The web you know is dying | Hacker News Reader

The web you know is dying

evbogue.com

115 pointsskeltoac56 comments

From the site which seems to be down:

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The web you know is dying

I'm drinking an espresso shot. It's half-cold. There's still gunk in my eyes from sleeping.

I've been thinking a lot about how I use the Internet. A year ago, I nearly vanished from the public web because I had an intuitive feeling the centralized web was a backdoor to the government. Now, as the dust settles from our collective experiences over the past week, I know this to be true.

So I'm revisiting some of my older habits. I'm using Tor to visit websites. I've installed Torbirdy on Thunderbird. I'm back on Hyperboria) using cjdns. If you want to send me Bitcoins, I'll take them.

I continue to try to find ways to communicate over the web. Forward security is a must. Distributed peer to peer social is a must. These are two seperate problems.

The kids on Hyperboria have the right idea: if you don't want to be spied on, evolve beyond reach. I'm doing just that.

Distributed everything is where we're going.

The way I see it, if you're still on centralized social networks, you're part of the problem. You can't stick your fingers in your ears anymore and scream 'lalallalal'. All of your information is being recorded, forever, in the nice little boxes you type into all day long.

I'm running more and more under the pseudonym of Ven Portman. I'm powering up a hyperboria-only website at venportman.com. Evbogue.com will continue to be my stable public web presence. The madness will happen on Hyperboria.

The centralized Internet you know is dying. We're scattering to darknets everywhere to look for what we'll build next.

–Ev Bogue July 4 2013 undisclosed location

If one's goal is to be anonymous, why publicly associate an old site with a new identity? Doesn't that defeat the point? Now, nothing done under the name "Ven Portman" will be anonymous because that name is forever linked to the author's previous identity of Ev Bogue.

He said it was to be a pseudonym. Pseudonyms are used for pseudonymity- "casual" anonymity that is not intended to hold up under examination and scrutiny.

The typical purpose of a pseudonym is to prevent some set of people from connecting certain activities to your legal identity, while still permitting reputation to be accumulated.

It's quite possible for pseudonyms to remain completely disconnected from one's legal identity, even under scrutiny. For example, merchants on Silk Road use pseudonyms to manage buyer/seller trust, but still take care to avoid being arrested for drug possession.

The important thing is which entity is considered to be the "adversary". If a teenager just wants to hide angsty reddit posts from her classmates, that doesn't require retreating to a crypto-nerd darknet.

The author feels that he must abandon the open internet because it's being monitored by the NSA. This implies that he considers the NSA to be his adversary, in which case his choice to link identities has in one step undone all of his sacrifices. There's no point in using a pseudonym on a darknet if your opponent knows about the darknet and knows your pseudonym.

While I agree with everything he's said, his assertion that people should learn HTML5/CSS, deploy with Node on a VPS, (etc) to "use the internet" really misses the point. Makers like us will always know these things. The problem is that 99% of people will never bother. How can they resist centralization when they are too busy being experts in other things to learn so much web tech? We need to find a way for those decentralized networks to be the cool ones. We need to get the mass on them, de facto.

Before that we probably need the surveillance state to get scarier. And I mean a handful of very, very high profile cases. Or maybe we can bring it to everyone via a browser plugin that lets you know when you're content is likely to be flagged by admins/etc.

How else can we popularize decentralized services?

Edit: oops. I read both this and his "distributed services" post and just realized I'm replying to both.

I find his articles really hard to read, here are 5 simple reasons:-

> Wordpress exists. You don't need to be a maker to use something like this, anyone with the motivation can.

> It's faddish, the mention of nodeJS as a requirment has me rolling my eyes into my fucking brain.

> Actually, most important content is decentralized. If facebook died tomorrow, there would be some value lost, but it'd be hardly the end of the internet.

> "We're going distributed". Why? Because you woke up one morning and decided? Because you've gave it some thought?

> He doesn't seem interested in what we'll lose when we're decentralized. Does he understand the drawbacks?

There is some really good content on HN, loads of it, but this really isn't it and I'm not saying that because I disagree I think the internet should be a series of peer nodes like it was first designed to be.

However, I don't think we need a self appointed spokes persons to achieve this, it's already there, and if you want to discuss decentralizing major services like facebook, I'd like to see, on a tech site, someone with a technical solution that attempts to mitigate what we'd lose.

> Before that we probably need the surveillance state to get scarier

I don't know how it could get any scarier short of them starting to round people up, and when that happens, it'll be too late.

How ironic.

