captaincalliope.blue
Social Justice Cyborg 🐙 and lover of the Web 🕷
Serving the world from Massachusetts 🍵
🇵🇷 Pride is Protest 🏳️🌈
DEI means Veterans
Newly committed to the Hopescroll. Hold me to it.
DM me on Signal: CaptainCalliope.11
404 posts
414 followers
1,522 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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You weren't kidding. 😭 Hits especially hard with my being the same age as Marina.
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Omg, I'm only on the third track right now and you have me even more excited than I was which I didn't know was possible!
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for those of you who don't use substack you can also find it on my main blog
www.shanley.com/blog/exploit...
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Readers can tell. Not sure about the bean counters.
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I really like the quiet posters feed though. I bet others who show up there experience and feel the same.
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I'm seeing this through the Quiet Posters feed. Also, all my engagement comes from @ Ing people. So, posting style is part of it. Taking awhile for people to engage my non-discussion posts directly. Some recent followers I've engaged frequently in the past are now starting to engage me.
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Also, if this toolset were able to surface browser settings outside of settings, it feels like they become navigational rather than settings. tools.
I don't know why I'm visualizing the browser as a cockpit right now.
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Strangely this is a use case I could see a local llm playing a role in. Monitoring logs and making their meaning coherent somehow (not necessarily chat).
Extensions like tracking blockers, https for all, etc have had flavors of this piecemeal.
What would you include in a "Firebug"-style prototype?
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Those ideas:
- Replace democracy with corporate dictatorship
- Total surveillance society
- Erasure of human rights
-Eugenics
Are a pressing threat 2025.
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Some people don't think Yarvin is important. They are wrong.
But his value is not in his genius, which does not exist.
He's the guy who says what fascist billionaires want to hear.
Their embrace of the *ideas* he spouts — despite his unhinged persona — is the scary part.
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They're different questions. I'm throwing darts at the wall trying to see what gets shaken up.
If the web is a tool it can be critiqued within different contexts of power and applications. Like guns.
I kinda oversimplified to "is it bad" to be provocative. Mostly to myself, but public. 🫣
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I'm trying to separate my feelings about the open web from the ideals that underly my conception of it. They're too intertwined in my head and it's making it hard to think critically about solutions to centralization.
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My other question though, if you're willing to share, what was the feeling that you had reading my post and writing your initial response?
When I asked myself the initial question I first had a sinking feeling and then realizing just how much I'm emotionally attached to the idea of the open web.
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That actually makes some sense. I've been wondering if open source software's ideals and systems to realize them are undermined by essentially being a hack on top of our existing intellectual property system. I hear there's a parallel culture to oss in parts of China like Shenzhen. Need to read up.
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Then perhaps the game is to perpetually redecentralize with each generation of corporate capture of computing platforms. Democracy requiring vigilance and all that.
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But building trust is a huge challenge. Trust is hard and doesn't scale easily, at least not resiliently. That's what the open web sidesteps. It assumes certain kinds of trust. But then we geothermal Facebook, Amazon ws, cloudflare, etc and suddenly we have a tragedy of the commons scenario.
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That said, closed webs also exist behind firewalls. The open web is in part a cultural convention of public publishing. We don't have to do that. We could put everything behind firewalls and build a web of gates for people to browse. The web becomes more open as trust is built and nets become porus.
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I'm also trying to imagine if the open web didn't exist, what could we build that would do what it does for us, but better.. such as resistant to centralized systems.
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You misunderstood my questions. I'm presupposing that maybe the open web as we've imagined, built, advocated, and fought for has inevitably lead to centralization. If anything, I'm exploring arguments for decentralized and peer to peer computing that is platform agnostic including the web platform.
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I ask this as someone who has loved the open web since we grew up together. It's almost part of my dna. So asking this question absolutely gives me a strong emotional reaction.
But really, what if we went the wrong way with it? Maybe it's time to evolve past the web itself.
Don't you dare say ai.
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Back to the original question, what if the history of files vs apps leaves out or obscures a third thing? I might have to go back 50 years or so to see what was going on back in the day..
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My frame in thinking about user agency and the internet is evolving right now. All the new questions popping up are a good sign..
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Who has authority over our data legally, architecturally, physically? Who has authority on where computational transformations of data occurs and by whom/what?
I don't know where the concept of ownership fits into all this or if it's even relevant except in the legal sense.
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Maybe ownership is a distraction because it limits us to thinking about new tech infrastructures rather than thinking about people and their relationships first. To each other, to their individual and shared data. To metadata derived by second and third parties. Who has authority over computation?
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In other contexts I often think about stewardship over ownership whether building in the commons or owning personal property. Extending that to ownership, I think authority speaks to power in ways that ownership doesn,t. (Or maybe ownership is a concept within or underneath authority? Venn diagram?)
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The client server model inherently centers institutions over people. Propagates the cult of the expert. And in a capitist system, the client server model tends towards centralization. Strong servers and weak clients make for a resilient open web.. of servers. Not an open or even closed web of users.
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I've started thinking about a parallel/interrelated idea: authorship. Not just in terms of creative ventures or intellectual property, but straight up authority. The client server model is a political constraint as it is architectural, and its been a disaster for individual and community sovereignty
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Why does bluesky have an AI pretending to be staff?
Jk jk 😜
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"Anyone remember the Humane Pin? Or the Rabbit?"
Omg,weren't these Ike.. Yesterday?
Who needs market research these days? I guess it's move fast and break broken things more, just to make sure it's dead.
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Evidence that they can't take everything from us!
Sometimes we find hope in weird places..
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I'd expect to get punched wearing this. And Google's trying Google Glass again. Let's see how well that goes this time..