The role of social networks and direct message applications (basically WhatsApp) in the electoral campaign of Jair Messias Bolsonaro is one of the central themes of the new forms of political configuration in Latin America. False news, propaganda, the construction of uncritical common sense and the sowing of hatred are not innovative practices in either political history or war. The attempt to configure passive and malleable subjects has been studied for centuries as a substratum of ideological struggles aimed at capturing the collective social will and directing it for the benefit of corporate interests. What has changed is the vehicle of its propaganda, its directionality and the territory where the circulation of myths and convincing and sensationalized slogans become more effective.

Virality and interactivity have supplanted the historical verticality of political discourse. These have substituted the characteristic downward directionality of the contents proposed by the party, the program and the candidate. Bolsonaro’s campaign was sustained with brutal gestures and relied on mythologies present in the accumulated social fears, much more than on proposals and projects. For a large part of the Brazilian population, especially those with less critical capacity to evaluate content, the intrinsic complexity of public policies is perceived as a convoluted and incomprehensible fiction.

Brazilians have changed the forms of communicational interaction and access to information. The cell phone has become the priority recipient of news exchanges and its inhabitants have access to news from WhatsApp, which has 120 million young and adult users integrated in affinity networks that provide a significant appearance of reliability on what they send and receive. These users represent 80 percent of all Brazilian voters and Bolsonaro’s campaign was fundamentally effective through this way, added to the platform of four social networks; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

According to a report elaborated by the Latin American Strategic Center of Geopolitics (CELAG), the distribution between recipients of social networks of Bolsonaro, Haddad and Lula shows a clear preponderance of the first one over the other two, even in the sum of both petitioning leaders. The particularity of this data is that the target age of the followers is based on the youngest, the so-called millenials, who have limited exposure to TV, do not listen to radio frequency and the Internet and are informed only through networks segmented by interest groups.

Followers of Social Media networks (in millions of users) during the campaign

A large part of the campaign was configured by consultant experts in algorithms and audience analysis, capable of detecting the deepest emotional fears and rejections that permeate society. Several of these fears were previously inoculated with unusual persistence by hegemonic media, and then targeted at specific segments detected with demographic and statistical precision. The latter ended up constituting the central political activism of the army captain, exonerated in 1988, under the accusation of scheduling bombings at the Adutora del Guandu supply station, which provided drinking water to the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. The subsequent step consisted of using thousands of network influencers (previously detected for having a large number of followers) to geometrically multiply the threats, lies and occasional misrepresentations that could be maximized in the campaign. The final step included the use of robotic applications capable of analyzing the initial big data (provided by the reception trials), and willing to evaluate the success or failure of the fake-news. With that information, analysts were reoriented and repositioned precisely and tightly on the most pampered axes.

The viral circle predisposed to achieve a positive electoral wave to the interests of the Brazilian right was configured from seven agreed upon axes within the Bolsonaro campaign team, in which Steve Bannon, former chief advisor to Donald Trump, participates. Along with him were members of the Brazilian Army’s Electronic Warfare Communications Command (CComGEx), trained in sociology, anthropology, communication and statistics, knowledge available for Tactics and Operational Procedures (TTP), undoubted psychological warfare devices . According to analyst Rodrigo Lentz, Fernando Haddad was illegally monitored by teams led by General Sérgio Etchegoyen, currently a member of the institutional security ministry of the Brazilian presidency.

The chapters of fabricated communicational intoxication, chosen as a priority to delegitimize Fernando Haddad and the PT were the following (1) The existence of a supposed “gay kit”, oriented to sexualize girls and boys, that Haddad would have been distributed in public schools, while he was minister of education in Lula’s government. (2) Appealing to the Venezuelan crisis as the future potential of the direction of a PT government. The diffusion of empty gondolas with the sign of Chavismo was the central image that accompanied this viralization. (3) The spreading of an image of an old woman supposedly attacked by leftist militants (with her face deformed by the blows), when in reality it was a photograph of an actor who had had an accident. (4) Haddad’s alleged defense of incest, denounced by one of the extreme right-wing ideologues, Olavo Carvalho. (5) The alleged intention of the PT to legalize pedophilia. (6) The distribution of a photo of Dilma Rousseff as a member of a Cuban military battalion.

None of these viralizations would be effective if it were not directed specifically to those who have a less critical capacity to deny them or contrast them with reality. This is the role of robots that analyze big data and can orient more effective messages to each particular social segment. Historian Marc Bloch, shot by the Nazis for his status as a Jewish member of the French resistance on June 16, 1944, asked in a 1921 text: “False news, in all its forms, has been part of humanity. How are they born? (…) A falsehood only spreads and amplifies, it only comes to life on one condition, if it can find in the society in which it comes to life in a favorable breeding ground. Unconsciously it allows people to express their prejudices, their hatred, and their fears.” So fake-news is not new. It only demands subjects who accept to believe them in order to accommodate certain installed fears. The basic solution implies the development of critical citizens that are not affected by symbolic manipulations.

After the Second World War, Albert Camus published The Plague. In his last paragraph he stated: “For he knew that this happy crowd ignored what can be read in books, that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears, that it can sleep for decades in furniture, clothes, that it patiently waits in alcoves, cellars, suitcases, handkerchiefs and papers, and that a day may come when the plague, for the misfortune and teaching of men, wakes up its rats and sends them to die in a blissful city, for the misfortune and teaching of men,”. The plague has returned. His name is Bolsonaro; a Macri without marketing and without restraint.

Source: El Ciervo Herido, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau

Photo by krishna.naudin

The post The Role of Social Media in Bolsonaro’s Irresistible Ascent appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s been a rough several months for the world’s dominant social media platforms. The recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was followed by a bruising congressional testimony for Mark Zuckerberg. And Twitter’s Jack Dorsey admitted earlier this year that abuse and harassment are overwhelming the platform.

As a result, users, policymakers and activists are abuzz about potential solutions. And while many talk of regulation, Sophie Varlow and Nick Wood suggest a different approach: introducing a new product from scratch, with radically different principles.

“You can’t change things by pushing against them,” Varlow says. “You need to build a new model.”

Contributors to the Commons Platform mull ideas. Photo via Rikki / @indyrikki

Varlow and Wood are the UK-based community organizers behind the Commons Platform, a nascent social media platform with core values like privacy and decentralization. The Commons Platform is participating in Mozilla’s Global Sprint, an annual, distributed hackathon taking place May 10 and 11. They’ll be working from the Redmond Community Centre in London.

