We are aware of the phenomenon called “Metcalfe’s Law.” Roughly that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the system. This “network effect” is perhaps the most important value driver in the world today. Because the value of the network increases with the number of people on the network, there is a self fulfilling prophecy. Past a critical point the biggest network is more attractive than any other competing network. Which means that it gets more users. Which means that it gets more valuable. Which means that it is more attractive.
It can be a pretty quick ride to monopolistic vastness. Just ask Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
OK. Lets call this feedback loop the “network attractor.” Once you have achieved some critical point, your platform is like a black hole that sucks in everything and makes escape increasingly impossible.
Now I would like to introduce a new concept. Perhaps even a new law.
Any for-profit entity that is founded on the value of network effects must maximally extract that value to the limit of the network attractor. This produces an ‘extractive repulsor’ force. As the limit is approached, the network becomes poised at fragility.
The straw that will break the camel's back ... "Any for-profit entity that is founded on the value of network effects must maximally extract that value..."
Turning Points in History Require Revolutionary Thinking
I am proposing this essay by Julius Ruechel as relevant to the discussion on P2P as an excellent example of the reasons why we have to overcome the current political system of conservatism vs. liberalism, by whatever names those opposing ideologies may go.
There is simply no solution within the political dichotomy of opposing factions periodically handing over power from one end of the spectrum to the other.
My comment after reading it was as follows:
"Thank you for this essay, the first part of which I enjoyed reading and no, I’m not a paid subscriber to your substack.
I was especially interested in the overview of historical changes in society, which shows that, whichever way the pendulum swings, we are still in the same see-saw of apparent change that ultimately leads nowhere.
The takeaway for me is that the era of strong leaders, be they conservative or revolutionary, may be drawing to a close.
The future, in my view, is not in any system that requires a leader but in a bottom-up kind of organisation as exemplified by the emerging P2P movement, where emphasis is on direct peer-to-peer connection and organising. That may require some time to come to maturity, but it will be the wave of the future, if humanity is ever to make it out of the authoritative era into liberation and emancipation.
If you are interested in diving more into the philosophy at the bottom of P2P, I recommend the substack of Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P movement, which you can find here: https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/
Kind regards
Sepp Hasslberger
Ps: I do not know if you would like to publish this comment (I find I have no access to do so) but if you do, I hereby give my consent."
To find the essay by Ruechel, click on the headline or use this link:
The era of strong leaders, be they conservative or revolutionary, may be drawing to a close. We need to find a way to push the power down to the level of the people, not by periodic elections but by a real re-organization of things from the bottom up ... is p2p the way to go?
Before I start explaining the logic implicit in the title of this article, please read carefully the following statement, which you should see as ‘preliminary evidence’ for the thesis that I will propose...
Michel Bauwens has a different take on AI and its role in the evolution of human society ... a very interesting take I might add, bringing agency to "the man in the street" and helping the spiritual component take its rightful place.
The salvific and ex-tropic implications of the medieval Christian vision of human work as spiritual activity. Excerpts from the study: “From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body"
Sepp Hasslberger's insight:
Michel Bauwens excerpts a phD thesis that looks at the history of human labor from both a social and a religious angle. Very informative ...
Tucker travels to El Salvador to interview President Nayib Bukele after his historic landslide reelection victory. Bukele has accomplished the impossible during his first term by eliminating violent crime, reducing emigration, and invigorating the local economy.
Video - Running Time: 65 mins
First, Tucker Carlson interviewed Javier Milei, then he interviewed Vladimir Putin. Now, the popular American journalist has released a highly-anticipated interview with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Bukele has taken several firm actions and positions that make him a target of the left-wing media:
• Tough on crime
• Investigates and prosecutes corrupt officials from previous administrations
This interview with El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is mind boggling. The story of how a country was turned around from being crime central to having the lowest crime rate of any Western country. A breath of fresh air.
How entredonneurs and Everywheres may be constructing a new type of narrative glue, based on the joint construction of the commons
"Crude forms of identity are emerging to provide social cohesion as national identity melts away. We need a scalable, networked form of social cohesion to replace those crude forms. That requires finding and reinforcing networks of consensus."
