Re-constituting the Internet: The Momentum of Re-Decentralization and Breaking the Web 2.0 Digital Feudalism
Distributed and peer-to-peer in place of server-client that takes care of "all the complexity" for you and "isn't evil".
I really miss the Web 1.0 - the cozy simplicity of it, protocols like IRC and USEnet newsletter boards (and the categories of characters that used to populate forums, as so amusingly as accurately described here), discussion forums where you’d lurk for a very long time before you dare post anything as not to come off as a stupid idiot (while at the same time actually being social). There were standards. And communities. Now, what we refer to as “communities” are anything but that. Who dictates Facebook or Twitter’s “community guidelines”? What constitutes the “Bitcoin community”, for example? Not to mention that so-called “social” networks and media are anything but social - quite the opposite (in being monocultural echo chambers and Skinner boxes of controlled emotion, outrage and manipulation). The wizard of Oz is pulling the levers behind the curtain, fulfilling B.F.Skinner’s dream of “technology of human behavior”.
They’ve gone way beyond the Pavlovian conditioning in getting addiction down to the precision of science. Data has truly become the new oil, and its extractive processes of turning raw material into useful products follows the principles of financial capitalism, as Prof. Shoshana Zuboff has gone to describe in much depth and detail in her seminal work “Surveillance Capitalism”. When we have markets dealing in human futures and derivatives based on behavioral prediction products with the granular precision of demographic targeting, we should realize we’ve gone way beyond just crossing a line.
There is a certain peculiar flavor of the Dunning-Kruger effect common among Silicon Valley tech bros and a side effect of disciplinary/departmental nerdification - the fallacy of transferable expertise. The notion that if you’re really good at one thing, you must be really good and knowledgeable about everything else. And the California ideology to which much of that world tends to subscribe is really paradoxical and senseless at best, hypocritical in essence. (An amalgam of Ayn Rand’s “philsophical fiction” of extreme individualism, which she herself amusingly called “objectivism” and incidentally created a cult-like following around her + some sort of social pseudo-concern about equality and what not…)
I recently, quite by accident, met the person who built Bitfinex’s platform, back-to-front-end - a talented programmer who has been doing C/C++ since he was 13. And, he was also a paranoid schizophrenic. But above all, my problem with him (otherwise a good, kind person underneath it all) was precisely this arrogance of thinking he knows it all and everybody else should listen to him about everything, never vice versa. It may have been his past successes, as measured in the money has was making, that is the reason for this kind of attitude and self-assurance, but he’s really in a bad shape at the moment and still blind to his own mistakes. Among his delusions he loves to talk about is Universal Basic Income and how to make it work (I am not arguing for or against UBI, I think it should be tried to see how it works - of course, not before clarifying its exact implementation and conditionals).
And just like most techies of his type, he was mostly after chasing that dollar on the stick - he undoubtedly enjoyed programming, as the process of problem-solving, but can’t really call him a visionary - few can be called that. And in this slowly emerging nascent trend towards re-decentralization and replacement of server-client with peer-to-peer network topologies and protocols of communication, those who dedicate themselves thoughtfully and informed by many different and diverse fields of science, inquiry and philosophy in specifying the designs of these future technologies (in the McLuhanian sense of “media studies as radical anthropology” and how “the medium is the message” - in other words, with the awareness and responsibility of how the nature of the technologies we interact with shape us back in return) are the real visionaries.
There is a very good blog post by Peter Turchin dedicated to just that issue that is worth citing from (entitled “Are Entrepreneurs Irrational? (According to Standard Economic Theory)”:
So, what does actually motivate entrepreneurs? Some of them are in it just for the money, and most of those fail. Successful ones are typically motivated by extrarational reasons: “thrill of competition, human altruism, a thirst for adventure, a joy of discovery and creativity, a concern for future generations, and a desire for meaning in one’s life.”
And while some may consider the coming up with more and novel ways of screwing up the end-user as an “useful idiot” and source of raw material to transform into profits something virtuous and admirable in terms of some of these people’s “success” (quantitatively speaking), a true visionary innovator’s motivations are not purely self-interested paper-clip maximization as one-dimensional homo economicus.
That said, I find the concept(s) in Holochain and its larger ambition of the Ceptr project quite visionary and very carefully thought through in every detail, even in their choice of terms and words (where some very much exploit words to mislead in the meaning of their implication). Holochain is basically the first component of Ceptr, the underlying data integrity engine for collectively running peer-to-peer social applications, using DHTs (distributed hash tables) as the public space, while users individually storing their own private hashchains in parallel and choose what to share and which applications’ DHTs to join in (or leave at any time).
How a DHT works and maps data in scattered pieces distributed between different peers participating in the network.
Scuttlebutt and its underlying protocol are actually designed similarly, also designed for running social applications, but Holochain goes much further: the composability of hApps (Holochain applications) in various constructions and configurations allows for a very wide range of possibilities, including - in a way - becoming one’s own anthropologist. All the different social apps and their DHTs constituting a massive DAG (directed acyclic graph), which maps the complexity of the system (or rather creates the map like a Deleuzian rhizome, “a rhizome is a map, not a tracing”).