Varlow and Wood began thinking about the Commons Platform long before Facebook and Twitter’s latest episodes. The idea came not from specific incidents, but larger, systemic problems with today’s social media ecosystem. Like “the impacts of not having consent within tech,” Varlow explains. “Or not owning our own data. These relate to structural inequalities within society.”

“We’ve been talking about these things for years,” Varlow adds.

So how is the Commons Platform different than the status quo? “One of the central differences is that everyone would own their own data,” Wood explains. Further, the platform itself would be owned by its members. Varlow likens it to public land: “No part of it can ever be owned by any individual or group in perpetuity.”

Contributors to the Commons Platform mull ideas. Photo via Rikki / @indyrikki

She adds: “Because it is not driven by the attention economy, advertising, and data revenue, people are not encouraged to spend time scrolling. They can curate their content to find the things that are interesting to them and connect to people, issues, and organisations that they care about quickly.”

Privacy features will be baked in from the start. And the Commons Platform is meant for communities, not just individuals. Groups will visit to organize, openly share software, and collaborate on solutions, the duo says. Developers won’t need permission to add or edit software. “We’re putting power back in the hands of communities, so they can create solutions that make their lives better,” Varlow notes.

Currently, Varlow, Wood and collaborators are finalizing the project’s values, aims, culture and ways of working. During the Global Sprint, they’re planning to work with like-minded designers and developers to take the next step forward: “The website, the technical infrastructure, the community standards,” Varlow explains.

But the Commons Platform welcomes more than just technical volunteers — any potential user or community is welcome to share feedback and ideas and co-create the platform. “We try to break down barriers between experts and nonexperts, users and developers,” Varlow says. “After all, we want to build a more equal society.”

Learn more about the Commons Platform. Learn more about the Global Sprint.

The post Social Media Decentralized: Spotlight on the Commons Platform appeared first on P2P Foundation.

important update, 2018/02/06: a new version of the proposal, completely rewritten to take into accounts recent developments and feedback, is HERE.

Preface

A percloud (permanent/personal cloud) is my own vision of a “REALLY usable, all-in-one alternative to Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, Dropbox…”.

I made the first percloud proposal in 2013. Very soon, however, I “froze it”, for lack of time and resources, and did not do any real work about it, for reasons I have explained in detail elsewhere. Then, at the beginning of 2017, several things happened, including but not limited to:

• The percloud proposal was mentioned here, causing several people to contact me to discuss the idea in detail, showing to me that it may still have some value
• In parallel, the Free Knowledge Institute, of which I am a Board Member, had started some work in Barcelona on a collaborative/community cloud platform
• Other groups have started to work on similar platforms on their own, and invited me to participate
• I did some homework to catch up with the “latest” developments in this space, and discovered that things look much better than they did in 2013

What I mean with the last bullet is that, thanks to projects like Sandstorm, Cloudron and several others, building what I call a “percloud” should, indeed, be easier than in 2013. “Easier” does not mean “easy” though, and I have realized several things.

First, integrating and polishing the several software components, until they are actually usable by non-geeks is still nothing one could do on his spare time (not me for sure, anyway). Second, personal clouds will be easily adopted by non-geeks ONLY if they are offered as a managed service: this means there must be web hosting providers that offer really turn-key perclouds.

Third, a real pilot/field trial of the percloud is needed. Because on one hand, we need many, ordinary Internet users to use the package, and tell us geeks if it works for them or not. On the other, we need to give wen hosting providers some real world usage data of these personal clouds, so they can figure out how much it would cost to offer them as a service.

Taken together, all these things have lead me to put together the proposal below.

Important: as I said, I’m already discussing similar cloud platforms with several groups. But I do not see this proposal in competition with the others. This is all Free as in Freedom software, and the more is shared and reused, the better! Much of what is proposed below may be directly reused in those projects, or similar ones, if not co-developed together.

Now, please look at the proposal, share it as much as you can, give feedback and, since this page may be updated often in the next weeks, follow me on Twitter to know when that happens. THANKS!

Percloud proposal, 2017 edition

Percloud definition and features

Purpose: personal, permanent, basic, online web presence and communication, that does replace {facebook+gmail+dropbox} today. Very little or nothing more. The target user is the average user of facebook, gmail, instagram, dropbox, google drive and similar services, who seldom, if ever, visits the rest of the Web. The goal is to make it possible to these people to get outside today’s walled gardens, as soon as possible. Once that happens, it will be much easier to move the same people to more advanced platforms. Advanced users for which this service is too little/too limited still need something like this for all their own non-geek contacts, if they want their communications to stay private.

Services offered

(regardless of which software implements them…)

ONLY the very basic ones, that everybody would surely need, e.g.:

email, blogging, calendar and address book, basic social networking, online bookmarks, save web pages to read them later, online file storage (personal files, pictures galleries).

common essential features of all services

• Inclusiveness (“equal opportunities cloud”?): the percloud must be an accessible service even for the many people who, these days, have a smartphone, but NOT broadband, fixed/safe residence, reliable electricity… (think students, but also refugees, migrants, homeless…)
• Available as a service (PEAAS, Percloud As A Service): even many target users who could run their own hardware server at home will prefer the convenience of not having to worry about any additional device
• Federation (where applicable): that is automatic notification of relevant events among different perclouds (e.g.: user A uploads a public picture or status update, her contacts see a notification about it in THEIR clouds, and can comment it, and be notified of each other comments…
• Social Connectivity with Facebook, Twitter, Gplus… and interface to online storage services like e.g. Dropbox… Google Drive
  • here “social connectivity” means a) possibility to automatically publish a status update also to Facebook, Twitter etc… and b) fetching Twitter timelines or Facebook notifications with systems like these http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/how-to-access-facebook-from-the-command-line/ and showing them INSIDE the percloud interface. Interface to storage like Dropbox is the same as in owncloud/nextcloud
  • PURPOSE: the target users will NOT move to this if it means burning bridges with their friends already on Facebook, etc.. No way.
• As little choices and configuration options as possible: “You can have any color as long as it’s black.” For the target users, this is a feature, not a limitation
• ARCHITECTURE:
  • 100% server-based. A permanent online home, and important data, cannot live on a smartphone or laptop, which may be stolen, or run out of charge every moment.
  • in practice: micro-vps: bare-bone Linux with all and only the services listed above, that can run on raspberry pi, normal PC, virtual hosting in a data center… also because of…
  • HIGH performance, i.e. RAM and CPU requirements as low as possible. Reasons: a) a really personal cloud of this type has very low needs anyway; b) only if it is possible to host MANY of these VPSes on one physical server it is viable to offer this as a managed service. Ideally hosting one percloud in a data center should not cost more than a few USD/month
  • REAL, almost turn-key portability from server to server. This includes automatic set up, at creation time, of own domain name, e.g. “marco-percloud.com”, so that even when changing server all connections with the rest of the world stay the same. There is no real freedom or data ownership if one cannot move her own data from one physical place to another without losses or disruptions of communications.
• MANAGEMENT:
  • complete separation of user interface and admin interface
  • remote administration also possible via command line
  • reason of 2 previous requirements:
  • PAAS providers can only afford to offer the service if administration (creation, software updates etc…) of many perclouds can be fully automatized *if admin is a separate account, it is possible to manage or give perclouds as “gifts” to minors, senior citizens, or everybody else who would like to use a percloud, but cannot or does not want to manage it themselves
  • automatic daily backup to other server
• USER INTERFACE:
  • Accessible from any modern Web browser, from any device (i.e. NOT locked to phone numbers or anything like that)
  • But REALLY usable on smartphones! Many target users only use their smartphone for any digital service, and will not accept something that THEY find hard to use on their preferred device

