centralization
I read with some interest Sue Gardner's recent post the war for the free and open internet and how we are losing it. She talks there about the notion of a commons in reference to parks, libraries, public places, like "the offline world" (mainly she describes, here, a city and its differing regulated spaces); and bemoans how few of these public places there are on the internet. How much it's commercial.
This is not an idle topic for me, though I will not go deep into why. Suffice to say I've a life-long desire to see the "public space" aspects of the net enhanced and the corporate nature of electronic mass media demolished; working, public, decentralized electronic media has been my mental chew-toy for as long as I can remember, back before the nightly sounds of the zone mail hour calls exchanging echomail with my fidonet upstream in the early 90s, as a teenager.
So I take what she's saying seriously. I take it seriously any time I think of the state of the net, in all it's modern capital-intensive, surveillance-intensive, increasingly centralized weirdness. And in that, I think she's overstating things, and maybe missing the longer term trend.
I have a friend who grew up on PLATO. This was a system built in the 60s, originally by the university of Illinois, as a remote educational system. It quickly developed chat and game subsystems, which absorbed much of the time and energy of the users (who were often young).
What's remarkable about the PLATO stories she tells me is that they have the exact same cultural marks of the phenomena I lived through in BBS-land in the late-80s / early-90s, and that were visible in USENET, and that are visible in the parts of the internet that Gardner doesn't much talk about in her talk. It's 2013 now and any such list I make will be non-exhaustive and quickly obsolete, but here are the places I think of as most interesting, culturally, on the net today: tumblr/pinterest, twitter/weibo, lj/dreamwidth, SA/4chan, AO3/OTW/fandom, email/mailing lists, the enormous traffic running through torrents, and the dual lineages of "real time" interaction in game and non-game forms, the IRC/IM/Skype/Hangouts on the one hand, and the MUDs through MMORPGs on the other.
These "spaces" are generally:
Setting aside the very important caveat that Gardner's measurement is the Alexa rankings which therefore happen to put eg. 10 different language-localizations of google in the "top 50"), the truthy part of what Gardner's saying is that for-profit companies own most of the machines, wires, power plants, buildings, software and domain names that we collectively refer-to as "the internet"; that economies of scale mean there are many chokepoints and "heavy hitters" who control a lot of it at any given time, and that in egregious cases they certainly can and do moderate, censor or inhibit activities they dislike within their fiefs.
But "the net" is a lot more than those objects or even those players -- google would be silent and meaningless without a web to index -- and the "net culture" that persists (and seems to be more-or-less recognizable for maybe .. fifty years now?) seems to me quite resistant to economic and technical trends.
This bears repeating: it takes a whole sub-industry of analysts to effectively reverse-engineer the mapping from "the internet" to specific bits of hardware and infrastructure. Capital moves fast. The relationship is obscure, and generally quite fungible. If a "public utility" entered the space of supplying internet infrastructure tomorrow -- say the US government decided to open 100 gigantic metropolitan datacenters and metro-area networks as part of a new Super-WPA stimulus bill or something -- and it undercut the googles and amazons, what services we situate on those sites would drain away very very quickly. The reason google tries to enter every conceivable market it can, aside from a certain degree of hubris on their part, is that it still makes 96% of its 10 billion in revenues from advertizing. If it loses that, it sinks instantly.
So I think I am more afraid of internal maladies of this culture (addiction, self-censorship, trolling and abuse, etc.) than I am from the exponential distribution of ownership of hardware and hosting services. I would also be concerned if (say) the googles and amazons were creating all the things they host, and thus in a position to more systematically bias the material. But they aren't. They barely have enough staff to keep the lights on. The users -- who outmass those companies by 100,000:1 -- produce the phenomenon being hosted.
This is not an idle topic for me, though I will not go deep into why. Suffice to say I've a life-long desire to see the "public space" aspects of the net enhanced and the corporate nature of electronic mass media demolished; working, public, decentralized electronic media has been my mental chew-toy for as long as I can remember, back before the nightly sounds of the zone mail hour calls exchanging echomail with my fidonet upstream in the early 90s, as a teenager.
