have found of solving that yet. None.
So far, that we're still alive seems to be pure luck, and that we make it out alive or not, seems to also be pure luck or bad luck. We certainly ain't helping ourselves all that much.
I'd say it's collapsing on itself. It's trying to optimize people out of the loop, but is not yet able to sustain itself without humans. Nor will the humans lay down and die without giving a fight.
Capitalism optimizes people into the loop in fact. It pulls more people into higher standards of living, and produces more jobs for people.
We have four billion more people than 50 years ago, and more people have jobs today globally than at any other time in history, and less people are in poverty, and there's more food available for everyone, and famines are almost non-existent, and the infant mortality rate has been drastically reduced, and the global life expectancy keeps rising, and a hundred other things that prove you wrong.
"More people have jobs" is a completely meaningless sentence. There is an amount of work that all humans have to do to ensure the survival of themselves and all other humans. If we were doing it right, we would all he doing less work, not more, and we would have some kind of equality of access to the total product of society. Instead, and increasingly, the people doing the hardest work are disconnected from access to the product of their labor or the chance at ever getting access to it.
The internet deals mostly in intellectual property, where socialism is actually working quite well. Github is essentially a communist marketplace: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
I think, to put it short, the middle path is the right one: partway socialist, partway capitalist. The capitalist side has had an upswing in Sweden recently, and the development it started is noticeable. Socalism can and does lead to stagnation, while capitalism can and does lead to overexploitation.
I wouldn't call countries with strong property laws socialists because of their welfare programs. After wall socialists want to abolish property (as the comment I replied to mentions). Unless you're talking about some Keynesian welfare state "socialist". As to your comment on the dictatorships... https://i.imgur.com/41fsQ9z.jpg
Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity" ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems even the present day primitive AI would be much smarter and more flexible. The reason of course is not that people are dumb or mean, but that they are driven by incentives and incentives in these positions are never right. Machines on the other hand are not afraid to lose their job and are (potentially) capable of much deeper and broader analysis of any situation than humans while simultaneously being less prone to error.
It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either.
With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic". And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace them with less dysfunctional folks.
With complex decision-making machines, it's not even clear whether a subtle bias it exhibits in its decisions is a sign of a bug or intentional design. The machine, of course, is capable of deep and broad analysis, but only of data that some group of engineers decided would be appropriate for it to analyze, using algorithms that were probably hand-tweaked by another group of engineers with their own individual quirks and unconscious biases.
Even the idea that a machine can be "smart" or "flexible" is based on a particular definition of "smart" and "flexible" that other people might strongly disagree with. And yet the machine presents an image of perfect objectivity, and its complexity makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to figure out exactly who or what is responsible for the many assumptions that underlie its design.
Moreover, the possibility of losing one's job is prettty much the only thing that keeps human decision-makers accountable in this world. Take that away, and we've got a benevolent dictator at best and a mechanical tyrant at worst, with the exact same quirks and biases, only hidden better.
People do point at Facebooks news filtering algorithm, which is "obtuse and unempathetic". People do complain about Googles algorithms flagging stuff as spam in an "obtuse and unempathetic" way.
Very very true! This comment sums up my fear exactly. I'll take it further, not only losing one's job -- but the fear of litigation is also a big deterrent. Now imagine in court you just say...Google Tensor Flow made me do it (or Theano or whatever...) I
wonder what would happen, but given my experiences to date (call center rep: no, the systems says you didn't pay, so obviously you did not [despite the cancelled check.])
The dream of decision-making machines has been with us for 70 years, since Wiener wrote Cybernetics in the '40s, but it keeps falling flat. Ultimately, computers remain a tool, no matter how sophisticated, and they will never be capable of reason. Tasked with implementing a policy, they will implement it deterministically, based only on the available input data, without judgment or context. You may implement a very complicated policy by training an artificial neural network, but that doesn't make it any less deterministic or provide it with powers of reason. It just means that you've succeeded in creating a policy you don't understand.
As for bureaucrats, like everyone I've had my share of bad experiences. But it's just not the case that they're uniformly bad. If you've ever had an airline agent find a creative way to get you on a flight, or a doctor prescribe medicine for a needed off-label use, or someone at the motor vehicle department decide you don't need to fill that form out again, you've seen human judgement and context in action. Even bad bureaucracies have good bureaucrats sometimes.
