100 years of whatever this will be

This article is profoundly insightful.

I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true:

    All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.

Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").

There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:

https://holo.host

This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.

Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...

I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completely unprofitable if it could get access to freshly printed money every quarter to prop it up. What then happens to all the other businesses who don't get access to that freshly created money? When we have situations like the BoJ owning more than 60% of the Nikkei 225 we really ought to be asking some serious questions about if we really have free markets? We also should be asking some questions about the properties we desire in money itself. If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional monetary policy such as purchasing equities we can quickly have a situation whereby an unelected group of bureaucrats can damages the ability of money to be used as a means to convey information. Further there's questions about picking winners and losers that comes up there too. As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be. It seems that these difficult questions really fell out of favor a while ago and as a result things have been drifting in a direction that many people aren't comfortable with.

If we don't ask these questions then technological approaches to money, like various cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies are unlikely to actually cause long lasting improvements. We have some serious monetary policy problems in the world right now and while some tech could help (in some cases) these aren't primarily technological problems.

* Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves

I was fortunate to have had a career with mild autonomy to help other team members even if it was slightly out of my job description. But this only happens in a shared office environment where you can see when someone is falling behind or overhear a problem. That physical presence also creates a bond with co-workers that's often more powerful than the corporate mission.

But working from home for the past years I feel like I mercenary working among mercenaries. Working with people that have never met and will never meet and for whom work isn't about the mission or the customer. If I get work done early, I now just call it a day. Why bother with ad-hoc testing, documentation, checking in on that new hire, proposing a conference paper, investigating technical debt, etc. It's liberating but it's also depressing.

I'll go even nerdier. Having implemented raft and paxos many times over (don't ask why, and also don't ask what implementing paxos means, no one really knows) The most efficient distributed systems rely on _not_ having Byzantine faults[1] -- effectively there's a certain amount of trust you need to delegate to the network. The network itself is the substrate in which these algorithms can work efficiently. Short of that you'll need to move to a system that is tolerant to Byzentine faults. The cost of moving there is very expensive transactionally-speaking.

For markets the analogy is the same: a regulatory environment provides the substrate in which an efficient distributed system can rely on to prevent Byzentine faults.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault -- for all intents and purposes byzentine == malicious.

edit: I should have read the article to the end, literally the next paragraph where I stopped to comment said what I just said, but better.

I generally agree with this essay, but I think the listed problems with society misses the mark.

"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." Is this really changing? I don't buy that people today have less empathy for each other than they did historically. The bulk of human history was cruel in ways that stagger the imagination.

"The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening." The gap between rich and poor is not the correct target to optimize. The only problem you can reasonably try to solve is improving the quality of life for the have-nots. World-changing innovation (steam engine, electricity, printing press) always makes a few individuals exorbitantly wealthy, and the world is better off because of it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on.

When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It's just more more! now now! to survive. So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.

To me, what's wrong with the world is that people are ok with being wealthy. They're ok with rising to positions of power and then denying empowerment to others. They're ok with the law not being applied equally and fairly to everyone.

They haven't realized that inequity affects themselves in another life, that violence against others hurts themselves, that destroying the planet this century leaves no planet for their next life.

I can't prove any of this, but I know it's true, because I'm here now, just like you.

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.

It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.

And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys.

Avery is such a treasure trove.

What's hard about this particular situation, and what we often don't recognize enough:

- We regularly overestimate the power of "traditional" systems such as government, courts, civil society. To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so.

- One of the hard problems is that we don't have any clue how new (human-designed) systems affect society. And that's not for lack of trying - economics, sociology, psychology - they are just insanely hard because people always lie, keep changing and are so damn inventive.

It's fascinating to me that some commenters react to this essay saying it's "profoundly insightful" when my first reaction was it's very vague and fully of major inconsistencies.

Here is just one example: he opens his argument calling Western societies a "systemic train wreck" and yet concludes toward the end: "As a society, we are so much richer, so much luckier, than we have ever been"

Which is it? Are we a trainwreck or are we rich & lucky?

In practice, any distributed system that doesn't have an explicit hierarchy evolves to have an implicit hierarchy, because economies of scale and network effects favor the increasing concentration of resources and connectivity, respectively. The OP is right about that.

In any distributed system, those nodes that by luck or skill become more cost-efficient and inter-connected tend to become even more cost-efficient and inter-connected, because all other nodes want to connect via the most cost-efficient, most inter-connected nodes.

This dynamic is self-reinforcing. We are all familiar with it.

Without some form of regulation (historically centralized, and always imperfect), distributed systems like market-driven economies, modern financial markets, and information networks evolve to have growing inequality of resources and connectivity over time.

I'm not aware of any exception.

You know what makes a distributed system work? Failure.

Now and again, nature arranges for a catastrophe. An asteroid, too much oxygen, lignin building up, nature has cleaned up after and built on top of the rubble.

Over the last 20-odd years, we didn't let a real economic catastrophe happen. There are millions of people working the wrong job. Loads of people have a made a ton of money providing nothing useful at all. Without a periodic shakeup, the bullshit merchants take over the economy. People who talk a good game but are never held to account. Who is swimming naked? There is too much money to know.

Part of the reason is centralization. Unfortunately, we don't really have 200-odd governments. A lot of them think the same way about the issues that matter, and a very small group influence all the others.

How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value? How many other institutions in the US are tasked with ensuring the safety and well-being of 300 million people and do it for less?

It's a bit of a cliche to say that government is too complex, but I think it's worth considering that the problems that government is trying to solve are unique and incredibly difficult. I appreciate the call in this article to get to the real work of helping to solve these problems.

"We are not doing the rework. We are chasing rainbows. We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation."

Really enjoyable article, and I love the way the author uses his networking experience to inform his understanding of the world.

The issue or possibility that the author misses, IMO, is that the lack or rework and general degradation, etc is BY DESIGN. The fail is coming and that is planned for.

I personally think that there are a parasitic elite, that harvest the energy and wealth from countries and situations, and have done so for centuries. We think in terms of months and years, but they think in terms of centuries. Eg Technocracy Inc was formed in the 1930s and even shared the same building as IBM.

The overarching idea here, is that Western society crashes somewhat, the lead is passed to China, and in reverse, we import their totalitarian infrastructure. We will be monitored everywhere, our governments will go, but (UN) technocrats will step in to micromanage our lives (water use, electricity use, travel, etc). The trick is to make us want that. And things will get so bad, that most of us will!

And that is the reason that we have ready excuses - such as never-ending viral or climate events, that somehow convince us to hand over authority in just the way that technocrats have always dreamed of, for example with bio-ids being required to do one's shopping or travel.

It's worth considering whether the premise actually holds.

* Yeah, there's a feeling of malaise, but if you look at e.g. surveys of trust in government (Pew, OECD, etc.), it's a fairly slow decline over decades and the end point is that most people are still fairly okay with how government, education, media, the judiciary etc. are run in many democratic countries and if you look at overall happiness (Eurostat etc.) then that seems to be fairly stable or even going up a little bit.

* Most artists do get little reward for all the benefit they provide, but we can't have everyone be artists so there has to be some way to disincentivize people from becoming an artist, no?

* Big banks and big governments suck, fine, but compared to what standard or compared to what point in time?

* The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening. OK, that one's probably true.

* Software stacks keep getting more bloated, but in exchange programming has gotten a lot easier, which seems like a wonderful trade-off.

* Governments like the European Union are absurdly complex, but overall it seems to have been a net boon to the countries that have joined it: travel is easier, paying is easier, your rights as a consumer are better protected than ever, etc.