Possible base software platform:

• barebone GNU/Linux distribution (debian? TBD) +
• SUBSET of the cloudron.io environment with ONLY these applications and 3rd party additions
  • owncloud or nextcloud (online file storage, picture galleries, office suite too?)
  • Lychee (photo management)
  • SoGo or Radicale? calendar and contacts
  • Wallabag (“Read later”/personal web archive service
  • RocketChat
  • Rainloop for webmail (but see “3d party SW” too, below)
  • Ghost for blogging (static blogging with markdown editor is simpler and safer than wordpress, and should require less RAM. See performance above)
  • Wekan or Kanboard?
  • Piwik
  • 3rd party software, i.e. packages not in cloudron today, but that would be nice to have IMO:
  • movim.eu (social networking like that is crucial, IMO)
  • mailpile for webmail?
  • shaarli (nice online bookmark application)
  • SSL key management for web and email servers
  • GPG signatures management

Note on interface integration and “real time interactivity”

The several components of a personal cloud as proposed here would share user authentication, and communicate with each other, as smoothly as possible. However, they cannot have a completely homogeneous look and feel as, say, the several features of a Facebook account. Such an integration is simply outside the scope of this proposal, because the only (but crucial) purpose of the percloud is to test and offer something actually usable, as soon as possible: see the “we need it SOON” part of this post, which is even valid now than it was in 2014, to know why.

As far as “real time interactivity” goes, the percloud must offer federation, that is let “friends” who own different perclouds see what each other has published, comment it, get notification, chat, and so on. However, percloud-based social networking does not even try to achieve the same numbers and levels of interactions and notifications of Facebook or similar platforms. This is a feature, not a bug. Facebook bombards people with real time notifications (“Jim tagged you”, 3 years ago you posted this”…) because it exists to… make people stay as much as possible inside Facebook. A percloud, instead, exists to let you interact with your contacts when you need or feel like it. It does not need to be so invasive and stressful.

Looking for sponsors

The contacts and discussions I had at the beginning of 2017 convinced me that a percloud available as soon as possible may still have a lot of value. The same activities also showed me that it should be done quite differently than what I imagined 4 years ago.

In order to build a percloud and test it “in the field”, together with the cloudron developers, it is necessary to have sponsors for: * adding the missing parts * integrating and documenting everything * CRUCIAL: deploy and manage a “large” scale field test/pilot in which e.g. 1000 people are given one percloud for free, for 12 months, in exchange of giving feedback on usability, etc… and allowing basic monitoring of percloud usage (e.g. number of posts and visitors per month, etc). Without this, i.e. without knowing for sure how the actual target users react to the percloud, we cannot make it succeed

As far as hosting goes, the test perclouds may be hosted on lightsail or similar platforms. But it would be great if community-oriented hosting or connectivity providers like guifi.net or mayfirst.org wanted to participate. If you know of any organization or group of organizations who may be interested in sponsoring such an activity, please let me know.

Further suggested reading, added on January 30th, 2018

• The fix for Facebook is NOT a different PLATFORM

• The percloud is still only a proposal. For everybody

• My proposal to integrate the percloud with the Eelo operating system for smartphones

• My posts on Mastodon, online identity and the need to put INDIVIDUALS before “platforms“

Photo by kndynt2099

The post Proposal: the Percloud, a permanent/personal cloud that is a REALLY usable, all-in-one alternative to Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, Dropbox… appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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 hypnotic documentary Hypernormalization, by British director Adam Curtis, takes its name from a concept developed by Soviet writer Alexei Yurchak. In his book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More, Yurchak describes the tense social and cultural atmosphere during the years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Curtis describes, after decades of attempting to plan and manage a new kind of socialist society, the technocrats at the top of the post-Stalinist USSR realized that their goal of controlling and predicting everything was unreachable. Unwilling to admit their failure, they “began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan”. The official narrative created a parallel version of the Soviet society, a fake reality (like in the home videos of Good Bye Lenin) that everyone would eventually unveil. But even though they saw that the economy was trembling and the regime’s discourse was fictitious, the population had to play along and pretend it was real… “because no one could imagine any alternative. (…) You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it”.

Nowadays, our society is driven by very different forces. We don’t need technocrats to predict our actions; the last advancements in information technology, in addition to our constant disposition to share everything that happens to us, are enough for an invisible —and, apparently, non-human— power to define and limit our behaviour. In his book Social Media Abyss, the Dutch theorist Geert Lovink —founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam— speaks about the dark side of these new technologies and the consequences of our blind trust in the digital industry.

The closest comparison that we have today to the New Soviet Man is perhaps the cult to the cyberlibertarian entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. We are now used to thirty-somethings in sweaters telling us, from the ping-pong tables in their offices, that the only road to success —both personal and collective— lies in technology. To oppose them is no easy task: who is going to question a discourse that has innovation and “the common good” at its core? But the internet today hardly resembles the technology that, in its origins, seemed to promise a source of decentralization, democratization and citizen empowerment. Nowadays, the giants of Silicon Valley —lead by Facebook and Google— have mutated towards a monopolistic economic model and flirt with intelligence agencies for the exchange of their precious data.

