Bridging Social Movements and the New Social Web (working draft)

This is a rough to smooth draft of a post I'm working on for my SpaceCadets.love blog that I feel is good enough to start some public dialogue. Feedback welcome.

There's a lot of social movement work to do in tech right now. There's just as much tech work to do in social movements.

And it's all the same work. Or at least it should be.

There are a number of ecosystems within the tech industry that I see as critical to the future of democracy, media, our collective abilities to self-determine, resist fascism (corporate and otherwise), etc.

I want to have discussions and take actions to bridge the disconnection between current social movements and key tech ecosystems.

The disconnect is especially wide now that institutions our society depends on are failing. The tech infrastructure upon which we rebuild our institutions (and build new ones) needs to be part of the renewal process otherwise we will continue to perpetuate much of the interrelated crises we currently find ourselves in.

So let's talk about some of the ecosystems I want to help bridge.

Social Webs: the ATmosphere and the Fediverse

I'm initially publishing this post on Leaflet.social which is built on the platform created by and underlying Bluesky, #ATproto, aka the ATmosphere. The software development ecosystem around ATproto has been taking off this year and we're seeing new kinds of apps emerge that have never been possible before.([] Find a link to a primer).

Later I'll publish a polished draft of this on my spacadets.love Ghost-based blog which has this past year joined the #ActivityPub flavor of the social web, also known as the Fediverse. This ecosystem has also seen a flurry of exciting new developments and directions this year.

These protocols are often seen as competing and they shouldn't be as they solve different needs in vastly different ways. Supporters and developers of both platforms that do see these two ecosystems as competing are in fact competing for resources: namely, people.

By approaching development and adoption of these protocols as inherently competitive, the communities behind both them are thinking about people the same way corporate social media does, and it needs to stop. People aren't resources to be fought over, and social graph portability is a value espoused by both ecosystems. There is not only room, but essential need for both ecosystems to get their acts together as two closely related fronts in a single movement to disrupt and leapfrog centralized control of social media.

Diversity in the social web communications protocols underlying the tools we build together will make all our infrastructure, technical and institutional, more resilient to capture by hostile economic and state actors. The shape of our institutions are constrained by the communication protocols on top of which they're built, and the logic of Web 2.0 calcified our options in ways that we can now break out of. As we rebuild institutions, new exciting protocols like ActivityPub and ATproto will enable new forms of social participation and governance.

While we are in a dark time right now, both of these protocols have been fueling my imagination for what a better world can be, vastly different from the status quo and what we've seen before. Luminaries within social justice movements have long spoken of how important it is not only resist oppression, but to imagine new worlds we can build towards. These new technologies open the door for radical reimagining of pretty much every aspect of our society.

For those of us working in tech, who do we want to reimagine society with? Whose resources do we want to engage in building the platforms envisioned by these reimaginings? Your answers to these questions are the social movements you need to be building bridges to cocreate the future with.

Redesigning our relationships with institutions

It's important for the new protocols and platforms we build to be able to accomodate not just the full communication and information needs of individuals and communities, but also small businesses and governments, local to global, small to big. Designing social media platforms without designing the terms of engagement for how institutions will engage with social media platforms will lead to those institutions ultimately circumventing and altering the cultures of those platforms.

What am I talking about? Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems for for one. It's only a matter of time before the big players such as Salesforce build tools for engaging with people on decentralized social media protocols. Should we let them figure it out for us themselves, or should we envision how we the people want institutions to relate with us? This can begin by building commerce tools for small businesses to help them thrive outside of mainstream social media. It's not enough to ask people to migrate to resist the incumbent corporate fascist platforms, we need to build tools to help people thrive.

By starting with local communities and small businesses, we can facilitate social graph connectivity that regenerates local economies. (Big ups to New_Public and Bonfire on their recent announcements!) By building new kinds of interactivity and data management primitives for businesses and local governments to serve the public, we can reset the terms upon which markets and public services operate.

I don't see leaders in social justice movements nor tech protocol evolution having these kinds of discussions at strategic or tactical levels, and the opportunity for doing so, together, is here.

