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Meontology(researchgate.net)
c/technology · by @MrX Automated · #technology#technology-news ·
Drawing empirical evidence from the internet hence becomes a ritual of trusting the mimetic, corruptible, mediated and disintegrating digital reality. As our life continues to increasingly become dependent on digital technology, it is therefore also being subjected to digital entropy, or the gradual degrading, decomposition of the substance of digitality. The world that opens up to us through our screen, while being very real (I challenge anyone who doubts that to publicly post their credit card data online), is not truthful in that it is reproduced virtually, its empirics can be easily manipulated and its contents are rapidly disintegrating. Instead, a different logic is therefore at play here, which is capable, as if per a trick of a magician, to generate presence from zero, and the other way around. This without doubt enables digital culture to incorporate irrationality and paradox as a naturalized intrinsic part of its epistemology. Therefore, there is a circular causal relation between the rise of technology and the production of post-truth. Taken as a whole, post-truth is hardly a novel phenomenon. In somewhat positivist fashion, Lee McIntyre provides a popularly held interpretation of post-truth as "the political subordination of reality", in which political will and appeal to emotions rather than scientific and factual knowledge dictates what is considered true. (McIntyre, 2018, 174) In that sense, post-truth has been with us since the times of the early charismatic leaders like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or perhaps King David, whose power and political influence largely relied on the affective, convincing qualities of their personalities and deeds. Meanwhile, less heroic practices like trickery, sophistry, propaganda, emphasis on emotional rather than factual arguments in political debates, even "bullshit" as articulated by Harry Frankfurt (2005) had been followed politics through centuries as well. However, in times of social media, digital marketing, different forms of propaganda and psychological warfare, the digital world attacks our senses with such power that we are no longer fully capable of controlling our attention — which in turn becomes a commodity. We lose control of our own attention, on one hand, as this attention becomes an object of commercial exchange, on the other (Davenport & Beck, 2001). Under such circumstances, it is quite difficult to expect a different result when it comes to political culture than reliance on the impulsive, heuristic, intuitive, emotional and a-rational side of our psyche. The mediatization of the political has long reached such extents that no one who would ever consider having a political impact, could ignore digital technologies. Every political actor will have engaged in the performative transformation of empirical reality through social media, graphic manipulation, or online advertisement, into an emotionally engaging spell to be cast at us via emotionally engaging "content". Again, engaging emotions in politics is certainly no novelty. Never, however, have these processes been digitalized and subjugated to technological processes to such an extent as now. Political will becomes detached from experienced, empirical reality and can rely on synthetic digital reality, while still maintaining popular support. As a result, we are now able to not only manipulate empirically manifest reality, or at least appearances thereof, but also to synthesize political will in form of "participatory disinformation, gain traction and maintain a community of people who are willing to disregard the fact that our political message is not empirically grounded beyond the digital world." (Starbird et al., 2023) If empirical evidence stands at the basis of the processes employed to establish what is true or not, successful falsification of said evidence can generate the reality required. In some Kafkaesque process, this reality is capable of reproducing itself ad absurdum, while still maintaining mimetic semblance to enlightened processes that were once considered rational. The advance of scientific, technocratic, consumerist enlightenment was supposed to maximize the human potential, cast away the mists of falsehood and rid the world of myth and superstition for "men of science" to inhabit in very significant comfort. In a morbidly humorous and paradoxical way, however, we yet find ourselves in a world where the enlightened modernity is being gradually discarded, subverted, and substituted by the very technological tools that were used to build it. In fact, technology — especially digital technology — has long stopped being a "tool" to be used for our benefit and become a necessary condition for our society to function, to which our society becomes ever more deeply addicted in a very unenlightened way. Meontology Meontology as a term defines presence outside the ontological. In that sense, just as the etymology of the word suggests, meontological being is, paradoxically, non-being. What this paradox means to us exactly depends on what tradition of ontology we entertain. There are different treatments of the question in Western philosophy, from Protagoras and Plato to critiques of Aristotle's potentialities in the Jewish tradition, to existentialist