Andrew Leonard: I remember the day I fell in love with the Internet as well as I remember the birth of my children. The summer of 1993; I was a reporter at the alt-weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian and my editor assigned me a story about an anime convention in Oakland, California. I asked the organizer of the conference where I could find some otaku (fanboys) to interview. “They all hang out on the Internet,” he said.

I didn’t have Internet access, but I had a modem and a CompuServe account that I used to exchange emails with my uncle. An hour spent lurking in a CompuServe anime forum sparked a life-changing epiphany. The online world, I realized instantly, was a fantastic reporting tool. I learned more about anime in that hour than I could have in a week spent tracking down interview subjects via landlines. I knew right away that I had to break out of the CompuServe walled garden and start homesteading the wild Internet.

From that day forward, my Rolodex might as well have been carved on cuneiform tablets. Within a week, I had figured out how to use my wife’s University of California, Berkeley student account to telnet and gopher and FTP my way around the pre-web “Net.” Within the year, I had quit the Guardian (although not before dropping a cover story — “How to Connect to the Internet”) and started writing for a brand new magazine called Wired.

I loved the Internet. But 25 years later, I see the words “the blockchain is the new Internet” scrolling down Twitter andI want to shake my news feed by the scruff of the neck and growl: Have you people learned nothing?!

As is so often the case with new converts, I was an instant over-the-top evangelist. And why not? Dreams formerly relegated to pulp science fiction novels had become reality: the library of all knowledge was just a few 14.4 baud beeps and gurgles away. I was far from a libertarian but I do confess to resonating to John “cypherpunk” Gilmore’s declaration that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Totalitarians, corporate overlords, and media monopolies: beware! Your gatekeeping days were over! The Internet had set us free.

Gosh, I loved the Internet. But 25 years later, I see the words “the blockchain is the new Internet” scrolling down Twitter and it’s all I can do to keep from screaming: Oh man, I fucking hate the blockchain. I want to shake my news feed by the scruff of the neck and growl: Have you people learned nothing?!Call me apostate, or maybe just an aging grouch, but if the blockchain really is the new Internet, we’re all screwed.

Let’s get a few things out of the way. I do not hate the blockchain because I fundamentally question the technical merits of cryptographically-secured, distributed-database technology. Nor do I hate the blockchain because of how quickly Initial Coin Offerings turned from “innovative way to raise startup capital without selling your soul to venture capitalists” to “how fast can we scam a whole generation of crypto-suckers out of their cash before security regulators slam the door on our collective ass?” I don’t even hate the blockchain because bitcoin seems, at this point, primarily a way to transmute massive amounts of electricity into a speculative, climate-change acceleratinginvestment commodity. There are a great many smart people working on blockchain implementations and a ton of money pouring into the space. I am prepared to concede that some useful applications will emerge that make my life more convenient and don’t break the planet. A few years had to pass between Mosaic 1.0 and the debut of Spotify and streaming Netflix and the iPhone. There’s still plenty of time before we call this round of innovation a wrap.

No, my problem has little to do with the actual technology. My gripe is with human faith in technology. The same kind of utopian promises that bloomed during the Internet’s early heyday — “freedom, fairness, and equality for the society of tomorrow” — are on the tip of every bitcoin miner’s tongue. The passion of the true zealot is everywhere: “The blockchain will set us free.”

But if there is one thing that we should have learned from the history of the last 25 years, it is that digital networks and computers and code are no solution to human brokenness. With each passing day, the opposite seems more likely to be true. Pressure exerted by the Internet cracked some long-existing social fissures wide open.

Instead of gaining access to the library of all human knowledge, we ended up card-carrying members of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” — that infinite biblio-nightmare that stockpiled every possible iteration of gibberish along with the real books written in real languages.

Instead of leading us to truth, the Internet gave everyone the unparalleled opportunity to build their own personal knowledge universe, catalyzing a comprehensive unmooring of society from actual fact that has surely been a factor in the rise of Trump and a global turn towards propaganda-fed authoritarianism.

I respect the idealism of blockchain developers… But I am confounded by their inability to see that they are falling victim to exactly the same fallacies their hacker forebears embraced.

Instead of freeing ourselves from the manipulation of corporations and governments, we have bequeathed them the most powerful tools of panopticonic surveillance and control ever invented.

The smartest blockchain developers that I have talked to do not deny these truths of what the Internet has wrought. On the contrary, what gets them most excited about the future is their confidence that blockchain technology is the antidote for all the toxic ills unleashed by Internet anarchy. Once their dream of perfectly decentralized, unhackable, smart-contract-executing “trustless” tech is perfected, they believe, central banks and government tyranny will be rendered impotent, nation-state borders transcended, voting fraud and fake news made impossible. The blockchain, in their view, is a teleological apotheosis, the perfection of progressive human civilization through technology.

At the heart of this vision is the idea that human messiness can be abstracted away by clever code. In a “trustless” system, public key cryptography and the “consensus” generated by distributing a database across multiple nodes eliminates the potential for fraud or corruption or exploitation committed by any intermediary. Smart contracts will automatically execute the terms of any deal, without getting bogged down by human fickleness or well-capitalized litigation. Tyrants will be powerless against cryptocurrency-funded freedom fighters organized in decentralized networks.

That’s the theory, anyway. But it misses the most important point about human messiness. The indisputable fact — obvious to anyone who has studied the history of technology or simply been alive for the last 25 years — is that living, breathing humans will deploy any conceivable technology for both good and evil, for the realization of both freedom and tyranny, for greed and power, and just plain mayhem. The Internet gave white supremacists a voice denied to them for decades; nothing is going to stop them from figuring out how to use blockchain technology for bigotry. Smart contracts will be tested in human courts. Regulators will regulate.

Decentralization is the first commandment of the blockchain faith. But what did William Butler Yeats tell us happens when “the center cannot hold”? Things fall apart!

I respect the idealism of blockchain developers who, I believe, are sincere in their faith that they are building a better world. But I am confounded by their inability to see that they are falling victim to exactly the same fallacies their hacker forebears embraced: this notion that we can code ourselves out of the deep holes we’ve dug; that we are building utopias in our virtualities that will finesse away the imperfections of human character.

It seems to me increasingly clear that we need to spend less time abstracting away our humanity and more time pressing the flesh. Instead of seeking out the anomie of decentralization, we need to figure out how to come together. To successfully deal with the failings of humanity, we have to spend more time with humans and less time thumbing our smartphones.

It’s not hard to understand the urge to declare that “the blockchain is the new Internet.” The mid-90s were a giddy time; the astonishingly fast transformation that swept through the culture was unlike anything in recent memory, and if you were riding the shockwave of that blast, it was exhilarating. Linked together in a global network, the computers that Steve Jobs called “bicycles of the mind” promised to take us anywhere we wanted to go. And, of course, a whole lot of people ended up making quite a bit of money off the new digital infrastructure. So who wouldn’t want to return to optimism of those days? Peace, love, and the Internet, man. It was so groovy.

That’s why I loved the Internet so much. Because of that sense of possibility and hope and progress. But that’s also exactly why I hate the blockchain. Because it reminds me of just how illusory those promises turned out to be.

The post The Blockchain Is a Reminder of the Internet’s Failure appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As the decentralisation movement grows, I consider the characteristics of decentralisation, what decentralisation is a tactic for, why and what work still needs to happen to re-decentralize the digital world.

Decentralisation has gone mainstream

Between Tim Berners-Lee raising the call to arms to re-decentralize the web, Mozilla, Internet Archive and other institutions pledging support, to the incredible financial success of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects — decentralisation is increasingly sexy.

(If you haven’t seen the hype, some of the mainstream coverage includes the New Yorker covering ‘the mission’ in 2013 to the Guardian calling decentralisation ‘the next big step’ earlier this month and Make Use Of wondering if blockchains are the answer).

Yet, what does decentralisation actually mean? Does it only apply to technology or is governance more important? Who gets to call themselves decentralised and does it matter?

The number of times I’ve heard ‘it’s decentralised’ as a reason to use or move to a particular application or platform recently, is impressive. All kinds of crypto/blockchain companies are branding themselves as ‘decentralised’ — every day there’s a new decentralised social network, decentralised file storage solution, decentralised identity app, decentralised syncing, contract management, health data sharing, dating service, avocado delivery — all decentralised! As if decentralisation is something wonderful and worthwhile in and of itself. Yet, when I ask ‘why does that matter?’ or ‘how are you decentralised?’ the answers tend to be very different and even inconsistent with the actual business proposition people are working on. How did we get here and what’s beyond the hype?

Decentralisation means different things to different people. When Francis and I picked Redecentralize to name our decentralisation-promoting side project 6 years ago, it was precisely because we cared about a number of things: privacy, competition and resilience. It wasn’t just about one solution (such as encryption) that we wanted to promote, it was a set of values: freedom, autonomy, collaboration, experimentation. Those values were tied up to the original spirit of the open web and net — the sense of freedom and possibility that we wanted to remind people of, and protect.

As decentralisation becomes more popular, those values and goals are getting lost as the community fractures into various roles. We need a way to distinguish and assess decentralisation meaningfully.

First, what does decentralisation actually mean?

At its most basic level, it is a distinction between a centralised hub and spoke model and a distributed connected network:

I drew this myself. You’re welcome.

Some people distinguish between ‘decentralised’ and ‘distributed’ — I’m talking about the general idea of decentralisation that encompasses distributed, federated and decentralised systems. This post is about the characteristics of decentralisation and the outcomes and implications of those characteristics rather than the specific configuration. (For more discussion on types of decentralisation, Vitalik wrote a great post on ‘the meaning of decentralisation’ last year).

While the diagrams are a simplification, they do immediately suggest certain characteristics. The centralised system on the left obviously has one much more important or powerful node — the middle one. All the other nodes depend on it to reach each other. It will know about all communication in the network. It’s a central point of failure and a central point of control. If you contrast this with the diagram on the right — which nodes are more important there? It’s hard to tell. Most nodes have multiple routes to other nodes. It seems like a more resilient system, but it’s harder to know how you can quickly make sure all nodes have the same information at once.

What we need is a more formal way to assess if something counts as ‘decentralised’.

