Werd I/O

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Books

Fiction

How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Not what I thought it was going to be. An early chapter was so heartbreaking that I thought I would have to abandon the book; it brought up feelings of loss I hadn’t felt since my mother died. I still don’t know if I appreciate the catharsis, but that’s what this book is: the author conjures how deeply we feel in the face of the worst horrors.

Nonfiction

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff. A cathartic read that would be a great back-to-back pair with Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America. I took some exception to his skepticism towards renewable energy, but the core message and diagnosis of what he calls The Mindset is right on. Now we have the diagnosis, the key part - left to us to determine - is what we do next.

Pageboy: A Memoir, by Elliot Page. Raw, personal, and honest: a memoir of transition and survival by someone who has been in the public eye for most of his life but never really seen. There’s no sanitized veneer to his writing, and my life is better for having read his story. I hope his life is better for having written it.

Notable Articles

AI

How Easy Is It to Fool A.I.-Detection Tools? “To assess the effectiveness of current A.I.-detection technology, The New York Times tested five new services using more than 100 synthetic images and real photos. The results show that the services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short.”

AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born. “AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard — impossible, even — to fully map the damage.”

A prayer wheel for capitalism. “Auto-generating text based on other people’s discoveries and then automatically summarising that text by finding commonalities with existing text creates a loop of mechanised nonsense. It’s a prayer wheel for capitalism.”

Google, one of AI’s biggest backers, warns own staff about chatbots. “Human reviewers may read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk. Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said.”

Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over. “When tested, “Over 90% of 1,008 generated jokes were the same 25 jokes.”” We have a lot in common.

Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers.“The new policy, establishing that AI-generated content is de facto allowed on the network, is harmful in both what it allows on the platform and in how it was implemented.”

Tech Elite's AI Ideologies Have Racist Foundations, Say AI Ethicists. “More and more prominent tech figures are voicing concerns about superintelligent AI and risks to the future of humanity. But as leading AI ethicist Timnit Gebru and researcher Émile P Torres point out, these ideologies have deeply racist foundations.”

Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI. “Just yesterday, I asked an AI program to write an entire sci-fi novel for me, and [as someone who will die an empty shell of a man who wasted his life doing nothing for the world and, perhaps, should never have been born] I was super impressed.”

Climate

In a First, Wind and Solar Generated More Power Than Coal in U.S. “Wind and solar generated more electricity than coal through May, an E&E News review of federal data shows, marking the first time renewables have outpaced the former king of American power over a five-month period.”

Climate Crisis Has Stranded 600 Million Outside Most Livable Environment. “Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life.”

A pledge to fight climate change is sending money to strange places. “Although a coal plant, a hotel, chocolate stores, a movie and an airport expansion don’t seem like efforts to combat global warming, nothing prevented the governments that funded them from reporting them as such to the United Nations and counting them toward their giving total.”

Culture

New Creative Era. “But we don’t want to go viral. We just want the basics: to make work we’re proud of with people we respect and who respect us that’s true to our intentions and who we are and are not.”

Alexandra Holt's Insurgent Experiment in Fine Dining at Roxanne. ““I’m sorry we’re not sticking a silver spoon up anyone’s ass when they walk in,” she says. “But we’re there just to give people a good time. A memory of a few good hours in their day. So I put eyes on their tiramisu, you know?” I want to eat here.

Democracy

What the 303 Creative vs. Elenis Supreme Court decision means for LGBTQ+ rights. ““Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion.” A reprehensible decision.

What will happen without affirmative action? College leaders react to Supreme Court decision. “The Supreme Court wants a version of the United States in which we ignore people’s life history, what they bring to the table in terms of their ability to go back to their communities and improve those communities, what it means to have differing voices and different backgrounds on campus. It is a true step back for our country.”

CEO Senator Challenges Teamsters President to MMA Fight. “GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin challenged Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to an MMA fight on Monday after O’Brien called him a “greedy CEO” and a “clown & fraud” in a tweet last week.” In other news, Brawndo has what plants crave!

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92. Rest in peace, and thank you for everything you did.

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens. ““This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.””

Europe: Is compulsory military service coming back? “After the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War in Europe, many countries abolished compulsory military service. But in the wake of the war in Ukraine, several are considering bringing it back.”

