It has been a weird, unproductive day at work. I had a hard time concentrating. I was thinking about how AI critique often makes a strong case for humans as opposed to non-human actors and I was wondering what somebody like Bruno Latour - an enormously important figure in my time as a student of history of technology and science and beyond - would say to that. Himself a staunch believer in the co-construction of scientific facts not only by humans but also by non-human actors.

I found out that he died:

“Latour died from pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2022, at the age of 75.”

And I hadn’t even known. At one point I knew a lot about Latour’s work. Closely reading it, applying to a field study of non-academic sociologists on twitter, way back when. That study failed to produce anything, really, but whatever: I spent almost five years positively swimming in “ANT” (actor-network theory) as my framework for describing my “subjects”.

I once saw Latour speaking in the Humboldt University in Berlin. I had to search for it a little, but I believe it happened on 2016-05-12¹:

163. Bruno Latour † Philosoph, Paris On a possible difference between earth and the globe (12. Mai 2016)

I asked him, since he tried to abstain from criticism and instead engage in rediscription of what was more less established (the process of making science), why he wasn’t doing it for the humanities as well. And indeed he was a merciless critic of the epistemic practices and traditions in the humanities at large as well as in the social sciences. Whereas he would go out of his way redescribing the actual physical work that is done to produce a scientific fact, he would merely criticize the work in social fields and not look at how these fields construct knowledge. (And so on.)

I still remember how, in the middle of commenting I suddenly got very excited - there I was, commenting in front of a large audience - on a specific issue that - let’s be honest - had only tangentially to do with the main topic of his talk, but clearly showed that I had lived in this mans thoughts for many years. It was exciting. And the closest I ever came to talk to him.

I also remember his answer. I put my question in a way that asked for patience with the humanists: As “subjects” of an academic anthropology, why would we take what humanists do as the only expression of the humanists process? Why not take the time to look? Latour answered, that he felt, that he had given enough time to the humanists and related my comment to his then new project modes of existence. And that was it.

I still remember that there could’ve been a little more said and done. And I’m also sure that the a - possibly new? - field of an antropology of the humanities would be interesting - has anybody tried to do field work in this way? I’m sooo out of academia… - but I also remember how I somehow knew that this was possibly my only chance to actually make that small, human connection to a person that had opened up the world for me. I’ll always be grateful for his amazing ability to make me rethink everything and get excited about the process of doing the hard epistemic groundwork in the hard way, because that’s how you end up with new insights.

I think that Latour was… is so important to me is because I found him. During my studies we had read the Berlin Key essay, but it was me who took on the ANT head first, by myself, out of sheer intrinsic interest. And I guess because Reassembling the Social had recently become available for purchase and was a perfect entry point for me.

Thank you Bruno Latour.

[...]

The big question when it comes to shifts of society like you describe with your examples for me is always: How much can you actually do? My reflex is to say: Not much. Intentions are a lag measure. That doesn't mean we shouldn't support what we think is important to create the world we want to live in - even if it's only for our own sakes - and support the people and actions the seem to us necessary to make these things more likely, but I do think this stuff is merely necessary but not sufficient to change the course of the world at large. So we'll have to live within the world in which we live, warts and all.

This implies to me that what follows from your observations is no ownership of cause and effect but recognition of our collective limitations. I don't think that we make actual choices in that way as you hope.

I said this - slightly edited here for brevity since not everything is relevant - in a reply to Jason Becker under one of his posts and wanted to shortly explain what I mean by that.

It seems relatively easy to fall victim to attribute to intent what is simply an expression of a system. Since we can’t observe society as a whole we may think that there are intentions involved in the sense that you make a conscious choice to behave in one way or another - in this case it was about having the feeling of not being able to give a complex take because an audience nowadays demands a simple take - and any members of the audience as well as the one talking to said audience has lots of freedom in how to behave here. Rational discourse then can decide the best course of action. Critiques like this suggest that it could be different if we would just choose to behave differently (and here some good reasons for doing it or alternatively some bad reasons to no do the old thing anymore).

Now, the text I replied to here is called Takes spread like wildfire. What I love most about this blog post - and I commented on it before actually - is the title, because it doesn’t assume that anybody is doing anything on purpose. It just happens. This I totally agree with.

I’m generally very interested in the make-do. As in: “I was made to do this”. As I don’t assume intentions I also don’t assume clear-cut flows of cause and effect. I believe in entanglement. Meaning: There are a million little things we are connected to - human as well as non-human actors - and all of these act as weights on our doing and being. In a sense we are these weights. Part of these weights are internal. I do think we have to assume consciousness. But internal or external weights: we are a result. And if we are results then so are our actions. Except that our actions are not the result of us because we are just a part of the chain (or better: net) through which something like a society expresses and reproduces itself.

