"All the world's a stage" (and it's on fire)
Tl;dr: We need controlled burns at the protocol level, and the kinds of online terrain that our Tech Oligarchy boys can't blaze through.
We are once again in a period of bold manifestos. There's usually an uptick in these whenever the world starts to feel less stable. Even when civilisation's worst people assemble to frack the sociopolitical terra firma into bits, there will inevitably be some plucky optimists around with better worlds to plant while the soil feels permeable enough. I admire these people. We need them. We are screwed without them. But (there's always a 'but') as they invite us to adopt their blueprints for that always-near Shangri-La, we should be careful that we're not in fact just re-architecting the same firetraps for tomorrow. This is not the Utopia Report.
Everything seems to be on fire, literally and figuratively. Let's start with the literal. New rounds of high winds are predicted in Southern California, where several large fires remain untamed and fresh blazes continue to spark. While America lunges into a Trump Regime 2.0, the returning president hasn't given the part of the country he now leads that is on fire much attention, but his new energy policies suggest that it's an acceptable trade-off for accessing all that "liquid gold." What little time Trump has dedicated to it has been dedicated to spreading disinformation via social networks to score a few late-game political points. Disaster is a tool for fascists and dictators. They know how to get good use out of it. We're going to return to that. And fire, along with its many purposes. The Donald knows how to get mileage out of it all, but he can't do it alone. Every thug needs his crew. This time around, Trump has found it among the corporate giants of Silicon Valley, who weren't hesitant to join.
We all know about the newly anointed American Oligarchy. There have been countless headlines featuring it. It's become so ubiquitous of a metaphor that even outgoing President Biden had to slip it into his farewell address as — one could suppose — an attempt to invoke Eisenhower's 1961 leaving speech that carried a warning about the emergence and dangers of a new "military-industrial complex." There are other similarities. Both presidents bear some responsibility for letting the monsters they'd warn their citizens about to fester and root into the infrastructure of everything, for example. Both preferred funding other countries' conflicts instead of waging their own whenever possible. Proxy wars are "the cheapest insurance in the world," Eisenhower had said. Biden once quipped that “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” But I digress.
"The alliance between Donald Trump and social media platform bosses such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg represents a global threat to free access to reliable information," wrote Jérôme Fenoglio, director of Le Monde, on the news outlet's decision to stop posting on Elon's X and "increase our vigilance on platforms such as TikTok and Meta." Over the last fortnight, numerous articles, editorials, and opinion pieces have been published on Trump's Tech Oligarchy and what it means. Don't Google them. DuckDuckGo them. I like the Le Monde take for a couple of reasons:
- In typical French style Fenoglio starts his first paragraph with a reminder that it was Montesquieu, the 18th century political philosopher from Bordeaux, who greatly inspired the authors of the U.S. Constitution.
- It's one of the better pieces to get to the crux: The problem is deeper than just the money these billionaires have, it's the platforms they control. It's the infrastructure of public discourse. "Far beyond freedom of opinion," Fenoglio writes, "it is once again the facts that are under attack, as well as the methods used to place them at the heart of public debate. Without these facts, no discussion is possible, no opinion is founded."
I'm not here to debate semantics. I don't care whether oligarchy is an imprecise fit, it gets the main point across. When Elon Musk supports a hate-fuelled campaign in the U.S., backs every far-right cause around Europe, and is constantly amplifying racist and anti-LGBTQ+ views on his Twitter clone website, I'm not going to argue over whether his "gesture" at a Trump inauguration gala resembles a top-form Sieg Heil or not. We all know what we saw. The counter argument is gas lighting. "This wasn't an isolated incident," writes Joan Westenberg. "It was not a misunderstanding. It was the culmination of years of increasingly overt Nazi behavior from a man who controls both vast wealth and one of the world's largest communication platforms." None of this happened in secret. We saw it splayed across the platforms owned by the super-villain class that we've been convinced represents some kind of digital town square.
There is a tacit quid pro quo between Trump and his oligarchy. Trying to figure out who is pulling whose strings is to diminish the transactional nature of the arrangement. When Trump announces the U.S. will plant a flag on Mars and gives Elon a "department of government efficiency" (DOGE) to play with, that's what spending $44 billion to crash Twitter and another $277 million on political campaigning will get you.
Content moderation with MAGA vibes.
