Thread by @everestpipkin

last weekend i made this short, gamelike piece of hypertext / hypermedia for #speculationjam

everestpipkin.itch.io/gift-game

its a brief synthesis of a lot of recent reading and thinking about what the internet could be, and maybe, with work, will be

like so many of us, i can't imagine an internet shaped like this in the future

this is partly because- does this ungainly, physical, VC-backed thing actually survive energy scarcity + climate collapse? and, yeah

but also because i'm truly convinced we can build something better

principles of minimal computing and low tech absolutely offer a path forward- as well as a present for many people.

(here is a link to more links on the subject, some loose lecture notes i put together for my class last semester: docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…)

offline/decentralized/altline peer to peer networks (dat, scuttlebutt, beaker, local community networks, the fediverse, packet radio, the mail system) also feel potentially viable in a real way! it is exciting

(again, more links: docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…)

but i'm extremely interested in how trust plays into all this, how a 'small internet' changes what is trustworthy or even an option. this partly is because of my own trusting online communities (shout out runyourown.social) and partly because of what the web once was

trust is also why i used a ~hypermedia~ format for this little project. even tho hypermedia is the foundation of browsing, its original vision- flatly linked data, from video to sound to website to text- is often a security risk now

(friends, the drama of using iframes, my god)

our internet isn't a community- it is full of communities, but it isn't A Community. it is hard to trust a stranger. it is easy to hurt a stranger. and there is little social recourse for doing so- you won't run into them at the coffee shop, you don't need them to walk your dog

we also generally don't have ownership in many of the spaces that our smaller communities do function. we use these tools and platforms as best we can, but they are profoundly alienating. twitter is just a bad landlord, no matter how you slice it.

i am so excited to see what an era of decentralized and offline networks- which are built on real connections between human beings, and personal responsibility over those networks of circulation- brings. these changes will be social, certainly, but they will also be technical -

implicit trust in networks lets things like the shared login, the global user, bulletin boards, hypermedia, all those naive systems be viable again. and i can't wait to see what we invent in a space where we aren't boxed in by systems attempting to protect us. its truly exciting.