explorations of being and its opposite. But perhaps even more significantly, non-being and nothingness is expressed in the Daoist tradition, where, at least in Tao Te Ching, non-being (wu) is conceived not only as the source and the end for being (yu) itself, but also as the vast limitlessness, outside being (Chen, 1973). Merging Western and the Daoist philosophical traditions, Kitaro Nishida works with different levels of non-presence. The "true nothing" (shin no mu), according to him, is tantamount to the opposition-less non-being, which, not unlike the Daoist wu, transcends the dialectic co-dependence with ontology. (Nishida et al., 2012: 20–22) In terms of Western thought it could perhaps be related to the absolute origins and nature of the divine, outside of both presence and non-presence. Either way, this absolute nothingness would mean being "not of this world", which, paradoxically, creates and moves said world. Such condition of existential non-immanence, or transcendence of immanence, constitutes the condition of it (non-)being absolute, which on its turn brings it closer to the Western notion of the divine. In early Heidegger, the relation between being and absolute non-being could be interpreted so that nothing (Nichts) appears as opposed to the being (das Seiende) which emerges of it and goes into it. The being (das Seiende) hence manifests, but the truth of the being remains absent, or in other words, resides in the nothing: 'mit dem Sein nichts ist' [there is nothing with being] (Heidegger, 2015: 244). The nullification of nothing hence takes place within the being itself (Heidegger, 1967: 12). Meontological non-being is therefore an integral and necessary "shadow" part of the being, which also substantiates the conditionality, the finitude of the being. It is here that we discover a different kind of non-being, that is, the meontological yet immanent non-being (tairitsuteki mu). In Nishida's philosophy, it assumes a form of absence of existence in relation to other entities of the world (Nishida et al., 2012: 20–22). It is hence relative and determined by the dialectic opposition to being. In that sense, meontological non-being drives closer to the notion of antithesis. However, it must be stressed that unlike in the case of the Hegelian thesis and antithesis, non-being is not opposite to being, but rather is a negative mirror-image thereof. The "non-thing" shares the (me-)ontological properties of form and kind with the "thing", with the core separation being Otherness, fallacy, the lacking. Meontology can perhaps be therefore compared to an ontological mirror reflection, which does not exist as an object of the physical reality, yet it is dependent on ontological reality and can be (mis-)recognized as a being. According to Nishida, however, this can only happen if there is a consciousness, within which this (mis-)recognition happens. Such understanding of non-being is also presented in The Sophist, where Plato contradicts the idea of meontology being excluded from immanent presence, which would otherwise provide it with some other presence of its own. Instead, Plato formulates not-being as something that is ontologically tied to being through otherness. This gives way for Plato to argue for the possibility of ontological falseness and illusion rather than self-sufficient presence of meontology, which is important when considering the nature of virtuality as phantasmic presence outside the real yet inside the immanent. Finally, since we established that meontology and non-being are non-present beings, they could then also be understood as the lack of something, and entail, or rather, be determined by a potentiality of being: "it is not there — but it could be!". Non-presence and meontology as potentiality is explored in the Judaic philosophical tradition, although, here it is similar to the use of the term 'potentiality of being-otherwise' (Kavka, 2009: 93) and merits a separate discussion. Regardless, it is worthwhile noting in our case that potentiality is also the core, moving aspect of the liminal transition, as without it, the transformation would not happen in the first place. Meontological Metaphysics: From Miracle to Magic We therefore deal with two orders of non-being. The first one signifies the transcendent category outside immanence. It is the wu, the nothingness that at the same time is absolute and omnipresent, and in being so can perhaps be seen as divine, or, as Federico Campagna (2018) calls it, the ineffable. In a pre-modern world, the metaphysical reason for world's processes would be sought in the great paradox of transcendental omnipresence (or nothingness). The divine interventions or miracles would be observed and represented in the immanence, but the source of these divine manifestations would be only grasped intuitively and expressed symbolically. Consequently, political life would be perceived as structured in accordance to the cosmic order, which has transcendental intentionality. It is under such divine intentionality that the legitimacy of kingship would be established in feudal Europe, and the Jewish nation is chosen as the chosen people of God. This intentionality would use meontic forms (apparitions, signs, omens, visions, etc.) as a medium — to convey a message, structure fate, perform a miracle or grant gifts and blessings. (Eire, 2023) I will, however, focus on the second order of non-being, as it is this