
The web you know is dying - skeltoac
http://evbogue.com/
======
mindstab
From the site which seems to be down:

\----------------------------------

The web you know is dying

I'm drinking an espresso shot. It's half-cold. There's still gunk in my eyes
from sleeping.

I've been thinking a lot about how I use the Internet. A year ago, I nearly
vanished from the public web because I had an intuitive feeling the
centralized web was a backdoor to the government. Now, as the dust settles
from our collective experiences over the past week, I know this to be true.

So I'm revisiting some of my older habits. I'm using Tor to visit websites.
I've installed Torbirdy on Thunderbird. I'm back on Hyperboria) using cjdns.
If you want to send me Bitcoins, I'll take them.

I continue to try to find ways to communicate over the web. Forward security
is a must. Distributed peer to peer social is a must. These are two seperate
problems.

The kids on Hyperboria have the right idea: if you don't want to be spied on,
evolve beyond reach. I'm doing just that.

Distributed everything is where we're going.

The way I see it, if you're still on centralized social networks, you're part
of the problem. You can't stick your fingers in your ears anymore and scream
'lalallalal'. All of your information is being recorded, forever, in the nice
little boxes you type into all day long.

I'm running more and more under the pseudonym of Ven Portman. I'm powering up
a hyperboria-only website at venportman.com. Evbogue.com will continue to be
my stable public web presence. The madness will happen on Hyperboria.

The centralized Internet you know is dying. We're scattering to darknets
everywhere to look for what we'll build next.

–Ev Bogue July 4 2013 undisclosed location

~~~
jmillikin
If one's goal is to be anonymous, why publicly associate an old site with a
new identity? Doesn't that defeat the point? Now, nothing done under the name
"Ven Portman" will be anonymous because that name is forever linked to the
author's previous identity of Ev Bogue.

~~~
sliverstorm
He said it was to be a pseudonym. Pseudonyms are used for pseudonymity-
"casual" anonymity that is not intended to hold up under examination and
scrutiny.

~~~
jmillikin
The typical purpose of a pseudonym is to prevent some set of people from
connecting certain activities to your legal identity, while still permitting
reputation to be accumulated.

It's quite possible for pseudonyms to remain completely disconnected from
one's legal identity, even under scrutiny. For example, merchants on Silk Road
use pseudonyms to manage buyer/seller trust, but still take care to avoid
being arrested for drug possession.

The important thing is which entity is considered to be the "adversary". If a
teenager just wants to hide angsty reddit posts from her classmates, that
doesn't require retreating to a crypto-nerd darknet.

The author feels that he must abandon the open internet because it's being
monitored by the NSA. This implies that he considers the NSA to be his
adversary, in which case his choice to link identities has in one step undone
all of his sacrifices. There's no point in using a pseudonym on a darknet if
your opponent knows about the darknet and knows your pseudonym.

------
mrgreenfur
While I agree with everything he's said, his assertion that people should
learn HTML5/CSS, deploy with Node on a VPS, (etc) to "use the internet" really
misses the point. Makers like us will always know these things. The problem is
that 99% of people will never bother. How can they resist centralization when
they are too busy being experts in other things to learn so much web tech? We
need to find a way for those decentralized networks to be the cool ones. We
need to get the mass on them, de facto.

Before that we probably need the surveillance state to get scarier. And I mean
a handful of very, very high profile cases. Or maybe we can bring it to
everyone via a browser plugin that lets you know when you're content is likely
to be flagged by admins/etc.

How else can we popularize decentralized services?

Edit: oops. I read both this and his "distributed services" post and just
realized I'm replying to both.

~~~
ownagefool
I find his articles really hard to read, here are 5 simple reasons:-

> Wordpress exists. You don't need to be a maker to use something like this,
> anyone with the motivation can.

> It's faddish, the mention of nodeJS as a requirment has me rolling my eyes
> into my fucking brain.

> Actually, most important content is decentralized. If facebook died
> tomorrow, there would be some value lost, but it'd be hardly the end of the
> internet.

> "We're going distributed". Why? Because you woke up one morning and decided?
> Because you've gave it some thought?

> He doesn't seem interested in what we'll lose when we're decentralized. Does
> he understand the drawbacks?

There is some really good content on HN, loads of it, but this really isn't it
and I'm not saying that because I disagree I think the internet should be a
series of peer nodes like it was first designed to be.