Characterististics of decentralisation

The key characteristic I propose is that a system is decentralised to the extent it distributes power. Specifically, the distribution of control, knowledge and capability between many users. What does this look like?

Control is about ensuring user choice — adapting to user preferences and giving users decision making power. It’s fundamentally about autonomy. Decentralised control looks like end-users having a choice between service providers and not being forced into accepting terms and conditions that exploit them due to a lack of alternatives (see Facebook). This also looks like users having the freedom to adapt and customise the products and services they use to their specific needs. It looks like being able to opt out of targeted advertising or choosing to store your data locally. It looks like having applications that don’t require an internet connection to work.

Knowledge is about access to data and information. Knowledge distribution avoids information asymmetry and helps people recognise dependencies and the consequences of their choices. Decentralised knowledge looks like users having local copies of their data, being able to export data or choose to store the authoritative copy of their data locally. It looks like users understanding how the services they use actually work and their business models (for example whether it is advertising based, personalised advertising, selling your profile and preferences to external advertisers, something else etc). It looks like users being able to have private conversations and share photos securely with end-to-end encryption where the content of communication cannot be accessed or deleted by external organisations. It can look like the company providing the service not knowing or storing the metadata of who contacts who and when.

Capability is about infrastructure — the storage, processing and computation power needed to run systems and services. In a centralised model these are either all in the same place or in a small number of places controlled by one company. This creates a central point of failure both in the event of natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes) and attacks (whether virtual such as data breaches, data taps, denial of services attacks, or physical destruction and manipulation). Centralisation often means that people’s data, which we rely on and want to protect (such as our conversations, photos and work), can be compromised or even lost. Privacy can be easier to compromise in central systems. A decentralised approach tends to be more resilient, but also offers greater control and knowledge distribution. It looks like apps which work offline, users being able to communicate, collaborate or share data across devices without mobile networks or wifi through peer-to-peer networks or user data federating across a network (e.g. mastodon.social).

Why decentralise?

Importantly, decentralisation in and of itself is neither good or bad. It depends on the context and what is being decentralised. Decentralisation can bring new capabilities, privacy and flexibility or surveillance, inefficiency and waste. How and why it is done, matters.

Not all things need decentralising. Unlike some, I don’t think code should be law. I like the law. It has been iterated on and developed and tested over thousands of years by millions of people. I would trust British Law above even a dozen smart contract developers. (Disclaimer: I’ve worked in tech for over 10 years, but never in law).

Institutions have value and not all expertise can or should be replaced by an immutable list and algorithmic consensus. However, in many other aspects, we desperately need to redecentralise and serve people, not corporations, much better. Even so, simply decentralising in some fashion does not magically bring about utopia. Much of the rhetoric of blockchain and other ‘decentralisation’ startups offer no plausible way from where we are today to the autonomous secure empowered world of decentralisation via their service or application. Let’s be intentional and clear about what changes we want to realise and what exactly it might take to get there. If you’re not building all of it, then be clear on what else will need to happen. We will most likely succeed as an ecosystem, not as one ‘killer app’.

This brings me back to how and why decentralisation is done, matters. And for me, the meaning and value of decentralisation is closely related to the purpose and expected outcomes of it. That means understanding the problem, articulating an alternative and roadmap for how we get there and testing the roadmap and showing it’s better by tracking the impact.

Everybody in the decentralisation space needs to do this.

Understanding the problem

Centralised systems lead to increasingly monotonous and unaccountable power. Over time this encourages exploitation and disinterest in user needs. Take Facebook for example, a platform that on the face of it is designed to help people digitally connect with their friends and family — share photos, talk, organise events and keep in touch. If my needs were a genuine priority then I should be able to share and showcase my photos from flickr or talk to my friends using my favourite app (such as telegram, signal or wire) — which would be most convenient for me. If Facebook cared about connecting people, it would not have dropped xmpp support — an open instant messaging protocol that allowed people to choose their own interface (mine was pidgin!) and from one place and talk to anyone using gchat, facebook, AIM, msn or jabber. Instead, Facebook’s interface and functionality is optimised around keeping me scrolling and in-app as long as possible since their business model depends on selling my attention.

Amazon has become a near monopoly for buying things online with their brand recognition, efficiencies of scale and great customer service. As real-world bookshops close down and everyone else sells on amazon marketplace, few have the infrastructure, supply chains, funds or brand to be able to compete any more. When there are no alternatives, why be cheaper? Why have great customer service? Users have little choice or control and Bezos (the owner of Amazon) is the richest person on the planet. Instead of thousands of independent flourishing businesses, we have one very very very rich man.

Centralisation makes it easy to undermine privacy and use personal information in ways individuals cannot control. As the Snowden revelations showed us, Governments tap network cables and can curtail freedom of speech. Digital monopolies now hold unbelievable amounts of data on us which can be used to manipulate us into spending money, but potentially also to impersonate, blackmail or silence.

An alternative

Keeping power accountable requires alternative competing sources of power which are independent. This could be government, assuming government is there to represent the interests of the many above the few. It could be alternative companies and services. It could be many people choosing together.

An alternative, decentralised world is one of:

• Choice, diversity and competition — where many different business models and structures co-exist beyond the ‘winner takes all’ surveillance capitalism model (which depends on closed networks which don’t integrate or talk to each other). Centralised models, especially with data selling / advertising business models, have been deeply explored and within any new vertical often one or two winners take all and price out new competitors. This is uninspiring compared to the wealth of innovation that might be possible with local organisations tailoring their offering to particular sectors, cultures, interests and preferences. The same open source software can be provided in different configurations and alternative service standards to fit different user needs, budget and cultural context. It’s a world where providing ethical and environmentally friendly products and delivery services is possible and discoverable.
• Resilience — where our valuable data and services are persistent and safe from companies being bought, new management decisions, natural disaster or hacking. No more losing your journal or portfolio gallery when a company is bought up by a monopoly.
• Autonomy and privacy — where we control what kinds of terms and conditions we’re willing to agree to. A world where people can opt out of data sharing or choose to pay for their social network — choosing security and no adverts while still being able to communicate with friends using different providers. A world where end-to-end encryption works seamlessly.

How do we make it happen?

We all can contribute!

At Redecentralize.org we’re encouraging viable alternatives that work together (‘small pieces loosely joined’). This means ensuring that decentralised products and services are usable and work well with other privacy preserving user centered services and products. A key goal of redecentralize is to promote decentralised projects and platforms and bring people working in this space together through events and discussion forums.

Secondly, open protocols and regulation that incentivises or enforces their use is vital. The beginnings of this already exist in the data portability requirements of GDPR. Open protocols allow for collaboration between different and competing products and services, giving the user maximum flexibility and control without losing access to others in their network. The forced exclusion of closed proprietary protocols over network type services (such as social networks or marketplaces like amazon, airbnb, uber) has led to monopolies and lack of innovation and should be consigned to history.

Lastly we all have a role to play to disrupt the surveillance capitalism business model by choosing with our wallets and spending money on respectful software. A promising path may be to have payment built into how things work (cryptocurrency style) so that when you use IPFS and help store content you collect Filecoin you can then spend on the applications and services you value.

Conclusion

Decentralisation in and of itself, is unlikely to achieve all the outcomes that many people in the decentralisation movement care about. Yet it does offer a powerful way to tackle the problems of digital monopolies, growing inequality and loss of autonomy in our societies. Decentralisation incentivises power to be distributed across users. It’s an alternative infrastructure and way of being that creates space for autonomy, collaboration and local control. So, let’s be explicit about the change we want to see and test the impact.

Decentralised governance (knowledge and control in this model) is vital and must be considered alongside infrastructure and capacity. Let’s assess projects on all three characteristics of decentralisation and treat technology as a powerful tool to get us to a better world, but by no means the only intervention needed!

Can I get involved?

Yes of course. Join the discussion list and come chat on the #redecentralize matrix channel. We’re about to start fundraising —shout if you’d like to sponsor our work or come contribute!

Photo by Thomas Hawk

The post There’s more to decentralisation than blockchains and bitcoin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

John Leonard: The Decentralized Web Summit is over – what’s next?

Earlier this month a rather unusual tech event took place in San Francisco.

The Decentralized Web Summit played host to a gathering of web luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle and Vint Cerf. On top of that, activists and authors and screenwriters such as Jennifer Stisa Granick, Emili Jacobi, Mike Judge and Cory Doctorow put in an appearance, as did cryptocurrency pioneers like Zooko Wilcox, blockchain developers, and academics.

Then, there was what the Guardian‘s John Harris calls the Punk Rock Internet – companies like MaidSafe and Blockstack who play by their own decentralised rules.

Oh, and there was a sprinkling of techies from Microsoft, Google (Vint Cerf and others) and Mozilla in attendance too, along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities.

Uniting this diverse selection of delegates was the challenge of fixing the centralising tendencies of the internet and web.

Simply put, the internet’s reliance on centralised hubs of servers and data centres means that the more servers you control the more power you have, with all the negative consequences that follow from the creation of data-haves and data-have-nots.

To redress the balance, data needs to be freed from silos with control handed back to users, but how to do that while retaining the convenience and ease-of-use of the current web?

Aside from the inevitable resistance by the powers that be, this turns out to be quite the technical challenge.

One task among a set of complex interlocking challenges is to separate data from the applications that use it. People could then store their personal data where they choose, granting or limiting access by applications as they please. For example, Berners-Lee’s Solid platform enables everyone to have multiple ‘pods’ for their data allowing for fine-grained control.

Another element is authentication, ensuring that the data owner really is who they say they are, while ensuring real identities remain private by default.

Networking needs to be peer-to-peer rather than hub-and-spoke, with copies of files stored across multiple machines for redundancy and speed of throughput in a manner that users of torrent-based file-sharing services will be familiar with, but adding far more control and performance features.

And above all it will need to be easy to use, low latency and simple for developers to create decentralised applications for.

Computing contacted a number of contributors to the Summit before and after the event and asked about their take on progress towards a viable decentralised web.

Pic credit Vitor Fontes. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold (W.B. Yeats)

14/08/2018 – The key takeaways

With the summit now over and the participants returned to their basement labs (or shiny new offices) it’s time to consider the takeaways.

Interest in decentralisation is growing

While the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit summit attracted 350 enthusiasts, 2018 saw more than twice that number, with 800 attendees across 156 sessions. Not huge numbers as tech events in San Francisco go (the ‘big one’ Oracle OpenWorld attracts an astonishing 60,000 delegates), but important nevertheless in that it brought together the founders of the connected world with those looking at new ways to reclaim the web’s original vision.

“There are dozens and dozens of new projects and protocols and our goal was to get them to a place where people could do real learning,” said Wendy Hanamura of the Internet Archive.

For Blockstack’s Patrick Stanley the seed planted two years ago is still growing strongly: “I was very impressed by the quality of attendees and felt that the spirit of the original vision of the web as a place where people can create was intact,” he said.

No project is an island

The web touches almost every aspect of modern life. Re-architecting such a system will be a huge undertaking, one far too big for disparate bunches of developers working alone. MaidSafe COO Nick Lambert was among many urging more collaboration.

“Certainly, there are some efforts to work together on problem solving, but this is not happening universally,” he said. “Everyone at the event was clearly united in a common purpose to make the internet more private and secure, but the key takeaway for me is how we foster greater cohesion among the different projects.”

Money: no longer too tight to mention

Concerns about attracting VC funding haunted 2016, but those worries have largely evaporated as a result of the crypto goldrush which has given a huge boost to the value of the tokens that support many projects. Booms can turn to busts, of course, and sudden wealth can bring challenges of its own, but for now the gloom has lifted.

While some fear an inevitable clampdown on cryptocurrencies by the authorities, OmiseGO’s Althea Allen, who chaired a debate on the issue, said the worst may not happen.

“What I took away from talking with those excellent thinkers was actually quite a hopeful picture for the future of decentralised finance,” she said. “By all their accounts, they have found regulators to be more open to the possibilities of crypto than we tend to assume, with less default bias toward corporate interests, and largely concerned with the same things that we are: security, privacy, consumer protections; generally speaking, making honest people’s lives easier and not harder.”

Awareness of the bigger picture

Mindful of the developing relationship with the authorities, governance was front and centre of many discussions, a sign of growing maturity in decentralised thinking. For Miriam Avery, director of strategic foresight at Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies department, valuable lessons can be learned from those working “in countries where corruption is blatant, regulation is ineffective, and centralised control points cause palpable harm.”

Their experiences may turn out be more universal than some might think, she said. 

“The threat model is changing such that these harms are relevant to people who are less acutely aware of their causes. For instance, the things Colombian Ethereum hackers are worried about are things that we should all be a little worried about.”

Avery continued: “At the same time, digging into these projects we can already see pitfalls in the ‘governance’ of the software projects themselves, from the prevalence of benevolent dictators to disagreements on the limits of moral relativism. There’s room to grow these technologies through healthy, inclusive open source communities, and I’m excited to see that growth.”

The door needs to be wedged open, or it will be slammed shut again

Another Mozillan, software engineer Irakli Gozalishvili, said: “It was reassuring to see that the community is actively thinking and talking about not only making decentralised web a place that serves people, but also how to create technology that can’t be turned into corporate silos or tools for empowering hate groups.”

Scaling up

Any decentralised web worthy of that name needs to be quick and responsive at scale, said MaidSafe’s Lambert. “There is a long way to go to create a user experience that will encourage everyone to adopt the decentralised approach.  For example, none of the demonstrations at the summit were able to show scalability to millions of users.”

Front-end focus

The decentralised web, with a few notable exceptions, is still very ‘engineering-y’ with most of the effort going into the back-end rather than the user interface. The networking may be futuristic but the front end is (with a few honourable exceptions) still Web 1.0. Which is fine at the development stage but projects will soon need to move on from demonstrating capabilities to making apps that people actually want to use.

Creating an easy onramp is an essential step. Mozilla is piloting decentralised web browsing via WebExtension APIs, the first of the ‘major’ vendors to do so, although others have been working in this area for a while, notably the Beaker browser for navigating DAT sites and ZeroNet.

A long list of necessary developments includes a human-readable decentralised replacement for the DNS system, search engines, and proof that crypto-based incentive systems for the supply and demand of resources can make for a scalable economy.

And the next Decentralized Web Summit? Hanamura wouldn’t be drawn on a date. “We’re still recovering from organising this one,” she said.

Enthusiasm is not sufficient fuel

06/08/2018 – Maintaining the momentum

If the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit was a call to action, in 2018 it’s all about working code. That’s according to Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, the organisation that hosted both events. However, there’s still a fair way to go before it goes anything like mainstream.

The Internet Archive’s mission is to preserve the outputs of culture, turning analogue books, files and recordings into digital, storing digital materials for posterity and preserving web pages going back to 1996 in the Wayback Machine.

Unsurprisingly given its aims, the organisation is sitting on a mountain of data – more than 40 petabytes and rising fast. It has recently started experimenting with decentralised technologies as a way of spreading the load and ensuring persistence, including file sharing and storage protocols WebTorrent, DAT and IPFS, the database GUN and P2P collaborative editor YJS.

And it’s open to looking at more in the future. “We’re glad to be in at the ground floor,” said Hanamura. “We have no horse in the race. We’re looking for all of them to succeed so we’re looking at different protocols for different functions.”

Wendy Hanamura

Despite some substantial progress, few decentralised projects could yet be described as ‘enterprise ready’. More work is required in many different areas, one of which is providing more straightforward ways for non-technical users to become involved.

Hanumara pointed to developments among big-name browsers including Firefox, Chrome and Brave as among the most promising for improved user experience. Mozilla demonstrated a Firefox API for decentralised systems at the event.

“Participants were able to talk to each other directly browser to browser without a server involved, and they thought that was tremendously exciting,” she said.

Collaborations

For Ruben Verborgh of the Solid project, the cross-pollination required to overcome some of the challenges is hampered by the diversity of approaches.

“Ironically, the decentralised community itself is also very decentralised, with several smaller groups doing highly similar things,” he said. “Finding common ground and interoperability will be a major challenge for the future since we can only each do our thing if we are sufficiently compatible with what others do.”

While it’s still too early for projects to merge or consolidate around standards, Hanamura said she witnessed “lots of meetings in corridors and deals being struck about how you could tweak things to work together.”

“That’s another way you can make it scale,” she added.

Maintaining momentum

The summit had strong ideological underpinnings. Hanamura described it as “an event for the heart. People came to share,” she said.

The strength of small open-source projects with big ideas is that they can easily sustain shared ideals, but this can be hard to maintain as they evolve, she went on.

“Many founders said governance was their biggest worry. You need a team of developers who believe in you and are willing to work with you – if not they can fork the code and create something very different.”

In 2016 the main concern was very different: it was funding. The success of cryptocurrency token sales (ICOs) have removed many of these worries, at least for some. A lot of money has flowed into decentralised technologies, for example Filecoin recently raised $230m in an ICO and Blockstack made $50m. But this can be a double-edged sword as rapid expansion and bags of cash make team cohesion more challenging to maintain, Hanamura believes.

“It makes it a dangerous time. We came to this with a purpose, to make a web that’s better for everyone. So we need to keep our eye on the North Star.”

Once the technologies hit the mainstream, there will be other challenges too, including legal ones.

“As this ecosystem grows it has to be aware of the regulations on the books around the world but also those pending,” said Hanamura. “We have to have a strong voice for keeping areas where we can sandbox these technologies. We need a governance system to keep it decentralised otherwise it can get centralised again.”

It’s gonna take a lot of thinking through

01/08/2018 – Why is decentralising the web so hard to achieve?

Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues faced a number of tough challenges when inventing the web, including having to build early browsers and protocols from scratch and overcoming initial scepticism (his original idea was labelled ‘vague but exciting’ by his boss at CERN). The nascent web also needed to be brought into being under the radar, and the terms for the release of its code carefully formulated to guarantee its free availability for all time. It took 18 months to persuade CERN that this was the right course.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it,” said Berners-Lee in 1998.

The original web was designed to be decentralised, but over the course of time it has been largely fenced off by a small number of quasi-monopolistic powers we know as ‘the tech giants’. This makes designing a new decentralised internet  – one that’s ‘locked open’ in the words of the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle – a challenge even more daunting than those pioneers faced. The problem is the tech giants are very good at what they do, said Jamie Pitts, a member of the DevOps team with the Ethereum Foundation, speaking for himself rather than on behalf of his organisation.

“One of the key hurdles to decentralisation is the lock-in effect and current excellent user experience provided by the large, centralised web services,” he said.

“Decentralised web technology must enable developers to produce high-quality systems enabling users to search, to connect with each other, and to conduct all forms of business. Until that happens, users will continue to be satisfied with the current set of options.”

While a subset of users is worried about power imbalances, surveillance and lack of control and transparency, the fact is that most people don’t care so long as there are bells and whistles aplenty. A tipping point must be achieved, as Althea Allen of OmiseGO put it.

“The only thing that will force those decentralised systems to change on a fundamental level is a mass shift by consumers toward decentralised systems.”

Selling ads and services through the centralisation and mining of data (‘surveillance capitalism’) has made the tech giants very powerful, and it can be hard to see beyond this model.

“The monopolisation that can occur in a rapidly-advancing technology space poses one of the greatest challenges to decentralisation,” said Pitts.

“Aggregation of capital and talent results from the network effect of a successful commercially-run service, and developers and users can become locked-in. While many of their needs of users may be met by the dominant content provider, search engine, or social network, the monopolised network becomes a silo.”

Moreover, the suck-up-all-the-data model has proven to be highly lucrative for the big boys, and while alternative economic methods for paying participants involving cryptocurrencies and micropayments are emerging, none has yet proved itself on the wider stage.

“There need to be viable business models for app developers that do not depend on advertisements or exploiting user behaviour and data,” said Blockstack’s Patrick Stanley.

On the systems side, there is a necessity to rethink the architecture to avoid central hubs. One of the toughest problems is achieving reliable consensus: with nodes seeing different versions of the ‘truth’ (i.e. what events are happening and in what order), how can one ‘truth’ be agreed upon without reference to a central arbiter? And how can this consensus be secured against faults and bad actors?

This longstanding conundrum was finally solved by the bitcoin blockchain a decade ago, and many efforts are ongoing to make it more efficient and a better fit for the decentralised web, the IoT and other applications. However, other projects, such as IPFS and MaidSafe’s SAFE Network, don’t use a blockchain, arriving at different methods for achieving consensus.

