openrisk
9 months ago
The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.
The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
arethuza
9 months ago
I live somewhere that has a lot of castles - there are 3 (possibly 4) within 2km of where I am sitting writing this.
I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).
I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.
Maken
9 months ago
If you are in France or some other central European old Kingdom, the people living in those castles were the ones who either put the king in the throne or had the power to remove him if he started some funny business, so it was their kingdom in a sense. The problem with modern platforms is, as always, how much leverage the users have against the administrators.
inglor_cz
9 months ago
Removal of a bad king was a possibility, but actually attempting to do it was ... tricky. It could definitely backfire and end up with the rebels on a scaffold, or, worse, with a decade-long civil war that harmed everyone and opened the door of the kingdom to potential raiders from the outside.
In practice, unhappy nobles would often rather deny their necessary cooperation (at war or administering the land in peace) and thus force the king to make some amends and tradeoffs.
Passive aggressivity isn't a modern concept :)
user
9 months ago
int_19h
9 months ago
So long as the king is not sufficiently powerful to take on a bunch of nobles who gang up, for all practical purposes, it is not the king's country.
inglor_cz
9 months ago
"for all practical purposes"
Well, there is the practical purpose of legitimacy. It may seem too soft for modern power theoreticians, but the legitimate king has something that cannot be acquired by raw power, and that puts somewhat of a damper on potential rebels. Not on each and every one of them, of course, but it has a wide effect. Killing or deposing the legitimate monarch was a serious spiritual crime for which one could pay not just by his earthly life, but in the afterlife as well.
Even usurpers like William the Conqueror tried to obtain some legitimacy by concocting stories why they and nobody else should be kings.
We still see some reverbations of that principle today. Many authoritarians love to "roleplay elections", even though they likely could do it like Eritrea and just not hold any. It gives them a veneer of legitimacy.
int_19h
9 months ago
Would-be rebels don't necessarily need to kill or even depose the monarch, if the monarch's power is so limited in the first place. They can just go about their business and ignore the king's objections to the contrary.
Then, of course, legitimacy itself is culturally defined, and in some places being able to depose the monarch would be ipso facto proof of said monarch's retroactive illegitimacy. The notion of "divine right of kings" is far from universal.
arethuza
9 months ago
Yes, in the case of Scotland there is a famous document (Declaration of Arbroath) that was written to the Pope asking him to, amongst other things, acknowledge that Scotland had been pretty much always been independent of England. This was "signed" by the Scottish nobles and has a section saying that if the current king (Robert the Bruce) wasn't good enough at fighting the English he'd be removed and they'd find someone more capable.
khafra
9 months ago
So, you should build your castle in someone else's kingdom iff that kingdom either
1. Has strong norms against castle seizure or abandonment of the king's duties in kingdom upkeep
2. Has a federation of non-king castle owners strong and unified enough to force the former point.
hoorayimhelping
9 months ago
3. You are strong enough to provide a serious and credible threat to the king if he implements a policy that threatens you.
Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
oremolten
9 months ago
Sierra Online was acquired through fraudulent accounting, and the company that acquired them went under shortly after as their fraud was revealed.
Unfortunately Sierra had to accept the offer.
smcin
9 months ago
Also Valve has always been a private company tightly controlled by insiders, whereas Sierra had already been a public company since 1989, subsequently acquired by CUC in 1996 for $1.5bn, and embarked on a non-stop acquisition spree in pursuit of short-term growth, which usually ends badly (think Gateway, AOL, Time-Warner, etc). Esp. pre-Sarbanes-Oxley.
Moreover, Gabe Newell always had a controlling stake in Valve ever since 1996, so that prevents any shenanigans. There are comparatively few shareholders (than a public company) and they were all long-term, since Valve will likely never go public, certainly no year soon, or even be privately acquired; while Newell controls it.
In this instance your complaint is about corporate governance rather than tech; (how far back did tech people stop being in control at Sierra?)
user
9 months ago
nasmorn
9 months ago
Castle building was in fact a function of the downfall of the carolingian empire that until then kept it under control and only granted the right at strategic locations. Most castles simply made a local lord unfireable by his king since besieging a castle was way too expensive for a regular dispute. The castle building shifted the power to the local realm, starting the feudal period for good.