As an individual that has the capability to learn and observe, we may never untangle any of the entanglements that surround us in real time. But: We may learn to readjust our internal weights, so to speak. And this in turn is observable by people who care. This will never be everyone. And even those who care may not be able to see. But there is a potential here, which lies in a convincing performance and not rational argument.

Which is why I would say that performing a certain way of being is probably more likely - and let’s be clear here: it is still far from a clear a->b thing and not highly probable in the slightest - to inspire others to act with this new way of being in mind. What they do with it individually and as a collective is absolutely not in your hands, though.

So if it is about subtle takes: Make them! Realize a person - make a person a reality - that makes interesting, subtle takes. They may spread. You may get critiqued. People may want simpler answers. If it is about politics they may sort you more to the right and less progressive than you’d think. If you can’t realize a person like that - because it might bring harm to people you care about - that is society protecting itself. Maybe make only some takes subtle that don’t endanger what is vulnerable if a person like this would exist?

According to this survey there is little hope, that individual actions can do anything apart from maybe raising awareness. The Guardian asked “every contactable lead author and review editor of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018, with 380 of 843 responding”. Here is what you can do according to the opinions of the world’s climate scientists:

• “Most experts (76%) backed voting for politicians who pledge strong climate measures”
• “The second choice for most effective individual action, according to the experts, was reducing flying and fossil-fuel powered transport in favour of electric and public transport. This was backed by 56%[…].”
• “Almost 30% of the experts said eating less meat was the most effective climate action”
• “a similar proportion [30%] backed cutting emissions from heating or cooling homes, by installing heat pumps, for example”
• “Having fewer children was backed by 12% of the experts”

Ugh. And there are these statements:

It can only go so far. Deep, rapid cuts in carbon emissions from oil and gas, as well as other sectors such as transport, are needed, which are outside the control of the average individual […] Individual action can only amount to a drop in the bucket – only systemic changes will be sufficient

Many foresee catastrophic levels of global heating and are shifting their focus away from the physics of the climate system towards action that slows global heating and work that protects people against the climate impacts they now see as unstoppable.

Another post I read recently was A Tour of the Jevons Paradox How Energy Efficiency Backfires:

In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.1

Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.

Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t.

It gets harder and harder to not talk about the planetary trajectory as set in stone. I guess it’s good to have posts like this in your timeline?

The bald eagle could have easily gone extinct. But we did all sorts of “woke” things protecting it legally, ran conservation and study programs, banned DDT (that was good for other reasons too) and in 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list.

Likewise pine forests could be dead from acid rain.

The ozone could have a huge hole.

We CAN take care of nature when we want to. And the successes have been worth it.

I feel like we forget this, you know?

Is it? What will it do? Hope is cheap. Change is impossible to envision. Especially if imagined as collective change on a planetary scale. Things will have to become much worse before we can meaningfully engage with what happens. Maybe this is not you, but it is us. You can warn and write all the manifestos you want, have a negative footprint or whatever: Just as with AI we’ll have to come to terms with the fact that climate change is just us. We’re the planet. And as the planet is the result and the cause of what’s going on, the individual will have to recognize and come to terms with not being able to do a lot.

There is hope in disruption. But strategically “weaponized” disruption (like calculated, non-violent protest) can only do so much and it seems that big economic players like Big Tech™ to name an example are not even playing within the margins of democracy any more. Take this quote from a recent Cory Doctrow article on the EU’s attempt to regulate tech giants via the DMA:

Apple appears to be playing a high-stakes game of chicken with EU regulators, effectively saying, “Yes, you have 500 million citizens, but we have three trillion dollars, so why should we listen to you?” […] Just like Apple, Meta is behaving as though the DMA permits it to carry on its worst behavior, with minor cosmetic tweaks around the margins. Just like Apple, Meta is daring the EU to enforce its democratically enacted laws, implicitly promising to pit its billions against Europe’s institutions to preserve its right to spy on us. […] Tech has found new ways to compromise our privacy rights, our labor rights, and our consumer rights - at scale. […] After decades of regulatory indifference to tech monopolization, competition authorities all over the world are taking on Big Tech. The DMA is by far the most muscular and ambitious salvo we’ve seen. […] Seen in that light, it’s no surprise that Big Tech is refusing to comply with the rules. If the EU successfully forces tech to play fair, it will serve as a starting gun for a global race to the top, in which tech’s ill-gotten gains - of data, power and money - will be returned to the users and workers from whom that treasure came.

