<nettime> the resurrection of the edge

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Some 10-15 years ago the edge devices gave up, and became robotic 
extensions of the center. As Interwebs deteriorated* into 'web' and 
'apps', the agency of the edge devices all but disappeared. The 
organization behind the last non-corporate browser took money from 
corporations, and that was the end of it. The "Open source" become a 
lipstick on the pig, as pretty much all involved succumbed to the 
ideology of centralization (more on that at 
https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf .)
[* to illustrate to non-tech outsiders the sad state of computing 
machinery: take one page from your favorite book on philosophy; now 
imagine that all philosophy books can only be written by using only 
words from that page. Except that it's worse than that.]
But there are signs of life! Gab.ai created a piece of software that 
runs on *your* computer and overlays 3rd party web pages with Gab user 
comments. 3rd party sites can't do shit about it. The decades old 
concept that content can be locally modified prior viewing is back (I 
still remember an extension I used for years, that replaced each 
occurrence of select words on any site I visited with some other words. 
It sounds simplistic, but it did make a huge difference and made me 
realize how words hit you at levels below perception ... 
s/government//mafia/ etc.)
Why this didn't happen earlier? One part was fear of lawsuits. But the 
main reason was widespread collusion that the sanctity of the 
centralized model is not to be challenged. Now the first step was made, 
and it will be interesting to watch how it develops. It threatens the 
whole industry - after all that money spent on web and apps, some jerk 
can deface it with impunity. But more importantly, it reveals the 
elephant in the room - end user devices are actually computers!
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: