I sometimes wonder about this. Pretty much everyone already has a connected computer in their pocket. Wouldn't it be nice if we could use the phone without a ce

I sometimes wonder about this. Pretty much everyone already has a connected computer in their pocket. Wouldn't it be nice if we could use the phone without a cell provider? The web without an ISP? Connect to our friends without a social network? Exchange money without a bank? Thinking further, what if all these services could be plugged into a well-abstracted peer-to-peer network, consisting of every connected device in the world? Services similar to Twitter or Facebook would no longer require a central host. Redundancy would be built in. Uptime would be pretty much guaranteed. Ads would go away. Freedom would be an implicit part of the system; no longer would profit motives sully (or censor!) services that people use and enjoy. And it would be more natural, too: pumping all our data through a few central pipes makes a lot less sense than simply connecting to our neighbors. Our devices would talk to each other just like we talk in the real world, only with the advantage of being able to traverse the global network in a matter of milliseconds. New technologies like Bitcoin and BitTorrent would crop up naturally as part of this arrangement. It would put power back into the hands of the people. Sadly, it seems a future of locked-down app stores controlled by a small number of large corporations is much more likely. (Sorry, I realized this started sounding like a Marxist rant halfway through. And I'm not even a Marxist! It just sucks that this fascinating future is one that we're not likely to experience, even though we're almost at the point where we could actually implement it. I think.)