I'm disappointed but not surprised that the PeerPoint project is viewed with scorn by old-guard digital libertarians and anarchists. I am accused of being naive--they've seen everything and done everything and they have a superior, smug outlook. They argue that what works is more of what they are accustomed to. But it is exactly that approach that resulted in the present state of affairs in which the internet is colonized and dominated by large corporate actors. Anarchists and libertarians are the unwitting pawns of the powerful actors they mean to resist. I've been around IT since long before the internet, since it was called data processing. Since before email and electronic bulletin boards and USENET. And I've been involved in every aspect of it since we operated mainframes with teletype terminals and punched tape right through until today. I was old guard once, very old guard. I've also been a political, social, and environmental activist since the sixties, witnessing the horrifying failure of almost all our movements from the inside. But recently I woke up to the fact that it was on our watch--MY watch--that the world went to hell in a handbasket. My confederates and I all screwed up. We all get a big-assed #FAIL. Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that definition anybody who thinks that libertarian and anarchist business-as-usual is going to pull us through the crises and threats we now face is not just naive--they are burried inside a mystery wrapped in a conundrum, locked within an enigma. They are lost in space. The threats to privacy, liberty, democracy, and equality have steadily grown despite all our BRILLIANT efforts up to now, so only a new strategy can be expected to reverse that trend. That strategy is not a continued, exclusive reliance on slef-organizing, emergent systems. That by itself has not worked. We need to try something else. That something else might even be something that was tried in the past and discredited because it was impractical then. It might be large-scale collective organization and design. In the past large-scale collective design failed because it was forced to adopt centralized, top-down planning and organization. Now we can do it in a much more distributed, horizontal, and agile manner. It failed because it adopted organizational structures and created designs that were monolithic. Now we can do organizations and designs that are modular and composable. *Wikipedia: Composability* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composability> is a system design <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_design> principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides recombinant components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements. In information systems, the essential features that make a component composable are that it be: - self-contained (modular<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_programming>): it can be deployed independently - note that it may cooperate with other components, but dependent components are replaceable - stateless <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_server>: it treats each request as an independent transaction, unrelated to any previous request. *Stateless* is just one technique; *managed state* and * transactional* systems can also be composable, but with greater difficulty. Finally, many past revolutions have failed or succeeded upon their access to technology. Somehow ignoring the story of "guns, germs, and steel" the old guard now wants to say that revolutions are not about tools or technology, they are just about people and social relations. They pontificate that technology doesn't make revolutions, people make revolutions. Tell that to an Afghan tribesman and see if he will discard his AK-47 or his satellite phone. As I wrote in PeerPoint, I thought quite plainly and clearly, PeerPoint is a non-violent weapon of revolution. Let those who don't think we need a revolution shut the hell up and get out of the way. Poor Richard On Monday, June 18, 2012 9:14:27 AM UTC-5, Poor Richard wrote:

*Welcome to the PeerPoint Discussion Thread*

PeerPoint Design Specifications<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkAUpUxdfKGr_5Qio2SlZcnBu_sgnZWdoVTZuD_Regs/edit#>

PeerPoint is an evolving crowdsourced design specification for a suite of integrated peer-to-peer applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc. This specification overlaps with several existing p2p infrastructure and social networking projects but also goes substantially beyond anything yet existing.

Members of p2p projects, interested programmers and designers, power users, and others are encouraged to participate in the collaborative development of the open PeerPoint specs and to adopt any part of the specs they can use in their own work. To participate, please read the PeerPoint Design Specifications<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkAUpUxdfKGr_5Qio2SlZcnBu_sgnZWdoVTZuD_Regs/edit#>. If you then wish to edit the PeerPoint document you will need to join this Next Net Group.

In the near future we will have a PeerPoint repository and wiki at GitHub.

Poor Richard

<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet/catpnppl-tI/lvPuIz3HYDgJ>

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