Katherine Druckman (0s):
Hi everyone. Welcome back to this week's Reality 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman. I am with Doc Searls as usual and Petros Koutoupis is joining us again today. We also have a special guest Hadrian Zbarcea from Apache. If you were involved in Apache in any way, you probably know him and were talking about a little bit of everything. So I'm not going to nail this down to a specific topic. This is a very organic conversation, and I hope you'll enjoy the ride before we get going.

Katherine Druckman (45s):
I wanted to quickly remind everyone to please go sign up for our newsletter. You can find a link on our website Reality to cast.com and just click the Newsletter or subscribe link. Thanks

Doc Searls (57s):
So, so let me jump in and say that one of the things that makes is especially interesting is that this is a zoom call that started on another zoom call. As we came up on our time to start the show. And I said to a guy on a, on a Slack to Katherine and to Petros, Hey, I'm having this terribly interesting conversation with this guy. Hadrian I would like to just carry this forward into this show. And so I just wanted to say that because I just think it's an interesting thing. And, and we just decided maybe Revolutions of the topic here, because Hadrian has been through a bunch of them and he's probably has a better understanding of Revolutions than anybody I've met in.

Doc Searls (1m 43s):
Perfect. Because he was there for one of the physical kind that actually ended bloody and a So deal. But there are, there are others who has been working with a patchy. You seen the open source and free software So so Hadrian why do you, why don't you just give us the, the sort of the top down on, on Revolutions from your perspective,

Katherine Druckman (1m 60s):
Just, just before we go there, can I just point out that I hope that this episode does not end up a little bit too prophetic because it will come out next Friday after election day, it was like that out, but yeah, no, go ahead please. I think it might, it probably instructive. We might all need to know how

Hadrian Zbarcea (2m 18s):
Let's start with the most recent than the one that's going to be next week. I think that evolution already started, who knows how it's going to continue next week, but I think there are profound changes in society that we lead to some change. And I have a high trust inhumanity. I think most of the changes that are going to be a good changes, but going back in time, I know you alluded to the physical blood, the revolution in Romania, when I was in college, what to students do they, well, you know what evolved, but there was good cause 'cause, It was against the communism.

Hadrian Zbarcea (3m 2s):
And anyway, that was a bit of an ugly society that I'm very happy and the, the inhumane and that's better, but it wasn't my most interesting, Revolutions the most interesting Revolutions to me while I was, I believe what happened in the mid, late nineties in the.com era. And in particular, what I think is the most profound change is on the internet where the Apache web server and the mosaic Netscape browser, which gave everybody the power. We talked about this earlier, uhm, to basically publish their own data.

Hadrian Zbarcea (3m 46s):
And if you remember how the website's we're looking at with flashy colors in all that stuff's in the mid, late nineties, there were really ugly by that lead to new markets and new innovation in web frameworks, dynamic websites. I think that was the most interesting revolution that that actually lasted probably around the decade for me, between probably 98 to 2008, 2010, by the way, down to the UFC 97. So

Petros Koutoupis (4m 21s):
That's interesting. The, the, you mentioned Apache. Yes. I, I, I agree. It wasn't until Apache started becoming widely used and installed on cheaper commodity platforms, such as Linux, that, that, that the internet blew up. I mean, people were starting to see the internet for what it can do and a mosaic initially laid down the foundation, but it wasn't until Mark Andris and moved to the West TBI, I think he was a university of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and he moved out West to find his dream of a startup.

Petros Koutoupis (5m 1s):
And that's when Netscape was born. I think that really launched alongside of a patchy what, what we have today. I mean, that was a significant Revolutions.

Doc Searls (5m 12s):
Yeah, I mean, but for me it was a huge, I mean, I, I, I saw the internet coming for a long time. I wanted so badly to be on it, but I couldn't because there wasn't a university are a big company and the closest I could do is they kind of tunneling in through CompuServe toward the end of its life. It became kind of its own little ISP and you can kind of like kind of be on the internet through emulation, almost on CompuServe. But then once I S P is really realized peace came along and I could get on and I bought my domain name, I bought searls.com and I, and I could, I learned HTML and I wrote some of those ugly pages. We're looking at one earlier, we were talking about El Def Hadrian and, and I, that I wrote for Linux journal.

Doc Searls (5m 53s):
I can't find it on the Linux journalist site because it was for a magazine briefly had called web Smith. And we, we saw the web is such a big thing that we invented web Smith as the magazine for it. But there are so many other magazines that come along for the web. I don't know if those survive, but I wrote this piece about L DAP and eldap was a revolution in a way Hadrian was saying earlier that when he went to Google, people have asked him what his elder was, which is weird to me, but I can, I can kind of understand what that people didn't know what it meant, but they saw that as your identity there. Do I have that right? Hadrian that what they meant by that with Eldep

Hadrian Zbarcea (6m 30s):
Yes. What they mentioned was that I was shocked. So I had the rental car that I went to the parking lot and there was a valet parking and the valet asks me that was a young guy, clearly non-technical, what's your elder. And they assume he must mean something else, then the elderly by now. But I know he meant three out of that.

