Towards a more democratic Web

In the aftermath of the recent Harvey Weinstein revelations, Rose McGowan was suspended from Twitter for breaching its Terms of Service. Twitter made an unusual move by commenting on the status of a specific user’s account, which it normally publicly declares it does not do.

Many people who have suffered harassment on Twitter (largely women), are understandably fed up with Twitter’s practices, and have staged a boycott of Twitter today October 13, 2017. Presumably the goal is to highlight the flaws in Twitter’s moderation policies, and to push the company to make meaningful changes in their policies, but I’d like to argue that we shouldn’t expect Twitter’s policies to change.

Twitter: a neutral platform or a curated community?

No matter if you’re a conservative, liberal, a woman, an apologist for a serial rapist (fuck you), or a Nazi (fuck you too), chances are good that at some point you’ll:

1. Say something on Twitter that leads to your account being suspended, and/or
2. Be frustrated by Twitter’s actions (or inaction) surrounding moderation

Twitter is a public space for conversation and community for millions of people, so for Twitter to suspend an account is akin to banning someone from the public center. That should not be taken lightly.

But we should also not take it lightly when when someone is harassed into silence by speech that threatens violence. Threatening speech is no longer just speech – we must consider how that speech impacts other peoples’ voices.

And here lies the problem. Twitter cannot be both neutral platform and arbiter of good and bad speech. Nor do I want Twitter to be either of those things!

• If Twitter acts as a neutral platform, then unless Twitter can provide very powerful tools to help users manage their feed and who they engage with, then the platform will be flooded with bots, harassment, racism, libel, and all flavors of filth. A purely neutral platform leads to a terrible experience for users.
• If Twitter acts as the decider of good/bad content, then we all have to worry about whether or not our opinions align with what Twitter has deemed “appropriate”. Maybe they align right now, but what happens if Twitter gets new executives, or if someday Twitter’s leadership is pressured by powerful forces to silence people with beliefs like mine?

Neither of those situations are ideal, and currently Twitter is dancing somewhere between these two worlds, trying to be a neutral platform while selectively enforcing bans and suspensions.

Twitter’s stalemate

You may not agree with Twitter’s policies, but you can likely observe the forces at play here, and understand why Twitter’s moderation policies have appeared inconsistent, unfair, and sometimes downright wrong.

It’s because Twitter is not driven by doing the right thing. Twitter is motivated to avoid upsetting users to the point that they leave Twitter. Users leaving Twitter is bad for business.

For example, If Twitter suspends alt-right accounts that intentionally toe the line between American pride and white supremacy, then they lose a not-insignificant number of users who’ll cry “free speech haters”. If they don’t suspend those users, they risk losing the users who won’t stand for Twitter being used as a platform for harassment and racism.

It’s not going to get better.

Don’t hold your breath

Twitter’s executives likely think their moderation policies are driven by being fair and judicious, but those policies can’t escape the fact that Twitter’s bottom line depends almost entirely on engagement and ad revenue.

Unless we expect Twitter’s business model to change, then we shouldn’t expect their moderation policies to change. No matter what decisions Twitter makes regarding moderation, some large group of users will feel targeted, and will swiftly exit the platform.

Moreover, what could Twitter do that would be a reasonable solution? I don’t see any way out of this.

So what should we do?

Decentralize. Twitter is responsible for moderating who and what shows up in your feed because Twitter’s servers house the content that composes your feed. A centralized service like Twitter or Facebook has the choice to act as a neutral platform for speech, or set strict content guidelines and then work to uphold those policies. I don’t believe either option is a good choice.

The dream of a decentralized Web

I want to decide what is good content for me. I want help making that decision based on how people I trust have responded to that piece of content. I want to be able to mark another user as a porn bot or a Nazi, and I want people who follow me to be able to see that information, and to decide how to act on it.

And most importantly, I don’t want any single person deciding if another person has the right to speak. The fragility of expecting a “media monarch” like Twitter to make good decisions is too risky. I want online media to work much more like a democracy, where users are empowered to decide what their experience is like.

Moving forward

A lot of people feel the same way, and several decentralized social media apps have bubbled up out of this mess.

You have many options if you’re ready to give up on Twitter.

MASTODON

Mastodon has been around for a while, but since it operates on a federated network, it’s not quite the flavor of decentralized I think we deserve.

