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It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, buil

It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication. I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.

rayiner 2mo ago
The top-down centralization of mid-20th century technologies wasn't caused by "money," it was caused by their technological nature. They inherently relied on limited radio spectrum that was doled out to specific companies by the government.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  By "money" I mean that you can't attract investors for a project that they cannot later "leverage". This creates a bias towards some designs and away from others. Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.
danhodgins 2mo ago
Yes. I thought maybe Blockchain might be able to provide some of that robustness for the public web, but it's all about speculative investment now.
- switchbak 2mo ago
  A fully traceable public ledger is kind of a wet dream for an intelligence agency/evil corp. Funny how much faith we put into that, and look at it now.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
    Agreed. There are some good options among the CRDT's which might be able to deliver on on the promises made by the pre-hype blockchain days, but they're largely unexplored.
customguy 2mo ago
> we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption Says who though? The current front runners? Who can't even not let them hack into into other companies over the weekend unsupervised already?
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  I'm saying that the bad behavior you're talking about is the status quo. If we want to overcome it, we'll have to defend against it. Our earlier communication technologies merely had to work... at all. The next one will have to work in a world full of adversaries. The current front runners' products are those adversaries. Sure, they have legitimate uses, but when it comes to trustworthy communication between humans, AI agents have nothing to offer except for the ability to interfere. Sure, they can also defend against that interference, but that's a bit like how gmail blocks spam while simultaneously serving ads to your inbox: they're not so much solving a problem as protecting a monopoly on their ability to cause that problem.

rayiner 2mo ago

The top-down centralization of mid-20th century technologies wasn't caused by "money," it was caused by their technological nature. They inherently relied on limited radio spectrum that was doled out to specific companies by the government.

__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
By "money" I mean that you can't attract investors for a project that they cannot later "leverage". This creates a bias towards some designs and away from others. Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.

danhodgins 2mo ago

Yes. I thought maybe Blockchain might be able to provide some of that robustness for the public web, but it's all about speculative investment now.

switchbak 2mo ago
A fully traceable public ledger is kind of a wet dream for an intelligence agency/evil corp. Funny how much faith we put into that, and look at it now.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  Agreed. There are some good options among the CRDT's which might be able to deliver on on the promises made by the pre-hype blockchain days, but they're largely unexplored.

customguy 2mo ago

> we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption Says who though? The current front runners? Who can't even not let them hack into into other companies over the weekend unsupervised already?

__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
I'm saying that the bad behavior you're talking about is the status quo. If we want to overcome it, we'll have to defend against it. Our earlier communication technologies merely had to work... at all. The next one will have to work in a world full of adversaries. The current front runners' products are those adversaries. Sure, they have legitimate uses, but when it comes to trustworthy communication between humans, AI agents have nothing to offer except for the ability to interfere. Sure, they can also defend against that interference, but that's a bit like how gmail blocks spam while simultaneously serving ads to your inbox: they're not so much solving a problem as protecting a monopoly on their ability to cause that problem.