Category: politics

Leaving Twitter for New Frontiers

Luis Villa
A group of people gathered around the unfinished skeleton of a new barn. The people are of all ages and genders, dressed in the style of the mid-1800s. The photo is black and white.

Revised and updated: September 2024, to make more positive, include my own links, and mention how to improve LinkedIn.

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Dennis Leigh via Alasdair Gray

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends … and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now.

Michael Tager

You can think about leaving Twitter in one of a few ways:

  • Do you want to not hang out at a neo-nazi bar?
  • Do you want to be part of building a better world?

The negative take on this is accurate. Twitter is literally a nazi bar now: the owner, and his friends, follow, share, and RT literal nazis and fascists. I won’t dwell on that here, but it is real.

The optimistic take is that we can build a better, more decentralized social world. This is ultimately not a “they” problem—yes, someone has to build the protocol and the tools, but also we, the early “immigrants” to the new social frontier, have to labor too. We have to “work as if you live in the early days” and seek out people to follow, filter more manually, etc. That’s not necessarily easy—it means rough edges, more noise, etc. But we’ve done it before (most notably on Twitter c. 2008!) and we can do it again. This can be a moment of optimism and construction—a barn-raising for the 21st century social networks we want to see.

In that spirit of building a better thing together, and dealing with the rough edges in the meantime, here are some tips that have helped me move off Twitter.

Picking a new place

Here’s my current read on where to go first after you’ve decided to start out for new frontiers.

  • The most old-Twitter vibe these days seems to be on Bluesky—it has a loooot of politics and news, a decent sense of humor (dril is there, sometimes!), and some growing international traction (with big surges each time Elon endorses fascists in (so far) the US, UK, and Brazil). It’s also got very good discoverability features (about which more below). On Bluesky I’m @lu.is.
  • If you’re into the more nerdy side, the Fediverse (aka Mastodon) has you covered. I recommend creating an account on a server that’s specific to your place (like sfba.social or cosocial.ca) or your interests (like fosstodon or hci.social). The server functionality in Mastodon isn’t great (it is telling that the default UX calls it a server and not a community) but it can help you get your footing. On the Fediverse I’m @luis_in_brief@social.coop.
  • Threads has a huge number of users, including a lot of “official” accounts for things like news orgs, celebs, and presidential candidates. It also lets you start with your Instagram follows. My sense (from a distance) is that this gives it a somewhat sterile, but positive, feel. Optionally, you can also use Threads to interact with Fediverse—which may be a good way to support decentralized social media even while not relying on it.
  • If you use social media heavily for work, consider leaning into LinkedIn. Switch to their “most recent” (sometimes called “top”?) posts to get a much better feed of your follows rather than random people.

Settling in to the new place

  • Follow some topics: Once you’ve got an account set up, go old-school and follow some topics.
    • On Bluesky, you can do this by using search to find lists like Housing or Ukraine OSINT. Note that lists on Bluesky are waaaaaay more powerful than Twitter lists—they can pick sorting algorithms, use regexp to include only on-topic posts from members of the list, etc.
    • On Mastodon, the name of the game is hashtags. I particularly follow and enjoy #Bloomscrolling, #SolarPunk, #LawFedi, #BikeTooter, and #Bookstodon.
  • Find some follows! Besides the obvious—follow me! bluesky, mastodon—a few tips:
    • On Bluesky search works pretty well (because it isn’t actually a decentralized platform 😬) but you can also try these instructions that scan your Twitter follow list for exact matches on Bluesky. The default client also has a good trending feature (or at least it did when I started; the client’s defaults have changed somewhat since then.) You can also search for “starter packs”—groups of up to 50 people, usually organized around a theme, that you can follow en-masse.
    • On Mastodon, try Mammoth as your first client. It is from a variety of ex-Moz folks, and focuses on making sure you don’t start with an empty timeline, so it’s a great client to use on day one. (Once you’re settled in, I highly recommend using Phanpy.social—a genuinely excellent, full stop, social media client.)

