TALK: Personal @-Names, Crinks, Hinks, Ninks, & Binks: Conceptual Leaps for Radically Decentralized Networking
Radical Networks 2019 Proposal
"Personal @-Names, Crinks, Hinks, Ninks, & Binks: Conceptual Leaps for Radically Decentralized Networking"
Format: [Talk]
Name: [Gordon Mohr]
Pronouns: [he/him]
Location: [San Francisco, CA]
Email: [gojomo-radnets@xavvy.com]
Twitter: [@gojomo]
Repo: [n/a]
Url(s): [https://xavvy.com/]
Consent to being photographed?: [Yes]
Consent to being on the livestream?: [Yes]
Speaker Bio and Profile Picture
[Gordon is a veteran developer of internet and peer-to-peer systems, the originator of the 'magnet' link, and was the founding technical lead for open-source work at the Internet Archive that's used by libraries worldwide to archive the web. Gordon serves as an advisor to the Internet Archive and Electric Coin Company (cradle of Zcash). He seeks to build technology that makes censorship, deception, & distraction costly, rather than profitable.]
[Gordon considers himself a part of communities dedicated to free speech, privacy, honest histories, charitable listening, scientific understanding, and social innovation.]
[http://xavvy.com/Gordon_Mohr.thumbnail.256x256.jpg]
Description
[Two "original sins" of the internet, and the dominant social networks and communication utilities based on it, are reliance on centrally-assigned names, and location-based identifiers. These create a vulnerability to centralization, lock-in, manipulation by authorities, and censorship. Content-based and identity-based networking are alternatives that are more robust, but less intuitive, requiring new concepts for wider understanding.
In this talk, I review and update an idea from the earliest days of social network thinking – "petnames", where every user may choose their own names for correspondents – for the modern era where users understand "@-names". And, I introduce a new taxonomy to contrast the best-practices of emerging decentralized content and social networks – cryptographic links aka "crinks" - against the more familiar but problematic location-based "links". We'll see glimpses of the benefits and potential interfaces of a future internet, where personal-@-names and crinks dominate.]
Length: [20 minute talk & 10 minute Q&A]
Workshop technical requirements and materials list (if applicable)
Equipment/technical requirements: [Wifi & projector]
Maximum number of attendees: [limited only by facility seating]
Full list of materials needed for attendees: [just attention]
Artwork installation requirements (if applicable)
[n/a]
Performance requirements (if applicable)
[n/a]
Additional Info / Links / References
[This talk would be an expanded version of a 5 minute lightning talk I gave at the 2018 Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco, "Bringing Petnames to the @-Names Era" (video) – with both more detail about the "Personal @-Names" concept, and an introduction to the terms "crinks", "hinks", "ninks", and "binks" and their value beyond traditional location-based "links".]