[iDC] Replacing Facebook

[xDxD.vs.xDxD]

hi there!

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 2:44 AM, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com>wrote:

> Geert Lovink wrote:
> > After that I am keen to discuss alternatives like Crabgrass
>
> I wonder how we will share the hardware needed to host those kinds of
> Free Software...
>
> I can't seem to find any discussion of that difficult step.
>
> I have some ideas about how to approach the problem, but don't know if
> this is an appropriate forum for such a discussion?
>
> Even more aggressively I want to talk about how we, the users, can own
> and control the entire physical layer to become a Free as in Freedom
> ISP and cell-phone services, etc.
>

this is an extremely interesting point. And, over time, it has been the
center of multiple discussion.

probabily we will see a transformation. we are in a transformation. in which
many things are changing including the idea of public/private, of
where/how/what/howmany is your body or identity and, specifically for this
discussion, how you communicate/relate to and with other people. social
networks have been an important step in all of this, because they're
perceived mostly as a place. and we are going even more in this direction as
we can see in the slow, but steady, rise of networks such as foursquare and
all the other ones that are describing human beings that are constantly
connected and that are definitely adding their digital domains to their
physical bodies, mutating attitudes and in a way describing ne forms of
openness, ethics and relationalities in which, for example, digitally
disclosing your physical location is a perfectly acceptable part of the
game.

corporations and other forms of centralized power would love to grab a hold
on these possibilities. and they probabily already are doing it: they have
the servers, the networks, the designers, the masses...

but we will probabily see some suprises arising from the ethnographic
scenarios which we experience.

We are confronting a world which is progressively more formed by poor people
living in slums and constantly using mobile devices. This is a reality that
is clear and undeniable.

This world will eventually find the use for other forms of networks whose
base technologies are already here: meshed networks, p2p protocols,
proximity (or extended-proximity) technologies, wearables, new forms of
displays.

This ever-extending set of technlogies describes not the current networking
scenario, but more a different one, in which "I" act as a service provider.
A service provider whose "product" is myself: both my presence, my
information and my ability of being a bridge for "you" to connect to other
relations, information and data.

meshed networks are breakthrough in this. networks are created just-in-time
and just-in-place and, difficult as it seems, there are usage scenarios in
which you can possibly build entire geographical networks in this way. All
built on single-person ISPs providing a service ranging on a radius around
them.

imagine a p2p social network in which you are the provider, just as well as
your "friends" are, just as well as the people whose neighborhoods you're
traversing. When you're on, your piece of network exists, when you're off it
doesn't: et voilà, the social network enters your body in a totally
different way. A way on which entire (p2p) economies can be built, and
opportunities for self-expression, autodetermination and of empowerment for
what concerns the possibility of claiming one's own strategies for privacy,
liberty or expression.

i see this as being the most significant direction for mutation right now.
Both on the infrastructural and communicational levels. and one that fits
perfectly in the scenario that is currently being described by digital
networks on a global scale. which is the one of the favela, more than the
one of a happy global network of collaborating people.

cheers,
xDxD
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