We've all done it, that foolish - definitely dangerous - act of driving down the road with no hands on the steering wheel. Perhaps maybe you've not done this literally, but have instead done the equivalent in the way of "knee steering" or "message sending" or "phone dialing" or like I saw one time, "
newspaper reading" while traveling blind down the road in the drivers seat. Whether it be by distraction, tiredness, haste or just simply not paying attention; we have all relinquished control of our moving vehicle to chance.
When we do this it is generally with a perspective, that might not even be consciously acknowledged, that we need only reverse what we did to regain control. The natural mindset is, "Hands off the wheel" can be corrected by "replace hands to the wheel," or "distracted" can in theory be reversed with "pay attention." Though this may seem correct and logical on the surface, there is a problem here in that, simply put, it's just not that simple. If a problem arises putting our hands back on the wheel is only a part of the solution. We need to reassess our entire situation and maybe even learn some new skills in the moment.
Suppose I had lived my life in Florida and was on a trip to Canada in the late Fall when I decided to text Aunt Norma about the beautiful weather that is clear, but cold and damp. Quicker than I can press the "Send" key on the phone I could find myself in a skid on black ice I never saw coming. Now I have to get my focus back to the driving, reassess my situation, decide what is going on, regain a physical posture that will allow me to act, learn to handle a skid and get to work at resolving the problem of alternately seeing taillights and headlights as I'm spinning down the road. Simply grabbing the wheel is not enough.
If I were in the vastness of space where there is very little to affect my course I could point my vehicle in a direction and then take a nap, a very long nap, with confidence that when I awoke I would be going in the same direction with no external forces having imposed changes requiring my attention.
Our society is a vehicle that sits someplace between these two perspectives of the car that is going to get in trouble pretty quick if left unattended and the spaceship that is just going to go where it's pointed.
Compare our society to that of 50 years ago. Fifty years ago computers filled rooms. Today we carry them in our pockets. Fifty years ago people basically communicated in person, when there was a land-line phone available or when they had time to write a letter. Today, we can reach someone almost instantly through such a myriad of methods it would take a research paper to just identify them all, let alone explain them. That's where we were and where we are, but how we got here is on a path that we took for granted and slipped our hands off the wheel. We started shaving at the wheel, putting on makeup while the vehicle careened down the road; we started reading the paper from the drivers seat and just doing what we were told. We may have put our hands on the wheel and embraced technology today, but we've not checked our mirrors and we're still in a skid.
What we can do at this place we call "today" is phenomenal, but we've gotten here without any real plan. We've created all this fantastic new technology using a veneer of innovation on top a core of old ideas and concepts. We initially had to go to a centralized architecture for our social network for two fundamental reasons.
- 1) The substrate infrastructure of low powered commodity compute resources and slow Internet connectivity to the home prohibited decentralized hosting of personal communication. In other words, home computers were too under-powered, and residential Internet connections too slow, to support the general public hosting their communication needs directly from their residences.
- 2) The general public was not technology savvy enough to understand what could be done or how to do it.
Consequently we have wound up with these massive data repositories facilitating the public's communication needs. This architecture was necessary and worked when their use was basically for entertainment purposes. Today however, communication on the Internet has become a necessity if one is going to keep pace in our society. This means that all forms of information once held as "personally significant," everything from love letters to bank statements, is going into these giant repositories fully accessible to only a privileged few.
The veneer of great social network innovations and technology is still riding on an outdated concept of inadequate compute capabilities at the network end-points. Rephrased, most people now have, or at least have access to, the network speed and compute power to host their personally significant data privately where it belongs.
The public is now also generally savvy enough to understand how they can benefit through the use of the recent, and astounding, technological advancements we have made as a society. The only piece missing is for the populace to now learn how to steer their way off the black ice of exposing every nuance of their lives to someone else's computers and use the existing tools to regain control of their life's vehicle.