Take Back The Tubes.
CNN’s foreboding story, among many similar:
For all that the unrest in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.
But Dave Winer, pioneer he’s been, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, will not allow the Internet to be switched off at the whim of tyranny! He’s making it easy for home users to become web servers, far away and too numerous to be vulnerable to central commands.
There is no creed or constitution that’s good for people and also good for arrogant and cruel agents of government. No agency or corporation should control humanity’s knowledge or communication, nor hoard this knowledge, nor put it in silos easily metered, sold in mercantile chunks, nor shut off.
A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow.
Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?”
Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform.
Remove centralized bottlenecks !
To be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment.