The web's original sin, and its possible redemption

Anil Dash made a good point last December, but he also missed something. The rot was there from the beginning. The original architectural sin of the Web was that, in the name of security, we made web browsers unable to communicate with each other directly. This made browsers completely dependent on server intermediaries, which inevitably centralizes power in the hands of those who can afford to run servers. Shortly thereafter, web browsers crowded out all other Internet client software, and that was all she wrote.

This was not the original design of the Internet. The Internet is an end-to-end system, not an end-to-middleman-to-end system. There is no fundamental reason that the software you run on your personal devices must be neutered so that it can't talk directly to other personal devices.

So, the current state of the Internet could be a temporary condition. Eventually, clients might regain the ability to open socket connections to each other directly, with discovery mediated by an open distributed protocol. Servers will still be important, but it will become possible again to write peer-to-peer protocols, and to distribute peer-to-peer client software that (unlike, say, Usenet nodes) has true mass-user accessibility and appeal.

Think of it this way. It is completely infeasible for Facebook to run its massive server farm without demanding some toll. But it is probably feasible for you to share status updates and pictures with the people you personally know, using only the spare computing power and connectivity that you all collectively own. You don't need a 1000-CPU-hour MapReduce to share baby pictures with your extended family. You need blob storage, an email-like store-and-forward messaging protocol, and a pool of hosts that's available and connected enough to distribute, say, 100 MB of data per person per week. If you're a middle-class citizen of the First World, there's an excellent chance that you and your social circle own enough computing resources to support this infrastructure already — provided those resources could be utilized properly.

Thus the most interesting thing about WebRTC is not even the real-time communication it enables (although that's pretty interesting!). WebRTC is the first step towards enabling users to send nontrivial quantities of bits directly to each other, traversing through common firewall setups, without a server intermediary and without any native client software other than a web browser.

However, WebRTC is only the first crack in the wall. Fully cutting clients loose from the server layer will be challenging. Peer-to-peer web apps will have to operate in an intermittently disconnected state, and serve content to each other reliably without the crutch of a reliable web host paid for by somebody else's money. This is a challenging computer science problem, involving aspects of system and protocol design, software engineering, and human computer interaction.

It will also be a challenging business problem: how do you convince people to use this application rather than the ones they are already used to? Facebook works well enough, if you squint and ignore confidentiality, transparency, and control with respect to your personal data. And disregarding hardware and networking costs, how does the software development itself get funded? Eben Moglen is an interesting thinker, and it seems true that when you spin the planet, software flows through the network, but I am not convinced the current induced thereby is strong enough to satisfy all our software needs.

But if we are truly to regain "the web we lost", we may have to hack around the fundamental economics of the web that replaced it.

Decloak!

A few small announcements...

First, I'll be posting under my common name now [Update 18 April 2013] as soon as I finish wrangling my Google accounts into proper condition, which is proving more annoying than expected. I posted under "Cog" for a long time out of shyness. I assumed people I met would, from time to time, search for my name on the web, and I didn't want this blog to be the first thing they saw.* Now that I'm older, I care less. Blame aging-related disinhibition, or a more secure social and economic position (I'm in a committed relationship; I'm not so worried about prospective employers turning me down anymore); or maybe I'm just more at peace with myself, who knows.

Second, and perhaps relatedly, I recently left Google, so the various complicated disclaimers that I used to apply to technology-related writing will no longer apply. On the other hand, I still have some unsold Google stock left over from my tenure there, so you can continue to consider me a bought-and-paid-for mouthpiece if you like.

Third, as the link in the previous paragraph demonstrates, I occasionally post on Plus when something doesn't seem substantial enough to be here. (Actually, I'm decloaking here partly because I want to write longer pieces under my name and crosspost the link there.) If you follow this blog, you may find that feed worthwhile as well. I don't love Plus, but I think the most plausible path to ending the unipolar Facebook-controlled social web is for people to contribute to the growth of Facebook's competitors. Google's not quite the champion of the open web that it once was, but hoping for a permanent champion from capitalism is a dubious prospect. The alignment of any particular organization with the path of righteousness is a temporary condition. Look around at the forces at play in the world, and ally yourself with those that seem, at the moment, to offer the best hope for movement in the right direction.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I've gone through the archives and deleted or lightly edited a few posts. Mostly I've been deleting linkrot — this blog started out as a way to clean out my bookmarks file, and thus many of my old posts consisted of a now-broken link and some cryptic text — but I've also taken the liberty of deleting some stuff that simply seemed, in my judgment, like a waste of time for any conceivable future reader. Yes, this is a bit of a blogging faux pas, but I honestly believe that the archives are more useful now that there's somewhat less chaff. If you really care to see the full unvarnished past, you can of course consult archive.org, although I warn you that you'll never get those moments of your limited lifespan back.

