Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future
from the a-time-to-build dept
Look, I get it. The world is a mess. Important institutions are crumbling. It feels like both the tech and political worlds are collaborating to squeeze all remaining humanity out of all of us. Cynicism is ascendant. Nihilism is the new black.
And yet: I remain optimistic.
Not the naive, everything-will-work-out-fine kind of optimism. The kind grounded in seeing what’s actually happening beneath the surface-level chaos. Because while legacy institutions are capitulating and folding, others are standing up and speaking out. And more importantly, people are building alternatives that route around the failures entirely.
This is the pattern: centralized systems fail, people figure out how to build around them. We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again. The difference this time is that we’re building with the knowledge of how those systems failed baked in from the start.
Every year, my final post on Techdirt is about optimism. For the past decade, I’ve felt like I needed to apologize for it. Not this year. At the lowest points, you need optimism. Things are a mess. But let’s roll up our sleeves and fix stuff. And it’s easier to maintain that optimism when you can see the concrete alternatives already taking shape, even if only in their earliest forms.
If you want to see the past final posts of the year, they’re here:
- 2008: On Staying Happy
- 2009: Creativity, Innovation And Happiness
- 2010: From Pessimism To Optimism… And The Power Of Innovation
- 2011: From Optimism And Innovation… To The Power To Make A Difference
- 2012: Innovation, Optimism And Opportunity: All Coming Together To Make Real Change
- 2013: Optimism On The Cusp Of Big Changes
- 2014: Change, Innovation And Optimism, Despite Challenges
- 2015: Keep Moving Forward
- 2016: No One Said It Would Be Easy…
- 2017: Keep On Believing
- 2018: Do Something Different
- 2019: Opportunities Come From Unexpected Places
- 2020: Make The World A Better Place
- 2021: The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is A Twisty Path
- 2022: The Opportunity To Build A Better Internet Is Here. Right Now.
- 2023: Moving Fast And Breaking Things Is The Opposite Of Tech Optimism
- 2024: The Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities
Earlier this month, with some friends, we launched the Resonant Computing Manifesto—a framework for building tech that empowers rather than extracts, that resonates with what people actually want rather than what some corporation or politician decides they should have.
The response was overwhelming. Over and over we heard from people who’d been thinking similar thoughts but didn’t realize how many others shared them. That’s how movements start: not with grand pronouncements, but with the realization that you’re not alone in seeing what needs to change.
A movement comes about as more and more people realize things that need to change and need to be fixed and then step up and say “hey, we can be a part of the process of fixing things.” It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. There’s no silver bullet.
But you can move things in the direction of change towards a better system. And as more people join in, real change is possible.
Take politics. People are rightfully upset about the direction things are heading, in the US and globally. But the backlash is producing politicians who believe in actually helping people over accumulating power. That matters.
And, similarly, for all the reasonable fears about giant tech companies working hand in hand with authoritarians, we’re seeing that kick off the processes that will enable more people to take more control over their own lives, and away from those collaborators.
Or take AI. Yes, the slop is real and the hype is exhausting. But the same tools the giants are using to flood the internet with garbage can be turned against them. I’ve spent this year building personalized tools that work for me without handing my data to corporations for their benefit over mine. You can take back control from the billionaires. The tools exist.
This matters more now that we’ve watched centralized systems and power-hungry billionaires get co-opted by authoritarian regimes. But we can use the tools of innovation to empower ourselves over them.
It’s also why I remain incredibly bullish on the work being done on open social networks like Bluesky (where I’m on the board). This year may have felt slower than the year before, but there are so many exciting developments happening where people are building amazing tools and systems without having to rely on billionaires or ask for permission.
This feels like the early internet, when you could just build something and see what happened. But we’re smarter now. We’ve seen how centralized systems become capture points for authoritarians. We know the failure modes. So we’re building with that knowledge baked in—creating systems that are, by design, resistant to the kind of control we’ve watched corrupt the previous generation of platforms.
The mess that we’re in today on both the tech and political vectors should be seen as a guide to where we need to go and what needs to be done. The seeds have already been planted and many folks are already building. The optimistic viewpoint is that this movement will continue to grow and more people will continue to see how they, too, don’t need to be held back by the whims of billionaires and authoritarians, but can use the tools of innovation for their own interests.
As always, my final thoughts on these posts are thanking all of you, the community around Techdirt, for making all of this worthwhile—and this year in particular for coming out to support our fundraiser and our continued existence. The community remains an amazing thing to me. I’ve said in the past that I write as if I’m going to share my thoughts into an empty void, not expecting anyone to ever pay attention, and I’m always amazed when anyone does, whether it’s to disagree with me, add some additional insights, challenge my thinking, or reach out to talk about how to actually move some ideas forward.
