4 ms·

The Underlying Technology Shibboleth

6 points by chmaynard 4y ago

rektide 4y ago
The use cases are that government regulation will only grow & expand & the centralized DNS based, clinet-server internet will be at the mercy of hundreds of companies forever making publishing & commenting & sharing online harder & worse. The use case is avoiding an overreliance on a small number of hosting providers. There is something real about making everyone competent not just at accessing things online, but in being able to online parts of themselves. That said, it's indeed all mostly bollocks. This was a pretty fun read, albeit I'd appreciate some of the flourishes of language being blunted down to something more meaningful. I was also hoping for a connection to the micro, the personal. The succees of this shit is largely tied to people's utter ognorance of computers & computing. There's such a mix of reasons for this, but underlying it all, the first gate of the equivalent Drake Equation of computing knowability, is that we dont even try to expose computong itself. Applications are isolated, prebaked experiences which reveal nothing about the inner clockwork & which expose only bespoke arraingememts of buttons pictures & forms. There is no attempt to make computing malleable or holistic, no attempt to empower, only an attempt to better outpredict & specialize on the needs of the personas we pre-craft. It's a hogwash piece of shit project we are up to, that forever conceals rather than makes naked the craft, as it should. Without this start, the Drake Equation, the funnel of gates that narrows ever down to anyone knowing anythint about computing, will forever start with an eye of the needle. Fuck this. The Ada Lovelace Institute has an incredibly condemning report on people's relationship to digital data ecosystems & how badly disempowered we humans are. Everything here goes 10x for the computing, for the algorithms; we sometimes can get data dumps or sometimes control our data, but computing is mostly closed source, utterly inaccessible in every way, often running on cloud neo-mainframes fsr beyond our reach. https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/rethinking-data/ https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/rethinking-data/
paulusthe 4y ago
He's right. Blockchain is a solution to a very idiosyncratic and uncommon problem set: 1. You and your counterparty both need to be pseudo-anonymous 2. You and your counterparty can't agree on an existing intermediary (bank, credit card, whatever) to facilitate the transaction 3. You and your counterparty both require the transaction and resulting claim to ownership to be public record. The pundits doing the "the underlying tech cannot be questioned, so this sad single instance of failure cannot be extrapolated to the ecosystem as a whole" thing are, as Diehl points out, missing the forest for the trees. Couldn't agree more.
- hansvm 4y ago
  (1) and (3) are optional. (2) is a value add though; the credit card oligopoly, Stripe, PayPal, ... have a lot of power and choose to bias that power toward PR control and liability mitigation over letting you actually move and access your money. Crypto isn't the only solution, but in the absence of a benevolent, less profitable payment provider or else appropriate legislative action I don't see anything better coming down the pipe.

6 points by chmaynard 4y ago

The use cases are that government regulation will only grow & expand & the centralized DNS based, clinet-server internet will be at the mercy of hundreds of companies forever making publishing & commenting & sharing online harder & worse. The use case is avoiding an overreliance on a small number of hosting providers. There is something real about making everyone competent not just at accessing things online, but in being able to online parts of themselves. That said, it's indeed all mostly bollocks. This was a pretty fun read, albeit I'd appreciate some of the flourishes of language being blunted down to something more meaningful. I was also hoping for a connection to the micro, the personal. The succees of this shit is largely tied to people's utter ognorance of computers & computing. There's such a mix of reasons for this, but underlying it all, the first gate of the equivalent Drake Equation of computing knowability, is that we dont even try to expose computong itself. Applications are isolated, prebaked experiences which reveal nothing about the inner clockwork & which expose only bespoke arraingememts of buttons pictures & forms. There is no attempt to make computing malleable or holistic, no attempt to empower, only an attempt to better outpredict & specialize on the needs of the personas we pre-craft. It's a hogwash piece of shit project we are up to, that forever conceals rather than makes naked the craft, as it should. Without this start, the Drake Equation, the funnel of gates that narrows ever down to anyone knowing anythint about computing, will forever start with an eye of the needle. Fuck this. The Ada Lovelace Institute has an incredibly condemning report on people's relationship to digital data ecosystems & how badly disempowered we humans are. Everything here goes 10x for the computing, for the algorithms; we sometimes can get data dumps or sometimes control our data, but computing is mostly closed source, utterly inaccessible in every way, often running on cloud neo-mainframes fsr beyond our reach. https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/rethinking-data/ https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/rethinking-data/

paulusthe 4y ago

He's right. Blockchain is a solution to a very idiosyncratic and uncommon problem set: 1. You and your counterparty both need to be pseudo-anonymous 2. You and your counterparty can't agree on an existing intermediary (bank, credit card, whatever) to facilitate the transaction 3. You and your counterparty both require the transaction and resulting claim to ownership to be public record. The pundits doing the "the underlying tech cannot be questioned, so this sad single instance of failure cannot be extrapolated to the ecosystem as a whole" thing are, as Diehl points out, missing the forest for the trees. Couldn't agree more.

hansvm 4y ago
(1) and (3) are optional. (2) is a value add though; the credit card oligopoly, Stripe, PayPal, ... have a lot of power and choose to bias that power toward PR control and liability mitigation over letting you actually move and access your money. Crypto isn't the only solution, but in the absence of a benevolent, less profitable payment provider or else appropriate legislative action I don't see anything better coming down the pipe.