November 21, 2023 • 52 mins
From the moment his father handed him an IBM PC with the simplest of instructions - "Play with it, don't be afraid" - Aral Balkan's worldview was forever changed. Our chat with this developer, professional speaker, consultant, and serial entrepreneur takes us on an enlightening journey through his life, shaped by his early immersion in technology's limitless potential. Aral's deep-seated passion for programming, his dedicated commitment to simplicity, and his advocacy for the internet as a tool for personal empowerment and democratized communication are nothing less than inspiring.
Aral reflects on the evolution of the internet, once perceived as a decentralized entity, now understood as a client-server system molded partly by venture capitalists who recognized its potential. He emphasizes the need for coding education, applauding initiatives like Code Club and the involvement of Google, Raspberry Pi, and Coder Dojo in promoting coding. But our conversation doesn't stop there. Aral urges us to confront the systemic inequality in the digital space and the pressing need for simple articulation of the problem to spur action. He introduces us to the concept of small web and the empowering idea of owning and controlling one's own means of communication.
Our dialogue extends to the importance of alternative funding methods for initiatives that serve society. Aral shares his views on the limitations of relying on political institutions for funding and the absolute necessity for communication tools to be accessible to all. We tackle the issue of arrogance in the open source community and its impact on software usability, and discuss 'kitten', a framework and server for building small websites, with its innovative security measures and potential as a learning tool. Join us for this essential conversation for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, empowerment, and democracy. This episode promises to enlighten, challenge, and inspire.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Aral Balkan (00:00):
I think it's very important if you're trying to
build an alternative, it's notjust saying oh here we're on
this island and this island isterrible, we need to get off
this island.
We're going to go to this otherisland and all the other master
swimmers follow me.
That's great.
So the three of you are on theother island.
Everyone else is drowned.
You need to build a bridge, andthat's how I see the small web
as a bridge between you know,the centralized web that we live
(00:22):
in and kind of thedecentralized world we want to
get to.
Tim Bourguignon (00:26):
That's a hell of a swim, a hell of a journey.
Aral Balkan (00:29):
Well, hopefully it's not going to be a swim,
that's the thing, that's okay.
Let's hope to get the bridge.
Like we might have to swim overthere to build the other leg of
the bridge, but you know, Imean, we're really stretching
the analogy.
Tim Bourguignon (00:42):
Hello and welcome to Developers Journey,
the podcast bringing you themaking of stories of successful
software developers to help youon your upcoming journey.
I'm your host, tim Borghigno.
On this episode, I receive AralBalkan.
Aral is a developer,professional speaker, consultant
and serial entrepreneur.
He has love for programming andlearning new programming
(01:04):
languages and a passion forsimplicity, oh and and and drink
, fondness for visual andexperience design.
He's also a tireless advocateof open source and creative
comments, and he is immenselypassionate about the internet's
potential for individualempowerment, education and the
democratization of communicationand self expression, and I've
(01:26):
seen him on stage talk aboutthis.
He is a hit about it.
Aral, welcome to Journey.
Aral Balkan (01:33):
Thanks to you.
Thank you for having me, tim ohit's my pleasure.
Tim Bourguignon (01:35):
It's been a long time in the making and then
we saw each other a few monthsago at a conference and I say I
have to have you on the show,I'm glad it's finally happening
and yes, it has happened.
But before we come to your story, I want to thank the terrific
listeners who support the show.
Every month you are keeping theDev Journey lights up.
If you would like to join thisfine crew and help me spend more
(01:59):
time on finding phenomenalguests than editing audio tracks
, please go to our website,devjourneyinfo and click on the
support me on Patreon button.
Even the smallest contributionsare giant steps toward a
sustainable Dev Journey journey.
Thank you, and now back totoday's guest.
(02:20):
So, aral.
As you know, the show exists tohelp the listeners understand
what your story looked like andimagine how to shape their own
future.
So, as is usual on the show,let's go back to your beginnings
.
Where would you place the startof your Dev Journey?
Aral Balkan (02:33):
The start of my Dev Journey.
So I was seven years old and mydad brought home an IBM PC
compatible I am that old andplaced it in front of me along
with a basic manual and he saidyou know one of the most
important things that I've heardin my life.
He said go on, play with it,you can't break it.
(02:56):
And that's such a powerfulthing to say.
I did, I did break it.
Challenge accepted.
I did break it.
Yeah, challenge accepted,exactly.
I did break it a little whilelater, but with fire and smoke.
But yeah, if your dad tells younot to plug in the co-processor,
the math co-processor that youbought on your trip to Singapore
(03:18):
because you got the wrong one,don't plug it in, even if it
fits.
You know, seven year old me islike what does he know?
It fits, it must work right,turn it on, boom, oh yeah, smoke
and fire.
And the worst part of it is Iblamed him because I was so
afraid of him.
I was so afraid of him.
I mean like he wasn't abusiveor anything, he's a lovely guy,
(03:40):
but you know he had a voice onhim and I was afraid that.
You know this is an expensive,you know, computer back then,
especially so I told him hey,remember that paper clip you
dropped into the computer lastweek while we were working on.
It Must have shorted something,because you know, and he felt
so guilty, he got me another one?
Tim Bourguignon (04:03):
Did you come straight with it, or is it the
first one Like?
Aral Balkan (04:06):
decades later.
Okay, otherwise you can send me.
I was like, by the way, here'sa funny story while stepping
away yeah, no, but it was a verypowerful thing to say because
it just, um, it was the it was.
It basically meant that youknow, I had this tool that I
(04:30):
could play with, that I wasn'tafraid of, and that's very
important you know, because eventoday these things are, you
know, to some degree expensivemaybe.
But just to say, you can makethings with this.
You can play, not work, play.
You can play with this.
And it was amazing, I couldmake, you know.
I could write a few lines ofcode and I could have a star
(04:52):
field.
I could write a few more and Icould have a spaceship and I'd
be flying through my ownuniverse.
And I was seven years old.
You know, that's amazing.
That spark stays with youforever.
But I think it's also veryimportant for us to understand
that that was a different era,that I was lucky enough to have
(05:13):
been basically born into the eraof the personal computer and
that was the last time that weactually owned and controlled
our own technology.
That was the last era in whichthese were just tools and
nothing more.
You know that computer didn'twatch everything I was doing and
(05:33):
then reported to some facelesscorporation on the other side of
the planet.
That computer was not trying toanalyze me.
It wasn't trying to understandhow I was feeling, what
emotional state I was in, sothat it could manipulate my
behavior so that again we couldraise the profits and increase
the profits of some corporationssomewhere, and what's really
(05:55):
sad is today that is thebusiness model of mainstream
technology.
So today, depending on what Iwas giving my child, if I had a
child, I would be perhaps farmore concerned and I maybe
wouldn't say here, take it, dowhatever you want with it, you
can't break it.
That part of it might be true,but it could break you right,
(06:18):
because it's not necessarily asafe space.
That computer my dad gave me wasa safe space that I could play
in, I could learn in, I coulduse it as a tool.
And we've lost that with thebusiness model of mainstream
technology and that actually isleaping forward many, many
decades.
But that is why I do what I dotoday in a lot of ways, which is
(06:42):
we need to have a version ofthat in the internet age.
We can't go back to those days.
Some people want to go back tothose days, you know, and it's
great and I get it.
I get the nostalgia, you know,I pull up old games and I play
them sometimes, but that age isgone.
But we can have a version of itwith a global network that we
(07:07):
have today, in which ourtechnologies are again just
tools, they're not trying toexploit us.
Tim Bourguignon (07:14):
And.
Aral Balkan (07:14):
I think that's very key.
It's key to human rights, it'skey to democracy.
Tim Bourguignon (07:19):
It is indeed, and pulling the Wi-Fi cable is
not the solution.
Aral Balkan (07:23):
It is not the solution, no, no no, you know,
some people may want to behermits and live out in the
middle of nowhere with notechnology and you know, more
power to them.
We also have to defend theright for people to not use
technology if they don't want to.
So it's very important, I think, that we have ways of doing
(07:44):
things that don't requiresomeone to do it on a computer,
for example, as a fallback,possibly, but also to say, look,
you're not forced into thesesystems, especially if a lot of
these systems today are quitetoxic, especially if today, a
lot of these systems areexploitative.
It's very important that wehave other means of doing things
.
But yeah, but we're not goingto go back on mass.
(08:06):
So we need to find ways of goingforward differently, in better
ways.
I'm going to show thediscussion back toward your
childhood, but I'm sure we'regoing to come closer to 7.
Tim Bourguignon (08:19):
One thing I'm really bummed about is that
modern technology is a veryimportant tool for the future.
Devices I'm not going to saycomputers, I'm going to say
device Don't bring this basicprogramming language environment
like they used to do.
So this is not even an option.
If you buy an iPad nowadays,you don't have a mean to start
(08:39):
programming unless you go ontowebsites, and there isn't really
a supported by Apple way ofreally starting this and
embracing this from the get go.
Is it Is there.
Aral Balkan (08:51):
Well, I mean, there is like swift playgrounds, for
example.
I haven't played with it for along time, but that might be
possibly one alternative.
I don't know if you've seen itor played with it.
Tim Bourguignon (09:03):
Just know about it, but I find it so obscure
and not publicized as one of themain aspects.
Aral Balkan (09:10):
Right, Well, because, again, an iPhone is for
the most part a consumptiondevice, like I'm sure a lot of
people will disagree and go well, you can create so many things
with it.
Yes, you can, of course you can.
But I'm saying primarily it's aconsumption device.
And even in terms of yourcreation, if it's like you're
creating videos for TikTok orthis or that or whatever it is
(09:33):
you're doing, it's notnecessarily the same as
programming or creating TikTok.
I mean, don't create TikTok,because TikTok is again one of
these surveillance capitalistapplications and it's
exploitative and it's based on,you know, surveilling, you and
all of that.
But you know what I mean.
So, yeah, you're right, backthen you were actually thrown
(09:57):
into the tools by which thesoftware on these devices was
made.
And you know, the devicesthemselves may have still been
proprietary, the hardware itselfmight have still been
proprietary, but at least youcould build software for it.
And that was just somethingthat you almost had to do.
And in the earliest daysespecially, you know, I started
(10:18):
making my own games, because theIBM didn't have games.
You know, you played Alley Cat,you played DigDug, maybe, and
at the very early days, you know, then you had to build your own
.
So, yeah, there's something tobe said about that and I think
there are initiatives like.
I was actually involved in aone of these code club well,
(10:41):
actually in code club itself inthe UK.
It was this coding school forkids that we started up the two
founders and Claire and Lindaand I was helping them and I was
on the board of directors, etc.
And the whole idea was, youknow, to spark this initial
(11:04):
spark in kids.
You know, to like this initialspark in kids, and that's how it
started.
We were using Scratch.
So Scratch is a good tool forthat.
There are some, you know,better tools as well that enable
you to go from a visualenvironment into a textual
environment and help you alongthat path.
