Off the Cuff 7: What many people get wrong
When analyzing the problems of the web and platforms, people easily correctly, albeit intuitively, identify one of the mayor issues: These privately owned platforms provide the infrastructure our societies rely on for things like public discourse; our public square is privately owned. The clusterfuck of interests between the business, the advertisers, the varied landscape of users and the multitudes of governments wanting as say, is too much for a corporation to contain.
Sure, but it is where peoples minds wonder off to next is where they are getting it wrong. Now in the physical domain, these matters of ‘shared’ space are of a different nature than in the digital domain. This is because the physical domain is restricted by the rules of time and space. If you hold a market on the town square on Wednesdays between 7am and 5pm, you can’t also hold a music festival in that spot during that time; these things require coordination. And because the interests in that public square are varied, and no-one in particular owns it, we created these ‘’democratic’’ institutions to do the coordination. The point of these institutions is to segregate powers, introduce checks and balances, and hopefully result in representation.
A similar instinct pops up when discussing the web and its large central platforms. Instead of realizing that time and space restrictions are not really a thing on the internet and only appear because of platformization, they target the wrong part of the problem. They seek to impose, one way or another, this same ‘democratic’ institutional framework, because in their minds, the fact that these platforms are privately owned is the problem. They are stuck in the notion that all these varied interests need coordination, and want to replace the coordinator. They see the current landscape, identify a power and decide that power needs separation of powers.
Instead, if we target the structural landscape, replace platforms with protocols, the entire issue simply dissolves in the resulting freedom of association. Privately owned, publicly owned, semi-public, semi-private, democratic, communist, theocratic, dictatorial...it does not matter, construct whatever; the point is that users don’t rely on any platform in particular and as such don’t actually need them to interact with each other. They become places of convenience, rather than necessity; if you are excluded from a space, you are only excluded from THAT space, and not even from the people that ‘reside’ there (which is not the case with the fediverse which is why it sucks). The problem is solved, simply by the fact no one has ‘THE’ power anymore. On a structural level we are liberated from all these high minded considerations of ‘public good’, ‘humanity’ and whatever vague meaningless terms.
Now there are (atleast) two factors why people tend to ‘democratize’ the status-quo.
First because, and I can’t blame them and they make a very good point: you can’t possibly beat the network-effects these platforms have. The current structure exists and is heavily embedded, whilst the protocol story is for the most part, just a story. A gospel by ideologues that is of no help in actually changing the state of the world today, if ever. This type of skepticism is reasonable, and they are correct that leveraging government force at least seems doable. In short, they bet that laws and regulations are more likely to have an impact than some upstart protocol that will likely go nowhere. Now I have an argument about horizontal and vertical network-effects to address this, but for the most part those are just words, not practice.
The second reason however is that they don’t actually want to do away with the power and control. They don’t want freedom of association, they want to be able to stop certain people from interacting, they want abilities to effectively censor people; not just ensure they are not bothered by anothers words, but that no one is exposed to their words. Their grievance is that Elon Musk instead of them owns and controls twitter. They may or may not disbelieve that a protocol will succeed, regardless they don’t want it to succeed.
Whenever you are discussing this topic with someone. Try to figure out which of the two it is, and be mindful of the fact the second may initially hide behind the first. Find out if they want to trivialize the power position, or instead want to grab control of it themselves (under the flag of ‘democratization’ or other ‘social’ lofty terms. It is important because discussing Nostr with these people is pointless. They will never actively support it, the only thing that can happen is that they submit to the new reality when Nostrification is an accomplished fact. Don’t waste your time on these people.
As for the people that doubt if Nostrification as such could ever be accomplished. You may try to change their minds and turn them into believers, who knows, maybe they will; if not now, perhaps at some point in the future. But it is probably best to put most of your energy into the people that want to join the effort.