[p2p-research] Information Feudalism

Mon Sep 7 13:15:51 CEST 2009

Hmm... so what would something like this cost before and after R&D?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratellite

 Nathan

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Nathan Cravens <knuggy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
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