I have been thinking a lot about the term "free and open web" lately and I think that if we want to build an Internet that can live up to some promise beyond "I can order garbage delivered to my house quickly" we need to go back to the drawing board.

[lupinoarts@mstdn.social]

@tante follow-up question: what would we need to change about the internet if capitalism was abolished?

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@LupinoArts that is an interesting and complex question.

[darwinwoodka@mastodon.social]

@LupinoArts @tante

I blame eternal September

[nielsa@mas.to]

@tante Agreed. I keep thinking community gardens as a metaphor for this... something that is less libertarian in focus, and empathetic.

[jamey@toot.cat]

@tante I was just wondering yesterday if adding friction back to communications would improve anything. For example, what would the social implications be of an internet that only supported delayed store-and-forward messaging, rather than low-latency packet routing? Something like the UUCP/FidoNet era, or in some ways, telegraph networks. I feel like it's socially important for everyone to be able to communicate with people around the globe, and even to be able to share high-bandwidth information like video, but… maybe not so important to be able to do so quickly? And without a requirement for low latency, mass communications can be supported with so much less complexity and capital. I dunno, I think it's an interesting thought experiment, at least.

[janantos@f.cz]

@tante maybe some federated way of content sharing is worth of thinking. Take the domains out of equation, anyway it is ripping the money from us and taking control from us. And have it based on IPv6 and own distributed dns like system on top. We should have full control. Also lets scrap whole the complexity of modern web engines, let’s go back to roots, let’s have something like markdown based enriched with forms, very simple styling and very simple scripting and minimal “DOM”. We should be able to write new browser without all that complexity we have now.

[spdrnl@sigmoid.social]

@tante Part of tackling this is somehow communicating that not everyone has to do everything.

If enough people pitch in, the internet is going to change.

Some way to break that large unimaginable goal with commons aspects into more concrete domains that people can get involved in and attached to.

[derderwish@social.chaotikum.org]

@LupinoArts @tante
Depends on the structure that follows.

If fascism follows, we're going to look back to this time of freedom…

[lupinoarts@mstdn.social]

@derderwish @tante fascism is end-stage capitalism, so getting rid of the latter solves the former...

[josh@social.joshtriplett.org]

That would preclude phonecalls / video calls, and urgent messaging.

I don't personally think the problem is "low-friction communications". I think *part* of the problem is "engagement optimization": "let me show you the content that will make you respond", which often optimizes for anger. That's not *all* of the problem, and there are other things that need improving, but it seems like a major contributing factor.

[jamey@toot.cat]

@josh We know each other well enough that I'm sure you know that I know what my thought experiment precludes!

I didn't say low-friction was "the problem", I said I wondered what social impacts it has. Of course you're right that optimizing for engagement leads to serious social problems; and I'll add that store-and-forward messaging doesn't stop advertising or the motivation for engagement optimization, as demonstrated by newspapers for over a century.

But in order to address @tante's point, I think it's necessary to evaluate all of our assumptions about what's important in the architecture of the internet as it exists today. Low-latency packet routing is one core assumption, and we should consider exactly what it's buying us as well as what it's costing us.