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.
Use my special link https://zen.ai/dsVpYxjSth5fD-hlbzdIiw to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.
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.
Use my special link https://zen.ai/dsVpYxjSth5fD-hlbzdIiw to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.
I think it's very important if you're trying to build an alternative, it's not just saying oh here we're on this island and this island is terrible, we need to get off this island. We're going to go to this other island and all the other master swimmers follow me. That's great. So the three of you are on the other island. Everyone else is drowned. You need to build a bridge, and that's how I see the small web as a bridge between you know, the centralized web that we live in and kind of the decentralized world we want to get to.
Tim Bourguignon:That's a hell of a swim, a hell of a journey.
Aral Balkan: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 over there to build the other leg of the bridge, but you know, I mean, we're really stretching the analogy.
Tim Bourguignon:Hello and welcome to Developers Journey, the podcast bringing you the making of stories of successful software developers to help you on your upcoming journey. I'm your host, tim Borghigno. On this episode, I receive Aral Balkan. Aral is a developer, professional speaker, consultant and serial entrepreneur. He has love for programming and learning new programming languages and a passion for simplicity, oh and and and drink, fondness for visual and experience design. He's also a tireless advocate of open source and creative comments, and he is immensely passionate about the internet's potential for individual empowerment, education and the democratization of communication and self expression, and I've seen him on stage talk about this. He is a hit about it. Aral, welcome to Journey.
Aral Balkan:Thanks to you. Thank you for having me, tim oh it's my pleasure.
Tim Bourguignon:It's been a long time in the making and then we saw each other a few months ago 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.
Tim Bourguignon:But before we come to your story, I want to thank the terrific listeners who support the show. Every month you are keeping the Dev Journey lights up. If you would like to join this fine crew and help me spend more time on finding phenomenal guests than editing audio tracks, please go to our website, devjourneyinfo and click on the support me on Patreon button.
Tim Bourguignon:Even the smallest contributions are giant steps toward a sustainable Dev Journey journey. Thank you, and now back to today's guest. So, aral. As you know, the show exists to help the listeners understand what your story looked like and imagine 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 start of your Dev Journey?
Aral Balkan:The start of my Dev Journey. So I was seven years old and my dad brought home an IBM PC compatible I am that old and placed it in front of me along with a basic manual and he said you know one of the most important things that I've heard in my life. He said go on, play with it, you can't break it. And that's such a powerful thing to say. I did, I did break it. Challenge accepted. I did break it. Yeah, challenge accepted, exactly. I did break it a little while later, but with fire and smoke.
Aral Balkan:But yeah, if your dad tells you not to plug in the co-processor, the math co-processor that you bought on your trip to Singapore because you got the wrong one, don't plug it in, even if it fits. You know, seven year old me is like 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 I blamed him because I was so afraid of him. I was so afraid of him. I mean like he wasn't abusive or anything, he's a lovely guy, but you know he had a voice on him 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 last week 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:Did you come straight with it, or is it the first one Like?
Aral Balkan:decades later. Okay, otherwise you can send me. I was like, by the way, here's a funny story while stepping away yeah, no, but it was a very powerful thing to say because it just, um, it was the it was. It basically meant that you know, I had this tool that I could play with, that I wasn't afraid of, and that's very important you know, because even today these things are, you know, to some degree expensive maybe.
Aral Balkan:But just to say, you can make things with this. You can play, not work, play. You can play with this. And it was amazing, I could make, you know. I could write a few lines of code and I could have a star field. I could write a few more and I could have a spaceship and I'd be flying through my own universe. And I was seven years old. You know, that's amazing. That spark stays with you forever.
Aral Balkan:But I think it's also very important for us to understand that that was a different era, that I was lucky enough to have been basically born into the era of the personal computer and that was the last time that we actually owned and controlled our own technology. That was the last era in which these were just tools and nothing more. You know that computer didn't watch everything I was doing and then reported to some faceless corporation on the other side of the planet. That computer was not trying to analyze me. It wasn't trying to understand how I was feeling, what emotional state I was in, so that it could manipulate my behavior so that again we could raise the profits and increase the profits of some corporations somewhere, and what's really sad is today that is the business model of mainstream technology. So today, depending on what I was giving my child, if I had a child, I would be perhaps far more concerned and I maybe wouldn't say here, take it, do whatever you want with it, you can't break it. That part of it might be true, but it could break you right, because it's not necessarily a safe space.
