Peter’s article resonated strongly with my experience and my interpretation of history. As I see it, Democracies suffer from slow erosion of freedom over time, much like the increase of entropy in a closed system or overgrazing in the tragedy of the commons. Legislated freedom acts like a public good – and as such is under-produced.

I also agree with the thesis that technology seems has strong effect on the production of public good. This is especially true of communication technologies, such as the printing press, phones and the Internet.

There are several technology projects I am interested in that could change the dynamics of freedom:

Distributed reputation systems – such as described in Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – would allow fluid transmission of reputation information, enabling ad-hoc decentralized organization.  It would reduce the dependence on monolithic institutions / walled gardens, such as eBay, Amazon, credit bureaus and other systems that enable centralized control.

Gift/barter economies with distributed record keeping – such as described in Bruce Sterling’s short story Maneki Neko or as practiced at Burning Man.

User-controlled Internet apps – allowing people to own their data and applications rather than ceding control to third party application providers. It would be a step further in the evolution of open-source, and it would parallel the aims of the AGPL.

Interested in any of these? Please drop me a note.

(Note: the term Technofix is usually used pejoratively, but I like it.)

Update: Michael Anissimov writes about Peter’s article and muses about the differences between socialism and libertarianism being moot once scarcity is reduces by advanced technology.  I tend to agree.

H/T: Nanodot

I think one of the more important benefits of freedom is that it is generative. You can glue things together in ways that create completely new things. For example, you can take the Internet, existing computers and the ability to write software (originally the Mosaic browser) and create a whole new ecosystem – the World Wide Web.

What if you didn’t have the freedom to transmit arbitrary data on wires? You’d have the telco monopoly and no Internet. If you couldn’t talk to anybody you want? You’d get the original walled-garden AOL. If you couldn’t write arbitrary software?

But there’s nothing specific to software in this lesson. What if you couldn’t freely associate? If you couldn’t invest in arbitrary ideas? If someone else made the decisions for you?

Another question is how much could we go beyond the current state of affairs. I think we could have significantly more freedom in technology and obtain much richer outcomes.

For example, if reputations systems were not stuck in walled gardens, such as eBay and Amazon seller ratings, we could have a global reputation system. Such a system will be immensely more useful, since it could be used to guide us in every interaction rather than just the current 1%. I would guess that such a system could guide you to interesting content and interaction with uncanny accuracy. Such a system would have to be decentralized and user-controlled to protect the users’ interests.

Another promising direction is the Google Android phone OS. If you buy one of the unlocked ones (also known as dev phones), you can re-compile and install the OS and any applications you want. Google maps is one mobile killer app, but there will be more, and I would guess the truly groundbreaking ones will not pass the iPhone store gateway keepers. (see here, here and many others).

I sometime pay a price for being an early adopter and eschewing closed solutions. Yes, the iPhone is very slick and music from the iTunes store was tempting even when it was all DRM. But I think in the long term open solutions will be much more valuable. The original AOL was nice for the time, but it’s dead now.

A crowdhacking proof system will have to use a transitive trust model rather than the naive averaging existing systems use.

This is related to my previous post about the future of the web.

Found through Slashdot.

•  A global and open Reputation Network

•  A distributed and open Computing and Storage Platform

Reputation Network

What does it mean for a Reputation Network to be global?  Currently, we have propietary reputation systems, such as the reputation scores for sellers (and buyers) at Amazon and eBay.  However, that reputation is not portable.  This means that if an Amazon third-party seller wants to start selling on eBay, they have to start from scratch, as if their business is new.  Trust is an integral ingredient to transactions.  It becomes crucial on the internet, when a buyer and a seller are likely to never have heard of each-other.  With portable reputations, a trust metric can be made available in all interactions.

What about the open part?  A global reputation system owned by one entity is a non-starter.  Why would one trust a single entity to provide basic infrastructure that affects all commerce and other interaction?  Reputation should be like TCP/IP – based on open standards so that different vendors can provide different levels of service and create a robust overall system.  The individual reputation systems can remain under the control of Amazon, eBay and others.  However, they can inter-operate so that they can create a global reputation network.
Reputation should be subjective. End-users should be able to subscribe to different raters, and thereby compute different scores for the same target. End-users have diverse values and preferences. One number cannot capture this diversity.

Storage and Computing

What about storage and computing?  Currently, people have presence on the Web through Blogs, Wikis, Storefronts, IM, e-mail, etc. .  However, creating a new Web application faces certain barriers.  The application creator has to acquire servers, manage them, ensure that the data is safe and face scalability issues as the application grows in popularity.  Also, interoprability between applications is difficult.  A standardized computing and storage abstraction will allow new application to be installed by the user into their virtual computing appliance.  Users will have control of which application they run and how the applications communicate.  Applications and data will migrate to physical hardware based on what the user is willing to pay and what scalability requires.

The division of labor is:  the application provider does what they are good at – writing applications.  The computing and storage providers provide efficient and reliable computing and storage (and if they don’t – the application can migrate easily or even automatically).  The end-user does what they do best – connect the dots and provide content.