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If the Amish, or Benedictine monks, built an inter/intra-net, what would it look like?
The internet has a lot of problems. It is not just that there are some bad actors. Actually, the very shape of it incentivizes bad actors. It is malformed. We should not be surprised that it has devolved to the point it is today.
I don't think this technology is going away. It has too many benefits. But how can we radically re-form it? Let's look at a few aspects:
The World Wide Web is Flat
The web as we know it now is very flat. You immediately connect to the same server as everyone else. (I know it isn't exactly this simple, and that distributed computing systems are actually at play, but the FUNCTION is as if they were a monolith.)
This mirrors the big-boxification that we have seen in stores. It is not simply enough that there are multiple redundant systems. What we want is actually the capacity for individuals to have care and agency over how the internet is governed - and this requires that the net be segmented into pieces, communities, parishes. These pieces should probably mirror the geographical boundaries outside.
We want a hierarchical network.
A Day with the Catholic Intranet
This morning, I've got to haul a few loads of grain to our neighbor across the county. It's a 45 minute drive, so I pull out my phone before hitting the road, to get it connected to the cab radio. I open up Symfonium, which has downloaded music from the community server. It's by no means an exhaustive library. It has some classics - Bach, Beethoven, and other recordings (which were public domain). My neighbor Jim ripped a bunch of CDs and put the mp3 files on there - he's pretty into Dave Brubeck. But a large swath of what's on here is stuff that our community has recorded themselves. A few things are files that have migrated over from community to community, too. I notice that the Hutchinson kids' album of Gregorian chant that they recorded last month is on the server now (my neighbor Bill is one of the admins, he and a few other folks are the only ones that can add stuff to the library). I tap on it to stream it.
It's simply delightful. We don't have the same sort of novelty that people have with Spotify - but we have our own unique sort of novelty, and it's a novelty that I care all the more of, because it's my neighbor. We strike a balance between
I'm midway through the Dies Irae when it cuts out and my son butts in over (the localized equivalent of) Zello. He's looking for a pulley puller in the shop and they're not where he expected. I radio back over the Zello and tell him that I was using it on the work truck.
Back at the office I sit down at my computer to add a few receipts. I took pictures of the receipts and they auto-uploaded into the Immich instance on the server. I download the pictures from Immich and move them to my receipts folder (inside my documents). The whole documents folder syncs back up over Nextcloud. My wife (and secretary) gets the files quickly synced to her documents folder as well.
It's been a busy day.