Our relationship with the internet seems to be on its way to becoming something very similar to the later years of the Soviet Union. The Spanish sociologist Cesar Rendueles formulates this concern when questioning the capacities of technology to guarantee a plural and open space: “the network ideology has generated a diminished social reality”, he claims on his essay Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia. Lovink shares the “healthy scepticism” of Rendueles when elaborating what we could call an “Internet critical theory”. In Social Media Abyss, he inaugurates the post-Snowden era — “the secular version of God is Dead”— as the beginning of a general disillusionment with the development of the internet: now we can say that the internet “has become almost everything no one wanted it to be”. But even though we know that everything we do online may be used against us, we still click, share and rate whatever appears on our screen. Can we look at the future with optimism? Or are we too alienated, too precarized, too desocialized (despite being constantly “connected”) to design alternatives? In the words of Lovink, “what is citizen empowerment in the age of driver-less cars”?

The year did not start all that well. The big political changes of 2017 have been, as Amador Fernández Savater has described, “a kind of walking paradox: anti-establishment establishment, anti-elitist elite, antiliberal neoliberalism, etc.”. But fortunately, politics not only consists of electoral processes. Lovink has spent decades studying the “organized networks” that operate outside the like economy: “The trick is to achieve a form of collective invisibility without having to reconstitute authority”. We spoke with him not only about the degradation of the democratic possibilities of the internet (and the possibilities for coming up with an equitative revenue model for the internet) but also about how to design the alternative.

We may opt for hypernormalizing everything: “nothing to see here, let’s keep browsing”. Any other option involves theorization as we advance on our objectives. The answer lays on creating “dissident knowledges”.

“Radical disillusionment”

Your latest book starts with the idea that the internet, initially portrayed as a democratizing and decentralising force, “has become precisely everything no one wanted it to be”. The once uncontested Californian ideology is now being challenged for the first time, after the Snowden revelations showed us that we have lost any controlled, pragmatic rule over internet governance. What is our next move?

Geert Lovink

I don’t want to make it too schematic, in terms of chronology. But because the internet is still growing so fast, it is really important to ask ourselves: “where are we“? This was really the “beginners” question, but for a while, the discussion turned to what it could become. The Snowden revelations, together with the 2008 crisis, should make us go back to the original question: where is the internet now?

I like to see the internet as a facilitating ideology. This is a notion that comes from Arthur Kroker, a Canadian philosopher working in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan. It is obviously not repressive, let alone aggressive, as it does not cause any physical violence on you. But what it does is that it facilitates.

Since the 2000s and the so called Web 2.0, the internet has been primarily focused on its participatory aspect. Everywhere you go you are asked not simply to create a profile, but to contribute, to say something, to click here, to like… The internet these days is a huge machine that seduces the average user without people necessarily understanding that what they do creates an awful load of data.

The fact that we are not aware of what the data we produce is used for seems to be the problematic aspect. Precisely one of the defining phrases of the book is that “tomorrow’s challenge will not be the internet’s omnipresence but its very invisibility. That’s why Big Brother is the wrong framing”. In the internet, power operates in the collective unconscious, more subtly than a repressive force. In fact, “the Silicon Valley tech elite refuses to govern”, you say; “its aim is to achieve the right for corporations to be left alone to pursue their own interests”. So how do you better describe this?

Yes, you can see that even after Trump’s win. They take the classic position of not governing. This is in a way a new form of power, because it’s not quite Foucauldian. Even though we would love to see that it is all about surveillance —and the NSA of course invites us to go back to this idea—, the internet is in a way post-Foucauldian. If you read Foucault’s last works, he invites us to that next stage, to see it as the Technology of the Self. That would be the starting point to understand what kind of power structure there is at stake, because it is facilitated from the subject position of the user. And this is really important to understand. All the Silicon Valley propositions or network architectures have that as the starting point.

Nowadays, surveillance is really for the masses and privacy is for the upper class

In a way, this invites us —the activists, the computer programmers, the geeks— to provoke the internet to show its other face. But for the ordinary user this other face is not there. And when I say ordinary I mean very ordinary. If you look at the general strategy, especially of Facebook, the target is this last billion, which is comprised of people really far under poverty levels. When we’re talking about the average internet user, we are not talking about affluent, middle-class, people anymore. This is really something to keep in mind, because we need to shed this old idea that the internet is an elitist technology, that the computers were once in the hands of the few, that the smartphone is a status symbol, etc. We are really talking about an average user that is basically under the new regime of the one percent, really struggling to keep afloat, to stay alive.

So when I say invisibility, I mean that this growing group of people (and we’re talking about billions across continents) are forced to integrate the internet in their everyday struggles. This is what makes it very, very serious. We’re not talking about luxury problems anymore. This is a problem of people that have to fight for their economic survival, but also have to be bothered with their privacy.

That is what I call facilitating. When we are talking about facilitating, it also means that we are dealing with technologies that are vital for survival. This is the context in which we are operating now when we hear that the internet has been democratized. It doesn’t mean that there is no digital divide anymore, but the digital divide works out in a different way: it’s no longer about who has access and who doesn’t. It’s probably more about services, convenience, speed… and surveillance. Nowadays, surveillance is really for the masses and privacy is for the upper class. And then the offline is for the ones who can really afford it. The ones who are offline are absolutely on the top. And it didn’t use to be on top. It used to be reversed. These are really big concerns for civil society activists and pro-privacy advocates.

The social in social media

These brings us to the issue of “the social in social media”. You call it an ‘empty container’, affected by the “shift from the HTML-based linking practices of the open web to liking and recommendations that happen inside closed systems”, and call for a redefinition of the ‘social’ away from Facebook and Twitter. Could you develop this idea?

It is really difficult these days to even imagine how we can contact people outside of social media. In theory it’s still possible. But even if you look at the centralized email services, like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, they are now completely integrated in the social media model and they are, in fact, its forerunners. However, the problem really starts with the monopolistic part of the platform: the invisible aggregator that is happening in the background that most users have no idea about. Even experts find it very hard to really understand how these algorithms operate.

In this field, where there are a lot of academics but no critics, there is an enormous overproduction of real life experience and practice

Why has there not been any attempt from political science or sociology, at least that I know, to theorize the Social in Social Media? Obviously this is because the ‘social’ in scientific terms has really been reduced to the question of classes. But the idea that you can construct the social… sociology has a hard time to understand this. Historically it would understand that the social consists of the tribe, the political party, the Church, the neighborhood, etc. We know all the classic categories. Maybe when they are a bit newer they would talk about subcultures or gender issues. These are the “new” configurations of the Social.

