In the world of personal technology today, there is one project that I find more interesting, ambitious, and promising than any other. It is notoriously hard to explain. So let me try something a little more limited.
Without reference to it (I won’t even name it), this is my high-level explanation of the key problem to be solved by that project, if it succeeds. None of these ideas are new — to me or to the community around the project — but I hope this to be an introduction to why a solution is needed.
In the spirit of “Live in the future, then build what’s missing,” imagine you’re looking back from the near future. What are we doing wrong in the year 202X?
We don’t control our technology. We let inhumanly large corporations operate the software and services that we use to run our digital lives.
Everyone not “off-grid” has a relationship to technology splintered through a dozen different apps and platforms. You cannot read or edit their code and have no say in their update schedules. And each is backed by some company with goals of its own.
This wouldn’t be an issue if the objectives of those corporations were the same as their users.
(We are all now “late” enough in the history of capitalism to share in this common consensus regardless of our other “political” views: a corporation seeks the immediate benefit of its shareholders and nothing else. That’s just what they are. Optimists see this more as a law of nature to be exploited than a cause for despair, but your temperament may vary.)
But the scandals coming out of Facebook and its peers are not going to stop (see, for example, this list) — they will only accelerate as “social media” becomes a more important platform for more people. The difference between the common good and what Facebook wants will continue to amplify. Is this even controversial?
Even Apple — whose privacy principles are at least preferable to the other tech giants — is fundamentally misaligned. All ecosystems must face the freedom vs security dilemma, and Apple chooses to lock down. The full, naked power of their devices ought to be available for those who wish it; but Apple begs to differ.
Technology needs to be a tool used by individuals and communities to improve their lives. Instead, in the present era it is the “carrot” which teases us with its potential while collecting our money and/or data.
The only one with your specific best interests is you; you should have direct control over your digital life! And even if you don’t design your own software, you can have a tighter relationship to your apps.
iOS and its App Store are simple enough that they’re useable by the average person — props for that. But the cost is capability and flexibility. Apple locks its ecosystem down in a trade-off that makes sense for it here and now in the absence of a better alternative to compare it to. But in the future, we will wonder how we lived like this.
(And don’t get me started on the fragmentation! For a group of friends or colleagues to communicate by text, video, with spreadsheets, file-sharing, etc., you need an account and group on every different app. Instead of being siloed by medium, the community-of-humans should come first. If you were reinventing everything top-down that would be obvious…)
So what’s the alternative? None yet exists.
Even Facebook, considered alone, has no true alternative. The reason is simple: the userbase is itself a feature. “Everyone’s on Facebook” is a valid reason to prefer it to its competitors.
Similarly, because there is no substantive community of users and developers on any potential substitute to the megacorp-app-service-hydra, we cannot say there is any full-on replacement (yet). The only way such an alternative will appear is gradually, with the growth of its community.
But it would be a waste of effort to replace the current internet with something doomed to the same fate. (Current mainstream OSS work seems destined for this pyre, unfortunately.) Deep architectural changes are needed to improve the foundations of our digital world.
It can be done better — and is that really a surprise? The history of our underlying platforms is so happenstance and filled with ad hoc “Worse is Better” decisions. Unix was made for the mainframe time-sharing era; putting it on the internet was a hack. The deep-rooted complexity of that technical backbone is directly responsible for our nontechnical society’s reliance on a handful of Megacorps to manage our servers.
Do you really doubt that we can do it better, with the perspective of history? Now we have seen the majesty and horror of The Internet, surely we have an advantage over our esteemed predecessors. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
There is no single hill-climbing step to bust us out of this local equilibrium… But that just gives us a chance to work in the background and make sure we nail the fundamentals.
(Fundamentals like what? Like people and communities as primitive considerations from the ground up; like determinism and decentralization by default; and like ownership — computing that you control.)
There is one exciting project with the potential to get it right, and its community is gradually growing. Ultimately, it is better if the everyday user does not hear about this project until it succeeds. And if you are not an everyday user… then keep an ear open for something new.
The era of the personal computer has not yet begun.