The alternative is an imagined place of dystopia and despair that I refuse to entertain. There is enough of that in this world already.
Refusing to think about problems doesn’t make them go away.
I personally am hopeful about the future of the internet. We have lots of good decentralized systems being developed, cryptocurrencies are doing well, there’s lots of activity around anti-censorship, we’ve made a lot of progress on practical formal methods. However, we need to keep on top of the problems as well.
Refusing to think about problems doesn’t make them go away.
True, but if enough people believe in an idea it becomes reality. For example, if the majority would believe that Mastodon is bigger than Twitter it would become true.
That sounds more arbitrary than these things actually are. People flock to what’s fun, convenient (esp that), useful, and/or cheap. So far, outside BitTorrent or other P2P filesharing, decentralized protocols or trustworthy goods have been harder, less useful in terms of features, more costly, and/or have no ecosystem. The centralized models backed by unscrupulous people won about every time. What we need is more work on making private/secure things fun and useful while still being easy to use and cheap.
WhatApp before Facebook’s acquisition was a decent example where tons of people were using it. The potential to make it more private eventually happened with Moxie’s help. SpiderOak is another good example in the backup category. Dual-licensed alternatives to such popular products done with stronger privacy/security would be a nice start. Also, improving security of any widely-deployed FOSS where possible. Even a secure rewrite if modifying existing code isn’t possible. Gotta be sure the rewrite can plug into existing ecosystem, though, with gradual rewrites of those libraries possible.
Refusing to think about problems doesn’t make them go away.
I think he means it more in the sense of refusing to give up on avoiding the dystopia. If we are to have the necessary tools to avoid it, the people who would provide them can’t be too apathetic to pull it off.
This guy is just refusing to give up hope.
And the least we can do is to spread the message that centralization is bad, and to talk about the alternatives.
Mastodon makes me so hopeful. I hope IPFS becomes a bigger protocol too.
Not sure what we can do to limit this meaningfully outside of changing existing laws that apply to trusts to apply to these giants.
Refusing to think about problems doesn’t make them go away.
I personally am hopeful about the future of the internet. We have lots of good decentralized systems being developed, cryptocurrencies are doing well, there’s lots of activity around anti-censorship, we’ve made a lot of progress on practical formal methods. However, we need to keep on top of the problems as well.
True, but if enough people believe in an idea it becomes reality. For example, if the majority would believe that Mastodon is bigger than Twitter it would become true.
That sounds more arbitrary than these things actually are. People flock to what’s fun, convenient (esp that), useful, and/or cheap. So far, outside BitTorrent or other P2P filesharing, decentralized protocols or trustworthy goods have been harder, less useful in terms of features, more costly, and/or have no ecosystem. The centralized models backed by unscrupulous people won about every time. What we need is more work on making private/secure things fun and useful while still being easy to use and cheap.
WhatApp before Facebook’s acquisition was a decent example where tons of people were using it. The potential to make it more private eventually happened with Moxie’s help. SpiderOak is another good example in the backup category. Dual-licensed alternatives to such popular products done with stronger privacy/security would be a nice start. Also, improving security of any widely-deployed FOSS where possible. Even a secure rewrite if modifying existing code isn’t possible. Gotta be sure the rewrite can plug into existing ecosystem, though, with gradual rewrites of those libraries possible.
I think he means it more in the sense of refusing to give up on avoiding the dystopia. If we are to have the necessary tools to avoid it, the people who would provide them can’t be too apathetic to pull it off.
This guy is just refusing to give up hope.
And the least we can do is to spread the message that centralization is bad, and to talk about the alternatives.