Here’s what you should think about IPv8
Or, why your ‘experts’ don’t accomplish anything anymore.
As I’m sure many of you are aware, tech news has gone absolutely wild recently because somebody uploaded a proposal for the Internet Protocol suite that attempts to succeed where IPv6 failed.
It’s difficult for me to properly write about this because it is in so many ways the perfect storm of everybody of note being evil. I don’t know where to really start, but I’ll try to begin this with the video that was sent to me that led me to learn about this by reading about it for myself: a thinly veiled self-promotional vlog for some free software project made by a YouTuber with ~90,000 subscribers. Unsurprisingly, he has immediately adopted the same hateful, vindictive posture to this development that everyone else has, revealing a giant ongoing preference cascade of anti-intellectualism in the tech industry. His video description reads:
the tech news has gone absolutely wild recently because a random person uploaded their manifesto of how IPv8 should work to the IETF.
“A random person” and “manifesto” are the main phrases here telling you how you’re supposed to feel about this before you even find out anything about it. Importantly, this is meant to induce a sense of fear to cause you to refrain from vocalising any earnest interest in this, which you are likely to have. The slander here can just as easily be redirected at you, and you don’t want that, so don’t disagree! This is a RANDOM person and it’s their MANIFESTO. They could be a fucking school shooter basically, so watch your mouth.
As any IETF contributors know, anyone can upload a draft,
This is another common tactic in Western culture lately: don’t engage with the substance of what is being discussed, and don’t even directly attack the person uploading it. Instead, undermine all of it by passive-aggressively attacking their credibility by triumphantly asserting that they have none (ignoring your lack of place to say such a thing).
so the fact that the draft exists on their website doesn't mean anyone thinks this is a good idea. In fact, the IETF thinks this is a terrible idea, and so does every other professional organization that the author has taken it to
There is no citation for this, but of course that doesn’t matter. He’s flat-out lying about “the IETF think[ing] this is a terrible idea,” by conflating the personal opinions of several people associated with the IETF with the official stance of the IETF that does not exist. The author also hasn’t “taken it” to any other professional organisations as far as we know, so this is another fantasy that is unfalsifiable.
But that won't stop me from taking the one good idea from the draft and implementing a proof of concept, bridging old IPv4 clients to modern IPv6 using DNS-assisted translation. I call the concept CHARON (Cached Host Address Resolution for Outside Network) and the translation daemon is called 'styx'.
And here’s the rub. The guy spends a third of the runtime going on about this as if anyone asked or is interested in it. It’s disgusting to watch somebody tear down a complete stranger for having the audacity to create and attempt to contribute something new to the corpus of the Internet infrastructure, and then immediately use the tatters of his credibility to plug his own worthless bullshit. What a worm.
This is just par for the course though: everyone who is ‘anyone’ in the hilariously corrupt American-centred tech industry is hopping on this bandwagon to pelt rotten eggs at this guy for having the gall to do what they sit around and pretend to do all day. Cyber News breathlessly reports:
The proposal is receiving harsh criticism on Hacker News, Silicon Valley’s main social news website.
“Probably someone had an Adderall fueled night with an LLM, that’s just completely mad,” one of the users posted.
The website that was cloned from Reddit because Thiel acolytes realised the CIA got to capture Reddit before they could is ‘having an opinion’ about this. All of these websites are 100% captured and accultured to propagate the technical proclivities that suit their owners, and they have been doing this faithfully for years by now. There are no mainstream discussion forums on the Worldwide Web as we used to know them – in their place arrived metastable platoons of mentally ill terminally online losers who treat the place as a venue to adjudicate their own hyperreality. In other words, it’s all complete and total horseshit to coddle people who are rotting to death in their bedrooms. You can’t rely on this as a signal of how people feel about anything. And if all of that is too ethereal, the obvious mark is that they too are avoiding the object entirely, just like Mr. YouTuber before.