I know this community is full of creators, thinkers and advocates who care deeply about using technology to make the world better. Let’s use this opportunity to prove that innovation, thoughtfully applied, can route around institutional failure and corruption. Once again, thank you to those who are reading this for making Techdirt such a wonderful and special place, and let’s focus on being truly optimistic about the opportunities in front of us.
Filed Under: 2025, decentralization, empowering users, new year's message, optimism, resonant computing
Comments on “Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future”
Resolution 2025 :
I will never stop helping strangers. No matter how many times I get burned I will always extend a helping hand.
And quit smoking this week.
Happy new years.
Re: Cheap trick
Everytime I started to Crave, I took a nap. By the time I woke up, they were gone.
The use of AI everywhere, even for “good” things, is fueling expansions of power-hungry data centers, and making the physical machines that’re doing the computing needed for that Resonant Computing, to become more expensive. I really do hope that in the next year, Techdirt will have articles about these very real externalities.
Re:
It’s a fair point, and I think it could make for an interesting article. But I’m not sure it’s all that different from what happened during the crypto-currency hype. The externalities of giant centralized data centers were never really solved then, and it’s mostly the intended purpose that has changed.
(These types of data centers don’t majorly benefit from being close to the end users, which was the main thing preventing centralization.)
Re: Re:
Yeah, but we didn’t have Techdirt posts about how crypto-currency was Good, Actually.
Re: Re:
Crypto still exists and is still stupid, but cannot even begin to approach the enviromental and economic destructive power of AI. It’s not even in thesame universe. But yeah, so AI on top of the crypto, on top of the usual surveillance data centers, on top of the already ludicrous power consumption of”developed” countries.
AI is the Trump of technofascism. It’s like people just don’t get it. And the idiotic personal vibe coding and stupid resto recommendations are not a remotely resonable return on the cost.
Re: Re: Re:
The comment was not about crypto in general, but about crypto-currency specifically. If it wasn’t as bad as the current “hot” technology, that was probably because it had a fairly tight feedback loop in terms of finance. The data centers took “real money” to run, such that the mining businesses were not based directly on speculation; rather, encouraging speculation at the end-user level was a way to get traditional currency.
By contrast, OpenAI and others are burning money while bullshitting rich investors that the hype will amount to real money for them. But, either way, companies are building giant data centers that tax the electrical grid and the environment while neglible local benefit: just a handful of jobs. People were sure as hell complaining about those mining centers at the time, and I think that was a harder bubble to pop. I expect the current money-burning to end quite abruptly, because only a small number of people have to decide it’s stupid.
Happy New Year
Thank you for the past year’s work and the future optimism. Sorely needed! Best of the New Year to you and all your staff and your contributors.
I’m actually pessimistic on the idea of Bluesky being one of the things that helps. Between letting The White House and JD Vance settle in on the platform, and the whole “WAFFLES” saga from CEO Jay Graber, and no indication of the ATProtocol becoming meaningfully decentralized in any way that matters, it just looks like more of the same.
Re:
I hate to say it, but I agree. I’m quite pessimistic about Bluesky changing much for the better outside of offering a temporary place for former Twitter users.
There was a lot of pride about the platform being “decentralized”, but when the US government demanded age verification for the platforms users, the “decentralized” platform acted like just another fully centralized platform, folded like a cheap lawn chair under the pressure, and implemented the system for all users appearing to be from the geographic locations affected by this law.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the platform in general, but it’s not exactly the decentralized game changing platform it sells itself as.
Mastodon, on the other hand, acted like a decentralized platform. When asked to implement things like age verification, the question became, “who do you complain to?” When this tech was being demanded to be implemented, the question is, “in what way?”
Mastodon ended up being quite the brick wall when it came to laws demanding more surveillance among other things. Sure, in theory, you can go after owners of instances, but all users have to do is simply hop from one instance to another and carry on with business as usual. Heck, some users have already started up their own personal instance so they don’t have to worry about an owner getting in trouble in some way or another.
This is how decentralization should be working. I saw it with eDonkey2000 back in the day when the RIAA and MPAA went after the servers. They shut down multiple servers, pretending it made a dent in the network. All that happened was other servers popping up and users just hopping to those other servers to continue sharing. It didn’t make a dent in the network at the time thanks to its nature of being decentralized. Mastodon, so far, has been doing the exact same thing, but for general social media instead of file-sharing.
