commit 55a8518244c62f48d9088e40e546c801b2f51ec6
parent a315d2a271ca52da76fdb1ca1e4d082d82d3af06
Author: ugrnm <ultrageranium@bleu255.com>
Date: Thu Jan 30 22:50:00 +0100
thesis 5 final draft
Diffstat:1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
diff --git a/transmediale-2020-7-theses/index.html b/transmediale-2020-7-theses/index.html
@@ -370,24 +370,21 @@ To be sure the fediverse has not solved this, these are hard questions, but at l
# THESIS 5
## Fediverse as a way out of data sharecropping and free labour?
-As everyone here is well aware of, corporate social media platforms with their focus on self-gratifying metrics and gamification are infamous for taking free labour to the next level. Whatever information is fed into the system, will be used to directly or indirectly create models, reports, and essentially new datasets that have core economic value for the platform owners: enter the world of surveillance capitalism.
+As everyone here is well aware of, corporate social media platforms with their focus on self-gratifying metrics and gamification, are infamous for taking free and and pervasive labour to the next level.
-While on commercial social media this discussion is impossible to be have, discussion about who has acces to what you post, how it is stored, how it circulates are quite transparent on the fediverse:
-- at the level of the protocol design
-- design of the clients
-- issue trackers
-- user behaviour with pseudonimity and multiple accounts/identities becoming very popular again
+Whatever information is fed into the system, will be used to directly or indirectly create models, reports, and essentially new datasets that have core economic value for the platform owners.
-Fediverse is exemplary of what Robert Gehl sees as one of the characteristics of alternative social media platforms, that both the network and code have a pedagogical function,
+It's a complete deadlock that will never change because after all users have agreed to that, and even with chronic coverage of social media disasters, no regulatory bodies have seemed to care enough by acting in a significant way in the past 15 years.
-It does not mean it's easy,
-Fediverse does not make programming easier, it does not prevent scraping of publicly posted information, its subcultural model of instance linked to specific communities can even make some minorities or activists more easily exposed.
+This situation is like this because corporate social media are simply non democratic systems. They are allowed to exist outside of public reach and examination. End of story.
-But all this awareness and participation does not pay the bills or help prevent admin burnout and server/software maintenance fatiguqe within communities.
-typical FLOSS exploitation is going (dev, maintenance, documentation) worked through donations models, there is also a renaissance of coop models. And very importantly, the question of public funding in relation to public domain software or FLOSS needs to be revided.
+On the other hand, on the Fediverse, discussion about who has acces to what you post, how it is stored, how it circulates, are very transparent. To be sure, problems of scraping, doxxing, exploitation and privacy in general are not solved, but at least everyone is able to voice their perspective. The best way to witness this are on issue trackers that have transformed from a place where bugs are reported, to become public assemblies for programmers *and* non-programmers to deliberate, and most importantly, learn from each other.
-Once again
-widespread understanding this is an issue, and points to the fact that more research needs to made to understand how you define labour in these communities and if economic models outside of surveillance capitalism can exist to support non-exploitative solidarity and care across the whole stack.
+To Borrow from Robert Gehl talking about alternative social media, the Fediverse is a pedagogical environment.
+
+But what is gained in pedagogy, empowerement, autonomy, is obviously lost in sustainability in a system that exist outside of the moneytisation of its users. We're not talking about the difficulty of making billions for running a Fediverse instance, we're talking about much more basic issues such as preventing burnout for developers, maintainers, admins, moderators, etc. We're talking about the damage that we created when we've grown to expect that everything online should be magically free.
+
+So yeah, it's complicated, but at least notbody is pretending otherwise, and these challenges have allowed to re-open discussions about platform coop, public funding of free software, and basically if economic models outside of surveillance capitalism can exist to support non-exploitative solidarity and care across the whole stack.
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