Lawmakers in blue states are linking protections for abortion and gender-affirming care. “Each of us has the freedom to determine our path in life, each of us has the right to make decisions about our medical care and our bodies without government interference.”

The Coming Fight Over American Surveillance. “The government had little difficulty persuading lawmakers to renew the law in 2012 and 2018, despite growing evidence that it was being used to spy on Americans. But that evidence is now overwhelming, and the politics of surveillance have radically shifted.”

Health

The 19th Explains: What is gender-affirming care? “The 19th spoke with health care professionals who provide gender-affirming care to adults and adolescents — as well as trans young adults who were comfortable sharing their experiences — to answer those questions.”

The Horror. “100% of trans people who seek access to gender affirming care as children and are denied go through the horror. 100% of trans children who never know that gender affirming care exists go through the horror. And for what?”

Labor

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act 2023: How it protects pregnant people. “The law, which passed in December, requires that employers provide accommodations for pregnancy-related medical conditions, everything from pregnancy to childbirth to postpartum recovery.”

The Risks of Staying Put. “I have to remember that my health is more important than my job. And the pain that you’re used to is still a pain you should run away from.”

Google Gets Stricter About Employees’ Time in Office. “Google will consider office attendance records in performance reviews and send reminders to employees with frequent absences, becoming the latest company to urge a return to in-person collaboration following an embrace of remote work during the pandemic.” This is wretched.

Creating Psychological Safety for Black Women at Your Company. “Leaders who are truly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace must ask themselves these two critical questions: What are the individual, interpersonal, and organizational costs of neglecting how psychological safety is different for Black women? And how might a tailored approach to psychological safety boost well-being and work outcomes of Black women in the workforce?”

Media

Why Philadelphia Inquirer spent a year redesigning its print offering. This made me wonder: what if DoorDash, GrubHub, etc, added a checkbox to throw in a copy of the latest local paper with your delivery? Or imagine a breakfast subscription: bagels and a paper, every morning.

New electric cars won’t have AM radio. Rightwingers claim political sabotage. “There’s a reason big car companies were open to taking down AM radio … let’s be clear: big business doesn’t like things that are overwhelmingly conservative.” Adding to the list of organizations people think don’t like conservatives: [checks notes] big business.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa says research by Oxford institute can be used against reporters. “Nobel peace laureate Maria Ressa has claimed Oxford University’s leading journalism institute is publishing flawed research that puts journalists and independent outlets at risk, particularly in the global south.”

Fewer than a third of Americans believe local news holds public officials accountable, poll finds. “If the primary source of local news (for many people) is local television, it’s not a shock that less than a third of people would say they think local news is holding public officials accountable.”

Society

More than 100 U.S. political elites have family links to slavery. “More than 100 U.S. leaders – lawmakers, presidents, governors and justices – have slaveholding ancestors, a Reuters examination found. Few are willing to talk about their ties to America’s “original sin”.”

The Perils of ‘Innovator’ Mindset. “It’s not surprising the WSJ is disinclined to entertain the real lesson of the story: that confident idiots who think regulation is for cowards can end up getting themselves killed, and taking innocent people with them.”

US Internal Refugee Crisis: 130-260k Trans People Have Already Fled. “8% of all transgender people have already moved out of their community or state as a result of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. An additional 43% of transgender people are likewise considering moving.”

Nine out of 10 people are biased against women, says ‘alarming’ UN report. “At the current rate of progress it will take 186 years to close gaps in legal protections. It also explains why, while there has been some progress on enacting laws that advance women’s rights, social norms continue to be deeply entrenched and pervasive.”

America’s Suburbs Are Breeding Grounds for Fascism. “Without a massive reorganization of American life—away from privatization, car-centrism, and hyper-individualism—it’s likely the suburban ideology will remain popular, and even grow.”

How the U.S. Almost Became a Nation of Hippo Ranchers. “Great Britain has eaten the Australian kangaroo and likes him, horseflesh is a staple in continental Europe, and the people of Central America eat the lizard. Why cannot Americans absorb the hippopotamus?”

Pride Month: In conversation with The 19th's LGBTQ+ reporters. “It’s hard for me to get excited about Pride Month as a concept this month, because we are in that place where … it feels to a lot of trans people like we are being threatened to the point of genocide.”

