Facebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would be a good exercise to reflect on the fact that, should any or all of them disappear, no user would have any legal or practical recourse. I started thinking about this situation a few years ago when Tumblr—a platform devoted to a highly streamlined form of blogging, with an emphasis on easy reposting from other accounts—was bought by Yahoo. I was a heavy user of Tumblr at the time, having made thousands of posts, and given the propensity of large tech companies to buy smaller ones and then shut them down, I wondered what would become of my posts if Yahoo decided that Tumblr wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining it. I found that I was troubled by the possibility to a degree I hadn’t anticipated. It would be hyperbolic (not to say comical) to describe my Tumblr as a work of art, but I had put a lot of thought into what went on it, and sometimes I enjoyed looking through the sequence of posts, noticing how I had woven certain themes into that sequence, or feeling pleasure at having found interesting and unusual images. I felt a surge of proprietary affection—and anxiety.
Many personal computers have installed on them a small command-line tool called wget, which allows you to download webpages, or even whole websites, to your machine. I immediately downloaded the whole of my Tumblr to keep it safe—although if Tumblr did end up being shut down, I wasn’t sure how I would get all those posts back online. But that was a problem I could reserve for another day. In the meantime, I decided that I needed to talk with my students.
I was teaching a course at the time on reading, writing, and research in digital environments, so the question of who owns what we typically think of as “our” social media presence was a natural one. Yet I discovered that these students, all of whom were already interested in and fairly knowledgeable about computing, had not considered this peculiar situation—and were generally reluctant to: After all, what were the alternatives? Social media are about connecting with people, one of them commented, which means that you have to go where the people are. So, I replied, if that means that you have to give your personal data to tech companies that make money from it, that’s what you do? My students nodded, and shrugged. And how could I blame them? They thought as I had thought until about forty-eight hours earlier; and they acted as I continued to act, although we were all to various degrees uneasy about our actions.
In the years since I became fully aware of the vulnerability of what the Internet likes to call my “content,” I have made some changes in how I live online. But I have also become increasingly convinced that this vulnerability raises wide-ranging questions that ought to be of general concern. Those of us who live much of our lives online are not faced here simply with matters of intellectual property; we need to confront significant choices about the world we will hand down to those who come after us. The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt. (...)
Learning to Live Outside the Walls
The first answers to these questions are quite concrete. This is not a case in which a social problem can profitably be addressed by encouraging people to change their way of thinking—although as a cultural critic I naturally default to that mode of suasion. It goes against my nature to say simply that certain specific changes in practice are required. But this is what I must say. We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.
What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.
In their simplicity, those protocols are relentlessly generative, producing a heterogeneous mass of material for which the most common descriptor is simply “content.” It took a while for that state of affairs to come about, especially since early Internet service providers like CompuServe and AOL tried to offer proprietary content that couldn’t be found elsewhere, after the model of newspapers or magazines. This model might have worked for a longer period if the Web had been a place of consumption only, but it was also a place of creation, and people wanted what they created to be experienced by the greatest number of people possible. (As advertising made its way onto the Web, this was true of businesses as well as individuals.) And so the open Web, the digital commons, triumphed over those first attempts to keep content enclosed.
In the relatively early years of the Web, the mass of content was small enough that a group of people at Yahoo could organize it by category, in something like a digital version of the map of human knowledge created by the French Encyclopedists. But soon this arrangement became unwieldy, and seekers grew frustrated with clicking their way down into submenus only to have to click back up again when they couldn’t find what they wanted and plunge into a different set of submenus. Moreover, as the Web became amenable to more varied kinds of “content,” the tasks of encoding, unloading, and displaying one’s stuff became more technically challenging; not all web browsers were equally adept at rendering and displaying all the media formats and types. It was therefore inevitable that companies would arise to help manage the complexities.
Thus the rise of Google, with its brilliantly simple model of keyword searching as the most efficient replacement for navigating through tree-like structures of data—and thus, ultimately, the rise of services that promised to do the technical heavy lifting for their users, display their content in a clear and consistent way, and connect them with other people with similar interests, experiences, or histories. Some of these people have become the overlords of social media.
It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.
I say there is no financial compensation for users, but many users feel themselves amply compensated by the aforementioned provisions: ease of use, connection with others, and so on. But such users should realize that everything they find desirable and beneficial about those sites could disappear tomorrow and leave them with absolutely no recourse, no one to whom to protest, no claim that they could make to anyone. When George Orwell was a scholarship boy at an English prep school, his headmaster, when angry, would tell him, “You are living on my bounty.” If you’re on Facebook, you are living on Mark Zuckerberg’s bounty.
This is of course a choice you are free to make. The problem comes when, by living in conditions of such dependence, you forget that there’s any other way to live—and therefore cannot teach another way to those who come after you. Your present-day social-media ecology eclipses the future social-media ecology of others. What if they don’t want their social lives to be bought and sold? What if they don’t want to live on the bounty of the factory owners of Silicon Valley? It would be good if we bequeathed to them another option, the possibility of living outside the walls the factory owners have built—whether for our safety or to imprison us, who can say? The open Web happens outside those walls.
A Domain of One’s Own
For the last few years we’ve been hearing a good many people (most of them computer programmers) say that every child should learn to code. As I write these words, I learn that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has echoed that counsel. Learning to code is a nice thing, I suppose, but should be far, far down on our list of priorities for the young. Coding is a problem-solving skill, and few of the problems that beset young people today, or are likely to in the future, can be solved by writing scripts or programs for computers to execute. I suggest a less ambitious enterprise with broader applications, and I’ll begin by listing the primary elements of that enterprise. I think every young person who regularly uses a computer should learn the following:
There is, of course, no way to be completely independent online, either as an individual or a community: This is life on the grid, not off. Which means that anyone who learns the skills listed above—and even those who go well beyond such skills and host their websites on their own servers, while producing electricity on their own wind farms—will nevertheless need an Internet service provider. I am not speaking here of complete digital independence, but, rather, independence from the power of the walled factories and their owners.
A person who possesses and uses the skills on my list will still be dependent on organizations like ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and its subsidiary IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). But these are nonprofit organizations, and are moving toward less entanglement with government. For instance, IANA worked for eighteen years under contract with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a bureau of the US Department of Commerce, but that contract expired in October 2016, and IANA and ICANN are now run completely by an international community of volunteers. Similarly, the W3C, which controls the protocols by which computers on the Web communicate with one another and display information to users, is governed by a heterogenous group that included, at the time of writing, not only universities, libraries, and archives from around the world but also Fortune 500 companies—a few of them being among those walled factories I have been warning against.
In essence, the open Web, while not free from governmental and commercial pressures, is about as free from such pressures as a major component of modern capitalist society can be. And indeed it is this decentralized organizational model, coupled with heavy reliance on volunteer labor, that invites the model of stewardship I commended earlier in this essay. No one owns the Internet or the World Wide Web, and barring the rise of an industrial mega-power like the Buy-n-Large Corporation of Pixar’s 2008 movie WALL•E, no one will. Indeed, the healthy independence of the Internet and the Web is among the strongest bulwarks against the rise of a Buy-n-Large or the gigantic transnational corporations that play such a major role in the futures imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson, especially in his Hugo Award–winning Mars trilogy.
Some of the people most dedicated to the maintenance and development of the open Web also produce open-source software that makes it possible to acquire the skills I listed above. In this category we may find nonprofit organizations such as Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, as well as for-profit organizations that make and release free and open-source software—for instance, Automattic, the maker of the popular blogging platform WordPress, and Github, whose employees, along with many volunteers, have created the excellent Atom text editor. One could achieve much of the independence I have recommended by using software available from those three sources alone.
I am, in short, endorsing here the goals of the Domain of One’s Own movement. As Audrey Watters, one of its most eloquent advocates, has observed,
The Difference between Projecting and Promising
Training young people how to live and work extramurally—to limit their exposure to governance via terms of service and APIs—is a vital hedge against this future. We cannot prevent anyone from trusting his or her whole life to Facebook or Snapchat; but to know that there are alternatives, and alternatives over which we have a good deal of control, is powerful in itself. And this knowledge has the further effect of reminding us that code—including the algorithmic code that so often determines what we see online—is written by human beings for purposes that may be at odds with our own. The code that constitutes Facebook is written and constantly tweaked in order to increase the flow to Facebook of sellable data; if that code also promotes “global community,” so much the better, but that will never be its reason for being.
To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently. Given the importance of online experience to most of us, and the great likelihood that its importance will only increase over time, training young people to do some building themselves can be a powerful counterspell to the one pronounced by Zuckerberg, who says that the walls of our social world are crumbling and only Facebook’s walls can replace them. We can live elsewhere and otherwise, and children should know that, and know it as early as possible. This is one of the ways in which we can exercise “the imperative of responsibility,” and to represent the future in the present.
Many personal computers have installed on them a small command-line tool called wget, which allows you to download webpages, or even whole websites, to your machine. I immediately downloaded the whole of my Tumblr to keep it safe—although if Tumblr did end up being shut down, I wasn’t sure how I would get all those posts back online. But that was a problem I could reserve for another day. In the meantime, I decided that I needed to talk with my students.
