Archive of posts with tag 'Internet'

April 25, 2024 • #

Shrinking Arctic ice redraws the map for internet cable connections →

Politico:

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Early ARPANET Protocols →

October 13, 2022 • #

This was an interesting post with background on the design of the original ARPANET protocols, and the layering architecture developed by its creators.

The IMPs (Interface Message Processors) were the key to interconnecting original four ARPANET sites with a mechanism to allow message interchange between systems that couldn’t speak the same language. They needed a “translator” to sit between each site’s system and the other sites to convert messages into universally-interpretable formats. The entire architecture of ARPANET was an interesting proto-network architecture that’s uniqueness (run by a single entity, BBN / ARPA) allowed it some rigidity in the root protocol design and hierarchy. As TCP/IP was being developed, it needed to support a “network of networks” (the Internet):

The ARPANET protocols were all later supplanted by the TCP/IP protocols (with the exception of Telnet and FTP, which were easily adapted to run on top of TCP). Whereas the ARPANET protocols were all based on the assumption that the network was built and administered by a single entity (BBN), the TCP/IP protocol suite was designed for an inter-net, a network of networks where everything would be more fluid and unreliable. That led to some of the more immediately obvious differences between our modern protocol suite and the ARPANET protocols, such as how we now distinguish between a Network layer and a Transport layer. The Transport layer-like functionality that in the ARPANET was partly implemented by the IMPs is now the sole responsibility of the hosts at the network edge.

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Exapting Technologies

September 9, 2021 • #

New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.

Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of computers and the things we do with them evolved as a consequence of the expansion of the internet, enabled by interconnection to do new things we didn’t predict.

Former railroad corridors are regularly reused as cycling trails

“Exaptation” is a term of art in evolutionary biology, the phenomenon of an organism using a biological feature for a function other than it was adapted for through natural selection. Dinosaurs evolved feathers for insulation and display, which were eventually exapted for flight. Sea creatures developed air bladders for buoyancy regulation, later exapted into lungs for respiration on land.

In the same way, technologies beget new technologies, even seemingly-unrelated ones. In the case of the internet, early modems literally broadcast information as audio signals over phone lines intended for voice. Computers talked to each other this way for a couple decades before we went digital native. We didn’t build a web of copper and voice communication devices to make computers communicate, but it could be made to work for that purpose. Repurposing the existing already-useful network allowed the internet to gain a foothold without much new capital infrastructure:

The internet didn’t have to deploy expensive new hardware, or lay down new cables to get off the ground. It was conformable to existing infrastructure. It worked with the way the world was already, exapting whatever was available, like dinosaurs exapting feathers for flight.

Just like biological adaptations, technologies also evolve slowly. When we’re developing new technologies, protocols, and standards, we’d benefit from less greenfield thinking and should explore what can be exapted to get new tech off the ground. Enormous energy is spent trying to brute force new standards ground-up when we often would be better off bootstrapping on existing infrastructure.

Biology has a lot to teach us about the evolution of technology, if we look in the right places.

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Taking Back Our User Accounts

July 28, 2021 • #

Identity management on the internet has been broken for years. We all have 800 distinct logins to different services, registered to different emails with different passwords. Plus your personal data exists in a morass of data silos, each housing a different slice of your personal information, each under a different ToS, subject to differing privacy regulations, and ultimately not owned by you. You sign up for a user account on a service in order for it to identify you uniquely, providing functionality tailored to you. Service providers getting custody of your personal data is a side-effect that’s become an accepted social norm.

In this piece, Jon Stokes references core power indicators in public finance like capital ratios or assets under management that help tell us when an institution is getting too big:

As a society, we realized a long time ago that if we let banking go entirely unregulated, then we end up with these mammoth, rickety entities that lurch from crisis to crisis and drag us all down with them. So when we set about putting regulatory limits on banks, we used a few simple, difficult-to-game numbers that we could use as proxies for size and systemic risk.