However, I don't think we need a self appointed spokes persons to achieve
this, it's already there, and if you want to discuss decentralizing major
services like facebook, I'd like to see, on a tech site, someone with a
technical solution that attempts to mitigate what we'd lose.

------
amirmc
How ironic.

The same author has another post on the front page, which he posted on
medium.com [1], which is still reachable and has generated some interesting
discussion. However, a post on his own site has seemingly been brought down by
the weight of HN traffic and now no-one can discuss it.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991576)

~~~
rheide
No. The author has merely proven his own point that it's harder to make an
espresso yourself than it is to order one at Starbucks. It doesn't mean you
shouldn't try.

And look at what happened: someone at HN posted the content of the post here.
People will always find ways around things, especially people who can do more
than just push a button.

------
lotsofcows
I don't understand - many people who seem technology aware sound surprised to
discover that anything published digitally can't be unpublished.

My friends and I were already aware of this when messing around on the school
LAN in the 80s.

I'm quite happy using Facebook because I only publish what I'm happy to
publish.

Generally, I dislike being monitored but I assume it's happening and expect my
government to provide protection.

The web is changing but only in the sense that it's evolved rapidly since it
was created (only some 25 years ago).

In the future, the web will look different while being exactly the same:
people will be using it to communicate.

------
freechoice22
I completely agree and came to the same conclusion lately. The future for the
internet is micro "lightnets" which I prefer to call it, the true (dark)net is
what the original internet has become apparently. It is way too infiltrated by
those few who control the world and too big to try to change it. Try to make a
billion internet users encrypt their email and exchange keys... and even that
isn't secure. Those webs of "lightnets" can interact in the future in one big
network independent of each other. Like many tiny internets in one big
network. I find myself having a distaste more and more for everything
resonating with corporations who are too big to stay connected with the
individuals they serve on a human to human basis. When that threshold is
reached for a corporation it always spirals out of control and there you have
it, greed power control takes over the organization, and its only you the
individual who can make a change. Feudalism at its finest and it saddens me
deeply to see so many millions cave into it like zombies just to be going with
the herd, afraid to think and go their own path. Ever considered why so many
zombie movies lately? Perhaps reflection of reality on a mental level in our
society. People willing to do anything for freedom and the truth gives me
hope.

I will invest my time and future into these next gen lightnets and hopefully
we can share some freedom away from greed power and control. Internet unless
it is revoked exist no more. Transformed into a malicious beast savaging
everything and everyone in its path controlled by the masters who seek to
enslave the mind of mankind.

~~~
not_satoshi
Lightnets. I like it. I'm adopting the term. Just today, I was jotting down
some notes about setting up some Tor/I2P/etc. gateways in preparation for
research (and hopefully helping out with the development of such tools), and
when I wrote "darknet" I felt a little icky.

So, where do I sign up to join this conspiracy of light?

------
irickt
While I agree with the sentiment, this is less manifesto and more guerilla
marketing to bring eyeballs to their products.

------
grifterjustice
The health care system you know is dying. I'm drinking an espresso shot. It's
half-cold. There's still gunk in my eyes from sleeping.

I've been thinking a lot about how I we all get health care. A year ago, I
nearly vanished from my doctor's private practice because I had an intuitive
feeling that expensive, highly specialized care without a single payer
insurance system was a backdoor to endless health care debt nation wide. Now,
as the dust settles from our collective experiences, I know this to be true.

So I'm revisiting some of my older habits. I'm using WebMD to diagnose my own
problems. I've enrolled in an EMT course to learn basic triage and treatment.
I've installed an app that automatically notifies me of any possible drug
interactions between the various medications I buy off the black market for
myself. Last week I thought I might have sepsis, but I dropped into an off-
the-books IRC chatroom and found out I didn't; it was just a bruise that
looked funny. If you want to send me Bitcoins, I'll take them.

I continue to try to find ways to diagnose myself over the web. I learn new
tools every day. And every tool I have, that's another step towards freedom
from the corporate controlled health care system. I'm convinced that if other
people don't teach themselves how to be their own doctors, then they're just
pawns with their own lives and careers who obviously have too little spare
time on their hands. Distributed peer to peer medicine is a must. Evolve
beyond the reach of the insurance companies that want to bankrupt you. I'm
doing just that.

Distributed everything is where we're going.

