A General Sociological Framework

Realigning Our Systems With A Humanistic Purpose

Kurtz approached Kemeny in either 1961 or 1962, with the following proposal: all Dartmouth students would have access to computing, it should be free and open-access, and this could be accomplished by creating a time-sharing system (which Kurtz had learned about from colleague John McCarthy at MIT, who suggested "why don't you guys do time-sharing?")...

With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left, and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. To this day, the Movement's legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, influencing some political views and values of college students and the general public.

Another well-known neighborhood presence was the Diggers, a local "community anarchist" group known for its street theater, formed in the mid to late 1960s. One well known member of the group was Peter Coyote. The Diggers believed in a free society and the good in human nature. To express their belief, they established a free store, gave out free meals daily, and built a free medical clinic, which was the first of its kind, all of which relied on volunteers and donations. The Diggers were strongly opposed to a capitalistic society; they felt that by eliminating the need for money, people would be free to examine their own personal values, which would provoke people to change the way they lived to better suit their character, and thus lead a happier life.

Food Conspiracy is a term applied to a movement begun in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 in which households pooled their resources to buy food in bulk from farmers and small wholesalers and distribute it cheaply. The name came to describe a loose network of autonomous collectives which shared common values and, in many cases, suppliers. Many participants were seeking an alternative to supermarkets and became involved to obtain direct control of the quality and type of food they were sourcing, with a strong focus on wholefoods and organic produce.

The adoption of the name 'food conspiracy' has been described by a participant as a "response to the Nixon-Agnew rhetoric of the time (which) had us all as communist conspirators against the state, the war and public morality."

In the 1970s, collaborative "food conspiracies" began to recede and food activists founded a network of worker-owned cooperative stores and businesses that became known as the People's Food System. Offering employment to recently paroled prisoners and refugees from Central America, the system put its values into practice internally and externally. Campaigns to improve nutrition and to understand better the politics of international food industries, as well as the politics of various food choices, helped seed consumer demand for healthier and more organic alternatives, later widely adopted by mainstream grocery stores and restaurants.

Since the terminal was many people's first introduction to the computer, someone from the group sat next to the terminal to explain how to use it. They were unsure if they would have to dispel notions of centralized authority that were commonly associated with computers at the time. "While we had expected a certain amount of wariness or outright hostility, we found almost universal enthusiasm," wrote Felsenstein. The terminal took on a life of its own beyond the group's expectations that it would just be used to discuss housing, jobs, and cars. Musicians broadly embraced the system and music quickly became the most discussed topic. People began using the terminal for writing poetry, creating typewriter graphics, and posting about subjects ranging from art, politics, women's advocacy, dreams, and in one specific instance, where to get a decent bagel in the Bay Area. In response, a local baker offered their phone number and free lessons for how to make bagels. This validated the group's hopes for informal learning exchanges as written about by Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society [...] the content was shaped entirely by and synchronous to the community...

Lydia Bransten, Director of The Gubbio Project: "You have companies that used to have four buildings in San Francisco that now have one floor, so all of the infrastructure that has been built for this height is now sort of collapsing. And then to say that the reason San Francisco isn't doing well is because of poor people living on the street who use drugs, it's not real. It's a red herring. We just did a street assessment here in The Mission and 73% of the people that we spoke to were previously employed and housed. Where were they working? They were working in janitorial jobs in those office buildings. All of those businesses have changed their modality, especially those who talk about downtown being closed. Well, downtown used to employ hundreds, thousands of people who were working in low-level, entry-level jobs, as janitors, as all of the things that supported that business. Now, there is no one in those buildings."

Narrator: "Much like the gold tycoons who pillaged the West for its resources centuries ago only to leave behind ghost towns that mark the wild west, big tech has essentially used San Francisco as a playground for over two decades and now has left behind an over priced shell of a once-great American metropolis. Anyways, the story of corporate greed is typically left out of the San Francisco conversation. All you seem to hear about on TV is that San Francisco is an apocalyptic third-world wasteland..."

The Yippie "New Nation" concept called for the creation of alternative, counterculture institutions:

food co-ops;
underground newspapers and zines;
free clinics and support groups;
artist collectives;
potlatches, "swap-meets" and free stores;
organic farming / permaculture;
pirate radio, bootleg recording and public-access television;
squatting;
free schools;
etc.

Yippies believed these cooperative institutions and a radicalized hippie culture would spread until they supplanted the existing system. Many of these ideas / practices came from other (overlapping and intermingling) counter-cultural groups such as the Diggers, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Merry Pranksters / Deadheads, the Hog Farm, the Rainbow Family, the Esalen Institute, the Peace and Freedom Party, the White Panther Party and The Farm. There was much overlap, social interaction and cross-pollination within these groups and the Yippies, so there was much crossover membership, as well as similar influences and intentions.

"We are a people. We are a new nation," YIP's New Nation Statement said of the burgeoning hippie movement. "We want everyone to control their own life and to care for one another ... We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the accumulation of profit."

The goal was a decentralized, collective, anarchistic nation rooted in the borderless hippie counterculture and its communal ethos...

The 1980s have been called the decade of materialism in the United States. However, the U.S. did not suddenly emerge as a material culture; the 1980s were a culmination of decades of materialistic pursuit. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, de Tocqueville commented on Americans' avid pursuit of material well-being. Contemporary social observers describe a similar state of affairs.

The signs of materialism include self-absorption to the exclusion of others and a desire for immediate gratification. In addition, possession comes to be valued over other goals such as personal development, relationships with others, and the work ethic: the ascension of materialism as a central value may shape the nature of other values. Material objects also represent success and status in contemporary U.S. culture. Thus, materialists make use of tangible objects to signify success.

