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> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the clo

> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled. The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. (now I'm working on trying to solve some of this - well, at least build alternatives for people). and this: > The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite. Seems to be implying (as well as in other places) that this was all coordinated or planned in some way, but I've looked into how it came to be this way and I grew up with it, and for me, I think a lot of it stemmed from good intentions (the ethos that information should be free, etc.) I made a short video recently on how we got to a centralized and broken internet, so here's a shameless plug if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated Too bad nobody wrote a book called “the mythical man month” to dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the way the world works
- perching_aix 9mo ago
  Not sure I follow the allegory, could you substantiate? I'm not sure specifically e.g. why being an engineer would put someone at an outsized disadvantage against the already hopeless notion of "understanding how the world works [in its totality?]". One would think being smart and educated would put them ahead of the pack, even if they overestimate how smart and educated they are compared to others, or fall victim to the consequences of that - an accusation engineers commonly recieve on social media, with similarly high suggestiveness, and similarly little substantiation.
  - AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
    Sure If creative people don’t think at a systems level or a political intersectional level when doing design then they will completely ignore or miss the fact that engineering is a subset of a political or otherwise organizational goal The key problem with most engineers is that they don’t believe that they live inside a political system
    - perching_aix 8mo ago
      I think that's an important consideration, especially with telecommunications technologies, but the author seems to have been pretty mindful of that angle from the get go, i.e. they seem to have been frustrated with the state of affairs from the beginning. Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be? Cause while I can certainly see that being the case, I'd say such a cycle is as much desperation as it it naivety. I think this is even reflected in it being a PHY-agnostic thing, meaning as far as an effort into anything goes, it's a fairly enduring one.
      - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        > Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be? Couldn’t have said it better myself Desperation is just a manifestation of manic ignorance unfortunately The only solution to ignorance is education and I’ll go back to my original point which is this precise thing was discussed over and over and in detail over the last half century of computing in multiple places Most notably one of the most popular well distributed books that discusses this explicitly is Rodney Brooks’ mythical man month So my original critique is that engineers do not even utilize the core literature for which there is global consensus on these problems
        perching_aix 8mo ago
muvlon 9mo ago
But the part about the undersea cable is simply wrong! Major undersea cables have been disrupted several times and never has a "continent gone dark". I think this betrays a severe misunderstanding of what the internet is. It is the most resilient computer network by a long shot, far more so than any of these toy meshes. For starters, none of them even manage to make any intercontinental connections except when themselves using the internet as their substrate. Now of course, if you put all your stuff in a single organization's "cloud", you don't get to benefit from all that resilience. That sort of fragile architecture is rightly criticized but this falls flat as a criticism of the internet itself.
Night_Thastus 8mo ago
People naturally want to maximize the value they extract from any system. If you hand individuals or groups the internet, they will naturally use it for spam, advertisement, scams, information harvesting, propaganda, etc - because those are what gain them the most. The 'enshittification' if the internet was inevitable the moment it came into existence, and is the result of the decision of its users just as much as any one central authority. If you let people communicate with each other on a large scale at high speeds, that's what you get. The only way to avoid the problem is to make a system that has some combination of the following: * No one uses * Is slow * Is cumbersome to use * Has significant barriers to entry * Is feature-poor In a such a system, there's little incentive to have the same bad behaviors.
- DataDaoDe 8mo ago
  We'd probably agree on this: people respond to incentives created by system design. One example that comes to mind is how London's Congestion Charge and how it has changed traffic behavior over the years depending on how the rules change. There is nothing inherent about fast, large-scale, or user-friendly communication that forces spam, scams, or propaganda. Its just that those outcomes emerge when things like engagement, attention, or "reach" are rewarded without being aligned to quality, truth, or mutual cooperation. This is a well-studied problem in economics, but also behavioral science and psychology: change the incentive and feedback structure, and behavior reliably changes. Based on the studies I've read in and around this topic, I think harmful dynamics are not inevitable properties of communication, but really contingent on how each system rewards actions taken by participants. The solution is not slowness or barriers, but better incentive alignment and feedback loops.
  - Night_Thastus 8mo ago
    I would argue that it's not the systems of the internet that are the problem. The problem is the other structures (governmental, economic, etc.), which have bad incentives, which leads to using tools like the internet in a negative way. If it wasn't the internet, it would simply be whatever other form of communication was available. But the Internet's enormous speed and reach make it especially susceptible/tempting for those kind of behaviors.

