[p2p-research] Information Feudalism

Mon Sep 7 12:59:33 CEST 2009

I must make an additional mess of things: Another note on transcontinental
communications: make the repeaters mobile, with motors to keep them in
points of need. The is handy for repair and to distribute bandwidth at the
point of need. So if you're on an island and more bandwidth is needed, more
modules float your way, assuming at least one receives your signal. The same
would apply to land-based modules.

Just got your message, Sam, before sending this: air ships--like
blimps?--could work too! I'll give that a read. . .

Reflection.
It would be interesting to view these mobile units self replicate and repair
themselves or cluster up as I prepared to model the known universe. ;p

Nathan

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Paul,
>
> Sam is referring to your ideas here, is there some way to find out about
> them or to have you do a little write up,
>
> I'm hoping that now that you have more time, you can participate more with
> our collective work and learnig,
>
> Michel
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud
>> >
>> > Cory Doctorow?s editorial in the Guardian has an implicit warning.
>> > Cloud Computing may be the vehicle for extracting permanent financial
>> > rents, in a form of license-based feudalism. Cory also thinks it is
>> > unwise to rely on a corporate cloud in times of financial turbulence.
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> This is something that Paul Hartzog ( http://paulbhartzog.org/new/
>> )has thought about for close to 10 years, in the form of both "Peer
>> Net" distributed networking protocols, and "Knowledge Commons"
>> distributed database storage concepts that he's been working on.
>>
>> We applied many of those concepts to the current work that we are doing.
>>
>> One of the things that we want to do is include compatible open
>> standard specs for load balancing, distributed data integrity,
>> redundant synchronized mirroring/copying of data, etc
>>
>> We're meeting with some veterans of Open Standards, and data
>> management to round out current FLOWS specification, and possibly map
>> out some of this new territory. Right now, FLOWS can allow for a
>> networked component to act as a "microservice". If there were a way
>> for many to mirror these "microservices", and systematically load
>> balance, plus allow for redundant failover, then it's possible now for
>> collaborative groups to provide service infrastructure that stands
>> outside of grid computing.
>>
>> This doesn't solve the problem of where those "microservices" are
>> themselves hosted. But, practice of distributing a networked utility
>> redundantly across diverse networks really only then has a point of
>> failure of the whole internet itself collapsing.
>>
>> Physical points of entry to the internet itself are largely corporate
>> controlled (although they don't currently exercise their full capacity
>> to control, they could). Software of course won't solve this problem.
>> And, I have not seen many efforts to think about how to solve this
>> problem, honestly.
>>
>> I did see some really low cost ballon radio broadcasting circuits made
>> by these folks: http://stillepost.org/content/ and xbee radio/arduino
>> is cheap enough that it is possible that building blocks exist to make
>> a massively distributed mesh net (though I don't know how you cross
>> the oceans with this, maybe open source bouys, or submerged objects?)
>>
>> Personally, I have come to be of the opinion that to influence change
>> of public policy, it is often needed to create the building blocks
>> needed to deploy the systems that you are interested in seeing. When
>> it is possible to create and deploy those systems, public policy
>> makers have at least a more difficult time arguing against them.
>>
>> Thanks for the link, Alex.
>>
>>
>>
>> > (Information Feudalism is the thesis implicit in Jeremy Rifkin?s Age
>> > of Access that holds that we are entering a regime where the freedom
>> > of property makes place for the unfreedom of licensing, in effect
>> > placing limits on what we can do with the things we purchase,
>> > resulting in a new kind of capitalist serfhood.)
>> >
>> >
>> > Cory Doctorow:
>> >
>> >
>> > ?Since the rise of the commercial, civilian internet, investors have
>> > dreamed of a return to the high-profitability monopoly telecoms world
>> > that the hyper-competitive net annihilated. Investors loved its pay-
>> > per-minute model, a model that charged extra for every single
>> > ?service,? including trivialities such as Caller ID ? remember
>> > when you had to pay extra to find out who was calling you? Imagine if
>> > your ISP tried to charge you for seeing the ?FROM? line on your
>> > emails before you opened them! Minitel, AOL, MSN ? these all shared
>> > the model, and had an iPhone-like monopoly over who could provide
>> > services on their networks, and what those service-providers would
>> > have to pay to supply these services to you, the user.
>> >
>> >
>> > But with the rise of the net ? the public internet, on which anyone
>> > could create a new service, protocol or application ? there was
>> > always someone ready to eat into this profitable little conspiracy.
>> > The first online services charged you for every email you sent or
>> > received. The next generation kicked their asses by offering email
>> > flat-rate. Bit by bit, the competition killed the meter running on
>> > your network session, the meter that turned over every time you
>> > clicked the mouse. Cloud services can reverse that, at least in part.
>> > Rather than buying a hard-drive once and paying nothing ? apart from
>> > the electricity bill ? to run it, you can buy cloud storage and pay
>> > for those sectors every month. Rather than buying a high-powered CPU
>> > and computing on that, you can move your computing needs to the cloud
>> > and pay for every cycle you eat.
>> >
>> >
>> > Now, this makes sense for some limited applications. If you?re
>> > supplying a service to the public, having a cloud?s worth of on-
>> > demand storage and hosting is great news. Many companies, such as
>> > Twitter, have found that it?s more cost-effective to buy barrel-loads
>> > of storage, bandwidth and computation from distant hosting companies
>> > than it would be to buy their own servers and racks at a data-centre.
>> > And if you?re doing supercomputing applications, then tapping into
>> > the high-performance computing grid...
>>
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