This takes a while to digest. I've been hanging out on SSB (aka scuttlebutt) for a while now and I do enjoy the community. So this hits very close to home, and I guess it's good that it does.

The author, one the one hand, writes this in the concluding paragraph:

Without cohesive organisation, mobilisation to harden security and privacy and without a sincere commitment from protocol designers to revise their collective assumptions, the push back from incumbent power will leverage each and every socio-technical flaw in each and every network.

But on the other hand they write:

The moment demands not another protocol, not another manifesto, not another social network, but a savvy understanding of the political dynamics of protocols and the nakedness of today’s networks.

I guess that's a call for doing some serious stock-taking before writing the next (iteration of an existing) protocol? I'm fairly confident that the "solution" to this, if it is to be found, will have some technological component to it. But Cade Diehm is right in pointing out that that will not suffice, not by a long shot.

If we expect every (human-made) protocol to have flaws and vectors for "incumbent retaliation" like the bittorrent copyright suits of the 00s, then one way to side-step this would be to reduce the harm such tactics can do. Not saying that's easy, but establishing the social norm that copyright records won't get you into trouble when trying to find a job, that would be cool. There's a whole cultural aspect to this that has largely been confined to some niche cyberpunk (and even more niche, and frankly artistically lacking) solarpunk subcultures.

So where do we go from here? Do we "simply" design protocols and networks around them that don't allow siphoning off the entire traffic? Do we establish spaces (physical, mostly) where being "burned" by a copyright lawsuit won't matter, going full walkaway (look it up if you don't get the reference) or what should happen?