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*Note that I've always used the hapax legomenon "char bootred cataphora" to allow anyone to find me in the other direction, going from this blog to my common identity.

The death of refrigerators

Suppose that, around the time microwave ovens were invented, business analysts had a market category for "electrical devices which change the temperature of food".

Now, in the decade following the mass-market introduction of microwave ovens, you would be able to draw lots of graphs showing that microwaves were taking over the so-called "thermofluxion" industry from refrigerators, which were experiencing an astonishing relative decline. But if you had seen home appliance geeks circulating photocopied 'zines breathlessly proclaiming the "death of refrigerators" then I think you would have greeted this speculation with skepticism.

It turns out that thermofluxion is not just one thing. There are different thermofluxion devices and they have different uses. Some households have just one or the other but most people eventually want both, if they have the money. To some extent, having one even increases your desire for the other: when you have a refrigerator, a microwave oven becomes vastly more useful.

Application to recent punditry in other fields left as an exercise for the reader.

Mass shootings, terrorism, and Columbine

Brief followup to the last post: via cshalizi's pinboard, here's an article that taught me something new about Columbine:

[In his book Columbine, author Dave] Cullen reconstructed the shooters' state of mind based on their own extensive written and filmed records and countless interviews with friends, family, and law enforcement. He concluded that Eric Harris was a psychopath, a young man without empathy or conscience, who coldly manipulated the deeply depressed Dylan Klebold into joining his scheme.

It was clear from the boys' meticulously documented plans that Columbine was an act of non-ideological domestic terrorism. Their goal was not merely to shoot bullies. They sought to first responders and parents with a mass shooting and then blow everyone up with huge bombs. Harris hoped this spectacular televised violence would touch of some sort of revolution. The bombs failed to detonate but the intent was clear.

If this is correct, then the Columbine shootings were in fact terrorism. It was violence staged against civilians specifically to generate an emotional reaction and an attendant policy reaction. However ill-conceived, weird, and amateurish, it appears to meet the definition.

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Addendum: Incidentally this does not, of course, indicate that we should deal with terrorists of all types in the same way. The wall-to-wall media coverage of Columbine clearly played into the first half of the killers' plans. The most effective way to defeat this particular pair of terrorists would have been for the national media to ignore them entirely. The shooting should have been a purely local news story, focusing on memorializing the victims, and coverage of the killers should have been confined to wonky academic criminal science case studies.

Are "lone gunman" school shootings terrorism?

I try not to take Twitter seriously, because I find its format frustratingly hostile to clear thinking, but once in a while something provokes me enough that I have to write.

People who think the Connecticut school shooting is "terrorism" are merely living evidence that our discourse has completely degraded the meaning of the term.

Terrorism is not a synonym for "violence you don't like". Terrorism is violence against civilians calculated to elicit an emotional and policy reaction. Properly understood, terrorism is a tactic of asymmetric warfare, no more and no less. It is not terrorism when a lunatic kills people because they are conveniently available targets, and then commits suicide for no particular reason. (Terrorist bombers often commit suicide, but only because it is necessary to deliver the bomb successfully without being captured and interrogated; if they could deliver the same bomb to the same target without risk of capture or death, they generally would.)

Incidentally, for the same reason, the United States' drone strikes are not terrorism either. The US does not perform drone strikes to provoke the Pakistani population into a policy response. It performs drone strikes mostly for the simple utilitarian reason that it wants certain people dead, and (international law be damned) those people shall therefore be killed.

But this is a language game, and I am playing the role of the futile prescriptivist holding the line against a huge tide of people who would prefer that "terrorism" simply be a synonym for "doubleplus-ungood". A perfectly accurate phrase like "heinous criminal violence" is simply not enough for these people: they demand that the T-word be deployed. And in the end, descriptivism is the correct school of linguistics, and thus in the long run I will inevitably be wrong. Eventually, terrorism will be a synonym for "doubleplus-ungood" and a useful tool of thought will have been blunted into uselessness, like a scalpel bashed repeatedly against a brick wall.

This reminds me of how we now call everything "war" — war on drugs, war on poverty, war on women, war on Christmas — except when we pay our armed forces to shoot at another nation's people, in which case we call it "kinetic military action" or whatever.

Does this matter? I can't say for certain, but it seems to me that our national policy response to terrorism is muddled in part because our thinking about terrorism is muddled. I claim you can draw a connection between people who throw around "terrorism" with such carelessness, and the ridiculous anti-terrorism policy of the Bush years, when we reacted to terrorism by invading a country that had not committed terrorist acts against us, sacrificed our liberties to defend our "freedom", and spent untold blood and treasure to prevent terrorists from achieving their goal of provoking America into losing blood and treasure.