Oblomovka

2008-08-01»

Having lived in two countries means constantly living in a world of extended metaphors. First of all, you struggle to understand your new country in terms of the one you have left, so you create analogies to help bridge the gap. My favourite British->American yardstick is the “Edinburgh”. This is what people living in the South East of England (ie London and beyond) use to comprehend US distances. A trip from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, about 650 miles, for instance, is unfathomably far until it can be broken down into “My goodness, that’s over one and a half trips to Edinburgh!”. That’s to say: “think of the furthest distance you can possibly imagine, and then add a half”. To Americans, who famously will travel fifty miles to find a decent burger, this is akin to meeting a culture that counts “1, 2, 3, many”.

After a while, you forget these training metaphors, and begin to live in the cultural context of the new country. You still remain with one foot in your other land. That gives you the special power to explain each country to the other. I revel, for instance, in trying to explain attitudes to guns in the two nations. I can’t quite convey the American stance in English terms here (I sense it still requires several pints and some hand-waving), but my potted description to Americans begins: “Imagine if a foreign country had a special part of its constitution devoted to the individual right to own poisonous snakes”, and then goes on to describe the inexplicability of the “National Viper Association”, the apparent nonsensicality of arguing the importance in using snakes to defend oneself against political tyrants, and the seemingly obvious dangers of cities filled with unlicensed reptiles. It’s a brief moment when you hope to show one country not what others think of it, but what it would think of itself, if it were looking from the outside.

I’m in some new land now. I’m slowly assimilating into America. I’ve been here eight years now, very nearly as long as I lived in London. From the moment I seriously considered putting syrup on pancakes that had bacon touching them, I’ve felt my natural, instinctive understanding of Britain losing its hold.

img:howzey / cc:by-nc-ndI think it’s less forgetting your roots,though, and more like having you and your country take slowly diverging paths. The contemporary landscape becomes slowly peppered with alien artifacts, like someone has gone back in time and fiddled with the past. My London doesn’t have 30 St Mary Axe in it: every time I see it, it’s like somebody clumsily photoshopped it to make the skyline for a futuristic London movie.

I left too early for “chavs”, or at least for it to be semi-socially acceptable to call people that. My only solid referent for that is the guy who randomly punched me in the head when I bumped into him on Oxford Street in 2002. Everyone agreed that he was a chav; I was bemused. At the time, it was like being told I’d been accosted by a kobold , and then being hurried out of the country before I could really find out what that was. I don’t need chav explained to me, not any more: I think what needs explaining is how society shifted to the point where they could so freely discuss an underclass with such a dismissive and yet helpless — well, glee is perhaps too strong a word, but there’s definitely a peculiarly British pleasure in the compartmentalisation and birdwatcher-like identification of its values. It’s like the class system is slowly, so slowly draining out of British society, but leaving a concentrated residue of all its worst aspects (from all sides) at the bottom of the basin. I’m not saying things have gone downhill, or uphill — they’ve just moved collectively further in a direction that I haven’t. I basically departed at the point after the 1990s were clearly about to hawk up something, but before anyone felt comfortably naming and then alienating the problem.

I wonder what is slowly becoming invisible to me about American culture; backgrounding itself as it becomes second nature or I meekly follow the standards that surround me. “Sincerity” doesn’t seem so much of a swearword any more, but I’ve been expecting that sacrilegious shift. It’s probably something to do with attitudes to children. I’ve only been a parent in America, and I can sense something discontinuous about British child-raising and how I raise Ada. I don’t know what it is, but then it’s always a sign of a profound cultural difference when there’s no word for what you can barely still see — in any dialect. My mother can see it, I know; but as much as I try to look through both eyes, I just see children and parents.

This must be what it feels like to learn a second language. I guess I’m going to find out soon: my daughter starts school soon, and she’ll be learning Spanish. Which means I’ll be learning Spanish, too, or risk being the Foolish Father Who Knows Nothing About Homework (El Papá Muy Tonto Que No Sabe Nada de la Tarea).