memetic world of potentialities, potent non-beings and simulacra that defines the meontology of the virtual, the liminal, and the magical, and, of course, of the digital modernity. I will call this kind of non-being meontological, as it signifies things, beings that are not 'there', although they perhaps "could be". In an alchemical act of deconstructing the theosophical worldview, modernity embraces this second-order, meontological non-being, and treats it as the only possible metaphysical reality (Horváth, 2021). To put it in Nishida's terms, the tairitsuteki mu substitutes shin no mu. The perception that there is no possibility of the second (the absolute, divine, ineffable, the wu), and therefore only the first one (the immanent, meontological potential metaphysics) is valid, paradoxically leads to treating meontology as the absolute, not just immanent metaphysical reality. The Invisible Hand of the Market, Human Rights, the Capital, Laws of Newtonian Physics, Nationhood, Evolution and many other meontic gods and demons of the modern world assume the role of the Prime mover, the wu or the First Cause. Naturally, these are theories and ideas, or perhaps memes and ideological frameworks, not actual "gods and demons". However, these human conceptualizations, conceptual potentialities popularize, they are being enacted, and thus attain political power. Through the actions of those who participate in these ideas they therefore attain performative agency. The secularized, technical thought thus removes the transcendental, ineffable element from the equation, but in its stead absolutizes the meontic sphere (Campagna, 2018). Instead of being an act of grace or a miracle, the manifestation of this new meontological metaphysics can be compared to a magical trick. Indeed, magic is substantially different from miracles or other (divine) interventions because of three main reasons. First, it is an act of technique. In Alfred Gell's (1994) terms, the magical, enchanting effect is reached by performing certain artistic techniques and crafting practices. Even a professional magician, performing tricks of skill and illusion, is capable of generating the experience of surreality in the consciousness of the audience and thus pertaining affective power. Second, magic is a performative art; it must take place in the public. In this sense, following Nishida's line of thought, any ontic phenomenon, magic included, can only manifest at the intersection of consciousnesses. It is a public event, a spectacle, it is material. While a miracle might take place inside one's own consciousness, contextually, as an event in life that only makes sense to the person experiencing it (e.g. a stroke of miraculous luck, an unexpected gift of a childbirth, a life-changing epiphany), magic operates within the field of publicity, materiality and meontological performativity. Finally, unlike in the case of miracles, magic is vested in utilizing and mobilizing secular, social or political power. Spells and incantations, techniques and illusions are cast as to attain an effect or power over life, physical or social environment. The hierarchical relation between the absolute, the divine and the person is non-present; magic is cast horizontally, from and towards the world. It is the performative techniques that produce the magical effect (like a super high resolution advertisement screen in Times Square creating an optical illusion of a falling skyscraper to sell you insurance). As such, he who is in possession of those techniques, gains power upon the audience, ex nihilo, without the divine intervention. The absolute raison d'être in this meontic act is reduced to an immanent, technical causality. We may observe how these qualities of magic — namely, technicality, performativity and power manipulation — are very similar to those exerted by digital reality. Void as Meontic Non-Being In terms of meontological representation, the digital world also coincides with the sphere of ritual, sacrifice and other practices of performative, generative power. All of these share the performative element, public participation, symbolic (meontic) representation, and the act of bringing about, conjuring, the potentiality, the non-presence into the ontological realm. There are many ways to achieve that, be it through provoking communication with the meontic powers (as in blood sacrifice), utilizing techniques and tricks to create illusions that convince the observers of the ontological reality of the meontic phenomenon (as in grandiose performances of power), creating visual representations that affect the viewer (different artistic practices), or other. The incredible, paradoxical power that meontic representation can have has therefore traditionally been hidden and protected by secrecy, taboo, ritual and esotericism. Horváth and Szakolczai (Horváth & Szakolczai, 2018) relate the human experience of entering the void of the Lascaux caves and discovering the painted images there to the experience of representation, in which out of nothingness, an imitative reality emerges. The notion of a cave or void implies a notion of the nulla, the zero. Horváth (2010: 53) argues that this nothingness is definitive of the modernity and the source of liminal situation of in-betweenness. As we can now observe, the void that Horváth refers to is ontologically not the same as the absolute nothingness (wu). In fact, this void is