* App Stores are pretty great for most people, even though 30% is a bit absurd.

* The Bay Area is not the world.

There's probably a lot about modern society that needs solving, but the first step has to be to think really long and hard about precisely what does suck, why it sucks, whether it can be better.

Ignoring the first couple questionable true-isms, a lot of these bullet points are just choices the author locked themselves into. The author is painting a picture in which AWS is the internet, or somehow representative of pricing.

I don't have half of these problems. I have run services for $6,000/year on bare metal servers that would have cost $240,000/year on AWS at the time.

Likely the author is unwilling to make another compromise, because they already weighed their options and arrived at these which are the least bad thing they could choose; or maybe they just don't even see there are other options.

Seriously where do all these people come from who think society is worse today that it was a few decades before. It's not. There has never been an opportunity for so many people at various levels. Artists have it the best now in the internet era where they have various streams to monetize their work. Case in point is Spotify. Ofcourse Spotify and other providers are going to make money off artists. But without them most artists worth their salt would stay poor.

If you don't see and appreciate the huge progress made across the world in social life and quality, you have been living under the rock.

I agree with everything in the blog post. I just think it's really hard for societies to "unfuck" themselves. I think the reason things are going in this direction is because of an increasing concentration of power among a relatively small number of people. It's hard to walk back that kind of concentration of power without societal upheaval. The only reason the gilded age in the United States ended was because of WW2 and the widespread notion that the common American deserved to share in the post-war prosperity (that they had earned by fighting a world war!). That idea was so popular and widespread that it actually happened. But it took a World War to get to that point. I hope something will happen to walk back the concentration of power that has accumulated over the last 50 years or so, but my feeble mind can't quite imagine what that thing will be.

Its the worst of times, its the best of times. The digital revolution (or whatever this is) has degenerated into a bizarre mix of speculative frenzy, unprecedented concentration of control on a background of complete disregard for societal impact. Phoneyness and false representations abound - there are no repercussions. The "market" applauds.

Its time to go back to the roots of computing. Reinvent what the digital age means. Imbue it with soul and values in an inalienable way. 100% human-centric. Augmenting human ability, augmenting human society. There is enormous value in that. Not manufactured Ponzi value. Real value. Improving our lot. Solving the real problems of sustainability, persistent inequality, debilitating ignorance and suffering.

If you have talent now is the time to change the world. You know its not utopic because you have seen the extreme leverage of the digital toolkit.

The first step in solving a problem is realizing there actually is a problem. If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time. That thought really doesn't help much when you are fighting with a big bank about $261 in random fees, though.

Freedom is slavery...

We're not all in the same boat. If you want to change the system, you're going to have to fight the people invested in the status quo. Most people aren't interested in the "greater good," even though they may maintain this position publicly because it is considered antisocial to openly say "f** the plebs," but actions speak louder than words--by their fruits you shall know them. When we see things like rampant homeless and crushing debt, we know such things are being said in private.

It's time to put aside our idealism and don a cynical outlook. Our rose colored glasses are holding us back. We just need to make sure we don't become evil in the process.

> Big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.

> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.

There is a major contradiction in this line of reasoning that the author never addresses.

The only way to have successful regulation is to have a powerful regulator, a powerful governing organ. The government needs to be the most powerful "firm" in the market.

Otherwise, there will be a more powerful private firm or "trade association" (read: cartel) that is the de facto "shadow government" of one or more economic domains, that the de jure government cannot hold accountable. We see this a lot in America since the 70s, mainly expressed through regulatory capture.

I think most sensible people had figured this out already. The people that don't and honestly believe everything will be fixed by a DAO or whatever... they're beyond reason.

To put it in more clear terms, the problem right now we have with society is not centralization vs decentralization, global vs local, or even authority vs freedom. Rather, the configuration between the two opposites constitutes the totality of the whole system, and not just one side is either the poison or the cure. We need to change the whole system, both in terms of centralization and decentralization.

Our current neoliberal system allows for “freedom” as in freedom of the consumer, but in the most authoritarian, dehumanizing ways as possible. We have freedom as in which person to vote or what things to buy, but that freedom is frankly put, meaningless. The whole liberal framework of how we think about freedom has to be questioned and challenged, or else we are going to have more of those “freedoms” that rob ourselves more and more of actual human agency.

>Centrally planning a whole society clearly does not work (demonstrated, bloodily, several times).

I really, really hate this argument. If it's true, why does the CIA feel the need to destabilize countries with centrally planned markets? Why has China been so successful despite what is widely believed to be a failed premise?

Central planning works as well as unplanned markets work: That is, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and it mostly comes down to external factors.

> Computers are so hard to run now, that we are supposed to give up and pay a subscription to someone ....

Computers were hard to run when installing an OS meant you burnt CDs.

And medium tier "webhosting" meant an expensive control panel with no root access.

I'm amazed how easy things are today, you can setup and tear down operating systems in a minutes, and there's lots of medium tier server competition and a few big players for bigger projects.

For everyone reading this article who agrees with it, I would encourage you to start reading some history, especially ancient history, late 1800s history, and the history of colonialism.

Society, once you look at inputs and outputs, is predicated on "the masses" abdicating intellectual responsibility to leaders who leverage them for their own benefit. This has happened since before recorded history. It is codified into our mainstream spiritual ethos. We glorify it every day by simply perpetuating the system we exist in.

If history is any evidence, things will always continue to get worse in this part of the cycle, then we will experience a collapse and rebuilding period.

This reminds me of all the tech people (from Bill Gates on down) who think society can solve its toughest problems by supposedly sidestepping politics, as if they were not political actors and their “solutions” devoid of political context.

Also, charter schools are the education equivalent of “greenfield” solutionism alluded to in earlier comments.

"The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one."

That is very well put. I'm stealing it.

It seems to me that it's a little bit of hubris to have human's running the Federal Reserve and setting monetary policy.

It seems like the economy is this massive system with virtually infinite moving parts that no one truly understands and the people at the fed just continue to poke it with a stick.

I agree wholeheartedly with this piece. Have for years.

I've invested a lot of time into thinking and learning about these sorts of "big" or societal/infrastructural/cultural problems, and figuring out what are the very top problems (AFAICT), and prioritized them down to say the 2 to 5 biggest and most growing threats that need to be eliminated, mitigated or fixed. I've begun working in my free time on what I see is the 2nd most urgent and apocalyptic threat:

democracy vulnerabilities -- the risk of free peaceful democracies (like the US, most especially, and despite our obvious impurity in that regard) devolving and collapsing, and trying to mitigate the attacks and corrosive effects from the bad actors pushing for it (which in the case of the US includes some treasonous and misguided domestic folks but also certain foreign governments as well.)

I'd love to make a difference too on what I see as the #1 threat/risk (greenhouse gas emissions, climate shifts, ecosystem collapse, pollution of our land/water/bodies) but... its harder for me to see ways where my skill mix and resources can help there. compared to the #2 one (democracy collapse.)

they are inter-linked, because #1 can increase forces pushing #2 to happen. and if #2 happens its more likely to make #1 worse than better.

but yeah I'm done with the purely worrying, thinking & talking stage. I'm acting. With as much urgency as I can afford to invest, time-wise.

The way the article cites "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is slightly off base. The essay argues that lack of structure is not an effective way to dismantle hierarchies, because it merely masks them instead of dismantling them. It does not go as far to claim that hierarchies and power structures are inevitable (although many people citing it claim that it's making this argument).

Although I guess you could argue that the text itself is less important than the impression it made on people who read it...

