 in the chat. And I wanted to open by asking if everybody could just go around and share the story, one story of a sense of community you experience through a purely digital platform. So I think I want to frame today's discussion around how much our lives can be mediated by platforms that are within or beyond our control, but digital platforms that have mechanisms for control kind of built in. And I can start with my little story, which is I spent a summer working at a website called Instructables, which is, it kind of rose at the beginning of the maker movement. And it's this tutorial site where people log on and they make stuff. And they're really, like, I really admire that this site, they're very specific about trying to have kind of community that, they're very inclusive with their definition of maker. Like, one of the things that they have in their kind of maker space lab areas, they're very careful to have a test kitchen. And the founder was talking to me about this, like, makers, like, people who make robots and stuff, they know they're makers, but a lot of people who make stuff all the time just kind of consider it like, maintainership work or like women's work type of stuff. And like, making in a kitchen is also making, making with a sewing machine is also making, making with wires is also making, making with code is also making. So I really admire that about their community and also their comments policy, which is literally be nice. And as a user, you can flag a comment, not as just spam or inappropriate, but as not nice to have it reviewed by a moderator. And that's the first time I ever felt like I had friends who, like, I never met other than through their online presence, because you get this sort of core of people who you kind of get windows into their lives and post these step-by-step photo instructions for different stuff that they're making. And then they look at other people and they comment and they show you that they made it too. Yeah, that's one community. I can share next. Actually, edgy is like the first time I had, like, community through a digital platform because, oh, because edgy is completely distributed. So for a long time, like, I only interacted with people either through Zoom, Slack, or GitHub. And there was like a time, like, and it was really crazy because it's really amazing when you have, like, just consistent interactions through all these mediums that, like, like a year later when we had, when I was able to, like, attend an in-person meeting and, like, was meeting folks for the first time in person, but it just, like, I didn't feel that way at all. It's just, like, it's like, we were, like, knowing each other for so long already, but we were like, wait, I haven't ever actually, like, given you a hug before. But edgy's continuing, you know, going strong and then, like, continues to be, like, my community. Yeah, so that's my story. And for me, it is the Midwest 90s emo Facebook group that I am part of. And a few of us, like, the main posters in the group have branched off, and we've created our smaller group that's private, and we've become really good friends and have, like, lately we've been having Zoom calls with, like, many of us. And I've met a few people in different cities now. So it's sort of cool knowing I have friends across the country from this group. I can go. Next. I don't have a good, or I don't know. I mean, like, yeah, edgy, I feel like it's that for me, but when you said that, I didn't think of a good recent example. I thought of a old one, which is probably an early one for me, which then I was thinking about in the context of these readings, I was really into modding Morrowind. So I was an active member of a forum called Tamriel Rebuild, which was all about people who wanted to, like, build this one mod, which was, like, rebuild the whole continent in Elder Scrolls game Morrowind, which just had one little island of it, sort of like a quixotic project that could, like, also was, like, maybe not possible in the constraints of the game engine at the time. I think they're still going. I actually just Googled, still going. That mod is active if you want to play Morrowind, a game that came out when I was in high school. So, like, a good 15 years ago. Anyway, yeah, so I guess it was, like, I had been active in forums or, like, IRC and stuff like that before, but that was one of the first places where I really got to know other people. And kind of at a time where there weren't a lot of these, like, remote collaboration tools in the same way. So even the way I knew them is so different. And I think the way I'm lucky enough to know people I work with remotely now. And so I felt like I knew these people well because we just hosted in forums together, you know, and you kind of got to know who they were from that. Maybe it came a little bit to, like, say, what something awful was for folks. Yeah, and so, I mean, I just sort of eventually stopped making mods. That's kind of how I stepped out of that community, which in hindsight feels a little sad. I think that might leave me right on. I've had something actually in mind. With Liz Berry, I have been organizing this process of discussing this phenomenon of emerging, emergent, spontaneous, civic hacking disaster responders. And I just published this piece yesterday that shares principles that we articulated for crisis response, you know, network centric crisis response. My own experience during Hurricane Irma, I wasn't in Miami, which is where I'm from and where I am now, but I was watching the storm, you know, as it emerged and headed right at us. And I set up a slack, you know, for what I saw a whole bunch of people talking about how the storm was coming, but in different forums. And so, you know, I set up a slack for people who wanted to prepare. And within a couple of days, there were like 700 or almost a thousand people in it. And they were doing all kinds of things. And I felt responsible for this space that I'd set up. And so I was like working 18 hour days to just like manage all the things that all these people were doing. You know, a lot of which were actually like not very good things. All really well intentioned, but, but a lot of times people just like came up with something and they're like, let's get to work and let's, you know, put this data together. And it was just like, who did you talk to, who said that was a good idea, you know, how like blah, blah, blah. And I just had a really challenging experience trying to organize this community and slack as fun as it was, as it was like coming together. Like I had very few tools at my disposal for sorting through things that were going on. And it was just like, you know, there was a lot of noise and for, and for a set for like