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Thoughts from Day 1 & 2 of @WebOfTrustInfo Rebooting Web of Trust #RWOT...
/ankurb/status/1704502552170049820/photo/1

1. I was surprised by how little generative AI was a topic of conversation, definitely an outlier from the other conferences I've been to this year. The sense I get is that it's still seen as a shiny toy that makes coding and writing easier, rather than something that digital credentials could be applied to. (There's some really cool stuff that @C2PA_org is doing in this space around content provenance and authenticity, which can survive editing/cropping for legitimate purposes.)

2. Japan started looking at SSI because earthquakes/tsunamis are an existential threat to business continuity of data/data centres. Hence, giving people a copy of their data was seen as a way of leapfrogging how data is handled and managed. Still early days of course, but a cool insight on such a different driver for adoption compared to Europe, where it's driven more by increasing competition in the market / interoperability.

3. There were some interesting conversations around how to understand whether an "expert" or an "authority" is actually an expert/authoritative, without falling back to centralised mechanisms. (This is a topic I touched on in my last year's advanced reading submission for dynamic and decentralised reputation scoring: https://t.co/Qpg4uzX3JX)

4. A lot more focus on sustainable technology, not just ethical/privacy-preserving technology this year. I get the sense that the more obvious utility of generative AI technology (as well as climate change) has made the conversation more urgent and tangible. With blockchain, either you fell into the #Web3 camp where decentralisation was "obviously good", or thought the energy footprint of it was "obviously insane" because people questioned its utility. It's a much harder trade-off on tech progress vs climate when more people get why generative AI is useful.

5. The definition of what "good" or "bad" varies a lot. The example of Worldcoin was brought up, where this group of people think it's obviously bad. On the flip side, Worldcoin has users (even if acquired by questionable means) and on a completely different axis of trying to establish universal basic income, could be considered "good" - even if "bad" from a privacy perspective.

6. There's a lot of emphasis on direct/peer-to-peer connections. I do wonder though about intermediaries sometimes being valuable, e.g., eBay or Airbnb being intermediaries in ecommerce/rental housing (where there's someone to turn to and complain when things go wrong). An ideal system would be (more) direct and perhaps have some of the nicer attributes of intermediaries (someone/some mechanism of complaining and rectifying mistakes).

7. We did a past/present/future idea board with stickies. This was super fun to capture the mood of the attendees:
- 1990s: People mostly spoke about new tech, like email, sites, instant messengers etc. Very nostalgic.
- 2000s: Post 9/11 made surveillance capitalism normalised. Web-first started becoming a thing.
- 2010s: The slow rise of Big Tech.
- 2020s: A lot of despair, not just in the tech sense but a general atmosphere of sociopolitical instability. A sense that people are no longer just talking about the tech, but also talking about the impact of tech on society and vice versa.
- 2030s+: A hope that there's a ray of sunshine after the era of Big Tech, where people are more in control of their data and privacy is a human right.

Twitter

Time to get caught up with @ankurb from the @WebOfTrustInfo event over in Cologne, Germany.

Take a dive into his thoughts from Day 1 & 2. 🤔

Gotta love those doodles, too. ✏️😉