Handling the transition

  • Small town, not big city: Don’t treat other networks like 2020s twitter, when you were picky about who you followed and humble about who you interacted with. Treat it like 2010s twitter, when we all followed quite a few randos, and said things like “hi” and “thanks for sharing that!” It’s the sociality of a small frontier town, not the big city—and so far I find that mostly endearing.
  • Post on Twitter… sometimes. While I was transitioning, I followed the “Xlast” strategy: continue to post on Twitter when that’s important, but do it after you have posted elsewhere, and respond less. However, I rarely bother these days—I don’t know if I’m “shadowbanned” or it’s just that most of my friends have left, but I pretty much always get more interaction (often orders of magnitude more) for the same content on Mastodon than on Twitter.
    • Note that, if you do content professionally, Buffer can now post out to Bluesky and Mastodon—probably worth looking into.
  • Read Twitter via lists, not algorithms: California neo-urbanists are professionally important to me (because of my work with the California Housing Defense Fund) but have stayed mostly on Twitter. To follow them, I use a Twitter list. This helps me get what I actually want and avoid the elonified algorithm. (That said, more and more urbanists are making the Bluesky switch, so I’m hopeful I’ll be able to dump this soon.)
  • Filter aggressively: Mastodon has great filtering capabilities, which makes following a lot of people easier. Bluesky’s filtering is still a little experimental, but shows great promise. Both make my 2020 advice on social media in an election year very relevant.

Things I wish were better

This section used to be fairly long, but I’ve cut it because so many problems have been solved. As of August 2024, I primarily miss two things:

  • The AI community is still aggressively on Twitter. What that says about the morality of the AI community (genuinely, not all bad!) is left as a judgment for the reader. I fill the gap mostly with the AI News newsletter.
  • By and large, the international and Black American communities are still on Twitter (or at least, aren’t actively on the alternative platforms). This is a deep and genuine loss. Some of the best of the (not so) new generation of Black American political writers, like Jamelle Bouie and Adam Serwer, are on Bluesky, but the platform (like Twitter before it) struggles with brigading and racism.

The “warrior position” of optimism

Optimism is a hard choice to make. It requires what Nick Cave calls “a warrior position” to discard old habits and forcefully build new ones.

That’s particularly true here, where the alternative options are far from perfect—we really are walking away from not just a company, but from humans; and we’re walking towards well-known problems of underfunded feature development, and harder, towards deeply unknown problems of community-centered moderation (or lack thereof). (Or, in the case of Threads, we’re walking towards a different company whose owner also counts an unapologetic fascist as a friend and former board member.)

But if not now, when? if not us, who? Come, raise the barn with me. We can build something that may be rickety and imperfect, but will be ours in a way that won’t—can’t—be true of Twitter.

Surviving Crisis on Twitter

Luis Villa

[This was originally published right before the COVID pandemic hit, with the expectation that it was about the upcoming 2020 campaign and presidential election. In 2022 I revised and renamed it, since much of the advice was still very relevant.]

I’m a political junkie, perhaps in some ways more now than ever. And yet, in late 2019-early 2020 I was posting very little about the 2020 election on Twitter. An old friend with similar political compulsions asked how I was doing it. The answer was ironically too long for Twitter. It also proved deeply relevant after COVID and many other ongoing crises hit. So how does one benefit from — perhaps even enjoy? — Twitter in our extended ongoing crisis? Read on!

Reduce Twitter altogether

Step 0: use Freedom or a similar blocking tool to keep Twitter out of your life when you’re trying to get other stuff done. I generally block Twitter during the entire working day on my work computer, and during the early morning (6-8am), morning (9-12) and afternoon (1-5) on my tablet and phone.

This is occasionally irritating since I do sometimes need Twitter for work but overall is worth it.

(Perhaps worth noting here that after the 2016 election I didn’t just reduce Facebook, I stopped logging in altogether unless I absolutely needed to for some reason. Absolutely zero regrets about that, though from time to time I miss certain people I only connected with there, and am curious to what extent I could effectively replicate the strategy described in this post there. Last I checked you could not firmly block specific words, which I think is critical to healthy engagement with social media—see next section.)

Reduced my Twitter political inputs

Partial list of words I block on twitter, including “president” “omicron” and “Pelosi”.

