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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 on the Catholic Intranet
While driving to the next client's house, I pull out my phone. 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. 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.
Back at the office I sit down at