Public Computing
In 1995, Klaus Wuestefeld used a typewriter to start fleshing out a vision of what inter-networked computers were for. He ended up coining and defined the term Sovereign Computing. It is a concept that is borne out of questioning how inter-networked computing should be wielded by our real-time, digital global society, in search for a beautiful, powerfully beneficial outcome for all our lives.
He implemented his concept of Sovereign Computing in the form of Sneer, a sovereign, peer-to-peer, cooperative computing network designed to challenge the emergent cloud computing monopoly of big tech — at the time a critique that was not so easy to understand but that is now obvious.
Now, in 2025, 30 years later, if you search for “Sovereign Computing,” you will find numerous definitions and references to the term in the corporate world — Forbes, IBM, Google Cloud, Oracle, NVIDIA, and by various cryptocurrency companies. Capitalism has already absorbed it. The term has been mostly cleansed of its original meaning.
My first contact with Klaus’s ideas was with Prevayler circa 2002. I then got briefly involved with Sovereign Computing and Sneer around 2013. At the same time I was also learning about alternative currencies, local economies, Universal Basic Income and anarchism.
Since my understanding of the socioeconomic world was still sketchy at the time, my focus was always on a more simple, mechanistic, fundamental understanding of the technical problems of cooperative computing. In other words, how the average programmer sees things. For example, how do you actually make a million computers just cooperate with each other in a secure and reliable manner by combining their resources to provide the same thing that “cloud computing” provides via these gigantic corporate monopolies, but freely to each other, without encumbrances.
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My own vision started taking shape around 2002. My focus was always on game worlds and massively-multiplayer online games and their virtual economies. Around that time I started seeing that generic resource sharing between computers — that is, people’s computers running each other’s programs inside virtual machines — would be powerful. There are many projects started around that time, such as Freenet, which demonstrated that peer-to-peer networks and computing resource sharing in general could and should work.
Around 2011, my vision started taking a stronger shape. I would say that it was at that time that the concept of Public Computing as I define it became concrete, in the form of a recognizable, implementable, layered software architecture. The core insight is that resource sharing between computers replaces resource contracting, resource renting. It does not get into what the resources are being deployed for, as that’s the application’s concern.
It’s a simple insight, if it is considered just in its computing technology dimension. Dissociated from its obvious social, economic and cultural implications, that’s basically just it.
So-called “Peer-to-peer networks” as historically implemented are monoliths that combine a single-purpose distributed operating system (the “P2P layer” that meshes people’s home computers together, for example) with the application it is built to support (say, file sharing). Instead, a “P2P network” should be seen as the application of a Public Computing substrate which is comprised both of software and of a cooperative run-time infrastructure which is of a “P2P” nature as well.
Very briefly, the single goal of Public Computing is to enable Sovereign Computing. The vision of Sovereign Computing gives Public Computing its raison d’être; it functions as a searchlight, as a bearing. A Public Computing system is a development-time and run-time framework that is fit for the purpose of supporting an implementation of the original ideas of Sovereign Computing. That is, although you can use corporate cloud computing to implement many things, you cannot really use it to run a Sovereign Computing network, for reasons that are either completely mysterious or completely obvious to the reader, depending on where they are in understanding our existent socioeconomic system and its culture.
You can use a Public Computing substrate to run blockchains if you want, which you can then use to create cryptocurrencies and other “blockchain D-Apps,” if you must. You can use a Public Computing network to spawn any kind of peer-to-peer, client-server, or hybrid application-level distributed system. Just like “cloud computing” nodes allow you to do anything you want with them.
It’s been decades since I started working on this quest to create something that allows us to both joyfully and powerfully connect our computers together. In the process, I ran into the real world, and into myself. It’s been a while, but now I can give it a name and a definition. These are important to support the actual software architecture and implementation, which is still a work-in-progress.