Step 1: simply reduce the amount of political stuff that I see when I go to Twitter. I see all kinds of other wonderful stuff instead! What I do in this direction:

  • Turn off the algorithmic feed. You want control over what you see; no one else (and certainly not an algorithm designed to suck your eyeballs in) should drive that.
  • Unsubscribe from all ‘news’ feeds on twitter—@nytimes, @cnn, etc. I use other mechanisms (see below) to get them daily at most. More generally, I aggressively turn off all news notifications on my phone. If the missiles launch and I need to hug my loved ones, someone will text me.
  • Unsubscribe from people I don’t know personally. For me, that’s basically all celebrites (except Lin-Manuel) but if that sounds too aggressive, you can Marie Kondo your follows with the help of the Tokimeki Unfollow tool. Two (small) exceptions for me:
    • Have they taught me something I didn’t know, because they’re giving me diverse perspectives not in my personal network? That can be troubling/non-joyful, but still valuable.
    • Have they given me opportunities for real-world action that you can’t get in some other way? For me, this is primarily local organizations — several San Francisco bike, transit, and YIMBY activists. (I find this to almost never be the case from national media, because the opportunities for practical action are too limited.)
  • Turn off all pure retweets with the Turn Off Retweets tool. Yes, even from your friends. In my experience, pure retweets are highly likely to be more angry/emotional, and less informative; if people have something interesting to add they’ll quote-tweet. Yes, there was some FOMO here. I got over it very quickly. If it is important, I see it eventually.
  • Mute (aka filter) political words aggressively. Here are Twitter’s instructions. A sampling of my word list is the highlighted image for this post. Note that I mute the name of politicans I often agree with, not just assholes! You do not need a constant stream of affirmation news either. Turn it off. The world will go on without it.

(optional) Replace with better news sources

I still feel the need for a lot of politics news. A few tips on managing this:

  • I subscribe to news via non-Twitter mechanisms, primarily Feedbin, a feed reader that allows me to follow both old-school RSS feeds and new-school email newsletters.
  • As with Twitter, block whatever your chosen mechanism is most of the day with Freedom. You don’t need to be informed all day long. (If I really had the right willpower, I’d try to keep my non-job-relevant news consumption to weekly, but I don’t (yet) have that willpower.)
  • As much as possible, make this local news. Important national/global news will trickle in as you need it. In my case, key local news sources are Mission Local and the Chronicle.

(dangerous) Use Twitter lists

I call this “dangerous” because in my experience it becomes very tempting to check Twitter lists in the same way you used to check your main feed, defeating the whole point. But you can move political follows to a list and check in on them occasionally. If you must do this, a few thoughts:

  • Make the list as diverse as possible. Ideally don’t follow anyone who your “main” follows are already following or RTing. For me personally, about a decade ago I started unfollowing most high-profile journalists and, in particular, made a deliberate effort to follow then-up-and-coming Black journalists, many of whom have now become high-profile themselves. Hearing them in their more personal voices on Twitter, as opposed to at article-length, has made me a better, more empathetic American. (Sadly, many of the best, like Vann Newkirk, have left Twitter, but I can hardly blame them!)
  • Follow at least some folks who you don’t agree with ideologically, assuming they’re making fairly good-faith efforts to inform and engage. There’s a lot of those on the right post-Trump.
  • Again, even if you must do this, don’t follow @nytimes and @cnn. These accounts are not designed to inform you, they’re designed to hook you. And I say this as a paying NYT and Washington Post subscriber!

(hard, but helpful) come to terms with the world as it is, and act in that framework

At some point in the past few years, I accepted that I’m going to have a baseline level of anger about the state of the world, and that I have to focus on what I can change and let go of what I can’t. (Twitter anger is the latter.) So what can I change? Where is my anger productive?

I’ve found that doing things offline—for me, mostly giving money—really helps. In particular, giving to causes that seek systemic (usually, that means political/government) change like 350.org and local activist groups, and giving a lot, and regularly. This, frankly, makes it a lot easier for me to ignore anger online — each new tweet is not likely to make me be more angry, or give more, because I’m already basically giving what I can. Being confident about that really reduced my FOMO when I started filtering aggressively.

I hear from non-parents/non-startup-founders that physical-world activism (door-knocking, phone banking, local gov meeting-attending, etc.) can be great in this way too but sadly I can’t confirm :(

(I also want to acknowledge that, in the current state of the world, ‘letting go’ gets harder the less privilege you have. I have no great response to that, except to say that I empathize and am trying to fight for you where and how I can.)