Castles are thus more like domains where once you take hold of it, even the big powers have a hard time taking it away from you again
grues-dinner
9 months ago
Seems more like the rule is:
> Building a castle is a very good idea if you seek to entrench yourself in the power structure of the kingdom. To do this, you must be able credibly mount a defence of the castle to discourage forcible eviction without major mutual destruction (cough too big to fail).
> Don't build a wooden cottage and expect it function like a castle with a garrison under your command. Even if you slowly expand it to a stone mansion, if you don't maintain a garrison, it won't work as a castle.
Sadly, building an game on someone else's platform is more like setting up a cottage on the land. You might be able to get some farming done and survive, but if the lord fancies the grain, you're out of luck. But also good luck finding land to farm without a lord. Peasant.
arethuza
9 months ago
Well, you could go to the Moon or Mars or set up your own independent space habitat which are just a bit harder than building a castle and/or farming some land.
movedx
9 months ago
I’m guessing you live in Wales if the castles are that densely populated. It has the highest density of castles in the world.
PaulHoule
9 months ago
My understanding in many places (France in the Versailles era and the contemporaneous Tokugawa Japan) important families were expected to have some members at court where they could be observed, held accountable (hostage?) etc. That would be a reason to be your own domicile close to the court.
neon_me
9 months ago
When it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay.
And this is not cynic talking ...
j45
9 months ago
The web is still open.
Wide open.
For anything to build.
More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
Veuxdo
9 months ago
> More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
Not really. There are some people walking around with giant teddy bears[0], but that is entirely for show.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
rightbyte
9 months ago
That was honestly a really good read on enshittification.
I think the theory that luring the producers by throwing them in my face, is a really good one. And one I haven't though of.
gspencley
9 months ago
It looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct.
Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).
Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.
But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.
You can still build a website
You can still create opt-in email newsletters
And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.
It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.
But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.
j45
9 months ago
100% true.
But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not. The culture of creating more than consuming gave way to consuming content and scrolling becoming the default behaviour that was conditioned into users.
Using a platform is one thing, reducing your platform risk by finding the people who will be your supporters is the real purpose of other platforms in other cases... coming to your platform.
As people start to see themselves as a platform, I suspect this will change.
krapp
9 months ago
>But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not.
What's weird is how deeply held this view is on HN, by people who should know better.
treyd
9 months ago
It's functionally shackled by the terms Google lays out for it.
runamuck
9 months ago
Anecdotal: My hobby tech blog went from 4k hits/ day (all cold Google search traffic) w/ top Google searches in 2019 to about 60 a day today. I still publish at the same tempo and I believe I improved the quality of the blog, but I suspect these days the search engine traffic pushes eyeballs to the walled garden "social media" apps.
raxxorraxor
9 months ago
You are no "authoritative" voice. What do you think was all the rage against misinformation about? To give legacy media and advertising customers an edge. All platforms with user voices and ratings were destroyed too. User opinions are bad for marketing.
If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.
j45
9 months ago
I'm not sure why search engines would push there or where you are learning about seo, etc.
It seems search engines want to know it's real people behind content.
Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?
Veuxdo
9 months ago
> Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?
It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.
runamuck
9 months ago
I post it to LinkedIn and X, but my logs show very little traffic from those sources.
j45
9 months ago
If Google is relevant to it.
Google's relevance has been changing with alternate means to discovery (perplexity, chatgpt) than their search.
PaulHoule
9 months ago
I see more 401s than ever before running a webcrawler I think because of A.I. paranoia.
AtlasBarfed
9 months ago
The real elephant in the room is unless you are an actual king, your castle is always on someone's land
I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
j45
9 months ago
We already have digital citizenship and already are digital citizens.
We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.
It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.
This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.
A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
fsflover
9 months ago
> We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
Speak for yourself. Sent from my Librem 5.
j45
9 months ago
Haha, fair.