But the idea that communication technology can construct and really configure the social as such, despite all the good efforts of science and technology scholars, has caught them by surprise. I think this is especially due to the speed and the scale; the speed at which the industry established itself and the scale of something like Facebook, which now connects almost two billion people. If you would have told that to someone 20 or 30 years ago it would have been very difficult to imagine, how a single company could do that.

Something that is clear in your work is the need to take technology seriously. Rather than falling in the trap of “offline romanticism” —or its alternative “solutionism”—, you are interested in “organized networks” that are configured in this day and age, because technology is going to stay whether we want it or we don’t. Against this, you appeal to the importance of theory. “What is lacking is a collective imagination (…). We need to develop dissident knowledges”, you say. What is the role of theory in all this? Isn’t there a sense of urgency to act right now?

The urgency is felt by the young people. I can only point to numerous experiments going on at the moment which could tell us something about the models that could work. What is important now is to write down the stories of those who are trying to create alternative models and to really try to understand what went wrong, in order to somehow make those experiences available for everyone who enters this discussion.

In this field, where there are a lot of academics but no critics, there is an enormous overproduction of real life experience and practice. However, there is almost no reflection happening. This is in part because the people who build the technologies are quite entrepreneurial or geeky and they don’t necessarily see the bigger picture. So that is our task, that is what projects like the MoneyLab network aims for.

The entire industry is not changing fast enough to accommodate the rising group of precarious workers

Internet revenue models

One of the big problems of this lack of theorization, as you point out in the book, is that the internet was not built with a revenue model in mind. We pay for access, hardware and software but not for content, so there are fewer and fewer opportunities to make a living from producing it. You call it “anticipatory capitalism”: “if you build it, business will come”, they tell us. What is even more striking is that your own experience from decades ago seems to point out to no advancements. This lack of direction has given place to a number of contradictions; for instance, freelance work, “simultaneously denounced as neoliberal exploitation and praised as the freedom of the individual creative worker”.

In a way, the internet today has a very traditional financial model. It is essentially based on targeted advertisement, which already existed in the past, but it was not focused on the individual. This caught me by surprise as well because I thought, especially in the early 2000s, that advertisement in an internet context was more or less dead, that beyond the web banner there wasn’t really much else. Of course, there was e-commerce but that’s something different, because then you are purchasing something, there is a real money transaction.

What really remains unsolved —and not much has changed since the 1980s— is the problem of how to pay the people that produce the content. The entire industry is not changing fast enough to accommodate the rising group of precarious workers. We can see some solutions on the horizon, going in different directions, but again we have to fight against the free services of Facebook, Google and all these other companies based on advertisement and data resell, who will always try to sabotage or frustrate the implementation, because, obviously, it is not in their interest that these new models start to work.

The only thing we can say is that, luckily, since 2008, there is something happening in different directions. And the more we try, the more certain we can be that, at some point, something will work out. To just wait until the industry solves it is not going to work because, again, we know the main players will frustrate these developments. Because that will be the end of their revenue model.

These strategies will only work if they becomes ubiquitous, if they are somehow integrated in the plan of becoming invisible

What happens with some of these advancements, like crowdfunding, is that while they are portrayed as alternative models, they still don’t solve the question of how to get paid for produced content.

The thing with crowdfunding, for instance, is that while it can work (and I know it has worked for many friends of mine) it usually only works once. It is very difficult to repeat. I find the Patreon model more interesting, in which people subscribe to you as an artist, or a writer, or a magazine, and have the possibility to fund you over time. That goes back to my previous idea that the internet should have developed itself through the subscription model but it didn’t, and I think that’s a lost opportunity. Even if it catches momentum again in 10 or 20 years, it already means that numerous generations, including my own, have been written off. At the moment, we are still supposed to contribute to the internet, to bring their content online, discuss, organize and so on, without anything coming back to us.

Some of these models, however, can easily get mistaken with an act of charity.

At the moment, when we’re still on defense, every attempt that tries to put the revenue model situation on the table and bring the money back to the content producers, is a good thing. Kim Dotcom, for instance, is planning on launching a kind of revenue model system connected to bitcoin. He is of course speaking to really broad, mainstream culture. On the more obscure side we have this cyber currency experiment called Steemit, which also works with the idea that if you read something and you like it, you pay for it.

First, we have to understand that these strategies will only work if they becomes ubiquitous, if they are somehow integrated in the plan of becoming invisible. Because if they aren’t, if time and again you have to make the payment a conscious act, it is not going to work. These payments, or this redistribution of wealth and attention, in the end, need to be part of an automated system. And we have to fully utilize the qualities and the potential that the computer offers us in order for it not to remain a one-off gift. Because it’s not a gift. We are not talking about charity.

Designing alternatives

So you have a precarious youth, with high levels of disenchantment and short attention spans, living within a system that seems to absorb whatever is thrown against them and come up even stronger after crises.

It feels like social media and the entrepreneurial industry is designed for non-revolt. Because “we are Facebook”: you are the user all the time. Some would say that for us to move forward all we have to do is to stop using these platforms. But is that really the move?

I find difficult to make any moral claims because of how it has all turned out. The exodus from Facebook, for instance, is a movement which already has a whole track record in itself. I myself left in 2010, six years after it was launched. And I was already feeling mainstream then because I left with 15,000 other people! So already by then it felt that I was the last to leave. This discussion has been with us for quite some time now and it feels like, especially here in the Netherlands, it never proved to be very productive to call for this mass exodus.

The one approach I am particularly in favor of is that of the smaller groups, the “organized networks”, that do not necessarily operate out in the open of the big platforms. I say that because, if you start operating there, you’ll see that the network itself invites you to enter their logic of very fast growth, if not hyper-growth. For social movements, this is something very appealing.

Yes, it feels like now it’s all measured by followers, even social movements.

Exactly, we cannot distinguish the social movement from the followers anymore. This is the trap we are in at the moment, so in a way we have to go back to a new understanding of smaller networks, or cells, or groups. It is no surprise that many people are now talking of going towards a new localism, because the easiest way to build these smaller groups is to focus on the local environment. But that’s not necessarily what I have in mind: I can also imagine smaller, trans-local networks.

The point is to really focus on what you want to achieve without getting caught in this very seductive network and platform logic. You must be very strong, because it is something like a siren, you’re bound to the ship and seduced by her; but this type of network logic will not work in your favor, not in the short term or in the long term.