Improving my outputs

Having done all that, here’s how I try to improve the Twitter environment for others:

  • When in doubt, send it to a group of friends instead. You’ll get the same dopamine hit and no one will call you on it 5-10 years from now.
  • If I must RT or otherwise share politics news, I only quote tweet because that forces me to ask “what am I adding to this? why should I say it? What can I add that others can’t?” If I can’t add something, if I’m just amplifying anger, I try to shut up instead.
  • If I must be angry, I’ve tried to follow a rule that I only express that offline if I am also telling other people who are angry how to constructively address the problem. I don’t just say “I’m so mad about global warming”, say “I’m mad about global warming, here’s what I’m doing to help fix it, you can too“. If I don’t have a ‘here’s what I’m doing’ to add to it … I go back to ‘figure out what I can do’.

This isn’t perfect

Twitter has made me a literally better person, because it has exposed me to viewpoints I don’t have in my daily life that have made me more empathetic to others. It has changed my politics, making me vastly more open to systemic critiques of US center-left politics. So I’m reluctant to say ‘use it less, particularly for politics’. But I feel like it’s the only way to stay mentally well in our current world.

Democracy and Software Freedom

Luis Villa16 Comments

As part of a broader discussion of democracy as the basis for a just socio-economic system, Séverine Deneulin summarizes Robert Dahl’s Democracy, which says democracy requires five qualities:

First, democracy requires effective participation. Before a policy is adopted, all members must have equal and effective opportunities for making their views known to others as to what the policy should be.

Second, it is based on voting equality. When the moment arrives for the final policy decision to be made, every member should have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, and all votes should be counted as equal.

Third, it rests on ‘enlightened understanding’. Within reasonable limits, each member should have equal and effective opportunities for learning about alternative policies and their likely consequences.

Fourth, each member should have control of the agenda, that is, members should have the exclusive opportunity to decide upon the agenda and change it.

Fifth, democratic decision-making should include all adults. All (or at least most) adult permanent residents should have the full rights of citizens that are implied by the first four criteria.

From “An Introduction to the Human Development and Capability Approach“, Ch. 8 – “Democracy and Political Participation”.

“Poll worker explains voting process in southern Sudan referendum” by USAID Africa Bureau via Wikimedia Commons.

It is striking that, despite talking a lot about freedom, and often being interested in the question of who controls power, these five criteria might as well be (Athenian) Greek to most free software communities and participants- the question of liberty begins and ends with source code, and has nothing to say about organizational structure and decision-making – critical questions serious philosophers always address.

Our licensing, of course, means that in theory points #4 and #5 are satisfied, but saying “you can submit a patch” is, for most people, roughly as satisfying as saying “you could buy a TV ad” to an American voter concerned about the impact of wealth on our elections. Yes, we all have the theoretical option to buy a TV ad/edit our code, but for most voters/users of software that option will always remain theoretical. We’re probably even further from satisfying #1, #2, and #3 in most projects, though one could see the Ada Initiative and GNOME OPW as attempts to deal with some aspects of #1, #3, and #4

This is not to say that voting is the right way to make decisions about software development, but simply to ask: if we don’t have these checks in place, what are we doing instead? And are those alternatives good enough for us to have certainty that we’re actually enhancing freedom?

Notes on Arthur Bestor’s ‘Backwoods Utopias’

Luis Villa10 Comments

A few months ago I finished reading Arthur Bestor’s ‘Backwoods Utopias‘, a book on the Utopian social-communitarian movements of the pre-Civil War US. Some belated notes on the book’s themes follow.

The average high school US history textbook gives a thumbnail sketch of these movements, but for those who didn’t get that or don’t remember it, the gist is that, from very shortly after Europeans reached North America until right around the Civil War, groups of people regularly launched themselves into the North American wilderness, trying to found new communities organized around communitarian and egalitarian principles. They met with some success, but eventually the movements petered out, with none of them truly surviving into the modern age.

Robert Owen (untitled) by BinaryApe, used under CC-BY

The tie from this book to my own interests should be clear, but if not, I should make them explicit: free and open source software often thinks of itself as being sui generis, but in fact it is part of a history (in this country) of retreat from established economic structures with the intent of creating parallel systems that would eventually compete with or replace those established structures with something simultaneously individually empowering and socially just. (See also.) I’m both personally and professionally curious about gleaning lessons from such past experiments- so I picked up the book. If any of this blog’s readers have suggestions either of more histories of this movement, or of histories of other similar movements (watch this space for a post on the local food movement soon), please do let me know in email or comments.