evaluating the quality of different kinds of things that were going on. And it was only through connecting with other organizers who were experienced with this kind of community. Curation and network organizing that we got some measure of control by doing things like every channel should have a document that says what's happening in this channel, you know, at the top of the channel. And so I sort of walked away being like, I would like to help others learn from our mistakes so that they can make more interesting mistakes. So that's really interesting. That's a great transition actually to. I wanted to make sure everybody had a moment of community enabled by these types of platforms that they could kind of hold in their hearts as we talk about these articles, which are largely pretty negative. But I'm also going to talk about what it means to do moderation. And this is really, I mean, the topic is moderation in general in theory. But when I picked articles, I definitely focused on digital spaces and sort of power control, responsibility and what we owe to each other as participants. And I really thought it was very interesting, Greg, that you brought up the word responsibility, so quickly. Do you still feel responsible to your community? I'm curious how you handled that too, like in terms of bringing on new moderators and such. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I'm still, I mean, in the time that the way I, the way I, I felt responsible for the network that I convened, but also responsible to ensure that that network was accountable. To members of the community. So I was spending a lot of my time going out and finding people who would never join our Slack. And like talking to them and then bringing back. That, that perspective into this platform, right? Like, which was not like, there could, must be a better way. Yeah. And that was part of, part, partially why I wrote these principles was, you know, I didn't write the principles. I facilitated like these conversations and, but having something on hand to be like, this is why we're going to go to the extra effort to hear from somebody before we put this out into the world. People just like, you know, they're there in Slack and they're seeing everybody in Slack. And when I'm talking about like, why are we doing this? It's like, well, we're all here. We're doing this. And, and there, there wasn't really a framework for how to, you know, and there wasn't really a framework for how do we locate what, where this like digital virtual community in some real world context. And I did feel responsible for bridging that gap. Yeah. Which made me very popular in my own Slack. Lourdes, do you want to talk about what you were mentioning in the chat? Has anyone heard the podcast, last podcast on the left. And it's all about like, it's a comedy podcast about murders and paranormal stuff and conspiracy theories. And so I don't know, I got really on my drive from Boston to Texas. I listened to like all the episodes and I got really into it. And I joined the, the group on Facebook and I started posting a lot. And then all of a sudden little, did I know I became a moderator and it was a whole world. Like, so there was a group of mods and it, you know, we had our own group. So this was another extension group. And we had this chat and the mods on purpose chose people from like different perspectives. So in the chat, there were these far right dudes that were really into guns. And then there was me like far left lady of color who was totally like on them all the time. And, but, you know, we, we just like had the sense of camaraderie too. And we, and even a group name for ourselves. It's so weird. But this was a job. This was like a couple hours a day. And it, it was a, you know, thousands of people were in this group that we modded. And so the, the reading about Facebook, the Facebook moderators, I mean, that's a whole other level. But there is some stuff that people posted and I saw, and I was just like, humanity, what is up with humanity? And, and why, like, like, why are we unpaid group mods? For this group? Like, who, why are we doing this? And what kind of better you were paid? I think so. I mean, I guess the, the pain it was like being in, being friends with these people and being the cool mod and the cool group. I kind of done. Don, did you want to bring your chat into the conversation? There's not that many of us today. It's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, first, just to acknowledge that that was a lot of labor lordess. And I, I don't, yeah, it's like it takes a lot and a lot of time and a lot of emotional energy. Yeah, it kind of came up when I was thinking also about the Facebook article. And even though something awful one, which is like, or also, you, I guess, there's something I've touched on YouTube. It wasn't discussed, but kind of in the background in my mind was that really great article by, I'm going to forget his name, James Bridal, about like auto-generated content targeting children on YouTube, which is deeply creepy and disturbing. That came out a couple of a year and a half ago, maybe. And Lisa Nakamura wrote this like article and was kind of thinking through this thing, which she turned, which racism, which was like, you know, we often see the kind of aberrant, we see these postings are like all of this like kind of hateful, misogynist, racist, and like just like deeply disturbing graphic content as aberrations. But what if we took that seriously as like, and then almost like an expected outcome? So like, let's not treat it as like an unintended consequence of what these platforms do, but like read them as like, no, this is one of their products and like have that help think about how these spaces are built and maintained. Because I just don't actually know if I think that the model, any of these models are sustainable when what they require is like, I guess I think what Facebook and YouTube and some of these big platforms are doing is basically trying to just throw as much cheap labor and people's like dignity out of problem and hope that they're going to get good enough at automating from what they learn from that at the cost of all of these people's like emotional well being for and see if that'll like, you know, get them to a point where they expect that no one's going to have to look at it. But I just don't think that that's going to work. If you build systems that like magnify or create it where like virality is encouraged. And so it's not just that one video gets posted once is that like it gets posted hundreds of thousands of times of remixed and sort of like flows through multiple channels, you know. Anyway, so I just felt like that was like a piece there which wasn't explicitly