from the desk of planetnineisaspaceship

What's in a name?

Ursula K. Le Guin's fantastic A Wizard of Earthsea creates a world of magic where the greatest power one can hold over a person or thing is knowledge of its true name. A friend of mine and I were lamenting that we never had the opportunity to run in to Le Guin while we were all in Portland (he's a big deal enough that this was a possibility, I am not). He also shared with me her essay on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

Those of you familiar with Planet Nine's lore will know that boats feature quite heavily. Boats have two properties that make them useful: they float, and they carry things from here to there. If we relax our definition of floating to include being carried, I hope you'll indulge me in acknowledging that the carrier bag, and the boat have much in common.

(I'd like to note too that Le Guinn acknowledges the importance of stacks in her essay, "home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people." Anyone who has been drinking with me as I try to explain stacks and boats will recognize this flexibility in terminology)

The gist of the theory, which comes from Elizabeth Fisher's Carrier Bag Theory of Human Evolution, is that though bags [and boats] are essential to humans, so much so that they were likely our earliest tool, they don't fit in well with the conflict-driven hero narratives of modern fiction. Hero worship is not just in fiction, but I would say permeates all of popular culture in the United States--whether quarterback, or diva, or pedophile-turned-president--whereas carrier bags are things you get when you donate twenty bucks to PBS, which normally you wouldn't do, but now you have to because of that stupid president.

Le Guin writes in her essay:

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag I belly I box I house I medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

This notion of narrative as a continuing process is intriguing. Aren't stories, by definition, in possession of an ending? But robbed of the need for resolution, why not just go on and on?

People haven't been writing computer programs nearly as long as we've been writing stories so we don't really know what we're doing yet, and it's probably unfair to map the latter to the former. But I don't think it's too far afield to say that the world of Facebook and Google has it's own hero-fetish that might not be the greatest when the story doesn't end. "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain," Harvey Dent was on to something.

If the gigantocorps are our heroes, constantly on stage peacocking about like the world owes them for their benevolence, what's the carrier bag for tech? On Earthsea we would only have to speak its name to avail ourselves of its power. Here on plain old Earth we need that name, and then we have to build it.

We have an idea of what it might be.

We call it a base.

Billions and billions

When the interwebs was kicking off the dotcom boom, there were six billion or so people on the planet. Twenty-six years later there are eight billion. In real life, we call this increase a triumph of modern medicine, in the biz we call it a scaling problem.

If you want to bore yourself nauseous for an hour, go look up system design interview prep where some dude from a faang (this acronym is for Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (now Alphabet). Originally Netflix, whose market cap is a fraction of the others, was included so as to avoid the unfortunate F-word acronym without it, but given Facebook being Meta now, perhaps there is a four-letter acronym that could be used instead. I leave the anagraming of that as an exercise for the reader) company takes you through building out some system with eleventy-billion users and how cool they all are to have eleventy-billion users. He'll let you know that you need to handle a gazillion api calls an hour, and a gajillion bytes of data per call so that they can check that you know what Amazon Web Service you need to handle that kind of volume since you're definitely not building it yourself.

According to Claude, here are the top ten apps by Monthly Active Users (MAUs):

1. Facebook - 3.07 billion MAU Most Popular Social Media Apps in 2025 | Piktochart

2. YouTube - 2.54 billion MAU Most Popular Social Media Platforms & Apps (2025)

3. WhatsApp - 2 billion MAU (some sources report up to 3 billion)

4. Instagram - 2 billion MAU Most Popular Social Media Apps in 2025 | Piktochart

5. WeChat - 1.38 billion MAU (primarily China)

6. TikTok - 1.59 billion MAU Most Popular Social Media Apps in 2025 | Piktochart

7. Facebook Messenger - 947 million MAU

8. Telegram - ~800 million MAU (estimated)

9. Snapchat - ~750 million MAU (estimated)

10. X (formerly Twitter) - 556 million MAU

Now I trust these numbers as much as a Bernie named Madhoff, but let's just take them and do some math.

First, there's a steep drop off from one to ten, and if we assume that whatever we're building is not going to hit billion user scale immediately, maybe we can take half a billion as a starting point. Now 500 million feels like a big number, but if we divide it by the thirty days in a month we get 16 million DAUs. DAUs are of course higher than that, so, in order to make the math easier, let's say its 24 million.

