Read end to end, the source library tells one story told four times: each era of computing pushes authority further from a center.
The recurring move
- Cooperating machines, no owner. Licklider’s “Intergalactic Computer Network” imagined autonomous systems sharing programs and data without a central authority — networking as a federation, not a hub.
- Permissionless publishing. Berners-Lee’s 1989 proposal made the Web decentralized by default: anyone could add a page or a link without asking. No registry, no gatekeeper.
- Trust without an intermediary. Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper replaced the trusted middleman with cryptographic proof, proving a globally shared ledger can run with no owner at all.
- Control of the substrate. The Independent Internet adds the axis the others left open — control of the compute and data themselves, through self-hosting, mesh networking, and on-premises storage.
Why it matters
Decentralization is not a single invention but a direction the lineage keeps travelling, each step removing a different central point of control. Surveillance capitalism is what the story looks like when that direction reverses — when value extraction re-centralizes around intermediaries holding everyone’s data. The Independent Internet’s wager is that the structural cure is the same move, applied once more: take out the choke point.