Some 10-15 years ago the edge devices gave up, and became robotic
extensions of the center. As Interwebs deteriorated* into 'web' and
'apps', the agency of the edge devices all but disappeared. The
organization behind the last non-corporate browser took money from
corporations, and that was the end of it. The "Open source" become a
lipstick on the pig, as pretty much all involved succumbed to the
ideology of centralization (more on that at
https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf .)
[* to illustrate to non-tech outsiders the sad state of computing
machinery: take one page from your favorite book on philosophy; now
imagine that all philosophy books can only be written by using only
words from that page. Except that it's worse than that.]
But there are signs of life! Gab.ai created a piece of software that
runs on *your* computer and overlays 3rd party web pages with Gab user
comments. 3rd party sites can't do shit about it. The decades old
concept that content can be locally modified prior viewing is back (I
still remember an extension I used for years, that replaced each
occurrence of select words on any site I visited with some other words.
It sounds simplistic, but it did make a huge difference and made me
realize how words hit you at levels below perception ...
s/government//mafia/ etc.)
Why this didn't happen earlier? One part was fear of lawsuits. But the
main reason was widespread collusion that the sanctity of the
centralized model is not to be challenged. Now the first step was made,
and it will be interesting to watch how it develops. It threatens the
whole industry - after all that money spent on web and apps, some jerk
can deface it with impunity. But more importantly, it reveals the
elephant in the room - end user devices are actually computers!
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