Even if the DMA will be enforced completely and the EU won’t let big companies weasel out of actually complying, I have very little hope that this game of resisting compliance and enacting policies is not continuing for the foreseeable future. Non compliance is surely not a phenomenon exclusive to Big Tech. Far from it. Which means that even if we get the right people to put policies into place to reign in companies this cat and mouse game is just going to make sure that climate change is even more of a sure thing.

And what about all of the non-democratic societies? And what about all those non-environmental governments who do nothing? Can you solve a planetary problem while parts of the world are at war with each other? Or at least are ideologically opposed? What about China?

I read an article by Noah Smith about the wider implications of the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles the US have enacted. A couple of things form this:

Joe Biden is about to slap 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. A 100% tariff is an absolutely huge tariff. It means that Chinese EV makers would have to sell their EVs in the U.S. at half the price of EVs manufactured elsewhere in order to be competitive. That just isn’t going to happen. A 100% tariff will probably be enough to keep essentially all made-in-China EVs out of the U.S.

And further, himself quoting David Fickling:

A lot of people are worried that tariffs like these will slow down the transition to a low-carbon future powered by solar power and batteries. For example, David Fickling writes:

China’s widening lead in clean technology, coupled with its vast trade surplus…are combining with faltering efforts on decarbonization in developed countries to produce a toxic mix…If green technology such as electric vehicles…gets badged as foreign and threatening and finds itself excluded via…tariff policies, then drastically falling costs aren’t going to be enough to get it into the hands of consumers…An acceleration in trade wars will only slow our path to zero [carbon].

He’s right to worry. Transportation is responsible for almost 30% of U.S. carbon emissions, or about 4% of the global total. If the U.S. failed to switch to EVs, it could hamper decarbonization efforts by a small but noticeable amount.

And a last one from this:

The most important thing about these tariffs is probably the message they send. Protectionism is now the consensus economic policy of both major political parties in the United States. Biden has extended the Trump tariffs on China and levied the new EV tariffs; Trump is trying to one-up Biden by promising to raise the 100% tariffs to 200%, extend them to Mexico, and slap an additional 60% tariff on all Chinese-made goods. There is currently no major party or presidential candidate that you can vote for in America that is even remotely interested in free trade.

What I take from this is that the biggest economies are at a trade war with each other and it’s about to get very ideological on planet earth again(?) - but not in an environmentally friendly ideological way we might hope for. Meaning that systematic improvements of the climate situation are completely unlikely. Because a climate neutral Europe won’t be enough and itself utterly unlikely. I do not have hope for the rest of the planet.

All this is to say that: We will have to live with it. We will have to accept climate change. We won’t be able to stop the catastrophe. All the displaced people. All the pain and suffering. All the biodiversity loss.

What is interesting though, is that fossil fuels won’t last forever and the world’s overindulgence in a surplus of energy that is not bound to the solar energy system (as opposed to the fossil energy system that spurred much of industrialization) is inevitable. We will not live to see this, but we also won’t stop the shit show until then. The planet will go through this. I don’t see how it wouldn’t.

Having agreed to write more this month has produced a handful of posts that make me uncomfortable.

• A Post about my gripes with exclusionary “Manifestos” that seem to mistake moral purity for a self selected avant-garde with carefully trying to integrate new actors like LLMs in our lives
• A Post about my thoughts around LLMs that boils down to LLMs are here to stay, so we need actors that are interested in social justice, nature conservation, and so on to actively engage these things, to shape their future instead of turning away.
• A Post about my doubts that the web is a society and therefore non-violent internet protests can work.

These are all posts that make me uncomfortable because these are fluent thoughts that get more concrete the more I write. Today I wanted to add another point about (non-violent) protest.

If you’ve spent enough time in the social humanities, you will end up with a viewpoint that could be condensed down to “humans are gonna human”, meaning that intentional action very seldomly can be used as a starting point for analysis because either it is not visible to the observer, or intentions are getting displaced as soon as other actors are entangled. If that is true and it still seems possible to give good descriptions, maybe even explanations of change over time, of “why the things are the way they are” by completely excluding intentionality from the analysis, then it seems right to be very skeptical towards explanations that rely on private intentions being present to make sense of the world. You don’t need to know the why of individuals to understand the why (or at least give a convincing description of the state of things at a given time) in a larger sense.

Armed with this viewpoint it seems heartbreakingly obvious that protest can’t work, because bigger more distributed powers shape society, if you like it or not.

But. There is a case to be made for protest, if we don’t assume protesting is meant to inform and convince the wider public to change their ways and join the protesters until the social pressure becomes so high that other people would be elected to the parliament that in turn would enact new policies.

