As most of you know most of today's web runs on these things called clouds whose owners prefer that we simply use and conceptualize them as an abstract concept that we don't need to think about. This keeps us comfortable. But the fact of the matter is that the increasing scale, scope, and penetration of only a few large clouds is deeply harmful to the security and stability of the Internet in general.

"It's in the cloud"

they say.... without actually knowing what that means. Some of us have some idea of what a cloud really looks like, here's a photo:

"It's on other people's computers"

If you're like me, you take one look at a community like ours, or even communities like our own that compete with our community, and think:

Why is it that "the man" allows these things to exist?

And basically right now, the answer is "because in order to destroy these things that he doesn't like, he'd have to destroy a much larger quantity of things that he does like!" For geeks like most of us, online centralization threatens our very way of life.

What can we do about this?

We can build a decentralized could, and build it larger and better than the other clouds. In some ways this can be seen as the only way to preserve the middle class. I think that Jaron Lanier is well-intended but wrong when he ohserves the fall of the middle class and blames..... OPEN SOURCE!?!

LOLMOFGWUT?

But hey, I think he's also got the wrong idea overall: We shouldn't be striving for a world where the middle class continues to have work, we should be striving for a world where everyone is free (including economically free) to choose the work they think suits them best.

How is this cloud you're proposing going to help us get there faster?

On it's own, it isn't. As a design pattern for indie networked systems, it is. The cloud is VAST. Computationally speaking the only thing bigger than the cloud is the will of the people. Together, we can out-compute anyone, and never forget that. Instead, use that. People's phones, computers, televisions, routers, cars, radios, tablets, laptops and servers are surely more installed computational power than any of the governments or corproartions. So the next logical step is of course to use it.

but you can't.... well, mostly, you can't

If you're a super-geek like me you'ver heard of libreboot. Libreboot is software for booting a computer, and most computers do not use it. Why don't they? Well, if you use libreboot, you could commit the dastardly crime of making N computational object perform Y task. Oh, that was your goal?

"Well, now you see why we cannot let people have librebboot, they'd pulverize us, computationally!"
-The Man

Wrapping it up, there's a huge amount of idle compute capacity just waiting for users. All we need to do is liberate it.

Buy Only Open hardware

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Post by @faddat <--------follow him, he'll take you to computational nirvana
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