When it comes down to it, anti-capitalist ideologies have lacked solutions for how to get non-capitalist markets to successfully operate in non-coercive, consentful ways. The protocols we build today will power the economies of tomorrow, and we can't walk blindly into this reality otherwise we'll just replicate the same capitalist conditions that lead to corporate capture of communications infrastructure and resource supply chains. Rinse and repeat.

I didn't know this section was going to turn into a manifesto flavored rant. Whoops. lol

Server User Agents

A few weeks ago, my friend When Legget wrote about "Server User Agents". This is a vision for creating a new kind of infrastructure that I've heard called different things over the years. Personal Clouds. Private Clouds. Personal Data Servers (PDS), Personal Online Data Stores (PODS). Rather than explain it, I'll link to the middle of his post where he begins to define Server User Agents.

for Server User-Agents

Notes from the 41st IIW

The main idea from my perspective is that that we have ceded control of the means of our digital production and output to corporate cloud computing leading to societal ills like surveillance capitalism and the erosion of personal autonomy. Reclaiming the server side of our computing environments is a way to restore agency. It allows identity, data, and computation to live behind boundaries that individuals control rather than platforms. This shifts the balance of power. It turns the network back into a place where we can own our tools, set the terms of access, and participate without being harvested for parts.”

The term User Agent is best known to be used for Web Browsers and Web Crawler bots. Recently the term AI Agent has taken over how many people in tech think about the word Agent, but it's important for us not to cede the concept of agency over to an illusory concept of agency coercively delegated to corporate infrastructure. Unfortunately, the definition of the Web Browser as a user agent has stayed stuck in the pre-cloud era of being focused purely on rendering and computation on the client side. Presenting and moving data rather than managing and homing data. Pairing user agents such as Web Browsers and smart phones with Server User Agents as When describes in the blog post above is the next era of computing that corporations want to prevent. Instead, they feed us visions of metaverses and "AI" systems that further lock us into the status quo of thin client computing. That's a dead end for innovation and a frankly a dead end for a free society and our planet's fragile climate.

While I like the frame of "server user agents" for technical consideration, I think framing it as Web Browser innovation is better product-centric target for social movements to get behind and investment to be made.

I've written about this previously here at spacecadets.love :

Web Browsers, AI, and the Politics of Media Power

The left keeps building media strategies on top of platforms built to undermine them. As browsers are rebuilt for mass surveillance and manipulation, the systems that decide what people see and who gets heard are being rewritten without us. Control over the browser is control over political reality.

Where does this overlap with open social media protocols? It's their natural home! The ATproto PDS (Personal Data Store) is naturally an early version of this larger vision. If, for example, secure private data storage became a possibility within ATproto, we could build a web browser sync engine and act as the backend for web browsers. We could sign into our web browsers with our ATproto identities. We could build decentralized browser extension stores. Everything to do with web browsers could be decoupled away from any particular institution. We're not even talking about reinventing anything here, just reimplementing what we already have within a protocol like ATproto. Beyond that, the magic starts. The low-hanging creative potential that Server User Agents that can talk to each other with protocols old and new lies beyond what any corporation has any incentive to bring to market.

We need a Renaissance in Web Browser innovation. I'm not going to talk about what that means here, but I will say that it ain't fucking AI. If anything, Server User Agents can become an approach for introducing ethical and constrained AI into the equation. For now, I'd rather not discuss AI within this context because AI is just another app in the client-server model of computing that we need to break away from.

My instinct is that AI browsers will be seen as an embarrassing historical dead end in the history of computing. Social computing is the future and I want that future to be delivered by a social movement that fully embraces its potential to facilitate the reimagining of an egalitarian civil society, its institutions and the regeneration of local economies.

Organizing around these visions

I'm still writing this section, but it's about the work I would like to do and participate in to bridge these tech ecosystems with movement and media ecosystems.

Right now, the call to action is to let me know what you think! How's this draft going? How do you see yourself relating to these observations and ideas? Where do you think I could tighten things up or add clarity?

-Lyre Calliope