(11:24):
But you know what happened veryquickly, again, unfortunately,
this is so unfortunate.
It started out well and then,you know, google came on onto
the stage and we had a hugedisagreement between the
founders and because one of theco founders, linda, and I again
(11:45):
I was on the board of directorswe were like, no, we can't
normalize Google to kids, right,we can't normalize Google's
business model, surveillancebased business model to kids.
So we were very against it.
One of the co founders was likeno, no, they're fine, it's
great, don't worry about it.
So you know we resigned.
(12:05):
And then Raspberry Pi sorry,bought them and along with, I
think, the other coding likeCoder Dojo I think they bought
that one as well.
So, and when you talk aboutRaspberry Pi, these are the
folks you know.
We love their little devices.
I've got a bunch of them in mydrawer.
But they're the same people whovery recently were bragging
about hiring a spy cop, and whenpeople called them out on it,
(12:29):
they were like, oh, this is justa conspiracy against us.
It's like no dude, like don'thire a spy cop and then be proud
about it.
And again, don't normalize thisto kids.
This is the thing, like youknow it's.
It's in a lot of ways.
Maybe it was never a more naivetime or I don't know a better
(12:51):
time, but at least I guesspeople were solving some of the
big problems back then and theydidn't have time to, kind of,
you know, spend their CPU cycleson doing evil.
It wasn't that they didn't wantto be evil, maybe they just
didn't have time for that yet.
They were trying to solve thingslike how do we make this thing,
(13:11):
you know, actually play video,or when the internet is really,
really expanded the field and itwas a far worse, but is the far
worse still and yeah, and ofcourse it's not the technology.
you know, Melvin Cranesberg hasa quote about this, saying
(13:32):
technology is neither good norbad, nor is it neutral, and so
that last bit that's reallyimportant.
It wasn't necessarily thetechnology itself, you know.
So we, I said we had thepersonal computer era that I was
born into, and then whathappened is, of course, we got
the internet and we got the web,and a lot of people think that
(13:53):
the web and the internet weredecentralized, and this is false
.
So the personal computing erawas the last time that we
actually had decentralizedtechnology.
Think about it right.
You owned and controlled yourtools and everyone had their own
right, and then could youcommunicate with each other?
You couldn't a rudimentary way.
You had modems, for example,etc.
(14:16):
Whatever if you wanted to.
But with the web it lookeddecentralized at the beginning
because there were relativelymore people who ran their own
servers on the web, because itwas an academic institution
initially, as it started.
I mean, it was big in academia.
So people ran their own serversand you know if there were
(14:39):
maybe 200 people on the web atsome point, maybe there were.
You know there were 150 serversrun by 150 of them.
Maybe a couple of them, sharedit or something, so it looked
decentralized, but it never was.
It was always clients andserver.
And what happened was we gotthis huge injection of venture
capital when people saw thepotential of these servers to
(14:59):
scale to become the centers thattoday we call Google or Yahoo
or Snapchat or whatever.
So it was.
We have to understandtechnology within the
socioeconomic environment inwhich it exists and which
creates it.
(15:20):
So the reason the web blew upwas you know, we hear the story
Tim Burners-Lee made it open andthat's why it blew up.
He made it open.
He didn't make it free and open, he didn't make it.
He didn't release it under aGPL license, for example, or a
share alike license, and thatwas why it grew up.
It blew up because venturecapitalists saw that they could
(15:42):
actually own, they could encloseparts of it, right, they
wouldn't have to give back.
And that's how we got theGoogles and the Facebooks and
all of these, because theseservers scaled.
And now, of course, they'reserver farms and you know, when
people talk about server farms,I always ask them you know, just
stop for a moment and thinkabout who's being farmed in
(16:05):
these places, because it's you.
But yeah, so that was thesecond era, like the network era
, and that was actuallycentralized.
And I think now we're at apoint where at least some of us,
like me, are working on goingforward to a version of
decentralization that existswithin a world that contains
(16:30):
this global network.
So what does that look like?
And that's what you know.
That's why I'm working on thesmall, on trying to create the
small web, and on small tech, asI call it.
Tim Bourguignon (16:44):
Do you?
Shall we get there?
Do you want to?
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, how you got there interms of your story might be
fascinating as well, but hereyou have something unique and I
want to poke at that.
Aral Balkan (16:56):
Well, and yeah, yeah, I mean sure we can also
talk about the process, becauseI think the process is important
.
It wasn't like I was sevenyears old, this little spoiled
brat growing up in Malaysia then, which is what I was privileged
little spoiled brat growing upin Malaysia, you know, making
games for himself in ahedonistic way, just like you
know.
That was how I started, right.
(17:18):
There's nothing to be reallykind of applauded about, that.
I was just a lucky kid.
And but then afterwards, likemaybe in the next decade or so,
I kind of realized that thestuff I make other people use
and when I started working moreprofessionally with this stuff
(17:38):
and I did actually quit I quitcomputers when I was 13 for a
few years- Okay, wait a second.
Tim Bourguignon (17:45):
What?
Aral Balkan (17:45):
happened there.
So I remember I was making agame in C I think I was
programming in C at the time andI was making a game and I'd
spent so much time on it, likeweeks and weeks and weeks and
maybe even months and you knowwhen you're that age, that's a
long time.
And I got one of the firstcomputer viruses, c brain, and
(18:09):
it wiped everything that I had.
And so that taught me a coupleof things, you know.
One was have backups.
I learned that at that age, butit just felt like my whole.
I remember I was sitting, itwas a summer's day and I'm
sitting at home with thecurtains drawn because CRT
monitors and glare andeverything right, I don't want
the glare.
So I'm in the dark on thisbeautiful summer's day and
(18:35):
everything I was working on formonths just got erased.
It was just gone and I rememberI just stopped.
I felt like I died or something.
You know, it's just like apiece of me had died and I
stopped.
I remember I opened thecurtains, I looked outside and I
was like what the fuck am Idoing?
There's like a whole world outthere and I'm stuck in here
(18:57):
feeling like crap, feeling likeI'm dying inside.
And so I literally I steppedaway from the computer and I
didn't touch it for anothermaybe a year or so or maybe a
little longer.
So yeah, I know, but then whatreally retires me, you took you
back.
I think it was just in general,I mean more like it was becoming
(19:18):
more of a thing for school andthis and that, and I always
loved it.
So I guess I, yeah, I startedback up and then, when I was in
my early 20s or so, I think, Igot my first like consulting gig
and we were building a virtualschool like the world's first
virtual school.
(19:38):
I think it was called K-12.
I was in the States for mymaster's degree at the time and,
yeah, and then I kind ofrealized, well, people are using
the things that we're buildingand I really started
concentrating on design.
So I was like we need I wasvery naive as well.
I was like if we build thesebeautiful experiences, that'll
improve everyone's lives andeverything will be great and
(20:00):
flowers in your hair will bedancing in the fields and it'll
be so nice.
Not once thinking about, like,the business models or not once
thinking about the greater kindof economic factors at play, and
so for a while I was justconcentrating on design, because
I naively thought everyone wasjust like trying to build these
(20:22):
tools that helped people and Ionly very slowly started
realizing, no, wait a minute,when Google creates a product,
it's actually creating twoproducts.
Every Google product is twoproducts.
There's the product that peopleuse everyday people use because
they get some sort of value outof it.
That might be the mail aspectof Gmail, it might be the docs
(20:45):
aspect of Google docs.
But there's another product onthere at the same time and
that's what's watching them andmining them and exploiting them,
et cetera.
So it's hard work actually.
Hats off.
Hats off to the surveillancecapitalists.
They have a hard job for everyproduct they have to build to,
and then they have to make surethe people who are using them
(21:06):
are not aware of the secondproduct.
They must not see the wizardbehind the curtain.
So it's a hard job.
I don't envy it, I don'trespect it, but it's a hard job.
So, yeah, that's when I started.
I slowly started seeing this andthen I think it was the Edward
Snowden revelations that reallybrought it to the forefront and
(21:29):
really kind of showed me wow,this is.
I mean, this sort ofexploitation is horrible anyway,
but it has a real effect onhuman rights, on democracy, and
we're seeing that today.
We saw that afterwards withCambridge Analytica.
We saw Trump getting elected,we saw Boris Johnson getting
elected.
We saw the effects that thishas.
(21:51):
We saw the effect it has inpushing people towards the right
, and we have a huge problemwith that.
Right now, with fascism on therise everywhere across the
planet, you can't even listcountries anymore.
It's take too long, it'sgetting around, it is, it is,
and so this system is not.
It's not an ethical system,it's not a sustainable system.
(22:14):
It's a system in which we havea handful of it's created, a
handful of billionaires most ofthem absolute douchebags, if not
all and at the detriment ofeveryone else.
So I quickly started realizingthis is not what I want to be a
part of, this is not what I wantto contribute to, and it's
(22:37):
easier said than done.
Then they call it themainstream for a reason.
So, yeah, at some point Ibasically decided look, I'm just
gonna devote myself to tryingto build an alternative to this.
Whether or not I can, I don'tknow, but at least I can try.
And that's when we found it.
Initially it was called Indiefor independent, because it
(22:58):
really is all about how you'refollowing and it is all about
how you're funded.
If we took venture capital, wewouldn't be able to do what
we're doing.
We'd have much more comfortablelives, but we wouldn't be able
to do what we're doing.
So, and then we changed thename a few years ago when we
moved to Ireland, to SmallTechnology Foundation.
(23:19):
As we, over the last 10 years,I've kind of been looking into
this problem and trying tounderstand what could be not
just a solution one solution butone solution that can be
affected by someone who has verylimited resources.
One person coding, that'sstatistically.
That doesn't exist.
(23:40):
If we're talking about theworld in general, you shouldn't
wait, in balance, you mean.
Exactly, exactly.
So, yeah, that's what broughtme to working on the Small Web
and Small Technology with Laura.
Tim Bourguignon (23:55):
Wow, before we get there, how do you apprehend
such a problem?
I mean, this is one of thebiggest problems there is
currently, probably with someeconomic problems in the third
world, with some health problemsand with some energy problems
and the climate, not to forgetthe climate.
But how do you face this andnot just stare at it and just
(24:20):
say, wow, I have no idea whereto start.
How did you approach that?
Aral Balkan (24:23):
Well, I mean staring at it and going I have
no idea where to start is a veryvalid reaction because it is
such a big problem.
All of those problems youlisted are also interconnected.
They all stem from systemicinequality.
They all stem from anunsustainable system and climate
change.
We get rid of the billionaires.
(24:44):
We're going to be along the wayto fixing climate change if we
could do that.
Yeah, I guess the bit where Iwas, I don't know.
I guess it's lucky.
I don't know if you can saylucky, if you can use that term
within this context, but I'mlucky enough that I can do
(25:05):
something about it.
So a lot of people see theproblem and a lot of people try
to articulate the problem, whichis how I started trying to
tackle it.