Aral Balkan:That computer my dad gave me was a safe space that I could play in, I could learn in, I could use it as a tool. And we've lost that with the business model of mainstream technology and that actually is leaping forward many, many decades. But that is why I do what I do today in a lot of ways, which is we need to have a version of that in the internet age. We can't go back to those days. Some people want to go back to those 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 is gone. But we can have a version of it with a global network that we have today, in which our technologies are again just tools, they're not trying to exploit us.
Tim Bourguignon:And.
Aral Balkan:I think that's very key. It's key to human rights, it's key to democracy.
Tim Bourguignon:It is indeed, and pulling the Wi-Fi cable is not the solution.
Aral Balkan:It is not the solution, no, no no, you know, some people may want to be hermits and live out in the middle of nowhere with no technology and you know, more power to them. We also have to defend the right 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 things that don't require someone to do it on a computer, for example, as a fallback, possibly, but also to say, look, you're not forced into these systems, especially if a lot of these systems today are quite toxic, especially if today, a lot of these systems are exploitative. It's very important that we have other means of doing things. But yeah, but we're not going to go back on mass.
Aral Balkan:So we need to find ways of going forward differently, in better ways. I'm going to show the discussion back toward your childhood, but I'm sure we're going to come closer to 7.
Tim Bourguignon:One thing I'm really bummed about is that modern technology is a very important tool for the future. Devices I'm not going to say computers, I'm going to say device Don't bring this basic programming 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 programming unless you go onto websites, and there isn't really a supported by Apple way of really starting this and embracing this from the get go. Is it Is there.
Aral Balkan:Well, I mean, there is like swift playgrounds, for example. I haven't played with it for a long time, but that might be possibly one alternative. I don't know if you've seen it or played with it.
Tim Bourguignon:Just know about it, but I find it so obscure and not publicized as one of the main aspects.
Aral Balkan:Right, Well, because, again, an iPhone is for the most part a consumption device, 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 a consumption device. And even in terms of your creation, if it's like you're creating videos for TikTok or this or that or whatever it is you're doing, it's not necessarily the same as programming or creating TikTok. I mean, don't create TikTok, because TikTok is again one of these surveillance capitalist applications 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, back then you were actually thrown into the tools by which the software on these devices was made. And you know, the devices themselves may have still been proprietary, the hardware itself might have still been proprietary, but at least you could build software for it. And that was just something that you almost had to do. And in the earliest days especially, you know, I started making my own games, because the IBM 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 to be said about that and I think there are initiatives like. I was actually involved in a one of these code club well, actually in code club itself in the UK. It was this coding school for kids that we started up the two founders and Claire and Linda and I was helping them and I was on the board of directors, etc. And the whole idea was, you know, to spark this initial spark in kids. You know, to like this initial spark in kids, and that's how it started. We were using Scratch. So Scratch is a good tool for that. There are some, you know, better tools as well that enable you to go from a visual environment into a textual environment and help you along that path.
Aral Balkan:But you know what happened very quickly, again, unfortunately, this is so unfortunate. It started out well and then, you know, google came on onto the stage and we had a huge disagreement between the founders and because one of the co founders, linda, and I again I was on the board of directors we were like, no, we can't normalize Google to kids, right, we can't normalize Google's business model, surveillance based business model to kids. So we were very against it. One of the co founders was like no, no, they're fine, it's great, don't worry about it. So you know we resigned.
Aral Balkan:And then Raspberry Pi sorry, bought them and along with, I think, the other coding like Coder Dojo I think they bought that one as well. So, and when you talk about Raspberry Pi, these are the folks you know. We love their little devices. I've got a bunch of them in my drawer. But they're the same people who very recently were bragging about hiring a spy cop, and when people called them out on it, they were like, oh, this is just a conspiracy against us. It's like no dude, like don't hire a spy cop and then be proud about it. And again, don't normalize this to kids. This is the thing, like you know it's. It's in a lot of ways. Maybe it was never a more naive time or I don't know a better time, but at least I guess people were solving some of the big problems back then and they didn't have time to, kind of, you know, spend their CPU cycles on doing evil. It wasn't that they didn't want to be evil, maybe they just didn't have time for that yet.
Aral Balkan:They were trying to solve things like how do we make this thing, you know, actually play video, or when the internet is really, really expanded the field and it was a far worse, but is the far worse still and yeah, and of course it's not the technology.
Aral Balkan:you know, Melvin Cranesberg has a quote about this, saying technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral, and so that last bit that's really important. It wasn't necessarily the technology itself, you know. So we, I said we had the personal computer era that I was born into, and then what happened is, of course, we got the internet and we got the web, and a lot of people think that the web and the internet were decentralized, and this is false. So the personal computing era was the last time that we actually had decentralized technology. Think about it right. You owned and controlled your tools and everyone had their own right, and then could you communicate with each other? You couldn't a rudimentary way. You had modems, for example, etc. Whatever if you wanted to.
Aral Balkan:But with the web it looked decentralized at the beginning because there were relatively more people who ran their own servers on the web, because it was an academic institution initially, as it started. I mean, it was big in academia. So people ran their own servers and you know if there were maybe 200 people on the web at some point, maybe there were. You know there were 150 servers run by 150 of them. Maybe a couple of them, shared it or something, so it looked decentralized, but it never was. It was always clients and server. And what happened was we got this huge injection of venture capital when people saw the potential of these servers to scale to become the centers that today we call Google or Yahoo or Snapchat or whatever. So it was. We have to understand technology within the socioeconomic environment in which it exists and which creates it.
Aral Balkan:So the reason the web blew up was you know, we hear the story Tim Burners-Lee made it open and that'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 a GPL license, for example, or a share alike license, and that was why it grew up. It blew up because venture capitalists saw that they could actually own, they could enclose parts of it, right, they wouldn't have to give back. And that's how we got the Googles and the Facebooks and all of these, because these servers scaled.
Aral Balkan:And now, of course, they're server farms and you know, when people talk about server farms, I always ask them you know, just stop for a moment and think about who's being farmed in these places, because it's you. But yeah, so that was the second era, like the network era, and that was actually centralized. And I think now we're at a point where at least some of us, like me, are working on going forward to a version of decentralization that exists within a world that contains this global network. So what does that look like? And that's what you know. That's why I'm working on the small, on trying to create the small web, and on small tech, as I call it.
Tim Bourguignon:Do you? Shall we get there? Do you want to? Yes, absolutely. I mean, how you got there in terms of your story might be fascinating as well, but here you have something unique and I want to poke at that.
Aral Balkan:Well, and yeah, yeah, I mean sure we can also talk about the process, because I think the process is important. It wasn't like I was seven years old, this little spoiled brat growing up in Malaysia then, which is what I was privileged little spoiled brat growing up in Malaysia, you know, making games for himself in a hedonistic way, just like you know. That was how I started, right. There's nothing to be really kind of applauded about, that. I was just a lucky kid. And but then afterwards, like maybe in the next decade or so, I kind of realized that the stuff I make other people use and when I started working more professionally with this stuff and I did actually quit I quit computers when I was 13 for a few years- Okay, wait a second.
Tim Bourguignon:What?
Aral Balkan:happened there. So I remember I was making a game in C I think I was programming in C at the time and I was making a game and I'd spent so much time on it, like weeks and weeks and weeks and maybe even months and you know when you're that age, that's a long time. And I got one of the first computer viruses, c brain, and it wiped everything that I had.
Aral Balkan:And so that taught me a couple of things, you know. One was have backups. I learned that at that age, but it just felt like my whole. I remember I was sitting, it was a summer's day and I'm sitting at home with the curtains drawn because CRT monitors and glare and everything right, I don't want the glare. So I'm in the dark on this beautiful summer's day and everything I was working on for months just got erased. It was just gone and I remember I just stopped. I felt like I died or something. You know, it's just like a piece of me had died and I stopped. I remember I opened the curtains, I looked outside and I was like what the fuck am I doing? There's like a whole world out there and I'm stuck in here feeling like crap, feeling like I'm dying inside. And so I literally I stepped away from the computer and I didn't touch it for another maybe a year or so or maybe a little longer. So yeah, I know, but then what really retires me, you took you back.
Aral Balkan:I think it was just in general, I mean more like it was becoming more of a thing for school and this and that, and I always loved it. So I guess I, yeah, I started back up and then, when I was in my early 20s or so, I think, I got my first like consulting gig and we were building a virtual school like the world's first virtual school. I think it was called K-12. I was in the States for my master's degree at the time and, yeah, and then I kind of realized, well, people are using the things that we're building and I really started concentrating on design. So I was like we need I was very naive as well.
