> In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the “natural laws of the Internet” and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.
Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the Internet as it was couldn't last: it was, effectively, a state of nature. The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the constraints of the old order.
The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man.
The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages (as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment) but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend it and become the new establishment.
If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again.
I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.' We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.
Living through the evolution of the Web, it looks like money (especially ad money) and social networks encouraging people to broadcast their real identities (often doing so can be lucrative—see both traditional and Internet celebrities' use of Twitter, for example) are the main causes of (negative) changes.
Manipulative ad-spam typo-squatter sites basically took over the Web. Around '08 or '09 Google seemingly surrendered in the battle against them and took to just showing the same handful of trustworthy sites for most searches. Smaller communities and sites faded. Meanwhile, a huge percentage of "legitimate" sites have become nearly indistinguishable from ad-spam sites. The spammers won, in a way, by becoming the Web.
Youtube, briefly a kind of miracle of the information age, is so full of people trying to sell things or make a living at it that they've drowned out the earnest amateurs. Plus there's tons of advertising on it now. Just another bazaar full of haggling and people trying to pick your pocket, where once there was something like a community theater.
Broadcasting one's identity is valuable ($$$) but leads to the ongoing conflict between those embracing that and those viciously trolling them under what remains of traditional Internet anonymity. Now that there's money behind it, the old-school Internet reaction of "well yeah, why the hell did you put your real name and address on the Internet?" is being seriously challenged, even in tech circles, by "real names for all so we can hunt the trolls (oh, also anyone else we don't like, but surely that will never be a problem)!" The money in tying Web identities to real identities may well win, over the value of (even semi-)anonymous speech.
I don't see it as frontier versus civilization: I see it as pure human (and human-scale) expression versus (incomprehensibly massive and alienating) commercial exploitation. Commercial exploitation is winning.
There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists doing it in the side.
Producing pure human expression full time requires either an income stream or a pile of money to burn through. As the internet has opened up to more people, the reality of keeping it running has required the crass commercialism that is so at contrast with the early, aristocratic web.
I agree the current state of the web of fuedal and sub optimal, but the comparatively tiny boy's club of the early web wasn't terribly democratic, either.
> There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists doing it in the side.
"Aristocratic" strikes me as a strange way to describe at least two of those categories, and they hardly seem undemocratic (to take your comparison) to me. I mean, "on the side" and in the free time of students is where practically all democratic activity occurs! The exceptions would be full-time politicians and those making money from democratic processes (for the governmental sense of "democratic"), and those widely seen as exploiting the weaknesses of democracy to their advantage (think: wealth's influence on democracy) but I think it's fair to characterize those parts as (probably necessary) accidents of democratic society rather than the core expression of it.
What people do on the side is democracy, until the robots relieve us of our mostly-authoritarian day jobs (I'm not holding my breath on that one)
"In an important democratic innovation, pay for attending the Ekklesia was instituted in about 400 B.C., thereby ensuring that everyone, including citizens of the working classes, could afford to participate in the political life of the city. Bronze or lead tokens were issued to those attending the meeting, and these could later be redeemed for the assemblyman's pay of two obols (one-third of a drachma) per session."
The citizens assembly met every 10 days, so there were many opportunities for citizen participation.
Yes, participation is a difficult thing to ensure in a democracy, and even more so when it's online. A few years ago, I was a member of the German pirate party. We tried to implement "liquid democracy", using Liquid Feedback. It allows every party member to vote on anything or delegate their votes (based on categories, subcategories or single initiatives) to any other voter, and change those delegations at any time.
Because of the known security problems with digital voting systems, the system was supposed to work only as a tool to form opinions. Initiatives were then put to final vote in real-life assemblies, where everyone was allowed to participate. We didn't have any "classical" delegates.
Both of these steps posed their challenges in participation:
- Liquid Feedback was not the easies tool to understand and use. For non-technical people, it was quite the challenge. And of course, a computer in the first place.
