Broadcasting your government name, face, & location online. The fall of pen names & anonymity. This is all web2.0+ behavior. It's been extremely strange to see the rise & continued engagement in this behavior.
Being safe on the early web, you learned about 'threat actors', number one was protecting personal identity, not connecting to untrusted servers, watching out for bad / nosy systems administrators, & now? Google openly admits to reading your email & people just, don't care… what happened?
@rusty__shackleford Broadly speaking? For most people, the wall between online and offline life thinned and disappeared. There became more advantages to self-representing as who you were IRL than in keeping your dog-anonymity.
The threats didn't change, but the boons turned out to be huge. People collaborated online and that success transitioned to their real lives. Folks met other human beings in chat rooms and fell in love and got married. Bloggers parlayed their words into TED talks. People found business required them to represent themselves accurately for legal (or simple common human behavior in the offline business world) reasons. Facebook gave a generation of college students an opportunity to self-represent as themselves and their world didn't spontaneously combust as a result, on average (I think of all of these things, that's the one that had the largest impact on shifting online culture).
There's still an underground that stays anonymous, and God bless 'em. But as with most human societies throughout history, we tilted toward "reputation matters" and began to assume those who stay anonymous have something to hide that they don't want attached to their reputation, which is default-suspicious.
Disregards networks of trust. If this were the case, open source would have fallen apart decades ago.
Through networks and chains of trust we create an ecosystem without deanonymization.
If devs were forced to register government IDs and faces, the ecosystem and landscape would be vastly different.
Besides this, these are subjective perceived norms. Take note of how many Japanese interact with SNS & notoriety. Oftentimes covering their face, using pen names. Similarly to radio hosts.
While few may absolutely need this, as they market themselves as individual spearheads, see; Hideo Kojima, Cory Doctorow, etc.
The rest who appear in the credits may hide their presence, either by using a pseudonym; publicly or online.
Either way. The lack of separation between real life and the internet has not resulted in a boon for the majority of people, only for a very small percentage.
Meanwhile many doing real work remain anonymous, or at least attempt to.
@rusty__shackleford >The lack of separation between real life and the internet has not resulted in a boon for the majority of people, only for a very small percentage.
I mean, we could get hung up on the details of definitions here, but I think agree-to-disagree. Most white-collar jobs are connecting via LinkedIn now if they aren't using word-of-mouth and in-person handshakes. You're not using a pseudonym to communicate on LinkedIn.
Perhaps one could argue white-collar work is dwarfed by the kind of local blue-collar work that doesn't need a LinkedIn, but that's getting off into definitions.
Meanwhile many doing real work remain anonymous, or at least attempt to.
No disagreement there, and I didn't mean to imply that the non-anonymous Internet world is incompatible with the coexistence of the anonymous Internet world. Your point about open source is extremely solid (although I think we do know most of the names and identities of the most prolific contributors to the open source space, although that might be perception distortion; it's easier to know someone if they have a face, voice, and name tied to a reputation). But i don't know if I'd say the open source ecosystem is as large as, say, the Facebook userbase in terms of people.
Right right, I don't want to argue unnecessarily about semantics either, I do agree with many things you said. Everything is just a mess and I'm exacerbated at my lack of real options. Like many have said "I guess we are stuck with Google and LinkedIn despite the conditions"
*Big sigh
*Rubs temples
I just stopped smoking like two months ago lol
@rusty__shackleford Yeah, it's a hard ecosystem to escape. I don't trust Google nearly as much as I did when I worked for them, but wow am I disinterested in setting up my own email server. Especially since so many other servers out there will just refuse to transit my messages because the system (a) became a lot more complicated and (b) had to develop an ad-hoc web-of-trust architecture to compete with the threat of basically-unfettered spam.
(Quick plug: for Google Drive alternatives, I can give a soft recommendation to Sandstorm. It's not a drop-in replacement and you'll notice the performance difference, but as a personal cloud ecosystem, it's not bad at all!)
Yes, & that's what's crazy to me! Talking with a few people as I prepare to host myself & I have learned that even with a perfect set up, Google will still bin your messages to their spam folder!
I understand the reasons, but, coupled with the size of user bases, we have another potential 'Google & xmpp' scenario:
What if Google, Microsoft, & Apple "defederated" from the larger email ecosystem & encouraged others to join them? Forcing you to use their protocol, software, or services?
Seems like a ridiculous 'what if', but Google defederating from xmpp seemed just as ludicrous back then to users of xmpp.
@rusty__shackleford I concur that this is not an impossible scenario, although I think even they don't quite have the clout to make it happen; Amazon doesn't run its email on any of those servers, for starters.
But could the FAANGs hypothetically pull off some kind of sharding and create a sub-ecosystem on top of the open source implementations? I put it in the definite maybe category.
Rusty Shackleford
Mark T. Tomczak