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57 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
57 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
The Root Problems of the Modern Internet
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Main Thrusts:
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* Lack of federated, open identity protocol
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- need to somehow make forward reference to importance of identity in section 4
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* Network of computers != network of people; web of servers, instead of web of content
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* Centralized "Social Media" Considered Harmful
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* Core problems:
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* Loss of trust / loss of accountability b/c there is no Identity protocol; Analogue of a world where polyjuice potion exists
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* Peak words
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* Mining of attention
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* Synchronicity and "ringing"
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* Web of servers, instead of web of content. The Internet has always been an IoT. How do we layer a Web of Communities on top of that?
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* This is critically important:
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* Historically we have had a hierarchical method for sense-making. We trusted institutions of various types to serve in differnet roles in that sense-making infrastructure.
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* Without this kind of structure, we are tribe-less. In that disoriented state, we naturally line up behind the information mechanisms which are most comforting to us.
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* We have supplanted these structures with bad digital substitutes, simply because digital communications are now the default medium.
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Protocol Failure
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----------------
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There is no Internet standard for federated identity that preserves anonymity and ensures identity verification, and squarely places those controls in the hands of the producer and consumer of the content.
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So centralized messaging/comms systems become sites that VCs/wall street encourages to bundle up more and more “users” onto their platform, with more “engagement”, and they end up having to police content and do all sorts of artificial things to create a homogeneous social / cultural environment amongst people of wildly different backgrounds.
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The owners of the comms platforms become de facto police of content. That is antithetical to the nature of the internet, and also forces an artificial (and, I would argue, impossible) reconciliation between millions or even billions of people with vastly divergent value systems and social/cultural narratives.
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Current "social platforms" use lack of portable identity and karma as a moat, and their business models revolve around monetizing attention, which requires very invasive surveillance technologies.
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(In an ideal world, before I consume your content and allow your meme to pass through my brain, I should be able to configure my code to require that your packet meets certain provenance requirements. you don’t get my attention unless it meets that. It’s an implicit contractual protocol for attention.)
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Topology Failure
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Internet is based on principle of "intelligence at the edge, network is dumb". For computers trying to route packets in a command-and-control network, this makes sense because the network is the thing that is spread out, and is most vulnerable to attack.
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But for a *network of humans* in a society, this is completely, totally backwards! The social graph *is* the value that amplifies the intelligence of all of the individuals within it. This is the core motivation for taking a completely different tack for envisioning the future of a Distributed Information System.
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Further Reading
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---------------
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Books & Papers
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*
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