In a recent fediverse post by @Niall@mastodon.nz, he laid out his vision for an ethical tech experience, from a customer POV;
In my perfect world I’d buy some kind of a NAS with enough redundancy to survive a simple local hardware failure such as an HD. I would only need to plug it in and it would work as easily as my fridge.It would have a small portion dedicated to torrent-like storage for reciprocally backing up other people’s data so we would all have decentralized peer to peer disaster recovery. There would be some friendly, knowledgeable person that i paid fairly to migrate me to this and to maintain the infrastructure so that I didn’t have to do anything but use it.
I realise this is never going to happen but I can dream!
My reply was;
Why not?
All the core technologies needed to provide the products and services you describe already exist. There are plenty of people like yourself who desperately want them to, and are prepared to pay. There are plenty of people who’d be happy to make a living supplying them, rather than working EvilCorp jobs.
We can do this.
The main thing we’re lacking is a way to coordinate all these people, in ways that bring the required organizations into existence. It’s a classic collective action problem.
Funding to cover the startup costs would help. But anyone likely to be interested in supplying that - in enough volume to move the dial - will likely want evidence of a) demand, b) capacity for sustainable supply, c) a realistic plan to bring it all together.
Which brings us back to the collective action problem.
