I'm afraid the only way out will be to rethink the economy.
When you're out and about, your devices tunnel home automatically, knowing the endpoint is trustworthy (which is more than can be said about traditional VPNs). All your photos, tweets, posts, and all other brain farts straying into the open world are never sent out directly by the device they were produced on, but by the server at home instead.
Tor could finally work as intended, with millions of boxes in the network, all handling each other's traffic. Add new projects like IPFS, and the whole centralised cloud bullshit starts to crumble. Not just from a privacy pov, but features. Your home box talking to the neighbours' home boxes by itself is a whole lot more powerful than all parties meeting on some obscure server somewhere, although I find myself quickly coming back to privacy when thinking about advantages. I do hope there is room for other big features, otherwise getting this box into peoples' hands will prove difficult.
I see it as a kind of decentralised centralisation: your whole digital life is based on this one machine, but it's in your home, you own it, and you can do with it whatever the heck you want. No ads (!), no monetization of your private data, which stays in your hands at all times, except of course once you share. Still, then it will be in the hands of those you shared it with, and hopefully not huge corporations with little incentive to do no evil (who the hell thought this was an appropriate company motto?).
Most everything for which we turn to Google and Facebook can be done much more privately at home (office things, communication, sharing shit...), except maybe search. I have little problem in keeping Google as a search machine (they do a great job) once they stop waiting for me at every. single. corner, and following me around the bits inbetween. Decentralised search is hard, but I'm fairly optimistic once a basis is laid out, someone smart takes on the challenge (and is able to solve it, too!).
Regarding your last sentence, rethinking our economy isn't a bad idea in any case. Capitalism is fundamentally unfit to be a fair system, and if a socially fair system is what we want, we have to get rid of some ideas (like this infinite growth nonsense, or that education is obsolete. Education, in whatever shape or form, is the only way I know of how humanity is not going to spiral to its (intellectual) death).
Google still relies on institutions to provide data in indexable form, and those institutions build their reputations in ways that only partially rely on Google traffic.
I mean, a competent librarian has a kind of expertise that Google's algorithms don't, so that's one situation to explore for a post-Google idea of finding information (of course it's also pre-Google).
The social aspect of information discovery is something that Google and Facebook are kind of fighting over, but fundamentally it doesn't belong to them—it belongs to "us" intrinsically.
They shut down Google Reader but they can't shut down the human tendency to share information!
And the panopticon information provided by Google is often just a mesmerizing massive overload with no curation, weight, intelligence...
Wikipedia is the top hit for so many searches that one could see Google as an interface for it. Add Wikivoyage/Wikitravel, some other community wikis, API interfaces a la DuckDuckGo, social curation, etc, and you might find that the value of Google Search is actually not that incredible.
This is one of the main reasons I think home serving is a great idea. It enables people with some interest in one another to connect directly, one-to-one, instead of running around in some third party's server. This opens possibilities for exchange and networking on a very personal basis that we don't have today mostly because of privacy concerns (virtual neighbourhoods and the like).
Ultimately you'll never escape the fundamental flaw of Tor, which is that I, as a moderate bandwidth user, don't want to subsidize some leech's desire to download weird fetish porn in 4K with my connection.
I live in Canada where the scumbag broadband companies all collude to keep prices exorbitantly high, and I pay a lot of money for what would be considered bottom-tier garbage service in e.g. South Korea.
I don't run Tor because ultimately I want to use the bandwidth I pay for.
Check out http://yacy.net, you may be surprised!
I don't think we are even close to the limits if what we can reach with standard desktop and server software.
Our devices have incredible amount of computing power now - a great untapped potential that we could use for something else than for supporting unnecessary indirection layers.
The future of all of our devices having extremely fast connections existing in a world of amazing, free, peer-to-peer applications still seems so far away.
BTW just today I was thinking about IPv6 VPNs. Seems like a good way to extend one's Intranet of Things to one's mobile devices.
The challenge is how do we make it economically viable for both the producer of the technology and the end user to keep it useful and local, while also making it a good user experience?
The thing about cloud-based services is that they leverage scale well, making many things cheaper than they ever could be locally unless you buy a device and use it for long time AND fixes can be rolled out quickly with no lagging install base to cause problems or bad user experiences.
I really do want to have my privacy and keep my data safe but I also recognize that's hard to do without higher cost or more hassle (or both).
- Reasonable cost
- Availability
- Ease of use, especially setup
- Eye candy
- Social connections
If you can check all of those for an FOSS solution, then I think you are home. Unfortunately most of the points are still not available for average Joe users with FOSS.
Add to that, most people will give you a blank look when you start discussing how companies own your data, and even those who understand just shrug and go the route of least resistance.
We have a long way to go with all of the above points before we need megaclouds with asic and huge data *to move the state of art forward.
All of the above be solved without creating a new unicorn startup.
Deep Learning doesn't actually require "Big Data". They went from thousands of examples to millions or billions, but we can scrape that kind of data with open source tools, record with cheap cameras, sensors, etc.
Also, there is a lot of research into scaling big models to small hardware. We can run pretty decent AI on cell phones and small systems.
Third, the AI academic research community is pretty open and posts everything, often including code and datasets. This enables rapid progress, but essentially, it brings knowledge in the public domain. We need that to continue in order to have access to the best algorithms.
It will be much easier than you think to have open source implementations of the best AI tools.
On an algorithmic front, definitely. The key areas where free software is kneecapped against large corporate interests are in marketing, which free software has never been good at, and in training set gathering.
In the case of the latter, google, facebook and microsoft have a major advantage in gathering data to do things like improve accent recognition, because they don't give a shit about collecting everything you say via services like cortana to improve their voice recognition, as long as it's legal. That technique applies to a whole suite of other problems as well, unfortunately.
Supposedly there are doctors in Norway still holding on to their DOS based patient journal software. Arguably because they can operate it without taking the focus way from the conversation with the patient.
We could do live online or batch training of models in a distributed manner if it is feasible. It would take more time to build new models because we would have to produce more data, but it's an idea.
For my personal use, free software has always been high enough quality; its at least 90% of the way there if not better. And I can trust it.