There are many ways to skin the decentralised cat – and that is another issue. What do people want, is it privacy, autonomy, security, an alternative economy, all of the above? Where are the tradeoffs and who decides the priorities? And how can the various strategies work together?

The problem is too big for one player to handle. MaidSafe’s David Irvine sees collaboration as key to any solution, which was one reason why the firm open-sourced all its code.

“We want to collaborate with other companies in this space. We have the scars of developing specific functionality and are happy to work with companies to integrate that functionality where it makes sense.”

Pic credit Rene Böhmer. A decentralised web can also be a place to hide

31/07/2018 What might go wrong?

Technology is morally agnostic. Nuclear power provides the raw material for nuclear bombs. That new road can carry serial killers as well as saints. And while a decentralised web would redistribute power over personal data, it could also provide a convenient hiding place for the bad guys.

Danielle Robinson

It’s high time technologists started to see this issue in the round, said Danielle Robinson, co-executive director, of Code for Science & Society, a non-profit supporting collaboration in public interest technology.

“When technology is built, the biases of its creators are often embedded into the technology itself in ways that are very hard for the creators to see, until it’s used for a purpose you didn’t intend,” she said during an interview with Internet Archive. “So I think it’s really important that we talk about this stuff.”

The increased privacy and security built into decentralised web technologies makes it easier for anyone to collaborate in a secure fashion. And that includes hate groups.

“They’re on the current existing web, and they’re also on the decentralised web, and I think it’s important for our community to talk about that,” she said. “We need a deeper exploration that’s not just ‘oh you know, we can’t control that’.”

In a separate interview, Matt Zumwalt, program manager at Protocol Labs, creator of Inter-Plantetary File System (IPFS), argued that proponents of decentralised web need to think about how it might be gamed.

“We should be thinking, really proactively, about what are the ways in which these systems can be co-opted, or distorted, or gamed or hijacked, because people are going to try all of those things,” he said.

The decentralised web is still an early stage project, and many involved in its creation are motivated by idealism, he went on, drawing parallels with the early days of the World Wide Web. Lessons should be learned from that experience about how reality is likely to encroach on the early vision, he said.

“I think we need to be really careful, and really proactive about trying to understand, what are these ideals? What are the things we dream about seeing happen well here, and how can we protect those dreams?”

Mitra Ardron, technical lead for decentralisation at the Internet Archive, believes that one likely crunch point will be when large firms try to take control.

“I think that we may see tensions in the future, as companies try and own those APIs and what’s behind them,” he said. “Single, unified companies will try and own it.”

However, he does not think this will succeed because he believes people will not accept a monolith. Code can be forked and “other people will come up with their own approaches.”

30/07/2018 Blockstack on identity and decoupling data

Authentication and identity are cornerstones of decentralised networking. Through cryptography, I as a user can verify who I am and what data I own without reference to any central registry. I can use my decentralised ID (DID) to log on securely and perhaps anonymously to services and applications with no third party involved.

Identity is bound up with another tenet of decentralisation: separating the data from the applications. Applications are now interfaces to shared data rather than controllers and manipulators of it. Without my express permission, apps can no longer use and retain data beyond my control.

Coupling data to ID rather than apps was the starting point for the Blockstack platform, as head of growth Patrick Stanley explained.

“Blockstack is creating a digital ecosystem of applications that let users fully own their identities and data on the Internet. User data – like photos and messages – are completely decoupled from the applications. Apps can no longer lock users and their social graph in, since they no longer store anything.”

Storage is taken care of elsewhere, in a decentralised storage system called Gaia. As apps are now ‘views’ or interfaces you don’t need to log in to each individually.

“People use applications on Blockstack just like they would with today’s Internet. But instead of signing up for each app one-by-one with an email address and password — or a Google/Facebook log-in — users have an identity that’s registered in the blockchain and a public key that permissions applications or other users to access pieces of data.”

That’s lots of positives so far from a user point of view, and also for developers who have a simpler architecture and fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, but of course, there’s a catch. It’s the difference between shooting from the hip and running everything by a committee.

“Decentralisation increases coordination costs. High coordination costs make it hard to get some kinds of things done, but with the upside that the things that do get done are done with the consensus of all stakeholders.”

There are already privacy-centric social networks and messaging apps available on Blockstack, but asked about what remains on the to-do list, Stanley mentioned “the development of a killer app”. Simply replicating what’s gone before with a few tweaks won’t be enough.

A viable business model that doesn’t depend on tracking-based advertising is another crucial requirement – what would Facebook be without the data it controls? – as is interoperability with other systems, he said.

And the big picture? Why is Blockstack sponsoring the event? Ultimately it’s about securing digital freedom, said Stanley.

“If we’re going to live free lives online, there needs to be protocol-level safeguards to ensure your data stays under your control. Otherwise, the people who control your data ultimately control your digital life.”

Independent but interconnected

27/06/2018 OmiseGO on the importance of UI

OmiseGO, a sponsor of the Decentralized Web Summit, is a subsidiary of Asia-Pacific regional fintech firm Omise. Omise is a payments gateway similar to PayPal or Stripe that’s doing brisk business in East Asia. Omise enables online and mobile fiat currency transactions between customers and participating vendors, and OmiseGO, a separate company and open source project, aims to do the same with cryptocurrencies too.

The backbone of OmiseGO is the OMG blockchain which in turn is built on Ethereum. The goal is to provide seamless interoperability across all blockchains and providers. OMG uses Plasma, an enhancement designed to speed up transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, and the company counts Ethereum’s founders Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood among its advisors. While it’s very early days, in the long run OmiseGO wants to extend banking-type services to the billions of ‘unbanked’ people by cutting out the financial middleman who don’t serve those people, and also giving the ‘banked’ an alternative.

The current Internet has too many middlemen of its own, meaning that equal access does not mean equal control, explained OmiseGO’s head of ecosystem growth Althea Allen in an email.

“The decentralised web is crucial is providing equitable agency within the systems that internet users are accessing. Sovereignty over your own data, money and communication; access to information that is not censored or manipulated; the ability to control what aspects of your identity are shared and with whom; these are essential freedoms that the centralised web simply will not provide.”

However, if the alternatives are awkward and clunky, they will never take off.

“It is difficult, though not impossible, to create a decentralised system that provides the kind of user experience that the average internet user has come to expect. Mass adoption is unlikely until we can provide decentralised platforms that are powerful, intuitive and require little or no change in users’ habits.”

Team OmiseGO

Blockchains are a powerful tool for decentralisation as they can help keep control of events and processes across the network, but that depends on how they are used. There’s a lot of ‘blockchain-washing’ out there, Allen warned.

“Blockchains are not intrinsically decentralised – they can absolutely be private and proprietary. Many institutions, old and new, are showing an interest in adopting new technologies such as blockchains, maintaining the same centres of power and influence, and putting an ‘I blockchained’ sticker on them – essentially, appropriating the rhetoric of decentralisation without actually adopting the principles.”

Asked about the plethora of competing decentralised approaches, Allen said she believes this is positive, but sharing ideas is vital too.

“Cooperation is crucial for us to move the space forward, while healthy competition encourages the exploration of many different possible solutions to the same problems. We work particularly closely with Ethereum, but the success of our project depends on a thriving ecosystem (which extends well beyond crypto or even blockchain technology). To this end, we make a concerted effort to work with projects and individuals in many fields who are contributing to building the decentralised web.”

26/07/2018 MaidSafe on collaboration

As we mentioned in the introduction, a decentralised web will require a number of different interlocking components, including decentralised storage, decentralised networking, decentralised applications and decentralised identities.

MaidSafe, one of the event’s sponsors, is trying to cover all but one these bases with its autonomous SAFE Network, replacing the Transport, Session and Presentation layers of the current seven-layer internet with decentralised alternatives to create a platform for applications. The project is currently at alpha test stage.

So it’s all sewn up then, no need for further collaboration? Not at all said CEO David Irvine, who will be speaking at the event, pointing to the firm’s open-sourcing of its PARSEC consensus algorithm and its invitation to other projects to help develop it. It’s just not always easy to organise joint ventures he said. The summit will bring together many pioneers and innovators (70-plus projects are represented) with each pushing their own ideas for redefining the web.

“[Everyone’s] so passionate about improving the internet experience, we are defining the rules for the future, and everyone has a point of view. That does mean there are some egos out there who are quite vocal about the merits of their approach versus others, which makes for good media stories and fuels hype, but it’s not what we’re really focused on.”

Within any movement dedicated to upending the status quo, there lurks the danger of a People’s Front of Judea-type scenario with infighting destroying the possibilities of cooperation. Amplifying the risk, many projects in this space are funded through cryptocurrency tokens, which adds profiteering to the mix. It’s easy to see how the whole thing could implode, but Irvine says he’s now starting to see real collaborations happen and hopes the summit will bring more opportunities.

“We’ve already been talking to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project at MIT, and we have a growing number of developers experimenting with applications for the platform,” he said.

MaidSafe’s David Irvine

MaidSafe has been a fixture in the decentralised firmament for a while, predating even the blockchain which is the backbone of many other ventures. At one time it had the space almost to itself but has since been joined by a host of others. Asked about his company’s USP, Irvine came back with one word: “honesty”.

We asked him to expand.

“There is far too much hype in the wider blockchain crypto space and we have always tried to distance ourselves from that nonsense. We’re trying to build something hugely complex and radically different. That doesn’t happen overnight, so you have to be upfront with people so they are not misled. Sure we’ve learned along the way, got some things wrong, but whenever we have we’ve held our hands up and that has helped us.”

And the big-picture goal?

“In essence, privacy, security and freedom. The technology we are building will provide private and secure communications, as well as freedom through the unfettered access to all humanity’s data.”

25/07/2018 Kahle and Berners-Lee on the need for decentralisation

Organiser the Internet Archive directed us to some recent statements by founder Brewster Kahle. Here Kahle outlines some of the problems with the existing web.

“Some of the problems the World Wide Web that we’ve seen in the last few years are the surveillance structures that Snowden gave light to. There are the trolling problems that we saw in the last election. There’s privacy aspects, of people spilling their privacy into companies that sometimes aren’t the most trustworthy. There’s advertising technologies being used against users. There’s a lot of failings that we’ve seen in the World Wide Web.”