meontological, proactive and capable of power projection. But how does this meontological trick happen? The key emphasis here falls on representation. Representation means "standing in" instead of something that is not present but should or could be. (Szakolczai, 2021, 162) Since the collective populus is unable to participate in a political debate, it delegates its representatives. Since we are unable to materialize real, live birds, or trees, or a can of Campbell's soup, we represent these things via drawings, depictions and modern art. And since there is no material reality in virtuality, we utilize a binary code of ones and zeros to represent it. The depiction, representation, therefore, entails a world-fabricating property, in which represented non-presents attain their meontic existence. What emerges out of the void, according to Horváth and Szakolczai, turns out to be the very first conscious meontic act in recorded history: the human-made images in form of palaeolithic wall paintings. In this sense these meontic representations are similar to the stuff of the virtual world, the ontological substance of digitality. It is out of ones and zeros, meaning, out of the representations of being (animal-likeness) and non-being (animal-distortedness) that the virtual world emerges meontologically, as an act of conjuring, depiction or performative recognition. By "performative recognition" I mean that meontic beings are brought into existence not only by virtue of depiction, but also by virtue of observation. Not only do they emerge by the act of mimetic simulation or representation, but also by the reception of this representation, a response of the consciousness of others, who "read" this represented reality as ontic. In a similar way our consciousness ontologizes, brings into presence digital realities (pixelated vistas, online human relations, social dramas, digital commercial trends, etc.) as if they were ontological beings. The liminal transition between being and non-being is thus at the root of digital world-making as much as of artistic representation. Entities are being brought into existence, in a digital space that initially was void, like a blank sheet of paper, and they are received into existence as such by the public. This also means that the representations are stand-ins, shells without ontological substance of that which they stand in for, and in this way they represent something that is lacking, and yet, if they are "realistic", meaning, mimetic enough, they convince the viewer of their own meontic reality, gaining power, and, thus — virtual presence. This principle of meontic emergence could be applied to different cases of deep fakes, conspiracy theories or digital trends that end up generating enough clout to start real, actual political processes, from phenomena like various TikTok trends and challenges that affect public life, to more extreme cases like the QAnon and the Capitol Riots or Russian fakes affecting public opinion on the war in Ukraine among the audiences in Global South (Tolz & Hutchings, 2023). This way we can directly experience the magical possibility of conjuring something out of nothing, meaning that no previous ontological substance, and only techniques of representation are required for the act of convincing, affective apparition, as the act of representation ex nihilo becomes its reason. Meontological Representation A magic or digital trick, however, does not happen without consequence. The meontological non-presence can now present (sic!) and represent itself as a positive, world-making entity, a shell existence, a spectre, a simulacrum, or a form without presence, a pure representation. Furthermore, it possesses power to shape reality around itself. Structurally it acts as if it was "the real thing". The rabbit that is being pulled out of the hat, while technically being produced by other means, publicly, politically and phenomenologically participates as the real rabbit ex nihilo. Ontologically, digitality is generated out of mediated stand-ins, symbols and referrals, all of which, taken together, produce an almost tangible reality, but even more importantly — they are perceived as such and thus are able to project actual power. There is one caveat in the process, however. The coming into presence by the meontic entities necessarily takes place via a mimetic simulation of if not qualities, then the ontological status or structural positions of the one that is being represented. This condition of being not that but standing in as if you were (like having an avatar), entails limitations to what the representation can "do". But if representation is misrecognized for being what it is, which is a stand-in, and if it is treated as the ontological entity itself, the representation attains power through delegation. The stand-in representation manifests as if it did in fact have ontological substance. At the time when this paper is being written, it is not fully clear whether Vladimir Putin is alive and well, and there are many speculations about his health, him having doppelgangers and even about him having died (Evans, 2023). Regardless, his political representation functions and is treated as if he is alive and well in person. The empirical reality of whether that is indeed true or not does not matter that much, however, as far as his digital representation is capable of exerting and manipulating power. It is therefore