What is reason, beyond sensing, sense-making, logic, verification of facts/premises, and response/conclusion?
Computers absolutely will be (and are today!) capable of reason - but as with humans it will be limited and imperfect - just in different ways than humans. Having worked in the semantic web space for example, some logical inferences are computationally way too expensive to bother with, and a human will often be better. Other cases are better. Research on building reasoning systems for medical diagnosis , prescription and contra-indication are getting very sophisticated for example.
I suspect what computers will long be bad at are imagination, curiosity, ambition, emotion, and intuition... All of which relate to your examples of weaving through the bureaucracy.
> • You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
This isn't a change from the current state of things. For a hundred years, each of these decisions have been made by neural networks which we scarcely understand.
At least these are neural networks that we can hold accountable for their actions. Networks that exist in a single physical space easily detained when need be.
Not to mention that they can usually explain their reasoning and behind a decision.
2) They can come up with an explanation, but not usually an accurate one. We are used to giving offhand answers to neurology questions because parents angrily ask them of their children all the time. But the answers we give aren't truth-seeking they are punishment-avoiding.
Sure, but each of those neural networks has a face and (hopefully) a conscience. If we want to understand them better, we can ask them, sue them, pay them, shoot them, or do any of the thousands of other things we normally do with other people.
Good luck doing that with the algorithm used by a Google car to determine which pedestrian to hit.
I think Snowden's disclosures were a loss of innocence for many technologists, and this reflects that. I can't imagine this would have been written in his absence.
For the government surveillance parts of the article perhaps, though lets be honest, people were saying TLA's had been watching everything you've been doing for a while before that.
Another large part of the article is corporate control of the internet and that was a problem long before Snowden. That corporations would control the world and use the internet to create a Shadowrun type world was again something people had been warning about as less of the content on the internet was what people put up and more what was curated for you.
The end of the internet as a place for free expression is being driven in large part by the type of people that frequent this site. They're here to make money, a lot of it. And they're going to do what they can to lock you into their way of presenting things to make it very difficult for you to use another basically identical service. They're going to lock you in with your own data, sell it back to you and package you up to sell to others. The death of the internet began long before Edward Snowden showed the world what the other monster on the wires was doing.
The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one. It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's nessicary."
Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards.
* One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.
I disagree. Given the track record of the various 3 letter agencies over the past 50 years; any hacker who didn't think, prior to the Snowden leaks, that the NSA had cast a far-reaching net was naive in the extreme.
>The masses are pretty important in discussions about what kind of society we ultimately want.
This might be true, while it being true that the masses are largely irrelevant at implementing the societies that we have and live under… hence why organizations with the resources and power, can tend to drive what the masses can see and withhold things from a public that is all too willing to accept things at face value.
Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences[0].
"The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website."
As long as media won't talk about the topic, and the main avenues of discovery - Google, Facebook - won't show it to you, censorship works as intended: it removes a topic from the social conversation.
It's not "censorship" if media outlets won't carry messages they disagree with. It's actually pretty fundamental to freedom of speech that they're not obliged to.
It's a lot easier to find radical and controversial material than at any other period in history, including in the parts of the world where people actually do have to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing hitherto nonexistent detailed written criticisms of their government.
They don't care, because there's little marginal gain from improving on the results they already have. Even better, having holes in their wall helps relieve pressure. It's just like the old Sun Tzu adage about the line of retreat - you should leave one for enemy soldiers because if you encircle them completely, they'll realize they have nothing to lose and fight fiercely until they die.
Right. After all, even some people in North Korea can avoid some censorship by getting shipped USB drives with movies and whatnot. But you can't say that North Korea is censorship-free. If the government can keep 95% in the dark and easily brainwashed, that's good enough for it.
You know, one way out of building an internet none of us actually wants just because the people with the money tell us to is to organize as a union.
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of leverage software engineers already have, as evidenced by the wages and benefits that are standard in this industry, that we nevertheless refuse to use to try to exert some control over what we are building.
Wouldn't "we" be more likely to unionize if our wages were bad?
And are unions good at this stuff? Here in Sweden, they seem to be mostly aligned with the industrial profit motive. For example, the big metal workers' union supported extending our large arms export deal with Saudi Arabia, since it employs thousands of people.
Yes, historically unions don't get organuzed unless conditions are bad to begin with.