If we take as read that any protest would need enough active participants and sympathizers, why would you want to protest if not for convincing people? I found this great encapsulation in a Hacker News thread about the 3,5% rule:

Protests aren’t intended to gain allies. It’s to put pressure on those in charge. Pissing people off and interrupting commerce is literally the point.

Disruption is the point! It means that people will complain about the protestors. It means that the politicians in charge will be asked - sooner or later - to deal with the protestors and in its absolute form this can really only go three ways: 1.) The wish of the protestors is granted in some way or 2.) the state uses violence to end the protests. Either way the non-violent protestors keep the moral high ground. 3.) The third option is that the protest peters out, in which case the protest was not strong enough to begin with and not worth a potential conflict with the law. You really have to believe in what you believe (or at least make other people believe that you believe in what they believe) to spearhead a protest.

So there you have it: A rational case for protest is about disruption not about convincing fellow citizens. You need allies to make enough of a fuss, but changing society has a lot less to do with convincing people and a lot more to do with strategically annoy them.

What has this to do with not taking intentionalities into account? We can see that the mechanism of protest works even if people do not act strategically on purpose. All you need is the right strong convictions and the wish to disrupt people for disrespecting your values. If you as an individual realize that protest works like this or not is not important for it to work this way.

So what about the other posts? I wonder if some problems in wanting to change the web through protest and activism can be attributed to there not being a need to understand the mechanism. You can disrupt parts of the web, but the web is not a society which means that platforms won’t react in the same way - or at least they don’t need to - because shutting down protests is so much easier: like what recently happened on stack overflow:

Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest-rated answers.

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.

So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.

The web is not a democratic society so disrupting a platform will have a different result than disrupting society: Either nothing happens, the platform dies or you get banned. Note that these things seem similar to what I wrote above, but they are different. One way in which these are different is that a platform is not owned by its users. Another way they are different is that people in charge are not elected by its users. So the dynamic of pissing of fellow citizens, them complaining to politicians to end the disruption and the politicians having to decide to either answer with ethically questionable violence or by granting the wish to the protesters is not working in the same way. Users engage on platforms. Platforms have owners. And these owners may have share holders to answer to but share holders are not congruent with the users of said platforms. To make protest work you would need a meaningful amount of users be part owners of a platform. Or you need to protest in the context of your society, which would be my point to make here.

It makes me extremely uncomfortable to think in terms of ethics when it comes to generative AI. I would like to say that I am agreeing with Baldur Bjarnason on the matter and that there is actually nothing to discuss, but only to state that AI is unethical, unsustainable, un-researched and actively harmful to the planet and its inhabitants. It’s also a bubble and can’t deliver on its promise:

Found via a Reddit post about a WSJ article quoting a Sequioa presentation

In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue. This 17x number is just for chips – Nvidia chips alone, I think – so the actual cost-to-revenue multiplier is much higher in reality. So the hardware it’s installed in and the actual CPUs are extra. Research is extra. The army of freelancers used for RLHF training are extra. Electricity cost is extra. And chips depreciate in value pretty rapidly. Especially since every chip vendor on the planet has more specialised ML chips in the pipeline that are more effective at the task. This investment will be worthless pretty quickly.

But then … I am using it at work - where my employers pay for a pro version for us to use - and even in my free time I use it as my access to a more advanced version makes it more interesting to use and I’m - as I am so often - caught up in a kind of fatalist argument, it seems: I do not see LLMs going away. Do I feel better for not using them? Only theoretically. I feel like I am learning things while I use them because there are actually wast swaths of what I am theoretically supposed to to be able to do at work that I can’t do without a nudge here and there. Same is true in recreational programming.

In theory I feel that keeping myself morally untouchable and staying “pure” is interesting, but just as I tried to express when I was talking about manifestos and their harsh delineation between good and bad according to a standard they define without outlining the practical steps to make this a reality, I find myself reaching for the same here: Purity is theoretically interesting, but practically life happens elsewhere and so it is more a question of degree, if anything.

I can’t and won’t deny the fact that I find these AI tools helpful and interesting, sometimes. I won’t not agree either that they are also not unproblematic. However, I will say that excluding these things from your life - by individual consumer choice - doesn’t do anything to make them do less harm, make them more sustainable or actually changing the practicalities of life. We have become very good at defining things in such an “either/or” way that it has become useless to apply these standards to any real life situation, where you may be forced, coerced or seduced into - for example - using these things. What now? Time to stop living? Time to apologize for the rest of your life? I think that we may have to relearn how to examine the world. Not in terms of purity of our actions, but in terms of the realization of the world we inhabit.

