How the Internet is Lost
Tales of Two Worlds · What does a decentralized world look like? (part 1)
This is the follow up of the Bitcoin is Alien Technology series (part 1) (part 2) (part 3).
On the surface the idea of Decentralization seems to be simple and self-evident. Yet Bitcoin hints at a hidden world behind the almost zero-dimensional concept. Not only the idea of Decentralization is rich, multifaceted but also much more complex than we thought, a multi-dimensional world much larger than our own world. Because of the extra dimensionality much of this decentralized world is hidden from us in a way that is not easily revealed through the “lens” we observe our centralized world. And that “lens” is our mind’s centralized way of thinking.
In the acclaimed sci-fi movie The Matrix, captain Morpheus told our main protagonist Neo: “Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself”. But in fact no one can “see” the Matrix either — Neo “sees” it because he is “jacked into” the Matrix (or Matrix-like “construct” — simulation built outside the Matrix using code supposedly hacked from the Matrix on the movie’s rebel hovercraft); it is his mind that “sees” a whole new simulated dream world, a world exists outside our “ordinary” 4-dimensional Einstein Minkowski space, which is our physical reality; those extra dimensionality comes from a technologically enhanced network that connects our minds.
In our case the situation is a bit reversed from what Morpheus told Neo though. There is no way I can “jack” you into a “construct” for you to “see” the decentralized world; I can only “tell” you what a decentralized world “looks” like. But before I take you on a journey to a decentralized world with only words, I need to tell you something about this transportation apparatus — language. Built and perfected by our evolving mind, language is the only vehicle available to us that is capable of piercing through the haze of high dimensionality. Yet it is also a fragmented or sometimes schizophrenic one that can drive you crazy. Philosophers of many cultures of the past have noticed and debated this for centuries — it is referred to as the Blind Men and the Elephant phenomenon. In the following paragraphs I am going to do exactly that — telling you what a decentralized world looks like, Blind Men style. You’ve been warned. Now let me take you on that journey I promised. This journey will take the form of a train of stories.
Tales of Two Worlds
As we’ve seen in The Matrix movie, the narrative premise of that dream world is a fictional neural-electrical simulation they call the construct. In our story we also need a construct for our decentralized world. That construct is the computer networks we developed and since prospered and spread to the global scale — such as the Internet.
Computer networks are the construct for our stories to unfold, a primordial soup of genesis. This is our first story arc — the origin stories of computer networks, our construct. Computer networks and the Internet changed the face of humanity in profound and immeasurable ways. Yet this construct did not get created in six days but almost four decades, plus digital computers and communication technologies emerged and evolved in previous decades that lead to the creation of computer networks and the internet. That history is rich and expansive but I don’t have one thousand and one nights to tell you everything. On the other hand, all stories are refracted through the lens of the storyteller. Don’t worry. Like Scheherazade, I promise you I will pick good stories. Let me start with five stories:
Stories of Two Worlds — through the lens of the Centralized vs. Decentralized dualism:
Centralized vs Decentralized
- Society vs. Network
- People vs. Sentient & Autonomous Agents
- Social Activity vs. Network Effect
- Clustering increases efficiency & potency vs. Clustering decreases efficiency & potency
- Organizations trump people vs. Agents trump clusters
Stories are mind’s crystal balls to see a multiplicious world beyond reach. Who wouldn’t say that stories can carry you over vast space to reach the stars? Like an astrophysicist trying to understand distant stars with spectroscopy, our stories are refractional images we got from lights sent through the prism of a spectrometer: separately each image does not seem to present you a complete and canonical picture of the great Centralized vs. Decentralized dualism, but with several ones taken from different angles, I hope you get a pretty good sense out of it. The elephant is real. Believe me.
