Re: <nettime> Unlike Us links on social media and their alternatives

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Hopefully this time around it will be a more radical approach.

But first some non-technical issues have to be solved.

Anything that has a 'center' shall be censored and regulated sooner or 
later, no matter what the current operators say. Having the most 
benevolent hand holding your balls is always a bad idea. Usually the 
'alternative' center-full systems are left to operate as long as their 
membership is low. The moment they become popular the game is over. 
Whether the 'center' is material (ie. servers at known locations) or 
just administrative CCC (ie. Silk Road via onion) does not make much 
difference.

The center-full alternatives that do survive with limited popularity 
tend to become isolated islands, and usually end up with invitation-only 
memberships (because some dick 'knows' who to invite.) Great if you are 
into incest but suck otherwise (the islands.) There is something magic 
about 'public', the possibility of random connection and unintended 
consequences.

Technically, center-less platforms embodied exclusively on the edge are 
a solved problem.

The non-technical problems are how to manage general non-moderated 
access, and how to make it popular without exclusivity and known honchos 
in charge. For illustrative history, research the tragedy of Usenet.

The wrong way to think about these solutions is to assume that machines 
will somehow naturally liberate the society and enable everyone to have 
the say, even those with IQ in teens.

The right way is to deploy tried and tested real-world mechanisms for 
selection and throttling. People participating in traditional discourse 
today have means to come to cities, or they already live there, so they 
have money and access (hillbillies don't come to conferences.) Money is 
a functional moderator. Early Usenet was great because only those with 
access to computers and networks could participate, and that was a 
select elite from academia, industry and individual tinkerers (modems 
used to cost a fortune.) Education and club memberships are great 
moderators.

Along these lines, we need an electronic system that's neither cheap nor 
simple to access. Never forget that 'user friendly' concept is a 
sinister ideological instrument to ensure impotency of the medium. Yes, 
that's hard to digest, but it's true.

Then we need to make it popular.

I don't have a solution for the latter, but the former can be easily 
done by requiring costly PoW to participate, resulting in very material 
electricity bills, and likely a reserved piece of equipment that is used 
exclusively for the purpose of participation. Anyone willing to pay and 
set it up can participate. It would be like going to expensive night 
club: mostly nice people there, with only few scattered gangsters. The 
cost can be adjusted (via geolocating) to match the GDP of the locality.

Don't even THINK about liberating anyone - it's a guaranteed 
self-defeating concept - even the dumbest open access 
computers-as-democracy-enablers activist should have it figured out by now.

Jitsi is great, BTW. 100% edge-based and end-to-end encrypted. Use the 
'jitsi desktop', not the other stuff (which is all center-full,) and 
download the source, as they will soon end the support. It takes some 
effort to convince others to use it though, and then the idiots start to 
complain that Skype has better quality.

Everything else mentioned is center-full.



On 4/28/19, 09:50, Geert Lovink wrote:
> Dear nettime, as the world slowly moves towards regulation of Facebook
> and Google, the question of social media alternatives seems nowhere near
> to be resolved. Or is there some progress? For a while I have been
> compiling link lists related to the social media question for the Unlike
> Us email list and I am happy to share some of the ones from March/April
> with you here. What do you use? How about telegram, signal, duckduckgo,
> mastedon, jitsi, protonmail, openstreetmap, cryptpad.fr
> <http://cryptpad.fr>, deepl translator? Are there ways to create a
> critical mass within your own networks and communities? Best, Geert

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