Flutterby™! :

I've been thinking recently about "Personal Clouds" and social media, and how we're going to get to that future. I attribute a good portion of the growth of the early internet (and, before, that, the early BBS scene) to the ability to have the sorts of conversations we couldn't have in real-life.

To some extent, that meant that technical conversation was no longer geographically limited; I could talk about the minutiae of polygon rasterization on X86 architectures with people who weren't whitewater guides in Chattanooga TN, but another large portion was about the conversations outside of the social mores of that time and place.

For instance, Usenet groups like alt.sex.bondage (and alt.sex) were a huge step forward in how a sub-group of people found each other and started having conversations that in modern times are pretty mainstream, but at the time were totally revolutionary and subversive.

I have been hanging out with some of the "Internet Identity" crowd, and the "Personal Clouds" folks, and was a "social media" pioneer back when "weblogs" were called "micro portals", and there's a lot of talking about how we're going to take the net back from the FaceTwitSpacePlus centralization forces, and privacy, and all of that. But now that porn and sex are mainstream, and we've lost the filtering mechanism of the technological hurdle to connect that made some of those early forums special, there's nothing driving a social change to some new mechanism that will provide some of those privacy protections that people are talking about.

And privacy for its own sake doesn't seem to be much of a social motivator unless there are taboos.

Unfortunately, for the dark net right now, many of the taboos are ones I really don't want to enable. The driving forces behind things like Freenet seem to be child porn, not privacy for everyday projects, and givenhow much our social mores have relaxed over the past couple of decades, privacy isn't enough of a motivator that the participants on Flutterby would welcome or use such a presence.

So I've been thinking that the next technological and media revolution may very well be the first one that's not driven by porn and taboos.

But then this morning, Gloria Brame has been playing "what classic art conflicts with Facebook's standards?", Rouseau's Leda and the Swan, Salon de Paris.

And a few days ago I snarked on Twitter that:

.@Johannes_Ernst I'm just going to switch to MongoDB. All the features of http://devnull-as-a-service.com/ at a much lower price.

and have been inundated with MongoDB (it's "web scale") references and advertisements since.

I'm wondering if, perhaps, that sort of prudery coupled with the injection of ridiculously badly targeted ads into our conversations can help move us back towards less mediated conversations, and in the process we can find the way to build technological solutions that made those conversations more private.