addressed but brought up in those articles and then I like how Lisa Nakamura talks about it as a way to think about I guess like the design intentions. I guess I'm thinking of like in junior high everybody would share those videos of those gifs that would just go on being peaceful and nothing for a long time. And then suddenly a scary face would pop out and there was something so delightful about it to like every 12 and 13 year old that would cause that to go viral even though it was like kind of awful. And the in response to what you were talking about with the YouTube generation of content that appeals to young children but is kind of horrifying to adults. My niece whenever she got access to a phone for long enough you'd look over and she'd just be like in that part of YouTube and it's like weird stuff like adult for teenagers pretending to be babies just really weird like I don't know but something about how disturbing that is or how unusual that is there's got to be something biological about how attractive that is to somebody very young. And I guess I wonder, I wonder if that comes back to the question of responsibility to moderate like the existence of something awful is interesting by itself right or a 4chan. Like there is an audience that's explicitly looking for the sorts of things that like I in my adult life would like to be moderated out of my seats. I have a few, I have a couple of thoughts running in my head and like well first of all I'm thinking of the internet like when I was in middle school and just how completely unregulated it was you find really messed up messed up. I'm thinking one website forgot the name of it but it just has like graphic images and this was during I think this is like a 2001-2002 during the war in Iraq and it was just like images from the war and a lot of other gross things and a lot of like really messed up stuff that's not moderated but I don't know how I think you really had to I mean it was like a 12 year old stumbling upon it. It's pretty easy to get to. So this isn't a new issue but what's new is the capitalism that is being that it perpetuates and is being perpetuated by it like now people make money off of this content in a way. I mean like these companies that are contracting with Facebook and exploiting their workers. I mean there's a whole industry made from this messed up content. That end of the article about the I'm just going to forget the name sorry it's been a it's been a week and it's only Tuesday. It's called Cognizant or whatever. Whatever the name of the company is yeah Cognizant okay but with a Z. Just like the last line was or one of the last lines was like pretty evocative about how like it's a system where they're like sold this dream of like maybe getting like the people who worked there thought that they are like this is like oh my first step into being like a knowledge worker working at a tech company and then but it's really like Facebook like or controlling costs and like risk by like outsourcing. And I see worker finding and training human beings laying them off all when the contract ends. I have the vendors hit some just at a reach metric and let them figure out how to get there. It's sort of like yeah in one way I agree like it's nothing new but there it does feel like there's a like it's just such an acceleration of like existing patterns like that model of like outsourcing risk is very an old pattern. It's like that when combined with this like sort of the scale that some of these platforms are operating at sort of like this like fine tuning that's happening on them for certain behaviors or like types of attention like that whole article on Facebook Twitter's introduction of their new algorithm like it they're all just like compounding into this like hyper or like a cute state. I wonder if there's been something fruitful we could look at in kind of the most the most profit driven version of this which is the articles on advertisements. I think that what's really interesting just to get into the advertisements slightly is like unlike unlike say the Facebook news feed or Twitter generally we don't really have an expectation that advertisements should be equitable. What do you mean by equitable? Yeah I guess Facebook and Twitter feel to a lot of people like they're supposed to be a public forum even though they're very literally not but an advertisement you know that that's because somebody paid for it to be there. And I think that there's a really interesting balance there and I don't even have an article in this selection I'm now realizing around like the ability to buy bots to promote your stuff as though they're people or to buy people to promote your stuff as though they're individual people. Yeah I mean Facebook conflates and it's and it's messaging on this stuff. It conflates the concept of freedom of speech in like multiple directions. It's like you know first of all freedom of speech this means like the government can't arrest you right. Like there's the first amendment does not apply to Facebook. Facebook can choose whatever policies it wants right. So for them to say free speech is like not really coherent and and then yeah like they hide behind free speech to defend their position on allowing just have to political advertisements. But so I have some friends who've worked at Facebook for a very long time like since the mid-auts like since the beginning and I've argued with them about this stuff for a long time and those arguments over the last five years have become like really you know touchy. But they like it's worth at least understanding where they're coming from right. They're like from their perspective they have this like pseudo sophisticated view of human nature as like like a yes humans are flawed and so like bad things are going to happen on Facebook but b like the marketplace of ideas is like inherently good and and so like though there are bad things that happen on net freedom of speech is like people being able to say whatever they want is good right. It's all it's all going to work out in the end and trying to like curtail freedom of speech they're like you know well who gets to decide what's true right. And you know from my perspective I'm like that's a really interesting question it would be worth asking that question like let's have that conversation as opposed to it just being like like haha hard question to answer so therefore like and end of story right. But it is really worth thinking like and I don't know like I don't necessarily have ready answers as to like how should they decide what constitutes truth. Like it is hard right like it's I don't think it's as hard I don't think it's as irreconcilable as they make it out to be. But I think their perspective is bad and also we haven't