So this is the issue we want to address today: what kind of glue can hold humanity together during this ongoing ‘chaotic transition’...
Sepp Hasslberger's insight:
You might not know what an entredonneur is. I didn't and had to look around.
Apparently an entredonneur is an entrepreneur, someone who started and runs a business, only with the "preneur" or 'taking' part softened into a "donneur" or 'giving' part...
Quote: "
If you are an entrepreneur, etymologically ‘taking in the middle’, we suggest you become an entredonneur, ‘giving in the middle’."
"In the late 1990s, I co-produced with director Frank Theys, a 3 hour documentary called TechnoCalyps, subtitled, The Metaphysics of Technology and the End of the Human, which was an examination of the promise and peril of transhumanism.
Paradoxically, at the time I was very much involved in a spiritual quest, so I was immediately struck by the religious aspects of transhumanism and transhumanist technology, while Frank, a radical atheist, was enthusiastic about the practical possibilities to overcome human limitations.
My theory then, and it is still my theory now, is that the search for the transcendent, is an innate biological drive, inevitably linked to the human condition, but when we ceased to believe, roughly in the 17th century, collectively as a culture, in the possibility of spiritual transcendence, then this belief would express itself in another way, unconsciously. And unconscious drives are much more dangerous. Eric Voegelin places this much earlier, with Joachim de Fiore, who for the first time, spoke of the succession of spiritual ages in a temporal way, i.e. the Age of the Father, of obedience to the laws, the Age of the Old Testament; then came the Age of the Son, the era of Love, embodied in the christian Church; but we were poised to move towards an age of the Spirit, where such an institutions was no longer needed, and all the people would live in brotherhood, as only the monks did in his time. For Voegelin, this amounts to a ‘Immanentization of the Eschaton’, i.e. a temporalization, of the hope for transcendence. It would lead to the Reformation first, then to the political ideologies of the 18th cy, which promised an ideal society on this earth, but finally, it morphed into transhumanism, a radical religion of physical transcendence through technological means, in new spaces and other planets.
So today, I want to explore how the development of human technology is the expression of our unconscious desires and ideals, which we put out in the world in technological artifacts, where it becomes an uncontrollable cybernetic machine .."
Here is an interesting discussion found on fb regarding Meta's efforts to capture the distributed, open source model by introducing "Threads"...
The image is their disclosure of what personal data is being collected when opening an account there.
So the message: Stay away from "Threads"
Anastasiya
Yesterdayat5:05AM ·
I can't state this more sternly - do NOT get a Threads account (at least not before learning more about Web3.0 and the Fediverse - which was NOT created by Meta).
Meta is, in the public eye at least, hijacking over a decade worth of work done by Open Source, Decentralized Social, and Free Internet proponents, which was all done FREE.
This can't get more Monopolostically insidious than this - because they are not just developing their own closed source code, but trying to centralize the Open Source protocol, and do it in a way that forces people to join Threads, instead of staying in the Fediverse.
The tech goes over most people's heads - but this is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than any other social media platform, because of it's fundamental coding difference.
Meta is trying to monopolize the Open Source protocol called ActivityPub, which was specifically created to be open, free, and privacy oriented (aka, not selling data).
They will post TO the Fediverse (I have a post about that in 'normal'/non-tech speak) but apparently they will force anyone in the Open Source Network (Fediverse) to create a Threads account to comment, meaning they're still trying to control market share.
WHAT YOU CAN DO INSTEAD
Instead, get a Tumblr account, which is owned by Wordpress (Open Source leader) - which doesn't sell your data to advertisers - as Tumblr will very soon have total Fediverse integration.
Automate a link of your content from Insta to Tumblr (Zapier or Integrately will do this). This way you can still be linked into the Fediverse by sending content to a platform that [will] support ActivityPub, which is what Meta is trying to do with Threads.
ETHICAL ISSUES
Meta also tried to make it an "off the record" conversation, so the Open Source community doesn't find out about how they're trying to use FREE and open source tech to make money off of the people who built the tech. For Free. For a more free internet.
Do NOT support Threads if you truly want a change in Social Media.
