| There seem to be a lot of discussions going on inside each of these projects. There should be some central hub for research and exchange ;) Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of scattered communities. Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides - creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain to connect all available information. Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways of thinking about everything could be the results. The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency) to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and oppression. But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the internet exists and it will not want to go back. This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect. It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these possibilities to connect to the global information pool. The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead to social changes - it does already. Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people misusing the system just for their own profits.
Most probably "profit" will be an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves. Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation. |