Philosophy of Mori

This section is largely inspired by the Zen of Reticulum, a document outlining the philosophical foundations and consequences of Reticulum, a network stack for secure communication over spotty, high latency, and/or low throughput networks.

Why make a slower, smaller internet? Isn’t that just… worse?

This is a very reasonable concern!

Increased internet speeds give us increased access, slimming the interface between ourselves and the tool. It’s crucial to ask if we want to be as close to the tool as possible? Do we want to merge with it? Do we want to become dependent on something we can’t separate from?

Online, we have immediate access to the vast majority of human knowledge, as well as practically instant communication with everyone on earth. It’s an indespensible part of much of 21st century living, offering us unprecedented modes of agency and connection. Does the internet (also) often distract us from our daily lives, facilitate echo chambers that make people into the most isolated, radicalized versions of themselves, and provide entertainment that is economically incentivized to take reality’s place, ideally as much as possible?

Well… yeah. Not great.

The internet exists as this incredible, essential tool that can do so much for us, while also being really shitty in ways that are making it so much worse to exist. We accept atomization and radicalization because they’re bundled with the lifeblood of the modern world. It’s like how it’s unthinkable to live without a phone, and often totally impractical, so you accept the negative effects it has on you as an unfortunate but basically foregone conclusion.

But there are dumb phones! If you want a barebones communicator, you can have that! You can strip away the parts that make your experience worse, and use a tool that better suits your lifestyle. There is no “dumb internet”. Why is that?

A “Dumb” Internet

The internet exists to enable communication between local networks that otherwise couldn’t communicate, an inter-network system.

Fundamentally that’s all it is. What’s interesting are the structures that arise naturally from this basic inter-network property. Being a system that connects almost everyone together, an enormously massive quantity of human beings is concentrated in a dimensionless space. A space where the concepts of “distance” and “too far away” don’t exist. If you wanted to, you can scrape the web and map out the vast majority it because servers will typically respond to your request in less than a second. Online, everyone on Earth is your roommate, and you live in a studio.

It’s a space that spans almost zero logical distance, but contains vast internal dimensions. Truly a density that rivals the neutron star.

Economically, this is a goldmine. A mall with millions of hidden cameras, controlled by a few billionaires, that everyone on Earth shops at. The store also contains the world’s fastest post office, largest movie theater, a library with the most extensive media collection on Earth, and a million bars, ranging in capacity from one-hundred million to just a few. So most customers really aren’t even coming to shop. Though, you can (and would be wise to) record their behavior at any of the bars and sell it to shops that are interested. The mall knows an immense, intimately personal amount about its customers, far more than they could imagine.

So what if the web wasn’t a dystopian mega-mall? What if it was a neighborhood? A tight-knit, private community shaped by community interests, not oligarchy. A web that is small enough to know everyone on it, but still has the rich social dynamics and relationships found online.

Everyone gets a plot of land in the neighborhood and is free (actually free) to expand it as much as they please. Build a bar, an art gallery, or put up a community-accessible bulletin board.

This is the shape of Mori networks. And it seems “dumb” if we’re using the dystopian mega-mall as our yardstick, but I hope I’ve conveyed just how ill-suited this sort of structure is for human health and well-being. Mori, as a simple, local web, has an inherent friction and constrained size that sidestep the internet’s many fundamental, structural problems.