Technology

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever. “For a while, the internet got away from what Google Reader was trying to build: everything moved into walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, governed by Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and others. But now, as that era ends and a new moment on the web is starting to take hold through Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, the things Reader wanted to be are beginning to come back.”

The Drupal Open Web Manifesto. “With the Drupal Open Web Manifesto, we link our ethos of collaboration, globalism, and innovation to the preservation and advancement of the Open Web. Drupal pledges its active support for the Open Web and its core principles of open access, open standards, and digital inclusion as we guide and advance the Drupal project.”

Tom Morello, Zack de la Rocha Boycott Venues Using Face-scanning Tech. “Over 100 artists including Rage Against the Machine co-founders Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, along with Boots Riley and Speedy Ortiz, have announced that they are boycotting any concert venue that uses facial recognition technology, citing concerns that the tech infringes on privacy and increases discrimination.”

Meta's Facebook pressured by Vietnam's government to censor dissent. “Meta, which owns Facebook, has been making repeated concessions to Vietnam’s authoritarian government, routinely censoring dissent and allowing those seen as threats by the government to be forced off the platform.”

Google earned $10m from ads misdirecting abortion seekers to ‘pregnancy crisis centers’. “Google has made millions of dollars in the last two years from advertisements misdirecting users who were seeking abortion services to “pregnancy crisis centers” that do not actually provide care, according to a new study.”

Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? Unfortunately, I agree with every word of this.

Twitter Plunges on Annual Scoring of LGBTQ Safety on Social Media. “While none of the platforms achieve a passing score, Twitter is worst in class, with its score plunging 12 points compared to the prior year, to 33%. The company’s owner, Elon Musk, has used the platform to promote “bigoted and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric,” according to the watchdog group Media Matters for America, and the GLAAD report chronicles changes to Twitter’s policies under Musk that further endanger LGBTQ safety.”

Metablogging. “Metablogging is something any team can and should do.” I very much like this practice.

Reddit communities to ‘go dark’ in protest over third-party app charges. “More than 3,000 subreddits have joined the protest, and will go “private” on Monday, preventing anyone outside the community from seeing their posts.” Over 87% of subreddits joined the protest.

Is GitHub Copilot Any Good? “The code generated by Copilot is often wrong, but always subtly so, which means that when I let it fill in any non-trivial suggestion for me, I spend a considerable amount of time doing ‘code review’ on the code it emits.”

All this unmobilized love. “Even most of the emergent gestures in our interfaces are tweaks on tech-first features—@ symbols push Twitter to implement threading, hyperlinks eventually get automated into retweets, quote-tweets go on TikTok and become duets. “Swipe left to discard a person” is one of a handful of new gestures, and it’s ten years old.”

Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor shown in leaked screenshots. “Cox said the company already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime.” I am old.

Apollo will close down on June 30th. “Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue.” At this point, developers shouldn’t build their apps against commercial APIs. Open standards or nothing; the risk is too great.

Of Media & Monsters. “Ihave been in Silicon Valley long enough to see it transform from a group of outlier revolutionaries to play-safe career chasers. Recently, I have watched arrivistes who, if not in technology, would be running a penny stock brokerage based somewhere in Long Island or producing B-movies.”

The most used languages on the internet. “Millions of non-native English speakers and non-English speakers are stuck using the web in a language other than the one they were born into.”

Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro. “Now we’ll get to answer the AR question with far fewer caveats and asterisks. The display is as good as technologically possible. The interface uses your fingers, instead of a goofy joystick. The performance is tuned to prevent motion sickness. An enormous developer community is ready and equipped to build apps for it, and all of their tools are mature, well-documented, and fully supported by that community.”

Apple Vision. “The arc of technology, in large part led by Apple, is for ever more personal experiences, and I’m not sure it’s an accident that that trend is happening at the same time as a society-wide trend away from family formation and towards an increase in loneliness.”

Twitter Admits in Court Filing: Elon Musk Is Simply Wrong About Government Interference At Twitter.“Twitter’s filing is like a beat-by-beat debunking of the conspiracy theories pushed by the dude who owns Twitter. It’s really quite incredible.”