In order to participate, you have to sign up to an instance, whose servers are run by somebody else. If you pick a good instance with a good administrator, you shouldn’t have any trouble, but you still have to depend on a single person to decide what you should or should not be allowed on your feed.

Running an instance is also hard and expensive work. It would be great if we could find a way to make social media apps both free and easy to use.

PATCHWORK

Patchwork is a peer-to-peer social media application with a rich community. It’s built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt, and acts as a standalone desktop application. It’s a little rough around the edges in terms of UI and performance, but the community is really great.

BUILD A PEER-TO-PEER SOCIAL MEDIA APP ON BEAKER

I work on Beaker, a peer-to-peer browser, and we’ve built APIs that give developers the ability to publish on the user’s “profile” and “timeline”.

Profiles in Beaker are just datasets that live on the user’s computer, and are transported over a peer-to-peer network. With Beaker’s APIs, applications can ask the user for permission to read/write to a user’s profile.

The best part is that because user data is separate from application code, there’s no one social media app we all have to agree upon. As long as we all structure our data in the same format, we’re each free to use any compatible application.

I work on Beaker because I think it’s the kind of Web we deserve. Keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming 0.8 release, where we’ll be releasing the Web APIs I mentioned above. Or if you live on the bleeding edge, you can try building the development branch. If you do, be sure to check out beaker://timeline :).

Photo by Donna McNiel

The post Moving forward from Netarchical platforms in the post-Weinstein era appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The year is 2017 AD. The whole web is occupied by centralized services. Well… Not entirely. One small village of indomitable free software lovers still holds out against the invaders…

This is how the French association Framasoft presents itself. They have achieved something remarkable in the last two and a half years: Framasoft offers anyone free, libre and open-source alternatives to services like Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, Slack, Facebook Groups, Doodle. For free. Framasoft is hosting roundabout 30 services ranging from Etherpad, Nextcloud, Jitsi, Mattermost, Loomio and Studs used by hundreds of thousands of users every month (here is an quick overview of all services Framasoft offers right now). They did spend 400.000 Euros in the last two and half years on building this – most of the money came from donations.

There is much to learn from Framasoft on how to make free, libre and open-source software popular and accessible. There are many great alternatives – but you need to help people to use, understand and love them. To make it as easy as possible to use libre alternatives (here is a great talk on this at Fosdem).

The Framasoft team shares their insights in the interview below – answered collaboratively in an etherpad by six persons (the illustration above was done by Simon « Gee » Giraudot, I recut it, it is freely reusable under Creative Commons By–SA 4.0).

Why do you offer free services for anyone based on free software?

From its early age, Framasoft’s approach was– and still is – very pragmatic: we do not intend to convert people to the Libre as to a theoretical cause. We provide tools and services that you can use in your everyday environment – even on a proprietary OS! And from there on, we hope we can help people think by themselves, about their privacy, about their data, about the control they are entitled to claim on their digital lives.

Framasoft started 15 years ago, with teachers who created a directory website for free libre open source software (FLOSS), so that they could share the software with their friends and colleagues. And we kept on going along this path and proposing practical projects to bring more free libre software (DVDs, USB-Keys and so on) and culture (Blog, translations, publishing house…) to Mr-Mrs Everyone. Because we are (or were) Mr-Mrs Everyone: we still have a minority of tech-savvy hardcore developers among our midst, and we try to act as a “missing link” between this world and the widespread audience.

A turn point was 2011, when we started hosting our first Etherpad instance (the former branch). It was really powerful: as soon as we showed people how to collaborate on writing a text in real-time, online and without opening an account, they were amazed. We went on with hosting an Ethercalc instance (collaborative spreadsheets) and a now-homebrewed Doodle alternative named Framadate.

Nowadays, our association gathers people from all over France who seldom meet in the same physical space. So we have been the first to use our collaborative online services. As a matter of fact, we often started hosting them for our own private needs before making them publicly available.

But it’s only in October, 2014 that we launched our “Let’s De-Google-ify the Internet” program and made the bet that over the next three years we would host more than 30 Free-Libre and ethical alternatives to big-data services.

What do you offer that is unique compared to other web services or hosting providers?