This means manny big and small things. One small thing it means is to understand the relative limit any one’s actions have on the whole. We are an expression of the whole, so not being able to change the whole is not THAT surprising, I’d say. This also means that better understanding the whole - for example by examining the insane amounts of money and resources that are put into training, developing and serving these models to customers (like in the quote above) and how insanely powerless we as individuals are to change this - helps understanding us and our place int this world. Look, even in Europe - which I would only call a beacon of democracy by comparison to the alternatives out there - I do not foresee a sufficiently strict policy that would make LLMs impossible to deploy even though they are, in their current state, unethical in so many ways.

But if this is the case … I think you ought to be able to examine what you’re dealing with. I think people found always interesting what is problematic in one way or another. As far as I can tell LLMs and the whole field of commercial AI are no different. Does this give you card blanche to not care about any and all concerns around this? No. Does this mean you can’t use those tools? I don’t know, I tend to think the answer is no here, too.

There are things that are tabus in society that you definitely, positively cannot find good and explore in the way I try to argue for here. You can’t try on “slavery” or “naziism” for size, for example. But LLMs are not a tabu. They are problematic, sure, but they are not the same thing as those societal tabus. They may become one, we’ll see. It follows that you may be interested in them as long as you stay mindful and open to what they may become. I would even say that it is important to stay engaged, because this also makes it possible to recognize what may be worth developing further.

I guess what I’m trying to argue for is: 1. LLMs are going to stick around. They may not fulfill their promise of becoming super intelligent conscious agents - which is pretty unlikely and in any case prohibitively expensive and ruinous to our planet - but they are here to stay in some form or fashion. 2. Being interested in and using LLMs - even in your day to day life - won’t change this, however it well give you a better idea of what LLMs are and what they can and can’t do in an experiential sort of way that will absolutely change your perception of them. It’s not wrong to be curious as long as you’re cautious and recognize that you can’t generalize your experience: You’re not doing publishable research, you’re finding out for yourself. 3. I find it MUCH more valuable to live in the uncomfortable truth that you as an “unpure” individual can only do so much, apart from being interested in what is going on and actually recognize and examine what makes existence so uncomfortable if you can’t change what’s happening, which is kind of contradictoriy. I want people to express this ambivalence and live in it, because most of us are simply unable to live purely for purity’s sake.

The developer Michelle Barker has published a very cool Manifesto for A Humane Web and I wanted to comment on it a little. I mostly wanted to point to some lines from Bruno Latour and his 2010 paper An Attempt at a “Compositionist” Manifesto and comment on their implication for the Humane Web Manifesto, as far as I am interested in it here:

I know full well that, just like the time of avant-gardes or that of the Great Frontier, the time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, it is the time of time that has passed: this strange idea of a vast army moving forward, preceded by the most daring innovators and thinkers, followed by a mass of slower and heavier crowds, while the rearguard of the most archaic, the most primitive, the most reactionary people trails behind[…]. During this recently defunct time of time, manifestos were like so many war cries intended to speed up the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries. This huge warlike narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow of time had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. The war waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how many defeats they suffered. What this series of manifestos pointed to was the inevitable march of progress. So much so that these manifestos could be used like so many signposts to decide who was more “progressive” and who was more “reactionary.”

And even though I love this text for it is a pretty good one, I will stop quoting after one more passage:

And yet a manifesto might not be so useless at this point, making explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future.

I think that this understanding of what a manifesto could be in our modern world fits nicely to the way the web is going and how to proceed: Carefully and facing the future. With taking precautions and slowly. With an eye for a more “ecologist” web, that is with an eye for dependencies and conditions that make up diversity. I think this is a great framing for the humane web, because the categories used to frame this manifesto make clear what is needed for society of the web to make it in the wilderness that is the internet: “accessible”, “inclusive”, “safe”, “secure”, “sustainable”, “reliable”, “resilient”, “transparent”, “independent”, “human-centred”.

I have some quibbles with some of the categories and especially coming from a Latourian actor-network perspective I find that using the term “society” (as in “Like a functioning society, we take what we need, and we contribute what we can. We are citizens of the web…") would need to be qualified a little to make sure that we understand ourselves as makers being made by the web - which just means that tools have agency, too and that we have to lengthen our gaze a little past what we would traditionally call society. There is more involved.

About those categories I will only note one more thing before trying to express what I would’ve like to see more of. This point is that instead of “independent” I would have chosen the word interdependent. And instead of “human-centred” I would have chosen “un-centered” or “distributed”. But let’s not get lost in the weeds.

I know that this manifesto is very much of its time and reacts to platformism, late capitalism and the threat of “Big AI”. But I think it is important to realize that the society of the web needs to be assembled slowly, carefully, facing the complexities ahead by remaking - I would say - what here & now means, by taking more time examining what lies before us.