To be successful, the decentralised web will need to encourage “lots of winners, lots of participation, lots of voices” he said.

“So this is a time to join in, to find a place, get knee-deep in the technologies. Try some things out. Break some stuff. Invest some time and effort. Let’s build a better, open world, one that serves more of us.”

Open source principles are essential but not sufficient. There must be a focus on performance, functionality and new ideas.

“We’re only going to survive if the open world is more interesting than closed app worlds … what I would think of as a dystopian world of closed, segmented, siloed, corporately-owned little pieces of property. I’d much rather see an open, next-generation web succeed,” Kahle said.

Tim Berners-Lee

As ‘Father of the Web’ (Mk I), Tim Berners-Lee has become increasingly disillusioned with his offspring. Around the time of the previous Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, he said: “The web has got so big that if a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites you go to, they have tremendous control over your life.

“If they can spy on what you’re doing they can understand a huge amount about you, and similarly if a government can block you going to, for example, the opposition’s political pages, they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power.”

Since then, of course, many of the things he warned about have become evident in increasingly obvious and frightening ways. And in the US Congress recently scrapped net neutrality, doing away – in that country at least – with a longstanding principle of the internet, namely that ISPs should treat all data equally.

So, are there any positive developments to report over the last two years? Berners-Lee remains hopeful.

“There’s massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences,” he told Computing. “There’s a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data.”

In part this awareness is being driven by GDPR coming into effect, in part by news headlines.

Meanwhile, there’s the rise of “companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data” (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is “turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement”.

“These are exciting times,” said Berners-Lee.

John Leonard, Research Editor, Incisive Media

The post Decentralising the web: The key takeaways appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.”

We’re very glad that Andrey Salomatin, creator of Code podcast (see original post here), got in touch to let us know about this recent podcast on what’s happening lately in P2P decentralized web development. If you’re interested in the history Scuttlebutt (a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform) and how it works; or you want an introduction to the Dat project (a nonprofit-backed data sharing protocol for applications of the future); and a “vision for the decentralized future”, Andrey and his five guests share their experiences and reflections. This is certainly more technical than most of the material we share on the P2PF blog, but there is plenty of food for thought here for anyone interested in the future of the decentralized web.

Andrey Salomatin: Slack servers are down and work stops. Facebook sells users’ personal data to third-parties with no negative consequences to the company. Turkey successfully blocks citizens’ access to Wikipedia. Those are all results of peoples’ decisions of course, but there’s also something else at play. Our mainstream technology stack makes execution on all of those decisions ridiculously easy.

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.

Guests

• Jon-Kyle Mohr
• Zenna Fiscella
• Mathias Buus
• Christian Couder
• Mikey

Outline

• 00:07 Introducing the topic
• 01:57 Limitations of centralized systems
• 04:57 Introducing Jon-Kyle
• 05:57 Introducing Zenna
• 08:23 Introducing Mathias
• 11:20 BitTorrent and scale
• 14:19 Multiple versions of the truth, version control systems (Jon-Kyle)
• 19:16 Introducing Christian
• 20:08 Git internal structure
• 22:03 Benefits of Git architecture
• 27:03 Why is Git not decentralized
• 32:23 How Dat started, tech description of the protocol (back to Mathias)
• 45:28 Dat usecases (Mathias and Jon-Kyle)
• 51:42 Future of Dat (Mathias)
• 53:54 Introducing Mikey
• 55:07 History of Scuttlebutt
• 56:22 How Scuttlebutt works
• 65:30 Usecases for Scuttlebutt
• 69:29 Vision for the decentralized future (Zenna)
• 71:39 Final thoughts on the topic, summary, thanks

Find us in P2P networks

• This episode in Dat:
  dat://084e8ceae2fd1012e5368a70908acdb7aa92c3f5de0c62d14ef5beacbf19295d
• This episode in IPFS:
  QmVVjxxitJrhNoRkTe3nJ2SztWMx9tYnpURuAVAY3Dx75y
  cheat through a https gateway
• Andrey in Scuttlebutt:
  @RP01FOdcs/QABLmMxTGe1U9myUfSLN/5ItlXQcp7oWQ=.ed25519
• Zenna in Scuttlebutt:
  @3ZeNUiYQZisGC6PLf3R+u2s5avtxLsXC66xuK41e6Zk=.ed25519
• Mikey in Scuttlebutt:
  @6ilZq3kN0F+dXFHAPjAwMm87JEb/VdB+LC9eIMW3sa0=.ed25519

Links

• All things Decentralization / Open Source / Fabrication from Zenna
• Website peer-to-peer-web.com
• Article Achieving Scale in the Decentralized Web by Paul Frazee from Beaker Browser
• IPFS

Links: Git

• Git
• Git LFS
• Video of the talk “Git From the Bits Up” by Tim Berglund

Links: Dat & Beaker

• Dat Project
• Beaker Browser
• Enoki
• peer-to-peer-web.com

Links: Scuttlebutt

• Scuttlebutt.nz
• Scuttlebutt grants process
• Collection of articles Scuttlebutt stories

Episode was produced by Andrey Salomatin.

Music by Mid-Air!

Code Podcast is about ideas that shape the way we build software. It’s like Planet Money for developers.

Each episode we interview people with different views on a single topic. We break down complex ideas to present why and how they are used to build modern software.

Photo by duiceburger

The post Code Podcast: P2P, People to People appeared first on P2P Foundation.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties,  there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”^[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common life. As Noam Chomsky would caution, the only strategy for assuring the uptake of this narrative would be the concentration of information and media, meaning, the consolidation of the voice and the imagination of what is possible. It was the belle époque of neoliberalism.

In her book, Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes (Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas:Comunicación y acción en la era de Internet), Guiomar Rovira tells the story of how that unitary discourse was questioned to open up new possibilities. It began with the emergence of activist networks that, taking advantage of the internet’s open and decentralized infrastructure, created new technological tools to share images, words and feelings distinct from the official narrative. These were the times of Zapatismo and anti-globalization. Later, with Web 2.0, the politicized use of networks became socialized, providing access to anyone. This was the time of connected multitudes, including 15-M and other movements spawned by the crisis.

#YoSoy132

Guiomar’s account distinguishes itself from regular academic production in two ways. To begin with, the book is fundamentally affirmative, rather than critical. It affirms the political power of technologies once people have seized their ownership. The author does not view the world from the angle of power: she does not reinforce our impotence, or how dominated and manipulated we are, nor does she victimize us. On the contrary — she speaks about what’s been done, what’s being done and what can be done. She contemplates the world from the perspective of potentiality.

Secondly, it is a lived book. The author’s personal experiences – through punk, Zapatismo or Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement – form a basis for reflection. Guiomar Rovira is a Catalonian journalist and writer living in Mexico since 1994. She is the author of numerous essays and a teacher in Mexico City’s UAM-Xochimilco University.

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem.

Zapatismo and the Hope International

Amador: There is a second social movement that would be central to the creation of those activist networks. I’m referring to Zapatismo which, unlike punk, wouldn’t be a “dark” movement. Zapatismo opens a horizon of hope, removed from the metropolis. What can you tell us about the relation between Zapatismo, technologies and communication?

Guiomar: We have to take into account that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and we lived in a unipolar world marked by the “end of history”. But suddenly, from the most surprising and unexpected place, there is rebellion, hope, and a movement that speaks to us, and where I found myself.

I feel that the significance of Zapatismo is that it allowed for a global common framework. This was a moment marked by despondency across all struggles: the global left was despondent, the Latin American guerrillas were in the doldrums, and so on.  Suddenly, an interpellating framework that rescued us from isolated processes of resistance was born. A framework for active mobilization that allows many different struggles to have a shared sense of identity and a common foe. It is humanity against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas say. And who proposed this framework? The indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the most forgotten, the smallest, coming from a corner of the world where many weren’t even aware that there were indigenous communities, or resistance, or the possibility of struggle.

This was still a global media event, accordingly relayed by traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television). The World Wide Web was barely a year old, hardly anyone was using it. After a few days, though, the newspapers and radio dropped the story. Nevertheless, people sought ways to keep abreast and intervene in what was happening in Chiapas, supporting this rebellion as a locus of hope for the world.

Amador: This is when the appropriation of the Internet takes place. At that time, it was a new means of communication. How did that come about?

Guiomar: The appropriation was almost natural, spontaneous even. Given the lack of information from the traditional media, alternative media moved to occupy that space. Like many others present, I was participating and publishing in hegemonic media, important newspapers…but I was also sending a wealth of information to alternative radio stations, alternative media, fanzines…

In the midst of all this, these gringos (sometimes gringos can also bring about good things!) kept telling us, “you have to use the Internet”. They were the first hackers, tramping around with their spiky hair, installing modems and strange artefacts in your computer. We had no clue what those maniacs were on about. Less than three months later, we were all using the Internet. When I say “all”, I’m referring to the journalists, the NGOs, the activists. The first websites covering the revolution in Chiapas appeared spontaneously. Some US students decided to follow the situation and began publishing the EZLN’s communiqués. These were sent by fax and then published in the website (called Ya Basta). More people turned up spontaneously and started translating to English, French…

That is how information began to be shared and an informational scaffolding was built around the situation in Chiapas. This was huge: at that time the Mexican government was still quite invested in pushing a positive image internationally (that is no longer the case). But information was not the only thing circulating; many people were travelling to Chiapas, visiting the communities, and generating even more information. There were inputs and outputs, a communicative atmosphere supporting an indigenous rebellion and indigenous rebellion proposing the idea that another world is possible. An interpellation finding resonance in many places around the world and allowing for common action, aside from any differences in our ways of doing.

Walter Benjamin: Power above all things

Amador: I want to pose a question a bit beyond our conversation about activist networks and connected multitudes, about the support you find in the classic author Walter Benjamin. What is it about Benjamin, what kind of ally is he?

Guiomar: What I find in Benjamin is a profound metaphorical, poetical and political inspiration. In the darkness of his time he was able to see the light, more so than any other member of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin helps me understand this need of mine to find the power in each moment, each place.

