Distributed Everything

Google has been relatively "good" to us, the users, so far, and they've even been our allies in some cases(SOPA, ITU).

But make no mistake, when the Internet will start a trend towards fully decentralized/more anonymous services, they will become our enemy, because that will endanger their very way of making a revenue.

If I were a Google boss I'd try to start making money from other business models besides ads as soon as possible, possibly from hardware, like Apple. I think they're already planning this to some extent with Motorola, Google Glass, and even Google Fiber. But they need to hurry up. That trend might arrive sooner than they expect (within 5 years).

Facebook is already dead. They just don't know it yet (it takes a while for the market inertia to stop).

The states were complicit in this: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_U...

(Ratified in 1913 during the heyday of the Progressives, popular election of the Senator, turning it into a stuffy mini-House instead of representing the states by virtue of being elected by state legislatures.)

I think while there's a valid point in here, it strikes me as kind of harsh towards the larger public, which has never heard of IRC … for a reason. It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. Which is why it's essentially stayed around as more of a backchannel than anything else.

Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals.

Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this.

If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.

I think there needs to be a strong balance. For example, I think the "centralization" of EU has been great for unifying citizens across the continent, unifying trade, making it easy to travel and work in other countries, and perhaps the most important aspect - stopping European wars.

So far it seems like a pretty democratic system, and the laws tend to be much better, and with a lot more common sense than the ones being passed in US right now. But I'd be really wary about making it anymore centralized than it is.

A small coffee shop would align with the author's intent. The post favors distribution over centralization; federation, so long as it's into small-enough chunks, tends to do the same thing.