The same author has another post on the front page, which he posted on medium.com [1], which is still reachable and has generated some interesting discussion. However, a post on his own site has seemingly been brought down by the weight of HN traffic and now no-one can discuss it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991576

No. The author has merely proven his own point that it's harder to make an espresso yourself than it is to order one at Starbucks. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

And look at what happened: someone at HN posted the content of the post here. People will always find ways around things, especially people who can do more than just push a button.

I don't understand - many people who seem technology aware sound surprised to discover that anything published digitally can't be unpublished.

My friends and I were already aware of this when messing around on the school LAN in the 80s.

I'm quite happy using Facebook because I only publish what I'm happy to publish.

Generally, I dislike being monitored but I assume it's happening and expect my government to provide protection.

The web is changing but only in the sense that it's evolved rapidly since it was created (only some 25 years ago).

In the future, the web will look different while being exactly the same: people will be using it to communicate.

I completely agree and came to the same conclusion lately. The future for the internet is micro "lightnets" which I prefer to call it, the true (dark)net is what the original internet has become apparently. It is way too infiltrated by those few who control the world and too big to try to change it. Try to make a billion internet users encrypt their email and exchange keys... and even that isn't secure. Those webs of "lightnets" can interact in the future in one big network independent of each other. Like many tiny internets in one big network. I find myself having a distaste more and more for everything resonating with corporations who are too big to stay connected with the individuals they serve on a human to human basis. When that threshold is reached for a corporation it always spirals out of control and there you have it, greed power control takes over the organization, and its only you the individual who can make a change. Feudalism at its finest and it saddens me deeply to see so many millions cave into it like zombies just to be going with the herd, afraid to think and go their own path. Ever considered why so many zombie movies lately? Perhaps reflection of reality on a mental level in our society. People willing to do anything for freedom and the truth gives me hope.

I will invest my time and future into these next gen lightnets and hopefully we can share some freedom away from greed power and control. Internet unless it is revoked exist no more. Transformed into a malicious beast savaging everything and everyone in its path controlled by the masters who seek to enslave the mind of mankind.

Lightnets. I like it. I'm adopting the term. Just today, I was jotting down some notes about setting up some Tor/I2P/etc. gateways in preparation for research (and hopefully helping out with the development of such tools), and when I wrote "darknet" I felt a little icky.

So, where do I sign up to join this conspiracy of light?

While I agree with the sentiment, this is less manifesto and more guerilla marketing to bring eyeballs to their products.

The health care system you know is dying. I'm drinking an espresso shot. It's half-cold. There's still gunk in my eyes from sleeping.

I've been thinking a lot about how I we all get health care. A year ago, I nearly vanished from my doctor's private practice because I had an intuitive feeling that expensive, highly specialized care without a single payer insurance system was a backdoor to endless health care debt nation wide. Now, as the dust settles from our collective experiences, I know this to be true.

So I'm revisiting some of my older habits. I'm using WebMD to diagnose my own problems. I've enrolled in an EMT course to learn basic triage and treatment. I've installed an app that automatically notifies me of any possible drug interactions between the various medications I buy off the black market for myself. Last week I thought I might have sepsis, but I dropped into an off-the-books IRC chatroom and found out I didn't; it was just a bruise that looked funny. If you want to send me Bitcoins, I'll take them.

I continue to try to find ways to diagnose myself over the web. I learn new tools every day. And every tool I have, that's another step towards freedom from the corporate controlled health care system. I'm convinced that if other people don't teach themselves how to be their own doctors, then they're just pawns with their own lives and careers who obviously have too little spare time on their hands. Distributed peer to peer medicine is a must. Evolve beyond the reach of the insurance companies that want to bankrupt you. I'm doing just that.

Distributed everything is where we're going.

The way I see it, if you're still on centralized health care networks, you're part of the problem. You can't stick your fingers in your ears anymore and scream 'lalallalal'. All of your information is being recorded, forever, and it's all going to end up on an itemized bill that you can't pay because your insurance is inadequate and our country doesn't value primary care.

I'm running more and more under the pseudonym of Ven Portman. I don't really know why, since I just published that fact on my own public website. I believe that everyone should learn to be a specialist in their spare time in order to temporarily evade the abuses of corporations and governments. I somehow believe that normal people have time to learn these things and blame them if they don't. I avoid grappling with a broad conversation about corporate and government corruption and abuse in the field in which I dabble because clinging to my dilettante skill set is the only way I can retain some illusion of agency in a world which is increasingly unjust and beyond my control. Anyone who doesn't do what I do and devote all of their spare time to learning basic medicine to help build our distributed health care system of the future is just part of the problem.

