analognowhere/girl and fish/technomage.
i have been putting off reading it for a while, though mostly forgetting. not for any particular reason, i think it literally just fell out of scope and i needed a reminder it exists.
peaceful? connecting? searing? blunt?
i got the gist of the world before, from out-of-order panels. i talked to someone else who did. we described it as
escapist fantasy of being able to trust a program enough to put it inside your brain.“do you trust the program completely?”. a paranoid, familiar, avoidant rhetorical.
i draw to that end from many beginnings. “should i switch off nixos”. “should i get comfortable in this DE”. “how should i encrypt my disk”. “should i consider {platform} for job search”. “should i show myself to {person}, or remain watching from afar”.
do i trust the program completely?
the answer always lies somewhere between “no” and “maybe if”. it’s never a “yes”. it can not be “yes”. i am just one thing, one brain, one pair of eyes, one wildly misfiring endocrine machine in an ocean of complexity. it is too much for me to grasp the stack. the volume of history evades my understanding. the surface area of malice is infinite.
because, though my trust is incomplete, i entrust myself anyways. i suspend my mistrust to exist. everyone does.
there is no safe software, everything has a will of its own. as there is no safe hardware, everything is backdoored. as there is no safe place, all land is in range for a MATA drone. as there is no safe person, all minds are fragile, all arrangements are conditional, everyone’s tongue slips eventually.
you can not be sure the install won’t brick your brain. you can not be sure your crypto library doesn’t have a sidechannel. you can not be sure the person you’re opening up to won’t do something stupid.
you do it anyways. you do it anyways. you do it anyways. it’s better than doing nothing.
that this is the state of things.
that it is not something you can shield yourself from.
that the suspension of mistrust is the right thing. not a compromise. not a failure of will and research. a decision i make that has meaning.
that this was a sudden, bright revelation.
but it was one i was avoiding.
funnily enough, i did not have much trouble with the social side of it. but i could not quite bridge it back into technology.
but, really, what are my friends if not the messiest machines ever built? if i can trust them, i can trust a kernel, and a PGP implementation, and a build system, and a password manager, and a mixnet node. and when that trust is broken, it will not propagate like fracture through a sheet of glass. i’m better than that.