Sounds nebolous? But questions like the following arise from this stance:

• “How exactly are we going to think of a web society?”
• “How can an individual take meaningful steps?”
• “What does it mean to not filter out by categories, those who are “un-progressive” or “progressive with an asterisk” but to describe a prospective future?”
• “What series of steps can be taken as an assembly of actors (a team, a company, a neighborhood)?”
• “What is implied by the difference of being un/humane? Are those who are humane able to sustain themselves in any way? How? Can we separate them from the un-humane ones? How? Is this a stable difference? Who differentiates?”

I think the most understandable way I can put this - because I get annoyed by the way I have to express this as well, a little: If this manifesto and others like it that it links to point at something, is this something served by the playbook of exclusion/inclusion, sorting and filtering out? I imagine that whatever the humane web could be, it would express itself less in terms of framing out what it is not by underlining what it is, but by exploring what would make it possible to exist at all. What are the technologies, processes, organizational forms, ways of observing, tending to, maintaining, caring for and negotiating that could make a different web? This also implies what can stay - I assume the underwater cables, the http protocol can stay, CSS can stay, but what else? Do we know the web that is?

I’m all for binding those “How?“s I would have liked to hear more about to a higher order thinking, but I am not so interested to be sorted into good or bad by adhering to either all of the categories or none, without being told what is needed to even make one of these categories a real thing on a planetary scale (is that the goal?) and what is done to make it worth it to try for that.

It’s maybe a little bit weird to start writing again by pointing to a post by Jakob Greenfeld I disagree strongly with. It’s about a book called 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I’m not going to write a strong rebuttal about all of the claims in the post but rather focus on one important point and also add a few more general thoughts. But let’s start with a little context:

I do think embracing the limits of life to focus on what we can do is a good thing. I had written about the book myself a while ago. My main points were:

• “I have to play the hand that I was dealt and resources (and everything is a resource) are not available in endless supply. If you take these two things together, it makes sense to go for a satisficist way of life.” - Or: privilege is not evenly distributed, but you can still forge a life out of what you got (just not every life).
• “My here and now is not merely a transitory state in between the lacking status quo and an amazing future. Instead of improving things in the present moment, I would endure certain things simply because I defined my present situation as something that didn’t matter in the future.” Or: I am allowed to improve things in the here and now.

I think that Greenfeld’s post sees fallacies in Burkeman’s book where I see a not very generous reader. Greenfeld is a “hustle culture” kind of person whom I follow for useful notes on self help and productivity books but I do not always agree with him. One thing stood out as interesting to me in his post:

A cheap dinner with my parents is infinitely more meaningful than some networking dinner with strangers that costs me a fortune. In short, the amount of time/money you spend on something (and how much of it you possess) doesn’t dictate the meaning of anything.

This is a counterpoint against Burkeman’s claim that, because of the limited life span we possess, what we choose to spend our time on - and how much of it on what - becomes meaningful and defines our lives.

Greenfeld says that time = money. He then gives an example where spending relatively little money on an event doesn’t mean that that event couldn’t be more meaningful than another event that you spent more on. What Greenfeld has discovered is that you can’t compare single events like this but must compare topics: The question is how do you spend your time - over your lifetime? Comparing two singular events doesn’t make sense. But whether you spend your life mostly at networking dinners vs. mostly with your family does. This doesn’t mean that when you have disregarded an important aspect of your life that choosing to spend more time on it - even if at first it’s just a small amount - doesn’t feel meaningful. But the meaningfulness doesn’t come from it being a short event but rather from trying to rectify the neglect (or maybe exploring new frontiers).

I do think it can be worth it to read opposing opinions like this because it strengthens my viewpoint, it points to flaws in my approach or simply just widens my horizon. I am not convinced that what Greenfeld writes points out fallacies in Burkeman’s writing, but it still made me reconsider my own views, which is valuable.

The quoted passage for example made me think more deeply about my claim “everything is a resource” and how that relates to the sometimes very meaningful singular moments of life, as I’ve tried to untangle above. I think this passage especially hooked me for its relationship to my tendencies of sometimes living too much for a future that may never become a reality (it’s a risky investment strategy to always reinvest and never reap rewards). And that meaningful moments exist, reminds me how important it is to take advantage of choosing to be present for the things I am making my life about.

