For years, I’ve been looking beyond the technical and economic limits which we’ve developed during our fast few decades of personal computing and digital networking.  I’ve looked at co-creative potentials envisioned by Internet pioneers, and added ideas on the basic nature of communication and community.  This book reflects all of that research– but in most ways, it’s just a beginning.

Co- creating tech and culture

We can rebuild communications technologies (tools, techniques and systems) to foster the emergence of communities and inter-communities of autonomous peers. It’s an immense challenge, however, because we must displace corporations which marry communities to software platforms based on financially extractive models.

We can foster just and effective dialogue between tech and culture with these open tech goals:

1. All globally valuable communications software should be, or become, freely available to diverse digital networks.

2. Network participants should be able to use any software which meets systemic specifications for protocols or APIs.

Humanity first

I believe that p2p networking technology is crucial to a sustainable future.  However, it won’t get anyone out of the creative and social work we need to do together.

Communication and collaboration are deeply human. People must share ideas and activities to discover common interests, to plan and work fairly together, and to develop true community.

Putting humanity first, we won’t predetermine social tools and techniques according to currently usable software, including our evolving programming languages.  However, we’ll always need to refine tools and techniques through shared experiences with usable software.

Software applications and functions

Many processes described in Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking could be integrated into a small set of signaling and storage applications. However, they’ll probably be explored in various networks before they’re fully realized anywhere. Also, complex projects require coordinating functions which my book doesn’t yet mention. For instance, I’m developing a fractal process management system for objectives with unlimited levels of complexity.

I’m drafting a new paper on the open ecosystem of tools and techniques we need to support p2p organizing, including essential systems such as notifications, scheduling and calendars.  Designers can directly integrate such systems with this book’s networking models.

Coordinated Goals

I’ll openly develop Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking based on feedback, and I’ll use Agreement-Based Organization to help build co-authored versions of its networking models.  Ideally, participation will be open to all sincerely interested people, via distributive network management principles.

Agreement-Based Organization will always be separately available, and both documents will always be licensed for sharing and adaptation.  However, I believe that some form of agreement-based organization will receive increased attention as a component within a co-authored p2p networking model.

I’ll coordinate my goals with harmonious efforts in existing projects and communities such as Value Flows. We’ll only need a small fraction of our co-creative resources to develop open technologies for all people.

How you can help

I want and need feedback on Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking.  I’d especially appreciate if feedback reflects these framing questions:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

Maybe you have ideas I haven’t encountered before!  Feel free to comment directly on the document or email me, and share your thoughts on how we can emerge into an Information Age.

The post Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking: How the Internet Should Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

If we really do make subtle micro-gestures that betray ourselves to one another, then we must, on some level recognize those signs in others. Sure, some con-men and actors have gotten really good at masking their dishonesty or misdirecting our attention. But many of us have gotten really good at missing the signals we don’t want to see, or lying to ourselves about someone’s truthfulness against our own better judgment.

I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the illusion of secrecy we’ve been working under all along.

Subconsciously, anyway, we all pretty much always know when the other is lying. At best, all we do by lying is add noise to the signal, trigger alarm bells in the other person’s unconscious defense mechanisms, and push people away from us in the long run. So why bother to lie at all? Whatever it is we think we’re hiding, everyone already knows, at least deep down.

In an age when well-founded fears of government or corporate invasions of our privacy loom, I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the illusion of secrecy we’ve been working under all along. The abuses of our private information notwithstanding, could we be looking at a larger shift toward greater honesty?

Don’t get me wrong: It sucks that companies and agencies pore through our data, and sort it algorithmically to predict our future choices before we know them ourselves. Our social-media feeds steer us toward the paths most consistent with our big-data consumer profiles, reducing our spontaneity and manipulating us away from individual agency and unpredictable outcomes.

But the other side of the dynamic is that in order to get us to acquiesce to all this exposure, the sorts of things we are ashamed or afraid to disclose become less aberrant. Hell, marijuana is becoming legal. Gay people are allowed to get married. Transgender kids are getting bathroom rights in high school. How many people who were once afraid of what their email archives or web searches reveal to law enforcement or future employers can now say, “What do I have to hide? Pot’s not a crime, anymore.”

And as we’ve been reminded once again over the past few weeks, digital technology exposes abuses by individual police officers as well as systemic bias. There’s just no hiding anymore.

In the earliest days of the net, I remember young ravers telling me that the internet was itself just the clumsy precursor to the real connection we would one day experience through telepathy and other evolutionary advances. By their logic, the exposures we’re contending with today – whether it’s your girlfriend seeing that email to your ex, or your employer finding out you smoke pot – won’t be matters of technological surveillance. That’ll just be how things are when we’re all truly connected.

No, we’re probably not evolving toward an organically shared, telepathic “uni-mind” anytime soon. In fact, what these optimistic young net enthusiasts were imagining may actually be closer to an honesty we experienced long ago – before our media gave us so many opportunities to obfuscate the truth, hide from one another, and lose the intimacy we shared.

Before the invention of writing, for example, people could communicate only face to face. To lie to someone in person is a whole lot harder, on many levels, than writing a false note. While communication could be extended through time and space, it no longer had the interpersonal reinforcement of one’s spoken promise. It was more a matter of the law, and how to get around it.

Likewise, the printing press changed people’s once unquestioning relationship to the word of God and the actions of government. Ads on radio and television sold mythologies and pitched lifestyles that were unattainable lies. To accomplish this, these media alienate us from one another and ourselves.

The net offers to do the opposite: reveal truths. And while at first these may be crude truths like political scandals or illegal acts, those might actually be easier to deal with than the personal truths we hide from one another. Think honestly for a minute. How devastating would it be for certain people in your life to know all the secrets your online activities could tell them? And at the same time, this very fear is an indication of just how much we are living our lives in shame, secrecy, and isolation? How much might be released – and gained – if we could break through those boundaries?

In one of the most intimate moments of the first season of Mr. Robot, a TV show about cyber espionage, the highly alienated, vigilante hero hacker confesses to his therapist. He spills everything he knows about her from hacking her personal emails, web searches, and social media connections. He knows her heartaches, her porn preferences … her very soul. It’s a horrifying moment, but also the most profound human connection we see our hero make over the course of the series. True intimacy.

As he apologizes, in his way, for the invasion of privacy, he adds, “But I’ve helped a lot of people. I want a way out of loneliness, just like you.

Could part of the reason why this show is resonating so much with people – particularly those of us who spend so much time and energy on things digital – be that we share some measure of his sense of isolation and despair? Perhaps digital technologies don’t isolate us from one another so much than previous media, but they remind us of how much we do and don’t share with one another. Even the chronic oversharing we see on social media may be one small indication of a repressed, almost bulimic urge to release everything, to everyone.

I would never advocate compromising our digital privacy – particularly in an environment where selective enforcement, illegal government spying, and corporate manipulation are rampant. It’s simply not safe out there. But

Besides, everybody already knows.

Photo by Isengardt

The post Everybody Knows: From information abuse to more honest societies appeared first on P2P Foundation.