A house making more money than a person working a day job.

> Let's build what we already know is right.

Interestingly a friend and I had been discussing political threads and one thing that is interesting is how, in the US, a 2 party system has lead to some really awkward tribalism and many of us think we disagree on everything. But in reality there are some big group wins to be had if the "middle" block of people could somehow band together and agree to just do the intersection of their beliefs.

some examples were citizens united, the big money moving elections, lobbyists, government quid pro quo system is blatant corruption. and I believe a vast majority of the middle agrees corruption is bad.

I just learned about https://www.forwardparty.com/team and it seems like an attempt to address such a thing, would love to hear from anyone who knows much more.

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years...

* Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history.

* Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work.

* Society is able to support more art then ever before.

* We have computers... HOW are you complaining about one super amazing piece of technology that didn't exist 5 years ago compared to another piece of incredible technology. Seriously? Be more amazed with how far this stuff has come in such a short time.

And like... We're not even in world war 3. Life is pretty good on planet earth, idk where you've been but come on back down.

Regulation is fine, life requires it. Your whole body is one big regulatory system, centralized in various ways, making sure everything in you is aligned. It's a fundamental part of (your) Life, and we (evolved apes) require other simularly regulated Life forms to persist. I often wonder if those who don't like regulation fail to grasp this. I also wonder if those tuning regulation should look more for clues in evolutionary biology. There are no easy answers, but evolution has produced some truly incredible things. Go to then ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.

> I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.

We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one, which has problems that are impossible to fix. Rather than chasing a thousand new systems, we should be fixing the one we have.

> Artists really don't get enough of a reward for all the benefit they provide.

Love to see this in here. Wondering what the author's personal definition of artist is though.

The missing key here in my opinion is subsidiarity. Decentralisation works up to a point, but many decentralised solutions assume that everybody is the entire system must reach a concensus e.g. Blockchain. And that concensus usually involves some kind of "majority rules". Which means that in practice, 49% of people might be left unhappy. That is not the sign of a healthy society.

What we need instead is the follow the principles of subsidiarity [1].

Local level markets, DeFi solutions, governance structures, communication platforms, etc that are capable of enforcing their own rules, but that are interoperable to some degree with other systems.

The Matrix project I think is a great example of this. Unfortunately, it looks like they might be making some bad decisions around global moderation, but in general the idea that local servers can exist with their own rules, but still send and receive content from other servers is great.

We don't want to end up in a future where Big Tech can automatically censor any video you upload, any message you send, or any call you make. This doesn't mean we need the Wild West, it means that you should be participating in a community where you all agree on the rules. And if you want to participate in somebody else's community, you need to follow their rules. This idea that some global all powerful entity can just banhammer somebody for something they said in a community that everybody in the community thought was fine, is totally unacceptable.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."

As human beings, we have an underlying need for belonging and connection. All of us are by default programmed to be connected to our own interests. For many that circle broadens to their friends and family and for a few that broadens to their immediate community. Fewer still feel connected to their country and only some of us will feel connected to the world.

The "network effect" seems to be affecting everything: The rich get richer, and everybody else fights for scraps. It's winner-take-all.

This applies to countries also, not just individuals. If your country can't quite keep up with cutting edge manufacturing and services, you lose in the global trade competition and can't afford to give your citizens up-to-date college education, exacerbating the slide.

Here’s an exercise to think about if we’re living in the best or the worst of times: pick a year to be born in. But you can’t choose where, not the conditions: assume a typical human life at that point in time, considering the whole world. This might require some research, of course, and a lot of unknowns (How was South America in the 450’s?), but working with what we can know, try to choose this date.

I think this take on decentralization and structurelessness sort of misses the point. Of course it's true that all systems that do anything useful have structure somewhere. The point of various movements for "decentralization" are where to locate that structure. Jo Freeman's essay correctly points out that "structurelessness" in activist movements locates that structure in social influencers and insiders, which is probably not desirable for most action-oriented purposes.

Which layers or pieces of the system we choose to anonymize and make fungible are an important architectural choice, and DeFi/crypto simply expand the scope of available choices in that regard. Prior to their existence, it was not possible to locate structurelessness in the layer that crypto does. Whether locating it there proves to be useful remains to be seen, but it is clearly an expansion of our capabilities, in the same way that Paxos and Raft are for databases. Yes, they still have structure, no, that does not make them useless.

> All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

XMPP fits this definition.

Bulk activity occurs via decentralized federation.

Regulation occurs via yearly updated XMPP compliance suites. https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/

What's the technological equivalent of regulatory capture of trusted governance roles?

1. system control plane with security vulnerabilities, where the first attacker can lock out subsequent attackers?

2. corporate board without poison-pill, special class of shares with extra powers, or other defenses against hostile takeover?

3. corporate or IP acquisition due to debt, market failure or poor fiscal governance?

Watch the corruption in Wall Street, Congress (w/Lobbyists) and the Establishment:

* First Wall Street used modern tech in 1980s and 1990s to make better markets

* BUT then corruption happened when Wall Street maxed out making money from tech in efficient markets. They then shifted to taking money via a rigged economy.

* Wall Street rigged economy is shown by high frequency firms front running trades (at least claimed and maybe proven in Flash Boys book)

* 2008 Mortgage Crisis shows Wall Street rigging the economy

* $3.5 billion per year flowing through lobbyists successfully causes congress to sell out.

* The economy has been rigged for the last 30+ years

* At least bitcoin and crypto are enabling those abused by a rigged economy to create competitors

* Creating a "bank account" has been blocked from entrepreneurs for 40 years. Crypto at least enables businesses to be created with crypto-bank-account equivalents, transfers, and financial transactions.

The establishment is the root of the problem. Entrepreneurship by good ethical people competing and winning must be a strategic part of the solution.

> the control system itself, inevitably, goes awry

This seems to be the case with any control system, whether centralized or not. The difference is in the failure mode. Decentralized systems start failing earlier, but do so in a more gradual way. Centralized ones fail later, but much more abruptly and all-at-once. So it's really the question of which one you prefer.

Personally, I still believe that decentralized approach is preferable in that regard. Centralization gives the illusion that everything is a-okay (because things work!) even when the crash is already inevitable and in motion; then when it actually happens, it's a massive disruption all around. OTOH when bits and pieces start falling off in a decentralized system, it's readily obvious that a fix is needed, but there's still plenty of time to design and implement it; and, furthermore, since most of the system is still intact, it doesn't need to be recovered.

The other advantage of decentralization is that it's more politically viable to fix things in a more localized way. Fixes to centralized systems necessarily have to be centralized themselves, but that also means that you need a lot of buy-in from everybody affected to enact them. In areas where consensus is not established, this often means that problems in centralized systems don't get fixed at all, either because many people don't believe the issue at hand to be problematic, or because they can't agree on what the root cause it. In a decentralized system, local consensus is all that is needed to fix (or at least mitigate) an issue locally.

Some argue that this latter part is actually a deficiency because people end up fixing their own localized problems, instead of coming up with a single centralized solution that fixes it once and for all. But this assumes that such a single centralized solution always (or at least usually) exists and its implementation is viable - which is not at all obvious to me.

Markets have existed without empire overlords thoughout history though. Egyptians did not have to enforce trade rules to their neighbours, and despite whatever clashes everyone traded with each other in the mediterranean. It is exogenous rules that required the protection of an empire, such as the raids of pirates, or the threat from another empire. Since our current world order started after WW2, the governments have grown, but so have the monopolies, and we ve never seen them split, we just take them for granted after a while (e.g. mastercard/visa). In fact, if anything, government's role has been to pick the winners that better cooperate with them in order to ensure their mutual survival. It may be true that markets eventually do grow their own hierarchies, but this does not mean that imposing rules externally a priori is any good.

