Off the Cuff 5: Contextual WoT
Pondering a ‘’hyper-Nostrized’’ future, I imagine all these signature relationships among public keys manifested through Nostr discourse, to be interwoven and fully integrated into civilization. To illustrate:
Imagine a system, where parent define the domains of content and people their children can access online, by leveraging trust in various institutions; be those family, friend or other types of familiarity, schools, sports-clubs, churches, community centers, or business specialized in providing ‘child friendly’ environments and content.
While not geographically restricted per se, geography is a dominant factor in the webs of trust that are being constructed. After a short while of a couple of decades, entire generations of people can lean on this trust foundation, once constructed in carefully protected environments.
The point is not that these webs of trust are flawless, because WoT never is, but that they are ‘deep’; the high amount of cross-referencing that is achieved, makes it only such that trust erosion happens on the edges, but has a hard time penetrating to its decentralized core. This core consists out of an inter-generational complex of relationships. Its creation is bottom-up, merely leveraging a variety of centralized institutions, but ultimately only existing in the subjective perspectives of each individual user. It is semi-public, firstly because the information is distributed, but also because large parts of it is not public at all, and contains many private components and interpretations.
The result is an interplay between person, topic and location; either of the three, will lead you to the other two. When looking at people, you can find what they talk about, and where (what particular relay), just as much as visiting a relay will introduce new people and topics, and simply researching a topic will lead to new people and places. Now in principle this is not new, other than that currently the locations are often closed environments and peoples identities are always fractured among them as a result. The only real venue we have to move between the three are search engines like Google, who scraped all the things and help you on your way or fancy ‘deepsearch’ AI’s.
The problem with the current paradigm is that it relies on these locations (websites, platforms); it will put CNN above totallyrealnews.trustmebro, leading toward the necessity to organize trust in institutional constructs exclusively. This type of trust-construct is both rigid and fragile. At its core its due to the fact that albeit that lets say Google is subjective, it pertains to be able to serve everyone and aims for this faux objectivity by making its analyses as vast a possible. At the same time, it cant afford casting its broad net, given all the fake AI-bot-fish it will catch. If its heuristic leans on the credibility of location, and those locations in turn raise their walls to protect their credibility; the end result is an small insular permissioned construct where it is very clear what and how to attack.
The argument here is not that these institutional trust-constructs are useless, but that they are nice additions to a system that relies on inter-personal trust first. Its permissionless to shake someones hand in the real world, and subsequently shake their hand digitally; its a low barrier entree to a high form of trust. The resulting trust-complex not only offers a means of sense-making outside of permissioned systems, but in turn also offers the same type of sense-making to those institutions to increase their resiliency as well.
All I am saying is, Nostr is not an option, its a necessity…..and so are NIP03 timestamps :)