Aral Balkan:I was like if we build these beautiful experiences, that'll improve everyone's lives and everything will be great and flowers in your hair will be dancing in the fields and it'll be so nice. Not once thinking about, like, the business models or not once thinking about the greater kind of economic factors at play, and so for a while I was just concentrating on design, because I naively thought everyone was just like trying to build these tools that helped people and I only very slowly started realizing, no, wait a minute, when Google creates a product, it's actually creating two products. Every Google product is two products. There's the product that people use everyday people use because they get some sort of value out of it. That might be the mail aspect of Gmail, it might be the docs aspect of Google docs. But there's another product on there at the same time and that's what's watching them and mining them and exploiting them, et cetera. So it's hard work actually. Hats off. Hats off to the surveillance capitalists. They have a hard job for every product they have to build to, and then they have to make sure the people who are using them are not aware of the second product. They must not see the wizard behind the curtain. So it's a hard job. I don't envy it, I don't respect it, but it's a hard job. So, yeah, that's when I started.
Aral Balkan:I slowly started seeing this and then I think it was the Edward Snowden revelations that really brought it to the forefront and really kind of showed me wow, this is. I mean, this sort of exploitation is horrible anyway, but it has a real effect on human rights, on democracy, and we're seeing that today. We saw that afterwards with Cambridge Analytica. We saw Trump getting elected, we saw Boris Johnson getting elected. We saw the effects that this has. We saw the effect it has in pushing people towards the right, and we have a huge problem with that.
Aral Balkan:Right now, with fascism on the rise everywhere across the planet, you can't even list countries anymore. It's take too long, it's getting around, it is, it is, and so this system is not. It's not an ethical system, it's not a sustainable system. It's a system in which we have a handful of it's created, a handful of billionaires most of them absolute douchebags, if not all and at the detriment of everyone else. So I quickly started realizing this is not what I want to be a part of, this is not what I want to contribute to, and it's easier said than done. Then they call it the mainstream for a reason. So, yeah, at some point I basically decided look, I'm just gonna devote myself to trying to build an alternative to this. Whether or not I can, I don't know, but at least I can try.
Aral Balkan:And that's when we found it. Initially it was called Indie for independent, because it really is all about how you're following and it is all about how you're funded. If we took venture capital, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing. We'd have much more comfortable lives, but we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing. So, and then we changed the name a few years ago when we moved to Ireland, to Small Technology Foundation. As we, over the last 10 years, I've kind of been looking into this problem and trying to understand what could be not just a solution one solution but one solution that can be affected by someone who has very limited resources. One person coding, that's statistically. That doesn't exist. If we're talking about the world in general, you shouldn't wait, in balance, you mean.
Aral Balkan:Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, that's what brought me to working on the Small Web and Small Technology with Laura.
Tim Bourguignon:Wow, before we get there, how do you apprehend such a problem? I mean, this is one of the biggest problems there is currently, probably with some economic problems in the third world, with some health problems and with some energy problems and the climate, not to forget the climate. But how do you face this and not just stare at it and just say, wow, I have no idea where to start. How did you approach that?
Aral Balkan:Well, I mean staring at it and going I have no idea where to start is a very valid reaction because it is such a big problem. All of those problems you listed are also interconnected. They all stem from systemic inequality. They all stem from an unsustainable system and climate change. We get rid of the billionaires. We're going to be along the way to fixing climate change if we could do that. Yeah, I guess the bit where I was, I don't know. I guess it's lucky. I don't know if you can say lucky, if you can use that term within this context, but I'm lucky enough that I can do something about it. So a lot of people see the problem and a lot of people try to articulate the problem, which is how I started trying to tackle it. First of all, I did a lot of talks. Back then I did an RSA talk in the UK. There are videos of me speaking to the BBC. They did a surveillance capitalism bit, et cetera, whatever. So I was like my initial thought was people don't know, and if we can just tell people and explain it as simply as possible what's at stake, that this isn't just some geeky issue, that this affects human rights, this affects democracy, if we can just articulate it well enough, then of course, they're going to take action Again.