8 Comments »

2008-07-31»

(For those of you who complain that these status updates don’t really count as proper blog entries, here’s another piece from the Linux User & Developer backpage back catalog: Slower, Pussycat, Kill, Kill. Oh, and this week’s Irish Times column on Dan Kaminsky is briefly out of its subscription firewall)

Thanks to Struan, Richard, James (twice), and Chris, I am now obliged to blog for another month, so do blame them when I burn out horribly — also, any of you should mail me with your URL if you want linkage in the sponsor’s sidebar.

I’ve changed the “sponsorship levels” a little — getting an NTK special issue and NTK podcast are now lowered to five memberships, because an NTK issue would be pretty easy, and me and Lee secretly want to do an NTK podcast. We haven’t asked Dave though, because he no longer exists (if he ever did).

Saying what I really feel about Andrew Orlowski has been taken off the tally, because I have a feeling I have no actual control over whether I do that any more. One day it will just happen, like road rage or a stroke.

The new promised feature I’ve added is interesting, if only for historical value. As some of you may know, me and Merlin Mann somewhat abortively attempted to do a “Life Hacks” book a few years ago. Though in the end we decided to shoot said thrashing mutation in the head just before it ripped out the throat of a long-suffering O’Reilly editor (hi, Brian!), I do still have about half a book written and sitting on my hard drive. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of years, so it may have dated horribly, but for ten ORG subs, I’d be happy to dig it up and put together a mini-version. There are a few external contributors whose gave their time to it as well: I’ll check with them, and maybe put their hacks up here too. (For the best description ever of why the book was fated never to be made, listen to Merlin’s perfect summary, The Perfect Apostrophe. )

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2008-07-30»

My day job and my current obsession conveniently criss-crossed today: Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, and one of the most perceptive commentators on the international Net writing in English, wrote a thoughtful piece on the edge, and Silicon Valley’s benevolent dictatorship. As a suddenly-outed lbrtrn, of course, I must tow the party line and say that, despite Rebecca’s concerns, capitalism really can bring freedom to everyone (in the event of capitalism failing to comply, please return within 7 days in original packaging for full refund and your ecology back).

More sceptically, I do marvel how much we currently depend on the fair-weather compliance of others to preserve our privacy and our liberty — both from corporations and from individuals.

It’s not just Google suddenly throwing up its hands and going “Alright, sinister government guy, take everyone’s data, see if we care.” If you’ve ever spent any time as a systems administrator or helping out one, you’ll (briefly) know the power those individuals wield.

If you are a sysadmin, you’ll no doubt be heartedly sick of that power. You’ve been handed huge amounts of power, and responsibility — and nobody else but you seems to care.

There’s a good reason why sysadmins and doctors share the same morbid, callous sense of humour — both groups find themselves dealing with more responsibility towards others than you can reasonably expect a sane human to take. (At least doctors can expect their customers to understand what they might be palming off to another person.  Sysadmins have to live with the equivalent in medical terms of somebody leaving a naked body on the doorstep at 9AM, with a Post-IT note attached to it saying “Had sex with twenty people last night and now I think the kidney isn’t working. Could you get this back to me with my IQ intact for my 10AM appointment?”)

Like doctors, sysadmin’s throwaway jokes usually hide a very serious attention to protecting the privacy and dignity of their users. What that means, among other things, is that they try very hard not to accidentally lose millions of social security numbers. But what are they doing with access to that data in the first place? Well, because we hand it to them. We fob off that power to them, with very little support, both legally, infrastructurally, and frankly, without much emotional support either.

When you have that amount of responsibility, it’s very hard to conceive of reducing your power. That’s not because of greed: it’s because you don’t want people to get hurt, or company’s to go bust. Terry Childs, the San Francisco sysadmin who refused to handover passwords to anyone but Gavin Newsom, even after being jailed, wasn’t holding back because he wanted to hurt someone. He was holding back because the only way he could take on the responsibility he’d elected to assume was by also asserting a fantastic amount of control. Great power, great responsibily can get very commutative at times.

