gemini://jsreed5.org/log/2022/202209/20220904-the-viability-of-sneakernets.gmi

ew0k pondered yesterday whether a sneakernet is useful in free, developed countries^. It seems a modern sneakernet is a solution to a non-existent problem, assuming the activities it supports are not illegal or socially unacceptable.

Is this actually the case? I think the issue is not so black and white. The degree to which a society is free and a nation is developed is a major factor in my opinion.

First, a point of pedantry. The title of ew0k's post refers to free and developed societies, but in the article, the phrase "democratic countries in the developed world" is used. I don't see free countries and democratic countries as being synonymous. It's certainly possible for democratic countries not to be free: the majority may choose to give up freedoms for the sake of safety or civil order, or may strip freedoms from the minority for profit or to enforce societal norms. Conversely, free societies may not be democratic: a hypothetical anarchist society has almost unlimited freedom at the level of the individual, but does not have a central government, democratic or otherwise.

In relation to the main point, however, I think it's necessary to define what "free" and "developed" mean. For the sake of discussion, I would define a perfectly developed society as a society in which all people, regardless of economic status, have the ability to use and engage with technological infrastructure on an equal footing. Everyone has access a computer or smartphone, everyone has access to a fast and reliable Internet connection, and everyone has their own personal space in those technologies to store and share data. Further, I define a perfectly free society in this context to include the freedom to share essentially unlimited quantities of data without restriction, and such sharing is not tracked, monitored or surveilled--it is, in short, fully private.

Given these definitions, in a perfectly free and developed society, a sneakernet would not be necessary. People would be able to share whatever data they want, how they want, with whom they want, and they would not have to worry about their data being snooped on.

Of course, none of us live in such a society. Nowhere do we have such perfect freedoms (relative to this concept), and nowhere do we have such robust infrastructure--though some places are certainly closer to each ideal than others.

Though I didn't know the term, I was involved in extensive sneakernets during my middle and high school days. I grew up in a very small town in rural America, and several of my childhood friends still had dial-up Internet into the early 2010s. We shared all sorts of files with each other, from documents to family photos to freeware games, some of which I still have today. Even in 2014 I was still trading some burned CDs with one friend who lived in a poor part of town.

To me, however, the more enticing part of any sneakernet is the privacy. It's a fallacy, and unfortunately a highly-effective one, to say that the only people who care about privacy are those engaged in shady activity. But a strong argument in favor of privacy is the "future malice" argument: a powerful entity that looks into your private life may be benevolent now, but what if a malevolent force begins to abuse that level of access?

Our Internet connections, and the data we send across them, are constantly monitored by governments and corporations alike. Most of them we'll never hear about--until they suffer a security breach and our credit cards suddenly appear on the dark Web. I'd rather bypass that entirely and just deal directly with the people from whom I want data.

This problem is analogous to the question of cashless societies to me. "Why would you want to use cash? You have to carry heavy coins around to make change, you could get jumped in an alley and lose it all, and credit cards are just so much more convenient." That may all be true, but there are downsides to cards and cryptocurrency: a lack of physical objects leaving your possession reduces the psychological impact that a purchase makes, credit cards can be duplicated and used fraudulently, and all of your purchases are tracked and analyzed by your bank and their "trusted partners". I prefer cash, and I prefer sneakernets.

There is also an argument to be made for simply enforcing our right to do it. I've heard it phrased succinctly: "a right unexercised is a right lost". Companies in particular are very quick to deprecate and remove technology when more-monetizable technologies can replace it--think of Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone or Google building computers with Web-based operating systems. If companies see that offline technologies such as SD cards and physical ports are in demand, they'll be more reluctant to remove them, and keeping them is the only way sneakernets can stay alive.

The Viability of Sneakernets

2022-09-04