I have a serious problem with significant, massive Internet services being owned and controlled from a central point, be it government or a corporation.

Just take a look at Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Paypal and, first and foremost, Google.

In order to figure out why that is a problem, let’s see what Internet is and how it works. On the bottom layer of the Internet you have the networking hardware. Then you have the central infrastructure of ICANN which defines top-level namespaces and the DNS system. Then you have servers that run services, and clients who connect to those services.

Now, in the good old days of the Internet, the services were standard: HTTP, NNTP, IRC, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, FTP and similar. Essentially, if you wanted to host a website, you needed to run a HTTP service on your web server and put files into the designated directory on the server, and everyone on the Internet could access it. If you wanted to write a blog, you put a blogging CMS into the webserver directory, install and configure the database, connect the blogging CMS to the database and you could write your blog. If you wanted to host a mail server, the process was similar – you installed a SMTP service which received mail on your domain, and a POP3/IMAP server which enabled users to access their mailbox on your domain. Those services were standard, worked the same everywhere, were accessible using standard clients.

Then came the services that offered to make things easier. You got things like Blogspot which made it easy for someone to write a blog – you just registered, chose a visual template and off you went. If you wanted to have a website, there were options that made it very easy, and ultimately most people decided all they need is a Facebook account. If you wanted a chat, you had ICQ and Skype and what not. If you wanted to host video clips, you had Vimeo and Youtube. Basically, the standard generic services that ran on any number of Internet servers were replaced by huge corporations that offered to do it all for you.

Now, what’s the problem with that? Why would we not have it easier if we can? Why would someone configure mysql database and apache webserver and wordpress blogging CMS in order to write a blog, if he can go to the Blogger service owned by Google and create a similarly-looking blog in seconds with zero effort? I’ll tell you why. Because if you host your content on some company’s web-based service, you are in a position where that company can essentially close the tap at any time. If you start writing something they don’t like, or something that will make some socially evil entity with lots of influence pissed off, they can complain to that company’s helpdesk and you’ll find your account suspended, and you’re basically silenced with a single click. On the other hand, if you host your content on a server you personally maintain, one would need to have something very serious, like a court order, in order to force the hosting center to suspend your service. You still can’t do anything criminal, but today you don’t need to do anything criminal in order to be silenced on the Internet. It suffices to have some social justice warrior complaining about you and you’re fucked. It won’t do them any good in a court of law, but they can suspend your Twitter or Blogger or Facebook account, because those accounts are hosted by companies that are publicly traded and their revenue is generated exclusively from advertising, and advertising revenue depends hugely on good public relations, which basically means yielding to pressure from lobbying groups and professional complainers.

What I find extremely worrisome is that huge parts of everybody’s online functionality are based around services provided by huge, centralized corporations that are hugely sensitive to pressure for more censorship, and we will unfortunately see more and more of this every day, because people will continue using what is easier and gives them good results with a minimum of effort, which will result in producing single-point control over their online functionality, forcing everyone to basically censor themselves and reduce variety in the mental space in which we all operate. Because, if you unconsciously censor yourself in order not to have your account suspended, and the rules for account suspension are generated at a non-democratic single-point (corporate management and public relations departments in Facebook and Google, for instance) which is vulnerable to pressure from minority focus-groups (the professional complainers and whiners), the logical result will be either people reducing their thoughts to an increasingly narrow space of political correctness, or doing what I did: taking things into their own hands and doing it the hard way, by hosting everything on their own server (which is very inexpensive to do these days) in order to be able to write whatever they want, and if someone doesn’t like it, he needs to actually take you to court in order to take your content down. And in order to take your content down by a court order, it isn’t enough that they don’t like it or that their feelings are hurt. It needs to be something that is actually illegal, like piracy or child porn or giving advice to terrorists on how to make bombs. It can’t be mere opinions you disagree with. The point of the freedom of speech is that the option to speak offensive opinions needs to be protected by all means. Freedom of saying only inoffensive things isn’t worth having; they had that in Stalinist Russia.

Certainly, if all you want to do online is post pictures of your cat and talk about coffee, then by all means use Facebook and Youtube. That is, until some focus group starts complaining that cats and coffee trigger their psychotic episodes and hurt their feelings about something, that white cats and black coffee are racist and your offensive content needs to be taken down in order to protect their right to be fucking idiots.

There’s that thing that I find irritating in technology (and in society in general), that one could call the lemming trends. You know, the lemmings, the tiny rodent thingies that supposedly jump over cliffs in herds, because if everyone does it, it can’t be all that wrong, right? The way it happens in technology is that someone, either the tech journalists or users on the fora accept some arbitrary criterion by which they measure devices as either “good” or “bad”, and when this criterion is off, the entire industry goes off a cliff.