Aral Balkan:I'm very naive. I approach things naively. I don't think this is a problem. This is not something I'm looking to change. I don't think naive is a bad thing. Naive just means you approach things as they should be, as you expect them to be, in a world that works properly. There's nothing wrong with that. So I'm not getting rid of that aspect of my personality, because if you do that, I think you become jaded, and I don't want to be jaded.
Aral Balkan:So I approach things naively. Same in design. I approach things naively and they usually lie to me. It's fine, that's how you become a better designer. And same with this. So once I realize and I've spoken twice at the European Parliament about this issue, I even joined a political movement at some point because I was like this is not just a technological issue, it's a political and socioeconomic issue. So maybe we can do and, to be perfectly 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 to fix this issue and no matter how 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 activists and we need people to be talking about this, and that's partly why I'm also talking to you about it right now, instead of coding, not only because I broke my hand playing tennis.
Tim Bourguignon:Showing a nice, a nice, a nice hand. I know?
Aral Balkan:Yeah, that's, if you're going to see this on a, you're going to hear this on a podcast. I'm showing my cast hand in a cast playing tennis, tripping over my own feet first broken bone at 47. Been skating my whole life. I ride a one wheel, nothing, no tennis Anyway. So so you were saying, don't say talking. I'm talking.
Tim Bourguignon:Clearly not.
Aral Balkan:Clearly not so. But yeah, I basically decided look, other people can talk to and I don't mean this in, I'm not judging Like some people will, I'm sure even articulate the question better than I have and more power to them, and I hope they keep doing that. Not everyone can actually code something. That could be an alternative. And I think what I've realized is you can't fight every fire. You have to pick and choose your battles. And so at some point I was like, okay, where can I be most effective? And also I was always during this decade, I was thinking like what is the solution to this? And initially I was like we'll create a phone and it'll be great and it'll be a free and open 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 on that before realizing, okay, no, we can't do this without the kind of venture capital or whatever that it would take to get it off the ground. We tried crowdfunding and this and that and it was too big a problem. 10 years later, now we're just starting to see free and open source phones and they do again, not a judgment at all but they do the bare minimum that a phone should be doing right now. It's not like they also have their own app suites or the things that. So you buy a free and open source phone, but if you still have to use Google, then you haven't really fixed the problem right. So it's a big problem.
Aral Balkan:So I started narrowing down, narrowing down my focus and finally realized, look, we need people to own and control their own means of communication. So how can we best do that with the resources that we have? And that's what led me to the idea of the small web, which is very simple. The small web is a very simple idea, right? What if each one of us owned and controlled our own place on the web? And this would be a place that wouldn't require technical knowledge for us to set it up or to maintain it. We could be public there, just like we can, say, on Mastodon or on some other network, so we could have public posts or on Facebook or whatever. But we could also be private. We could also communicate privately, actually privately, not Facebook privately. So Facebook private is you, me and Mark Zuckerberg. So actual private is you and me, no, mark Zuckerberg. And so basically, that leads you to a peer-to-peer design.
Aral Balkan:The problem with peer-to-peer as it exists today is twofold discoverability and availability. These are issues common to every peer-to-peer network how do I find you and how do I guarantee that you will get my message when I send you a message or a photo or whatever? And there are ways of solving these issues, and every peer-to-peer network solves them in pretty much the same way, which, at the end of the day, relies on some sort of a centralized server somewhere that's always online for signaling or for guaranteeing the quality of that communication. We see this with WebRTC, we see it with any sort of peer-to-peer network, or it suffers for those two aspects, neither of which are things that people are going to expect or accept. In a world where you go on Facebook, it's always there pretty much, you can always reach your friends pretty much, and people don't understand that it's algorithmic. They don't understand that all their friends who are following 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, in order to have an alternative to this, you need a system that is always available, that is easy to find. So the Web is great for that. We can use it differently, and so that's what I'm building with the small Web A system where anyone who is a peer-to-peer network, a system where anyone without technical knowledge will just be able to go to a website, say, hey, I want this domain and maybe initially enter a credit card and pay 10 euros a month, I don't know and they get their own place and it can communicate with everyone else's places. Of course, this is free and open source. Every aspect of it is free and open source, and it may not have to be money.