One of the fun parts of my job has been going around to conferences like LISA and MySQLcon, and encouraging – okay, I admit it, begging – sysadmins to turn off logging. Pervasive logging is a civil liberties trainwreck waiting to happen. The list of data that the data retention directive requires ISPs to collect is derived, in part, from the data that ISPs would expect to collect anyway. Business practice now determines later what courts and intrusive governments imagine is “reasonable” to obtain. One of the most chilling conversations I’ve had recently is with Charles Miller, the Secretary to the Data Communications Group at the UK’s Home Office — basically the folk who determine the policy and ethics of interception and surveillance. He had been talking about the data that ISPs now collect as part of the data retention directive. I wanted him to confirm that this data, whose retention was ostensibly for the investigation of serious crime only, was also available to civil litigants. Of course, he said, a civil court order can reach anything that’s reasonable.

What’s reasonable? Think how much more others know about you — and expect to know about you, because Apache has generally shipped with logging turned on, instead of off. What governments will want tomorrow will be based on what your software’s defaults were yesterday.

These talks incidentally have a field effect of about 24 hours for most people, I estimate. You have some guy in an EFF t-shirt telling you about awful things that might happen in Uzbekistan if you even mount /var/log, and you go home and maybe have a few nightmares. Then, freaking PHP starts leaking memory and dragging down one of the servers again, and dammit, where are yesterdays logs? Where is my information? Noo! My precioussss!

I’m sympathetic: I wish our law gave them more power to say no to their bosses (though it’s always worthwhile in some cases to point out that the FTC can kick asses if you violate your own privacy policy). But more and more, I wish that we had alternatives to handing that power out to others, willy-nilly, and got to keep more for ourselves. I think the standard unit that it’s healthy for anyone to be responsible for that much. The interests of a person keeping tabs on a million people’s data is different from a person keeping tabs on their own.

The other reason why it’s good to have alternative power bases is highlighted by this piece by Rachel Chalmers, where she points out that if we can fall back on our own devices, corporations will be rather more civil to us: and hopefully compete on privacy and responsiveness as much as other values:

Software vendors got away with some pretty coercive licenses for many years by making the assumption that users didn’t care all that much. Richard Stallman helped change all that. Not everyone cares about software licenses today, but many do, and any OS vendor that regards such concerns as external to their business is clearly wrong. Cloud providers who assume that their users won’t care how their data is handled are likely to find themselves equally mistaken. These issues have to be quantified somehow and included in the cost-benefit analysis.

We’ve seen flickers of this: a few search engine companies have overtly competed with Google on their privacy practices. But to bring the full pressure of the market to bear, the real power we need as consumers is the ability to take our ball and leave the market entirely, not just go next door to the second-worst provider.

1 Comment »

2008-07-28»

So I didn’t get an iPhone 3G, because really I couldn’t bring myself to sign up to a bunch of AT&T years. But when I saw the refurbished iPod Touchs for $199 on the Apple site, I admit I caved. It’s sort of the sad halfway house for those of us who are strong in spirit, but weak in the flesh. It’s currently sitting next to my far more pure N810. I am rubbing them together in the hope that some of the nice implementation in the Apple product rubs off into the Nokia open source experiment.

I am sort of enjoying the flashy brattiness of the Touch, but I fear he is putting up a spirited fight against my Linux set-up, and thus rendering himself useless. Sure, people have Pwnage 2.0 now, so you can ssh into it, and have all the freedoms that Apple don’t want; but the latest firmware update also changed the hash value that the iPod software uses to check the “integrity” of the iTunes database. If you want to copy over music from a Linux machine on an iPod Touch/iPhone 2.0 firmware, you’re out of luck for now. Maybe not for long, as it didn’t take them very long to break the hash when Apple created this little roadblock. I will continue to lurk around on #gtkpod for the good news.

I’m racking my brains to understand a good argument (not any argument, a good argument) for why Apple would put a concealed checksum in the database in the first place. It doesn’t protect the music, or any copyrighted material that Apple might have a contractual agreement to protect (the music is still in the clear, AFAIK — it’s just the database that’s checked). It’s not part of the phone locking system, which again Apple can claim it needs to protect for a continuing business relationship. And it certainly doesn’t have a consumer-friendly reason, like making sure the database data is coherent — if the database is corrupt, iTunes doesn’t offer to reinstall your music, it demands you restore your entire iPod (actually losing your purchased music or apps whatever in the meantime).

