I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals.
When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited.
In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rarely get wide adoption, such as CJDNS, Hyperboria, Mastadon, Lemmy, Fediverse, ActivityPub, various DHT based tools, and others.
Hypothesis 1: if the threshold for action were high enough in the US, people would adopt these higher tech offerings en masse.
Hypothesis 2: the low tech nature of El Paquete Semanal and similar networks is critical to their success.
If hypothesis 2 is correct, then building a similar network using "boring" technologies would be more impactful than working on high tech open source tools.
The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck.
The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net".
In the US, you can always get access to whatever you need for free, with a little work, by torrenting for example. Torrenting is much less work than El Paquete or the stuff you listed.Why would anyone pay for those offerings instead?
You make a lot of good points. There's also the issue of scale. The US has a lot of land mass, and a whole lot of people at the very opposite edges of that huge land mass. Sneakernets work better across shorter distances.
I think there's an issue in your thinking: you're only approaching this situation in terms of technology. This is in fact the reason why the "solution" in western countries is open source and decentralization: we think it's a technology problem, so the solution is technology. But, like most things, it is inherently a social problem.
Cuba has been under embargo for decades now, and its internet has been heavily censored since; they haven't known how ingrained FAANG are, how ubiquitous Android and iOS and twitter and all those things are. For us, Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter; if there never was an ubiquitous Twitter to begin with, would we have created a heavily asymmetric client-server architecture ?
Sneakernet is the digital continuation of gathering with people and exchanging. Cuba already had an intranet between interconnected homes. The social shape always defines the communications shape, so the reason a sneakernet works there is not enough to say that a sneakernet would work here.
On the contrary, I wrote this as a reflection on our tendency to focus on technology systems instead of social systems. Another way to think about it is that a social system is just a different type or level of technology that can exist independent of or in close harmony with a technical system.
For example, the air transportation system is a complex social-technical system, where both the human patterns and the technology those humans use have evolved together over many years. Another example: a call tree, where the technical system is the phone line, and the social system is the training of people on who to call in the happy path and what to do if someone doesn't pick up.
Not sure what you mean by "threshold for action" but I think cost has a great deal to do with it.
Running a cable (copper or fibre) along a street is expensive. So is putting up a wireless tower. And either have to be connected to the next town (cable, microwave, satellite, etc) and so on.
Passing around some USB sticks is much cheaper - has rather poor latency but fine bandwidth :)
I'd like to see some kind of peer-to-peer system doing the same thing. I imagine small devices (phones, raspberry pis etc) close enough that they could propagate updates or messages autonomously, and providing local wifi access to their collection of data. Perhaps fetching more recent updates from users when someone with more recent data wanders into town. Wouldn't work for streaming movies but might provide a nice sneakernet alternative.
The problem with trying to build a samizdat internet in the West is that the corporate alternatives are OK enough for most people most of the time. That basically takes away the drive for alternatives.
Comments
I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals.
When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited.
In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rarely get wide adoption, such as CJDNS, Hyperboria, Mastadon, Lemmy, Fediverse, ActivityPub, various DHT based tools, and others.
Hypothesis 1: if the threshold for action were high enough in the US, people would adopt these higher tech offerings en masse.
Hypothesis 2: the low tech nature of El Paquete Semanal and similar networks is critical to their success.
If hypothesis 2 is correct, then building a similar network using "boring" technologies would be more impactful than working on high tech open source tools.
The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck.
The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net".
In the US, you can always get access to whatever you need for free, with a little work, by torrenting for example. Torrenting is much less work than El Paquete or the stuff you listed.Why would anyone pay for those offerings instead?
I think it's apples to oranges.
You make a lot of good points. There's also the issue of scale. The US has a lot of land mass, and a whole lot of people at the very opposite edges of that huge land mass. Sneakernets work better across shorter distances.
I think there's an issue in your thinking: you're only approaching this situation in terms of technology. This is in fact the reason why the "solution" in western countries is open source and decentralization: we think it's a technology problem, so the solution is technology. But, like most things, it is inherently a social problem.
Cuba has been under embargo for decades now, and its internet has been heavily censored since; they haven't known how ingrained FAANG are, how ubiquitous Android and iOS and twitter and all those things are. For us, Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter; if there never was an ubiquitous Twitter to begin with, would we have created a heavily asymmetric client-server architecture ?
Sneakernet is the digital continuation of gathering with people and exchanging. Cuba already had an intranet between interconnected homes. The social shape always defines the communications shape, so the reason a sneakernet works there is not enough to say that a sneakernet would work here.
On the contrary, I wrote this as a reflection on our tendency to focus on technology systems instead of social systems. Another way to think about it is that a social system is just a different type or level of technology that can exist independent of or in close harmony with a technical system.
For example, the air transportation system is a complex social-technical system, where both the human patterns and the technology those humans use have evolved together over many years. Another example: a call tree, where the technical system is the phone line, and the social system is the training of people on who to call in the happy path and what to do if someone doesn't pick up.
Not sure what you mean by "threshold for action" but I think cost has a great deal to do with it.
Running a cable (copper or fibre) along a street is expensive. So is putting up a wireless tower. And either have to be connected to the next town (cable, microwave, satellite, etc) and so on.
Passing around some USB sticks is much cheaper - has rather poor latency but fine bandwidth :)
I'd like to see some kind of peer-to-peer system doing the same thing. I imagine small devices (phones, raspberry pis etc) close enough that they could propagate updates or messages autonomously, and providing local wifi access to their collection of data. Perhaps fetching more recent updates from users when someone with more recent data wanders into town. Wouldn't work for streaming movies but might provide a nice sneakernet alternative.
The problem with trying to build a samizdat internet in the West is that the corporate alternatives are OK enough for most people most of the time. That basically takes away the drive for alternatives.