This is a really interesting article, and it's nice to see a lengthy discussion of treating sites like Reddit, Facebook, etc as a kind of digital nation-state.<p>But one point in particular bothered me (and perhaps I'm misreading it):<p>> It’s incumbent on anyone creating a new network of any kind not just to avoid using it yourself for criminal purposes, but to design it so that it’s not useful for criminal purposes.<p>Isn't a network, by definition, useful for criminal purposes? Perhaps the author means not <i>more</i> useful for criminal purposes than for legal ones, but what exactly might that mean? And by whose laws are we describing criminality?<p>I also think this argument is tremendously problematic, maybe even self-defeating, in the context of encryption. If we, as the author proposes, were to have a network designed from the beginning to be capable of eventual decentralization [1], doesn't that imply heavy use of cryptography? I can't imagine a digital network where you can create privacy (and therefore agency) any other way.<p>And yet clearly, government entities like the FBI are publicly railing against encryption as a useful tool for terrorists and criminals. Plenty of people, myself included, find this policy debate to be frighteningly under-informed, but if your goal is to avoid government attention to maximize the chances for success, it's not <i>our</i> opinion that matters, it's the FBI's. So I think think this kind of friction is unavoidable, implying the smart money is on people who can cleverly minimize its impact.<p>[1] On a related note, I'm working on exactly this problem, at a protocol level. If you're curious, check out our documentation repo <a href="https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse</a>
The article is more of a random rant - all whining, no solutions. It's not about a "digital republic" at all. There have been proposals for governmental systems with lots of online voting, but this isn't one of them.<p>Federated systems work fine technically, but few have achieved widespread use. USENET was quite successful, but Google effectively took it over. (Google Groups was originally just a USENET node, but now most people are unaware that many "Google Groups" are really USENET groups, with traffic flowing in both directions, and you don't need a Google account to access them from the USENET side.[1])<p>If there's no place where someone can put a boot on the air hose and cut off the air supply, systems are not highly profitable. This is why federated systems are not widely successful.<p>[1] <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.c++" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.c++</a>
>It’s incumbent on anyone creating a new network of any kind not just to avoid using it yourself for criminal purposes, but to design it so that it’s not useful for criminal purposes.<p>What happens when your point of view is "criminalized"?
Also available in the urbit docs: <a href="http://urbit.org/docs/theory/network-goals" rel="nofollow">http://urbit.org/docs/theory/network-goals</a> which are served from an urbit.