Doc Searls (6m 53s):
Well, and an interesting thing to me about that is that the, the piece that I wrote for Linux Gerald was actually an interview with Craig Burton. I'm in, and it was about Tim Howe's worked him. He has invented El Doc. He came up with eldap and it was at a time when Microsoft very much wanted to in Craig's terms, smushed the entire internet into active directory and went LDF still. I mean, the active directory is still succeeded in the enterprise to a large degree, but, but eldap app basically made that impossible and put into the, into the world. Something that was terribly useful and other protocols and approach it. When you have a totally useful protocol like that, it costs you nothing to use.

Doc Searls (7m 32s):
Then a revolution occurs, you know, that can happen to be around directory, but a bit, but others can So. I want to get a little bit into what I think is the meat. What bring to re you bring to the world. Hadrian, I'm a, and I'm going to die and it's not a round, a patchy, especially that maybe it isn't a way I don't know. So I'm going to compress what my, in my partial and probably flooded understanding of some insights that you have that I liked when we had an earlier conversations, which are that we, we tend to look at the internet through synchronous glasses that we've learned from the, from the HTTP protocol and wanting to run everything through our kind of client server view of the web.

Doc Searls (8m 19s):
And it was kind of explored everything we could possibly do with the web, but we need to look at asynchrony as well. We've a model for that se with the, with email emails, asynchronous And. If you look at it asynchronously, we, we can do a lot of other things that are around messaging. So for example, and you mentioned the us postal service is a model, but there are other asynchronous ways of addressing something that are substitutable. Essentially you can use FedEx, you can use ups, you can do something else. And I kinda want you to, if, if I'm close enough to write about that, I would like to hear more because I think there's a space here and the asynchronous world that we can have a zillion services that we can't even imagine.

Doc Searls (9m 7s):
Now that maybe we can imagine that a one or two or three, so go for it.

Hadrian Zbarcea (9m 13s):
Oh man, that's a complicated dish. I don't even know how to, how to approach, but how, how did I end up on this podcast?

Doc Searls (9m 25s):
Well, it's it's because I think that's an interesting point. I don't know. No, no. Oh, the mechanics of it. Oh, it's a heuristic question. Okay. Yeah. It's a Slack Slack.

Hadrian Zbarcea (9m 36s):
It wasn't a synchronous conversation between the two between you and Katherine okay. That's right. It could happen. And then you could plan and do other things and to tie it to your book, it was a bit of an intent casting, a synchronously via chat room, right? Yeah. And something happened. Yes. So I think in a way we're the victims of our own success, if you want. So circling back to the Netscape and Marc Andreessen, and I think we got as humans, So used to the idea for a browser and syndromes to be going to where we wanted to get the data we care about and going again, back to the late nineties, that's something we didn't talk about.

Hadrian Zbarcea (10m 31s):
One of the issues with synchronous communication is address management. We talked about the dresses. So how do I know the URL of the place where I need to go, all right. We talked about centralization as well. So until you have a Google and which became a verb, by the way, to Google something, we had like us not a Vista and all that stuff. Before but you need that centralization, it a sort of changing, you need that discovery mechanism to figure out where you want to do to be, or what to do Castillo the intent. Right? So a, another thing that people that are not aware of Before so rest in God, if you aren't successful in a massive battle with a w S start, standard's mostly the W3C and that it beat the toys.

Hadrian Zbarcea (11m 21s):
He says, I assume that you know that, right.

Doc Searls (11m 25s):
Yeah, I do. I was hitting a mute button because there was a leaf blower outside of my window. So, but yeah, so, so some of the action happens in those standards that you had a D a w S star was a bunch of large companies that wanted to get together to talk to me, to work on approach, to identity and the standards for identity. And then the W3C did some stuff and Oasis as well with SDI and Sri as a recall.

Hadrian Zbarcea (11m 52s):
Right. But it wasn't just my that's just a little bit, it was the soap and we still, in the core on the communication Site and all the years at the time supported, starting with Sony, then we talked about IBM WebSphere. So they were there ESBs are a new, interesting a topic to talk about that as well, by the way. But there was a w S people, by the way, which I'm a coauthor off, I was in the team that produces w S people, the equivalent to the W3C was the biggest choreography Martin Chapman was it, it wasn't like that.

Hadrian Zbarcea (12m 32s):
So there are, there were a lot of w S a N standards, not just around identity and dabble Guests was the early in the, so we used the word was the Hi ceremony, contracts. Everything is set in stone sort of approach coming from the enterprise. And you're right. The players are Microsoft.

Doc Searls (12m 55s):
Yeah. IBM, IBM was in Ws

Hadrian Zbarcea (12m 58s):
SAP, Fuji to, you know, what it is aspects. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Doc Searls (13m 7s):
When they say they were at this show gave the closing keynote. And I actually, you know, saying the Darth Vader theme that dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb when they were coming on stage thing, because it is,

Hadrian Zbarcea (13m 22s):
And to time to revolution, rest was kind of a revolt to that. Right. And in the language you space, we saw the same thing with the, a functional programming and a less strict typing sort of languages like Ruby. And who's a Drupal developer here.

Doc Searls (13m 47s):
We have, we have our house Drupal developer writing it up.

Hadrian Zbarcea (13m 50s):
Oh, it looks like if everybody has a head, this is her share of a Revolutions here. But what I wanted to say is that before this, there was another Bethel that took place between synchronous and asynchronous with the GMs back in, in the JCP sun at that time. And so you have said that there may be some connection with a batch. Yes, I'm a commuter in an active MQ. So one of the authors of active in Kew and Kamil and a few projects, their, so basically the project he was in, all of the DSPs that are based on the open source technology is today like fuse talent and others.

