This post captures a few notes from a second round of thesis brainstorming.
This time I took a completely different tack, exploring ideas surrounding sustaining the communities and knowledge present on the web without the need for a centralized infrastructure. What might happen, for example, of catastrophic technical or political events shut down ISPs — or if increasing regulation / paranoia leads to national firewalls or censorship?
Could the web be rebuilt with the scraps of hardware most consumers already have on hand? Are Wi-Fi routers, devices, and personal storage ubiquitous enough to patch together a mesh resembling the web as we know it today?
In the context of a thesis project, I envision answers to these questions manifesting as a kind of survival kit. A suitcase full of hard disks and wireless connections, for example, designed to restore fragments of the web to nearby users and act as a node in a broader network of data survivalists.
Here are a few questions to shape early exploration of the idea:
How big is the internet? How about just the text? How much physical space would it take to store a copy of the whole thing?
Build or find a wardriving app for the iPhone that will log SSIDs / MAC addresses / geo coordinates while walking around New York. From this data, I could find out how much of the area could (hypothetically) be covered by an ad-hoc mesh-based internet to verify the feasibility of the idea (at least in densely populated areas). WiGLE has been collecting wireless access point info since 2001, and they’ve aggregated and geo-tagged a list of about 27,500,000 Wi-Fi access points so far. Here’s how coverage looks across the United States:
What data do people take with them before they go off-grid? The subway, for example, is a wifi-free zone… and many riders descend with a few gigabytes of Mp3s at the least. More obsessive types might find ways to cache fragments of the web for consumption sans-connection.