If you really want to be involved in a Threads-like platform, just get a Mastodon account. But honestly, Tumblr will be better.
It's more mature and stable (older than Instagram), and evolving VERY rapidly, thanks to Wordpress.
We'll see how Threads evolves, but from a business and marketing perspective, not even coding - this launch, with zero details and being very secretive - goes against the very principles of the Decentralized community that created the tech Threads operates on.
By principle, it's hypocritical, and people don't even know it.
----
What's even MORE insidious, is that you can't delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram.
The implications: You are now forced to use Meta's servers in the Fediverse, because you're basically tied to the account anyways.
There's no incentive for users to use any other portal into the Fediverse, and (as far as I've heard) in order to interact with any content that enters the Fediverse from Threads, you HAVE to get a Threads account.
The hearsay is, if you're on Mastodon or any other open source server, you can SEE Threads content and follow users, but you can't interact or reshare.
----
BREAKING: "regulatory concerns mean it will not be available in the EU." The EU has the best privacy laws in the world. If that doesn't tell you something....
-----
Even worse - this is basically how we officially have entered the era of Web 3.0 - a day after "Freedom Day" in America, Meta has monopolized the Public Perception of the Decentralized movement and incentived people to stay on their platform for at least the next few years, without educating their users on why this is different than anything else.
Meta is already rolling out their ID system and by 2025, it most likely may be mandatory to attach an ID to their Meta account.
The implications of committing to Threads - is there's no way to get your content OFF their servers and migrate to the Fediverse. You'll have to start over, and by then, it'll be too late because you'll be so bought into the Threads ecosystem that other platforms can't compete feature-wise. (EDIT - Meta says they're working on a way to migrate away - but we know how long that could take.... And if they really wanted to let people out of Threads, they could've launched Threads a month later and finalized the ActivityPub integration...)
----
What the founder of ActivityPub (the core framework) says about Threads:
"We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you.
The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services.
This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come."
Mastodon is a non-profit headquartered in Germany and fully crowd-funded through donations.
All reactions:
2828
10 comments
Sarah Wisebird
My ADD brain really needs a video on this Bub. . Do you have it in you? I’m so keen to learn more
Anastasiya
Sarah Wisebird Yes, planning out the podcast now. I'm going to have to piecemeal it. For now - just don't sign up. Like with everything, delay, and don't jump on the bandwagon.
Virginia Fox
Thank you for the advice. Just stumbled over threads the first time today. I only looked at it since I'm from Europe but hadn't even heard of it before. It's crazy...
Marjus Pee
People are reporting this when signing up for threads
Persephone Skye
The first post I saw on threads, I said, see you in 5 years. And they were like, why five years. Then I laughed. See? I'm always on point.
Anastasiya
UPDATE - check out this huge list of SPECIFIC data they collect. DM for source
Sepp Hasslberger's insight:
This is a heads-up on a Meta (Facebook and Instagram) effort to capture and centralize the open source, de-centralized model of the web.
An overview we published on urban policies that support the mutualization of provisioning systems: The Vital Role of Urban Commons for Ecological Resilience and Social Pacification
The commons are a perennial human institution that has protective and regenerative functions for human society and its ability to live in balance with its environment, and in partnership with life. In traditional societies, it played a balancing role vis a vis the more extractive institutions that were the markets and states, but it has been too overtly marginalized at the present time.
As we seek to redynamize the commons, we also need to update their form and function to the present conditions. In this report, we will introduce a number of concepts and practices associated with the current revival in urban commons, which have grown tenfold in the last decade:
1) partner state practices and the quintuple helix: city administrations have been devising new legal frameworks to support the commons
2) cosmo-localism: the logic of subsidiarity of material production as a de-risking strategy in the context of a multipolar world; the factor 20 energy reduction through the mutualization of urban provisioning systems
3) the magisteria of the commons: translocal fractal and polycentric governance mechanisms
4) the shift towards open 'holoptical' ecosystems that make contributions and impact of economic decisions visible
5) the potential role of distributed technologies
* Article: Commons Economies in Action: Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems, By Michel Bauwens and Rok Kranjc URL = https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Mutualizing_Urban_Provisioning_Systems In: P2P: TOWARDS A COMMONS ECONOMICS By Michel Bauwens, Jose Ramos and Rok Kranjc, P2P Foundation, 2020, Part 3.