had many opportunities to or I would at least I would like to see other opportunities to demonstrate that there really is a coherent alternative to this sort of like civil libertarian like there's nothing we can do approach. There's a really good book that is relevant to this conversation called Words That Wound and it's about hate speech especially in a university setting and the facts and it's in response to this whole liver libertarian idea that all speech should be free with the argument that words actually do have and like they can be violent. They have a physical impact and especially when it's you know a racist or homophobic slur or diet tribe it can actually affect someone's livelihood. Very nearly but didn't quite include an article in the reading list around the punching of Richard Spencer. Yeah. It was effective right like like for all that hand wringing about punching fascists like the fascists were like every time we go into public we get punched so we're going to stop doing that now I think like it seems like he's he doesn't go into public anymore right it was effective. Yeah. Yeah I would like to see a retrospective take on that actually it was really hot for a minute. And it's like if you're spewing violence you're going to get violence in return. I'm sorry it's like at that point it's defense to punch him because he's just such a violent character. I guess I'm curious how platforms are going to get into this discussion of violence and public forums and freedom of speech like do you think that if Facebook and Twitter didn't appear to be such big civic forums do you think that we would like request one from the government a digital space to discuss things. I mean I so there are already there are various governments that have attempted to create those sort of platforms but they tend to be like in the era of or like it kind of be like a capture for consent or you know resistance to like ideas like Canada is a very consultation heavy country so like we get consulted a lot using like consultation platforms and I think there's other countries that have models like that like the CDM in lots at a different scale in Barcelona I know Greece had sort of like a way that they were doing these online consultations but like not necessarily in the sort of model of like a public forum that maybe Twitter operates at now and Facebook but those places were not that in their original intent right like one of the articles you posted shows that sort of shift in Twitter and I think you know for history of Facebook is also a history of shifting the way that Lackenberg has reformulated their mission multiple times I guess like sort of reflects his changing thinking on what their goal is I think now it's supposed to connect the entire world right so I don't like the question about like would people demand it I don't know I mean I think that's like a different model of like how nations how identities get like performed or like articulated at a nation level like probably not because a lot of those are kind of like fictions anyway that are stitched together by a variety of forces but I think that there have been like very powerful like more regional like ways that there has been bottom up like wanting that kind of space but I'm also like I think to bring in here is like the nationalized efforts right like the whole people who want to nationalize like some of these larger things and or break them apart or the activists they told us you basically want to buy a Twitter and make it a platform co-op like I think there's some interesting ideas circulating around converting those spaces yeah I mean do you all have experience with the decentralized alternatives like mastodon because I tried it wasn't so much fun oh wait I did try yeah wait Greg what was not fun for you I just like it wasn't actually clear how to how to do it you know like I managed to after like half hour I managed to like join a you know a little group or whatever like a node or an instance I couldn't figure out how to see people on other nodes or how to communicate with them it just it really I believe deeply in the concept of Federation right and decentralized networks and so on but I couldn't figure it out you had a community that you like went there and built on and you know and you like just made it work for a specific community it seemed promising but yeah it was hard for me to imagine it catching hold I totally understand I I've been on mastodon since I think 2015 and I have sub 100 followers there and no one responds to anything I do and I don't know any anybody there and I've like gone on conscious like when you get a Twitter when you make a new Twitter account in order to get followers you go out and you follow like a thousand people on mastodon I tried to do that and it was just like I got nothing but I wonder if that's what's powerful about Slack for people as kind of like you can have Twitter lists and other kind of sub communities and sub forums but I've been I was trying to think of like some ID centralized even though it's proprietary platforms for creation of community and I feel like that's been Slack for a lot of people including some spaces I'm in a space called we all JS which is a Slack community for like explicitly inclusive for different identities who do JavaScript and they have a bunch of kind of special moderation bots and rules where if you say something if you say you guys for example Slack bot will respond and correct your language which is something that Slack explicitly enables is for you to set up that kind of interaction I wonder if that's actually more decentralized than Mastodon because you don't have to be a deeply committed decentralized technologist to use it I mean with Mastodon there's a really interesting I mean tension there right so I think there's been two waves of news to Mastodon which kind of like open up some questions around it so GAB switched to using it like last summer July so the alt right far right space for everyone who got the platform Twitter went to to build their like I guess place where they could be white supremacist had a different underlying tech stack and they switched to using GAB on like sorry they switched to using Mastodon servers but like sort of more selective rules about how to federate them and that kind of spawned this whole like crisis or kind of just like question within the Mastodon community of like do we want to federate these things like that came as a community to that space right and so I think that became rather self-contained and functional fairly quick to those people who are kind of it was like an in-group that wanted in-group connections there's another one more recently I think the beginning of this year where there was a lot of censorship going