It's rotting in here...
History tends to repeat itself. Of course it does, when we actively choose to be ignorant about our past mistakes.
I have been there, as a child, not understanding the purpose of learning about the past, about other lives, stuck real low in related grades... and also being a complete disaster of a person.
I believe that for an interest in history to form, the following conditions must be first met:
- One must become aware and conscious of the consequences of their actions: required to also understand historical consequences.
- One must gain an interest in some aspect of the world, giving reason to want to find out how stuff came to be.
- One must understand loss: knowing that our history not only isn't going to write itself, but that it could be gone forever motivates to protect general knowledge and to contribute to it.
Either that, or someone could just enjoy the experience of sifting through old records and piecing together what happened. Either way, education vastly lacks in all of these departments around the world, with 'history' as a method of propaganda rather than an actual skill.
When somebody isn't interested in keeping and maintaining records; including their own life, work, achievements, their actions and whole existence will eventually amount to nothing.
What purpose is there to life, if your struggles, your challenges will just be forgotten, never learned from by anybody other than yourself? If everything you ever did ends when you pass, and the future will just be all the same whether or not you lived it?
It must come from the people
The current state of things is that we do have a lot of records kept... by a bunch of tech companies mainly located in one country. Keeping tabs on people who did not give consent, did not set the boundaries. And the alternative is no service at all.
When you open anything these days...
The tech companies hide the details of how they handle data in a legal document they know nobody will bother to read. We know why, because we know what they do:
- They collect as much information as possible, with no regard for whether it is actually useful for not.
- They replicate and send it off willy-nilly to third parties, including scammers, often by sale.
- Sometimes your personal, private data will even be discovered and published in a 'leak' by 'hackers', after 'forgetting' to dispose of it when it was no longer necessary to keep around.
And in case the above didn't sound evil enough, how about:
- Taking over the internet, then hiding behind the 'private-owned server', 'copyright' or other excuses to implement mass censorship.
- Or accepting contributions, but modifying what you said so it looks like you said something else entirely.
- Creating and running fake bot users for 'social experiments' or other purposes.
- 'Collect as much information as possible', part 2: the smart TVs listening in on your private conversations in your private spaces incident.
2026 is some wild times to be living in: our fiction cannot possibly measure up to the cartoonish evil that our corporations actively and intentionally apply to the hundreds of millions of real users: actual percentages of the entire human population on a daily basis.
This is the reason privacy is becoming more and more of a hot topic in our world: to shield ourselves from the sheer disaster that is surveillance by private entities that answer to nobody good; complete manipulation of the narrative of our lives.
How did we even get here?
The best way to get on the journey to owning your stuff is to recognize what got me to despise tech companies even at a child age: thinking about the function of things:
- If it is called a personal computer, and it belongs to a person, then logically, that person should be the sole operator of that computer.
- The job of a smart appliance is still the appliance functions. A fridge no longer working because of a borked software update is just objectively bad design.
- The job of an operating system is to provide the tooling to run user software. Despite this, Windows actively imposes telemetry, remote scanning, remote modifications (to configuration or the software), anti-competitive software practices, advertisements, a required internet connection to use the required online accounts, and the list just goes on and on... the paranoid even suspect backdoors for US agencies and botnet behavior.
- And something relevant to today: the job of ID verification is to run a check once. Despite this, ID verification systems often log and keep the information, which is simply so stupid that even I suspect they might be harvesting the IDs for illegal use.
The drive towards open source on our own hardware used to be technicalities picked up on by, well, technical people for the most part. We tried to warn the non-technical lot that it would end in this. They did not listen. And we ended up at the quite predictable outcome of genuinely evil hardware and software as something YOU spend money on, no less!
The me part
We're through the half of the document that establishes the problems of data collection not just without consent, but with manipulation. So, what's with me being interested in records of our lives now?
Having lived outside of the shackles of tech, I no longer have any privacy of mine to protect. Chlorobyte misinformation is limited to a couple hardly organized nutjob communities, and that is about it.
