This year I found myself more “available” than previous years and decided to commit to being a “Space Wrangler” for this year’s Mozilla Festival. I was warned that it was a fairly heavy commitment, however so far it’s been great. Commitments don’t seem to be so heavy when you’re shouldering them with other like-minded people.

This year the Festival is divided into spaces that represent the core values of Mozilla, laid out in their manifesto.

• Decentralization
• Digital Inclusion
• Open Innovation
• Privacy and Security
• Web Literacy
• Youth Zone

All of this to be infused with OpenNews sessions and artistic installations in keeping with the various themes.

More detail on the various spaces can be found on the Mozilla Festival website

Scratching the Surface

I’m helping to wrangle the Decentralization Space. Decentralised, Distributed or Peer-to-Peer systems can range from the perhaps more obvious technical applications to include finance, energy, journalism, healthcare, governance and a whole host of other things.

I’ve been interested in decentralised systems for a while, check my last post for more about that but I was wholly unprepared for how much things have moved on over the years.

By scratching under the web’s surface and actively trying to improve my own knowledge of the subject I realised that there was so much more going on than I had imagined. I’d heard of BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin and the Blockchain but I had no idea that many other distributed and decentralised systems existed. Here’s a what I discovered:

Dat – which I’d heard of as a tool for data sharing in the journalistic world, can in fact be used as a general purpose distributed data protocol. Currently Dat is the protocol of choice for a certain peer-to-peer browser! WAIT – THERE’S A PEER-TO-PEER BROWSER!? How does that even work? Well, I dug deeper … there’s a great video explainer on the BeakerBrowser website. You don’t have to use Dat for distributed data storage and transfer, you could use IPFS – there are long discussions about that.

The further I dug, the more I found. There was a project called Web2Web which “takes centralized servers out of internet equation”. There was BlockStack and a whole BlockStack Summit! There’s ZeroNet. There are subreddits dedicated to decentralisation! There are foundations and other groups all dedicated to P2P.

Technology is an Enabler

And then of course there is Blockchain, SO MUCH BLOCKCHAIN. Blockchain for Healthcare, Blockchain for Mainstream Finance, even Goldman Sachs is actively looking at Blockchain! I’m not sure how to feel about this any more! But wait, I do know how to feel. I feel passionate about this because decentralisation is so much more than the technology that enables it. Decentralisation has the potential to affect us and society in so many positive, significant and diverse ways.

I’ve spent my entire adult life pondering about how systems work. Seventeen years ago I came to live in Italy. We settled in an area, where I saw first hand how decentralised systems actually worked; ranging from community driven hubs such as the ARCInetwork of Casa Del Popolos (literally People’s Houses) to fully functional cooperatives running public libraries or providing schooling for children.

At the same time I’ve witnessed the increasing centralisation of power and control both online and off. An insidious consolidation that I’m willing to bet will benefit very few of us.

Decentralisation crosses over into sustainability. I remember when incentives were provided for Italian homes to add solar-panels and how excited I was that we’d would be allowed to sell electricity back to the national grid. What a beautiful concept! Such a pity it was scrapped!

However, the belief in decentralised systems is a philosophy, the implementation of them is a very real discipline. Slowly but surely it feels like things are changing – the technology is becoming viable and people are switching on to the concept.

Opportunity

There is an opportunity now at the 2017 Mozilla Festival to raise awareness around decentralisation, to come together (and then disperse again) with the idea that we can push back against centralisation, to cooperate and support each other in our endeavours to distribute control in a number of crucial areas. The Internet, as ever, plays a key part in allowing decentralisation to flourish.

Above, I touched on a few examples of decentralisation, there are so many more. So far we’ve had around 50 proposals for sessions in the Decentralization Space, today is the last day for submissions (August 1, midnight Pacific Time), but it’s fine just to get a place holder in there and flesh out on the Mozilla Festival Github Pages

If you haven’t already, please consider proposing a session and do make space in your calendar for the Mozilla Festival on the 27th to 29th of October in London.

Lead photo and sculpture “New Rising Sun” courtesy of Paolo Benvenuti

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It’s funny how things turn out. Six years ago when I decided to blog about my thoughts about a ‘radically new’ and decentralised web; snappily titled “P2P Web Apps — Brace yourselves, everything is about to change”, I thought decentralisation was imminent. It wasn’t.

