Web True Believer.
The history of the internet, and particularly the web, are major interests of mine, and with a new book coming out from author Ben Tarnoff, there's been some fun interviews and articles coming out about not only how the internet and the web have developed, but how they could have and could still develop differently. I love Darius Kazemi's idea of federated social networks maintained by local library systems — something I've advocated for in the past is a wikipedia-inspired approach to context creation on networks like Twitter, and that's a fitting task for librarians — but what frustrates me in Tarnoff's hypothetical vision of a better internet is that it's still algorithmically driven, only in this case the users decide the algorithm. Or I suppose the government does, and if people complain about first amendment rights now when they don't get enough likes, I can't imagine how a city government would handle the actual first amendment issues of government moderation of the internet. It seems about as well conceived as Elon Musk's idea of open-sourcing the Twitter algorithm. Structural and technological changes to algorithms don't solve the possibly unsolvable problem of moderation at scale, and I think Tarnoff understands this, but then why fixate on algorithms at all? An algorithmic feed is still relatively new, and I still exclusively use Twitter's chronological feed. That Mastodon — essentially a more complicated and less interesting Twitter experience — remains the primary example of a different path for the social web seems proof positive to me that there's a fundamental unwillingness to reimagine what social media can be outside of griping about the content moderation decisions or user interface of Facebook or Twitter (and this extends to Congress). Clearly Tarnoff understands this and is grappling with it from a position of real understanding of the historical, technological, and sociopolitical architecture of the internet, so despite my own gripes I'm excited for the book. But before we get to those links, a great historical what-if about the semantic web.
Two-Bit History: Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been
“Which finally brings me back to FOAF. Much of the world seems to have forgotten about the FOAF standard, but FOAF was an attempt to build a decentralized and open social network before anyone had even heard of Facebook. If any decentralized social network ever had a chance of occupying the redoubt that Facebook now occupies before Facebook got there, it was FOAF. Given that a large fraction of humanity now has a Facebook account, and given that relatively few people know about FOAF, should we conclude that social networking, like subway travel, really does lend itself to centralization and natural monopoly? Or does the FOAF project demonstrate that decentralized social networking was a feasible alternative that never became popular for other reasons?”
Adi Robertson interviewing Ben Tarnoff: Why We Need a Public Internet and How to Get One
“So I see those spaces and those alternatives as really cool and inspiring and creative technical experiments. But technical experimentation, as we’ve learned, isn’t enough to generate a radically different arrangement. It’s important — but we need politics. We need public policy. We need social movements. We need all these other ingredients that we can’t get from a code base.”
Ben Tarnoff: The Internet Is Broken. How Do We Fix It?
“What would a day on the deprivatized internet look like? You wake up, grab coffee, and sit down at your computer. Your first stop is a social-media site run by your local library. The other users are your neighbors, your co-workers, or residents of your county. There’s a news report in your feed about a coming municipal election, published by a local public media center. In fact, much of the content that circulates on the site comes from public media sources.
“The site is a cooperative; you and the other users govern it collectively. You elect the board that designs the filtering algorithms and writes the content moderation policies that determine what you see in your feed. The board’s decisions are carried out by employees of the local library, who act as caretakers of the community, always on hand to help classify, curate and add context to information.”