🙋🏾‍♂️🤳 Exploring new concepts for a people-powered internet

An excerpt of Nick Couldry’s new book, The Space of the World

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“In recent decades, for the first time in history, human beings started designing, even if haphazardly, something which never before could be designed,” writes Nick Couldry in his new book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?

That new thing being designed for the first time in human history? Nick says it’s “the space, potentially, of all possible spaces where people live and interact, and how information and communication circulate between those spaces.” No king, emperor, or dictator has ever been able to do this, he says, but through the internet, we’ve ceded those design choices to a few businesses (“commercially managed platforms, portals, apps and search engines”) and the billionaires who control them.

Nick is a Friend of New_ Public, a sociologist, and a Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Space of the World, the first book of a planned trilogy, puts forth “a social theory that investigates that space’s implications for social life on the broadest scale.” This leads Nick to some interesting places, including some rarely mentioned in this conversation, such as how social media may be making it harder for us to confront the existential emergency of climate change — so heartbreakingly on display in LA’s fires right now.

Towards the end of the book, Nick explores various solutions, including new, decentralized social media projects (New_ Public’s Sam Liebeskind has a great primer here.) Recently, Bluesky has captured people’s attention as a rapidly-growing, independent, semi-open platform built on a federated protocol. This section, written before Bluesky started throwing heat, is a great exploration of different concerns and opportunities in designing alternative social media. Nick and his publisher, Polity, have graciously allowed us to excerpt it here, exclusively for our newsletter. Below I’ve adapted most of Nick’s footnotes into links and added my own bolding.

–Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial

Public Values for Social Media

Federated platforms are not the only answer to our needs, but they clearly express a public value: rejecting the tyranny of pure markets, they assert a principle of community, devolving much of their governance down to smaller scales where actual communities can operate, groups of people who have reason to know and trust each other and act in a common interest.

Another approach, which may be useful while commercial social media remain powerful, is to introduce something like community governance into commercial platforms themselves. This was largely how things were done in the early years of online communities on bulletin boards, multi-user domains and the like. Right now, there are examples within commercial platforms, such as the ‘subreddit’ groups within Reddit, to which are delegated at least the moderation of their discussions. In the short run, this might be a way of shoring up the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in large platforms, but the risk is that in the long run those platforms would refuse to make more fundamental changes in their business models, while happily free-riding on the community efforts of their users.

A third proposal goes further: to build a new public infrastructure for social media and indeed for other forms of online organising, alongside commercial platforms and federated alternatives. This ‘intentionally digital public infrastructure’, as Ethan Zuckerman puts it, would be publicly supported and non-commercial. An infrastructure that supports existing communities, including civil society organisations, to meet, talk and organise online. In the US, campaigning organisations are now emerging to signal this new direction, such as New_ Public (led by Eli Pariser, mentioned in Chapter 5) and the Center for Humane Technology, founded by former Google psychologist, Tristan Harris.

Consider also the PublicSpaces collective of Dutch organisations. This is currently building spaces such as PubHubs, where people can talk within a secure larger space that is not for profit, designed to support civic values and solidarity. PublicSpaces operates on a federated principle, devolving the management of discussions and activities down to particular communities on the network. But, unlike federated social platforms, it does not have any plans to scale globally beyond its Dutch setting. It is intended, however, as a complement to the Fediverse. In size, it is significant: it links thirty-five Dutch civic social and arts organisations, so reaching potentially more than 70 per cent of the Dutch population. Meanwhile, in Mexico and the US, the MayFirst Movement Technology group securely hosts thousands of activist websites and email accounts so they no longer need to depend on commercial platforms.

PublicSpaces and the MayFirst Movement Technology are funded with public seed-money or membership fees, but there are other funding possibilities. Why don’t national governments raise taxes on the commercial social media platforms, targeted at their revenues from extractive business models? Why shouldn’t national governments, when commercial platforms blatantly distort market competition, use their leverage to extract from them resources that can fund more publicly oriented ways of running social media?

Supporting community platforms could be a very useful way of addressing two important problems. One may be temporary, but it is still serious. There are many groups in society, particularly vulnerable groups like forced migrants with few resources and even less political voice, who rely on the free infrastructure of Big Tech platforms. A priority for new public infrastructures should be to build resources for vulnerable groups for whom federated platforms may not right now be helpful. There is an important role here to be played by platform cooperatives that bring individual workers together, based on ‘communal ownership and democratic governance’. Why not reconnect with the positive visions of computer-based sharing from earlier eras that were overwhelmed by the drive to commercialise the internet?

The other problem is how to rethink the appropriate scale and context for social media for children and young adults, a debate that, as we saw, has barely begun. Just as any community would want a say in how its young people are educated, so it should want a say in the spaces where they can interact and learn social skills. Public community initiatives may be the best starting-point for this debate. Commercial platforms have shown that they cannot be trusted to perform this role.

