How to Do Nothing
Page 20
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THESE DAYS, IF you ask someone to define a “community network,” they might point to Nextdoor, a neighborhood-specific social networking service founded in 2011. Nextdoor seems to fulfill at least some of the criteria: its communities are each restricted to physical neighborhoods, it gives you a way to meet neighbors you might not otherwise, and it promotes neighborliness: a cheery introduction video shows cartoon people finding lost dogs, recommending plumbers, and throwing block parties. In a New York Times article on Nextdoor, Robert J. Sampson, author of Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, says that “[t]here’s a common misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to facilitate local interactions.”14 At a glance, Nextdoor seems to be an example of this; as with the Community Memory kiosks, it should be possible to log on and get a sense of what’s happening in a neighborhood.
My boyfriend, Joe Veix, writes often about Internet phenomena and spends more time on the Nextdoor site for our neighborhood than I do. When I asked him what he thought the difference was between Nextdoor and something like Community Memory, the first thing he said was that it felt geared toward uppity property owners. Although he meant it somewhat jokingly, when I went to Nextdoor’s About page, the first two out of seven suggested uses were “Quickly get the word out about a break-in” and “Organize a Neighborhood Watch Group.” Their manifesto suggests that “strong neighborhoods not only improve our property value, they improve each one of our lives.”
But Joe’s biggest gripe, which is his gripe with most online platforms, has to do with advertising and scale. As of December 2017, Nextdoor was valued at $1.5 billion, and it is as committed to growth and VC funding as any other Silicon Valley startup. In 2017 it invited companies to begin advertising on its network. Now the Nextdoor daily digest email is kicked off by a sponsored post by a company, followed by real estate listings. On Nextdoor’s Ads page, which invites businesses to “connect directly with local communities,” you see the same language as that of a community network—trust, local relevance, and word of mouth—but directed toward brands:
Verified identity
Confirmed identities result in a brand-safe environment
Local at scale
Customized messaging drives authentic, relevant connections between consumers and brands
Brand advocates
Word of mouth from trusted sources is the most effective form of advertising.15
In startup parlance, “at scale” refers to the expansion of a software or service to larger and larger contexts—i.e., the development of a local prototype into a widely used product. Given this meaning, only the phenomenon of national or even multinational corporations advertising simultaneously in many targeted neighborhoods can explain the oxymoron “local at scale.”
In this and other ways, Nextdoor is basically of the same species of technology as Facebook and Twitter, even if its communities are geographically bounded. Once again, our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising. It’s not just technology that’s being “harnessed to facilitate local interactions,” but local interactions that are being harnessed to produce revenue. The rules of engagement are nonnegotiable, the software is a black box, and the whole thing relies on centralized, company-owned servers whose terms of service are the same for everyone everywhere. This “commons” only feels like a commons. As Oliver Leistert puts it in “The Revolution Will Not Be Liked,” for social media companies, “the public sphere is an historically elapsed phase from the twentieth century they now exploit for their own interests by simulating it.”16
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WRITING IN THE ATLANTIC about a nascent decentralized network called Scuttlebutt, Ian Bogost gives us an image for this absurd situation: “Facebook and Twitter are only like water coolers if there were one, giant, global water cooler for all workplaces everywhere.”17 Dissatisfaction with this standard-issue water cooler has fueled the movement toward a decentralized web, which instead of private companies and servers makes use of peer-to-peer networks and open-source software. The goal is not only for users to own their own data, but to shift that data and software closer to their end points of use. Mastodon, for example, is a federated social network of “instances,” each using free software on a community-run server whose users can nonetheless communicate with those in other instances. As its creators point out, Mastodon can never go bankrupt, be sold, or be blocked by governments, because it consists of little other than open-source software.
