shinyhappyrainbows

I've written about peer-to-peer technology before. It is essentially the underlying design principle behind DARPA's creation of the internet. Internet technologies were researched during the Cold War as a way of literally bomb-proofing communications networks, as telephone networks were essentially a client-server model. If an attacker wanted to cut off communications, especially for government, all they had to do was blow up the nearest telephone exchange to the facility they wanted disrupted. The internet inherently does what its name says, it inter-networks around centralised exchanges. When built to do so, at least. The trouble is power (and power takes many forms, not just government or authority) likes its perview to have a baked-in central distribution point, so the telcos and tech bros who built the modern, public internet opted for the old client server model and built an infrastructure with a bomb-proof peer-to-peer backend. Then they put the clients on "spokes,...

Capitalism proliferates by manufacturing scarcity. Sometimes, the scarcity looks like a dream - "Here's a Ferrari, but you can't have one. However, you can have this Hyundai in red, if you like." Sometimes the scarcity is a lie - "We simply can't get enough programmers to solve the information management problems of the world, so we need AI." This latter is becoming more prevalent as the venture capitalists seek greater and greater returns from a technology restrained by a genuine scarcity - margins of sustainability. The global energy and pollution limits. The earth can only sustain so many "monkeys" at a given level of consumption. Fewer "monkeys" at greater resource consumption and pollution output, more "monkeys" at reduced consumption and pollution output. Venture capitalists believe in the fiction of infinite growth and, while we are limited to a single earth, this one we all share, our civilisation is built inside a ...