Werd I/O

This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival, in which Manuel Moreale prompts us to think about the various facets of digital relationships.

Our relationship to digital technology has been through a few different phases.

One: the census

In the first, computers were the realm of government and big business: vast databases that might be about us, but that we could never own or interrogate ourselves. Companies like IBM manufactured room-sized (and then cabinet-sized) machines that took a team of specialized technicians to operate. They were rare and a symbol of top-down power.

Punch cards were invented in the 1880s, and were machine-sortable even then, although not by anything we would recognize as a computer today. In the 1930s, a company called Dehomag, which was a 90%-owned subsidiary of IBM, used its punch card census technology to help the German Nazi party ethnically identify and sort the population. (Thomas Watson, IBM’s CEO at the time, even came to Germany to oversee the operation.)

The first general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC, was first put to use to determine the feasibility of the H bomb. Other mainframe computers were used by the US Navy for codebreaking, and by the US census bureau. By the sixties and seventies, though, they were commonplace in larger corporate offices and in universities for non-military, non-governmental applications.

Two: the desk

Personal computers decentralized computing power and put it in everybody’s hands. There was no overarching, always-on communications network for them to connect to, so every computer had its own copy of software that ran locally on it. There was no phoning home; no surveillance of our data; there were no ad-supported models. If you were lucky enough to have the not-insignificant sum of money needed to buy a computer, you could have one in your home. If you were lucky enough to have money left over for software, you could even do things with it.

The government and large institutions didn’t have a monopoly on computing power; theoretically, anyone could have it. Anyone could write a program, too, and (if you had yet more money to buy a modem) distribute it on bulletin board systems and online services. Your hardware was yours; your software was yours; once you’d paid your money, your relationship with the vendor was over.

For a while, you had a few options to connect with other people:

• Prodigy, an online service operated as a joint venture between CBS, IBM, and Sears
• CompuServe, which was owned and run by H&R Block
• America Online, which was originally a way for Atari 2600 owners to download new games and store high scores
• Independent bulletin boards, which were usually a single computer connected to a handful of direct phone lines for modems to connect to, run by an enthusiast

(My first after-school job was as a BBS system operator for Daily Information, a local information and classifieds sheet in my hometown.)

In 1992, in addition to bulletin board systems and online services, the internet was made commercially available. Whereas BBSes, AOL, etc were distinct walled gardens, any service that was connected to the internet could reach any other service. It changed everything. (In 1995, my BBS job expanded to running what became one of the first classifieds websites.)

But for a while, the decentralized, private nature of personal computing remained. For most private individuals, connecting to the internet was like visiting a PO box: you’d dial in, would upload and download any email you had pending, browse any websites you needed to, and then log off again. There was no way to constantly monitor people because internet users spent 23 hours of the day disconnected from the network.

Three: the cloud

Broadband, the iPhone, and wifi changed everything. Before the advent of broadband, most people needed to dial in to go online using their phone line. Before the iPhone, cell connections weren’t metered for data, and there was very little bandwidth to go around. Before wifi, a computer needed to physically be connected with a cable to go online.

With broadband and wifi, computers could be connected to the internet 24/7. With the iPhone, everyone had a computer in their pocket, that was permanently connected and could be constantly sending data back to online services — including your location and who was in your address book.

It was incredibly convenient and changed the world in hundreds of ways. The web in particular is a modern marvel; the iPhone is a feat of design and engineering. But what we lost was the decentralized self-ownership of our digital worlds. More than that, we lost an ability to be private that we’d had since the beginning of human civilization. It used to be that nobody needed to know where you were or what you were thinking about; that fundamental truth has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Almost immediately, our relationship to software changed in a few key ways:

• We could access all of our data from anywhere, on any device.
• Instead of buying a software package once, we were asked to subscribe to it.
• Instead of downloading or installing software, the main bulk of it could be run in a server farm somewhere.
• Every facet of our data was stored in one of these server farms.
• More data was produced about us as we used our devices — or even as we walked through our cities, shopped at stores, and met with other people — than we created intentionally ourselves.

