Thought Shrapnel

When I worked at the Mozilla Foundation a decade ago, there was a programme called Webmaker. There were web apps and Open Source tools that the team created to help people learn how the web works in a practical, hands-on way. My work on web literacy and Open Badges underpinned it (see this white paper for example) with the aim to avoid ‘elegant consumption’.

In this post Gita Jackson points out that elegant consumption via centralised, Big Tech-owned social networks has won the day. The way to resist that is to build your own website. Learning some code is great, but these days Mozilla has a service called Solo which makes it super-easy to have your own website. There are easy ways to run your own blog. It takes more effort, but it’s worth it.

Social media erased the need to build a website to express yourself online. Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends. On top of that, MySpace had total ownership of that page, meaning when the site was bought and sold, individual users had no say in the changes. By 2019, you couldn’t even look at your old MySpace accounts anymore because they lost all the data from prior to 2016.

This only accelerated as we moved to new social media, like Facebook, which was determined to keep all important contact information within the app. Instead of a local business making a website on Geocities, they would make themselves a Facebook page—or now, an Instagram account—because all their customers likely had Facebook accounts already.

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It is clear that tech billionaires like Musk know that when they own the means of communication, they run the whole show. If you’ve made a home on Twitter, you’re basically completely vulnerable to Musk’s randomly changing whims, and also his disgusting political beliefs. He campaigned with Trump and immediately congratulated him when he won the election. Also congratulating the President-elect were Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, two tech oligarchs who also want us to use their proprietary apps and websites for everything in our lives.

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To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before. If you look at my work on Kotaku, there’s so many garbage ads on the screen you can barely see the words. Waypoint and Motherboard are both being run like a haunted ship, pumping out junk so that Vice’s new owners can put ads on it. I don’t have to worry about that anymore—I don’t have to worry about my work being taken down or modified or sold, or put in an AI training set against my will. I have my own website, and it is mine, and I get to own it completely. I hope someday soon I can visit your website.

Source: Aftermath

Image: Patrick Tomasso