Why a Decentralized Network?

The moment the "net

neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was

lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its

capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers

and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect

change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of

the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.

Of course the Internet was never

truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been

designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack,

but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its

Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly

centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can

make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors

the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised.

And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the

websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can

still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks,

relays, and ISPs. That's why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables

released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was "no threat."

I'm not trying to be a downer here,

or knock the possibilities for networking. I just want to smash the fiction

that the Internet is some sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all,

so that we can get on with the business of creating something else that is.

That's right. I propose we abandon

the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to

corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was

bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for

conquest.

Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer

economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still

had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st

century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its

hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It

will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture.

And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will

be adjusted to prevent it.

The fiberoptic cables running

through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are

corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public

universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell

us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications

through which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a

shopping mall. It already is a shopping mall. Your revolutionary YouTube

video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes, that's the

price of "free" when you're operating on someone else's network.

But unlike our medieval forebears,

we don't have to defend our digital commons from corporate encroachment.

Fighting and losing that un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of

helplessness, anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined

to be our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire

together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this

priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.

It is not rocket science. And I know

there's more than a few dozen people reading this right now who could make it

happen.

Back in 1984, long before the

Internet even existed, many of us who wanted to network with our computers used

something called FidoNet. It was a super simple way of having a network —

albeit an asynchronous one.

One kid (I assume they were all kids

like me, but I'm sure there were real adults doing this, too) would let his

computer be used as a "server." This just meant his parents let him

have his own phone line for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our

computers (one at a time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and

download any email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server

would call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived

for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple.

Now FidoNet employed a genuinely

distributed architecture. (And if you smart hackers can say why that's wrong,

and how FidoNet could have been more distributed, please continue that line of

thought! You are already on your way to developing the next network.) 25 years

of networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine how

much better we could do?

So let's get on it. Shall we use

telephony, ham radio, or some other part of the spectrum? Do we organize

overlapping meshes of WiMax? Do we ask George Soros for some money? MacArthur

Foundation? Do we even need or want them or money at all? How might the funding

of our network by a central bank issued currency, or a private foundation, or a

public university, bias the very architecture we are trying to build? Who gets

the ability to govern or limit what may spread over our network, if anyone?

Should there be ways for us to transact?

To make the sorts of choices that

might actually yield our next and truly decentralized network, we must take a

good look at the highly centralized real world in which we live – as well as

how it got that way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the

forces at play, and accepting the battles we have already lost, might we begin

to forge ahead to create new forms that exist beyond any authority's ability to

grant them protection.

The Answer to the Internet Off Switch

From the actions of the Egyptian

government to the policies of Facebook, the monopolies of central banks to the

corporatization of the Internet, we are witnessing the potential of a

peer-to-peer networking become overshadowed by the hierarchies of the status

quo. It's time for us to gather and see what is still possible on the net, and

what, if anything, can be built to replace it.

I have had a vague misgiving about

the direction the net's been going for, well, maybe 15 years. But until

recently, it was more like the feeling when another Starbucks opens on the

block, a Wal-Mart moves into town, or a bank forecloses unnecessarily on that

cool local bookstore to make room for another bank.

Lately, however, what's wrong with

the net has become quite crystalized for me. It started with the

corporate-government banishment of Wikileaks last year, and reached a peak with

Egypt shutting off its networks to stave off revolution. The Obama

administration seeking the ability to do pretty much the same thing

in the US, Facebook's "sponsored

stories," and the pending loss of net neutrality don't help, either.

On the website Shareable, and again in an OpEd

for CNN.com, I suggested we "fork" the Internet — that we accept the

fact that the net is built on a fundamentally hierarchical architecture,

surrender it to the corporations who run it, and consider building something

else for ourselves. The Internet as built will always be subject to top-down

government control and domination by the biggest corporations. They

administrate the indexes and own the conduit. It has choke points —

technological, legal, and commercial. They can turn it off and shut us out. A

p2p network protected only by laws — that exists but for the grace of those in

charge — is not a p2p network. It is a hierarchical network allowing itself to

be used in a p2p fashion, when convenient to those currently in charge.