But if all that smearing and slandering wasn’t enough, they even went for the jugular here by calling it “AI slop.” Cyber News ran it through GPTZero, a wrapper that’s as honest as the AI slop they pretend to have misgivings about now because it personally suits them.
Nevermind that it’s been well-known for years that ‘AI detector systems’ aren’t reliable indicators of artificial generation. Nevermind that the people posing this provide no argument to follow from this observation that brings the credibility of the content they refuse to read into question. No, you need to fucking hate this shit! Hate it, hate it! Fucking hate it right now!
The IP protocol operates at the third (the network) layer, while OAuth is at Layer 7, the application layer. Many network devices don’t even have the capabilities to process application-layer functions, such as logins.
Here’s some more stupid pathological Americanisms on display. “I don’t understand this thing, so therefore you’re terrible and you suck and should fuck off forever.” This is one of the more overt cases of anti-intellectualism: the logic is, ‘my ignorance and incompetence is his fault’. They are entitled to be stupid and you are obligated to try to do this impossible favour for them, only to fail and of course prove them right because they rhetorically put it on you. Stupid, antisocial and circular horseshit.
Additional proof that this is a giant egregore of Western academic mental illness is its failure to replicate in Japan. Minnano Rakuraku fails to replicate the insinuations of seething, pathological hatred towards this man in their reporting on the proposal, only coming so close as to say this:
It is crucial to note that IPv8 is merely a proposal—an open submission—and not an official international standard (RFC).
The only other things you can point to are its repeating of the talking points as to why this initiative will fail, which is a kind of failure that journalists are a lot less culpable for. You wouldn’t blame a reporter when the entire Army lies to him, and likewise you wouldn’t blame an innocent tech journalist for taking the academy’s false consensus at face value. That’s why people like me are necessary for getting into the weeds about that.
On the contrary, journalists are very much chiefly culpable for doing what Cyber News is doing here: ‘joining in’ on the beat-up session by faithfully smuggling through all of the potshots, insinuations and unspoken arguments that are made to induce fear and loss in others. Journalism is centred around care of narrative, and unlike the Japanese tabloid Cyber News is very much guilty of molesting that here. Their only defense about it is that they’re following the crowd from the likes of Hacker News, but it’s not a very good defense to say you only kicked someone’s ribs in because 15 other guys were already doing it.
Everywhere you look there’s an emergent smear ongoing against this proposal, and the people doing it are absolutely merciless. The guy who proposed this is having his rice bowl smashed no sooner than he appears on the scene, getting more pathological vitriol than Terry Davis did when he was alive. Why are these tech people so violently opposed to this, especially when they don’t even make arguments that connect to the substance of the matter? Did they even read it at all? What the hell is going on here?
The first clue to answering this is in the YouTube video we started with. Look at who is doing the bullying here:
What you are looking at is the aesthetic embodiment of a cargo cultist of 1980s computing, who is completely entitled to the fruits of that world, labouring only for the pleasure of enjoying it while abhorring the guilt of pressure required to create and maintain it. This man does not build mainframes or write compilers for a living. He makes YouTube videos about pushing buttons created by people who did.
Even to start with, this premise of being assumes lots of load bearing that people like him have no intention of participating in. The computing of the 1980s was overwhelmingly achieved by true nerds who wore blue ties and refrained from swearing. Now it’s been co-opted by their red-headed hangers-on who liked Star Wars action figures a little too much, but were too incompetent to join NASA and instead had to get a job installing HVAC or repairing vending machines. Reagan’s heralding of neoliberalism and all the free money that implied opened the floodgates for unwarranted promotions and inclusions of millions of people like this that, in a real sense, we could never afford. Now we are suffering the stench of their presence, dying under the weight of their bloviating incompetence and need to bully to keep up the pretensions of their own worth to society.
