Thanks for taking the time to respond and collect all those links, I really appreciate it! Not just for the great reading material, but hopefully some potential community / contacts for people already working in this space (broadly).
I hope you're right, on... yeah, every single point here. It seems like we need something that's definitely not the mostly centralized world of the major tech giants, but also not completely atomized and economically unsustainable in a way that creates a power and technology vacuum... that leads inexorably back to centralized control and exploitation.
The essay on "local first software", in particular, really resonates. Going back to my point about our economic models for technology development (strongly) influencing the nature of the technologies that get developed, it seems like a lot of the existing open source technology is designed in way that facilitates commercial for-profit activities and structures. For example, most databases aren't designed for end-user access directly, nor do they enable users to bring different applications to the same data, in the way that traditional filesystems do. On the other hand, the traditional filesystem paradigm just doesn't scale like applications with big back-end databases. It's like... there's a whole type of infrastructure for which the technology stack just isn't really there yet. Or, maybe more accurately, hasn't yet come together in quite the right way.
I'm just starting to get more involved in this scene, but, just based on where I've come from studying the economics of ICT, this seems like just going to take considerable effort to get started. Probably a lot of work by activists/enthusiasts/etc... at the beginning. In the long run, I think it needs something more structured and economically SELF supporting than the traditional open source model as well. I'm hoping all of this is just... early in the process, so the organization that you'd see around larger projects just hasn't coalesced yet. I'll have to get in touch with some of these guys and have a few conversations...
Again, thanks so much for taking the time to reply.
You're very welcome. The Ink and Switch folks have more interesting posts (and a few released prototypes) that advance the conversation, which are dense and thoughtful:
You're right that the economic incentives aren't such as to produce highly polished frameworks, libraries, and apps yet, and the public discourse is fairly diffuse. An entrant that just popped onto my radar is Aphrodite:
Adhoc mesh networking is something that has been potentially available forever, but existing business models of network operators (who subsidize and resell — and therefore shape — hardware) are hostile to it. R&D-wise it is sidestepping mobile communication devices per-se and finding applications in niches like autonomous drone swarm coordination, which is obviously restricted to mostly military applications. In the absence of direct support for similar capabilities on smartphones (or the ability to add such support through Software Defined Radio networking) we see apps like Briar filling the need with occasionally-connected approaches:
> but the combinatorial explosion of syntax that supports them is untenable.
I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but it's definitely one of the sharper edges of the language currently--particularly because some of the features don't work together yet. E.g., async and traits.
I hope you're right, on... yeah, every single point here. It seems like we need something that's definitely not the mostly centralized world of the major tech giants, but also not completely atomized and economically unsustainable in a way that creates a power and technology vacuum... that leads inexorably back to centralized control and exploitation.
The essay on "local first software", in particular, really resonates. Going back to my point about our economic models for technology development (strongly) influencing the nature of the technologies that get developed, it seems like a lot of the existing open source technology is designed in way that facilitates commercial for-profit activities and structures. For example, most databases aren't designed for end-user access directly, nor do they enable users to bring different applications to the same data, in the way that traditional filesystems do. On the other hand, the traditional filesystem paradigm just doesn't scale like applications with big back-end databases. It's like... there's a whole type of infrastructure for which the technology stack just isn't really there yet. Or, maybe more accurately, hasn't yet come together in quite the right way.
I'm just starting to get more involved in this scene, but, just based on where I've come from studying the economics of ICT, this seems like just going to take considerable effort to get started. Probably a lot of work by activists/enthusiasts/etc... at the beginning. In the long run, I think it needs something more structured and economically SELF supporting than the traditional open source model as well. I'm hoping all of this is just... early in the process, so the organization that you'd see around larger projects just hasn't coalesced yet. I'll have to get in touch with some of these guys and have a few conversations...
Again, thanks so much for taking the time to reply.