The only reasoning that makes sense is that Apple dearly wants iPod and iPhones locked ever-more tightly into iTunes. Obviously, I’m shocked, shocked. But if I was Apple, I’d try and come up with another cover story quick before the regulators start sniffing…

4 Comments »

2008-07-26»

Perhaps while attempting to decide my entire political framework was not the best moment to go and see The Dark Knight. That Joker chap certainly makes a persuasive argument.

Followers of the warrantless wiretapping program in the US should note that, yes, that was Senator Leahy who simultaneously stood against telecom immunity in the Senate, and stood up to the Joker in the fundraising scene. Wonder if he demanded another notable particular plot twist in the last moments of the film?

I have two minutes to post this in time for Saturday, so quickly: if you’re using Ubuntu Hardy, and you have libflash-support installed because you want sound and Flash (greedy), try this out. There’s a bug in Adobe’s closed source flash plugin which makes it crash frequently with libflash-support, but using nspluginwrapper will stop it taking out the entire browser when it dies.

Comments Off on Dark Knight, Ubuntu Flash Sounds

2008-07-25»

I’ve found it kind of odd to watch in myself that for the past decade I’ve steadfastedly declined to announce my politics to anyone, even to close friends. It’s not because I’m indifferent about politics; it’s because I’ve felt that about the best label for what I believe has been tarnished by association.

So, here is what I whisper to myself at night, and get teased by my partners for slyly adopting at home and furiously evading the rest of the time. I guess I’m a… No, dammit, I am a libertarian.

I’m just not that sort of libertarian.

I’m a libertarian not because I think that white Western males like me are suffering under some terrible yoke of hardship: I’m a libertarian because I think that I’m extraordinarily privileged in terms of the freedoms that I do have; and that I believe that it is this privilege that provides the engine of my many other advantages. As someone who believes that, I naturally seek to spread that as much freedom to as wide a group as possible.

I sort of get the fist-waving anger at high taxes and your right to smoke down the pub, but it’s not really what I’m here for. I’m a low-hanging-fruit kind of guy, so I believe in crafting tools for people that will expand their freedom more widely, and building a culture and institutions that permit the maximum amount of freedom and the minimal amount of coercion. I’m an optimist, ultimately, about the power of self-determination to make the world a better place.

What I see online presents another view of the inhabitants of Libertaria. A lot of self-identified libertarians present themselves online as a victim of government and of other tyrants in the world (including, but not limited to, liberals, conservatives, the mainstream media, feminists, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, workers, the elite, and people who censor comments on their noticeboards). At the same time, others’ misfortunes are presented as their own personal responsibility, for which no-one else can and should give a flying Philadelphia fart. Charity should only be dispensed to the truly hopeless; changing the conditions of the hopeless is an impossible task we should leave to the fates, not each other, and certainly not the speaker.

I don’t think any of those positions automatically arise from a belief in freedom.  I do think they lead you to be a bit of a dick.

When you actually meet a libertarian, much of the time, you’ll find the online stance gives an incredibly misleading impression. If anything, they seem more optimistic about how the world works, and more understanding of their own good fortune and the tribulations of others. They’re smart, and charitable and generous, and less doctrinaire than most political thinkers on every point.  Also fun. Obviously, they then accidentally shoot you with their concealed firearm and then finish you off with second-hand smoke, but, hey, you should see what the Randians would do to you.

Of course, you also meet libertarians that are dicks, too, but not really in any higher proportion than any other group. (I’ve long ago abandoned my search for a set of ideological principles that magically turn you into a nice person: I think the final straw was meeting a total arse of a Quaker. How can you be a Quaker, for God’s sake, and still be horrible? Truly, God is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tortilla.)

Anyway, I think I would have still come out as a libertarian, if it hadn’t been for the tremendous schism in the libertarian community over the response to 9/11 and the Iraqi war. If you knew a real libertarian, dear reader, you would be amazed by how many came out in support of Operation Flail Like A Dangerous Hyperpowered Idiot. If, by contrast, you gained your knowledge of libertarian thought post-2001, you’d assume that they were all about the “anti-idiotarian” flag-waving.

