A Community Cloud
Citizenship of a free society requires free access, and to be an effective citizen in our increasingly digital society requires digital access. Internet access.
While much has been made of this, net neutrality, availability and cost, open data, privacy and ownership of personal information, tech and information literacy, one piece of the landscape feels un — or at least under — discussed: ownership of infrastructure.
Metaphors are often problematic in a situation like this, imposing an existing mental model onto something distinctly new. However, given that caveat, a metaphor does appear useful here. If internet access is the roadway of digital society, allowing free flow of goods and ideas, and if bandwidth is the size, capacity, and quality of those roads, it follows that the things connect to those roadways — the “servers” and connected devices, or nodes to use a better term term — are something like real estate and property.
Coming back to digital society, our personal freedoms in a digital society are under attack. Under attack from many sides, in fact.
First, and most obviously, there’s the digital property. Many of us know our data is at risk, owned and controlled by forces beyond us, often out of our reach as individuals. But we also realize many of the tools, software, we use to accomplish tasks of various importance are also not ours to own. We rent them with our attention or via constant payment. Perpetually paying duty to the maker or owner of the tool we’ve come rely on. This often makes sense, allowing tools to constantly improve and spreading the costs among a pool of users who share access. But we know about this and we’re taking some steps in the right direction.
However there’s another issue lurking under the issues above. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to own the nodes on which most modern software runs. Building a web app is a trivial affair now, and cloud services make it easy and cheap to rent nodes on which to deploy. It’s highly efficient. However it carries risk due to who often and increasingly controls these nodes.
Platforms and Infrastructure as a Service like AWS, Azure, and GCP make it easy to get started, in many cases free to launch. Depending on the task, just one press of a button can sometimes get your web app into the cloud and ready to run. But in AWS and GCP, A stands for Amazon and G for Google, Azure is powered by Microsoft. Many other providers simply layer their service atop the *aaS of one of the giants. Even counting independents, we’ve entered an era in which a small handful of entities, similar to land developers, control the bulk of the digital land, the cloud. This is where the metaphor begins to falls apart and I’ll be careful to not push beyond its limits: unlike physical land, there’s no finite limit on the amount of cloud available. You can always create more. But a practical dichotomy seems to exist today: a choice between turnkey developments complete with foundations and walls and roadways and parking lots… or an unsettled wilderness ready to be tamed.
For many (most?), this choice is obvious. Why start from nothing when you can trust that the first 90% is done by someone more skilled than you. What about those who are unskilled in the areas required for development?
Skill aside, what about effort?
The problem isn’t a reliance on these more skilled others creating the baseline we can all work from. That is what society is, after all. Specialization is a sign of progress, as is a rich well of common material from which to work. We often call this pool The Commons. We benefit from the efficiency of pooled resources and combined effort, mutual understanding and cooperation. We know this. The problem is ownership. We’ve lost ownership of much of our commons. We’re losing ownership of private digital spaces. And we’ve effectively built (and continue to build) the holdouts and our attempts at reclamation on land rented from landlords at dubious terms.
In order to truly reclaim the commons, and to reclaim individual ownership, we must establish common space in which to build. No more company towns, community infrastructure. I believe this is true in all facets of modern life, but I think it’s especially overlooked in the discussion of digital infrastructure. We realize the need to build the parks, libraries, town squares, and the like. But we also need space in which to build those parks and libraries and town squares. As infrastructure moves to the cloud, it becomes obvious to me that we need a common cloud. A community cloud.