- Full member real-life assemblies, particularly on a national level, require time and money for travel, accommodation etc. Because we didn't have "real" delegates, if you couldn't afford to go, you were out.
There were some suggestions to overcome these issues (like a "permanent assembly" which would work by postal -snail mail- vote), but that never came to pass. (Or at least I think it didn't, I moved out of the country since then and don't follow that closely anymore.)
You can't organize the opposite of commercial exploitation. It's something the individual has to value and oppose for themselves, a choice they make. But you can motivate commercial exploitation by dangling carrots in front of people who can be bent to compromise, which is many of us. So commercial exploitation can gain momentum.
One of my big takeaways from read a US history [0] was that conflicts were often solved by the dissenters moving somewhere else and settling that new empty space. Which is one reason why I think space exploration is important; there's plenty of room for multiple viewpoints out there.
[0] 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson
It's fascinating to imagine it being possible and affordable for a specified minimum number of people to launch a sustainable ecosystem into space and never be seen/heard from again.
The Internet may allow the free exchange of information and ideas but every inch of the cable, routers, and other infrastructure that makes up the Internet is owned by either a government or by a telecoms corporation subject to government regulation, going all the way back to ARPAnet. There was never any chance of the internet remaining a free place, merely a brief moment between when the technology was invented and when entrepreneurs & lawmakers caught up. If anything, it's surprising that anyone ever believed otherwise.
There were and are links owned and operated by universities and colleges.
As in, the sysop at foo.edu called up the sysop at bar.edu (a mile down the road) and said:
hey bill, 50% of all our napster traffic from the dorms
is going to bar.edu, and it is going through my-isp.net
and your-isp.net to get there. Why don't you mount a
transceiver on a pole and I'll do the same and we'll
establish this alternative route for those packets?
It is unfortunate that it was also common to rent "alarm wire"[0] copper from the phone company for a point to point link over DSL... I don't think that product is available anymore, because VoIP vs POTS.
0: "Alarm wire" is the term I learned to use to describe an electrically connected circuit from point A to point B in a town, where neither A nor B is the telco. The copper might physically go through the telco's building, but there was no POTS on it and if you apply voltage on the point A end, it can be observed on the point B end... I think maybe the term "dumb circuit" could apply, too. Anyway, these were cool because you could upgrade the DSL modem on both ends to get a faster connection without paying more per month!
This point is critical to understanding how we ended up here. The weakest points of the Internet or anything that runs on top of it, like the World Wide Web, are the parts that interact with meatspace, ie. once you dig far enough down, you're subject to the whims of a third-party who is either a government, or a private corporation that answers, through laws, to a government.
The interests of these third-parties are different from ours, and they're subject to different pressures. We can talk about transparency and oversight all we want, but any positive progress for 'those of us in the middle' will just be populist concessions for our appeasement.
I agree with most of your historical analysis, and I agree with your final sentence (People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.), but I think, of the four things in that sentence, only the first two are fundamental, and the last two are mostly desired as a means to the first two. I.e., people want safety and security, and see the power to ensure others' conformity to their vision of how the world should be as a means to be safe and secure in the way they want to live.
I think if we can create enough freedom and opportunity for people to live as they want to live, in as much or as little community with like minded others as they want, where they don't feel that their particular way of life is threatened, then we will see much, much fewer attempts to control other people.
This is the basic standard of social coexistence: my right to control my world ends at the equilibrium point between my legitimate interest and yours. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is really great on this topic.
Very well written. I would also add they dont just want safety, they want someone else to make it safe for them. They dont want to be responsible for their own safety.
In a purely personal, sense, I miss the wild west days of the internet. I was an odd kid, never fitting into any of the big groups at school. The classic son of an immigrant with one foot in his parents' world and one foot in his country of birth. The internet's pseudonymity guided my adolescence in a way that's near and dear to my heart. Slow to grow, awkward and ungainly, at school I was nothing more than a dust mote. On the internet, though, I became a leader in my set of niche communities. To this day, some of my closest friends IRL (am I dating myself with that?) come from the reputation and the identity I built up in my particular niche of the internet, driven by my passions (often at the detriment of my grades).
