Technology

The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed.

The textbook explainer for the existence of the internet was (at least) two fold:

• Provide a high speed communication between research universities for conveying large amounts of digital data

• Devise a system of redundant communication such that any major node going offline would not cripple the international data infrastructure (specifically with an eye towards major natural disasters or nuclear wars).

But the evolution of the system, from a boutique international data exchange for government enterprises to a business-heavy commercial data system to a retail facing SaaS model degraded both original goals.

Data is no longer supposed to be public and freely traded. It is jealously guarded as a commodity controlled by a handful of privatized tech giants. And due to the continuous, voracious digital harvesting performed by these tech giants, more and more of the information needs to be siloed, encrypted, and otherwise shielded. This clogs the vast redundant network with overlarge choke-points designed to filter out unwanted traffic and shield the identity/data of its users.

This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.

The stupidity is a directly result of how the US private sector repurposed tools layout out by the international public sector. Unregulated solicitations and chronic system intrusions by malicious actors aimed at a naive retail user base, combined with the gluttonous privatization of research data, has inverted the core function of the network.

And because of the Tragedy of the Commons, there is no single actor who can fix the problem through their own virtue. You can't unfuck this chicken with a Meshnet or through voluntary individualistic commitments to ideological principles unbound from the central rules of network communication.

You need the heavy hand of national scale regulators and industry scale redevelopment to re-engineer how the root layers of the internet function if you want to get back to its original design.

Or... if we're moving in the direction it seems that we're moving... we're going to end up with a wholly proprietary loose confederation of Walled Gardens that look more and more like the Anarcho-Capitalist model of civil government (ie, The Network State).