So I take what she's saying seriously. I take it seriously any time I think of the state of the net, in all it's modern capital-intensive, surveillance-intensive, increasingly centralized weirdness. And in that, I think she's overstating things, and maybe missing the longer term trend.
I have a friend who grew up on PLATO. This was a system built in the 60s, originally by the university of Illinois, as a remote educational system. It quickly developed chat and game subsystems, which absorbed much of the time and energy of the users (who were often young).
What's remarkable about the PLATO stories she tells me is that they have the exact same cultural marks of the phenomena I lived through in BBS-land in the late-80s / early-90s, and that were visible in USENET, and that are visible in the parts of the internet that Gardner doesn't much talk about in her talk. It's 2013 now and any such list I make will be non-exhaustive and quickly obsolete, but here are the places I think of as most interesting, culturally, on the net today: tumblr/pinterest, twitter/weibo, lj/dreamwidth, SA/4chan, AO3/OTW/fandom, email/mailing lists, the enormous traffic running through torrents, and the dual lineages of "real time" interaction in game and non-game forms, the IRC/IM/Skype/Hangouts on the one hand, and the MUDs through MMORPGs on the other.
These "spaces" are generally:
- Pseudonymous at best; though "anonymity" is easily dismantled by an adversary like the NSA who can literally tap all the wires everywhere and do traffic analysis, many of us are able to carve out separate-enough voices to produce the fantastical, guard-droppping and self-experimentation benefits of pseudonymity.
- Nearly communistic, generally "gifty" so long as there's perceived reciprocity and/or attribution; natural social adaptations to circumstances of plenty.
- Text heavy, literary but also chatty. People have a lot to say, a lot to write down, a lot to discuss.
- Ephemeral, high-churn, flighty, temporary, in constant flux.
- Mostly oblivious to copyright, react strongly to perceived control of open flows.
- Theoretically decentralized; if practically-speaking they flow through a single point of control, they keep switching points-of-control until they find one that does not inhibit open flows too much.
- Pluralistic, highly varied. The internet-pundit popular term "long tail" denotes the fact that the zillions-of-little-things, at least if exponentially distributed, are equal in mass to the "most noticeable" heavy hitters. They add up. Unlike with TV, say, you do not get a nation of people perceiving (or "only perceiving") the exact same message. You get a lot of variety in everyone's habits and interests.
Setting aside the very important caveat that Gardner's measurement is the Alexa rankings which therefore happen to put eg. 10 different language-localizations of google in the "top 50"), the truthy part of what Gardner's saying is that for-profit companies own most of the machines, wires, power plants, buildings, software and domain names that we collectively refer-to as "the internet"; that economies of scale mean there are many chokepoints and "heavy hitters" who control a lot of it at any given time, and that in egregious cases they certainly can and do moderate, censor or inhibit activities they dislike within their fiefs.
But "the net" is a lot more than those objects or even those players -- google would be silent and meaningless without a web to index -- and the "net culture" that persists (and seems to be more-or-less recognizable for maybe .. fifty years now?) seems to me quite resistant to economic and technical trends.
This bears repeating: it takes a whole sub-industry of analysts to effectively reverse-engineer the mapping from "the internet" to specific bits of hardware and infrastructure. Capital moves fast. The relationship is obscure, and generally quite fungible. If a "public utility" entered the space of supplying internet infrastructure tomorrow -- say the US government decided to open 100 gigantic metropolitan datacenters and metro-area networks as part of a new Super-WPA stimulus bill or something -- and it undercut the googles and amazons, what services we situate on those sites would drain away very very quickly. The reason google tries to enter every conceivable market it can, aside from a certain degree of hubris on their part, is that it still makes 96% of its 10 billion in revenues from advertizing. If it loses that, it sinks instantly.
So I think I am more afraid of internal maladies of this culture (addiction, self-censorship, trolling and abuse, etc.) than I am from the exponential distribution of ownership of hardware and hosting services. I would also be concerned if (say) the googles and amazons were creating all the things they host, and thus in a position to more systematically bias the material. But they aren't. They barely have enough staff to keep the lights on. The users -- who outmass those companies by 100,000:1 -- produce the phenomenon being hosted.