That's a million users per hour if we assume a smooth average, and that's 277 users per second. If all of those users are making like four to five api calls that's about a thousand per second.

The latest in the Raspberry Pi line.

This guy above is a Raspberry Pi 5. It costs a hundred dollars, and can handle a thousand api call per second no sweat. I don't know, let's say I'm off by a factor of ten and twitter does ten thousand api calls per second. Do you think nazi musk can afford ten of these bad boys?

The question then is what do these companies need with the gigantic datacenters they're actually using. As anyone whose had an empty drawer in their house knows, nature abhors a vaccuum. If you're paying for computers and storage, you better be using and filling them.

And that's what they're doing, filling them with every single last piece of data on you that they can.

They're not doing four or five api calls per user, they're making forty or fifty, tracking every last millisecond you spend on posts and videos. Did you go down, and then up? Did you tap for more info, check the poster's profile, like, love, downvote, favorite, swipe, breathe heavily, tremble at all, you name it they're grabbing it.

And why not? They don't even need to pay people to analyze the data anymore. They just feed it to more machines to determine what combination of colors and words and graphics will get you purchasing more.

They have to do this to pay themselves and their investors, and now that they're buying islands and rocket ships, the checks they expect look like those numbers above: billions and billions. Sagan wrote a book with that title, which starts by explaining he would never use that term because it's too imprecise. And he was a cosmologist thinking about the universe. If there aren't even billions and billions of things in space, what the heck are they doing in a handful of people's bank accounts?

When things get like that, you're supposed to be able to create competition to the giant firms, but how can you possibly compete with a platform serving half of the population of the Earth?

Well first we have to answer what's competition?

The pin factory

In The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, his first example is a pin factory. It was a good in high demand back in the eighteenth century. One with clear inputs, and outputs, and not a whole lot of reason for global distribution. There weren't technological improvements other than in the manufacturing process, and the labor wasn't particularly skilled.

One interesting thing about the economics of the eighteenth century: you couldn't move pins around the globe at close to the speed of light.

The rules of microeconomics where firms are bounded by location, and materials, are no more in a world where bits and bytes flow through tubes unfettered. How on Earth, pun intended, do you start a business to compete with a business that can deliver its "goods" instantaneously to everyone?

In the biz we talk about "products." The product is the thing that you sell, as in the thing your customers give you money for. Do you give Meta money to use Instagram? Who does?

Obviously its advertisers, and behind advertisers are businesses. They buy ads, but what is it they're buying?

Is it reach? Is it the demographics? Well let's talk about both of those.

Reach is the whole kit and caboodle for the internet. The promise that everyone in the whole world can buy what you're selling just by you buying a domain name and setting up a small site is just as awesome today as it was thirty years ago.

As the gigantocorp platforms grew and grew, it became harder and harder (or more expensive) to break through the noise. After a while, the only way for your marketing dollars to hit the ROI (return on investment) they were looking for was to "go viral." Guess what happens when you go viral. Your website tips over, and you run out of inventory, and a bunch of people get pissed, and it's like the lottery winner who's broke two years later because they can't figure out how to stay rich.

What about demographics? Facebook boasts four billion MAUs, and Instagram half of that. If you're marketing something though I think you already know which app you're marketing on. Before the internet, people would self-select into spaces and media to consume, and there wasn't much of a need for further segmenting within groups. There's not a huge overlap between the people walking into Hot Topic, and the ones walking into Abercrombie and Fitch, and there's no real need for those brands to intrude on blog posts becase the people who like them, will find them.

The premise of digital advertising is that we know everything about everyone, and thus can put exactly what they want to see right in front of them. It is a ridiculous premise, which is why it's so lucrative. Because it's the modern equivalent of a rainmaker. Did your campaign fail to make it rain because the advertisers suck, or because you didn't spend enough? If there's no competition, there's only one variable in your campaign to change you know?

So here's our premise. The selling points of digital advertising are reach, their ability to attract large numbers of humans to their platforms, and demographics, their knowledge of who you are and what you're looking to buy right now. And that, currently, they suck, but no one's figured out how to do these two points better.

Reach

"We met at Starbucks. Not the same Starbucks, it was actually the Starbucks across the street..."

It's fun to make fun of the Starbucks across the street from each other, but there's actually a pretty good reason for it. Most stores come equipped with two point-of-sale (POS) systems, and there's a maximum to how many customers can go through those systems. So if a store hits that max, you open another store across the street.

This is how scaling works with computers too, and a lot of time, money, and energy is put into making sure that the machines that a platform runs on all work the same, and give people the same experience. You don't see the instagram across the street, but that's what's happening.

There's no reason why you couldn't see it though.

For those of you who have never played a Massively Multiplayer Online game, here's what you see when you first sign up:

As you can see, there are quite a few Starbucks on this street (this is the World of Warcraft server selection screen).

On the engineering side of things, instagram and WoW are more or less the same. Tons of users, tons of computation needed to serve the users, and a need for this system to never fail. The difference is that WoW users expect a little more control their experience.

Now, what's interesting in the MMO is that users are persistent characters, so even though the realm they choose has the same software, the state of the realm is unique to the realm. You can see a number of PvP realms where players can fight each other. Each one of those has some sort of mini-culture around its PvP, which can define and change the game pretty significantly. Sort of like how the baristas at the Starbucks across the street might affect which one you go to (no, she's not interested in you, she's just being nice).

Instagram doesn't want its users to create anything like that because it undermines their ability to control what is displayed to its users. Control over what is displayed to its users is how Instagram sells advertising, which is how they make money. So, what is Instagram's product? It looks like this:

At least the good people in Kubrick's world were kind enough to make the science tapping into your brain visible.

Maybe there's room to play with this realm idea though. Give the users a little more control over what content they consume, and maybe even make it so people can setup their own realms like some games like Minecraft do. Not sure how to monetize it though, but we can punt on that for now.

Demographics

I live in Portland, Oregon, and in the early tens and teens of this second millenium, there was a great show called Portlandia. In the first or second episode, a proprietor of a feminist book store tells Steve Buscemi that he should head to a puzzle store to find what he's looking for.

The shocked Buscemi asks, "where is there a puzzle store?" The proprietor responds by listing off all the locations where there are puzzle stores. It cracks me up every time.

Are there puzzle stores where you live? I'm guessing probably not. They're kind of peculiar to the kind of place where grown ups take pride in being big wholesome kids and grandparents at the same time and/or smoke enough weed to require a steady stream of jigsawed cardboard to stay busy.

Now if you're a puzzler in need of a fix, and you've just moved to Portland you might google up the nearest puzzle store, and then head to it. We'll get to search in a second. Chances are though, you found out about puzzle stores the same way as Buscemi on Portlandia: word of mouth.

Marketers will tell you that nothing beats word of mouth, but I don't think we need to ask them why. Who're you going to trust to best understand your puzzling needs? A system of cold, and uncaring machines programmed by cold and uncaring people, or your friends?

Your friends know you better than the machine, and more importantly know the context through which you're asking. The answer to, "I need a puzzle stat!" and "I need a puzzle for my nephew's birthday." might be different. The machine doesn't understand your context when you search for, "puzzle stores near me," but your friends do.

Well that's not entirely true.

There's actually quite a bit that the machines are doing to try and understand that context. Is your nephew's birthday in google calendar? Well then the machines know you might be looking for puzzles for his gift. Did you get a receipt sent to your gmail after your last puzzle purchase? Well then the machines know about your puzzle addiction.

Does writing a truly massive amount of software in order to spy on all digital communiques to attempt to extract what our friends do for us for free seem like an incredible waste of time and resources? Perhaps not, perhaps it's so successful that we humans have embraced our Orwellian present so as to more efficiently purchase socks. Let us check the average click-through rate of the ads served by Google and Meta, companies whose combined market cap would put them seventh, between the UK and France, in national GDP.

There's a lot of blah blah blah, and it's impossible to get a real number because these two companies are basically giant deception machines, but it's somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. Let's call it 1.5%.

How often do you click on the stuff your friends send you?