Technique is not our enemy. It also represents the possibility of living in a fuller world, where our covenant with nature is not hostile, nor does it force the violence by which we survive or perish. Predatory capitalism, based on artificially created pain and scarcity, undermines the potential of technique. The blame for the expulsion of life and accumulation through dispossession lies not with the Internet, but with a montage, a global system, that takes technique and, rather than put it in the service of humanity, gifts it to capitalism and the predatory production of scarcity. Benjamin invites us to conceive of another, non-capitalist modernity.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin sees the democratizing possibility enabled by the fact that we can all take ownership of technique, become authors, and have fuller lives, our own voices. There is another idea of his, which appears in Theses on the Philosophy of History, the concept of jetztzeit: the radiant moment that constellates a kind of epiphany in the here and now where everything opens. This is the idea of the constellation, which I keep coming back to in the book. Those that precede us implore us to see that justice is done. At the same time, there isn’t a single genealogy for all movements. Rather, every movement constructs its own history, shines a light on its radiant moments and, from there, articulates its own destiny. It is a tremendously creative way of understanding that the political also represents an opening to the past.

Benjamin is an inspiration. He died in Portbou, my grandparents’ village. This summer I went to see his grave. He lived a terrible life and never achieved the recognition he deserved. Still, he was the most optimistic, the most creative of the intellectuals of his time. It’s ironic that the one who suffers the most is more able to see the openings, the possibilities, the power.

Connected Multitudes: Technology in anyone’s hands.

Amador: First there is networked activism, the appropriation of technology by activists (punk, Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement), but then there would be a second movement marking a radical transformation from networked activism, which would be the “connected multitudes”. I would like you to tell us about that transition.

Guiomar: The communicative environment of networked activism remains permeated and populated mainly by militants — people with political consciousness. The shift to connected multitudes is highlighted by the fact that the leading voices are no longer limited to those coming from activism. Anyone using a social network has a voice, without necessarily having been previously politicized or part of any specific activist space. And this can happen in politically incorrect spaces like Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, which are privative networks.

For example, take Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement. Not all the Ibero-American University students that started the protests were already politicized, but they did feel aggravated, and used tools to voice that discontent and be heard in the media after remarks were made about president Peña Nieto’s visit to their University. The video they uploaded to YouTube had impressive consequences, generating a wave of indignation that many sorts of people felt identified with. Everybody wondered how it was possible that such an important movement hadn’t come from the UNAM^[2], or from the groups that had been cutting their teeth for years, denouncing unjust situations. Instead, this came from a totally unexpected, unpredictable collective.

In those protests we see a phenomenon that Manuel Castells calls Mass Self Communication: everyone becomes an information producer, a remixer, a retweeter. Everyone takes part in conversations and strengthens the movement with his or her own ability, for example, graphic arts. The processes of putting out and taking in become fuzzy; the entrenched notions of origin, authority and attribution become somewhat “lossy”.

Amador: The book highlights the positive character of the shift between these two stages of alternative communication. This is a process of democratization: if networks had previously been in the hands of activists, now the political use of technology is in the hands of anyone. But, doesn’t this mean that we’ve also lost sight of the importance of technological infrastructures and technological sovereignty? These elements, crucial to the hacker mentality, seem to have been sidelined in favor of “ease of use” in the distribution of content, thanks to social networks made freely available by the same system we are trying to undermine.

Guiomar: While what you’ve mentioned is undoubtedly important, I can’t fully agree with your assertion of what it is we’ve lost. I think that we’re shifting from a very uninformed and automatic use of networks to a more conscious usage due to the Snowden or Wikileaks revelations on spyware. I think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement that is far more aware about surveillance, control and data appropriation in social networks. This awareness is something new and we’ve reached it thanks to the work of certain hackers. I see Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange as hackers. They’ve shown why we need to be careful and use Tor, use free software, why we need to have secure passwords and use the web responsibly. We’ll see what comes of that.

Doing it together

Amador: Instead of intellectuals raising a finger to tell us: “be careful, this is not going well”, what we need is more social appropriation of technology, more learning, more technological literacy, more hacklabs. I think that this is one of the key messages in your book. You acknowledge that the Internet is taking a somber turn, while asserting that the solutions will not be found outside the Internet.

Guiomar: Discursive critiques of technology never solve anything. How can we teach ourselves about sociability in networks? By appropriating spaces, constructing them collaboratively, sharing what we know…by doing what we feel like doing, in ways we feel like doing it, and generating new ways. This is what, in my book, I describe as “hacker unfolding.” This is not just a technological possibility; to me, the concept of hacking goes far beyond technology. The hacker takes something apart to then build something new, deconstructing what is offered as a black box to open new possibilities. And this is not limited to technology, it can be done anywhere. Widen your scope and construct new potentials, whether it’s in the university, or in human relations. As Fernanda Briones, the hackfeminism expert, says “Let’s do it together”.^[3]

Amador: How do you consider of the relation between technology and bodies, between the world of bytes and the world of atoms.

Guiomar: My position is that, beyond the differentiation between online and offline worlds, everything occurs on-life. Seen this way, the corporeal experience of encountering is the key. Going out, looking at each other, experiencing the body-to-body connection. Physical encounters, opening spaces for emergence, experimenting with the body’s vulnerability, all of this is essential. The very logic of networks stresses the commonality of how impossible it is to live under the conditions imposed by this expropriating capitalism. This encounter is the quintessential political moment of our times.

To me, this dimension that deals with the vulnerability of the body, this exposition, has transformed voluntary activism into something more alive, less predetermined. The body becomes visible; it interacts and creates convivial, caring spaces while simultaneously politicizing what is private. My current thesis identifies a feministization of connected multitudes, a kind of free appropriation of feminism, a feminism that becomes inevitable. No emancipatory movement can ignore the widely varied approaches to women’s struggles and feminist struggles over the course of time. All of this happens through the body.

Internet feminista y redes libres – Liliana Zaragoza Cano (Lili_Anaz)

Bodies in the street and communication through networks; I can’t think of these as separate. We are a type of cyborg: we carry our own technological extensions. When I think about politics, technology becomes part of collective action. It’s not something additional, or different. If you pay attention, the most important cyberspace and network actions have always taken place within a context of street mobilization. Acting is communicating and vice versa. Everything happens in the on-life dimension. Our brains are the ultimate platform. There is nothing non-physical. The idea that networks are beyond physicality is just dead wrong, and I have put my mind to opposing it.

This text was transcribed from an interview during Guiomar’s book launch. It took place on September 19, 2017 in UAM-Xochimilco. The original Spanish interview was transcribed by Gerardo Juárez and edited by Amador Fernández-Savater.

^[1] Pensée unique, a term coined by French journalist Jean-François Kahn refers to hegemonic ideological conformism. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[2] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the world’s highest ranking University in R&D. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[3] “Hagámoslo juntas” in the original. Spanish is gendered, “juntas” is the female form of “together”. Female (as opposed to the “default” male) grammatical forms have become more commonly used after the 15M movements, such that people of any gender identity more frequently choose to use the female form to describe mixed gender groups.

Republished from Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Lead image from It’s Going Down

Original article published at eldiario.es

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Laura James: OPEN 2018 last week was an exciting event, not only because of the incredible people the organisers brought together, but because it felt like something new was starting to take off.

There were people from many different organisations, sectors, and backgrounds, and they found sometimes unexpected things in common with each other. Although we heard some big ideas from the stage, it felt like most attendees were actually working on things, and had practical questions and collaborative opportunities they wanted to discuss. To me, the diversity and the blend of pragmatic action and shared big vision feels like a new movement getting off the starting line.

But what is the movement? OPEN 2018 has “platform cooperatives” next to the logo and yet a lot of the most interesting conversations weren’t actually about platform co-ops. It felt like a melange of several things:

• internet technologies
• open source
• open standards and protocols (as distinct from open platforms)
• commons (not just of code, but of knowledge, public space and more); a mixture of collective goods, and public goods (echoing the Public Stack Summit)
• co-operatives, the co-op principles, and the broader co-op movement
• entrepreneurship — people trying new ideas and ventures
• networks and ecosystems of mutual support
• a desire for impact at meaningful scale (looking beyond local activities)
• resilience and distributed systems (in the technical sense)
• equality and fairness, specifically around technology and data

This is a powerful set of ideas.

They are things I’ve been thinking about and working on in different ways for some time, but I didn’t have a clear sense of them as a group or a coherent whole until now.

I wonder whether others would recognise this list as the facets of OPEN 2018?

It all fits together quite coherently, to me at least, although we’ve no catchy phrase to explain it as a whole. “Platform co-operatives” doesn’t quite do it. “Collaborative technology for the cooperative economy” is the event byline, which is good, although maybe not quite the visionary call to action a movement might coalesce around. Oli Sylvester-Bradley talked in his thoughtful introduction about “people and planet before profit” which seemed to resonate with many of us as a grand vision, although it’s perhaps a little vague? Or maybe it sets out a general dream, without defining what this particular community is doing to achieve it. Gary Alexander talked about a movement and a shared vision too: working together for mutual benefit rather than competing; a society organised for the wellbeing of people and planet (not for money and profit). He also helpfully checked what the audience thought about this (positive, but a little mixed), and admitted some of this may be too much like “new age bollocks.” Recently John Elkington, creator of the triple bottom line (where social and environmental factors are considered alongside economic ones), announced earlier this year that it was time to review whether it is still fit for purpose. So maybe we need to thrash out some more specific, compelling and useful framing…

Part of what made it feel like the emergence of a new thing was that, whilst there is a big vision for a new economy, fit for the internet age, still a little vague in some details, it didn’t feel like a hyped up rally where we all unhesitatingly cheered. Even on the main stage, as well as in smaller conversations, critical questions were posed which we do not have answers to. And there was an energy and a focus on practical action as well as reflection and learning.

Of course, there were ways the event could have been better, and I’m sure 2019’s equivalent will be different, more diverse, and maybe more interactive. But it’s quite something to convene across interests in this way and to frame an event which felt so special. Huge thanks and congratulations to Oli, Thomas and the Open.coop team!