The article addresses an important stage that the pandemic brought to the transition of the transition from the “old” to the “new” ways of organising Society. Points to an attitude emerging from changes. The Corona crisis, despite weaknesses and errors, has shown what can be done and how quickly institutions can adapt and change their choices, since life is at stake and, therefore, its legitimacy.
This process towards ‘partner state’ practices and public-commons protocols will not be automatic, and will be an alternative to a coercive and authoritarian state-centric model, which could be one of the negative outcomes of this crisis.
Find the whole article of Michel Bauwens in pdf format at this link:
Will the corona crisis in the end be an important accelerator of the transformation of society from its present top down command structured state into a society that is more commons and p2p oriented? Michel Bauwens believes this may be the case and he says so why in this article on academia...
Holochain provides foundational technology to allow people to connect with one another, with a choice of what data they share. As such, Holo is creating a bridge platform between users of Holochain and the traditional internet.
Holochain is seeing increased adoption welcoming new Holochain applications (hApps), offering developers an efficient and cheaper alternative to blockchains.
This has been achieved with substantially lower upfront and running costs, instant transaction finality, and without traditional consensus algorithms.
All this is possible thanks to Holochain’s distributed hash table (DHT).
The Holo token (HOT) reached new all-time-highs recently as the Holochain platform has gained industry-wide recognition.
An excellent basic expllanation for beginners of what this emerging technology called Holo is all about and what it can do to wean us from addiction to centralized servers and build a real peer-to-peer net.
When Bitcoin entered the scene in 2008/2009, it wasn’t with a bang. Designed as an alternative to the legacy financial system, it attracted little attention at first, not least because few people really understood it. For the first few years, the majority of the conversation centred on the currency aspect – for good reasons. It was only in the last few years that the conversation shifted to the underlying technology that makes Bitcoin work: the blockchain.
But while all of this was going on, another effort was already well underway. Even before the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper, a relatively obscure group called The MetaCurrency Projectoutlined a very different technology. In contrast to Satoshi Nakamoto, the intention of this group was never to create a (pseudo-) anonymous digital cash. Instead, they were looking for ways to enable more sophisticated social coordination, an effort that resulted in their post- (or pre-?) blockchain technology called Holochain.
And given that the limits of blockchain architecture are becoming readily apparent thanks to the scaling debate and forking fiascos, we are in need of other systems to carry forward the massive project of decentralization they began. Holochain, as you will see, is uniquely positioned to pick up that baton and bring it over the finish line.
This is an excellent article to explain Holo, the post blockchain technology, to anyone still confused about Bitcoin and blockchain technology. There is an alternative ... and it is growing.
At the dawn of an inevitable change of era, I have decided to release much of my work as a digital artist and teacher into the public domain (meaning free to get, use, reuse, modify and share):
I decided to leave the art industry. I believed - or attempted to believe - that through entertainment, we could raise awareness of the ecocide's reality and perhaps help bring about systemic change through mass-narratives.
But I think today that the problem is precisely linked to a phenomenon of scale. Any desire to produce emotions, truths, thoughts, stories, art, desires, whose finality is mass broadcasting is part of the problem.
By this act, I therefore deliberately destroy years spent building a career in concept art, to free my creative energy from the restraints in which it was embedded and thus mobilize it in other forms...
Sepp Hasslberger's insight:
Yessss - we need more "public domain". Actually, everything on the internet should be in the public domain. Open to anyone to know, work with, and re-distribute!
"If we approach this in the right way, it will spark a 21st Century Renaissance. A flourishing-forth of art, science, wealth and culture not seen since the Middle Ages."
We live in an era of unprecedented Centralisation.
Cultural, economic and political activity is largely dominated by a tiny number of increasingly powerful global institutions and wealthy individuals, at the expense of everyday citizens.
This process of Centralisation has been going on for decades, maybe centuries, and is driving levels of wealth inequality not seen before at any point in human history.
