💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2023 › 202302 › 20230214-digital-peasantry.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:33:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)
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Before the dawn of telegraphy, information and goods both needed to be physically transported to a location for the recipient to get them. Correspondence was carried on horseback, and all business occurred out directly in offices and storefronts.
Imagine if in those days, ordinary people didn't live in immovable houses but pod-like structures on wagons. They didn't own the land their wagons were parked on; they simply rented space along roads that were owned by the gentry, who themselves answered to coordination by the offices of the king. In order to have an address and receive goods and services, one had to rent a spot on a road somewhere.
Further, imagine if the gentry occasionally hooked up oxen to people's wagons and pulled them to different places on different roads. It was done in the middle of the night, not disturbing one's daily activities, but upon waking up the next morning one would discover that one had a different address.
In such a world, ordinary people couldn't reliably run businesses out of their homes or arrange meetings with people independently. If the powers that be decide to move their houses, how would they inform others? They couldn't count on deliveries from other individual people, and if customers tried to show up to the previous address, they wouldn't know where to look for the current one.
Of course, the landed gentry also own public squares and mail delivery companies. One could post a flyer at the square with information on one's new address. The trade-off is that guards patrol the square, preventing the peasantry from saying things the aristocracy disapproves of, and allowing them to know exactly who lives where and does what. The mail service is similarly controlled, the couriers promising not to read the mail but keeping a close eye on who corresponds with whom, when, how often, and attributes of the letters and packages that are sent.
This kind of situation is what we find on the modern Internet. Many people don't have permanent digital homes anymore: their ISPs don't offer static IP addresses, or if they do, customers on a residential connection have metered or throttled uploads, preventing them from effectively serving data to others independently. Smartphones and other devices that use a cellular data connection have no hope of maintaining a permanent home of their own, and even if they could, hosting content is impossible, both at the OS level and the network level. Big companies control so-called "public" spaces like Facebook and Twitter allowing people to speak only at their whim, and most messaging services don't respect user privacy--metadata, taken in aggregate and analyzed properly, can quite reliably recover actual data. without ever needing to decrypt a packet.
This state of affairs worries and disappoints me. People are more willing than ever to let go of their rights and freedoms, in exchange for the promise of comfort and convenience: a promise that has been shown in the last three years to be unenforceable the moment the world stops behaving the way we want it to. We must regain our independence and our agency as individual people if we want to harden ourselves against political strife, natural disasters, and societal disarray. It also gives us the ability to disconnect on our own terms and take care of ourselves, rather than getting caught up in the maelstrom of the digital world.
That's precisely what interests me so much about decentralized technology. I love the idea of projects like BitTorrent, GNUnet, cryptocurrency, and more recently NNCP. However, these are all forms of decentralization at the software level. They don't solve the problem of centralized infrastructure, a state in the physical world where individuals often don't have the same right of tenancy as wealthy and powerful corporations.
As I dig further into NNCP, I want to explore ways to decentralize the physical layers as well. This drives my interest in amateur radio: I find I'm less interested in the physics and principles of radio broadcasting as I am in the applications of building networks I can participate in freely.
However, I'd also like to see a world in which all people have equal access to permanent homes in the digital space. There are practical barriers right now, such as the starvation of IPv4 addresses, considerations of power and bandwidth, legal questions, and the issue of environmental stewardship. But while some people are taking these challenges seriously, in the general public there is a severe lack of awareness of the problem, and where there is, there's little motivation. The push for change should be cultural first, but I don't know where the momentum will come from.
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[Last updated: 2023-02-14]