It’s easy to imagine how the dispersed nodes of decentralized networks could lead to a healthy reintroduction of context, particularly when, for example, anyone can create a Mastodon instance with custom rules of engagement. (For that reason, LGBT, non-binary, and other frequently harassed communities have flocked to Mastodon.) They allow more granular control of one’s intended audience; when you post to Mastodon, you can have the content’s visibility restricted to a single person, your followers, or your instance—or it can be public. But while Mastodon instances begin to reintroduce context, that context is not necessarily aligned with physical space, nor is it intended to be. When I asked my friend Taeyoon Choi, cofounder of the School of Poetic Computation in New York, about a network that would allow you to “listen to a place,” he suggested local mesh networks like Oakland’s PeoplesOpen.net. The nonprofit Sudo Room, whose volunteers develop the mesh network, describe it as a people-powered, “free-as-in-freedom alternative” to centralized, corporate servers: “Imagine if the wifi router in your home connected to the wifi routers in your neighbours’ homes and they again connected to their neighbours to form a huge free wireless network spanning the city! That’s exactly what a mesh network is, or at least what it can be.”18
The volunteers add that mesh networks would be particularly resilient in the event of a natural disaster or state censorship. Alongside instructions for “building your own internet,” they provide a directory of other community networks, like NYC Mesh, Philly Mesh, and Kansas City Freedom Network. And PeoplesOpen.net’s mission statement seems to echo that of Community Memory:
[W]e believe in the creation of local internets and locally-relevant applications, the cultivation of community-owned telecommunications networks in the interest of autonomy and grassroots community collaboration, and ultimately, in owning the means of production by which we communicate.19
But for those networks that aren’t locally specific, it might simply be the case that the network that allows you to “listen to a place” is just one that doesn’t demand that you use it all the time. After telling me about mesh networks in an email, Taeyoon added:
To me, listening to a place is about discovering a sequence of encounters. I just came back from running in Prospect Park, there were many birds and nature stuff that helped me listen to the place. I don’t bring my phone or any device during the run. I develop ideas locally, and reserve them (stage them, as in github terminology) and share them once I’m ready for more encounters.
Taeyoon’s strategy echoes the findings of Barassi about the incubation time of activism. Just as activism requires strategic openness and closure, forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public! Though I acknowledge that some people enjoy sharing their process publicly, this is personally anathema to me as an artist. The choice—not of what to say (“What’s on your mind?”) but whether and when to participate—doesn’t feel like it belongs to me when I use Facebook and Twitter.
A counterexample would be the sparse UX of Patchwork, a social networking platform that runs on Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a sort of global m
esh network that can go without servers, ISPs, or even Internet connection (if you have a USB stick handy). It can do that because it relies on individual users’ computers as the servers, similar to local mesh networks, and because your “account” on a Scuttlebutt-powered social media platform is simply an encrypted block of data that you keep on your computer.
The interesting thing about Patchwork, and Scuttlebutt generally, is that it reintroduces a choice I didn’t think I had. Although Patchwork users have the option to connect to a public server (or “pub”) for more and faster connections, it’s otherwise a network that relies on two people being on the same local network. As Bogost writes, Scuttlebutt’s default model is that friends share with friends via local networks or USB, and “word spreads, slowly and deliberately.”
When I asked Jonathan Dahan, also at the School of Poetic Computation, whether it would be possible to use Patchwork to “roll into a coffee shop in a new town and see what the local gossip is,” he responded that at first, this had been precisely his experience, and he enjoyed it. Soon, though, he decided to expand his network by joining a pub:
[I] had a voracious appetite for data, updates. Kinda more traditional “check insta / twitter and something is always new there.” Turns out Patchwork doesn’t give that dopamine hit, until you start friending tons of people and joining pubs etc. It is a slower network in many ways, and helped me realize some of my traditional feed addictions.
My own experience using Patchwork bears this out. There is nothing on it that could be called persuasive design, and it was surprisingly strange. Left alone in an uncrowded interface with nothing at all being suggested to me, I realized it is finally incumbent on me to decide what to say, when, and to whom—already the beginnings of context. And like Jonathan, I felt the knee-jerk urge to join a pub, because of what I was used to. Only afterward did I question why I assume social media needs to feel like a Wall Street trading floor.
In his article on Scuttlebutt, Bogost asks, “What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?” He says this in the context of describing how Dominic Tarr, the creator of Scuttlebutt, lives largely offline in a sailboat in New Zealand, but it makes me think of the not-yet-wireless phone in my house growing up. Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You thought about the call you needed to make, you went to the phone made the call, and then you walked away. If you decided you had something more to say, you called back later. Not only that, the interaction was with the one other person you had decided to contact. Even calling someone to chat aimlessly had more intention than many of the ways I communicate now.