Aral Balkan:Part of what I've realized again, I spoke twice at the European Parliament and what I told them was look, we need an alternative to venture capital. We need a means of funding these sort of initiatives that I'm working on, others are working on from the commons for the common good, because that's what we're doing it. So we need an alternative to VC. It's not something that should be government controlled. It should be done by individuals, independent organizations. But these independent organizations should have certain rules that they have to adhere to, that they can't sell out to a Facebook or a Google once they become large enough. Right, they have to keep working in the interests of the commons and it just kind of went flew right over their heads. They were like we see his lips moving but we don't understand what he's saying. So we need funding for this.
Aral Balkan:And I kind of realized, look, we did a pilot project with the city of Ghent and we went up to them and we were like, look, what if all the citizens in Ghent had their own place on the web and you funded it right as part of their? They pay for stuff with their taxes as part of that, but it also would mean that they can use these places to communicate securely with you, the municipality. And so we did a pilot when the government was a progressive government in Ghent, and then we demonstrated it. Everyone was like, oh, this is beautiful, this is lovely. And then a conservative government came in and boom, our funding got cut.
Aral Balkan:So, all this to say, I've realized that I've come to the conclusion again that, you know, relying on these political kind of institutions for funding it's good for projects. If you want to have an art project to, you know, bring attention to the horrors of surveillance with a modern art dance, then yes, they'll fund it right. You want to build a product, an alternative, that requires ongoing work, but not so much very bad at that. So that's why I'm building in an ability for it to exist in the current system. So you will like, we'll host one of these hosts for these small websites and anyone else can host theirs as well, and ours will take payments and hopefully that will keep Small Technology Foundation, our not-for-profit, sustainable in the current system.
Tim Bourguignon:So what you're suggesting is actually not flipping the table on everything, it's actually keeping some of the building blocks you talked about, peter Chopier, and centralization. Well, we cannot revoke centralization, but we can like we did for non-for-profit we can put some stamps and some rules around it that says this is the value codex you're going to adhere to and you're going to live through. And if you do that, then the problem of centralization, for-profit plus VCs is not there anymore. Right, I mean that's so.
Aral Balkan:My basic thing to the European Parliament was like we could fund these things differently, but they need to have certain rules so that we don't do what we're doing today. Today we fund technology in the European Union. We fund startups, and what happens? A startup is successful, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. It's not successful? The EU taxpayer foots the bill. So what have we become? We've become a free research and 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 we will, I don't know. But that's why we're building like. I'm building a commercial aspect into it as well, and hopefully that will mean that organizations like ours can be sustainable. At least.
Aral Balkan:The thing about the small web is I'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 at your own domain and you get whatever application is installed there. So we're going to have a social network style thing that we're building, but other people will be able to build other things as well that get installed there. So, again, the whole thing is free and open, but so I'm building an aspect of it where you can actually pay 10 euros a month, but a municipality like Ghent could just mail out codes to their citizens and they use that instead.
Aral Balkan:In the future, we might decide, hey, this should be a human right. Everyone should have their own place on the web, and this is important for democracy. It's important for people to be able to communicate without algorithms controlled by douchebag billionaires and deciding what they can see and what they can't see, filtering their realities, deciding on what they can say and what they can't say, which doesn't mean that you get carte blanche to do whatever the heck you want. It just means you have your own place. If you go out there, use that place and incite hatred or incite people to violence, we have a system of policing already in society and that can kick in. We don't need additional things to surveil everyone or whatever. We're just modeling. What I'm doing is I'm just modeling the human being.
Aral Balkan:We don't have that aspect in technology today. If we want to talk to one another you are a person, I am a person we get together, we talk. If some of us want to organize and do something whether it's work or plan a protest or do whatever. We are individuals, we get together and we're able to communicate. And in situations where we all have similar tools and we're mostly equal, that's where I think we have the most democratic potential.
Aral Balkan:In situations where that's not the case, think of a corporation that has huge capital costs, that has machinery that the employees don't have, that they've invested millions and millions in, so you have to go work for that corporation, right, and the power differential there is big. The corporation has all the power. You as an employee don't have a lot of power, right. What if everyone had the same tools? I'm not talking about manufacturing, I'm talking about communication. I'm talking about the ability to organize. Right now, facebook has a lot of the tools, or TikTok or Google. What if we democratize that so that everyone had the tools and could communicate? Then it would be a much more egalitarian sort of society. I think that's much better for democracy, so we're not beholden to these gatekeepers.
Tim Bourguignon:Yeah, amen to that. So we spoke a lot about the history and the projection in the future. If I go into the small web right now, what can I do with it and what's coming in the next month? Where are you and what's the next step for you?