We don't know the specifics, but we don't need to. There's a raft of executive orders that benefit the Tech Oligarchy. They're getting it on taxes, regulations, rescinding Biden’s executive order on AI safety, and other goodies, like committing to support a $500 billion boom in infrastructure for artificial intelligence ventures which makes of UK's AI Turbocharge pledge look like coins found between the couch cushions. And here's what we saw: OpenAI updated its policy to remove references around politically biased content. Meta revised content moderation rules to make it easier for bigots to attack whatever group they hate while it censored information aimed at women about accessing abortion services. TikTok thanks Trump for cancelling its ban in America by censoring "Free Palestine" on its platform and joins Meta in loosening its moderation policies to make it easier for MAGAs to reach Gen Z. Bezos joined Zuckerberg in cutting any pretence of a commitment to diversity in employment, and made sure to delete all the content on equity for black people and LGBTQ+ support from Amazon websites. The avalanche of bad changes continues. These are just a taster. For an administration that claims to hate performative virtue signalling, its oligarchy is full of people who are the guiltiest of it.
In exchange whatever these internet robber-barons are getting, they'll easily support and administration that attacks environmental protection laws, pulls out of climate agreements, quits the World Health Organisation, attacks immigrants, women's rights, erases trans identities, empowers violent hate groups, reverses policies that support minorities in the workplace, closes the Pentagon office aimed at reducing civilian deaths, and probably kicks puppies for fun.
Orange guy has signed 200+ executive orders, we aren't going to itemise everything here, but there are strong indicators many of them have been pooped out by generative AI bots, so that could explain why so many people are confused by how they could be implemented. If this is the case, then this is officially the first AI-assisted world leader. The existential threat isn't from a super-intelligent artificial intelligence, it's from hustlers that want to automate their kleptocracy.
“Trump has largely bent media and technology companies to his will," Oliver Darcy wrote the day before the inauguration. "Industry leaders, many of whom are facing various business challenges and are wary of provoking a president eager to weaponize his office against dissenters, have largely chosen appeasement over confrontation.”
Enough of all that. Let's get back to fire. In 1962, the Los Angeles Fire Department produced "Design for Disaster," a 27-minute documentary about the Bel Air Fire of 1961, which destroyed 484 homes in the neighbourhood-t0-the-stars, and warned about systemic fire risks in LA's landscape and urban design. Its source material stems from a 1959 survey by the National Protection Association. It found the Santa Monica Mountains within the city — full of combustible roofed houses closely spaced in dry, brush-covered canyons — were perfectly made for repeating fiery disasters.
The same conditions that destroyed Zsa Zsa Gabor's Bellagio Place pad still exist, only worse given changes to the climate. Tastes change but the habits remain, and so fires return like a cyclical reminder that we're still doing it wrong.
The architects of the firetraps come in all shapes. As Trump heads out peruse the destruction wrought by the fires of LA and announce "limits" on the federal aid the state can receive, his administration also announced plans to dismantle FEMA. It makes sense he'd find common cause with a Tech Bro saturated oligarchy that also want to drop their Trust & Safety teams and call it the new "masculine energy." The Tech Oligarchy is getting free reign to ignore the public good and reap the profits on their platforms by doing what they can to support a regime that wants to accomplish that across civilisation.
We are in an age of corporate capture on the internet. It's been an oligarchy for some time. Amazon hasn't just monopolised online retail, it hosts a large portion of the web. 30% of email addresses out there use gmail. Meta has over 3 billion active users worldwide. Elon's Starlink network controls two thirds of the satellites orbiting the planet. This is also a design for disaster. It can promote genocidal propaganda, rain burning debris that may just hit anywhere, poison the atmosphere, and just ruin the night sky. It can throw off democracies or assist in automating war crimes. And other stuff. These companies have been lobbying governments for ages. Elon lives on government subsidies. Trump has invited them in. They can move fast and break civilisation, now. It makes sense that some folks may want to do something about it... big, small, whatever. By that I mean they want to build the internet differently, reboot it in ways that aim counter this other kind of cycle of wildfires.
"The solution to this is decentralized, federated, portable social media in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere when the server they are posting on changes its rules, changes its politics, is threatened or attacked by the government, or otherwise becomes untenable," writes Jason Koebler, a cofounder of 404 Media. "The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms’ relevance and importance doesn’t necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it."
I'm a sucker for these kinds of things. They're the scruffy underdogs. I want them to win. I wanted Mastodon to beat Twitter back when I made an account in 2017. I download all the P2P apps and have a go and am happy to federate all the things. Mostly they linger in the low-user numbers and flicker out over time. There are many aging Github repos of long declined nice tries. But there's a different energy this year. Fuelled by Trump's debutante ball for the Tech Oligarchy boys, advocates of nascent, still unfinished platforms and obscure interoperable protocols are trying to build movements around them. This is different. Not like Apple's Think Different. But like these are going to create the firebreak that stops the blaze from spreading.