The “users table” works as an analogous metric in tech: the larger the users table gets (the more users a product has), the more centralized and aggregated their control and influence. Network effects, user lock-in, and power over privacy policies expand quadratically with the scope of the user base.

As Stokes points out, web3 tech built on Ethereum will gradually wrest back control of the users table with a global, decentralized replacement controlled by no-one-in-particular, wherein users retain ownership of their own identity:

Here’s what’s coming: the public blockchain amounts to a single, massive users table for the entire Internet, and the next wave of distributed applications will be built on top of it.

Dapps on Ethereum are so satisfying to use. The flow to get started is so smooth — a couple of clicks and you’re in. There’s no sign up page, no way for services to contact you (presumably unless they build something to do so and you opt-in to giving your information). Most of my dapp usage has been in DeFi, where you visit a new site, connect your wallet, and seconds later you can make financial transactions. It’s wild.

The global users table decentralizes the authentication and identity layers. You control your identity and your credentials, and grant access to applications if you choose.

Take the example of a defi application like Convex. When I visit the app, I first grant the service access to interact with my wallet. Once I’m signed in, I can stake tokens I own, or claim rewards from staking pools I’ve participated in proportional to my share of the pool. All of the data that represents my balances, staking positions, and earned rewards lives in the smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, not in Convex’s own databases. Services like this will always need to maintain their own application databases for aspects of their products. But the critical change with the global users table is that the user interaction layer exists on-chain and not in a silo’d database, with custody completely in the hands of the person with the keys to the wallet.

If more services use the dapp model and build on the public, on-chain global users table, what will the norms become around extending that table with additional metadata? With some systems like ENS (the Ethereum Name Service, decentralized DNS), subdomains and other addresses associated with an ENS address are properties written on the blockchain directly. This makes sense for something like name services, where they’re public by design. But other use cases will still require app developers to keep their own attributes associated with your account that don’t make sense on the public, immutable blockchain. I may want GitHub to know my email address for receiving notifications from the app, but I may not want that address publicly attributed to my ETH address.

Web3 is so new that we haven’t figured out yet how all this shakes out. The most exciting aspect is how it overturns the custody dynamics of user data. Even though this new world moves the users table out of the hands of individual companies, everyone will benefit (users and companies) over the long-term. Here’s Stokes again:

If you want to build a set of network effects that benefit your company specifically, it won’t be enough to simply cultivate a large users table or email list — no, you’ll have to offer something on-chain that others are also incentivized to use, so that the thing you’re uniquely offering spreads and becomes a kind of currency.

Incentives for app developers will realign in a way that produces more compelling products and a better experience for users.

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The Shopify Effect →

July 7, 2021 • #

The internet broadly lowers friction and barriers to entry. It’s a mantra so well-known in internet businesses that we think whoever hasn’t embodied it isn’t going to make it.

Alex Danco contrasts this perspective with gaming, where that market is these days seen as an innovation zone, doing things that other markets discover and adopt years later.

In gaming, though, friction is part of the deal. You don’t have games at all if you don’t present customers with a challenge. If there’s no challenge or achievement (a type of friction!), then no one ever plays games at all.

This is where Alex draws the comparison in consumer products between Amazon and Shopify: Amazon removes frictions, Shopify embraces them — at least the right kinds:

To me, this is the real “Shopify Effect”. Our merchants can have such massive global impact (3.6 million jobs! $307 billion in 2020 economic contribution!) not only because they’re able to start and scale businesses, but also because those businesses are good businesses. They have strong fundamentals, powered by healthy gross margins that can support huge communities around them. The fundamental reason why they can do this isn’t only by getting rid of all the unnecessary friction. It’s by creating really expressive challenges, and helping their buyers become someone through conquering that challenge.

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Bull Cases for Starlink →

March 18, 2021 • #

Byrne Hobart makes the case for Starlink’s business model:

The line between a vision and a sales pitch is always blurry, and Elon Musk is unusually good at using this to his advantage. There’s a reasonable case that Starlink is just a natural way to amortize the fixed cost of SpaceX’s investment in launch infrastructure. But a sufficiently compelling sales pitch has a way of coming true, and if part of the pitch of Starlink is that it’s a censorship-resistant communications medium that creates access to the global Internet, not individual countries’ more restricted versions of it, then that may be what it becomes.

