The Missing Middle - urbit blog
source:: https://urbit.org/blog/the-missing-middle
Both internal norms (‘how do we act’) and external perceptions (‘who are we?’) get yanked around by the dictates of platform owners, routing infrastructure providers, and the societal consensus that governs both, at levels far above our Dunbar phyles. Privacy is contradicted by the need to surveil internal activity in order to target ads. The current model of social connection technology sets the bar for self-determination so high as to prevent it from adapting to external circumstances. The technical realities of the situation are due to client-server technology and its institutional history. The social aspect is a holdover from the 20th-century media paradigm of mass consensus cultures.
The ‘long 20th century’ of mass institutions and broad consensus realities is over. Contrary to impressions, it was not the inevitable or final result of moral and civil progress. Rather, it arose from pragmatic external incentives of mass advertising and great-power ideological rivalries.
The assumption that we must inevitably play by the same rules of discourse, given the autonomy granted by wealth, technology, and knowledge, is rapidly degrading. This status quo is a leftover from a time when mass education prepared workers for mass jobs, where mass communication hammered the same messages over the factory loudspeaker and advertised the same small number of products over the few television channels available. Yet we still assume that the shape and function of the tools and spaces for dialogue we inherited from that era are immutable and inevitable; this outdated belief cuts us off from new methods of choice and collaboration.
Without the external political and economic pressures which created our mass culture, inclusion in or acceptance by it becomes just another sinecure for sale, the outcome of a zero-sum auction to benefit from and utilize for further gain, the power accumulated by the legacy institutions safeguarding it. The ‘objective’ model has become a straightjacket on human ingenuity and community self-determination. The fact that it is ‘supposed to exist’ means that it is the ultimate prize. Inclusion in the mainstream Discourse grants scalable exploitation of any idea and prestige to its proponents. But it is a booby prize. No serious and nuanced idea, no dedicated community can withstand its flattening effects or the ways that it commercializes and cargo-cults its subject into an artificial shape. The resulting conversations are lackluster in form as well as subject.
The same dynamic wreaks havoc inside Dunbar groups as well; when there are fewer gradations of acceptable difference, internal schisms take on a stark tinge of zero-sum loyalty versus betrayal, rather than consensual drift. Savvy users, knowing the stakes, migrate quickly, leaving behind wastelands of the obstinate and clueless, who are in turn preyed upon by grifters and demagogues. Only when external events force a ‘tectonic shift’ in official understanding do these standards change. The problem is that the usual result of a ‘tectonic shift’ is a sudden, destructive earthquake. If networked culture is going to survive dramatic events out in the real world, we’re going to need a middle structural layer that allows norms and agreements to shift and negotiate based on observed reality and the wishes of ordinary participants.
Stars are somewhere between ISPs and consumer hosting platforms (like Geocities an eon ago, or Wordpress today); independent enough to set their own policies, but generally subject to the realities of running a profitable business. The decisions made by service providers inevitably have a great influence on the norms of any network, and Urbit is no different. The advantage of the Urbit model is that there are far more stars than ISPs, they are easier to run, they are fungible properties with clear ownership, and they are not burdened with technical and regulatory debt which ties them to the status quo. These qualities allow them to be purchased and maintained by a far wider range of people than might be able to control an ISP today; the massive decentralization of routing infrastructure also seems a likely antidote to the current state of regulatory overreach and centralized snooping which ISPs are subject to.