Let's start with the Social Web Foundation. It aims to create an "open future
for social networks" by developing a "growing, healthy, sustainable and
multi-polar Fediverse." The engine behind this would be ActivityPub, a federated protocol that's been with us for many years now, and is quite mature in a lot of ways. It runs all the flavours of Mastodon social sites, and the decentralised photo sharing platforms that use Pixelfed. Wordpress has been incorporating it into its CMS through plugins, and Meta's Threads has adopted it as well, letting anyone on an ActivityPub site follow any Threads user.
"The Social Web Foundation is our best chance to establish the conditions in which the new social media operates with zero harm," said Mallory Knodel, its executive director, when it launched in September last year. It's hard to see how this level of integrity can be maintained given some the foundation's participants. I'm no purist, and funding is always fraught with ethical dilemmas, but the foundation has in its membership companies that do not benefit from a zero-harm social media ecosystem.
While it's good to see Ghost and Mastodon working with some other good names in there, Meta's involvement has to be seen as malicious. Meta is no friend to decentralised competition. Earlier this month it blocked links to Pixelfed on Instagram and on Facebook labelled all links to it as 'spam' triggering auto-deletions of posts about it there. Much the way that Google killed off xmpp/Jabber as a once active open and decentralised communication ecosystem running many apps, Meta will eventually need to exercise the same Embrace, Extend, Extinguish approach to squash the Fediverse. ActivityPub is open, so any platform can adopt it, but you don't have federate with bad actors trying to use it. The Fediverse may let you see Threads posts while being on Mastodon, but you won't see the ads that are on Threads. That is not going to be a tolerable position for Meta for long.
Zuckerberg has a track record for acquiring and consuming good initiatives for his own interests. Meta exists as a brand because the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative bought and then destroyed a small academic software company in Canada just so Facebook could get meta.org as a domain. Meta is bigger than everything in the Social Web Foundation combined, and it sees anything that allows engagement outside of its walls as a threat.
"As creators of federated social software, we have a choice," Darius Kazemi had said well before this foundation existed or before Meta had created a Threads that would use ActivityPub. "We can compete with social media giants on their own terms, or we can play our own game, one that's impossible for the giants to play in the first place. If we want to do the latter, we need to identify the fundamental assumptions that constrain the giants and ask ourselves what we can do when we throw those assumptions out entirely." This is still true.
There's a tendency to seek legitimacy (and cash!) by sticking a couple of big corporate logos on the NASCAR section of every foundation's website. It's good PR for large companies who often see their involvement as little more than a bit of propaganda that they aren't all that bad. Some folks at these companies may really support these causes themselves, but when it comes to tech giants' involvement with little tech, it's often a trap. It repeats the old paradigm. It's designing for disaster.
Mastodon shouldn't have any truck with this. It recently announced its own efforts to ward off threats of enshittification by transferring ownership of "key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual." Given that it's developing its own nonprofit structure, I don't see the need to engage with consortiums with the enemy. “Our core mission remains the same: to create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms or corporate monopolies,” Mastodon claims. That would not be in line with the kind of platforms that Meta wants. Lately it seems like Automattic isn't that interested in the free and open web, either.
ActivityPub and services like Mastodon that use it have some interesting anti-authoritarian qualities baked into the source code. Centralised algorithms can't game it across the federated network. It carries some nice, inherent anti-censorship capacity, and users can more easily retrieve and migrate their data if they want to leave one platform for another. At the core protocol level, it's pretty fireproof. Big Tech will want to kill it.
Verdict: Firetrap elements lurk in the foundation's membership.
Free Our Feeds is aimed at scaling up the AT Protocol, the underlying a social networking framework that runs Bluesky. It's designed for decentralisation even if it's currently only limited to one site for now. It could ostensibly allow users to control their online identity and data across different platforms if it ever gets used beyond the one. I enjoy BlueSky. It's the Hot Mess of social platforms right now. It's still being built even as it's out of beta and amassing a 27+ million user base. While Mastodon heads toward decentralising ownership and management, Bluesky is very much a traditional top-down entity. It was created by Twitter Jack and then he abandoned it for crypto bros on Nostr. What Bluesky has going for it is a community. It's prettier and more fun than Mastodon can be a lot of the time, but it's still a plane flying while the plane is being built. It has no business model; it doesn't seem to want to be a nonprofit. I tend to think of it as the one that's here for a good time, if not a long time.