And when I say ‘radically new’ I actually mean ‘radically old’ because as mentioned in my original post on this topic — the original internet or ARPANET as it was known was supposedly built to withstand a all sorts of catastrophes.

Decentralised networks have many advantages, one of which is resilience.

That was Then

Back in 2011 I was convinced that the way things were going, a new decentralised web was just around the corner.

But hey, naivety is underrated! If I had been a bit more cynical I probably wouldn’t have written that blog post with quite so much gusto — I may not have written it at all. And that would have been a shame, not because the world needed to know, but because nobody can comment on blog posts that don’t exist.

The comments on that old blogpost were what really made it for me, I did my best to reply to most of them but I’m by no means an expert. That said, the commenters were extremely nice about calling out my naivety.

Naivety — that word again. Although I don’t think I underestimated the vested interests that the big internet players held by keeping the web centralised, I assumed that there was a strong appetite to change this and that crucially the technology existed to make a secure, robust, scalable, decentralised web a reality. The second assumption was soon tackled in the comments. Decentralisation is no mean feat it appears.

Why are we Centralised?

Centralised services can be convenient for both supplier and consumer and while we can hypothesise about why it’s often in the supplier’s interest to keep the web centralised, it’s difficult to convince the average consumer as to why they should care.

We touched on the various advantages of decentralisation, summarised:

1. Resilience — fewer Single Points of Failure
2. Scalability — when clients become servers, things just scale better
3. Privacy/Security — your data isn’t stored at a central point

It’s clear why suppliers would care about robustness, but what about consumers and the general population?

Right now it’s too easy for people to shut down parts of the internet, whether we’re talking about “cyber-terrorists” or frightened governments — they can both legally or illegally shut down core web services. One premise of decentralised systems is that they would be more resilient to those attacks.

The ability to scale automatically — and at little extra cost per user — must also be attractive to suppliers of services, especially to startups. Implemented properly, hosting costs pretty much disappear.

Our Privacy, Our Security, Our Data

Finally we come to the nub of the matter — privacy and security. Many of us want this for sure, however it’s telling that despite the significant advantages of point 1 (resilience) and 2 (scalability), few of the established service suppliers are embracing decentralisation. Note that when you use services like Google or Facebook they are not actually free — you are paying for them with your valuable data — for one, data is often used to create more efficient advertising models. To give up that source of income makes no sense at all to many of this new establishment.

It should be clear that we cannot let market forces ride roughshod over our privacy and security — and note that keeping data in a central repository is not a prudent security or privacy measure.

This is Now

So it’s warming to hear that organisations such as Mozilla hold decentralisation as one of their key values and as such have made decentralisation a ‘space’ at the 2017 Mozilla Festival.

The only way we can do any difference is by limiting the powers of these companies — by governments stepping in — but unfortunately the EU or the US don’t seem to have any interest in doing this. — Peter Sunde

If you read “We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now” (the article that the quote is taken from) it feels like it’s very much time to act!

It’s also a very exciting time to explore technologies like the blockchain and crypto-currencies, P2P (Peer to Peer) browsers and blogs, but decentralisation is not limited to The Internet — many organisations are seeking a decentralised way of working and crowdsourcing is, in it’s own way, a successful form of decentralisation.

Again it’s the people taking part and the discussion that’s important. Sure, we’re planning to get some of the world’s leading thinkers and builders of decentralised systems in the same space — but our plan is to raise awareness and facilitate participation, so crucially we hope to attract people who are not experts — we want as many people to be involved as possible in what will be concerted effort to put decentralisation on ‘the agenda’.

We owe it to ourselves and coming generations to be less naive about our future web.

So if you feel like finding out more and contributing to the debate, I’d highly recommend you come to the Mozilla Festival this year and if you have ideas for a session you’d like to run, now’s the time to submit them.

Also if you have ideas around the type of activities we could run in the Decentralization Space, please let us know.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Decentralization Space at the Mozilla Festival, fellow ‘space wrangler’ Ian Forrester from BBC R&D has written about his perspective in “Decentralization, the people, power, money and the future of the internet”.

Image used by permission from the artist, Paolo Benvenuti.

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