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Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

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Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#21
post #20

billionaires != revolutionaries Billionaires never want to revolutionize the system that made them billionaires in the first place. It would be tantamount to admitting their gains were ill-gotten. At best, they're just figuring out new ways to transfer more wealth in the existing frameworks. At worst, they're pulling up the ladders they climbed up after them so none may follow (and challenge) them.

This is what crypto believers always miss. No way in hell will powerful people and organizations allow us little people to threaten their power in any way. That's why "Web3", if it happens, will only serve their interests. Or rather, it will only happen because it serves their interests.

Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#23
post #8

everyone needs equal access to public data. right now only big tech can download the many web pages (without thottling or being ip banned) on linkedin (microsoft), youtube (google), facebook, github (microsoft) and billions of more pages. this also leads to a gap on AI training sets to give big tech even more entrenchment. for instance, only microsoft can build that ai coding application they did because other compan…

access to public data doesn't really mean much. A lot of training data already is public. Increasing computational resources and reducing the cost of communication always has a centralizing effect, for basic economic/energy/efficiency reasons, it increases the benefits of division of labor and returns at scale. The history of technological process is a history of agglomeration and if web3 reduces barriers all it does…

this is all true, but consider a computing model that almost was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langua...

telescript was kinda of weird, but wildly ahead of its time. the idea was decentralized services and commercial activity, but centralizing computation due to power/energy efficiency.

it was like a inverse jvm born at the transition from arpanet->nsfnet->internet, which greatly deregulated commercial activity.

it was also born when mobile devices were almost tractible, though 14 years before the iphone.

it almost birth the idea of an app store, except "apps" would be decentralized services people send/recv.

Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#24

There are lots of more compelling ways to reboot the internet that we're currently neglecting. I think we should begin by enacting government regulation to strip more power from the big tech companies, and transfer that back to the hands of everyday users. GDPR was a step in the right direction. We should go one step further, and actually enact the data portability promises that GDPR failed to deliver. We should deve…

Your plan is to achieve technological progress through regulation? I'm very, very skeptical the result will be anything other than grinding progress to a halt.

Just take a look at at computing systems within highly regulated industries such as consumer banking or medicine. Do you find either inspiring? How about nuclear power plants still using technology from our grandparents' era because doing so was legislated?

I'd bet that if such regulations came to pass in a country or market, in 15 years the internet there will lag considerably behind the internet in freer places.

Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_A_ Metaverse will be controlled by Facebook. One will be controlled by Microsoft, one will be controlled by NVIDIA, many will be decentralized using blockchain technologies like Web3. I see no reason to give the term to Facebook, just because they announced their product first. It's an arms race and Facebook merely fired the first shot.

No one was even talking about the "metaverse" until Facebook mentioned it. After Facebook mentioned it, no one was talking about anything other than what Facebook (or Meta) would do with it. Anyone looking to provide services or create content for the Metaverse is focusing on Facebook. All of the discussion on Hacker News about the metaverse is relative to Facebook. There is no arms race here. There won't be many "de…

People have been talking about building the metaverse since Neil Stevenson coined the term in Snow Crash in 1992.

> "Sorry, you've already lost. And Web3 is just a scam."

Generic dismissals like that aren't helpful.

Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#26

There are lots of more compelling ways to reboot the internet that we're currently neglecting. I think we should begin by enacting government regulation to strip more power from the big tech companies, and transfer that back to the hands of everyday users. GDPR was a step in the right direction. We should go one step further, and actually enact the data portability promises that GDPR failed to deliver. We should deve…

Your plan is to achieve technological progress through regulation? I'm very, very skeptical the result will be anything other than grinding progress to a halt. Just take a look at at computing systems within highly regulated industries such as consumer banking or medicine. Do you find either inspiring? How about nuclear power plants still using technology from our grandparents' era because doing so was legislated? I'…

It isn't technological progress I'm after. It's social progress. I want to live in a world where it's easier for different groups to exchange information using a well-defined set of semantic data standards. I'm not advocating for the imposition of any new technologies here. Everything I outlined is readily achievable using technology we have at hand today. It's just a question of holding organizations accountable to the good of the people on this planet instead of just to their own bottom line.

I don't think the purpose of consumer banking should be to inspire us with technological wizardry. It should be to provide a stable suite of services to customers, with protections to safeguard those customers where appropriate. If 50-year-old Cobol mainframes are serving that goal, well and good. If they're not (say, because they're more susceptible to breaches), then those companies running outdated software should be penalized until they upgrade their shit.

For each of your points, there are counterpoints to be made where government-imposed regulation had a positive effect on the citizenry. Do you find Teflon-induced cancers inspiring? What about marketing cigarettes to children? Should we get rid of all FDA labels on food products? More pertinently, should we do away with Sarbanes-Oxley and give corporations free reign over how they manage their financial affairs?

Restrictions on liberty are a fundamental part of living in a society, whether we're talking about individual or corporate liberties. This isn't to say that all regulation is perfect, or that there won't be some bumps in the road. Far from it. But I consider it a hallmark of our immaturity as a society that we see the regulatory landscape in such black-and-white terms as "regulation kills innovation".

Of course, entrenched industries spend tons of money trying to convince the average person that this is the case, so perhaps it is excusable that so many people feel that way...

Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your plan is to achieve technological progress through regulation? I'm very, very skeptical the result will be anything other than grinding progress to a halt. Just take a look at at computing systems within highly regulated industries such as consumer banking or medicine. Do you find either inspiring? How about nuclear power plants still using technology from our grandparents' era because doing so was legislated? I'…

It isn't technological progress I'm after. It's social progress. I want to live in a world where it's easier for different groups to exchange information using a well-defined set of semantic data standards. I'm not advocating for the imposition of any new technologies here. Everything I outlined is readily achievable using technology we have at hand today. It's just a question of holding organizations accountable to…

There's no point in our history where I'd like technological progress to have been halted. We live longer, healthier lives than our ancestors ever did.

It would be a terrible gamble to assume we've reached the pinnacle and should stop or even slow down here.

Re: Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet

#28
post #8

everyone needs equal access to public data. right now only big tech can download the many web pages (without thottling or being ip banned) on linkedin (microsoft), youtube (google), facebook, github (microsoft) and billions of more pages. this also leads to a gap on AI training sets to give big tech even more entrenchment. for instance, only microsoft can build that ai coding application they did because other compan…

Except web3 won’t actually fix those problems. Switching to blockchain won’t decentralize the web because centralization is an unavoidable emergent property of large complex systems.
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