Speaking of complexity, another project that deserves mention and attention, goes the other way - towards eliminating the bloated and unnecessary complexity of what the Internet has turned into, declaring it a complete failure and going tabula rasa (clean slate) by overlaying the entirety of the existing Internet infrastructure with a small, minimalistic operating system which makes up the user’s personal space and is designed along the lines of calm technology principles and KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid!”). The project was started by Curtis Yarvin, also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug associated with the blog posts and political philosophy essays which ended up being the foundations of what developed into the neo-reactionary movement and the Dark Enlightenment (a term later introduced by Nick Land). Also, notably (and interestingly), Peter Thiel has invested in Urbit.
Now, I haven’t yet personally dived much into Urbit myself (as the project is named), but it seems to follow functional language logic and employ its own language and virtual machine. It it a bit like WeChat in a way, only without being controlled by the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, but re-creating that cozy privacy of the early days and more. On a technical level, I still not sure I completely get it - but when I do, I will share more insight.
And lastly, Tim Berners-Lee’s (creator of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web) latest project, Solid (in which also security guru and renoun cryptographer Bruce Schneier is involved), should be mentioned. It is not unlike Urbit in the sense that it offers users their personal Pods or spaces, where they choose which apps to connect to under what access control permissions, as well as what to share or not, where and how. Writing apps in Solid would appear much easier than doing so in Urbit (the former using Javascript), but in any case, all these undertakings and endeavors (and they are far from the only ones) point and push towards the general direction of how the Internet will be re-constituted in its future incarnations. Which is really important as these technologies, as they get integrated into our lives as complex socio-technical systems involving non-human actors and agencies, have enormous influence on shaping the culture in which we live in, and culture, in turn, determines the longer-term direction of biological evolution itself.
What kind of traits, qualities, virtues, thought patterns, kinds of awareness and even language(s) do want to encourage and cultivate in developing ourselves as species? And which ones are evolutionary beneficial and useful in the longer-term of both survival and conditions for thriving? Since what we basically are is the random evolutionary trash can of whatever has however made it up to here so far - that doesn’t mean it’s all useful, desirable or even benign. But the only way to learn and acquire deeper awareness of it all is through modifying our perceptions and behaviors through the ways in which we interact with technology (well, not the only way, but the only one where it is possible to have an effect on a large scale, on the population as a whole and with the consideration that people are generally lazy and stupid - the two defining characteristics of the human condition, intellect being only just a special case of the more general stupidity…. otherwise, there’s always mind-altering substances and drugs that allow for re-programming and re-conditioning oneself, as well as philosophies and other methods for achieving the same with different degrees of success and half-life of lasting effect….)
And, almost forgot mentioning, the importance of ontology engineering and web ontologies for trans-disciplinary research. Solid and Holochain allow for just that, as standardizing the ontologies (syntax, grammar, structure and terminology of a particular domain, discipline, field of study or research, or anything else whatsoever, really) of all that is available online makes them interoperable and makes possible the revealing of connections and correlations between things otherwise invisible and unsuspected. This is part of what is today known as the digital humanities and Cliodynamics’ Global History Databank is one example of such a thing (with a polity being the main entity of its ontology, each polity contains myriads of variables in creating a structured database of human political, economic, social, demographic and cultural history going as far back as possible with as much precision as scientifically possible, or at the very least, adequate approximations relying on archaeology). The Underscore protocol is another relevant project which operates like git, but for ideas in the sense of ontological relationships and associations.
These are all powerful tools and frameworks that allow for better informed collective decision and policy-making, or - in the language of Ceptr and Holochain, collective sense-making (very well chosen term, given how everything nowadays makes less and less sense with every day, drifting into the madness of what almost seems like collective psychosis at times) and collective-synthetic intelligence (as opposed to so-called artificial intelligence, which is at its core computerized statistics on steroids - so, while far from NOT being useful, intelligence might not be the best word to describe it, depending on how one does define intelligence, of course…. but the tech world is full of these buzzwords and the deception of how you refer to something is the first step towards getting most people’s attention, unfortunately….)
Other interesting projects and proposals I’ve come across lately have been the UsenetDHT - a revival of USEnet, but based on a distributed hash tables design of storage and retrieval (similar to how BitTorrent works). Aether is another experiment trying to re-create something similar in the vein and spirit of the old USEnet, but decentralized, with self-governing communities and moderator elections.
Blockchan is a recent reinvention of 4chan, but based on a Ripple ledger and IPFS. Syndie perhaps deserves special attention, being a distributed and highly flexible and modular, yet simple system for discussion boards and forums design. The Dat protocol as an alternative to the HTTP hypermedia and its integrated Beaker browser may be also worth checking out (at the very least as an example for protocol designs and how they are came up, done, prototyped and tested out - since the Web 3.0 will be mostly about the protocol level). SOCIETY2 is an IOTA-based social network which sounds promising, but I haven’t been keeping up how things are going with that particular project lately. And here is a list of some other such applications, projects and frameworks to build upon - including serverless apps and services, running on things like Scuttlebutt and remoteStorage (which is similar to Solid in many ways), a simple Web 1.0-like search engine that makes use of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, a Bitcoin Cash-based social and blogging network and an EU/German alternative to Solid.