Re: <nettime> Yanis Varoufakis: What is techno-feudalism?

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

Thank you Luke and Felix, I found you both enlightening!

On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 09:25:50AM +1300, Luke Munn wrote:
> Platforms do possess power - and this is precisely why it's important to
> try to understand their technical operations, to grasp their power
> relations, and to examine how they play out in real world settings.

I still think, had we put the proper regulatory framework in place
sometime around 1999, these platforms would never have risen.
Internet would still be the fair and open marketplace that it was
in the mid-90s. Felix boils it essentially down to a single catchy
phrase: "Being able to shape people's action without telling them
directly what to do." That sounds to me like the business model
principle that should never have been viable. Humans, accepting
the madness of platform computing, doing what the platforms tell
them to do, having not the faintest clue that a completely different
way of experiencing technology would arise, if the sick and broken
one was no longer acceptable.

We are in this absurd situation whereby the large majority of humans
can no longer imagine how computers would be, if operating systems
were forbidden from being proprietary - how communications would be,
if all personal devices were obliged to make digital transactions
between humans end-to-end-encrypted and anonymously routed.

If these preconditions were imposed by regulation, we would not only
be having actual privacy on our phones, jobs that are now done in the
cloud would take place in form of (proprietary, sandboxed) apps on
the phone that interact with other people not via a central cloud
database (no longer permitted) but via the operating systems' ability
to directly route to other people over the network.

There may be some special cases whereby computation needs to be
moved to more powerful systems, but that could work anonymously.
Most of the platforms we have been mentioning in this thread have
a little bit of business logic glued on top of a huge centralised
database that enables transactions between people. Be it private
to private (Facebook...), private to pseudo self-employed (Uber..)
or private to merchant (Alibaba, Amazon..). So we need ways to
implement search engines over all the offerings? Distributed
technology has answers to that. Netflix, Spotify use case: a
legalised PirateBay of micropayment-friendly automated torrents?
If done with proper multicasting distribution it could even be
more ecological than today's streaming.

There is no need to let platforms own marketplaces and dictate
terms. We can outlaw them and require companies to actually
compete on the open market defined by Internet standards for
distributed computing (TBD).

My scenario doesn't involve neither blockchains nor proof-of-work.
The kind of distributed technology that can stem this challenge
isn't available yet.* Therefore, outlawing cloud technology would
need to be implemented over a timespan of many years, motivating 
the industry to contribute to the new operating system of human
society in a similar way as industry is being steered from fossil
to renewable energies.


*) There are a truckload of projects doing a fraction of what
is needed. Whereas the "Metaverse" is a speed train heading in
the opposite direction of what we as a human society need, if
it blindly reiterates the empowerment of the platforms. Even
the "Metaverse" is possible in a peer-to-peer format that puts
control back into the hands of those who paid for owning a
portable computing device.

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