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The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, it
by openrisk 2y ago
The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.
The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIt is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.
- openrisk 2y agoAbsolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies. It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
- Moru 2y agoHistory isn't exactly the most liked subject in school. Most people continue not liking in later in life.
- throwaway48476 2y agoHistory is just terribly taught and practiced. At the core history is just telling stories which are always interesting when told well.
- Maken 2y agoHistory is terribly taught because it's often about the how and not the why.
- teqsun 2y agoEven worse is the overemphasis on when (in terms of exactness). Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.
- arethuza 2y agoThe most interesting history we got taught at school was by one of our music teachers who was a kilt wearing Scottish independence supporter who used to tell us bloodthirsty stories about Bruce, Wallace and others... NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)
- Neonlicht 2y agoI suppose he skipped the part in which the Scottish elite sold out their country (literally) to the English crown?
- arethuza 2y agoHe probably didn't mention that because it wasn't particularly bloodthirsty and therefore of little interest to 12 year old boys. Mind you, the fact that it was events on the Isthmus of Panama that were one of the main causes of the union is fairly interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AmericanChopper 2y agoScottish history would be far too dangerous to teach today. Undermines the narrative that all white people have a detestable history of colonisation and exploitation. The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.
- throwaway48476 2y agoAmerican history id even more dangerous as it justifies the violent overthrow of the government
- zigman1 2y agoDo you think fediverse is a good direction as response to that?
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe fediverse just moves the problem to multiple servers. The solution is a content addressed network.
- openrisk 2y agoConceptually the fediverse points towards the "right" direction, but imho it still falls way short from being a fully developed and sustainable new proposal. Both on the technical side and (maybe more importantly) on the economic side. Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge. The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots. We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents. But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.
- account42 2y agoThe biggest failing of the fediverse seems to be societal - federation is split along political boundaries even before the system really caught on. How can we possibly get out of digital feudalism if Eve will only let us talk to Bob if we don't talk to Alice. We need an open system that is actually universal like phones or email - both of which would be shut down or severy limited today for allowing all kings of unfavored characters to send heretical messages to each other, if they were not alredy well entrenched before the latest cultural shift.
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- arethuza 2y agoI live somewhere that has a lot of castles - there are 3 (possibly 4) within 2km of where I am sitting writing this. I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison). I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.
- khafra 2y agoSo, you should build your castle in someone else's kingdom iff that kingdom either 1. Has strong norms against castle seizure or abandonment of the king's duties in kingdom upkeep 2. Has a federation of non-king castle owners strong and unified enough to force the former point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hoorayimhelping 2y ago3. You are strong enough to provide a serious and credible threat to the king if he implements a policy that threatens you. Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
- oremolten 2y agoSierra Online was acquired through fraudulent accounting, and the company that acquired them went under shortly after as their fraud was revealed. Unfortunately Sierra had to accept the offer.
- smcin 2y agoAlso Valve has always been a private company tightly controlled by insiders, whereas Sierra had already been a public company since 1989, subsequently acquired by CUC in 1996 for $1.5bn, and embarked on a non-stop acquisition spree in pursuit of short-term growth, which usually ends badly (think Gateway, AOL, Time-Warner, etc). Esp. pre-Sarbanes-Oxley. Moreover, Gabe Newell always had a controlling stake in Valve ever since 1996, so that prevents any shenanigans. There are comparatively few shareholders (than a public company) and they were all long-term, since Valve will likely never go public, certainly no year soon, or even be privately acquired; while Newell controls it. In this instance your complaint is about corporate governance rather than tech; (how far back did tech people stop being in control at Sierra?)
- neon_me 2y agoWhen it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay. And this is not cynic talking ...
- j45 2y agoThe web is still open. Wide open. For anything to build. More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
- gspencley 2y agoIt looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct. Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022). Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore. But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists. You can still build a website You can still create opt-in email newsletters And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour. It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time. But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.
- j45 2y agoOr, maybe reside on large platforms partially or temporary. There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit. The open web. We can build any web we want, at any time. And build we should. All large communities were small once. Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow. Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still. And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.
- j45 2y agoDo we go on massive platforms to find the small communities (like subreddits) that we like?
- j45 2y agoWe already have digital citizenship and already are digital citizens. We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more. A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit. It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click. This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to. A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
- fsflover 2y ago> We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more. Speak for yourself. Sent from my Librem 5.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoThe real elephant in the room is unless you are an actual king, your castle is always on someone's land I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
- N8works 2y agoMake all Algos for content recommendations open for scrutiny and watch the walls come down.
- hackable_sand 2y agoDisagree. That is still "playing nice"