Unfortunately, Bestor’s intended follow-up book (covering the 1840s to the end of the movement) was never completed, which limits the lessons that can be drawn about the decline of the movement.  Nevertheless, some observations and themes from the book:

  • The movement had a broad spectrum of motivations and philosophies- some were heavily religious, while others were overtly anti-religious; some had (or were intended to have) quite complex governance systems, while others were nearly anarchist, and indeed Marx condemned them in strong terms because (to over-simplify) they were not dedicated to fighting the good fight in the cities. Interestingly, while the community focus of these groups was typically very strong, in modern terms we might also call them libertarian (or what Erik Olin Wright calls ‘interstitial’ revolutionaries): they all believed that they had the right and the ability to make a better world by striking off on their own, rather than working within or against established structures.
  • Religion was initially a major motivating force; this faded over time, but Bestor does not make it clear why later groups tended to be non-religious. Interestingly, American critics of later movements like Owenism apparently tended to focus on this non-religious aspect, rather than the practical/anti-capitalist issues modern critics might focus on.
  • As with every movement, looking at who left is often as important as understanding who stayed. In particular, Bestor mentions that when pragmatists became frustrated and left New Harmony (perhaps the highest profile of the various communities), those left behind were a combination of those too lazy to leave and those too fanatic to leave. This was a huge problem for the morale of the remaining pragmatists, who resented the free-riders and were driven nuts by the fanatics, and so they repeated the cycle.
  • Relatedly, Bestor argues that the repeated talk of ‘everyone will live in our miraculous new society any day now’ meant that many newcomers were not prepared for the long haul; that may have disillusioned some people and contributed to a sense of lack of momentum. To paraphrase Bestor, ‘a new society cannot be built on excuses.’
  • When the movement started, it was actually pretty easy to get a community going- lots of land was effectively empty, and the median community size in the US was in the low hundreds, making it quite easy to form a community that had all the ‘comforts’ (such as they were) of traditionally organized communities. As time progressed, two things began to work against this: first, more and more ‘normal’ landowners migrated to the midwest, causing land to become more scarce, and second, even the smallest villages became larger as the country’s overall population grew. This meant that finding enough space for a ‘basic’ community became a much more capital intensive process over time. Not coincidentally, later communities tended to have wealthy patrons- with all the plusses and minuses that brings.
  • As economic complexity increased (more machinery, more specialists) it became harder to create a self-sustaining village, especially if your human capital stocks were limited to ‘believers.’ For example, when the movement started in the late 1600s/early 1700s, having a self-sustaining community required very little specialization, while by the mid-1800s, it was understood that you needed machinists and manufacturers who would trade with other areas. Bestor says that New Harmony was bitten by this, as the land they bought for the town had the hardware for extensive wool manufacture, but lacked the people familiar with the machines, killing an expected source of financial sustainability.
  • Over time, some of the social goals of early communitarians became more broadly accepted or supplied by other organizations. For example, public education was a significant goal of New Harmony, but over the course of the 1800s, that became more common in non-utopian communities. New Harmony also had a concept of mandatory social insurance; unions started providing similar services in the late 1800s. This again made recruitment harder.
  • As for most world-changers, the gap between theory and practice was often large. Robert Owen, the wealthy patron of New Harmony, created an elaborate philosophical scheme intended to encompass everything from the individual to the nation-state, but he was bad at creating practical schemes, which led to constant reorganizations at New Harmony. This may reflect the extreme difficulty of organizing a full society; capitalism has the advantage of being simple and direct in general scheme relative to a centrally planned society like Owen’s.