The fact that our awkwardly exploitative synthetic systems depend on elegantly balanced natural systems which are now inexorably collapsing renders this otherwise-interesting discussion entirely moot.

Get your UUCP maps up to date -- you'll be communicating through USB sticks transported by pirates before you know it.

Man: if you weren't able to design a big, centralized system that works, don't repeat the same propaganda you were fed with for years: that is, that central state-level planification don't work. Look at China, and tell them their system is going to crash. They will laught at you, and you deserve it.

Stop repeating this propaganda and start questioning your assumptions. You are saying that we need some kind of overall hierarchy and regulamentation. This is what the world is trying to do since decades with international organizations. Like the UNO, who is asking since almost thirty years to stop the embargo against Cuba.

Start complying with the international rules and the world's democratic institutions, then come back giving us a lesson about what we need to do.

Bro, literally none of this stuff is inherent in the system. You can still make a Beowulf cluster. You can still network a bunch of Raspberry Pis. Computing has never been more accessible.

Writing software has never been more accessible.

But consumer standards have risen. The geeks are out there and will happily work from your source code if that’s all you want to share.

The old life is still available. It’s just that back then that was all that was available.

It turns out there are a whole bunch of superstar product designers out there. And now that the software nuts and bolts are easy, those guys are beating (in the market) all the guys whose skill was nuts and bolts.

That’s natural. It what comes from accessibility. That is good because the whole world is lifted by the fact that some fool can build a business on Zapier and Airtable.

The real problem is not the technology but the mindset. Simply follow the twin principle of live and let live AND do no harm to others. Have a moral compass. You don’t need to be religious or even spiritual for this. Just understand that this is best for you in the long run.

Markets can be seen as regulatory institutions in themselves, though they exhibit many undesirable side effects. The inherent "decentralisation" in Western societies is enabled by markets. Producers meet consumers in a constant feedback loop, production follows demand. Some producers are weeded out, new classes of products and their corresponding market types appear. Consumers can choose what, when and where to buy. What would be political decisions in a centralised society are market mechanisms in a market society.

It goes awry when you add mass media, mass culture and psychology into the mix. They encourage all kinds of irrational group behaviour which skews the markets in unpredictable ways.

Not more regulation, not better regulation, but impartial enforcement of existing regulation.

>"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy. Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."

It's been that way forever with some rare exceptions.

>"You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers"

Total baloney. Many do run Internet service without cloud providers, including yours truly. It is true that for some reason many do fall for that cloudy propaganda. Their loss. Not ours. Keep digging your own graves. Or if they big enough they might not care as they pass those costs down to end customer.

I suspect I do not agree with many of the political opinions of this writer. Yet, I find myself strongly agreeing with the general conclusions. Of course, specificity and implementation is probably where the civil war breaks out.

Maybe there is already a better alternative that is enjoying meteoric success along many dimensions. Maybe that alternative already dominates the supply of physical goods and supply chains. Or maybe not.

So aside the link to "the tyranny of structurelessness" (which I am about to read) the article is basically supporting it's own premise: distributed systems always go awry. I hate to be that guy but there's no proof of this at all. I can see it theoretically, you can never predict all behavior in a system, chaotic systems are unpredictable, etc. But there's no proof of the claim, and the article basically argues that it is true because it is true.

> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.

I feel this one. Having worked in security in the past, even I often feel overwhelmed keeping my own security going. I use the best defense in depth that I can, but I know that's not enough.

> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.

This is the key point. So many debates about "more X" vs. "less X" when what we mostly need is "better X". Anti-Covid measures; almost any sort of "security"; government programs of all sorts. And, yes, very much regulation.

Scott Alexander has had some nice riffs on this theme, though I can't come up with a specific link at the moment.

Wait until the free money stops. Then you’ll have real problems on your hands. If folks are whining now in an economy with a rate of inflation higher than most long term debt, and the biggest market rally since the 90s, wait until the party stops. Then you’re actually going to have something to cry about.

Incredible how people in developed countries have no idea or appreciation for the freedoms and opportunities they’re surrounded by.

You see what you want to see. These are not true in my daily life,

1 "Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy." 2 "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." 3 "Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up."

Dial back the doom and gloom mindset. It's an abundant world.

> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.

I really like this. The same goes for trust - we need to be able to trust more, not build a trustless system. Be able to trust medical advice from doctors, trust that the auto-repair shop will be honest, and trust that the plane we fly on is built to the correct safety standard.

The author seems to be confusing distributed systems with market systems. Cloud services are a market system, but it isn't distributed... it's all in central servers. The technologies that are "simply never going to be able to achieve their goals" are trying to be market systems and distributed systems.

This article is:

* 20% - Arguments that we've deregulated too much, and need more economic regulation.

* 80% - The "old man yells at cloud" meme. Getting a zillion upvotes, simply because it happens to tap a lot of HN's particular old man buttons.

I understand why this is at the top of the page. It's just a little disappointing.

> Let's build what we already know is right.

Agreed. And that will be 10,000 different things. Right now all the media fuss and discussion from it is about deciding "what do we know is right" without recognizing (intentionally?) that there's no one answer to that question.

> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.

Sad but true.

I love this article so much.

> People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.

Yes, yes, this 1000x yes. Every time someone on HN or Reddit blithely assumes deregulation will solve everything, I want to forcibly point out that the most important word in "free market", is not "free", it's "market". A free market operates within a structure that must be created and maintained not using the properties of the market itself. If you don't have anything with more power than the market maintaining the market, before long you don't have a market. And once you don't have a market, you don't have "free" either.

There's a reason professional sports matches have referees on the field. You need a structure more powerful than the game to preserve the game.

Our bodies/biology is a perfect example of agency + regulation ;-)

Great essay, but I think fundamentally wrong.

There are some important distributed systems he overlooks: the ones found in nature. Gas Laws, photosynthesis, and radiant energy are pretty great, it means I always have air to breathe. No one is regulating that, and to do so would only make things much worse.

The challenge is that humans suck at designing distributed systems. Nature is exquisitely designed (or, if you want, evolved). The solution then, is to root ourselves in nature rather than desperately, constantly trying to replace it. Bitcoin is the only new tech I can think of that does this (not sure if that's the 'most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system' the author refers to). Everything else: farming subsidies, AI, Keynesian economics, plastic surgery, vaccines, desk jobs — are all hopelessly out of touch with reality.

That's not to say technology is Bad, but it needs to be real, not manufactured.

> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.

Is there really "public" transportation only available to FAANG employees ?!

This post had so much potential, only to start going off the rails by making a straw man of libertarianism [0] and then crash and burn by ignoring that so many of the listed gripes are due to centralized authorities being themselves corrupt. The regulators he's referencing for the solution have also been corrupted by their own incentives - they create ever more bureaucratic restrictions on small-scale actors for the appearance of doing something, while failing to police large scale misbehavior because of too big to fail. Joe Businessman sells psychoactive substances? Make sure to prevent his access to the banking system! Golden Mansacks creates financial logic bombs to loot retirement accounts? Print trillions to bail out the metaindustry!

The example of an invisible hierarchy being not paying your "AWS bill" is straight up weird. If the entirety of a system is on AWS (and paid by a single account!), then it's not really decentralized now is it? In fact the whole post is weirdly biased towards the paradigm of centralized systems while claiming to talk about decentralization. Only boring-ass "web scale" businesses need to "pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers". Grassroots self-hosted P2P communication - aka the original and everpresent Internet punk dream - does not.

