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Preface: Networks + Incentives

There's a lot of talk about rebuilding the web lately.

  • This is a love letter.
  • You underestimate your potential
  • Heterogeneous temporal scopes, living document
  • General ideas, principles, conclusions, strategies, specific technologies, specific versions of those technologies

Introduction

  • [I love you. I want you to be happy and I want you to have the causes of happiness.]
  • Communities and Individuals should have the power to control what is stored on their machines and transmitted on their networks
  • People who rely on information should be able to possess a copy of it (collectively or individually)
    • Parallels to open source and open access principles

Possibly a workable similie is to say that the crypto space, is poised to do for trust systems what fertilizers and pesticides did for agriculture. We had many options for applying those technologies. In the interest of profit, companies like Monsanto drove us to a future that has poisoned the oceans and destroyed milennia of agricultural practice. Its up to us to define a better path, and that starts with better history lessons. [... avoiding] a more dangerous (and common) pattern of ignoring the old things we don’t understand and forcibly replacing them with powerful tools which conveniently make rich investors in the global north even richer while neglecting to measure unintended consequences.

The biggest problem we face right now: believing that interaction with mediated data is a form of social connection

  • Decentralization doesn’t solve this - its merely a dependency for a whole category of viable solutions

Online storage & dissemination as Cultural voice, Traditional Knowledge vs Captive Social Data

  • Possibly make this a separate essay specific to the Foundation?
  • Impossiblility of Unbiased search [Bourg & Sadler]

Data structures & the Evolution of Language

  • vocabularies that allowed convergent behavior (for better or worse)
    • English
    • Creative Commons
    • TK (Traditional Knowledge)
    • Dublin Core, LCSH, MESH
  • data structures that allowed convergent behavior
    • Word Processor Documents, Spreadsheets
    • RSS, JSON
    • Hypertext
  • Data where we lack convergence
    • Social data
      • Attribution
      • Describing people
      • Describing places
      • Describing events (date, time, optionally Location)
    • Citation & Review of information