The Internet’s Back-to-the-Land Movement | Hacker News Reader

The Internet’s Back-to-the-Land Movement

are.na

60 pointsbroskoski19 comments

I fully expect that as the 'traditional' internet becomes increasingly monopolised, locked down and regionally fragmented, solutions similar to Othernet [0] will become more common. Personally I can't wait to be able to select between a multitude of networks all serving different content and services.

[0] - https://othernet.is/

I hope so. Maybe it'll bring back some of that BBS/early-internet community feel to it, at least for a while.

Maybe this is a bit tangential, but speaking of alternative networks, there are some really cool projects like cjdns and yggdrasil, which can be used to create an "alternative internet". A group I am involved with are trying to use it to create a local mesh network, since it's technically trivial to provide access to the greater internet over the mesh. And since you can manually peer with other nodes using the existing internet, you can participate in the network without being located near any existing nodes (though that may be considered defeating the purpose, it's very helpful to join all the meshes together so mesh services are accessible to everyone).

> The analysis concluded that unless people took immediate action to counteract growth, global resources would be exhausted by the first few decades of the 21st century. In other words, civilization as of 1972 was projected to reach a total collapse by what is increasingly becoming our present day.

I've read it quite a while ago, but I certainly remember that the first few decades of 21st century, and 2015 in particular, was projected to be the "top" point in terms of overall life quality, and after that point, the humanity would slowly, but inevitably, turn backwards. "Total collapse" by this model wouldn't occur until the last quarter of 21st century, and "our present day" would be just the almost unnoticable beginning of stagnation.

Unnoticeable? Everyone seems to be noticing pretty loudly.

What global resource is nearing exhaustion?

Attention.

The nature of evolution dictates that, even without a collapse in our ability to harvest energy and other resources from the environment, life is destined to get worse for the median human being. There are only so many resources to be consumed, but life reproduces exponentially.

> life reproduces exponentially

Life in general does. Humans, however, seem to be abandoning this trend.

It's temporary. Most humans are poorly adapted to modern life. But not all. The transition back to higher fertility is already underway, it's just hard to notice because the percentage of people who are well adapted to modernity is really small. But there are people who have 4+ kids, despite living in the developed world. Those are the humans of the future.

While I appreciate the lightening of the load of websites to something more manageable and reducing overprovisioning, it should be stated that data centers are more efficient, in that they spend fewer watts for the same number of gigahertz, compared to at-point computer rooms or even personal computers. Clouds reduce energy consumption, not increase it.

An increase in efficiency does not necessarily mean a reduction in total consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I've always struggled with the application of Jevon's paradox to decision making. Does it mean we shouldn't try to make our usage of scarce resources more efficient?

I think it just means you have to do more than simply make things efficient. You also have to have some way to minimize total costs.

> Fukuoka recognized that many of our celebrated technological advancements would be unnecessary had humans not created an ecological crisis in the first place.

Interesting. I'll have to give this some thought. I suspect there is some truth in this and some over-simplification as well.

While I agree that many websites are needless bloat in a game of chasing ad revenue that drives people away or to block them back to the land is fundamentally a silly regression based on fantasies of a past that never was. Where do they think industrial labor came from? Farmers. Agriculture for reduced growth is counter effective.

Agricultural efficiencies were too high for that sort of thing centuries ago and density is actually the lower in environmental impact option. It seems an idea pushed more by memes and ideology than anything practical.

This is a really good point. After reading, this article seems mostly about the aesthetics of these movements and how they influence people and businesses and how they affect lifestyle choices. To quote the slogan of sfpc.io: It's "more poetry, less demo". It feels like something that could be tacked on to Fred Turner's The Democratic Surround. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTKmcToqKRs)

There are really two separate but related things here. Communes didn't work, but many of the ideas from that movement are still useful. The people involved with or sympathetic to that movement exposed just how wasteful rampant consumerism is, for example. There are many, many practical ways to reduce consumption, most of which are still widely ignored, even by so-called progressives.

The second, related part of using the internet as a way to organize people was also co-opted by the very organizations that benefit from continued consumerism, and that had more of a debilitating effect on the internet that the "eternal September" tech types like to complain about. The tipping point was somewhere in the late 90s or early 00s. That has led to the current godawful web we have today, with probably over 98% of the packets being sent for purposes of surveillance or ad-serving.

So, maybe it seems futile to some, but for someone like me who has living memories of the time before computers were common and relatives who died with basic tools of life that were more than 50 years old, it's worth discussing at least.

I don't think the article is advocating for agriculture - instead, my understanding is that it is advocating for taking a value system analogous to 'back to the land' and applying it to internet usage. To follow the analogy - instead of visiting factory farmed Facebook, we instead choose to spend our attention at the community blog.

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