First of all, I did a lot oftalks.
Back then I did an RSA talk inthe UK.
There are videos of me speakingto the BBC.
They did a surveillancecapitalism bit, et cetera,
(25:26):
whatever.
So I was like my initialthought was people don't know,
and if we can just tell peopleand explain it as simply as
possible what's at stake, thatthis isn't just some geeky issue
, that this affects human rights, this affects democracy, if we
can just articulate it wellenough, then of course, they're
going to take action Again.
(25:49):
I'm very naive.
I approach things naively.
I don't think this is a problem.
This is not something I'mlooking to change.
I don't think naive is a badthing.
Naive just means you approachthings as they should be, as you
expect them to be, in a worldthat works properly.
There's nothing wrong with that.
So I'm not getting rid of thataspect of my personality,
(26:10):
because if you do that, I thinkyou become jaded, and I don't
want to be jaded.
So I approach things naively.
Same in design.
I approach things naively andthey usually lie to me.
It's fine, that's how youbecome a better designer.
And same with this.
So once I realize and I'vespoken twice at the European
(26:33):
Parliament about this issue, Ieven joined a political movement
at some point because I waslike this is not just a
technological issue, it's apolitical and socioeconomic
issue.
So maybe we can do and, to beperfectly honest, I'm done
talking.
I know this is quite ironic,since we're talking and I don't
truly 100% believe that I mean,it's not one thing that's going
(26:55):
to fix this issue and no matterhow many lines of code I write,
I'm not going to fix this issue,because it's not an issue that
can be fixed just with code.
We need the political aspect,we need the educational aspect,
we need people to be activistsand we need people to be talking
about this, and that's partlywhy I'm also talking to you
about it right now, instead ofcoding, not only because I broke
(27:17):
my hand playing tennis.
Tim Bourguignon (27:20):
Showing a nice, a nice, a nice hand.
I know?
Aral Balkan (27:22):
Yeah, that's, if you're going to see this on a,
you're going to hear this on apodcast.
I'm showing my cast hand in acast playing tennis, tripping
over my own feet first brokenbone at 47.
Been skating my whole life.
I ride a one wheel, nothing, notennis Anyway.
So so you were saying, don'tsay talking.
(27:44):
I'm talking.
Tim Bourguignon (27:46):
Clearly not.
Aral Balkan (27:48):
Clearly not so.
But yeah, I basically decidedlook, other people can talk to
and I don't mean this in, I'mnot judging Like some people
will, I'm sure even articulatethe question better than I have
and more power to them, and Ihope they keep doing that.
Not everyone can actually codesomething.
(28:08):
That could be an alternative.
And I think what I've realizedis you can't fight every fire.
You have to pick and chooseyour battles.
And so at some point I was like, okay, where can I be most
effective?
And also I was always duringthis decade, I was thinking like
what is the solution to this?
And initially I was like we'llcreate a phone and it'll be
(28:30):
great and it'll be a free andopen source phone and they'll
have all the software.
And it's like, yeah, okay, you,and what money?
Right?
So we actually started off onthat before realizing, okay, no,
we can't do this without thekind of venture capital or
whatever that it would take toget it off the ground.
We tried crowdfunding and thisand that and it was too big a
(28:52):
problem.
10 years later, now we're juststarting to see free and open
source phones and they do again,not a judgment at all but they
do the bare minimum that a phoneshould be doing right now.
It's not like they also havetheir own app suites or the
things that.
So you buy a free and opensource phone, but if you still
have to use Google, then youhaven't really fixed the problem
(29:13):
right.
So it's a big problem.
So I started narrowing down,narrowing down my focus and
finally realized, look, we needpeople to own and control their
own means of communication.
So how can we best do that withthe resources that we have?
And that's what led me to theidea of the small web, which is
(29:34):
very simple.
The small web is a very simpleidea, right?
What if each one of us ownedand controlled our own place on
the web?
And this would be a place thatwouldn't require technical
knowledge for us to set it up orto maintain it.
We could be public there, justlike we can, say, on Mastodon or
(29:54):
on some other network, so wecould have public posts or on
Facebook or whatever.
But we could also be private.
We could also communicateprivately, actually privately,
not Facebook privately.
So Facebook private is you, meand Mark Zuckerberg.
So actual private is you and me, no, mark Zuckerberg.
(30:17):
And so basically, that leadsyou to a peer-to-peer design.
The problem with peer-to-peer asit exists today is twofold
discoverability and availability.
These are issues common toevery peer-to-peer network how
do I find you and how do Iguarantee that you will get my
(30:42):
message when I send you amessage or a photo or whatever?
And there are ways of solvingthese issues, and every
peer-to-peer network solves themin pretty much the same way,
which, at the end of the day,relies on some sort of a
centralized server somewherethat's always online for
signaling or for guaranteeingthe quality of that
communication.
We see this with WebRTC, we seeit with any sort of
(31:05):
peer-to-peer network, or itsuffers for those two aspects,
neither of which are things thatpeople are going to expect or
accept.
In a world where you go onFacebook, it's always there
pretty much, you can alwaysreach your friends pretty much,
and people don't understand thatit's algorithmic.
They don't understand that alltheir friends who are following
(31:27):
them don't see all their posts,etc.
But they think they do at least, so they're fooled into that
sense that they might be.
So in order to combat this, inorder to have an alternative to
this, you need a system that isalways available, that is easy
to find.
So the Web is great for that.
We can use it differently, andso that's what I'm building with
(31:48):
the small Web A system whereanyone who is a peer-to-peer
network, a system where anyonewithout technical knowledge will
just be able to go to a website, say, hey, I want this domain
and maybe initially enter acredit card and pay 10 euros a
month, I don't know and they gettheir own place and it can
(32:09):
communicate with everyone else'splaces.
Of course, this is free andopen source.
Every aspect of it is free andopen source, and it may not have
to be money.
Part of what I've realized again, I spoke twice at the European
Parliament and what I told themwas look, we need an alternative
to venture capital.
We need a means of fundingthese sort of initiatives that
I'm working on, others areworking on from the commons for
(32:31):
the common good, because that'swhat we're doing it.
So we need an alternative to VC.
It's not something that shouldbe government controlled.
It should be done byindividuals, independent
organizations.
But these independentorganizations should have
certain rules that they have toadhere to, that they can't sell
out to a Facebook or a Googleonce they become large enough.
Right, they have to keepworking in the interests of the
(32:53):
commons and it just kind of wentflew right over their heads.
They were like we see his lipsmoving but we don't understand
what he's saying.
So we need funding for this.
And I kind of realized, look, wedid a pilot project with the
city of Ghent and we went up tothem and we were like, look,
(33:15):
what if all the citizens inGhent had their own place on the
web and you funded it right aspart of their?
They pay for stuff with theirtaxes as part of that, but it
also would mean that they canuse these places to communicate
securely with you, themunicipality.
And so we did a pilot when thegovernment was a progressive
(33:35):
government in Ghent, and then wedemonstrated it.
Everyone was like, oh, this isbeautiful, this is lovely.
And then a conservativegovernment came in and boom, our
funding got cut.
So, all this to say, I'verealized that I've come to the
conclusion again that, you know,relying on these political kind
of institutions for fundingit's good for projects.
(33:58):
If you want to have an artproject to, you know, bring
attention to the horrors ofsurveillance with a modern art
dance, then yes, they'll fund itright.
You want to build a product, analternative, that requires
ongoing work, but not so muchvery bad at that.
So that's why I'm building inan ability for it to exist in
(34:22):
the current system.
So you will like, we'll hostone of these hosts for these
small websites and anyone elsecan host theirs as well, and
ours will take payments andhopefully that will keep Small
Technology Foundation, ournot-for-profit, sustainable in
the current system.
Tim Bourguignon (34:43):
So what you're suggesting is actually not
flipping the table on everything, it's actually keeping some of
the building blocks you talkedabout, peter Chopier, and
centralization.
Well, we cannot revokecentralization, but we can like
we did for non-for-profit we canput some stamps and some rules
around it that says this is thevalue codex you're going to
(35:05):
adhere to and you're going tolive through.
And if you do that, then theproblem of centralization,
for-profit plus VCs is not thereanymore.
Right, I mean that's so.
Aral Balkan (35:16):
My basic thing to the European Parliament was like
we could fund these thingsdifferently, but they need to
have certain rules so that wedon't do what we're doing today.
Today we fund technology in theEuropean Union.
We fund startups, and whathappens?
A startup is successful, itgets bought by Google or
Facebook.
It's not successful?
The EU taxpayer foots the bill.
(35:37):
So what have we become?
We've become a free researchand development department for
Silicon Valley.
Right, we take all the risk.
They get all the reward.
That's stupid.
So let's do better than that.
Hopefully, maybe one day wewill, I don't know.
But that's why we're buildinglike.
(35:57):
I'm building a commercialaspect into it as well, and
hopefully that will mean thatorganizations like ours can be
sustainable.
At least.
The thing about the small web isI'm designing it, so it doesn't
scale.
So even this hosting aspect,where it just creates your own
server for you, it's not so.
You get your own VPS server atyour own domain and you get
(36:21):
whatever application isinstalled there.
So we're going to have a socialnetwork style thing that we're
building, but other people willbe able to build other things as
well that get installed there.
So, again, the whole thing isfree and open, but so I'm
building an aspect of it whereyou can actually pay 10 euros a
month, but a municipality likeGhent could just mail out codes
(36:45):
to their citizens and they usethat instead.
In the future, we might decide,hey, this should be a human
right.
Everyone should have their ownplace on the web, and this is
important for democracy.
It's important for people to beable to communicate without
algorithms controlled bydouchebag billionaires and
deciding what they can see andwhat they can't see, filtering
their realities, deciding onwhat they can say and what they
(37:07):
can't say, which doesn't meanthat you get carte blanche to do
whatever the heck you want.
It just means you have your ownplace.
If you go out there, use thatplace and incite hatred or
incite people to violence, wehave a system of policing
already in society and that cankick in.
We don't need additional thingsto surveil everyone or whatever
(37:27):
.
We're just modeling.
What I'm doing is I'm justmodeling the human being.
We don't have that aspect intechnology today.
If we want to talk to oneanother you are a person, I am a
person we get together, we talk.
If some of us want to organizeand do something whether it's
work or plan a protest or dowhatever.
(37:48):
We are individuals, we gettogether and we're able to
communicate.
And in situations where we allhave similar tools and we're
mostly equal, that's where Ithink we have the most
democratic potential.
In situations where that's notthe case, think of a corporation
that has huge capital costs,that has machinery that the
(38:10):
employees don't have, thatthey've invested millions and
millions in, so you have to gowork for that corporation, right
, and the power differentialthere is big.
The corporation has all thepower.
You as an employee don't have alot of power, right.
What if everyone had the sametools?
I'm not talking aboutmanufacturing, I'm talking about
communication.
I'm talking about the abilityto organize.