Now we're going to start talking about my stack here, and while I've gotten tons of help, it's still sort of mine to shepherd for now, and so I'd like to make something quite clear. I think you, like all people, are cool and interesting, but if I'm going to get to know you it's going to be over coffee or beers some time, and not through the systematic harvesting and exploitative usage of your personal data. I have neither the interest nor the time to do so, and I don't really trust myself to protect your personal data from the 1337 h4x0rz of the world.

So instead of collecting all of this stuff and using it to ruin the internet, the idea is to let your friends do that work like they already do, and just give them a piece of the action.

A tale of two cities

Portland is known for a good many things, but let's focus on two right now: our general love of the outdoors--specifically those of us who like to climb things--and our sizable lesbian population. There are a number of products in the world that cater to these two groups, subaru outbacks being one of the most noticeable, but for our discussion here I'd like to talk about just one. The humble carabiner.

Whether it's helping you survive a fall to gravity, or a fall to love, this little guy's gonna have an outsized impact for the cost.

For a variety of reasons, the carabiner is of rather significant importance to the two groups above. If you're not part of those groups already though, do you have any idea what the difference is between all of those carabiners? I don't, and it's not entirely clear where I might go to learn. For some things it's fine to rely on trial and error, but are you ready to trust your life, romantically or otherwise, to fate?

Now let's say I'm a fashion-conscious rock-climbing lesbian with a degree in mechanical engineering, and a passion for metalurgy. I start a blog called Tie the Metal Knot about finding love and carabiners in the Portland bouldering scene. I should of course be compensated for my expertise, and to do so I load up my poor blog with ad cancer, of which I see a fraction of a penny for every person who lands on the page. I also go through the hassle of becoming an affiliate at Amazon so I can get a dime from carabiners sold through my site should someone wade through the swamp of ads and actually find them, at least until that link dies because Amazon killed my preferred carabiner store's business, and now it's just a dead link amongst all the other garbage that covers up my thoughtful and interesting prose.

I probably don't even need to show you a screenshot of a site set up like this, but I'm going to anyways:

Was gonna show you the ads, but can't even do that with this barely dismissable popup asking for your personal information.

The hypothesis is that all of our sites are like this because there isn't a better alternative. If we can find a way to monetize sites as much or more through another mechanism then people will adopt that. But, if you make it an either/or then you need to grow big enough to compete with everyone with a gmail and/or facebook account. That's pretty much everyone on Earth with a computer.

So instead of making it either/or we worked out a way to make it whichever works better. If you want ad-infested garbage in front of you all the time, you can keep on doing what you've always done. If you want a cleaner interface that can make more people and not gigantocorps money, then read on.

All about that base

<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
Hello World
</body>
</html>

This ^^^ is a website. Your device and its browser are called the client. The computer that these words come from is called a server.

When you type realultimatepower.net into your browser's url bar, a number of computers talk to each other to figure out where that server is and get you the words that are that website (feel free to check it out, it's pretty sweet). The problem is that computers, as powerful as they are, are still finite so if your website is super popular and/or does a lot of things, you need a bunch of servers. That can get expensive, and people aren't big on paying for things on the internet.

Now there's no real reason why the words that are a website can't come from different servers. In fact that's how it works right now. There are plenty of servers serving up google for example.

But what you don't see all that much is servers serving the same words from different domain names. That's the thing those game servers are doing. And it's the thing the Fediverse does with Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Lemmy.[^1]

That's great, but they're all still doing something that's not the best for users, namely keeping everything you do around forever and ever. There's value to the platform in the permanence of the things people have and create on them, because that's what these platforms are.

Whether servers in the Fediverse, or Bluesky are selling this data or not is debatable. That they're being scraped, for free, by tons and tons of other platforms for data is not. As the platforms grow, they become more expensive to run, and even Mark Cuban's Bluesky money is finite, especially if he runs for president, so how do you foresee them monetizing should they live long enough to become the villain?

I on the other hand, and again I want this to be crystal clear, do not care what you had for brunch back in 2012. I don't think that should have much bearing on either of our lives.

Still, someone's gotta pay to run the servers.

Either I build a platform that steals your data and sells it to advertisers to sell it to businesses for businesses to sell you stuff, or you buy stuff and that pays for the servers somehow. Y'all probably buy stuff online already, we just need a way to make sure the server gets paid when you do.

