9 ms·

Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet

158 points by zby 10y ago

walterbell 10y ago
> In addition to re-reigning in government power, we need similar restrictions on corporate power: a new Magna Carta focused on the institutions that abuse power in the 21st century. Now we have corporate-friendly proposals in TPP, TTIP, TiSA and RCEP. Where are the proposals from civil society?
meira 10y ago
Great essay. I missed only one point: why he used Brazil as a succesful example of internet use? Facebook, Google & Twitter sponsored a mob that finished with a coup d'etat here. We are far from being a good example, I think we are the worse and what happened here is been exported to other countries right now.
- gpribeiro 10y ago
  Sorry, but there are a lot of disagreement about your "coup d'etat". A portion of the population, me included, don't see it as a coup, as the deposition of the president followed, and is following, the law. I don't think here is the place to have this kind of discussion, but I just wanted to make it clear that that are opposing ideas on this... Regardless, I think that social media in general was key to some very important social movements here, but you won't agree with my examples :). But I agree it wasn't clear what he was referring to in case of Brazil.
  - anf 10y ago
    Even if "coup" is the wrong word for it doesn't mean it was all kosher: https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-events-expose-the-fraud-of-dilmas-impeachment-and-temers-corruption/ https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-events-...
- ars_nihili 10y ago
  What the hell are you talking about? You may even think there was a coup d'etat here in Brazil, even though the Supreme Court and the media in general disagree. I won't challenge you in this point, as I don't think this is a topic to be discussed here in HN. However, your affirmation that Facebook, Google and Twitter sponsored this coup is quite bizarre. Care to give any source in this?
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    I have no information on the Facebook/Google/Twitter involvement, but I can share this video, perhaps you'll find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXuxZXMzSNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXuxZXMzSNY
zeveb 10y ago
> In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the “natural laws of the Internet” and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order. Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the Internet as it was couldn't last: it was, effectively, a state of nature. The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the constraints of the old order. The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man. The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages (as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment) but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend it and become the new establishment. If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again. I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.' We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.
- pjmorris 10y ago
  One of my big takeaways from read a US history [0] was that conflicts were often solved by the dissenters moving somewhere else and settling that new empty space. Which is one reason why I think space exploration is important; there's plenty of room for multiple viewpoints out there. [0] 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson
dineshp2 10y ago
PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change for the better. As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions. If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely remain a pipe dream. The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO, one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be far away. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rasengan 10y ago
The answer is to educate everyone, fast, on embracing the new world order - a world where technology rules and all else is of lesser importance as we all strive toward a better future. We need to continue to educate, educate, educate, and give to all the powers of the computer, programming, scripting, and google.
- pyrale 10y ago
  > give to all the powers of the computer, programming, scripting, and google. One of those is a private company.
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    Actually, with lowercase g, it's just a number but is non sequitur in this context.
    - dylanfw 10y ago
      The number is spelled "googol."
      - quadrangle 10y ago
        oh, huh, thanks
- __jal 10y ago
  I fail to understand on a number of levels. Which new world order are we talking about here? There are a number of things with that moniker. Education inexorably leads to embracing this one (whichever it is)? If you don't get some percentage of naysayers, you're not teaching, you're indoctrinating. Technology as the ultimate master of human society? That isn't a better future. At least for humans. And what any of this has to do with independence from our corporate infolords, I have no idea.
skybrian 10y ago
We have feudalism because spam and abuse make everything suck. That means you need user accounts that are at least somewhat hard to abuse or the sock-puppet problem becomes unmanageable, and automated filters for the spam, and ways to block abusive users, and moderators to appeal to when users can't solve things on their own. These things can't be fully automated and they aren't fun for volunteers so businesses end up hiring people to do them.
- fulafel 10y ago