I set an alert on the SpaceX YouTube channel a few months ago, which gives me a closer perspective on how much they’re investing in Starlink, their satellite internet constellation. Multiple times a month I get a notice of a live-streamed Falcon launch with a flock of new Starlink sensors being put into orbit.

Each of these payloads puts 60 new birds into space. Now Starlink is in beta with early customers, and I’ve seen some amazing posts from folks at their off-grid cabins, now with 300down/20up connections where they used to be dozens of miles from connectivity of any form.

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satellitemap.space →

February 19, 2021 • #

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is getting pretty dense. So far they’ve put over 1,000 in orbit, with a goal of eventually reaching tens of thousands.

Someone put together this map visualization showing the orbit position of each bird, animated.

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The 1980s Dream of a Free and Borderless Virtual World

October 15, 2020 • #

Reason Magazine has put together a 4-part documentary series on the cypherpunk movement, the early-90s collective of hobbyist computer enthusiasts that believed in an open and free internet. Their philosophies influenced cryptography, bitcoin, and BitTorrent.

This is part 1, a well-produced piece on an important phase of internet history.

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Intellectual Value →

September 28, 2020 • #

Investor Esther Dyson published this piece in her Release 1.0 newsletter in 1994¹. It’s a look forward at what the market for content and digital goods with the rise of the internet.

These were the days of CompuServe and AOL, when you had to pay by the hour for access to the net. Software was still sold in a box, still on diskettes, and effectively all media was still consumed in print. Even search engines were in their very early days.

Dyson is prescient here, with some amazingly accurate predictions about how value would shift to different parts of the value chain for digital works:

Intellectual property that can be copied easily likely will be copied. It will be copied so easily and efficiently that much of it will be distributed free in order to attract attention or create desire for follow-up services that can be charged for.

The way to become a leading content provider may be to start by giving your content away. This “generosity” isn’t a moral decision: it’s a business strategy.

She references what eventually would become the open source movement, SaaS companies, and subscription publishing. An astonishingly forward-looking view of how intellectual property would evolve, and also assumes an internet explosion that wasn’t obviously inevitable at the time.

I still would love to see a publication (looking at you Increment) that curates and republishes historically-important articles from the history of computers.

The back issues are all available from O’Reilly, as well. An excellent historical archive of the early days of the internet era. ↩

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Weekend Reading: A New Web, Future of Higher Ed, and a Ford Concept Car

August 22, 2020 • #

🔗 A Clean Start for the Web

Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology:

I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.

And, maybe most importantly, what would website editing tools look like? They could be way simpler.

🎓 Michael Munger on the Future of Higher Education

Great discussion on this episode of EconTalk with Michael Munger about the possibilities post-COVID of “unbundling” the university a decentralized set of separate services that could combine to give serve the same needs that traditional universities do.

🚗 Ford 021C Concept Car

I saw this through a tweet somewhere, but what a great work of design. Very George Jetson.

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Owning Your Internet Property →

June 8, 2020 • #

Ben Thompson posted this a few days ago, something I’m glad to see getting so many likes and retweets:

Blogs = still the best representation of the Internet’s promise. Everyone should have a site that they own, not just a social media account (which are great for promoting blog posts).
— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) June 7, 2020

Even as it’s gotten so easy to publish your own content with Wordpress, Substack, Ghost, and even GitHub Pages, we live in a time when personal property on the open web is in decline. The volumes of users and content living in closed ecosystems like Twitter or Facebook are booming, while the number of blogs aren’t. I agree with Ben, tools like Twitter are additive to the foundation of owning your own space. They’re not replacements, and absolutely bring value in accessing the network effects for distribution.

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Annotating the Web with Memex

June 5, 2020 • #

I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for “power users of the web.” Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle.