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated Too bad nobody wrote a book called “the mythical man month” to dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the way the world works

perching_aix 9mo ago
Not sure I follow the allegory, could you substantiate? I'm not sure specifically e.g. why being an engineer would put someone at an outsized disadvantage against the already hopeless notion of "understanding how the world works [in its totality?]". One would think being smart and educated would put them ahead of the pack, even if they overestimate how smart and educated they are compared to others, or fall victim to the consequences of that - an accusation engineers commonly recieve on social media, with similarly high suggestiveness, and similarly little substantiation.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  Sure If creative people don’t think at a systems level or a political intersectional level when doing design then they will completely ignore or miss the fact that engineering is a subset of a political or otherwise organizational goal The key problem with most engineers is that they don’t believe that they live inside a political system
  - perching_aix 8mo ago
    I think that's an important consideration, especially with telecommunications technologies, but the author seems to have been pretty mindful of that angle from the get go, i.e. they seem to have been frustrated with the state of affairs from the beginning. Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be? Cause while I can certainly see that being the case, I'd say such a cycle is as much desperation as it it naivety. I think this is even reflected in it being a PHY-agnostic thing, meaning as far as an effort into anything goes, it's a fairly enduring one.
    - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      > Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be? Couldn’t have said it better myself Desperation is just a manifestation of manic ignorance unfortunately The only solution to ignorance is education and I’ll go back to my original point which is this precise thing was discussed over and over and in detail over the last half century of computing in multiple places Most notably one of the most popular well distributed books that discusses this explicitly is Rodney Brooks’ mythical man month So my original critique is that engineers do not even utilize the core literature for which there is global consensus on these problems
      - perching_aix 8mo ago

muvlon 9mo ago

But the part about the undersea cable is simply wrong! Major undersea cables have been disrupted several times and never has a "continent gone dark". I think this betrays a severe misunderstanding of what the internet is. It is the most resilient computer network by a long shot, far more so than any of these toy meshes. For starters, none of them even manage to make any intercontinental connections except when themselves using the internet as their substrate. Now of course, if you put all your stuff in a single organization's "cloud", you don't get to benefit from all that resilience. That sort of fragile architecture is rightly criticized but this falls flat as a criticism of the internet itself.

Night_Thastus 8mo ago

People naturally want to maximize the value they extract from any system. If you hand individuals or groups the internet, they will naturally use it for spam, advertisement, scams, information harvesting, propaganda, etc - because those are what gain them the most. The 'enshittification' if the internet was inevitable the moment it came into existence, and is the result of the decision of its users just as much as any one central authority. If you let people communicate with each other on a large scale at high speeds, that's what you get. The only way to avoid the problem is to make a system that has some combination of the following: * No one uses * Is slow * Is cumbersome to use * Has significant barriers to entry * Is feature-poor In a such a system, there's little incentive to have the same bad behaviors.

DataDaoDe 8mo ago
We'd probably agree on this: people respond to incentives created by system design. One example that comes to mind is how London's Congestion Charge and how it has changed traffic behavior over the years depending on how the rules change. There is nothing inherent about fast, large-scale, or user-friendly communication that forces spam, scams, or propaganda. Its just that those outcomes emerge when things like engagement, attention, or "reach" are rewarded without being aligned to quality, truth, or mutual cooperation. This is a well-studied problem in economics, but also behavioral science and psychology: change the incentive and feedback structure, and behavior reliably changes. Based on the studies I've read in and around this topic, I think harmful dynamics are not inevitable properties of communication, but really contingent on how each system rewards actions taken by participants. The solution is not slowness or barriers, but better incentive alignment and feedback loops.
- Night_Thastus 8mo ago
  I would argue that it's not the systems of the internet that are the problem. The problem is the other structures (governmental, economic, etc.), which have bad incentives, which leads to using tools like the internet in a negative way. If it wasn't the internet, it would simply be whatever other form of communication was available. But the Internet's enormous speed and reach make it especially susceptible/tempting for those kind of behaviors.