{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2024/eroding-trust-for-web",
  "description": "I deactivated my accounts and will be deactivated more.\n",
  "path": "/essays/2024/eroding-trust-for-web",
  "publishedAt": "2024-10-24T03:10:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
  "tags": "essay",
  "textContent": "I've deactivated my accounts on more platforms today. I looked at the amount of time I spend on all of\nthese platforms and it doesn't seem to matter if they're open or closed; I still burn so much time\nthat doesn't allow me to justify it. When I was looking for work, it filled up the space that I\nmight have spent wondering how I might have wasted the last four years of my life. That means\nI've been doing a lot of journaling and thinking — including developing thoughts about the\n\"open social Web\".\n\nThis choice was indirectly prompted as I was watching a talk from [XOXO 2024][1] about the need to\nheal the networks we exist on. I appreciate the forms of optimism that came up during this talk\n— the excerpt from the letter _really_ got to me. I'd love to see these networks flourish,\nthese spaces grow.\n\nI'm afraid that I don't have enough faith to see it through anymore. I've personally attempted and\nfailed multiple times to what I've come to understand a dream of utopia — a means of allowing\npeople to design, inform and communicate consent on the Internet. I've spent time reading\nspecifications in attempts of finding some guidance. I got more concerned that no matter\nwhere I looked, everything demands it to operate as if we're all sitting at CERN sharing research\npapers. Notice the \"I\" statements. _I_ don't have faith — but I do think someone out there\nwill manage to make something happen. My resistance or lack of faith comes from the focus on the\npush to _make something new_ and not take _any_ of the lessons that have come up in the development\nand evolution of these platforms.\n\nEducation does not fix much here — you can suggest developers to read any book that's\nhighlighted how some of the features will crush the kind of experiences that they're aiming to\ndevelop for people who have no idea what WebFinger or JSON-LD is. I catch myself doing things I\nfeel nasty doing after the fact — making cheeky threads about the false banner of alignment,\nthe thin curiosity of tech and the reincarnation of American manifest destiny made global and\ndigital under the banner of \"innovation\". That has done _nothing_. There's no Fediverse Enhancement\nProposal to operate with consent-centric communication, the Social Web working group is _very_ eager\nto allow employees from a [violence-enabling][6] company to participate in the development of \"the\nfuture of the Social Web\" nor is there anyone who breaks away from the conventional mold of Western\ntechnological development at the nascent [ActivityPub-centric(?) Social Web Foundation][7].\n\nThis sounds like a rant at this point. If it's taken as such then it's not going to introduce\nanything I haven't already written or posted. I'm largely disappointed in the toilet-bowl swirling\nof the _same_ nature of green-field behaviors that planted the same seeds over and over. This is\nwhere my lack of hope and faith comes in. This probably will discourage anyone else who doesn't fit\nthe mold from joining — which means that the people who _do_ spearhead this needs to put more\neffort into the _people_ part and not into the protocol.\n\nMy \"anger\" is in the knowledge that _it is fully possible_ to build out a safer, more\ncommunity-centric and consent-optimized Web and that instead there's a hunger to make that as\nunviable as possible. It's coming from multiple sides of the table and it makes me want to walk away\nfrom the table altogether. I don't plan to but I will keep as much distance from the parts of the\ntable that I don't want to engage with until there's a better way to go about this.\n\nI'm going to expand on this in a less rant-centric way in November, but for now, I'm logging off.\n\n[1]: https://xoxofest.com/2024/videos/erin-kissane/\n[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet\n[3]: https://nyupress.org/9781479829965/distributed-blackness/\n[4]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043373/hashtagactivism/\n[5]: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-feminists-alt-right-twitter-gamergate.html\n[6]: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series\n[7]: https://socialwebfoundation.org/\n[8]: https://www.patreon.com/Are0h\n[9]: https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatomy.pdf",
  "title": "An Erosion of my trust in the Web"
}