  Pseudonymous identities with reputations and decentalised webs of reputation would be the solution in the old school spirit. But since things like Google and Facebook are financed by ads and trade of personally identifiable information, the incentives don't really align.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    The way you talk you'd think real names were invented by advertisers. Um, no. There are plenty of good reasons to use real names that have nothing to do with advertising. Handles work well for CB radio, BBS's, games, and other geeky pursuits. In the early days, your friends and relatives weren't online anyway, so why not use a handle? But they don't work for relatives, offline friends, businesses, politicians, or really, any of the other ways we use our real names.
    - fulafel 10y ago
      You could still publish an assertion about a real name, but the foundations need not require it to be public information.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      See, the idea of a singular real name is interesting to me - I have a small handful of names I'd consider "real". It's the same with a fair few people I know, to varying extents, due to the groups I'm involved in. The ability to use many names is strongly tied to the ability to identify yourself. Being forced to use a single name in all contexts, whether you want to or not, is relinquishing that ability - it's being told who you are permitted to be by an external force.
ethbro 10y ago
Ah, so that's how we end up in a cyberpunk future. It is almost 2020...
pasbesoin 10y ago
Load stalling for me. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fen.collaboratory.de%2Fw%2FPower_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_Internet http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A... P.S. It's a piece by Bruce Schneier.
abakker 10y ago
I appreciate the metaphor to feudalism - it certainly can describe what we are seeing now in the concentration on corporate powers, but I it is misleading to characterize the internet as a whole system of government, rather than a new dimension or frontier of an existing one. A better metaphor is probably a comparison to the wild west. The early internet was government-sponsored, and the government's wait-and-see attitude is much more akin to their attitude toward early homesteaders heading out into the wild - they wanted the country settled, but could not offer anything but space to the early settlers. The government didn't really know what it was offering. That initial rush into the west came with the promise of fortune and glory and freedom, but came with no security, no guarantees. That state that we think of as the wild west - boom and bust, saloons, gunfights, and stage coach robbery - really only lasted for around 20 years though, and was eventually replaced with a much more standardized, civilized world by comparison. That is where we are with the internet now. The frontier is colonized, and the issues that remain are the industrialization of the existing claims. We're at the age now where the internet frontier yields to human habitation and comforts, and supplies us with guarantees, trade, economies, industries, mass production, and jobs. The internet isn't industrial yet, but we're seeing the beginnings of it now. The original booms are mostly gone (Yahoo was one of the last), and now the more corporate, more focused companies have grown large. Now, the established businesses, too, are moving in, and the frontier is looking pretty tame - just an extension of the existing world order. Just like the wild west though, the original frontiersmen don't take well to reintegrating.
Karrot_Kream 10y ago
In a purely personal, sense, I miss the wild west days of the internet. I was an odd kid, never fitting into any of the big groups at school. The classic son of an immigrant with one foot in his parents' world and one foot in his country of birth. The internet's pseudonymity guided my adolescence in a way that's near and dear to my heart. Slow to grow, awkward and ungainly, at school I was nothing more than a dust mote. On the internet, though, I became a leader in my set of niche communities. To this day, some of my closest friends IRL (am I dating myself with that?) come from the reputation and the identity I built up in my particular niche of the internet, driven by my passions (often at the detriment of my grades). When I see kids today, I feel sad. The internet was an escape for those of us who were awkward, unloved, and bullied. The internet was the playground of the mind. Of course, I see the hypocrisy in my own nostalgia; Here I am, making a living in the Feudal Internet. I hope kids find a way to reclaim the frontier that was once theirs.
- parennoob 10y ago
  Kids are finding spaces to reclaim "wild west" states even in the midst of hyper-curated social networks. For example, look at what they call finstagrams[1] today. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagram-fake-account.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagr...
- pikachu_is_cool 10y ago
  The "wild west" stuff is still out there. You just need to look harder.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
This is largely because leveraging power on the Internet requires technical expertise, and most distributed power groups don’t have that expertise. This is actually my biggest concern. Our company is bleeding edge technology in AR and ML and it's really fucking hard to hire computer vision and machine learning people because Goog/Face/Apple can offer 300-400k for PhDs and give them exciting and engaging projects. If giant companies constantly "disrupt themselves" and acquire anything that looks like competition then they just consolidate further and nobody can take a competitive position. I know people will hand wave this away, but as RL becomes the architecture for software - especially led by these big companies - it's going to be increasingly hard to unseat big players. At the AI meetup at Stanford I went to last week, Andrew Ng was asked by Jen-Hsun Huang, "How do small companies create the new technologies for the future better than the big ones" and Andrew's comment was basically: "They don't anymore." I'm worried that the time for disruptive startups (at least in software) is coming to an end. Hopefully I'm wrong.