Nathan Schneider had questions about the cooperative side of things. Are we using the language of commons, or the language of ownership? Are we escaping ownership, or doubling down on it? As I feel I’m barely on the edge of the cooperative movement, still figuring out how it works, and its relationship to technology, Nathan’s musing on whether this community is part of the traditional co-op movement or something new and different was interesting. I remain astonished how many co-operatives there are around us. In the UK there’s the Coop Group, John Lewis (as I think John Bevan said, you can take a radical stance just by getting your groceries at Waitrose), but also many others such as dairy co-ops. I learned at OPEN2018 that in the US, a surprisingly large proportion of electricity cable networks are co-operatives. I hadn’t realised that Visa and Mastercard were mutuals until early this century. But they are pretty much invisible in everyday life, in conversations about economic growth and enterprise. Cooperatives UK’s 2018 co-op economy report highlights the scale and scope of co-ops in the UK.

Nathan also talked about where we all sit relative to the mainstream, for-profit startup world. Are we doing entrepreneurship but a bit differently? Or are we doing something radically different, entirely away from concepts like disruption?

One of the things I found really encouraging at the conference was the number of enthusiastic initiatives setting out to make it easier to set up and grow co-operatives, with different combinations of toolkits, mentoring, and funding (Platform6, start.coop, incubator.coop, Solidfund, CoopStarter, and more). And boy, are there more ways to get risk financing in the co-op space than I’d realised. There’s paying a regular cash return, investment from other co-ops, token issues, specialist investment houses such as Purpose Ventures; and depending where you are, tax breaks and specialist co-op startup funds. I was surprised how different the co-op startup financing environment is in different countries. Regardless, platform co-ops are out there already, and in diverse sectors — eg. Stocksy, Savvy.coop and Arcade City. There are more tools than ever before to support scalable co-ops too, with collaborative budgeting (eg. Cobudget), decision-making (eg. Loomio), and day to day participation. There are co-ops you can work with on technical stuff, such as Outlandish or the other denizens of CoTech, and co-ops who can help you with other things such as working openly. Coming soon there will be new ways of distributing computing, organised by co-ops like RChain. Of course, there are also support networks and communities of practice, such as Enspiral.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya talked about the words we use, in a great session on narrative and the importance of stories. In particular, she highlighted that some of the most successful campaigns and movements avoided using the words that one might expect to define them; instead, focussing on stories, and getting away from polarising framings such as anti-capitalism (maybe a story about corruption might be more persuasive?). Cristina also highlighted a point I tried to make in my talk earlier that day, that collaboration is not always built on a shared discursive framework, but might involve parties with very different world views and ways of communicating.

I’m delighted to hear there will be an OPEN 2019, and looking forward to it already. (This is also motivating me to make sure that I can show up next year and feel I’ve done something useful in the interim!)

A note on hyphens: I’m sticking with “co-op.” I can’t bring myself to say “coop,” like a place chickens might live, and I think I know enough people who, like me until very recently, don’t know much about co-ops, and would be confused by coops in this business context

Some rights reserved – CC-BY-SA 4.0

Laura James  is the editor of Digital Life Collective

The post Thoughts on OPEN 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cory Doctorow: The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they threaten to wreck the Internet itself.

Photo by ccPixs.com

The post The EU’s Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought new competitors—especially venture-backed startups that love nothing more than to disrupt the kinds of intermediary roles in value chains where co-ops have held niches for decades. And many co-ops seem stuck playing catch-up. They buy the latest software and hire expensive consultants, but it’s never quite enough. The disruptions keep coming.

Playing catch-up is never the role co-ops are best suited for, anyway. They’re at their best when they’re doing another kind of business—when they’re finding value that investors don’t see, when they’re meeting needs that Wall Street doesn’t bother figuring out how to meet.

This is what a new generation of cooperative entrepreneurs is doing. I’d like to introduce you to some of them, and to some of the ways that they’re doing better than catching up to the internet of venture capitalists and aspiring monopolists. They’re letting co-op values and principles guide them to a vision for a different kind of internet economy. As they do, they’re also rediscovering the competitive advantages of cooperation—old strategies, really, that powered this model in generations past but that can be too easily forgotten.

First, take a foray with me into the mind of one of our eminent internet overlords. Consider it a survey of the terrain.

In February 2017, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still coming to terms with the previous year’s election cycle, he published a post called “Building Global Community,” a manifesto of sorts. “In the last year,” he wrote, “the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community.” Then he admitted, remarkably, that he couldn’t rule a platform shared by billions of human beings out of the wisdom of his own head.

And so he called for something that sounds almost like democracy: “Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

As autocracy and oligarchy run aground, he reluctantly falls back on democracy, then announces it as if it were the latest software update. Should we or should we not tell him that cooperatives have been practicing forms of “collective decision-making at scale” for a long, long time? Perhaps they have something to teach him. Perhaps they can do what Facebook’s investor-owners can’t.

Business model innovation

The designers of the internet didn’t set out to build infrastructure for cat-meme-sharing on social-media monopolies. Paul Baran, who conceived of the “packet switching” system by which the cat memes and all else travel from server to server, was concerned about a Soviet missile attack. In the 1960s, Baran worked for the RAND Corporation, which was helping to build the military communications tool that would later evolve into the civilian internet. The system relied on a complex collaboration among peers to avoid any single, vulnerable point of failure.

Radically centralized systems like Facebook are a departure from the network’s underlying structure. They arose not for technical reasons but economic ones—to deliver the profits that early investors demanded. Centralizing Baran’s distributed scheme has been a gradual, expensive process. Much more akin to the internet’s design are standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, which balance the needs of diverse stakeholders. The internet, like a co-op, is built for federation.

Over and over, we have seen old, cooperative practices imitated online. Take the wonders of crowdfunding, which enable businesses and products to launch without the need for loans or profit-seeking investors; well, co-ops were the original crowdfunding. When people needed something the market wasn’t furnishing, they pooled their money and built a cooperative to provide it. And they got more than one gets in the usual Kickstarter: real ownership and accountability. Around half of U.S. households have an Amazon Prime membership, which delivers convenience to customers and loyalty to the company—but, again, without shared ownership and accountability to back it up. The internet giants are getting by with a pale imitation of what co-ops have in their bones.

The technology has added something new, however. When we talk about the online economy, we’re not just talking about slapping websites on existing business models. The real disruptions have been bigger than e-commerce; they’re happening through platforms. Platforms are a kind of business model that the internet has supercharged: multi-sided markets that generate value through interactions among users, not just through what the company provides to them. The canonical and over-used examples are platforms like Airbnb, the hotel chain that owns no hotels, and Uber, the taxi company that owns no cars.

Once again, cooperatives got to it first. When rural electric co-ops were forming across the U.S. in the 1940s, they depended on their members’ collaboration and sweat equity to build a shared asset. Marketing co-ops have enabled independent producers to set the terms on which they sell and even compete. For decades, Italian “social co-ops” have maintained balanced markets between care providers and patients who co-own their companies together.

With age, however, many co-ops have conformed themselves to the business models of their corporate competitors. They’ve come to focus on the value the co-op can deliver to members, not on the unpredictable interconnections it might facilitate. It’s service more than sharing. The rise of online platforms thus presents itself as a terrifying disruption, when it should be an opportunity for co-ops to take the lead.

The investor-owned platforms have been ambivalent creatures. In come Amazon’s conveniences, and out go the local retailers that co-ops enabled to thrive. In come flexible schedules on gig platforms like TaskRabbit, and out go protections and benefits that workers have fought for centuries to achieve. Inequality and conglomeration accelerate. And there’s no going back; the perks are too irresistible. But what if co-ops could face those disruptions on their own terms, with their own strengths? What if they invested in a new generation of cooperative innovation instead?

Silicon Valley likes to have us believe that innovation is the purview of its investor-driven formula. But when you look at a lot of the most successful companies there, they didn’t begin with a miraculous invention. From the GPS behind Uber to Google’s original search algorithm, the tech often comes from publicly funded research in government and universities. The Silicon Valley magic, more often, lies in spinning up a seamless interface and the means to monetize it.

According to Fred Wilson, a renowned investor at Union Square Ventures, “Business model innovation is more disruptive than technological innovation.” What innovations can the co-op model deliver?

The rise of platform cooperativism

I’ve been dwelling in abstractions so far, and please forgive me for that, because what I’m talking about is not an abstraction at all. I came to notice the potential that cooperative business might have for reinventing the online economy not through theoretical reflection but, as a reporter, by noticing how people were already making it happen.

Starting around 2014, hiding behind the fanfare and controversy surrounding “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb and Uber, I began coming across startups that were trying to build a real sharing economy. This usually meant adopting cooperative models. They were working in isolation, not aware of one another, with little in the way of mentoring or co-op-friendly financing to support them. But there they were. By the end of that year, I was publishing about what I’d found, and one of my sources, the New School media professor Trebor Scholz, put a name to it all: “platform cooperativism.” The following year, we organized the first conference on the subject in New York, and more than a thousand people came. Even The Washington Post called it “a huge success.” Something real was indeed afoot.

At first, we had the idea that we could simply copy the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, slap a co-op label on, and the world would switch over. But the more I’ve watched this platform co-op ecosystem grow, the more I get excited about how cooperation allows these businesses to do things differently. Cooperative ownership isn’t just some add-on mutation, it’s another sort of genome.

Quality, not monopoly

One of the earliest, most successful platform co-ops is Stocksy United, a Canadian stock photo platform owned by its photographers and employees. Its founders were executives for a much bigger platform who concluded investor-ownership was stiffing the photographers and hurting the quality of their work. The founders realized that if they made their startup accountable to its photographers, they could prioritize quality. After just a few years, the company is thriving in a crowded industry.

Stocksy also breaks a cardinal rule for tech startups. You’re supposed to achieve scale at all costs, but the thousand-or-so photographer-owners have been cautious about accelerating their growth. They don’t want to dilute what they offer. They’re growing, but only at their own pace and far slower than they could. They’re making their own rules.

Control over what’s ours

It has become an implicit social contract of life online that—in exchange for useful services like Gmail and Uber—we give up heaps of data about ourselves to who-knows-who for who-knows-what. But for platform co-ops, this trade-off tends to disappear. Users really can be the owners of their data from start to finish. There’s no more need for all the funny business hidden in the legalese no one reads.