Hadrian Zbarcea (14m 38s):
So the enterprise actually didn't realize the importance of asynchronous messaging and all the large enterprises have some, is have business processes based on asynchronous messaging. And one of the technical problems is to managing the address space because you cannot have a different entities using the same address, which is easy to control in the enterprise, more or less easier. You can enforce it Doc down, but it's hard to do it at cloud scale. And nobody looked at this problem of addressing. And that's why I think we didn't see any innovation in that space to take the asynchronous messaging at the cloud scale, because somebody would have to solve the addressing problems.

Hadrian Zbarcea (15m 29s):
First, I see these as the biggest, so if you want to go though, okay. So

Doc Searls (15m 37s):
I'm relying on my, you know, now 20 plus year old familiarity with covering some of this stuff on the enterprise side, that they're, and again, it goes back to L DAP and active directory and the rest of it, the problem that lots of enterprises had was many multiple address spaces. Here's HR, here's the manufacturing here's, here's marketing, here's a customer support, and they all had different. Namespaces no way to reconcile them. And the big talk, the whole point of Ws star and have the Liberty Alliance also, which sun was a, that was my son's creation. That's now can Terra, or does the Cutera is descended from him?

Doc Searls (16m 19s):
You know, the whole idea was Federation and Federation was like the big term for about 10 years there in the early aughts. It kind of in awe, right? There are roughly from the end of the.com boom. But I, but I wanna go deeper into head and into the addressing and that inconvenienced addressing to some degree, but I, and that may have been when there wasn't much innovation in there other than some cool companies came in, paying in others, the same will take care of Federation four. You, you know, will, will, will reconcile all of these battling namespaces in and have some kind of coherent outcome. But there wasn't, we're still sort of stuck with the same problem. And I am I wrong about that? That I'm trying to get it toward where you want to go with where messaging is going to enter the message, the asynchronous messaging approach to things may go or could go if we get it, get something together,

Hadrian Zbarcea (17m 12s):
A sink does messaging gives you, is that we use email, we use Slack, we use bike. It's not used, it's used in silos. Yeah. But I didn't interrupt you by the way. But when we had the conversation about a Netscape and the Apache server that revolutionized internet, we agree on that to some extent, why did we have Before you mentioned CompuServe. We had platforms and what do we have today platforms? And everybody did belts against them, but we don't know what to do. So what we need, I think it is not something Hi ceremony. We need the same ad hoc innovation sort of approach of the student in technology is kind of like the identity foundation does.

Hadrian Zbarcea (18m 0s):
I really hope they would coordinate their efforts a bit more and he would learn more from each other and from history, because there is a lot of really usable prior art.

Doc Searls (18m 11s):
It's interesting what you said about platform's like we, we had a platform problem with CompuServe prodigy and the rest, you know, in the early nineties, late eighties, early nineties there in a way it was solved by a TCP IP, which actually has been around for a long time too. But once I S P D came along in, in, in the mid nineties, plus the graphical browser, plus Apache really huge, important innovation there, I remember IBM was selling web sphere for like, you know, a, a thousand dollars a seat or some crazy number like that.

Hadrian Zbarcea (18m 44s):
I am in the article. It says a sales WebLogic. Yes.

Doc Searls (18m 47s):
Yeah. So, so there, there, there are all of these big companies selling, assuming that only a big company is going to have web servers, right. And not anybody can set up a web server and have it. And now we're in platforms again. Right. And now we're not. And now we're back to, we were thinking inside the silos of Apple and Facebook and Google and the others, and only what can be done there. Am I wrong? And what you do?

Hadrian Zbarcea (19m 13s):
No, you're right. But sorry to interrupt because you know, Revolutions aspect to this in 93, 94, I worked, I was at the United nations, by the way, working on some really cool project or No is too. And speaking, it's not really quite platform, but it's the same stuff. If you remember the Microsoft versus IBM Beto at the time when IBM bet on the enterprise and a bill Gates bet on the grandma with the person's computer at home, all right,

Doc Searls (19m 46s):
Well, I've even had microchannel and they wanted to split the, the PC world into micro channel versus whatever the good that was tied in with <inaudible>. I think it wasn't it

Hadrian Zbarcea (19m 56s):
Right, but from an adoption, from an economic point of view, IBM bet. On the enterprise and really the Gates bet on the consumer and the results were not even funny for IBM.

Petros Koutoupis (20m 10s):
You know, the funny thing is, now that you mentioned that because years ago I used to work for IBM. And to this day, to this day, they still bet on the enterprise. It's almost like they haven't learned from history and it's still a business to business M commerce. It is that they don't deal with the end-user, which is why, when you look at 'em, IBM's a footprint or market share, and the cloud, it pales in comparison to your Amazon, to your Azure, to Google, to anything else only because they strictly focus on business to business and have

Hadrian Zbarcea (20m 48s):
Always worked under that model. Since, like you said, you know, since all of us two days, what are you talking about? Red head. No, no, no, just kidding. <inaudible> God, I was there. You were there. I was there when they acquired red hat, there was a, it was a bit of a shock for everyone. All right.