The split freaked me, and many of my friends, the hell out. Nothing to me seemed more counterintuitive, more contradictory, more challenging to my own beliefs than seeing libertarians who devote their life to campaigning for the minimization of the State’s involvement in their lives enthusiastically encouraging the world’s largest State military to rampage in the lives (and deaths) of thousands of individuals as a co-ordinated response to the murderous actions of a handful of extremists with no connection to those targetted. If this was performed by a non-State actor, would they have supported it? If so, would they accept the same action taken upon themselves?

And yet, somehow, this became the dominant idea in Net libertarian circles in both the US and the UK. In the end, I had to admit to myself that most of the libertarians I knew worked on a moral calculus that was unconnected to their love of freedom. Which is fine, but it’s not my moral calculus — or indeed my cultural bent. If I was going to identify as libertarian, I’d end up being painted as a special kind of traitorous, deluded, idiotarian, Dhimmist pseudo-libertarian, and frankly if I wanted that kind of ostracisation, I’d join traditional political in-fighting.

Now, it’s my suspicion that I’m not the only one in this position. I think that the whole Ron Paul movement was representative of the wish many to have a libertarianism they could trust not to claim that “using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense” is an honorable view. I’m not a Paulite, but he definitely appealed to a similar bloc of believers. What I think needs to happen is for this group of exiles to coalesce; after that I think that the moment is ripe for the flurry of ideas that marks the beginning of a new (or revitalised) political position.

I guess it’s because I’ve been waiting for that coalescence for so long that I’m finally admitting that I  want to be a part of it.

(I hereby pre-emptively declare this “Post I will most regret having comments on”)

18 Comments »

2008-07-22»

One of the funnier conversations I watched at BlogHer was between some big league blogger talk to a small crowd. The big leaguer was talking about how she’d built up traffic by creating a community around her, and linked to everyone else, and written positive comments across the Net, and held carnivals, and proptly replied to email from visitors. She then explained that she was now really guilty about all the mail she didn’t answer, and how her community was always needed tending because some drama was blowing up, and how much time she had to spend reading and commenting on other people’s posts. The listeners looked in horror; eventually one hesitantly said “So I write online because I’m introverted. Why would I want to deal with anyone else?” Cue buzz of agreement from everyone else hiding under the desk, including me.

Speaking from adjacent experience, I’d say that one of the pains of doing something for fame and fortune (apart from the usual lack of fortune), is that the incredibly low quality of  mass-produced fame. I may have mentioned tangentially before, but if you scale up who knows your work, you often end up with fans whom you can’t stand. For many, this is quite disheartening. How are you supposed to value your own work when it appears that most of the people who love it are idiots?

If anything, the effect of this online is worse than in Ye Olde Traditionale Media. We all know people who produce great work, but are afflicted with cesspits of comments that hang on their every word. The beauty of new media is that you’re in direct contact with your readers: the horror is that you’re in direct contact with people who you never want to meet, but who feel that they have some sort of relationship with you.

In the end, the conversation moved away from “building traffic” and we ended up talking about how slowly you can grow a blog: avoiding ending up with a mass-produced audience, and instead taking the time to organically grow a smaller, perhaps more costly, but ultimately more satisfying bunch of readers.

Like you, of course. Group hug!

4 Comments »

2008-07-21»

I got two surprise packages today. One turned was a pile of Jazz disks and semi-ancient copies of Analog from my past, which my old flatmate Gavin was relaying back through time to me. The other was a completely mysterious consignment of dalek cookies from New York. Given that in today’s mail I’d also managed to be mentioned in Those Slightly Mispelled Anonymous Internet Threats, I had a moment of mild paranoia. Surely if you were going to poison someone, you wouldn’t actually go to the extent of cooking them in the shape of daleks? But then, maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think. Maybe the design was supposed to lull me into a false sense of fannish security…

I spotted the Free Software Foundation trying to gently explain to people why the iPhone wasn’t something you’d want to buy. I know the standard response to this which is — oh, but man, it’s lovely! The counter-response is often something like ACTUALLY I THINK YOU’LL FIND THAT YOU CAN DO JUST THE SAME WITH A NEO FREERUNNER WITH GNOME ON IT AND THEN SOME SORT OF USB 3G DONGLE SELLOTAPED TO IT.