on in India and a bunch of journalists actually all made a move collectively to Mastodon at the same time and really trying to think about censorship resistance and how what these like really decentralized alternatives offer so like I think I mean I just think that poses some like it opens up some of these questions around how moderation or like how content works or when there are one in these federated models like what some of these questions mean when there is an universal view on like Twitter where like you know expensively I should I can access unless it's blocked or I blocked someone about me and I'm into the platform blah blah blah like in many ways I have a view that can be pretty like universal of like a whole platform space but that is actually certainly you can definitely like play with in something like Mastodon and if you come as a community maybe it's a good community or maybe it's a community that the existing Mastodon users don't want like you can kind of choose I think how porous that boundary is in and out of you I mean this issue has come up as well with Scuttlebot and SSP right so they had some pubs that were people were blocking but the issue with how content is syndicated as people were worried that they without them seeing it they were still syndicating content from pubs that were like I guess kind of like anarcho capitalist libertarian veering into kind of more right wing and I think some of the users or devices identities were doing like alt-right or white supremacist content so there's like also that I don't know there's a lot of things there that I think are so interesting around moderation these federated and Q2Q models open up my partner is also very into the decentralized web and so when we want on one chat it is typically through Riot which is by Matrix and decentralized and even though it is significantly less reliable than our former platform Facebook messenger and I also like tried to get my family over on to signal for our group messaging partly because signal is you know better than using Facebook for a lot of reasons but also partly because I just want it to work on my laptop I can't if they're not on it and everyone by my sister by the way joined I don't know why she won't she doesn't know either but I'm curious I'm curious if you guys have made that kind of decision with your with your families or communities on which platform to be on and and why for a while I was like only message me and signal and um but now I don't have a smart phone so I did actually get my family on Slack a few years ago which they resisted until they figured out how to embed animal gifs and it was like they were so mad that I was like trying to get them to use this tool and then like once they saw that they could share gifs it was like everybody took to it and there's like 30 channels and like greatly I remember yeah I mean like I worked with a lot of different people and I kind of collaborate with a lot of people who are very value-driven in how they work with technology so I think these questions about like how far down our own stack or what are our tools that we use comes up a lot so like my in one organization like our main spaces and as a matrix I use riot so matrix chat it's always like I walk in that trade-off of like this is like open and decentralized alternatives and that is probably also true in my personal life I have a lot of signal groups but also what's that one and I'm just not on some platforms but I think with all the mutual aid stuff going on right now it's kind of been on my mind a lot more so I started like a pod building and we're using what's up because it's like that perennial I think organizing problem of like you have to go where the people are and I think a lot of that model too is also one of harm reduction not like puritism so it's like you can't be like well only talk if you first install X new tools and like air gap your machine to generate your key so blah blah blah like you know you gotta be like okay like let's like get working but like let's start thinking actively about how to reduce risks to ourselves and what the risks we face as an individual or small group or community are um you know I think you're seeing that right now with zoom like all of this stuff around this sort of miss the little misleading ease this is not end to end encrypted the say in and or like privacy and some of those trade-offs so yeah I don't know I mean I think that's an active tension right it's not something to be resolved I think it's probably just often something to negotiate and the other thing is what's up is global it's and it's integrated with our cell phone numbers so but then it's owned by Facebook yeah so going with what you're saying Donna it's the whole tension that we have to face but what's up is pretty useful interesting conversations with my mom around um what gets communicated over different spaces I was trying to convince her to try scuttle but I don't remember why I don't in retrospect think it would work super well for her do having no friends on scuttle but um but she's talking about how on Facebook there's a lot of stuff that she just doesn't bother posting anymore which I think is generally true for people is once you get past a certain number of friends you kind of don't want to post anything anymore or not anything like real or raw yeah I guess I've been thinking about how how we self-moderate on these platforms and how that kind of interplays with the moderation that's built into the platform or how these platforms I guess nudge us to behave in certain ways towards each other I have a meme that I'm going to find that addresses this question I can't find the good meme but this is the one with 16 can the 16 candles one Marna are you living in a wild and wooly world memes on a memes via pinterest what that's what I found in my google images search so it has what's his face, Emilio Estevez's character is twitter wait what actor is that Allie Sheen Molly Ringwald yeah molly ringwald's instagram and then what's his face is linked it so I mean that's how I did like my instagram is my I just have friends there so I can let loose and then my facebook is like just everyone in my life so I keep it pretty restrained unless I'm in my special private groups even though all my data is on there but you know it depends on the like there's a plat we mold different platforms to different aspects of how we want to present ourselves to the outside world to our audience there's all this performativity and internet like I'm trying to figure out a way to like frame this conversation around ways that we could take power over these spaces and it's very difficult because like I can't suggest anything you know I mean I think that's again I just am really interested