Big Ideas, Fact-Checking, and Reading George Carlin’s Mind
Lee Felsenstein and his decades-long campaign to recreate the public square in cyberspace.
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The Week
This week Facebook announced that it would end its third-party fact-checking program, loosen its controls against hate speech, and kill all DEI programs internally, the US Supreme Court took up the TikTok nail-biter, Los Angeles caught on fire, and the United States memorialized one former President while sentencing another.
That former and next President got smacked down by leaders in Canada, Mexico, Denmark, and Panama before even entering office, but on the bright side, he still gets to commit any and all crimes with impunity, so that’s a net positive for him.
And in hyperlocal Swaine’s World, we’re keeping up with our program of walking three miles a day and offsetting the presumed health benefits by adding a weekly margarita to our diet.
Image of the Week
Lee Felsenstein has written a book about the work he has been doing, and the goal he has been pursuing, for over four decades.
Quote of the Week
“We face a chaotic information environment on the Internet, and it has had serious effects on our polity and our society’s cohesion.”
— Lee Felsenstein
Recommendation of the Week
This week in his blog Ken used what I would normally call a gimmick, gratuitously name-dropping George Carlin. But Ken’s list of books he thinks George Carlin would have recommended rings remarkably true.
I suspect Carlin would have approved of the cultural critiques in books like Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, This Is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev, and Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Ken also recommends some Carlin-esque TED Talks, films, and songs.
Always something interesting going on at Ken’s place.
Lee Felsenstein Wants to Fix Social Media
“[M]y concern is the empowerment of peoples’ communication in public space.”
Lee Felsenstein and I each eventually got our Bachelor’s degrees in 1972, he from UC Berkeley and I from Indiana University. “Eventually” because in each case this was after dropping out of college for about four years in the 60s, not an uncommon path in that interesting time. I idled away the next nine years as a kind of professional student, while Lee helped launch the personal computer and social media revolutions.
Although I was closely following developments in the brand-new field of personal computers and knew something about Lee in the late 70s, I didn’t meet him until 1981, shortly after I moved to Palo Alto to work for InfoWorldmagazine and shortly before Lee designed the first widely successful portable computer and got himself interviewed by 60 Minutes.
I tell you all this so that you’ll understand that Lee was already an important figure in tech history by the time Paul and I got him drunk and extracted some of the better stories that went into our personal computer history book Fire in the Valley. And also so that you’ll understand that I’ve been following the story of Lee’s life for a very long time.
I also followed the development of this book, Me and My Big Ideas, from draft through several edits.
Here’s the quote that, for me, encapsulates what Lee is presenting in the book:
“[S]ome visions of non-institutional civil society based on very old practices [enhanced] through intelligent application of technologies, especially ones developed with such a milieu in mind.”
That is a very compact bundle of ideas. Let’s unpack it.
Non-institutional Civil Society
I come from an activist family — both of my siblings and a cousin were at the 1963 civil rights March on Washington.
As he describes in the book, Lee developed some of his ideas while handling communications for counterculture activists at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement. The architecture of communication that he envisioned was to be distributed rather than centrally controlled, organically developing, person-centric. It would serve a community, loosely defined, barely organized, but still a community.
Lee had some pretty clear ideas about community, drawn from history.
Old Practices
“Civilization developed in the village, and it didn’t develop in the houses, but rather in the space between the houses. That space became the village square, the piazza, the agora, the forum, the plein — any of a range of names designating the area where social, political, and economic transactions were carried out in public.”
Even before the World Wide Web was created, Lee was working with others to build a virtual village square, or agora as he prefers, modeled on real physical spaces, in which people could gather to carry out social, political, and economic transactions.
The precursor of Lee’s agora was bulletin boards: literal boards in storefronts and record stores and bookstores where people would post notices of things for sale or purchase, notices of meetings, requests for people to pitch in on some project.
“The Piazza Del Campo in Siena, Italy is a splendid example of the adaptation of architecture to human behavior.”
Community Memory was created by Lee, Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad, Jude Milhon, and Mark Szpakowski as a technological descendant of those bulletin boards. It began with a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley, connected via a 110 baud link to an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco, designed to let users enter and retrieve messages. It served as an information and resource sharing network, and the plan was to link up counter-cultural groups with each other and with the public for economic, educational, and social communication, with computer terminals throughout the (virtual) community.
Intelligent Application of Technologies
“We were attempting to approach an appropriate technology implementation of a system to support ongoing community.”
Through Community Memory, Lee learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t. Although one use of CM was expected to be economic transactions, CM itself was never intended to be a commercial venture. The users of the system would themselves, through their use, define what the purpose of CM was. That was the idea, but Lee understood that the architecting of any such system was itself a political act, because it would favor certain kinds of uses over others.
“My position was that we who had the skills and opportunity had a resultant responsibility to try to create functional examples of systems that would enable the sort of uses we wanted to support and which would disrupt the uses we felt to be harmful.”
The Public Square Today
Well, the vision has been realized: the internet is our new public square. But that vision has not not worked out as Lee had hoped. It’s hard not to feel that those “uses we felt to be harmful” now dominate social media.
