 Thank you, yeah, so the title of my talk is surveying the commune cloud joining hands to de centrally processed decentralized data So starting off hi, my name is Noah. You can find me on Twitter at underscore ton of Pishton Tom Pishton is the namesake og for Noah So a quick kind of introduction or a preview of the structure of the talk So I'm hoping to make it quick so that we can spend some more time discussing and this is kind of like a great size of A group of people to kind of talk about the ideas here. So part one of the talk is Maybe this thing called the cloud What's its problem? And then finally what is a commune cloud? So just getting into it part one So maybe a tentative definition a good tentative definition would be something like the cloud is just the network of computers And those computers are run in warehouse sized buildings that we call data centers We also probably can't get into them. So here's a picture of one such data center This is Google's data center in the Dallas. I think that's how you pronounce it a little bit down the road from here So there are the warehouses some cooling systems. I think that's an electrical distribution system But I really don't have any idea And your data is somewhere near there, you know, probably not He's probably not there So what does it look like inside it looks like this? Well, and what's that? That's a network of computers And here's a picture of them from above. This is a different data center. This is one in Iowa What's inside the computers computer resources? What are those? so I think a nice kind of non-technical definition is that computer resources are the means of digital production They're the raw materials that programs require to run and Google Defines compute resources to be any physical or virtual component of limited availability within a computer system So every device is a resource every internal system component is a resource Kind of the short of it is that the sorts of things that computers are made up of some examples are things like CPUs GPUs non-durable and durable memory Knicks pages sockets Okay, and so maybe we can kind of like find the definition of a cloud and the cloud is just a network of compute resources So here's a quick question. Who might have a computer? Here's an answer these people They look so interesting. Who are they? Those are Millennials Here's another quick question who else might have a computer possibly also you 77% of Americans have a you're on a smartphone and a smartphone is a computer So if you ask, you know, what's inside of a phone? Here's an example. Here's the iPhone 4s exposed It's got some compute resources inside of there And you might wonder if they're everywhere and they are so your laptop compute resources desktop compute resources tablets compute resources Juicer compute resources, and I think that's them Not positive that that's them, but I think that's them Okay. Wow, right these things are everywhere. And yes, they're ubiquitous And this is kind of what they look like. This is a picture of their ubiquity. Okay, this is I think what Alan Kay called a Selfie the internet selfie. It's a picture of the internet All these different lines show connections between different connected devices And so remember when I said the cloud is just a network of compute resources. Well, it looks like the internet is that as well So maybe the internet is a cloud, right? substitution Okay, I don't I don't think the internet is a cloud Because I don't think a cloud is just a network of compute resources I think the cloud is maybe something better described as a network of compute resources that can be shared between the programs running on it Running on the resources running on the cloud. So sharing is kind of a pretty important aspect here So here's a picture of a cloud maybe and here's a picture of the resources being shared It's kind of like a static Sharing of resources. So you see that none of the individual resources none of the individual servers are kind of Sharing resources between different programs on them. They're kind of my sequel gets this set of resources Cassandra these men cash those And so you can also make things a little bit more dynamic a little bit more fine-grained where Each individual application each individual program can kind of be spread across kind of given different resources So if you've ever used something like AWS or GCE And actually have no idea how it works in GCE because I've never used it But at least in AWS, you know, you can Rent an instance and say I want you know one CPU when I want five gigabytes of RAM and you can run your program that way And so, you know, this thing seems so great with all the sharing And kind of it is it is kind of great It's a pretty incredible system and people are building really incredible systems on them But it's also kind of not great. And so what's its problem? This is a menacing cloud So this is a really great paper By Langdon winner was written in 1980. It's called do artifacts have politics and that's a really long quote and I won't read it all here, but Maybe the most important points are he distinguishes between the ways in which two ways in which an artifact can have politics. So there's kind of Intentional ways that an artifact can have politics can be designed with, you know, a certain Political purpose in mind. I don't know if anyone has heard of Robert Moses Robert Moses Back in the 20th century is largely responsible for the structure that New York City has and He designed designed these arches on the parkways that he would build to only be nine feet tall and the reason he did this is because he wanted people who were able to Purchase cars to be able to drive out to the beaches on Long Island, but he didn't want any buses to be able to go out there Yeah, and so is largely inspired by his, you know serious racial prejudice so that's one explicit way in which, you know An artifact or a technology can have politics, but there are other sorts of ways and Before going into that. I think I One of the thing he points out is that There's an impact that an artifact has after it's kind of been enacted So after a society or a community chooses to adopt a certain technology the implications are kind of long-lasting afterwards and so there's a Section