Oh No, Technology!

The Closed Web and Illusory Ownership

With the the USL season done and my Hartford Athletic's playoff hopes long crushed, I've been back to thinking about other things in my life, this time the role technology has in it.

It started with my laptop, I have one of the MacBooks with the M1 processor in it, and I'd picked up the project to put linux on these machines. The Asahi Linux developers had been so incredible in their work that it really inspired me, it made me feel like using free software was viable again.

Combined with a recent Cory Doctorow talk I watched, this has driven me to remove myself very consciously from certain aspects of the corporate web. It's also got me thinking about the internet we could have if we push in the right way, the free web, the social web. My first post on this site was "The Era of Three Websites Is Over" and that's no more true than today, when it is revealed that NPR hasn't lost any measureable traffick from leaving twitter.

Which brings me to the title of this post, once I started to move away from some of the big platforms, it became easier to see how they were taking choice away from me, and how little they really offered in return. I miss the people I had found on twitter, but I like the people I've found on mastodon too. There are innumerable alternatives to google and all of them are about as bad as modern google is. (except Kagi, which I actually kind of like)

What we sell to the closed web is choice and what we receive is convenience. As Cory describes, the platforms will always try to minimize your choices to their own ends, especially absent competition. You can ask Facebook to show you posts from relatives, friends, people who share interests with you, and Facebook will still serve you posts boosted by the daily wire instead because the daily wire pays them and your friends don't. In all cases, the content you want to see is less profitable than the content the platforms want you to see, so they will put as much of their stuff in your feed as you will tolerate.

But you won't tolerate as much as the platforms want you to, so they have to trick you, and they do it by pretending you have control over what you see. You get the ability to like content to make it show up in your feed, you get to ask the platform to show you less of some content, you get to follow users so they'll show up in your feed. In reality none of these controls are promises, and all of them are contingent on what you won't click away from. In truth, you have no control over what you see and the platforms will remind you of that if you stick around long enough to let them.

GIF from The Simpsons scene where all the giant mascots are ruining town and Paul Anka sings 'just don't look'

The solution then is to click away. It seems hard, and it is at first, but once you stop looking and start looking other places you realize just how little the platforms actually do for you, and how much of your time and attention they were sucking. You're already on neocities, try looking around there, or check out other indieweb stuff. There's so much out there to make the internet fun again, you only have to look.

In USL news, the oakland roots community round went well, but unfortunately the ownership of the club was not in fact for sale, and all "investors" purchased was in name only, along with a survey they could fill out that indicated their preference on certain club activities, which would be passed along to a representative "lead investor" who would then actually vote on club matters, with some voting power far less than 20%. Certainly not enough to keep an Oakland team in Oakland. Keep in mind the dangers of illusory ownership when companies ask you to "invest" in their business.

What I'm up to

  • Moving some of my online services from "free" platforms to self hosted stuff
  • Putting together a mastodon server

Watch out for

  • Some kind of self hosted chat server
  • An anouncement about a connecticut focused mastodon server, it looks like the nutmeg.social admin is AWOL
  • A zine???? (maybe if I post it online I'll actually do it)

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