PeerPoint Discussion - please don't use for other topics
Poor Richard
poor.ricardo at gmail.com
Sat Jun 23 03:54:47 PDT 2012
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>
>
>
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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