These incredible LAN party photos remind us how much work it used to be to play games together. Hi, yes, this was teenage me.

Meta Is Trying, and Failing, to Crush Unions in Kenya. “Kenyan content moderators at Meta have been fighting for better compensation for workers forced to watch videos of murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. Meta was initially unwilling to give in to these demands, but Kenyan courts are intervening on the side of workers.”

Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? “Unlike Mastodon, which is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, it’s simple to get started on Bluesky.” Mastodon has work to do.

Organizing childcare as relative newcomers to an area has been really hard. We weren’t on any daycare waiting lists before our baby was born; we don’t have the local connections that can help you figure out how to separate the good facilities from bad.

Erin’s back to work, and I’ve been primary carer for a few months now. Honestly, were it not for the financial squeeze, I’d be very happy with this arrangement: the concept of paying money to someone for the privilege of spending less time with my child so I can work more feels inherently broken. Given the choice between spending time with my baby and spending more time at work, it’s a no-brainer: he’s only going to be nine months old once in his life and I don’t want to miss a single second. But, of course, it’s not really a choice. The mortgage won’t pay itself; food doesn’t magically appear on the table. You may be shocked to hear that a career in open source and the open web has not left me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

We had high hopes for a local Montessori school with an infant program. We love Montessori: a child-led teaching philosophy that emphasizes open-ended curiosity over rote learning and rigid compartmentalization. But Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and teacher who pioneered the technique, never trademarked the name, and it turns out that Montessori education in the United States has become a free-for-all. The infant program was resistant to us touring, but we insisted. I don’t think Maria had the broom closet sized room littered with broken plastic toys that we saw in mind; I’d like to think she might have frowned upon the infant carer who left the door open while she left the room, remaking that “it’s amazing, the babies never go through the doorway”. She might have at least raised an eyebrow at the nearby school run by the same family that was closed down because inspectors found over twenty safety infractions after a child died. Being a European, she might also have wondered why parents had to pay thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of leaving their baby there.

My point is: it’s a minefield. And, while we’re not independently wealthy, we’re still luckier than many. I have no idea how most parents do it.

Work-life balance takes on a whole other meaning when kids enter the picture. It seems like this is doubly true here in the States, where the work culture is markedly less humane. I have fond memories of my parents being around most of the time: first as students, which is why I grew up in Oxford and am stuck with this accent forever, and then as entrepreneurs running their own small pre-internet media business. There was always at least one parent around when we came home from school, and there was no talk of putting us in after-school programs so they could spend more time at work. School, come to that, started at a sane time, because the learning day wasn’t designed around parents needing to get to work at 8am. I was well-rested, well-fed, and would spend my afternoons drawing and playing. Sometimes we would walk over to the playground on Aristotle Lane (again, Oxford), or visit the commonly-held meadows beyond. All for free. We didn’t have a ton of money, but so what?

It feels so far away from this world of people asking for thousands of dollars a month to place our child in a murder corridor so that we can earn enough money to pay for it all. And this is years before we have to start worrying about the active shooter drills and performative busy-ness that seem to be hallmarks of modern American schooling.

I want to recreate that feeling of endless safety and open-ended creativity for our child. I also want it for us. I need that open, secure space to be creative for my own work and development, too, and I want the same for Erin. I want us both to have a strong relationship with our son for our own well-being as much as his.

There are a few things I know I can do. I’m permanently a remote worker for the next eighteen years at least. I can set strong boundaries around my workday. I can reserve time each week for my own creative endeavors so that I can show up refreshed and happy for his. I can learn to put my fucking phone downand be present. I can find ways to move my career towards making and selling things rather than advising. I can relax about my career ambitions and get serious about my lifestyle ambitions. I can take a step back and design a life around the way I want to live.

But there are some things that are harder to change. I can’t change the need for health insurance, the lack of support for parents with younger children, or the culture of performative productivity. My wonderful cousin Jonathan Neale remarked to me recently that a society that works for its inhabitants is actually rather easy to achieve if that’s what you set out to do; we are not doing that. We’re trying to produce more and more and more, using technology to go faster and faster and push that GDP number ever higher, without considering its effect on our quality of life. We’re pushing individual achievement over community health. We’re starting our kids off at school at 7:30am and leaving them in programs until after we get home from work so that we can produce. We’re forgetting to breathe, and in turn, teaching them that it’s not okay to breathe. This is a fucked-up thing to do to any human and it’s not something I wish for our son.