- parennoob 10y ago
  You are conflating technical and financial power. If your company has bleeding edge technology, and the only thing you want is to see it widely adapted, open source or freely license all your software, so a large number of small companies can build things using it. But (my guess is, I don't know what company this is) you won't do so because you want to leverage the financial power of that knowledge. In that case, why begrudge the Google researchers their 300k? An example of a truly distributed purely technical power group would be something like Debian GNU/Linux. One of the reasons it's possible, and getting easier by the day to run desktop software that isn't locked down by one of the big corporations is the existence of distributed projects like the kernel and Debian.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    I'm not conflating it, they are related. I had this argument at AGI 14 where someone was trying to argue that it was possible to make disruptive FOSS to the same scale as Google. I just don't believe it. Why? People have to eat. If you want to compete, at the impactful-change the power structure level, you have to pay people real competitive wages to work full time. What you say is anathema to everything else written on this site about how to build good products with good people that have impact. Otherwise you wait around till the next gauss/perelman shows up that's only working for passion.
LittleSpider 10y ago
Interesting take on the internet as Feudalism, and everyone having to align with a king or a prince to protect him from other unknowable threats. There is a blog which discusses how much of the internet is more like a digital bazaar - everyone shouting and no one listening to most of it (camels, get your camels here, dates, I have dates, and so on). I trust I can include the link here, and as I am very new to Hacker News, I trust I am not overstepping some boundary by doing so. http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/ http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/ Maybe the internet is a little of all things - bazaar, wild west, feudalism, democracy, socialism, and so on.
windlep 10y ago
> What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so wrong? Sort of reminds me of some scientists concerns after inventing the atom/hydrogen bomb.... oops, what did we just do? Yet I don't see or hear about any tech ethics groups. You know, a group of people that actually tries to determine whether some tech being considered/built will actually be good for society or not. From what I've read, the Amish have such a thing, ie, it's not that they're strictly anti-tech, but that they have community leaders that evaluate the pros/cons to their society before allowing its introduction. I found it refreshing that there's movement around an AI group of this nature to try and ensure we don't hose ourselves with AI, but really, a broader tech ethics group should've already been on that as well. Unfortunately it's much easier to just plow ahead and ignore such things in the hopes of being the next billionaire startup founder. Leave it to someone else to decide whether you're making things in our society/world better or worse.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
What i gathered from the article is that access to data means power; - more transparency of government + ability to organize means more power to grassroots organizations - more data on individuals means more power to corporations and governments - ability to steal data means power to cyber criminals. What i did not understand is the motivations of each of these actor to curtail his access to data/power? i think Bruce Schneier precisely described the new steady state now what i don't understand is how the system could possibly change. this reminds me of the transformation of the former Soviet Union : in the nineties a lot of people thought that liberalism is here to stay; you can't just do a dictatorship and censorship in the 21st century etc, etc. However it turned out to be a brief interlude - the new elite is just a repackaged old nomenklatura and state power was never curtailed/balanced by an independent judiciary. Same with the internet - the new gadget couldn't change the power balance, it just took them some time to adapt. TLDR: The criminals were the fastest to adapt (they always do); civil society got something out of the ability to organize but then the balance shifted back to the state and corporations, it just took them some time to get their act together.
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  just to add, this article is from 2013; still we are living in the same era so not much changed. Here is the original link: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_for_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_fo... It also first appeared in 'The Atlantic': http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-battle-for-power-on-the-internet/280824/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-ba...
carmella22 10y ago
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carmella222 10y ago
Look he's real I have confirmed it, contact Alphafasttunnel247@cyberservices.com for your hack issues ranging from , University Grades change, Email and phone hack for text, whatsapp imessages, call logs,Gps tracking and lots more. He provides proof and trust me he's real. Ive been ripped severaly his name is Richards a computer Engineer.

