The Old Kingdom

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The old kingdom is a pattern of centralized information, command, and control. Businesses, governments, and even the very fabric of the web (more on this in a moment) are composed of gatekeepers and those seeking access. Our attention and labor has been aggregated, funneled and taxed by those in power for generations. The truth of this pattern is as old as civilization, as old as human culture. We are a society of unwitting drones.

Autonomy Moves to the Edges of Networks

The folks I share a world view with believe in equal opportunity, not equal wealth. Work, strive, and be judged. As long as we thoughtlessly perpetuate a hierarchical system, we erode the opportunity for growth that our predecessors will no doubt inherit. This is less a rallying cry, and more of a message. The shift in value is in plain sight for those willing to see.

Why the Web is part of the Old Kingdom

As an active digital explorer and participant in evolutionary web development, I’ve delved deeply into protocols, web scripting languages, frameworks, and RESTful interfaces. Time and again I slam into the limitations of client side code, and the requirement for server hosting. The insidious requirement for servers is built into every layer of web stacks.

Need a server? No problem for the fluent

Although the technology surrounding self hosting has made it drastically cheaper and easier to setup a web server, there continues to be a barrier to entry for non developers. For example my wife doesn’t deploy Rails servers, not even on Heroku. Why isn’t each and every access point a fully functional network citizen? What’s stopping users from clicking their way into their own read/write node without going through gatekeepers? Satisfactory nodes enable pushing and pulling updates to and from friends, and subscribing to preferred news and media sources.

The default response is “it’s too hard for non geeks to setup and maintain a server”, but that argument holds as much water as a raised aquarium platform shoe (very little).
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With the rise of technologies like CouchDB we’ll see the expansion of servers to mass market consumers. Admittedly there is a layer of UI polish that’s required for each application, yet it comes as no surprise that mobile devices are upgrading to servers. The issue of local access to a recognizable url like https://marksmobile.ln/OneSweetApp without global domain name registration is as simple as modifying a temporary hosts file. Security IT specialists will shoot me for mentioning such a hack, but there are authentication methods that could make this work (using an extension like .ln to signify a local name).

  • http://www.alearningaday.com Rohan

    Equal opportunity, not equal wealth. Like that. :)

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Thanks Rohan. There’s a clear distinction between economic philosophies, and I’m a firm believer in equal opportunity, no matter where you begin.

    Your name came up at the AVC meetup, William and Shana both noted how active you’ve been on the forums. I enjoy and appreciate your enthusiasm, keep up the thoughtful comments.

  • http://www.renterence.com Terence Reilly

    Interesting that you wrote this. You are very interested in decentralized information as part of the Old Kingdom where I have been recently exploring solar, wind and other power sources as a way of decentralizing power and seeing Big Oil as part of the Old Kingdom.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Great tie in, information can’t go very far without power.

  • http://www.alearningaday.com Rohan

    That was a nice way of putting it. :)

    Aww. thanks for the note on the meetup, Mark. I missed being there myself.. 

    But I’m sure the time will come… soon. 

    Thanks a lot for the note though. :)

  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    After reading this, I had no idea that there was a “No SQL Movement”.  Looks like by reading this I have given myself a whole bunch of homework to attend to :-)

    Especially since I found this PDF below that looks like a neat introduction :

    NoSQL Databases by Christof Strauch
    http://www.christof-strauch.de/nosqldbs.pdf

    I’ve been so hooked on discovering the joys of Digital Video Recording that recently I have swapped the HG of the internet for HD television.  (Of course the HG isn’t “the Highly Googled” but “the Holy Grail”).

    This is a nice timely reminder that even if DVR can now hunt me down all the quality television there is at my disposal like some all-you-can-eat media buffet, ignoring quality stuff on the net is so faux pas – so it’s nice to be back online after weeks off, and rediscovering what I have been absolutely missing.

    [Em]

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    What a rich resource you’ve discovered, checking for an ePub version of Christof’s lecture now.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    This may come in handy to others:
    Two bookmarklets did an adequate job of converting an HTML google scholar web crawling variant to ePub.
    Google scholar edition of the paper: http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:p6ttZi1mFaAJ:scholar.google.com/+NoSQL+Databases&hl=en&as_sdt=0,33
    Instapaper text (optimizes font for mobile devices) javascript:function%20iptxt()%7Bvar%20d=document;try%7Bif(!d.body)throw(0);window.location=’http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=’+encodeURIComponent(d.location.href);%7Dcatch(e)%7Balert(‘Please%20wait%20until%20the%20page%20has%20loaded.’);%7D%7Diptxt();void(0);
    And dotepub: javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20d=document;try%7Bif(!d.body%7C%7Cd.body.innerHTML==”)throw(0);var%20dotEPUBcss=d.createElement(‘link’);dotEPUBcss.rel=’stylesheet’;dotEPUBcss.href=’http://dotepub.com/s/dotEPUB-favlet.css’;dotEPUBcss.type=’text/css’;dotEPUBcss.media=’screen’;d.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)%5B0%5D.appendChild(dotEPUBcss);dotEPUBstatus=d.createElement(‘div’);dotEPUBstatus.setAttribute(‘id’,'dotepub’);dotEPUBstatus.innerHTML=’%3Cdiv%20id=%22status%22%3E%3Cp%3Eworking…%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E’;d.body.appendChild(dotEPUBstatus);var%20dotEPUB=d.createElement(‘script’);dotEPUB.type=’text/javascript’;dotEPUB.charset=’utf-8′;dotEPUB.src=’http://dotepub.com/j/dotepub.js?x=’+(Math.random());dotEPUB_links=1;dotEPUB_lang=’en’;d.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)%5B0%5D.appendChild(dotEPUB);%7Dcatch(e)%7Balert(‘The%20page%20has%20no%20content%20or%20it%20is%20not%20fully%20loaded.%20Please,%20wait%20till%20the%20page%20is%20loaded.’);%7D%7D)();

  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    I liked what Jeff Sayer is saying here about moving beyond relational databases, since being a newbie trying to get a handle on the “New Kingdom” of the DB, I found Sayer’s comments very helpful as an intro for an area totally new to me :

    Jeff Sayer “Moving Beyond the Relational Database”
    http://jeffsayre.com/2010/09/17/web-3-0-smartups-moving-beyond-the-relational-database/

    BTW when it comes to command and control at the organizational level of the “Old Kingdom”, I dig John Seddon’s thinking – he also has neat video’s on You-tube that further flesh out his thinking (based on lean approaches)

    John Seddon “Freedom from Command and Control”
    http://books.google.ca/books?id=IP_yVb-5xtcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

    Since, Mark, you are well versed in this technology space I can see why you entitled this post as “The Old Kingdom”.  From my newbie vantage point this is really “A whole new domain” and as I have found in such a sort space of time, a mighty interesting one at that.

    Also I take the use of the word “Kingdom” is in the spirit of how biologists use the term rather than monarchists :-)

    [Em]

     

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