The Good Netizen

This has been a long time coming. I’ve been holding on to this domain name intending to do something excellent.

A few things are coming together to give this site the critical attention it needs from me right now: Fighting sexism in technology companies and particularly in programming is actually happening widely, and the discussions around that are taking place on Twitter and blogs like this one, and these issues play into the larger problem that technology companies have widely ignored larger social problems, and even special interest groups are largely technical and ignoring social issue aside from a few narrow fields: patent reform, copyright law reform, and occasionally, trying to reinvent social institutions in ways where the technical structure more than our social structure is what drives results.

“Social media” has become the mode, with most sites expected to provide some measure of ability for its readers to push back or at least share some feature of the site with ‘friends’ and more distantly connected people, sometimes pathologically requiring us to share more than we would like for the mere privilege of using the site, game or tool.

The revelations that the National Security Agency has been reading every bit of internet traffic they can get their hands on are public, to the surprise of most, but the tinfoil hat security types are saying ‘I told you so’.

None of this is helped with the Internet being balkanized, ‘web pages’ with at most simple access control replaced by ever-shifting networks with private APIs, interoperability only within these mostly corporate feifdoms, all smaller sites who try to get a critical mass suddenly beholden in some way to a few big players. Having power and computation itself so greatly concentrated into few hands has made it relatively eay for wholesale spying on the entire world’s communication.

There are people working to keep the web open, though. Aral Balkan has a delightful talk up called Digital Feudalism and How to Avoid It that sums up a lot of the problems from a technical perspective.

Maybe the human tendency to want the underdog to win is useful: Our own freedom is that scrappy fighter right now.

It’s going to take a lot of people, and we’re going to have to reclaim our place as Netizens to do it.