Morlock Elloi on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:42:20 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> [Fwd] A Spit in the Ocean (or the limits of social network paranoia)


It's not the economic pressure as much as it's the Clumping Effect:
there appears to be a biological predisposition for humans to clump in
larger ... clumps.

Setting up a separate home mail server, with its own domain,
practically unsubpoenable and unspiderable, or home node of a
distributed 'social network' is technically trivial and can be dumbed
down to one-click install process.

However, convincing a meaningful fraction of the people to have
separate services, when *most* of others have already clumped into few
big clumps, is very hard and goes against the grain. This has nothing
to do with usability - e-mail travels via standard protocols, but has
everything to do with prevailing trends, where big clumps win.


> So, what's the real alternative if any?
>
> The alternative, I think, is perhaps too difficult to even imagine.
> The technical problems of building an open, stable, and user-run
> communication space are minuscule compared to the massive amounts
> of economic pressure from the larger macro-structures of our social
> machinery.?





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