The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)
Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge.
The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots.
We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents.
But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.
I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).
I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.
Mind you, the fact that it was events on the Isthmus of Panama that were one of the main causes of the union is fairly interesting:
The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.
And this is not cynic talking ...
1. Has strong norms against castle seizure or abandonment of the king's duties in kingdom upkeep
2. Has a federation of non-king castle owners strong and unified enough to force the former point.
The reality is that if you truly want to get rid of digital castles and kings, you're essentially going to have to operate a distributed digital firehose (cynically: digital sewage pipe) that anyone can submit to with no preconditions whatsoever. For many reasons (first one that jumps to mind: spam, second reason: illegal shit, third reason: trolls) most people don't want to operate something like that, and that's before the law gets involved.
Pet projects exist of course, but pretty much zero of them are made to scale up against the idea of truly nuking kingdoms; the closest to a realization of this sort of network is something similar to TORs peer2peer, and you can consider pretty much all legal risks of running a TOR exit node for a service like this.
There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit.
The open web.
We can build any web we want, at any time.
And build we should.
All large communities were small once.
Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow.
Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still.
And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.
Wide open.
For anything to build.
More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
There’s a few other neat technologies that are toying with being social network protocols.
There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.
We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.
It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.
This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.
A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).
Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.
But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.
You can still build a website
You can still create opt-in email newsletters
And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.
It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.
But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.
If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.
In practice, unhappy nobles would often rather deny their necessary cooperation (at war or administering the land in peace) and thus force the king to make some amends and tradeoffs.
Passive aggressivity isn't a modern concept :)
Google's relevance has been changing with alternate means to discovery (perplexity, chatgpt) than their search.
It seems search engines want to know it's real people behind content.
Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?
But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not. The culture of creating more than consuming gave way to consuming content and scrolling becoming the default behaviour that was conditioned into users.
Using a platform is one thing, reducing your platform risk by finding the people who will be your supporters is the real purpose of other platforms in other cases... coming to your platform.
As people start to see themselves as a platform, I suspect this will change.
Not really. There are some people walking around with giant teddy bears[0], but that is entirely for show.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.
Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.
Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
Unfortunately Sierra had to accept the offer.
Well, there is the practical purpose of legitimacy. It may seem too soft for modern power theoreticians, but the legitimate king has something that cannot be acquired by raw power, and that puts somewhat of a damper on potential rebels. Not on each and every one of them, of course, but it has a wide effect. Killing or deposing the legitimate monarch was a serious spiritual crime for which one could pay not just by his earthly life, but in the afterlife as well.
Even usurpers like William the Conqueror tried to obtain some legitimacy by concocting stories why they and nobody else should be kings.
We still see some reverbations of that principle today. Many authoritarians love to "roleplay elections", even though they likely could do it like Eritrea and just not hold any. It gives them a veneer of legitimacy.
Are there any common terms one could research?
Castles are thus more like domains where once you take hold of it, even the big powers have a hard time taking it away from you again
What's weird is how deeply held this view is on HN, by people who should know better.
> Building a castle is a very good idea if you seek to entrench yourself in the power structure of the kingdom. To do this, you must be able credibly mount a defence of the castle to discourage forcible eviction without major mutual destruction (cough too big to fail).
> Don't build a wooden cottage and expect it function like a castle with a garrison under your command. Even if you slowly expand it to a stone mansion, if you don't maintain a garrison, it won't work as a castle.
Sadly, building an game on someone else's platform is more like setting up a cottage on the land. You might be able to get some farming done and survive, but if the lord fancies the grain, you're out of luck. But also good luck finding land to farm without a lord. Peasant.
I think the theory that luring the producers by throwing them in my face, is a really good one. And one I haven't though of.
Then, of course, legitimacy itself is culturally defined, and in some places being able to depose the monarch would be ipso facto proof of said monarch's retroactive illegitimacy. The notion of "divine right of kings" is far from universal.
Moreover, Gabe Newell always had a controlling stake in Valve ever since 1996, so that prevents any shenanigans. There are comparatively few shareholders (than a public company) and they were all long-term, since Valve will likely never go public, certainly no year soon, or even be privately acquired; while Newell controls it.
In this instance your complaint is about corporate governance rather than tech; (how far back did tech people stop being in control at Sierra?)
Speak for yourself. Sent from my Librem 5.
Librem seems nice.
I was more referring to email accounts.
Is your email with librem too?