The great irony of the net's platformization is that platforms are intermediaries, and the promise of the internet that got so many of us excited was disintermediation - getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.
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@pluralistic As the main author and editor of https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6092, I have to tell you that it has all turned out just as I was predicting it would. I fought like hell to make sure there was something somewhere in there that would allow ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking between endpoints behind residential gateways, and I mostly failed. There is one tiny vestigial clause, like an Easter egg, hidden in there about BTNS that I hoped would eventually enable the evasion of the platform monopolies that I was fighting against. Buried treasure, and nobody seems to be digging it up.
@pluralistic The backstory on how I came to be the dipshit volunteered to write that RFC is kind of tragic. The earliest drafts called for the firewall to be in “transparent mode” by default and require an explicit opt-in by the interior network administrator to enable blocking of ad-hoc peer-to-peer protocols. The contest over that recommendation in the working group lasted years, and the pro-transparency faction that I favored ultimately lost. The commercial service providers made clear that they had no intention of following that recommendation in the gear they would be providing to customers who didn’t bring their own gateway, and their own standards for equipment vendors would include explicit deviations to the IETF recommendation.
@pluralistic The reason this matters: with IPv4, the NAT in your home gateway is the pinch point where ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking can be prevented from functioning with quality that compares favorably with centralized platforms. In theory, with IPv6, where a NAT is unnecessary, that pinch point would not be a hindrance anymore. Which is why they needed someone to write RFC 6092— so that pinch point would still be there even after IPv4 and its NAT came to be replaced by IPv6.
And now you know why I cried all the way through LITTLE BROTHER.
The platformized internet is ripe for #RentSeeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing.
But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get #enshittification:
An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons - it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.
But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet.
Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An #open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on #access - the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.
At last week's #MuseumComputerNetwork conference, #AaronStraupCope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of #recall and #revisiting:
Cope is a museum technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the #GalleriesLibrariesArchivesAndMuseums (#GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the #web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the #metaverse, and its various guises - #XR, #VR, #MR and #AR.
The biggest reason to be excited about the web was - and is - the openness of disintermediation.
The internet was inspired by the #EndToEnd principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all."
But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."
That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral ... was a waste of time and effort... not worth doing."
The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.
This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas - that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds.
This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:
As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of #apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:
Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":
You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents info) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.
Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks - HTTP, HTML, etc - as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' #technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics.
By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage - your data, perhaps, or your friends:
abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;
ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")
when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;
#TimBernersLee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos - the dialup equivalent to apps - organized as "branded communities."
The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.
Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser.
Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with #React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.
Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old - just five years younger than Snow Crash:
But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."
Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" - so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you - but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"
Apple's #VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:
Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.
It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly... access to basic literacy... a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally."
Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.
In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."
The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm.
This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't #FreedomOfReach" - if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:
As @adapalmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:
A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship - but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is.
However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of #MomsForLiberty and their book-bannings).
It's not a coincidence that Palmer - a historian - would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker.
One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship - the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.
Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen - the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.
When I was a kid, I loved the writing of #CradKilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:
But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers - all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers - are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation - it's capture.
For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell - that's just not how it worked.
But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they're worth slightly more as writeoffs than they are as movies:
There's 4 giant studios and 5 giant publishers. Maybe five is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:
Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:
One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."
But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting.
Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T
he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.
I'll be at the #StudioCity branch of the LA Public Library TONIGHT (November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
@pluralistic Don't forget the cameras that face inward. Great for foveated rendering, controller-free UI, cool eye graphics - and keeping track of where your focus lingers.