Now in the real world when the puzzle store gets too busy, someone opens a puzzle store across the street. People sort of self-select which puzzle store they pick, mostly because crossing the street is onerous.

In the digital world, people usually don't have visibility to which side of the street their server's on. And when they do, like with the game servers, they usually have to pick one and stick with it so you don't lose all your stuff. But if you don't have stuff to lose, what's to stop you from just picking whatever server's closest, or fastest, or pays you the most, or is run by your buddy?

This kind of server is what I'm calling a base. And it belongs to us.

Base and essence

In philosophy there's a distinction between what a thing is (essence), and what it does (function). In software, pretty much everyone cares about essence because at a pretty fundamental level the function of computers is all the same: bytes moving around and doing things. A base has no inherent essence, it only has function.

And that function is to monetize content creation through user transactions to businesses directly without the need for advertisement-based discovery. Allow me to show you the pictures of what I mean. Here is the current monetization flow of the internet:

In this picture users and content creators are linked to businesses via advertisers and content platforms. Again, most of us buy stuff online, it's not that we want all businesses to go away, but having the advertisers and content platforms as the link between us makes businesses, and consumers beholden to them for our needs. Beholden is just another word for exploitable. And in economics, whenever you can exploit a resource, you're going to be making money.

Remember, we're talking about what a base does, not what it is. Here's the picture:

Please note the use of the color green to indicate money flowing into your pockets.

This is what a base does it lets you join along with other members of whatever group/community/horde might care about the base to figure out ways of buying things on the internet that pays the group/community/horde and not already rich dudes buying up land in Hawaii.

How it does this is up to the group/community/horde that uses it. You wanna create a gaming store community where everyone gets a piece of the action when some hot new cardboard drops? Go for it. You wanna create a safe space for new parents to exchange hand-me-downs, and share in the profit when someone just has to have a brand new stroller? You can do that.

Bases are easy to join, and easy to leave. Don't want to hear about the latest SCOTUS news for one freaking minute? Just leave that base. Need to get your fix after you cool down? Rejoin the base.

Different platforms can drift off the same bases, and you can have multiple versions of the same platform connected to different bases. Don't want to think about all of this? Just join a base where someone else thinks about it for you.

I don't have all the answers, so I'm not going to build a system that tries to tell you what to do. I just want to build a system that takes money from gigantocorps and gives it to you. This is what I came up with.

Conclusion

You know how everything's getting more expensive? How those great spaces for kids, and cafes that won't kick you out for just having a coffee keep closing? How you really want to buy from anywhere but Amazon, but man is it just too convenient to be able to order from your couch, and have some overworked and underpaid blue-vest-wearing sap run up your walk so they can stay on their delivery schedule?

A base is just a computer, and computers can be small. Look up. Could you stick a shelf up above eye level with a machine or two on it processing transactions, and making you, or your favorite cafe, or a non-profit you contribute to money?

People are already doing this with home servers, but they're renting them out to folks so they can scrape data around the internet for advertising.

Be the change you want to see. Start a base with your friends, make money, tell google, amazon, and meta to kick rocks. If it doesn't work, you turn the computer off and hand it to your niece or nephew to play roblox on or something.

If you make a dollar though, and I don't know anything about you, it will make me so happy.

So don't tell me about it.

Tell your friends.

So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

I don't want to be a hero, and there is no narrative arc here. I just think it's high time the regular folk had a carrier bag (or boat!) of there own. One they can load up with bananas, and socks, and mall ninja shit, and empty at home without having to sign their life away to companies the size of governments.

That's why I go by planetnineisaspaceship. I'm easy enough to find if you'd like, it's not a very effective pseudonym. It's a reminder that the spaceship, the boat, the carrier bag is the purpose.

If you've setup a server before, or even if you haven't you can check out the allyabase repo here.

If you haven't setup a server before, I'd recommend watching a video or two on how to setup a minecraft server as those usually have what you need in them.

This system is in production, but also a definite work in progress. If you run into any issues find me on discord or email me at zach at planetnine dot app.

[1]: If you've never heard of the Fediverse, it can be overwhelming to dive into it. So I recommend not doing that unless you're in for some deep cut tech.