The AI wave is yet to hit the tech illiterate, it’s still charging up.

The CEOs at these companies (Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft) clearly don’t understand how much people crave trustworthy sources in the current moment. If they would focus their investments on enhancing trust, they would actually make more money in the long run.

Making money in the long run isn’t the goal of any of these people. They are already beyond wealthy, with enough money to influence global politics. I see the purposefull deterioration of trust is a form of perversion. If you have a good and trustfull image it’s a lot of work to maintain. There are limitations as a company or individual on what you can get away with while maintaining a good image. But if you are untrustworthy and still successful, you can get away with mostly anything, since there are no expectation of you to act in good faith.

This is in my opinion what those people or corporations are trying to achieve. If there is a veil of distrust between everyone they can do as they please and just point a finger at the next bad person. The goal is to bring everybody down on the same level.

Those people could already get away with mostly anything by paying themselves out of trouble, now they will be able to get away socially by convincing you that they aren’t worse than others.

The trust issue is a constant concern in the tech world (SSL certificates, firewalls, authentication/authorization/accounting, blockchain, etc). The problem is that the approaches adopted don’t make it into the public until it’s late for two reasons:

• They tend to cost money
• They take effort

Every once in a while some service comes out that strikes a good balance and brings forth a paradigm shift. Letsencrypt did that for SSL, zero trust did it for internal systems communication, and so on. However there’s always lag in adoption of security measures, and it only takes one malicious actor adopting new technology to blow a hole wide open in “tried and true” security and trust measures.

One of my speculative critiques of the fediverse is that, technologically, it isn’t terribly relevant any more, or at least as much as it was just a year or two ago, because it doesn’t seem designed to cope with this new threat to the internet and media landscape. Rather, it’s designed to counter big corporate social media and the attendant lack of privacy, circa 2012.

Naively, to me, closing things down from public accessibility, encrypting and creating + enforcing chains of trust, seem to be the sort of things we might need to think about to create good human spaces against the pestilence of the modern internet. My naive impression is that to add that to ActivityPub would probably require just starting again.