The centralized health care system you know is dying. We're scattering to back alley healthcare everywhere. If you're a normal person with a family and their own field of expertise who doesn't have time to take an EMT course and learn how to intubate an unconscious blunt force trauma victim, well then fuck you. You're all sheeple anyway.

–Ev Bogue July 4 2013 undisclosed location

> I've installed an app that automatically notifies me of any possible drug interactions between the various medications I buy off the black market for myself.

Hey, not only hilarious, but that's a good app idea!

It actually already exists (minus the black market part). My friend is an RN an she and most of her co-workers use it in their clinic every day. I forget what the app's name is though.

Everytime I connect to darknet, I feel like Batman with a secret, underground, Gotham identity. In the rain, on the rooftop, or something like that.

Even when the darknet is nowadays used mostly for spam and child porn.

That's why it needs bat man.

Yeah, Gotham city.

You guys are funny. Half of you are voting this stuff onto the frontpage, and the other half commenting on how awful it is.

Let's get it together, people! :-)

Eternal September comes to all communities, in time.

This guy and James Altucher need to be friends.

Here's a backup copy of the page: http://archive.is/5hFxW

Seems to be a dead link.

It's working fine now for me.

Ev Bogue is a mentally unstable guy who comes out of the woodwork every so often to say crazy 'edgy' things. He generally builds little cults and then destroys them in fits of mania. His last title for himself was "Cybernetic Yogi."

After he destroyed his minimalist and post-human blogs and communities he's recently got into coding Node. Presumably because he lost all credibility in the other fields. His thing is to "quit" services. He quit Twitter, quit writing, quit Facebook, rejoined Twitter, deleted his blog, undeleted his blog, quit his identity, created a new one, and so on. This would all be very amusing if he didn't take it so seriously himself. He is at best, very mentally ill.

I find his current work particularly annoying because he's a guy who has about six months of coding experience claiming that Node.js is the messiah of the web. Just not worth it. In six months or so Bogue will quit Node and discover the new 'it thing' and ramble about that somewhere. The problem is that he writes about topics that he is not adequately educated on. He does this because he has a deep need to be seen as an expert.

Some back story: http://ariherzog.com/blogger-insists-on-twitter-users/ http://adamtervort.com/blog/2011/01/26/minimalism-isnt-dead-...

"Gwen Bell Blocked Me; Ev Bogue Blocked Me" https://plus.google.com/u/0/114850856787256556043/posts/GLYo...

"Far Beyond My Ego" (parody) http://farbeyondmyego.blogspot.com/

Please, it's incorrect to draw "mentally ill" from this.

Mental illness is a very common, serious problem of society which deserves genuine attention. What you described are not symptoms of mental illness.

Of course I'm not in a position to diagnose anyone with anything specifically, however I think erratic self-destructive behavior is in that realm.

"A mental disorder or psychiatric disorder is a psychological pattern or anomaly, potentially reflected in behavior, that is generally associated with distress or disability, and which is not considered part of normal development in a person's culture. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_disorder

Regardless, my assessment of his mental health is irrelevant to my argument that he has no credibility for other substantial reasons.

> Of course I'm not in a position to diagnose anyone with anything specifically > my assessment of his mental health is irrelevant to my argument

Then don't include it. You're not a health specialist and it only weakens your argument.

I think he's dangerous and posturing these posts to build a new following to replace the last one that he destroyed. I would quite like to keep the HN community out of it.

Fortunately having a weak point in an argument doesn't nullify the whole thing.

Wtf, why would anyone care who someone is or how "mentally stable" he is. If I care about what someone has to say, I can put it in context by myself by looking up his work (github, available resumes etc.). If I were to invest in his company or something, I'll do a proper background check on him myself. Some people like/need a degree of anonymity and the ability to reinvent themselves periodically until they find a "sweet spot" in life. You're way too aggressive about him, which could only suggest a past encounter that resulted in bad business or maybe some personal grudge.

If you think the guy is talking about things he doesn't know enough just say "take care people, he is pretending to be an expert on X but he isn't!" or something equivalent, professionally, don't go ad hominem on someone just because he may be weird and wacky or even stupid...

I've met guys way smarter than me that were way beyond "mentally unstable" (in a bad way!) and I don't respect their work or their ideas less because of this. And I don't know this guy, he may just be a crackpot, but it's just annoying to find this kind of attack as a top comment.

I have a hobby of keeping an eye on and occasionally critiquing 'cult of personality' types who build cults and scam their members. I am passionate about it, however I've never had contact with Mr. Bogue.

I believe the guy is dangerous. Take it as you will.

I can respect that you do not like what Bogue does/writes, but decrying someone you do not even know personally as mentally unstable/ill is simply presumptuous in my book. Such a harsh accusation should be backed up by hard evidence, and probably better made in private rather than shouting it all over the internet.