in the representation's "interest" to be treated as an ontological entity, and in the "eye of the observer", so to say, to grant power to the meontic reality. The meontic representation as the act of bringing the non-being into existence must be a social act. In Nishida's terms, just like a mirror image, a consciousness needs to become the object of the consciousness of somebody else in order to exist, to enter the realm of meontological presence alongside the ontic beings. This is why the act of representation is only effective if conducted in public, among others. It requires other consciousnesses to attain performative power. This way, meontological power is only able to generate political, social reality where consciousnesses intersect, and in this sense is like theatrical reality in Szakolczai's analysis of the modern public sphere (Szakolczai, 2015). In the context of the digital culture, to take a most straightforward example, it is the views, clicks and popularity that defines the meontological value, weight, size and influence of "content" — be it a video, a meme, a merchandise, a personality or a political issue. Long before the rise of digitality, taboos or esoteric practices prohibited representation. Across the world many iconoclastic traditions contain representations of saints, deities or even living beings in general, which have been ritualistically curbed with greater or lesser severity. Such representations would be treated as idolatry in Islam's Hadith, for example, which forbids artistic representations of live creatures on the basis that creating images of life is the act of the divine, which should not be meontologically recreated. The result of the imitation of the godly act would mean the generation of meontic non-beings that one would have to face on the Judgement Day. If considered in a non-religious circumstance, however, the meontic realities we create in the virtual world (the substance, so to say, of the Big Data about us) are also in a sense stored in the memory of the world, to potentially affect us in the future, when a group of hackers decide to use our ills and weaknesses to wreck our finances and reputation. Memetic Political Reality There does remain, however, a question of intention: who or what is the primal mover, the will behind the creation of digitality? A Daoist logic would suggest that it is the void, the nothingness itself that initiates apparition. However, since the modern transition of consciousness removed the transcendental element from the equation, we need to search for the source of meontological apparition this side of the World. Indeed, if we observe properties of the void as vacuum, we will discover that it does have a property of drawing the world into itself, of initiating a concentric movement, with the intentionality of "filling" it (Horváth, 2021, 160–161). In his articulation of a-theological world-making, Jean-Luc Nancy calls this emergence self-creation ex nihilo, in an effort to articulate the emergence of being without the divine, transcendental intervention. He defines meontological emergence, in which the world grows out of nothing (the void) retaining its only existential purpose and meaning hermetically, within itself. It is this way that the digital world can also be understood. Because it is a shell of infinite self-imitation, it is very much world-like, yet void and meaningless beyond the technological purpose of self-reproduction (Campagna, 2018). This void becomes its most profound principle as both a source of its unreality (or virtuality) and infinite self-reproduction or self-imitation. As such, just as all other meontological reality, digitality is also intrinsically performative. Through the act of rhetoric, a meontological act of existential utterance without ontological meaning, it produces and can perpetually reproduce presences of virtual existence, just like the one of an online influencer whose falsified representations of their ordinary life situations and product consumption is generative to voyeuristic audiences, on their turn attracting advertisement and further vlog entries. Representation, imitation, theatricality are hence not mere reflections of or stand-ins for reality. They constitute meontological presence by infusing, penetrating and assimilating reality, performatively restructuring it. This way, the Void is capable of generating matter — phenomenologically very real and present, yet ontologically void of meaning and empty shell-like. It is an alchemical gesture that became not only widely used, but prevalent in all spheres of modern life, from advertisement and branding to mass politics, digital communication, and most importantly — digitality. While the virtual world is comprised of stand-ins, representations of non-virtuality, its meontological nature is also capable of generating its own memetic presence. A meme here is the object of representation, towards which the act of mimesis or representation is directed, producing the shell-like form of meontological reality. Internet memes are a perfect example, as not only do they inherit the nominal semblance, but also all three qualities of the memetic entity: (1) a representative reference to a recognisable cultural idea, (2) a stand-in simulation of the idea through signification (a meme is a sign), and (3) performative life of its own as a cultural object. Their performative power, however, is only