Philosophy of LoRaCS
This section is largely inspired by the Zen of Reticulum, a document outlining the philosophical foundations and consequences of Reticulum, a dynamic network system for secure communcation over potentially spotty, high latency, and/or low throughput networks.
Digital Serfs
The modern internet can't run without hundreds of thousands of miles of fiberoptic cables.
This infrastructure has been built over decades with trillions of dollars of investment.
If your goal is independent, local connectivity, each mile of cable would only cost... around $60k.
Not exactly approachable.
In this sense, the vast majority will never "own" their access to wireless communication
in any meaningful sense. Individuals hook into a vast expanse of underground infrastructure
using a gateway granted by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and every bit you send is done with their explicit permission.
So we resign ourselves to being renters, paying a small but continuous fee for a share of access to the medium.
But it's not just Jim, Jill, and Joe: everyone's a serf, even giant, multi-million dollar corporations, and the larger
you are, the more you have to pay. Tech megacorporations need to use a mind-boggling quantity of network throughput
to service their customers, and to keep using it, they must pay the same, continuous fee the rest of us do, but on a scale
many orders of magnitude greater.
Like how a mouse eats less than a elephant, the need for consumption grows proportionally with the size of the organism.
Human Resources
In the days of the early internet, before Amazon-scale e-commerce and social media, web services were funded by investors. Companies hosting these services promised that massive growth was coming, and they were on the ground floor of something special. Soon after, the ground floor dropped from beneath them when, in the early 2000s, investors that had speculatively overvalued the internet sold their shares in a panic. Suddenly, web services with no mechanism for financially sustaining themselves evaporated. The few that survived adopted a new diet.
Tragedy of the Commons
The World on a Pinhead
The Binding Problem
Home | Tech Details