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4 The Root Problems.md

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The Root Problems of the Modern Internet

Main Thrusts:

  • Protocol failure: Lack of federated, open identity protocol

    • (need to somehow make forward reference to importance of identity in section 4)

  • Topology failure: Network of computers != network of people; web of servers, instead of web of content

  • Core problems:

    • Loss of trust / loss of accountability b/c there is no Identity protocol; Analogue of a world where polyjuice potion exists
    • Peak words
    • Mining of attention
    • Synchronicity and "ringing"
    • 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?

  • Why does the question of morality arise when it comes to API design?

  • This is critically important:

    • 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.
    • 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.
    • We have supplanted these structures with bad digital substitutes, simply because digital communications are now the default medium.

  • We Must Destroy the Internet

    • Architecturally, treat it as commodity transport, with pervasive hostile actors leeching metadata about connections and realtime streams
    • Mesh networks

Protocol Failure

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

Topology Failure

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.

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.

Why does the question of morality arise when it comes to API design?

It’s not like we’re making heat-seeking bullets that only target children, it’s just functions and data being stored in a database over here instead of over there…

The reason is because the technical architecture directly lays out what is and isn’t possible for application design; and when we build apps in certain ways, we separate users from their data, and get to deeply inspect their every action. This is especially pernicious when the apps are used as the medium of communications between individuals in their private lives, where they have deeply personal and intimate interactions with their friends and loved ones.

With “social sharing” sites like Instagram, we’re training a new generation to literally be attention whores: giving up what should be their intimate lives, to power inferential engines owned by the largest companies, so that they get debased for artificial “social currency”.

The cost of this to each individual, and to society at large, is not typically contemplated. But it is vast. We are raising an entire generation of children and teenagers on a sugar diet that displaces all else in their lives. We are force-feeding this same sugar down the throats of adults who are old enough to know that this doesn’t feel right, but don’t know how, as individuals, they can stop the spiral of social regression and private degeneration.

Our private selves matter.

Consider this simple nuance of software or API design: the visibility of the To: field in email. If SMTP had been designed with BCC as the default, what would our communications patterns look like? Alternatively, what if email included an explicit list of all the people who could see the email? What if read-receipts were always sent, and could not be turned off? What if people could set a quota on how many emails they accept in a day, and senders had to bid on inbox access, and receivers could set different rates for different sender classes? Etc.

Software for human communications is extremely subtle.

Further Reading

Books & Papers