Call it a hunch but: AI and robotics will only make everyone fabulously wealthy *if* it's all built on open models and open, accessible infrastructure.

What if all data was self-encrypting? And what if we did it with LEGO? Join me as I smash some things up in the name of cryptography, and a better kind of cloud. youtu.be/rwinVk5QD8k

It’s about time we all acknowledged the real architect of surveillance capitalism. Santa. 🎅🏻

Where is the Bluesky of Instagram? Anyone doing that? If not… shall we do it together? Who's in?

Indeed! In fact, a did a follow-on that describes just that, and why it's bad news — and the benefits of the alternative!

Ok, so I had a go at this! What is a protocol?

I actually raised this with David Anderson when he was advising the UK government on the "Anti-Terror" legislation which now requires ISPs to retain all user internet history for years… on just how big an attack surface this creates. He had made the same point to ministers, and it fell on deaf ears

It never ceases to baffle me that the national security implications of the surveillance economy never seem to spur lawmakers into action. And the industrial espionage risk is just as bad. Bad for security and for business, you'd think conservatives wouldn't shut up about it.

Ok, so who's building the Bsky equivalent of Instagram? Somewhere that can be owned by photographers and artists, and not advertisers?

I realise this isn't a binary choice, it's an "all of the things" situation… But we must also be building collectively owned, resilient infra from the grass routes, up. We have the raw materials… encrypted, p2p, distributed systems + the ingenuity. And now, as Bsky shows is, the impetus too.

We just let the web become an oligarchy. We just watched as drifted away on a tide of ads, trackers, bait and switch. Oh how we need the vision back now. Of small places, and web gardens, and home grown. A place to be proud of. A place to call our own.

Forget the side hustle. Invest in family.

Very nearly ran over Joe Dart on Byres Road. Apologies Joe!

I absolutely see this in my research on censorship. Any tool that can be used to censor *will* be used to censor, if not right away then years later, & it will be used to censor things 90% more broadly & beyond the intended scope. We see this from the Inquisition to Australia to USSR to USA. Always.

Bluesky: for people who don’t want innovative ways of socializing online they just want Twitter circa 2007