Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

With due respect, it is time to go outside.

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

Well pardon me if I politically digress in the LOTR memes group, but it might get worse before it gets better. Encryption, for example, is an inherent existential threat to authoritarianism, and there is global bipartisan support for law which would (or already did) criminalize it under broad or subjective circumstances. The exponential growth of industry puts massive economic strain on political systems, and those explicitly designed to be procedurally overthrown (via representative democracy, for example) may adapt by creating unconstitutional political tokens such as, just off the top of my head, internal revenue systems designed to destabilize opponents’ campaign finance systems, aggressive zoning practices intended to control demography, and deficit spending courtesy of international geopolitical entanglement backed by informally declared unconventional warfare.

It’s irrational to refrain from criticizing the left wing, which, in the US, supports all of the above practices when the White House is blue. So does the right when it’s red. We have to get past this shit. Industry exacerbates otherwise manageable resource asymmetry. We need to put our cultural differences on hold while we purge the bias and clientelism from our internal revenue systems. Only then will this pressure to enforce subjective values subside to a level where it can be managed by individuals and their technology.

* dons wizard hat

You think you’re joking, but peer-to-peer, capability-based distribution is the future of web design. Federation protocols (like ActivityPub, on which run Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, et. al.) are a big step up from single points of centralization like Reddit and Twitter, but most implementations are still fundamentally client/server architectures which give server owners power over users. Some of the people who invented ActivityPub have already moved into a new phase of distributed systems architecture. “Second-party” is not a terrible way to think about it.

WASM (WebAssembly) is one of the key technical breakthroughs that will facilitate much richer distribution; it allows many languages to run natively (fast) in common browsers. No longer will we all be necessarily bound to the abomination that is Javascript. With WASM, backend guys like me can run our fancy languages/databases right on your browser, building stronger meshes of user computers acting like lighter versions of federated servers. Together with Free Software ─ the legal right to share and change code ─ this technology represents the democratization of the Internet.

So why hasn’t this glorious revolution happened already? Well, WASM support is still not ubiquitous and there are still serious architectural challenges whose solutions are very much in progress. Security is a big one. With centralized infrastructure, the most efficient way to handle security is a concept called ACLs (Access Control Lists), which are like firewalls ─ lists of rules for who can do what. With ACLs, each node has all the tools and a copy of the rules. This does not work when you want powerful nodes to run independently under the control of complete strangers.

The way forward is Capability-Based Security, which includes three big ideas:

1. Each node has only the tools that it needs.
2. When a node needs a new tool, it has to ask its neighbors to borrow it.
3. Just because a node is borrowing a tool doesn’t mean it can share it with others.

Cryptographically-enhanced capability-based security makes the computational power of individual nodes irrelevant to their role in the larger system. WASM contains an implementation of this idea ─ it’s called WASI (WASM System Interface) ─ but there are different approaches with different tradeoffs. The one I’m studying right now is called Spritely Goblins, developed by some of the people who invented ActivityPub. You can read more at https://spritely.institute.