Modern computers suck.
They do. They do too much, and they do it too fast, and there are so many layers between the user and the hardware that I can do things like boot up a chrome book, switch to a chroot, launch FreeDOS in qemu, launch VICE or PC64 in Freedos and have an emulated c64 running in an emulated x86 running in a guest OS on a real x86.
And it all mostly works! Except for some weird bugs that only exist because what I'm doing is ridiculous.
Plus we've made so many computers, and written so much software for those computers.
What do I do on Mastodon that I couldn't do on usenet?
How is mastodon different in principal than an evolution of the ideas of usenet?
I love mastodon, don't get me wrong! I think it's a nice incremental evolution over some ideas that we had a long time ago and abandoned for bad reasons in favor of centralized services.
But old software suffers from many of the same problems as other kinds of media but amplified by the fact that floppy disks and HDDs are less durable than the traditional methods through which we've distributed music.
And then there are compatibility issues. And then you get in to cryptography and... well, DOS was never meant to be used for more than 18 months, but I installed it in a VM on my chromebook 30+ years later.
There was a huge DIY software movement back in the 80s and early 90s that hardly exists anymore.
You could say that it has been supplanted by FOSS but you'd be partially right at best
Archive your software. Share your source code. Don't let things you've worked on die.
The internet is not the only way to archive things.
The internet is not the only way to distribute things.
The internet is not eternal. It may not last the rest of our lifetimes. It may be replaced. It may die.
Have a backup plan.
So, when I say computers suck, I don't actually mean that computers suck.
I mostly mean that they change too quickly.
I don't mean that modern software is bad, and old software is good as a rule.
I mean that some modern software is great, and some of it is horrible. And a lot of modern software is no better, or is actually worse, than some old software at the same tasks.
Heck, there are a few scripts that I use literally every day that I wrote myself on a DOS machine when I was 12.
Some of them are still DOS batch files running in DOSEmu, but most of them were eventually ported over to bash or PHP or whatever.
I consider them the same, though, because they still do the same things.
Now, my software that I wrote for my own use isn't archived anywhere other than in nextcloud on my server and on some DVDs and flash drives stashed here and there.
That's Bad! I'm not eating my own dog food.
Some of that is because the software itself is trivial, or because it was never intended for distribution.
A lot of it is because I'm embarrassed to show the world code I wrote when I was 12 (or code that I wrote more recently that looks like it was written by a 12 year old)
So in the spirit of eating my own dog food, I'm going to start (slowly) releasing the software that I write for public consumption.
I'll self host a git repository somewhere, and put together some web pages about it all, and make sure that the binaries and the sources end up in the internet archive with good meta-data because that's the closest thing we have to a good future proof archival solution at the moment.
My blog is already public and archivable. I'll add it to the wayback machine, too.
The handful of computer games I started and never finished will get a final pass for QA and I'll put them up too.
I'm going to eat my own dogfood.
I'm going to upload PDFs of old issues of the AR magazine, too.
That's scary for me because there are lots of things in that that I wrote, or that @CaptainUnderpants wrote and, while they weren't particularly personal at the time, they are very personal in retrospect.
Lots of the people we talk about in those issues no longer talk to us for various silly reasons (and occasionally for some very good reasons.)
Those magazines are very much a product of the time that we wrote them, and largely no longer represent today.
That doesn't preclude them from being useful or valuable.
Most of the content in them is already archived in various places, but the magazines themselves should be (will be) as well.
That takes me through point 4 (DIY media) and point 3 (computers are bad) and touches point 2 (the internet isn't perfect.)
Let's focus on that for a minute.
The internet has problems!
The web also has problems!
The available replacements for the web (Gopher, DAT, IPFS) also have problems!
Let's talk about these things.
When I say the Web has problems, I mostly mean this: https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
That's a long article, I'll sum up:
- Centralization is bad!
- Everyone is spying on you!
- You are executing arbitrary code every time you load a URL (Even Mastodon//Especially mastodon, although in Mastodon's case that code is open source and publicly audited.)
