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Why am I telling you this?
The Open Web, walled gardens, and 327 personal obsessions
Why do I blog about what I blog about? Why does this blog exist?
Primarily because I have a large number of interests and I love to use them to delight the enlightened (and enlighten the benighted). I like to share and discuss ideas with people, and if the ideas are worthwhile, I like to see them spread.
I track my interests in a perpetually growing file called obsessions.txt. Every one of its (currently) 327 lines contains an interest of mine, such as SETI, Sherlock Holmes, Sid Sackson, the Singularity, or solipsism. I wrote a program called ii that randomly combines such interests two at a time and searches for them on the Web. I want to find new mutations of my memes (mine in the sense that they inhabit my brain, not necessarily that I originated them), and I want to delight in the mutations myself.
So that's why I blog. But why do I blog here on this tiny shred of the World Wide Web rather than in the massive walled garden of Facebook, or some other one? The answer lies in a concept called the Open Web, which I support and have seen most succinctly defined by Bryan Behrenshausen of Red Hat:
The “open Web” is the idea that the World Wide Web should remain accessible to as many people as possible. It has both technical and cultural dimensions.
The Open Web has these dimensions; walled gardens do not. The technical dimensions are open standards such as HTTP and HTML. The cultural dimensions, are, I think, expressed elegantly in turn by this Declaration of Internet Freedom from 2011:
We stand for a free and open Internet.
We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:
Expression: Don't censor the Internet.
Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies and don’t punish innovators for their users' actions.
Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.
I find these Open Web principles admirable. For example, I hardly think I need to elaborate on social media's poor reputation for privacy. Facebook alone is notorious for, if not synonymous with, violating its users' privacy, sometimes with catastrophic results (arguably including the 2016 U.S. presidential election). This little blog, on the other hand, wouldn't steal your privacy, or mine, if it could.
Innovation and all the rest are great virtues, but I think the virtue of openness is what leads me to make most of my posts on the Open Web rather than social media walled gardens.
Even though I probably have a bigger audience now on both Facebook and Twitter than on this little blog, that might not be true in the long run. Writing on the Open Web is so much more discoverable than on Twitter, and especially on Facebook. Search engines can't find you on the latter (can't get over the walls of the garden), and have a hard time of it with Twitter too. Facebook will even throttle your posts within the walled garden so that only a fraction of your audience will see them.
You may have noticed that the Declaration of Internet Freedom link I gave was to the Internet Archive copy of the Declaration of Internet Freedom, which seems to have disappeared from the Web. "HAW! HAW! HAW!" I hear you say (as if you are a hopeless sinner in an old Jack Chick bible comic). "Where's your manifesto now?"
That's the point. Because its writers used open web standards, the Declaration is safe in the planetary memory of the Internet Archive, whereas your yesterday's Facebook post is quick down the memory hole like a meth-addicted rabbit.
I recently wanted to catch up on a friend's Facebook timeline, but I couldn't scroll back any further than a few months before the delay retrieving his posts became too onerous. Either the masters of Facebook are more incompetent than even I suppose, or else the increasing delay is deliberate, like the throttling mentioned earlier. After all, I can use Google Groups to retrieve open-standards-based Usenet articles from at least thousands of people posting all the way back to 1982 in a matter of seconds; surely finding messages from a single person a few months ago shouldn't tax the infrastructure of a walled garden that encloses a third of the population of the world.
In any case, old Facebook messages are almost impossible to retrieve -- but I want to be retrievable for a long time, even if my messages are of no more than historical interest.
If you find the ideas in this post interesting, you can use the Comments link at the bottom of the page to share your ideas with me and whomever else happens across it, perhaps by running their own random searches. For the love of Dog, don't go back to the walled garden where you found the link to this message and comment there instead.
Another benefit of findability is the opportunity to communicate and, hopefully, collaborate with people you don't already know. Aside from the social benefits of meeting new people, evidence points toward enhanced creativity when working with people you don't know well. This is fascinatingly explored in the Hidden Brain podcast found here: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/24/687707404/creative-differences-the-benefits-of-reaching-out-to-people-unlike-ourselves
Right, I just listened to that again, because I was distracted when it was on this morning. It's sort of like the hack Enjoy Good, Clean Memetic Sex from Mind Performance Hacks. You don't want to exchange ideas exclusively with people you know, lest your memetic offspring be sickly and inbred. You want "new blood"!