this is not my project but where I in the mood to suggest research projects to people I actually think revisiting what moderation means in some of these shifts in like peer to peer systems that authenticate identity per device as opposed to some other way that you verify it is quite interesting so like you know SSB you generate a key pair it's tied to device so you see people have multiple identities on SSB that are actually just like this is my phone and they'll say like I don't do it but it'd be like PC walk laptop PC walk mobile or something and that kind of like it's like what gets identified with you or associated with you and what you is when that changes I think that really opens up how you want to think about some of these questions of moderation and they actually have a really lovely you know I don't know if any of you have read I don't know if this was a previous reading topic the principles that the Scuttlebot community has defined but they have this concept where they talk about near moderation I think right beside where they talk about interdependent abundance which is also lovely so yeah like they I think they're really trying to like get at opening up some of these topics in it from a very different angle that maybe like comes from the different architectural choices but I think can speak back in cool ways too I think that would have been a great reading it reads as maybe directly coming out of influence from Inspiral if you know them yeah there's a lot of overlap there in terms of early people in Scuttlebot and Inspiral I mean the other thing I would say is like a power take back mechanism and this is like I have like a broken record today sorry that comes out of some of the mutual aid stuff is like just even visibility right like I think people have flagged like you know when people are going and doing this more pod style or neighborhood level collaborating and working to each other like those don't surface or get like brought up on this sort of like a single platform but like the model that Facebook is perpetuating is this universal space but I think that many scholars have like really very convincingly like critique that what the problem is with like framing or designing for a universal and I think that that model doesn't work so I feel like thinking about ideas like Federation how we are better to represent like kind of like a more pluralistic approach to like a lot of different people all over the world connected rather than like a universal platform wait so what does Federation mean I've been talking about I can do an explanation but I know Greg you said you're interested in it so do you want to talk about so I mean Federation as I understand it is like you have a lot of different semi-autonomous systems that are a part of one system and so one distinction that I think is really important although sometimes I think these get fudged is like the difference between Federation and confederation like a confederation is like sort of like allies who aren't necessarily each other whereas Federation is like actually we are members we are bound by a specific set of rules sometimes that distinction I think when talking about networks is not always so clear but yeah like the United States is a Federation of States the States like have their own governing scopes and processes but they also you know the federal government like sets some standards and does some things on their behalf right collectively and so a Federated Network sometimes it's not always clear to me whether a Federated Network is like whether there is some sort of central organizing entity or whether a Federated Network just means like like there are different nodes that can communicate to each other using common protocols but they're not necessarily actually like bound through some sort of central coordinating entity I'm just thinking of Star Wars yeah so yeah I you mean like like the Imperial like the Empire versus the like the Federation from like the first three episodes yeah like the I what is it like the Galactic Federation that they communicate with each other but they usually stay out of each other's business unless it's to defeat the Empire the big Imperial force thing whatever yeah I think Star Trek as well like Star Trek has a functioning Federation wait is that the Galactic Federation no that was Star Wars but there's different Federations depending on where you are in the Star Wars timeline okay but I do think that's actually a really valuable point especially like Greg what you're talking about with not being sure in a decentralized technology context whether we really did mean Federated in the sense of having some powers delegated to a like unifying authority I think it's super interesting I don't hear that discussed much I'm really interested in how Americans seem to have lost the capacity to understand the concept of Federation like Americans do not understand this concept and when you talk about Federation it makes them very uncomfortable I find which is so bizarre because like we were the first to really like do it not the very first like the Native Americans actually did it before us but like you know like that's the whole American idea is that you have like local state federal and we've just like we just don't really understand it culturally anymore do you think it has to do with how we see subjectivity and shared values like in my mind a Federation would be held together by shared values but in the US we're so into subjectivity and you know the idea that there's no universal morality but it's like dude there is you know hurting other things and people is not moral yeah but yeah I think it's the shying away just like with the freedom of speech thing with color blindness shying away from any sort of strong yeah well also I mean it's really interesting that you hone in on values there because so I study the commons like the governing the commons the whole field of common pool resource management that's like largely associated with Eleanor Ostrom the Bloomington School and you know in the last 10 years there's become like a sub field that focuses on knowledge commons and digital resources as commons even though traditionally these are fields that study like watersheds and fisheries and and woodsheds you know like natural resource systems but there are definitely some similarities but the tricky thing is when it comes to digital commons for about 10 years I think the open source field had a lot of hype and sort of like tutored its own horn a lot but got a lot of things wrong and I was finding that as an organizer who was like totally sold on the here comes everybody Yochai Benkler like wealth and networks approach and then once I started doing these projects I'm like this is all like