| Thanks for a thoughtful informative reply. > They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus
what molds it's intent upon us very strongly I often couch this struggle as the relation between IA (intelligence
amplification) and AI (artificial intelligence). I am not the first to
draw the lines that way, and I don't literally mean AI (machine
learning) in the sense that most of us techies would understand. But
I think it's a good demarcation to show the way computing is
splitting/polarising along socio-political lines. For BigTech, it's a
means of control, not discovery. > Ursala Franklin's lectures Thanks for this. I've heard of her I think, but obviously have some
more reading to do. > Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective In Digital Vegan I talk some about the transformation of digital
technologies from enabling tools to instruments of enforcement. > The web, here, is remarkably strong powerful, with userscripts being
a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common
knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every
corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like
it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically
implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself
functions. Ted Nelson (and some of the other WWW pioneers) had similar visions of
a "lisp machine-like" queryable distributed structure. > imagine a web where components could more clearly state their
intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common
devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of
could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could
help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for
everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in
what it expresses, but internally as well. Web1.0 carried that hope but failed. Web2.0 tried (at least brought
interactive participation) but was usurped by commerce. Is Web3.0
trying again? Is the arc of web history on the side of your vision? I
hope so. |