158 points by zby 10y ago

> In addition to re-reigning in government power, we need similar restrictions on corporate power: a new Magna Carta focused on the institutions that abuse power in the 21st century. Now we have corporate-friendly proposals in TPP, TTIP, TiSA and RCEP. Where are the proposals from civil society?

meira 10y ago

Great essay. I missed only one point: why he used Brazil as a succesful example of internet use? Facebook, Google & Twitter sponsored a mob that finished with a coup d'etat here. We are far from being a good example, I think we are the worse and what happened here is been exported to other countries right now.

gpribeiro 10y ago
Sorry, but there are a lot of disagreement about your "coup d'etat". A portion of the population, me included, don't see it as a coup, as the deposition of the president followed, and is following, the law. I don't think here is the place to have this kind of discussion, but I just wanted to make it clear that that are opposing ideas on this... Regardless, I think that social media in general was key to some very important social movements here, but you won't agree with my examples :). But I agree it wasn't clear what he was referring to in case of Brazil.
- anf 10y ago
  Even if "coup" is the wrong word for it doesn't mean it was all kosher: https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-events-expose-the-fraud-of-dilmas-impeachment-and-temers-corruption/ https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-events-...
ars_nihili 10y ago
What the hell are you talking about? You may even think there was a coup d'etat here in Brazil, even though the Supreme Court and the media in general disagree. I won't challenge you in this point, as I don't think this is a topic to be discussed here in HN. However, your affirmation that Facebook, Google and Twitter sponsored this coup is quite bizarre. Care to give any source in this?
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  I have no information on the Facebook/Google/Twitter involvement, but I can share this video, perhaps you'll find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXuxZXMzSNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXuxZXMzSNY

zeveb 10y ago

> In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the “natural laws of the Internet” and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order. Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the Internet as it was couldn't last: it was, effectively, a state of nature. The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the constraints of the old order. The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man. The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages (as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment) but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend it and become the new establishment. If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again. I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.' We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.

pjmorris 10y ago
One of my big takeaways from read a US history [0] was that conflicts were often solved by the dissenters moving somewhere else and settling that new empty space. Which is one reason why I think space exploration is important; there's plenty of room for multiple viewpoints out there. [0] 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson

dineshp2 10y ago

PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change for the better. As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions. If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely remain a pipe dream. The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO, one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be far away. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

rasengan 10y ago

The answer is to educate everyone, fast, on embracing the new world order - a world where technology rules and all else is of lesser importance as we all strive toward a better future. We need to continue to educate, educate, educate, and give to all the powers of the computer, programming, scripting, and google.

pyrale 10y ago
> give to all the powers of the computer, programming, scripting, and google. One of those is a private company.
- quadrangle 10y ago
  Actually, with lowercase g, it's just a number but is non sequitur in this context.
  - dylanfw 10y ago
    The number is spelled "googol."
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      oh, huh, thanks
__jal 10y ago
I fail to understand on a number of levels. Which new world order are we talking about here? There are a number of things with that moniker. Education inexorably leads to embracing this one (whichever it is)? If you don't get some percentage of naysayers, you're not teaching, you're indoctrinating. Technology as the ultimate master of human society? That isn't a better future. At least for humans. And what any of this has to do with independence from our corporate infolords, I have no idea.

skybrian 10y ago

We have feudalism because spam and abuse make everything suck. That means you need user accounts that are at least somewhat hard to abuse or the sock-puppet problem becomes unmanageable, and automated filters for the spam, and ways to block abusive users, and moderators to appeal to when users can't solve things on their own. These things can't be fully automated and they aren't fun for volunteers so businesses end up hiring people to do them.

