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In 2022 I wrote a post^ in response to a question posed by ew0k about the usefulness of sneakernets^^. The original post references NNCP, which I had not yet tried out when I wrote my initial response, and which I wouldn't dig into for a few months hence. Now that I've spent over a year using NNCP on a regular basis, I'd like to expand on some of my thoughts.
ew0k's post questioned if sneakernets have a useful role in free and developed societies. My response focused on the fact that spectra of freedom and development exist in societies throughout the world, and where there might be lack of progress in one area or another, sneakernets still fulfill an important role. The example I gave was my own experiences with sneakernets: trading files back and forth with friends who were stuck with dial-up Internet access or had old computers that couldn't handle the modern Web.
At the end of the post, I briefly talked about the idea of using sneakernets simply as a way to exercise our right to offline storage and transmission. That was more of a footnote than anything else, but my recent experiences with technology have brought this aspect of sneakernets to the fore for me.
In late 2022, my smartphone was the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. It was an old phone and had some problems, from an aging OS no longer compatible with my company's MFA apps to a tired battery that plummeted from full to empty in little more than six hours. Despite its issues, some of my favorite features of the phone were its storage capabilities: expandable on-board storage via microSD, and USB OTG storage through the USB-C charging port. I used both of these features extensively, to the point that I simply refuse to buy a smartphone these days if it does not have expandable storage.
When I finally replaced the Note 8 in early 2023, there were very few smartphones available that had expandable storage. All of them were budget models, some of particularly low quality--the first smartphone I bought next had to be replaced itself after only four months. But high-end Samsungs, Pixels and iPhones were simply out of the question for me. I had to go where the features I wanted were.
Smartphones aren't the only place where local storage is disappearing. An increasing number of modern laptops, especially those that aren't used for gaming, have only a small amount of onboard storage for the OS and assume that user data will live in the cloud. Service subscriptions are ubiquitous in IoT devices, through which company servers will store the data the devices collect. Even TiVo-style set-top boxes with local recording are giving way to streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. And once a cloud provider or corporation gets hold of our data, we can likely never take it back again.
Sneakernets are gone from from modern culture not because they have no use, but because we're increasingly being barred from using them.
However, we have tools we can use to fight back--and NNCP is one of them. One of NNCP's major strengths is that it not only caters to sneakernet media well, but it includes a built-in daemon to handle direct connections from another computer. This means NNCP can bridge the gap between highly-connected devices and offline-first transmission modes a little more easily by seamlessly passing packets from one communication mode to another. NNCP can take a message sent over the Internet and relay it through intermediate offline storage devices, from USBs to CD-ROMs to even a series of printed QR codes, then move it back to connected devices again. Other programs like Secure Scuttlebutt and even git can work through a blend of online and offline means.
As long as disparities in freedom or technological development exist, there will always be a niche for sneakernets. But I believe it's more important than ever to simply exercise our right to share data via sneakernets at all. Physical property is one of the few things we can fully control, and we shouldn't take that level of control for granted. As long as we can exchange data using those means, we still have true decentralized power.
^^ Sneakernet in a Free, Developed Society
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[Last updated: 2024-08-13]