The sad state of personal data and infrastructure | beepb00p

1. On the internet, we are always living in the past.

The mechanics of this permanent state of retrofuturism are simple: if you have access to detailed data about the behaviour of people, editorial control over what information people receive (as social or search recommendation engines), and the means to nudge people using designed affordances then ... See more

Thirty years into mass adoption of the Internet, our data architectures are still based on the concept of the stand-alone computer, where data is centrally stored and managed on a server, and sent or retrieved by a client. Every time we interact over the Internet, copies of our data get sent to the server of a service provider, and every time that ... See more

Each app builds a moat and walls to protect the hoard of data its peasants produce. This is both for reasons of protection, and power. How did this condition emerge?Before the advent of the internet, apps ran on your computer and saved data to your computer. The internet flipped this around. Web software ran remotely on server computers, and saved ... See more

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we disco... See more