Cool Concepts That Deserve More Recognition

Over the years, there have been many fascinating projects attempting to push the limits of digital decentralization. What makes these inventions interesting is the opportunity to truly transform the systems people take for granted. While not every attempt succeeds in radically changing the game, there is often quite a fair bit to learn from them. In fact, it is often through failed experiments that we can learn the most to inform future approaches. Cyber rebels of all stripes need to rekindle their sense of creativity and curiosity.

It is tragic that so many brilliant technical minds are absorbed into big money cargo cults rather than drawn to working on practical answers to pressing problems. A lot of the very tantalizing and game-changing techniques are very often the most obscure. It is our job as cyber rebels to give these underrated gems their due credit. In the hopes of exploring the art of the possible, we’ll be looking at a few fascinating projects that have covered important ground.

ZeroNet - A web revolution

A particularly ambitious project to reinvent the Internet as we know it was ZeroNet. This project was a particularly daring attempt to solve a great many problems all at once. Describing itself as “Open, Free and un-censorable websites, using Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent network”. The project was also built to be quite friendly with Tor, leveraging existing anonymity solutions to protect privacy on this new frontier. This project had some absolutely astounding potential and some very well-refined approaches. It is a shame that the repository hasn’t been updated since 2021, but the project lives on as 0net.

If ZeroNet had gained significant adoption, it would have become an incredibly powerful tool against online censorship. ZeroNet attempted to level the playing-field of information dissemination by ensuring that sites were served by their visitors. Getting the visitors to share the load meant that the originator didn’t even need to stay online for their content to remain available. This has many performance benefits that have also been replicated in other projects. IPFS is another parallel initiative that tried to take this on, but ZeroNet also had other advantages.

Far from merely being a resilient content delivery system, ZeroNet had a truly revolutionary design for serving dynamic content. A limitation IPFS and other similar approaches had was that it was impossible or impractical to build even relatively simple web experiences on top of them. Because of its radically different approach to static and dynamic content, ZeroNet had mechanisms to allow for any modern site to be built on top of it. At the peak of its popularity ZeroNet had a decentralized, password-less, pseudonymous single-sign-on system that worked with blogs, mail and even an attempted YouTube clone. Serving a web site from ZeroNet rather than the regular Internet had many advantages similar to other darknets, such as no cost permission-less hosting.

ZeroNet did a lot of very interesting things, but it certainly had its limitations. To my knowledge it was quite obscure and relatively unknown even to technical people. Many trade-offs had to be made to work as well as it did, and there are a wide variety of valid criticisms one could make. If ZeroNet was remade today I’m sure it would be radically different, but there is a great deal to appreciate about how it was put together. The best and worst thing about ZeroNet was that it took on a lot all at once. This made the project much more rigid and inflexible, but certainly created a more user-friendly experience than similar projects often have.

OpenNIC - Democratic DNS

Many people underestimate how many problems of our current Internet are downstream of the social conventions around DNS, Domain Name System. Web addresses (such as libresolutions.network or example.com) are effectively just names mapped to assigned numbers. What we know of as the Internet is largely based on the mutual agreement on a single set of addresses mapped to assigned internet addresses. There is no real technical barrier to people deciding to use alternative numbers mapped to the same names. You very well could reinvent your own internet and assign names and numbers as you wish, but then the problem is getting others to cooperate. This may sound wildly impractical, but it’s truly a testament to how free we can be with technology if we choose to be. It’s worth understanding the advantages of an alternative DNS root if for no other reason to recognize the real potential we have to change our digital experience.

The centralized and capitalist nature of the domain name system is a huge design problem for those of us working to build bridges between the centralized Web and the Peer Webs as the current system makes it very difficult to match the onboarding experience of centralized platforms. (You can sign up to a centralized social network in 30 seconds… can you register your own domain name, have your server and app set up, and be up and running with your decentralized one in that time? You could. But not with our current system.)

Web+ - Aral Balkan

One of the recurring problems when it comes to radically transforming the very structure of the web is facing DNS. While some attempts try to eliminate DNS all together, a great deal of infrastructure has been built on top of it, so throwing it away entirely includes a variety of trade-offs and consequences. The trouble with going through the effort to reinvent the wheel, is that you’re also going to reinvent many other things people take for granted as well. This would notably include infrastructure for generating and accepting certificate files to protect connections with TLS.

