I’ve spent the last few posts trying to explain the philosophical and social reasons why we need to move away from centralized, intermediated tools for communicating with each other. There is more to be said on that topic but, with LibrePlanet later this week, I want to talk directly about how we can replace these dangerous tools and combine them into a free software social networking distribution like the one called for here.
The Idea
We should all have good tools for digital socializing, but Facebook and similar programs are not them. These “social networking” tools all share a fatal flaw. While they claim to connect you with the people in your life, what they actually do is connect everyone in your life to the man in the center running the social network. All communication with your friends has to go through the network operator first. Once you tell him, he tells your friends for you. Or sometimes he tells too many people and you get upset. But what are you going to do, stop talking to the people in your life? This is like no social network on earth; it is more like a giant game of telephone where they hold all the strings. And it is systematically unsafe.
Rather than build our digital lives as part of their networks, we need to bring some of our real life social structures to the digital world. In real life we don’t talk to each other through a central intermediary. Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone in your family, or office, or town had to go through a single person in order to talk with each other? In real life we talk to each other directly, which works a lot better. Our digital tools could work like that too. Many, like the internet, were designed with exactly this kind of direct communication structure in mind. We got the centralized, intermediated tools that we have now mostly because the people designing them thought of us as children who could never learn to run our own.
That dismissal of our competence comes up regularly when you talk about moving away from centralized services, but it ignores us too quickly. It is just as possible for everyone to run their own web server as it is for everyone to know how to read, and both should be social goals in the 21st century. To think otherwise is to believe that we can never build tools well enough for people to learn them, no matter how many generations go past, and no matter how central a role those tools come to play in our lives. It is a belief that sells our engineers, our teachers, and our selves short, and one that will only fade as we learn how to run our own communication networks. The alternative is to stay childish and incapable, digitally speaking.
It is time to grow up and take the private communications of our lives back into our own hands. We have all of the individual tools we need, email, IM, photo sharing, etc, but putting them all together into the system we deserve will take a little assembly. Don’t worry if you are not a software developer and you feel like building digital tools is beyond you. If we decide we want tools for ourselves and are willing to lend some time and support, there are lots of great developers out there who will build them as Free Software for everyone to use, learn from, and share. In these next few posts we’ll outline what I think that new network looks like and how we might put it together.
Posts in this series
Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box
Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook
Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network
Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic
Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel forthcoming
3 Comments
Hi Ian-
Just getting around to reading some of your blog posts. A couple of thoughts.
- What exactly is wrong with having a “man” in the center running a social network? How is this different, for instance, from the phone company? In one of your recent posts, you talk fairly abstractly about the dangers associated with the loss of privacy, but I’m still not sure what exactly those dangers are. Obviously one needs to be sensitive to the nature of different online forums – for instance, Facebook is a quasi-public space, and one should expect that strangers may view whatever information you post there. But assuming I understand that (and I do) what potential bad outcome is there that I need to be frightened of? I don’t find the notion that large corporations have access to quasi-private information about me particularly disturbing. Large (and potentially corrupt) institutions have always had access to lots of information about me – hospitals, insurance companies, schools, universities, the IRS, etc. It strikes me as just part of the cost of modern life.
- You write “We got the centralized, intermediated tools that we have now mostly because the people designing them thought of us as children who could never learn to run our own.” I’m not sure if that’s right. There are all kins of tools and communities available online, with varying levels of ease-of-use, personal control, etc. The problem isn’t on the supply side – it’s on the demand side. People just prefer simple, easy to use tools. I think I’m probably on the right tail of the technological sophistication curve. But when I read your description of a DNS based Facebook alternative, I think: “I’d rather just use Facebook – the ease of effort more than makes up for some loss of privacy/control.” And if I think that, many of the people who I want to connect to via social networking (who are less technologically sophisticated than I am) are certainly going to think that.
Of course, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to imagine a gradual cultural evolution towards more empowering technology, particularly if it can be achieved without sacrificing ease of use. But I don’t think it’s going to just happen out of nowhere – people are going to need a good reason to switch. And (see my first point above), I’m not totally clear what that good reason is.
Interested to hear your thoughts…
Greg
Hi Greg – Having a “man” in the center of your social network is a weakness and a cost – and it’s one that doesn’t actually have anything to do with your social network.
While my social network may be compromised because Ian is a horrible bearded monster, that’s just part of having him in my circle.
If I have to trust Mark Zuckerberg to deal with Ian, I now have to worry about Mark’s motives. I know how I’m paying for my server, and how Ian pays for his. Zuckerberg has a different lifestyle – he might, for example, allow unsavory third parties to offer services and give them free rein over my information.
I also think Ian’s point about maturity and literacy is a good one. Being able to type quickly used to be a specialized skill, like these skills are now. Right now, you’re saying “It’s easier for me to just let the priests tell me what god wants and for them to learn to read the book.” Ian is trying to make you more free – he wants you to be able to read the book and be able to make decisions about what you believe and who you trust.
@Matt, @Greg:
Yes, the “freedom as capability” aspect is important to me and, from that view, the man in the middle is dangerous because relying on him keeps you ignorant and dependent. The costs of dependence are not always obvious up front, which is actually why I agree with your comparison to the phone system. AT&T wouldn’t have been able to turn all our phone records over to the NSA if we had been routing those calls through our friends. We had to build the copper phone network through intermediaries then, but we don’t have to build our digital communications networks like that today. It is an unnecessary dependence, which makes the impact on our freedom more important.
Beyond the freedom and independence aspects of the situation, we need to be concerned about the social and legal controls over the systems. As I mention somewhat in Privacy’s Ghost piece and in the Friend-to-Friend Network one, our existing social and legal mechanisms just don’t work for controlling the behavior of people running social networks. So we can’t just regard social network operators as normal participants in communications that we can trust or doubt on an even footing with everyone else in our lives. These operators are effectively unchecked by social constraints, which makes letting them into our lives dangerous.
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