Treehouse, et. al.; How the Internet is Fundamentally Misused

Tad Williams had vision. He wrote an epic saga whose events unfolded in a hyper-connected world. In this Otherland of virtual realities existed an undernet, a virtual reality operated by those who populated it – it was an elusive place, a metaverse called Treehouse whose entrance was almost unlocatable – but it was owned by those that lived within. This made it completely unlike the Internet we use every day. We are the citizens of the internet, but we do not own it.

This was not the original vision. ARPANET was essentially peer-to-peer (they called it host-to-host), and when email was concieved in 1971, it was designed to be essentially peer-to-peer. Email has no central authority – it is a communication protocol between peers. But, we find ourselves surfing today in a hierarchical network of those who provide and those who consume. Once more, we are cast as the consumers.

With the penetration of broadband around the wold, we can finally realize a truly peer-to-peer web of connections between people, not corporations. We have seen a rise in the “social web” – a social gathering mediated by and on he property of a corporation.

This is convenient, until it isn’t. Until the service goes down, or mishandles your data and loses it, or worse, sells it, you might not mind. But even email, originally meant to belong to the users of the network is now “webmail”, and unsurprisingly is hosted on central servers that the users don’t own.

But it would be simple to change all that. We just have to figure out how. And I think I have a simple idea of how to start.