I agree that the community which has grown around purported solutions to these problems doesn't seem poised to bear much fruit relative to the level of excitement. There is definitely some insight in this post and we're never going to change things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in many different paradigms. But I feel this post's train of thought would have produced much richer results if it had spent more time pondering before trying to synthesize a sweeping summary.

[0] The simplistic rules championed by many capital-L "Libertarians" and other cryptofascists are likely a setup for failure, but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized authority is not.

There are many negative top-level comments here. I wonder what a good survey of developers would say about their feelings on the different bullet points from the article.

This whole essay boils down to "This time, for sure!"

I don't think it's a good idea to make more and more solutions to problems that we don't understand.

What about we spend more time to study the problems, to study us.

I was recently on sick leave and had some time to concentrate. I read William Gibson's Neuromancer finally. Glad that we aren't in that dystopic future.

sometimes... I hate how popular avery's posts are. (he's my former boss). I simply can't write like that. Or think like that. good show, ex-boss!

> I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.

All hierarchies are structures but not all structures are hierarchies. I'm not sure Jo Freeman argues for explicit hierarchy.

CTRL-F the article.

Structure - 92 Hierarchy - 0

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Some arguments there are ok but:

> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.

Just move to Europe lmao

This piece seems to use "decentralized" and "distributed" interchangeably. These are not entirely the same concept.

> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.

What's this about?

Sounds like this is a generalization that the "don't be evil" motto slowly disappears and turns into "get money".

I get it, I worked at a company like that. It started out as connecting everyone to the internet for free, and turned into connecting the wealthy so they could be more efficient. The wealthy tend to pay more than the poor.

Altruism is unfortunately a poor motivator in capitalism.

Perhaps we need to write out the tenets of western society to determine if the system trends in the right direction and determine which amendments need to be created in order for it to bend towards good.

Switching from a capitalist society to an altruistic society.

> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.

This is such an important statement. The hub of this article really.

  People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism. 

I've never seen this put so concisely. I've found it frustrating that so much of the popular social-economic diatribe is based on outdated economic terminology from 100 years ago. So much has changed and yet the language does not.

> Let's build what we already know is right.

There's no universally or commonly accepted view of what is "right".

> One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance.

is there a reference for this astounding number?

Every non-tech item in their list is evergreen. Artists impoverished and rich getting richer and not new things.

Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:

> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."

It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way.

There's one line in there which is very important.

Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).

Right there is what's needed to make capitalism work. I've mentioned previously that a European Union study (I need to find the reference for that) indicated that it takes about four substantial players in a market before price competition works. Three or less becomes oligopoly. The US has three big banks, three big cell phone services, and three big pharmacy chains. All act like oligopolies.

There's an over-regulated edge case, too. The US used to regulate who could be a trucker, or where airlines could land. That ended in the 1980s.

We need criteria for when things are getting out of the stable region. This is a quantitative thing, and law doesn't do quantitative very well. So we have a philosophical problem in how to regulate into the continuous control region region, where price signals work.

This is at least a PhD sized problem and possibly a Nobel Prize in Economics sized problem.

We currently emphasize freedom or people making choices. The fact that greed and indifference often carry the day is an indictment of people and their choices, not "the system".

It has often been remarked that socialism and Christianity are similar. They both preach the gospel of love. The difference is that the Christians, whatever their faults, understand that good and evil is a question of something inside every person. Socialists, on the other hand, tend to have this legalistic idea that we can regulate away sin. It doesn't work. Regulatory bodies, like all institutions, are composed of people and so they cannot transcend the frailities of those people.

The defi people have this idea that we can regulate with clever algorithms. I don't think they will be any more successful than the socialists. If they succeed, they'll create a system without humans at its center which we will find even more intolerable than capitalism or socialism. If you want a preview of this system, consider the phenomenon of people begging on twitter for Google to unban their account.

When we complain about greed, we're talking about one of the oldest questions: how to make people good. We should pay much more attention to what religions have to say on that question than the world socialists or technocrats imagine they can create with the right regulations.

The article mentions that we incorrectly use the term "free market" to describe the optimal market system, but I'd argue we do a similar thing with regulation. We use "regulation" to describe the "ideal regulation", and both these term misuses divide people that might otherwise agree.

I'll give one example: patents. Right now there is a discussion about waiving pharma patents in order to help with vaccine production in other countries. This is framed as a government action against businesses, when in reality it is an act of deregulation of markets. Patents are an incredibly heavy handed government regulation that uses tax dollars to protect state-sponsored monopolies of "ideas" and "inventions", creating a huge drain in terms of legal resources (courts, judges, juries if necessary), have obvious regulatory capture dynamics as that is in fact the stated goal of a patent, as well as creating entire sectors of the "private" economy that exist solely to perpetuate this system (patent lawyers, patent trolls, etc.), not to mention create networks of "safe havens" of theoretically competitor companies that are actually "allied" in their accumulation of mutually-assured-destruction patent portfolios that make it almost impossible for new startups to enter a field since they hold no such cards.

It's unfortunate that the "deregulation" discussion has been largely co-opted by these corporations as opposed to focusing on these IMO much more pertinent issues that could actually have a dramatically more positive effect.

Like many people, much of the OP implicitly accepts as its premise the philosophies that create this problem. When you do that, the battle and debate are already over. The assumptions determine the outcome.

Many of those philosophies espouse hopelessness and despair. Making your enemy despair is a transparent and brazenly obvious tactic, and fundamental psyops. You are giving away your power, which is considerable, for nothing. The nutcases are vastly outnumbered. Why are people so stupid as to not see that, and to buy into it? Are you kidding me?

Another thing I've long believed is the disparagement of humanities and 'post-modernism' is disarmament. These are the tools that will win, not more algorithms. The bad guys embrace and use those tools, disparaging them all the while, and most people I know again implicitly accept that and unilaterally disarm themselves. Brilliant!

Why does everyone do this stupid sh-t? IMHO: The pressure of social norms. Look at the widespread use of contempt, for example - a great tool for enforcing social norms, and but which serves no rational, productive purpose. Open-mindedness, humility, respect, and reason are the productive tools - but I can sense the contempt coming for mentioning those things

Some examples:

> Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up.

We've made cowardice a social norm. If you think the situation is serious, 'giving up' because you are tired or due to social pressure is very weak. People regularly have risked their freedom, lives, fortunes, and honor (reputation) for to give us what we have, generation after generation. We are the stewards and leaders now; what will we give the next generation, or will we just be parasites and throw it all away. Nothing we face is worse than prior generations - if you think it's tough now, imagine advocating for women's rights, for example, facing millennia of history and widespread reactionary outrage; success didn't look assured at all.

> Big banks and big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.

Democracy is the tool, the place everyone gets a vote regardless of their wealth, status, power. By despairing, you again abandon the field of battle to the other side, which certainly has not despaired. It's incredible to watch people surrender unilaterally, for no reason, other than telling each other to despair.

  > We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

maybe i'm crazy, but it just seems weird to lump these all together like they are expected to work well together

democracy: one person, one vote (egalitarianism)

capitalism: money is power, and capital is used to accumulate more of it (competitively and socially)

if you base your society on those two contradictory ideas, it seems inevitable a competitive system that encourages commodification and selling anything and everything to make increasing profits will cause all sorts of havoc on society and warp institutions to support those who "have" vs "have not"

  > We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.

this sounds good at first, but we used to have "good regulation" and obviously we are where we are because those "good" regulations were torn down.... running the clock back on regulation will just put us back in the same place again because those with power and influence (monetary and social capital) will warp them for their own ends

Hetzner is super affordable alternative to AWS, now with a DC in US, east coast.