Doc Searls (21m 17s):
Okay. So what kind of, okay, so we were seeing that, you know, could, so we had Slack. I mean, when we were talking in Slack, we, we were talking inside a silo and it's a good silo. I mean, it's like, nobody is, nobody makes it better, whatever that is that Slack does. When do you call that? What it is it just, what is it like a Brita Katherine, you know, is it a, it's basically souped up by IRC. Okay. Now nobody does a bitter souped up by our seats. And then, then Slack does.

Hadrian Zbarcea (21m 49s):
Yes. I R C thank you. Yes.

Doc Searls (21m 51s):
But, but I mean, but, but what IRC made possible and we still do, we still do IRC. I do IRC every day. I mean it, so it's not like IRC has gone away. Newsgroups have kind of gone away. We were talking about that earlier on another call, I think, or there's still a news groups, I guess they're still do it as groups and you might still be active. Maybe a mailing list are coming back, but they are all proprietary. Like if you're on sub STAC or you're on MailChimp or some of the things like that, you know, I th th those two or kind of siloed, but, you know, were, you know, what, what intrigued me here is that it just sort of lay out in my prejudices.

Doc Searls (22m 32s):
And I think they're typical of ones for geek's of the, of the Lennox band. And it kind of go back to the free software days, which is I do all my own stuff. I have my own thing. I've got my, I am the rock on which I build my life. I, I have my own web server. I have my own email server. I have my own everything. I had my own domain name. I I am the captain of my ship and my soul. And umm, and I start there now I'll go ahead and use things. I'm talking to you over a Mac, right? It's not like I'm totally wedded to that, but I'm starting from that position. And part of the way of thought about that is that all, everything should be peer to peer, right?

Doc Searls (23m 16s):
There is sort of a, a prejudice I have like I, I want to be able to deal in a peer-to-peer way with everybody else. I am no different than a big company. That way we were all on the same planet. We all use the same gravity and I should be able to, we should look for us to solve everything at a peer to peer way. But I also get, let me ask you this, you know, for sure

Hadrian Zbarcea (23m 36s):
Aside from the user interface, how did you know you were on Slack?

Doc Searls (23m 40s):
I probably didn't.

Hadrian Zbarcea (23m 43s):
So if you had your own Doc user for messaging and you have some channels, addresses, chatrooms, whatever you, you call them in there and you can just type and the user interface would know that this address actually maps to Slack or naps to IRC or whatever. Why would you care?

Doc Searls (24m 5s):
I would love, I would not care.

Hadrian Zbarcea (24m 7s):
The financial industry goes that single window to the world, right? So you use a single window to talk to, you know, the financial stuff, any band you want, right? So you have this year and that will lead to innovation because you would use any client you want because the back end would be the same, the mediator that mediates to whatever channel you're talking about. So if we separate the two, I think we can get over the platform. It's the same to let that we needed that existed between the Apache web server and the browser. You have to separate the presentation from the back end.

Katherine Druckman (24m 42s):
You mean, if, you know, if you strip the, the, the client and the, the Polish, you know, we can substitute matrix or discord if you're a gamer or whatever, none of the rest of it really matters in terms of communication.

Hadrian Zbarcea (24m 57s):
But you need the user interface, like the browser that unifies in a way or the other channels, right? So the browser, you can look at any web server on the planet. You didn't have to have a specialized gooey for a while,

Katherine Druckman (25m 11s):
Nor should you have a specialized the takeaway for chat. But that's a whole other conversation. I wish Kyle are we here?

Hadrian Zbarcea (25m 17s):
What's the address?

Doc Searls (25m 19s):
Okay. So you are moving toward addressing here So so if a routing notice in some way, okay. Let's say, I mean, it annoys me for example, that I have people we, or I talked to on telegram on signal, on SMS, on Facebook messenger, Twitter, DM, there is no common in our user interface for those I have to, I have to declare the tunnel that I'm going through, but we have to agree on that. But before we go there, right, we are doing that right now is zoom at a way, it was, they were going to do this on zoom, right? And, and we could be doing it with Microsoft teams. Are you to do it some other system and sit on it.

Doc Searls (26m 0s):
We have to agree on it. There's this little ceremony where we all agree on something, right? This is a little bit is not negotiated. It's more or less like I got this, that's open. Let's just do that. But not only kind of fails the usability test at the front end, it does it a back end to it because there's all these, if we keep our record about these, they are all stored in, in different places. That's another thing to, to Zoom's credit. If they're is a chat and you click on the little file button and you save off the chat, it creates a directory on your computer and sticks it there as a TA, as pure text as a, you know, formatting or, or anything.

Doc Searls (26m 40s):
So that kind of gone to the lowest possible common there, but it works. I mean, it works in, it'd be nice if the others did a similar thing and you know, I don't know, but, but it's in a directory called zoom by the way. So that's, you know, but that, that just is, it is something easy is that easy is finding it, but that, but that's part of, we still all live in the Unix directory world and we've lived there and we lived there on the web as well. Right. I mean, that's, that's what the folder in a folder in a folder is it's still a Unix path and that's, that's fine. I mean, it's a standard, it's a kind of a standard way of working, but I wanna, I wanna kind of go toward an I and I realize it is not an end state here because unlike almost every podcast I am on you, haven't already built something and you're not selling anything.

