Facebook and Twitter are only like water coolers if there were one, giant, global water cooler for all workplaces everywhere. But the services they use embrace gossip’s content rather than its form. Today, that authority rests in the hands of a handful of big companies that run services used by billions of people.Īnd those billions do indeed gossip online. And so business dissolved the internet into commercial product offerings. Keeping a popular server running became too expensive for ordinary folk and too complicated for non-technical people. And it worked, for a time, while the network and its user base were small. When the web entered public use in the 1990s, it offered a publishing platform without intermediation, as commercial services like AOL had done for online access. The ARPANET’s infrastructure was decentralized, but that design served a central authority: U.S. Geographically distributed servers could communicate with one another absent a central hub, thanks to the communication protocol TCP/IP. The internet’s precursor, ARPANET, was designed to withstand nuclear catastrophe. It has always been concentrated in some ways and dispersed in others. Isn’t the internet decentralized already, for that matter: a network of servers distributed all around the globe? On first blush, that might sound no different from Twitter and Facebook, where gossip reigns. Being a sailor, Tarr adopted the name thanks to its nautical provenance, an apt description of its behavior. Named for a water cask (a butt) that had been cut (or scuttled), early 19th-century sailors would dish dirt while drawing from it. The term “Scuttlebutt” comes from the original water-cooler gossip. Why make communication slower, inefficient, and reliant on random interactions between other people? But Tarr and others building SSB applications think it might solve many of the problems of today’s internet, giving people better and more granular control of their lives online and off. Then the friend does likewise, and word spreads, slowly and deliberately.įor the contemporary internet user, it sounds like a bizarre proposition. When a user runs into a friend, the system automatically synchronizes its stored updates with them via local-network transfer-or even by USB stick. Instead of posting to an online service like Facebook or Twitter, Scuttlebutt applications hold onto their data locally. It’s a decentralized system for sending messages to a specific community, rather than the global internet. He built something called Secure Scuttlebutt, or SSB. What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network? Unreliable and sporadic internet connectivity became an interesting engineering challenge. Tarr started living on the boat after burning out at a previous job and discovering that the peripatetic lifestyle suited him. But that’s by design rather than by misfortune. Connectivity is worse on the boat than on the farm, and even less reliable. Today, Tarr lives on a sailboat-another Kiwi staple, alongside sheep and distance. Australia and New Zealand are first-world countries with third-world latency. Bad, unreliable internet service is a particular challenge. Getting goods, people, and information to and from Australasia for families like Tarr’s has always been difficult. Down in the antipodes, isolation is even more isolating. Dominic Tarr is a computer programmer who grew up on a remote farm in New Zealand.
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