I’m a couple of weeks into using it and it brings an interesting new approach to the world of bookmarking tools like Pinboard or Raindrop, both of which I’ve used a lot. Raindrop has been my tool of choice lately, but it’s heavy for what I really want, which is a simple, fast way to toss things into a box with tagging nomenclature to organize.

On the privacy topic from Wednesday’s post, Memex is approaching their product with similar principles. It’s is a browser extension only with no “cloud” element to it like most other services have. All of your data is stored client-side, and the only attachments to the cloud at all have to be opted-into, like syncing backups to Google Drive. It’s got an open source core also, for maximum transparency on how it works. Reading the vision document gives you a sense of where they’re headed:

The long-term mission of WorldBrain.io is to enable people to overcome information overload and the influence of misinformation through collaborative online-research.

We can’t research and understand all the topics we are exposed to well enough to not fall for misinformation. But we all are experts in some of those topics and could help each other understand them better — if we were able to share our existing knowledge more effectively with each other.

Decentralized knowledge management and web annotation is a movement I can get behind. I’m reminded of what Fermat’s Library is doing with academic papers — creating a meta layer of knowledge connection on top research source material. Passages highlighted in Memex could be referenced from other pages to denote connection points or similarities, building a user-generated knowledge graph on top of any internet content.

With Memex you never have to leave the browser. It overlays a small right-hand sidebar on hover with commands for bookmarking, adding tags, or displaying annotations. And they’re following through on their promise for power users with keyboard shortcuts. It also offers the option of indexing your browser history, which if you’re using DuckDuckGo but still want to archive your history for yourself could be useful. I don’t care much one way or another about this particularly, but it’s cool to have the option.

From mobile they have something interesting going. There’s a “Memex Go” app that works well for quickly bookmarking things from the Share Sheet on iOS. Syncing is a paid feature that works through a pairing process with end-to-end encryption to move data between mobile and desktop, synced over wifi. I haven’t tried this yet but I’m looking forward to checking it out. Seems like occasional syncing is all you’d need to move data between desktop and mobile, so this model could work fine.

I don’t think Memex has any integrations yet with other tools, but ones that come to mind that I’d love to see at some point are with two of my favorites: Readwise and Roam. From a technical standpoint I’m not sure how one would integrate a client-side database like what Memex has with a server-side one, but perhaps there could be a “push” capability to sync data up from Memex on-demand to integration points. With Memex’s highlights, perhaps I could decide if and when I want to send my highlights up to Readwise, rather than Readwise doing the pulling. In the case of Roam, even simple tools to drag highlights or bookmarks over as blocks in Roam pages would be a cool addition.

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Privacy with Utility

June 3, 2020 • #

The winds of internet privacy¹ shift all over the place. Certain technologies like encryption have given us important moves forward in security, but then big platforms like Facebook or a million small ad tech outfits have taken us the other way with invasive trackers and mishandling of data they shouldn’t have and most of the time don’t need. But the prevailing winds over the past few years have moved, on net, positively toward a focus on protecting personal data.

The nuclear options deployed by the pro-privacy EFF advocate to combat internet creepiness are to delete Facebook, block all trackers, use burner devices, and tape over their webcams. Of course that type of response brings a level of security in exchange for utility and convenience. Events like the revelations around PRISM, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and countless corporate data breaches have made it common knowledge for everyday people what personal data many companies had, what could happen when that data is exposed, and how easily it happens.

Blockchain technology promises to enable a lot in this area, but most of it is still immature. On the political front the regulatory responses through GDPR and other challenges to corporate data handling have helped, as well.

I’ve never been too paranoid about this stuff. I still use Chrome, Google’s productivity services, and many more of your classic Big Tech platforms. As technology spreads to more people (the internet is for everyone now, not just techies) and becomes more complex (a natural side effect of improvement) the issues creep in depth and scope. Data breaches, browser cookies, IP tracking, and hidden Javascript trackers are different dimensions of the same broader issue: gradually boiling the frog of what users will tolerate, if they even realize it’s happening in the first place.

There are many companies in the market now getting traction by safeguarding privacy as a central tenet. I like seeing these challengers to the BigCos of tech building secure, privacy-first products. They’re finding revenue paths that don’t require invasive, privacy-encroaching models with advertising, bending backwards to support “free” products.

To try and wean myself off of some of these platforms and support organizations committed to privacy, I recently made two big switches: DuckDuckGo for search, and Brave as my default browser.

DuckDuckGo’s gradual growth is a testament to how little Google has done to address the privacy concerns with their technology, especially the Ads stack, Analytics, and Chrome. In the way that I use search today, DDG’s usefulness and speed rival Google’s results, as far as I can tell. On the browser front, Brave was created by Javascript creator Brendan Eich to rethink how web browsing works, to rid us of the creeping, bloated megabytes of JS trackers that have to load on every modern media outlet website. It’s got ad blocker tech built in, and brings an interesting concept to attempt to replace old media-style advertising revenue through its “Basic Attention Token” cryptocurrency model — as you browse the web and view ads through their secure ad network, you earn tokens which you can donate back to content creators. From what I’ve read there’s some controversy around this model which I haven’t researched much, but I’ll have to give them credit for trying something new. On the surface it feels like they’re onto something here. As long as we’re using the traditional ads and PPM model, we’ll be chasing ghosts on the privacy front. Content creators can push on this issue, too. Substack and Ghost have been building healthy businesses supporting content creators building properties to go direct to their audiences, disintermediating the ad networks and big media distributors from the business of publishing and owning customer relationships — consumer directly pays creator, with minimal indirections in between.

But back to the original title of this post. The interesting thing today is that there are compelling tools to replace the high utility (but low privacy) products that seemed irreplaceable a few years ago. Indexing on security has felt like a trade-off against having quality products available to you. But now there’s been a renaissance for personal, secure products by companies being transparent about where their money comes from. DuckDuckGo is still ad supported, as is Brave. I’ve read a lot about Fastmail recently as a Gmail alternative, and they’ve gone with the all-too-unique business model of charging money in exchange for a service (how novel!).

You could use the terms “user data stewardship” or “security” interchangeably here and throughout this article. ↩

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Dithering and Podcast Subscriptions

May 22, 2020 • #

A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson and John Gruber launched Dithering, a new podcast they’re doing together with a unique model: 15 minutes per episode, 3 times a week, only for paid subscribers. They launched with a dozen or so episodes in the can from over the previous month, so I’ve already gone through the back catalog.

As with the open web and individual creators running their own web properties (versus only creating for other platforms like Twitter or Medium), I love to see certain folks in the podcast space pushing for business models that allow them to remain independent. Like with web content, advertising has been the dominant monetization path for podcasts, but the ad reads can get annoying. Most of the time for my favorite programs, I’d be happy to subscribe and avoid ads. The creator also then gets the luxury of more regular cadence of revenue (since ad revenues can be volatile), maintains direct relationship with the audience, and has more flexibility with the programming structure not having to worry about ads.

I now have several shows in my subscriptions that I pay memberships for. There’s room to get even more creative with it, too, and I’m sure we’ll start seeing more experimentation on monetization strategies as podcasting keeps expanding.

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Memex →

May 18, 2020 • #

Not that we needed another bookmarking utility, but Memex looks like an interesting take. It’s a browser extension focused on history, bookmarking, and annotation, but all stored in a local database. It has an end-to-end encrypted syncing service, as well.

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Why Alto? →

March 9, 2020 • #

In 1972 at Xerox PARC, Butler Lampson wrote this memo to the Xerox leadership making the case to produce the Alto computer from Chuck Thacker’s original design. Amazing to think how significant this piece of communication was in the subsequent progress on personal computers and the internet.

At this stage in ‘72, the ARPANET had only been live a couple years, and Bob Metcalfe’s ethernet design was still in the future. And the closest thing to a personal computer at this point was Wes Clark’s LINC, designed during his time at Lincoln Lab. Two of the critical points Lampson uses as justification were on both networking potential and personal computing:

Distributed computing. We can very easily put in an Aloha-like point-to-point packet network between Alto’s, using a coax as the ether (or microwave with a repeater on a hill for home terminals). We can then do a large variety of experiments with dozens of machines. It is easy to try experiments which depend on the independence of the participants as well as those which use specialized components which must cooperate to accomplish anything. In particular, we can set up systems in which each user has his own files and communications is done solely for the interchange of sharable information, and thus shed some light on the long-standing controversy about the merits of this scheme as against centralized files.

Personal computing. If our theories about the utility of cheap, powerful personal computers are correct, we should be able to demonstrate them convincingly on Alto. If they are wrong, we can find out why. We should, for example, be able to satisfy heavy Lisp users such as Warren and Peter with an Alto. This would also take a big computing load away from Maxc. It should also be quite easy to simulate the hardware configuration of other proposed personal computers (e.g., different memory hierarchies) and thus to validate those designs. This is important because more compact machines will require a much larger investment in engineering development and more precise optimization of the memory system.

The “Maxc” refers to PARC’s emulation of the PDP-10.

Pivotal moments can come down to a single well-articulated idea.

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Enter Ethernet

February 25, 2020 • #

The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to connect the machines together:

Ethernet schematic

From this Wired article:

PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was the first time that computers were small enough for hundreds to be in the same building, and the network had to be fast to drive the printer.

Metcalfe circulated his plan in a memo titled “Alto Ethernet.” It contained a rough schematic drawing and suggested using coaxial cable for the connections and using data packets like Hawaii’s AlohaNet or the Defense Department’s Arpanet. The system was up and running Nov. 11, 1973.

It’s amazing how simple many foundational technologies start out: a simple comms medium meant to connect their computers to a shared printer. Now the same tech is the backbone of almost every local network.

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RFC Reader →

February 23, 2020 • #

This tool lets you plunge back into computing history and read the RFCs published over the years since the early days of the ARPANET. I’ve been reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which tells the interesting story behind how RFCs came to be the medium for proposing standards on the internet.

A few notable ones:

Steve Crocker’s RFC 1 on IMP software (ARPANET’s “Interface Message Processors”, basically dedicated computers for network communication queueing)
Vint Cerf’s RFC 675 on TCP
John Melvin and Richard Watson’s RFC 97 on telnet
AK Bhushan’s RFC 114 on FTP

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Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles

January 18, 2020 • #

🥩 The Internet of Beefs

Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:

The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.

Almost none of these battles matter individually. Most mook-on-mook contests are witnessed, for the most part, only by a few friends and algorithms, and merit no overt notice in either Vox or Quillette. Beyond a local uptick in cortisol levels, individual episodes of mook-on-mook violence are of no consequence.

🎭 The Curse of Culture

I have a working draft post on this topic for sometime in the future. This is one of my favorites from the Stratechery archives — on corporate cultures and how they impact company strategy:

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so.

📚 Book Review: Secular Cycles

The Slate Star Codex review of Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which seeks to understand patterns in technological and social development, and underlying causes for expansion and stagnation periods.

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Protocols, Not Platforms →

December 20, 2019 • #

With the recent Twitter team announcement of bluesky, a research effort looking at creating a protocol standard out of Twitter, this piece is a timely look at a topic on a lot of minds in tech on the risks of the mega platforms, and what to do about it.

There are some great details here explaining the differences between the two. The idea of newer communications platforms morphing into networks of disparate systems with shared protocol standards certainly gets my decentralization nerves tingling:

A protocol-based system, however, moves much of the decision making away from the center and gives it to the ends of the network. Rather than relying on a single centralized platform, with all of the internal biases and incentives that that entails, anyone would be able to create their own set of rules—including which content do they not want to see and which content would they like to see promoted. Since most people would not wish to manually control all of their own preferences and levels, this could easily fall on any number of third parties—whether they be competing platforms, public interest organizations, or local communities. Those third parties could create whatever interfaces, with whatever rules, they wanted.

