In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

How to counter the power of social media platforms?

Written by

Lorraine Lee

in

They need to be disassembled, in the assembly language sense. The root of the problem is commercializing the Internet in the first place. I don’t know what if anything can be done at this stage. Maybe create a whole new internet from scratch, and hopefully leapfrog some key mistakes that went into the development of the one we have. Being an ancom, I deeply distrust both business and government. I think the Internet had some promise as a positive technological development back when much of it was concentrated in academia, but of course I don’t very much trust academia, either. I do think the replacement for the Internet should be explicitly monetization-hostile by design.

For now, rear guard defensive action to preserve (or if necessary, restore) what’s still good about the Internet such as the fact that it runs on a nonproprietary stack of protocols, while creating and promoting nonproprietary (necessarily, noncommercial) and decentralized alternatives to the “platforms.” Also, reverse-engineering at least a modicum of interoperability into the damn platforms by licit means or otherwise.

Comments

2 responses to “How to counter the power of social media platforms?”

  1. edisondotme Avatar
    edisondotme

    Starting over: https://geminiquickst.art/
    What do you think?

    Reply
    1. Lorraine Lee Avatar
      Lorraine Lee

      I certainly approve. I especially like that they actually included the words “DIY ethos” in their spiel. The need to resuscitate that in particular is very, very key, a point seemingly missed by the many projects focusing on things like federation or (gag me) “free speech.” Note that the present comment is from a quick reading of the linked page, and so far I’ve only read the four-point bulleted list. Going full plaintext is cute. I don’t know how necessary it is. As is pointed out, it definitively eliminates tracking, which is both simple and elegant. I do believe, however, that “hypertext” (most essentially defined as text containing links) is one of those technologies that actually helps liberate knowledge, but that’s assuming the lines of communication aren’t already clogged with linkspam. Everything in the early web having to do with hacking was published as plaintext, even though HTML was an option. They had their reasons. I’m not sure I understand the need for a new request architecture (and a new protocol?) for this network of plaintext content. Certainly ‘text/plain’ is still one of the MIME types supported by HTTP(S)://.

      Reply

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