Not every country is like the United States, and we could move. Perhaps, eventually, we will. For now, though, it’s off the table, and we’re in the position of trying to figure out how to design a humane life in the midst of a culture that doesn’t seem to want to let us have one.

There's still time to apply to be The 19th's next Chief Technology Officer. If the idea of working with a women-run, highly diverse, non-profit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy sounds good to you (it's a truly GREAT team), go check out the job description and apply.

I posted a link the other day to this sobering essay about how the promised migration to Mastodon didn’t go as hoped. It makes some assumptions about what people were hoping for in the first place, but if you were (as I was) hoping that this would be a moment that federated social media might become mainstream, I think its arguments are correct. I wish they weren’t.

So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation.

I’ve made this argument before: for most people, decentralization is not a selling point. For a significant number of people, not being Twitter as run by Elon Musk is a selling point. And while there are certainly arguments to be made about how decentralized networks are less likely to fall prey to the same fate, the fact of the matter is, most people don’t care. Most people don’t understand what decentralization even really is, and nor should they have to.

Decentralized protocols are infrastructure in the same way that servers are infrastructure. Nobody cares if a traditional social network is built on AWS or Google Cloud. What they care about is the community: can they follow people they’re interested in, can they engage in great conversations, potentially find an audience for the things they make, and do all of this safely and without abuse.

Mastodon has, so far, not done well on this front. People really do find it hard to use. And when they do make it on, the number of “reply guys” — people who respond in an unwanted and condescending way to peoples’ posts, particularly those written by women — is sometimes off the charts. Finally but by no means least, there’s a disturbing current of anti-Blackness that extends from the covert racism of asking people to hide their lived experiences behind a content warning to overt white supremacy. For many people, it is not a welcoming place.

Dr Johnathan Flowers, who studies the philosophy of technology, gave a great interview last year that covers this topic in detail. It’s very difficult for me to pull a representative quote out; instead, I recommend that you read or listen to the whole piece.

Indeed, when I posted the link, I got some interesting replies that expressed the sentiment: it’s good that not everyone can use Mastodon. Sometimes a higher barrier to entry leads to a better quality of community. We never wanted everyone to move over; we just wanted the right people to move over.

Not a good look when many of the people who are put off from using the community are people of color, women, the disabled, and people with few resources. I’m strongly opposed to this sentiment: I think for social media to truly be useful, it must be welcoming, inclusive, and accessible.

There’s another reason why I want user-aligned social media to be readily accessible. (I’m struggling for a good term for this, as you can tell: it’s not decentralized social media, because decentralization is just a functional means to an end. What do you call something that is inherently supportive of the people who use it and their underlying interests? Democratic? Progressive?) Social media is intrinsically involved in the very dark moment in democracy that we’re living through; it has empowered populism and the rise of a militant far right. We need the online spaces that most of us use to not be run by people who are active supporters of fascism at worst and agnostic to it at best.

Social media helped bring about Trump. Right now Elon Musk is using Twitter in the same way Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire. Facebook does not look like it is eager to avoid the mistakes of its past if it means forgoing profit. There has to be a strong, inclusive alternative to these platforms, and right now there simply isn’t one.

None of this is to say that the underlying protocols are bad. I love ActivityPub. I think they’re a fantastic way to build new platforms. And I think that’s exactly what we need: new platforms, in the human sense, built with the participation of the communities they support. It’s not nearly enough to build a functional Twitter clone. Technology is never enough.

We need to build communities in new, participative ways that ensure everyone’s voice is heard. We need to share equity. We need to ensure that people with few resources are able to onboard. We need to ensure that everyone can feel safe as they express their true selves. Otherwise, to be frank, I don’t see the point.

I think it absolutely can be done, but lately I’ve been feeling like Mastodon itself is not yet the answer. The big question, then, is: what do we do next?

If you take investment to build your product, you will one day need to find a way to repay those investors. That might be a risk that you need to take because you otherwise wouldn't be able to build the thing you want to. But it's a key part of the equation.

