zlacker

The Web will cease to be an open system, and will become a glorified fax machine and cable TV network. Those few who care will turn to more esoteric, incomplete, user-unfriendly but open systems. Eventually one of those systems will gain popularity with nerds, academics, and weirdos. They'll fill it with information and media they compile and create in their spare time, and it will interoperate in useful ways that for-profit corporate networks can't. Over time it will gain popularity and "normal" people will start using it too. Money will start to pour in, the network will fill up with garbage, and then corporations will come in and take it over and lock it down.

Rinse repeat.

>>gary_0+(OP)
Except in the age of hyperinformation, you will see such fringe systems pump and dump on the time frame of a few months, not decades like it used to. You would pray that it would not happen and the thing that you are using right now will not gain that kind of attention.

>>gary_0+(OP)
> Those few who care will turn to more esoteric, incomplete, user-unfriendly but open systems.

A lot of that has been happening for a long time now.

>>JohnFe+m2
Care to share some examples?

>>gattil+l5
Just talking about subcultures/communities that I've been a part of. Several of them only have a minimal presence on the public web, having moved to a network of private sites. A couple of them have assembled what amounts to a "shadow internet" that uses the internet for an encrypted communications channel but provides its own mailservers, IM servers etc. that don't interact with the internet proper.

And, locally, there have been two ISPs set up (one by me and my friends) that aren't meant for public use, but to supply service to smaller groups. The one I set up was to supply internet service to a remote neighborhood that isn't likely to get reasonable commercial internet in the near or medium future.

Those two ISPs supply internet access, but they also operate an intranet that is mostly decoupled from the public internet.

All baby steps, and nobody is 100% "off the grid", so to speak, but it's a trend that started long ago and seems to be gaining a bit of momentum.

My prediction is that the web will ultimately be just for commercial use (it's already 90% there), and there will be a whole bunch of tiny networks -- that may or may not portal to the internet -- that will fill the needs that the internet is increasingly unable to fill.

>>gary_0+(OP)
ISPs will not be letting that traffic through. So no little romantic underground. No cycle; the internet is happening just once, and we're in it. The assumption that everything is necessarily part of a little epicycle of history somehow mashes together Whig history and and an inert nihilism. Don't worry, nothing matters?

We're not in a movie. When they close the open internet, there will be no reason for them to open it back up. Everybody's Playstation will still work. Facebook will still work. Twitter will still work, but it will be all blue checks.

In the future they may not even sell general purpose computers to the public that can access the internet. The network will kick them off as unsigned machines. Maybe they won't let anything on the internet that is capable of running illegal or unlicensed encryption.

The open systems will have to be physical places where we go meet each other, and don't bring our phones. Of course, they could make you carry your ID in your phone (for a few years, there'd just be a $100 charge for a physical ID until they eventually just phased them out), or make you carry cash in your phone, so how could you meet up in person if they didn't want you to?

If we're writing stories.

>>JohnFe+N8
Are there people writing about this?

edit: I'm studying ways to facilitate decentralized decisionmaking in small permissioned networks.

>>pessim+Rl
If we're talking cyberpunk dystopias, we'd have to resort to hand-soldered audio couplers that use our locked-down phones as modems. Once the next Android/iOS update detects and blocks unauthorized binary carriers, we'll have to steganographically hide our traffic in fake voice calls. Crappy baud rate, but good enough for encrypted text. Augment with sneakernet and local hard-wired networks running under lawns and dorm room carpets.

Although in this grim future where all communication is monitored and censored, people like you and I will probably be up in the hills in the rebel camps, and open networking protocols might be low on our list of priorities.

>>gary_0+Js
Most of what I talked about they've already tried to make happen.

>>gary_0+Js
You already can't run modems over the phone network anymore. Modern noise reduction algorithms helpfully remove as much modem data as they can.

>>gary_0+Js
> If we're talking cyberpunk dystopias, we'd have to resort to hand-soldered audio couplers that use our locked-down phones as modems

…and they will make us use lead free solder.

>>pessim+Pn
On the public web? I assume so, but I don't know. I only know about the communities I am a part of.

>>kuschk+Op1
Now I kind of want to build one just for the challenge. Analyze what frequencies can get through, and reverse engineer the phone company's codec so I can send a pirate signal, like a phreaker of old.

Fun fact: You can no longer do such a project in software on stock Android. They locked down the voice audio API.