Notices by Benjamin Mako Hill (mako@social.coop), page 5

@mike_hales In terms of managing protocols, you're right that's turtles all the way down.

But I also think there's real autonomy to be gained from pushing things onto a lower turtle. ;)

Creating, changing, adding to the SMTP (email) protocol standard involves politics. And it has been coopted in clear ways. But the fact that it's a federated protocol by design means that we're MUCH better than alternative where everybody had to use GMail to send messages to each other.

@mike_hales We should remember that although the consequences rarely involve being sold to Microsoft cooperative organizations also become oligarchic—e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy.

Peer production & Internet-based cooperativism is hardly immune: https://mako.cc/academic/shaw_hill-laboratories_of_oligarchy-DRAFT.pdf

@mike_hales I'm saying that there are two distinct ways of solving the problem of infrastructure run by organizations with little structural reason to act in the interests of their users: (1) Build new tech to decentralize tasks so there is less/no need for shared infrastructure. (2) Manage infrastructure cooperatively & democratically (and develop new/better ways to do this!).

Both approaches have limits and I think the best results involve pursuing both in parallel.

coop≠libre but coop⊂libre

@mike_hales Cooperative management of shared infrastructure is path to "libre." A more libertarian approach is decentralization and federation around fixed (or cooperatively managed?) protocols which deemphasize the need for shared infrastructure in some way.

If we believe that effective cooperatives will be limited in scale or scope, a combination of the two may be necessary. This is more or less what we have here at social.coop which is part of a larger federated network.

@mike_hales There's link to both a WebM video (no nonfree Javascript) and a Youtube video from this link: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

("Sharecropping" is Cory's term, not one I've used.)

@PresGas Yay! I'm so glad you appreciated it!

@PresGas Edits!

I paid somebody on Upwork to edit in the slides and that person also cleaned up some other stuff including editing out some pauses and a weird interruption in the middle due to AV issues.

I watched the whole video and also noticed some of the skipping but I can verify that the content is all there and that the whole experience is smoother this way (even if the video isn't in a few places).

What does the "maker" movement think of the song "Maker" by Fink? An accidental anthem or just unfortunate evidence of the semantic ambiguity around an overloaded term? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJhnbmdSy_U

@stevelord You are correct that this is also evidence in favor of my thesis. 😉

@stevelord It's is also self-hosted as WebM playable in a browser (also linked to from the post): http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production-libreplanet_keynote-20180326-EDITED-v3.webm#t=199

My personal goal is to never require folks to use a service like YT but to consider republishing or mirroring things there. I am OK with meeting them where they are if it doesn't mean requiring them to go somewhere they probably shouldn't be.

This writeup of my #LibrePlanet2018 keynote on BoingBoing is more eloquent and concise than the talk. Thanks to Cory for the awesome summary, reflections, and signal boost! https://boingboing.net/2018/06/21/digital-enclosure.html