Maff

This is going to be a draft of a blog post I intend to write. I want to post here first to see if anyone resonates with what I'm talking about. Please comment if you identify with this, or know another name for what I'm going for.

You may already be familiar with that XKCD comic. Number 2347, "Dependency."

It captures a peculiar phenomenon of the internet. Much of it is developed by big companies. From the Cisco switches rerouting packets to the YouTube javascript running on hundreds of millions of devices right this moment, the internet is dominated by corporate tech.

But the thing is, despite it's massive impact, big tech is not the whole internet. In fact, we know that the internet wouldn't work properly if it was only the product of big tech. You need the wikipedia volunteers. The open source programmers. The hobbyist web-tool makers. The free ad-block maintainers.

These are the municipal volunteers of the internet. The roadside litter cleanup crew. The mural painters. And I think we all know that the internet would be a horrible place to live if it weren't for these people. The profit motive that fuels big tech leads to greed, closed-source code, and walled gardens. Every company would need to write their own crypto libraries. There would be no ad-free online encyclopedia. There would be no neal.fun.

I'm going to suggest a name for these people. "Netkeepers." A person who sees a problem on the internet that needs fixing, and fixes it.

But what motivates the Netkeeper? Not the profit motive, obviously. So what then?

Let's do a case study from my own life. I would describe myself as a Netkeeper. One example of something I've done is Blamscamp, a bandcamp-style player that you can embed on itch.io to sell your albums. I made this when it was announced that Epic Games bought Bandcamp. I saw that the internet had a problem—that bandcamp was a single point of failure in the selling-albums-online space—and I did my best to fix it.

I did this because I want a better world. I don't want it to become impossible to buy albums anymore. And if I can do my part to steer us away from that future with two days of gratis hypomanic programming, then I'll do it. I don't need to get paid for it.

But there's the problem. I do this because I believe in it, AND I do it for free because I don't need the money. I don't need the money because I already have a job that pays well. I don't need to follow the profit motive because I'm already comfortable. Capitalism isn't actively threatening my existence, so I have the luxury to spend time doing stuff I find interesting and important for free.

If I didn't already have a stable income, or I had a job that took all my energy and left nothing for myself, I wouldn't have been able to create Blamscamp.

And this is why this post is titled "The Netkeeper Needs to Exist But Can't." I'm not actually a Netkeeper. I'm a hobbyist Netkeeper. A true Netkeeper would be someone who could do it full time. Who finds problems on the internet, fixes them, and is paid for it. Not paid for each problem they fix, but paid unconditionally. Paid because the community has trust that you'll do the right thing with the energy you have.

So, can a true Netkeeper exist? Maybe. The only obvious option to me is Patreon. However, how do we describe what we're doing? If our Patreon says we "do random stuff for the internet," will people actually donate?

And this is where I reveal this is actually a manifesto. I feel like Patreon could work. We could make the Netkeeper real. But we need a better phrase than "I do random stuff for the internet." I suggest we popularize the word "Netkeeper."

Imagine a Patreon where someone proudly describes themselves as a Netkeeper. Every month they post updates of what they've been up to, like a Tom Scott newsletter. You pay them because you believe in them. You believe they can steer the internet in a better direction with the time, money and energy.

There could be directories of Netkeepers. It could be your job title. It could be how you spend your career break, gap year, or retirement.

But the Netkeeper can't exist. Not right now. The concept is knocking on the door to our reality. It wants to come in, it wants to become real. The Netkeeper needs to exist. I think we can all agree on its value. Maybe not on the execution, that could use some ironing out. But the concept, the concept is perhaps something we can believe in.

