rationale

motivation: the ghost of cyberspace

the existing internet's not really space. it's not really a place you can travel.

"the" internet, the one ruled by ICANN, a host of peering and consumer-facing ISPs who play resource games with each other, certificate

this internet that is talked about these days is a small sliver of all of the other things the initial decentralised network project is and was, even at that time. that sliver used to be called the "world wide web". it is no longer worldwide--it is balkanised and corporatised, it is regulated and stratified, and its hierarchy is incredibly firm. you know that some things will be hidden and some will be visible when you v

and that's just it--"the" internet, as it is now, is a collection of financialised behemoths (not even metaphorically, this is the age of the server farm) who package up code and content to serve to consumers. sometimes they're "content creators", but they don't benefit the way an actual "creator" might. this line was written in 2016 CE and we're still
digital sharecropping.

even if you're not a marxist (or a telekommunist), you would probably like to own what you create, right? this is literally a world where people work for scraps (or sometimes for nothing at all) doing things like completing menial videogame tasks.pdf), write articles mainly designed to steal attention
(often instead of actually informing), or transferring labor directly to machines
through APIs whose endpoints are actually humans.

this kind of network is not much of a space, and certainly not a safe space to be. if it's any sort of space at all, it's like the railsea of china mieville's novel: it approximates an ocean, but all you can do is switch rails (and companies and governments are out to put a price tag and patrol on every inch of it).

with the advent of increasingly decentralised, private, independent (in the sense of capacity) communications, we've been given a chance to revisit the conception of 'cyberspace' as a separate performative domain.

actually, you know what--scratch the passive voice. here is what happened: a bunch of really thoughtful people did an unbelievable amount of work for free and gave it away honestly. that continuing work, in the form of protocol designs, code, tests, server time, commentary, conversation, and jokes, creates new spaces the way the internet did before existing social/economic empires and edifices colonised it.

we've taken to calling it 'cypherspace', since cryptography is one of the main pillars on which it rests.

cypherspace is a place whose entryways and underpinnings lie outside of monolithic server farms, name authorities, global singletons, or any other hierarchy dwarfing any of the people who visit or inhabit it. its limits are defined solely by the choices of those who work within it, and the consent of those around them.

while all of this is great news, decentralisation, and the egalitarian agency that lies beyond it, can't be a purely network layer movement--it needs to happen at the application layer also. it needs to put people at its center.