this doesn't work right and I was trying to figure out why and when I when I started reading Ostrom stuff which is super technical and jargony and boring and it's also like the most important stuff it has a set of principles of like their principles for the design of institutions that can sustainably share resources right principle number one is boundaries and this was really tricky for like open open source and open knowledge communities to wrap their heads around and when I was talking about Ostrom's work like with like real anarchist hacker types they just get like just they just get immediately turned off by the notion of boundaries the whole idea is like a network is more valuable more people are in and blah blah so like how would you set up boundaries and I actually think that the key is to understand that the values set the boundaries right the values the values help a community determine like what's in and therefore what actually must be even this is an open network blah blah free speech but like if you're not in line with these values then you're out and we have mechanisms turned so yeah I think you're resonating a lot with that I'm resonating a lot with that and I'm trying to figure out which part of that to discuss one of the things that I see in open source and I I've been I'm a lapse maintainer of an open source project called Tesla like is hardware which people are continuing to buy I think I might be the most active maintainer which is not good and there's this sense of responsibility that is hard but then there's also this sort of sense of like we really did have this this very embracing approach to maintainership which is to say anyone could show up and say hey teach me how to use GitHub so that I can be a contributor and we did like this sort of radical yes to that but I would definitely not recommend that to your average open source project and and a lot of I think I've talked about this with Rob with an edgy a bit but like different different open source projects have different meanings when they say open source and it's okay it has to be okay to say that because a maintainer is not well first of all a maintainer is typically not getting paid it is not their job to a make your feature b accept your poll request see listen to you talk about what you do and don't like about the thing they gave you for free open source can just mean I let you see it open source can mean I let you suggest things but not contribute it can mean I let you contribute that can even mean I help you contribute but that distinction is not it's frequently not made and I think I think part of that has to do with um part of it has to do with it being still kind of a new field but part of it also has to do with people coming in with too much idealism um and I say that with a cringe in my body but boundaries matter a lot you can't make any you don't have anything meaningful inside of them I'm thinking about the beginning of the internet stuff like I'm sure people have read you are not a gadget that book by Jason linear or whatever yeah um and the whole you know the whole idea like before that this was a sort of um wait what was that Kelsey oh um that the internet was some sort of like anarchist idea or vision that then became co-opted by capitalism and and by our our I know just our ideas of what a computer interface should look like like a group of people's idea of what a computer interface should look like is what people are now interacting with for for now decades like the whole idea of a file folder the fact that we store our information that way and I don't know where I'm going with this but like having no boundaries or set of principles going in allows other principles to take over and yeah and that's I think that's how a lot of the technology we've built has become co-opted by systems of surveillance and advertising and capital I mean I think with some of that stuff around early networks there's also the historiography around how ARFANET and internet unfolded is like really gnarly as something that I've been reading a lot about for my dissertation but I think that there's also just a way that it unfolded that actually speaks to kind of having an intentional flexibility that got kind of like recast in ways that were maybe unintended and so I do think that there was sort of like an under definition of like certain values that allowed them to be kind of empty buckets that could be filled with a lot of discordant things you know so yeah like I would kind of like maybe just add that layer and that is like a hard problem or that's a problem that I'm interested in is sort of these projects that are very value driven that kind of still use these like flexible terms like decentralization kind of like stands in for multiple different values but it's sort of like thinking about how you pair that with other values that actually give shape or like a definition or like a trajectory to your work or like actually speak to the types of social change that you're pursuing like that is what I'm kind of interested in my neck is getting so much better just FYI good to hear Kelsey I was just wondering like I was thinking about when you were shaping these readings um I don't know I guess I was wondering about how you were thinking about like I guess power and moderation and community or if there's like another piece of that that it feels like we haven't touched on yet like yeah just thinking about like how you maintain spaces at a much smaller level like there's a lot of like quote unquote moderation work that never counts as moderation work which is actually just like maintaining social ties and I guess that was like something that was in my mind is like when what is formally or has to formally be understood around moderation and kind of what are these other ways that you talked about consent or I think that's in the title like if there's somebody we want to touch on that actually the one article we haven't really touched at all is human centered design considered harmful um and this is so interesting I'm excited that there is an article about this I was expecting to have to go and look for articles around how how like notifications and badges and stuff draw from casinos are you familiar with this I didn't know that there's addictive design patterns that are built into a lot of different apps and notification styles and I think someone recommended this one in GitHub instead maybe even you Dawn around around human centered design and how like how things that begin I don't know like I'm seeing I'm seeing the broader pattern of things that begin with these really genuine intentions like the creation of a community that needs to talk to each other can turn into these crazy things when with these other interest