the really fun thing about the “free software is load-bearing” is knowing all the places it pops up that you really wouldn’t think of.
There’s the common knowledge ones, that the PS4 and PS5 run on top of a BSD variant (I think FreeBSD but I could be wrong), or that Mac OS is derived from a BSD, or that netflix’s servers all run BSD, and I would be remiss to mention Android being Linux-based, but then there’s the things you don’t think about.
Linux has been present in things like set top boxes and DVD players as far back as the early 2000s. Every consumer router/modem/wifi AP runs a variant of Linux (some even come with literally just OpenWRT and maybe some vendor customisations), and most of the enterprise ones do (Cisco Meraki products all run a derivative of OpenWRT, even). Juniper equipment runs their FreeBSD derivative JunOS.
Any Intel-based machine that has the management engine coprocessor built in? That runs MINIX, which gave Andrew Tanenbaum a huge ego. You may also be surprised to learn that regardless of what your phone itself runs, the cellular modem inside it is probably running Linux! Hell, the PinePhone demonstrated this wonderfully when someone found a vulnerability in software running on the baseband, and was able to get root on that. My understanding is that modern networking cards (WiFi/Ethernet) all also run some form of embedded Linux, though I don’t remember where I found that out.
That’s just conventional operating systems. In microcontrollers, there’s FreeRTOS, Zephyr, NuttX, RT-Thread, a bunch more, which all can be found in microcontrollers used in commercial products, from the immediate thought of IoT devices, to stuff like dishwashers. A market study from 2019 done by “AspenCore” showed that 21% of respondents were using embedded linux, followed by 19% using an in-house or custom OS, then 18% using FreeRTOS.
The very funny part comes in when an open-source product is used as part of bootstrapping something commercial and proprietary. In a past job, I worked on the software security team for some widely-deployed Windows-based embedded machines, but those machines needed disk encryption beyond what was available in Windows. The solution? A linux-based preloader environment that boots first to do all the setup.
This was just an overview of operating systems. The number of commercial products and proprietary software out there using free software as a component is nearly immeasurable, and you might not find out until something breaks or a license change comes up and someone from a company using the software opens a bug report to complain.

saw a kickstarter today for a product called "I'm Back Film", which i'm not going to link because i don't think this product should under any circumstances exist (although it has already, as is natural for a kickstarter product that tries to "solve" a nonexistant problem, been funded a thousand times past its listed goal).

it's just a fucking ccd sticking out of an imitation roll of film that "converts analog[ue] cameras to digital" as if the reason people like film cameras is purely because of optics and not because of any of the things that are actually unique to film photography.

please tell me if i'm way off base here because although i grew up with film photography and love it today, i am not In The Hobby Or Profession and so my opinions are potentially ass, but i see this as "technology man saw an old nikon and decided what was missing was a lithium-ion battery, wifi, an sd card and a colour lcd screen". every time someone's talked about why they love film photography, the most common parts have been:

• the number of photos you can take on a single roll being limited can help you consider your shots better
• the fact that you can't see how a shot turned out until you get it developed is good actually and helps you appreciate the photos better
• the film itself, its manufacture variances, the developing process, everything about the film photography process that's actually analogue, has tangible impacts on the end result.

at least this is something you just insert into a camera rather than being a thing that you have to modify the camera in order to use, so hopefully no film cameras will be harmed by the kind of villain that buys an old computer or something and guts it to turn it into something mundane ("stick a raspberry pi in it" assholes).

the mgs master collection for nintendo switch has the original HD collection logo on the title screens for MGS2 and 3, as well as the loader banner.
also for some reason it's really slow to load mgs1? if you skip the intro cutscene there's a solid fucking second of hang where it's loading the area. i know the nintendo switch is not a performance juggernaut but i feel like it should be capable of at least matching the sony psp in terms of how well it runs a playstation 1 game.

also the "volume 1" part of the title really strongly suggests that there's more to come, but what else is there? i don't for a fucking second believe that konami are going to put any effort into an mgs4 re-release, the only game that has been completely exclusive to the PS3, and i don't think they're gonna re-release MGR:R and MGSV. the original HD collection included peace walker instead of mgs1 on PS3 and xbox 360, and there's metal gear acid and so on, but.. i dunno.

i would love to have some faith but i just don't.