More freedom without diminishing the overall power of the technology (at least too much) is always preferable to a world where we try and create mass consensus when that’s an impossible achievement.

I’m glad to see that later in the piece there’s analysis of the business model issue. Companies like Facebook and Twitter didn’t shy away from protocols in favor of centralized walled-gardens because for technical reasons, or because protocols aren’t advanced enough. It’s the simple fact that aggregating the largest audience possible is more efficient for monetization. It’s not necessarily in any one inventor’s interest to work on the protocol problem — why not make a new technology proprietary and closed instead of working on a protocol that advantages a marketplace of competitors?

Protocol standards are also painfully slow to evolve and expand once they gain wide adoption, for logical, and mostly appropriate, reasons. Getting features added to something like NNTP, SMTP, or HTTP takes years if it happens at all. For core communications infrastructure you can make the case for stability and compatibility, but that must be balanced with new innovations and ideas.

I agree broadly with decentralization for technical and sustainability reasons, but it remains to be seen how exactly to get from here to there.

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Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding →

November 4, 2019 • #

“Waldenponding” is a phrase coined by Rao to describe the growing backlash movement against hyperconnectedness, driving people to disconnect completely and long for a life of lower information overload and deeper meaning — a reincarnation of Thoreau’s idea from Walden. This podcast interview is about an essay Rao wrote last year that argues against this idea, a contrarian viewpoint considering the “right” or “intelligent” thing to do is considered to be disconnecting from the vapid, toxic environments of Twitter and Facebook. He makes a compelling case about a continuum of information-light vs. information-dense sources of data, and high and low latency, arguing for the merits of connectedness and low latency social media sources — the “Global Social Computer in the Cloud” as he says. On one end you have low latency/shallowness (tweets) and the other high latency/richness (1000 page history books).

I love this idea. Anyone making arguments for diverse spectra of material and owning your own attention has my interest. In the essay he describes the view of the waldenponder as someone convinced that the Googles and Facebooks of the world have attention-hacked our brains and that their platforms are poison, an argument he refutes by saying that that’s “giving the attention hackers too much credit”. I would agree — people have more agency than they admit. After all, it’s easier to blame your inability to put down your phone or close Instagram on an algorithm than your own decision making.

Great interview and fantastic, thought-provoking essay.

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The End of Friction

April 10, 2019 • #

One of my favorite topics on Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, and one that underpins much of his Aggregation Theory, is the role friction plays in economies and cultural forces. Most of the pros (and cons) of internet companies can be tied back to the fact that they took existing businesses or customer demands and removed the friction. Whether it was shipping goods to your door, streaming movies, or communicating with friends, the internet stripped the friction from these interactions for good, but with some downsides that are only recently being realized and understood.

In 2013 he published one of my favorite pieces of his on this subject. One of the reasons the internet stacks up next to the industrial revolution in terms of economic enablement was that it removed friction of many stripes:

With the loss of friction, there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. And that’s only three examples! The Internet is pulling out the foundations of nearly every institution and social more that our society is built upon.

Count me with those who believe the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries. And it wasn’t all good. Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming. Then again, it also propagated slavery, particularly in North America. The industrial revolution led to new monetary systems, and it created robber barons. Modern democracies sprouted from the industrial revolution, and so did fascism and communism. The quality of life of millions and millions was unimaginably improved, and millions and millions died in two unimaginably terrible wars.

On the latest episode of Exponent, Ben and James dive in on this topic as it relates to the recent news of YouTube and its issues with toxic content on its platform, and their response (or lack thereof). We’re all well aware of the benefits of infinite information, reduction in cost, and increase in scale made possible by the internet (and YouTube, specifically), but this is a perfect example of the downsides when you remove friction.

Listen to the episode. It’s an excellent conversation that digs into the costs and benefits both of platforms like YouTube, and kicks around some ideas on how the negatives can be controlled.

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