here where he says, you know in that sense technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political Founds that establish a framework for public order that one ensue Over many generations Okay, and so he also says here the issues that divide or unite people in society are settled Not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper But also and less obviously in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete wires and transistors nuts and bolts And we could also say today my computer resources. So less obviously. I think maybe obviously Yeah, and so The other thing I want to kind of draw attention to is when he talks about technologies as ways of building order You can also maybe translate that as Technologies or ways of distributing power And so what are like maybe the cloud politics? What's cloud power? I think it's pretty clearly the politics of centralization So your data is centralized and I can't see the notes from Google slides here, but One of the questions I wanted to ask is You know, there's maybe like a normative or philosophical sense in which we think the data is ours like it's our property maybe in some way But I think there's a much more important question to ask which is is it really ours? If in practice, we don't have control over it. We don't know where it is. We don't know who's using it. We don't know What they're using it for It can it really be called yours and especially can it really be called yours if it's being used to maybe like change your behavior So there's a talk given a few weeks ago by this guy Thomas Hendrick Ilvis I think that's I say his name is the ex-president of Estonia. He gave a talk at Stanford called Liberal democracy in the digital age and any he kind of surveys the election the events leading up to the election Discussing things like the hacking that took place The spreading of people's emails talk about the talks about the impact that it has mentions The fact that there are some bold voter election rolls that were hacked You know, it's just the data of who lives where and Talks about what that is But one of the things he brings up is this company Cambridge Analytica and Cambridge Analytica attempts to use data to target Electoral advertisements at potential voters to try and build you know, like I think he describes it as by kind of Scraping people's Facebook likes they build kind of like a personality profile of them and then target Electoral advertisements at them using that information Oh another important thing is that it's largely funded by this guy Robert Mercer who is a huge Trump supporter There's really good New Yorker article That and so I mean, you know, you could ask yourself the question of whether something like this is humane You know whether it's reflective of the kind of society that we think is healthy in the kind of society that we want to live in And I think even if you do think it's humane, maybe you think that for example, this is the right of like, you know, the free Free market. I'm not necessarily trying to take issue with something like that But maybe you think it's it's humane because this is what people using their freedom to create do with it But I think it's still reasonable to be able to ask whether there are alternatives Okay, so maybe there are alternatives Maybe if the problem is centralization, maybe if it's a structural problem Then maybe the way and the place to look is something like de-centralization So that kind of brings me to the question of what is a commune cloud? Okay, so I think it's this Which is what I used to define a cloud before and you know, don't we already have that? This is what it looks like today, and this is what I think or maybe hope or It looks like maybe tomorrow So maybe instead of commune where it sounds like an odd smaller like an odd like commute Four theses about it So it's not a programming language or a programming language runtime. I Think whatever a commune cloud ends up being it should be able to share fine-grained compute resources on consumer devices Should be able to identify consumer devices with their owners You should allow owners to arbitrarily federate and de-frat federate devices Like you should be able to share your resources with others. You know collect your resources together Maybe be able to you know build Clouds that are the size of your home. Maybe the size of your neighborhood You know start to extend them out to you know different sections of your city Basically like cloud free association. It's not a cloud composition You might think this is kind of foolish because there are maybe massive security concerns things like botnets, right? I mean the idea here is that you should be able to do anything that you can already do in the cloud Just do it on consumer devices, and maybe that's a little naive Maybe there are certain things that you can't do on consumer devices that you can do up in a place like AWS in EC2 And I want to come back to the topic of botnets a little later But I think that's that's an important concern. The one thing I will say is that If you use a browser then you run arbitrary computation like All day long, you know as long as you're browsing you didn't write that HTML You don't know who wrote that HTML You also didn't write the JavaScript, and you don't know who wrote the JavaScript And the reason why this is safe is because Chrome has pre-sophisticated sandboxing Mechanism, and there are a bunch of different ways to sandbox processes It's not just the way that Chrome does it and so I think that there's a lot of promise and maybe engaging those alternatives To see what could be done kind of in general in the general case for running Computers that's what I think it's kind of dumb because we already have something like this We don't really need it and it's definitely vaporware and definitely does not exist And I don't have a demo But I do want to point out some things that I think are like or have some properties that are kind of nice or desirable and Whatever might become something like a community cloud and so one of them are botnets you know, so There's a spotnet that I think is still around today. I think it's only about 85,000 hosts today, but circa 2007 Had between 1 to 50 million hosts at its height You know I had enough collective