I was teaching a course at the time on reading, writing, and research in digital environments, so the question of who owns what we typically think of as “our” social media presence was a natural one. Yet I discovered that these students, all of whom were already interested in and fairly knowledgeable about computing, had not considered this peculiar situation—and were generally reluctant to: After all, what were the alternatives? Social media are about connecting with people, one of them commented, which means that you have to go where the people are. So, I replied, if that means that you have to give your personal data to tech companies that make money from it, that’s what you do? My students nodded, and shrugged. And how could I blame them? They thought as I had thought until about forty-eight hours earlier; and they acted as I continued to act, although we were all to various degrees uneasy about our actions.In the years since I became fully aware of the vulnerability of what the Internet likes to call my “content,” I have made some changes in how I live online. But I have also become increasingly convinced that this vulnerability raises wide-ranging questions that ought to be of general concern. Those of us who live much of our lives online are not faced here simply with matters of intellectual property; we need to confront significant choices about the world we will hand down to those who come after us. The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt. (...)
Learning to Live Outside the Walls
The first answers to these questions are quite concrete. This is not a case in which a social problem can profitably be addressed by encouraging people to change their way of thinking—although as a cultural critic I naturally default to that mode of suasion. It goes against my nature to say simply that certain specific changes in practice are required. But this is what I must say. We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.
What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.
In their simplicity, those protocols are relentlessly generative, producing a heterogeneous mass of material for which the most common descriptor is simply “content.” It took a while for that state of affairs to come about, especially since early Internet service providers like CompuServe and AOL tried to offer proprietary content that couldn’t be found elsewhere, after the model of newspapers or magazines. This model might have worked for a longer period if the Web had been a place of consumption only, but it was also a place of creation, and people wanted what they created to be experienced by the greatest number of people possible. (As advertising made its way onto the Web, this was true of businesses as well as individuals.) And so the open Web, the digital commons, triumphed over those first attempts to keep content enclosed.
In the relatively early years of the Web, the mass of content was small enough that a group of people at Yahoo could organize it by category, in something like a digital version of the map of human knowledge created by the French Encyclopedists. But soon this arrangement became unwieldy, and seekers grew frustrated with clicking their way down into submenus only to have to click back up again when they couldn’t find what they wanted and plunge into a different set of submenus. Moreover, as the Web became amenable to more varied kinds of “content,” the tasks of encoding, unloading, and displaying one’s stuff became more technically challenging; not all web browsers were equally adept at rendering and displaying all the media formats and types. It was therefore inevitable that companies would arise to help manage the complexities.
Thus the rise of Google, with its brilliantly simple model of keyword searching as the most efficient replacement for navigating through tree-like structures of data—and thus, ultimately, the rise of services that promised to do the technical heavy lifting for their users, display their content in a clear and consistent way, and connect them with other people with similar interests, experiences, or histories. Some of these people have become the overlords of social media.
It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.
I say there is no financial compensation for users, but many users feel themselves amply compensated by the aforementioned provisions: ease of use, connection with others, and so on. But such users should realize that everything they find desirable and beneficial about those sites could disappear tomorrow and leave them with absolutely no recourse, no one to whom to protest, no claim that they could make to anyone. When George Orwell was a scholarship boy at an English prep school, his headmaster, when angry, would tell him, “You are living on my bounty.” If you’re on Facebook, you are living on Mark Zuckerberg’s bounty.
This is of course a choice you are free to make. The problem comes when, by living in conditions of such dependence, you forget that there’s any other way to live—and therefore cannot teach another way to those who come after you. Your present-day social-media ecology eclipses the future social-media ecology of others. What if they don’t want their social lives to be bought and sold? What if they don’t want to live on the bounty of the factory owners of Silicon Valley? It would be good if we bequeathed to them another option, the possibility of living outside the walls the factory owners have built—whether for our safety or to imprison us, who can say? The open Web happens outside those walls.
A Domain of One’s Own
For the last few years we’ve been hearing a good many people (most of them computer programmers) say that every child should learn to code. As I write these words, I learn that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has echoed that counsel. Learning to code is a nice thing, I suppose, but should be far, far down on our list of priorities for the young. Coding is a problem-solving skill, and few of the problems that beset young people today, or are likely to in the future, can be solved by writing scripts or programs for computers to execute. I suggest a less ambitious enterprise with broader applications, and I’ll begin by listing the primary elements of that enterprise. I think every young person who regularly uses a computer should learn the following:
how to choose a domain nameOne could add considerably to this list, but these, I believe, are the rudimentary skills that should be possessed by anyone who wants to be a responsible citizen of the open Web—and not to be confined to living on the bounty of the digital headmasters.
how to buy a domain
how to choose a good domain name provider
how to choose a good website-hosting service
how to find a good free text editor
how to transfer files to and from a server
how to write basic HTML, including links to CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files
how to find free CSS templates
how to fiddle around in those templates to adjust them to your satisfaction
how to do basic photograph editing
how to cite your sources and link to the originals
how to use social media to share what you’ve created on your own turf rather than create within a walled factory
There is, of course, no way to be completely independent online, either as an individual or a community: This is life on the grid, not off. Which means that anyone who learns the skills listed above—and even those who go well beyond such skills and host their websites on their own servers, while producing electricity on their own wind farms—will nevertheless need an Internet service provider. I am not speaking here of complete digital independence, but, rather, independence from the power of the walled factories and their owners.