As always, essays like these bring to mind the Prisoner's Dilemma. A thought experiment that, at scale, humanity consistently loses.

I'm not sure that there is a solution. Part of the overall system of..."all this," for lack of a better term...is the fact that we are always dissatisfied by the results of consistently losing the Prisoner's Dilemma and thus are always looking to solve it; our always-looking-to-solve-it more or less guarantees the fact that we will continue to lose it. Around and around it goes.

I ruminate on this stuff probably more than I should, and the only semblance of a conclusion that I can come to is that we only choose the objectively right choice within the Prisoner's Dilemma when we are given a reason to overcome our selfishness, i.e. during times when not working together presents a clear and present existential danger. Thus, war, breakdown of complex systems, death, etc, are all inherent parts of choosing that which keeps us going for just a little bit longer. Just as someone suffering from addiction might only finally turn the nosedive up once they've hit rock bottom, the New Deal was only possible in the midst of a world war and the Great Depression. Intelligent folks can see these problems coming from a mile away, as this essay makes clear, but actually mustering humanity together to walk in step to a degree in which we can actually address these problems either requires authoritarianism or a massive imminent danger to rally against.

Some are born during the spring, when we're coming out of one of those bad periods and have mustered the will to replace a part of society's roots with something better so that it might continue a little longer; almost immediately, those who benefit from it take advantage of it and begin dismantling it, thinking they can have their cake and eat it too -- retain the work society has done together, that rare thing, and use it to help boost themselves to a height far greater than might be achieved by simply contributing to the continued existence of society as a whole. Everyone being in its for themselves results in a breakdown, leading inexorably to some sort of collapse, big or small. Those born in winter do the hard work of setting things the pins back up so that their children can knock them down again. Around and around it goes.

The wild thing is that, as the interlocking mechanisms of society get more complex and consist more and more of complex interlocking systems themselves, and as globalization continues, those cataclysms shrink in scale and increase in number. 90 years ago it was a world war; today it's millions of little fires that need putting out, technical debt piling up, the odd sense of alienation brought upon by society looking at itself. The rock bottoms multiply, from one a generation, to one a minute somewhere in the world. Just juggling that and seeing how that all interacts becomes its own crisis of entropy.

I suppose I'm rambling now -- this kind of ruminating has a way of transforming from terse description into navel-gazing poetry. Around and around it goes.

> The major rework we need isn't some math theory, some kind of Paxos for Capitalism, or Paxos for Government

the part time parliament https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (lamport 98)

author is describing a system of taxation based on compatibility rather than on the need to pay for roads + armies

this part feels real

integrating with things is a tax in a lot of ways

I immediately thought of Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch".

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

His conclusion is that the only thing that could ultimately defeat the god Moloch (basically a personification of the problems described in the OP) is if we install a different god Elua (basically the personification of a human-friendly machine intelligence) to do the job. And if that sounds like hubris, the notion that we could overcome these problems ourselves is an even bigger form of hubris.

> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.

The article's thesis is so obvious that it's amazing it needs to be argued in this particular way.

Two thoughts here:

1) It's often problematic when people take absolutist views on things, i.e. "government regulation is ALWAYS bad." The optimal amount is never zero.

2) After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a subset of very far right viewpoints, it's becoming clear that lots of these people claim to want "freedom," but what they really want is freedom from the existing power hierarchies, and to create new ones in which they are on top again.

Only on hacker news would someone post about a very good take on the problems of our society and then everyone's comment is arguing over semantics. Happens every time on here.

Most of his assertions about 'trends' are just wrong.

100 years ago:

- They would sometimes shoot strikers - Strikers and owners faced off in literal violent battle - There was no socialized healthcare, fire or emergency services - College was for the ultra elite, even by 1960 only 7% were going to Uni. - A lot of workers just died. Colorado River was dammed at the cost of dozens of lives to 'Keep It On Schedule' - Blacks used the back entrance, and their grandparents were literally slaves - 'Art' was something people did in their spare time, and there were very, very few opportunities for true artists. - People didn't travel for vacations etc. that was for the rich only. - The legal system was much more classed than even it is today. - 'The Rich' 100% controlled the news. It's why they owned papers.

The material standard of living for regular people has increased immensely for everyone, to the point that people now live in general relative abundance and safety which would have only been the privy of the 0.1% before.

I also don't buy at all the notion that 'decentralization' is in any way some kind of magical advantage for the commons.

We have Health Officers and International Orgs like the WHO and academic institutions in order to do things, like coordinate and understand the impact of things like COVID.

Note that in most of those systems, there is some degree of 'Centralization' but also 'Decentralization' -> Universities may have some authority, but there are many of them.

For information for example, 'full decentralization' means the absolute most ridiculous concepts becoming the most popular (i.e. QAnon) and semi-fabricated ideas about all sorts of things. Especially those that target 'out groups'.

There is no substitute for thoughtful, conscientious and legitimate leadership across all elements of society.

Although there's probably some room for decentralization in some areas, maybe currency, as long as currency is managed within some reasonable range by the Central Banks, and you don't hold a lot of cash (cash was not meant to be a store of value), then even then, the Central Bank is not that-that bad.

Most of the items read like specific 2nd order effects of Capitalism 101. We were always aware of the pros/cons and the cons have overtaken the pros in our current incarnation.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5002/economics/pros-and-c...

"One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance" - I did not know that!

"Your phone can run mapreduce jobs 10x-100x faster than your timeshared cloud instance that costs more. Plus it has a GPU."

Plus you can carry the phone anywhere, e.g., somewhere no internet access, but you need internet access to reach a timeshared cloud instance.

Have been experimenting with running servers on "phones" personally and think we need computers in this form factor that are not "phones".

"One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance."

Same. Can carry Macbook anywhere.

"Computers are so hard to run now, that we are supposed to give up and pay a subscription to someone - well, actually to every software microvendor - to do it for us."

All under the guise of "making things easier". Anything is easier if you do not have to do it yourself. This does not mean the thing itself is becoming easier to do. IMO, microvendors are, intentionally or not, effectively building "complexity moats". When DIY becomes exceedingly more difficult, then we know that no one is "making things easier". They might be deliberately doing the opposite. If the thing isn't any easier for the microvendor, then we are just transferring the burden to someone else, not making the thing easier.

"We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous.""

There is usuallly an HN comment along the lines of "I am thankful that Apple screens apps for me" as if it is some kind of service. However the "service" is not solving problem of "dangerous apps". Someone still has to look at the program and ask, "What is this app doing". Of course, many users do not need to be paying for this "service" because they can select "safe apps" just as well as Apple can. But it isn't optional. Pay up.

"IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware."

Maybe this is, to some small extent, the result of trying to delegate 100% of our responsibilities when using a computer. "Let someone else take care of it."

Not to say I enjoy having to know how to do everything in order to compile and install an OS, a server, and configure it, but I know if I don't then there are consequences.

No problem with running software on a computer in "the cloud" so long as I own the computer. There are consquences if I don't.

Make the choices the marketers want us to make, enjoy the "convenience" (and the expense), but accept the consequences. Take personal responsibility.

When no one knows how to do anything for themselves, then the problem of "gatekeeping" can only become worse.

