Web Agency

Definitive Topics

The Web We Lost

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.

But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.

This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.

Our haunted internet

https://erinkissane.com/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow

The structures of our network commons have concentrated our responses to the forces already pressing against our livelihoods and children and futures. Within their engagement-optimized interfaces, we’ve built ourselves into a standing wave: Abusive posts became network-wide events that require a response not only from moderating authorities, but from every user.

In this machine, silence transmutes to approval of the worst thing happening; via entirely real human needs for signals of safety and support, continuous attention and engagement become mandatory. Simply bad posts are opportunities for demonstrations of prowess. People we agree with become footholds for demonstrating all the subtle ways in which they don’t quite understand. Sometimes—rarely—these moves result in policy changes, but fight and flight and status display all taste the same to the machine.

In the machine, we are always forgetting, chasing the same discourses and panics in circles. Instead of making restitution, we wait for the cycle to erase the screen and carry on as before. Stay long enough and everything rhymes with something that gave you scars, but that everyone else has forgotten. Resolution eludes us online even more than off. (...)

We won’t technologize our way out of the ghost machine. I don’t think we’ll mod our way out, either. Actual trust and real safety do require protection from griefers and villains—and abuses of authority—but that’s table stakes: that’s the floor.

Meta in Myanmar, Part IV: Only Connect

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-iv-only-connect/

The Atlantic Council’s report on the looming challenges of scaling trust and safety on the web opens with this statement:

"That which occurs offline will occur online."

I think the reverse is also true: That which occurs online will occur offline.

Our networks don’t create harms, but they reveal, scale, and refine them, making it easier to destabilize societies and destroy human beings. The more densely the internet is woven into our lives and societies, the more powerful the feedback loop becomes.

In this way, our networks—and specifically, the most vulnerable and least-heard people inhabiting them—have served as a very big lab for gain-of-function research by malicious actors.

The allure of the do-over

The internet in Myanmar was born at a few seconds to midnight. Our new platforms and tools for global connection have been born into a moment in which the worst and most powerful bad actors, both political and commercial, are already prepared to exploit every vulnerability.

We don’t get a do-over planet. We won’t get a do-over network.

Instead, we have to work with the internet we made and find a way to rebuild and fortify it to support the much larger projects of repair—political, cultural, environmental—that are required for our survival.

The benefits and limits of defederation

Another characteristic of fediverse (by which I mean “Activity-Pub-based servers, mostly interoperable”) networks is the ability for both individual users and whole instances to defederate from each other. The ability to “wall off” instances hosting obvious bad actors and clearly harmful content offers ways for good-faith instance administrators to sharply reduce certain kinds of damage.

(...)

A related threat that was expressed to me by someone who’s been working on the ground in Myanmar for years is that authoritarian governments will corral their citizens on instances/servers that they control, permitting both surveillance and government-friendly moderation of propaganda.

Meta’s fatal flaw

I think if you ask people why Meta failed to keep itself from being weaponized in Myanmar, they’ll tell you about optimizing for engagement and ravenously, heedlessly pursuing expansion and profits and continuously f***ing up every part of content moderation.

I think those things are all correct, but there’s something else, too, though “heedless” nods toward it: As a company determined to connect the world at all costs, Meta failed, spectacularly, over and over, to make the connections that mattered, between their own machinery and the people it hurt.

So I think there are two linked things Meta could have done to prevent so much damage, which are to listen out for people in trouble and meaningfully correct course.

Root & Branch

https://erinkissane.com/root-branch

To recap: Things are weird on the networks. Weird like wyrd, though our fates remain unsettled; weird like wert-, the turning, the winding, the twist.

I think one of the deep weirdnesses is that lots of us we know what we don’t want, which is more of whatever thing we’ve been soaking in. But I think many—maybe all?—of the new-school networks with wind in their sails are defined more by what they aren’t than what they are: Not corporate-owned. Not centralized. Not entangled in inescapable surveillance, treadmill algorithms, ad models, billionaire brain injury. In many cases, not governable.

It’s not an untenable beginning, and maybe it’s a necessary phase, like adolescence. But I don’t think it’s sufficient—not if we want to build structures for collaboration and communion instead of blasted landscapes ruled by warlords.

Taproots

Two big root-level things that I think we haven’t properly sorted out:

• Resources: All networks require a whole lot of time and money to run well—the more meticulously run, the more money and time are required, and this is true whether we’re talking about central conglomerates or distributed networks. If we want to avoid just the most obvious bad incentives, where does that money and time come from?
• Governance: Who—what people, what kind of people, what structures made of people—should we trust to do the heavy, tricky, fraught work of making and keeping our networks good? How should they work? To whom should they be accountable, and how can “accountability” be redeemed from its dissipated state and turned into something with both teeth and discretion?

