“A PC today is like a typewriter now…”
– Jensen Huang, CEO of nVidia, discussing Agentic AI
An AOL install CD, or “drink coaster” from the turn of the century. Perhaps the start of the rot.
Yeah, they’re doing it again. Part of what AI is about is the concept of obsoleting the Personal Computer. Corporations would very much like you to just keep a device you don’t understand or control as your only interface to the wider world. Even the side-effects of the AI buildout (increasing component prices, higher energy costs) are making your recent computer shopping much more difficult. For the first time in many decades you are paying more and getting less. Soon, you won’t be able to get anything at all. Maybe you’ll *subscribe* to everything. Won’t that be fun?
History is an Ouroboros, eating itself without even botherin’ to chew…
– RRTM
This Reticulum stuff is kind of a philosophical re-awakening to me as I’ve been exploring it. The idea of anonymity as a base value in the network structure itself is very different from the way the Internet really works. You *can* be anonymous on the TCP/IP internet, but it takes a *LOT* of work and extreme care with every connection you make. Web 3.0 and Social Media came along and centralized everyone’s social activity into a handful of corporate sites and ecosystems. Now they track every click and mouse movement you make, and calculate your identity by taking a signature of your SSD even if you’ve blocked all cookies and masked your connection with a VPN.
The challenge for me as someone who works to foster the typewriter collector and user community – and bringing that to a network where the basic assumptions and attitudes about tracking identities are diametrically different to the network that TWDB was built for – is: “How do I treat Identity on TWDB Nomad?”. Frankly, TWDB as it is wants very little information about you. Just a name (which I could care less if you make a fake one) and an email address (so I can have some indication that you can click a link in an email, which bots can’t do, and so you can recover your password if you need to). That’s all I need, so that’s all I ask, and all I bother to collect.
But we don’t really even need that much on TWDB Nomad. All it needs to know is that you are trusted by TWDB Web, and it only gets your Username, User ID# and User Level in return. These are the (mostly) immutable things about your account. They don’t change in TWDB once firmly established, and so are safe to pass as indications of who you are to TWDB Nomad and what you are allowed to do or access. While this somewhat transgresses against the philosophy of “NO CENTRALIZATION” by relying on TWDB Web to act as an authorization server, and thus preserving “identity” from a primarily permissive environment into a primarily anonymous environment, I think it is pretty much essential to have that identity within a community, though. The way it’s designed, that TWDB Identity is infinitely re-assignable to whichever node identity you happen to be using, so divorcing that identity from your Node identity is pretty trivial and should satisfy anyone struck with a sudden desire to erase *all* traces of their TWDB identity from their current Node identity. This of course necessitates TWDB Nomad *NOT USING* your node fingerprint as an identifier once you’ve established sync, so there’s no particular reason to ever display it anywhere or use it as an ownership key for forum posts and things like that. It *could* and, we assume it *will* change. I need to design everything around those assumptions and restrictions.
These are the things you have to ponder when designing mechanics around an entirely new philosophical framework. Throw in a couple fresh, new complex languages with extremely picky grammar and an unhealthy concern for whitespace and tab levels, and I’ll be fighting off the Alzheimer’s for the next couple’a years at least with all this learnin’ & brain exercise. :D
On another positive note, We got an offer accepted finally! Now comes the rat-killin’ part for a couple months and then we should be no longer homeless. This exile shall end! (:
That’s right – “pending”, that’s us! :D