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.