It's a bit sad that a "daytime hacker, night time musician" from Sweden sees "internet anarchists" as something of a slur. I guess punk really is dead.
Besides, it's not about being excited as much as trying to find silver linings in a rapidly deteriorating environment.
Maybe your last sentence was more about some form of nostalgia for a long-lost decentralized Internet than excitedness?
I can certainly sympathize, but I think the best path forward for any anarchist would be to fight the attestation initiatives fiercely, rather than to resign and say “maybe we could have a good web again if we start over fresh”.
That aside, I’m not sure what you are saying with that comment about myself. I don’t think it serves the discussion.
I didn't define myself as an anarchist, you labelled me as such and drew some unflattering connotations to the term. Generally speaking, I don't deal in false dichotomies anyway. I was just saying that this could be the long-predicted inflection point.
Absolutely. Smarter people than me have predicted it at various points over the last 30 years, and it has yet come to fully pass. We are seeing pieces coming slowly together, though.
> More likely is a bifurcation of the internet between West and BRICS
You are using BRICS very liberally here - I don't think Brazil is particularly internet-hostile, and South Africans have more important issues to think about.
Is there a movement towards a more balcanized network? Absolutely - most European countries now have individual DNS blacklists (the UK one is basically at full discretion of an opaque paralegal entity that answers to no-one); Turkey, Iran, and every other Middle-Eastern or South-Asian country (including Israel, India, Pakistan) can and do shut down their networks whenever they see fit; China have had their Great Firewall since Day 1; and Russia, well, they do what Putin likes to do on any given day.
None of that is particularly new though, it's just the usual autocratic crap. Corpweb will be much more cyberpunk.
Besides, it's not about being excited as much as trying to find silver linings in a rapidly deteriorating environment.