Bookmarked This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network by Cade Diehm
Another good find by Neil Mather for me to read a few times more. A first reaction I have is that in my mind p2p networks weren’t primarily about evading surveillance, evading copyright, or maintaining anonymity, but one of netwerk-resilience and not having someone with power over the ‘off-switch’ for the entire network. These days surveillance and anonymity are more important, and should gain more attention in the design stage.
I find it slightly odd that the dark web and e.g. TOR aren’t mentioned in any meaningful way in the article.
Another element I find odd is how the author talks about extremists using federated tools “Can or should a federated network accept ideologies that are antithetical to its organic politics? Regardless of the answer, it is alarming that the community and its protocol leadership could both be motivated by a distrust of centralised social media, and be blindsided by a situation that was inevitable given the common ground found between ideologies that had been forced from popular platforms one way or another.”
It ignores that with going the federated route extremists loose two things they enjoyed on centralised platforms: amplification and being linked to the mainstream. In a federated setting I with my personal instance, and any other instance decides themselves whom to federate with or not. There’s nothing for ‘a federated network to accept’, each instance does their own acceptance. There’s no algorithmic rage-engine to amplify the extreme. There’s no standpoint for ‘the federated network’ to take, just nodes doing their own thing. Power at the edges.
Also I think that some of the vulnerabilities and attack surfaces listed (Napster, Pirate Bay) build on the single aspect in that context that still had a centralised nature. That still held some power in a center.
Otherwise good read, with good points made that I want to revisit and think through more.
…driven by the desire for platform commons and community self-determination. These are goals that are fundamentally at odds with – and a response to – the incumbent platforms of social media, music and movie distribution and data storage. As we enter the 2020s, centralised power and decentralised communities are on the verge of outright conflict for the control of the digital public space. The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the decentralised networks and the communities they serve have never been more vulnerable. The peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.
Cade Diehm
Found not one but two links to Cade Diehm’s article in my RSS reader this morning: one by Jacky Alciné, another one by Ton Zijlstra. Both seem to have enjoyed the article and speak highly of it, so I had to give it a read.
Got up to the second sentence.
This article may contain valuable thoughts, but I can’t force myself to read it any further. I’ve tried three times, I just can’t get past this sentence. My brain starts screaming in agony: “This schmuck is calling IPFS a blockchain project and ActivityPub an information network. The schmuck has no idea what either IPFS or ActivityPub is and didn’t bother to research. The author has no clue about the things he’s discussing. Complete waste of time! Close the tab! CTRL+W now!!!”
Note to self: if you don’t get your facts straight in the first place, your ideas — though they might be brilliant — may fail to ever be heard.
Yes it’s interesting that they focus on privacy. I do agree with the main thrust of the article, that without diligence, and when just focusing on the tech, the decentralised can easily be centralised again. And in some cases the absence of privacy can be the attack vector. But I think I find things like the anti-disintermediation of blogging, email (gmail) and git (github) as more low-hanging examples of what we need to prevent against, where privacy had nothing to do with it.
I’m reading through Future Histories at the moment. The chapter linking the work of Frantz Fanon to the ideas of digital self-determination is very interesting and I am getting my head around some of the ideas. Solid and personal data pods get a namecheck, which is pretty much IndieWeb just under a different guise.
(Most of the chapter from the book is also available online here: Fanon and (digital) self-determination).
I think there are some parallels with what Ton said here:
Future Histories:
I am going to read Ton’s posts on networked agency, as I feel like there is a connection there. (And they will be good, even if not).
Self-determination, autonomy, agency – it certainly does sound related.
Ton en Neil linken beiden naar een interessant artikel wat ik op mijn leeslijst zet voor de komende dagen. “This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network” vertelt over de huidige stand van zaken van p2p netwerken en hoe ze er zijn gekomen. Toch lijkt p2p maar niet grootschalig van de grond te willen komen. Terwijl dat in deze periode van polarisatie, anonimiteit, privacy-issues een interessant alternatief kan zijn. Het voordeel wat Ton geeft in zijn commentaar:
Het deed mij weer herinneren aan mijn eigen Mastodon account. Waar ik al meer dan een half jaar niet naar had omgekeken. Zo zie je maar, een beter internet begint bij jezelf