While computing became infinitely easier to use and the internet became a force that changed global society in ways that I still believe are a net positive, surveilling us also became infinitely easier. Companies wanted to know exactly what we were likely to buy; politicians wanted to know how we might vote; law enforcement wanted to know if we were dangerous. All paid online services to build profiles about us that could be used to sell advertising, could be mined by the right buyer, and could even be used to influence elections.

Four: the farm

Our relationship is now changing again.

Whereas in the cloud era we were surveilled in order to profile us, our data is now being gathered for another set of reasons. We’re used to online services ingesting our words and actions in order to predict our behaviors and influence us in certain directions. We’re used to Target, for example, wanting to know if we’re pregnant so they can be the first to sell us baby gear. We’re not used to those services ingesting our words and actions in order to learn how to be us.

In our new relationship, software isn’t just set up to surveil us to report on us; it’s also set up to be able to do our work. GitHub Copilot learns from software we write so that it can write software automatically. Midjourney builds stunning illustrations and near-photorealistic images. Facebook is learning from the text and photos we upload so it can create its own text and realistic imagery (unlike many models, from data it actually has the license to). Far more than us being profiled, our modes of human expression are now being farmed for the benefit of people who hope to no longer have to hire us for our unique skills.

In the first era, technology was here to catalogue us.

In the second, it was here to empower us.

In the third, it was here to observe us.

In the fourth, it is here to replace us.

We had a very brief window, somewhere between the inception of the homebrew computer club and the introduction of the iPhone, where digital technology heralded distributed empowerment. Even then, empowerment was hardly evenly distributed, and any return to decentralization must be far more equitable than it ever was. But we find ourselves in a world where our true relationship is with power.

Of course, it’s a matter of degrees, and everything is a spectrum: there are plenty of services that don’tuse your data to train generative AI models, and there are plenty that don’t surveil you at all. There are also lots of applications and organizations that are actively designed to protect us from being watched and subjugated. New regulations are being proposed all the time that would guarantee our right to privacy and our right to not be included in training data.

Those might seem like technical decisions, but they’re really about preserving our ownership and autonomy, and returning those things to us when they’ve already been lost. They’re human, democratic decisions that seek to enforce a relationship where we’re in charge. They’re becoming more and more important every day.

I tried Arc Search, the new mobile app from the Browser Company. Its central insight is that almost every mobile browsing session starts with a web search; rather than giving you the usual list of results, it prioritizes building a web page for you that contains all the information you asked for. That way, the theory goes, you can see the information you need and be on your way faster. (You can still fall back to a Google search, although given that Google is going down the same path, that might not be as differentiated an experience — or as correct — as you might think.)

Obviously, I searched for myself. (Admit it, you would too.) Here’s what it gave me:

I have a few notes:

• This is a photo of my friend Tantek Çelik. I have a lot of respect for Tantek, and I think he’s done a lot to consistently work for the open web in a way that most of the rest of us haven’t always been able to. I also miss hanging out with him. But I am not him.
• I am not the Chief Technology Officer at The 19th. I was, but I haven’t been there for almost a year. Tyler Fisher is the CTO at The 19th, where he’s doing an excellent job.
• It’s not in the screenshot, but it also claims that I’m a contributor to The 19th. I wish I was a journalist of that calibre, but let’s be clear, I’m a web developer who blogs.

If this was an ordinary web search, you could easily see that pages that describe me as the CTO at The 19th are old, and that the photo is of Tantek. But it’s not an ordinary search at all, and Arc Search has presented the information as factual, without context or attribution, as a very simple website. There are three representative links presented further down the page, but in a way that is disconnected from the facts themselves.

