erlend_sh

Speaker: Martin Kleppmann, University of Cambridge, Inc & Switch

We have come a long way since my colleagues and I published the local-first essay five years ago. In this talk I'll review where the local-first idea came from, where we are now, and what I hope the local-first community can work towards in the future.

To free ourselves of our current predicament, we must simultaneously de-centralize and re-centralize identity.

• Decentralize ownership.
• Recentralize agency.

By de-centralizing the ownership of identity away from platform monopolies and back to individuals, we can re-centralize the agency of personhood.

The central authority of ones digital identity must first and foremost be the individual themself. That's how we regain our digital sovereignty.

Like any other major network incumbent, Discord cannot simply be side-stepped altogether; appropriate off-ramps are required.

#Matrix bridging enables an incremental, non-disruptive transition from the old to the new.

We invite anyone interested in the development of #CommuneApp to join our newly opened space: https://matrix.to/#/#home:commune.sh

The first half of our product rollout starts next month, as we begin publicly testing our uniquely community-oriented Matrix client.

Microblog link: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/112141665369480242

Some excerpts:

What comes out of Big Corp’s ASS

When you hook up your mind to a cloud-controlled Artificial Synthesizer (ASS), you plainly receive their fully digested discharge.

You don’t get to see what happened further up in the synthetic digestive tract of the ASS, where copious amounts of data grub were initially ingested and processed by a divine black-box entity.

You don’t have any insight into where and who those morsels of data came from, and you certainly don’t get any say in which of them the entity should or should not consume for processing and output, delivered to you through the ASS-as-a-Service.

All you’re supposed to do is open your mind’s mouth wide and say “please” and “thank you” for the grossly diluted information bits you’re about to receive.

They’ve already laid claim to our collective land, labor and attention. With AI, they want to own our thoughts and the last shred of agency that comes with them. If we fail to defend our personal sovereignty at this juncture, a dark age of the corporate singularity awaits us."

To land a real blow, look for where the machines are at their most materialized. Take aim at their massive bodies of data and strike there with conviction."

With the now accepted RSA signatures for DPoP tokens, the ephemeral, dynamic clients and the basic serving of webid documents for each user, Rauthy should now fully support. Solid OIDC. This feature just needs some more real world testing with already existing applications though.

EVENT_MATRIX_ERROR_NO_PANIC This new config variable solves a possible chicken and egg problem, if you use a self-hosted Matrix server and Rauthy as its OIDC provider at the same time. If both services are offline, for instance because of a server reboot, you would not be able to start them.

On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"

It has been thirty years. The Internet isn’t just the realm of the future anymore. It is also our present and has a substantial past. It is worth examining how the past promises of those 90s techno-optimists worked out.

They promised that technology would solve our environmental problems. And there has, just recently, been some real progress in clean tech. But the trend lines are somewhere between bad and cataclysmic. We do not inhabit the future they insisted they were building. For Andreessen, in 2023, to declare that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology” is an act of willful self-deception. Just how long are we supposed to clap-and-wait while Andreessen’s investment portfolio tries to science the shit out of the climate crisis?

Back at FOSDEM we announced the idea of Matrix 2.0 - a series of huge step changes in terms of Matrix’s usability and performance, made up of Sliding Sync (instant login/launch/sync), Native OIDC(industry-standard authentication), Native Group VoIP (end-to-end encrypted large-scale voice & video conferencing) and Faster Joins (lazy-loading room state when your server joins a room).

Now, we’re excited to announce that as of today everyone can start playing with these Matrix 2.0 features. There’s still some work to bring them formally into the specification, but we’re putting it out there for folks to experience right now. Developers: watch this space for updates on the spec front.

Practically speaking, this means there are now implementations of the four pillars of Matrix 2.0 available today which you can use to power a daily-driver Matrix 2.0 client. The work here has been driven primarily by Element, using their new Element X client as the test-bed for the new Matrix 2.0 functionality and to prove that the new APIs are informed by real-world usage and can concretely demonstrably create an app which begins to outperform iMessage, WhatsApp and Telegram in terms of usability and performance… all while benefiting from being 100% built on Matrix.

https://archive.ph/hMZPi

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

How to free users from Big Tech’s walled gardens

The two benefits of competition are that it breaks the [megacorp] cash reserves that are used to enact public policy and it introduces the collective action problem that makes the remaining reserves harder to spend.

How does that virtuous cycle then extend from tech into other sectors?

Doctorow: Think about what happened with the breakup of Standard Oil in the first part of the 20th century. Standard Oil was not the only trust. There were trusts for everything: whiskey, railroads, iron, aluminum, cars. Standard Oil’s dominance made people so hopeless about whether or not they could have an accountable government that the toppling of Standard Oil opened up a floodgate of political will that saw all of those other trusts shattered.

I want to go after tech because it has this characteristic interoperability that makes it a soft target. We start with tech, and that gives us the momentum, the credibility, and the political will to go after everybody else.