. @bentarnoff at @internetarchive discussing #InternetForThePeople
Highlights April 1995 as a key moment: the NSF shut down its public backbone, to be replaced by private internet providers. Privatization of the internet is a deeper process than we think; it “began in the basement.”
Ben doesn’t like the term “platform” in its current meaning of basically any software that runs on the internet. Citing Tarleton Gillespie, he says “platform” suggests evenhandedness and obscures the sovereign role of internet companies.
Ben prefers the metaphor “online malls”: a capitalist terrarium, a corporate enclosure that hosts some social interactions, but is designed to manufacture commercial data about everything you do there.
Anti-monopoly folks think the problem with the web is excessive consolidation in the market: more competition and interoperability will solve issues. Ben appreciates some of their ideas but diagnoses the market itself as the problem.
Take Facebook: it’s been built from the bottom up to optimize for engagement at all costs. That leads FB to privilege certain types of, often inflammatory, content. That orientation came out of a relatively competitive era. Competition may not fix it.
Ben aims for deprivatization: community alternatives to the corporate structures. At the ISP level there are examples: 900 co-op and nonprofit networks across the US. They can encode democratic values into their operation.
Many of the co-ops started as rural electrical cooperatives. To retain their tax status they have to have an elected leadership.
Mastodon gets a shoutout (drink!). Q: Do you see an opportunity, with the migration to Mastodon, to build those values?
Musk’s purchase of Twitter is an interesting teaching tool for these concepts. If our online public spaces are subject to the whims of the market, they can become one-man dictatorships. Part of a longer pattern of media consolidation, but nonetheless scary.
Mastodon is a starting point to show us what we can imagine. But the change we need is more social and political than technological. On that level, we’re demobilized.
We can build promising alternatives, but we aren’t necessarily in a world-historical moment where the window is very open to that needed political change.
Asked to end on a high note, Ben brings up @darius’s idea that there could be a Mastodon instance hosted in every public library. If you have a problem on FB, you can’t knock on Zuck’s door, but you can go to a local librarian. Bring back the face to face element.
What kind of content belongs on social media is a political problem. Politics has to happen face to face.
scott f
Phil
KarlE