I’m flattered by the comparison to Tantek, and while I’m not that keen on having my job position misrepresented, it’s not catastrophic. In other words, it could be worse. But consider if you weren’t just doing a vanity search, and instead were looking for something that actually mattered.

I’m also troubled by the role of training models themselves. When you remove attribution and display facts in this way, you give the appearance of objectivity without the requirement to actually be objective. It all comes down to which sources it checks and how the model is trained to report back — in other words, the biases of the developers.

If I search for “who should I follow in AI?” I get the usual AI influencers, with no mention of Timnit Gebru or Joy Buolamwini (who would be my first choices). If I ask who to follow in tech, I get Elon Musk. It undoubtedly has a lens through which it sees the world. That’s fine in itself — everyone does — but by removing context, you remove the clues that help you figure out what it is.

Finally, obviously, the sources themselves are automatically browsed by the app but don’t see the benefit of a human visitor. Real people sometimes pay to access content, or donate to support a nonprofit publisher, or watch an ad. Those things can be annoying but pay for the content to be produced in the first place. If we strip them away, there’s no writing, information, or expression for the app to summarize. A world where everyone uses an app like this is a death spiral to an information desert.

I guess what I’m saying is: thanks, I hate it. Give me context; give me nuance; give me the ability to think for myself. We built the world’s most incredible communication and knowledge-sharing medium, rich with diverse perspectives and alternative ideas; let’s not sanitize it through a banal filter that is designed to strip it of its humanity.

Tantek Çelik has posted a lovely encapsulation of the indieweb:

The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity.

This complements the more technical description on the indieweb homepage:

The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards, based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

I first came across the indieweb movement when I’d just moved to California. Tantek, Kevin Marks, Aaron Parecki, Amber Case, and a band of independent developers and designers were actively working to helping people own their own websites again, at a time when a lot of people were questioning why you wouldn’t just post on Twitter and Facebook. They gathered at IndieWebCamps in Portland, and at Homebrew Website Camp in San Francisco.

One could look at the movement as kind of a throwback to the very early web, which was a tapestry of wildly different sites and ideas, at a time when everybody’s online communications were templated through web services owned by a handful of billion dollar corporations. I’d prefer to think of it as a manifesto for diversity of communications, the freedom to share your knowledge and lived experiences on your own terms, and maintaining the independence of freedom of expression from business interests.

A decade and change later and the web landscape looks very different. It’s now clear to just about everyone that it’s harmful for all of our information to be filtered through a handful of services. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal through Facebook’s culpability in the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, it’s clear that allowing private businesses to own and control most of the ways we learn about the world around us is dangerous. And the examples keep piling up, story after story after story.

While these events have highlighted the dangers, the indieweb community has been highlighting the possibilities. The movement itself has grown from strength to strength: IndieWebCamps and Homebrew Website Clubs are now held all over the world. I’ve never made it to one of the European events – to my shame, it’s been years since I’ve even been able to make it to a US event – but the community is thriving and the outcomes have been productive.

Even before the advent of the fediverse, the indieweb community had built tools to allow websites to connect to each other as a kind of independent, decentralized social web. Webmention, in conjunction with lightweight microformats that extended HTML to provide semantic hints about the purpose of content on a website, allowed anyone to reply to any website article using a post on their own site – not just that, but they could RSVP to events, send a “like”, reshare it, or use verbs that don’t have analogies in the traditional social networks. The community also created micropub, a simple API that makes it easy to build tools to help people publish to their websites, and a handful of other technologies that are becoming more and more commonplace.

In the wake of the decline of Twitter, Google’s turn towards an AI-driven erosion of the web, and a splintering of social media, many publishers have realized that they need to build stronger, more direct relationships with their communities, and that they can’t trust social media companies to be the center of gravity of their brands and networks. For them, owning their own website has regained its importance, together with building unique experiences that help differentiate them, and allow them to publish stories on their own terms. These are truly indieweb principles, and serve as validation (if validation were needed) of the indieweb movement’s foundational assumptions.

