The broken promise of Web Components (2017)

I have a working-theory-slash-rant as to why things are the way they are. Some may disagree - it's a bit left-of-center - and I accept downvotes, but hear me out.

The mess everything's in is because things are working as designed. I think the State of The Web™ is actually a working psyop primarily on Google's part to make everything as complicated as possible in order to enforce their agenda.

Google introduced a browser to get a position on Web steering committees, then forked [from] WebKit so they could deepen their agenda down to the technical levels of the stack and simply sidestep the committees by throwing resources at what they want to actually be developed.

I learned (from an old novel) about the lawyer-training industry concept of "sweat files", contrived fictions built up over years that are indistinguishable from real client files and are solely for the purpose of exhausting and testing a lawyer's metal. I don't think that's happening directly with the Web, but I think something similar might: what if, some of the "web technologies" that are out there, are simply to create noise?

I'm not talking about noise for noise's sake, or conflating the thousand and one JavaScript frameworks developers build To Save The World© with Google's high-level agenda. But I do think it's a very interesting thought experiment to suggest/wonder/ponder that maybe that noise - so easily attributed to people learning - is the result of a deliberate social psyop within the Web steering industry (I consider it an industry).

The Web steering committees seems to be extremely weak in terms of strength of social structure. What I mean is that their defaults seem to be stagnation, bureaucracy, slow development, arguing about minutiae and trivia instead of analysis, dividing and conquering and commitment to measurable rapid high-level/real-world progress. The way I poorly express it it to say that these groups' instinct seems to be travel ever inward (zooming in on the details) instead of defaulting to traveling forward.

This situation seems ripe for social exploitation :(

I wrote a couple more comments on these lines a few days ago. Unfortunately there's no way I can link to the reply chain (hiding messages outside the chain) like you can on reddit :(

- Top of reply chain (all context, 20 pages of unrelated text :/): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176032

- More focused, but less useful context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176299

- Just my comments, no context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192992