Decentralisation requires work. Fortunately, there are many good people working to make it happen. It will put power into the hands of the people, making much of today's centralised structure obsolete.
Why commons-based institutions now need to regulate the market and state, ‘cosmo-locally’
... imagine the following:
Local alliances of regenerative projects unite and create common digital identities and ‘sovereignties’, allowing them to autonomously engage with the regenerative sections of crypto capital.
Domain-specific alliances, say of all community land trusts in a trans-national context, are created, relying on global knowledge commons and shared innovation, common protocols of cooperation and coordination, and shared financing capacity.
These two types of trans-localized forces can co-own parts of their global commons infrastructure, while at the same time, regenerative parts of crypto capital create mechanisms for distributed co-ownership at the local level.
Sepp Hasslberger's insight:
Government and multinational "big capital" institutions are life-determining forces. Michel Bauwens proposes to bring the people into play through a "cosmo-local" commons ...
Understanding the transition from an immature technosphere, which destroys the biosphere, to a ‘mature technosphere’, which lives in harmony with the biosphere.
Our task is to shift from an immature Technosphere which overuses the planetary biosphere, to a mature Technosphere, which can live in long-term balance with the biosphere, likely for millions of years.
This is a shift in which we must somehow succeed in producing for human need, without the long-term exhaustion of our planetary ecological system.
This is of course a very complex task ahead of us, sometimes called the Metacrisis, and this article is concentrated on one aspect of it: how to envisage the technological and infrastructural basis of such a shift.
In our interpretation, this is very much linked to a change in ‘value regime’, i.e. how we extract and distribute value, from nature, as human society...
Michel Bauwens of the p2p foundation on: "Understanding the transition from an immature technosphere, which destroys the biosphere, to a ‘mature technosphere’, which lives in harmony with the biosphere."
You probably know to take everything an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot says with a grain of salt, since they are often just scraping data indiscriminately, without the nous to determine its veracity.
But there may be reason to be even more cautious. Many AI systems, new research has found, have already developed the ability to deliberately present a human user with false information. These devious bots have mastered the art of deception...
So Artificial Intelligence programs have been found to deliberately be deceptive with humans, when it is to the AI's advantage. Is there any way to guarantee that this won't happen in the future? Probably not, because the human programmers of AI often cannot understand any more what AI is writing into its own programming when it "learns"...
Bastyon is a decentralised social network focusing on privacy and free speech. It uses a peer-to-peer network, and the blockchain.
Daniel Satchkov is the founder of Bastyon, which is decentralised social network focusing on privacy and free speech. It uses a blockchain-based peer-to-peer infrastructure, avoiding central servers, which buffers against censorship.
Bastyon has no headquarters.
The aim is to be an alternative to establishment heavyweights like X and I strongly recommend it. An increasing number of my videos are hosted on Bastyon, including the one below.
Introducing a data commons stack, Arkology outlines tools for data-driven sensemaking, by and for communities.
To act in the world we must first make sense of it.
However, the world is complex, containing an amount of information exceeding the processing capacity of any individual or group. Adequate sensemaking in the context of complexity and info-abundance therefore requires the ability to process and analyse data.
We refer to this capability as data-driven sensemaking.
Yet, today the means for data-driven sensemaking are unevenly distributed. In our essay, The Politics of Data: Data Commoning as a Territory of Transition, we described how data is shaping the landscape of power, perpetuating and amplifying asymmetries. Unsurprisingly, the principal beneficiaries are large corporations and state actors with the financial and technical resources required to undertake data collection, processing and analysis at scale. As with ‘natural resources’ and ‘labour’, the dominant economic and cultural logics of today regard data as another resource to be extracted, siloed and abused in service of narrow objectives and/or for the benefit of a few...
LBRY Inc. must die, there is no escaping this. It has lost a judgment to the federal government, has several million dollars in debts, and has pledged to shut down.
This will be our last post.
What’s happening to LBRY, Inc?