On the other hand, the problem of losing our history comes up. For me in particular, I have a lot, and I really mean a LOT of struggles that would be better documented so others can learn to navigate them on either side of the situation.
I am intending to rework this website to not just be a space for projects. Perhaps you are reading this on the future layout. Hello there, people from 2027 and onward! As a fun fact, this is what it once looked like in development:
Here, and on other spaces owned by nobody but the people, for nothing but the sake of the people get the closest to how our stories propagated in the good days: by simple word of mouth. The worst that could happen is the telephone game, the effect of which can be minimized by playing things smart. And hopefully not the mass misinformation kind of smart.
Okay, so why trust me to do it right?
Simple: do not.
In theory, it is very much possible for me to lie; to manipulate information, to track your interactions despite my word; to slide off towards tech billionaire behavior.
Thinking in such hypotheticals is what allows me to spend months upon months of staring at a screen, pondering how to do things right, instead of writing actual stuff.
These are important problems to ponder through for general strategy; cybersecurity and verification being just a few branches of 'war' against bad actors and blatant liars.
Thankfully, the pondering isn't endless, and I have landed at a much more forward-thinking position for the website rework; writing and configuring software; or other things. To be specific: easily, independently verifiable proofs that things are right: the opposite of stacked legal nonsense nobody bothers to read through.
It helps me out too: reducing the proofs to where even you can simply figure out if I've messed up with minimal effort makes any problem clear to myself as well.
It's not worth thinking it through any further. It's good enough of a foundation to start off. Even if I keep going to devise the most correct strategy possible: when exploring new things, mistakes are inevitable.
The problems don't end at practical experience, either: when exploring things we think we know really well, mistakes are still inevitable. There is no escape. The scientific process will come and prove our current intuitions wrong one way or another.
Feedback
Being open to feedback and adjusting is important. After all, a single person's background and experiences are merely a single person's background and experiences.
But it is also important to understand what feedback is valuable; what comes from actual understanding, and what is an attempt at malicious manipulation.
Unlike certain dramatic internet bots would "think" ('This guy no longer has a contact on the one platform we have been programmed to use!!'); I never ran away from public contact. I simply refused the platform infested with actively enabled bots, pedophiles, and frankly noise even from actual users. Discord hardly filters for spam if at all, and if anything, seems to enable it:
Email servers do filter for spam, and are quite customizable, too: not that I needed it much. It is crazy: at some point email was the service known for spam. Now I have escaped to email to avoid spam.
Enforce the boundaries
Set your expectations straight. For my stuff: this website's purpose is to host information, which should hopefully be trustable. My software's purpose is to be a tool, not to take over the world and run on every computer with hidden intent beyond the tool's explicit and implicit purposes.
And then enforce those expectations. Do not allow me, or anybody or anything else, to manipulate you into accepting anything else than you were expecting.
I wouldn't even be able to do much if I tried. We are in the age of AI that is increasingly threatening to replace manipulative services, handing control back to the other end of the transaction. Not the "consumer", but the customer.
To be specific for future reference about what I do not wish to receive; I will not accept under any terms:
- Promotion or production against basic principles, such as open and free access and tooling.
- Gaslighting: misappropriation of actions as something they are not; misattribution of work as someone else's; false advertising; etc.
- Gag orders, non-disclosure agreements, intellectual property abuse, etc. If you feel like things could go south if I were to publish what's going on, you should already know I will not be on your side.
- Other attempts to coerce and steer me or others off of a path we chose.
- Trades or transactions which result in any of the above, no matter how much my or others' personal benefit, or any other factors. No 'but's. Strict, hard no.
These are just some of the filters I will be enforcing on my partners. There are over 8 billion people on this planet. If it takes filtering through 7 billion to get to the ones who have a basic damn sense for cooperation without overreach (or underreach!), then I am filtering through 7 billion.
A strong, sure mind works wonders. If you are sad to see this document come to an abrupt end here, the previous birthday document dives into how a straight (or straight gay) mindset can help out socially as well.
Otherwise, see you around!