What is it about?
While our world burns in a climate emergency, the Internet grew to a centralized and commercial space. To deal with our failing world, we have to move back to operating infrastructures in a care-focused way. Scale makes things the same that are not, and that leads to systems creating harm. This work presents 13 propositions on how the Internet and our world will change in the future to come. It asks engineers to show care in their work, and take responsibility for the infrastructure they create.
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Why is it important?
We make 13 statements on how the Internet will change due to the human made climate emergency and the ensuing disasters and wars. We claim that our failing world needs engineers to operate infrastructures focused on care. At the same time, the progressing centralization of the Internet prevents systems to be build and operated with care in mind. Instead, this centralization further cements global injustice in the distribution of wealth and resources. The future of a burning world will be bleak, no matter the privilege you hold now. As engineers, it is our job to make any future brighter, no matter how dark it may be. The future can only get better if we take responsibility for the systems we build and users we serve.
Perspectives
This article is a summary of sysadmin lore and thoughts hidden in plain sight accross the operations community, combined with research insights from our recent work on centralization and system operation. We hope that it will serve as a wake-up call for engineers to realize the responsibility they carry, prompting more attention to care in how we build and operate systems.
Tobias Fiebig
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 13 propositions on an internet for a "burning world", August 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3538395.3545312.
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