Can you build an autonomous structure that maintains its momentum, that can exist over time?

In a recent article on open!, ‘Before Building the Avant-Garde of the Commons’, you defined the commons as an “aesthetic meta-structure”, or a collection of dozens of initiatives and groups that come together but are also in tension. Is there no place, or no need, for a sort of collective plan?

That’s when we enter the debate about organizing. Some people say ‘yes’, and the obvious answer to that is the political party. The political party is not a network, it is not a platform. Of course, there are many ways in which to do this and in different countries there are many traditions on how to operate a political party, but this is not necessarily what I have in mind. I am still trying to understand ways in which to organize the social that might have a political party component but is not reduced or overdetermined by that.

We are not talking anymore of the old division between socialists and anarchists, or the street and the institution. What is interesting now is: can you build an autonomous structure that maintains its momentum, that can exist over time? This is the big issue for both the social networks and social movements these days. Social movements come and go very fast. On the one hand, the speed is exciting if you are into it, it has a seductive side to it, and this is of course related to the network effect. But the frustration is also very big because you come back one week later and it’s gone. You cannot find any trace of it.

The problem, of course, is when the effect stays in the social media and it doesn’t translate into other realms. “When do we stop searching and start making?”, you ask in your book.

Those other realms are very diverse, even in terms of social relations between people, organizational capacities, or even policy, for that matter. The key debate here remains perdurability. Try something that might last for a year, go ahead. That would really transform something. I am talking about those type of commitments, of expression of the Social.

In Spain we had the indignados movement back in 2011. I think one of the successes of that movement was that it showed a lot of people what else was out there. And, while at some point it might have seemed as it was banishing, it actually created all these little networks that we are today seeing translated into a bunch of different initiatives, not all exclusively political —although the discussion has been heavily monopolized by the institution-street dichotomy—. Is there something to learn from these experiences?

Again, what I am interested in is reading what has been going on, and have people outside, but also inside of Spain find out about it. What has worked and what has not worked? Tell the story and share it with others. This is the way forward. One of the problems is to find a trigger, to see where things can accelerate, where can new forms of organization take shape. But again, I think that this only happens if you start to try. If we don’t try and just wait nothing is ever going to happen. This is the same issue as with the internet revenue models: “try something, do it”, because it will not resolve itself, even more so with the more political, social forms.

I still strongly believe in more local experiences because, even the 2011 movement, where there was a very interesting dynamic at play, wasn’t necessarily local. And that experience is still ahead of us. At the moment it feels like things are more defined by lifestyle, by generation or by some kind of general discontent, a very diffused feeling that “it can’t go on like this anymore”. Usually this means that people start to become active when they know they have got very little to lose and they are thinking “the current situation is not going to bring me anything in the foreseeable future”. This is the moment when you can share that discontent with others and start to become active, “get the ball rolling”. And it is possible that these days technology will play a less important role and we forget the whole naive idea that there were Facebook or Twitter revolutions, which we of course know afterwards that it wasn’t quite like that.

What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities?

Last year, I listened to Pierre Lévy on Medialab Prado say that it may be a better strategy to use the existing social networks and apps instead of trying to constantly make the public change their platform. Is that too optimistic?

Well, first of all, when the moment is there and people need to do something, it is going to happen regardless. Regardless, also, of what I think or what Pierre Lévy thinks. If you think out of the necessities and the making of history growing out of that the question may not be very important.

The things that I’m talking about are much more on a conceptual level. It means that you need to have a longer term view in which all these things are based upon, and then think of how they can further develop in alternative directions. In technology we know that these concepts are very important. That’s why I emphasize that we need to do a lot of experiments and report about them. Because maybe in the larger scheme, when we are talking about really big events or changes, all these concepts may not be very relevant; but if you take one step down and think in a more evolutionary mode how these technologies further developed, it is indeed very relevant. Just think of what may have happened if 20 or 30 years ago people would have thought more carefully about the revenue model situation, for instance. That may have made the difference for millions of people.

There is another consideration we can make. I understand that Pierre Lévy says we should use the existing technologies more efficiently. But obviously other people say we can only use the social media that exist now in a more emancipatory way if these platforms are socialized, if we really take over their ownership. That is a very interesting and radical proposition that other people have started to work on. What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities? This is an interesting development in which you don’t emphasize so much on the alternatives or the conceptual level.

But then again I would say that even if it is socialized, it would be in dire need of radical reform from the inside. I have theorized a lot about that. I think where the social media really fails is that it doesn’t offer any tools and this is a real pity. Google is a bit more interesting in that respect, because it comes from an engineering background… but precisely because of that, Google has failed in social media realm even though they have tried a lot of things. So it is interesting to further investigate how this utility and this invisible nature relates to a more conscious use of the tools they provide.

These are the two directions that are quite contradictory at the moment. On the one hand there is the whole technological development, which is definitely going into that realm of the invisibility; just look at the Internet of Things. On the other hand there is the aspect of democratization and politicization of the tool. These two strategies don’t necessarily have to be opposed, but at the moment it seems quite difficult to bring them together.

Photo by basair

The post “Developing dissident knowledges”: Geert Lovink on the Social Media Abyss appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our panelists included:

• Michel Bauwens, lead theoretician of the P2P Foundation
• Terry Bouricius, political scientist and expert on voting processes and sortition
• Susan Basterfield, management consultant and expert in self-organizing methods

The discussion centered on the importance of collaborative decision-making of tech platforms: What are the unique challenges — and potential solutions — when it comes to governance for platform co-ops, especially when their users are massive and remote? What are the foundations, pre-conditions, and key elements that enable collaborative deliberation? What are some real-world examples of how this can play out? Here are six ideas that emerged from the dialogue:

1. Learning and Building Upon Existing Models

Basterfield said it’s critical to listen to diverse perspectives and learn how to re-orient organizational power structures from the inside out. She said it’s important to find and shine a light on organizations and movements that are already reimaging how power can be distributed.

2. Dividing Decision-Making Responsibilities

The panelists agreed to some degree that there needs to be some divisions when it comes to decision-making. In simple terms, there are operational activities and deliberative activities. Passive users of a platform may not need to be in the know about operational activities. They may be more interested in the broader deliberations about the overall direction of the service.

The group agreed that there could be governance modules or teams to break up the huge mass of users into specializations over certain topics such as finance, branding, and policy decisions.

