<nettime> .another internet is possible!_

["Orton AKINCI aka .-_-." <ortonak@yahoo.com>]

.another internet is possible!_ 

"not only possible but also necessary".

the internet which used to be a "beach" until the 2000s, where another
world was not only possible bu also in practice. that was what richard
barbrook described as "cyber-communism" at the end of the 90's on this
list. but most of the applications on the internet are being designed
to capture our "data body" (as coined by CAE) beginning with the 2000s
through monitoring for internet ads and other tools of neo-liberal
economy.

our online identity, which used to be anonymous to one degree, has
become our physical identity beginning with the facebook. though,
social networking may not be evil if the architecture is "free" (like
that of the upcoming GNU social). networking and meeting with the
new people, with the new people whom you will choose and want to be
networked that you can not meet in your physical environment was a
great opportunity on mailing lists, on irc, even on icq. but whom
we are networking on facebook is our high school friends that we
have mostly choosen not to see any more and our families who had
the control on us telling us what to do and what not to since our
childhood. on the internet, now we are who we are in our life in the
"babylon". we are not free on the internet anymore. we feel the same
pressure of control on the internet as we feel it on our daily lives.
the internet is not a "beach", not a place to escape to, not a place
to take a breath, not a place to be free, anymore...

free distributed p2p architectures are important for internet
appilications, where we can also be anonymous if we want to. if we
want to be free... "freenet"s model (http://freenetproject.org/) is a
great opportunity for the possible (but also necessary) future of the
internet. the "freesites" on freenet are not hosted on servers that
are subject to control but on peer's computers in a distributed and
encyrpted way. all the activities on freenet are also anonymous. each
peer shares a part of their disk space for freenet but they cannot
reach it directly since the information is encrypted and only a small
part of that information is stored on their own single computer. i
think this must be the way another internet is possible.

cloud computing, what richard stallman
calls SaaS (software as a service -
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
), gives the control of the software to the private companies.
online storage applications (like that of dropbox) also give the
control of your information to the companies giving that service.
in the beginning of the 2000s, i used to advocate that storing the
personal information on remote servers would totally dematerialize
the information which is metariazed on the harddisk of a particular
computer. so we need "that computer to reach the information. but if
it was on "the internet", not "on the harddisk", then what we would
need was "any" computer not "that" computer. when a computer is
connected to the internet thorugh a (lan) cable, it also materializes
the access to information by rendering us dependent on the location
of "the" cable and "the" computer. when the internet connection is
free public wireless connection and when the personal information
can be reached form any computer, then a hardware, "the" hardware,
which also raised the problem of digital divide, would be alterable.
a public hardware or a "100 dollar laptop" (of negraponte), even a
"zero dollar laptop" (of James Wallbank) will be enough to access and
interpret information, if the the software demanding high computing
power also runs on the "cloud". essentially not the software in the
cloud as described as SaaS by richard stallman but software in what
i dare say "peer cloud". software running on an architecture like
that of freenet. not on private servers like that of google's (as
in googleDocs). AFAIK it is not technically possible yet but if we
encourage the work on distributed p2p architectures, it may be one
day.

web 2.0 was a great opportunity to democratize the way information is
created and shared. bu it is not a great opportunity to access it.
youtube is banned in turkey for very long. blogger was also banned for
a time. web is subject to censorship and control. p2p is the way to be
without intermediation of any parties. the problem with p2p was that
it is widely being used for sharing files not for running systems. but
"freesites" of freenet shows that running system-like applications on
p2p can be possible. wouldn't it be great if it was "p2p 2.0" instead
of "web 2.0".

so the idea of the "cloud" is not evil if it is not dependent of
private servers and "services". it even has the potential of fully
dematerializing the information rendering the access to it independent
of any particular "hard"ware. i totally agree with what felix has
written about "the return of DRM". the way to escape from control
and property on internet lies on free anonymous distributed p2p
architectures like that of the freenet.

another internet is possible! it is not late find the way to the
"beach". it is not totally covered with the "pavement" yet like that
of the world. another internet is possbile, first of all to influence
the possibility of another world. http://another.httpdot.net/

 .-_-.

http://httpdot.net/.-_-./


      


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