"But social media also exposes movements to many vulnerabilities. The solidiarities it generates are often superficial: movement use of social media can easily devolve into repetitive messaging in echo chambers without collective gains in narrative power—a change in the stories and values that hold sway in society—or a translation to real-world militancy."
@strypey <article about the history of activist internet media>
In about 1999 Google proposed to sell Excite.com itself for 10e6 USD.
Four years ago, Google (restructured as Alphabet Corporation) joined four other corporations as having exceeded 10e12 USD of value.
In this money-is-speech world, in the late 90s grassroots movements could roll with million dollar corporations with genuine speech worth a million bucks.
The other team are all trillionaires now, though. That's 12 zeros.
@screwtape
> In about 1999 Google proposed to sell Excite.com itself for 10**6 USD
... which at the time was all it was worth, given that they hadn't invented AdSense yet, so they had no idea how they were going to monetize the thing. I remember we all loved it at the time because it had no ads 😂
@strypey though my point was that a grassroots movement that was roughly one Google corporation of social power in 1999, the same grassroots movement now would be 0.000001 Alphabet Corporations of power and this dynamic seems different to me.
@screwtape
> though my point was that a grassroots movement that was roughly one Google corporation of social power in 1999
Fair point. In '99, both were experimental startups with a single website and no commercial viability. One mistake the Indymedia network made IMHO was to tie ourselves to a strict volunteer-only, non-commercial policy. If we had embraced a platform cooperative approach we could have employed our tech people and other specialists, who ended up drifting away to get day jobs.
@strypey I actually think Google was already a powerhouse out the gate, with their NSA, CIA and other American government built-in contracts, though obviously excite.com declined to buy them and they took in another 25 million in funding in the second part of 1999. I think activists on the internet were seen to be about as powerful as google over those years. However that's about a million times smaller than the five trillion+ dollar companies now, so now activism can't gainfully use the corpos
@strypey I disagree that becoming a corporation like the now-mega corporations would have been a good strategy; the people involved would have been Facebook people, and would have done Facebook business. No good megacorporation came out of that.
In contrast while activists could adopt small-business approaches to the internet from '95 - '05, there hasn't been a meaningful activist web product in the ensuing two decades (w3's activitypub a lonely exception).
@strypey while berry-picking, it struck me that lifetimes of talent were being squandered on historical re-enactment serfdom like this: If, somehow, our government adopts a universal basic income to enable a transition away from centrally planned 200-year-old factory style population labor models, just to let people be themselves instead (or be parents to children..) the world will transform.
@screwtape
> I disagree that becoming a corporation like the now-mega corporations would have been a good strategy
Well, I didn't say it would have...
> activists could adopt small-business approaches to the internet from '95 - '05, there hasn't been a meaningful activist web product in the ensuing two decades
Ae, which is why that, also, is not what I suggested we could have done.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with platform cooperatives? Here's a good starting point:
@strypey I definitely misunderstood, and now understand even less. At first, I thought that link not attempting to describe what a platform coop is was a mistake of sorts, but the Wikipedia article also doesn't describe what a platform coop is, but says that one can't describe what a platform coop is. It seems to be a generic term for a platform software that prioritises providing the service it is intended to provide over monetisation, but there's still monetisation.
@screwtape
> that link not attempting to describe what a platform coop is was a mistake
This isn't a description?
"if ‘we the people’ own and democratically control the platforms we use we all get a better deal; without external investors syphoning off funds every quarter any value created can be recycled within the platform; workers get paid more (and, most importantly, a real liveable wage), customers get better value and together we set the rules."
@screwtape
Maybe you don't know what a cooperative is? See the link in this paragraph:
"This ownership revolution, is just one aspect of what makes the platform co-op model so enticing and grounds it within a pre-existing legal model, established in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers. Bringing the co-op movement up to date for the internet era and equipping ourselves with the right tools to organise effectively, collaboratively and democratically is what Ours to Hack and Own, is all about."
This, right here, is the naivety that killed Indymedia. It's why most of us either got day jobs in DataFarming corporations or (like me) lived in poverty and struggled to sustain ourselves and our work. If we want to avoid making the same mistake with the fediverse, we need to find ethical ways to pay people for their work. Platform cooperatives are the best proposal I've seen so far. Practical examples; Loomio.org, meet.coop
@strypey Hmm @galdor did you ever consider a cooperative, such as a platform cooperative? [Nicolas is an extremely high calibre and also maverick lisp programmer]
@screwtape@strypey@galdor I’m an unashamed laissez-faire capitalist. My surprising and revolutionary method for #programmers to receive money for work is called “getting paid for it.”
@screwtape@strypey@galdor Also: #blog, post online, and hack on #OpenSource code that scratches your itch or puts food on the table so you can drum up new business. Get your employer to let you release generic non-core code under a permissive license. Create mindshare for the tools and techniques you care about.
I explicitly started #Perl#blogging in 2021 because I wanted to keep getting paid to program Perl.
Mark, your approach is exactly what I'm leaning towards.
Funny thing is that at an individual level, optimizing for money is how you get to a point where you can afford the time to build Open Source software the way you want to.
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.”