Doc Searls (27m 26s):
So that is

Hadrian Zbarcea (27m 27s):
So that's what object storage solves. Right. And you know, a folder in a folder, in a folder. And now it's all a one flat file system, like a giant hash, the appointing to your object data, which is exactly what the hard drive is. Yes. It's a, it's a flat storage space and then direct restructuring. I know this is just the meta data. Exactly. And so on how you look at

Doc Searls (27m 51s):
Right. And is it, I mean, your drive itself as horribly fragmented, right? And in ways that you will, it's horrifying to even look at, right. I, I've got looking over there at my backup drive in C it's a 10 terabyte drive. It is almost full what I'm sure it's just horribly frame in there, but somehow the directory structure manages to, and to put stuff, to put that stuff together. It's putting Humpty together at all times, which is pretty wild. And we do that as a matter of, of course. So where does this go? I mean, that, that's kind of where I want a revolution. I think it goes, well, what happened? I mean, I I've been in a number of Revolutions and then one of the problems Revolutions have is imagining what's on the other side of them, you know, we are going to, I mean, if it, for God's sakes, you know, both the Soviet union and China for the longest time, it's all like, lets keep the revolution going.

Doc Searls (28m 43s):
It's all belonged to the, the revolutionary party of us and such and, and is just, it's just another bureaucracy after, after all is said and done with a lot of politics in it. But I I'd like us to imagine that where this goes, you know what I mean? I, I did not imagine that ISP, but ISP, they, our, what made part of what made the web happen? I there were many web servers. I remember Apple had one. I briefly used their, as it was done by a guy in new, I forget his name right now, but it was there a little server, but they ended up, you know, we've like all of us, we just used the patch. There was a patchy, it laying around, we just put this in here. It gets, you know, as a matter of fact, it didn't, it didn't Linux distributions come with a patchy.

Doc Searls (29m 26s):
Some of them, I think as part of it, just as a distro, I don't really remember

Hadrian Zbarcea (29m 31s):
The lamp <inaudible> BHP. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and if it doesn't, it's easy enough to install. That's the thing. So it's funny. We, Sam

Katherine Druckman (29m 42s):
Sitting here, I'm like, Oh, this is great. You know, impromptu as a guest. And I'm kind of, you know, sitting here thinking like, Oh wow, I've got a patchy committer here. What can I ask? And then I find myself struggling because to me and not to steal one of your analogies Doc but Apache is like gravity. So like what, what, what should I ask him about breathing oxygen? You know, So so I'm in the sort of place where I, I wonder if so like, I mean, I can't say that Apache won. It's not like there were no other, there are no other competitors or whatever, but the, the nature of what a patchy is one and changed the world and what not, but I'm wondering, so, but like Doc says, where do we go from here? What's the, what's the next revolution? Like what are we currently hashing out right now?

Hadrian Zbarcea (30m 23s):
Well, I, I think the best way to, to answer that question is to ask yourself, why was there a revolution in the first place? It, you have individuals that are not happy there not going to stand for or what others are probably accepting or complacent to him. And they want more, they want something different and that different could be something political. It could be something soft where it could be something, you know, anywhere. So if you want to see where the next revolution is going to be, your going to have to look out and, and figure out why are we not happy?

Hadrian Zbarcea (31m 4s):
And where are we not happy? And what's already brewing, that's going to kickstart another revolution. Oh, I have a few ideas about this. And, but so one is a bit negative. What I think is different now is the limited attention span. It takes time for adoption. And we have so much technology around that. It's almost not worth innovating anymore because you know, the big guys are just going to wait you out. This is going to be another guy in the garage, innovating something, this place in you. And in the meantime, we just chug along or collect your data or sell it.

Hadrian Zbarcea (31m 45s):
I think that there are two worlds going on a very small world of, you know, innovation, which is what open source was all a lot of actually, I mean, it goes through, but it's still not a significant versus the world of the giants. Yeah. And if they don't displace, you they'll consume you and probably get rid of you. Yeah. Right. The post on a positive note. Is that again, talking about Revolutions I heard the conversation with what kind of income I think is brings really interesting memories of this conversation. Like I forgot about this, about a military strategy and the, a how to put it in the fight in military strategy between mobility and armor.

Hadrian Zbarcea (32m 30s):
Right. You cannot have both is a central or mobility or nobility in the armor mobility. Yeah. Being fast and agile vs. Having a lot of farmer. An

Doc Searls (32m 44s):
Armor. Okay. Okay. And

Hadrian Zbarcea (32m 46s):
In our ward, I think it is between centralization and decentralization if you want. Right. Because things start to, I mean, the internet was started to decentralize to protect against damage in case of a nuclear attack, the Russians and all that stuff. Right. DARPA, seventies, and then you got back centralization, then you got, you got the mainframes, then you got the PCs. Then you got centralisation again in the cloud or if you want, and what made the analogy that these kind of sounds like a in military, you don't know what if you want to have, you want to be lightweight more of a ability or, you know, a heavy and more armor in both have their advantages, obviously.

Doc Searls (33m 34s):
Yeah. And in the part of it, when one approach is offensive and defensive and we were probably, it was a lot of different ways to cut out that.

