Draw near, folks.

I am not going to talk politics. It needlessly upsets me.

I'm going to talk Parler.

Because, twenty minutes ago, AWS shut it down.

https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-suspends-parler-app-web-services-1560366

You think that's an end to it?

I got news: that's not an end to it.

That's selection pressure.

Every morning I check Hacker News (which is not for _those_ kinds of hackers, btw, but for people who practice the arts of programming), in which posts get voted to the top - and of course, this morning, several Parler alternatives have floated to the top 30.

They're all P2P.

We've gotten extraordinarily good at writing peer-to-peer apps over the last few years - mostly because of everything we've learned working with cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance apps.

The state of the art is lightyears beyond where it was even a few years ago.

And because of my work in the Australian startup community, I am regularly being pitched by startups who are using cryptocurrency technologies to create distributed, decentralised social networks.

Networks that are, by design, highly resilient and very difficult to monitor.

So we have a need for a network that can't be shut down by Apple, Google, Amazon - or anyone else - that is now meeting a whole new set of techniques designed to empower communities to work resiliently and highly effectively.

We are going to see a 'Cambrian Explosion' of apps.

None of these new tools will immediately threaten existing networks of either capital or power.

They will take time to grow to scale. They will be buggy. They will be attacked.

Those attacks will tend, over time, to make these apps more resilient.

So they're not going away.

This is the birth of the truly 'Dark Net. It wasn't about Silk Road or ordering your illegal drugs online. That was a sideshow.

It's about creating a completely separate, invisible and for that reason largely unassailable cognitive space for a political counter-culture.

I do think that this day was always bound to come.

In some ways it feels as though it was long overdue.

But the technology wasn't ready - and the need wasn't acute.

Now Platforms have, through their own actions, given birth to something they can not dominate.

Daoist dilemma.