influences and you know people when people get involved it gets messy but also when money gets involved it gets warped in this weird way what did you guys get out of this yeah I've been I've been waiting for an article like that for a long time I find the user centered design force maddening um like which isn't to say like it can't be useful as a tactic for a certain phase of a process but like it's just it seems to have been a huge miseducation for an entire generation of would-be-do-gooders to just like be like well we just have to think about like who the specific user is and how do we design for them and it just involves all this whole process of simplification which I understand like the objective of that process but when you're dealing with things like infrastructure and complex systems that process of simplification is a process of like a ratio and it's eventually going to come back to bite you in the ass if you you're probably going to fail or if you succeed you're going to end up becoming a part of somebody else's problem by going through by like just starting with human centered design principles I just shared this set of principles that I found last month society centered design principles which um maybe a helpful corrective although I really only read through it once but I was like yeah this this is what you know what I want to see in the world I've also I just received slash like a stanza tax book design justice awesome and I started reading it and I think there are their argument is right on point and we've been drawing a lot from it and edgy with the environmental data justice group that design really needs to happen from bottom up instead of top down and through capital surveillance but what also resonated me was this argument about anthropocentrism that this human centered design is anthropocentric and ignores everything else in the world it reminded me of this geographer I forgot who it was that writes about um and it's a jumble in my head I can't really articulate it but like turns our ideas of anthropocentrism on its head and critiques like the whole mainstream environmental movement as anthropocentric because it's um you know like with ecological systems it's saying oh we need to be we need to take care of the wild and of the wilderness because we're humans and we need to survive instead of looking at environmental justice issues which is not anthropocentric it's more society I'm going on a tangent but I think what's weaving these together is this idea of a collective um moving towards collective oriented design and thought instead of in decisions as opposed to individual and alienated decisions that will destroy the world yeah there's been some really good um kind of critiques of user centered design are kind of that very like I think this is like a lot of design scholars would also kind of like broadly than sort of these narrow terms like human centered user centered would just like speak to in design especially kind of coming out of those roots of industrial design like an operationalizing tendency which kind of like turns focus to product and then like thinks about an individual engagement with the product is like the site to design for um like I don't know just like that famous pappanek design for the real world like an early an early hot take which is pretty fun um and I think so it is like also you just see in the way theory or ideas around design get like developed like I think Don Norman as like the seminal figure in design thinking in that sort of space like kind of took a theory from psychology like affordances which is like about a relational approach um ecological psychology I guess and then like kind of like narrowed it down to this narrow way you think about like an individual like perceiving or like having seen these affordance in an object so I think there's just this like tendency that I actually don't know if we're like at a good point to like unwind um but there's a lot of really cool I think ways in where people are trying to challenge that and thinking about say like um Sasha Kassanza Chalk's work instead of design justice and that very like participatory approach like there's that kind of lineage of like participatory design and like workplace study stuff which is like super rad starting in 1670s um I think this is really hard like this to me is like a thing where there's a lot of people kind of coming at it but there aren't ways through yet that I think are reproducible like there are these micro moments but I don't know if we've sort of like escaped the like gravity well that is um getting trapped in like designing a specific product and then starting to like when you just have to like design a thing you just fall back on those patterns I don't know I found myself doing that when I do project management work like okay let's write user stories it's like persona like persona is like you just start like doing that thing just because you need to like move forward Definitely something we've talked about before in these discussions is that sense of need for momentum and we know that we need them we know we need it to stay motivated at things but it can be the most harmful thing we do is like make progress intentionally on the other hand I get really frustrated with these like the bottom up design question and the decentralization question like we can say that it's good theory all we want but how do you deploy a thing like that without without starting at the top I guess translocal non-hierarchical distribution that's it that's the way no I actually think there are like again the glimmers of like really cool processes around that right like but yeah they're not they don't scale because scale is like a part of the problem or it's like there's like a tension in that I'm not resolved I was also going to say I said in the chat so the Toronto node of the design justice network is starting to do a read-along of the book I think we're doing like a chapter meeting Garance, Egy, known to you all and Egy is I think kind of leading it with Victoria who's an old design justice network person there's like a crew in Toronto and it's all online now because of the moment we're in so easily joinable and part of what some of the design justice people are doing which I think is cool is like actually doing this like reflective process of projects they work on and like kind of like applying or thinking through the design justice principles and kind of doing like a retrospective so I feel like that is a nice model for trying to like notice that leg and do like a re-sinking work or kind of like trying to leave back principles and practice what do you mean it's like I think it's Tuesdays or maybe Thursdays I'll send it in the chat and I can send it out over the mailings