Cold Constructs Blog

Regular visitors of Killusion might notice that I installed a little unobtrusive banner thingy that asks you to set up an account with IndieKarma so that you will donate a penny (one fucking cent) to me for every visit. It’s called micropayments, and it’s what should destroy advertising forever. As you probably don’t know, I really hate advertising.

Content can be discovered through word of mouth and various searching platforms. Our time is that of instant gratification, which fits perfectly with micropayments. Find what you want, download/pay, then indulge. With the internet, we don’t have to struggle with physical media–content is dynamic and can be infinitely duplicated. Therefore, the only “production” cost is for distribution, ie the service that serves your content and bandwidth. There are enough free tools that you can buy and maintain your own servers and distribute it with some p2p thing such as BitTorrent, trimming costs.

Anyway, I’m waiting for a true international mesh network to emerge. One that connects wirelessly (WiMax or equivalent) on a p2p scheme so you can communicate with anyone that uses the system without having to log onto anything at all. Just broadcast a mesh network signal and you can surf whatever is in the net cache of whoever you’re connected to. If that person is connected to someone else, you hop through B to C, and so on, until you have access to established backbones (which will hopefully be compatible) and servers. Some wicked routing algorithm will be needed… something genetic programming could probably solve.

With that type of internet, the distribution costs of content delivery will be negated, unless you use commercial software that handles content management. Combine that with our digital economy (surprise! we’re already there) and you have the beginnings of my kind of society. Now if we can just get public-accessable camera networks around our cities, and a v1.0 RepRap, and…