When I see kids today, I feel sad. The internet was an escape for those of us who were awkward, unloved, and bullied. The internet was the playground of the mind. Of course, I see the hypocrisy in my own nostalgia; Here I am, making a living in the Feudal Internet. I hope kids find a way to reclaim the frontier that was once theirs.
Kids are finding spaces to reclaim "wild west" states even in the midst of hyper-curated social networks. For example, look at what they call finstagrams[1] today.
This is largely because leveraging power on the Internet requires technical expertise, and most distributed power groups don’t have that expertise.
This is actually my biggest concern.
Our company is bleeding edge technology in AR and ML and it's really fucking hard to hire computer vision and machine learning people because Goog/Face/Apple can offer 300-400k for PhDs and give them exciting and engaging projects.
If giant companies constantly "disrupt themselves" and acquire anything that looks like competition then they just consolidate further and nobody can take a competitive position.
I know people will hand wave this away, but as RL becomes the architecture for software - especially led by these big companies - it's going to be increasingly hard to unseat big players.
At the AI meetup at Stanford I went to last week, Andrew Ng was asked by Jen-Hsun Huang, "How do small companies create the new technologies for the future better than the big ones" and Andrew's comment was basically: "They don't anymore."
I'm worried that the time for disruptive startups (at least in software) is coming to an end. Hopefully I'm wrong.
You raise a fair question, and I think the answer partially lies in the definition of "compensation."
Can a startup afford to pay market rates for PhDs and other qualified individuals? Probably not. That's always been the case though, and I don't really see that as being new for computer vision and machine learning talent.
So you need to look at what else you can offer them. A significant amount of equity seems like a big one. It may be more than you wanted to give, but that may be the reality of the market. Beyond that, since risk is significant and fewer and fewer liquidity events seem to be occurring, perhaps a straight profit-sharing model might be more appropriate and more immediate in terms of its ability to balance the risk equation of startups. If you start getting customers and someone knows they'll stand to make money as you grow vs. waiting for some increasingly unlikely IPO, that could be more favorable.
There's also other less tangible things like flexibility that comes in the form of remote work, flexible hours, etc. that can have very real value to people. Taken to the extreme, you may be able to land some awesome talent remotely in other countries where maybe what you can offer them is still a lot of money.
It would be interesting to know what you are trying to do to remain competitive in these other areas. Money solves a lot, but depending on what someone is looking for and where they are in their life, it may not be everything.
It's true, however the difference in talent is staggering between someone with experience in CV/ML and someone who has only studied it. So I suppose that just stating "PhD" is too vague.
Your point is correct though about giving other benefits, and that's what we (and others in the field) do - equity, flexibility etc...
Understand though that the key issue here is that most of the people with these skills are rabid about working on big projects with grand vision, and rightfully so. Part of the problem however is that there are only so many data sets for these problems and without those data sets the pace is slow.
The frontier today requires much more infrastructure than previous breakthrough projects. I was just watching the "rise of the nerds" and it was illuminating how "simple" even back then it was from a scale perspective to make great progress. The microprocessor really opened up this whole ecosystem because it was something that anyone could buy. That's just not possible with machine learning because you have to have so much data and that kind of data you can't buy, you have to build it.
I was talking with a major heavy hitter in this field (one you've heard of) about his work options this year. He was debating leaving a very well funded billion dollar company to go to one with some of the best people in ML in the world. He didn't leave because the company he was working for already had terabytes of vision data to work with and infrastructure that made his work possible. The newer company, which had amazing talent and some great funding, would have to start gathering data and it would take time to set up their GPU clusters etc... So it was because the bigger company was already at scale with data and could gather data faster, that he didn't leave. And these are the cream of the crop people with a lot of money we are talking about here.