My official line on inter-platform rivalry, inherited from the NTK position paper on the topic, is that all software sucks and all hardware sucks. After years of using all kinds of shonky equipment: proprietary, non-proprietary, simple, or hallucinogenically complex, my main rule (like Mark Pilgrim’s) is simply to maximise the amount of unique and valuable data i can extract when the platform inevitably turns into the steaming pile of inoperable blast furnace slag that is the fate of all operating systems. It’s one of the more practical reasons why I’ve ended up edging toward open source: in the end proprietary set-ups grows so keen to trap you, that I end up being cornered in the corner using Vim and mutt, and if that’s all I’m doing, I might as well go to the happy place where noone wil actively attempt to step between me and my bits when it all goes to hell.

That said, I do agree that MacOS and the iPhone, on a “ooh that’s nice” level, really do kick the living shit out of open source platforms at the moment. It’s not all fancy pyrotechnics and the Steve-Jobs-As-Hypnotoad. And, frankly, I am totally willing to entertain that Jobs-built kit will continue to win on that front.

It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.

2 Comments »

2008-07-20»

So, I finally put my old hand-crafted blogging software, deadhorse, to rest and moved over to WordPress. I’m sure I’ve put something out of place, but now you have comments in which to tell me how badly I’ve screwed up. Enjoy your new powers while you can, earthloids.

My switch over was really helped by careful cross-examination of the attendees at BlogHer, which I’ve been sculking around for the last couple of days. I spoke at their final day conference, answering (in a non-lawyer, hand-waving way) questions about blogger’s legal rights. One of the things I’m realising from these conversations is that a lot of people don’t realise that EFF has a finely-honed referral service for online folks (especially bloggers) who worry they might be in legal trouble, or are facing a DMCA takedown, or some other out of context legal problem . Eva, our referral co-ordinator, has an incredible amount of resources to hand, and while EFF itself doesn’t take on every case, we often know the right person to put you in contact with. E-mail info@eff.org if you need help.

Anyway, in turn, I shamelessly the other  BlogHer’s attendees advice on how to set-up and run a blog.  These are women here who scale across from casual bloggers to folks running sizeable businesses from their blogs, and have vast spanning networks of information and influence that I don’t usually come into contact with. I definitely think that’s a product of the conference continuing for a few years, and generating its own web connections. I remember someone I knew attending a few years back and saying that they recognised the excitement of a new generation of bloggers arriving, but felt a bit alienated by it. That’s understandable, I guess, but the organizers seem to have spent a lot of time moving on from that early excitement  to ensure it didn’t fossilize into an “old girl’s club” of the same few figures. I get the impression that they really go out of their way to find new people (and of course they have a very wide brief to do so). When you work on deliberately maintaining that diversity for a few years — and yet you still have some binding quality to hold the whole thing together — the coverage and breadth of your attendees really helps drive the thing.

It made me think about the vague rules we had for Extreme Computing, which became OpenTech. Back then the idea was to “cross the streams” — force together geek clans that hadn’t really met, but we thought would be interested in each other’s work. The standard example I’d use was that roboticists would really like to hang out with amateur rocketry enthusiasts, even though there was (at that time) no real world venue for them to do so. Maker’s Faire does this very well, almost literally fulfilling the prophecy. The challenge is coming up with an umbrella that everyone likes the idea of standing under, without it just being restricted to people you already know. Dale and co’s genius of combining the craft and construction communities under the banner of “people who make” was brilliant in that direction. I think that rather broader, omnidirectional mini-conferences like Interesting08 work well, too.

I’m such a sucker for quixotically attempting to transplant things across the Atlantic that I shouldn’t even be considering this, but a British BlogHer or She’s Geeky would be so good. A few friends and I were idly kicking around a list of awesome women speakers; we came up with dozens who we see speak too rarely. It would be such a good excuse of an umbrella to get them to all speak in one place.

