@JessTheUnstill: I have a strong feeling about this point. It seems to me that as a society, we've been too willing to allow a hierarchy between "developers" and "end users" to creep into the "software products" that we use, and I believe that technical means encouraging people to see, and treat, software not as black boxes but as systems of rules that can be modified on the fly would help neutralise the worst abuses of this unpleasant development.
I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet, though. In the context of web browsers, adding simple and powerful tools to enforce the notion the user has power over what happens in the browser, by means of easy-to-use archival and scraping and "content" re-formatting tools would probably be a good start.
@riley @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @ariadne@treehouse.systems (Disclaimer: I can't see the original post that this is replying to)
Something about this that has been annoying me forever... it's *very difficult* to build a system that is manipulable in this way without losing its security and reliability properties.
That doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, of course, but it does mean that the 'obvious' approaches generally work very poorly, and that it's a Big Problem that you can't really work towards incrementally, because if you start with a quicksand foundation, it can never become reliable later.
At the same time, very few people seem to be interested in figuring out these Big Problems properly, instead choosing to work within the 'status quo' framework of hierarchy. But the people who *are* interested in changing this, often don't recognize the complexity.
So in the end we just end up with a lot of unreliable user-manipulable tools that then further entrench the belief that "this just isn't possible" :/ And I'm not sure where one would even begin to fix this problem...
@joepie91: May I suggest collecting the most obvious approaches, and carefully cataloging the ways in which they're broken, so as to try and bootstrap some resemblance of iterative approximation?
(My thinking here is, a major reason making this field hard to think about is, we've got a bunch of ill-conceived intuitive social assumptions about how society should work, and they tend to repeatedly clash with common just as intuitive engineering ideas about how computers should work. By making these assumptions explicit, by laying the problem field out in the open for people interested in solving these problems that very explicitly concern the intersection of society, technology, and geekdom, it should become a little bit easier to thinking about the hard parts, and to discuss them among people of otherwise diverse backgrounds and subtly diverse intuitions.
The end product, after all, will necessarily involve breaking and reshaping some of these assumptions.)
ariadne@treehouse.systems