It can all be summarized in one word: trust. We try to offer the best conditions for users to trust us with their data, thus giving them the questions everyone should ask themselves when using a hosted solution. To us the conditions of this trust stand on a few non-negotiable points:

1. Exclusive use of Free Software (as in free speech), for both the services we provide and our system administration. Their source code being open, everyone can audit them and therefore have trust in them. It also induces the use of open formats, which is key for interoperability and importing/exporting one’s data.
2. A transparent and data-friendly economic model. We chose to finance our services on user’s donations, allowing us to claim that we don’t have any financial incentive in collecting data and digital lives. Note that other economics models can also be data-friendly, but our model fit’s our goals. We aim to be as transparent as we can: our Terms of Services are user friendly.  We edited a “tl;dr”-version which only takes five minutes to acknowledge and is legally binding. Our charter describes the values we defend, we publish our administrative, technical and financial information and are always present to discuss and explain further all these information.
3. Net and social neutrality: We respect and try to protect net neutrality. Moreover, our economic model allows us to offer free services (as in free beer), so there are no differences in the services you get based on your income. Last, as we don’t need to know who you are. We don’t want nor need to get a “user profile” or a “social graph” from you. We don’t (and can’t, and won’t) discriminate the service you get based on your (non-)gender, skin color, origin, orientations, political preferences and the like.
4. Solidarity and education: We try to facilitate as much as we can the use of our services by providing startpages, quick-start guides, documentation, self-hosting tutorials, support (both individual and through our Frequently Asked Questions page), users forums. We both provide and ask for contributions on the software we use and their documentation, so our users community can also become a contributors community.
5. Decentralization: Our services are offered as a kind of proof of concept. They demonstrate that FLOSS can be an alternative to Big Data’s services, and that it is possible for the users to keep the control over their digital lives. Users can try different software and use it as much as they need, and (if and when they are ready) leave our services for even more digital independence, because they are able to host the software they need themselves. We often provide guidance for those who wants to cooperatively or self-host these services and migrate from our services to their own servers.

What are the benefits of doing this as an association instead of a cooperative for example?

Not dealing with clients :p!  OK, behind that poor-tasted-joke lies some kind of truth: we want to empower people in their digital lives, and we feel we won’t be able to do so if we place them in a passive customer role.

On a general point of view, our activities are non-commercial and we intend to keep them on a small scale and to maintain a democratic balance between the employees and the volunteers in the association. By doing so, our relationship won’t become anonymous and everyone is involved in the global project. Like in a cooperative, 1 person = 1 voice

Since we don’t sell our services (nor won’t we one day propose “premium fees” and such), we are dealing with users. It changes everything: people are more understanding, less demanding. They know we do our best (we would settle for nothing less) and they can accept when our best isn’t enough, when there is some downtime, for example.

We don’t aim to host and concentrate as many people (and people’s data) as possible. Our goal is to demonstrate that the Free-Libre world has already worked on alternatives to GAFAM’s services (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). We want people to come and try services with us. That’s why we contribute through user & self-hosting documentation, translations into French, presentation and a (tiny bit of) design, some code. But our final goal is that users leave our services because they liked to use them and were so convinced that they started self-hosting them. Or that they have at least found a local ethical Free-Libre service provider – decentralization of data is important and forgotten too often.

Those purposes make us not compatible with a model based on profit. Being a non-profit looking only for self-sustenance allows us to explore, to take time to educate people and to experiment – and with experiments come failures, which are great lessons.

Last, being an association, under the French status of “Association de loi 1901” allows our organization to be officially recognized of general interest. This benefits directly to our more than 2,000 donators who can get a tax relief of a third of the amount they gave us. Thus it’s an incentive for them to keep on supporting us. And donations are 95% of our revenue stream and the basis to pay for our 6 employees, our servers, and such.

How much of the collective work of framasoft goes into the free services?

Nowadays: most of it!

Before the “Let’s De-Google-ify the Internet” project, we had some balance between free software projects (the directory, USB keys, DVDs, etc.), free culture projects (blog, translations, publishing free-libre novels, comics and handbooks, etc.), free-libre services (pad, calc and doodle-like), and the life of the association.

Now, our translation group and our publishing house are still very active, our free software directory has been completely re-modeled, but half to three-quarters of our energy are focused on the 30+ services we are hosting, and the few alternatives left we intend to complete.

What we didn’t realise before starting this project, is how much support and communication (public relations) we would have to provide. And it’s important, as we both want to help people adopt free-libre services and to care about the stakes of data silos such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (the infamous “GAFAM”).

Even though, we still take and find time to share our experience so it can be reproduced and adapted, mainly through a network of local ethical free-libre services hoster we initiated: CHATONS (French for “Kittens”).

