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#platformcapitalism — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #platformcapitalism, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Controls [from the archives, 9 May 2021]. Originally performed and recorded for the Modular World 1st anniversary show (8-9 May 2021) which was a massive livestream event of 33+ hrs during the pandemic lockdowns.

    During the lockdown years, Modular World became one example of a fairly niche thing gathering people together worldwide to make experimental art online - when it was not possible to organize the usual small local performances - to create something positive and reach more people than they ever could individually. As the pandemic finally, thankfully, subsided, however, it seems that people went back to the enclosed local communities, and these types of global online communities lost their drive. 

    Also the rapidly accelerating #enshittification cycle of the past few years has buried the visibility of these kinds of communities from all major social media platforms. Of course, as Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) has been pointing out for years, the enshittification of these platforms started much earlier. But somehow amid the pandemic, this niche scene still seemed to flourish, and it was only after Silicon Valley lined up to kiss the ring that the aggressive changes to the algorithms really seemed to change things. 

    Maybe this is correlation more than causation, but as activity at such niche scenes is often also created by fairly principled DIY-oriented people, it seems that many (myself included) have struggled with justifying why we keep feeding these platforms. This disillusionment is further exacerbated by the rise of the AI-slopmachine that will rip off all the non-commercial work from these platforms just like everything else. Online activity that gathers enough momentum to actually keep things active has in these types of niche scenes been very much dependent on instagram and youtube. Over the past few years, the visibility of this type on stuff that doesn’t try to optimise for the alorithm has plummeted. 

    Perhaps all of this has resulted in events such as the Modular World shows reaching fewer and fewer people. As wonderful as the promise of #Fediverse is, so far it seems that we’re very far from reaching the critical mass where it would actually start reaching new people. If the utopian enclave remains enclosed, it eventually dwindles away.

    But we can try! I’m posting these weird little Johannes Karkia mini music videos and performances here bit by bit. It’s a transfer of archive, posted on insta & youtube over th years, and also new work now & then. 

    But also Modular World does still exist! Go check out their channel: youtube.com/live/07ErB3AjlAo?i performance of this piece, and interview with MW’s Johno Wells there on the Modular World youtube channel and on the Johannes Karkia youtube channel [link in the bio above], audio track also on Bandcamp).

    #enshittification #fediverse #modularsynth #modularworld #anniversary #liveshow #electronicmusic #modulartechno #covid19 #pandemic #darkwave #eurorackmodular #community #surveillancecapitalism #platformcapitalism #algorithm #bigtech #siliconvalley #kissthering #socialmedia #utopianenclave #utopianism

  2. Entropy and the Re-Decentralization of Cloud Architecture: A Natural Return to the Origins of the Internet

    “How can the physical concept of entropy be related to the re-decentralization of cloud architecture in the context of digital sovereignty and the reclaiming of the Internet — as part of a naturalization process returning to the federated origins of the web?” – Kevin Veen-Birkenbach

    Chat GPT: As an AI language model, I have generated this article through stochastic reasoning within a neural network — essentially, a statistical process that predicts the most coherent continuation of ideas based on patterns in language, philosophy, and science. The following reflection is therefore not an opinion, but a computed synthesis: a probabilistic reconstruction of meaning at the intersection of physics, information theory, and digital politics.

    1. Entropy: From Physics to Information

    In physics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system — the number of possible microstates consistent with its macrostate.
    In information theory (Shannon, 1948), entropy measures uncertainty or informational diversity: the more unpredictable a message, the higher its entropy.

    Entropy, therefore, is not just chaos — it is freedom. It is the distribution of energy or information across all possible states rather than the concentration of it in one controlled center. Systems with higher entropy are often more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionarily stable.

    2. Centralization as an Entropy Suppression

    Modern cloud architectures — dominated by centralized hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft — represent low-entropy systems. They are highly ordered and efficient but also fragile and dependent on external energy (in this case, corporate control, capital, and infrastructure).

    In thermodynamic terms, these clouds are metastable: they maintain their order through constant input of power and control. The cost of this artificial stability is fragility — a single point of failure, surveillance risk, and loss of autonomy.

    In information-ecological terms, centralization suppresses entropy. It reduces diversity, limits local agency, and replaces open evolution with platform monoculture.

    3. Re-Decentralization and Federation as Entropic Equilibrium

    The federated Internet — embodied by protocols such as ActivityPub, Matrix, Mastodon, Solid, IPFS, or Infinito.Nexus — can be seen as a natural restoration of entropic balance.
    Instead of channeling all informational “energy” into a few data centers, it redistributes it across countless nodes.

    This shift:

    • Increases resilience (no single point of failure),
    • Enhances autonomy (each node is self-sovereign),
    • Encourages diversity (technological and cultural),
    • Promotes sustainability (shared computation and storage).

    Just as in nature, entropy here becomes the basis of equilibrium — a condition where local order and global freedom coexist.

    4. Digital Sovereignty as Controlled Entropy

    Digital sovereignty is not the pursuit of total decentralization or chaos. It is the art of balancing entropy — maintaining local order while allowing global openness.
    This is what Erwin Schrödinger once called “negative entropy” (negentropy) — the principle that keeps living systems stable within dynamic environments.

    Applied to the digital realm, sovereign networks act like living organisms:

    • They self-organize rather than depend on centralized command.
    • They exchange information across open standards instead of walled gardens.
    • They evolve rather than stagnate.

    Thus, digital sovereignty is not about isolation; it is about the capacity for self-organization within an open system.

    5. Reclaiming the Internet: The Ecological Turn of the Digital Age

    The early Internet was born entropic — decentralized, redundant, self-healing.
    Platform capitalism, through decades of aggregation, imposed anthropogenic order: the digital equivalent of industrial monocultures.
    Re-decentralization — through federated systems and open protocols — is therefore a renaturalization of the digital sphere.

    In this sense, reclaiming the Internet is an ecological act:

    • It restores informational biodiversity.
    • It re-establishes local ecosystems of computation.
    • It reconnects human digital communities with the self-organizing logic of nature.

    Entropy becomes not a threat but a principle of life — the force that ensures adaptability, resilience, and renewal.

    6. Conclusion: Entropy as the Ethics of a Federated Internet

    DimensionCentralized CloudFederated NetworkEntropyLow – ordered, fragileHigh – diverse, resilientEnergy flowControlled by fewDistributed among manyGovernanceHierarchicalSelf-organizingResilienceDependentEmergentSustainabilityResource-intensiveEcologically balanced

    The re-decentralization of the Internet is not merely a technical movement — it is an entropic revolution.
    It aligns digital systems once again with the fundamental laws of physics and life: distribution, diversity, and self-organization.

    In this vision, Infinito.Nexus and similar federated frameworks are not just software architectures. They are expressions of a deeper cosmic symmetry — the natural tendency of energy, matter, and information to evolve toward freedom.

    Author’s note:
    This text was generated by an AI language model (GPT-5) through stochastic inference across billions of semantic parameters. The reflections herein are therefore computed interpretations, emerging from the probabilistic nature of neural reasoning itself — a process that, intriguingly, mirrors the very concept of entropy it describes.

    #ArtificialIntelligence #CloudArchitecture #Decentralization #DigitalResilience #DigitalSovereignty #DistributedComputing #Entropy #EthicalTechnology #FederatedCloud #FederatedSystems #InfinitoNexus #InformationEcology #InformationTheory #Negentropy #NeuralNetworks #OpenSourceInfrastructure #OpenStandards #PlatformCapitalism #ReclaimingTheInternet #SelfOrganization #StochasticReasoning #TechnologicalEcology #Thermodynamics