3. Bootstrapping the Organization

Bouricius said a key issue for democratic organizations is the the bootstrapping phase — how to get things up and running. There must be an initial plan to get it off the ground and to establish a process to ensure it continues in a democratic way. This can be done by having something like a rules committee that includes experts in facilitation or democratic procedures to draft the initial list of procedural features.

4. Sortition Model

Drawing from his decades of experience in public office and at a large consumer food co-op in Burlington, Vermont, Bouricius advocated for a jury model — or sortition — with random sample selections of average members to choose an organization’s board of directors and make major policy decisions.

During the bootstrapping phase, an organization that uses a sortition model must establish its initial rules about how the jury is drawn from the overall community to make sure it is as open, fair, and representative as possible. Once that is initially established, there must be a way to review the process itself to make sure it continues to function democratically, Bouricius said. Through this process, which would be iterated periodically, the jury system could be used to create a nominating committee to select boards of directors or a review committee that would oversee the board.

5. Social Charter

Bauwens described the need for a kind of social charter — much like the Constitution in the U.S. — that would establish the rules of engagement and values of the community. Basterfield said there must be an agreement on expectations — not just about participation and operations of the service — but how people on the platform choose to relate to each other. She noted that this is completely absent from most traditional, extractive shareholder-focused organizations.

6. User Ownership Would Lead to a New Twitter

Bauwens pointed out that if users owned Twitter, they would establish a new vision for the platform. Instead of being closed and controlled by management from above, it would be a more open platform where many can contribute — similar to an open-source project. That means endless potential for creating features that users would like to see on the platform. It also means the creation of a new social contract — one that could be built into Twitter’s Terms of Service that calls for the co-op to seriously address the tensions between free expression and sexual and racial harassment on the platform.

Since Twitter is so large and well established, Bauwens said a user-ownership conversion at this phase would be like taking over a plane in mid-flight. The question is, how would we make sure the plane doesn’t crash during this transition from being a shareholder-owned, top-down organization to one that is user-owned and governed from the bottom up? At the very least, there needs to be a core team of developers and operational people who understand how it works and continue to make it run.

If the proposal passes next month, that still doesn’t ensure that Twitter will become a user-owned cooperative. But even if it doesn’t, this process is raising interesting questions and sparking dialogue about how technology companies could turn into platform co-ops. We’ll keep you posted on how things progress for the #BuyTwitter movement — stay tuned.

Watch the full discussion here:

Graphic by Maira Sutton/Shareable

Photo by shivalichopra

The post 6 Ideas on How Millions of Users Can Own and Govern Twitter appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Dear Birdies,

The tweet-powered t-shirt vending machine in the room at Twitter’s shareholder meeting didn’t work at first. A Twitter employee attending to the machine walked me through the three hashtags required to get the shirt, but the machine wasn’t recognizing my tweeting. So, after 10 minutes of small talk with the employee about our proposal, I told her “Thank you” and started to go. But then the employee opened the vending machine door and handed me a shirt. Such a simple fix!

At Monday’s annual meeting, Twitter shareholders did not approve our proposal.

But by winning 4% of the vote, we can – and very likely will – resubmit a better proposal next year to democratize Twitter.

Twitter’s opposition statement to our proposal said it couldn’t be done. The truth is, even some of the strongest allies of #BuyTwitter assumed it was too complex. We’ve been through eight months of organizing, from op-ed to petition to proposal, defense, andMonday’s vote tally. Looking back, it all seems simple, like unlocking a vending machine.

Now, after the meeting, everything seems possible for our group.

A stock market analyst who helped guide our efforts emailed me, saying: “This study could be a game changer… You have legitimacy now from the shareholder vote. That carries weight. Leverage it to the fullest. Media coverage may very well be in your favor, too.”

Momentum from the vote is one way that #WeAreTwitter #BuyTwitter has succeeded so far at building organized power among Twitter users and shareholders.

Here is some more of what we’ve accomplished together:

• Advancing democratic ownership and accountability on the platforms we use, including a couple dozen individuals doing analysis, web design, advocacy with allies, and more.
• Dozens upon dozens of articles featuring #BuyTwitter including The Financial Times, WIRED, Salon, Recode, Vanity Fair, and The Co-op Water Cooler.
• Hundreds upon hundreds of tweets in the past week alone about #BuyTwitter, including an original love ballad on YouTube!
• A letter signed by major of coop allies, including the International Co-operative Alliance, Co-operatives UK, the National Cooperative Business Association, and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. You can sign it, too!
• Another letter by the International Co-op Alliance, on behalf of 2.6 million enterprises and 1 billion members worldwide.
• A poll conducted last week found that more than 2 million UK Twitter users would consider investing in a democratic Twitter.
• A Twitter Moment of selected highlights uniting #BuyTwitter, #NetNeutrality, #Coops, #corpgov, and exiting the stock market.

This is just the beginning. What’s next?

• Help build cooperative social media by joining the new Social.coop, a cooperatively owned instance of the federated, open-source Mastodon network. This is just one of many projects you can support in the #platformcoop ecosystem.
• Explore the broader movement for cooperative platforms and an Internet of Owners by attending The People’s Disruption conference in NYC and other events around the world.
• Join the organizing effort in our Loomio group. What should next year’s proposal say? Should we press on as a social media users’ union? A cooperative investment club?

I hope we can get together for an open online conversation. Until then, share our celebration tweet and have a wonderful week.

Onward,

Danny and the #WeAreTwitter team

PS: If someone you know wants a free kitten, tell them to get one here.

Photo by clasesdeperiodismo

The post Twitter, you’ve been served appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For lots of us users, it’s a different story. Twitter is pretty great. We reporters rely on its instant access to the chatter of the world more than we like to admit. The running commentary of friends and celebrities has turned horrible presidential debates and State of the Unions into Mystery Science Theater 3000. And the platform nurtures communities fighting for justice; historian Anthea Butler has argued, for instance, that Black Twitter has come to inherit the mantle of the Black Church. It also delivers us frequent access to Donald Trump’s id, if we want.

The trouble is, Wall Street’s economy has become Twitter’s economy, even if Wall Street’s view of the platform’s usefulness isn’t necessarily our view. But what if we changed Twitter’s economy? What if users were to band together and buy Twitter for themselves?

