
Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet - zby
http://en.collaboratory.de/w/Power_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_Internet
======
zeveb
> In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the “natural laws of the
> Internet” and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power
> blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of
> the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship
> was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes
> were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen
> journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties.
> Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web
> marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against
> corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.

Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the
Internet as it was _couldn 't_ last: it was, effectively, a state of nature.
The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the
constraints of the old order.

The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an
older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an
even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man.

The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together
to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their
mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages
(as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as
Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who
are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment)
but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend
it and become the new establishment.

If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and
freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until
their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again.

I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of
Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.'
We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would
rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity;
they want power over others.

~~~
ashark
Living through the evolution of the Web, it looks like money (especially ad
money) and social networks encouraging people to broadcast their real
identities (often doing so can be lucrative—see both traditional and Internet
celebrities' use of Twitter, for example) are the main causes of (negative)
changes.

Manipulative ad-spam typo-squatter sites basically took over the Web. Around
'08 or '09 Google seemingly surrendered in the battle against them and took to
just showing the same handful of trustworthy sites for most searches. Smaller
communities and sites faded. Meanwhile, a huge percentage of "legitimate"
sites have become nearly indistinguishable from ad-spam sites. The spammers
won, in a way, by _becoming_ the Web.

Youtube, briefly a kind of miracle of the information age, is so full of
people trying to sell things or make a living at it that they've drowned out
the earnest amateurs. Plus there's tons of advertising on it now. Just another
bazaar full of haggling and people trying to pick your pocket, where once
there was something like a community theater.

Broadcasting one's identity is valuable ($$$) but leads to the ongoing
conflict between those embracing that and those viciously trolling them under
what remains of traditional Internet anonymity. Now that there's money behind
it, the old-school Internet reaction of "well yeah, why the _hell_ did you put
your real name and address on the Internet?" is being seriously challenged,
even in tech circles, by "real names for all so we can hunt the trolls (oh,
also anyone else we don't like, but surely that will never be a problem)!" The
money in tying Web identities to real identities may well win, over the value
of (even semi-)anonymous speech.

I don't see it as frontier versus civilization: I see it as pure human (and
human-scale) expression versus (incomprehensibly massive and alienating)
commercial exploitation. Commercial exploitation is winning.

~~~
sdenton4
There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently
aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers
with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists
doing it in the side.

Producing pure human expression full time requires either an income stream or
a pile of money to burn through. As the internet has opened up to more people,
the reality of keeping it running has required the crass commercialism that is
so at contrast with the early, aristocratic web.

I agree the current state of the web of fuedal and sub optimal, but the
comparatively tiny boy's club of the early web wasn't terribly democratic,
either.

~~~
ashark
> There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently
> aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers
> with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists
> doing it in the side.

"Aristocratic" strikes me as a strange way to describe _at least_ two of those
categories, and they hardly seem undemocratic (to take your comparison) to me.
I mean, "on the side" and in the free time of students is where practically
all democratic activity occurs! The exceptions would be full-time politicians
and those making money from democratic processes (for the governmental sense
of "democratic"), and those widely seen as exploiting the weaknesses of
democracy to their advantage (think: wealth's influence on democracy) but I
think it's fair to characterize those parts as (probably necessary)
_accidents_ of democratic society rather than the _core expression_ of it.

What people do on the side _is_ democracy, until the robots relieve us of our
mostly-authoritarian day jobs (I'm not holding my breath on that one)

~~~
walterbell
From an early democratic institution, the Citizens Assembly of Athens,
[http://www.agathe.gr/democracy/the_ekklesia.html](http://www.agathe.gr/democracy/the_ekklesia.html)

 _" In an important democratic innovation, pay for attending the Ekklesia was
instituted in about 400 B.C., thereby ensuring that everyone, including
citizens of the working classes, could afford to participate in the political
life of the city. Bronze or lead tokens were issued to those attending the
meeting, and these could later be redeemed for the assemblyman's pay of two
obols (one-third of a drachma) per session."_

The citizens assembly met _every 10 days_ , so there were many opportunities
for citizen participation.

~~~
prance
Yes, participation is a difficult thing to ensure in a democracy, and even
more so when it's online. A few years ago, I was a member of the German pirate
party. We tried to implement "liquid democracy", using Liquid Feedback. It
allows every party member to vote on anything or delegate their votes (based
on categories, subcategories or single initiatives) to any other voter, and
change those delegations at any time.

Because of the known security problems with digital voting systems, the system
was supposed to work only as a tool to form opinions. Initiatives were then
put to final vote in real-life assemblies, where everyone was allowed to
participate. We didn't have any "classical" delegates.

Both of these steps posed their challenges in participation:

\- Liquid Feedback was not the easies tool to understand and use. For non-
technical people, it was quite the challenge. And of course, a computer in the
first place.

\- Full member real-life assemblies, particularly on a national level, require
time and money for travel, accommodation etc. Because we didn't have "real"
delegates, if you couldn't afford to go, you were out.

There were some suggestions to overcome these issues (like a "permanent
assembly" which would work by postal -snail mail- vote), but that never came
to pass. (Or at least I think it didn't, I moved out of the country since then
and don't follow that closely anymore.)

------
Karrot_Kream
In a purely personal, sense, I miss the wild west days of the internet. I was
an odd kid, never fitting into any of the big groups at school. The classic
son of an immigrant with one foot in his parents' world and one foot in his
country of birth. The internet's pseudonymity guided my adolescence in a way
that's near and dear to my heart. Slow to grow, awkward and ungainly, at
school I was nothing more than a dust mote. On the internet, though, I became
a leader in my set of niche communities. To this day, some of my closest
friends IRL (am I dating myself with that?) come from the reputation and the
identity I built up in my particular niche of the internet, driven by my
passions (often at the detriment of my grades).

When I see kids today, I feel sad. The internet was an escape for those of us
who were awkward, unloved, and bullied. The internet was the playground of the
mind. Of course, I see the hypocrisy in my own nostalgia; Here I am, making a
living in the Feudal Internet. I hope kids find a way to reclaim the frontier
that was once theirs.

~~~
parennoob
Kids are finding spaces to reclaim "wild west" states even in the midst of
hyper-curated social networks. For example, look at what they call
finstagrams[1] today.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-
finstagr...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagram-
fake-account.html)

------
AndrewKemendo
_This is largely because leveraging power on the Internet requires technical
expertise, and most distributed power groups don’t have that expertise._

This is actually my biggest concern.

Our company is bleeding edge technology in AR and ML and it's really fucking
hard to hire computer vision and machine learning people because
Goog/Face/Apple can offer 300-400k for PhDs and give them exciting and
engaging projects.

If giant companies constantly "disrupt themselves" and acquire anything that
looks like competition then they just consolidate further and nobody can take
a competitive position.

I know people will hand wave this away, but as RL becomes the architecture for
software - especially led by these big companies - it's going to be
increasingly hard to unseat big players.

At the AI meetup at Stanford I went to last week, Andrew Ng was asked by Jen-
Hsun Huang, "How do small companies create the new technologies for the future
better than the big ones" and Andrew's comment was basically: "They don't
anymore."

