this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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In the old days, when you wanted to do something new on the Internet, you designed a protocol and published an RFC. Perhaps you provide a reference implementations, but maybe you didn't. Anyone who wanted to could implement clients and servers for that protocol. People created things just to empower each other.
Today, capital dominates development on the Internet. When capital wants to provide a new service, it encapsulates it in an app. Users may only interact with the service as an access-controlled black box. Capital creates things to parasitically multiply itself.
The old Internet never went away. It never really even stopped growing in absolute terms. It just got out-competed by the wild malignant growth of the commercial Internet. But, the old one is still there, and today it's like it was in the 1980s, early 90s all over again; people who live on the old Internet are once again finding ourselves alienated from mainstream culture.
Now that debt isn't free and unlimited anymore, things might change. I hope the old, free, distributed, democratic Internet has a revival. Everyone who doesn't find us or can't unplug from the matrix is going to get terribly exploited.
I don’t disagree, but I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to attribute it all to capital. There is a failure in how the original internet (and traditional FOSS for that matter) envisioned the world.
The original vision was that everything will be distributed. There are protocols, there are implementations, and there are “users”. Where the term “user” encapsulated everyone from the person developing/contributing/maintaining the code, the person deploying and operating it, all the way to the grandparent or child or otherwise absolutely non-technical end user.
The idea was sound. You are a technical user, you could run email server for a set of people you know. Others could do the same. Small companies could start offering paid services, etc.
But the devil is always in the details. Who is maintaining it? Who is keeping everything secure and updated? How does it scale? How frequently do you need to migrate everything because the operator is going out of business or has come down with health issues, or has died. How much trust do you have to put in every operator? People don’t want downtime. People don’t want frequent migrations. People don’t want to have to trust hundreds of small providers and have churn all the time in services they rely on for their day to day.
The rise of a centralized, large, and popular operators of each type of service is inevitable in that case. A couple of large email providers were always distant to happen. Same with storage, messaging, etc. It’s difficult to selfhost everything yourself, and it’s incredibly burdensome to do it for free for a large number of people.
No, we don't disagree, though you might be reading in a stronger point than I made. I don't recall saying it's all capital's fault, whatever "it" is. However, I could probably be baited into doing so.
A tremendous amount of capital has been poured into Internet ventures. It out-competes mere human altruism. I think that if we want to have meaningful human experiences in our lives, we need to intentionally create spaces capital is not interested in occupying, or is prevented from occupying.
I think the janky details are important. Not the actual details, just the fact that they are janky. It forces one to understand and engage with the medium, which gives one power over the medium instead of the other way around. I think humans getting old, sharing what they know, and passing on is a vital feature of the human social experience, not a bug we need to patch around. (Ed Hew's registrar.ca will always be my spiritual domain registry.) There are lots of good business reasons why we would like commodified services provided by fungible service units rather than a society of human relationships, but I suspect there are some important psychological reasons for doing it the messy way, though no benefits to capital.
I think human spaces will always be fleeting and messy, as humanity constantly loses control of the most lucrative and populated spaces to our own greedy wealth. Human spaces are hard to use because they are always shifting, displaced and forced out to the frontiers, where things are less comfortable. In a real way we are all becoming marginalized citizens of an increasingly less human globe-spanning empire.