This post is also valuable because it’s an example of a person who is unwilling or maybe (as of yet) unable to recognize life’s limits. These people exist out there and they may not be easily convinced of the opposite. That’s useful to keep in mind. Greenfeld and I are holding different values that’s for sure and since values are personal one may be persuaded to think this is just a battle between differing subjective viewpoints. But the objective realities of life - e.g. that your lifetime is limited and being more productive doesn’t make life last longer or spending time fiddling with your productivity systems doesn’t make you enjoy the important moments more - do not care if you would like to forget about these facts (and rather work hard to grow your business or whatever). You will have to come to terms with them - if you like to contemplate these things, or not.

The post and its author is a useful counter example to my own life’s plan: A (relatively) small but reflected life in the here and now is more rewarding, more livable, more rational, more emotionally honest and also more ethically sound, than any sweeping pronouncements of a “big life"™ could ever be.

My mental model predicts that sooner or later everyone will have to open their eyes to the small life they are actually living and embrace it - or failing that will live with a lot of avoidable cognitive dissonance. Greenfeld suggests the opposite. We’ll see whose bet holds.

• Previously.

There is this weird dream logic inside me that wants to do everything I want to do in a progressively better way until it reaches an optimum which then also can be sustained.¹ I imagine that, no matter what it is, if I would just start to try to achieve anything and keep iterating on it, that any improvements needed to reach a sustainable optimum would be in reach. Reached optima somehow would become free of effort. They would just happen. In this way I could at least potentially do an infinite amount of things.

Of course, this is not how it works. Everything has a cost and in reality life is quite limited. There is even a cost associated to making something cost less to do. Effortlessness does only exist in a certain, unrealistic, frame.

The problem with good free hobbyist websites is that some people misunderstand; just because these good things are free does not mean you are entitled to have everything on the web for free.

simonmumbles.micro.blog

[@simonwoods](https://micro.blog/simonwoods) I would love for this fact to be more noticable again. Not only does it allow creators to earn a living but it also creates something valuable for the consumer: scarcity itself. If taken seriously, it restricts you, you'll have less choice, which I think is a good thing, because consumption decissions become important again.

[@matti](https://micro.blog/matti) Yes exactly. We don't have these expectations in the physical world and I've yet to see somebody justify how it is we change that for the web, you know?

I was going to answer to this ongoing conversation within the thread but ran out of space and I thought it is interesting enough to warrant a titled post¹:

Simon’s observation is interesting to me because I think it relates to my point from the other day about social problems being naturally occurring emergent properties of the social.

The question of why do some people feel entitled to demand everything to be available for free on the web is, I think, mostly answered by the attitudes they hold²: Is it important to you (to acknowledge that you ought to pay for stuff and/or be fine with not having stuff), or not? And I think this is universal and holds actually true for physical stuff as well.

Given suitable conditions, the same demands will pop up in the physical world. Example: My partner works in a national park. In the customer service center of this park, they offer printed maps of the area for free. In other parks the same kind of maps cost money. Some People are upset by this state of affairs.³

If this behavioral pattern is not confined to the web, the question then becomes a question of how to change the attitudes of people - given, that we want to problematize this observation. Can we? And more importantly: at what cost? This question is interesting to me, because I think it relates to my point about social problems being emergent properties, that I mentioned earlier.

Attitudes and values are not one and the same. Values are part of the social and individuals might have an affirming or rejecting attitude towards those values. The way to get to an individual is through the social - you’ll have to be social to interact. This means that to change an individual’s attitude (or more efficient: make attitudes matter less) is a social problem - and, again, as I said in that other post: social problems are more social realities than problems, so changing attitudes can only be achieved by suppression⁴. Suppressing anything - even for a moment in history - takes lots of maintenance. To make it last, you have to establish structures within the social. So this social question becomes cultural - if you want to make it last.

I will stop here and ask, if the amount of resources needed to do this is worth it. And I’ll answer that it is not. Akin to locks keeping honest people honest, the real task is to get more people who are sitting on the fence (or peeking over it) on the “right” (“our”) side. As far as I can tell the best “above board” way to do this is to communicate clearly what is free and what is not and give people varied options to buy what needs to be bought.⁵ Giving reasons why to buy can help. Letting your personality shine through also helps.

In short: People behaving entitled and demanding things for free is not tied to the web only. These behaviors are the result of undesirable attitudes that are too hard and too expensive to change sustainably. Therefore the real task is - apart from understanding the initial problem better - not changing the attitudes but to offer the people which are close to doing the right thing options to follow through and not worry about the rest.

Problems with "the social" are emergent properties of the social¹. Since they are properties, we're unlikely to fix them on a grander scale. You aren't so much "fixing" these problems, anyways: You suppress them (which isn't meant to suggest that that's always a bad thing). But suppression is work, takes infrastructure. The bigger the social structure you try to keep "in order" (like a gardener) the bigger the work. This is why suppression only works for self selected (or lucky), small groups with aligned interests and supporting structures (resources, established processes, a shared and actively maintained history², …). Teams, clubs, activist and research groups, etc. have the best chances to successfully suppress some of the more nastier but nonetheless naturally occurring characteristics of the social. It really is a jungle out there.