How do you measure the performance of framasoft – what are your goal, what are your key performance indicators?

When we started the “Let’s De-Goole-ify the Internet” project, in October 2014, it almost seemed like a fools’ errand, an impossible bet we took on ourselves. So, at first we didn’t set any other goals than trying to do our best to achieve what we had announced: To inform the audience of the stakes of data-concentration, to show that FLOSS can provide ethical alternatives, and to help those who could to achieve digital independence.

Two and a half year later, many people trusted us and gave us the means to achieve what at the time could have looked as a moonshot project. Now, our main goal is to share this experience so other hosters can reproduce, adapt and use it. We have initiated a network of French-speaking ethical sevice hosters (named CHATONS), and now we are trying to see if such a network can be expanded or reproduced in other languages and countries.

As for the measurements, we have of course some quantitative indicators: for instance, we get more than 2 million visits per month on our network of websites and services, which means that hundreds of thousands of people are at least trying to change their digital habits every month.

Since we don’t want to collect detailed users’ data, we don’t have qualitative performance indicators. So, right now, we can only share some quite informal feedback.

Until now, we mainly get feedback by interacting with people, online via social networks, comments, e-mails and so on, and in real life because we take part to roundabout 100 events every year. And it is a great pleasure to get thanked by people we helped get rid of the services of Google and the other big players of the Internet. It allows us to think that what we do is useful and that we are doing it in the right way.

Of course, a key indicator is the volume of donations, our main resource. It has been significantly growing with our current “De-google-ify” campaign, which allowed us to hire and to grow from 2 to 6 employees in the last three years. If we weren’t responding to a need, people would stop giving, wouldn’t they? And if they weren’t satisfied, they would give less.

This De-google-ify campaign has brought more light to our little association: Now French journalists come to us from time to time and ask for our opinion. Some media have mentioned our services, not only the specialized and tech press, but also national newspapers. We sometimes are invited to talk on the radio or on television. Meanwhile, known figures from the free software movement are supporting our methods, which is an important recognition because this is where our services are rooted. We didn’t want to respond to a few invitations by politicians (for instance by a political group at the Assemblée nationale) and explained that our association’s goals were not political and that we were addressing people from the civil society, regardless of their political position.

When we met for our general annual meeting last January, we were thinking that at this point, we needed to know better our users and their expectations. So we decided that we should launch a survey to find out: “Who are you, Framasoft services users?”. It could help us improve our services to better fit the people who actually use them and we expect to have a better and more reliable insight next year (barring unforeseen circumstances,)

How did you key performance indicators develop over the last years?

Great as our project thrived and users adopted more and more our services.

In 2014, we participated in around 30 events, and our support team got about 10 messages a day. In 2016, we attended more than 100 events (conferences, workshops, debates and so on) and our support team processed more than 100 tickets a day.
We can’t compare visitors numbers, since we changed this tool during this time, settling on a self-hosted Piwik instance to analyze visits on our website.

Everyone can check https://framastats.org to get some metrics (but unfortunately it’s only in French for now)

What are your aspirations, what are your promises to users in regard to availability, security, service for framasoft free services? Or asked differently: Would you recommend an association or local volunteer groups to use your services for organizing themselves and getting work done?

In our charter, we pledge to give our best efforts, but not to get the best results (at least, not at any cost).
Practically, it translates into doing everything we can for the best uptime. We hired a full-time system administrator, help by other tech-savvy employees and volunteers. 100% uptime isn’t a sensible goal for a non-profit like us, the cost would be overwhelming. When our services fail (need to reboot), it’s usually for less than 15 minutes. If there is a bigger issue, we inform our users (through social networks and a dedicated website), taking this chance to educate them about what it means to host a service and administrate a system. We only had one major incident in January 2015, when our ethercalc instance became unstable after an update. It was closed for a fortnight, but when we re-opened it, all the user data were there and safe.

We take every security step we can for our users, with multiple backups of data at different geographical places.
Service is very important to us: our support team respond to each and everyone, as it is the occasion to know our users and to try and help them on their way to digital independence. Of course we provide a Frequently Asked Question page, but you will never get a reply like “read the fucking manual” (RTFM) from us ;).

Any association and local group is welcome to use our services, we know how they can be a very important vector of digital education, awareness and empowerment. That being said, we would advise them to consider our services as a “first step”: use it, try anything you think would help your self-organization, and when you know the tools you need, try to take the second step and host them for your group. We’ll be here to provide help and share our knowledge!

Do you have plans and activities to educate interested users in the configuration and usage of tools like Mattermost and the like? The learning curve is steep for people who never worked with other tools besides E-Mail and Office. How can this change?

Our approach is a progressive step by step enticement to change. We consider it to be one successful step if people adopt LibreOffice instead of MS office and Firefox instead of Chrome. We don’t invite people to jump immediately into the full-fledged Libre world. We believe in suggesting alternatives that fit the needs of users. Rather simple tools like Framapad and Framadate are good examples: They have huge success because they need almost no initiation. The success proves that this one possible way to change usage. We provide two kinds of documentation for our alternative services: One for the mainstream user and one for more tech-savvy people that can install services themselves. It is crucial to swarm/spread.

Pouhiou, the PR person at Framasoft, had never used Slack (or something similar) before Luc (our sys-admin) proposed a Mattermost instance. He obviously proposed it as a side-feature of our Gitlab instance, aimed mainly for developers. But when I tried it, I claimed in surprise “Wow! This can be THE alternative to Facebook Groups!” And we all realized the potential of this tool, aimed to developers, but easy to apprehend by most.

Lots of people already know FB Groups, that can be public, confidential or private, where you have to join with your account, where you can talk both in real time or with delay, where you can share pictures and links… Well, Mattermost is quite the same (just better with its search and text-formatting features).

That is how we decided to aim and present it to the widespread audience: a Facebook Groups alternative. We translated user-documentation into French, created a detailed example for our blog presentation to show the power of this tool.

We really think that being a mixed crowd with software developers and enthusiasts help us to reach the everyday person. Because, for most of us, we are this person (or used to be not so long ago).

Whom are you building the free services on framasoft for?

We are working for two categories of persons:

1.  A clear majority of users who we call the Dupuis-Morizeau, the average French family with zero to some knowledge about computers and the Internet. We consider it is our main mission to bring them step by step a little more freedom in their digital usage. They are the people we wish to take advantage of our degooglisons campaign in term of awareness, new habits, discovering free software, the importance of privacy, etc.
2. A more limited group of tech-savvy people pertaining to the FLOSS community that can bring knowledge and technical tools to the population. They can install applications and services on their own servers. That is why each service we offer to the public is released with an installation tutorial to spread alternative tools.
   CHATONS is the name of our other recent initiative for decentralization.
   The name itself is a play on words (it means Kittens in French), It is an acronym for Collective of Hosters which are alternative, transparent, open, neutral and solidaric. The project aims to bring together players who offer free, ethical, decentralized and solidarity-based online services in order to enable users to find – quickly – alternatives to Google products (among others) but respectful of their data and privacy. Since Oct ’16 the first wave of “CHATONS” is 20 hosters strong, and more are coming. The validation of wannabe CHATONS is made via the collective itself on the basis of a manifesto and charter that were elaborated collectively.

What are framasofts sources of revenue and what are spending on?

Note that 2016’s books are being revised by an independent account commissary (a legal obligation for us that we love, as it enforces transparency), so we’ll talk based on 2015’s… but it will roughly be the same shares.
90% of our income in 2015 (~178,000 €) came from donations from our 2,000+ supporters. The rest comes from state employment aid (5%) and selling things (such as books and goodies – 5%).

We mostly spend it on paying our six employees (70%), because we cannot depend on volunteer’s’ energy if we want to provide reliable services and user support. Then we spent it on conventions, conferences and meeting fees (10%) as “evangelization” is a big part of our work. Then comes technical fees (only 6%!), operating costs (6%, too) and the rest is divided between printed communication, supplies and bank fees.

What never cease to amaze us, is that with ~400,000€ over the last two and a half years, we’ve been able to host and maintain roundabout 30 services (along with our ~20 other projects), and change the digital customs of hundreds of thousands of users each month! It’s about the price of 50 meters of a highway!

If people like your work: How can they ensure that Framasoft flourishes?

We accept donations which are almost our unique source of money – donations are welcome here. But we are also glad when code contributors join us because our tech team is only 3 people strong. The same with language and translation contributors, as we wish to spread our experience and services to other languages.

Are you planning to offer localized versions of Framasoft’s free services in Germany?

