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You want ethical alternatives? Let’s build a campus where folks can work on them without worrying about how to exist day-to-day (or fund their early-stage development like VC does for surveillance capitalism).
The extent of what public funding is doing today is “Oh, looks like you’ve got some alternative functional, let’s pay you to add Feature X to it.”
Better than nothing?
Sure.
Best we can do?
Not by a longshot.
https://ar.al/2019/11/29/the-future-of-internet-regulation-at-the-european-parliament/
(
) They have NGI0.
But this is more like politicians making fun of activists and alternative minded people.
They sat down to write up everyone alternative folks wanna see and then ...made fun of them, by putting a few peanuts in funding and make them all compete against each other ...so they can watch and laugh their asses off :D
@aral This is, of course, pretty much what communes often do
@aral Sorry, that probably sounded more flippant than I intended. I more meant that in the sense of "this is absolutely something that can be collectively organized and funded, we don't need to *rely* on eg. the EU to set up this stuff"
@joepie91 Nah, not at all, you’re right. But collectively funding shit like this is exactly what our taxes should be used for.
@aral
Isn't that a lot what the Kibuz in Israel tried to achieve but with agriculture?
@aral I'm wondering what do you think of something like that I drafted here: https://raphael.lullis.net/open-source-funding/
The European Union is making fun of programmers who want to build the "Next Generation Internet".
We applied 3 times already and never got anywhere.
Others applied too and got rejected.
Some get it, but they get peanuts for never ending paper works and delays.
The entire NGI has like 8 Million for all projects over the entire program duration to build the NGI.
That is what "keet/hypercore" has alone for just hypercore (10 Million).
Also that's a drop compared to blockchains.
@serapath Yeah, I remember the one that we were part of too. I’m done with that crap.
@aral@ar.al VC-funding is private funding. The only antidote to private funding is public funding.
The only reason for VC-funding to exist is to fill the gap left by small governments that pulled out of moonshots and large R&D projects.
We wouldn't have landed on the moon if it wasn't for a large government pumping a lot of money into the Apollo program. Had space exploration been left out to private investors, we would have had at most a couple of billionaires taking selfies in low orbit or launching luxury cars from rockets.
The Apollo program was funded by public money.
ARPANET was funded by public money.
The development of TCP/IP was funded by public money.
The development of HTTP was funded by public money.
Moonshots like the C programming language and the UNIX system were only possible because AT&T was forced by the government to spin off a big R&D unit with lavish public funding in the form of the Bell labs, so they were less likely to build an IP monopoly (it was an age were antitrust policies in the US were still more effective than a couple of elderly dudes questioning Zuckerberg in Congress).
All the big advancements in technology in the past century have been possible when public money was involved, or when governments intervened to force (or reward, depending if you adopt the stick or the carrot approach) potential monopolies to reinvest their revenue in moonshots without immediate returns.
The Anglo-Saxon world stop doing that only when Thatcher and Reagan began their anarcho-capitalist kingdoms, put the stocks market in charge of R&D investments, and established that any form of long-term government investment and planning was akin to a Soviet five-year plan.
We just need to revert those axioms, and things should get better by themselves.
Some intermediate actionable ideas that may work:
- The Dutch government has the WBSO program, where a company that can prove that they invest a certain amount of their time/capital into R&D with considerable risk (from a financial perspective) and no immediate returns gets a tax break.
- Germany has the KfW, and Italy has the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti - they are even comparable in size, with ~$500B in total assets. Those act as publicly-owned banks whose job is mainly to fund high value/high risk projects - basically the job that a private bank, SVB, used to do in the US.
- Both Germany and Italy have healthy "incubator" programs - i.e. funding for projects with tight coupling between academia and industry. You only need checks in place to ensure that the industry doesn't end up sacrificing academic resources to the altar of the shareholders, but if a good balance is in place these can be an appealing "symbiotic" option for projects that may still be too risky from a perspective of immediate returns, and still need academic/public backing, but already want to prepare a go-to-market strategy, or requires resources from the industry to operate better. Such a vision of industry/academia synergy is much healthier than the one that operates most of today's tech-related academia, where you mostly have a bunch of big companies pumping a lot of papers that describe the incremental progress that they make on their closed-source + closed-data models that spit out non-replicable results.
- Public institutes/consortia, like IEEE, ISO, W3C etc., should again have a big say in terms of standards and protocols. The monopolies that have formed today have formed also because there was no publicly owned no-profit institute to push for common protocols (or for their enforcement) for e.g. videoconferencing, social media, identity verification, etc. Thus all these fields were up for the grabs for whoever wanted to build a VC-funded monopoly.
There are many flavors of how governments can start funding their own future again. But it all starts from acknowledging that the only alternative to private money is public money.
Something like "Universal Innovation Income" would be nice: A fixed sum to pay for your apartment and your bowl of ramen, and in exchange you can focus on realizing your ideas.
@aral @joepie91 Yes! But, can we exclude the bros talking about business models and focus groups? Otherwise it’ll just be a free lunch for them.
And include the misguided nerds that are interested in the tech but also brainwashed into thinking their work needs to be profitable. They can often still be saved.
freezr @aral wow it so good that you can address such complicated topics so clearly. It is a skill by itself!
I really loved the concept of "ethical reboot" for me it sounds much stronger than "small web"...
We really need an "ethical reboot" in almost every field actually.