(38:32):
Right now, facebook has a lotof the tools, or TikTok or
Google.
What if we democratize that sothat everyone had the tools and
could communicate?
Then it would be a much moreegalitarian sort of society.
I think that's much better fordemocracy, so we're not beholden
to these gatekeepers.
Tim Bourguignon (38:52):
Yeah, amen to that.
So we spoke a lot about thehistory and the projection in
the future.
If I go into the small webright now, what can I do with it
and what's coming in the nextmonth?
Where are you and what's thenext step for you?
Aral Balkan (39:09):
Right.
So depends on who you are.
So right now it's not ready foreveryday people who use
technologies and everyday thing.
I don't like to use the termusers.
You might notice that I feelthat user is an othering and I
find that, especially inmainstream technology, once
we've othered a group, it's avery small step from user to
(39:32):
dumb user, right.
Once we've kind of created thathierarchy of where the people
who know, where the smart ones,where the designers, where the
developers and they're theidiots who use it, then it makes
it easier to do bad things tothose idiots, right.
So I don't like that.
I don't think they're idiotseither.
(39:56):
But that whole thing about oh,this is actually really
prevalent, unfortunately, infree and open source, where we
have this notion that people whouse what we make have to either
really care enough to learnwhat we've built, even if it's
(40:19):
difficult, or if they don't,they don't deserve it.
It's an arrogance that we haveand we make comparisons like oh,
you know, even your mom coulduse it, or even your grandma
very, very sexist things as well.
But we have this notion that,you know, people are stupid if
they don't understand how to usewhat we make and we really need
(40:40):
to, even especially in the freeand open source world.
We need to really move beyondthis because it is arrogant
these people who use the thingswe make.
I'm not stupid.
The reason we have to make thethings that we're making easy to
use and beautiful and lovelyexperiences Is not because the
people who use them are stupid.
It's because their brainsurgeons and they have brain
(41:03):
surgery in the morning so theydon't have time for your useless
thing that doesn't workproperly that they have to learn
right.
So you're the stupid one.
If it doesn't, if it isn't easyto use, they're not, and I'm
sure I'll get some hate for that, but it's okay you guys should
be able to take it we should beable to take it right and it's
(41:26):
an arrogance that doesn't helpanyone really.
So right now the small web is ata stage where developers can
play with what there is, andwhat there is is Two things.
The main one is kitten, likethe cat, like little baby cat,
(41:47):
and it's a framework and aserver for building small
websites.
So developers can take this andstart kind of playing with
small websites.
And again, remember, a smallwebsite is a peer to peer
website.
It's very different from yourregular centralized website.
It's only meant to serve oneperson no users.
There's no concept of users.
When you remove the concept ofusers, you greatly simplify the
(42:11):
system In what you have to buildright.
Authentication becomes.
You don't even need a user namebecause there's no user right.
So you have a secret and that'ssecret.
And kitten is a string of emoji.
So you just put that into yourpassword manager.
It's a string of emoji, notjust because it's cute, because
it is cute, but so that youcan't write it down on sticky
(42:34):
and posted onto your monitor anddefeat the whole purpose of
security in the whole system.
So, but there's no usernameright.
It means that we can cut out ahuge amount of complexity.
We're designing just for oneperson on one node.
So imagine a tiny VPS and theapp that's running on it is just
(42:56):
for one person and it connectsto other VPS nodes that are just
for one person.
It means we can have an inprocess database, for example,
etc.
Etc.
Etc.
So that that in turn, makes itmuch less complicated to deploy
these things, which means thatwe can start building deployment
aspects that are very simple touse, that don't require
(43:18):
technical knowledge to eitherdeploy or to maintain.
So if you've ever installed andrun your own mastodon instance,
you know how complicated thatis, because mastodon is built on
a big tech stack, right, and soevery mastodon instance could
serve one person, like mine isjust for me but it can also
(43:39):
serve a hundred thousand, maybefive hundred thousand depending
on how beefy your server is, andthose are completely different
worlds.
It's a world of complexityapart to serve one person versus
five hundred thousand.
That's why it's built with thetechnologies that it's built
with.
Tim Bourguignon (43:55):
You don't need communities to have one user on
it, exactly.
Aral Balkan (43:58):
And that's why I had to build kitten.
That's why I had to build myown server and my own framework.
It's also a really goodframework for learning web
development in general, becauseit is built on HTML, css,
javascript and thenprogressively enhanced with HTML
and HTML on the wire, basically, and Alpine JS if you want it
or whatever else you want to use.
But it has built in support forthese things.
(44:19):
It makes the basics very simple.
It has built in support forpublic key encryption so you can
send and send encryptedmessages between these nodes,
for example, without as adeveloper, without knowing how
to build that yourself, becausethat's also not the simplest
thing to build and very easy toget wrong.
(44:41):
But also the way that ittranslates to people who are
using it is they don't need toknow about keys or a secret keys
or whatever.
They just have their littleemoji Secret that they put into
their one password or theirpassword manager or whatever it
is.
Everything else gets generatedfrom that.
That's actually an add two,five, five, one, nine secret key
.
Do they need to know that?
No, it's a string of emoji.
(45:03):
It's cute.
Way better, way better.
To be honest, it's a little bitmore complicated.
Tim Bourguignon (45:08):
To be straight, I could spin up in an instance
how do you call that A node?
I could spin up a node on mymachine and have that done on a
different machine beside me andjust connect the two ends and
messages, right and left.
Aral Balkan (45:20):
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, if you go to thekitten website, the website is
right now on my source coderepository.
It doesn't even have its ownsite yet, but it's on code Byrk,
codeorg, forward slash, kittenforward slash app.
If you go there, you canactually.
There are lots of examples andone of them is an end to end
(45:40):
encrypted kitten chat and youcan just run that locally
because it's got things like youcan actually.
It's got aliases for place oneto place fivelocalhost, so you
can actually run nodes locallyand test between it.
It's a pure web I you'veprobably never worked with this
(46:01):
before or played with it, soit's probably a good time for
developers to kind of just atleast have a look and go okay,
this is an interesting concept,maybe.
What does it feel like?
How is it different?
And also it's kind of cool toyou know, play with a system
that has no bullshit baked in.
Part of it is.
When I first started again, Iwas always I'm always trying to
(46:23):
see where in the stack.
Like you said earlier, we can'trebuild the whole thing Right.
There are people trying tobuild a completely different
internet and this and that andsure, but you need to build a
bridge between where we are andwhere we want to be, Right,
especially if you want otherpeople to be able to come over
with us to that place.
We want to be, because all ofthese issues that I mentioned
(46:44):
surveillance, this and thatwhatever they're all solved if
you have technical knowledge.
Right For us.
Actually, these are solvedproblems.
We can delve into the you knowthe guts of the Linux kernel if
we need to, depending on howmuch we want to harden something
.
These are not issues for us,it's an issue for everyone else.
So I think it's very importantif you're trying to build an
(47:06):
alternative, it's not justsaying oh here, we're on this
island and this island isterrible, we need to get off
this island.
We're going to go to this otherisland and all the other master
swimmers follow me.
That's great.
So the three of you are on theother island, everyone else is
drowned.
You need to build a bridge, andthat's how I see the small web
as a bridge between you know,the centralized web that we live
(47:27):
in and kind of thedecentralized world we want to
get to, and so yeah, yeah.
Tim Bourguignon (47:35):
That's a hell of a swim, a hell of a journey.
Aral Balkan (47:38):
Well, hopefully it's not going to be a swim.
That's the thing.
That's okay.
Let's hope we get the bridge,Like we might have to swim over
there to build the other leg ofthe bridge.
But you know, we're reallystretching the analogy.
Tim Bourguignon (47:52):
I'll trust you with that, but wait for a couple
weeks until your cast is off.
Aral Balkan (47:58):
Yes, definitely.
Tim Bourguignon (47:59):
That's usually the place where I as an advice,
but I'd like to wrap up aboutthe elements that you brought.
So where should we send peopleafter listening to this, to read
again about your concept, toread about Kitten, to read about
the small web star?
What are the different placesyou would advertise or push for
(48:21):
people to go to?
Aral Balkan (48:22):
Sure, just two really.
The Small Technology Foundationwebsite is at small-techorg and
my own website is even shorterit's A-R-dot-A-L, so it's just
my first name with a dot in themiddle.
I'm so jealous.
And, yes, it was expensive.
(48:42):
No, I wanted that domain for solong Because, again, part of it
is your domain on the small weband your domain on the web is
part of your identity in a senseor identities.
That's the cool thing about thesmall web have 10 different
places, explore differentaspects of your identity.
It's very dangerous if peoplesay we control your identity,
(49:04):
this is your identity.
No, we're much more complexcreatures than that.
But so I've always wanted thatsort of it's a vanity domain, of
course Albanian.
So I did actually.
I went to them and I was likecan I have A-R-dot-A-L?
And they were like we don't dotwo-letter domains.
And I was like no sad face.
And then a while later somebodysaid would you like A-R-dot-A-L
(49:25):
?
I'm like I thought they didn'tdo it and then they apparently
started doing it.
Somebody else got it.
We were so lucky, they knewabout what we were doing and
they were sympathetic.
So I did pay.
I did pay more money than I'veever paid for a domain, but I
didn't pay as much as I couldhave, especially considering
that A-R-L is the name of aGerman petroleum company, so
they could have actually gone tothem.
Tim Bourguignon (49:48):
So I'm very lucky to have it.
Aral Balkan (49:50):
But yes, that's where people can go, okay.
And there are videos there, etcetera.
There are lots of examples inkitten for developers to play
with and, as always, I'm veryeasy to reach, so you'll find a
link to my mastodon.
If you're on mastodon, feelfree to just ping me there If
you have any questions, andreally just it's at the point
(50:11):
where.
Just play with it.
Hopefully, within a couple ofmonths, you'll be able to deploy
your own websites with it aswell small websites, and then
the fun will really begin,because then we can evolve a
protocol together.
It's not going to be a top downsort of thing and, and you know
, other developers will be ableto build other things, because
the thing I build may not be thething that you know people end
up using.
I don't know.
I hope it is, but I'm trying tobuild it in such a way that you
(50:35):
know we're sharing every brick,so that you can build your own
little Lego creations as well.
Tim Bourguignon (50:40):
Then I'm pressing my thumbs in German is
wishing you luck.
Aral Balkan (50:48):
Okay, yeah, I'm pressing my thumbs right now.
I'm pressing that one thumb.
Tim Bourguignon (50:56):
Aril, it's been a fantastic discussion, thank
you so much.
Aral Balkan (51:00):
Thank you for having me.
Tim Bourguignon (51:04):
My pleasure.
People go to the links I willadd to the show notes.
Have a read on the small techwebsite.
It brushes over everything wetalked about.
It just goes in depth and inway more detail.
So take the time.
If anything wasn't clear rightnow, it will be after the read.
So please do that, aril.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, tim, and that's beenanother episode of DevPost
(51:27):
Journey with each other nextweek Bye, bye.