Well, they are already offered over the Internet to everyone, but only a few services are already internationalized enough to be translated into various languages. We need some effort and contributors and an English version first since English is the lingua franca nowadays. All of our services are on a Git repo. When there are “locale” files to be translated, the German-speaking community is welcome to do it!

Note that the majority of our services are based on well-established free software which already is available in English and German. It’s mainly our design modifications and the quick-start guides that are not translated. In case German people are interested in having an English version of a page/tutorial/service/interface which is currently French-only, please tell us and we will do our best to facilitate the transition to a German-speaking resource.

The post Project of the Day: Framasoft – free and libre alternatives to netarchical collaborative platforms appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published on Medium.com

A recent article about the BlockChain appeared on the Italian version of Vice’s Motherboard and raised a series of interesting conversations, and was soon followed up by another one.

In that article I was called to express a series of opinions about what was happening with BlockChains and cryptocurrencies, from the point of view of an organization such as the one I lead (HER, Human Ecosystems Relazioni), which deals with data, complex connections between sciences, technology, society, design and art, and the social, political, cultural and psychological implications of these connections and interactions.

In my job, everyday, I deal with multiple points of view which confront with these impacts brought on by data, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, with a wide variety of subjects from hyper-technical ones, to entrepreneurs and investors, to policymakers, up to the ones beyond suspicion, “ordinary” people who have to understand what an artwork which uses the blockchain does, or who deals with culture, museums, the city’s neighborhoods. People who — whether they like it or not — have to do with these technologies and practices. A large variety.
I have the maximum respect for the blockchain. It possibly is the technology which bears the highest potential for radical innovation and transformation today. With all its limits and problems.

My critique is not technical, but psychological.

It moves across the domain of perception and of comprehension of reality.

In this domain — the one of the psychic processes which are engaged and shared by people and their relations as they interpret the world to understand how to orient themselves and how to act in it — technologies like the Blockchain are a disaster.

Why?

On the one hand, they are a very powerful agent towards the “transactionalization of life”, that is of the fact that all the elements of our lives are progressively turning into transactions.

Which overlaps with the fact that they become “financialized”. Everything, including our relations and emotions, progressively becomes transactionalized/financialized, and the Blockchain represent an apex of this tendency. This is already becoming a problem for informality, for the possibility of transgression, for the normation and normalization of conflicts and, thus, in prospect, for our liberties and fundamental rights, and for our possibility to perceive them (because we are talking about psychological effects).

On the other hand, they move attention onto the algorithm, on the system, on the framework. Instead of supporting and maintaining the necessity and culture of establishing co-responsibility between human beings, these systems include “trust” in procedural ways. In ways which are technical. Thus, the necessity for trust (and, thus, on the responsibility to attribute trust, based on human relations) progressively disappears.

Therefore, together with it, society disappears. Society as actively and consciously built by people who freely decide if and when to trust each other, and who collectively agree to the modalities of this attribution.

What remains is only consumption of services and products. Safe, transparent and all. But mere transactionalized consumption. Society ends, and so does citizenship: we become citizen of nothing, of the network, of the algorithm.

These are not technical issues, but psychological ones, perceptive ones. And, thus, even more serious.

Technology is not neutral.

I can use a hammer to plant a nail or to smash it on your head, that’s true. But what is also true is that as soon as I have a hammer in my hand, everything starts looking like a nail.

This is the same for Blockchains. As soon as I start using them, as soon as I start imagining the world through them, everything starts looking as a transaction, as something which is “tokenizable”. And this is a disaster, in the ancient sense of the word (dis-aster, without stars for orientation).

Technology creates us just as much as we create technology.

We are starting to design systems which are, on the one hand, completely open and transparent. Which is a good thing from one point of view, and a problematic thing to do on the other. (unless the complete transparency of “The Circle” scenarios is something we feel comfortable with).

From another point of view, these systems are progressively being associated to identity systems, meaning that all the advantages and freedoms deriving from the fact that digital identity is anything but univocal and fixed are progressively being lost. Byebye anonymous, temporary, shared, multiple, plural, identities. Goodbye all the freedoms that come with them.

What derives are “citizenship” sytems (not “existence”, not “inhabitantship”) which are literally trustless, “without the need for trust”, in which trust is in the peer-to-peer network, in the automation, in the algorithm.

Institutions and other people disappear, replaced by an algorithm. Who knows where trust is at/in! It is everywhere, diffused, in the peer-to-peer network. Which means that it’s nowhere, and in nobody.