Aral Balkan:Right. So depends on who you are. So right now it's not ready for everyday people who use technologies and everyday thing. I don't like to use the term users. You might notice that I feel that user is an othering and I find that, especially in mainstream technology, once we've othered a group, it's a very small step from user to dumb user, right. Once we've kind of created that hierarchy of where the people who know, where the smart ones, where the designers, where the developers and they're the idiots who use it, then it makes it easier to do bad things to those idiots, right. So I don't like that. I don't think they're idiots either.
Aral Balkan:But that whole thing about oh, this is actually really prevalent, unfortunately, in free and open source, where we have this notion that people who use what we make have to either really care enough to learn what we've built, even if it's difficult, or if they don't, they don't deserve it. It's an arrogance that we have and we make comparisons like oh, you know, even your mom could use 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 use what we make and we really need to, even especially in the free and open source world. We need to really move beyond this because it is arrogant these people who use the things we make. I'm not stupid.
Aral Balkan:The reason we have to make the things that we're making easy to use and beautiful and lovely experiences Is not because the people who use them are stupid. It's because their brain surgeons and they have brain surgery in the morning so they don't have time for your useless thing that doesn't work properly that they have to learn right. So you're the stupid one. If it doesn't, if it isn't easy to 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 be able to take it right and it's an arrogance that doesn't help anyone really.
Aral Balkan:So right now the small web is at a stage where developers can play with what there is, and what there is is Two things. The main one is kitten, like the cat, like little baby cat, and it's a framework and a server for building small websites. So developers can take this and start kind of playing with small websites. And again, remember, a small website is a peer to peer website. It's very different from your regular centralized website. It's only meant to serve one person no users. There's no concept of users. When you remove the concept of users, you greatly simplify the system In what you have to build right. Authentication becomes. You don't even need a user name because there's no user right. So you have a secret and that's secret. And kitten is a string of emoji. So you just put that into your password manager. It's a string of emoji, not just because it's cute, because it is cute, but so that you can't write it down on sticky and posted onto your monitor and defeat the whole purpose of security in the whole system. So, but there's no username right.
Aral Balkan:It means that we can cut out a huge amount of complexity. We're designing just for one person on one node. So imagine a tiny VPS and the app that's running on it is just for one person and it connects to other VPS nodes that are just for one person. It means we can have an in process database, for example, etc. Etc. Etc. So that that in turn, makes it much less complicated to deploy these things, which means that we can start building deployment aspects that are very simple to use, that don't require technical knowledge to either deploy or to maintain. So if you've ever installed and run your own mastodon instance, you know how complicated that is, because mastodon is built on a big tech stack, right, and so every mastodon instance could serve one person, like mine is just for me but it can also serve a hundred thousand, maybe five hundred thousand depending on how beefy your server is, and those are completely different worlds. It's a world of complexity apart to serve one person versus five hundred thousand.
Aral Balkan:That's why it's built with the technologies that it's built with.
Tim Bourguignon:You don't need communities to have one user on it, exactly.
Aral Balkan:And that's why I had to build kitten. That's why I had to build my own server and my own framework. It's also a really good framework for learning web development in general, because it is built on HTML, css, javascript and then progressively 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 for these things. It makes the basics very simple. It has built in support for public key encryption so you can send and send encrypted messages between these nodes, for example, without as a developer, without knowing how to build that yourself, because that's also not the simplest thing to build and very easy to get wrong.
Aral Balkan:But also the way that it translates to people who are using it is they don't need to know about keys or a secret keys or whatever. They just have their little emoji Secret that they put into their one password or their password manager or whatever it is. Everything else gets generated from 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. It's cute. Way better, way better.
Aral Balkan:To be honest, it's a little bit more complicated.
Tim Bourguignon:To be straight, I could spin up in an instance how do you call that A node? I could spin up a node on my machine and have that done on a different machine beside me and just connect the two ends and messages, right and left.
Aral Balkan:Yeah, yeah. In fact, if you go to the kitten website, the website is right now on my source code repository. It doesn't even have its own site yet, but it's on code Byrk, codeorg, forward slash, kitten forward slash app. If you go there, you can actually. There are lots of examples and one of them is an end to end encrypted kitten chat and you can just run that locally because it's got things like you can actually. It's got aliases for place one to place fivelocalhost, so you can actually run nodes locally and test between it.