I'm worried that the time for disruptive startups (at least in software) is
coming to an end. Hopefully I'm wrong.

~~~
shostack
You raise a fair question, and I think the answer partially lies in the
definition of "compensation."

Can a startup afford to pay market rates for PhDs and other qualified
individuals? Probably not. That's always been the case though, and I don't
really see that as being new for computer vision and machine learning talent.

So you need to look at what else you can offer them. A significant amount of
equity seems like a big one. It may be more than you wanted to give, but that
may be the reality of the market. Beyond that, since risk is significant and
fewer and fewer liquidity events seem to be occurring, perhaps a straight
profit-sharing model might be more appropriate and more immediate in terms of
its ability to balance the risk equation of startups. If you start getting
customers and someone knows they'll stand to make money as you grow vs.
waiting for some increasingly unlikely IPO, that could be more favorable.

There's also other less tangible things like flexibility that comes in the
form of remote work, flexible hours, etc. that can have very real value to
people. Taken to the extreme, you may be able to land some awesome talent
remotely in other countries where maybe what you can offer them is still a lot
of money.

It would be interesting to know what you are trying to do to remain
competitive in these other areas. Money solves a lot, but depending on what
someone is looking for and where they are in their life, it may not be
everything.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_That 's always been the case though_

It's true, however the difference in talent is staggering between someone with
experience in CV/ML and someone who has only studied it. So I suppose that
just stating "PhD" is too vague.

Your point is correct though about giving other benefits, and that's what we
(and others in the field) do - equity, flexibility etc...

Understand though that the key issue here is that most of the people with
these skills are rabid about working on big projects with grand vision, and
rightfully so. Part of the problem however is that there are only so many data
sets for these problems and without those data sets the pace is slow.

The frontier today requires much more infrastructure than previous
breakthrough projects. I was just watching the "rise of the nerds" and it was
illuminating how "simple" even back then it was from a scale perspective to
make great progress. The microprocessor really opened up this whole ecosystem
because it was something that anyone could buy. That's just not possible with
machine learning because you have to have so much data and that kind of data
you can't buy, you have to build it.

I was talking with a major heavy hitter in this field (one you've heard of)
about his work options this year. He was debating leaving a very well funded
billion dollar company to go to one with some of the best people in ML in the
world. He didn't leave because the company he was working for already had
terabytes of vision data to work with and infrastructure that made his work
possible. The newer company, which had amazing talent and some great funding,
would have to start gathering data and it would take time to set up their GPU
clusters etc... So it was because the bigger company was already at scale with
data and could gather data faster, that he didn't leave. And these are the
cream of the crop people with a lot of money we are talking about here.

So it's not so much compensation, it's that the biggest companies have the
scale needed already to do the breakthroughs in tasks like reinforcement
learning and machine vision - the tasks that are going to dominate the
landscape going forward - that are impossible for startups to get to.

------
abakker
I appreciate the metaphor to feudalism - it certainly _can_ describe what we
are seeing now in the concentration on corporate powers, but I it is
misleading to characterize the internet as a whole system of government,
rather than a new dimension or frontier of an existing one.

A better metaphor is probably a comparison to the wild west. The early
internet was government-sponsored, and the government's wait-and-see attitude
is much more akin to their attitude toward early homesteaders heading out into
the wild - they wanted the country settled, but could not offer anything but
space to the early settlers. The government didn't really know what it was
offering. That initial rush into the west came with the promise of fortune and
glory and freedom, but came with no security, no guarantees.

That state that we think of as the wild west - boom and bust, saloons,
gunfights, and stage coach robbery - really only lasted for around 20 years
though, and was eventually replaced with a much more standardized, civilized
world by comparison.

That is where we are with the internet now. The frontier is colonized, and the
issues that remain are the industrialization of the existing claims. We're at
the age now where the internet frontier yields to human habitation and
comforts, and supplies us with guarantees, trade, economies, industries, mass
production, and jobs.

The internet _isn 't_ industrial yet, but we're seeing the beginnings of it
now. The original booms are mostly gone (Yahoo was one of the last), and now
the more corporate, more focused companies have grown large. Now, the
established businesses, too, are moving in, and the frontier is looking pretty
tame - just an extension of the existing world order. Just like the wild west
though, the original frontiersmen don't take well to reintegrating.

------
dineshp2
PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in
this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is
distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive
surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer
data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to
control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change
for the better.

As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions.
If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with
cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely
remain a pipe dream.

The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO,
one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the
mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently
large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be
far away.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI)

------
walterbell
> _In addition to re-reigning in government power, we need similar
> restrictions on corporate power: a new Magna Carta focused on the
> institutions that abuse power in the 21st century._

Now we have corporate-friendly proposals in TPP, TTIP, TiSA and RCEP.

Where are the proposals from civil society?

------
meira
Great essay. I missed only one point: why he used Brazil as a succesful
example of internet use? Facebook, Google & Twitter sponsored a mob that
finished with a coup d'etat here. We are far from being a good example, I
think we are the worse and what happened here is been exported to other
countries right now.

~~~
gpribeiro
Sorry, but there are a lot of disagreement about your "coup d'etat". A portion
of the population, me included, don't see it as a coup, as the deposition of
the president followed, and is following, the law. I don't think here is the
place to have this kind of discussion, but I just wanted to make it clear that
that are opposing ideas on this...

Regardless, I think that social media in general was key to some very
important social movements here, but you won't agree with my examples :). But
I agree it wasn't clear what he was referring to in case of Brazil.

~~~
anf
Even if "coup" is the wrong word for it doesn't mean it was all kosher:
[https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-
events-...](https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-events-
expose-the-fraud-of-dilmas-impeachment-and-temers-corruption/)

------
skybrian
We have feudalism because spam and abuse make everything suck. That means you
need user accounts that are at least somewhat hard to abuse or the sock-puppet
problem becomes unmanageable, and automated filters for the spam, and ways to
block abusive users, and moderators to appeal to when users can't solve things
on their own.

These things can't be fully automated and they aren't fun for volunteers so
businesses end up hiring people to do them.