So it's not so much compensation, it's that the biggest companies have the scale needed already to do the breakthroughs in tasks like reinforcement learning and machine vision - the tasks that are going to dominate the landscape going forward - that are impossible for startups to get to.
You are conflating technical and financial power. If your company has bleeding edge technology, and the only thing you want is to see it widely adapted, open source or freely license all your software, so a large number of small companies can build things using it. But (my guess is, I don't know what company this is) you won't do so because you want to leverage the financial power of that knowledge. In that case, why begrudge the Google researchers their 300k?
An example of a truly distributed purely technical power group would be something like Debian GNU/Linux. One of the reasons it's possible, and getting easier by the day to run desktop software that isn't locked down by one of the big corporations is the existence of distributed projects like the kernel and Debian.
I'm not conflating it, they are related. I had this argument at AGI 14 where someone was trying to argue that it was possible to make disruptive FOSS to the same scale as Google. I just don't believe it. Why? People have to eat. If you want to compete, at the impactful-change the power structure level, you have to pay people real competitive wages to work full time.
What you say is anathema to everything else written on this site about how to build good products with good people that have impact.
Otherwise you wait around till the next gauss/perelman shows up that's only working for passion.
Aren't there problems where large scale data sets are not available, even for the big players?
With small amounts of data and/or unconventional learning situations, there should be options for incorporating domain expertise in interesting ways. I might be wrong, but I think the fraction of problems that can be solved with deep learning/large data set analysis is a small fraction of the set of AI problems as a whole.
For example, at a statistics symposium at MIT last year Stanford Professor Robert Tibshirani mentioned a healthcare (cancer diagnosis) problem, done in collaboration with healthcare people: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ftp/canc.pdf (these slides are different from the ones used at MIT, the content is similar though). He mentioned how they talked to some deep learning experts at Google, who told him that the data set was too small for effective deep learning usage. Another reason is mentioned on pg 30 of the above, basically sparsity being more important than nonlinearity here.
In healthcare, people care a lot about "interpretable" models. The term is ill-defined, but in a sense it is something where the trained model is easily explainable, and easily written down. A linear model is a simple example of such a thing, though usually insufficient on its own.
Deep neural nets arguably do not meet this, hence a reluctance (among other reasons) to shift in certain fields.
Your point may still be valid though - I do not know whether there are enough viable economic opportunities. Computer vision in particular is dominated by DNN/large scale analysis these days, and I sympathize with your difficulties here.
Your point is valid though about there being silos of industries that don't have a lot of data, or the data not being accessible.
I think a great example of this is in Agricultural Tech. There is just incredible amounts of data that is totally siloed and fractured. But if you pay attention Google Ventures is right there, ready to fund or acquire whatever is happening in the space.
Out of curiosity, how about hiring masters or bachelors that have substantial projects, but might not qualify as research?
It's personal interest, I don't have a degree at all yet, but I understand convolutional neural networks fairly well. Stanford has a good number of open classes on such subjects.
Otherwise, you probably have to give them something they can't get at Google; autonomy, environment, time off, whatever.
Otherwise, you probably have to give them something they can't get at Google; autonomy, environment, time off, whatever.
Not to harp on what we do too much, but that's all part of what we offer. Remote, minimum vacation (meaning we set a mandatory 10 day minimum but no higher bound on vacation day), equity grants (not options) etc... to make up for not having 400k salaries.
As I mentioned elsewhere though, with most people money is what tips it over, but not they key thing. It's access to data that is important - it's why LeCun went to Facebook and Ng to Baidu. That's not something you can get as a startup without a product at massive scale already (though we have some staggeringly large proprietary vision data).
Since it's PhDs you're after, maybe you could offer something along the lines of a small lab that they can pursue their own projects in for 1-2 days a week and establish that you encourage them to publish research.
I appreciate the metaphor to feudalism - it certainly can describe what we are seeing now in the concentration on corporate powers, but I it is misleading to characterize the internet as a whole system of government, rather than a new dimension or frontier of an existing one.
