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It’s funny, I thought of the exact same metaphor to describe tech giants, just a few weeks ago. It was in the lead-up to reddit pulling the plug on their API, as I was thinking about the ideal alternative to the current model of social media. Sometime around March, I saw this video: https://www.tiktok.com/@endangeredecosystems/video/7226846526713171205?lang=en
I thought about how current platforms quash diversity similar to how huge sections of rainforest are replaced with endlessly mundane tree farms that produce only palm oil. Instead of different levels of canopy for big communities, medium communities, and small communities, the tree farm just has one level which uniformly blocks almost all the light from making it to the forest floor.
In old growth forests, the biggest and oldest trees naturally fall and leave gaps in the canopy for new life to emerge. Right now, we have some new trees reclaiming portions of the homogeneous zones. Where parts of Facebook are burning, we have Friendica moving in. Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube are slowly being encroached upon by Lemmy, Mastodon, and PeerTube.
I think that ActivityPub is a big step in the right direction, but it’s also just the first step of many. In the future, I want to see a full ecosystem of applications that are not just replacements of existing platforms, but living, growing, and evolving platforms of their own. We have pieces of that now, but communication between different fediverse platforms is not fully integrated. It would be great to eventually have an online world where the barriers between platforms are largely symbolic and any idea can spread anywhere with minimal effort.
Meaning, we’ll all be passing around snippets of code, digital assets, and textual ideas, allowing us to create new subplatforms on demand, which naturally intermingle and breed with everyone else’s subplatforms to produce dynamic macroplatforms capable of delivering desired content and behaviors quickly, accurately, and securely. We can crowdsource efficiency into every action in our society and everyone can benefit from our collective successes, while still programmatically rewarding those who work to push the progress bar forward.
Ultimately, I think that is the way to beat both climate change and income inequality. Find ways to achieve rampant decentralized success, so that resource hoarders cannot game the system to the detriment of others, but they can use their resources to take part in building a better society if they so wish. And if they don’t opt in, the rest of us will get it done behind their backs, and we’ll just have to find out whether capitalism or technosocialism works better.
The ideal is fine but in conjuction with that there are two downsides as well. A consolidated datacenter does hold onto the efficiencies of scale in many facets, multiple small instances require more boxes using more resources to iperate and the inconsistent retrieval and bandwidth attached will have an effect. The other is the political realm, where regulators can be readily bought those with resources can and will make things more difficult if they feel existentially threatened. Loo at the fight that hollywood amd the music industry put up against just the pirate bay alone for an example of what the distributed web is up against. The fact that there’s not so much gray area of activity going on is secondary to the fact that it challenges the established systems.
It’s an uphill battle for sure. We gain resiliency from decentralization, but you’re right that there is a cost in efficiency. Long-term, we should work to achieve collective ownership of centralized data centers, to literally seize the means of our content production.
But we can’t currently afford the upfront cost such an endeavor takes, even collectively. The ruling class has gone far to ensure our collective means reach not much further than the ends of our own tables. But I still have hope for what we can achieve.
Even if we don’t yet have the resources or the efficiency, one thing we can start working on already is the political infrastructure. Obviously, the official government is laden with corruption. And we can dream about overturning Citizens United, but we shouldn’t be holding our breath. While we must keep fighting that fight, we can simultaneously devote time to learning how to govern ourselves.
What is fair? What are rights? What is the value of a person’s time? Of a person’s life? What is a person? When does an idea stop belonging to an individual and start belonging to everyone?
We can codify these things, and we can even make algorithms that compare our opinions on these subjects and build up logical governing rules over time to maximize fulfillment for everyone. But one thing that’s almost impossible to do is to protect our new society from corruption. We can make the perfect voting system and even if we manage to successfully detect and remove bots, the influence of capitalist ideology penetrates our zeitgeist deeply. Our TV, music, religions, and games while often poking fun at the beast are all intrinsically part of it.
So, what do we do? I think we should accept that part of ourselves. The part that corrupts us, that loves the wars, the pollution, the lack of education. The side of our society that glorifies the billionaire class and will lash out if in mortal danger.
Because I think you’re absolutely right. The more of a threat we appear to be, the more they will come after us. So, we need to make our endeavors look and act like theirs. Real businesses with a real regard for efficiency and profit margins.
But instead of a CEO and a board of directors, we place an artificial intelligence. And instead of trying to maximize profits for investors, we train our AI to maximize profits for workers. And each worker gets a say in the design of the AI, in proportion to the amount of work they do for the company. The work they do is measured as a calculation of how much success they make for the company. Success being a combined metric of estimated financial profit merged with quantifiable improvement in quality of life for our customers.