@mjgardner
One problem with Randism is that it's the political equivalent of a physics that only believes in particles, not forces. Individuals do not and have never made decisions in isolation, so societies can't just be an aggregate of individual decisions. Any more than the universe is merely an aggregate of the actions of particles. People who don't have an analysis of cultures and structures inevitably end up as serfs of people who do.
@strypey@mjgardner I began phloging openly under this nome de plume late 2018 to start normalising myself as myself, though I have radical anti-money views (maybe comparable to Rand's interaction with public healthcare ~ well the laws currently are what they currently are). I might write a small book on playing with autoassociative memory spiking networks, and have a liberapay with it if people like it (with a lisp).
I guess recently you've been letting-people-know-you're-out-there @galdor
@strypey
I guess this idea of being a force unto your own juxtaposes platform cooperatives, where people ~pay into a democratically steered labor entity. I balk at the idea of somehow cooperating with others by voting; basically I don't want much of a relationship with people I don't have a natural consensus with regarding what we're doing together; in which case it doesn't make sense to have democratically controlled wages I think.
I had a DISC assessment once, 100% D. @mjgardner@galdor
@screwtape
> I balk at the idea of somehow cooperating with others by voting; basically I don't want much of a relationship with people I don't have a natural consensus
Depends on your definition of "democracy", but in mine, consensus is also a form of democracy. Arguably a more democratic one. See Graeber's book The Democracy Project.
> it doesn't make sense to have democratically controlled wages
Better than having them imposed down a hierarchy, surely?
> Better than having them imposed down a hierarchy, surely?
I do not know where you work, but in France as in most countries, you negotiate your salary with your employer. If you are not satisfied, you are free to seek employment elsewhere or build a business yourself.
Having to play politics to get my colleagues to agree about my compensation would be a special kind of hell.
Currently co-founding a co-op, using my freedom to...
> seek employment elsewhere or build a business yourself
> Having to play politics to get my colleagues to agree about my compensation would be a special kind of hell.
I don't understand why negotiating with a superior is better than negotiating with equals. That's not the experience of people I know who work for co-ops. But whatever, different strokes for different folks
@strypey@galdor@mjgardner I guess a business's power is approximately its size, so a co-op would be in some sense a shortcut to creating a large, flat business that is your own and others' employer to reduce personal risk for everyone involved.
In that taxi service platform co-op, people aren't earning the same per se- but there are rules such that which taxi receives a request for pickup is decided in a consistent manner, and fares are set by a global scheme.
@mjgardner Hitch thought it was more generally palatable to refer to The Virtue of Selfishness rather than Atlas Shrugged per se, though I think he was also setting himself up for his joke about finding it quaint that some people think the problem is that Americans are not yet selfish enough
> Hmm @galdor did you ever consider a cooperative, such as a platform cooperative?
I'd love to see an alternate way to build software, especially if it could allow the creation of quality software without the pressure of short term profit. But I have no idea on how to build a sustainable model out of the traditional way (i.e. a company).
> It seems to be a generic term for a platform software that prioritises providing the service it is intended to provide over monetisation, but there's still monetisation.
At the end of the day, you need money to build anything, and people working on it need money to live. The Open Source world is comfortable pushing for "contributions", also known as "free labour", but it is not sustainable. It's no surprise so many big tech companies love to pretend they support Open Source software (i.e. they do the minimum to profit from this free labour).
An interesting system is one where individual developers sell support and custom development on Open Source software, Sidekiq being maybe the best example.
I have no idea how to make it work with an entire team without a traditional company though.
@galdor
> I have no idea on how to build a sustainable model out of the traditional way (i.e. a company)
A cooperative (or "co-op") is a kind of company. Like any company, it's run in the interests of its owners, including earning enough revenue to cover costs, including paying staff. But it's run democratically, not from the top down. The owners are usually either the workers or the customers, although there are other models. Check out:
A platform co-op is just a web platform structured as a co-op, instead of a public corporation (like Meta) or a private corporation (like Titter). There's been rising interest in this model over the last 5-10 years (roughly since Occupy WS), with international conferences organized by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, who maintain this directory of examples:
"This reliance on corporate platforms has transformed movement media strategy. Rather than devoting energy to a collective enterprise, individual movement organizations prioritize “getting their message out,” a strategy governed by social capital, competition, and a political economy of clicks. This strategy may sometimes be necessary to achieve certain short-term ends, but it is deeply detrimental to the long-term project of building a meaningful and shared resistance."
"In November 1999, the Seattle IMC helped cover and coordinate the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle. During the four days of the meetings, the new IMC website received over 1.5 million hits, outpacing CNN for the same amount of time... The model captured the imagination of activists and journalists, leading to the rapid development of local IMCs from Seoul to São Paulo and the birth of the global Indymedia network."
"The people who took part in Indymedia saw themselves as participants in the social movements of the day. Paying homage to the Zapatistas, they referred to themselves as IMCistas. Building on the Zapatista concept of “many yeses,” Indymedia emphasized building connections between different movements and struggles. The media infrastructure would be a connective tissue, linking a plurality of voices, histories, and visions into a global 'movement of movements'..."
It blows my mind that in late 2022, as Titter was being torn apart by its new owner, authors who are clearly in favour of the left having our own online media infrastructure (like we did with Indymedia) still felt compelled to say...
"But we can’t simply abandon social media. It is too dominant, too ubiquitous, and, occasionally, too useful."
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