Amazing to read this (the keynote from SXSW a couple of weeks ago) and not know who T. Bone Burnett is until now.
I knew almost all of this, but it is worth reading all the same to see it all in one place. I agree with him on everything too (although he misunderstands GDPR - who doesn’t! It is about P for Protection, not P for Privacy. The latter is still being worked on: the ePrivacy Regulation).
@timbl the speech sets the scene well, including mentioning you and Solid, but advocates for a radical approach:
Berners-Lee has said he is “devastated” by what his creation has become, and he is working to “re-decentralize” the web with a new project he calls Solid. I sincerely wish him the best of luck, but from where I stand, we would do well to scrap this first internet project- we should break up these advertising platform monopolies, and we should start from scratch to build an electronic communications system founded on hard and fast ethics rather than utopian fantasies.
I think SAFE Network is such a radical approach, not instead of Solid, but by giving Solid an underlying foundation that can transform the web - democratises it at its core - with baked in privacy, security and new business models that allow anyone to profit from their creations at scale, without the need for intermediaries or to trade their IP in order to finance infrastructure. Soon I hope to have more to show on how easy it will be to develop for both Solid on pods and Solid on SAFE, so developers don’t need to choose, but can just create Solid apps (for both). It is nearly a year since my Plume demo, so it is time for an update!