But look, what if we just didn't use the word "union"? What if we were talking about a professional organization like the bar association that set standards of what its members can and can't do, what is and is not ethical work? That set certain expectations of providing your otherwise very expensive services for free to people who need it but can't pay?
Without knowing too much about bar associations I feel like a programmer association with a code of ethics similar to the ABA model rules (perhaps including the Six Fixes[0]) would be a great start to reining in privacy violations.
I immediately see that it would need to be government mandated for it to have any effect, and given that many governments routinely violate these terms I don't know how it could be enforced.
Is unfortunate how she mixes racism and sexism in this essay, which makes the subject too broad, specially when bringing things like "only 30% of google is female", firstly because such companies are the ones making the "internet dream" die, so you are asking diversity by the "enemy", also when the "internet dream started" it was a lot less diverse than now, the steryotype of lonely male teenager messing with computers is silly but it IS based on real life mostly because men are more likely to be loners who seek refuegee in things like tech, D&D and such "hobbies". And nobody would care for diversity if this particula hobby (tech) weren't the one shaping the world.
As a lawyer, I don't think Granick appreciates just how the Internet has become a realm of haves and have-nots.
She talks about right to tinker and end-to-end communications. Back in the 90s, I played with HTTP and SMTP services on my Mac. It was just install a program and go. No root permissions for special ports. No configuring port forwarding, because even on dial-up I had a global IP address. And HTTP was a simple text protocol. Network protocols these days are so complex, I don't know how kids learn how they work.
One essential component is IPv6. I perceived that centralized control would be a problem as soon as I heard about how NAT works, but short-term costs have kept IPv6 inaccessible. This is an immense frustration.
I grew up through the 80s and 90s too and I'm not sure why you're that concerned:
- we mainly all still have global IP access on our broadband
- HTTP and SMTP are still fundamentally text even if you need TLS (just need the key to be able to read it)
- HTTP/2 has clear semantics that can make it look like text with a simple script
- NAT is annoying and yet essential ; it will be in an IPv6 world too.
the dream of everything having a public IPv6 address was always unlikely precisely because people want privacy for their devices, a (misplaced?) belief they're one step off the grid.
I suspect the work we are seeing with cloud technology around automated dynamic provisioning of firewall & routing will make its way into consumer edge routers and ISPs some day when the right app is there. Tinkerers always find a way.
"At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company’s overall workforce, but hold only 17 percent of the company’s tech jobs"
Hence what? In France prison population is 96.5% male. Does it prove sexism? That's it, I quit reading women, they can't write without pulling the cover to themselves.
You know I read that paragraph expect to cringe at any implied reasons, but there were none. In fact, if you read the previous paragraphs, the author states that the tech community is very inclusive of difference - it's really not an issue.
To me these paragraphs together indicate that it's not a tech problem that there are less women in the industry, but rather a wider societal issue. The tech community is welcoming and inclusive and tolerant of diversity. Any supposed lack in numbers of women in tech does not prove the opposite.
The way I see it, there's 2 main hurdles for truly free internet: hardware and encryption.
When normal folks start having personal servers at their home, and have all their traffic and data fully encrypted on their personal server which is in their turf, they will have the freedom to act as they like.
The problem with these two hurdles is infrastructure (being ISP dependent) and regulation (Government can make up rules for personal servers) - if we can get past those, oh my it will be wonderful. But I don't think it will be possible until someone forms a "Digital Country" - a territory with 'open source' government with some sort of 'digital rights constitution' that would allow the above to really happen.
The Internet is not a place apart from society. It exists within society. And society will exert the same amount of control over it as it asserts on other facets of life in order to meet social priorities.
Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of Internet Service Providers, and each large (and most medium) one gave access to Usenet discussions.
Then with increased monopoly and commercialization, the ISP's shut down, and Verizon and AT&T gained a duopoly over the majority of the US's wired and wireless last mile. With this accomplished, they shut down their Usenet feeds.
A programmer I know calls it digging ditches with air conditioning. Programmers are wage slaves, just a slightly more exalted position than the people who come in at night to empty the waste baskets.
By this definition, anyone with a job is a wage slave unless they work for themselves. Unless you meant something else, because in the US programmers enjoy salaries and flexibility that many other professionals don't have.
> The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real slavery.