Hadrian Zbarcea (33m 42s):
Yeah. But I think innovation, we always have been and who knows, what's going to get some traction personally. I didn't expect blockchain's to get these kind of traction. Well, they still, we still don't because to me, blockchains are technology from a technology standpoint, a brilliant think it's not new, but it's brilliant, but it couldn't have been justified. There is a sort of a non-repudiation system. So they had to cram other things into it, like blocks with financial transactions to justify and to make things even worse that reward for the operators have the blockchain, what

Doc Searls (34m 22s):
The No of miners for

Hadrian Zbarcea (34m 23s):
The miners in, in Bitcoin. Yes. It was not based on the quality of service they provide to their users. But based on mining, which created, in my opinion, the horrible eco-system that can not survive in this shape because the incentives are not well aligned. I think that will be an ovation on Facebook is another example that, who knew that social media has kind of grow to this extent that they have so much influence, right. We talked about the revolution next week. So I think that it will be an innovation and something that is kind of a catch for the reasons that we can really foresee, but coming back, I really think that they synchronize sort of messaging and establishing the infrastructure for that because the Apache web servers became kind of like a fax machines, right?

Hadrian Zbarcea (35m 16s):
They had this network effect. There was no point in having a browser until you have a lot of servers running.

Doc Searls (35m 24s):
I just had a thought, as I know, it's an old one, which is that, and it goes back to the intention economy. We, it, in the, in the project VRM world, which is at that time, a few dozen people probably is still just a few dozen people. We came up with this term fourth parties. And the idea behind a fourth party is it's a third party, but it works for us. Most of the third parties that we run into are actually on the vendors side, they are on the big company side there on the server side, they are accessories to whatever service that we're taking advantage of there not working for us. You know, I mean, one example that we have been working on lately, it, at least to kind of in conversation is I want a fourth party to take care of all my subscriptions, all of them, all of the gaming within a subscription.

Doc Searls (36m 8s):
I wanted to know when they expire, I want to know what New, you know, what their current offer is there. I went under the difference between having been a customer a long time and having some privileges there and versus becoming out as a new customer, every time I wanted to be able to manage to, to budget this, you know, we were all like overcome with the subscriptions. Now I want to fourth party that working for me on this. It seems to me that's a space. So if we look at that, like, let's say, instead of looking at silo's, we look at room's, here is a building with infinite, infinite variety of rooms. There's a room over there. It's empty right now. There, there, there is a couple of little ones to be fourth party's there, but there is no PR there is no there's a missing protocol maybe, or maybe there is a protocol that exist, but nobody is using it.

Doc Searls (36m 56s):
If somebody thought it up in an RFP back in RFP 45 back in 1987, but we haven't used it yet. I mean, that's the top of the email. I mean, SMTP came along, it like 85, we got used at a 95 right there, maybe a PR protocol like that. But its kind of like in the meantime we go into this big, beautifully furnished room and we can eat our way through the Susan buffet table, starting with the dessert. Right. And is infinite food in their, and it all seems to be set out that's Facebook and that's Twitter and that's these other things. And for that matter as the world, we live in with Apple and with Google and, but over there, there's this big space that actually works for us. What is that? And I do think it has something to do with asynchrony.

Doc Searls (37m 37s):
I think it's like maintaining my subscriptions. For example, it was just one thing. Loyalty programs is another, you know, all of the airline miles, I belong to the CVS and all the rest of it. That's another one. There is no universal, no universal services. There, there is some really, really good kind of halfhearted attempts. Maybe they go and run it run only in your phone, but there are all, they're all CompuServe's they are all prodigies. They're not there not something that can be universalized that we can make something out of it. They are asynchronous right. There is a missing Slack. There would Cal the Henderson and Stewart Butterfield came up with was Slack was like, look at this, Hey, we could collaborate in business with, Katherine just called, you know, well decorated IRC, you know, you know, whatever that was, you know, but I'm not sure.

Hadrian Zbarcea (38m 27s):
Can I ask you a question? Sure. Was, so let's say you head that fourth party that you are talking about what's the, or a to implement it, not as a silo because they could be their own platform where you, you know, logging to their Site, you manage your things.

Doc Searls (38m 47s):
Well, its the incentive that, that every hosting service got out of Apache, right? I mean, Apache people have made money because of the Apache, not with patchy people who make money, you know, because of SMTP in pop three. And I am actually not with those things. So somebody can imagine out, I mean, okay, I can make money by having a better fourth party that runs on these established protocols in ceremonies, whatever else they might be. Some, some familiar UI that we might have, but the back end, you know, runs on gravity, whatever the gravity I'll find some gravity, they didn't, they had nobody noticed it before and I can bring in that gravity or that sunlight or something that is inherently free and open, but it will build on that rather than say, I'm going to make money with it.

Doc Searls (39m 34s):
I mean, that's the difference is, you know, would I be a mom wanted to do with, with a token ring versus what would digital Intel and whoever else it was Xerox did with ether, net link that here, we've got the patents go for it. We're not going to exercise the patents, do whatever you want with either Annette and I'm, you know, I'm still trying to sell, took and ring. Right. And even if it would run at anything, you know, where it's token ring needed. IBM Special

Hadrian Zbarcea (39m 59s):
I think that's a very good analogy actually. And similar to the Apache web server. So from an economic point of view, you need to have that technology that enables, that creates a low barrier to entry to this for parties. Yeah. So now everybody can be a publisher it's very cheap to put the lamps, they can run your own website.