A lot of Bluesky's most active users left Twitter because of Elon and are eager for it to take down his platform. They also want Bluesky to challenge Facebook and TikTok. I'm one of these, myself. Free Our Feeds aims to accomplish this by supporting wider spread adoption of the AT Protocol. While Mastodon has been plugging along challenging Big Social for years, AT Protocol is new. Many users of Mastodon are open-source software devotees. A lot of Bluesky users are less concerned about GNU software licensing technicalities. Free Our Feeds is promoting the protocol with a far more political manifesto...
"With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square.
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.
This isn't just about bolstering one new social media platform. Our vision offers a pathway to an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any company or billionaire.
Join the movement to liberate social media. Will you donate?"
Then there is a "donate" button.
“Personally, I think it’s a wasted opportunity to organize this huge effort with a $30 million fundraising goal just to rebuild … what already exists and flourishes today on ActivityPub,” Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko told WaPo. "He argued that Bluesky’s protocol, called AT Protocol, is designed in a way that gives Bluesky too much control over the system as a whole, meaning that 'it will always be an uphill battle' to make it truly open." Or, as one Mastodon user posted: "Spending thirty million dollars to somehow force bluesky to interoperate with a copy of itself while people are out here connecting C64s, AA-powered PalmPilots, aquarium pumps and toothbrushes to the Fediverse is definitely an entire idea."
Free Our Feeds isn't affiliated with Bluesky. Its "Technical Advisors and Custodians" roster is full of an impressive assortment of individuals who run the Mozilla Foundation, Future of Technology Institute, some AI companies and so forth. It also includes the executive director of the Social Web Foundation, Mallory Knodel (crossover!). The home page content quoted above is an open letter signed by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Shoshana Zuboff, Cory Doctorow, Mark Ruffalo and other names people in journalism, music and media. It seeks $30 million from donors to create a public-interest foundation aimed at turning AT Protocol into a global standard; build relays to basically truly federate Bluesky (it's only one site still); and pay developers I guess to do all of these things.
"There is a broad vision for something different, wrote Knodel on her foundation's site about her joining Free Our Feeds. "We do not have to settle for how corporate spaces choose to govern, or not govern, themselves. The promise of an open social web is that we can all join communities and that online communities can be interconnected."
Brilliant. Love it. Let's do it. The goal is targeted at saving social platforms from the malign control of billionaires. It sees the AT Protocol as the vehicle for this destination. They should then worry about what Mark Cuban is up to. The tech investor wants to fund a TikTok clone using the AT Protocol. Are they going to collaborate, compete, or ignore? This matters. Cuban is anti-Trump and no friend of Elon, from a political compass standpoint, he's an alley in a lot of ways. The sentiment isn't the problem. Concentrated wealth creates its own physics. It changes gravity and how everything orbits around it. If Cuban was serious about this, he'd donate that mad cash anonymously and never out himself for having done it. Billionaires don't do this. If he's a traditional billionaire, he goes through Bluesky's front door and just buys controlling stake. There are no new problems, just persistent ones.
Wealth concentration keeps the super-rich in the middle of everything since everything still costs money. Trump this week attempted to kill off the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change by pulling U.S. contributions to it. Michael Bloomberg announced he'll cover it. This is good, of course. We need that. How many other UN bodies can just be subsidised by billionaires? Are they going to put the Human Rights Council on eBay? If countries keep opting out of obligations, do we end up with a United Nations run on pocket money from the super-rich? George Soros is one of my favourite billionaires. His philanthropy started with scholarships to Black South Africans under apartheid and has scaled out to support everything needed for strong democratic societies around the globe ever since, which makes you realise why so many of the far right don't like him. These things should be able to exist independently of billionaires, though. They are ultimately put at risk by wealth concentration itself. How can Free Our Feeds develop a firewall against billionaires (even those with the best of intentions) and still thrive? Should it do that, or establish more foundational policies on how it operates? Not every bad actor is a billionaire. What should its members say no to? What's to say Bluesky and its AT Protocol couldn't just be bought within the span of a phone call? Our models are still designed for disaster.
Verdict: Firetrap elements lurk in the Free Our Feeds approach.