A person who possesses and uses the skills on my list will still be dependent on organizations like ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and its subsidiary IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). But these are nonprofit organizations, and are moving toward less entanglement with government. For instance, IANA worked for eighteen years under contract with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a bureau of the US Department of Commerce, but that contract expired in October 2016, and IANA and ICANN are now run completely by an international community of volunteers. Similarly, the W3C, which controls the protocols by which computers on the Web communicate with one another and display information to users, is governed by a heterogenous group that included, at the time of writing, not only universities, libraries, and archives from around the world but also Fortune 500 companies—a few of them being among those walled factories I have been warning against.
In essence, the open Web, while not free from governmental and commercial pressures, is about as free from such pressures as a major component of modern capitalist society can be. And indeed it is this decentralized organizational model, coupled with heavy reliance on volunteer labor, that invites the model of stewardship I commended earlier in this essay. No one owns the Internet or the World Wide Web, and barring the rise of an industrial mega-power like the Buy-n-Large Corporation of Pixar’s 2008 movie WALL•E, no one will. Indeed, the healthy independence of the Internet and the Web is among the strongest bulwarks against the rise of a Buy-n-Large or the gigantic transnational corporations that play such a major role in the futures imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson, especially in his Hugo Award–winning Mars trilogy.
Some of the people most dedicated to the maintenance and development of the open Web also produce open-source software that makes it possible to acquire the skills I listed above. In this category we may find nonprofit organizations such as Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, as well as for-profit organizations that make and release free and open-source software—for instance, Automattic, the maker of the popular blogging platform WordPress, and Github, whose employees, along with many volunteers, have created the excellent Atom text editor. One could achieve much of the independence I have recommended by using software available from those three sources alone.
I am, in short, endorsing here the goals of the Domain of One’s Own movement. As Audrey Watters, one of its most eloquent advocates, has observed,
By providing students and staff with a domain, I think we can start to address this [effort to achieve digital independence]. Students and staff can start to see how digital technologies work—those that underpin the Web and elsewhere. They can think about how these technologies shape the formation of their understanding of the world—how knowledge is formed and shared; how identity is formed and expressed. They can engage with that original purpose of the Web—sharing information and collaborating on knowledge-building endeavors—by doing meaningful work online, in the public, with other scholars. [The goal is that] they have a space of their own online, along with the support and the tools to think about what that can look like.Watters adds that such a program of education goes far beyond the mere acquisition of skills: “I think its potential is far more radical than that. This isn’t about making sure literature students ‘learn to code’ or history students ‘learn to code’ or medical faculty ‘learn to code’ or chemistry faculty ‘learn to code.’” Instead, the real possibilities emerge from “recognizing that the World Wide Web is a site for scholarly activity. It’s about recognizing that students are scholars.” Scholars, I might add, who, through their scholarship, can be accountable to the future—who, to borrow a phrase from W.H. Auden, can “assume responsibility for time.” (...)
The Difference between Projecting and Promising
Training young people how to live and work extramurally—to limit their exposure to governance via terms of service and APIs—is a vital hedge against this future. We cannot prevent anyone from trusting his or her whole life to Facebook or Snapchat; but to know that there are alternatives, and alternatives over which we have a good deal of control, is powerful in itself. And this knowledge has the further effect of reminding us that code—including the algorithmic code that so often determines what we see online—is written by human beings for purposes that may be at odds with our own. The code that constitutes Facebook is written and constantly tweaked in order to increase the flow to Facebook of sellable data; if that code also promotes “global community,” so much the better, but that will never be its reason for being.
To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently. Given the importance of online experience to most of us, and the great likelihood that its importance will only increase over time, training young people to do some building themselves can be a powerful counterspell to the one pronounced by Zuckerberg, who says that the walls of our social world are crumbling and only Facebook’s walls can replace them. We can live elsewhere and otherwise, and children should know that, and know it as early as possible. This is one of the ways in which we can exercise “the imperative of responsibility,” and to represent the future in the present.
by Alan Jacobs, The Hedgehog | Read more:
Image: HedgehogReview.com
[ed. This is why I got off Facebook. Why share stuff I was interested in through an intermediary? Of course, Google could kill me off at anytime as well, and probably will at some point (being on Blogger), so enjoy Duck Soup while you can (or until I figure out how to transfer everything over to WordPress).]
[ed. This is why I got off Facebook. Why share stuff I was interested in through an intermediary? Of course, Google could kill me off at anytime as well, and probably will at some point (being on Blogger), so enjoy Duck Soup while you can (or until I figure out how to transfer everything over to WordPress).]
