I posted the Strategy Aims we are building plans around a few days ago which are important in the context of this discussion. Because we all want the project to meet its objectives. We all need a better Internet. My hope it you all manage to have a read of that and let the implications soak in.
A lot has changed in the 16 odd years since this project started. It’s a long time in the history of the Internet. In fact, the Safe Network’s conception is closer in time to the launch of the world wide web, than it is to the present day.
I say this to make the point that the context and environment we will be launching the Network into matters. It matters in how it will be received, perceived, used, adopted, attacked, and abused too.
The Network is intended to be a shared resource. A knowledge commons.
Commons can be fragile things that need to be continually nurtured and tended to. This isn’t a new challenge, or even a technological one… it’s sociological in nature. That commons could be a rice paddy, or a drinking-water well.
Yes the network will be autonomous but it won’t be all powerful, and it will always have human’s defining and organising the parameters of its operation, use, development, and its future.
Those people could be acting with good intentions, or with malice, and their decisions could have foreseeable, or unforeseen consequences. But they are still decisions taken by humans, for the benefit of other humans. The key is how decentralisation works to distribute power rather than concentrate it.
There still is, and there must be, mechanisms for the Network to adapt, change, and course correct over time based on the needs of humans. We aren’t making an indestructible robot, or a virus—we are making a shared resource that is owned by humanity, and it must be answerable to humanity. The question is how does humanity articulate those questions, and demands? That is the problem to be solved.
We are having this discussion in the light of the fact that we do not have the answers yet. Neither do any other teams and projects grappling with the same problem.
But we must work diligently and responsibly on it, and face up to it directly in good faith in order to solve that problem. As it’s not going to just go away with “This One Neat Legal Trick”, or some launch tactic, or technology alone. It’s rolling up sleeves time.