fulafel 10y ago
Pseudonymous identities with reputations and decentalised webs of reputation would be the solution in the old school spirit. But since things like Google and Facebook are financed by ads and trade of personally identifiable information, the incentives don't really align.
- skybrian 10y ago
  The way you talk you'd think real names were invented by advertisers. Um, no. There are plenty of good reasons to use real names that have nothing to do with advertising. Handles work well for CB radio, BBS's, games, and other geeky pursuits. In the early days, your friends and relatives weren't online anyway, so why not use a handle? But they don't work for relatives, offline friends, businesses, politicians, or really, any of the other ways we use our real names.
  - fulafel 10y ago
    You could still publish an assertion about a real name, but the foundations need not require it to be public information.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    See, the idea of a singular real name is interesting to me - I have a small handful of names I'd consider "real". It's the same with a fair few people I know, to varying extents, due to the groups I'm involved in. The ability to use many names is strongly tied to the ability to identify yourself. Being forced to use a single name in all contexts, whether you want to or not, is relinquishing that ability - it's being told who you are permitted to be by an external force.

ethbro 10y ago

Ah, so that's how we end up in a cyberpunk future. It is almost 2020...

pasbesoin 10y ago

Load stalling for me. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fen.collaboratory.de%2Fw%2FPower_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_Internet http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A... P.S. It's a piece by Bruce Schneier.

abakker 10y ago

I appreciate the metaphor to feudalism - it certainly can describe what we are seeing now in the concentration on corporate powers, but I it is misleading to characterize the internet as a whole system of government, rather than a new dimension or frontier of an existing one. A better metaphor is probably a comparison to the wild west. The early internet was government-sponsored, and the government's wait-and-see attitude is much more akin to their attitude toward early homesteaders heading out into the wild - they wanted the country settled, but could not offer anything but space to the early settlers. The government didn't really know what it was offering. That initial rush into the west came with the promise of fortune and glory and freedom, but came with no security, no guarantees. That state that we think of as the wild west - boom and bust, saloons, gunfights, and stage coach robbery - really only lasted for around 20 years though, and was eventually replaced with a much more standardized, civilized world by comparison. That is where we are with the internet now. The frontier is colonized, and the issues that remain are the industrialization of the existing claims. We're at the age now where the internet frontier yields to human habitation and comforts, and supplies us with guarantees, trade, economies, industries, mass production, and jobs. The internet isn't industrial yet, but we're seeing the beginnings of it now. The original booms are mostly gone (Yahoo was one of the last), and now the more corporate, more focused companies have grown large. Now, the established businesses, too, are moving in, and the frontier is looking pretty tame - just an extension of the existing world order. Just like the wild west though, the original frontiersmen don't take well to reintegrating.

Karrot_Kream 10y ago

In a purely personal, sense, I miss the wild west days of the internet. I was an odd kid, never fitting into any of the big groups at school. The classic son of an immigrant with one foot in his parents' world and one foot in his country of birth. The internet's pseudonymity guided my adolescence in a way that's near and dear to my heart. Slow to grow, awkward and ungainly, at school I was nothing more than a dust mote. On the internet, though, I became a leader in my set of niche communities. To this day, some of my closest friends IRL (am I dating myself with that?) come from the reputation and the identity I built up in my particular niche of the internet, driven by my passions (often at the detriment of my grades). When I see kids today, I feel sad. The internet was an escape for those of us who were awkward, unloved, and bullied. The internet was the playground of the mind. Of course, I see the hypocrisy in my own nostalgia; Here I am, making a living in the Feudal Internet. I hope kids find a way to reclaim the frontier that was once theirs.

parennoob 10y ago
Kids are finding spaces to reclaim "wild west" states even in the midst of hyper-curated social networks. For example, look at what they call finstagrams[1] today. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagram-fake-account.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagr...
pikachu_is_cool 10y ago
The "wild west" stuff is still out there. You just need to look harder.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

