Looking at this list, open source software is the only thing that can help save us from this future. Whenever a corporation takes control of a widespread open source software (eg Oracle buying MySQL) it is forked by the community (MariaDB).

If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software. Not even HN. Nor Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram or even Signal. They need to retain control because of the capitalism system in which they were conceived (Facebook, LinkedIn) or sold (WhatsApp, Instagram), and the shareholder class which the corporations must serve and extract rents from their ecosystem forever. It starts with venture capitalists and it ends with wall street ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

If you look at my posts for the last decade, I have been openly saying this. Those of you who saw the movie iRobot back in 2004 may remember the tagline: “One Man Saw it Coming”. I feel like Will Smith’s character. Except that I have been doing something about it.

1. From Digital Feudalism to a Free Market

We are living in Digital Feudalism, and like serfs, we have very little say. And all of this is because we don’t have a viable open source alternative. The first step is to have this software be available to everyone.

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

There were attempts with diaspora* and Mastodon has so far been the most successful. We’ve quietly been building something far, far beyond Mastodon and attracted 10 million people in over 100+ countries. But you probably haven‘t heard of it. It’s a web-based, open source, general-purpose Community Operating System, on which anyone is free to develop just as they are on Linux or Wordpress.

While an app like Telegram or Signal could be easily banned from app stores by governments, something like this is much harder to censor. If millions of websites use https and some may be hosting Qbix widgets, then how will governments and corporations ban it? They may have to insist on having a backdoor to the https certificates, which means enough people would have to fork Chromium / Blink (open source on the front end). But until then, it’s a way for We the People to continue building an innovating in the face of corporate and government crackdowns.

Back in 2019 I wrote this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

Ans just two days ago LA Weekly wrote about the project and the difference it can make: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

2. From a Free Market to Autonomous Networks

In a free market you have a choice of landlord (eg who will host your Wordpress or Qbix instance). But you still have a landlord.

This is the part that some on HN are allergic to. I’m going to extol the virtues of automomous networks, because they’re the most benign “Landlords”, who can be trusted to uphold the rules and never change them (if enough of the community doesn’t like the changes, they can fork and continue the old rules).

Blockchains and smart contracts are JUST THE MOST POPULAR VERSION of this at the moment. There are many other architectures, including Hashgraph, IOTA DAG, and more generally, networks based around Distributed Hash Tables / Kademlia, such as BitTorrent, IPFS, and the ultimate in safety, safenet (I am not affiliated with them, but am a big admirer, see https://safenetforum.org if you want to participate, they have been active since 2004 and are still going strong.. that’s dedication!!)

I don’t just build things, but I seek out and connect with people who design, administer and build all these open source platforms and distributed systems. Back in 2014 I met Tim Berners-Lee. I corresponded with Leslie Lamport over the years. In 2018 I met up with the inventor of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, who went to my school (NYU). I also hung out with Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) although I didn’t keep in touch w him. I also try to invite them onto our community forum and publicly interview them on our YouTube channel. Here is my discussion with Ian Clarke, inventor of arguably the first decentralized autonomous file sharing network, FreeNet.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

If you want to understand why Web3 is important, or at least the type of distributed software it represents, here is my rebuttal to Moxie Marlinspike, as he had the most substantive critique of it:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

3. Economics

Closed software and intellectual property is a product of a private ownership without limit embedded within a capitalist system. “I built it, I own it”. You end up with Zuck controlling Facebook and no one can vote him out. Or Elon controlling Twitter. Oh, I mean “Meta” and “X”. And if they want to, they’ll gradually boil the frogs until they all spend their lives in the virtual reality metaverse, or inside X.com’s “everything app”.

On the other hand, open source software is either a pure gift economy, or since 2014 can be a socialist economy where people collectively own the means of production and eliminate the shareholder class (just as they do in various cooperatives, credit unions, etc). Software produced in this way doesn’t end up with central control (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE

To me, utility tokens represent a “libertarian socialist” alternative to the “capitalist” system in which our current infrastructure has been developed. Stallman’s Free Software Movement is more like a gift economy, or perhaps “distributism” (a 19th-century Christian economic system). Those are actually really good, but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we need an accounting system, and that’s utility tokens.

Utility tokens represent a way to monetize it in a way that happens to fit the dictionary definition of libertarian socialism: “collective ownership of the means of production.” Note that it doesn’t require a central government, but collective ownership.

When you sell utility tokens to finance your startup, the buyers only have a claim to the goods and services of your eventual network. They don’t start to demand that your company extract rents forever (eg Uber taking 50% of all the money that goes from riders to drivers). Instead it becomes a giant socialist cooperative (like eg a driver’s cooperative, or FileCoin for IPFS). Vitalik Buterin and Juan Benet simply don’t exercise the kind of total control over their platforms as Zuck and Elon do.

When you sell shares to finance your startup, you introduce an ever-growing shareholder class which will exercise more and more control over the ecosystem you build, and at every steps will insist that you retain control and extract rents so they can profit.

It can sometimes be as overt as Peter Thiel saying “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and together with Sean Parker killing all Mark Zuckerberg’s open source tendencies (such as when he eventually gave away Synapse as open source instead of giving it to Microsoft for $1 million https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artific...) and dreams of decentralized file sharing software: (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/) but he always retained a soft spot for open source when he personally funded diaspora* (a decentralized facebook competitor) and now, you should be thanking his open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI woukd belong to only a select few, just as Web2 and all our public forums do today.

When a few at the top of a corporate ladder hold all the power, then they can boil any frog. And if they don’t want to, they’ll be replaced by those who will. That’s how the system works.

Opt out. Embrace open source and distributed systems. Take a few hours a week. It’s out there, it’s free to try. Contribute, get certified, serve your local communities, and make money doing it!