The End of the Internet Dream

"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.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

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.

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.

--

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.

--

[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.

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.