Doc Searls (40m 23s):
Right. Exactly. And what happens in a longer time?

Hadrian Zbarcea (40m 26s):
Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It is the same. So we need these kind of technology or a set of the technologies that the United way that allows anybody to become these kind of fourth party at a reasonable cost.

Doc Searls (40m 40s):
Yeah. So I mean, it's a perfect example. So so Petros is actually on my website. Would you help me reset up? It was on a red hat server at Rackspace in a physical rack that I leased, you know, for a while actually for nothing. But then they started charging me and I've moved it off. You know, the server was at an IP address on a day in my house, in, in, in, in, in Woodside, moved from there to a Rackspace server and then Petros helped me move it to one-on-one, which is, you know, somebody who is probably on a patchy, I'm sure it's on Apache, isn't it? Petros yes. Yeah.

Doc Searls (41m 19s):
It's a patchy. Yeah. So, so that made, but it made possible one-on-one and, and, and, and, and Rackspace and all everybody's in a hosting business there using a patchy, but you can also use a what's whatever a thing is called is pretty big, but I forget the name of it, but anyway, I S R I S yeah, yeah. You can use IIS or you can use to use a patchy. I mean, Apache at this point of credit in this case, it is actually, you know, it isn't the majority web server anywhere. It doesn't matter. You know what I mean? If everybody's using the protocols and the protocol, the protocols make it possible. So, you know, and there are probably some of it, the things in addition to protocols there, you know, I mean, I can Katherine, we can put a Drupal server up on a number of different things.

Doc Searls (42m 3s):
Can we, I suppose,

Katherine Druckman (42m 5s):
Yeah. And they are, yes, yes. Drupal can be used for many, many things

Doc Searls (42m 11s):
Yes. And run on them, a lot of things. So it means so, so to me, it's like, I mean, w w w when your pointing toward, I think Hadrian is, is the fourth party space that nobody's built out yet based on gravity that we haven't pulled out of the woodwork yet, but problem, I suspect might even exist. Let me even be out of it.

Hadrian Zbarcea (42m 31s):
It's an economic problem. Right. We have to do it create a low barrier 20 basically allow anybody to become a fourth party like this at a low cost. And it should allow you to be able to move from, you know, your basement to a Rackspace, to the cloud. Yeah. So they can get these services should be interchangeable if you want.

Doc Searls (43m 1s):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you do want an interchangeable or substitutable of services, but, you know, obviously you need economic incentives. Cause somebody has to imagine a business, right. Somebody has to say, wait a minute, there's a business here. You know what I mean? That's in a way in Trieste, did that with Acquia, write, he invents Drupal for his own convenience and then imagines up a company that could lead in a dribble space. Or am I wrong? I mean, it, no, that sounds about right. Is pretty much it

Hadrian Zbarcea (43m 26s):
Is there. I think you just mentioned a few use cases and at ITW, there were quite a few use cases. Some of them are quite credible.

Doc Searls (43m 35s):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean that Mullenweg did that with, with WordPress. WordPress is laying around as open source code, write. It just was there, it was basically a knockoff of a closed source, won a, a livable time. Okay. Pretty much knocked off a moveable type. As I recall, maybe some Lisner or a bill or disagree with me about it as a doc is so full of crap, but it was great. We want that

Katherine Druckman (44m 2s):
You can empower an insulin pump. Oh, sorry. That that was a Drupal story or a real life, like a cool thing. But yeah, there was a, there was a wearable device that interpreted in and you conveyed information and it was connected to an insulin pump or it wasn't in one of the trees is a keynotes a few years ago. I think at Drupal con it was interesting I'll link to it. So, you know,

Hadrian Zbarcea (44m 23s):
It was case is dark. You've got me thinking of a, that fourth party HIE or for an operator.

Doc Searls (44m 30s):
Yeah. H a N of one is the

Hadrian Zbarcea (44m 32s):
Adrian Gropper or is it Adrian? Is that other guy born in Romania, but he's an R and D is right. And he's, he's missing the age, I guess. But he is the ha have won, which is a, a, a, a health. What does the other two words HIV? Yeah, but what's the one of the IAEA, Oh gosh. I, I, I guess he thought the H he moved it to HIV. Right. Because if you left it just, I E people would have thought its internet Explorer. Yeah. And in any way, but, but the whole idea was that you, you, you have, you can be your own operator of your own health provision is basically it's, it's, it's a way to, to work within the existing.

Hadrian Zbarcea (45m 16s):
One of the growing up, you don't need the browser there. You need the doctors to have the single lean though. The browser that sees any a HR you'll have one system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and the So, I think we talked about this. I was making the case that hospitals don't really need the EMR or the HRS. Okay. So not really sure. Again, EMR is a electronic, electronic medical records or electronic health record is a DHHR, the same kind of, and the idea of you have, there has been an effort for a very long time for, to sort of universalize the infinite number of fields in a, in a record for an individual patient to reconcile those so that everybody can understand everybody else's health records and nobody made it work at that's nonsense.