If we have a dream of how social

media could restore peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and government, and if the

current Internet is too tightly controlled to allow for it, why not build the

kind of network and mechanisms to realize it?

I received literally thousands of

emails in response. Some people simply wanted to know if it was really true —

could a government really just "turn off" the net? Yes. It's true. Others wrote

to let me know there's no alternative; there's no such thing as an unstoppable

network. Even if we use ham radio or wifi "mesh" networks to connect to each

other, they can always be jammed by governments. True, but by that logic the

authorities also can prevent us from speaking to one another by shooting us. At

least the tyrant would be in the position of attacking the people's network,

instead of simply turning off the network he already controls.

Finally, though, the vast majority

of emails came from people who wanted to get started actually building a new

net, developing p2p currency, or figuring out how to promote deep democracy

through social media. What should they do? Where should they go? And those

kinds of questions can't be answered in an email, an essay or a column. It's

not something you click on. These challenges can only be answered over time by

people actively collaborating on solutions.

That's why — with some encouragement

from a few great organizations — I've decided to convene a summit called

Contact. Contact will seek to explore and realize the greater promise of social

media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and

creativity. I'm inviting technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople,

funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, to come together to

hatch new ideas, connect with new collaborators, and forge an ongoing community

for innovating social media and beyond. Some of them, like Michel Bauwens of

the P2P Foundation, Paul Hartzog and

Sam Rose at the Forward Foundation,

have been working on these questions for a while. Others come from NGOs and

even corporations looking to support and become part of whatever is next,

rather than spending money resisting it. Evolver/Reality Sandwich is one of the

project sponsors.

From the development of a new

non-hierarchical Internet to the implementation of alternative e-currencies,

the prototyping of open source democracy to experiments in collective cultural

expression, Contact will seek to initiate mechanisms that realize the true

promise of the networking revolution.

The first summit, to be held October

20, 2011 as a MeetupEverywhere and centered at the historic Angel Orensanz

Center in New York City, will be a participatory festival for ideas and action,

consisting primarily of meetings convened by attendees. Featured participants

will deliver brief "provocations" on stage, sharing the greatest

challenges they are facing in their particular fields. But their primary contribution

to the day will be to join in the meetings convened by other participants,

sharing their experience, insight, and even connections to help bring these

ideas into reality.

If it's not the only thing of its

kind in the world, so much the better. Let's connect, conceive, and conspire.

Contact isn't a way of competing with those efforts, but supporting them.

Topics I'm opening for discussion

include:

TECHNOLOGY

Can we build an alternative Internet that can't be

turned off?

turned off? Alternatives to top-down registries and corporate-controlled

access

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

New net-based currencies and transaction networks

Net-enabled Local Activism and Job Creation

CULTURE

Arts networking initiatives

Decentralized social networking platforms

GOVERNMENT

Proxy voting to expert friends

open source democracy

"Filter Bubbles" and how to prevent them

MEANING

What Factors Facilitate Collective Intelligence?

The Reclamation of Public Space

But please feel invited to bring

your own. I may be initiating this thing, but I am by no means in charge.

At the epicenter of Contact will be

the Bazaar — a free-form marketplace of ideas, demos, haggling, and ad-hoc

connections. If you have visited the Akihabara, Tokyo's ultra-vibrant open-air

electronics market, or the under-the-highway open-air jade market of Kowloon,

or even the Burning Man festival, you understand the power of combining

commerce, physical location, and serendipity. A decidedly unstructured

counterpart to the convened meetings, solo provocations, and the

MeetUpEverywheres, the Bazaar will bring p2p to life, encouraging

introductions, brokering, deal-making, food-tasting, and propositions of every

kind. It is where the social, business, political, and spiritual agendas merge

into one big human agenda.

Contact will hope to revive the

spirit of optimism and infinite possibility of the early cyber-era, folding the

edges of this culture back to the middle. Social media has come to be

understood as little more than a marketing opportunity. We see it as quite

possibly the catalyst for the next stage of human evolution and, at the very

least, a way to restore p2p value exchange and decentralized innovation to the

realms of culture, commerce and government.

Content was never king. Contact is.

Please join us, and find the others. More about Contact, for now, here.

This article originally appeared in two parts on

Shareable.net.

Image by Daniel R. Blume, courtesy of Creative Commons license.