MMM* Bacon Networks

Declare your independence from Tech Oligarchy!

Delete Your Cell Bill

Do me a quick favor: take out any screen+WiFi device, and look at your WiFi available connection list (usually the upward segmented quarter-pie “waves” icon in the menu you can drag down from the top of your screen). Look at the top of the list, with the biggest-strongest “signal” indicators but locks next to them. Imagine you could share your WiFi lock keys with each other, and get free signal as you pass by your neighbors, in return for them getting signal when they pass by yours. Imagine extending all these signals by miles with existing technologies like Super-WiFi. Would you ever need any 5G Telco Oligarchs?

Delete Your Internet Bills

Now look at the weaker signals near the bottom of the WiFi list. Some of them are on opposite sides of wherever you’re holding your device right now, so you can barely see them but they can’t really see each other. Imagine you could all agree to “relay” each other’s signals, where anyone who couldn’t connect to each other directly can “hop” via neighbors who can see them both. Extend that to any town, city, province, county, State, continent, island, or cluster can become one big system of relays. That could be The Internet! We don’t need these monopolist Telco or Cable hoarder Oligarchs at all. This can all be done with current technologies, but near future ones will make it even easier.

Delete Your Cloud Service Bills

Another quick favor: count all the people you would trust to watch your precious things, pets, plants, etc. while you are away. Not that they’re always available, just that you would trust them if they were. Top of the dome only! If you take too long to think of them they don’t count for this. Then think about how not everyone on their lists are already on yours, meaning you all combined have a much longer collective trust list.

This is called “small world network phenomenon” on your personal “web of trust”. Past studies (look up those quoted terms, along with “Dunbar’s Number”) show that you can cover almost the whole world with these overlapping human-trust networks via just handfuls (3-9) of “hops”. Some of you fellow-olds know this as the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, tempting me to call these “Bacon Networks”, mmm! These trust networks can replace your current Internet ID, secure communications, backup storage services, and more! This will finally flush out the Enshittification Oligarchy.

Short* AI

Declare your independence from the Big AI Oligarchy!

Look up the name “Ed Zitron”, or the phrase “data center resistance”. We have. Big AI is going to fail. Maybe not all of it. Maybe one will actually reach a manageable form of AGI and “win”, but not all of them will.

If any one of them fails, there will be some kind of equipment sell-off for orders of magnitude cheaper prices than new, or at least not nearly what they paid. We are gathering a funding pool to buy up these equipment lots for you, regular people, to collectively give you all the computational power of Big AI.

Even if these equipment lots never become available to us, we can buy existing AI capable equipment at lower costs as soon as these companies stop buying up all future production, like the Framework AI desktop.

We will work together to use it more efficiently, using *Short-er logic chain open Machine Learning or “AI” models, gathered in open source research repositories like Hugging Face and OpenML. We will network together in our own neighborhoods using collaboration networks like Kwaai.ai. Together, we will defeat the monopolist-wannabe giants.

*MMM is both onomatopoeia and an acronym for: Multi-Modal Mesh. This is a nonprofit project of the 501c3 Data Roads Foundation and BeforeNeed.org. Consult with a tax advisor about possible deductions from donations to this project.

*Not a short position on any stock, nor a bet for or against any one AI corporation. The position we’re taking is that at least one major AI company or data center provider will fail eventually and be forced to sell core equipment at orders of magnitude lower prices than new price. This is a nonprofit project of the 501c3 Data Roads Foundation and BeforeNeed.org. Consult with a tax advisor about possible deductions from donations to this project.

Parody collage image credits: HuggingFace, OpenML, Kwaai.ai, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and xAI logos; musgraphic “Cartoon Ramadan Cannon 3D Rendering” CC-BY; Toki “Papercraft Tin Toy Robot” CC-BY; and a masked still from the movie iRobot. No endorsement granted nor permission given by sources of any images in use, composite parody representation only for project metaphor illustration purposes, simplicity defeating over-anthromorphized engineering.