Your posts very much shine a light on your mental outfit as much as the guy you're decrying as being dangerous and mentally ill.

My 2c. Take it as you will.

If you're right the warning may be deserved, and I definitely wouldn't pay for any of his books, but calling someone like him "dangerous" means you've never dealt with really dangerous people :)

Actually, I took attention to this mainly because I'm researching the whole "personal branding" thing, but boy he's doing it wrong.

I wish it were snark, but experience leads me to the conclusion that most people without a development background (even some that do) conclude that node will deliver us to the promised land, just after a short time with it.

Not much for monotheism myself.

As a veteran programmer (20 years now, pretty much everything out there), I spent a couple of days with Node to see what all the fuss was about.

I walked out with 'meh' after working out I can shift more requests with asp.net and the tooling was better on asp.net as well.

Node looks good on paper but the new approach and scalability is pointless when you're losing perhaps 1-2% of a request on your web server and framework and actually having to do some work in the back end. JavaScript sucks for that and so does node's async model.

Node just makes stuff harder.

Not for monotheism either which is why you can swap asp.net, java EE or python/flask with the above and I'll say the same.

Agreed.

I actually find the await/async model of C#/.NET 4.5 less hideous than the callback hell of Node.

That said, there is an attraction to tipping up a basic server in a dozen or so lines of code.

Golang seems to fit that bill for me. I'm using it more every day now.

You sound like a pretty boring dude. He's just a guy in the Internet writing stuff, and you're just a guy on the Internet talking about him.

Thanks to my tiny phone screen, I accidentally downvoted you. Sorry. I agree entirely. Have two upvotes for other posts.

Seems pretty hypocritical of you considering you are in the same position.

>Ev Bogue is a mentally unstable guy who comes out of the woodwork every so often to say crazy 'edgy' things. He generally builds little cults and then destroys them in fits of mania. His last title for himself was "Cybernetic Yogi." After he destroyed his minimalist and post-human blogs and communities he's recently got into coding Node. Presumably because he lost all credibility in the other fields. His thing is to "quit" services. He quit Twitter, quit writing, quit Facebook, rejoined Twitter, deleted his blog, undeleted his blog, quit his identity, created a new one, and so on.

All of which sound like very normal things for a non-conformist with lots of interests. Perhaps they exhibit a small attention span, but that's about it.

>He is at best, very mentally ill.

I presume that you are a medical professional, and you have, in fact, examined him. Else, you are, at best, rude.

Why would you presume that? Your mistake.

"this would be very amusing..."

i think you could describe this person without being so aggressively unfriendly. [edit: i think what i am saying is that really you should try not to be yourself quite so obviously.]

Or I could be myself thanks.

People say that like it's a kind of medal of honour.

No, if your self is impolite, jerk, greedy, racist, etc, and a thousand other things, it's not OK to "be yourself".

That's what societal standards of conduct were for, back in the day.

Half of the hobbyists and makers who made personal computers and the internet sounded just like Ev at one time.

You muggles should lay off the magicians. They could have saved you from the Panoptican if you'd been less dismissive.

If they are actually a magician a dismissive critic would hardly prevent them from 'saving' everyone from anything.

"A year ago, I nearly vanished from the public web because I had an intuitive feeling the centralized web was a backdoor to the government."

Yeah, I bet that's why he did that.

Another attention-whore riding the NSA-scandal wave.

Edit: Okay, this guy is a troll. Or insane. He uses the verb "deploying" like it's a.. i don't know, lifestyle or something. His node code is a really, really basic website with some routes, views and markdown code. And he wants 37$ for his ebook which will teach you how to do that on your own! Whoa.

Don't feed the trolls.

I just found this post, it's a pretty good review of the madness: http://evbogue.com/haters

"Learning to deploy Node.js is probably one of the hardest things I've done with my life to date. It's a different kind of challenge than traveling around the globe, or throwing out all of your shit."

In fairness, it is fairly difficult to read the documentation with your head crammed up your rectum.

Well, if you're not a programmer, it makes sense.

Yeah but this is a guy who is selling a guide on deploying Node.

Depends. It could easily be a crude guide saying little more than "apt-get install node". Isn't that "deploying"?

Another gem from his twitter:

"@_jpope How likely is it that I will brick my Macbook Pro while trying to install Arch Linux?"

...

I bricked a mac the last time I tried to install linux on it. (one of the last pre-imac ones. one too few zeroes when changing the firmware adress thingy. Kind of a shame as it had a very nice A/V PERCH card). So it's not an entirely unreasonable question.

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