by api | 2025-05-03 17:53:44+00:00
I’ve toyed around with an ultimate heresy: that the Internet, or at least the way we built it, was a mistake, and that something more like the telecoms and their OSI channel based network would have been socially superior.

The PC age was incredible. Jump in your time machine and go back and buy a decent PC in 1995, probably the height of the pre Internet PC era. It’d be kind of a big clunky box, sure, but the striking thing you’d find was a machine brimming with features and software almost all built primarily to serve the user of the machine. It was a product designed for you, the customer, full of attempts to deliver value to you.

It was a product of the good kind of capitalism, the kind where you try to create and trade value for value. (BTW think on this and you’ll understand why libertarian thought was popular then. Capitalism didn’t look so bad in this era. A 90s PC was an argument that Ayn Rand was right.)

You might use this PC to call BBSes, which were of course slow and very limited, but they too were either volunteer efforts aimed at building a community or services to serve, well, their users. Volunteer free or low cost BBSes were pubs, third spaces, while things like Compuserve were more like paid libraries, basically the pro version.

Ten years later in 2005 you can already see this world giving way to the dystopia of today where you are the product and the machine is there as a host for things to hack your dopamine system.

A telco OSI net would have been more expensive and limited. It would have been basically fast data calls. But it would have been point to point. Your PC would have called other PCs or PC services like with modems, just faster. No NAT and more importantly no unpermissioned access to your machine so no security armageddon driving the installation of firewalls that break end to end connectivity.

You probably would have gotten cloud eventually but its role might be different. You might not have gotten the www as we know it, and that might not be a bad thing. You might not have gotten Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and that’s like saying we might never have had the AIDS epidemic. Social media has been a pretty strong net negative for humanity.

That network would probably have had a billing mechanism built in too. You’d be able to put up the equivalent of 1-900 numbers, services that automatically bill their callers. That would have allowed a profusion of small businesses serving and aggregating data with working business models that do not inevitably lead to enshittification.

I’m just speculating of course. You can’t rerun history. But I do wonder if a more limited and managed network would have counter intuitively led to a more free, open, and decentralized computing landscape with an economic model centered around the user as the customer.

Instead we’ve gone down this terrible road where the net and computer tech is primarily about delivering the user to the real customer: advertisers, political parties, and ultimately authoritarian political regimes. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that this ends with a command and control architecture where a small number of despotic god-kings drive humanity by mass dopamine system hacking with the assistance of AI. That is a dark, ugly future.