starlit blog

ephemeral nature of web

early on in this blog (scroll down) i spoke of the ephemerality of posting on the web. today i want to revisit this notion for just a moment.

a few years ago i wrote some extremely secret twitter bots. i was excited to have a kind of monument churning out subjectively interesting patterns, but anonymously & without an obvious reason. i used to tend these bots like a small garden, growing them & nurturing them every day or so. the idea of permanence was not the goal, but i did dream that internet arcana investigators would try & unravel the “mystery” behind the mechanisms. as time went on i paid less & less attention to the growth & kind of let go of them.

recently i noticed that several of my bots have been suspended from twitter, which must be due to the new anti-spam measures twitter has been moving towards.

it’s quite an insignificant loss, considering how nobody actually followed these bot experiments, & the fact that there’s no lack of injustice when it comes to corporations silencing folks. it just helps hammer home this idea that platforms are volatile & ephemeral. they aren’t balanced, they don’t have the users’ best interests at heart. they can close or change hands overnight (see also: yahoo acquiring geocities). i understand that tumblr is also on shaky ground as of this writing.

i think one answer is to “go small”. this isn’t a practical solution (under the wage system), because people need to eat. however, as an outlet, as a way to communicate & share ideas among small audiences, rejecting mass [social] media might be helpful. there’s no need to wrestle your personal data away from a large corporation if it’s just a single static page of html sitting on a server. having an account deleted makes no difference if you’re just trying to hold a conversation with a few of your close friends. no threat of an updated policy can disrupt your work if it’s text & images.

in the late 90s i was convinced that the internet was poised to render ignorance non-existent, & do something like destroy all forms of government. (i was a teenager at the time.) today i feel like returning to a tiny internet, a local one, an intimate web, is how we might move forward & out from under the overwhelming shadow of big corp, capital-driven ephemerality, & planned obsolescence.

accessibility & social media

as a Person attempting to find a way out of encroaching digital totalitarianism, it’s clear to me that we have to forgo the big platforms. feeding into goog or face means we submit more & more of an immeasurable quality of ourselves into the huge future meatgrinder of data appropriation. we can see the edges of the machine today, but the data is persisted and the machine only grows. the limits of this mechanism are boundless as algorithms mature and become more sophisticated, while it feeds off of data we have already submitted in the past.

accessibility is often posed as the reason for consolidating our online presence to a single platform. but what is meant by “accessibility”? let’s break it down …

• sensory accessibility: big platforms have an inherent standard look & feel to them, which creates a format that lends itself to easy adaptation to various screen readers, navigation aids, etc.. but the content of each post has no such requirement, making much of social media invisible to those who need special tools to consume the media. there are many ways to make specific content actively harmful for others (for example flashing gifs or lack of content warnings). by monopolizing the format of content, a pressure is created to leave homegrown or experimental formats behind — without enforcing any accessibility rules upon the content itself. (& anyway there are plenty of open standards for presenting content in an accessible way, standards that are not necessarily beholden to a specific online platform.) one important counterexample is how automatic captioning of videos has improved due to many people watching video without sound & the market necessity to maintain advertisements. in this particular case the gigantic platforms contribute something to sensory accessibility. but accessibility is an ongoing process that needs to adapt constantly. why should minorities be dependent on shareholder pressure to decide if & when they are allowed to enjoy certain content?

• technical accessibility: this is server uptime, geographic ease of access, compatibility with various devices & browsers, etc… it’s true that big corps can afford to keep things running & available. data centers around the world keep response times to a minimum, balancing millions of users, yadda yadda. they can also pay programmers to keep applications & web pages running on the latest devices. but it’s in their interest to remove support for older devices in accordance with planned obsolescence & various deals they may or may not have with the major device manufacturers. even without clandestine agreements, “bigger” apps tend to use cutting-edge features which require dropping older devices & operating systems & favor newer, high performance hardware. which devices & browsers a big company chooses to support can have a broad effect, deciding what “should” or “should not” be supported for the entire industry. net neutrality is always under lobbyist pressure to succumb to changes. the outcome could be that it would be even harder for people to access a free & unbiased internet in the future (which is not a given for everyone even today). in a dire potential scenario, all public traffic would be routed through goog or face, & all content would be monitored & distributed under their auspices. visiting alternate sites would be expensive or impossible for end users. what is “accessible” if an individual is forced to upgrade their hardware every 24 months in order to remain connected, or to pay communications monopolies exorbitant fees to access the “free” web?

• linguistic & cultural accessibility: big platforms can afford to localize their interface into however many languages they wish. often the platform’s own users are petitioned to undertake the translations on their own, with little or no compensation. of course, localization is much more than just translating texts, & the depth of localization for a given language will be proportional to the amount of effort allocated … which is proportional to the amount of money the company hopes to gain by doing the localization. one good example of how big platforms can fail to localize properly is through user name database fields. the idea of “first name” & “last name” as a way to identify a person is extremely west-centric, as many different cultures around the world have vastly different naming traditions. even if a group of locals take it upon themselves to document all the changes necessary, the decision to actually implement the changes is held hostage high up in the corporate chain — where nothing will be done until it is of immediate capital benefit to the company, & may or may not end up aligning with the people who are actually affected by the changes. what is “accessible” when your native language interface with a platform is ultimately filtered through a higher-up in a company who probably doesn’t have your best interests at heart?

• accessibility through inclusiveness: big platforms make a huge deal over inclusiveness. they throw their doors open wide & paint a picture of the global village, in which we are all neighbors. behind those doors, however, are hidden policies, judging who is truly welcome & who is not. an easy example is various “real name” policies, & verified accounts on social media sites. ostensibly to deter harassment, these ultimate aid harassers in identifying and targeting vulnerable people. not to mention how the usage of deadnames can persist effectively forever under these system. content is monitored for problem topics, but what is or is not considered a problem is a decision made behind closed doors. posting about reproductive issues or hormonal health care can be found against “community guidelines” while hate groups operate unopposed. a sick desire to keep spaces “family friendly” often make discussions about mental health or sexuality a cause for removal from the platform. social networks have strict privacy rules that make it easy to disappear someone (or individual posts) from the platform without a trace (& incidentally makes it easy for someone being bullied or harmed to simply drop off the radar & be forgotten or left to their fate). these factors contribute to an unhealthy & dangerous environment for precarious or marginalized people. what kind of platform is being cultivated when privacy & safety are superficial, & designed to protect only a specific subset of the population — who self-selects to represent, closing the circle?

important note: in all of these cases, the effect of the problem will be entirely invisible to those unaffected.

my conclusion is that popular/widespread online platforms take advantage of the misleading term “accessibility”, which is cynically used to maintain control while denying sincere access to several important population subsets — until such time as these populations can be exploited for monetary gain. (token diversity & representation is popular right now, as it lends a credibility to major brands, as we see queer & disabled, etc. people appear in commercials. representation is, of course, quite welcome, but consider that the decision makers & CEOs are the same people they’ve always been & that the considerable capital pulled in via such commercials don’t actually benefit the people they supposedly represent.) as these populations are subdued, experimentation with formats is similarly subdued.

final questions … how do we find the balance between sincere access to technology vs. a monopoly over available platforms? how can we subvert the current popular platforms in a meaningful way? how do we allow experimental or extremely personal media works without forgoing accessibility? can the power consolidated by the three or four major tech players be redistributed more fairly?