What a great article. Sums up many of the challenges regarding decentralization. I also like it's discussion of a modern corporation as a "Slow AI" designed to do one thing at the expense of everything else: generate profit. This explains why modern large internet companies probably won't ever change their business model. It goes against their slow AI and to do differently for such large businesses would be too costly and difficult.
If that's how slow AIs operate, I shudder to think about what actual AI will do once it's integrated fully into business decisions.
This excerpt makes me act after having considered to distance my communication from corporately developed social networking sites (i.e., #Facebook) learning from my research."Facebook has 1.37*109 daily users, so it is about 22,800 times bigger than Diaspora. Even assuming Diaspora was as good as Facebook, an impossible goal for a small group of Eben Moglen's students, no-one had any idea how to motivate the other 99.996% of Facebook users to abandon the network where all their friends were and restart building their social graph from scratch. The fact that after 6 years Diaspora has 60K active users is impressive for an open source project, but it is orders of magnitude away from the scale needed to be a threat to Facebook. We can see this because Facebook hasn't bothered to react to it."
This quotation from Rosenthal's blog blog.dshr.org/2018/01/it-isnt-… makes me both discontent and dissatisfied with how powerless most users succumb to media conglomerates and states. #politicaleconomyofcommunication #decentralisation #onlineprivacy #surveillance #civilsociety #newhere
like this