Thanks a lot for tuning in.
I hope you have enjoyed thisweek's episode.
If you like the show, pleaseshare, rate and review.
It helps more listenersdiscover those stories.
You can find the links to allthe platforms the show appears
on on our website devjourneyinfoslash subscribe.
(51:52):
Creating the show every weektakes a lot of time, energy and,
of course, money.
Will you please help mecontinue bringing out those
inspiring stories every week bypledging a small monthly
donation?
You'll find our Patreon link atdevjourneyinfo slash donate.
And finally, don't hesitate toreach out and tell me how this
(52:15):
week's story is shaping yourfuture.
You can find me on Twitter andat teamathabtimothep, or per
email info at devjourneyinfo.
Talk to you soon.
I think it's very important if you're trying to
build an alternative, it's notjust saying oh here we're on
this island and this island isterrible, we need to get off
this island.
We're going to go to this otherisland and all the other master
swimmers follow me.
That's great.
So the three of you are on theother island.
Everyone else is drowned.
You need to build a bridge, andthat's how I see the small web
as a bridge between you know,the centralized web that we live
(00:22):
in and kind of thedecentralized world we want to
get to.
Tim Bourguignon (00:26):
That's a hell of a swim, a hell of a journey.
Aral Balkan (00:29):
Well, hopefully it's not going to be a swim,
that's the thing, that's okay.
Let's hope to get the bridge.
Like we might have to swim overthere to build the other leg of
the bridge, but you know, Imean, we're really stretching
the analogy.
Tim Bourguignon (00:42):
Hello and welcome to Developers Journey,
the podcast bringing you themaking of stories of successful
software developers to help youon your upcoming journey.
I'm your host, tim Borghigno.
On this episode, I receive AralBalkan.
Aral is a developer,professional speaker, consultant
and serial entrepreneur.
He has love for programming andlearning new programming
(01:04):
languages and a passion forsimplicity, oh and and and drink
, fondness for visual andexperience design.
He's also a tireless advocateof open source and creative
comments, and he is immenselypassionate about the internet's
potential for individualempowerment, education and the
democratization of communicationand self expression, and I've
(01:26):
seen him on stage talk aboutthis.
He is a hit about it.
Aral, welcome to Journey.
Aral Balkan (01:33):
Thanks to you.
Thank you for having me, tim ohit's my pleasure.
Tim Bourguignon (01:35):
It's been a long time in the making and then
we saw each other a few monthsago at a conference and I say I
have to have you on the show,I'm glad it's finally happening
and yes, it has happened.
But before we come to your story, I want to thank the terrific
listeners who support the show.
Every month you are keeping theDev Journey lights up.
If you would like to join thisfine crew and help me spend more
(01:59):
time on finding phenomenalguests than editing audio tracks
, please go to our website,devjourneyinfo and click on the
support me on Patreon button.
Even the smallest contributionsare giant steps toward a
sustainable Dev Journey journey.
Thank you, and now back totoday's guest.
(02:20):
So, aral.
As you know, the show exists tohelp the listeners understand
what your story looked like andimagine how to shape their own
future.
So, as is usual on the show,let's go back to your beginnings
.
Where would you place the startof your Dev Journey?
Aral Balkan (02:33):
The start of my Dev Journey.
So I was seven years old and mydad brought home an IBM PC
compatible I am that old andplaced it in front of me along
with a basic manual and he saidyou know one of the most
important things that I've heardin my life.
He said go on, play with it,you can't break it.
(02:56):
And that's such a powerfulthing to say.
I did, I did break it.
Challenge accepted.
I did break it.
Yeah, challenge accepted,exactly.
I did break it a little whilelater, but with fire and smoke.
But yeah, if your dad tells younot to plug in the co-processor,
the math co-processor that youbought on your trip to Singapore
(03:18):
because you got the wrong one,don't plug it in, even if it
fits.
You know, seven year old me islike what does he know?
It fits, it must work right,turn it on, boom, oh yeah, smoke
and fire.
And the worst part of it is Iblamed him because I was so
afraid of him.
I was so afraid of him.
I mean like he wasn't abusiveor anything, he's a lovely guy,
(03:40):
but you know he had a voice onhim and I was afraid that.
You know this is an expensive,you know, computer back then,
especially so I told him hey,remember that paper clip you
dropped into the computer lastweek while we were working on.
It Must have shorted something,because you know, and he felt
so guilty, he got me another one?
Tim Bourguignon (04:03):
Did you come straight with it, or is it the
first one Like?
Aral Balkan (04:06):
decades later.
Okay, otherwise you can send me.
I was like, by the way, here'sa funny story while stepping
away yeah, no, but it was a verypowerful thing to say because
it just, um, it was the it was.
It basically meant that youknow, I had this tool that I
(04:30):
could play with, that I wasn'tafraid of, and that's very
important you know, because eventoday these things are, you
know, to some degree expensivemaybe.
But just to say, you can makethings with this.
You can play, not work, play.
You can play with this.
And it was amazing, I couldmake, you know.
I could write a few lines ofcode and I could have a star
(04:52):
field.
I could write a few more and Icould have a spaceship and I'd
be flying through my ownuniverse.
And I was seven years old.
You know, that's amazing.
That spark stays with youforever.
But I think it's also veryimportant for us to understand
that that was a different era,that I was lucky enough to have
(05:13):
been basically born into the eraof the personal computer and
that was the last time that weactually owned and controlled
our own technology.
That was the last era in whichthese were just tools and
nothing more.
You know that computer didn'twatch everything I was doing and
(05:33):
then reported to some facelesscorporation on the other side of
the planet.
That computer was not trying toanalyze me.
It wasn't trying to understandhow I was feeling, what
emotional state I was in, sothat it could manipulate my
behavior so that again we couldraise the profits and increase
the profits of some corporationssomewhere, and what's really
(05:55):
sad is today that is thebusiness model of mainstream
technology.
So today, depending on what Iwas giving my child, if I had a
child, I would be perhaps farmore concerned and I maybe
wouldn't say here, take it, dowhatever you want with it, you
can't break it.
That part of it might be true,but it could break you right,
(06:18):
because it's not necessarily asafe space.
That computer my dad gave me wasa safe space that I could play
in, I could learn in, I coulduse it as a tool.
And we've lost that with thebusiness model of mainstream
technology and that actually isleaping forward many, many
decades.
But that is why I do what I dotoday in a lot of ways, which is
(06:42):
we need to have a version ofthat in the internet age.
We can't go back to those days.
Some people want to go back tothose days, you know, and it's
great and I get it.
I get the nostalgia, you know,I pull up old games and I play
them sometimes, but that age isgone.
But we can have a version of itwith a global network that we
(07:07):
have today, in which ourtechnologies are again just
tools, they're not trying toexploit us.
Tim Bourguignon (07:14):
And.
Aral Balkan (07:14):
I think that's very key.
It's key to human rights, it'skey to democracy.
Tim Bourguignon (07:19):
It is indeed, and pulling the Wi-Fi cable is
not the solution.
Aral Balkan (07:23):
It is not the solution, no, no no, you know,
some people may want to behermits and live out in the
middle of nowhere with notechnology and you know, more
power to them.
We also have to defend theright for people to not use
technology if they don't want to.
So it's very important, I think, that we have ways of doing
(07:44):
things that don't requiresomeone to do it on a computer,
for example, as a fallback,possibly, but also to say, look,
you're not forced into thesesystems, especially if a lot of
these systems today are quitetoxic, especially if today, a
lot of these systems areexploitative.
It's very important that wehave other means of doing things
.
But yeah, but we're not goingto go back on mass.
(08:06):
So we need to find ways of goingforward differently, in better
ways.
I'm going to show thediscussion back toward your
childhood, but I'm sure we'regoing to come closer to 7.
Tim Bourguignon (08:19):
One thing I'm really bummed about is that
modern technology is a veryimportant tool for the future.
Devices I'm not going to saycomputers, I'm going to say
device Don't bring this basicprogramming language environment
like they used to do.
So this is not even an option.
If you buy an iPad nowadays,you don't have a mean to start
(08:39):
programming unless you go ontowebsites, and there isn't really
a supported by Apple way ofreally starting this and
embracing this from the get go.
Is it Is there.
Aral Balkan (08:51):
Well, I mean, there is like swift playgrounds, for
example.
I haven't played with it for along time, but that might be
possibly one alternative.
I don't know if you've seen itor played with it.
Tim Bourguignon (09:03):
Just know about it, but I find it so obscure
and not publicized as one of themain aspects.
Aral Balkan (09:10):
Right, Well, because, again, an iPhone is for
the most part a consumptiondevice, like I'm sure a lot of
people will disagree and go well, you can create so many things
with it.
Yes, you can, of course you can.
But I'm saying primarily it's aconsumption device.
And even in terms of yourcreation, if it's like you're
creating videos for TikTok orthis or that or whatever it is
(09:33):
you're doing, it's notnecessarily the same as
programming or creating TikTok.
I mean, don't create TikTok,because TikTok is again one of
these surveillance capitalistapplications and it's
exploitative and it's based on,you know, surveilling, you and
all of that.
But you know what I mean.
So, yeah, you're right, backthen you were actually thrown
(09:57):
into the tools by which thesoftware on these devices was
made.
And you know, the devicesthemselves may have still been
proprietary, the hardware itselfmight have still been
proprietary, but at least youcould build software for it.
And that was just somethingthat you almost had to do.
And in the earliest daysespecially, you know, I started
(10:18):
making my own games, because theIBM didn't have games.
You know, you played Alley Cat,you played DigDug, maybe, and
at the very early days, you know, then you had to build your own
.
So, yeah, there's something tobe said about that and I think
there are initiatives like.
I was actually involved in aone of these code club well,
(10:41):
actually in code club itself inthe UK.
It was this coding school forkids that we started up the two
founders and Claire and Lindaand I was helping them and I was
on the board of directors, etc.
And the whole idea was, youknow, to spark this initial
(11:04):
spark in kids.
You know, to like this initialspark in kids, and that's how it
started.
We were using Scratch.
So Scratch is a good tool forthat.
There are some, you know,better tools as well that enable
you to go from a visualenvironment into a textual
environment and help you alongthat path.
(11:24):
But you know what happened veryquickly, again, unfortunately,
this is so unfortunate.
It started out well and then,you know, google came on onto
the stage and we had a hugedisagreement between the
founders and because one of theco founders, linda, and I again
(11:45):
I was on the board of directorswe were like, no, we can't
normalize Google to kids, right,we can't normalize Google's
business model, surveillancebased business model to kids.
So we were very against it.
One of the co founders was likeno, no, they're fine, it's
great, don't worry about it.
So you know we resigned.
(12:05):
And then Raspberry Pi sorry,bought them and along with, I
think, the other coding likeCoder Dojo I think they bought
that one as well.
So, and when you talk aboutRaspberry Pi, these are the
folks you know.
We love their little devices.
I've got a bunch of them in mydrawer.
But they're the same people whovery recently were bragging
about hiring a spy cop, and whenpeople called them out on it,
(12:29):
they were like, oh, this is justa conspiracy against us.
It's like no dude, like don'thire a spy cop and then be proud
about it.
And again, don't normalize thisto kids.
This is the thing, like youknow it's.
It's in a lot of ways.
Maybe it was never a more naivetime or I don't know a better
(12:51):
time, but at least I guesspeople were solving some of the
big problems back then and theydidn't have time to, kind of,
you know, spend their CPU cycleson doing evil.
It wasn't that they didn't wantto be evil, maybe they just
didn't have time for that yet.
They were trying to solve thingslike how do we make this thing,
(13:11):
you know, actually play video,or when the internet is really,
really expanded the field and itwas a far worse, but is the far
worse still and yeah, and ofcourse it's not the technology.
you know, Melvin Cranesberg hasa quote about this, saying
(13:32):
technology is neither good norbad, nor is it neutral, and so
that last bit that's reallyimportant.
It wasn't necessarily thetechnology itself, you know.
So we, I said we had thepersonal computer era that I was
born into, and then whathappened is, of course, we got
the internet and we got the web,and a lot of people think that
(13:53):
the web and the internet weredecentralized, and this is false
.
So the personal computing erawas the last time that we
actually had decentralizedtechnology.
Think about it right.
You owned and controlled yourtools and everyone had their own
right, and then could youcommunicate with each other?
You couldn't a rudimentary way.
You had modems, for example,etc.
(14:16):
Whatever if you wanted to.
But with the web it lookeddecentralized at the beginning
because there were relativelymore people who ran their own
servers on the web, because itwas an academic institution
initially, as it started.
I mean, it was big in academia.
So people ran their own serversand you know if there were
(14:39):
maybe 200 people on the web atsome point, maybe there were.
You know there were 150 serversrun by 150 of them.
Maybe a couple of them, sharedit or something, so it looked
decentralized, but it never was.
It was always clients andserver.
And what happened was we gotthis huge injection of venture
capital when people saw thepotential of these servers to
(14:59):
scale to become the centers thattoday we call Google or Yahoo
or Snapchat or whatever.
So it was.
We have to understandtechnology within the
socioeconomic environment inwhich it exists and which
creates it.
(15:20):
So the reason the web blew upwas you know, we hear the story
Tim Burners-Lee made it open andthat's why it blew up.
He made it open.
He didn't make it free and open, he didn't make it.
He didn't release it under aGPL license, for example, or a
share alike license, and thatwas why it grew up.
It blew up because venturecapitalists saw that they could
(15:42):
actually own, they could encloseparts of it, right, they
wouldn't have to give back.
And that's how we got theGoogles and the Facebooks and
all of these, because theseservers scaled.
And now, of course, they'reserver farms and you know, when
people talk about server farms,I always ask them you know, just
stop for a moment and thinkabout who's being farmed in
(16:05):
these places, because it's you.
But yeah, so that was thesecond era, like the network era
, and that was actuallycentralized.
And I think now we're at apoint where at least some of us,
like me, are working on goingforward to a version of
decentralization that existswithin a world that contains
(16:30):
this global network.
So what does that look like?
And that's what you know.
That's why I'm working on thesmall, on trying to create the
small web, and on small tech, asI call it.
Tim Bourguignon (16:44):
Do you?
Shall we get there?
Do you want to?
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, how you got there interms of your story might be
fascinating as well, but hereyou have something unique and I
want to poke at that.
Aral Balkan (16:56):
Well, and yeah, yeah, I mean sure we can also
talk about the process, becauseI think the process is important
.
It wasn't like I was sevenyears old, this little spoiled
brat growing up in Malaysia then, which is what I was privileged
little spoiled brat growing upin Malaysia, you know, making
games for himself in ahedonistic way, just like you
know.
That was how I started, right.
(17:18):
There's nothing to be reallykind of applauded about, that.
I was just a lucky kid.
And but then afterwards, likemaybe in the next decade or so,
I kind of realized that thestuff I make other people use
and when I started working moreprofessionally with this stuff
(17:38):
and I did actually quit I quitcomputers when I was 13 for a
few years- Okay, wait a second.
Tim Bourguignon (17:45):
What?
Aral Balkan (17:45):
happened there.
So I remember I was making agame in C I think I was
programming in C at the time andI was making a game and I'd
spent so much time on it, likeweeks and weeks and weeks and
maybe even months and you knowwhen you're that age, that's a
long time.
And I got one of the firstcomputer viruses, c brain, and
(18:09):
it wiped everything that I had.
And so that taught me a coupleof things, you know.
One was have backups.
I learned that at that age, butit just felt like my whole.
I remember I was sitting, itwas a summer's day and I'm
sitting at home with thecurtains drawn because CRT
monitors and glare andeverything right, I don't want
the glare.
So I'm in the dark on thisbeautiful summer's day and
(18:35):
everything I was working on formonths just got erased.
It was just gone and I rememberI just stopped.
I felt like I died or something.
You know, it's just like apiece of me had died and I
stopped.
I remember I opened thecurtains, I looked outside and I
was like what the fuck am Idoing?
There's like a whole world outthere and I'm stuck in here
(18:57):
feeling like crap, feeling likeI'm dying inside.
And so I literally I steppedaway from the computer and I
didn't touch it for anothermaybe a year or so or maybe a
little longer.
So yeah, I know, but then whatreally retires me, you took you
back.
I think it was just in general,I mean more like it was becoming
(19:18):
more of a thing for school andthis and that, and I always
loved it.
So I guess I, yeah, I startedback up and then, when I was in
my early 20s or so, I think, Igot my first like consulting gig
and we were building a virtualschool like the world's first
virtual school.
(19:38):
I think it was called K-12.
I was in the States for mymaster's degree at the time and,
yeah, and then I kind ofrealized, well, people are using
the things that we're buildingand I really started
concentrating on design.
So I was like we need I wasvery naive as well.
I was like if we build thesebeautiful experiences, that'll
improve everyone's lives andeverything will be great and
(20:00):
flowers in your hair will bedancing in the fields and it'll
be so nice.
Not once thinking about, like,the business models or not once
thinking about the greater kindof economic factors at play, and
so for a while I was justconcentrating on design, because
I naively thought everyone wasjust like trying to build these
(20:22):
tools that helped people and Ionly very slowly started
realizing, no, wait a minute,when Google creates a product,
it's actually creating twoproducts.
Every Google product is twoproducts.
There's the product that peopleuse everyday people use because
they get some sort of value outof it.
That might be the mail aspectof Gmail, it might be the docs
(20:45):
aspect of Google docs.
But there's another product onthere at the same time and
that's what's watching them andmining them and exploiting them,
et cetera.
So it's hard work actually.
Hats off.
Hats off to the surveillancecapitalists.
They have a hard job for everyproduct they have to build to,
and then they have to make surethe people who are using them
(21:06):
are not aware of the secondproduct.
They must not see the wizardbehind the curtain.
So it's a hard job.
I don't envy it, I don'trespect it, but it's a hard job.
So, yeah, that's when I started.
I slowly started seeing this andthen I think it was the Edward
Snowden revelations that reallybrought it to the forefront and
(21:29):
really kind of showed me wow,this is.
I mean, this sort ofexploitation is horrible anyway,
but it has a real effect onhuman rights, on democracy, and
we're seeing that today.
We saw that afterwards withCambridge Analytica.
We saw Trump getting elected,we saw Boris Johnson getting
elected.
We saw the effects that thishas.
(21:51):
We saw the effect it has inpushing people towards the right
, and we have a huge problemwith that.
Right now, with fascism on therise everywhere across the
planet, you can't even listcountries anymore.
It's take too long, it'sgetting around, it is, it is,
and so this system is not.
It's not an ethical system,it's not a sustainable system.
(22:14):
It's a system in which we havea handful of it's created, a
handful of billionaires most ofthem absolute douchebags, if not
all and at the detriment ofeveryone else.
So I quickly started realizingthis is not what I want to be a
part of, this is not what I wantto contribute to, and it's
(22:37):
easier said than done.
Then they call it themainstream for a reason.
So, yeah, at some point Ibasically decided look, I'm just
gonna devote myself to tryingto build an alternative to this.
Whether or not I can, I don'tknow, but at least I can try.
And that's when we found it.
Initially it was called Indiefor independent, because it
(22:58):
really is all about how you'refollowing and it is all about
how you're funded.
If we took venture capital, wewouldn't be able to do what
we're doing.
We'd have much more comfortablelives, but we wouldn't be able
to do what we're doing.
So, and then we changed thename a few years ago when we
moved to Ireland, to SmallTechnology Foundation.
(23:19):
As we, over the last 10 years,I've kind of been looking into
this problem and trying tounderstand what could be not
just a solution one solution butone solution that can be
affected by someone who has verylimited resources.
One person coding, that'sstatistically.
That doesn't exist.
(23:40):
If we're talking about theworld in general, you shouldn't
wait, in balance, you mean.
Exactly, exactly.
So, yeah, that's what broughtme to working on the Small Web
and Small Technology with Laura.
Tim Bourguignon (23:55):
Wow, before we get there, how do you apprehend
such a problem?
I mean, this is one of thebiggest problems there is
currently, probably with someeconomic problems in the third
world, with some health problemsand with some energy problems
and the climate, not to forgetthe climate.
But how do you face this andnot just stare at it and just
(24:20):
say, wow, I have no idea whereto start.
How did you approach that?
Aral Balkan (24:23):
Well, I mean staring at it and going I have
no idea where to start is a veryvalid reaction because it is
such a big problem.
All of those problems youlisted are also interconnected.
They all stem from systemicinequality.
They all stem from anunsustainable system and climate
change.
We get rid of the billionaires.
(24:44):
We're going to be along the wayto fixing climate change if we
could do that.
Yeah, I guess the bit where Iwas, I don't know.
I guess it's lucky.
I don't know if you can saylucky, if you can use that term
within this context, but I'mlucky enough that I can do
(25:05):
something about it.
So a lot of people see theproblem and a lot of people try
to articulate the problem, whichis how I started trying to
tackle it.
First of all, I did a lot oftalks.
Back then I did an RSA talk inthe UK.
There are videos of me speakingto the BBC.
They did a surveillancecapitalism bit, et cetera,
(25:26):
whatever.
So I was like my initialthought was people don't know,
and if we can just tell peopleand explain it as simply as
possible what's at stake, thatthis isn't just some geeky issue
, that this affects human rights, this affects democracy, if we
can just articulate it wellenough, then of course, they're
going to take action Again.
(25:49):
I'm very naive.
I approach things naively.
I don't think this is a problem.
This is not something I'mlooking to change.
I don't think naive is a badthing.
Naive just means you approachthings as they should be, as you
expect them to be, in a worldthat works properly.
There's nothing wrong with that.