Most of the talk around "wage slavery" is about people who're going to spend the rest of their lives working hard for all their day on stuff that they don't like, for so little money that it barely allows them to stay fed and healthy. It's a different thing that the "real slavery"[0], but there are some important similarities - namely, people using up their whole lives to enrich somewhere else, with no capacity to opt out.
The reason it's being brought up so often now is that in the past, "wage slavery" seemed a necessary component of survival of a society. People simply had to work. But today the necessary work is increasingly being automated, while we compensate with inventing new make-believe jobs living in closed loops that together have no useful output. So it's about time we should start aiming for freeing people from the need to work.
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I agree though that saying programmers are wage slaves is... weird. I suspect 'obrero meant something about lack of agency - as a programmer, you're to implement whatever stupid shit your boss envisions, and you have no say about it, even if it damages the environment you're working in. We may be getting paid more than a janitor, but that doesn't mean we have anything more to say about company's business than a janitor does.
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[0] - by "real slavery" we mostly think about a particularly brutal and dehumanizing enslavement of plantation workers in the United States; slavery in the past was often not unlike employment today.
To be honest, I'm struggling to think of any profession which less resembles the concept of wage slavery than programming, Compared with other jobs it pays relatively high salaries, offers more opportunities for remote and flexible working, more opportunities as self-employed contractors and more opportunities to start companies that don't even rely on contracting for others.
In a company of any size, nobody has absolute agency and complete immunity from stupid shit that bosses envision, not even the zillionaire owners of the company who don't have to do performance reviews or attend standup meetings.
Yes, I am familiar with the general concept of wage slavery. How does it apply to software engineers without applying to...basically anyone whose main income is not investment?
Well, the honest answer is that it does apply to everybody whose main income is not investment or anybody who must remain employed in order to survive. We live in relative luxury and privilege, but many of us certainly might not work for their current company or as many hours as they do if they had the freedom not to.
As LesZedCB points out, it does apply to everyone whose main income is the sale of their labor. Software engineers could be considered part of the [aristocracy of labor][0], but still part of the working class.
Back in the 80s on BBSes and 90s on usergroups and finally the Internet a bunch of techies did whatever they wanted and normal people didn't get anything. Now they're getting more than any of us got back then and we're not standing still either, it's just moved on from the web. The Internet dream is alive and is evolving and whilst the original manifesto sounds a bit childish to me nowadays it's still part of what drives us. Wherever the mainstream catches up so do the old hierarchies and we move on.
Right now the biggest threat I find is the lack of options in terms of ISP for most people, and somewhat mass surveillance which will likely be used for profit rather than prevention of illegal activity. ISP's that are creating arbitrary data caps, filtering/throttling or modifying content as it comes in, and little is being done by the FCC to stop it, these are the most dangerous trends.
Beyond that encryption, etc has allowed us more freedom.
This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope.
The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things.
To fight this, we tried federation. We tried building social systems that allowed people to choose their own provider but participate in the same network, but federation hasn't worked since email. If you take a long look at email, you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of evolution that we see in successful social systems. The design-test-iterate loop that design thinkers use to build products people want doesn't work when the rest of the federated providers don't keep up, and they never do.
Where federation failed, I believe decentralization will succeed. There is an honest-to-god renaissance happening right now in decentralized systems, and the tools to continue the internet dream are reaching maturity. Core to this renaissance is our new ability to use blockchains to establish universal cryptographic identities with no intermediary—no federated server to hold back the tide of progress. When you want new features, you don't switch servers, you switch clients. They all speak the same peer-to-peer protocol using the same portable, blockchain-based identities. This has a very useful side-effect: systems that don't rely on servers never shut down as long as people keep using them. Decentralized systems are forces of nature.
This combination makes network effects a public good. Second place companies in network effect industries today have their own private networks that just aren't as useful. It is in their best interest to make their networks as large as possible, and treating the decentralized network as part or all of their network achieves that. It creates a network used by all the competitors who aren't in first place, even as those competitors die off. I think the immortal network used by competitors will over time become as large as the front-runner's. At equal size, the open network is more valuable than the closed one—the open one can be built wholesale into any other product that benefits from it. If you want, you can use a ride-hailing app that uses your social network connections to share rides with friends of friends instead of complete strangers, and anyone can build that app when the ride-hailing and social networks are decentralized.
When our industry gets great at creating decentralized application protocols, it will no longer be feasible to build a business on privately controlled network effects. It's not a defensible business anymore. Users will be able to choose which clients they use instead of being forced to sacrifice their data to a company to benefit from its network.
