What’s funny is that for enormous big systems with network effects we are trying to use mechanisms intended for smaller businesses, like a hot dog kiosk.

IRL we have a thing for those, it’s called democracy.

In the Internet it’s either anarchy or monarchy, sometimes bureaucratic dictatorship, but in that area even Soviet-style collegial rule is something not yet present.

I’m recently read that McPherson article about Unix and racism, and how our whole perception of correct computing (modularity, encapsulation, object-orientation, all the KISS philosophy even) is based on that time’s changes in the society and reaction to those. I mean, real world is continuous and you can quantize it into discrete elements in many ways. Some unfit for your task. All unfit for some task.

So - first, I like the Usenet model.

Second, cryptography is good.

Third, cryptographic ownership of a limited resource is … fine, blockchains are maybe not so stupid. But not really necessary, because one can choose between a few versions of the same article retrieved, based on web of trust or whatever else. No need to have only one right version.

Fourth, we already have a way to turn sequence of interdependent actions into state information, it’s called a filesystem.

Fifth, Unix with its hierarchies is really not the only thing in existence, there’s BTRON, and even BeOS had a tagged filesystem.

Sixth, interop and transparency are possible with cryptography.

Seventh, all these also apply to a hypothetical service over global network.

Eighth, of course, is that the global network doesn’t have to be globally visible\addressable to operate globally for spreading data, so even the Internet itself is not as much needed as the actual connectivity over which those change messages will propagate where needed and synchronize.

Ninth, for Wikipedia you don’t need as much storage as for, say, Internet Archive.

And tenth - with all these one can make a Wikipedia-like decentralized system with democratic government, based on rather primitive principles, other than, of course, cryptography involved.

(Yes, Briar impressed me.)