(2021-08-06) Brander Exapt Existing Infrastructure

Gordon Brander: Exapt existing infrastructure (Exaptation). Designing an Internet (by David Clark) is a history of the internet’s technical design decisions, by one of the internet’s key designers.

One of the early goals of the Internet was to work on top of essentially any communications technology, because that approach seemed to be the only path to rapid, wide deployment

Systems have layers, and these layers evolve at different paces.

Pace Layering, Stewart Brand

Infrastructure has decades-long replacement cycles.

Here are the adoption curves for a handful of major technologies in the United States. There are big differences

Landline telephones took about 86 years to hit 80% adoption.

Smartphones took just 12 years.

Why these wide differences in adoption speed? Conformability with existing infrastructure

First our infrastructure shapes us, then we shape our infrastructure

The internet bootstrapped on top of existing telephone landlines, but it didn’t get stuck there

This is possible because the internet isn’t designed around telephone networking hardware. It isn’t designed around any hardware at all. Instead, the internet runs on ideas, a set of shared protocols

As this internet gained momentum and built up network effect, something interesting happened. Instead of conforming the internet to existing hardware, the hardware started to conform to it.

How to design a new internet? I think there are some systems design insights here that might be valuable for p2p, Web3, dweb, and other efforts to reform, reboot, or rethink the internet.

Resist the urge to build on a clean site.

The path of evolution is always through the adjacent possible.

Build around open-ended protocols

Exapt existing infrastructure.

The more it can conform to existing infrastructure, the faster it can get adopted. This is why I feel DeltaChat is one of the most quietly interesting things happening in the distributed software space. An end-to-end encrypted chat (instant messaging) app built on top of email infrastructure that already exists.