2.9 KiB
New Conditions
We have silently crossed Rubicon. The Internet entered in our life and now it has become an integral and essential part of our lives. It multiplied our powers and also it multiplied dangers we are put under.
Here I'd like to consider two issues that looks important to me, interlinked and could be reached by the single movement.
Scientific Frontiers and Automation of the Science
For centuries the primary form of scholarly communication has been publishing researches in peer-reviewed journals and books. Thus, every further move in the science naturally stood and stand on the shoulders of predecessors. Our intrinsic endeavor to explore and to learn and to share learnt were born much earlier then we had ever recognized ourselves as human. The fact that we must admit is that knowledge discovery has had never shared anything with market laws but just collaborated with them for its own prosperity.
It is the main reason why recent decades in academic publishing have passed under the shadow of ongoing controversies. The advent of the Internet was a game changing event that opened the way to reduce paper costs down to zero and relief financial pressure on the science. Nevertheless, practicies of the past times still keeping us in chains of outdated copyright laws and of publishers monopoly. While humankind is already armed with state-of-the-are technologies to process enormous amounts of textual data we are still not applying this power due to presence of these burden chains.
Currently we have a unique historical chance to align scientific movement with its natural order. Organizing the continuous flow of knowledge available for everybody and in the name of our prosperity is the first-class goal that should be solved in short terms.
Technological Leviathan
Starting from 2010s there are rising tensions on the digital frontiers. The Internet that has been created to unite people across the world now is dissipating into divided islands. Rules of these dissected pieces are dictated by those who is hunger to manage and control for the sake of their own stability but often not for the sake of who are hunger to learn and move humankind forward.
Here just a few attacks on freedom to mention:
- Great Firewall of China that is banning the entire country out of presence in the world
- US Corporations that taking responsibility of judging what is good and evil using full power of their technologies and de-facto applying laws of USA extraterritorially
- Russia that is moving rapidly on the Chinese path in her attempts to border Internet traffic. The ultimate goal is spreading lies and propaganda inside and to outside to keep people ignorant.
What is more important is that these actions are disrupting natural flows of knowledge exchange.
Wide adoption of new decentralized technologies like IPFS, libp2p, distributed routing schemas (as cjdns/yggdrasil) is essential for science flourishing in the world ruled and crowded by ignorant persons.