MIDATA, for instance, is a Swiss co-op for personal medical data funded through the voluntary use of that data for medical research. Users get a convenient repository over which they have full control. Savvy Cooperative, based in New York, is a platform where medical researchers and startups can benefit from the data of patient feedback—on the patients’ terms, because the patients are the owners. Farmers are doing something similar through the Grower Information Services Cooperative, which allows them to benefit from the data their ever-more computerized machines produce without relinquishing it to third parties.

Federation not centralization

Social.coop brings that kind of user control to social media. It is a small experiment that operates an open-source alternative to Twitter called Mastodon—a federated system in which people can keep their data with a provider they know and trust, while still interacting with the wider network. Federated social networks like this are great for privacy, and the technology has been around for a while. They’ve just lacked a business model, since investors have so much to gain from highly centralized networks. Co-ops might be uniquely suited to change that.

Social.coop is unusual in other ways. It’s not legally incorporated; instead, it operates through Open Collective, a co-op-friendly platform that enables groups of people anywhere to collect money and distribute it without their own bank account. Accounting on Open Collective is public, for all to see and inspect. Social.coop members make decisions about how to use those resources and more on Loomio, a decision-making platform built by a New Zealand-based worker co-op. Most of them—well, us—have never met each other in person. We’ve built the trust we need to cooperate through transparency.

Trust on a trustless network

When the Bitcoin digital currency system first appeared in 2009, it promised the possibility of “trustless,” pseudonymous transactions over a network that would rely on no central authorities, like Visa or the Federal Reserve. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Walmart are now adopting the underlying “blockchain” technology. So are credit unions. A project called CU Ledger uses blockchain technology to better manage, secure and share data about credit union members’ identities. The credit unions, that is, are applying Bitcoin’s software to purposes nearly opposite from what others have in mind: to build on institutional trust and to better collaborate.

As the blockchain economy grows, co-ops may be poised to play a vital role. RChain, for instance, is built on a supposition that the co-op model can solve some of the technical bottlenecks that Bitcoin and its cousins have faced. In Berlin, Seedbloom puts the co-ownership back into crowdfunding with blockchains. Already, it has aided the development of Resonate, a music-streaming cooperative co-owned, over its own blockchain, by fans and musicians alike. Moeda, starting in Brazil, is a co-op that uses blockchains to help credit unions expand financial inclusion and to finance its own growth.

Venture capital as cooperative bank

For this platform co-op ecosystem to grow, it will have to develop its own means of financing, just as co-op sectors of the past have done. Already we’ve started to see developments like Purpose Ventures, a new fund designed to grow long-term with its startups, not to sell them off for a quick buck. It’s co-op compatible; in some respects it even resembles an old-fashioned cooperative bank.

The old and the new come together. They converge. And they need each other. One of the most important developments in recent years has been to see co-op veterans start to embrace and support this new generation.

This has been done before

The conditions that have given rise to cooperation in the past are appearing in new guises—workers barely getting by on gig platforms, or customers not sure whether they can trust the companies they nonetheless rely on. It’s not enough for co-ops to tack websites on existing business models. We need co-op business models designed in and for a networked world.

I must confess, however: When I’m in a room full of leaders in big, established co-ops, I’m not sure these kinds of innovations will come from them. I bet most of them would agree. But what we need isn’t coming from the small, experimental platform co-ops I’ve mentioned either. They’re not enough. We need both. We need experienced co-op mentors stepping in to support the new, risk-taking co-op entrepreneurs who will help keep this sector vibrant.

How can that happen? First, it needs to be easier for startups to see the co-op model as a viable option—with tech-oriented co-op incubators and seed capital, as well as outreach to existing startup communities. Second, established co-ops can find ways to pool their funds to invest in promising new co-ops, then share dividends back to their members. Finally, we need to identify the financing and policy tools to help existing platforms that should be co-op converts. Too many online platforms we depend on are stuck trying to meet investor demands when they should instead be accountable to their users.

I’m a reporter, so I don’t like to make predictions. But based on the experiments out there, I’ve noticed some patterns that may become more common in the co-ops to come.

They will create value not just with the services they offer to members, but with the connections they enable among members—and the efficiencies members discover together. Their specialty will be in fostering trust on trustless networks, federating local communities across the globe. And they will build on the long cooperative legacy with forms of online governance that are more transparent than both the competition and co-ops past.

Open software and open data could help co-ops cooperative with each other more deeply than ever. Open supply-chains could display, for potential customers to see, their commitment to the highest quality sourcing. If they’re doing their jobs right, greater transparency will only make the cooperative difference more evident. And that difference matters.

I meet more and more people all the time who are warming to the co-op idea—and not because they’ve already worked for co-ops or studied co-op history. For the most part, they haven’t. A cooperative internet might seem utopian, but they hope for it anyway.

I don’t think it is so far-fetched. Cooperatives brought electricity to rural America when no one else would, and they’ve given Main Street a fighting chance against the big boxes. They help millions buy homes. They pioneered the local, organic revival and the means of delivering fair-trade products from across the planet. Next, the internet. We have done this already, and we can do it again, even better than before.

Photo by Pat Guiney

The post Next, the Internet: Building a Cooperative Digital Space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in the network to work around these forms of reconcentrated power.”

Abstract

“The original Internet design combined technical, organizational, and cultural characteristics that decentralized power along diverse dimensions. Decentralized institutional, technical, and market power maximized freedom to operate and innovate at the expense of control. Market developments have introduced new points of control. Mobile and cloud computing, the Internet of Things, fiber transition, big data, surveillance, and behavioral marketing introduce new control points and dimensions of power into the Internet as a social-cultural-economic platform. Unlike in the Internet’s first generation, companies and governments are well aware of the significance of design choices, and are jostling to acquire power over, and appropriate value from, networked activity. If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in the network to work around these forms of reconcentrated power.”

The full article is available here.

Photo by abraham.williams

The post Essay of the Day: Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Indonesia is one of the world’s hottest and fastest growing digital markets. “With around 90 million Internet users and more than 281 million active mobile phone subscriptions, we can anticipate the development of the digital ecosystem in Indonesia that will lead the growth,” Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo wrote in “Strategic Review: The Indonesian Journal of Leadership, Policy and World Affairs” last year. “E-commerce has been one of the vital driving forces of Indonesia’s digital economy.”

Unfortunately, this growth has been uneven, and not all Indonesians have access to this burgeoning digital economy. Although it’s improving, only a little more than half of Indonesia’s population has regular internet access, and outside major cities, broadband access is severely limited. Smartphones — the most common method for accessing the internet in Indonesia — are almost all either manufactured abroad or domestically by international companies.

Koperasi Digital Indonesia Mandiri (KDIM), a cooperative based in the country’s capital, Jakarta, is trying to bridge this digital divide. It’s developing a locally-produced, low-end smartphone for Indonesians left out of the digital boom. It’s also building a platform for users to access services from other cooperatives on their phones.

“Unlike commercially distributed phones, this smartphone can only be obtained by becoming a member of the cooperative via its website, after which one needs to pay Rp 100,000 (US $7.48) per month for one year,” The Jakarta Post reported.

The phone had its soft-launch in late March, and will be available for all members in the coming months. We spoke with Adie Marzuki, chair of KDIM, to learn about how the organization uses the cooperative model to bring digital technologies and services to underserved Indonesians.

Can you tell us about how KDIM started, and why you decided to form a cooperative rather than a regular, for-profit company?

KDIM was initiated by two organizations, APJII [Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association] and MASTEL [Telematics Society]. We believe that we need to build inclusive economy for Indonesia. We have a very huge market here — more than 80 million smartphones users in the [Indonesian] market right now. But we still we have 60 million of our population un-served — this means that 60 million people in Indonesia have never had a smartphone. That’s why we need to have a domestic smartphone industry that serves the underserved in Indonesia — and that’s why we are creating an entry-level smartphone. They are not served by the current industry right now.

photo courtesy of KDIM

For that, the model of a cooperative makes the most sense. It is a fundamental economic system in Indonesia. We have the power of population, that’s why we built KDIM as part of an inclusive economy, so that we can leverage our numbers.

We don’t have power of capital — but we have power of the people.

What are your operating costs? How did you raise the capital to start the cooperative?

Our operating costs covered by collecting membership share from members. Membership share is a term used to refer to the contribution required for a person to become a member of the cooperative. The initial funding/equity capital [was] provided by the founding members, which consists of KDIM members of APJII and MASTEL.

Indonesia has many cooperatives. Can you tell us how you are similar, and different, from other cooperatives in the country?

We are the first Indonesian digital cooperative. There are other efforts to support the un-served people, but they are not in the digital industry — we thought that now, we need to engage all the population to emerge in the digital life, and benefit from it.

We created KDIM based on our own formulation — this is a completely new model for Indonesia. Other cooperatives in Indonesia are all in conventional businesses. We want to work with them, and we are asking the other cooperatives to follow in our way, and we are ready to serve them and give them the platform they need.

We are not trying to make our cooperative the biggest cooperative — we are offering the other cooperatives to use our platform to benefit and go to the digital era.

Once consumers become members of the cooperative, do they have to remain involved in the cooperative for as long as they’re using the phone? What do your members gain besides the phone itself, and how are they involved in KDIM?

Our members will use the phone itself as their membership tool. Members will benefit from the use of the phone as we have digital advertising system embedded in the platform. Members also gain points when they use the apps in the phone e.g. digital transaction, purchasing, and other digital activities, which are provided by the KDIM phone. Their points will be reflected in annual closing book, and members will redeem their points in rupiahs. In our annual meeting, each member will have one vote.

What’s your current membership base, and what are your medium-to-long-term goals? What kind of impact would you like KPIM to have on the country’s technology sector?

Currently we have 25,000 members. Of those, 5,000 of are directly, KDIM members, and the rest are from other cooperatives. Our medium-term goals are to invite lots of other cooperatives to benefit from our platform, while still allowing them to use their own cooperative brand. We will give white label B2B services to other cooperatives while we also inviting more members to join. Our long-term goal is to have our own digital industry ecosystem, which will serve all the 49 percent digitally un-served sector of society.

We are hoping our business model will inspire other tech players to be more inclusive and eventually close Indonesian digital divide. We haven’t officially launched yet, and we are aiming for an official launch of our phone in May, probably before the start of Ramadan.

Photo by AdamCohn

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