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<h1 id="we-have-never-been-social">We Have Never Been Social</h1>
<ul class="post-metadata">
<li><time datetime="2019-06-10">10 June 2019</time></li>
<li><a href="/tags/writing/" class="post-tag">writing</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Bryan Alexander on his <a href="https://bryanalexander.org/the-future-trends-forum/">Future Trends Forum</a>. We were primarily focused on <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking"><em>Generous Thinking</em></a>, but by way of having me introduce myself, Bryan asked what Im working on this year. I mentioned that Im in the early research phases of what might turn out to be a new project — which is to say, I have a pretty inchoate idea and Im doing a lot of reading this summer trying to figure out whether theres a there there. Late in our conversation, however, the discussion turned back to that project idea, and given that Ive now shared it on video (soon to be available on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlcx8yl6hlPC3QjlbIHzxGqCP3qRa0zcg">YouTube</a>), I thought it might behoove me to commit a bit of that idea here.<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup></p>
<p>The project has as its working title <em>We Have Never Been Social: Rethinking the Internet</em>. It revisits the history of the Internets development and, in particular, the rise of the social media structures that have come to dominate so much of our experience of networked communication, arguing that a significant part of what has led us to the mess we find ourselves in today — with corporate entities tracking our every move while ignoring (or abetting) the growth of violent radical movements just under the surface, undermining not just how we interact with one another in casual ways but the very organization of our formal, public, political lives — is a desperately flawed model of sociality, one that is in fact not just <em>un</em>-social but <em>anti</em>-social. These structures allow us to talk to one another and to form connections with those who share our interests and concerns, for sure, but they are predicated on a hyperindividualism that is not just contrary to but actually corrosive of the kinds of deliberation necessary to a productive public life. (You might begin to see some of the ways in which this project grows out of ideas I developed in the course of <em>Generous Thinking</em>; the Internet, like the university as it exists today, is not conducive to generosity, and imagining how a more generous Internet might be developed requires thinking through its present and potential structures of reward and relation.)</p>
<p>I imagine that the first part of this project will focus on how it got to be this way, what got missed or ignored in some of the early warnings about what was happening online and how those warnings were swamped by the hype depicting the Internet as a space of radical democratization. But then I want to turn my attention to where we might go, whether there are possibilities for building an Internet that would be more genuinely social. Some argue that a more decentralized web — a web in which we manage the platforms through which we interact with others, or what Wired recently referred to as the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/soothing-promise-our-own-artisanal-internet/">soothing promise of the artisanal Internet</a> — would allow us to control the ways that our data is used, as well as to control the terms of our engagements with the broader network. There is no small irony in the suggestion that what has been termed the <a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a> could actually turn out to promote a deeper sociality, of course, and the vision of a distributed, self-hosted, self-controlled Internet would be a real challenge to achieve. But as I see it, the desire to pull our efforts at creative production and connection out of platforms like Facebook and Twitter and, commit to more distributed platforms like Mastodon or return to blogging and its micro-blogging relatives focus not on the goal, but instead on a means to an end. Because the problem is not that our platforms havent been sufficiently individualized; despite — or more truthfully because of — being under ravenous corporate control, they cater to our worst individualist instincts. Contravening that force is going to require something more than personal control, promoting something other than atomization.</p>
<p>That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individuals data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isnt enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. Its not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. Its a matter of governance.</p>
<p>So this is where some older paths-not-taken, such as Ted Nelsons original many-to-many, multidirectional model for hypertext, and some more recent potential paths, such as Herbert van de Sompels decentralized, distributed vision for scholarly communication, might come in. But this is also where I want to turn my attention to the arguments I raised in my <a href="https://vimeo.com/330154852">plenary talk at the Spring 2019 CNI meeting</a> about the relationship between sustainability and solidarity. Because this, as Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds us, “is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product. This requires politics” (<em>Lower Ed</em> 182).</p>
<p>Thats where I am in the project: re-reading a lot of early writers on the rise of the Internet and social media, including the techno-utopians, those who got dismissed as Luddites, and the wealth of critical thinkers that fall somewhere in-between. And Im reading a lot of recent work that looks at the mess were in and how it got to be this way. And Im reading some key texts in social theory that will help me envision potential paths forward. But what else? What are the crucial texts and ideas I should be engaging with? Where are the new movements in rethinking the Internet that I shouldnt miss?</p>
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>I will admit to being pretty nervous about this, not least because Ive been wrong before. After I finished <em>The Anxiety of Obsolescence</em> I was quite sure that my next book was going to focus on representations of the writing machine, but one article into that project I was pretty much done. So I was well into <em>Generous Thinking</em> before I went public with the plan here. But Im taking my own advice and blogging this idea earlier than I might be wholly comfortable with, not least because yall might have ideas that can help me push the thing forward. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>
<ul class="links-nextprev"><li class="links-nextprev-prev">← Previous<br> <a href="/summer-2019/">Summer 2019</a></li><li class="links-nextprev-next">Next →<br><a href="/15-june-2019-1646/">Dewey, The Public and Its Problems</a></li>
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