natecull Great post according to me !
By the way I have corrected many spelling and phrasing mistake in my previous post.
I agree with all your points but I have a few comments to do that I will post here by editing this post later on today (I still have not commented all your points, for now the text below are only general remarks I wanted to write down after your post).
- For now, I will just say that I discovered and realized progressively that if, theoretically, current FPGA are not architecturally tainting (Meaning they would be forcing you and/or greatly pushing you toward designing some preferred kinds of digial architectures, and therefore making designing others more difficult or complicated enough to discourage you from doing so for many reasons, including performance), in practice they actually strongly are, and very smartly and covertly.
- I also want to say that this very covert and invisible tainting tendency with FPGA is not decreasing but increasing. It's clearly an attempt at reducing freedom and diversity of design, all justified by performance optimizations or other kinds of optimizations of all sorts. But this is not neutral architecturally, and this means, to me, as a consequence, that it is not neutral politically, even if those political consequences are not very visible at first sight. We see them, we are conscious of the hidden consequences, and we will take creative measures to bow things into a new direction that better fits our preferred architectural, therefore, preferred political goals and directions of evolution.
"They" knew for decades that architecture is law (And politics), and "they" are angry that we the people finally managed to see it too, despite their covert strong effort to mask it to the populace in general, and even to the hackers, hacktivists and crypto-anarchists and crypto-libertarians communities, thanks to ad-hoc well engineered diversions of all kinds most of us stayed lured or hypnotized by for decades.
natecull have you ever tried to draw or visualize in your head a simplified schematic of the cyber-powers and cyber-rights model of the current whole cyberspace architecture called internet, with all its citizen clients' computers and all its servers and infrastructure commutation/routing equipments ?
I bet you did not, but maybe you tried, dunno, you will tell. This kind of intellectual torture and extreme hard work is the masochist privilege of a few radical crypto-anarchist situationists like me, Theruran and few others. But it worth it doing it a try, really, as it is almost an impossible task because of its complexity and the huge amount of work necessary. But when you force yourself trying to at least draw a very simple schematic overview of those cyber-powers and rights models, your brain is forced to be creative and efficient at the game of complexity reduction, until you start seeing something that could potentially be drawn on a page.
I've played this very specific game for more than a year, it was the "main exercise" of the small french crypto-anarchist research group I was animating, before some law enforcement (Not that much my own countrie's law enforcement, this time, but more the CIA and MOSSAD) and some associated mafias destroyed everything and made the most valuable contributors run away (I'm thinking to a very smart crypto-anarchist Russian, and he was not a crypto-libertarian, I insist, which is rare for ex USSR hackers, who run away because he realized we were surrounded by CIA and MOSSAD that were shamelessly imposing their views and digital prophets, and he preferred running away fearing spyshit bad trick, and he was right by the way, still I remember him a lot and miss him a lot, maybe he will read these lines one day, who knows) - I wanted a wide variety of nationalities in this research group for obvious reasons of internationalism. Why am I talking to you about this exercise like that, with a kind of story telling heh ? It's not manipulation, don't fear anything at this level. I just want you to see something by yourself progressively:
So let's get back to the topic : When you push hard enough a small group of crypto-anarchist researches like us to draw, on one page, the cyber-powers and cyber-rights models of the current cyberspace architecture called internet, we end up deciding simplification strategies in order to progressively mitigate complexity and start seeing something.
And for this specific exercise, it leads to identifying architectural patterns of several orders to enable simplification. And we obviously choose to start by hardware, the lowest level, the physical level, to then climb into layers up to the top most software layers.
At an intermediate advanced stage of this simplification exercise, we had a shape for characterizing the hardware architecture patterns of each digital equipment (Computer, server, router), and colors for characterizing their associated software architectural patterns.
And from here, you start seeing the global picture : The internet was a galaxy of all identical shapes interconnected (Meaning, indeed, that almost the exact same hardware architecture pattern reproduced almost everywhere), with an overall global color almost the same too, if zooming out enough so that those shapes turn to a single pixel only characterized by its color.
Only from this point, you start realizing the importance of what I have said earlier, not only about standards, but regarding FPGA that are covertly more and more tainting the digital architectures that are being built with them.
The inventor of FPGA declared, in 1992, that FPGA were digital freedom. He was fully right and "they" took Xilinx founder's very seriously on that "digital freedom" declaration, and "they" started imagining covert ways to control it in a desired way. The same way Stallman RMS declared free software was freedom, they also took him very seriously and started imagining ways to control or suppress the best they could the digital freedom procured by free software by that time. This is history. It happened, and it is still happening.
What I want you to ultimately see here, is that through this very specific crypto-anarchist exercise we did at trying to draw in one page the whole cyber-powers and cyber-rights model of the entire current cyberspace, is that we realized, at doing so, that our digital world was a massive repetition of assembled patterns, almost always the same patterns, both for hardware and software.
Patterns are here to be seen as a synonym for architectures, and as architecture is law, this must call the maximum attention of any honest crypto-anarchist researcher. We're talking about politics. We talking about how the multiplication and duplication of a few set of digital patterns (Both hardware and software ones) end creating a global cyber-powers and cyber-rights model that politicaly and geopoliticaly shaped our entire capitalist society the way it is today, bypassing all "official" democratic structures, that are senates and parlaments in our so called "democraties". Yes, we can talk of a global digital big tech and military covert coup, driven by an Empire.
This is why, noticing that the lastest generations of the current FPGAs are more and more "tainting digital architectures" is something to be taken very seriously. It is not neutral politicaly.
Here I just wanted to sensitize you on how the cyber-powers and cyber-rights models for the current cyberspace architecture and concept are, for a large part of them, generated by the repetition of a few very specific digital hardware and software patterns due to the necessity of scaling to all human beings using it.
The work of crypto-anarchists like us is to understand and study this, deeply. And to master it like no others. In order to later be able to invent, propose, construct and deploy, why not using the same strategy of pattern repetition (But let's not limit us to this), alternative cyberspaces architectures leading to alternative cybernetic political systems, and therefore to an alternative societies that better fits our goals, needs and hopes.
Do you sense or visualize more or better the deepness and importance of this simple phrase "Architecture is law" ? Mind blowing isn't it ? I hope so. Even in your own researches and preferred directions, it must help. I think indeed, in your particular case, that you were already aware of this. But it's never a bad thing to put the topic on the table again, just to ensure all participants and contributors here won't miss this.
I will conclude these lines by saying that doing all kinds of weird exercises of this kind is what has allowed us to tackle things deeply and force us to think. And to think better, and deeper, with a much better sense of strategy. With many different angles. And only from here, we really started moving forward with new ideas or visions or concepts.
I will post later on my comments and remarks on the 4 points you wrote, and with whom I mainly fully agree.