bandwidth to knock small countries off the internet. This is a quote from a Anti-spam researcher at message labs in 2007 But if you added up all of the 500 top supercomputers of 2007 it blew them away with only, you know, what is that 125th of its machines And this is actually another major issue. I think with the kinds of systems that we have set up so Because it's so access to get or because it's relatively easy to get access to resources from malicious Purposes means that if you say run your own email server, right and you become the target of an attack like this Like what are your options? Your only options are really to kind of flee into the domain of say a Google Because they have the resources they have the infrastructure to be able to mitigate those kinds of attacks And I saw an article Just this past week that Google will now Offer a legal protection to startups and exchange your startups who are being kind of trolled by patent trolls in exchange for equity So it's kind of a weird world that I think application development and maybe kind of development in general is leading into where These platforms are almost becoming, you know, something that we're dependent on to provide certain kinds of foundational services And I think it's only going to increase kind of this Centralization maybe the cage or the cages around us maybe something like a new fiefdom, you know Where you're share cropping it out on you know a bunch of Google hosts So there's also all of these at-home projects that you might be familiar with things like SETI at home Composed these are with volunteer computing projects Executes a bunch of different signal processing jobs Not too impressive, but this one is pretty impressive folding at home It's composed of a bunch of volunteer nodes as well using heterogeneous resources like both GPUs and CPUs and I think currently it is the world's second fastest Computer You know, it's been super beneficial to the scientific community, you know Allowing researchers to run these computationally costly atomic level simulations And it's produced 129 scientific research papers. I don't know how relevant that is I came from the humanities where the average readership for the paper was about like 15 people So I don't know if 129 scientific research papers is a you know, just 129 times 15 people reading them But it seems pretty important And then there's also all these other decentralized Applications and things are kind of starting to get a little exciting today. So these are kind of Some examples of them So that which I think this fellow here and maybe those two people back there are involved in building is a package manager Called a package manager for data under the covers, there's a couple different node modules hyper hyper archive right and then hyper core And people are building really interesting things on top of them like this one right beneath that is Hypervision and that's kind of P2P Livestreaming or decentralized live streaming decentralized twitch. I've got things like IPFS and IPFS is a little sneaky actually so IPFS released I guess the first full release of this library called lid P2P Which is kind of the underlying peer-to-peer networking infrastructure And there's like a really small section where they talk about resource discovery and they mentioned things like CPUs They mentioned things like memory that you should be able to discover these resources on the IPFS network. So maybe IPFS is kind of you know Going to be building something like what I'm talking about. I don't know. I know that Ethereum which is Kind of menacing Diamond There's something like a runtime for that so you can kind of run programs execute programs on the Ethereum blockchain Bitcoin, obviously everybody knows Bitcoin this wheat Multicolored wheat here. This is democracy earth. They're building something called sovereign which is I think an attempt at decentralized democracy. It's democracy on a blockchain. That's a really interesting Like project. I think it's a really important project the democracy the form of democracy that they advocate for is something called Delegative democracy. I don't know if anybody here has ever heard of Delegative democracy But basically what it is is every individual on every issue is given a vote And you can either choose to delegate your vote to someone else or vote on an issue directly So it's kind of a hybrid form of direct and representative representational democracy And the people behind it actually started a party in Buenos Aires Argentina and campaigned on the idea that you know you kind of put them in power and then they'll build kind of deploy this application and give it Everyone all their constituents access to it and then all their constituents can kind of it's almost a way of kind of hacking You know representational democracy and kind of layering over top of it this Delegative or fluid democracy on top of it. There's patch pay. This is like Decentralized Twitter Facebook, you know for hippies, maybe not exclusively for hippies There's a lot of hippies on there for people who seem like hippies. That's not men as a judgment. That's men as like High esteem and then the last one here is orbit this circle Series of circles and that's something like decentralized slack and there's many many more I mean, it's really exciting and the thing I kind of just want to point out about them is for the most part And I could be wrong is that this kind of resource sharing is already going on. Okay, so it's just implicit It's it's kind of hidden behind the application semantics and I think that it's Really important to kind of pull that resource sharing resource allocation resource delegation out from behind, you know, it's kind of Or make it explicit at least reach it up to the first level. So this is in any stuff. That's original Read a whole lot of other things about it. This is Alexandra's Mariano's Marinos is the founder of resin. I don't know if anyone's familiar with resin This is browser cloud This is one of the lead developers on IPFS. This was I think their master's thesis Q machine is a really interesting project that I haven't seen a lot of talk about the Q machine is Kind of like a super computer on top of web browsers as well Yeah, that's it so five minutes, but maybe we can