Re: <nettime> [Fwd] A Spit in the Ocean (or the limits of social network paranoia)

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

It's not the economic pressure as much as it's the Clumping Effect:
there appears to be a biological predisposition for humans to clump in
larger ... clumps.

Setting up a separate home mail server, with its own domain,
practically unsubpoenable and unspiderable, or home node of a
distributed 'social network' is technically trivial and can be dumbed
down to one-click install process.

However, convincing a meaningful fraction of the people to have
separate services, when *most* of others have already clumped into few
big clumps, is very hard and goes against the grain. This has nothing
to do with usability - e-mail travels via standard protocols, but has
everything to do with prevailing trends, where big clumps win.


> So, what's the real alternative if any?
>
> The alternative, I think, is perhaps too difficult to even imagine.
> The technical problems of building an open, stable, and user-run
> communication space are minuscule compared to the massive amounts
> of economic pressure from the larger macro-structures of our social
> machinery.?





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org