The web is for user agency

https://berjon.com/user-agency/

Technologists trying to maximise user agency often fall into the trap of measuring agency by looking only at time saved (in the same way that they fail to understand what people want to do when they measure time spent). On the surface, the idea seems straightforward: spend less time on one thing, have more time for other things! That would seem to fit our mandate of improving "What each person is able to do and to be". And all other things being equal that can be true, but the devil is in the details: the enjoyment of doing the thing, the value in knowing how to do it, or the authority over outcomes. Even things that many would consider chores aren't always best automated or delegated away: you may not wish to clean your house but you might want a say in the chemicals introduced into your home, about how your things are organised, or over whether your house can be mapped by a robot and data derived from that map sold to the highest bidder. Not all leisure is liberation.

The more detail we have on a piece of technology that may be part of the Web, the more readily we can assess it in very specific ways that capture aspects of improved user agency. In fact, that's something that the Web community has been doing for a long time. Consider:

• The great level of detail that has gone (and continues to go) into specifying how to make the Web and Web content accessible. These guidelines and techniques can, in exceedingly concrete ways, push for a world in which disability does not limit agency.
• An equally-impressive trove of actionable principles can be found in the Internationalization work. This empowers people to use the Web in the languages of their choice. We will never celebrate the work of the Unicode Consortium enough. Bringing all of the world's languages into a unified system of character encoding is a historical achievement that "respects and empowers users".
• It's hard to act freely if you can't act safely, which makes work on security core to the agency project. RFC8890 ("The Internet is for End Users") captures this well when it states that "User agents act as intermediaries between a service and the end user; rather than downloading an executable program from a service that has arbitrary access into the users' system, the user agent only allows limited access to display content and run code in a sandboxed environment. End users are diverse and the ability of a few user agents to represent individual interests properly is imperfect, but this arrangement is an improvement over the alternative — the need to trust a website completely with all information on your system to browse it." This trust is empowering.
• And the same can be said about privacy, which is key to trust as well. Privacy further matters (as discussed in the Privacy Principles) in that it includes the right to decide what identity you present to others in which contexts. Additionally, widespread data collection creates information asymmetries and information asymmetries create power asymmetries. The issue here isn't so much that data might be used to support mind-controlling AI snake oil but rather that it powers more mundane (and far more effective) manipulation techniques such as hypernudging.

These shared foundations for Web technologies (which the W3C refers to as "horizontal review" but they have broader applicability in the Web community beyond standards) are all specific, concrete implementations of the Web's goal of developing user agency — they are about capabilities. We don't habitually think of them as ethical or political goals, but they are: they aren't random things that someone did for fun — they serve a purpose. And they work because they implement ethics that get dirty with the tangible details.

Websites are the atomic matter of the internet

https://blog.erlend.sh/weird-web-pages#website

I consider the personal website to be the smallest possible building block of web identity. Once you wanna go past the observer (READ) level to the contributor (WRITE) level as a netizen, you’re gonna need a material web-persona to make yourself known. Unfortunately we never made personal-web sites easy enough to build, so the likes of Facebook became mainstream persona providers.

“Seize the means of communication”

https://blog.erlend.sh/assembling-community-os

Digital autonomy begets individual freedom begets fairness & equality.

The hopeful possibility of this moment lies in the open-social web protocols which make up the foundations of a comms & coordination ecosystem owned and operated by the general public.

“Decentralize ownership; Recentralize agency”

https://blog.erlend.sh/weird-netizens

To free ourselves of our current predicament, we must simultaneously de-centralize and re-centralize identity.

By de-centralizing the ownership of identity away from platform monopolies and back to individuals, we can re-centralize the agency of personhood.

Once more for clarity: Decentralize ownership. Recentralize agency.

The central authority of ones digital identity must first and foremost be the individual themselves. That's how we regain our digital sovereignty.

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Decoupling Identity

All mainstream identity providers get you hooked into their ID-network by means of a tight coupling between a light identity layer plus a heavy service:

GitHub: ID + git Discord: ID + chat Gmail: ID + email The indivisibility of this coupling weakens our digital sovereignty. Even if I stopped using Gmail for email, I still rely heavily on it for my authentication to hundreds of sites & services. It’s part of their lock-in scheme.

Gmail et.al. make identity confusing because they've made it appear necessarily coupled with an overarching complexity like email or a social network. But identity should stand on its own. In fact it is paramount that our identity is not owned by a personal-data-loving megacorp because there's nothing more valuable for them to keep locked up than the very essence of your digital self.