Mark and I have continued our Diaspora-inspired conversation ( myself – mark ) via email. The conversation now seems to be centered around whether or not the web needs to be centralized or decentralized. I would like to try to take apart and reframe the question.
The Internet is a meeting place between people and software applications. Currently the software applications that meet people on the internet are controlled and dominated by big tech companies. So essentially the internet has become a meeting place between people and big tech companies.
This meeting is currently in a paradigm in which the centers are the big tech companies. It is a paradigm of social nature – people are subverted to social institutions. Personal identity is split and controlled (divide & conquer?) by corporate entities. This isn’t all bad: The big tech companies in their efforts to capitalize have innovated and demonstrated to us the potential of what can be done on the internet. This isn’t all good: it has a hidden but very high price tag.
So now it’s time to change that paradigm and reorganize it around a better moral order. To do this the relationship between society and individual thought needs to be reversed. The weight needs to shift from the big tech companies to individuals. In this new paradigm individual thought is the basic building block of the web. Software applications are subverted to individual thought and expression.
We can think of this is a recentralization of the web. Only this time there will be so many centers – it will not feel centralized at all.
So how can we do this? The biggest and most innovative software company in the world is “open-source” and it is “of the people … by the people … for the people”. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Because open-source is just now starting to mature so that it can make people-friendly software products.
Where will this leave the big tech companies? Struggling, hopefully to get better – to find a new place in this new “recentralized” order of the web. The irony of it is that this is probably how big tech companies got started. At some point (I am guessing it has to do with business aspirations, the injection of funding and the exposure to shareholder interests) their priorities shifted and their creativity stagnated.
Take for example Google’s search – despite all the resources available to Google and their reputation for fostering employee creativity, their core capability – “search” really hasn’t changed/improved much in a long time. They’ve done wonders at improving their capability to squeeze money out of advertisers. They’ve even added drag-and-drop image attachment to Gmail – Wow! (much pun intended). But search has been pretty much the same for a long time. Sure, a recentralization of the web is going to demolish some of their working assumptions on exploiting privacy for advertising gains – but I wouldn’t be surprised if they would also end up inventing and providing some amazing new search technologies (and hopefully business models) around the new paradigms.
… And just for comparison – take WordPress. No two WordPress installations look the same. WordPress itself is constantly changing and it’s plugin ecosystem extends it’s reach way beyond any one person’s imagination.
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A Better Moral Order for the Internet
Mark and I have continued our Diaspora-inspired conversation ( myself – mark ) via email. The conversation now seems to be centered around whether or not the web needs to be centralized or decentralized. I would like to try to take apart and reframe the question.
The Internet is a meeting place between people and software applications. Currently the software applications that meet people on the internet are controlled and dominated by big tech companies. So essentially the internet has become a meeting place between people and big tech companies.
This meeting is currently in a paradigm in which the centers are the big tech companies. It is a paradigm of social nature – people are subverted to social institutions. Personal identity is split and controlled (divide & conquer?) by corporate entities. This isn’t all bad: The big tech companies in their efforts to capitalize have innovated and demonstrated to us the potential of what can be done on the internet. This isn’t all good: it has a hidden but very high price tag.
So now it’s time to change that paradigm and reorganize it around a better moral order. To do this the relationship between society and individual thought needs to be reversed. The weight needs to shift from the big tech companies to individuals. In this new paradigm individual thought is the basic building block of the web. Software applications are subverted to individual thought and expression.
We can think of this is a recentralization of the web. Only this time there will be so many centers – it will not feel centralized at all.
So how can we do this? The biggest and most innovative software company in the world is “open-source” and it is “of the people … by the people … for the people”. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Because open-source is just now starting to mature so that it can make people-friendly software products.
Where will this leave the big tech companies? Struggling, hopefully to get better – to find a new place in this new “recentralized” order of the web. The irony of it is that this is probably how big tech companies got started. At some point (I am guessing it has to do with business aspirations, the injection of funding and the exposure to shareholder interests) their priorities shifted and their creativity stagnated.
Take for example Google’s search – despite all the resources available to Google and their reputation for fostering employee creativity, their core capability – “search” really hasn’t changed/improved much in a long time. They’ve done wonders at improving their capability to squeeze money out of advertisers. They’ve even added drag-and-drop image attachment to Gmail – Wow! (much pun intended). But search has been pretty much the same for a long time. Sure, a recentralization of the web is going to demolish some of their working assumptions on exploiting privacy for advertising gains – but I wouldn’t be surprised if they would also end up inventing and providing some amazing new search technologies (and hopefully business models) around the new paradigms.
… And just for comparison – take WordPress. No two WordPress installations look the same. WordPress itself is constantly changing and it’s plugin ecosystem extends it’s reach way beyond any one person’s imagination.