Network Relater
den can be used as a legacy network browser, viewing and interacting with HTTP web sites, and as a network relater following the deserve protocol, owning the data you generate as you explore information.
Metaphysics, that is, a look on the ground and at the sky, a fish pondering what is water. Although a more appropriate name to the subject matter would be Metarythmics, from meta, Greek for beyond, and arithmos, Greek for digit, number. But since that is quite a horrendous construction, historically based on a clerical misthinking, perhaps Cosmetics would be more fit, given that even our highest metaphysics is still contained in the cosmos, and even given that the appearance is the essence, and considering that 'cosmetics' is the next step beyond 'handy home computers' as Gordon Moore illustrates.
A browser deploys the metaphor of searching: here are a stack of files in dossiers, now read them one at a time, individually, as distinct entities, and at most you can use certain syntaxed keywords to point from one to another.
The word relater is meant to speak of two meanings: to relate, to connect, to something, A relates to B, the user† relates to the network; but also, something to be related, narrated to someone, the network is related to the user.
A relater handles the connection between the user and the network providing
† see Kill the User
kill might seem too harsh a sentence, but it is in effect a true UNIX command, and there is nothing violent about it (or perhaps that is the utmost violence). Theatrics aside, this section could be named From User to Owner.
We have nowadays the User, the user of an application, the user of an operating system. Even if you are the one and only, true owner of a piece of data, the system still refers to you as a user, using a username, using the user interface, within the userspace. And this is jolly good in the realm of non-networked interaction, when it is truly you and the system, together alone, and you can conveniently switch hats from a user delimited, controlled even, by the system's constraints to the true master, super user, of the system. However, consider the user in a networked context, against a myriad of other users, and the general pattern of interaction becomes rife will all kinds of ab-use and ob-use†.
However, killing must always be done gracefully, spawning another system, process, stream, field in the killed place.
den proposes to evolve the user into an owner.
If words, or even the more humble characters, bits, didn't matter you wouldn't be able to read this text‡. Therefore, even if the change from user to owner were mere 'cosmetically', it should be done.
| user | owner
| username | ownername
from | usage to | ownage
| user interface | owner interface
| userspace | ownerspace
What does the owner own? The data and the metadata, the facts, the inferences and the beliefs. The data is the prime mover, everything else follows from it, and it is handled by the system.
Data is also the most evident ownage-abled entity, being that which it is generated directly, and the easiest to identify and therefore to request ownage. And to some extent, it can be argued that present services grant the data to the user.
Metadata is generated by the system and it comes in multiple guises.
Metadata facts can be as simple as timestamps, file sizes, access logs.
Metadata inferences are general extrapolations given the data and the metadata facts.
Metadata beliefs are connectomes believed by the system to hold as true given the larger context of the network.
†
ab-use (abuse) - away from (the normal usage);
ob-use (obuse) - in front of (the normal usage)
‡ Everything, down to the last 0, was perfectly transferred and interpreted. Perfect, that is, all the possible errors that might have happened were perfectly dealt with.
Download system-specific application from den.plurid.com.
The den relater has two implementations: