The Internet and its Discontents
We asked, you answered! Last week, the MetaCurrency Project posed to its lovely network a question: What ticks you off the most about the Internet?
90 stated concerns resulted in the following breakdown:
Let’s eat through the doughnut bite by metaphorical bite to address each of these concerns and how the tools we’re working on, notably Holo and its underlying technology Holochain, will help to alleviate them, and in many cases solve them altogether.
Its centralized architecture: 42%
The Internet as we know it today is centralized. A few large companies host nearly all of the data that people access. By their very nature, these companies are usually more concerned with making a profit than with supporting their users. Ever download a new update to a piece of software you rely on only to find a crucial feature was inconveniently changed, a much-requested addition was still lacking, or paywalls, fees, or ads had been set in place? That’s corporation-driven software at work.
Not only do the companies behind our internet services not necessarily have their users’ best interests in mind, they rely on advertising to make money.
Advertising: 5%
Advertising is regarded as a toxic, attention sucking practice designed to do little to present users with products or services they might have a genuine interest in, and much to generate the largest amount of revenue possible while oversaturating the user’s experience with mischievously designed commercial content.
Many of the companies behind internet services like Facebook collect and increasingly detailed data about their users. While this is usually presented as a way to “customize your experience,” there are almost always deeper, more profit-facing motives behind these practices. It’s evident that many people don’t feel that data about them is in their control.
I don’t own my own data: 33%
Users of a service should not have to agree to a restricting privacy policy and sign away agency over their data to have access to an online service. They should have not only choice of what happens with data about them, but control over those data.
These three concerns, the centralized architecture of the web, the absence of data ownership by users, and a toxic reliance of the industry on advertising, are all tightly linked, and are all solved by Holo. Decentralization of the internet puts the responsibility, and also the power, into the hands of the users. Using Holo, one can have sovereignty over one’s data with confidence that they are not being scraped for commercial use without explicit consent. Its underlying architecture, Holochain, provides complete data integrity using cryptographic hashing and co-signing of transactions. And, since services accessed via Holo are user-hosted, there’s no need for unwanted ads. Users support the apps that in turn support them.
Precarious state of Net Neutrality: 5%
In the US, an ongoing series of frightening legal developments, has seen rich, greedy Internet Service Providers leveraging government agencies to introduce legislation allowing them to treat different data they serve unequally. This “Censorship Lite” lets ISPs limit the connection speeds of whomever they want. Similar moves to censor of the web have been seen around the world.
While Holo won’t solve the specific structural problems with ISPs that threaten Net Neutrality, the goal of Holo is to propagate tools that provide truly distributed means of governance. These new governance models would help combat the corruption that is present in systems like the ones putting the web’s equity in jeopardy today. Also, Holo’s distributed hosting network established the trust required for the implementation of mesh networks, which would avoid the problem of Net Neutrality entirely.
Bad for collaboration: 10%
The way we use the Internet is shaped by the Internet’s design. Centralization leads to hierarchical forms of coordination. Hierarchies are non-ideal for many use cases, and co-ops are emerging as adaptable and diverse patterns of organization. The concerns we heard about the lack of effective collaboration among people on the Internet precisely identified this issue: Old technology is limiting the growth of new, better forms of social coherence.
Holo enables mainstream access to distributed applications. Users of these apps are freer agents than before. They have the capacity to set permissions on their data, and exert greater choice over who their collaborators actually are. Moreover, users or communities that host on Holo can choose to support distributed apps they use and care about. This builds meaningful collaborations between the communities that use the apps, and the communities that create them.
If we’re going to change things, work together, and repair the broken systems we see all around us, if our species is going to survive and spread across the stars, we must fix the Internet.
That’s our goal and we’re reaching for it with Holo.
