I embrace the hope side of this post. Every person should be free to have their own web site, their own public voice. If you have a grievance, you should be able to tell the world, and unless you're breaking the law AND societal norms doing so, nobody should be able to stop you.
There's nothing that says everything has to be open to everyone. With capability based tokens, you could give access to select portions to friends, family, co-workers, etc. If you want to put all of your mp3s up for your own use, or to share with friends, but not accessible to others, why not?
We should all have a voice in this new medium. Let's not shun this idea because the details aren't perfect. Our need to pick apart things helps us avoid future trouble when we're coding... but it's not always the most constructive response. That's the first problem I see with this post... our (HN et al) reaction to it.
The other problem I see is technical, but also related to our views of the world... and that's security. Given our current views on operating systems, especially our support of systems with ambient authority, it is unwise to make a habit of just visiting any random website. This is why walled gardens are so popular. It's a technical issue that is widely seen to be a problem with either capitalism and markets, or some malign quirk of human nature, but the root cause is technical.
Related Tangent about OS design: Imagine if there were no fuses or circuit breakers, and nobody had heard of them.... would you be willing to just randomly plug in a device from an unknown manufacturer? You could potentially burn your house down, and have everyone in your grid mad at you (because they no longer have power) as a result. You'd never do anything imaginative in that world with electricity. This is how I see our world with the internet and our crop of OSs that have ambient authority everywhere.
There's nothing that says everything has to be open to everyone. With capability based tokens, you could give access to select portions to friends, family, co-workers, etc. If you want to put all of your mp3s up for your own use, or to share with friends, but not accessible to others, why not?
We should all have a voice in this new medium. Let's not shun this idea because the details aren't perfect. Our need to pick apart things helps us avoid future trouble when we're coding... but it's not always the most constructive response. That's the first problem I see with this post... our (HN et al) reaction to it.
The other problem I see is technical, but also related to our views of the world... and that's security. Given our current views on operating systems, especially our support of systems with ambient authority, it is unwise to make a habit of just visiting any random website. This is why walled gardens are so popular. It's a technical issue that is widely seen to be a problem with either capitalism and markets, or some malign quirk of human nature, but the root cause is technical.
Related Tangent about OS design: Imagine if there were no fuses or circuit breakers, and nobody had heard of them.... would you be willing to just randomly plug in a device from an unknown manufacturer? You could potentially burn your house down, and have everyone in your grid mad at you (because they no longer have power) as a result. You'd never do anything imaginative in that world with electricity. This is how I see our world with the internet and our crop of OSs that have ambient authority everywhere.