• Forward

I am amazed that one of the most important, if not the single most important term in continental and especially German idealistic enlightened philosophy, “Mündigkeit” (maturity), has only a very short article on the German Wikipedia (no discussion page that would explain this either) and no article in English. The only other Wikipedia with an article on it is the Danish one.

Today I discovered Manuel Moreale’s Blog thanks to this great endorsement by @uncertainquark (which I in turn found thanks to micro.blog’s discovery tab):

I just donated to a personal blog writer I really like. Check out his very human blog, which actually cares about the state of the Internet: manuelmoreale.com 📝

One of the posts there (On discovery and consumption) made me pause when I was thinking about how to react to this beautifully little post by @pimoore:

Who we are is the most eloquent and unique story that we all write every single day.

There is a difference between commenting and quoting a post like this. Since that post was inspiration to a point (this) I wanted to make, I don’t think that a comment would have been appropriate. Looking at the comments other people actually made, they are engaging with the post more directly, by uttering e.g. approval (for example, @patrickrhone’s “Truth”)

There is also a difference in the way I engage with the post when quoting it: The engagement here is very indirect, the other person does not even necessarily notice that I took what they wrote and re-contextualized it for my own needs.

Similarly to Manuel Morale’s point about discovery and consumption, this might be an obvious difference. But I think commenting and quoting also is related to what Manuel has to say about the centralization of discovery and consumption (meaning the engagement with the discovered content):

One major change the web has experienced was the consolidation of discovery and consumption. Digg was—and still is—a place to discover new content but the consumption of that content takes place away outside of Digg. And the same was true for discussions around the content. Those used to happen in comment sections spread across the internet. But now, places like Twitter or Instagram are acting as places for both the discovery and the consumption of new content.

A platform that only allows comments about content linked from elsewhere on the web will not lead to this kind of centralization. A comment-only platform like this is also much less convenient to use to actually build upon other people’s content, which most often happens in the quoting (or linking) style instead the commenting-style of engagement.

Making it easier to quote other people’s content might on the other hand have consequences as regards to how we engage with the creators behind the content. Which brings me to another post of Manuel (The internet is not broken. People are.), which is that social media exposes a lot of people’s interest not in doing the thing for the love of the thing, but for the fame, which might be achieved through it (Something I have always appreciated about @merlinmann: He does the things because he loves doing them).

A commenter is not very likely to become famous through commenting. A quoter on the other hand produces first order content: This post here stands on its own, even though it is inspired by other content. Combined with the strong network effects of the big social media platforms, odds are that the wish for fame becomes more likely to surface - because fame itself is more probable in these conditions.

Therefore offering tools for quoting, for building upon other people’s content, is a double edged sword. If the social media platform is too big and quoting is too easy, there is an increased likelihood of a bloodless hunt for fame, in which first order creators become increasingly invisible to each other.

Just read @manton’s old post on the deliberate lack of Hashtags on here. I think the concept of emojiitags is a great idea not least because it’s kind of a more controlled way to tag a post with a certain topic.

This means users have the freedom to tag, but the platform has control over what a tag ca be. Bad actors may not invent new tags or reinvent slightly different tags that denote essentially the same topic only with a slight change of emphasis and all the other tricks of attention generation that free-form tagging lends itself to on social media.

Hashtags and Twitter trends go together.

Emojitags won’t solve this problem, I’m afraid. A limited and controlled topic dictionary doesn’t change that. If trends are not to be made invisible, then there is an incentive to appear in the discovery timeline for the trending tag.

And even if trends are not going to be made to stand out more: Trends are somewhat inevitable. E.g. the hockey tag :ice_hockey: shows what you would expect at the moment: A few posts on the Stanley Cup.

Another problem is that certain forms of content happen to be more successful. Just think of instagram, which is full of cute puppy videos (amongst other things) or tik tok, which has a crazy amount of dancing videos. What I’m trying to say: A platform has a ratcheting effect on content once one (or more) repeatable format(s) is (or are) found and found to be successful.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. I think this is a somewhat predictable quality of social media platforms, when they grow big enough to sustain the complexities on which those emergent properties are dependent.

So what can platform owners do to mitigate the bad effects of growth?

The answer is probably that growth needs to be slow. And content needs to be actually policed. And discoverability needs to be somewhat limited. And content shouldn’t be sorted by likes or similar.

It seems that micro.blog already does most of these things.