I’ll refrain from drawing any direct conclusions for free and open source software here, in part because many of them will be obvious to many of my readers, and also because my reading of the book (especially several months after the fact) is inevitably heavily biased by my own thinking about social movements like this one, so I’m not sure whether any ‘lessons’ would reflect actual history or just my interpretation (compounded with Bestor’s.) With or without direct applicability, though, the book was an interesting read for a history nut, and left me with a lot of food for thought.

deliberative nirvana and software design myopia, Mar. 2009 edition

Luis Villa8 Comments

Ages ago, I tried to write a senior thesis about the potentials and pitfalls of bringing deliberative democracy to the internet. The thesis failed, badly. There were a lot of reasons for that failure ((Krissa moved to Africa; my advisor was not technically savvy; it was a fallback topic; etc.)) but in the end the biggest reason was that I let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When, at some point during the year, I realized that the internet was (gasp) not going to create a deliberative utopia, I quit altogether- it never once crossed my mind that it might be worthwhile to examine how the internet could fall short of an ideal but still be better than the offline world. In fact, it took until last year- in the midst of the election campaign- for me to have that ‘ah-ha’ moment.

And so now in the back of my mind I keep toting up the little examples of ‘so close, so far’ that keep cropping up. There are tons of them, because to their great credit, the Obama campaign and administration seem determined to push the edges of the possible in this area ((see, e.g., http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rssstimulus )). But I do wish that more people had an idea of the issues and values involved, and how merely naively asking questions on the internet can greatly diverge from the nominally democratic values people are trying to advance.

The example that finally spurred me to blog a bit, and try to get some ideas written down, was a post on the google public policy blog titled ‘Citizen participation that scales: a call to action’. It’s a fine little post, noting that the recent Obama ‘Open For Questions‘ was driven by Google’s ‘Moderator’ tool, which (being a Google product) is built to scale virtually infinitely, or at least to happily cope with the 3M+ votes and 100K+ questions. Google pats itself on the back for this:

We think technology can be a force for greater accountability and access between citizens and their elected officials. We’re excited that the White House has chosen to use the power of cloud-based applications like Google Moderator and App Engine to scale the president’s direct dialogue with the American people.

And Google should pat itself on the back for this. This is a big step forward from the insanely skewed filters of the traditional media- it’s impressive to compare the (mostly) substantive nature of the questions being asked by this group with the ‘gotcha’/news cycle driven questions that often make up the average White House press conference.

Of course, Google’s focus on ‘scale’ makes it sound like the only problem here is an engineering problem about how many people can use the system before it bogs down:

[T]hanks to the scale that App Engine provides, this application can now support tens of thousands of people at once. This gives everyone the chance to be heard in a way that gives priority to the issues that matter most to the broader group.

Tens of thousands of people can vote, ergo, we get issues that matter most to the broader group! Technology- specifically, server scaling technology- has solved the problem. No thought given to user interfaces; no thought given to what values those interfaces are expressing.

Not surprisingly the resulting questions have some issues. Most predictably, almost half of the most popular questions (in techpresident’s accounting) were substantive… about marijuana legalization. Now, don’t get me wrong- marijuana legalization is actually a reasonable question to ask the president. ((Even those who (like me) don’t smoke should be very concerned about the cost of imprisonment, drug violence, and lost potential tax revenues; the president’s dismissive answer reflects poorly on him.)) But does anyone seriously think that the huge number of votes for marijuana-related questions (top three vote-getters in budget, for example) actually represents American public opinion in any reasonable way? In fact, the huge number of marijuana questions actually represents a transparent attempt to game the system. That the system was gamed did not come as a surprise to anyone who has thought about the problems of democracy online. Treating the problem as merely an exercise in scaling up a very simple question tool designed for well-intentioned, very homogenous users – Google engineers – was a recipe for a mess in the much more complicated real world, where anti-gaming and moderation techniques are a must have. ((Though careful they don’t get too complicated, or else they’ll scare off non-technical people and lead to accusations of non-transparency. Yes, I’m talking about you, slashdot.))

Even if, miraculously, no one choose to game the system like NORML and others apparently did, there are all kinds of other potential design issues with software built for democracy-scaled online deliberation. Most notably, unlike the small, homogenous group of Google employees for which this tool was first built, American politically engaged computer users are not at all representative of America as a whole. ((Almost certainly more representative than newspaper editors or TV network owners, but still, not representative.)) For example, we are extremely, extremely unlikely to have had friends killed by the police, so one important perspective in the discussion over criminal justice reform is unlikely to ever get reasonable representation in a forum like Open For Questions, no matter how much scale the backend can provide. Biases of this sort- who has more access to technology? who is more likey to use it? who is more likely to use it effectively? who will game it and how?- are of course impossible to eliminate merely with software design, but the google post (and virtually all other coverage of the Open For Questions experiment) have been shockingly devoid of skepticism of the design of the software. They all seem to blithely assume that you can just throw up a polling tool on the web, and voila, democracy.

