Wanted: Digital Dreams
In this corner of my world, I seek a better digital life, one where I own my own digital identity, where I am not forced to be a microsoft or facebook user just because my school or family use them, one where I get to choose my digital service providers to suit my values...
In this corner of my world, I plan how I might achieve this using open-standard protocols, open-source software, replaceable services...
In this corner of my world, in order to get some of this digital sovereignty in my own life, and to learn skills to help build the better world, I practice “self-hosting”, but in great frustration knowing full well it's so far away from the needed solutions...
In this corner of my world, I am meeting lots of people with similar views, and hearing lots of comments like X is bad, Y is an open-standard protocol, Z is an ethical service...
But I am rarely hearing people's imagination of how it all works in this new, better world.
How does a family pick up a laptop and a tablet and a smart-phone and a printer and some on-line service providers in this new world, and get on with managing their family archives and their school work and their chats and calls and diaries? How do they transfer photos between their devices, find a document they wrote or scanned earlier, verify their human identity when needed, choose and change their messaging service providers?
A common pitfall is thinking in terms of apps. Nextcloud, Fediverse, Jitsi-meet, Matrix, Linux, open-this, libre-that. Great, those are useful components, but they are not the picture.
Do we imagine each home running a little Microsoft replacement and a compressed Google compatible service in their home router box? Do we see communities running big servers for their citizens? Do we dream of peer-to-peer local-first apps, operating independent of network services? Maybe some of these are involved, but how would it actually work from the user's point of view? How do we pay for it? In what ways can we demonstrate it working better than today's Big Tech model?
Without this imagined new way of working, we are swimming in a sea of bits of software and protocols and services and funding campaigns for the same. Without our shared vision, how will all these little bits ever come together?
Once we see the big picture, we'll enjoy plugging the little bits together into a pattern. Look! — project Z implemented this bit of the picture, so now they interoperate with all those adjacent projects. Look! — project Y needs help with solving that other bit of the picture. Look! — two incompatible protocols — we want to plug those areas together so let's do something about it.
A few times I have had a go at writing down how things work “in my dream world”. I'm not short of ideas, but it takes time and effort, I'm not so great at telling stories, and I don't have all the dreams. I want to write and share more of my own dreams, and I also want to read how it all works in your dreams. Bouncing ideas back and forth with others is stimulating. It's important. More and more I am thinking how much better we could work together if we shared these dream stories. Stories in words. Stories in pictures too.
Where are our dreams? Who will write them down, draw the big pictures, share the visions?
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