A notable example of that are the TN panels, that were lauded by the tech pundits in the media as the best because they had the least pixel inertia – a pixel could change its state much more quickly than on an IPS or PVA display. However, the TN display has shitty colors and even shittier viewing angles, and usually looks like a fluorescent negative image when viewed at any angle other than perpendicular, and since this type of a panel was “best”, it was widely adopted by technology manufacturers, because the buyers would not settle for the “inferior” IPS or PVA when they could get all those wonderful refresh rates. This went on for a while, until Apple started putting IPS panels on their devices and people started drooling after them, realizing fully what a horrid piece of shit a TN display really is, and now nobody wants to be close to anything that even resembles a TN display, except for the gamers and, presumably, the idiot journalists who brought that plague upon us.

Another example is the camera industry. In the 1990s, the camera manufactures started producing the autofocus cameras, which were advertised as the professional solution. Soon, most buyers went for it because they wanted a “professional” camera, and they threw away their manual focus lenses. A camera was measured by how many autofocus points it has, by how accurately it tracks a moving object, and by the ultrasonic-motor lenses it worked with. The thing is, those cameras were advertised for the professionals of a certain kind – wedding photographers, sports photographers and the photojournalists. For this target audience, the autofocus cameras are great. However, if you photograph landscapes, closeups and, basically, things that don’t move fast, a manual focus camera is as good. For things that require critical accuracy of focus, the manual focus lenses can actually be preferable, but you could never explain that to the people who just got into photography and trolled the photographic community with comments like “your camera is shit, it has only 3 AF points”, when you only wanted to photograph bugs and waterfalls and you couldn’t give a damn about autofocus in general. But an interesting thing happened lately. Some premium equipment manufacturers started producing series of brand new, expensive, super high quality manual focus lenses, such as this one:

BTW that’s a $800 lens, not an old beater from the 1980s that’s so behind the times it actually can’t focus electrically. And the tragedy is, the same zombies who used to praise autofocus are now herding around those “newest and best” manual lenses.

What I want to say is, people are idiots. They have a terrible fear of exclusion from a group, and if a group defines criteria, they will attempt to be “good” if not “best” according to those criteria. If a criterion is having a shitty TN display, they will have the shittiest of all TN displays. If a criterion is to have a shitty plasticky piece of shit lens, they will have the shittiest plasticky lens with a camera that has the greatest number of autofocus points and shoots ten frames per second, although they intend to take pictures of waterfalls. If the criterion of acceptance into a group is to bow to some psycho’s imaginary friend four times a day, they’ll do it, and make everyone else do it, and have them put to death if they happen to “offend” their bullshit. If the criterion of acceptance is to have your daughter’s clitoris cut off, they’ll have their daughter’s clitoris cut off, and slut shame everyone who doesn’t.

The thing is, it’s very nice to be excluded from most human groups, because humans are usually vile fucktards with no sense in their heads and no inherent ethics other than “I’m good and my tribe is good and if something threatens me or my tribe, it’s evil and must be destroyed”. Being excluded from a group that worships hallucinations of idiots or mutilates children is a great thing. Removing yourself from the company of idiots clears the mind like nothing you can imagine, because you no longer have to accept completely ridiculous and obviously false ideas just to fit in and not get into conflicts with fools. Just do your own thing. You can be wrong, but at least if you’re wrong you can correct yourself quickly. If you’re wrong because you want to conform with a group that’s wrong, not only will you be wrong forever, you will not be yourself. And if you’re not yourself, how can you ever learn? The groups never learn. They never, ever fucking learn. The bronze-age shepherd cults still dominate the intellectual discourse in the 21^st century. People still believe in astrology, which was devised in ancient Mesopotamia together with divining from animal entrails. You just can’t make this shit up. The only way you can get rid of evil traditions, apparently, is to kill all their adherents or at least completely destroy their culture, which is why the Aztecs no longer perform human sacrifice en masse – there are no Aztecs. Is there really no better way to get rid of totally idiotic ideas and cults? Oh wait, there is: people would simply have to get rid of the concept of needing to belong to a herd. Then the need to accept the herd’s insane beliefs and practices would simply fall off, as necrotic mental tissue, because people would judge ideas on other criteria, such as usefulness, correctness and practicality. However, this is such a radically heretical idea it’s no wonder Socrates was killed for it. Accepting only what’s good, true and useful? Why, people might actually stop making human sacrifices to Poseidon! O heresy, o evil! As I said, you just can’t make this shit up.