I'll add to that: most web browsers now have DRM in them, and that makes it illegal to do certain kinds of security research on them in many countries.
When I say the internet has problems, I'm mostly talking about a lot of technical mubojumbo that boils down to a few points:
The people who give us access to the internet don't always have our best interests at heart,
Further, the internet is used by governments as a tool of surveillance, and centralized identities through platforms like Facebook exacerbate this.
Also! Wired infrastructure is almost always owned or operated under exclusive contract by a big 'ol nasty corporation.
Most of the problems with the internet are super technical, or straight up legal issues.
And the solutions to them will be super technical, and also legislative.
The upshot, though, is that the modern internet is less free than it should be, and we should recognize that it can be abused, and have a backup plan in place in the event that something goes wrong with the net.
For me, the backup plan for the internet is a return to the BBS model (I talk about this a lot: http://ajroach42.com/a-modern-bbs/)
Lots of people, especially in urban areas, have been talking about mesh-net ISPs, which are a good idea, with a whole mess of potential problems of their own. Not the least of which is that they will only really work in populus areas.
BBSs were a weird, wonderful facet of early computer culture, connecting community members in to a distributed, often free, local social network. I want to revive this almost forgotten concept, and find a modern spiritual successor.
Right now, as far as I can tell, there isn't a single solution to the problems presented by an unfree internet and a user hostile web.
But there are a bunch of partial solutions.
I cover a lot of these here: http://ajroach42.com/net-neutrality-the-consolidation-of-american-media-and-you/
But I'll sum up.
Here is the situation. Disney now owns the majority of Fox’s assets, making them the single largest owner and supplier and controller of english language pop-culture anywhere in the world. Rupert Murdoch is now the largest shareholder at Disney. Rupert Murdoch is, IMO, the reason Trump was elected. The Trump administration has removed Net Neutrality protections. This is their latest victim, after destroying many banking consumer protections, and allowing airlines to lie about, or refuse to disclose, the baggage costs.
To fight Centralization:
- Own your data.
- Archive your data online and off.
- Use decentralized services like Mastodon and Matrix and whatever whenever possible.
- publish to places that aren't facebook or medium (and if you must, only use central services for syndication.)
To fight user hostility:
- Use ad blockers and privacy badger
- If you can get away with it, use no-script or similar when possible.
- Stop using, or reduce your use of, platforms that profit from treating you poorly.
To fight ISPs being shitty:
- Lobby congresspeople to actually do something about net noot.
- Talk to your local governments about municipal fibre
- Consider building networks that don't depend on the internet (Sneakernet! Mail those flash drives back and forth. Intranet! Set up that piratebox.)
I talk about some more of this here: http://ajroach42.com/steps-towards-a-web-without-the-internet/
The web is broken. We’ve talked about this before (net noot, gopher). Today, I am here to talk about some potential solutions. Specifically I want to talk about how we can leverage some brand new technologies to build a network that operates independently from the Internet and supplements it, mitigating the ways the web is bad for users.
I mentioned DAT and Gopher and IPFS.
Each one of these really deserves a longer deep dive than I'm going to give it right now.
Gopher was a service that existed before the modern web that used the internet to share files and articles and stuff. Read more here: http://ajroach42.com/gopher-remembering-the-web-that-wasn-t/
It's neat. I like it. It can't spy on you or execute arbitrary code on your machine. It'll work on a DOS machine from 1982.
This is an article about Gopher, a service that existed on the internet before the web. It’s also an article about how the web is broken, and some speculation on how Gopher might fix that. If you want a more general overview of Gopher, try this article from Tedium. If you want a more general overview of how the web is broken, try every thinkpiece titled “The web is broken” on Medium.
DAT and IPFS are attempts to make the web way more peer-to-peer.
I don't know as much about IPFS, but I'm learning.
DAT forms the bones of the "web without the internet" project I've been working on (http://ajroach42.com/steps-towards-a-web-without-the-internet/)
Unfortunately, DAT currently only works on (relatively modern) desktops. Eventually, it should also work on mobile devices, but until then... it's not an ideal solution.
