The Why Question

-- By OrnaMadigan - 28 Nov 2023

Introduction

Formally released in November of 2008, the open source online editor Etherpad promised “collaborative editing in really real time.” One click and any user could begin a new document, a quick copy-send of the url later and friends and collaborators could join, within minutes multiple people all working simultaneously in a single document.

Now, if you are anything like my millennial self you likely are doing a double take, asking yourself; “Did she mean to say Google Docs?” If that’s the case, you are not far off. Etherpad functions in much the same way as the Google Doc you recently sat up all night editing ahead of your group project deadline. However, unlike Google Docs, Etherpad has no third-party servers, no fear of data leaks, or user information being packaged and sold at the behest of big tech giants. Etherpad is all of the positives, with none of the surveillance capital negatives. And yet, here I am writing this first draft in a Google Doc, leaving the question–why?

The Question

This “why” is the exact question Professor Moglen enjoys lobbing to his computer-screen lit Law in the Internet Society class late on Wednesday afternoons, and when an under eye-bagged student extends for the catch, it normally boils down to the same quibbles–I have to for school or work, everyone uses it, the other options are not as good or non-existent etc. I had the latter answer the day I reached out my mitt and was probed the ever present “why” as it pertains to my usage of Google Docs? Professor Moglen’s rebuttal, of course, was Etherpad. Caught off guard by the techy title, I navigated to Etherpad’s homepage. Quickly, the naivety the parasite had evidently injected into me was laid out in all its glory. For the first time I was uncertain whether I had, of my own free will, chosen Google Docs or whether the parasite had chosen it for me. A parasite that feeds off my data, digesting and repackaging it to make me into an easily and readily manipulable data point, whose current and future decisions may already have been decided.

This particularly uncanny realization and the question it has spurred has proven unshakeable. Were there other alternatives? Did they work? Was anyone able to actually gain popularity against the parasitic tech offspring of Jobs and Zuckerberg? Had I already lost the ability to control my “future tense” as Zuboff has coined.

The Search

So, I began to look. I started searching for alternatives to the platforms I frequented all too often; Instagram, TikTok? , BeReal? , Gmail and the like. In these meanderings I came across Moments. Created by a team of 3 undergraduate students at Columbia University (go figure), the app brands itself as a “new social media” that preserves “your memories, your way.” In their catchy product launch TikTok video they state plainly their mission to “take down instagram,” and dethrone petty, money-hungry, Mark Zuckerberg. The platform itself is quite basic. Following a quick download from Apple’s App Store any Iphone user can begin running it in mere moments. The app itself allows users to post “photo-dumps” or create event-specific albums that friends can add to or comment on. The major difference between Moments and other media platforms, Instagram for example, is that only those one invites to see or add to a “moment” will see it “no followers. No following.” The creators emphasize that moments is a “safe space”, no more scrolling through “influencers and reels bullshit” or “daunting pressure” over what you post or worrying about being “silently judged.” However, another crucial part of this app–its promised security. Only a few days after its launch the app experienced major slow downs, the reason the creators told their users “the main difference between us and Instagram is that we will never switch up on privacy. We want to ensure everyone’s data is encrypted so it can never be sold. Which is why things are taking a bit longer to scale because we never want to sacrifice privacy.”

There it was social-media sans behavioral futures markets participation, and the answer to my question – yes, just like Etherpad it is possible.

An Answer, But What About A Future?

Although I believe this knowledge of possibility holds power in and of its own–I downloaded the app, I have begun to use Etherpad (sporadically), I was intrigued to understand what exactly was fueling those making the change. You see, from my perspective Etherpad had been a before, created at the precipice of the Google Docs’ own inception, it appeared it had already lost the race towards mass usage. But Moments, on the other hand, held a different hope. It was an after, a competitor, an antithesis and interestingly, what seemed to be motivating them was not entirely the same as the creators of Etherpad. Top of mind for the creators of Moments was not necessarily privacy, but escape from the feelings and emotions they were recognizing the parasite was invoking in them. The creators market the app by emphasizing the shared experiences of those in their generation feeling crushed by the [[https://www.tiktok.com/@ahmadnabihah/video/7291810400373394731][“daunting pressure,” “influencer..bullshit.” “judg[ment],”]] and worries that one “did too much by adding a song to your story.” Privacy, was just a tool to achieve this end. Although, different from the developers a decade before them, this shock to action leaves a glimmer of hope that possibly the parasites side effects may jolt this new generation to fight back.

Conclusion

The day I was asked why Google Docs I felt quite hopeless. Although Etherpad reflected maybe a shimmer of hope I still was not totally convinced. However, looking at Moments, despite its illumination of the exact ills the parasite has ingrained in us–worry, fear, judgment, obsession, I see a realization that it has to stop. To date, 238,000 people have liked Moments launch video on TikTok? , if people did not care about gaining back their online freedom this would not be so. Then again, a quick scroll on the Moment’s creator’s personal page and you’ll find a picture of her smiling, a yellow google branded bike in hand, Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters in the background.

Excellent. This is learning and thinking going on, is it not?

Let's apply the anatomical and physiological analysis I offered in class to this evolving discovery. The Web is the underlying structure through which services are offered by things called webservers to things called browsers (mostly, although programs other than browsers can and do very effectively make use of web services). Kinds of services that can exist include collaborative editing and photo sharing. Services can be centralized (to be provided by particular servers) or federated, to be provided by servers anyone can stand up and add to the federation, serving either particular requestors or the public net, or levels in between. The desire to provide services that do not surveil users is consistent with either centralized or federated design, but centralization abets surveillance and federation somewhat impedes it. If the software for providing the service is free software (that is, software anyone can copy, modify and share without additional restrictions) then services will tend to federate, surveillance will tend to be modified out by parties who want to increase service privacy, and bottlenecks will be melted by the combined effort of cxooperating programmers. (This is not speculation: this is the history of the last quarter-century of software, the legal aspects of which I have myself done much to create and enhance.)

Etherpad is free software for federated provision of collaborative networking, enclosed and turned by Google into a centralized surveilling service. Moments is a centralized, privacy-aware service based on unfree software. As you can see and feel, its ethos is different and the bicycle shows why.

But there's nothing to prevent you from standing up your own webserver (including one that is virtual, based in the cloud and configured to be as secure as any server running on someone else's hardware could be) and sharing photos using any of the (literally) thousands of free photo-album service programs made of free software that you could run on it. You could provide the same levels of encryption of user data and other security provided by Moments, and then let other people use your serve for their albums. And you could be doing the same right now using a server set up (maybe on a FreedomBox?) by a sixteen-year-old near you.

So we are back to the question, why? As in, why don't you? I think it would be a very great improvement if you actually devoted a little more of the next draft to unearthing fragments of the answer.

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