Can The Internet Be Saved?
Written 13th August 2020
If the global pandemic has shown us anything, it’s how much we rely on the Internet these days to get by; whether it’s been working or learning from home, receiving COVID-19 updates, or communicating with loved ones, I’m not sure I can envisage what navigating these times might have been like without the Internet and the Web.
However, the Internet isn’t without its perils — from #fakenews, echo chambers and trolls; to privacy violations, the commodification of everything and aggressive algorithms — it’s clear that its faults go way beyond minor frustrations; leaving many of us feeling cynical and untrusting of the tool that transformed the world.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash at a Save Your Internet protestThe Internet is like nothing else humans have experienced before and finding ways to collectively and efficiently manage it was always going to be a big challenge. Reading Lisa Borst’s review of Joanne McNeil’s new book ‘Lurking: How a Person Became a User’ in The Nation, I am reminded, however, that the Internet as we know it today “one of history’s most expensive, extractive, and manipulative advertising apparatuses, dominated by a shrinking handful of giant platforms”…”didn’t have to become what it is today.”
This year marks the 35th birthday of Copyleft, which through the Emacs General Public License, turned copyright law on its head to ensure that once software was released freely, it would always remain free. It required that distributions of the software, or modified versions of it, be released under the same terms, guaranteeing that everyone is free to run, study, modify, and share the work or their own modifications to it. It’s important, however, that we don’t take Copyleft and other hard won protections for granted. There are decisions being made about how the web and our data should be managed or restricted all the time — GDPR in Europe, Article 13 (see also SaveYourInternet) the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), in the US Congress, and Bill C-32 in the Canadian Parliament — and it’s important not to assume that our rights and freedoms are automatically protected. As Bruce Stirling, author of ‘Short History of the Internet’ puts it; “The Internet belongs to everyone and no one;” and although that, as we have seen, can be open to abuse, there are so many beautiful examples of the internet as open, transparent, and collaborative processes and products and infrastructure with dispersed ownership and control.
At the end of her review of ‘Lurking’, Borst suggests that “a better and more equitable Internet would […] begin with the premise that every user is a person, something our existing platforms have consistently failed to do.” With an eye firmly on the global pandemic and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement Borst concludes: ‘The past few months have only made it clearer that market-based solutions can’t build the better and fairer health care or justice systems we badly need. They won’t build the healthier and fairer Internet we deserve, either.’
Fortunately, there are plenty of people around the world working hard, campaigning for and developing free and open internet for the benefit of all of us. This week I will be sharing just a few examples of what’s possible when we recognise and value the common wealth of the Internet and the world wide web. I’d love to hear about your examples too, so please share them by emailing us here, Tweeting us here or leaving a comment on our Facebook page here.
With respect and appreciation from this little corner of the internet,
Elsie
Commoning around the world wide web
Happy Birthday copyleft
We referenced it in the intro above, but think it deserves a little more love.
To find out more about copyleft, what it is, and why it’s important, read the full article here.
r/Place
On April Fools’ Day 2017, a social experiment was launched by Reddit in the form of a subreddit called “place”. It featured a collaborative pixel art canvas, where a user could place a pixel every five minutes. This limitation de-emphasized the importance of the individual and necessitated the collaboration of many users in order to achieve complex creations. Each tile placed was relayed to observers in real-time. The result is genuinely one of the most fascinating collaborations and videos on the internet and shows the full spectrum of the weird and wonderful of the online world and what’s possible when we come together.
Read more here and watch the video of it unfold here.
Mastodon
Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service kind of similar but different to Twitter and Weibo. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. We’ll have a Commons Transition account in our favourite Mastodon instance (Social.coop) soon. Stay tuned!
Find out more and join here.
Creative commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges. They have an incredible library of 1.6 billion Creative Commons Licensed resources — from literary works, to videos, photos, audio, open education, scientific research and more.
Find out more here.
Access Now
Access Now defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world. They work on five key issues: privacy, freedom of expression, digital security, business and human rights and net discrimination.
Find out more about their brilliant work here.
Alliance for Affordable Internet
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) is a global coalition working to drive down the cost of internet access in low- and middle-income countries through policy and regulatory reform.
Find out more about A4AI’s work here.
This week, we are also reading
Article 13 and #SaveYourInternet
The European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market requires the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to take more responsibility for copyrighted material being shared illegally on their platforms. It’s become known by the most controversial segment, Article 13, which critics claim will have a detrimental impact on creators online.
Find out more about article 13 here and the campaign to stop it here.
Tell Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police
IBM, Microsoft and even Amazon are pausing their facial recognition programs right now because this technology is often biased along the lines of age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Even more concerning, evidence suggests that even when facial recognition works as expected, it’s often used to surveil people of color. Bottom line: facial recognition and law enforcement just don’t mix.
The story doesn’t end there, though. Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras pose similar risks, because Ring shares its footage with law enforcement through its Neighbors Law Enforcement Portal, which has been called the “perfect storm of privacy threats.”
Sign the petition to ask Amazon Ring to immediately press pause on its partnerships with law enforcement here.
And if you needed any further proof that Amazon is the anti-commons villain of the internet, read this.
The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?
A look at the complicated business of funding open source software development.
Read the full article on Vice here.
Dmytri Kleiner: “You can’t code away their wealth”
Dmytri Kleiner talks about exvestment, CounterAntiDisIntermediation and much more at Procomuns Barcelona.
Watch the video here.