A better metaphor is probably a comparison to the wild west. The early internet was government-sponsored, and the government's wait-and-see attitude is much more akin to their attitude toward early homesteaders heading out into the wild - they wanted the country settled, but could not offer anything but space to the early settlers. The government didn't really know what it was offering. That initial rush into the west came with the promise of fortune and glory and freedom, but came with no security, no guarantees.
That state that we think of as the wild west - boom and bust, saloons, gunfights, and stage coach robbery - really only lasted for around 20 years though, and was eventually replaced with a much more standardized, civilized world by comparison.
That is where we are with the internet now. The frontier is colonized, and the issues that remain are the industrialization of the existing claims. We're at the age now where the internet frontier yields to human habitation and comforts, and supplies us with guarantees, trade, economies, industries, mass production, and jobs.
The internet isn't industrial yet, but we're seeing the beginnings of it now. The original booms are mostly gone (Yahoo was one of the last), and now the more corporate, more focused companies have grown large. Now, the established businesses, too, are moving in, and the frontier is looking pretty tame - just an extension of the existing world order. Just like the wild west though, the original frontiersmen don't take well to reintegrating.
PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change for the better.
As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions. If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely remain a pipe dream.
The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO, one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be far away.
> In addition to re-reigning in government power, we need similar restrictions on corporate power: a new Magna Carta focused on the institutions that abuse power in the 21st century.
Now we have corporate-friendly proposals in TPP, TTIP, TiSA and RCEP.
Great essay. I missed only one point: why he used Brazil as a succesful example of internet use? Facebook, Google & Twitter sponsored a mob that finished with a coup d'etat here. We are far from being a good example, I think we are the worse and what happened here is been exported to other countries right now.
Sorry, but there are a lot of disagreement about your "coup d'etat". A portion of the population, me included, don't see it as a coup, as the deposition of the president followed, and is following, the law. I don't think here is the place to have this kind of discussion, but I just wanted to make it clear that that are opposing ideas on this...
Regardless, I think that social media in general was key to some very important social movements here, but you won't agree with my examples :). But I agree it wasn't clear what he was referring to in case of Brazil.
What the hell are you talking about? You may even think there was a coup d'etat here in Brazil, even though the Supreme Court and the media in general disagree. I won't challenge you in this point, as I don't think this is a topic to be discussed here in HN.
However, your affirmation that Facebook, Google and Twitter sponsored this coup is quite bizarre. Care to give any source in this?
We have feudalism because spam and abuse make everything suck. That means you need user accounts that are at least somewhat hard to abuse or the sock-puppet problem becomes unmanageable, and automated filters for the spam, and ways to block abusive users, and moderators to appeal to when users can't solve things on their own.
These things can't be fully automated and they aren't fun for volunteers so businesses end up hiring people to do them.
Pseudonymous identities with reputations and decentalised webs of reputation would be the solution in the old school spirit. But since things like Google and Facebook are financed by ads and trade of personally identifiable information, the incentives don't really align.
The way you talk you'd think real names were invented by advertisers. Um, no. There are plenty of good reasons to use real names that have nothing to do with advertising.
Handles work well for CB radio, BBS's, games, and other geeky pursuits. In the early days, your friends and relatives weren't online anyway, so why not use a handle?
But they don't work for relatives, offline friends, businesses, politicians, or really, any of the other ways we use our real names.
See, the idea of a singular real name is interesting to me - I have a small handful of names I'd consider "real". It's the same with a fair few people I know, to varying extents, due to the groups I'm involved in.
The ability to use many names is strongly tied to the ability to identify yourself. Being forced to use a single name in all contexts, whether you want to or not, is relinquishing that ability - it's being told who you are permitted to be by an external force.
It's not just financial. Those things are incredibly hard for ordinary people (or busy technical people) to understand and use. Only nerds with lots of time on their hands use such systems.
My UX rule of thumb is: every step required to set up or otherwise adopt a new technology cuts adoption in half.
