A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:
The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.
It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.
Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on the Waldsterben of the internet:
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.
This is a wonderful service! Pop your Mastodon handle into this form and you can see which of your followers have websites with RSS feeds you can subscribe to.
You and I are partaking in something magical.
Anil says the glass is half full:
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
In the past few years, there’s been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site.
I try not be judgy, but if you’re still posting to Twitter, I’m definitely judging you.
Maybe you feel like you have a megaphone. That it’s hard to walk away from a big number, even if you know the place sucks and the people listening now are mostly desperate blue-tick assholes. That’s a choice you can make, I guess! But if you have a follower count in the thousands and have ever complained that rich people aren’t pulling their weight, or that elites acting in their self-interest is bad for society at large, you should probably take a long hard look in the mirror tonight.
I had around 150,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve left Twitter. So can you.
A terrific interview with Deb Chachra. Her new book, How Infrastructure Works sounds excellent!
A good overview of syndicating from your own website to social network silos:
The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
References and contributors include Cory Doctorow, Manton Reece, Matt Mullenweg and, of course, Tantek.
We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.
The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.
A great talk from Addy on just how damaging client-side JavaScript can be to the user experience …and what you can do about it.
Today’s AI promoters are trying to have it both ways: They insist that AI is crossing a profound boundary into untrodden territory with unfathomable risks. But they also define AI so broadly as to include almost any large-scale, statistically-driven computer program.
Under this definition, everything from the Google search engine to the iPhone’s face-recognition unlocking tool to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is already “AI-driven” — and has been for years.
LLMs have never experienced anything. They are just programs that have ingested unimaginable amounts of text. LLMs might do a great job at describing the sensation of being drunk, but this is only because they have read a lot of descriptions of being drunk. They have not, and cannot, experience it themselves. They have no purpose other than to produce the best response to the prompt you give them.
This doesn’t mean they aren’t impressive (they are) or that they can’t be useful (they are). And I truly believe we are at a watershed moment in technology. But let’s not confuse these genuine achievements with “true AI.”
After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win. The change they imagine still requires a lot of user education — and a lot of work to make this stuff work for users. But the fundamental shift, from platforms to protocols, appears to have momentum in a way it never has before.
Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”
So many gems in this piece by Paul Ford:
The Fediverse apps are all built on a set of rules called the ActivityPub standard, which is a little like HTML had sex with a calendar invite. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get? Who will create the chore chart?
Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.
I’ve been a part of this for many years until I gave up hope. How would you compete against the VC money, the technical and economical benefits of centralised platforms? It was a fight between David and Gloiath. But now Mastodon could be the stone.
Mastodon has gotten two things right that no other social media giant has even seriously attempted:
- If you follow someone on Mastodon, you’ll see everything they post; and
- If you leave a Mastodon server, you can take both your followers and the people you follow with you.
The most common criticism of Mastodon is that you must rely on individual moderators who may be underresourced, incompetent on malicious. This is indeed a serious problem, but it isn’t the same serious problem that Twitter has. When Twitter is incompetent, malicious, or underresourced, your departure comes at a dear price.
On Mastodon, your choice is: tolerate bad moderation, or click two links and move somewhere else.
On Twitter, your choice is: tolerate moderation, or lose contact with all the people you care about and all the people who care about you.
The first thirty years of the web may have been an orgy of unregulated expansion, but that era is over. The EU has been a leader with the GDPR, but there’s more coming. And I’m glad. The big players have had plenty of time to get their shit together and they haven’t. It’s time to regulate them as much as we regulate a shot of bourbon.