I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online. When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn’t immediately present itself. You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons. The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a noncommercial and non-“productive” space so often under threat of closure, allows for browsing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information—provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it’s even about—are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment. Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it’s me who’s being researched.
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I THINK OFTEN about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its own form of “research,” and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.
What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time? What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return—and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? Whether it’s a real room or a group chat on Signal, I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse. If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.
Recall that the activists interviewed by Barassi complained that social media did not allow them the space to elaborate their ideas or have real discussions. I think that what social media was lacking for them, and what they eventually found in physical meetings and slower media like magazines, was what Hannah Arendt called “the space of appearance.” For Arendt, the space of appearance was the seed of democracy, and it was defined by any collection of people who speak and act meaningfully together. Although it is fragile, the space of appearance can arise anytime these conditions are met, and they have to do with proximity and scale. “The only indispensable factor in the generation of power is the living together of people,” Arendt writes. “Only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action are always present can power remain with them.”20
Basically, the space of appearance is an encounter small and concentrated enough that the plurality of its actors is un-collapsed. The dynamism of this plural encounter is what underwrites the possibility of power; we know this intuitively from the form of the dialogue, where the interplay of two arguments leads to something new. Audre Lorde’s reminder to white feminists that difference generates power comes to mind when I read Arendt’s description of power:
[Power]’s only limitation is the existence of other people, but this limitation is not accidental, because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin with. For the same reason, power can be divided without decreasing it, and the interplay of powers with their checks and balances is even liable to generate more power, so long, at least, as the interplay is alive and has not resulted in a stalemate.21
The space of appearance is like a communal “I-Thou” relationship that has resisted the temptation to collapse into an “I-It” one, where no part of the group appears abstract to the other or where, as in Plato’s ideal city, “some are entitled to command and others forced to obey.” It is a space where I am empowered to see and be seen, hear and be heard, by those whose investment in the space is equal to mine. Unlike the abstract public of Twitter, the space of appearance is my “ideal audience” in that it is a place where I’m addressed, understood, and challenged—thus providing a known context for what I say and what I hear in this space. In this form of encounter, neither I nor anyone else has to waste time or energy on wrangling context, or packaging our messages for the lowest common denominator of public opinion. We gather, we say what we mean, and then we act.
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IN RESEARCHING SUCCESSFUL examples of resistance for this book, I came across many iterations of the space of appearance. I’m struck by one thing that hasn’t changed: while certainly supported by other forms of communication, the space of appearance is still so often a space of physical appearance. The history of collective action—from artistic movements to political activism—is still one of in-person meetings in houses, in squats, in churches, in bars, in cafés, in parks. In these federated spaces of appearance, disagreements and debates were not triggers that shut the whole discussion down, but rather an integral part of group deliberation, and they played out in a field of mutual responsibility and respect. In turn, those groups kept in touch with other groups, who kept in touch with still other groups, sometimes spanning the country—as in the case of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee or the successive layers of organized labor. The coordination of these groups offers witness to Arendt’s observation that dividing power does not decrease it, and that its plural interplay increases it. They achieve the best of both worlds: that of coordinated action, but also of the new ideas (Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “creative protest”) that can only arise out of plurality in the space of appearance.
Even the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, who grew up more “connected” than I did, recognized the importance of in-person meeting when they began campaigning for gun control in 2018. In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.” Although he was outspoken in the days after the tragedy, he predicts that by himself, he would have burned out after a few days or weeks. “The real beginning,” Hogg says, “came two days later at Cameron Kasky’s house.” Kasky, another student, had begun holding meetings at his house, and Hogg was invited by Emma González, a mutual friend. Writing that the students were “obsessive from day one” and often slept over at Kasky’s house, Hogg describes a scene that evokes the emergent tactics of political activisms past: “[I]f [we] thought of something that seemed like it could work, [we] just did it. Some people did a lot of interviews; some people were really good at Twitter; other people focused on organizing and coordinating.”22 Like the meetings that the Montgomery bus boycott organizers held behind various closed doors, it was here that the students worked together to outline their demands and make decisions about how to speak to the public at large. While they pulled strings on Twitter and in the media, it was the house—and the group dynamic that it brought into being—that provided the space of appearance.