With no outside money, only people with copious spare time or disposable wealth can afford to build software of any complexity. I don’t see that as a desirable outcome, not just because it’s fundamentally unfair, but also because we then won’t get software built by people with a wider range of lived experiences, which means it will be less useful overall. We therefore need to have investors or grant-making institutions in the mix. Venture capital, though often maligned, has allowed a lot of services we all use to exist.

The trouble is, the need for exponential growth or revenue sometimes pit platforms against their users, which is death for a Web 2.0 business.

Web 2.0 businesses work by making their user-bases into part of the machine. They produce network effects, which means that the product becomes more valuable as more people use it. Reddit with one user is not particularly useful; Reddit with millions is a much more compelling place to converse.

For years, those user-bases have just sort of gone along with it. There have been minor skirmishes from time to time, but the utility of the platform itself has generally been enough to keep people engaging.

Twitter’s implosion changed that. Millions of people decamped from the platform to places like Mastodon — and some of them to nowhere at all. More than creating a problem for Twitter and an opportunity for anyone working on alternatives, this mass movement of users also opened the floodgates for more direct action among Web 2.0 users.

Over 87% of subreddits - the themed discussion communities that make up Reddit - went on strike this week in protest of new API policies that price most apps out of the market. When CEO Steve Huffman issued a tone-deaf internal memo suggesting that this, too, would pass, they decided to extend the action. In effect, the vast majority of the site has been shut down. Huffman lost the respect of the people who had, up to then, been willingly part of his machine.

In the old days, we talked about Web 2.0 “democratizing” industries. Blogging democratized publishing. Flickr democratized photo discovery and use. Delicious democratized … bookmarks, I guess? Because these use cases represented a move away from centralized publishing models where an elite few controlled who could be seen and heard, they were democratized, in a sense. But the platforms themselves continued to be built, run, and funded by an elite few. There was no democratization of power or equity. As has long been the case with mass media, the users were not the customers; they were the product being sold.

While there were always people who discussed these obvious harms and advocated for solutions — long-time members of the indieweb community and its cousins, for example — these were not mainstream topics. The cracks really began to show after the 2016 election, when Facebook finally caught some criticism for its flippancy towards democracy. Subsequently, stories about its role in genocide, its misrepresentation of its own engagement analytics to news organizations, and other harms became more widespread.

But while there has always been some sporadic direct action — there have been a few third-party tools that have let people delete their content and connections from Facebook, for example; LiveJournal users finally left en masse after its sale to a Russian media company which enacted homophobic and anti-politics policies — we haven’t seen anything on the level of this year’s. Millions of Twitter users quit following Elon Musk’s acquisition, and now most of Reddit is offline.

Reddit is the perfect testbed for this kind of collective user action. Each individual subreddit is controlled by a set of moderators who have the power to turn their communities off — which is exactly what they’ve done. But Reddit isn’t the only platform with this dynamic: a 2021 report by the NYU Governance Lab suggested that 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month. Admins of those groups have remarkable power over the Facebook platform.

This has the potential to be a radical change. Once users realized that they have power as a community, the fundamental dynamics of these platforms changes. You can no longer engage in adversarial business practices: there’s nothing wrong with making money, but it will need to be in a way that aligns with the people who give a platform its value.

Not only should that give the leadership of more established Web 2.0 businesses pause, it should inform early decisions by both investors and founders of any new collaborative platform on the internet. An adversarial business model, or a hand-wavey one like “selling data”, has the potential to deeply harm the value of a venture that depends on its users further down the road.

The health, trust, and safety of a platform’s community is paramount. The potential for collective action means that, finally, users can have some say in how the platforms they use are run. We may even see more platforms move to co-operative and community-owned models as a way to ensure that they remain aligned with their ecosystems: it’s not just good ethics, but it’s good business sense in a world where users, admins, and third-party app developers understand that they have the power to leave.

We may even see moderator’s unions, providing collective bargaining, advice, and other benefits for people who run communities across platforms. Perhaps even bonuses like negotiated healthcare that industrial unions have long provided. There’s honestly no reason why not: these people are the direct drivers of millions upon millions of dollars for platform owners. They have power; they just have to stand up and use it.

Also posted on IndieNews