Again, I don’t mean to be completely negative here- my thesis was torpedoed by that. Like Carolus and the early TV innovators, Google, the Drupal team, and others are doing valuable work, and this technology improves a great deal on letters to the editor and other ancestors which were also badly gameable. We shouldn’t throw this baby out with the bathwater. At the same time, it is very easy ((particularly for engineers, but also for non-engineers who don’t fully grasp the implications and limitations of technology)) to ignore the deeper, less obvious ramifications on democracy of the design of the code that we use- who participates? under what conditions? how does UI design affect those things? We should all be sensitive to these limitations and constantly demand better of the technology that (more and more) is going to significantly control how we relate to our government and to each other.

considering Lessig

Luis Villa13 Comments

So Lessig isn’t saying no to Congress quite yet. This really should excite me; to call Lessig one of my heroes is not a stretch at all.

Lawrence Lessig 1

Lawrence Lessig 1 by Mario Carvajal. License:

My initial response was, I think, pretty solid: Lessig would make a very good Congressman. He’s proven in his Creative Commons work that he can build coalitions, work multiple sides of an issue, and (perhaps most importantly) build a winning staff. He’d have a better grasp than almost anyone in Congress on the critical issues of technology and the Constitution. And he’s right that imbalanced influence is one of the core problems in American political life, and that this is clearly a change election where issues like this can be discussed in ways they normally can’t.

But watching the video, I can’t help but think that this is not yet the right time for Lessig’s version of this message. He spent years refining the framing around free culture and Creative Commons, and it paid off. With his finely tuned message he was able to persuade not just tech geeks in the US but creators, lawyers, and policymakers around the world. In contrast, by the time of these elections, he’ll have spent only about a year working publicly on the ‘corruption’ issue. And this lack of time shows- the message is too unpolished, and the substance isn’t there yet. I badly want his latest video to inspire me- but it doesn’t.

First, the message. If you’ve got one key word you’ve chosen to discuss the issue at hand (corruption), it doesn’t bode well when you have to redefine it almost immediately when you use it. To paraphrase, the video says basically ‘well, there is corruption, but I don’t mean corruption like that.’ The maddening ineffectiveness of this tactic will be familar to anyone who has had to explain the difference between free and free over the years. It may be that I’m just too sensitive, but to me this and similar linguistic/framing/messaging problems make the quasi announcement possibly the least persuasive Lessig video I’ve ever watched- there may some day be a polished message there, but it isn’t here yet.

I’m not incredibly inspired by the substance either. The solutions (no PAC/lobbyist money, no earmarks, public financing) are good as far as they go, but they are not terribly new, and they are very top down- focusing on what should be prevented rather than what should be enabled. Part of the genius of Creative Commons was the bottom-up approach- using the motivations of large numbers of individals to counter systemic problems. Similarly, Obama refuses PAC/lobbyist money, but his campaign puts even bigger emphasis on bringing nearly a million people into the system. I’d love to see Lessig (and/or ChangeCongress.org) put emphasis on bottom-up factors like transparency, so that people outside of DC can analyze, diagnose, and mobilize to highlight and resolve problems, or perhaps on issues like broadband access, so that a greater number of people can become not just speakers but also publishers. These aren’t necessarily great suggestions, but Lessig’s don’t seem to be either right now- I’d like to see him apply his talent to improving them before he puts them so forcefully to the public. Even the great ones need time to solve difficult problems like this.

So what’s the bottom line? I’d support Lessig if he decides to run, and if he’s elected, I’ll be thrilled that he’ll be my representative when I arrive in California in ’09. ((Ed. later: I though the district covered all of southern San Francisco, but it actually covers only southwest San Francisco, and because of the location of the train station I’ll probably be in southeast San Fran when I move there. So he won’t be my rep. Oh well.))  But I really hope that he reconsiders and instead spends more time refining and strengthening his critically important message. It would be great to see, in two or four years, dozens or hundreds of candidates powerfully wielding the sharpened, focused message I know he can produce, instead of having him rush out alone this year, wielding the more blunt tool he’s created to date.