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I think the FAIR folks did a good job capturing what, to me, is the most core essence of this all: exposing the data at the heart. It's important that we also reveal & spread light on the computing, on opening the source. But the data underneath is highly occluded, highly captured, and is the root thing we want empowerment over. The tools are good to open, but the key radical movement that feels like it just has to happen is opening the thing the tools work on, the data. Once we can start to actually grasp what's underneath interface, once the data itself is FAIR, we open up human agency. That's the first start for freedom respecting technology. I think FAIR lights the fire of interest, re-opens the window for enlightenment to flow again. And that will be compelling for people. FAIR: Findable, Addressable, Interoperable, Resuable. https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/ Hat tip to one Dorian Taylor for the reference. This is just one of a million angles, but it does make me think of the semantic web. There's a lot of business & data & research folks in this sector, but one of the core lessons is that things should have URLs; core axiomatics of the web itself (https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html). Even the littlest drop of rdfa or microdata often starts with marking up different elements of the page to give them their own URI/URLs, making it explicit that the page is made up of many different objects. This is a low key change, but sets the seeds to let the web be more than opaque pages, to let the web be a thing of many objects. |
A very sad state of affairs