In a weird way it is like in call centers: they are not really useful for the client, and they completely serve the purpose minimizing bother for the companies, letting clients slipping into the “procedure” (which is synonym with algorithm), and avoiding them from obtaining real answers and effects, in their own terms outside of procedures.

These are all processes which separate people from each other, from institutions, organizations, companies, through the Procedure.

Citizens of everywhere. Citizens of nowhere and nothing.

From a philosophical and psychological point of view it corresponds to a powerful addition to a process which is already taking place on a large scale: the transactionalisation of life.

Everything is turning into a transaction: our relationships, emotions and expressions; our ways of producing, acquiring and transferring knowledge; communication; everything.

As soon as each of these things become the subject of a service, they become transactions: they become an atomic part of a procedure.

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model.

This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.

With the Internet of Things these processes also arrive to the objects which fill our daily lives, to the elements of the environment and to the environment itself.

This means that we will be surrounded by transactions, within ourselves and in everything around us. It will become truly difficult to think of something that does not correspond to a transaction.

As said above: this will bring on issues for informality, the possibility for transgression and for our freedoms and rights.

Many of these these will simply disappear, as we lose capacity to conceive them outside of the “procedure”, of the transaction that embodies them. Whether it is purchase or an emotional expression, it will not make any difference.

Furthermore, speaking of transactionalization and its equivalent, financialization, the issue of access will also arise from the fact that there will be a limited amount of subjects who will have the resources to sustain the cost of the transactions which are needed to have rights and freedoms, or to pull themselves out of the procedures themselves. And of course there will be people who don’t have these resources.

These reflections have long been outside of the discussions which are going on about these new technologies. Hackers, activists, researchers, philosophers, antropologists are talking about the blockchain, as well as governments, organizations, companies and banks themselves. Yet none of these doubts are yet on agendas. There is a mono, singular narrative, which is interpreted for activism, business, governance, exploitation.

Investments, from above (with governments, financial institutions, investors) and below (with crowd based operations, evangelism, activism and also with the desire to exploit and to access funds and resources, to abandon the state of crisis) are happening.

And yet we must consider.

The Blockchain is the first tentative answer in years to the extremely centralized models which are de facto ruling us today, whether we talk about energy, environment, finance, welfare, governance.

The Blockchain is all about distribution of power.

And yet, this same distribution is its weak spot, if our objective is to collectively create a society with more freedoms, solidarity and opportunities for relation, emotion, communication and knowledge.

Because this distribution of power does not require conscience and desire, and the responsibility of these conscience and desire. Because these are in the algorithm, not in ourselves and in our relations.

It is not the algorithm serving us, and what we want. It is the algorithm turing us into itself, making us become like it.

What can we do?

The most important thing we can do is, probably, that we need to realize that these are not technological or technical issues.

Design only arrives up to a certain point. The design and production of services, products and instruments does not address a class of issues which are aesthetic, psychological and which deal with sensibility and imagination.

For example, in our practice we often talk about the Third Infoscape, which is originated from the concept of the Third Landscape.

As in the Third Landscape: where “technicians” see “weeds”, the Third Landscape sees opportunity, biodiversity, an open source media which is a reservoir for the future of the planet, which does not require energy to maintain, but produces energy, food, knowledge, relations.

As Marco Casagrande describes, the entire territory becomes a form of knowledge, with all its conflicts, dissonances and polyphonies. This is not a transactional (or transactionalizing) vision. It is a thing in which data and information are not laid out geometrically, formally, as in gardens, but more like the woods and wild nature, in which multiple forms of dimensions, boundaries, layers and interpretations co-exist by complex desire, relation and interaction, not by design.

It is a different kind of technology, a different kind of science, with a different imagination to support it.

The Third Infoscape, just as the Third Landscape, is not a matter of technology or technique. It is a question of sensibility, of imagination and of aesthetics.

The problem? It is current science and data. Which we are now using as something absolute and immutable. As a society, we are now using Science and Data like once we used Religion and Magic.

The Blockchain is one direct effect of this.

It is the procedure that “liberates” us from trust, from having to trust, from having to trust others. It compels you to trust, because it is the algorithm itself which embodies trust. And, by doing that, by forcing you to become like it, transforms all into a transaction.

To make trust exist, it transforms all into itself.

We need a change in sensibility and imagination, not disruptive services.

The post The Financialization of Life appeared first on P2P Foundation.