did we ever need the decentralised web?

i mean, it makes sense to me that we do.

but recently i’ve been wondering if it really all matters, like, any of it.

centralisation, stuff in one place, one building, one set of servers, a team, these days distributed i guess in nature and often remote. i saw that 40% of engineers are now working remotely so really they are just ssh’ing into the servers, the raw metal heavy lifting machines connected to the beefy internet tubes that serves them.

we are the most remote we have ever been. both in human connection and interaction and with our jobs and that magic sauce called money that gives us the ability to feed and clothe ourselves, pay for the massive heating bills for the roofs above our heads that the government has decided to enforce to keep us locked away and stopping us from travelling about.

i really LOVE what web3 offers but then i really LOVED what web2 has brought us (sure, i had to sell a bunch of my garbage data that’s different now anyway to a bunch of vulture db’s and scummy services) to this stage. it’s only when golden balls elon stepped in and bought twitter for billions that i truly realised that web2 was over.

maybe bernie sanders is right, we don’t need billionaires.

seems to fucking ruin everything money anyway. i mean look at hive/dtube (most blockchain platforms, although deso seems alright and i spend a bit of time there now) it’s absolutely full to the brim of warmongers and people who think they are remotely “working” here, that always used to crack me up.

i do still like the fact that something is immutable. that feels good, solid, trusted, sync’d at the macro level of a set of records that everyone has seen and will seen until the mother nature EMP takes down all our hard drives and reverts us back to papyrus.

it has made me less trusting of humans thou where as web2 did not. with web2 i felt like i wanted to go and meet those people in the flesh where as these days when i think of web3 it’s the last thing i wanna do. faceless profiles, power struggles, digital reputation attacks, the whole nice yards. it’s a literally fucking tinderbox of a fuck show.

i like things spread out.

far.

over there. lots of them,
blinking nodes
lots of led lights doing there things.

decentralised and distributed sounds right, it sounds perfectly structured for the way the world works today. someone stops working, another node jumps in to keep the signal alive, to keep the big digital radio transmitter of information alive.

another person willing to spend a few microseconds of their meat sack life to look at their console to make sure they are syncing blocks, it’s like being a priest on a message to spread the world of a deity you subscribe too.

cross references facts and factoids from alternate views. like spending a night in a locals pub and going from untrusted to relatively trusted after finishing the whisky and the real true filters are in full flow.

centralised seems antique now.

i guess we only have to look at how napster and p2p changed everything to realise how this digital free market was going to play out, it was always gonna be this great big meshed network of bees buzzing around, pollinating, taking food back to to the queen.

but also decentralised has many flaws. never ending it seems.

even like five years in all we see is new methods of attack, new controlling parties, state level and otherwise. nearly every platform on this planet is poisoned in some way or used to elevate disinformation or augment it to do something it was not meant to do.

it can’t last. it won’t last.

you can’t keep pouring pseudo ideas of value/money on to these things and expect them just to keep churning along, at some point, it all stops.

then you’ll be just standing there, with a limited amount of rounds, your balls in your hand for heat and a cap to starve off the mid day sun due to climate change.

the last of us style ending won’t care two fucks about web2/3/4/5 it’s just mother nature and the awe of those superior systems that will return to zero and reset again without us.

i guess what i’m getting at is that this is all just transition times, known of it really matters, nobody is doing things that will be adopted or used by another civilisation, apart from maybe their definition of comedy. i’m sure it will give someone a laugh after it’s all ash.

but there is something about pushing to the next level, to change things up, we humans love to do it, change is better than a rest my grandad used to say and now more than ever in my life i get what he was getting at.

you stagnant where you are, so keep it moving.

centralised, decentralised, it don’t matter, what matters if that you are the engineer of your own bubble in this life, you can either fill it with air or die to the gas. the key is to keep filling that bubble with joy and experiences so that when the mortal coil fizzles out and you get that life replay. . .

. .. you know it’s not getting served up from some wonky, poorly configured s3 instance!

peace out my lovelies.

humble x