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I’m so embarrassed that I thought this was so deep and true when I was younger:
It comes across as “things will sort themselves out on unregulated TCP/IP”, and the entire 2.0 silo era kinda put a damper on my enthusiasm for that perspective, and then proof of work protocols added planet-burning on top of that.
Also, we’re more and more seeing the downsides of free speech extremism, downsides that the article kinda downplays.
Some of the other arguments come across as a li’l wishful thinking à la “fable of the keys”. Like saying that search engines work well as services on the edges when in practice search engines were implemented by harvester robots traversing links all over the entire “ball of ends” and doing that over and over and over again since the spice must flow.
The entire foundational premise that everything is p2p isn’t true either; instead, it’s a client/​server model, which turned out to be pretty useful in the mobile and battery era when you can’t rely on cron or nginx or bind being always on in your coat pocket.
I don’t like making slag pieces that just tear down someone else’s essay. I’m making an exception here for two reasons, but both of them are kinda selfish:
1. I’m just as much criticizing my own past self because this really was a memorable piece when I first read it many years ago, I found myself nodding along and going “Yes, that’s right, stick it to those silos! Down with Facebook! Down with those who wanna wall in the net instead of our loose and separate homepages!” And now I’m re-reading it and am like “What the heck? This does nothing to stop the garden-wallers and in hindsight, the garden-wallers turned a tidy profit.” Turns out the commons really had a tragic side and that tragedy was Meta putting up a poison factory killing everyone.
2. I already had it written since I’m pasting in the first part of this post from a conversation I had. Always on the look out for cheap ways to fill this capsule without thought or care.