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Actually, isn’t self-hosting and federation more like feudalism and the Big Tech more like a modern central state. When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Actually, isn’t self-hosting and federation more like feudalism and the Big Tech more like a modern central state.
When self-hosting say Mastodon, you have to have a relationship with the hosting provider, the software developer, your users, and any other servers you federate with. This is more reminiscent of the network of relationships that dominated Feudal Europe.
Whereas, if you use Twitter, you basically have just a single, more comprehensive relationship to Twitter, which is closer to the central state model, where there is a central authority that subsumes and manages these relationships.
Also, in a feudal system, if you got robbed/assaulted there would be a very complicated means of trying to hold people responsible as there would be multiple domains and authorities involved. Similarly, fighting spam in a federated model is also complicated. Ina nation-state model, it’s much easier to at least try to impose a uniform standard of justice. Similarly, “Big Tech” can deal with spam much easier than federation.
Also, Apple’s App Store fees do not indicate feudalism. People in the modern world also pay various taxes to governments, even though we don’t have a feudal system.
So I think federation is more like feudalism and Big Tech is more analogous to the modern central government.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThis, the more centralized the less feudal it could possibly be, for better and for worse .
- tmcb 3y agoVaroufakis' point is not about the size of those entities, but rather the nature of economical relationships inside these realms. Of course the analogy will break at some point. Every single analogy will. We should also ask which kind of power structures have nation states borrowed from feudalism, and which ones were borrowed again by big tech.
- rsolva 3y agoI get your angel, and partly agree. Feudalism might not be a perfect way to describe this tension. But at it's core, we are talking about a concentration of power. Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor. The fewer owners of land, the more concentrated is their power. They dictate the rules. That is Meta, Google, Amazon etc today – a lot of power held by a few men. The more interoperability we implement in this web we call the internet, the more diversity we get. It has made it possible for me to host my own presence on the social web from a tiny computer sitting next to my freezer. I'm using GoToSocial, which is a piece of software built by a bunch of people collaborating. They have much less power over my online social life than what Mark Zuckerberg had when I was still using Facebook! I can contribute to GoToSocial at their code forge, adding code, bug reports, feature request or voice my opinion on the direction of the project. If I would hit a major disagreement, I could relatively easily move to one of the many other software projects that uses the same protocol and not risk being cut off from my entire social network online. To me, this feels very empowering!
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> Feudalism is defined by a few noblemen owning huge swats of land, lending it out in exchange for labor. Feudalism was much more complicated than that. Again, it was closer to federation where there were a bunch of reciprocal and overlapping relationships between multiple people. A feudal lord might just be someone who owned a castle on a hill. Again, the situation is much closer to federation.
- rsolva 3y agoYeah, I agree that comparison with feudalism is flawed in that sense. I guess Yanis is using the term in its stereotypical form, evoking the image of a dictatorial lord wielding all the power.