This is the kind of thinking at work in the growing movement for platform cooperativism – a series of experiments in shared ownership and governance for online platforms. But it’s an old idea, too. When I mentioned a Twitter buyout to co-op and crowdfunding veteran Danny Spitzberg, he reminded me of the Green Bay Packers. Have you ever wondered why the small-ish city of Green Bay has held on to its really good football team? It’s because, rather than being traded around by billionaires, the team started selling shares to its fans, starting in 1923. That has resulted in sold-out games, affordable ticket prices, tasteful stadium advertising, and an all-around successful, sustainable business model for generations.

I’m sure many of us have ideas about how we could make Twitter meet our needs better. One suggestion that came my way: “actually moderating threats and hatespeech.” But what would it take to put Twitter in the hands of those who rely on it most?

Armin Steuernagel, founder and managing partner at the innovative new investment firm Purpose Fund, suggested to me that it could go down this way: assemble a company and invite investment for shares that grant dividend rights, but not voting; gather about 20% of the funds needed for the buyout, then borrow the rest, and buy. As for the voting rights, they’d be distributed according to a “ladder of engagement,” including investors and general users, but allocating more control to those who contribute the most value to the platform, such as employees and the most active users. Finally, there could be a few “golden shares” with veto rights, perhaps controlled by a foundation representing all users.

It’s a long-shot, Steuernagel admits, but he points out that this kind of thing recently worked with Prokon, a sizable wind-power company that escaped bankruptcy and buyout by converting to a cooperative.

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc, wonders whether Twitter’s current leaders could play a role. “Could existing employees (or founders) who believe in such a purchase,” she wrote in an email, “be willing to roll-over some of their stock into the new ownership structure?” We might also need to ask this Saudi prince.

Another suggestion comes from Tom McDonough, a blogger with a history in capital markets, who proposes that less than 1% of users – no small number, at three million – could each buy $2,300 worth of shares and vote as a bloc for a transition to cooperative ownership. They’d then be paid back through the transition process, partly through a membership fee that could average to $10 each year. Rather than giving the company a blank check to sell your data, would you pay a co-ownership fee?

There are other possibilities as well. Using the Jobs Act, which now allows equity crowdfunding, a buyout could be funded with small investments from millions of people. Even the US government could step in, recognizing Twitter as a public utility and helping to orchestrate the conversion – just as it has in financing rural electric co-ops since the 1930s, which have become vehicles for broadband expansion today.

Twitter’s impending transition need not be, for most of us, merely a time to wait and see. It can be a chance for us to discuss, scheme, and organize. What would be an appropriate ownership design for the Twitter we know and love, and how do we get it there? How can we make sure that the future of the company serves those who depend on it most, who most want see it succeed culturally, technologically, and financially? This could be a chance to make the company better reflect the commons and the community that we have built with its product.

Republished from The Guardian

Photo by eldh

The post Here’s my plan to save Twitter: let’s buy it appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Caitlin Dewey writes:

On June 4, the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”

Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy.

Now, as if it needed further proof, the satirical headline’s been validated once again: According to a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.

Worse, the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.

“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”

To verify that depressing piece of conventional Internet wisdom, Legout and his co-authors collected two data sets: the first, on all tweets containing Bit.ly-shortened links to five major news sources during a one-month period last summer; the second, on all of the clicks attached to that set of shortened links, as logged by Bit.ly, during the same period. After cleaning and collating that data, the researchers basically found themselves with a map to how news goes viral on Twitter.

And that map showed, pretty clearly, that “viral” news is widely shared — but not necessarily, you know, read. (I’m really only typing this sentence for 4 in 10 people in the audience.)

Read the full article here

Photo by mkhmarketing

The post 6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Yet only in the twisted logic of the startup economy could a company with around $500 million of revenue per quarter—and more, most recently—be called a failure. That’s half a billion dollars for a tiny application that simply lets people send out 140 characters to each other. The economic activity it has generated is nothing short of miraculous.

But that’s not enough for investors who expect recoup 100 or even 1,000 times their original investment in the company. To do that, Twitter must grow. Somehow, it must turn itself from a simple, popular, and profitable way for more than 300 million people to broadcast messages into something still bigger—even if it has to risk killing what people love about Twitter in order to do so.

This is why I couldn’t help but grimace that morning I saw Twitter’s founders smiling on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as the company celebrated its IPO and each of them became billionaires. Among them, these guys had upended journalism with Blogger, and credit with Paypal and Square. Here they were throwing in with the biggest industry of them all. When you get to ring the opening bell on the exchange and bask in the applause of the traders on the floor, it’s not because you have “disrupted” something. It’s because you have confirmed that—at least for a few—the game is still working. As the dealer is sure to cry out at the casino for all to hear, “We have a winner!”

But becoming such a winner—even playing the startup game to begin with—condemns the founders of a company to chase growth above all else. That’s the core command of the highly accelerated digital economy.

This is why a company like Uber can’t simply be satisfied helping people get rides. It must instead establish a monopoly in the taxi business so it can “pivot” to another vertical such as delivery services, logistics, or robotic transportation. Airbnb can’t just help people find places to stay, but must colonize city after city and deregulate its entire sector. A social media platform like Facebook must pivot to become a data miner; a messaging app Snapchat must try to become a news service; even a giant like Google must accept that its once-inspiring stream of innovations pales in comparison to what it can earn as a new holding company, Alphabet.

For Twitter, this command means finding a way to grow a business that may already be full-grown. What if half a billion dollars a quarter really is all the world wants to spend on tweets? But that is not an option. Instead, the company must pivot toward new potential growth areas, at the expense of the market it already has.

And so Twitter users are confronted with a news reader through which they’re supposed to glean the headlines. Or a new, annoying feature called “Twitter moments”—an algorithmically derived stream of greatest hits, which is little more than a thinly veiled opportunity to fold in “Sponsored Moments,” meaning commercial messages masquerading as organic content. Now the company is working on live-streaming video ads, again valuing growth over user experience.

Maybe it’s this very drive toward growth that is pushing users away. For the first time Twitter’s user base has begun to decline, from 307 million users down to 305. It’s just a tick, of course, but in the wrong direction.

If Twitter were to value the sustainability of its enterprise over the growth prospects of its shares, it wouldn’t have to invest so much of its revenue in new, outlandish features, and would have a lot more to show in profit. Heck, it might even be able to offer a dividend.

Last week, Dorsey told investors on his conference call that he wants Twitter to become “the planet’s largest daily connected audience.” That’s supposed to give them hope for the future. But when the hope of a company is based on it becoming the biggest thing in the whole world, chances are the opportunity for genuine prosperity has already been lost.

Originally published in The Atlantic

The post Twitter is not a failure appeared first on P2P Foundation.