Hadrian Zbarcea (46m 17s):
OK. So that's my opinion. OK. And I was a member of Doc Sarah. So I was involved in the field because the fields are dictated by the profession. You can not put any kind of fields in an EMR. Right. Okay. Yeah. Do you feel if you're in a urologist or a surgeon, you know, very well, what taxonomy you are dealing with, what information you expect from the patient or don't expect from a patient, and that's really what should be in the medical records. So if it gets a bit fuzzy, but yeah,

Katherine Druckman (46m 53s):
Well, I think, I think there was an established that electronic records or, or not in fact necessary in hospitals after the, a recent hospital ransomware attacks is we can't remember where the hospital is. We were just talking about it over Slack.

Hadrian Zbarcea (47m 10s):
We're all out of the way place's and one of America's Siberia is, and I don't mean that a negative way, but I do, I do mean it in a way that it is snowbound in the winter up there in Gouverneur and Pottsdam New York or a beautiful area is up near the a thousand islands, but it's Y there, you know, but they, they, they, they had a ransomware attack, but you're right. I mean, you know, I mean, is it,

Katherine Druckman (47m 34s):
Well, the point being in that sense, these hospitals have just the, the effect that hospitals have just CSO to use any, any electronic records. They are paper only, and that's their way of dealing with it at least temporarily. So I mean, if it, and they see it and I read into a wired article, which again, I will link to, and they seem to be functioning at least, although as a result of a ransomware attack. And I can't remember where off the top of my head, I, a woman died. I think it was in Germany as a woman died because you know, this attack, it, you know, collapsed the information exchange have of this specific hospital. So, you know, there are real consequences to, to relying on this stuff and so on.

Katherine Druckman (48m 16s):
And that's why a certain hospitals I have taken the drastic mint measure of, of just ending, ending electronic records. It, you know, for now I'm going to do it

Hadrian Zbarcea (48m 25s):
Well, I am not sure. So coming back when I said, notice this, I was a bit facetious, obviously all of the fields that you are talking about, the extra things do not come actually from providers. They know there are a job very well. It comes from the bureaucracy, from the office of the CFO collecting data. And yes, there is no limit. And they put it in the same database with the medical records, by the medical records, per se, they are pretty standard. I mean, everything is diagnosis, you know, ICD nine snowman that everything is, is a standardized, right? All the other fields are not really related to the medical part of the, of the records.

Hadrian Zbarcea (49m 8s):
So when people say that they are actually having two separate conversations in one and another thing after talking to you a few weeks ago, I was thinking So, or maybe a tire w somebody's made a, a, a case for business is not starting our data, but that is not really possible, right? Because I wanted to give the analogy with, ah, with the marriage. I want to have information about my boyfriend girlfriend, right. And they want to keep it in my memory. Do you see what I'm seeing? So you can not stop companies from collecting data and keeping the data in there. My memory that's really there, right?

Hadrian Zbarcea (49m 48s):
If you want the problem, is that the way technologies evolved it infringes have on our ability to have the same ability to keep records or a memory of our experiences and see what I'm saying. Yeah. So a couple of things that are one is that I was when I went into the, when I started working at, at the Berkman center at Harvard, I, I got into their health care system. And I went out of my way because of it was that young and have a long record of, of health things. And so I, I brought in a printout of all of this stuff here. You'll be interested

Doc Searls (50m 28s):
In this. And I gave it to the doctor. They assigned me, she sets it aside. It has to know if I need to take this verbally I needed from you. I need you to tell me this and I will take the notes. And then later I will type them into my system here, and then it will be printed out and we can fax that. And that's, that will be your record. And that was, that was bizarre. So I just, I just wanted to kind of share that. And other one was that I had speaking to your point about the specialties and the bureaucracy. I have what I would call for the sake of simplicity, congenital an unpronounceable, and memorizable obscure health audit.

Doc Searls (51m 15s):
I mean a blood oddity. And I'm telling this to my hematologist. He said, well, I don't know what that is yet. And he was like the top guy in his field. And he was at Harvard. He teaches there and he said, look, you got to understand, there are over a hundred thousand hematological conditions. This one, when he looks it up, Nope. Nobody knew what it was before, 1990. Right. And one of the first time, times it was isolated. He was with me and my sister. Right. And it's not like a life-threatening thing. It's like, that's interesting that mutation occurs on this, and this is part of your genome. Okay. That's cool. But the world is full of those things where the easiest way to deal with them is actually in the vernacular. It's not in the formal, right.

Doc Searls (51m 56s):
It's and you translate the vernacular of the formal, but I wanted to go to a place with this with the fourth party idea, which is, I just thought of a fourth party, possibility that might put Adrian in a business with his H a N of one, which is that there is this class of doctors' now called a concierge. Provider's right. It it's a one off you want to, you lift the hospital system, you have left your teaching job or your, you don't want to be in the bureaucracy and you and your buddy's have created a concierge service and the patient will pay an extra $10,000 a year or something in order to get handheld service from you on the back end of that is where the fourth party goes is to supply the consierge as business.

Doc Searls (52m 40s):
All of those one off considers business's out there could sure use some normalization couldn't they, that normal is just in a way, like all of us, everybody doing a one off works on a patchy web server, wait a minute. You know, we can normalize this as a number of additional ways. Right. And in a way that you can just add on patches, so you can add on, I mean, the lessons of a run on a patchy, right. So I can add things to that, but it occurs to me that might be where to go. And there may or may be the financial incentive. Oh, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for <inaudible>.