Hi, welcome to Web of Trust, Sam Hart’s workshop-style blog, containing a variety of ideas and notes from in-progress experiments.

Since most of my work is digital, I’ll be treating posts like a series of virtual studio visits. Writings will aim to capture some kernel of interest, but the resolution may vary as I continue to learn.

I’ll reference open source software projects I’ve developed to work through these ideas, including Aura, Telltale, and Jacquard. Subject matter will orbit around a few topics of interest: natural philosophy, ideology, aesthetics.

The name “Web of Trust” owes to the concept of distributed key authentication proposed by Phil Zimmermann in 1992, as a solution to PGP’s social scalability challenges. I’ve always been fond of the term because it frames a deeply technical system in human terms.