Where is the IndieWeb?
One might consider the IndieWeb’s indieweb.org wiki-based website and chat the “logos” of IndieWeb. There is a small group of about a hundred active to very active participants who hang out in these spaces on a regular basis, but there are also many who dip in and out over time as they tinker and build, ask advice, get some help, or just to show up and say hello. Because there are concrete places online as well as off (events) for them to congregate, meet, and interact, it’s the most obvious place to find these ideas and people.
Beyond this there is an even larger group of people online who represent the “ethos” of IndieWeb. Some may have heard the word before, some have a passing knowledge of it, but an even larger number have not. They all act and operate in a way that either seemed natural to them because they grew up in the period of the open web, or because they never felt accepted by the thundering herds in the corporate social enclosures. Many are not necessarily easily found or discovered because they’re not surfaced or highlighted by the sinister algorithms of corporate social media, but through slow and steady work (much like the in person social space) they find each other and interact in various traditional web spaces. Many of them can be found in spaces like Micro.Blog, Tilde Club or NeoCities, or through movements like A Domain of One’s Own. Some can be found through a variety of webrings, via blogrolls, or just following someone’s website and slowly seeing the community of people who stop by and comment. Yes, these discovery methods may involve a little more work, but shouldn’t healthy human interactions require work and care?
The final group of people, and likely the largest within the community, are those that represent the “pathos” of IndieWeb. The word IndieWeb has not registered with any of them and they suffer with grief in the long shadow of corporate social media wishing they had better user interfaces, better features, different interaction, more meaningful interaction, healthier and kinder interaction. Some may have even been so steeped in big social for so long that they don’t realize that there is another way of being or knowing.
These people may be found searching for the IndieWeb promised land on silo platforms like Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger, or Medium where they have the shadow on the wall of a home on the web where they can place their identities and thoughts. Here they’re a bit more safe from the acceleration of algorithmically fed content and ills of mainstream social. Others are trapped within massive content farms run by multi-billion dollar extractive companies who quietly but steadily exploit their interactions with friends and family.
All three of these parts of the IndieWeb, the logos, the ethos, and the pathos comprise the community of humanity. They are the sum of the real conversation online.
Venture capital backed corporate social media has cleverly inserted themselves between us and our interactions with each other. They privilege some voices not only over others, but often at the expense of others and only to their benefit. We have been developing a new vocabulary for these actions with phrases like “surveillance capitalism”, “data mining”, and analogizing human data as the new “oil” of the 21st century. The IndieWeb is attempting to remove these barriers, many of them complicated, but not insurmountable, technical ones, so that we can have a healthier set of direct interactions with one another that more closely mirrors our in person interactions. By having choice and the ability to move between a larger number of service providers there is an increasing pressure to provide service rather than the growing levels of continued abuse and monopoly we’ve become accustomed to.
None of these subdivisions—logos, ethos, or pathos—is better or worse than the others, they just are. There is no hierarchy between or among them just as there should be no hierarchy between fellow humans. But by existing, I think one could argue that through their humanity these people are all slowly, but surely making the web a healthier, happier, fun, and more humanized and humanizing place to be.
I’d appreciate others’ thoughts and perspectives on this regardless of where they choose to post them.
We caught ’em!
— Perusall (@Perusall) February 21, 2022
https://hyp.is/A9EcXpR0Eey_JGdvKnxDPg/twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751
In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.
Image made with the help of BibleMunger 2.0
***UPDATE*** On Sunday April 18 Ian Linkletter [announced](https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1383896567279538177) that his legal fees have extended beyond the amount raised in his fundraising campaign from a few months ago. We had always intended to discuss online proctoring and academic surveillance during this session and now with this new development we are dedicating the event to Ian’s defense fund. If you are unfamiliar with this case the [Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good overview of what is at stake](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic) and we ask that you:
**Give to Ian’s GoFundMe in solidarity with this cause**
We are having a Virtually Connecting Missed Conversation following the #OER21xDomains conference on Friday, April 23rd, 8pm UK time.
Our guests include #OER21xDomains keynote speakers Jasmine Roberts, Rajiv Jhangiani, Laura Gibbs, Tutaleni Asino, and our participant discussants include Maya Hey, Georgia Yee, Sarah Silverman, and Errkie Haipinge . Your Virtually Connecting buddies/hosts are Autumm Caines, Maha Bali, and Brenna Clarke-Gray.
We will focus on reflecting on the conference in general, and specifically would like to address the topic of online proctoring and surveillance in education. To keep the conversation intimate we will not be sharing a Zoom registration, but you are welcome to watch live and post comments/questions on the YouTube livestream, which we will be monitoring.
To know the time in your local time, see below:
Watch Live via YouTube
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April 23, 2021 at 12:00PM - April 23, 2021 at 01:00PM
Michael Mignano (Medium)In the coming months and years, we’ll be working to further enable choice for creators, including giving them the power to choose not only how someone wants to create or monetize audio, but also where specific content is able to be consumed, ensuring creators have an opportunity to decide if they are aligned with the platforms distributing their content.
The open RSS standard has provided immense value to the growth of the podcasting ecosystem over the past few decades. ❧
Why do I get the sinking feeling that the remainder of this article will be maniacally saying, “and all of that ends today!”
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 09:34AM
We also believe that in order to democratize audio and achieve Spotify’s mission of enabling a million creators to live off of their art, we must work to enable greater choice for creators. This choice becomes increasingly important as audio becomes even easier to create and share. ❧
Dear Anchor/Spotify, please remember that “democratize” DOES NOT equal surveillance capitalism. In fact, Facebook and others have shown that doing what you’re probably currently planning for the podcasting space will most likely work against democracy.
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 09:13AM
In the coming months and years, we’ll be working to further enable choice for creators, including giving them the power to choose not only how someone wants to create or monetize audio, but also where specific content is able to be consumed, ensuring creators have an opportunity to decide if they are aligned with the platforms distributing their content. ❧
So this means you’re going to use simple, open standards and tooling so that not only Anchor and Spotify will benefit?
Or are you going to build closed systems that require the use of proprietary software and thus force subscriptions?
Are you going to Balkanize the audio space to force consumers into your product and only your product? Or will producers be able to have a broad selection of platforms to which they could easily export and distribute their content?
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 08:57AM
Thus, the creative freedom of creators is limited. ❧
And thus draconian methods for making the distribution unnecessarily complicated, siloed, surveillance capitalized, and over-monitized beyond all comprehension are beyond the reach of one or two for profit companies who want to own the entire market like monopolistic giants are similarly limited. (But let’s just stick with the creators we’re pretending to champion, shall we?)
Annotated on April 19, 2021 at 09:07AM
tl;dr: Anchor: We’re doing this not so much because creators say they want it, but because we really, really want it. P.S.: We don’t care at all what our listeners think, and so have nothing to say about their freedom.
It took a bit of moving data, extensions, and other details over, but I’ve now made the switch to Firefox as my default browser. Sweeping Chrome into the dustbin.
"They sued me to silence me."
Directed by Jeff Orlowski. With Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, Vincent Kartheiser, Tristan Harris. Explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.
Incredibly bleak. Sadly not a lot of discussion (literally until the credits) about how to begin to address the issue.
This does a good job at pointing out some of the problems, but doesn’t really begin to suggest solutions. (i.e. it covers some of the reasons for Why IndieWeb, but doesn’t get into the ideas of how to escape corporate social media.)
I sort of expected more discussion about how the algorithms are actively radicalizing people toward the fringes. Instead this was suggested in the fictionalized parts.
I’m not sure that I really enjoyed the fictionalized character “avatars” portions as much, but they will give the more passive viewers specific examples and people to attach the narrative to to help push the points home. I suspect that for most, those portions will prevent the documentary from being as dry and thus help it reach a broader audience.
Vincent Kartheiser was a generally good anthropomorphization of an AI in an interesting piece of type-casting, but at one or two points he actually may have even been sympathetic.
Everyone who is on social media should watch this movie.
So this represents a fun set of assumptions.
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) June 10, 2020
1. You do all your reading based on things you click on Twitter
2. Twitter tracks every single article you click on and records the full URL against your profile.
3. Retweeting unread links is very commonhttps://t.co/scW20WShLE
I would like to have some of the data here for how I found things and came to things, but I’m not such a fan of Twitter having and tracking it all on my behalf. This stinks of yet another reason for them to be collecting data on me and what I’m reading.
This is the only video phone I have time for. I don't want to talk to you people, let alone see you. FFS. Apparently all of you are diving headlong into the nightmare that is video conferencing, and "Zoom" seems to be the poison of choice these days, so you should know that it's terrible: Violet Blu...
By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.
For a variety of reasons (including lack of budget, time, support, and other resources) many educators have been using corporate tools from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others for their ease-of-use as well as for a range of functionality that hadn’t previously existed in the blogosphere or open source software that many educators use or prefer.
This leaves us and our students open to the vagaries and abuses that those platforms continually allow including an unhealthy dose of surveillance capitalism.
Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation)The Gopher story is a perfect case history for Adversarial Interoperability. The pre-Gopher information landscape was dominated by companies, departments, and individuals who were disinterested in giving users control over their own computing experience and who viewed computing as something that took place in a shared lab space, not in your home or dorm room.
Rather than pursuing an argument with these self-appointed Lords of Computing, the Gopher team simply went around them, interconnecting to their services without asking for permission. They didn't take data they weren't supposed to have—but they did make it much easier for the services' nominal users to actually access them.