Back to the fire. The LA wildfires sparked renewed interest in how indigenous people had historically managed these risks. Before settlers showed up, native tribes set small burns that kept the land healthy, scorched off waste and reset the land. That practice was banned by the usurping state, allowing invasive plants like mustard to proliferate. These plants suck up lots of water and then create dense, dry vegetation during droughts, which are all around lots of easy burning houses. Poof.
I'm going to tie it all together, now. Are you ready for this?
Be the fire. That good, controlled burn. To beat the Tech Oligarchy boys at the protocol level, burn off what would be their fuel before they arrive and create an ecosystem hostile to their spread.
- Build alliances against the shared threat. Free Our Feeds and the Social Web Foundation combine around supporting an open standard for federated social protocols instead of being weird frenemies with favourite models competing for donors and support. Create alliances between tribes to oppose colonisation. Do this by filling organising efforts with people directly targeted by the Tech Oligarchy under Trump's leadership. We need to see the interests of users in at-risk communities represented across these initiatives, not the logos of their persecutors.
- The causes of the wildfire can't be part of the solution. Before working together, the Open Social Foundation should boot out Meta and any other companies or organisations that aren't committed to transparency and free open-source software, fair use practices, eliminating malicious algorithms, and anything else that leads to monetising data or micro-targeting users. Meta's Threads federation seems to be more or less a one-way street. It's easier to follow a Threads user from Mastodon than the other way around. This is like the large pistachio farmers in Southern California who displace water from where it's needed and contribute to both the wildfire-igniting climate conditions, and deplete the amount of water available to deal with it.
- Case in point: FOSDEM, an annual event for developers of free & open-source software, damaged its credibility among its core community by giving tech billionaire mogul Jack Dorsey a platform. "If billionaires want to participate in FOSS," blogged Drew DeVault, "I’m going to ask them to refrain from using our platforms to talk about their AI / blockchain / bitcoin / climate-disaster-as-a-service grifty business ventures, and instead buy our respect by, say, donating 250 million dollars to NLNet or the Sovereign Tech Fund." Before being forced to cancel the talk, FOSDEM had published a request: "We would appreciate if anyone organizing a protest would contact us in advance at info@fosdem.org so we can ensure that we’re able to meet our crowd control and fire safety obligations." Ha!
- The first web was the open web, that's its native terrain. It was also a diverse web, with all kinds of tools and functions doing different things. Some talked to one another, others didn't. Who cares? This is the indigenous vegetation that the colonial Big Tech companies displaced to build their large settlements. Being committed to a single protocol, or even a pair of them, is to limit the diversity of growth we need. Focus on the standards that foster a diversity of these to sprout. A single identity online is what Big Tech wants. It makes it easier to categorise and target users on everything from sneakers to diet pills to voting for Brexit. Develop for diverse online identities and this disrupts the blaze.
- Allow controlled burns at the protocol level. Algorithms and AI models both need data. Deleting content from Facebook doesn't remove it from its trove of content that feeds its algorithm. OpenAI needs access a corpus of back content to steal for it training models. Good open, federated protocols embrace the ephemeral. I'm a fan of auto-deletion and tools that deprioritise older content. I use Mastodon's auto-deletion mode on a 7-day timer. I periodically run Profile Cleaner on my Bluesky account to wipe older posts. Whenever I start a new conversation on Signal, it retains messages exchanged for about a week. We don't need a corpus. Social is about conversation, and that is something that happens in the present. Good social protocols will make it harder for scrapers to crawl entire feeds by allowing parameters for auto-deletion or unsearchable personal archiving.
- Recognise firetraps and support ways to flee them. The web is a sand mandala, platforms come and go. Don't depend on structures that are built to burn. Data interoperability is great, standardised formats allow different systems to talk to one another. When they're adopted by large tech companies with ambitions to monetise everything in their path it can also be a super spreader. It's like those houses that burned faster than the others in the L.A. hills because they had great airflow throughout. As innovative and fun as interoperability can be, any good set of open protocols can support data portability, letting users easily export their content and move it somewhere else. Bridges between protocols are fine, but we may need boats.
We need controlled burns at the protocol level, and the kinds of online terrain that our Tech Oligarchy boys can't burn through. When Shakespeare penned Jaques' "All the World's a Stage" speech in As You Like It, he envisioned an eternally impermeable metaphorical platform in which ephemeral characters wandered on an off. He didn't think some of them might actually light it on fire. He didn't predict that some of us might actually try to be the infrastructure itself. Yeah, I just mutilated a Shakespeare reference for the cause. Fin.
Obligatory...
