Man and Web

In no case do I pretend to be the truth. Maybe I’m completely mistaken somewhere. But I post it to share my thoughts and understand myself.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about the essence of the Web as a reflection of a Man. By its very nature, a Man, like a Web, is decentralized. Both have both vertical (bosses, cities, node routers) and horizontal (close, neighbors, local area networks) connections. Is that why the original Web so easily overlapped with society and was accepted?

The original idea was simple - here are a handful of protocols that allow you to transfer information between nodes. From person to person, from terminal to mainframe, from worker to shop supervisor, from computer to computer, and so on. There are a lot of analogies here. But if vertical connections in human society have a rather indirect effect on horizontal ones (you won’t stop loving someone if you are ordered to), then horizontal connections in networks are extremely difficult to maintain. Technology is not perfect and does not reflect well how a person builds connections in the real world. We can get to know someone online, communicate, and belong to communities, but we depend on the site where this communication takes place. Whether it’s a game server, a forum, or a social network. Just think about how many of you know your friends’ email in case the WathsApp or Telegram are closed. At best, a cell phone number.

It is also important that a person is not inclined to perceive network connections as at least somewhat similar to real ones. You’re more likely to meet people at a concert than in the comments below a video or post. And this lower weight of connections in the Web is difficult to condemn, because humanity does not live with them for so long. Here you are communicating with people, strengthening your connection based on interests. But suddenly the person disappears, and you don’t have any other contacts. He might just get bored and stop going on the platform for a while. And without knowing it, you decided that he had left the resource forever, and you were leaving too. Perhaps that is why we are all drawn to large resources where “all friends are sitting”.

But back to the protocols. For example, RSS¹ and Atom² are extremely simple protocols that people know almost nothing about. Their essence is to convey the news to people in a simple way. You don’t need to visit your favorite website or blog to find out if there was any news. The RSS reader will receive all the updates on its own and inform you about them. But the ease of receiving this news in a decentralized manner has helped major news aggregators also receive this news, publish it, and thereby increase their already considerable audience. After all, a person is simple and unpretentious, he will not check the original source. This creates two excellent opportunities. First, publish half-truths or lies. Secondly, don’t publish anything at all. And we get censorship and the imposition of opinions based on the vector of editorial policy. That is, what was originally intended to bring independence to people was used against them, in favor of selfish interests at best.

And so we find ourselves in a situation where, with a seemingly abundance of information, we find ourselves in an information cocoon that we don’t even know we have. For balance, we have, for example, as many as three different opinions about the same event. The others before you were filtered, digested, and disguised. You won’t even know about it, because people learned to lie and manipulate long before the advent of the Web.

There have been other attempts besides RSS and Atom. The most successful of them, of course, is email. There are no options. It appeared much earlier than large companies realized how to take advantage of such technologies. And due to the steady growth of email, they are now in a situation where it is a very risky idea for them to lose backward compatibility. Perhaps this is one good example of a protocol that could not be subdued and squeezed under itself. But despite this, they do not stop trying to make a mail club “for their own” and continue to impose “new” and “secure” protocol extensions on us. Dancing with certification authorities and PTR records alone is worth a lot. I am already silent about the shadow blocking of the 25 TCP port by providers.

XMPP/Jabber³ was the least lucky. Does anyone even remember it? And it’s not surprising, because the whole Google has put a lot of effort into suppressing its use. Ban? Blocking? Be more cunning! The good old tactic: if you can’t win, take the lead. They have launched their large XMPP service. The same free cheese as the Gmail, but which was much easier to collapse. The fact is that it is quite difficult and expensive to keep an XMPP server. This requires a fairly large storage for chat histories, a stable connection, and round-the-clock server operation. Only geeks could keep it for themselves. Basically, people signed up at large nodes, which kept crashing, and people left for others. That was until Google came on the scene. And indeed, they will be able to provide user support. Large nodes began to close due to the outflow of users. And soon Google itself shut down support due to “low demand”. What can you do against Google? The funny thing about this is that XMPP/Jabber is still in use. But you don’t know about it. After all, you don’t care how WhatsApp works. The RSS story repeated itself, almost one-on-one. It was the same with personal websites and blogs: just switch to hosting or a platform. And as a result, we have to count on our fingers the companies whose resources are used by, if not 90%, then certainly 70% of the planet.

People on large platforms don’t belong to themselves. Their correspondence is being read, information is being leaked, and is being used in behavior analysis, targeted advertising, and neural network training without their consent. They can be automatically blocked at any moment for saying something that is “incorrect” from the platform’s point of view. And even despite the huge number of people on these platforms, they are all extremely lonely. After all, as I have already said, the value of virtual communication is much lower than the real one. Have a million followers or 100 friends, which one do you choose? Moreover, the more subscribers you have, the less you belong to yourself. Sincerity disappears, sponsors and advertisers appear. Step to the left and you’re an outcast without funding. A commissioned article, a few corrected facts - no one will remember you tomorrow. But even worse, you don’t communicate. It’s a surrogate. On the one hand, the content producer. On the other hand, the consumer. No love, no trust. Just production and consumption. Accurate calculation. Does this really happen in real life? No, of course, you can give examples of their category of “so calm, sociable, but it turned out to be a maniac”, but this is already a distortion. Most often, people who know you personally will either not believe in slandering you at all, or ask you for your position on the situation. Truth and sincerity are rarely truly alone.

But what is the purpose of separating us by false unity? I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to this question yet. All I know is that it all depends on us. Yes, it’s hard to keep your email server at least for your family. But this is already a huge step at a fairly low price. And I understand ordinary people who are far from information technology, and geeks who are not interested in this routine. After all, it’s so easier to go with the flow than to stand apart and even more so to go against.

In general my thought is very simple - protocols can only combine and cannot be evil in themselves. Only in evil hands. That’s what happened with XMPP. This is what happens with RSS. And the corporate Towers of Babel did not originate on their own. It’s all the fault of people’s idleness and vanity. “They give me free registration and chat, just a rare advertisement”. But the ads you see aren’t even half of what you got.

The externaly Web may have changed in a similar way to humanity - tribes, villages, cities - but in fact this path has not been passed. The analogy here is very simple - the revolution of 1917 in Russia. They have not been able to make a communist out of a man by force for 70 years. Even the socialists turned out to be so-so.

I repent, I have sinned. But I’m working on myself. Until recently I tried Fediverse, but I found all the same flaws in it as on major platforms. At the moment, the nostr⁴ protocol looks very promising to me. But I find the clearest reflection of myself on the web at the moment in returning to the original Web - the website, RSS, and Plan 9, which is very close to my spirit.

But I believe that Mankind will be able to find their true reflection on the Web and the Web will cease to be an alien and hostile place for a Man.