But ultimately it’s not about business, or technology, or any one technique or facet of website-building. As Tantek says, it’s about building a social internet of people: a human network of gloriously diverse lived experiences, creative modes of expression, community affinities, and personalities. The internet has always been made of people, but it has not always been people-first. The indieweb reminds us that humanity is the most important thing, and that nobody should own our ability to connect, form relationships, express ourselves, be creative, learn from each other, and embrace our differences and similarities.

I’m deeply glad it exists.

Also posted on IndieNews

CNN reports that the NSA has been buying internet data as a way to track Americans without a warrant:

[Oregon Democratic Senator Ron] Wyden, one of Congress’ most vocal privacy advocates, said he spent nearly three years pushing to be able to disclose the NSA practice and only succeeded when he placed a hold on the nomination of Nakasone’s successor for NSA director, Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh. In a similar disclosure in 2021, Wyden revealed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had purchased commercially available smartphone location data without a warrant.

A few different tools are available to highlight software that tracks you across the websites you visit. The Markup’s Blacklight tests any individual website; the EFF’s Privacy Badger claims to protect your browser as you visit websites; Firefox has built-in privacy as standard. For the average user, however, the advantages might not be so obvious: so what if some firm I’ve never heard of sets a cookie in my browser? What does it matter that Google can see me? After all, they already have my search history.

While we can make tracking software visible, it’s harder to understand who the customers of this tracking data actually are. And that matters a lot, because that’s how your data is actually getting used. The companies that run the trackers are middlemen trying to make a profit; they’re interested in tracking you as well as possible. The real question is why you’re being tracked. Who has a use case for your information?

Some of those use cases are relatively benign: box stores trying to understand what they should advertise to you, for example. But those customers also include law enforcement and the security services, who have found that they can discover information that would ordinarily necessitate obtaining a warrant simply by paying a data broker for it.

H.R. 4639, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would ban this practice, was introduced in Congress last year. That’s a start, but it wasn’t voted on, let alone passed. There’s a long legislative road ahead before we see rules barring warrantless surveillance through data brokers.

Even if you feel like you’ve got nothing to hide, consider that this puts you in a privileged group. I like Edward Snowden’s comment on the right to privacy:

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. A free press benefits more than just those who read the paper.

For example, consider a pregnant person who is trying to find information about finding an abortion. Those searches — or carrying a cellphone with location services enabled that contains apps which report location in the background while visiting a reproductive health clinic — create a trail of internet traffic that could potentially be obtained by law enforcement in a state that disallows abortions. That information exists, despite claims by Google and others that it would be deleted to avoid this situation:

A year and a half has passed since Google first pledged to delete all location data on users’ visits to abortion clinics with minimal progress. The move would have made it harder for law enforcement to use that information to investigate or prosecute people seeking abortions in states where the procedure has been banned or otherwise limited. Now, a new study shows Google still retains location history data in 50% of cases.

A few years ago, it emerged that a branch of the military was buying data from Muslim prayer apps. Back then, developers admitted that they had no idea who was buying the data:

Some app developers Motherboard spoke to were not aware who their users' location data ends up with, and even if a user examines an app's privacy policy, they may not ultimately realize how many different industries, companies, or government agencies are buying some of their most sensitive data.

While blocking trackers is absolutely a way to protect user privacy, I believe these events point to a need for privacy policies to identify the people and organizations who actively purchase data (both directly and at the data broker level). That means data brokers need to be far more transparent with the websites and software developers they partner with, so that they, in turn, can be more transparent with their users.

It’s clearly not something that would happen without legislation: given the optics and public sentiment around surveillance, who would want to be seen to be purchasing peoples’ private information? But adding sunlight to a mix of privacy protections that also include purchasing restrictions on government and technical restrictions on trackers can only be helpful.

While we certainly should care about how our activity is tracked, we all really care about who has access to our private information. We should have the right to find out.