This is a summary of my deep passion, a hill I want to die on until I or someone else gets it done.
The spiritual aspect
Western thinking makes the grave error of dualistically sanctifying spiritual from physical things, as if living in truth can exist apart from making changes, or as if faith can exist apart from works. And yet, history tells us a different story:
- The New Testament only exists because of the politics in Rome after the Maccabean Revolt.
- The Protestant Reformation only existed because of printing press technology that served Europe’s growing middle class.
- John’s Revelation speaks of things that haven’t happened yet, and some of those prophecies are undeniably the attempt of a first-century observer trying to explain technologies we may actually have names for now.
In the case of how a Christian should live, there are only three large-scale commands Jesus gives within the Bible:
- Preach the Gospel message to everyone on the planet.
- Make disciples everywhere.
- Wait and live righteously.
And, therefore, I consider this endeavor to have tremendous spiritual consequence, even while I’m focusing on building a very practical thing:
- The Christian Gospel depends on the free transmission of information.
- Making disciples requires consistent, steady communication between mentor and mentee.
- While websites can be a detriment to quiet time with God, they do serve individual righteousness in the domain of educating people.
If Jesus had been born in the last 40 years, the “Epistle of Paul to Timothy” would be “Paul’s Email to Timothy” and the “Gospel According to Matthew” would be originally sent as a PDF attachment.
A new press
The movable type printing press has indisputably revolutionized how we convey information. This turned society upside down, and we wouldn’t have the Reformation, Age of Reason, or American Revolution without it.
The World Wide Web is our present-day printing press. Many people bemoan the impact of social media, but most people will agree it has done more good than harm.
The Internet as a whole has utterly transformed the way we interact. It has now replaced the marketplace, the public square, the rest stop at the road juncture, and the local watering hole. Nothing has abstractly changed, but new tools require us to change our mindset.
New freedoms
Prior to 1776, you couldn’t speak the following things without likely losing everything over it:
- Disparaging remarks about the current king.
- Contradicting religious remarks against the State’s currently accepted religion.
- Things you understood to be true but society generally agreed was false.
- Facts you could prove that presented political threats to the current order.
The only reason revolutions arose is because people were both willing and able. I can’t directly speak to their willingness, but I definitely want to empower their ability.
I am convinced most people take this current state of affairs for granted. Jefferson famously said the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Franklin once said those who give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety don’t deserve either of them.
The Internet has empowered anyone to speak freely about anything, with zero or trivial cost. However, the new currency is now in giving up our privacy.
New risks
The 2019 COVID pandemonium has demonstrated that the government can reach farther than we have ever seen before. As it stands, free speech can and will always persist as long as enough people repel hyper-collectivist tyranny, but it only persists as long as the willing minority have freedom to do it.
Part of the reason the COVID-19 lockdown didn’t persist in the USA was because there was simply no way to stop all the gun owners: police don’t kick down doors and drag away people for violating a lockdown when they can shoot back.
The Fifth Amendment protects the right to property, but the individuals in the USA have used the Second Amendment enough to resist the government on all physical property. We need something on that level for the First Amendment to protect our rights to expression and privacy.
Here’s a thought experiment. Right now, imagine a sweeping government edict to completely remove one word from all public discussion. Stating that word in text, or any of its variants or synonyms, is the criminally justified equivalent of both libel and treason. Maybe we’ll use the word “Jeffrey Epstein” for drama.
My assertion is that right now, the censorship would be utterly complete with minimal resistance if about 50 companies complied. Every email sent about the subject on a Google or Microsoft server, every PDF stored on Dropbox or OneDrive, every text message or phone call associated with Verizon or AT&T would all cease to exist.
As long as a few large entities hold most of the Internet’s information, free speech is only protected through governments acting in good faith. We are, in effect, a few legal maneuvers away from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, and the risk of civil unrest is the only thing holding them accountable.
The present infrastructure
Large-scale companies have always paved the way forward for the relatively new things everyone uses:
- Since the 1950s when computers used vacuum tubes and punch cards, they have always been large-scale company projects (e.g., IBM and the Seven Dwarfs).
- The personal computer in the 1980s (or “microcomputer”) brought computing into the home, but was still the product of vastly wealthy corporations making a little magic logic machine.
- Right now, machine learning (the so-called “AI”) requires enormous computing capacity to generate the statistical inference necessary to build what we see today.
However, the individual with something to say has now been able to benefit as well. Anyone with $150 and about 5-40 hours of focused work can make a website, even when they don’t understand computers very well.
However, while static websites have been with us, the most critical infrastructure of today is “social media”, which is essentially a highly specialized database system. Each user gets a database of content from a custom list of “friends/following”, and then the administrator keeps track of everyone’s activities.
Individuals can’t easily create social media websites right now, at least not at scale. This means that history has now migrated the printing press and book, but the public marketplace, local watering hole, and roadside junction are all under heavy surveillance.
Large social media companies have added new antisocial layers to their algorithms over the past few decades:
- Rules that profile users and distribute content catered to their preferences, with the implicit goal of making them addicts.
- Their monetization model largely involves anonymizing those profiles and selling them to marketing firms at about $20 per user on an open marketplace.
- Their secondary monetization model comes through freely selling the data to government agencies.
This monolithic control needs to change, but it must happen because individuals make that change. Barring moral deviance from human nature, it isn’t common to see someone willingly sacrifice their own power, so we shouldn’t expect Big Tech, billionaires, or any government to assist in gaining this freedom.
Even when Big Tech addresses decentralization, most of their technologies are half-hearted at best and are often secretly monolithic (e.g., Web3).
Therefore, we must do something, or we will continue to advance to a Brave New World if we keep waiting.
What I’m planning
Johannes Gutenberg combined existing technologies (the screw press and movable type) with mechanized paper production to create the codex book format we’re familiar with today. He didn’t make anything “new”, but slammed together what was already there into a new combination.
I intend to build a Fully Federated Fediverse (FFF, or triple-F), and I have moved the nuts and bolts of this project to this GitLab instance.
I intend to openly release this software and idea.
- I don’t care about the money, but it will only propagate widely if it makes people money.
- I’m advancing a cause, so I want others to steal and imitate what works with it. If enough people get this to market before me, I’ll happily do something else.
- I’m not trying to replace anything, but add to it. If you’re an executive and don’t like this, then do a better job at federation than me.
In the interests of good faith, please let me know if you intend to use this idea. I won’t dissuade whatever you’re trying to do, and may even inform you of something you couldn’t have known.
The big picture
To summarize the idea, I’ve added a few management-style statements about what this whole thing looks like.
Mission statement:
- Giving moderately tech-savvy individuals the power to deploy grassroots, small-scale websites and social media, ultimately allowing anyone with a weekend to either spin up an entirely federated hosting solution or sell their computer hosting for side money.
Vision statement:
- Combining the physical architecture of blockchain-style hosting, the software architecture of fediverse instance hosting, and the business model of a two-sided marketplace.
Values:
- Keep it simple – In particular, the end user should be able to easily understand what’s going on and what they need to do to fix it.
- Protocols over platforms – This system should be reproducible to everyone. It’s about making a change, not making money.
- Choose boring technology – Reinventing the wheel is hard. While often fun, it doesn’t get things out the door.
Motto:
- “Making federation normal”