Mr. YouTuber here is far from alone. George Hotz is also at level in these ways, being an otherwise completely ordinary reverse engineer and ROM hacker—something I myself was as a teenager, as were hundreds of others at the time—who parlayed his talent into a string of news articles about his exploits that he could then use to convince Silly-Con Valley criminals to invest in him as a kind of meth-fueled programmer strongman. John Carmack used to be much more faithfully a true nerd, and accomplished great things in his heyday, but apparently abandoned his calling as he got rich in the mid-1990s and opted for a more corporate selling out, in contrast to Hotz. People like Justine Tunney have similar backstories of abusing halcyon goodwill to carve out a piece of turf by force in the existing paradigms of computing. Creating new things is hard, and it’s much easier to tear others down, so the smart move is to claim something existing everyone already has. But the most noteworthy examples are examples of the inverse who you don’t see shuffling around social media: people like Guido van Rossum or, funnily enough, Linus Torvalds. You don’t hear about them because social media is 100% captured and they haven’t made that deal with the devils running them to sell out and become a clown of their former selves.
The reason that this kind of person is so morally disgusting is because, collectively, they are why computing as we know it is stuck in a stunted paradigm of making impossibly fast renditions of the same computer chips we had in the 1980s. It happens through a combination of free money (either literally or by Moore’s Law, which is dead by the way) and special effects (usually this means paying true nerds in Taiwan to do it for us), because the ‘programmers’ that are qualitative dollar store rip-offs aren’t actually pulling their weight at all. Earnest attempts at progress—such as this IPv8 proposal—are violently punished, while cult creations sanctioned by committee, like Rust, are paraded around while their glaring failings are excused and ignored. The simple problem here is that the computing doesn’t actually chiefly matter to these people, but they are willing to use every power they have to make sure that they get to continue to inhabit the avatar of Hackerman without doing the work to earn that distinction.
These people do not love computing. They do not love computers. Nobody who loves computers would ever write a fucking YouTube title like “IPv8 is STUPID!!” with two exclamation points. Nobody who loves computers would criticise this despite not having read the fucking thing. These people are cultural frauds, and they’re causing incalculable amounts of damage to human society in their efforts to keep the charade running.
For what it’s worth, there are a few things that I would change to try to improve the IPv8 proposal. But I can hardly write about that in this toxic environment where everyone has already settled on being a violent pieces of shit to the person who proposed it because it made them look like the incompetent buffoons that they really are. This made them mad because it’s a bold and naked instance of someone demonstrating not only technical wit but also courage, in a very public way that they cannot shove under the rug and ignore. They’re scrambling and doing damage control because they do not have that courage and this is demonstrating that in an undeniable way – after all, if this was possible, why didn’t you do it already if you’re such a preeminent expert that everybody was right to pay and promote all this time?
The end state of all of this is the self-discreditation of the academy, at least for informatics. The luminaries of our field either do not know, do not care, or do not believe that they can stop this onslaught of Dark Age backstabbing, but they alone have the required credibility to do so. In any case, unknown authors like myself will be the lone wolves mourning the destruction of the commons, and the damage here is existential to the field. From these moments, the field has less reason to be believed by the general public, because they could not self-regulate enough to produce responsible and meaningful work. They chose self-aggrandising YouTube videos of them crybullying and circlejerking over making a better technology stack for humanity.
As for myself, this is not the end, but another beginning. Anodyne is quickly finding footing amongst people who wish to take it seriously outside of the contrived trappings of the tech mob in America, and my reworking of Protocol Seven was certainly far from complete in its handling of the rest of the orchestra compared to IPv8. So, I will do what the academy should have been doing in response to this instead of burning the books and lynching the authors: I will use this work collaboratively and the new, reworked Protocol Seven will earnestly credit the IPv8 as a major source of inspiration. And as with everything else in Anodyne, it will arrive to the general public without the approval of the corrupt circuses holding the industry down and kicking it until it cries uncle. And when real people are finally using this, the loss of credibility taking place here is realised, making the whole world marvel at the failure taking place today.
Glad I didn't have to read another potshot on the topic