I was on sabbatical when filming for Code for the People began. I yearned to be a part of this project and took time to deeply reflect on whether it was worthy of me breaking from my sabbatical. Five years prior I squandered my sabbatical, and five years later I had vowed to honor it as if it were sacred.
One notable notion that perks up my ears when I hear it — often from those returning from Automattic’s sabbatical benefit — is that three months off is the longest they’ve spent not working since they were a young adult, a kid really. And this was true for me as well. Which is why I chose to remain diligently focused on unplugging from work.
My ego is the only source of my regret. The film is a beautiful song, composed of lyrics we all need to hear. I do not know that my addition would have made it better, nor do I know that my absence made it any worse. Only that I feel a sense of longing to have been included, because this work is the work I have dedicated my life to. This song is my theme song.
To quiet my ego, and to give back to the project, I have decided to write an article deconstructing the film and adding my own melodies.
Your reality is dictated by commercial interests
At the risk of sounding like an economic capitalist conspiracy theorist, there is no clearer argument that commercialization can be a poison pill, a virus that infects its host, than on the Internet. The World Wide Web — a beautiful canvas of content owned and published by us, the community — is losing the beautiful pattern of chaotic, entangled connections. Every sign-up on social media platforms, every purchase on titan-level ecommerce marketplaces, every article read on media-mogul-owned news sites is one less dynamic connection across the tapestry of the web. We are clipping the silk strands that connect the open web and braiding down those connections under a few platforms.
“If we’re in a world where only commercial software exists, that means your reality is dictated by commercial interests.”
– Beau Lebens [0:38-0:45]
The risk to the Internet is real, and we aren’t even fully aware of our contributions to that very risk.
Consider the pipes through which content from the Internet travels. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are spending fortunes lobbying for the right to clog the pipes for the poor. Seriously, take a look at the COPE Act this bill would have enacted high-speed throughways and lower-speed throughways, allowing ISPs to charge content creators a fee to have their content delivered at today’s speeds. If they succeed in the future, only select platforms will be able to afford unclogging those pipes.
Consider the rented podiums you speak from. Consolidate the Internet to a select few platforms and suddenly shadow banning and algorithmic devaluation are weaponized mechanisms for controlling free speech. Everyday social media influencers will be on the front lines, and we’ll chalk it up to the cost of doing business, while these platforms build precedent and refine algorithms to control and filter the voices of journalists, leaders, and activists.
Now consider the scale. When a handful of companies have consolidated the voices and the microphones, they become the de facto regulators of speech. The executives behind the algorithms will decide which ideas spread and which are relegated to the shadows. They’ll decide whose candidates make it to the polls. They’ll decide which small businesses can thrive and which die. And we are paying them for the privilege. We pay with our cash, our attention, our data, and we even make it all possible by feeding them our content. We are funding the wall being built around our freedom.
“Open source is a way to build software that increases freedom and autonomy in the world. And I feel like we have to fight for that freedom.“
– Matt Mullenweg [0:45-0:54]
We need to vaccinate ourselves against the disease infecting the Internet. A vaccine teaches our body to recognize the threat by building immunity. The Internet’s immunity is going to be powered by open source. When code is open, there are no secret ingredients. When you can read and question and improve and, most importantly, move your code and your content, you are diluting their power. You’re fighting against platform consolidation and lock-in. And that’s the first symptom you should be on the lookout for. If a platform is trying to lock you in, you need to fight back by unlocking and opening that door.
Free as in Freedom
“Free as in freedom, not free as in beer… The free stands for the freedom of using, reading, modifying, sharing the code.”
– Paolo Belcastro [0:53 – 1:12]
The value of open source can’t be underestimated, but it can be undervalued. It’s our responsibility as stewards of the open web to speak to that value, which spans from the practical to the profoundly moral. Engineers can spout arguments of improved quality, security, and longevity. Designers can talk about collaboration and shared experiences. Accessibility experts can access a diverse audience of builders and buyers. And the philosophers among us can stand up and fight to ensure that tools of expression won’t be rationed by wealth, geography, or the approval of a gatekeeper. An Internet available to everyone, on equal terms, is not only a technical achievement but a moral one. It puts any voice, and all voices, on equal footing.
This was understood instinctively. Before the Internet, anyone could carry a soapbox to the town square. Ideas fought for attention in the open, and those ideas lit the torches of revolution without asking permission or being ranked by an algorithm. When the printing press gave way to broadcast, we built a system of accountability around it. Albeit imperfect, a system built on self-regulated journalistic integrity and government-regulated compliance balanced the message. I wrote about this in Cognitive Inheritance: our parents trusted the news because the system was designed to be worthy of that trust. And we celebrated when those regulations fell to the free Internet. Our work to democratize the voices is falling victim to privatization.
Where would we be if the greatest voices of the past were forced to appease an algorithm? If Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was banned to the shadows. If suffragists’ pamphlets were flagged as “borderline content.” If the articles written by abolitionists were maliciously downvoted. History’s most necessary voices were rarely the most comfortable ones. And comfort is precisely what we optimize for. Free as in freedom means the door is open and can never be closed behind you — not by a CEO, not by a shareholder, and not by a machine no one fully understands.
“The reason why every single company in the world is built on open source is because it is the safest technology of all.”
– Jensen Huang [1:17 – 1:25]
I say this as someone who co-founded a security company, transparency is the security model. Security through obscurity only goes so far; hiding the blueprints doesn’t keep a building safe. Open the code and you trade a handful of employees reviewing vulnerabilities, design flaws, and UX issues for thousands of skeptics and evangelists, investigators and researchers, rivals and champions. The most scrutinized software is the safest software. The most extended software is the most reachable software. The most used software is the most accessible software.
“You can see the decisions being made, you can see the lines of code, you can decide what you want to do with your data. It’s like a technological democracy.”
– Anne McCarthy (and one other) [1:25 – 1:34]
A technological democracy. I love that phrasing, because democracies, like the cities, are never finished. They are always in motion, always under construction, shaped by the people who inhabit them and owed a debt of stewardship in return. We don’t just have a right to the city we’ve built together on the Internet. We have a responsibility to it: to protect it, to govern it wisely, to repair what breaks, and to enjoy what’s been created.
Own your Influence
“Platforms find a way to lock users in… once it’s hard for them to leave they make things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers… eventually it’s just a pile of sh*t.”
– Cory Doctorow [0:23 – 0:37]
I frequently return to my mantra — Own your Influence — for the preservation of social influence in a world looking to strip you of it. Social media influencers, writers, teachers, musicians, and anyone else building a community online has little knowledge of the fragile foundation they build their house upon. It breaks my heart to see passionate content creators pouring their blood and sweat into building an audience that they do not own. Worse, they don’t even own the connection to that audience.
Horror stories litter the Internet and tell tales of people building a following, gaining traction, quitting other pursuits, and losing it all to the almighty algorithm. The siren’s song draws you in with a built-in audience, an easy-to-use interface, and a promise of engagement. Anyone can do it, you hear; I can do that, you think. And why not?
The truth is that shortcuts and downhill passages are never as perfect as we are promised. All things worth doing take time.
Everything on these platforms is designed to show you a fantasy. One that feels tangible; it feels close; it feels like you could reach out and grab it. We have all seen beauty through the lens of camera reels. Rarely are we able to see what’s out of frame, the dirty underbelly of someone’s feed. We don’t concern ourselves with their challenges, vices, or addictions. We see a beautiful Greek beach and wonder why we don’t get to be the ones sinking our toes into that sand.
The same goes for creator’s envy. We see lively, personable influencers sharing their passions. They make it look easy. They make it look like they hopped out of bed, turned on the camera, and got a thousand likes. We don’t concern ourselves with the sheer work involved in making it happen.
Nor do we concern ourselves with the risks. The devil is in the details, and the details are buried in terms of service we never read and algorithms we will never see. We ignore the fact that you can’t stop making content, ever. We pretend that the algorithm is on our side. We convince ourselves that the dopamine we feel is repeatable and sustainable.
The reality of the situation is far different. We become slaves to the algorithm, never breaking, never ceasing in the creation of content. We make sacrifices on the altar of the algorithm because we really don’t understand it, not truly, and so we are left with faith that the choices we make will pay off. And we chase the positive feelings we had when things started to grow, like an addict looking for a fix.
And all of it — all of your work, all of your efforts to devise strategies and plans and ways to glean the algorithm’s rules. The work you pour into content and building an audience. The time you take from your families, or worse, the lifestyle you build around justifications that it’s okay to always be creating content. All of it is at constant risk, because the truth — the hard-to-hear, and truly unfiltered, unwashed truth — is that the platform does not care about you. You are leasing a podium from them, and you get to keep it for as long as you keep the attention of those standing before it. That’s it. You’re a monkey on a box whipping yourself to perform, and if you fail, if you falter, if you make one mistake, you’re often left standing on your podium with no one to perform for.
That is the truth behind the mantra of Own Your Influence. Not that you should own your audience, because you can’t. But rather that you should own the connection you have to the audience you built. The only way to do that is to rid yourself of the algorithm. The only way to Own your Influence is to build a connection to your audience over the open web. Stripping yourself of the rented land you perform on and instead opening yourself to a green field of opportunity. Because you can’t lose your connection to an audience built on the open web. Yes, they can unsubscribe. Yes, they can move on. Yes, they can choose that you’re no longer relevant. But the important detail to remember there is that those are individual decisions made by real people.
The algorithm is an unmanned, unrelenting beast with no compassion or empathy for anyone. It will decide you’re irrelevant, it will listen to malicious reports of you breaking the rules, it will watch your analytics and decide to cast you into the shadows without a moment’s notice. You will be shadow-banned, and your dopamine drip will dry up, and you’ll have no recourse, no options, and no ability to effect change. You won’t even have the ability to reach out and talk to your audience, to convince them to stay, because your connection to them has been strangled in the fist of the algorithm.
Juxtapose that with the open web, where you own your connections, you can pivot, you can make changes, you can be transparent and tell your audience you’re taking a much-needed vacation and to bear with you. You can be open and honest and build a loyal audience. Yes, it will take more time, but it will be far more resilient. Yes, it will take more work, but you are smart enough to realize that you don’t actually want to be an overnight success. You don’t want to be forgotten as fast as you were found.
Look for Part 2 next week. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Leave a Reply