Like 1/3 to 1/2 of the problems in this list are just problems with using AWS or other cloud providers. I say this all the time, and nobody takes it seriously: Don't use the cloud. The cloud costs more, requires more work to set up, and provides you with machines with broken IO and 1/50th the capacity you would get if you just racked servers yourself.

Let me say it again: Compared to buying servers from Dell (or whoever) and driving them down to the local COLO and plugging them in yourself, the cloud:

- Costs more (between 5x and 20x more over the course of a 4 year depreciation for hardware).

- Is more work in the end, by a large factor (you are going to do a ton of stuff you don't need and are never going to use with the cloud. When something goes wrong you are going to spend days or months trying to fix it. Performance is so bad that you have to build very complex solutions to problems that it is very easy to just throw hardware at, like having a db server with millions of IOps, which is extremely easy if you rack hardware and basically unreasonable due to cost and hard limits in the cloud (Well over $10K/month for Postgres at 80,000 iops, which is the most you can provision).

- It's more work up front, even if you have no idea how to do anything to start with. For your deployments to be secure you have to know what you are doing either way, in AWS you just have less choices of how to set things up. Most things in AWS are at least as hard or harder than doing them yourself, and you can't fix problems you run into. Their tier 1 and tier 2 support are completely useless and just do keyword matching against their scripts.

- It costs WAY more. You pay for more than the cost to buy much better hardware and the cost to colo that hardware every 4 months. Yes that is right, if you go buy a pile of servers from dell and rack them in a colo, or buy the same capacity from EC2, the EC2 capacity you get will be far lower. Far far far lower. And you can't customize it or redeploy it for other uses as it gets older.

- When things break, you can't fix them. You just have to live with it or stop caring. IO to disk stalls randomly leaving processes in uninterruptible IO wait status for 100ms? Get fucked, they not only won't admit it's a problem, they will also hide this fact from you in all their cloudwatch metrics, and deny it is happening. Maybe it's a noisy neighbor, maybe it's their terrible networking stack, who knows, you'll never figure it out and you probably can't fix it even if you do. I have weird failure scenarios in AWS all the time that I have never seen or even contemplated as reasonable to consider on my own hardware.

- Cloud deployments are stupid. K8 is an awful system built by children who don't what is important. I don't even directly deal with K8 as my actual job, but I spend more time worrying about K8 to get code shipped today than I ever spent maintaining deployment scripts when I had to own deployments end-to-end.

> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.

You can tune out here.

Relevant : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Falling somewhat into the category of a libertarian, I fundamentally disagree that "all useful discourse terminates forevermore". My issue is with the presupposition that it's OK to force people to cooperate effectively. All of the named problems are there basically because people aren't interested in solving them voluntarily. It absolutely does not follow that therefore it's okay to use force.

The hubris required to decide that you know better than others how they should live their lives, and your ends justify the means, always astounds me. Treating people as components in a system, to be regulated and managed, is in opposition to treating them as beings with agency, entitled to choose how and when to engage with others.

> Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.

Don't pull any punches, tell us how you really feel...

At current state WALL-E looks like a near future

“We don’t need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.”

Ah, I guess the anarcho/libertarian crowd is stepping back from the abyss. But how is that going to make your EC2 SSD go faster? Cheapen your egress fees? Make you write software that actually has less exploits? Pay artists better?

As with many ideas here, how about a concrete suggestion? Here’s mine: software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.

You don’t get to call yourself a professional and punt on responsibilities. We don’t let doctors or lawyers do it, why should we let coders?

List of general malaises:

> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.

> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.

Seriously? These problems are not remotely in the same ballpark.

I don't even know what is the point of this article. A handwavey call for better regulation of "Western society, economics, capitalism, finance, government, the tech sector, the cloud". Oh, and free daycare too. Gee thanks doc, I'll get right on it.

To me, this reads as "If we, as a society become better people, we don't need other solutions to address how not great of people we are". In other news, water is wet.

I feel as if the author seems to somewhat misunderstand the relationship between those who have less and those who have more. There's a fundamental lack of trust (which really erupted in 2008) that kicked off this whole crypto/web3 thing.

We tried the "trusting people" route and it didn't work. The incentives are just too misaligned for "trust" to ever work (in my opinion). So, techies basically said "Fu$k it, I'll build my own system to do what you (those who have more) _should_ be doing".

This articles seems to say that we don't need all these complex solutions to problems that can fundamentally be solved by just...being better people? But that has never, and will never happen. We all wish we lived in a perfect world where everyone does the right thing - but that is just not the reality we live in. So these "decentralized/distributed systems" (e.g., Bitcoin) are our way of removing the human component from the equation.

I dunno, sorta seems like trying to solve rentier capitalism from the tech side isn't really going to work.

whatever this will be, will be. que sera, sera...

o' lord, please bless us and protect us from thy holy hells of capitalist economic centralization. please let there be upon us deliverance for all, from this century of hellfire and brimstone, consolidation of silicon and machine code... deliver us with the great gifts of modern encryption for mesh networking with centralized administration, all for a very reasonable monthly price. praise be thy software as a service, so thou may centralize thy administration, simplify thy budgeting and leave thy key rotation to thy pros so thou may fight thy wars for not only a good, but for the ultimate good, against thy centralizing powers of capital that seek not only to enslave us, but divide us for eternity as every man, woman and child pays thy holy rent on thy proprietary servers, enslaved to a permanent life of indignity and servitude to those who own not only thy physical real estate, but thy ethereal real estate in thy metaverse as well..

to whom do we owe for this great beacon of light which shall deliver us all?

> We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

I generally agree with much of this blog post but the phrase "Western society" annoys me no end and is a bad fit here.

This essay seems deep and profoundly insightful but I don't think it actually is. Its ultimate call for "better designed regulation" is the no-true-scotsman fallacy in sheep's clothing. How do you know if your regulations are "properly designed?" If they produce good outcomes. But the problem is that there is no consensus about what a good outcome is. Some people are not happy, for example, unless women are quite literally forced to bear children under threat of fine or imprisonment [1]. Of course, these people would not put it that way. They would say that they are not happy unless the systematic slaughter of innocent babies is stopped. That is the problem.

And this problem runs very, very deep. A significant contingent -- significant enough to swing elections -- of one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation on earth would prefer to literally deny the laws of physics than admit that anything said by a "liberal" might actually be true. They would prefer to literally have children shot in school on a regular basis than "give up their guns". Of course, they wouldn't put it that way, but that is the trade-off in point of actual fact.

In an atmosphere like that it is not possible to produce "properly designed regulation." In today's political environment, the instant you even utter that phrase, you lose.

---

[1] And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work.

Excuse me for the dismissive tone, but this looks a dog chasing his tail. Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed? No sir, the systems in place work flawlessly for those who put them there, enjoy the benefits of those systems and make damn sure these systems keep benefiting them no matter what. As long as one doesn't acknowledge this very simple fact, they have no hope of drastically changing society, not even conceptualize a solution IMHO

It's interesting to look at things from a controls perspective.

An economy (any kind of economy!) is just a feedback control system.

Generally, when you're choosing a feedback controller, you have two options: PID, where you have a set of 3 "dumb" rules, and all you have to do is tune the gains on those dumb rules. Or MPC, where you need to actually build a model of the system you are controlling, and then you can optimally plan to control it the future.

In general, MPC is quite good, much better than PID, if you have a great model of your system. It fails when the model is bad, or when you can't determine your state with accuracy.