Example: if your audience consists of a million people and it takes 10 steps to set something up, about a thousand people will end up using it.
> What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so wrong?
Sort of reminds me of some scientists concerns after inventing the atom/hydrogen bomb.... oops, what did we just do?
Yet I don't see or hear about any tech ethics groups. You know, a group of people that actually tries to determine whether some tech being considered/built will actually be good for society or not. From what I've read, the Amish have such a thing, ie, it's not that they're strictly anti-tech, but that they have community leaders that evaluate the pros/cons to their society before allowing its introduction.
I found it refreshing that there's movement around an AI group of this nature to try and ensure we don't hose ourselves with AI, but really, a broader tech ethics group should've already been on that as well.
Unfortunately it's much easier to just plow ahead and ignore such things in the hopes of being the next billionaire startup founder. Leave it to someone else to decide whether you're making things in our society/world better or worse.
Interesting take on the internet as Feudalism, and everyone having to align with a king or a prince to protect him from other unknowable threats.
There is a blog which discusses how much of the internet is more like a digital bazaar - everyone shouting and no one listening to most of it (camels, get your camels here, dates, I have dates, and so on).
I trust I can include the link here, and as I am very new to Hacker News, I trust I am not overstepping some boundary by doing so. http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/
Maybe the internet is a little of all things - bazaar, wild west, feudalism, democracy, socialism, and so on.
What i gathered from the article is that access to data means power;
- more transparency of government + ability to organize means more power to grassroots organizations
- more data on individuals means more power to corporations
and governments
- ability to steal data means power to cyber criminals.
What i did not understand is the motivations of each of these actor to curtail his access to data/power? i think Bruce Schneier precisely described the new steady state now what i don't understand is how the system could possibly change.
this reminds me of the transformation of the former Soviet Union : in the nineties a lot of people thought that liberalism is here to stay; you can't just do a dictatorship and censorship in the 21st century etc, etc. However it turned out to be a brief interlude - the new elite is just a repackaged old nomenklatura and state power was never curtailed/balanced by an independent judiciary.
Same with the internet - the new gadget couldn't change the power balance, it just took them some time to adapt. TLDR: The criminals were the fastest to adapt (they always do); civil society got something out of the ability to organize but then the balance shifted back to the state and corporations, it just took them some time to get their act together.
The answer is to educate everyone, fast, on embracing the new world order - a world where technology rules and all else is of lesser importance as we all strive toward a better future.
We need to continue to educate, educate, educate, and give to all the powers of the computer, programming, scripting, and google.
Which new world order are we talking about here? There are a number of things with that moniker.
Education inexorably leads to embracing this one (whichever it is)? If you don't get some percentage of naysayers, you're not teaching, you're indoctrinating.
Technology as the ultimate master of human society? That isn't a better future. At least for humans.
And what any of this has to do with independence from our corporate infolords, I have no idea.
Reading it written like this, I think I understand why it was that the Internet as it was couldn't last: it was, effectively, a state of nature. The Internet was a great frontier, where folks were finally freed of the constraints of the old order.
The problem is that the old order itself was formed out of the chaos of an older frontier still — and that frontier was populated by folks escaping an even older order, and so on back to the dawn of man.
The state of nature is inherently unstable, because people will band together to use violence and/or the threat of violence against those who violate their mores, whether those mores are going to church on Sundays in the Middle Ages (as various heretics discovered) or not giving to conservative charities (as Brendan Eich discovered). Some people want a frontier (generally, those who are relatively weak in the current order and wish to escape its establishment) but, once they have established a sphere of power for themselves, they defend it and become the new establishment.
If only there were a way to ensure a permanent frontier, where dissenters and freethinkers (and, yes, criminals) can escape and form their own orders, until their own dissenters and freethinkers escape away again.
I don't think most people want that, though. We saw it with the collapse of Ethereum's DAO. We see it every time someone says, 'there ought to be a law.' We see it every time a government forces someone to do something he would rather not do. People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.