Exactly.
Two excerpts from the paper I wrote on the topic:
""
One aspect of this ideology is centralization. Centralization of
traffic, directories, data bases, personal information, you name it.
That center is somewhere where you are not. People interfacing machines
built under this ideology are called ’users’. This is telling, as those,
for example, driving machines or being driven in machines are called
differently - drivers, pilots or passengers. The prospect of having
millions obey machine instructions designed by few is very seductive. In
the previous times only select novelists, directors, songwriters and
dictators enjoyed this replicative amplification of consequences, mostly
for entertainment, enlightenment and indoctrination of the audience.
Today the code determines conversations, money flows, employment,
entertainment, and the rest of the life.
Perhaps the most sinister aspect is that it captures the energy of
activism, which adopts the ideological canons and builds the same
dystopian constructs, on the premise that they are now operated by the
good guys, as if an Open Source cage is anything but a cage. The
underlying fallacy, that the power will be used only for good purposes,
becomes obvious always too late, when the energy and trust have been
exhausted. Thus the useful idiots complete the ecosystem and seal it
against the alternatives.
...
Almost every single ’app’ and ’web site’ is based on this paradigm.
There is a server and there are thousands/millions/billions ’clients’.
The underlying motivation is that the owner of the server has control
over multitudes of clients. The edge equipment owners themselves do not
need this centralization any more than San Francisco residents need to
pass Market/Van Ness every time they go to the grocery store, but they
have little choice. This is considered normal - from dreams of every
startup that few will make and operate something that billions will use,
to schools where engineers learn to make servers work and to make
clients work.
""
On 12/4/18, 16:04, Emery Hemingway wrote:
To quote Melvin Conway, "organizations which design systems ...
are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these organizations"[1]. For this
reason teams that develop security software are willing to
operate as isolated individuals under the rule of a dictator to
produce software that operates under total control of the user.
Conversly, Facebook built the worlds largest open office[2]
because its goal is to produce pervasive software without form
or boundary.
Producing progressive social software will take a body of designers
to define the structure and flow of interactions between users in
abstract terms. This body will need to restructure itself to reflect
successive design iterations. Implementation of course requires
engineers, but engineers need to organize themselves differently
from social designers for purely technical reasons. Unfortunetly
it is simply not practical to gather engineers, designers, and
users under the same organizational principles.
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