The internet dream is back, y'all. If you want to help rebuild it, come join the folks using Ethereum, IPFS, and related protocols to build networks we can't control.
> you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of evolution that we see in successful social systems
Federated social software failed to have long-lasting, wide-spread adoption largely because any market that is created as a result tends to be immediately competitive, democratised, and with a low barrier of entry. Companies would rather create a monopoly/walled garden and then milk that for all it's worth. They are in the business of making money after all.
Though I have high hopes in the future for distributed systems utilising blockchain tech, real-time comms are not ever going to be a good use case.
Pour one out for our fallen federated friends SIP/ENUM & XMPP.
Yes, that's it. With federated networks, you still rely on another party — the server you connect to. With decentralized networks, you are a part of the thing everyone else relies on.
1) In a decentralized network where you are also the client, you also usually rely on another party: the party that contains the resource you wish to access. Not that many decentralized networks give every node a complete copy of all of the data in the network.
2) In a federated network with open federation (Tor, XMPP, email, etc...), you can choose to become a server in that network and be a part of the thing that everyone else relies on.
I'm still having trouble seeing the essential distinction between the two. Is the assertion that "decentralized" networks force you to be a server in the network, whereas federated networks leave the choice up to you?
In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server. If you have a domain name, sometimes you can have portable identities that piggyback on DNS. This is a terrible solution for normal people. The cost of switching servers is high.
Decentralized systems have cryptographic identities. If you want to use a different client or a different server that participates in the network while you're offline, just fire up the new one and give it access to your identity via your private key or signing a new key.
Low switching costs are the key to progress on a network. It's why browsers have gotten so good. Similarly, competition will make the clients for decentralized networks improve rapidly, unlike XMPP or email.
> In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server.
Untrue.
TextSecure/Signal is a federated system. [0] IDs have always been and are -currently- tied to a user's phone number. [1] If you demand, I'm sure that I can dig up more examples, but that's the first thing that came to mind at $WAY_TOO_FUCKING_EARLY in the morning.
[0] The server software is open source, but only trusted operators are permitted to federate with the official TS servers. However, anyone is 100% free to stand up their own TS network (even if it's a single server) and distribute their own patched TS/Signal clients that use that unofficial TS network.
[1] There is ongoing work (that's probably nearly completed) to move IDs from a phone number to something that makes multi-device-but-a-single-user accounts work. I get the impression that it's coming along rather nicely, but haven't checked out the Github repo in quite a while.
How does IPFS deal with censorship/takedowns, if every piece of content has a unique ID? Physically distributed systems can choose (or be induced) to implement central policy.
At least one cultural solution might involve people adding a new letter or word to any blocked content. I understand this would result in a new hash/ID. Republish, redistribute, and repeat. Would this work?
Yay! More click bait-y doom-and-gloom nonsense from Medium.com. /s
Seriously, what's the deal with these poor quality posts and why do they float so high in the Hacker News rankings?
Aside: The same can be said for posts linking to theguardian lately.
The internet dream is far from dead. Despite numerous setbacks surrounding lack of security/privacy, new standards/practices are being introduced to fix the issues.
The whole personal computer ecosystem that used to be dominated by vendor-monopolized platforms have continually become more open and flexible over time.
The flexibility to share data and services across the web in a standardized manner has never been better. 10 years ago, tools like Zapier that thrive in the ecosystem of openness never would have been possible. There are public APIs and microservices for anything and everything nowadays.
The developer tools and platforms are evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Data silos are crumbling. Patent/copyright trolls are getting paid their due. Sources of very high quality educational materials are abundant and free. etc...
Great talk. I just posted the link to people who follow me on T and G+
As sosuke mentions in another comment, possible alternative mesh networks might regain some freedom and flexibility but we will all be vulnerable to embedded IoT technology that tracks us and because of laws prohibiting looking at embedded code (assuming this happens) it will be difficult for white hat privacy advocates to check the information shared out by these devices. Cars, home appliances, electronic gadgets - a lot of areas that might leak privacy.
That was an example; the general problem of people whipping up a mob, hate campaign, harrasment or slander against someone remains as something the victim cannot easily opt out of. Even if they try to go off-net completely.