Photo via Unsplash

To sum up the vision so far: instead of gambling everything on building federated competitors to today’s commercial social giants, we can complement them by encouraging existing communities to pursue principles and spaces beyond the commercial options. Why not build from the communities that exist around our public institutions, such as schools, colleges, community centres? If this feels strange, that’s the legacy of thirty years of relentlessly commercialised computing. Maybe it’s time to renew what historian Joy Lisi Rankin calls the ‘people’s history of computing’.

Of course, this will not resolve everything. In particular, there will remain the difficulty of toxic groups looking for a home somewhere online, a problem that exists in society generally. This problem is not, ultimately, resolvable by single platforms: it’s a problem for the ecology of the whole internet (everything from domain names to cloud services). Meanwhile choosing open-source architecture does, by definition, allow anyone to adopt it (as Donald Trump’s Truth Social adopted Mastodon’s protocol). But effective solutions will always have their basis in the values defended by particular communities. Here federated platforms, whose members are real communities, have an advantage over commercial platforms driven by abstract business measures and shareholders looking for a return.

Contrast Mastodon’s success as a comment platform in isolating Gab’s offensive content, discussed earlier, which came from the actions of the people who run its instances, with how the alternative commercial chat platform Discord handled similar problems. Discord is a closed-source platform that is centralised, not federated, although it devolves moderation down to its groups on the basis of some powerful shared moderation tools. It is home to many very large groups (called confusingly ‘servers’) and also many very small ones. Some smaller Discord servers became notorious for being populated by alt-right extremists, including those who planned the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, USA in August 2017.

Although Discord made efforts centrally to expunge those groups, two US researchers (Daniel Heslep and P. S. Berge) have shown how the problem persists. If you want to find groups on Discord, there is a platform search engine, but this only covers large public groups. However, a third-party service called Disboard, endorsed by Discord, can help you search for smaller groups which otherwise would be invisible. This is where the offensive groups can be found. As those researchers say, Discord can advocate as many intensive moderation standards as it likes, and delete as many groups as it likes, but, given its size, this ‘is not unlike a prairie fire: fertilizing the ground after every attempted burn’.¹ Underlying all these difficulties is the permanent problem of protecting our common resources of social life, a problem that Silicon Valley engineers have ignored. The insights of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom are enduring here: that the commons is best protected from erosion and misuse by a set of rules, which include clearly defined group boundaries and respect the right of communities to adapt and implement their own version of those rules. Put more directly, platforms designed for communities are much more likely to hold to social values than platforms built for profit: after all, it is communities that are directly affected by what platforms do and so are most likely to care about getting solutions right.

What about state ownership of commercially social media? For sure, the need to reject the corporate elite who own our space of the world has never been clearer. Take the debacle at Twitter in late 2022. US communications scholar Victor Pickard spoke for many: ‘we can’t let billionaires control major communications platforms’. The ex-CEO of Twitter and founder of Twitter rival Bluesky, Jack Dorsey had already said back in 2022: ‘I don’t believe any individual or institutions should own social media.’

Is the answer as simple as nationalising commercial social media? Many left-wing critics argued this before the alternatives just discussed emerged more clearly. But nationalisation has two downsides. First, it is too optimistic about how democratic control can be asserted over today’s huge commercial platforms: how can that be done without unprecedented regulatory force? And what would democratic control mean for the longer term? Can every aspect of platform management be opened up to democratic deliberation? Second, it ignores the wider consequences of platform scale: what if many of the problems in today’s space of the world flow not just from the capitalist drive to extract profit from social life, but from the sheer scale at which they operate (itself, of course, motivated by the lust for global expansion)? It is this second problem – of scale – that federated platforms meet head on, returning ‘democratic control’ down to a scale where it can be meaningfully exercised, while maintaining overall technical oversight of the platform.

The way forward then depends not on ownership – nationalising commercial platforms – but on collective values and how those values are woven into social media designs. Let’s encourage a wealth of non-commercial alternatives to grow around Big Tech platforms in an inclusive process whereby commercial giants are weakened and, over time, lose their relevance.

Finally, consider the most radical alternative of all: the Small World model of computing proposed by Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, which proposes dispensing not only with large distant platforms, but even distant computer servers, with all our computer needs (including new versions of social media interfaces) being met by each person having their own small server.² This alternative vision of the internet’s basic infrastructure launches [soon] and, if it inspires developers to work with it, might offer a completely new starting-point for a public-value-driven internet, a connected space of the world beyond even the Fediverse.

We must wait and see how fast these visionary ideas develop.

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Thanks Nick!

Happy to have some snow on the ground,

–Josh

1. Mastodon encountered a variation of this problem, when Gab, after adopting Mastodon’s code, started to rely on third-party apps listed on Mastodon’s central pages to gain visibility on the platform, but it appears that most, if not all, of those apps decided to block this, so sealing off this alternative entry point.

2. Compare the IndieWeb project’s vision of reorganising the internet on a ‘people-focused’ basis