I’ve had this idea for a while but hadn’t yet found the right way to express it — the contrast between doing something ourselves (“in house”) vs outsourcing it and the implications thereof.
There are trivial examples like whether to hire someone to clean your house and more profound ones like whether to send your kids to school rather than educating them yourself (homeschooling.)
The outsourcing almost by default of fundamental things like the electrical power to your home, the server on which your most personal information is stored and your life savings to a bank or brokerage firm is anomalous by historical standards. One’s personal information, wealth and power were largely in one’s own hands, and it is only recently, due to technological progress and convenience that we have adopted such tradeoffs.
Of course, this didn’t happen all at once. People stored their gold in banks for safe keeping, and banks issued paper notes for ease of transacting. It’s since been abstracted to inauditable bits on a screen, in an account for which you have to convince a third-party server of your identity to access. Moreover, if you want to donate to Hamas, ISIS, Julian Assange or the Canadian trucker protests, for example, the bank might not sign off on it. Had you kept your money in hundred dollar bills or silver bars, you could physically hand them to any of those parties (if ISIS didn’t behead you first) permissionlessly*.
*If you had bitcoin, you could do this digitally, but you still wouldn’t be able to buy goods and services (yet) in most places or pay your taxes with it.
Another area in which personal autonomy is exchanged for centralized convenience is social media. You log-in to platforms like Twitter or Facebook, wherein they store your identity and data and feed you information via algorithm based on whatever it determines will keep you most engaged. You could instead keep a list of bookmarked blogs and sources for news and the interpretation thereof, but the convenience of having it served to you on a single platform is too good to pass up for most.
The mission creep from your money to your information diet to your alimentary diet (processed supermarket and restaurant food) is only the beginning. The pharmaceutical industry is constantly developing new pills and potions as substitutes for in-house biological processes. Instead of eating healthy and exercising you can simply take Ozempic to lose weight. Instead of experiencing anxiety or anger, you can outsource management of these emotional states to various pharmacological cocktails.
With vaccines, we’ve started to outsource immune function to large pharmaceutical conglomerates, and this is deemed so important that we have in many cases made this mandatory while simultaneously conferring preemptive liability on their makers. During covid, it got to the point where “natural immunity,” the in-house option for evolution’s aeons, was called a “conspiracy theory.”
The mRNA shots, in particular, crossed the line from immunity based on stimulating your in-house antibodies to creating their own mini-factories inside the body and quite possibly altering human DNA.
And of course we have artificial intelligence now, and that creates ever greater possibilities for outsourcing. A telling exchange between mRNA-zealot Stephen Colbert and the author Yuval Harari occurred on the Colbert show wherein the host suggested outsourcing his very judgment to AI, as we humans are too error prone.
Colbert’s idea wherein not only is our biology, but our sense- and decision-making outsourced for convenience is the ultimate capitulation. The Matrix movies were not, to my knowledge, meant to be documentaries, but this is the end game of total outsourcing where even autonomy of mind is surrendered for comfort, ease and the “greater good.” …
I read a piece on nostr by Svetski (don’t know if that’s his real name) wherein he explains the internet stack. The stack, he points out, is made up of protocols like IP, TCP, and on top of it HTTP (web), SMTP (email) and FTP (files).
Platforms like Twitter, Gmail and Facebook are built on top of those protocols. For example, Google can ban you from using its Gmail client, but it can’t ban you from using email generally because email (SMTP) is a neutral protocol available to anyone to send information peer to peer, not a third-party client platform like Google.
Svetski argues that the internet was successful (and crushed the walled garden of AOL) because nobody owned it. He compares the open protocols of the internet to a free market which is where innovation and creativity necessarily flow. But because the bitcoin protocol (a native internet money) had not yet been invented, payments were still at the platform level. Paypal and online banking are third-party, walled gardens, accessible only by permission. And because nostr had not yet been invented, identity online was similar. Third parties controlled information about you, and you needed a variety of logins, 2FAs, etc. to prove you were who you say you are and access your accounts. As such, they could track your usage of their platforms via that information.
Put differently, both the monetary and identity pieces of the internet were at the platform rather than the protocol layers of the stack.
Of course, with bitcoin and nostr, that no longer need be the case. You can now securely log into platforms without disclosing your personal information to third parties via nostr’s public/private key pairs. They know that npub has been signed by the user’s private key, but they don’t know your real name, phone number or banking information. If you needed to pay for something you could do so via bitcoin, again, without the need for third-party authentication.
Of course, many people are opposed to this because it means you could transact privately**. But there is also nothing stopping platforms from requiring proof of real-life identity — they’ll just have to compete with ones that don’t.
**(In truth, there is in some ways more transparency because everything in bitcoin and nostr is publicly viewable and auditable even if the connection between real-life identity and npub/xpub is severable.)
In other words, this in-house/outsourcing choice can alternatively be looked at as an up/down struggle via the technology stack. The forces of centralization and outsourcing want to push money and identity up the stack onto their platforms. The in-house forces want to push money and identity down the stack to the protocol layers.
The same framework can be used for things like education or social media too. Is education (learning) something that requires a platform replete with admissions offices, graduation ceremonies and credentials, or is it a body of knowledge and wisdom handed down over human history to which anyone can have access? Does social media really need to be mediated by middlemen or can we via nostr simply connect peer to peer over relays?
In fact, the original protocol might be language — accessible to anyone with the requisite vocabulary — and even in that area there are factions who want to make it platform-like with ever more words you’re not allowed to say and even words you’re required to use in reference to certain sensitive individuals. It’s not enough to be understood, but you must, in certain circles, signal your “good person” credential to interact via the new rules of the platform.
This is not to suggest outlawing universities and colleges from offering platforms to those who deem them worthwhile or Twitter from organizing the social experience in a way people prefer. Surely, it should be possible to outsource if you prefer, and if you want sit on the couch eating Doritos all day and hand your weight management to Ozempic, that should be an option (provided the side effects of the medicine are all fully disclosed and concomitant liability is in place.)
But it’s long past time to see these “solutions” for what they are — conscious top-down grabs from centralized power to turn what used to be protocols — language, money, education, online communication — into permissioned platforms, accessible only to those with the requisite credentials.
So please don’t mistake this for an argument that nothing should be a platform, or that we need to grow all our own food and never outsource tasks to other people with superior technical knowledge and expertise. It’s great that restaurants and farmer’s markets exist, that designers make clothing and architects draw the plans for structurally sound buildings. The point is we should be aware that in-house vs outsourcing requires tradeoffs and be free, even encouraged, to refuse to them when the balance is not in our favor.