(Trigger-happy policing is certainly its own problem)
Yes; the mob mentality is unfortunately something much harder to fix than even trigger-happy governments. (I am thinking about the recent hoopla about Trump's remarks. For me, the problem isn't what HE is saying - the problem is the fact that he finds people who agree with him.)
Perhaps such networks already exist? Should I be checking out I2P?
I can't be the only one hating how our Internet "town squares" and public spaces have all become commercially owned, centralized, sanitized and surveilled, but where did the old‐guard go? SMTP mailing lists, IRC and Usenet have the decentralization down, but are beyond dated, and not a good way to interact.
Anyone know where cypherpunks hang out now? Perhaps they found a place, or made one.
Mailing lists and IRC are still in good shape. I don't know about hardcore cypherpunks, but Hackerspaces tend to use both.
It's not that they're not a good way to interact, it's more that the clients didn't follow with the times and didn't get all flashy and streamlined. You can use mailing lists fine even from GMail (as I do, still haven't figured out how to make it work with Emacs), but it's not so convenient as Basecamp. You can use IRC in pretty much whatever, but it's not as flashy as Slack.
It used to be that you could find mailing groups and even IRC in the internal networks of companies. But sadly, there are now SaaS products targeting those, and companies are switching because get one piece of infrastructure less to maintain. Also, I think Skype and similar is what really killed IRC at work. Companies use a lot of voice communications - what used to be phone teleconferences is now VOIP - and since everyone has to have a VOIP app installed, it's easier to just use its internal group chat for communication.
We need to compensate that with having accessible endpoints - otherwise it means that things like[0] won't be possible. Security can be one of the most effective enemies of the Freedom to Tinker.
Accessibility doesn't necessarily have to be the highest priority. BITD folks would jump through ludicrous numbers of hoops just to gain access to the network. Whether or not this limiting factor improved the quality of interactions online is an open question.
But we can go a different route. Would love to see mesh technologies get dirt cheep so we could stick nodes everywhere. Develop a new internet such that nobody would be in control.
What's a, say, 200 USD app or OS that isn't pretty shitty? There aren't many. In fact, I can't mention one on the post.
I know of a few OSes and app that are decent (at least don't try to track you, show ads to your face, do weird stuff in the name of making profits for a company). These all cost 0 and are open-source. Weird uhm.
That entirely depends on your definition of "shitty".
Some might care about an occasional ad in an app that they chose not to pay for, or never paying for software on principle, and will always choose open. Some might find the need to manage system-level functionality and installation, or make allowances for miserable UI/UX simply because it is open, too much to bear.
But also, there aren't many 30 dollars apps worth buying! It's a weird deadlock. Most app are either crap and free with ads, crap and "free" w/ in-app payments, crap and for $1 or crap and terribly overpriced. For some weird reason, there's little of good development going on.
The weird reason is that customers are totally fine with buying and using crap. Until that changes, there will be no incentive for doing good development.
During the period being discussed, the constituency of the communities participating in the Internet has completely changed. The percentage of non-paid contributors has drastically declined; the percentage of professional contributors has drastically increased. The percentage of active or contributing participants has greatly declined; the percentage of passive or consumer participants has greatly increased. The norms, laws, and conventions are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats and less and less by community members. The majority of interaction and activity on the Internet is now mediated and tracked by commercial interests. Even if you disagree with one or two of my points, I think you'll grant me the general point.
In a strange twist on things, where in the traditional body-politic one says, "It's the economy stupid", in Internet-politics it's actually the politics. Who participates. What are the power relations. Who makes the laws or enforces the norms. I think this is because, where as in traditional economies money and goods are scarce and so we must have a healthy economy to eat and have shelter, in the information economy scarcity is fast becoming a thing of the past and so a democracy is being replaced by a do-ocracy. Whoever builds it, makes the rules. The law is always two steps behind. So as corporations and governments increasingly hire and direct all the professionals and bureaucrats that produce the Internet, it is created in their likeness or in their interest. So participation, power dynamics, and participant empowerment become foundational.
Unfortunately, the tech industry often superficially dismisses traditional politics. When it does engage it often claims the ideology of libertarian or plays the part of technocrat, seeking purely utilitarian approaches. Libertarianism, you'll please forgive me for phrasing it this way, is rather sophomoric. It's rather like that guy in college that had the Che Guevara t-shirt, but really didn't know what it was all about. Like it or not, we're in a highly coordinated, interconnected, interdependent society, and just as fully realized communism was a very romantic notion but would never get the job done, libertarianism just won't get the job done. We need each other, and we need participation from each other. And this is, in a nutshell, a political issue. Technological, disruptive, efficient "solutions" will not solve this problem. Or worse, the tech industry might engage purely to satisfy its commercial interests. Think about the idea that, a start-up creates a product, and then hires lawyers to "legalize it". Then the start-up claims that it is libertarian or not participating in politics.
We need the equivalent of "The Federalist Papers" for our time. Something contemporary, but grounded in history. Something academic, but pragmatic. Something plain spoken, but inspiring. Instead, we've created the TPP.
We need each other, and we need participation from each other.
Libertarianism does not dissuade (but quite the contrary, encourages) cooperation provided it is not coerced through means of binary, triangular or other forms of intervention.
First off, there's always a tendency to overplay the negative aspects of the present while dismissing the positive aspects and to treat the past with excess nostalgia.
Moreover, it's very difficult for most people to grasp the significance and degree of major changes in society, culture, and the economy on short time scales while immersed in it.
I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and while there are certainly many negative developments that have happened along the way there have also been many positive ones. I would not at all characterize the modern internet as heading toward less freedom, not at all. My impression is that far more people are far more aware of issues of injustice and oppression today than was previously the case. It used to be that only a tiny sliver of "radicals" were really clued into those issues, and many of them also adhered to one or another nonsensical conspiracy theory to boot, which weakened their cases when it came to appealing to the modern world. Today I see growing kernels of increasingly less marginalized and increasingly more powerful people who have been educating themselves, participating in the conversation, and speaking out.
No it's not perfect, and it's not happening absent a lot of the revelation of lots of repugnant behavior. And it's also happening seemingly very, very slowly. But my perception is that the trend is for the most part in the right direction and strong. Giving up is the only sure way to lose at this point.
The bulk of this article seems to be completely out of touch with the way people have been using the internet, especially younger people. It's not becoming more TV-like, it's becoming more interactive and participatory. It's not retaining existing power structures. That only appears to be the case when you look at bullshit measurements based on bogus statistics like paper valuations and user counts. The reality is that the real power is in the people. In the content creators, in the groups, in the social networks themselves. The value layered on top of that or spread in-between to facilitate it is fragile and small by comparison. It's the same as in Silicon Valley. Having a billion dollar valuation doesn't mean your company is powerful or secure any more than having a billion users does. And it doesn't.
I predict that within the next 5 or perhaps 10 years there will be another great shift and "implosion" of one of the current major "internet powers". Perhaps facebook, or youtube, perhaps even google or amazon. I don't think people understand the mobility of the modern technological market. You do not own users or customers, you retain them through superior service. It will probably shock people who vulnerable these mega-corps are to disruption, and once one of these big shifts happens once you are going to see a crapton of bloviation from the chattering classes about how absolutely unpredictable and ground-breaking the whole thing is, but it means nothing more than that they haven't been paying attention.
Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience.
Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business?
We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer some activities over others!
I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm this time and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it:
"Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum."
She says there are more people on the autism spectrum in the hacker crowd than expected. Also (I believe is implied) college dropouts, apparently. And it's ok. So if there are more males in the field, why is it not ok? Shouldn't we be fighting against the autism-bias and dropout-bias? Surely neurotypical people and college graduates are underrepresented in tech, by the very definition of "being statistically underrepresented".
Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be disproportionately autistic compared to the general population.
I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts are disproportionately autistic?
Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so autistics are disproportionate among security experts when compared to their prevalence in a group drawn from the general population with the same gender statistics as security experts, then a possibility to consider is that whatever it is about males that makes them more likely to be autistic might also be something that makes males more likely to be interested in hacking.
That would fit with Asperger's view that autism was at the extreme end of a spectrum of behaviors normally associated with "maleness".
I don't believe she has real numbers on whether security people, in particular, are neurotypical. I'm guessing she's invoking studies of technologists in general (which would make sense in the context of a talk).
No, please don't. On HN we try to optimize for signal/noise ratio. Pasted comments are noise.
Ideological venting is also noise. Regardless of your views, if you're going to comment on a divisive issue (or any issue), please don't do it like this here.
More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before.
Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly).
The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in.
Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are internet oriented.
Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political.
We got this ;) Stay vigilant friends.