The way I see it, if you're still on centralized health care networks, you're
part of the problem. You can't stick your fingers in your ears anymore and
scream 'lalallalal'. All of your information is being recorded, forever, and
it's all going to end up on an itemized bill that you can't pay because your
insurance is inadequate and our country doesn't value primary care.

I'm running more and more under the pseudonym of Ven Portman. I don't really
know why, since I just published that fact on my own public website. I believe
that everyone should learn to be a specialist in their spare time in order to
temporarily evade the abuses of corporations and governments. I somehow
believe that normal people have time to learn these things and blame them if
they don't. I avoid grappling with a broad conversation about corporate and
government corruption and abuse in the field in which I dabble because
clinging to my dilettante skill set is the only way I can retain some illusion
of agency in a world which is increasingly unjust and beyond my control.
Anyone who doesn't do what I do and devote all of their spare time to learning
basic medicine to help build our distributed health care system of the future
is just part of the problem.

The centralized health care system you know is dying. We're scattering to back
alley healthcare everywhere. If you're a normal person with a family and their
own field of expertise who doesn't have time to take an EMT course and learn
how to intubate an unconscious blunt force trauma victim, well then fuck you.
You're all sheeple anyway.

–Ev Bogue July 4 2013 undisclosed location

~~~
javajosh
> I've installed an app that automatically notifies me of any possible drug
> interactions between the various medications I buy off the black market for
> myself.

Hey, not only hilarious, but that's a good app idea!

~~~
grifterjustice
It actually already exists (minus the black market part). My friend is an RN
an she and most of her co-workers use it in their clinic every day. I forget
what the app's name is though.

------
runn1ng
Everytime I connect to darknet, I feel like Batman with a secret, underground,
Gotham identity. In the rain, on the rooftop, or something like that.

Even when the darknet is nowadays used mostly for spam and child porn.

~~~
themstheones
That's why it needs bat man.

------
paulrademacher
You guys are funny. Half of you are voting this stuff onto the frontpage, and
the other half commenting on how awful it is.

Let's get it together, people! :-)

~~~
jaibot
Eternal September comes to all communities, in time.

------
javajosh
This guy and James Altucher need to be friends.

------
Mithrandir
Here's a backup copy of the page:
[http://archive.is/5hFxW](http://archive.is/5hFxW)

------
Torkild
Seems to be a dead link.

~~~
cmpxchg8
It's working fine now for me.

------
vertr
Ev Bogue is a mentally unstable guy who comes out of the woodwork every so
often to say crazy 'edgy' things. He generally builds little cults and then
destroys them in fits of mania. His last title for himself was "Cybernetic
Yogi."

After he destroyed his minimalist and post-human blogs and communities he's
recently got into coding Node. Presumably because he lost all credibility in
the other fields. His thing is to "quit" services. He quit Twitter, quit
writing, quit Facebook, rejoined Twitter, deleted his blog, undeleted his
blog, quit his identity, created a new one, and so on. This would all be very
amusing if he didn't take it so seriously himself. He is at best, very
mentally ill.

I find his current work particularly annoying because he's a guy who has about
six months of coding experience claiming that Node.js is the messiah of the
web. Just not worth it. In six months or so Bogue will quit Node and discover
the new 'it thing' and ramble about that somewhere. The problem is that he
writes about topics that he is not adequately educated on. He does this
because he has a deep need to be seen as an _expert_.

Some back story: [http://ariherzog.com/blogger-insists-on-twitter-
users/](http://ariherzog.com/blogger-insists-on-twitter-users/)
[http://adamtervort.com/blog/2011/01/26/minimalism-isnt-
dead-...](http://adamtervort.com/blog/2011/01/26/minimalism-isnt-dead-youve-
just-gone-insane-everett/)

"Gwen Bell Blocked Me; Ev Bogue Blocked Me"
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/114850856787256556043/posts/GLYo...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/114850856787256556043/posts/GLYoBb1RHG9)

"Far Beyond My Ego" (parody)
[http://farbeyondmyego.blogspot.com/](http://farbeyondmyego.blogspot.com/)

~~~
tippytop
You sound like a pretty boring dude. He's just a guy in the Internet writing
stuff, and you're just a guy on the Internet talking about him.

~~~
kryten
Thanks to my tiny phone screen, I accidentally downvoted you. Sorry. I agree
entirely. Have two upvotes for other posts.