The web is broken. We’ve talked about this before (net noot, gopher). Today, I am here to talk about some potential solutions. Specifically I want to talk about how we can leverage some brand new technologies to build a network that operates independently from the Internet and supplements it, mitigating the ways the web is bad for users.
Neocities (one of my favorite free hosting companies!) uses IPFS.
When I start writing guides for taking back your digital life, I'm going to include Neocities among the options.
I know it seems weird for me to be promoting a centralized service, but they are free and open source, they make it easy to download your stuff, and they are honestly just a Lot of fun.
DAT isn't without issues. IPFS isn't without issues. Gopher isn't without issues.
Some of those issues are the same issues the web has. Some are unique.
This is a huge topic, that we're going to have to talk about a lot more in the coming months.
We've covered DIY media, Modern computers, the internet.
That leaves me with my personal life.
I'm moving. It's stressful and scary.
I might have to find another job when I get to where I'm going, and I won't know for sure for several more days.
This is pretty stressful. It's going to end up being about $2k more out of pocket than we expected, and there are all kinds of weird rules about where the money can come from and ... it's just a lot.
When everything is said and done, I'll have more freetime to focus on making media and writing code and helping the world be less shitty.
Until then, I have less time to do those things than I otherwise would, because I am planning the logistics of this move, and looking for a job, and making the move happen.
That was a quick rundown of my priorities right now, and a demonstration of why the things that are globally important are globally important.
I'm going to take a few minutes to go through my replies and gather some steam, and then I'm going to talk about my to-do list.
The projects that I want to cover in the next six months that relate back to those four overarching ideas, and the ways in which I need help.
Okay, let's recap:
1. We have to make media
1.5 we have to talk about the media other people make
2. We have to Archive the media we make
3. We have to make software
4. We have to archive the software that we make
5. We need viable alternatives to the web and the internet
6. We need to be smarter about the ways we use the internet
7. I may end up looking for work in the next 6 months, I will be moving 600ish miles. My ability to do The Work will be impacted by this.
Over the next six months, I want to tackle some of these things.
1. I'm working with @CaptainUnderpants and hopefully some others (any volunteers?) on some podcasts.
That is to say, I'm making media directly.
I'm also working to support (socially and/or financially) as many independent creators as I can.
This is a good start towards making media.
IMO it's not enough. I want to see more media. Do you want to make stuff? (Next several posts will be about the podcasts and other media.)
You wanna start with Fiction or non-fiction?
Depends on the angle really. I'm mostly a physical theater creator, but I can mangle words together here and there.
@RussSharek I'm not sure exactly what Physical theater Creator means, but it is a very specific phrase. I like that.
We're working on a lot of stuff, a couple of the podcasts I outlined in the followups on this thread, but there are more.
I can just run down some of the more important ones:
- Articles: Once a week we have a rotating cast member read an article from our magazine.
- Poetry and short stories: Once a month, we have 7 people record 5 poems, and one short story or chapter from a longer work (these are released daily/weekly)
- DIY Media Spotlight: weekly or monthly - updates on the world of DIY media
- sysadmins in space: Sitcom about people running the space internet in the far future
... hold on, I've written all of these descriptions before. Let me just grab that file rather than retyping them all from memory.
@RussSharek
“Do a thing with computers”
Each episode, I walk you through step by step instructions on how to do something interesting with a computer
"The hourly show" - 1 minute segments, 8 per day, 5 per week. We would record them all at once at the end of the week, and it's politics and jokes about the previous week.
“Learning to podcast with andrew”
“Hi, I’m Andrew. I don’t know how to do this podcast thing. We’ll learn together”
I've always wanted to see a linux/foss podcast that focuses on creative people (professional or otherwise) working with the software to make cool things or run their weird little empires.
I think because of the way I'm wired I'm better suited to chime in on projects like these rather than run them. I'm still "recovering" from the last weekly project I worked on, which sort of ate my life (in the most wonderful way) for five years. :)
Maybe I can guest star in some episodes?
Andrew (Television Executive)
Russ Sharek