Latest revision as of 13:17, 16 July 2021

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No "gag order" contracts

My policy is to never sign any nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).
(And if you are a broad thinker then it should be your policy as well.)
I need no potentially gargantuan boulders in the way of openly sharing my thinking.
A wiki like this one is a network that holds together by it's internal interlinking.
and if you blast big and/or numerous enough permanent "off-limits-to-write-about holes" into it then
it eventually irreversibly disconnects and falls apart.

Getting to much declared off limits (or rather too little declared within limits) ...

• Blacklist: None is off limits except what is declared to be
• Whitelist: All is off limits except what is declared not to be – this is just beyond bad

... can cross some sort of percolation limit beyond which the context of the content(pages) rips apart leaving a holey/porous mess.
This is similar to what you have in dementia or amnesia. (Related impactful entertainment: ^[1])

Wikis (like the one you are reading) at some point become a mental crutch for me.
One could in some sense maybe even call it an extension of the brain.
So analogies to damaged states of the brain may not be entirely unreasonable.

Nearing and crossing the "fall-apart percolation limit":

• Things get harder and less pleasant to read, and less read.
• Comprehensibility for readers drops rapidly.
• This fosters incomprehension and even worse miscomprehension and
• eventually negatively effects the authors reputation leading to discreditation.

Privacy and anonymity vs transparency dilemma

Do not misunderstand.
I do value other peoples, groups, (and of course my own) privacy.
I do try to keep secrets (no matter whether implicit or explicit declared as such) that where shared with me secret. Within reason.
But I absolutely need to remain able to use my own judgement for that. This is not negotiable.
Not to speak of non disclosure agreements with a whitelisting model.

The two extremes

Maximalist transparency:
I absolutely do not subscribe to the mindset of:
"if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
– This mindset does not see value in the existence of secrets.
– This mindset does not allow for any privacy (personal secrets), anonymity (secret identity), or pseudonymity (possibly secret identity).
All of which can be perfectly reasonable and even essentially important given the right context.

Maximalist privacy and anonymity:
But I also absolutely do not subscribe to the polar opposite maximalist mindset since
refusal to entrust any secrets to any kind of groups necessarily leads to total anarchy.
Some secrets must not remain unexposed.

Middle ground?
There is a need for balancing between these two clearly bad extremes.
Reaching and staying at a stable middle ground is
the eternal struggle of management of rules from family all the way up to global governance.

Unfortunately (and hopefully unsurprisingly) finding reaching and staying at a middle ground is
nothing to solve and explain in just a few sentences.
It is one of the major challenges of humanity and probably all intelligent life in the multiverse (if it "exists").

Necessities in software improvement

"Why not keep a private wiki and only share what you are allowed to?" you may say?
I absolutely do not have the timely resources to keep a private mirror wiki.
Not to say I am not trying but It's a nigh useless mess.
But that's not even the point in regards to non disclosure agreements as you should understand by now.

To manage the privacy+anonymity / transparency tightrope-walk properly (within one ownes judgement)
what is really needed is massive improvements in software that
allow for smart management of a middle ground.

As it seems to stand now current software solutions

• either do not allow for this at all
• or allow for just a bit at the cost of a huge timely effort.

Concretely: There is no wiki software yet that simultaneously is all of:

• a private personal "desktop wiki" – See: zim wiki ^[2]
• a public personal wiki (like this wiki here that you are reading right now – or personal homepage-wikis)
• a public globally-open wiki (like Wikipedia) allows for a seamless private "desktop wiki" writing and
• the rest of all the the possible combinations – adding groups as agents which may access and maybe contribute (beyond personal and globally-open)

All that seamlessly combined in one.

Globally open digital areas need to deal with the war-zone that is the open internet.

• spam attacks (fist thing you get flooded with if you provide an open rule-less platform)
• vandalism (intentional and unintentional),
• system damaging content (commuter viruses, trojans, worms),
• content harming humans in psychological ways
• content harming humans in physical ways (necessarily indirectly)
• the list is long ...

Also self hosting is important to get back to a middle ground.
You do not want your data taken hostage.

• Neither for technical reasons (Gaps in software)
• Nor for economical induced centralization reasons

Related: The problem with current day programming and its causes#Likely causes (high abstraction level)

A particular project to look out for that might
allow us to get closer to the middle ground again
may be Holochain.

External links

• Percolation limit
• Zim wiki
• Holochain
• Self hosting
• Data taken hostage

References

1. ↑ Time of Eve (イヴの時間, Ivu no Jikan) – Wikipedia: Time of Eve
2. ↑ Wikipedia: Zim (software)