So I'm not getting rid of thataspect of my personality,
(26:10):
because if you do that, I thinkyou become jaded, and I don't
want to be jaded.
So I approach things naively.
Same in design.
I approach things naively andthey usually lie to me.
It's fine, that's how youbecome a better designer.
And same with this.
So once I realize and I'vespoken twice at the European
(26:33):
Parliament about this issue, Ieven joined a political movement
at some point because I waslike this is not just a
technological issue, it's apolitical and socioeconomic
issue.
So maybe we can do and, to beperfectly honest, I'm done
talking.
I know this is quite ironic,since we're talking and I don't
truly 100% believe that I mean,it's not one thing that's going
(26:55):
to fix this issue and no matterhow many lines of code I write,
I'm not going to fix this issue,because it's not an issue that
can be fixed just with code.
We need the political aspect,we need the educational aspect,
we need people to be activistsand we need people to be talking
about this, and that's partlywhy I'm also talking to you
about it right now, instead ofcoding, not only because I broke
(27:17):
my hand playing tennis.
Tim Bourguignon (27:20):
Showing a nice, a nice, a nice hand.
I know?
Aral Balkan (27:22):
Yeah, that's, if you're going to see this on a,
you're going to hear this on apodcast.
I'm showing my cast hand in acast playing tennis, tripping
over my own feet first brokenbone at 47.
Been skating my whole life.
I ride a one wheel, nothing, notennis Anyway.
So so you were saying, don'tsay talking.
(27:44):
I'm talking.
Tim Bourguignon (27:46):
Clearly not.
Aral Balkan (27:48):
Clearly not so.
But yeah, I basically decidedlook, other people can talk to
and I don't mean this in, I'mnot judging Like some people
will, I'm sure even articulatethe question better than I have
and more power to them, and Ihope they keep doing that.
Not everyone can actually codesomething.
(28:08):
That could be an alternative.
And I think what I've realizedis you can't fight every fire.
You have to pick and chooseyour battles.
And so at some point I was like, okay, where can I be most
effective?
And also I was always duringthis decade, I was thinking like
what is the solution to this?
And initially I was like we'llcreate a phone and it'll be
(28:30):
great and it'll be a free andopen source phone and they'll
have all the software.
And it's like, yeah, okay, you,and what money?
Right?
So we actually started off onthat before realizing, okay, no,
we can't do this without thekind of venture capital or
whatever that it would take toget it off the ground.
We tried crowdfunding and thisand that and it was too big a
(28:52):
problem.
10 years later, now we're juststarting to see free and open
source phones and they do again,not a judgment at all but they
do the bare minimum that a phoneshould be doing right now.
It's not like they also havetheir own app suites or the
things that.
So you buy a free and opensource phone, but if you still
have to use Google, then youhaven't really fixed the problem
(29:13):
right.
So it's a big problem.
So I started narrowing down,narrowing down my focus and
finally realized, look, we needpeople to own and control their
own means of communication.
So how can we best do that withthe resources that we have?
And that's what led me to theidea of the small web, which is
(29:34):
very simple.
The small web is a very simpleidea, right?
What if each one of us ownedand controlled our own place on
the web?
And this would be a place thatwouldn't require technical
knowledge for us to set it up orto maintain it.
We could be public there, justlike we can, say, on Mastodon or
(29:54):
on some other network, so wecould have public posts or on
Facebook or whatever.
But we could also be private.
We could also communicateprivately, actually privately,
not Facebook privately.
So Facebook private is you, meand Mark Zuckerberg.
So actual private is you and me, no, mark Zuckerberg.
(30:17):
And so basically, that leadsyou to a peer-to-peer design.
The problem with peer-to-peer asit exists today is twofold
discoverability and availability.
These are issues common toevery peer-to-peer network how
do I find you and how do Iguarantee that you will get my
(30:42):
message when I send you amessage or a photo or whatever?
And there are ways of solvingthese issues, and every
peer-to-peer network solves themin pretty much the same way,
which, at the end of the day,relies on some sort of a
centralized server somewherethat's always online for
signaling or for guaranteeingthe quality of that
communication.
We see this with WebRTC, we seeit with any sort of
(31:05):
peer-to-peer network, or itsuffers for those two aspects,
neither of which are things thatpeople are going to expect or
accept.
In a world where you go onFacebook, it's always there
pretty much, you can alwaysreach your friends pretty much,
and people don't understand thatit's algorithmic.
They don't understand that alltheir friends who are following
(31:27):
them don't see all their posts,etc.
But they think they do at least, so they're fooled into that
sense that they might be.
So in order to combat this, inorder to have an alternative to
this, you need a system that isalways available, that is easy
to find.
So the Web is great for that.
We can use it differently, andso that's what I'm building with
(31:48):
the small Web A system whereanyone who is a peer-to-peer
network, a system where anyonewithout technical knowledge will
just be able to go to a website, say, hey, I want this domain
and maybe initially enter acredit card and pay 10 euros a
month, I don't know and they gettheir own place and it can
(32:09):
communicate with everyone else'splaces.
Of course, this is free andopen source.
Every aspect of it is free andopen source, and it may not have
to be money.
Part of what I've realized again, I spoke twice at the European
Parliament and what I told themwas look, we need an alternative
to venture capital.
We need a means of fundingthese sort of initiatives that
I'm working on, others areworking on from the commons for
(32:31):
the common good, because that'swhat we're doing it.
So we need an alternative to VC.
It's not something that shouldbe government controlled.
It should be done byindividuals, independent
organizations.
But these independentorganizations should have
certain rules that they have toadhere to, that they can't sell
out to a Facebook or a Googleonce they become large enough.
Right, they have to keepworking in the interests of the
(32:53):
commons and it just kind of wentflew right over their heads.
They were like we see his lipsmoving but we don't understand
what he's saying.
So we need funding for this.
And I kind of realized, look, wedid a pilot project with the
city of Ghent and we went up tothem and we were like, look,
(33:15):
what if all the citizens inGhent had their own place on the
web and you funded it right aspart of their?
They pay for stuff with theirtaxes as part of that, but it
also would mean that they canuse these places to communicate
securely with you, themunicipality.
And so we did a pilot when thegovernment was a progressive
(33:35):
government in Ghent, and then wedemonstrated it.
Everyone was like, oh, this isbeautiful, this is lovely.
And then a conservativegovernment came in and boom, our
funding got cut.
So, all this to say, I'verealized that I've come to the
conclusion again that, you know,relying on these political kind
of institutions for fundingit's good for projects.
(33:58):
If you want to have an artproject to, you know, bring
attention to the horrors ofsurveillance with a modern art
dance, then yes, they'll fund itright.
You want to build a product, analternative, that requires
ongoing work, but not so muchvery bad at that.
So that's why I'm building inan ability for it to exist in
(34:22):
the current system.
So you will like, we'll hostone of these hosts for these
small websites and anyone elsecan host theirs as well, and
ours will take payments andhopefully that will keep Small
Technology Foundation, ournot-for-profit, sustainable in
the current system.
Tim Bourguignon (34:43):
So what you're suggesting is actually not
flipping the table on everything, it's actually keeping some of
the building blocks you talkedabout, peter Chopier, and
centralization.
Well, we cannot revokecentralization, but we can like
we did for non-for-profit we canput some stamps and some rules
around it that says this is thevalue codex you're going to
(35:05):
adhere to and you're going tolive through.
And if you do that, then theproblem of centralization,
for-profit plus VCs is not thereanymore.
Right, I mean that's so.
Aral Balkan (35:16):
My basic thing to the European Parliament was like
we could fund these thingsdifferently, but they need to
have certain rules so that wedon't do what we're doing today.
Today we fund technology in theEuropean Union.
We fund startups, and whathappens?
A startup is successful, itgets bought by Google or
Facebook.
It's not successful?
The EU taxpayer foots the bill.
(35:37):
So what have we become?
We've become a free researchand development department for
Silicon Valley.
Right, we take all the risk.
They get all the reward.
That's stupid.
So let's do better than that.
Hopefully, maybe one day wewill, I don't know.
But that's why we're buildinglike.
(35:57):
I'm building a commercialaspect into it as well, and
hopefully that will mean thatorganizations like ours can be
sustainable.
At least.
The thing about the small web isI'm designing it, so it doesn't
scale.
So even this hosting aspect,where it just creates your own
server for you, it's not so.
You get your own VPS server atyour own domain and you get
(36:21):
whatever application isinstalled there.
So we're going to have a socialnetwork style thing that we're
building, but other people willbe able to build other things as
well that get installed there.
So, again, the whole thing isfree and open, but so I'm
building an aspect of it whereyou can actually pay 10 euros a
month, but a municipality likeGhent could just mail out codes
(36:45):
to their citizens and they usethat instead.
In the future, we might decide,hey, this should be a human
right.
Everyone should have their ownplace on the web, and this is
important for democracy.
It's important for people to beable to communicate without
algorithms controlled bydouchebag billionaires and
deciding what they can see andwhat they can't see, filtering
their realities, deciding onwhat they can say and what they
(37:07):
can't say, which doesn't meanthat you get carte blanche to do
whatever the heck you want.
It just means you have your ownplace.
If you go out there, use thatplace and incite hatred or
incite people to violence, wehave a system of policing
already in society and that cankick in.
We don't need additional thingsto surveil everyone or whatever
(37:27):
.
We're just modeling.
What I'm doing is I'm justmodeling the human being.
We don't have that aspect intechnology today.
If we want to talk to oneanother you are a person, I am a
person we get together, we talk.
If some of us want to organizeand do something whether it's
work or plan a protest or dowhatever.
(37:48):
We are individuals, we gettogether and we're able to
communicate.
And in situations where we allhave similar tools and we're
mostly equal, that's where Ithink we have the most
democratic potential.
In situations where that's notthe case, think of a corporation
that has huge capital costs,that has machinery that the
(38:10):
employees don't have, thatthey've invested millions and
millions in, so you have to gowork for that corporation, right
, and the power differentialthere is big.
The corporation has all thepower.
You as an employee don't have alot of power, right.
What if everyone had the sametools?
I'm not talking aboutmanufacturing, I'm talking about
communication.
I'm talking about the abilityto organize.
(38:32):
Right now, facebook has a lotof the tools, or TikTok or
Google.
What if we democratize that sothat everyone had the tools and
could communicate?
Then it would be a much moreegalitarian sort of society.
I think that's much better fordemocracy, so we're not beholden
to these gatekeepers.
Tim Bourguignon (38:52):
Yeah, amen to that.
So we spoke a lot about thehistory and the projection in
the future.
If I go into the small webright now, what can I do with it
and what's coming in the nextmonth?
Where are you and what's thenext step for you?
Aral Balkan (39:09):
Right.
So depends on who you are.
So right now it's not ready foreveryday people who use
technologies and everyday thing.
I don't like to use the termusers.
You might notice that I feelthat user is an othering and I
find that, especially inmainstream technology, once
we've othered a group, it's avery small step from user to
(39:32):
dumb user, right.