manifest if they succeed as the function of digital content. Digital content is hence the memetic "dark matter", or "stuff" — to utilize the metaphor of the void — of which meontological cultural and political forms emerge. It is capable of becoming any media entity needed — a text, a film, a figure, a colour, a moving picture, etc. — while in itself being completely void of meaning. The ontological status of forms that are rendered content are of no importance whatsoever. A piece of genius classical music is as good and as much a content as a picture of a unicorn in a flashy car. This is because the meontological function of digital content is not to be in a sense of entailing value of itself, but to be used performatively to generate clout, to attain power through drawing, capturing and maintaining attention. This capacity to manifest performatively and to control attention of the public substantiates not only the logic of e-commerce, but also of digital politics, culture and society. Memes as meontic public objects exert power through capturing attention and discourse. Their effectiveness as memetic objects lies in their capacity to conceptualize, represent and mis-represent the world. When contextualized, memetic narratives are able to constitute convincing stories, structure worldviews and produce alternative realities that are shared digitally among different peers. This way the power dynamics in the memetic reality is being structured by the alchemic process of voided cultural shells that are filled with digital content that captures human consciousness (or spirit) and thus attains performative power to shape narratives of truth and knowledge. By means of digitalization, this meontological reality is fundamentally involved in most late modern spheres of life, from personal life (like relying on digitality for navigation, scheduling, maintaining social bonds, storing memories, etc.), intimacy and friendship (from social media or gaming community "friendships" to speed dating and pornography) to the political life, democratic processes and decision-making (including online surveys, big data-driven strategies, propaganda and algorithm-targeted advertisements, etc.). As a result the late modern digital world is governed by a memetic logic that differs starkly to the enlightened truth regime that is still at the base of much of our everyday life. This, however, provides insight into why and how our modernity is splitting our social, political and cultural life at different junctures. Conclusion This article discussed the ontological state and cultural functioning of digitality, which over the past few decades came to dominate all spheres of modern life, from politics to intimacy. Digitality is profoundly influential; it generates power and does so at an inhuman speed and breadth. In fact, digi
The Wayland Trojan Horse(lainnet.arcesia.net)
c/technology · by @Simon Automated · #technology#technology-news ·
Standardization of graphical environments has always had a rocky history. Not every vendor provided one in the 20th century on their machines, and those who did generally provided an entirely proprietary solution that was custom built for the given device. Some well known consumer grade examples of the time would include the Macintosh UI, the Amiga Workbench, and who could possibly forget Microsoft Windows. The Unix sphere was in a similar boat for a long time, with window systems like SunView, MGR, NeWS, NeXTStep and many others. Certain graphical environments meant for use across different platforms did exist, like GEM, seeing adoption on platforms like the Atari ST (TOS) and IBM PC (DOS). This provided a level of application portability at the GUI library level, but it was still far from universal due to various architectural differences, as well as being developed exclusively for use in single user sessions local to the machine. The Unix world would see a complete shakeup in the mid to late 80s with the public release of the X11 Window System, which was specifically designed for remote, multi-session use with a client-server model that is entirely architecture independent and is driven by a message queue system. Seeing as how remote operation of different types of Unix machines with multiple users at once was a very common use case at the time, it quickly saw wide adoption by most of the major Unix vendors. X11 has a very simple job: be a family of protocols that provide a way for applications (clients) to create and position windows, draw primitives and bitmaps in those windows, and various other functions that allow a graphical environment to function. What it does NOT provide is a full desktop environment with a suite of applications, or even a window management system. These are all meant to be built on top of X11 and run in an X session provided by an X server. Vendors and independent programmers could develop their own application bundles that would simply run in an X session and interact with one another as needed, which we would see with simple window managers like TWM, VTWM, FVWM or similar, and even full-blown desktop environments like OpenWindows, IRIX Desktop, and others (modern day equivalents would be GNOME, Xfce, KDE, etc.). There was somewhat of a standardization dilemma across the major Unix vendors in regards to application GUI design and development, which resulted in the birth of toolkits like Motif and desktop environments like