Granted this didn’t affect computers with system integrity protection on, a normal state for most Macs which protects the device from third party software accessing sensitive parts of the operating system. But, still, this type of audaciousness is just rude. Especially in a time when trust of Silicon Valley is at an all time low. So I decided I’m done with Google Chrome, but, ha ha, it’s damn hard to completely uninstall.
I used to love Chrome. Especially in the early days. I love its values of being open, pushing the web forward, advocating for the right technologies, etc. What did it become though? Now that it owns the vast majority of the market share, it feels to me like it's becoming rogue. I'm getting worried about its way of operating but also about the way it treats my data. Truth is, even f I try to get away from it, it's so engrained with all my accounts that it is painful.
True to my mildly obsessive nature, I did a clean install of Mac OS and downloaded the Brave browser.
Just as I'm reading this I'm feeling incredibly tempted already.
Overall, I’m incredibly weary of the diligence one has to maintain just to somewhat safely access the internet these days. I weep for the future.
I'm genuinely curious what the future for the web will look like. I'm more and more scared about privacy — it seems it's a topic where we slowly move in the right direction. Who knows though, things change so fast.
On a different note, yesterday I sent a letter to CJ. I'm curious to experiment different types of engagement mechanisms. It seems like all our blogs are their own island and it really takes effort to go to the other person's island. As I said in the letter, I don't mind so much actually. It's exciting to open your feed, read, and see if people engaged with your content. Inquiry put it very nicely:
It's basically an endless stream of birthday presents to open.
There's no incentive to do it, which makes it even better. It's give without take.
I think I've mentioned this before, but there's a book called “The Dice Man” (Luke Rhinehart) in which the main character stumbles on the idea of associating possible “what should I do next?” items with dice outcomes, rolling the dice, and unflinchingly/unfailingly obeying the “what should I do next?” associated with the outcome.
I'm actually looking for a non-fiction book to read! I might give this one a go. Let me roll the die to see if I should. Keeping you posted.