LBRY Inc. has debts to the SEC, its legal team, and a private debtor that it cannot pay. Its assets, including Odysee, are being placed into receivership. As of this post, all LBRY executives, employees, and board members have resigned. All will be doing what is required to satisfy any outstanding legal requirements, but no more.
What’s happening to the LBRY network?
Fortunately, LBRY isn’t our network. It’s a decentralized network, and all the code powering it is open source.
But the LBRY network might die, too. Decentralization isn’t magic – it only works if enough people use it. Could LBRY still swallow all digital publishing like we intended? Could this be the beginning of a descent to obscurity? Who knows? It’s not like we’re LBRY experts.
Explore how the Holochain framework enables local interaction at global scales.
Holochain is a tool for local interaction at global scales.
Why do the work documents that you share around an office need to be stored on a server hundreds of miles away? How do emergency services communicate when a disaster knocks out the connection to the internet? Does my team's message board really need the global cloud?
At its most basic level, the internet is just computers networked together. But as it’s grown, it has come to rely on huge communication infrastructures and the cloud, with data centers stationed around the globe. This has enabled the internet as we know it, but what happens when a piece of that puzzle briefly fails? Most modern applications cannot work without talking to a central server to coordinate data between users. You might be able to bypass the default settings for Google Docs to work offline, but that doesn’t let you edit live with someone else on the same LAN.
Because Holochain applications function peer-to-peer and thus don’t rely on a central server, the application’s network scales to whatever devices are actually able to connect at that time. This means that if you can form a local connection over whatever networking protocol you share, from Bluetooth to TCP/IP, then you can interact with the people in the next room.
This essay tries to outline the general aspects of a political agenda for a gradual transition to a commons-oriented, social knowledge economy. In doing so, we first articulate some transitional proposals concerning both the micro-economic and the macro-economic levels, shedding light on the concept of the “partner state”. Next, a discussion follows that attempts to argue why our proposals would imply post-capitalist developments, as well as to explain the role of the capitalist sector in such a scenario. We, then, conclude by addressing some issues for future research and action.
Find the essay (and download pdf if you like) at this link:
Sensocracy is the unavoidable replacement of politics as we know it, when sensors tied to our senses around the planet will measure our preferences every second rather than every four years or so in a voting booth. The difference from today's politics will be at least as radical as the difference between monarchy and democracy as we have known them. But will sensocracy be a central computer A.I. police-state dictatorship, as currently planned in Communist China, or can the rest of the world respond with a properly developed concept of a sensocracy that remains free, open and creative? The key is who controls the algorithms, will that be you and your own tribe, or will that be algorithms corrupted by desperate capital and manipulated by invasive political correctness that instead control your mind?
An interesting talk and q and a about how to create that future world we all are looking for ... how to get around the pitfalls that are very much in evidence now.
A week and a half ago, we invited the wider public to try out a proof-of-concept app called Elemental Chat that was designed to stress-test the Holochain framework and the Holo hosting network built on it.
We finished the test yesterday, and from the entire team’s perspective, it went wonderfully and also provided us with excellent learnings.
Elemental Chat is a pretty bare-bones chat app, so if you tried it out, it might not have seemed special. It isn’t as fancy as Slack or Discord. But under the hood, there’s a lot happening to bridge the traditional web to the P2P world.
And as far as we know, our approach is unique. Holochain + Holo hosting can blend the offline-friendliness of self-run nodes with the portability of web access, all while maintaining users’ sovereignty and making their experience pleasant and familiar...
The first beginnings of an independent, user-maintained internet experience. We are talking about gradually eliminating our dependency on centralized servers and walled garden social networks...
This is a draft paper, published on www.academia.edu describing a project to use www.openstreetmaps.org to bring together 'transitioners' towards a sustainable, abundant-for-all future based on collaboration, involving clean energy, a fair economic system, local food production based on permaculture, and more...
From the author:
"I did not intend to publish a final draft as "published", but as P2PFoundation is not operative in the way i estimated, i will have to rewrite it. Until then, the design should already be discussed as described here. #altrusitic #keydesign #interdisciplinaryopendevelopment #strategicempowerment
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The straw that will break the camel's back ... "Any for-profit entity that is founded on the value of network effects must maximally extract that value..."