Once we've kind of created thathierarchy of where the people
who know, where the smart ones,where the designers, where the
developers and they're theidiots who use it, then it makes
it easier to do bad things tothose idiots, right.
So I don't like that.
I don't think they're idiotseither.
(39:56):
But that whole thing about oh,this is actually really
prevalent, unfortunately, infree and open source, where we
have this notion that people whouse what we make have to either
really care enough to learnwhat we've built, even if it's
(40:19):
difficult, or if they don't,they don't deserve it.
It's an arrogance that we haveand we make comparisons like oh,
you know, even your mom coulduse it, or even your grandma
very, very sexist things as well.
But we have this notion that,you know, people are stupid if
they don't understand how to usewhat we make and we really need
(40:40):
to, even especially in the freeand open source world.
We need to really move beyondthis because it is arrogant
these people who use the thingswe make.
I'm not stupid.
The reason we have to make thethings that we're making easy to
use and beautiful and lovelyexperiences Is not because the
people who use them are stupid.
It's because their brainsurgeons and they have brain
(41:03):
surgery in the morning so theydon't have time for your useless
thing that doesn't workproperly that they have to learn
right.
So you're the stupid one.
If it doesn't, if it isn't easyto use, they're not, and I'm
sure I'll get some hate for that, but it's okay you guys should
be able to take it we should beable to take it right and it's
(41:26):
an arrogance that doesn't helpanyone really.
So right now the small web is ata stage where developers can
play with what there is, andwhat there is is Two things.
The main one is kitten, likethe cat, like little baby cat,
(41:47):
and it's a framework and aserver for building small
websites.
So developers can take this andstart kind of playing with
small websites.
And again, remember, a smallwebsite is a peer to peer
website.
It's very different from yourregular centralized website.
It's only meant to serve oneperson no users.
There's no concept of users.
When you remove the concept ofusers, you greatly simplify the
(42:11):
system In what you have to buildright.
Authentication becomes.
You don't even need a user namebecause there's no user right.
So you have a secret and that'ssecret.
And kitten is a string of emoji.
So you just put that into yourpassword manager.
It's a string of emoji, notjust because it's cute, because
it is cute, but so that youcan't write it down on sticky
(42:34):
and posted onto your monitor anddefeat the whole purpose of
security in the whole system.
So, but there's no usernameright.
It means that we can cut out ahuge amount of complexity.
We're designing just for oneperson on one node.
So imagine a tiny VPS and theapp that's running on it is just
(42:56):
for one person and it connectsto other VPS nodes that are just
for one person.
It means we can have an inprocess database, for example,
etc.
Etc.
Etc.
So that that in turn, makes itmuch less complicated to deploy
these things, which means thatwe can start building deployment
aspects that are very simple touse, that don't require
(43:18):
technical knowledge to eitherdeploy or to maintain.
So if you've ever installed andrun your own mastodon instance,
you know how complicated thatis, because mastodon is built on
a big tech stack, right, and soevery mastodon instance could
serve one person, like mine isjust for me but it can also
(43:39):
serve a hundred thousand, maybefive hundred thousand depending
on how beefy your server is, andthose are completely different
worlds.
It's a world of complexityapart to serve one person versus
five hundred thousand.
That's why it's built with thetechnologies that it's built
with.
Tim Bourguignon (43:55):
You don't need communities to have one user on
it, exactly.
Aral Balkan (43:58):
And that's why I had to build kitten.
That's why I had to build myown server and my own framework.
It's also a really goodframework for learning web
development in general, becauseit is built on HTML, css,
javascript and thenprogressively enhanced with HTML
and HTML on the wire, basically, and Alpine JS if you want it
or whatever else you want to use.
But it has built in support forthese things.
(44:19):
It makes the basics very simple.
It has built in support forpublic key encryption so you can
send and send encryptedmessages between these nodes,
for example, without as adeveloper, without knowing how
to build that yourself, becausethat's also not the simplest
thing to build and very easy toget wrong.
(44:41):
But also the way that ittranslates to people who are
using it is they don't need toknow about keys or a secret keys
or whatever.
They just have their littleemoji Secret that they put into
their one password or theirpassword manager or whatever it
is.
Everything else gets generatedfrom that.
That's actually an add two,five, five, one, nine secret key
.
Do they need to know that?
No, it's a string of emoji.
(45:03):
It's cute.
Way better, way better.
To be honest, it's a little bitmore complicated.
Tim Bourguignon (45:08):
To be straight, I could spin up in an instance
how do you call that A node?
I could spin up a node on mymachine and have that done on a
different machine beside me andjust connect the two ends and
messages, right and left.
Aral Balkan (45:20):
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, if you go to thekitten website, the website is
right now on my source coderepository.
It doesn't even have its ownsite yet, but it's on code Byrk,
codeorg, forward slash, kittenforward slash app.
If you go there, you canactually.
There are lots of examples andone of them is an end to end
(45:40):
encrypted kitten chat and youcan just run that locally
because it's got things like youcan actually.
It's got aliases for place oneto place fivelocalhost, so you
can actually run nodes locallyand test between it.
It's a pure web I you'veprobably never worked with this
(46:01):
before or played with it, soit's probably a good time for
developers to kind of just atleast have a look and go okay,
this is an interesting concept,maybe.
What does it feel like?
How is it different?
And also it's kind of cool toyou know, play with a system
that has no bullshit baked in.
Part of it is.
When I first started again, Iwas always I'm always trying to
(46:23):
see where in the stack.
Like you said earlier, we can'trebuild the whole thing Right.
There are people trying tobuild a completely different
internet and this and that andsure, but you need to build a
bridge between where we are andwhere we want to be, Right,
especially if you want otherpeople to be able to come over
with us to that place.
We want to be, because all ofthese issues that I mentioned
(46:44):
surveillance, this and thatwhatever they're all solved if
you have technical knowledge.
Right For us.
Actually, these are solvedproblems.
We can delve into the you knowthe guts of the Linux kernel if
we need to, depending on howmuch we want to harden something
.
These are not issues for us,it's an issue for everyone else.
So I think it's very importantif you're trying to build an
(47:06):
alternative, it's not justsaying oh here, we're on this
island and this island isterrible, we need to get off
this island.
We're going to go to this otherisland and all the other master
swimmers follow me.
That's great.
So the three of you are on theother island, everyone else is
drowned.
You need to build a bridge, andthat's how I see the small web
as a bridge between you know,the centralized web that we live
(47:27):
in and kind of thedecentralized world we want to
get to, and so yeah, yeah.
Tim Bourguignon (47:35):
That's a hell of a swim, a hell of a journey.
Aral Balkan (47:38):
Well, hopefully it's not going to be a swim.
That's the thing.
That's okay.
Let's hope we get the bridge,Like we might have to swim over
there to build the other leg ofthe bridge.
But you know, we're reallystretching the analogy.
Tim Bourguignon (47:52):
I'll trust you with that, but wait for a couple
weeks until your cast is off.
Aral Balkan (47:58):
Yes, definitely.
Tim Bourguignon (47:59):
That's usually the place where I as an advice,
but I'd like to wrap up aboutthe elements that you brought.
So where should we send peopleafter listening to this, to read
again about your concept, toread about Kitten, to read about
the small web star?
What are the different placesyou would advertise or push for
(48:21):
people to go to?
Aral Balkan (48:22):
Sure, just two really.
The Small Technology Foundationwebsite is at small-techorg and
my own website is even shorterit's A-R-dot-A-L, so it's just
my first name with a dot in themiddle.
I'm so jealous.
And, yes, it was expensive.
(48:42):
No, I wanted that domain for solong Because, again, part of it
is your domain on the small weband your domain on the web is
part of your identity in a senseor identities.
That's the cool thing about thesmall web have 10 different
places, explore differentaspects of your identity.
It's very dangerous if peoplesay we control your identity,
(49:04):
this is your identity.
No, we're much more complexcreatures than that.
But so I've always wanted thatsort of it's a vanity domain, of
course Albanian.
So I did actually.
I went to them and I was likecan I have A-R-dot-A-L?
And they were like we don't dotwo-letter domains.
And I was like no sad face.
And then a while later somebodysaid would you like A-R-dot-A-L
(49:25):
?
I'm like I thought they didn'tdo it and then they apparently
started doing it.
Somebody else got it.
We were so lucky, they knewabout what we were doing and
they were sympathetic.
So I did pay.
I did pay more money than I'veever paid for a domain, but I
didn't pay as much as I couldhave, especially considering
that A-R-L is the name of aGerman petroleum company, so
they could have actually gone tothem.
Tim Bourguignon (49:48):
So I'm very lucky to have it.
Aral Balkan (49:50):
But yes, that's where people can go, okay.
And there are videos there, etcetera.
There are lots of examples inkitten for developers to play
with and, as always, I'm veryeasy to reach, so you'll find a
link to my mastodon.
If you're on mastodon, feelfree to just ping me there If
you have any questions, andreally just it's at the point
(50:11):
where.
Just play with it.
Hopefully, within a couple ofmonths, you'll be able to deploy
your own websites with it aswell small websites, and then
the fun will really begin,because then we can evolve a
protocol together.
It's not going to be a top downsort of thing and, and you know
, other developers will be ableto build other things, because
the thing I build may not be thething that you know people end
up using.
I don't know.
I hope it is, but I'm trying tobuild it in such a way that you
(50:35):
know we're sharing every brick,so that you can build your own
little Lego creations as well.
Tim Bourguignon (50:40):
Then I'm pressing my thumbs in German is
wishing you luck.
Aral Balkan (50:48):
Okay, yeah, I'm pressing my thumbs right now.
I'm pressing that one thumb.
Tim Bourguignon (50:56):
Aril, it's been a fantastic discussion, thank
you so much.
Aral Balkan (51:00):
Thank you for having me.
Tim Bourguignon (51:04):
My pleasure.
People go to the links I willadd to the show notes.
Have a read on the small techwebsite.
It brushes over everything wetalked about.
It just goes in depth and inway more detail.
So take the time.
If anything wasn't clear rightnow, it will be after the read.
So please do that, aril.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, tim, and that's beenanother episode of DevPost
(51:27):
Journey with each other nextweek Bye, bye.
Thanks a lot for tuning in.
I hope you have enjoyed thisweek's episode.
If you like the show, pleaseshare, rate and review.
It helps more listenersdiscover those stories.
You can find the links to allthe platforms the show appears
on on our website devjourneyinfoslash subscribe.
(51:52):
Creating the show every weektakes a lot of time, energy and,
of course, money.
Will you please help mecontinue bringing out those
inspiring stories every week bypledging a small monthly
donation?
You'll find our Patreon link atdevjourneyinfo slash donate.
And finally, don't hesitate toreach out and tell me how this
(52:15):
week's story is shaping yourfuture.
You can find me on Twitter andat teamathabtimothep, or per
email info at devjourneyinfo.
Talk to you soon.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!