Librem seems nice.
I was more referring to email accounts.
Is your email with librem too?
fsflover
9 months ago
One of these: https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems
throwaway48476
9 months ago
It is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.
openrisk
9 months ago
Absolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies.
It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
Moru
9 months ago
History isn't exactly the most liked subject in school. Most people continue not liking in later in life.
throwaway48476
9 months ago
History is just terribly taught and practiced. At the core history is just telling stories which are always interesting when told well.
Maken
9 months ago
History is terribly taught because it's often about the how and not the why.
teqsun
9 months ago
Even worse is the overemphasis on when (in terms of exactness).
Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.
arethuza
9 months ago
The most interesting history we got taught at school was by one of our music teachers who was a kilt wearing Scottish independence supporter who used to tell us bloodthirsty stories about Bruce, Wallace and others...
NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)
AmericanChopper
9 months ago
Scottish history would be far too dangerous to teach today. Undermines the narrative that all white people have a detestable history of colonisation and exploitation.
The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.
throwaway48476
9 months ago
American history id even more dangerous as it justifies the violent overthrow of the government
Neonlicht
9 months ago
I suppose he skipped the part in which the Scottish elite sold out their country (literally) to the English crown?
arethuza
9 months ago
He probably didn't mention that because it wasn't particularly bloodthirsty and therefore of little interest to 12 year old boys.
Mind you, the fact that it was events on the Isthmus of Panama that were one of the main causes of the union is fairly interesting:
user
9 months ago
zigman1
9 months ago
Do you think fediverse is a good direction as response to that?
openrisk
9 months ago
Conceptually the fediverse points towards the "right" direction, but imho it still falls way short from being a fully developed and sustainable new proposal. Both on the technical side and (maybe more importantly) on the economic side.
Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge.
The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots.
We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents.
But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.
account42
9 months ago
The biggest failing of the fediverse seems to be societal - federation is split along political boundaries even before the system really caught on. How can we possibly get out of digital feudalism if Eve will only let us talk to Bob if we don't talk to Alice. We need an open system that is actually universal like phones or email - both of which would be shut down or severy limited today for allowing all kings of unfavored characters to send heretical messages to each other, if they were not alredy well entrenched before the latest cultural shift.
noirscape
9 months ago
The fediverse is probably the best answer you're gonna find to digital feudalism that is compatible~ish with the real world. Which is to say; it theoretically divides the risk that any single castle and king could hijack the entire process up into many smaller castles, meaning that if a king turns hostile, you can go somewhere else with relatively little friction.
The reality is that if you truly want to get rid of digital castles and kings, you're essentially going to have to operate a distributed digital firehose (cynically: digital sewage pipe) that anyone can submit to with no preconditions whatsoever. For many reasons (first one that jumps to mind: spam, second reason: illegal shit, third reason: trolls) most people don't want to operate something like that, and that's before the law gets involved.
Pet projects exist of course, but pretty much zero of them are made to scale up against the idea of truly nuking kingdoms; the closest to a realization of this sort of network is something similar to TORs peer2peer, and you can consider pretty much all legal risks of running a TOR exit node for a service like this.
throwaway48476
9 months ago
The fediverse just moves the problem to multiple servers. The solution is a content addressed network.
j45
9 months ago
It’s one of the better options.
There’s a few other neat technologies that are toying with being social network protocols.
There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
9 months ago
> There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.
Are there any common terms one could research?
andrepd
9 months ago
No. Network effects + turbo-capitalism being able to lose 100s of millions a month to build market share, mean excessive concentration which we cannot get rid of simply by providing alternatives, even if they are "better".
j45
9 months ago
Or, maybe reside on large platforms partially or temporary.
There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit.
The open web.
We can build any web we want, at any time.
And build we should.
All large communities were small once.
Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow.
Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still.
And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.
N8works
9 months ago
Make all Algos for content recommendations open for scrutiny and watch the walls come down.
j45
9 months ago
Do we go on massive platforms to find the small communities (like subreddits) that we like?
hackable_sand
9 months ago
Disagree. That is still "playing nice"