First story: How the Internet is Lost
Society vs. Network
The greatest ideas are the ones you couldn’t have ever dreamt of. This phenomenon is most evident in the history of the invention and burgeoning of computer networks and the ensuing emergence of the internet. The unbound imagination of the human mind is a remarkable trait of our species. Our ancestors had wild imaginations such as heavier-than-air flying apparatus (Daedalus and Icarus, Greek Mythology) and dancing robot (Sentient Automaton, Chinese as well as Greek Mythology). Notice that the examples that I picked, although from mythology, are actually engineering projects in a mythical setting, since they all involved ingenious engineers creating their invention with earthly designs and components, without resorting to fantasy or mysterious mythical powers, such as counterexamples like Zeus’ thunderbolt or Thor’s hammer. Yet human imagination of the past hadn’t produced a parallel space that humans can dwell like in the real world in real time, until the 1980s with the concept of cyberspace — a precursor and later as a synonym of the internet. Philosophies of the past and religions alluded to concepts like pure form (Platonism) and pure land (Buddhism), but those are essentially introspective concepts confined to the solitary mind. On the contrary, cyberspace is communal, which might be the singular characteristic that made it as real as the real world, and a potential portal to a decentralized world with extra-dimensionality.
Communality is the key. Human society builds on it. So does cyberspace.
If we look at the early history of cyberspace, it was not so much driven by technology or consumerism, but largely communities. We know human civilization and society evolved around building communities, in cyberspace we see a replay of the evolution of human society. People joined and formed online communities for common interest, or just for the sake of it — people are communal animals, after all. Unique cultures emerged and flourished online (in cyberspace), just like in the human society. We even have legends of these early online communities, such as The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), and many others. Aside from being driven by community there are two more important traits of early cyberspace, our computer network construct. One is that these online networks are infrastructure agnostic, be it online chat rooms, bulletin board systems, mailing lists, video games, etc — the existence or survival of any of those online networks doesn’t depend or bound by any technological infrastructure. Some might point out that video game communities are not purely infrastructure agnostic, since game developers could unilaterally shutdown games, thus kill the main drive for that game community; but the beautiful thing is, many such video game communities survived even long after game developers are gone. Another trait is that these online communities, driven by common interests, not external incentives (commercial interests), are open and public, with very little access control. We can see that these traits are the traits of decentralization.
Then history took another turn, unfortunately, to the dark side. One network, the Internet, emerged victorious and consumed all other networks. The Internet triumphed over other networks on technological merits. Remember what we’ve talked about how important being infrastructure agnostic is for the freedom of cyberspace? At first nobody realized that this (the triumph of the internet) is a serious blow to the very foundation of free online communities, cyberspace and most importantly, decentralization. Of course, back then (1990s) nobody realized how important the concept of decentralization is. They knew it intuitively by monikers such as freedom and liberty. The problem is that those words are already institutionalized beyond recognition; they could mean exactly the opposite — control, for the sake of freedom; true freedom needs another conceptual sanctuary and decentralization is that sanctuary. By that sense in the 1990s most think freedom (decentralization) is a given of the Internet. Many were exuberant that it is the end of history and the Internet would spread freedom to all humankind.
But they were all of them deceived, for another ring was made.
That other ring is the Web (World Wide Web, invented by a regretful Sir Tim Berners-Lee). The Web has also built an enslaving army and prison for human kind, called Big Data. The exuberance of the 1990s and 2000s are gone. Online properties owned by two web giants Facebook and Google, account for over 70 percent of all internet traffic. News of massive data leaks bombarded us throughout the last couple of years. Then came the rise of extreme populist movements such as the 2016 Brexit and the U.S. presidential election aided by misinformation warfare via social media platforms such as Facebook. We turned from a utopian-ish jubilant web of the 1990s into our current dystopian nightmarish “age of giants” Big Data surveillance web in less than two decades. We have lost the Internet.
If you are a fan of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring (LOTR) lore, the Necromancer Sauron secretly forged a master ring to rule/enslave the middle earth, and the most distinct power of the ring is actually the power to deceive and corrupt the minds of men (or hobbits). That is exactly the analogy we could say about the evolution of the Web. The villain is not the web itself though. Only if Sir Tim-Berners Lee designed the Web a bit differently than what we have today, things might be different, right? Maybe. But like in LOTR the real power behind the one ring is Sauron the evil master. In our case the real culprit that corrupts the web and deceives us is the Centralized Technological Industrial Regime (CTIR) that ruled us for as far back as human history can remember.
Yet hope is not all lost.
We should rebuild the construct, reclaim the Network as our own, in its true cyberspace spirit, Decentralization. Sometimes the right time to grow something truly beautiful and extraordinary is the hard time. That hard time is now.
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Please come back for the next story tomorrow night.