PID can be very good -- for systems with very fast dynamics and response times, it is better than MPC, because you don't spend a lot of time in the feedback loop evaluating the model, and you don't need to worry about modeling at all ("model-free")

I think of an economy (very broadly) the same way. The mythical "free market" that everyone talks about is like a PID controller over the whole economy. It's a simple rule, supply and demand, and you can keep prices under control quite well with just a PID controller. But PID can fail spectacularly, too, and cause instability.

In general, you know when instability is happening when you look at a graph of your state variables and it looks like an exponential with a positive coefficient [1]. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this: every single chart we can draw about our economy right now looks like an exponential. Energy, probably the most base measurement, looks like an exponential. This is bad [2] and everyone knows it, which I think is the source of a lot of the modern ennui.

Our old MPC models failed spectacularly, because we didn't have a good way of modeling the whole economy, we only had very granular and incomplete information about the markets, and we didn't have a way of actually solving the optimization problem. The obvious missing link here is the computer.

I agree wholeheartedly with the author, and I think it's really valuable to bring up that we already have central planning going on in the form of the corporation. There are thousands of people whose work is completely decoupled from profit and who engage in long term planning at a scale larger than the market they operate in.

What he describes is like a cascade controller, where the inner loops occur in the linear supply/demand region and the outer loops are a smarter model-informed controller. Rather than pretend like the outer loops are just like the inner loops (a pie-in-the-sky libertarian view) or pretend like the inner loops are just like the outer loops (the anti-capitalist view) we should be thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of both. Right now we're very good at the inner loop but we're basically randomly flailing about with the outer loop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function

[2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.

Everyone is getting richer, as for greedier..

> Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society.

The socially responsible company movement is now a thing. Most companies now care about the environment and their employees to a point that was unheard of decades ago, even if only because of PR.

> Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up.

And yet there’s a market for doing good things. The number of NGOs is in all time highs.

> Artists really don't get enough of a reward for all the benefit they provide.

What? Artists have never had it easier. From spotify to patreon, or even youtube. Distributing and monetizing has never been easier.

> Big banks and big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.

Suckness is non-surprisingly tied to government. The closest a market is to government the more it sucks.

> The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening.

The statistics say otherwise

> You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers, just like you couldn't run software without paying IBM and then Microsoft, back in those days.

On premise is still a thing.

> delivering less per dollar, gigahertz, gigabyte, or watt.

Except compute has never been more efficient.

> We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous."

We pay them for curating and maintaining a system that’s working for millions of people.

> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.

When wasn’t it that way? Were you around the days of the “ping of death”?

> Everything about modern business is designed to funnel money, faster and faster, to a few people who have demonstrated they can be productive. This totally works, up to a point.

Citation needed

> But we've now reached the extreme corner cases of capitalism. Winning money is surely a motivator, but that motivation goes down the more you have. Eventually it simply stops mattering at all.

Call me crazy, but once I’ve covered my expenses and built a safety net, I’d rather slow down, enjoy my life, spend time with my family… That you see a negative there somehow is baffling to me.

  We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy,
  capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing
  actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

I think the author is looking at the past through the lens of the present. A lot of that paragraph is mixing so many ideas that a historian would be shaking their head. What we have is miles better than anything that came before. We botched "the dream" ? Whose dream?

Firstly, we don't live in a "true Democracy". The Athenians tried that, and some aspects of it were pretty nice, and some sucked (which was something of a trend... all political systems have pros and cons) and it lasted a couple hundred years. And when this new nation (USA) was founded, literally all the founders couldn't agree on how to set it up, because every way they could imagine sucked. So they all compromised a whole lot, and what we got is a Representative Democracy, in the form of a Republic (specifically a federal presidential republic). And today it's working exactly the way the founders intended 245 years ago. That's a huge deal! Not 100 years before our nation was born, the British overthrew the monarchy and tried to form a Republic, but that only lasted 20 years until it fell back to Monarchy and then evolved into Empire. We're doing pretty damn well today, I think.

Second, Capitalism comes in many forms. Which one is your dream? Because I'll guarantee you that the founders, and everyone since, have all had conflicting views about what kind of Capitalism we're supposed to practice, what its aims should be, and how to achieve them. But we still accomplish the broadest sense of Capitalism, and we do it so well that we're the richest nation in the world by far. If you can somehow convince everyone to agree on one form of Capitalism, with one specific set of goals, then maybe we can achieve that.

Third, Social Coherence can only work in a bubble, and we do certainly have many of those, so I'm not sure how that dream failed. You're never going to get 320 Million people to be socially coherent in all ways, all the time. Especially not when their political, cultural, and ideological history has evolved such that one half of them think the other half are maliciously immoral and virtually evil.

Finally, hooooo boy. Utopianism. What can you say about the dream of a literal perfect society? If that's what you're basing all of these complaints on, then I guess the rest make sense... If you believe in a perfect society, then of course you'd believe you can get politics and economics and social order perfect, too. But the most ridiculous part of this dream is that technology is supposed to reach a Utopia. Really? Technology? That stuff that's expensive and complicated and pollutes the earth and depends upon the "evils" of Capitalism and Globalism and Programming? That stuff that depends upon outsourced employment, unequal pay, and unfair labor to produce, and creates huge piles of toxic waste? That stuff that enables new technological business models that find new innovative ways to prey upon people to create money for a tiny few? That is what's gonna bring about your Utopia?

I am not embarrassed. We've accomplished a lot, and we'll keep accomplishing a lot. It won't be fast or easy, and we will never have a perfect society. But things do get better. If you want to feel less embarrassed, stop ranting into your blog and start creating change. Then you can rant into your blog about how difficult change is.

vote cako

> Everyone seems to have an increasingly horrifically misguided idea of how distributed systems work.

> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.

This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.

It looks like the author is thinking while writing, which is fine. But that alone is not going to change people's minds. I'd look forward to an article where the author, after having gotten thoughts in order, comes back to write an article talking about something specific.

Mods, please ban me. I can't stop checking this site but it keeps disappointing me. please just ban me

The Old Major we desperately need. Now we need only a "Beasts of England", to claim the farm, and be watchful of the Napoleans in our midst. Sign me up for whatever revolution this is.

A minor point but

> Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.

If you ran your database locally and with multiple reundant power sources, it wouldn't have this problem.

That's of course a bad idea, however it shows it's not impossible to do it without a single point of failure.

"I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. [...] As long as the regulators are doing their job."

Is he not aware that regulators in many places work towards making that impossible?

What are examples of good, helpful regulations, does he cite any? Or is it just a vague feeling that regulation is good, and governments are good and for helping people?

All I read is "bla bla power bad" - all those leftists have is "power theory". Power this, power that - power somehow explains everything. It is almost esoteric.

Even the bad things he claims happen without regulations (monopolies) are not proven to happen without regulation, and also not proven to be automatically bad things.

And his first sentence:

"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy."

How does everyone feel so exploited? Who is greedy? Why are you in their power? How do they make it so that you don't have a choice? Goods for consumption generally get better and more affordable over time. So are the producers really so greedy?

What is stopping you from creating a better bank, better health care, better what not? The "rich, powerful, greedy" people are just people like you and me. You are not forced to use their products. With one exception, the government, whose power you can't escape - but that somehow is the one thing lefties like?

I mean some people did and created a better financial system. But now this leftie hates them, too. Guess it is just unbearable if people are independent and not victims like everybody else. And without asking him for permission to boot.

The article lost me here:

"The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff."

Here's the problem: a "market" that is regulated this way is no longer a market. In order to have a market that works at all as a market, it has to be free in the sense that all transactions are voluntary. If you restrict people's freedom to engage in the transactions of their choice, you break the market; it no longer does what it's supposed to do.