I love the secularism of America’s holidays: Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Festivus. It seems funny to me that the only one commemorating a Christian martyr, Martin Luther King Day, is the one most grudgingly celebrated by the religious areas of the country.
But I like Independence Day the most. I get to make a joke that all Americans smile at. “Good riddance day!” I say in my toy British accent. Ahaha. Americans like to win, and the British like the purifying sting of a sustainable loss. I have my own ritual of sitting through “1776: The Musical” and singing tunelessly along to all the songs. (I have a friend who really is a Lee of Old Virginia, and sings that song more enthusiastically than the Lee in the film).
Last July 4th was the best. All in all, I’ve had a horrid two years, and July 4th was the best day in a long, long time. Ada and I went down to the beach. On the way I explained about how some countries had birthdays and that this was hers. When we got to North Beach, she screamed with joy to find the beach so close to her home, and ran into the waves, soaking herself and laughing like a sea-spirit. We wieved through the holiday crowds, still ten times thinner than Britain’s beach packs, past a brilliant Eighties cover band that made her stop in amazement and then dance until she ached, onto a shop where I converted an outsized tanktop into a warm jacket for her, to pizza, to carrying her across darkening San Francisco, asleep and happy.
I also thought a little about independence. I’ve seen endless technology booms now: the Eight-Bit Ascendancy of the seventies (I was a kid, but used to play games where Apple battled Atari), the British Cambrian Explosion of 1981-1986, the Windows Anchsluss of 1990, the False Boom of 1995, the Even Falser Boom of 1997-2001, and, lately, the Ajax Restoration of 2005.
If you want to make no money at all but find the interesting ideas, I’ve found the trick in these booms is to tack against the primary trends. If everyone is talking about portals, seek out single-function websites, if Windows is imposing a monopoly, look for where everyone who likes multiple OSes is hanging out. These ideas won’t necessarily form the components of the next boom, but you’ll be able to import the best ideas in these spaces cheap. And when you say them to others, you’ll seem a very clever controversialist with outrageous yet fruitful ideas. You can trust me on that, I’m a columnist.
Anyway, a trend you couldn’t help but notice in this latest overexcitement is migration of data from the edge to centralised servers. Email moves to webmail, documents move to Google documents, private data moves to Mylinkedfacefriendbook-or-not?, Amazon S3, Flickr – even Blogger.
I’m curious as to what happens when one tries to buck this trend. There are clearly some functions that really should live on centralised servers: I’m not sure I can imagine how you can do web-wide search without camping out in the Googleplex or equivalent (Wikia notwithstanding). But there really isn’t any need for Google Documents to live on Google servers. The two functions that Google Documents provides over desktop applications – shareability and remote access aren’t aspects of Google’s mega-servers. They’re just workarounds for the lack of distributed ID and unfindability of edge nodes. With alternate workarounds that otherwise allow your friends to log onto your home PC to edit documents, and find your home PC in the first place, you could easily host your docs, run your webmail, hold up your end of the social network, store and share files, display your photographs, and run your website, from your home.
If that sounds terrifically inconvenient next to letting Google and Yahoo run the shebang, remember that the move from ghastly inconvenience to one click bliss is always just somebody’s smart UI innovation away. There’s nothing about Google Docs that requires shitloads of servers, except the fact that Google is singlehandedly having to deal with shitloads of users. Lovely though Flickr is, somebody, somewhere could follow its rearlights, and knock up an open source clone that runs on your own machine in the fraction of the time it took for them to polish their UI. Maintaining your own server, handling security updates, fiddling with the optimum settings, are all high hurdles now, but they don’t need to be. Running a Unix desktop used to be a nightmare until MacOS and Ubuntu came along.
There’s also a pressing civil liberty reason to start leaning back towards holding your data close to your chest. Data held by a third-party in the United States just isn’t safe. Terms and conditions deny you any recourse for leaked or lost data; courts and Congress both deny citizens the protections of the Fourth Amendment for *any* data that you share with others. That even means data you expect to keep private, or have no way of keeping to yourself (the key case here is United States v. Miller, where the court decided that you have no expectation of privacy in your bank records, because you *shared them with your bank*!)
So here’s the question: how much of our life that we share with the Web 2.0 giants do we really *need* to share? How much of these services can and should we be running from the comfort of our own homes?