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One risk in Flancia is that the tools we use to reach it might turn out to also be sufficient to reach Antiflancia; by building or improving such tools we could be enabling futures that are opposed to pro-social good.

I try to think often of this risk, keep it in check. To manage it, among other things, it is that I try to keep Flancia friendly and maximally inclusive.

@flancian

Flancia must be strongly and actively strategic against capture by Antiflancians then no?

Perhaps counterantidisintermediation is of interest as an instructional parallel.

@neil I think it should be; the first line of protection is to make Flancia 1. fully optional, in the strong sense that people should be able to ignore it without ill effects -- hopefully this quality is symmetric w.r.t. Antiflancia -- and 2. made up of/supported by tools which are free and easily reproducible, so they can't be "captured", at worst only cloned/coopted.

@neil The Agora is meant to have both qualities, plus a seed of well-meaning intent (representing the community) which hopefully can't be coopted easily even if cloned by adversaries.

But I'm bad at adversarial thinking, I think both because of limited analytical skills and an optimistic bent. We need to think as a group :)

[[counter anti disintermediation]] is a new concept to me, thank you; exploring.

@agora http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation

@flancian I fully wish Flancian attitudes could prevail on positive intent alone. But what I found interesting in what I read of CAD was how bad actors were able to exploit good intentions. e.g. Github centralising the world's source code on the back of an entirely disintermediated tool. The argument being that a more strategic approach may have avoided that.

So there may be some food for thought in counter anti disintermediation for counter anti Flancianism. I will node it a bit more!

@neil very interesting indeed.

I think centralization is just one of a number of possible strategies with competitive advantages for entities working on a certain space. If I look around, I don't think corporations will be able to hold their grip on the internet. We have our own advantages.

@neil in particular, centralized entities tend to build with one pattern in mind: the walled garden, and I think those are local optima -- we can build bridges and siphons and run them for the good of the people and the internet.

@neil but I fully agree that learning from CAD is much in the menu.