Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

It would be wonderful if this came about, but this isn't exactly a plan either. Current technologies almost all require you to work against decrypted data. For example, if I encrypt my laptop, and I use column level encryption on my database, and use ssl to connect to that database, and use certificates and two factor authentication and so on, in the end my application can read decrypted data. All the encryption prevents access to the data through many mechanisms, but rooting any of the machines involved still gives an attacker a path to much or all of the data (eventually all the data).

What is necessary isn't more advanced methods of encryption, what we need is less painful methods of encryption. Encryption should be supported at the hardware level (ssd's can move data faster than even the most modern cpu's can comfortably decrypt it, memory is rarely encrypted), and applied everywhere all the time.

As you say, the service fills a need (perceived or otherwise). It's the size of the network, not necessarily the service itself, that causes the problem. Make the service a protocol, and move it back into the (web 1.0) fold.

Yes they could contact an employer, but

Can they show up reliably on-time? Public transit costs money -> Homeless -> no address, so can't use a bank, cashing of checks can be done, but only if there is credit offered by an employer, or through charity of others. So from the get go, there's a geographic limitation w.r.t body-here types of work.

What about mental/computer work? Assume a smartphone. Still homeless, so no address means no bank. Could send a check to a P.O. Box maybe; but if there is company hardware you need to be vested with, that may not work out well. BYOD is a thing, and can work out, this is truly a success in that regard, but again, lack of address complicates things.

I mean, you aren't totally wrong, but I'm just not convinced that the homeless jobless experience has been revolutionized to the point people in poverty have been uplifted by the billions. If anything, infrastructure automation has allowed more to be done with less in terms of previously manual jobs, and enabled more efficient fund extraction from the average consumer through economies of scale. Especially in terms of rent seeking. If you look at the number of contracts entered into over a lifetime as a metric, software/the Internet has allowed an explosion in terms of the "one-sided contract" and has led to a social tilt away from the original purpose of the construct which was to serve as a meeting of the minds between equals.

Essentially, it's allowed for the carve out of unethical contracts at massive scale, and consolidation of capital intensive workflows through automation and standardization.

Can people learn and share? Yes. Are people all uplifted equally? I'd say no, and certain populations in particular are likely worse off. I'm thinking Kenya's predatory debt crisis, China's maturing surveillance state, and even the United States and U.K. are getting uncomfortably close to that event horizon.

Marketers ruined everything. We just wanted to be able to learn stuff. They had to turn that around and take it to the unhealthy extreme in the name of targeted advertising.

Often overlooked in my opinion is the significance of the unseen barriers to true, high fidelity communication. The ability to translate a written message from one language to another is surely beneficial, but even when sent between two parties who speak the same language, how successful is the "communication" really? Might we be vastly overestimating the magnitude of fidelity (the degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else), where "something else" is often an extremely nuanced idea, with (often unseen) inter-relations to many other nuanced ideas?

For the communication of any given idea, the sender must first attempt to get some reasonable conceptual handle on the idea themself (depending on the complexity of the topic, this is massively error prone right off the bat), pack it into a message in a relatively (compared to the complexity of reality itself) simplistic language (that they likely have a rather imperfect grasp of), put (using flawed communication/articulation skills) that message into some medium of transport (text, audio-only, verbal discussion via teleconference, in person verbal discussion, audio only presentation, audiovisual presentation, etc), each of which comes with it's own variety of shortcomings, and then the receiver must do all the same in reverse, subject to all the same problems, plus some additional issues like the human mind's tendency to subconsciously supplement received communications with additional information from mental storage, a process not detectable to the conscious mind. (This is what they said, but what did they really mean?).

It seems to me a big part of the problem is that we've invested so much brainpower into figuring out how the physical world works, resulting in incredible technical achievements and tools that now have extremely widespread use, but we've invested a relative pittance into understanding how human minds and societies work. Just as nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of those who lack sufficient wisdom, might there be something similar going on with mass communication technologies? How would one even know the answer to such a question?