Article: The Internet Transition
berjon.com/internet-transition/
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- To sum things up, we’re trying to run a planetary society that needs to solarpunk the fuck out of itself in a hurry on the collective intelligence of an 18th century principality that’s heard of the Enlightenment from some guy at the pub.
- ==Our collective mission today, and we don’t have much of a choice in accepting it, is to make the Internet really happen.== The Internet has the potential to be more than a random pile of naive technologies operated by a handful of companies competing to be the best neocolonial reincarnation of the Dutch East India Company. But that potential is not going to happen if we keep operating with a dated toolbox and let the people currently in power design what comes next. We need to develop the governance, and the technical architecture to support it, that matches the problems we need to solve and the wonder we yearn to build.
- When a novel field emerges, it can often feel like the people involved with it are breaking out their jargon just to dust, polish, and oil it. But the fact is that the intellectual toolbox with which we intuit how governance ought to work at all scales is getting dated. In some ways it has barely evolved since the Enlightenment and we’ve run that to the ground: we need new thinking.
- To summarise, ==we are traversing an epochal change and we lack the institutional capacity to complete this transformation without imploding.== We could well fail, and the consequences of failure at this juncture would be catastrophic. However, we can collectively rise to the challenge and an exciting assemblage of subfields is emerging to help. ==We can fix the failed state that is the Internet if we approach building tech with institutional principles, and an Internet that delivers on its cooperative promise of deeper, denser institutional capacity is what we need as a planetary civilisation==. The internet’s megacorporations are struggling because they are stuck in dated Engineer King ideologies — Thorstein Veblen’s “Soviet of Technicians” — and are limited in their thinking by the ingrained belief that technology is apolitical. They cannot build the future.
- To take but one example, ==the best governance model that is available in a client/server architecture is benevolent dictatorship.== No matter how you set things up, the server can ultimately change the rules. That’s a major constraint to work with; it will eventually break most equalitarian governance models and mechanically limit collective intelligence. Peer-to-peer architectures offer a much richer set of institutional roles for agents and for the rules with which they can interact, and therefore provide a much more powerful solution space. It’s worth spending some quality time with them for that reason alone.