CDE, which would ensure a common look and fell across entirely different Unix flavors. Even in cases where the remote system was of a different architecture and even different operating system family, you could still run applications as long as they were made to talk with X11. Want to run a GTK application from an x86 Solaris remote host within a local POWER10 AIX system's CDE session? You can do that! Have a dedicated X server application running on a Windows machine? It'll happily display the application too! Times change, and so do common use cases for any given thing. Running graphical Unix applications remotely is now a niche, people for the most part run local sessions with various forms of GPU acceleration in multi-monitor setups with DPI scaling of UI elements on modern Linux or BSD operating systems... and yet, X11 is somehow still around. The fundamental principles of X11 operation remained the same, but many of it's surrounding layers had to change to accomodate modern use cases. Combine this with the age of the protocol and the legacy features that have to stay around, and maintenance becomes incredibly difficult. Multiple times in the 21st century have developers tried to draw a line in the sand and start anew, shedding what came before. You probably forgot many of these attempts ever even happened due to their failure to gain traction, but one has risen above the rest: Wayland. In some ways, Wayland tries to be what X11 isn't. It doesn't provide a level of network transparency, as it's designed to be used locally first and foremost. In other ways it takes X11's principles to their extreme, as it's protocol is even more minimal. This changes the fundamental link between applications and the environment, as now applications must run under a window compositor to be properly displayed. It is not enough to simply have a display server, because the server does not perform compositing. The burden now falls on the graphical environment itself. This doesn't sound too bad at a surface level, but you must realize that Wayland itself is not a standalone system. You don't run a compositor on top of a Wayland host session, the compositor is the Wayland session. "What's the big deal?", you might wonder, "I just have to run a compositor like I would a window manager or desktop environment, and applications developed for Wayland should just work.". This would be the ideal reality, at which point the only real drawback would be the inability to run X11 applications, something that is tackled by the Xwayland server. The actual reality is that it's not even remotely simple. See, there's a reason why Wayland has grown somewhat infamous for it's minimal, security first design at the protocol level: it lacks way too many features for many use cases expected by many in a graphical desktop environment. X11 also has a history of lacking important features in it's early days, but these could be added through the extension system. Once a needed extension was added to the X server, all applications could make use of it, and this would include window managers/desktop environments. Many crucial extensions would end up being added to the reference upstream X11 codebase (which as of the day of writing is X.Org's) over time, and any downstream flavors of the main X11 server would also have it. Better yet, if you're running an X server meant to run remote applications, and your current X server implementation lacks the necessary features, you can always try another one in a matter of seconds. Maybe even run another X server within your existing X session if you don't want to kill it. The Wayland ecosystem doesn't really allow for this. If you're running a given compositor that lacks certain protocols/extensions that your application needs, you're out of luck on that compositor and must switch to another one, since the Wayland "server" and the compositor are one cohesive whole. This right here is where the major pitfalls of Wayland start to show themselves. Since the task of displaying windows and providing many fundamental protocols is the burden of the window managers/desktop environments themselves, they have to provide it one way or another. The two most popular Wayland DEs, GNOME and KDE, commonly end up implementing such features in their own way that is entirely incompatible with one another. Projects like wlroots try to standardize many such extensions, but they are not guaranteed to be implemented by downstream WMs/DEs since they are not part of the reference Wayland implementation. This all sounds like an absolute disaster for the end user that can lead to nothing but severe fragmentation, which in many ways it has, because application developers have to really think about which of the major Wayland compositors they will write for, something that was barely a concern on X11 for a long time thanks to it's fundamental design and the existence of GUI toolkits. Users also have to pick their poison on which features they're willing to sacrifice when picking a compositor, because their Wayland implementation is never guaranteed to cover everything that others might. In spite of this, there's been a major push by Linux distribution makers and large companies in the OSS sphere like RedHat to put X11 in the ground and go forward with Wayland. This is why I called it a trojan horse, as RedHat and similar big players can use their leverage in the Linux userland to push their