Re: Re:
BSky has a lot of problems, but I think in this particular one, you’re misunderstanding how it works a bit. The way BSky works is, Bsky itself is centralized, but the underlying protocol is what is decentralized. So people can make spin-off servers (or appviews, or relays), that don’t use Bsky, but do use the protocol.
Right now, it still seems pretty centralized because 99.9% of people just use BSky. But others can set up their own servers. There’s only a few out there right now though, like BlackSky (see also Northsky, Whitewind, etc. There are also people hosting their own PDS’s, and even a few people bridging between Mastodon and Bluesky), because most people don’t want to. It’s similar to mastodon, but if most people were still sitting on the mastodon.social default. The underlying tech to decentralize is there though.
This is how it was always supposed to work. Bluesky is supposed to be the proof of concept, so if a normie just wants to hop on to something Twitter-like it’s the default, but they wanted more people to spring up their own servers and services. It just takes time (and to be fair, not all the features have/had been fully implemented). If anything, leadership seems a bit frustrated people aren’t building out third party services more. The problem is a lot of bluesky users just wanted nu-Twitter.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen more progress on projects like Leaflet. It uses the same ATProto decentralized backbone for blogs.
Re: Re: Re:
I wish I’d been able to get on with Mastodon but it was always a bit too complex for easy adoption and the purity culture (both tech and social) was aggressive and exhausting.
I still miss MySpace…
Re: Re: Re:2
It’s not that complex. Just think of it as a network of independent sites that federate (share data) with each other. Like email or Jabber.
As for purity culture (assuming I understand what you mean by that), I just ignore that, maybe take a jab or two at people who participate in it if it crosses my feed, and talk to reasonable people.
I suggest these instances if you don’t like the mainstream culture on the fediverse: noc.social (where I am), qoto.org (for science and academia), linuxrocks.online (don’t use but also looks pretty good), blob.cat and absturztau.be.
Good luck! The block, mute, and mute instance/domain buttons are your friends. The last one mutes an entire one of those websites, which is occasionally necessary.
Re: Re: Re:3
I don’t get the impression that people, in general, ever figured out Jabber, and I’m sure people don’t really understand e-mail. Ask anyone about setting it up for yourself, and probably a few people will simply tell you “Don’t.” How does one reliably deliver mail to Gmail, except via a giant provider?: Who the hell knows.
Spam filtering and moderation are, themselves, both very complex. They’ll be needed in a large federated system, and I’m optimistic, but it hasn’t really been figured out. Evidence suggests that people want a central authority to decide who gets to say what, because when they see something they don’t like, they go running to such authorities and pressuring them publically.
Never mind how hard it is to get people to care, and to use anything other than the big platforms where all their (other) friends are. If the federated culture seems agressive or “pure”, it’s probably because it’s dominated by an internet-savvy group who care deeply about it. That group is not watered down as they would be on Facebook and Twitter.
Re: Re: Re:3
To be clear I have tried it, can’t remember what instance, but I doubt I’ll be going back.
There was nothing compelling to tempt any of my existing friends or contacts over from other services, there were still technical challenges if you only used a phone to access it and there was definitely a sense that if you weren’t tech-savvy enough to figure these out then you shouldn’t really be there anyway.
It’s also the only online place I’ve ever had a death threat for not being left-wing enough.
So in general, not a winning combo for me.
Re: Re: Re:2
And also the internal instance admin politics (most notably via how a number of instances simply won’t federate with Threads because Facebook).
Re: Re: Re:
Exactly.
I think way too many people (especially those used to Mastodon) keep mistakenly comparing Mastodon to Bluesky based on the way Mastodon works. Bluesky / ATproto is an entirely different paradigm.
See Paul’s latest for more details: https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing
Re: Re: Re:
I think the question we need to be asking is where exactly would the age verification barrier be applied.
If it’s at the AppView/frontend component then, well, there are alternatives to that such as https://deer.social/
If it’s at the PDS level, then that is also self-hostable.
The only difficulty I can see would be if it were applied at the relay level. Relays are IIRC the hardest component to host. But fortunately I can’t see how a relay would enforce age verification.
Disclaimer: I am not familiar with ATProto so I am probably getting many things drastically wrong. Please correct me if so.
Re: Re:
This is just wrong. I’m sorry. I like Mastodon. I like ActivityPub, but I can’t accept lying about it all. Age verification laws are very bad (I’ve talked about why for ages), but they mostly DO absolutely apply to every Mastodon instance. That nearly all (or maybe all!) are ignoring the law won’t help them in court down the road should anyone decide to go after them.
Complain about Bluesky all you want, but using age verification for your argument makes no sense. Bluesky is abiding by laws. Most Mastodon instances are breaking the law and hoping no one decides to go after them.
