The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly

There is one final step in the inexorable march toward decentralized access. At the same time we are moving to an intercloud we will also move toward one that is fully decentralized and peer to peer. While the enormous clouds of Amazon, Facebook, and Google are distributed, they are not decentralized. The machines are run by enormous companies, not by a funky network of computers run by your funky peers. But there are ways to make clouds that run on decentralized hardware. We know a decentralized cloud can work, because one did during the student protests in Hong Kong in 2014. To escape the obsessive surveillance the Chinese government pours on its citizens’ communications, the Hong Kong students devised a way to communicate without sending their messages to a central cell phone tower or through the company servers of Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) or WeChat (their Facebook) or email. Instead they loaded a tiny app onto their phones called FireChat. Two FireChat-enabled phones could speak to each other directly, via wifi radio, without jumping up to a cell tower. More important, either of the two phones could forward a message to a third FireChat-enabled phone. Keep adding FireChat’d phones and you soon have a full network of phones without towers. Messages that are not meant for one phone are relayed to another phone until they reach their intended recipient. This intensely peer-to-peer variety of network (called a mesh) is not efficient, but it works. That cumbersome forwar...