This is largely because leveraging power on the Internet requires technical expertise, and most distributed power groups don’t have that expertise. This is actually my biggest concern. Our company is bleeding edge technology in AR and ML and it's really fucking hard to hire computer vision and machine learning people because Goog/Face/Apple can offer 300-400k for PhDs and give them exciting and engaging projects. If giant companies constantly "disrupt themselves" and acquire anything that looks like competition then they just consolidate further and nobody can take a competitive position. I know people will hand wave this away, but as RL becomes the architecture for software - especially led by these big companies - it's going to be increasingly hard to unseat big players. At the AI meetup at Stanford I went to last week, Andrew Ng was asked by Jen-Hsun Huang, "How do small companies create the new technologies for the future better than the big ones" and Andrew's comment was basically: "They don't anymore." I'm worried that the time for disruptive startups (at least in software) is coming to an end. Hopefully I'm wrong.

parennoob 10y ago
You are conflating technical and financial power. If your company has bleeding edge technology, and the only thing you want is to see it widely adapted, open source or freely license all your software, so a large number of small companies can build things using it. But (my guess is, I don't know what company this is) you won't do so because you want to leverage the financial power of that knowledge. In that case, why begrudge the Google researchers their 300k? An example of a truly distributed purely technical power group would be something like Debian GNU/Linux. One of the reasons it's possible, and getting easier by the day to run desktop software that isn't locked down by one of the big corporations is the existence of distributed projects like the kernel and Debian.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  I'm not conflating it, they are related. I had this argument at AGI 14 where someone was trying to argue that it was possible to make disruptive FOSS to the same scale as Google. I just don't believe it. Why? People have to eat. If you want to compete, at the impactful-change the power structure level, you have to pay people real competitive wages to work full time. What you say is anathema to everything else written on this site about how to build good products with good people that have impact. Otherwise you wait around till the next gauss/perelman shows up that's only working for passion.

LittleSpider 10y ago

Interesting take on the internet as Feudalism, and everyone having to align with a king or a prince to protect him from other unknowable threats. There is a blog which discusses how much of the internet is more like a digital bazaar - everyone shouting and no one listening to most of it (camels, get your camels here, dates, I have dates, and so on). I trust I can include the link here, and as I am very new to Hacker News, I trust I am not overstepping some boundary by doing so. http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/ http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/ Maybe the internet is a little of all things - bazaar, wild west, feudalism, democracy, socialism, and so on.

windlep 10y ago

> What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so wrong? Sort of reminds me of some scientists concerns after inventing the atom/hydrogen bomb.... oops, what did we just do? Yet I don't see or hear about any tech ethics groups. You know, a group of people that actually tries to determine whether some tech being considered/built will actually be good for society or not. From what I've read, the Amish have such a thing, ie, it's not that they're strictly anti-tech, but that they have community leaders that evaluate the pros/cons to their society before allowing its introduction. I found it refreshing that there's movement around an AI group of this nature to try and ensure we don't hose ourselves with AI, but really, a broader tech ethics group should've already been on that as well. Unfortunately it's much easier to just plow ahead and ignore such things in the hopes of being the next billionaire startup founder. Leave it to someone else to decide whether you're making things in our society/world better or worse.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

What i gathered from the article is that access to data means power; - more transparency of government + ability to organize means more power to grassroots organizations - more data on individuals means more power to corporations and governments - ability to steal data means power to cyber criminals. What i did not understand is the motivations of each of these actor to curtail his access to data/power? i think Bruce Schneier precisely described the new steady state now what i don't understand is how the system could possibly change. this reminds me of the transformation of the former Soviet Union : in the nineties a lot of people thought that liberalism is here to stay; you can't just do a dictatorship and censorship in the 21st century etc, etc. However it turned out to be a brief interlude - the new elite is just a repackaged old nomenklatura and state power was never curtailed/balanced by an independent judiciary. Same with the internet - the new gadget couldn't change the power balance, it just took them some time to adapt. TLDR: The criminals were the fastest to adapt (they always do); civil society got something out of the ability to organize but then the balance shifted back to the state and corporations, it just took them some time to get their act together.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago
just to add, this article is from 2013; still we are living in the same era so not much changed. Here is the original link: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_for_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_fo... It also first appeared in 'The Atlantic': http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-battle-for-power-on-the-internet/280824/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-ba...

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carmella222 10y ago