If that works the ONLY reason it will work is because the particular Mastodon instance is too unimportant to matter. I don’t see that as a benefit.
But if you want to set up an ATproto system that ALSO violates the law, you can do that. And some are doing that, though I’m not going to snitch on who.
Re: Re: Re:
Just to reiterate, I don’t hate Bluesky by any means. I think it’s a great place and a welcome change from what Twitter has devolved to today. I’m still in the market to easily share content on that platform as well, so I’m open to using it more in the future. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression of my position on the platform.
I think we both agree that age verification is a terrible law. We both know the consequences of implementing such a law.
I think where our opinions diverge is the response from the community to a law like this. The law demands that everyone puts users information at risk. Whether that is through people breaking into a system to swipe the data, people intercepting that information in transit, or a host of other ways that this law endangers people, the risks are unacceptable. As such, refusing to comply with such laws is a reasonable response.
The reason for this is that compliance sends a signal to lawmakers that the current set of laws is reasonable and justified. It also gives them blanket permission to expand the laws to be even more unreasonable. We’ve seen this when age verification laws went from just blocking porn sites from youth to age verification to block people from social media in general to what we are seeing now: age verification at the device level. They are not going to stop until there is sufficient resistance.
I’m not sure how you think I was lying. Mastodon is not complying with age verification laws last I checked. Can law enforcement theoretically go after Mastodon instances? Sure, but that is limited to wherever the law takes affect. If law enforcement starts making demands for a US based instance, then the owner can simply notify their users that they are going to be shutting down. Those users can simply hop to another instance located elsewhere. Yeah, that instance is cooked, but then other instances simply take the place of what was loss. Decentralization at work.
The same thing happened with file-sharing applications years ago. US based ones largely, one by one, began shutting down in the US. That resulted in applications being built outside of the US – a number of which were also open source. Law enforcement did take place many times over, but the networks survived that. The only threat those networks faced was people using those networks less and less as marketplaces finally evolved to accept the digital age (and even then, as streaming platforms abuse their customers, more people are returning to those file-sharing networks).
If a central authority is making a decision for the whole platform, that’s an indication that the platform isn’t exactly decentralized. Unless there are numerous popular instances on Bluesky where this decision only affected a small portion of the users, then I think you would have a point, but that’s exactly how things are functioning at the moment. Maybe over time the platform will act more like Mastodon where users are picking and choosing which instance to be on, but at the moment, it’s mostly one instance that dictates how the majority of the network operates. Bluesky has a long way to go to achieving that whereas Mastodon is already there.
Like I said, geography may disagree with that notion.
I bring up age verification because it exposed both Bluesky’s current weakness and Mastodons current strength.
I think Bluesky is great. I hope it continues to see success. I think multiple ideas in the social media marketplace to improve what has been broken for a while (ala Facebook, X/Twitter) is a great thing.
Re: Re: Re:2
If you are small and inconsequential and believe no one will ever enforce the law against you, then sure. If you are not, or strive to actually matter, then you can’t just ignore laws.
I think you are reading way too much into this. If you don’t want to be shut down you have to deal with laws that apply to you. You can fight certain laws but smaller operations with limited resources have to be picky where and how they do that.
My complaint was with the false claim that that Mastodon was somehow not subject to the law since “who do you complain to?” The answer is obvious: you enforce the law against instance owners. Mastodon GMBH runs the two largest instances and they are taking a massive risk in ignoring the law, one which I think comes back to haunt them.
You think Mastodon GMBH is going to shutdown Mastodon.social? Lol. No. If a government started to threaten them (and note that France is about to pass an age verification law, and Germany may do so soon as well), Mastodon GMBH is going to comply. They’re not going to shut down the two largest instances.
Without all their past content. Not great.
But either way, the original claim is just wrong: that age verification somehow can’t be enforced against Mastodon. It absolutely can be. They’re just betting on the fact they are too inconsequential to matter.
Bluesky wants ATproto to matter. And, again, there are other implementations of ATproto that are also not complying with these laws, and you are free to use them at your own risk.
Which is not happening with ATproto. This is also what you’re wrong about. You are falsely suggesting that Bluesky makes up the entirety of the Atmosphere and that’s wrong. It is a large part of it, but there is more and more activity unrelated to Bluesky. Bluesky was always the basic reference app.
And now that more and more developers are seeing the benefits of ATproto, we’re seeing way more development that has nothing to do with Bluesky.
This is a weird issue that seems to only come up from people who only listen to folks on Mastodon who lie about Bluesky. There are non-Bluesky ATproto systems out there. Many of them don’t look like microblogging because that’s not all ATproto can do.
Re: Re: Re:3
What do you mean by “actually matter”?
A social medium doesn’t have to be big and “important” to be fun, interesting, and/or useful.
Re: Re: Re:4
No, it doesn’t. Small communities are great. And if the goal of Mastodon is to stay small and enclosed, then fine. Let it do that and hope that no one notices it’s breaking the law.
But that’s not going to have much of an impact on the world. The goal of Bluesky with ATproto is to have a fundamental global infrastructure for open social systems. And, as such, it’s largest demo, kinda needs to obey the law or it will get sued out of existence.
Other providers can choose to ignore the law if they want to. And see what happens.
Re: Re: Re:
Coming from Australia, BlueSky isn’t even covered by the teen social media ban (at least publicly) yet it’s complying in advance by locking DMs (and probably other things I haven’t noticed) behind age assurance.
Re:
The problem isn’t that Elon bought Twitter.
The problem is every twitter user being shown all Elon’s tweets.
bluesky specifically stops this by allowing users to control their feeds.
I can explain it for you.
I can’t understand it for you.
I’m not.
I am not convinced enough americans have truly suffered yet to stop being absolute idiots who will vote in another trump or trump lite.
I’ve yet to see evidence that those who supported trump regret any of the death, murder, torture, or other harm they wrought on others, only that they wish things he did didn’t harm them too.
👍
Happy new year to you!
I like the concept of using past failures as a learning tool for the future. Frankly, I wished more people did that. Sadly, I see government looking at past failures and, at increasing frequency, simply doubling down on those failures instead of learning from said mistakes.
Right now, I’m actually seeing that with age verification laws. Australia implemented those laws, those laws wound up speedrunning their way to failure in less than a month, and other governments are looking at that failure (such as France and Ireland) and saying, “we gotta get me some of that failure!” and pushing through similar laws with no plans on changing anything.
As a result, I no longer find myself reporting on the research and warnings on the impending failures of these laws, but rather, reporting on history repeating itself as these kinds of laws fail multiple times over. This as I find myself increasingly exasperated at the idiocy of these politicians screaming, “damn the consequences, we’re doin’ it too!”
Happy new year Mike!
Personally I’m not convinced new alternatives can scale fast enough before they’re bought out or legislated into irrelevance.
But I’ve been wrong before, many, many times…
So many problems, But there are solutions.
And the Solution is?
From Prisons, we have solutions, we have had them for years. But for Some reason we dont use them. Including a Cheap phone system. FBI would love to monitor In/out phone calls.
As to Food Prices? There are a Bunch that NEED reinforcement and Adjusting. Like Separation of National and International Prices.
Get Rid of the PTFC’s DONT Bury them in the Fields. The old ways Work. Quit trying to Force the plants to Grow, when they cant. Still cant figure WHY they created a 30 pound Turkey.
Then we get to the Stock market. And the Gov. Scared of what would happen IF’ we could fix things.
Capitalism at its Worst. They Let it out of the box and removed the Chains. Taking Advantage of everything it can get its hands on, Taking advantage of our Gov. And so many things Could be fix.
A Correction in the System can be Fast and Hurt abit, OR you can be the 2 year old Child running Away from WHATS GOOD for him. And we have a dart gun to give a Injection/correction.
Re: 30 # Turkeys
Turns out, Toms have been up to 30+ since we first came across them
https://static.pbslearningmedia.org/media/media_files/4aac190a-9609-4ee5-adcd-a10c7f4bc875/7d5184fc-c2bc-4308-8b3a-38a937f30d33.pdf
Breaking with the Old Guard
I’ve found myself breaking with the Old Guard more and more often as they keep refusing to pay attention to the problems that they keep enabling. The ones that do see what the hell is going on are often either ill equipped to handle them or are outside of the country and are taking active measures of their own. I intend to head outside of the country in order to better fight against the monsters that the Old Guard enabled as home soil has burned me far too many times.
I hooe that the current American Empire burns to the ground this year, and we get Reonstruction 2.0 that aligns us with the many nations of Europe and more that treat fascist rhetoric as the cancer that it is. I know some people, like Stephen T Stone/Sage Freehaven, will crap themselves at the idea of the First Amendment being burned like it should have year and years ago. But if he and more don’t like it when it happens they’re free to move to another country.
Sadly, over here on Techdirt, we’re still going to have middle-aged 45-year-old free speech cultists like Stephen T Stone advocating for their “principles”, as well as cheerleaders like Leah Abram who should know better by now treating Mike Masnick the same way that MCU Peter Parker fawned over “Mr. Stark”.