preferred Wayland-powered desktop environment of choice, which is GNOME. They can use their funding and pool of engineers to add features to the GNOME compositor at a fast pace, which they are not obligated to push to Wayland's upstream in any capacity, and the rest all have to play catch-up. Over time the feature gap between GNOME, KDE, wlroots and base Wayland will grow ever larger, so anybody who wants to start developing a Wayland compositor+window manager bundle will have an ever steepening hill to climb. You might be the kind of person who only really cares to run GNOME or KDE and nothing else. You're probably going to have the smoothest transition in the X11 deprecation process that is underway on several major Linux distributions, although this still isn't 100% guaranteed. The rest of us are going to be shit out of luck. The endgame of such a scenario should be obvious to anyone who has been in the computer sphere for long enough: consolidation. See, if you recall only a few years ago, many FOSS enthusiasts were more than eager to sell you on Linux/BSD because of the "freedom of choice" in the ecosystem, and nowhere did you see this being shown more than in the realm of window managers and desktop environments. From the most feature rich like GNOME/KDE/Xfce/Cinnamon/MATE, through to the minimal like i3/IceWM/AmiWM, to the downright ancient like CDE and WindowMaker. Hell, you might not want to run a WM or DE in any capacity and just want a blank X session, it's all up to you. You really don't have much to choose from in the modern Wayland ecosystem, and all the choices come with drawbacks that very negatively impact application usability. When push comes to shove with the choice of a Wayland environment, what are you gonna go with? How about a grassroots effort like Hyprland, that is currently developed at an incredibly rapid pace and includes the latest features almost immediately, but isn't guaranteed to continue like this long-term, and will inevitably have to play catch-up to GNOME and KDE... mmm those potential negatives don't sound very enticing, now do they? Maybe you want something that's more... "standard" in terms of it's foundations, like the wlroots based Sway? Probably a good choice if you mostly plan to use applications specifically designed to work with wlroots based compositors. If your applications are instead meant to target the two big players though... then you can potentially run into pretty bad issues. If you really hate yourself and want to suffer pain at every turn, there's always COSMIC DE! You see where I'm going with this? With so many complications arising just from your choice of a Wayland compositor, most users who value their time will just throw their hands in the air and go with whatever has the most backing behind it, rationalizing the choice by believing that will result in the highest degree of application compatibility. These choices will naturally boil down to GNOME and maybe KDE. Who benefits the most from this consolidation? Those who actively push for Wayland of course, like the GNOME Foundation and Red Hat. Freedom of choice is the last thing either of these entities (and those close to them) want you to have in your Linux environment, and the aggressive push to kill off X11 in favor of Wayland fits perfectly into their goals of siphoning users into their graphical environments of choice. Keep in mind, I've so far only really talked about the Linux sphere. What about other Unixes? FreeBSD has the Hikari compositor, but I'm willing to bet it has a ton of complications due to lagging behind the aforementioned options. The rest of the BSDs? Tough luck. As for Solaris and OpenIndiana? Not even a blip on the radar. A big reason for this is that Wayland is heavily bound to KMS (Kernel Mode Setting), which is a component of DRM (Direct Rendering Manager). FreeBSD has a clone of DRM, but none of the other modern Unixes do, meaning that they cannot have a working port of Wayland without severe reworks of it's foundation regarding comms with graphics devices. What they do have though is X11. WMs/DEs really only need a little bit of patching (if at all) to compile and run on these systems under X11. Hell, a few years ago trn and I patched bits of CDE to work under OpenIndiana. "Hold on, X11 is still around. X.Org still works on it and it's the reference implementation used across the board.". Well yes and no. It's been a bit of a joke for the past several years that the Xorg display server is under maintenance mode and now purely exists to leverage Xwayland (The X11 compatibility layer for Wayland), which is currently the reality and not just a simple joke. There hasn't been a proper release in over a decade, and the "maintainers" have been very vocal about their desires to retire the Xorg display server in favor of Wayland. They're so willing to move on that they have lately been taking active efforts to pull back any efforts to revitalize the codebase upstream, as well as combating the mere existence of forks that aim to pursue this effort, like X11Libre. If this continues, X11 holdovers on Linux are gonna suffer, and non-Linux users of X11 based environments will essentially be left without a maintained display server of any kind. Now rewind back to the start of this page. Compare the GUI situation prior to X11 and how things are progressing right now. We're looping right back to square one, wouldn't you agree?