Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/pzwang/lostweb

The Web We Lost, and What Comes Next
https://github.com/pzwang/lostweb

Last synced: 3 months ago
JSON representation

The Web We Lost, and What Comes Next

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
# The Web We Lost, and The Web We Must Rebuild



by [Peter Wang](https://twitter.com/pwang)



This site is a reflection on how the web (and really, how the internet as a whole) has failed.  This serves as background reading and context for my interest in the emerging initiatives around "decentralizing the Internet", or the "peer-to-peer web".



I'm writing this for a technically sophisticated reader.  I'm also writing this for myself, to help organize my thoughts on this topic, and to provide an intellectual breadcrumb trail; that's why I provide a "Further Reading & Sources" at the end of each section.  I don't expect anyone to read every link, every piece of background material, but I have tried my best to cull & curate so as to present only the best of what I've read so far.



If you are already convinced that the current Internet/web is broken, you can skip ahead to section 4, "The Root Problems", to see if my formulation of what's broken and what's at stake aligns with your thinking.



## Contents



 i. [Introduction](0%20Introduction.md)

 

I. The Web We Lost



   1. [The Web In 2017 - Structural Failure At Every Level](1%20Web%202017.md)

       * A Beastiary of Obvious Failures

       * The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism

       * From Connection to Consumption

       * The Chinese Model

       * An American Model



   2. [The Web We Lost](2%20The%20Web%20We%20Lost.md)



   3. [Centralized "Social Media" Is Harmful By Construction](3%20Centralized%20Social%20Media%20Is%20Broken%20By%20Design.md)



   4. [The Root Problems](4%20The%20Root%20Problems.md)



II. The Web We Need



 1. [Moral Philosphy for Digital Humanity](5%20Moral%20Philosophy%20for%20Digital%20Humanity.md)



    * Why go so deep?  Why talk about philosophy??

      * Human communications have undergone a phase transition.

      * Peak words; semantic density of the human cognitive field is at breakdown voltage

      * Four-dimensionality: Digital Humans are all ships of Theseus

      * Sensemaking is not optional (draft)

    * Social Physics

        * Identity, Names, and the Social Field

        * Privacy and Trust

        * Self-hood and agency



 2. [The Humane Network](6%20The%20Humane%20Network.md)

    * The Fundamental Question - What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence?

    * Computer Networks vs. Social Networks

    * The role of decentralized communication technology in bringing about a new, sustainable human ecology

    * The Internet Is Too Much

    * Anomie (in Clipped Articles Civ 2.0)



 3. What Could Come Next

    * What are current stop-gap tech approaches, and why are they not enough?

    * 4 Layers of Fail

    * Challenges for any distributed data application system



 4. What Should Come Next: A Decentralized Information System

    * Motivating questions (a la Bitcoin's "money no one can stop me from spending")

    * Orthogonalizing transport from representation from identity

    * Computational Trust: bootstrapping from local trust to global reputation; web of trust; a global decentralized credit system



 5. Beaker and Dat



 6. Tech overview/survey, 2018: What About _____?

    * ZeroNet / Zero platform

    * SAFE network

    * Fermat

    * Urbit

    * Ethereum (and ether-related, e.g. https://www.uport.me/) and [Akasha](https://blog.akasha.world/2018/02/10/akasha-beta-emergence/)

    * Blockstack

    * DAOStack / Backfeed

    * Mastodon

    * Matrix

    * IPFS

    * I2P

    * Consensys

    * DFINITY

    * cjdns

    * Solid

    * Syncthing

    * WebTorrent

    * StrongLink

    * Twister

    * Indie

    * Cicada

    * RetroShare

    * Self-sovereign identity

      * Sovrin.org

    * Better hypertext/knowledge systems:

      * FutureOfText.org

      * Xanadu

    

III. Civilization 2.0



  * A Brief History of Modern Economics

     * Labor and resource scarcity

     * Fifty years of "As if" growth in a fiat currency bubble

     * The system of the world: Transactional money, Wealth, Risk, and Temporal Novation

     * Centralization of credit and "trust bondage"



  * Collective Intelligence



IV. Commentaries



----



All contents within this site are copyright 2017 by Peter Wang, and licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.