Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and all the rest of the propaganda machine known as the “MSM”, (CNN, Wapo, NYT, etc.), have passed the event horizon and are in a death spiral, joining the political elites that locked them in their grip on the way down.
Remember Compuserve? That’s okay, nobody else does either, but they were the Big Thing in the 1980s … before the World Wide Web (WWW) flushed them into the sewer.
How will mediageddon happen?
It’s already happening. I remember when Google was cool … when only the cognoscenti knew about it and the riff-raff used Yahoo or AOL. Now, if you’re in the company of the Cool People, you don’t dare admit that you still use Google for search lest you be laughed at and shunned into a dark corner of the room. DuckDuckGo is the ascendant player at the moment, but they too are only a passing phenomenon because they suffer from the same underlying weakness: concentrated servers.
You have to have servers to store and deliver the content you look at and hear, but when servers belong to and are run by corporations larger than many governments, the corporations become targets for the instruments of violence and coercion known as “politicians.” This is how we got to where we are: with Facebook and Google acting as proxies for those who see themselves as the Ruling Class.
But servers don’t have to be concentrated. The function of servers can be distributed among millions of computers, and at that point there is nothing for the Ruling Class to attack. It will be like cops breaking into a house and shooting at holograms that laugh at them while they jump around to trap the cops into shooting each other.
Distributed encrypted servers are nothing new. Freenet (sometimes known as “The Dark Web”) has been around for a long time. But the interface is far from user-friendly and it’s a huge bandwidth hog, which is why it won’t be the Next Big Thing.
What will take over is an adaptation of Freenet that will incorporate the blockchain along with peer credentialing to establish trust levels that will at the same time limit the amount of data needed to be stored and retrieved on any participating computer.
Want to propagate some fake news like CNN does routinely now? Go ahead and try, but you’ll only get as far as the peer group who decided you were trustworthy. If you painstakingly built a web of trust by disseminating reliable news, hoping you’d then be able to turn your followers into gullible zombies similar to those who now watch TV news, you’d watch all your efforts go instantly down the drain when most of your peer group shut you out because your scam got revealed.
Maintaining ones peer group will be the most highly prized commodity, and organizations will go to insane lengths to assure that nothing allows that to happen.
The same technology will also solve the problem that vexes publishers today: how to monetize their efforts. Micropayments will be incorporated into the blockchain, allowing users to pay tiny amounts, perhaps fractions of a penny, for what they deem worthwhile.
Today might not yet be the day to get rich by shorting Google stock, but I’d keep an eye on it.
