It’s finally time for Punch-over-IP.
It’s 2015, and Silicon Valley is awash in specious ideas being showered with venture capital again. Speculation about whether this second wave of Internet entrepreneurialism is overblown and poised to collapse is plentiful, and a substantial portion of that speculation is probably justified. One need only look at companies like Twitter from a business perspective to become befuddled as to how they’ll ever be able to monetize what they’ve built, and Twitter is still on a hiring binge, poaching “developers”, systems administrators, and every other job description they can from other companies that may or may not have figured out that primary function themselves. “Cloud computing” is among the more prevalent buzzwords used to describe so many of these companies, and to the layperson, this may seem like a new thing, if not “the next big thing”, but, really, how new is it? The notion of outsourcing computing power or, more commonly, file storage, is hardly new. In fact, it predates the first wave of “Internet business” by a fair span of time. In the “old days” (read: 1963's first “timesharing” services, and beyond), local storage was unheard of, and any computing task requiring significant resources was scheduled to run on shared user systems, to which users connected via network in order to launch, and then to retrieve whatever output the shared system managed to generate for them, once their scheduled task was complete.
To be fair, there are companies that are fundamentally altering different businesses; Uber comes to mind, with the huge effect they’ve managed to exert on the traditional taxi industry in every city they’ve extended their service to. Certainly companies like Facebook have had a major effect on the advertising industry; what advertiser would turn down the ability to narrowly focus their campaigns to potential consumers who have freely, willingly, and even joyfully provided all the demographic information about themselves that any ad campaign manager would ever want? And certainly our intelligence agencies have reaped major rewards from this trend of providing a world full of narcissists the opportunity to micro-document their every thought, feeling, or life moment to an audience of whoever might listen.
Anonymity, echo-enablement, and stupidity magnification.
But what is really new in all of this? What has been built that, at the end of the day, makes the world a better place for the people that live in it, rather than a louder place, or a more marketable place? If anything, the proverbial offering of a “voice” for the common man has come with an uncomfortable, if unstated, reality that tempers any good that it may have ushered in; the common man is a moron. Often, people will say things simply because they can, without giving those things any thought at all. Anonymity is an enabler. And morons broadcasting moronity to other morons only empowers other morons; it gives them the delusion that the stupid things they think of, when they think at all, can’t possibly be that stupid. After all, other morons think the same thing, so obviously it must be OK, right? Wrong.
Personal freedom should not be separated from personal responsibility
One aspect of enabling everyone (with Internet access) to have a voice that we, as a community of technologists, have missed is the aspect of personal responsibility. The blessing of personal freedom carries with it the burden of personal responsibility. Or it should. For example, in the real world, if you sit at a dinner table full of burly veterans of foreign wars and demean their service in some way, there is a likelihood that one, if not more, of them will physically take you to task. If you enter a room full of childhood abuse victims, and make some insensitive remark comparing their suffering to the lengthy time you wasted at the DMV that day, one of them might just explore the differences in that comparison for you. Physically. Possibly by punching you in your face. That fear of physical retribution causes, or at least it used to cause, people to give what they say a second thought before they said it. If you know that saying something is going to result in your receipt of an ass-beating, you’re more likely to exert the appropriate levels of self-control, and keep that statement to yourself, where it belongs. It doesn’t take too many ass-beatings to teach that lesson, either. Usually one or two is enough to get the message across.
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But in the rush to deliver a quick return to investors, we’ve skipped adding personal responsibility to the technology that gives us the power to let the world know our feelings on any variety of subjects, both in and out of our proverbial lanes. Some naively assume that this will sort itself out. Some just can’t focus on the need for the responsibility (I’m looking at you, millennials) because they honestly were never taught they had any responsibility.
The tech has already been built.
And some technologists (generally not the ones involved in building Internet stuff) have actually developed highly effective means of delivering messages of responsibility to people anywhere on the globe, at any time, though these means might be a hard sell to the general Western public. For instance, if you think you can build suicide bombs, convince mentally challenged poor people to deliver those suicide bombs to crowded areas and detonate them, and get away under the veil of anonymity, you might be unpleasantly surprised when an MQ-9 Reaper, a few tens of thousands of feet above your head, delivers a GBU-II Paveway laser guided bomb through your roof and on to your head. Of course your surprise won’t last long, as the blast wave will probably render you dead before you are completely incinerated or destroyed by flying debris, but I assure you the surprise will be remarkably unpleasant. However, this solution might be “overkill” if all you’ve actually done is said something crappy in the comments box on some YouTube video someone made as a memorial for a dead grandparent. My point, though, is that a proof of concept exists for what I suggest needs to be built; remote delivery of punishment simply can be done. The level of justice just needs to be dialed back a bit to more accurately address the offense.
(Re-)introducing PoIP:
The concept of “Punch-over-IP”, or PoIP, sometimes known as “Punch in the Face over Standard TCP/IP” or other slight variations on the name, has been kicked around since the days of USENET. It has been a dream of the systems administration community for a little over three decades now, yet developers have dragged their feet (probably because developers would have historically been the prime delivery targets of PoIP, if it were run and controlled by administrators), only accidentally building pieces and parts of the necessary technology where such technology was required for other purposes.
Most of the pieces have been built already, though. Uber’s ability to track users and drivers, Google’s ability to deliver location-based ads, and Apple’s “Find My iPhone” application are all obvious signs that users will willingly carry their own “digital collar” (their precious phones and tablets), and can therefore be accurately found at any given time, at almost any given place. All that said, it behooves the community to act together to implement just such a system, using the parts that have already been built, in order to distribute Great Justice to the masses. People claim they want justice. They make demands for it, publicly. Surely this is a sign that there is a glaring opportunity to offer just that. With a small amount of venture capital investment, a small amount of hardware integration work, a very small amount of development work, and a little bit of propaganda (by which I mean “marketing”, of course), someone should be able to distribute a system for delivering justice to anyone, anywhere, from anyone, anywhere, with a few clicks of a mouse, or a couple of fingertaps on a screen. And get this; it could even be monetized. Right there’s your motivation.
Put the pieces together.
Are people going to carry around a phone attachment containing a robotic fist in a box, so that other people can hit them when they say something stupid? Probably not. But perhaps the addition of stun-gun functionality to phones would be sufficient. Say something super-rude and think you’ve done it anonymously? Surprise; a quick jolt of 40,000 volts goes off in your pocket. Payback! Justice! Or maybe someone adds some functionality to the pending army of product delivery drones certain companies think they’re going to build. If one of those drones can carry a 30 pound package from Amazon distribution centers to your front door, then certainly they can either reduce the load capacity by 10 pounds, and add the punching robot arm, or just add more justice-specific drones. How hard is this, people? Figure it out. The idea’s time has come. That time is now. Do it because it needs to be done. Do it because it is the right thing to do. Just finish it, already.
