Werd I/O

Werd I/O

Writing at the intersection of technology, democracy, and society by Ben Werdmuller

We need to make better software and fight for our users.

This was a sad day. Unsurprising, but sad.

The web connects people from different contexts, backgrounds and geographies, with different skills and ideas. Learning happens when different contexts collide. I'm not a technological determinist, but I think the web is a tool that we can use to make a more tolerant, peaceful, progressive world. Yeah, yeah, I know. But I do.

I knew the risks from putting everything online, and from the data mining it enabled, but I saw the benefits, too. I knew that Silicon Valley had a lot in common with the progressive movements in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies, and I felt like people had their hearts and minds in the right place.

There is nothing less empowering than filing yourself, your friends, your family and your neighbors into a surveillance database. If today's reports are true, every time you attach an email address or a profile page to a phone number and save it to the cloud, that's what you're doing. Every time you tag someone in a photograph. You're communicating with your friends and having fun, but you're also potentially crowdsourcing a surveillance state.

The point isn't that the current government might persecute you. I mean, there's a real chance that they might, if you're a minority or the wrong religion or something else that triggers an algorithm to flag you as being more likely to be harmful to national security. But that's not the crux of it.

The point is that we have created the tools so that we can be surveilled and persecuted. By a future government, by private companies with access to the data, by anyone with the right tools. A government didn't create the data-gathering tools behind #PRISM. We did. We are the computer; we build it every day. All the NSA is doing is taking a peek.

What we do now defines us as a generation and as a society. It's not about whether the NSA is surveilling US citizens on their own soil, although that's certainly a legal point of conflict. It's no more moral to spy on anyone else's citizens on their own soil. No, it's fundamentally about the nature of all this data that we're creating. Who are we creating it for, and why are we creating it? Why does it need to exist at all, in this massively interrogable form?

Everyone talks about big data, but I'm much more interested in how we can keep data small without ruining the connectedness that the web provides. Movements like the IndieWeb and the federated social web are important. So is regaining a sense of community responsibility on the web. We're here to make the world better, after all. We should be fighting for the users from the ground up, not working against them behind their backs.

Questions, tribes and independence

I come from a culture of skepticism, in the best possible way. I was brought up to, and later sought out friends and acquaintances who would also, question and test the things around me. Leaders? Question them. Institutions? Question them. Traditions? Question them. And then, from what you've learned and been able to intuit, form your own belief system over time.

Part of that is understanding that you might be wrong, and being able to change your mind. I think having a willingness to change your mind is a strength, like skyscrapers built to bend in the wind, or trees that twist and adapt to their environments as they grow. Rigid ideas tend to break.

Another part is not believing something because you're told to. I always find it a bit alienating when people don't, for example, like me criticizing the President (or the Prime Minister), as if it's somehow wrong or disrespectful to point out his shortcomings. I tend to disagree: I think that's what democracy requires us to do. My opinions don't put me in a pigeonhole box, and I don't think, really, anyone's do. We're all demographics of one.

I don't like ideological (or theological) tribes. I don't think they're useful for their participants, although I think they're very useful for people who are in positions of power within them. We can agree on things and disagree on other things, and we're all part of a larger tribe. If the Internet has shown us anything, it's that we are all connected, we are all different and we all the same - and all of us contribute to a much larger whole. We should celebrate diversity in ideas, goals, opinions, knowledge and skills, just as much as we should celebrate diversity in our physical traits, personalities, sexualities and backgrounds. Values are ideas; rigid values are fragile ones. They're narrow gene pools. I think we should question ourselves, and each other, often.