~~~
fulafel
Pseudonymous identities with reputations and decentalised webs of reputation
would be the solution in the old school spirit. But since things like Google
and Facebook are financed by ads and trade of personally identifiable
information, the incentives don't really align.

~~~
skybrian
The way you talk you'd think real names were invented by advertisers. Um, no.
There are plenty of good reasons to use real names that have nothing to do
with advertising.

Handles work well for CB radio, BBS's, games, and other geeky pursuits. In the
early days, your friends and relatives weren't online anyway, so why not use a
handle?

But they don't work for relatives, offline friends, businesses, politicians,
or really, any of the other ways we use our real names.

~~~
vertex-four
See, the idea of a singular real name is interesting to me - I have a small
handful of names I'd consider "real". It's the same with a fair few people I
know, to varying extents, due to the groups I'm involved in.

The ability to use many names is strongly tied to the ability to identify
yourself. Being forced to use a single name in all contexts, whether you want
to or not, is relinquishing that ability - it's being told who you are
permitted to be by an external force.

------
pasbesoin
Load stalling for me.

Google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fen.collaboratory.de%2Fw%2FPower_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_Internet)

P.S. It's a piece by Bruce Schneier.

------
windlep
> What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so
> wrong?

Sort of reminds me of some scientists concerns after inventing the
atom/hydrogen bomb.... oops, what did we just do?

Yet I don't see or hear about any tech ethics groups. You know, a group of
people that actually tries to determine whether some tech being
considered/built will actually be good for society or not. From what I've
read, the Amish have such a thing, ie, it's not that they're strictly anti-
tech, but that they have community leaders that evaluate the pros/cons to
their society before allowing its introduction.

I found it refreshing that there's movement around an AI group of this nature
to try and ensure we don't hose ourselves with AI, but really, a broader tech
ethics group should've already been on that as well.

Unfortunately it's much easier to just plow ahead and ignore such things in
the hopes of being the next billionaire startup founder. Leave it to someone
else to decide whether you're making things in our society/world better or
worse.

------
LittleSpider
Interesting take on the internet as Feudalism, and everyone having to align
with a king or a prince to protect him from other unknowable threats.

There is a blog which discusses how much of the internet is more like a
digital bazaar - everyone shouting and no one listening to most of it (camels,
get your camels here, dates, I have dates, and so on).

I trust I can include the link here, and as I am very new to Hacker News, I
trust I am not overstepping some boundary by doing so.
[http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-
bazaar/](http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/)

Maybe the internet is a little of all things - bazaar, wild west, feudalism,
democracy, socialism, and so on.

------
ethbro
Ah, so that's how we end up in a cyberpunk future. It is almost 2020...

------
MichaelMoser123
What i gathered from the article is that access to data means power;

\- more transparency of government + ability to organize means more power to
grassroots organizations

\- more data on individuals means more power to corporations and governments

\- ability to steal data means power to cyber criminals.

What i did not understand is the motivations of each of these actor to curtail
his access to data/power? i think Bruce Schneier precisely described the new
steady state now what i don't understand is how the system could possibly
change.

this reminds me of the transformation of the former Soviet Union : in the
nineties a lot of people thought that liberalism is here to stay; you can't
just do a dictatorship and censorship in the 21st century etc, etc. However it
turned out to be a brief interlude - the new elite is just a repackaged old
nomenklatura and state power was never curtailed/balanced by an independent
judiciary. Same with the internet - the new gadget couldn't change the power
balance, it just took them some time to adapt. TLDR: The criminals were the
fastest to adapt (they always do); civil society got something out of the
ability to organize but then the balance shifted back to the state and
corporations, it just took them some time to get their act together.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
just to add, this article is from 2013; still we are living in the same era so
not much changed.

Here is the original link:
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_fo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_for_1.html)

It also first appeared in 'The Atlantic':

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-
ba...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-battle-for-
power-on-the-internet/280824/)

------
rasengan
The answer is to educate everyone, fast, on embracing the new world order - a
world where technology rules and all else is of lesser importance as we all
strive toward a better future.

We need to continue to educate, educate, educate, and give to all the powers
of the computer, programming, scripting, and google.

~~~
pyrale
> give to all the powers of the computer, programming, scripting, and google.

One of those is a private company.

~~~
quadrangle
Actually, with lowercase g, it's just a number but is non sequitur in this
context.

~~~
dylanfw
The number is spelled "googol."

~~~
quadrangle
oh, huh, thanks

