Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.
More formal layers. Similar amount of real ones.
Slaves also could own their own things, which were not owned by their own owner (oof). So they could buy their freedom. It’s complicated.
Free people could carry weapons, participate in politics.
Unless they use IP to prevent new producers from entering the market, there should be a response eventually.
HDDs are precision machinery, of course, but not lost alien technology only old big companies can make.
In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.
They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.
It’s not panic, it’s consequence of networking and a very specific culture having formed for CEOs and such.
A bit like Silicon Valley tech bros, they think they are the chosen ones leading the charge and able to make decisions for all of us, sort of aristocracy.
So in their circles it’s fashion now to play this “AI” thing.
And mechanisms to remove those fools from places they don’t belong to and make them clean streets have rotten.
Usable and decentralized - well, you’ll need some beyond-the-horizon planning for how the development of that will go on. Because 90s Web was kinda normal too, except there were future stages.
You need something that’s usable almost from the beginning, but that is also usable for everything you haven’t yet thought about. Something that allows any use, but doesn’t limit any, even needed only by a handful of people, task.
You need universal open infrastructure. Something allowing to pool public service trackers, storage services, relay services, notification services, key services, search services, but tying them into specific applications on the client. Different applications, over the common high-level medium (of authors and messages and groups, for example ; perhaps subscriptions). And you need that to be untrusted and backed up by DHT and sneakernet as perfectly functional alternative ways for the same system. You need them all.
And you need means of development with higher common, basic level. You need something like Hypercard on the clients, so that development in this “alternative Web” were accessible in its full power. With “cards” shared like messages. That’d be similar to how we fetch different websites.
Messages and people and groups would have global identifiers, tied to cryptography. One could have sort of “permission rule” messages to be interpreted by clients to decide, during “replaying” a group with its messages, which action was valid and which wasn’t, and what can this specific user do to the group at this specific moment.
There could be different types of messages, perhaps with references to “interpreter” messages containing scripts.
OK. That’s just a pet dream of mine, but I don’t yet have a full picture in my mind.