#robinberjon — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #robinberjon, aggregated by home.social.
-
This is a reasonably long article, part of a series by Robin Berjon about the future of the internet. I like the bit where he mentions that “people who claim not to practice any philosophical inspection of their actions are just sleepwalking someone else’s philosophy”. I think that’s spot on.
Ultimately, Berjon is arguing that […]https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/10/17/in-what-ways-does-this-technology-increase-peoples-agency/
-
"To summarise, we are traversing an epochal change and we lack the institutional capacity to complete this transformation without imploding. (...) We can fix the failed state that is the Internet if we approach building tech with institutional principles, and an Internet that delivers on its cooperative promise of deeper, denser institutional capacity is what we need as a planetary civilisation." (#robinberjon)
#internet #complexity #transition #society
https://berjon.com/internet-transition/ -
"... whoever has more data, especially from more varied sources, will structurally tend to outcompete whoever has less. Because of this, broad sharing of data enables increased returns to scale and scope, leading to dominance, winner-take-all, and competition for the market rather than in the market."
#RobinBerjon, 2021
-
"Given the fast-growing complexity of our digital lives, we are facing with high probability and inside of a few years the dystopia of a single company inserting itself as the broker for all of our transactions with third parties. As a community, we need to become systematic and unforgiving in hardening our architectures against capture and we need to do it proactively rather than reactively."
#RobinBerjon, 2022
-
"The Internet-wide data free-for-all is key to the process of how some firms rose to dominance. This includes access to information about other businesses’ internal operation that platform infrastructure can observe, network effects in the valuation of data that make bigger players win systematically, or the conquest of adjacent data-rich markets through predatory pricing powered by universal identifiers and lack of purpose limitations."
#RobinBerjon, 2022
-
"The [W3C's] membership-based governance model that prevails today (and its accountability shortcomings) actively prevents other sources of financing. Why help fund an organisation that looks like it will serve its members first and Big Tech first amongst those? No matter how much the individual representatives of those companies might sincerely seek to be independent from their employers, if that independence is not guaranteed by the process... it’s a pinky promise."
#RobinBerjon, 2022
-
"It’s important to note that preventing the concentration of power is not about (architectural) decentralisation. Architectural decentralisation can certainly help, but it isn’t enough: as explained in Capture Resistance, linking on the Web is technically decentralised, but that was not enough to protect the Web from being centralised by Google. What matters here is the active checks and balances on excessive power."
#RobinBerjon, 2022
-
"I remember a time... when the W3C was indeed a member organisation — but you can’t work for the Web if you don’t work with the Web. Over the years, the W3C community layered fix atop fix to progressively address the vexations and limitations of being a member organisation. Three decades in, the W3C looks a lot more like a public interest organisation financed by a generous group of donors who call themselves 'members'."
#RobinBerjon, 2022
-
https://berjon.com/internet-transition/
Robin Berjon on the future of governance...“the Internet is largely a failed state with much infrastructure at the whims of gangs and their billionaire warlords ... anticooperative dynamics prevent collective intelligence”
#robinBerjon #future #governance #internet #fixingThePlanet #sociopolitics #politicalScience #daffodilPetals
-
I think it’s fair to say that this article features ‘florid prose’ but the gist is that we should want society to be as complex as possible. This allow innovation to flourish and means we can solve some of the knottiest problems facing our world. However, we’re hamstrung by issues around transnational governance, and particularly in the digital realm. To summarise, we are traversing an epochal change and we lack the institutional capacity to complete this transformation without imploding. We could well fail, and the consequences of failure at this juncture would be catastrophic. However, we can collectively rise to the challenge and an exciting assemblage of subfields is emerging to help. We can fix the failed state that is the Internet if we approach building tech with institutional principles, and an Internet that delivers on its cooperative promise of deeper, denser institutional capacity is what we need as a planetary civilisation. We don’t need a worldwide technical U.N. to figure this out. Rather, we need transnational topic-specific governance systems that interact with one another wherever they connect and overlap but that do not control one another, and that exercise subsidiarity to one another as well as to more local institutions. Yes, it will be a glorious mess — a Cambrian mess — but we will be collectively smarter for it. Source: The Internet Transition | Robin Berjon
https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/01/26/cambrian-governance-models/
-
This!
"Networked technology that mediates so much of our lives is social engineering — which is to say that deciding how it works is politics."
#RobinBerjon, 2023
-
"... I am in fact more worried about [the] anticooperative effects [of highly centralised Internet corporations]: by taking over infrastructure and shaping it according to mechanisms designed to benefit themselves... which prevents distributed agents from coordinating their behaviour usefully. I believe that this could be measured using Apolito’s metric. It matters because anticooperative dynamics prevent collective intelligence."
#RobinBerjon, 2023
-
@serenity
"Token-based voting can have plutocracy issues...but even people-based voting can share that problem: Julia Cagé showed quite clearly that elections are readily swayed by money, which directly embeds plutocratic tendencies. Voting has a place, I certainly wouldn’t claim that it shouldn’t be used, but we should refrain from considering it to be required in all instances. Voting does not define democracy, it’s only a tool one might use when there is no better option."#RobinBerjon, 2023