It’s not a corruption-proof system, but I think allowing real workers to collectively train an AI boss is a good way of combating the effects of corruption in realtime. If I were a worker in such a system, I would implore our AI CEO to classify any livestock in our farms as customers and workers with rights proportional to their brain sizes when compared with our own. So, making lives better for cattle on farms would directly affect the perceived value of the worker who made those changes. This might make our products more expensive when compared to a capitalist model, but if a worker implements the innovation of livestreams from all our livestock to show how fulfilled they are, and the biodiversity/ carbon capture solutions we have crafted into their environments, customers may be willing to pay for a food with less attached guilt, especially if they are entitled to larger profit shares from their own AI employers than in the capitalist model. And if our customers are perceived to be happier as a result, the workers who implemented the livestreams would be rewarded in kind.
If capitalists can game that system by creating bots which produce quantifiable work and are compensated in kind, we can still utilize that labor. If we set the initial conditions correctly, this should result in a workless society where no human has or needs money. Because at the end of that road, no humans can find any appreciable amount of work to do, so the only purpose they serve is to be customers for the perfected AI companies. And because all efficiencies have already been carved out by the capitalist bots, the only way for the bots to make additional profit is to make quality of life improvements for the customers. We become the livestock, with all our needs met. The rich become the workers, toiling to find something to do with their money.
And that may not seem like the perfect end, but maybe it’s the best we can hope for. The capitalists finally have all the money. But they’ve unwittingly taken part in our utopia. And we didn’t have to eat them after all. We just have to find a way of quantifying fairness.
If we can train an AI to determine what compensation is a fair reward for any given task, both now and in the future, everything else falls in line. But maybe that’s as tautological as saying if we could only root out corruption from the US government, we could get rid of Citizens United. The horse isn’t anywhere near that cart. But hey, it’s fun to dream.
Eh, decentralization can be effective, think about WFH (work from home) and fossil fuel usage. Same general thinking applies… those multiple boxes can be spare cycles in everyone’s home.
I was thinking more on the lines of containerization vs virtualization vs bare metal in regards to the efficiency. A compute cluster running a stack of containers all backed by a storage area network can handle a pile more transactions than a bunch of desktops all running their own OS with dedicated drives.
The distributed spare cycles thing works well for projects like the FAH or BOINC systems where all are working on a singular project in small pieces but less so for other things just because of the transfer and transaction overhead. Still, it’s a fine way to start putting some control back in the user’s hands that can be run with a minimal investment.
Can someone post the text? Medium won’t let me sign in.
The archive link should work?
Thanks, I didn’t see it and now have read it :)
Not working for me
California needs to burn. For millennia, First Nations people oversaw controlled burns in the forests they lived, played and worked in. These burns cleared out underbrush, saw off sick trees, and created canopy openings that admitted sunlight to help quicken new growth. The importance of fire to healthy renewal is testified to by the regional trees that can only reproduce through fire, including the state’s iconic giant redwood.
Centuries ago, European settlers dispossessed the state’s First Nations of their ancestral lands and banned “cultural burning,” declaring war on both indigenous people and fire. This was the start of a long period of firelessness, during which time ever-more-heroic measures have been deployed to keep fire at bay.
This is a vicious cycle: massive fire suppression efforts creates the illusion that people can safely live at the wildland–urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to this combustible zone. The presence of these people in the danger zone militates for more extreme fire-suppression, which makes the illusion all the more tempting. Yielding to temptation, more people move to the fire zone.
But the opposite of controlled burns isn’t no burns, it’s out-of-control burns: wildfires.
Fires that erase whole towns. Fires that burn unchecked. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. Fire debt mounts. When the interest payments get too high to bear, we go into chaotic default.
California needs to burn. It needs an orderly bankruptcy. It needs to revive the controlled “good fire” that kept the land safe and healthy and allowed humans and forests to peacefully co-exist.
The alternative to letting California burn in an orderly, controlled fashion is for California to burn anyway. It’s wildfire. It’s tragedy and destruction.
Social media needs to burn.
From its first days, the consumer computing and networking sector was synonymous with explosive growth.
Companies would spring up out of nowhere and grow to impossible scale overnight. The source of this rapid corporate gigantism was no mystery: it came from network effects.
Have you tried the archive link? There’s no need to sign in with it
Getting secure connection failed errors on my browser. Removing the s from https gives me DNS resolution error from cloudflare instead.
Thanks, I didn’t see it and now have read it :) That Medium sign in method really sucks though.
“Make Medium Readable Again” addon for firefox, no probs here…
Make Medium Readable Again
Thanks for that, I shall install it if I find a lot of interesting content is posted on here from there.
Because it doesn’t show clearly on mastodon, this is another blog post from Cory Doctorow about letting the platforms burn, and allowing their users to safer grounds.
