Excellent article on Diaspora and the paradoxical way people deal with networks and technology.
This is the depressing Matrix-like paradox of technological progression. Even as each new discovery empowers us, we also risk a kind of slavish attachment, inertia and dependence. In fact, nothing short of government intervention stops the beast of disruption from mutating into something ugly. And even by then, usually, the effects have already been felt.
If you’re living now, the future depends upon the path that Facebook chooses for you. “Does Facebook start to copy Google," which advocates open alternatives to the offerings of austere Apple, “or does it start to copy Apple?” If Facebook picks Apple? Says Wu: “We’ll be in a very different future.”
We are in a culture of profits-no-matter-what so, they all want to be Apple. The margins always make me think “a lot of people are getting screwed” but the margins, man. On the other side, users don’t mind the slavish attachment.
He called it the “Freedom Box,” and with it, users could theoretically communicate directly with each other using peer-to-peer technology, circumventing the control of dictatorial data middlemen.
But developers make another photo app or Twitter client instead of using open protocol to build stuff like that. Developers are not so great at understanding long term things, I suspect. And also, profit, money first. It’s not always been this way but the app store madness took over. I blame developers and services like web hosting for not having been able to make things simpler for users, like Facebook Twitter and Tumblr did. WordPress is already “too complex” for people, so it’s also people’s fault because it’s not that complex (but web hosting is a nightmare), it’s just that they don’t see freedom of speech as worth it.
Whatever succeeds Facebook, it won’t be owned by Mark Zuckerberg, but it also might not be owned by the people. It might fall somewhere in between.
The question to me is, will making insane profit still be the thing we use to measure success? If so, it will be the same problem over and over.