It seems like this implementation of the concept of the public square has worked out to be toxic.
“The public square sprouted fences, with toll gates controlling admission. The toll was free in many instances — only your identity information required, but the fences grew to curtains that focused all attention inward, at the cost of the users’ anonymity. Our identities and behavior patterns were sold to merchants, and clever minds manipulated the curtains to concentrate users’ attention to where the most money could be made.”
“The architecture is still that of a mainframe to which the user communicates on a character-by-character basis, and which dispenses information from scrolled files according to proprietary algorithms, and huge amounts of money are raked off through advertisement and by ‘capturing eyeballs’ through [these] devious, secret algorithms.”
Lee’s subtitle for his book is “Counterculture, Social Media, and the Future.” So what do we do to fix social media, to build a better future?
The Future
This book is my attempt to catch up and to provide an understanding of what needs to be done and why for the many people younger than me.
Lee has some ideas. Maybe he could work from the bottom up. Forget about finding some venture capitalist or corporation to fun a grand project. Why not seed the ideas, along with some simple hardware embodiments, into the hobbyist community. Lee was part of such a community back in the 70s, and it turns out that there is such a community today, called the “maker movement.”
Lee argues that the way to change the structure of society is by changing the lines and practices of communication, and the most effective way to change those are by changing the enabling technology. Interestingly, new platforms and new channels of communication are constantly being created in the public space. And users of current platforms are eagerly seeking new alternatives. The zeitgeist is hungry for something new. Millions of people flocked to Bluesky when it appeared to offer an alternative to Twitter. And Bluesky wasn’t some well-funded startup, it was a skunkworks project with no ambitious goals.
Bluesky isn’t going to reform public discourse. It isn’t radically different from existing social media technologies. But its success is evidence that somebody, or some group of people, with a clear vision and a project plan might actually give us a new village square.
Lee describes one project plan thus: “- Develop mobile version of Community Memory — software to support group conversations.” That’s on his project list. If you’d like to see that idea or something like it developed, you can actually help, by buying his book and/or joining his Patreon.
The Rest
Statement of the Perpetrator
I’ve been a writer all my life, and computers entered the picture pretty early. With Paul Freiberger I wrote the seminal history of the personal computer, Fire in the Valley, the basis for the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I’ve written short stories and poetry and books and columns for magazines, and have had a long and productive career editing books and magazines. For decades I was associated with the pioneering personal computer software developers’ magazine, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and I currently edit books for The Pragmatic Bookshelf and blog about artificial intelligence and other topics.
The List
I’m on a constant search for truth in this age of disinformation. This is a rotating list of some of the fact-checking sites and journalism sources that I rely on. It’s unavoidable that the list reflects my political leaning, but these sources are all on the side of informing the public truthfully and accurately. If you support them, that’s what you will be supporting.
Snopes
When Mark Zuckerberg cut ties with third-party fact-checkers for Facebook this month, it didn’t directly affect Snopes, which hadn’t been part of Facebook’s fact-checking program since early 2019. (Source: Snopes CEO Chris Richmond.)
Snopes is the granddaddy of fact-checking sites, with an archive of thousands of fact-checks and new fact-checks daily of the latest rumors, news stories, and memes. NewsGuard has given Snopes a perfect 100/100 credibility rating, a score given to only a handful of news outlets with the highest of editorial standards.
Site:
https://www.snopes.com/
Support: https://www.snopes.com/join/
Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger created Wikipedia to be a free, collaborative, and widely accessible encyclopedia, “a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge.” Yes, in being open to all contributors, it opens itself up to inaccurate and misleading articles, as well as articles written by artificial intelligence programs, and that’s why it should never be your only source of information on any important topic. But the fact that the World Health Organization collaborated with Wikipedia to disseminate COVID-19-related information to help combat the spread of misinformation is just one example of why it belongs on this list. Note: Wikipedia survives on donations.
Site:
https://www.wikipedia.org
Support:
https://donate.wikimedia.org
The Guardian
The Guardian US is decidedly liberal. I also subscribe to conservative sources, but I highlight The Guardian for support because it isn’t owned or controlled by advertisers or billionaires; it’s owned by a Trust, and more than half of its revenue comes directly from readers. Its independent ownership structure means it is entirely free from political and commercial influence. It is renowned for the Paradise Papers investigation and other award-winning work. Supporting The Guardian protects independent investigative journalism and keeps it open for everyone.
Site: https://www.theguardian.com/us
Support: https://support.theguardian.com/us/one-time-checkout
My Day Job
I edit books for the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Books for programmers. Here are the current best-sellers at the Bookshelf.
First Verses
A Facebook faultfinder named Fred
Whose posts we had all come to dread
Logged back in and swore,
”Just one comment more
To announce that I’m leaving this thread.”
So the thing is, I’ve written a book of verses. And they’re not all Limericks.
Coming Attractions
Thanks for reading. In the coming weeks, look for more Swaine’s Flames flashbacks, Dirt Road Diaries, bulletins from the AI revolution, tech history, and books. Although Swaine’s World will remain free, keep an eye out in 2025 for some additional goodies, accessible for a modest price.