I've been quieter than normal recently.
Time to fix that.
This is a thread about the things that I am working on/thinking about, and how they relate back to the current state of the world.
It's going to be one of /those/ threads, probably, so please forgive me if it takes me a little while to respond to you if you jump in the replies. I'll get there, I promise.
But first, some music.
I'm thinking Blues, but I'm always thinking Blues. Let's see what I can find on the shelves.
Alright, I'm spinning a shockingly clean copy of The Original American Folk Blues festival (if you've never heard it, do yourself a favor), drinking a cup of coffee (Decaf! The Horror!) and thinking about the #internet, the #web, #gopher, #usenet, The American Media Oligopoly, #copyright, #DIYMedia and the #PublicDomain.
It's been stormy. My head is cloudy, my bones ache, and I'm honestly terrified to my core of the future.
So this should be fun!
Sometime between 10 years ago and 5 years ago, @Ethancdavenport suggested to me that it'd be really cool if we could get a bunch of little intranets connected to one another all over the country/planet, and rebuild the internet.
This was honestly probably in the wake of the first brush with SOPA/PIPA?
God that seems like it was ancient history.
And it was probably before that, and just came up again in the wake of SOPA/PIPA.
Either way, the idea struck a chord with me.
The exact genesis of the idea isn't super important.
The point is that I started thinking about networking without/outside the internet.
As time has worn on, this idea has moved closer and closer to the forefront of my mind.
I've done various experiments with BBS style systems, and shared servers.
I spent too much time reading about the history of Usenet, and watching documentaries about BBSs, and just *thinking* 
about what a national or a global non-internet would look like.
This idea comes up any time anything bad happens to the internet (Like, you know, the Net Neutrality rollback, or the pending European copyright clusterfuck)
I've written some blog posts about it. When I talk about it on Mastodon I usually use the hashtag #mBBS or #alternet although I sometimes forget to do this.
I've written a lot, in other places about how the modern web is a trashfire. I'm not going to re-hash all those ideas here, but I'll sum up:
- Massive downloads for no reason
- Arbitrary code execution
- Tracking you constantly (advertising)
- Increasingly silo'd
- Tracking you constantly (NSA Panopticon)
- Bad Laws (we'll discuss this at length.)
- EME/DRM in browsers
Before I go any further, I want to talk about USENET.
Do you remember usenet?
I'm going to quote wikipedia about usenet so that I can save myself some time.
"Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.
Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups."
More from the wiki article on usenet:
"Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
And then, the good bit. Which won't fit in this toot and will need to go in the next one.
So that's ~1200 characters of Usenet summary from wikipedia.
The whole article isn't bad, honestly, but that has most of the bits you need to understand where I'm going.
The important points to take away:
- Usenet predated the internet by a good while
- You still connect to a usenet server, but you (traditionally) connected directly to it over dialup
- Usenet fully supports servers popping up and disappearing all the time.
- At this point, usenet is mostly spam, piracy, and viruses.
Like BBSs, Usenet is basically only accessed over the internet today.
Traditionally, though, there wasn't an internet.
usenet posts spread by having college servers straight up call one another, and transfer data. (Or, in some cases, by mailing truck loads of tape to another continent in order to bootstrap a new server, because it took less time to arrive than it would have over dialup.)
So your local server fetches the posts.
Then, people with shell accounts on those multi user servers could log in to their account, and fetch the news to their local newsreader.
They'd treat the messages kind of like emails. When they were done, they press a button, and sync their new posts back to their local usenet server.
The next time their server calls another server, those posts propagate the whole network.
In some ways, it was honestly a lot like the current fediverse. In other ways, it was not at all like the current fediverse.
If you want to get a feel for what it was like, check this out: http://olduse.net/
It's an archive of Usenet, updating in real time, as if people were making these posts.
And that's *really* fucking cool.
Here's some more information about the Old Usenet website: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/announcing_olduse.net/
There was, at one time, a blog post about trucking the tapes across Canada too, but I can't find a copy of that which is still online.
Shame, but that's the way these things go.
Alright!
So Usenet was designed to allow people all over the place to talk to one another over intermittent, slow, indirect connections.
These schools and other places used a lot of the same ideas for cross system Email, if I'm not mistaken. I dunno, it's been a long time since I read about email.
The upshot, though, is that we have something of a template for how to propagate certain kinds of information over shitty intermittent connections.
Of course, usenet isn't a solution today, because the problems we're trying to solve today aren't the problems that usenet solved.
But it's important to think about, and to remember, that The Web isn't the only way.
Which brings us back to the internet, and the ways it's falling apart.
Personally, my biggest concern about the modern internet is that the whole thing is resoundingly fragile, while acting like it is indestructible. (https://boingboing.net/2016/11/11/the-internets-core-infrastru.html)
It was designed to be fault tolerant. It was designed to be censorship resistant.
In some ways, it is!
In other ways, it's a massive, ubiquitous tool of surveillance.
The Web was designed to deliver documents with light markup, and it's now used as an application layer, complete with arbitrary code execution.
The internet, and the web, are so big that they are resistant to change. They have inertial mass.
I gotta do another quick sidebar here.
Ultimately, what I want to talk about is building a regional (then national, the international) network that has more in common with fidonet and BBSs and Usenet than the internet, and how we could do that, and what it would look like.
But, before I do that, I gotta talk about one of the biggest reasons that the modern internet is less good than I want it to be, and that's The Copyright Industry.
We talked about using dirigibles for this long before Googles balloon networking was a thing. We were mostly joking of course.
but hitching the data on busses* ... now that would be cool.
* The large wheeled vehicles that tend to run fixed route kind, not the bundle of wires kind.
90.6K Posts, 1.77K Following, 7.94K Followers · Trying to reshape the future of television. I write and build stuff. Est. 1990. (He, Him, Etc.) http://andrewroach.net Original posts CC-BY-SA 4.0 - Share them, but link to the original.
90.6K Posts, 1.77K Following, 7.94K Followers · Trying to reshape the future of television. I write and build stuff. Est. 1990. (He, Him, Etc.) http://andrewroach.net Original posts CC-BY-SA 4.0 - Share them, but link to the original.
90.6K Posts, 1.77K Following, 7.94K Followers · Trying to reshape the future of television. I write and build stuff. Est. 1990. (He, Him, Etc.) http://andrewroach.net Original posts CC-BY-SA 4.0 - Share them, but link to the original.
@gedvondur Hi!
I don't think we've spoken before, and if we have I don't remember you, so I'm going to try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you somehow meant this comment in a constructive light.
This is going to be a long discussion, and there are a lot of moving parts to it. You're coming in at the beginning and making very broad and negative statements, which would be enough to dampen my enthusiasm on a worse day,
Today, it just makes me mad.
@gedvondur While you're right that the law won't make that distinction, I think you're misunderstanding the problems that arise from those laws.
And you're making some pretty broad assumptions about what I'm trying to do, so either come along for the ride, and see if I address your concerns, or don't, but either way I won't be engaging with you anymore tonight.
@Ethancdavenport :100:
We were in a pizza place when you suggested it.
I think I'd been talking about mesh-networking, and you were like "why do we even need the internet?"
I'm real upset that that didn't emojofi.
Andrew (Television Executive)
Rotating Skull
deejoe
bhtooefr
neville park
Austin Dern
Bi Bi Bunny
An(arch)druid Wraidd
St John
Coyote of Winter
Benjamin
Ethan 🌒
DJ Sundog