Dark Technology

Technology excites me. It always has. The first time I used a computer was at age six; it was what I believe to be an Apple II with no hard drive. Everything ran off a 5-1/4" floppy disc, including the operating system. From there, it was an IBM Personal Computer, then a Dell, and then enough different computers that I've not kept track.

I started programming in middle school. I discovered some short BASIC code snippets in my math textbook, and proceeded to try to puzzle out how it worked based on only pencil and paper. When I finally realized the IBM computer at home had a BASIC interpreter, I discovered I hadn't done a very good job of it. Later, I added C++, ruby, and JavaScript to my repertoire and toyed with several other languages. I learned to hate Java with a passion.

I don't know what the first operating system I used was, whatever was on that first computer I used. I know since then, I've used DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 was written before memory protection circuits were available in consumer CPUs, and used cooperative task switching. Writing an infinite loop would freeze the entire computer requiring a reboot. I repeatedly found this out before I eventually got Windows 95, then 98 and then XP. Windows XP was the last Microsoft operating system that I've purposely used.

I found and started using Linux shortly after graduating from high school. It started with the boot-able Live CD distribution Knoppix (http://knopper.net/index-en.html). Then I naively tried to install Gentoo. I gave up before I got it installed and settled on a Ubuntu, which I used thru college. I eventually found what I use now, Arch Linux. It has a feel like Gentoo, except with most of the packages compiled. I still require the installation guide to install a new system. But I end up with a system I know how it was put together.

After Bitcoin was invented, I saw the posting on slashdot, and downloaded the app to try mining. I never got any blocks mined, and eventually gave up trying. I later learned how the system works and obtained some thru an exchange. Bitcoin has truly revolutionized money at least as much as banking did when it was introduced, but it doesn't really look that way because we are still in the transition from a world without cryptocurrency to one with it. Trust is no longer required to send money at a distance. Bitcoin provided the first distributed byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm and the first practical digital cash system.

Shortly after Bitcoin was introduced, another now lesser known cryptocurrency was introduced. Namecoin promised to do to the domain name system what Bitcoin did to money. It also provided a solution for Zooko's triangle by providing a human-meaningful, secure, decentralized name system. Unfortunately, Namecoin has not panned out the way Bitcoin has.

This leads me to some troubling developments relating to technology that has been occurring recently. If you've been paying attention, you will have noticed the rounds of censorship that have taken to the internet. To my recollection, this started to occur shortly after the election of the current US president, and kicked into gear last year in August after a protest turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia. A couple websites that are very much described as white supremacist had their domain names stolen by large tech companies, and subjected to DDOS attacks. These attacks moved on very quickly to other de-platforming, demonetization, shadow-bans, and account shuttering. Almost all of the targets were conspicuously on one side of the political spectrum.

This August, things have once again escalated. The popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was banned from multiple platforms almost simultaneously. In many instances, the platforms doing the banning are supposedly competitors. This was followed up by a sustained DDOS attack against Jones' website, and continued on to other targets, all of which appear to be on once side of the political spectrum once again. Two things of particular note are that Alex Jones was blamed for Donald Trump's election as president, and the midterm elections are three short months away in November.

I don't have guaranteed solutions to this de-platforming, and I don't think that anybody really does. But that doesn't mean there are not things that could be done to make this kind of de-platforming much more technically difficult. Peer to Peer (P2P) technologies that have been developed since their popularization with the Napster file sharing program may be a part of this.

When Bitcoin was introduced, it utilized a P2P network for money transfers and made stopping those transactions practically impossible. Another P2P technology, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), proposes replacing the current Hyper Text Transfer Protocol with another protocol that utilizes content-addressing that makes everything indefinitely cacheable. Essentially, it is Bittorrent, but for all the static content of the web. There are others for global IP routing (cjdns), distributed databases (gun, orbitdb), and many others that have been developed and are in development.

As dark as things have gotten, this gives me hope from the technology side of things, that there are solutions to the problems facing us, if only we used them. I just hope that people will be able to find solutions to the political problems facing us.