642
DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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We need more than this.
We need a way to make sure that the internet can't be owned, physically.
We need some kind of easy to use and fast and robust open source alternate internet that we can all use.
Something that somehow costs nothing to run, that has enough storage and bandwidth for everyone and everything.
Something that has interoperability built in. Every platform should confirm to openid or openauth or activitypub or something like that.
And you know what? we have the technology!
We all have spare devices lying around. Old PC's, old laptops, old phones - they could all be running some kind of node in a distributed platform of some kind of open source AWS equivalent, and let anyone host anything and post anything without getting ad-raped or data stolen.
It's a pipe dream of mine, and I'm sure others... but with a will and a movement we could just take it all back, all at once.
That's how they'll spin the legislation to ban it:
Pedophiles and terrorists use that service!
Side note -- I wanted to use 'X' instead as a variable above, but Musk ruined that.
That's why you need digital signatures and authorship tracking. Copyright just by itself would already put an end to every P2P alternative or at least stop it from ever gaining any mass traction. On the other side if everybody put a digital signature under their published work, others could mirror it without themselves becoming responsible and you could have take downs of objectionable material via blacklists.
So far very few of the P2P alternatives implement anything like that and even those that do just have arbitrary accounts that don't link back to any real person.
This of course goes against the whole anonymity and privacy focus that has been predominant in this field for the last 20 years. But if we actually want a real alternative to the Web, not just some toy app with a dozen users, I think it's the only way to go. And of course you could also have a layer of indirection in there to provide some anonymity or pseudonymity, so it's not like those things would be impossible, just reduced.
Search for Locutus, it's very similar to what I've been imagining, only real (well, not yet, it's a project).
Wolf 359 was an inside job
Is that a Star Trek reference?
It is, Locutus was a commander in the battle at Wolf 359.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Wolf_359
The result you may get then is "I am... Locutus of Enshittification. Resistane... is futile. You life, as it has been... is over. From this time forward... you will service... us" which may make you go "Lock on and file all weapons on full!'