This piece in the Atlantic about “how to put out democracy’s dumpster fire” turns to a range of experts who are rethinking the motivational structure and design of the Internet. It starts with a discussion of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and harkens back to a day when the U.S. thrived due to its various “associations.” Groups of workers or other like-minded citizens gathering to do the work of democracy. The history told in this piece is over-simplified, and this critique from Jeff Jarvis is fair:
However, I’m most interested in the article’s turn to a “new generation” of people who are trying to reimagine the Internet:
“A new generation of internet activists, lawyers, designers, regulators, and philosophers is offering us that vision, but now grounded in modern technology, legal scholarship, and social science. They want to resurrect the habits and customs that Tocqueville admired, to bring them online, not only in America but all across the democratic world.”
That generation includes a range of folks, including J. Nathan Matias, Ethan Zuckerman, Eli ariser, Talia Stroud, and many others. It also discusses Polis, a platform that I’ve made note of in a previous post. However, there’s no mention of the fediverse, and I think it would be interesting to set those efforts alongside those mentioned in the article. The fediverse is driven by folks who are trying to build a new infrastructure, while the Atlantic appears mostly interested (with some exceptions) in those studying the existing infrastructure.
Obviously, there is room (and a need) for both, though I’ve thinking of those managing federated servers as doing something like the “vernacular” work in this area – developing some on-the-ground strategies. Those strategies are doing theory by way of software, codes of conduct, web development, server maintenance, etc. I wonder if these research centers are studying this (often niche) portion of the internet or if the focus is primarily on how to rethink the corporate Internet that we all live inside of.
As I think more about this project that I want to get off the ground, I am interested primarily in the applications emerging out of the fediverse as models for a range of activities. Yes, I am interested in understanding how a federated model might be enacted by more people – by people who are outside of the very tech-savvy groups that currently run and maintain federated services. But I’m also interested in understanding if those tools and practices of these fediverse communities might be something that could be enacted on the corporate Internet or if the mere fact that a service runs through servers that are extracting and monetizing data essentially kills any possibility of learning from federated networks.