Aral Balkan:It's a pure web I you've probably never worked with this before or played with it, so it's probably a good time for developers to kind of just at least 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 to you know, play with a system that has no bullshit baked in. Part of it is.
Aral Balkan:When I first started again, I was always I'm always trying to see where in the stack. Like you said earlier, we can't rebuild the whole thing Right. There are people trying to build a completely different internet and this and that and sure, but you need to build a bridge between where we are and where we want to be, Right, especially if you want other people to be able to come over with us to that place. We want to be, because all of these issues that I mentioned surveillance, this and that whatever they're all solved if you have technical knowledge. Right For us.
Aral Balkan:Actually, these are solved problems. We can delve into the you know the guts of the Linux kernel if we need to, depending on how much we want to harden something. These are not issues for us, it's an issue for everyone else. So I think it's very important if you're trying to build an alternative, it's not just saying oh here, we're on this island and this island is terrible, we need to get off this island. We're going to go to this other island and all the other master swimmers follow me. That's great. So the three of you are on the other island, everyone else is drowned. You need to build a bridge, and that's how I see the small web as a bridge between you know, the centralized web that we live in and kind of the decentralized world we want to get to, and so yeah, yeah.
Tim Bourguignon:That's a hell of a swim, a hell of a journey.
Aral Balkan: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 of the bridge. But you know, we're really stretching the analogy.
Tim Bourguignon:I'll trust you with that, but wait for a couple weeks until your cast is off.
Aral Balkan:Yes, definitely.
Tim Bourguignon:That's usually the place where I as an advice, but I'd like to wrap up about the elements that you brought. So where should we send people after listening to this, to read again about your concept, to read about Kitten, to read about the small web star? What are the different places you would advertise or push for people to go to?
Aral Balkan:Sure, just two really. The Small Technology Foundation website is at small-techorg and my own website is even shorter it's A-R-dot-A-L, so it's just my first name with a dot in the middle. I'm so jealous. And, yes, it was expensive. No, I wanted that domain for so long Because, again, part of it is your domain on the small web and your domain on the web is part of your identity in a sense or identities.
Aral Balkan:That's the cool thing about the small web have 10 different places, explore different aspects of your identity. It's very dangerous if people say we control your identity, this is your identity. No, we're much more complex creatures than that. But so I've always wanted that sort of it's a vanity domain, of course Albanian. So I did actually. I went to them and I was like can I have A-R-dot-A-L? And they were like we don't do two-letter domains. And I was like no sad face. And then a while later somebody said would you like A-R-dot-A-L? I'm like I thought they didn't do it and then they apparently started doing it. Somebody else got it. We were so lucky, they knew about what we were doing and they were sympathetic. So I did pay. I did pay more money than I've ever paid for a domain, but I didn't pay as much as I could have, especially considering that A-R-L is the name of a German petroleum company, so they could have actually gone to them.
Tim Bourguignon:So I'm very lucky to have it.
Aral Balkan:But yes, that's where people can go, okay.
Aral Balkan:And there are videos there, et cetera. There are lots of examples in kitten for developers to play with and, as always, I'm very easy to reach, so you'll find a link to my mastodon. If you're on mastodon, feel free to just ping me there If you have any questions, and really just it's at the point where. Just play with it. Hopefully, within a couple of months, you'll be able to deploy your own websites with it as well 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 down sort of thing and, and you know, other developers will be able to build other things, because the thing I build may not be the thing that you know people end up using. I don't know. I hope it is, but I'm trying to build it in such a way that you know we're sharing every brick, so that you can build your own little Lego creations as well.
Tim Bourguignon:Then I'm pressing my thumbs in German is wishing you luck.
Aral Balkan:Okay, yeah, I'm pressing my thumbs right now. I'm pressing that one thumb.
Tim Bourguignon:Aril, it's been a fantastic discussion, thank you so much.
Aral Balkan:Thank you for having me.
Tim Bourguignon:My pleasure. People go to the links I will add to the show notes. Have a read on the small tech website. It brushes over everything we talked about. It just goes in depth and in way more detail. So take the time. If anything wasn't clear right now, it will be after the read. So please do that, aril. Thank you so much. Thank you, tim, and that's been another episode of DevPost Journey with each other next week Bye, bye.
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