Despite being over 24 years old, OpenNIC is a very ambitious attempt to maintain an independent DNS root. What’s worth considering is that it doesn’t have to be the only one. As covered in NWNW 1328, Russia made a move in 2017 to build their own. With some creativity, it’s absolutely possible for even smaller localities to experiment with doing the same themselves. By localizing control over the “Internet phonebook”, it’s possible to begin building truly independent digital infrastructure.

PirateBox - Portable internet

Chgoddon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Source

If you’re interested in local internet you can start yourself, PirateBox was a phenomenal demonstration of what can be done. The concept is relatively straightforward: you load up public services on portable hardware and then share a public WiFi (or wired) access point. The PirateBox project itself is discontinued since 2019 but it’s a relatively simple concept to replicate. In many ways it is much easier, because many open source self-hostable solutions are even more robust and accessible.

It may seem quaint in a time where most people spend their time collaborating online, but there are real advantages to locally-based digital services. At minimum, it’s a convenient way to have your own separate internet with a curated set of content and services. With a significant investment in network access, a permanent installation could provide private and uncensored comms to a small community.

As a proof-of-concept the project demonstrated that even mobile phones can be utilized. It’s important to consider that there are many ways to adapt to modern consumer trends. Ironically, because smartphones are consumption-based devices, they’re well suited to be clients for PirateBox-like systems. With permanent installations, and long-range communications there can be many useful independent networks with a wide variety of capabilities.

Gun - Decentralized application framework

The holy grail that cyber nomads have been seeking for a long time is a truly refined ecosystem to build dApps. A “dApp” is a decentralized application that doesn’t rely on centralized points of failure. The calling card for a good dApp is “write once, use forever, anywhere”. Gun is a web application framework that provides peer-to-peer functionality and a decentralized database to persist data. These features are what’s necessary to build truly revolutionary online experiences.

This means that any developer who learns to use gun can build almost any peer-to-peer private application they can imagine. This radically different way of building applications creates new possibilities to escape the problems of our present paradigm. By breaking free of centralized management, these applications have the potential to build the “best of all worlds” when it comes to convenience, security, and resilience.

Gun has the advantage of leveraging many modern web browser functionalities. This is both an asset and a liability. On the positive side, it allows for many tried and tested technologies to be leveraged to build the foundation. But on the negative side it means that these applications are entirely dependent on major browser vendors. In a time where the future of the open web is in doubt, there are reasons to take this concern seriously. Like many of the other projects in this piece, and others across the web there are win conditions beyond critical mass success. Even if gun doesn’t become the main dApp framework, there can still be a lot to learn from it’s successes and challenges.

The Future

These three examples are but a taste of the ocean of possibilities out there. I wanted to highlight these examples to show that obscurity or lack of mass adoption is not actually failure. Ambitious attempts themselves are valuable experiments regardless of how they end up. Often times, newer projects are inspired or informed from techniques that were tried in the past. It’s high time we embrace the “freedom in freedom” and learn to explore possibilities rather than fight over dogmatic preferences and approaches.

There are a wide variety of projects I’m currently curious to see grow and evolve. From Guix a new approach to a fully-free Linux OS, to the fascinating work of the Spritely Institute on real-time distributed computation. Peer-to-peer and private applications are also entering a new phase as Iroh and Veilid are becoming more mature. But software is only part of the real equation. Finding truly independent and ‘hackable’ (user-modifiable) hardware solutions is what I’m most curious about these days.

As dark as the technological landscape can be at times, it’s now more important than ever to remember that there is so much potential to build a different future. The inertia behind centralized and controlled platforms is very much on borrowed time. Even you could discover, build, or share the part that tips the scales. There is an immense amount of power in the hands of those who decide to strike out a new path in our time. Digital technology is really just a heap of re-programmable logic circuits, with enough effort, creativity, and inspiration there are no limits to how much things can change.

Never forget that your choices matter, and that we can always forge a new path.

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