4 Comments »

2008-07-19»

Prompted by Dave Birch‘s talk on digital money at OpenTech, I’ve been going on a long mental escapade through my own political roots, and the history of the Net.

I think that it’s inevitable that the dominant explanatory context and the direction of successful advances in technology and society heavily influence the politics one subscribes to. I grew up cheerleading microcomputers and later the Net, and lived through the vindication of their (material) success, so I’m naturally going to be a fan of decentralisation — actually, that’s a pretty empty statement. I don’t think anyone actually comes out as against decentralisation these days. Nobody says “Me, I’m a big fan of increased concentrations of power.” It’s like being against democracy — by the time you’ve explained why you have your doubts about it, no-one is listening to you any more. The main question on this topic in our time is not “is decentralisation good for the body politic?” but “how much of it should we have?”.

Which is not to say that the conventional answer would be “a lot”. People get rather shifty if you start on any project of power dilution, because such projects represent a loss of control to almost anyone who matters in the current system: even Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition want something to remain loyal to. You can disagree with the direction a ship is taking without wanting someone to come along and pull out the steering mechanism (or replacing the captain with a voting committee of the passengers).

Decentralisation deliberately pulls power away from the center. Either it works, and total control ebbs away. Or it doesn’t, and power gets re-concentrated in entirely random (or worse, actively dangerous) hands. Since almost anyone making a decision to decentralise has at least some access to the current levers of power, that makes it an unpleasantly radical decision to make.

Those who first built the Net and first to be drawn to it (the two groups are inextricably merged) were fans of decentralised power structures.(One of my favourite second-hand stories of the early years of the Net was from someone who wasn’t involved, but was around the research labs at the time. He claimed that the ARPANETters were always the flakes who everyone else avoided; obsessives out to pursue an idea that no-one else took seriously. If you wanted to have tenure in computer science, you stayed well away from packet-switching loons back then. He may have been bitter.)

If you’re a real fan of decentralisation — and your sole lever on power, as a packet-switching loon, is designing and distributing instruments that deliver decentralisation to everyone — the question “how much” becomes much more pertinent. Just how far can and should you take this? What happens when you turn all the dials to 100%?

Anarchy is the answer to that question. The truly hardened advocates would then say: “And would that be a bad thing?”

Those hardened advocates, in the middle history of the Net, were the cypherpunks. The strongest statement on their position was — is — the Cyphernomicon, and in particular Tim May’s Cypherpunk Manifesto: a prediction and prophecy of a radically-decentralised world, created inevitably by virtue of the widespread use of strong cryptography.

Would it be a bad thing? Just as it’s hard to cheer on extreme centralisation of power as a good thing, it’s hard to imagine complete elimination of central power as a good thing. I’m not saying that you can’t advocate for it: in fact, most people in liberal democracies in our times default to advocating for it, with the assumption that it’ll never get so far as to turn into something horrific (or transformatively beautiful). Call it a lack of idealism, call it a failure of creativity. It’s just hard to imagine it. Go on: imagine a world without governments. Despite what John Lennon (or Vladimir Lenin) claims, it’s not easy at all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that difficulty, because I think it illuminates what we want from decentralised power, and what we think the practical limits are. It also challenges us to see beyond them.

One of the most vivid positive descriptions of a world under the Cypherpunk model of anarchy would be David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. But Friedman’s book is a series of arguments, not a vivid picture of daily life in such an environment. The closest he gets is a depiction of what he says is a close equivalent to the anarcho-capitalist vision, medieval Iceland.

Right now, I’m intensely enjoying S. Andrew Swann’s Hostile Takeover Trilogy, a space opera which includes as its backdrop an anarchist planet of Bakunin. It’s a great counterbalance to re-reading these broadly positive depictions of extreme decentralisation: Bakunin is a rough and vicious world, the sort of anarchy that most people would imagine would follow the collapse of an all-powerful State. On the other hand, it also paints a strong picture of sympathetic characters who rather like Bakunin’s backdrop. They remind me of the cypherpunks. Is that what extreme and irreversible decentralisation would lead to: a world order only a cypherpunk could love? Or a place where ultimately, any group could find comfort and freedom?

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