What do you think of the metanet, on Bitcoin SV? I feel like permanent uncensored blockchain storage is a more open open web than hoping that things are echoed by archive.org when they go down. With metanet you pay a few cents once to post something and then it's a safe stable permanent link forever.
My brain has needed nutrients from your brain that it doesn't get by itself. I have this old person aversion to newness, and a tendency to burrow into the past, including the futurism of the past. There's a reason that steampunk is so popular and fun, as it feeds this need for a kind of silly speculation and extrapolation that is just.... wrong. Fun. That feeds some deep desire that the real world is never got feed.
The anarchic notion that providers and hosters have no responsibility for the content their applications hold and use, that tool manufacturers bear zero responsibility for what is done with their tools, is one of those absolutes, like freedom of speech that shades into gray in the real world around some weird stuff. (Like, say Child porn, which can be evidence of a crime and criminal exploitation as well as a document) Zuckerberg laughed at the idea that he was in any way responsible for the content on his platform, as he took millions from Russia to hack the election with carefully crafted and tested info-poison.
Of course it's the profit motive that weaponizes the platform, that gives it its weird monopolistic power. You can't be brainwashed by an anarchic raft of largely text based communications. You need videos and branding and the echoes of social media. Great New Yorker piece on how the Non-Story (the hat story) is ginned up by twitter trending which is fed by bots, again, many Russian.
The anarchic web, with fake identities based on email addresses, is an illusion of anarchy where bots and tools and paid agents spew poison into every commons. Yelp? Amazon reviews. Social media. If the content has commercial value, it can be exploited, manipulated, and the amount of signal needed to drown out the noise grows every larger.
Smaller communities resting on meat-world, real-time components or built up slowly over time and jealously gaurded by moderators can be wonderful things. In the same way that grocery stores sell real food on one aisle, and monstrous addictive machine food in the other 20. I have had to train myself not to walk down those asiles to reduce my dementia risk by a factor of three. (turns out gum disease is another factor of three I've been working on for years now). I have to know now that FB is the soda and chips aisle, Twitter is the old school boxed pasta and canned vegetables and nestles quick and drink powders, etc. Your blog a curated experience created by a dedicated and incorruptible lensmen like yourself, is the produce aisle.
But is a different kind of walled garden; you're the wall; you weed the garden. If nazis show up and put up flags for genocide, you take them down. You don't have algos that can't tell the nazis from pussy hats, and giant fields of crops so huge only robots can tend them. You don't worry about the knock on effect of taking down swastikas. You're one of a million points of light. Thus far, the million points of light have never been enough to really drive back the darkness. Or maybe the points of lights are the candles carried that do change everything. Though they are also the torches.
And now I have to figure out the UI here because the software isn't showing my name. And like a cranky old person learning new UI bugs me
Jay, thank you for your thoughtful response. I certainly enjoy being called a dedicated and incorruptible Lensman. However, I have to disagree that this blog is yet another walled garden. I'm not stopping anyone from posting here. You don't need an account on Overwhelming Gearwheels to post on it. There are no passwords. There's no special client necessary. And so on.
It's true that if someone started posting hate speech (or spam) I'd delete it. But I think this makes me more of a gardener than a wall. In the end, this blog is a "curated experience", as you put it: not a wilderness, but a garden, and definitely not a walled one.
mungojelly, the press release for metanet, from only a month and a half ago, says that metanet is a for-pay "secure alternative to the Internet". Sounds like a walled garden to me.
Gott's principle indicates that metanet, being brand new, is less likely to stick around than the Internet Archive (functional for decades) or the Internet itself (even longer). I'm just not ready to have faith that this brand-new tech is ready to create a "safe stable permanent link forever" for my data. Talk to me in twenty years. Meanwhile, if you'd like to pay to back this blog up on metanet, be my guest.
Finally, you don't need to "[hope] that things are echoed by archive.org when they go down". You can point archive.org directly at a URL you want to archive with the Save Page Now feature and it will be saved immediately.
(If the author doesn't want it archived or changes their mind) then content can be retroactively-removed-from/never-archived-by the Internet Archive. Content is most preservable if using open standards (i.e. html+css) and non-walled so making a copy is easy, under a license that allows making/sharing copies (i.e. Creative Commons), and compelling enough that people bother to make/share local copies (especially easy if source code of website hosted somewhere like Github although there are plugins to make local copies of non-walled websites).
I don't have special insight into Internet Archive policy, but knowing how they feel about preserving information, I'd be willing to bet they don't actually delete data on request, but instead mark it as unreadable.