Because material objects have become so important in our society, people tend to amass more and more objects. These accumulations of objects lead to a great deal of "noise" in any attempts to use these objects to communicate. Thus, people need more and stronger signals to break through the noise in order to communicate effectively (or, indeed, at all)...

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A free-net was originally a computer system or network that provided public access to digital resources and community information, including personal communications, through modem dialup via the public switched telephone network. The concept originated in the health sciences to provide online help for medical patients. With the development of the Internet, free-net systems became the first to offer limited Internet access to the general public to support the non-profit community work...

[...] We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. [...]

Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, [...] Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

It's important to understand the cypherpunk take on economic philosophy. The cypherpunks were deeply suspicious of central banks and their control over monetary policy after the end of Bretton Woods. Many years later, their suspicions were arguably justified after the financial crisis of 2008, when central banks created massive amounts of money to bail out failing banks.

It's worth taking a brief excursion here. In general, governments have two ways to finance their operations.

The first is taxation, where a government directly transfers money from citizens into its coffers. The second way is by printing money, traditionally known as seigniorage, which also transfers money to the government, but is a little more subtle to analyze. When a government prints money, the government obviously acquires currency, but citizens often find that the value of their currency holdings has depreciated, since there's now more money chasing the same set of real assets.

Taxation and seigniorage are roughly economically equivalent, but taxation generally requires the assent of citizens, whereas printing money can be done unilaterally. The cypherpunks thus saw money printing as a form of theft from the holders of currency.

The cypherpunks believed that to have a form of money truly native to cyberspace, it would have to be free from government intervention. After all, the Internet itself was already borderless and international! An Internet-native currency ought to put everyone, regardless of nationality, on a level playing field. Tying a digital economy to a singular fiat currency would subjugate it to the whims of a single country's central bank.

Furthermore, such a system should not have a central party capable of surveilling it. Otherwise that central party would be tempted to censor the system or manipulate the currency. After witnessing the many financial crises and hyperinflations in the 20th century, the cypherpunks believed that the soundest economic system was one that no one could manipulate.

Proponents believed that in a post-industrial, post-capitalist, knowledge-based economy, the exploitation of information and knowledge would drive growth and wealth creation while diminishing the older power structures of the state in favor of connected individuals in virtual communities.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

At noon yesterday, Phil Brandenberger of Philadelphia went shopping for a compact audio disk, paid for it with his credit card and made history.

Moments later, the champagne corks were popping in a small two-story frame house in Nashua, N.H. There, a team of young cyberspace entrepreneurs celebrated what was apparently the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.

Experts have long seen such iron-clad security as a necessary first step before commercial transactions can become common on the Internet, the global computer network.

Try to imagine a world after a nuclear war, try to imagine what it would be like if the bomb did drop. Well, we may as well stop imagining now, because it will ALL be over. There would be nothing left. Although we have a lot of complaints with how the world today is, it feels like PARADISE in comparison with the thought of the world after the total destruction of a nuclear conflict.

The world governments and Law Enforcement agencies are trying to find us...WHY? All we are doing is putting foward a message that you people are taking yourselfs and your countries along the path to SELF-DESTRUCTION. Look at the below picture, and honestly tell us that you are not bothered by this image. Tell us that it doesn't strike fear into your hearts and minds. Tell us that you would like to see this day happen. Because as far as we can see, you don't care, it seems as if it is just a matter of time before this will happen, and we do not want to see this, so we PROTEST, we stand up to you, we are not scared of letting you know the TRUTH, something that you have been scared of giving us all these years, so we take our own truth, we take the evidence we need, and we make sure people know the truth....

Imagine, all your land, friends, family, possesions, everything, gone. All because of some egotistic governments and countries in this world. Surely, the developed countries (United States, United Kingdom etc.) do not want to see this. We thought that nuclear peace talks were going to happen? [...]

Free speech is under siege at the margins of the Internet. Quite a few countries are censoring access to the Web through DNS [Domain Name Service] filtering. This is a process whereby politically incorrect information is blocked by domain address -- the name that appears before the dot com suffix. Others employ filtering which denies politically or socially challenging subject matter based on its content.

Hacktivismo and the CULT OF THE DEAD COW have decided that enough is too much. We are hackers and free speech advocates, and we are developing technologies to challenge state-sponsored censorship of the Internet.

Most countries use intimidation and filtering of one, kind or another including the Peoples Republic of China, Cuba, and many Islamic countries. Most claim to be blocking pornographic content. But the real reason is to prevent challenging content from spreading through repressive regimes. This includes information ranging from political opinion, "foreign" news, women's issues, academic and scholarly works, religious information, information regarding ethnic groups in disfavor, news of human rights abuses, documents which present drugs in a positive light, and gay and lesbian content, among others.

MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld, who is also director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), created the first fab lab with the late Mel King, a legendary civil rights activist and former MIT adjunct professor who saw the fab lab's potential to empower communities. From there, the expansion into a wider network was driven by grassroots interest from far-flung communities around the globe.

The Transformation of Subcultures

The "smol" net is the "small" net. It's small because it is built for friends and friends of friends. It doesn't have to scale to millions of people because those millions should build their own local small nets.

That is:

- servers are small, with fewer resources (cores, RAM, disk space)
- communities are small (sometimes the number of accounts are limited arbitrarily)

That is, there is a plan to limit growth. Since scale is not a goal, the technology stack can be simpler and easier to understand. The smol net prefers simple systems.

...We can't just replace the platforms and protocols we have today with other purely profit-driven companies that can only call their product "decentralized" because the technology functions in a more distributed manner. For decentralization to be a remotely revolutionary concept, we need to question the internal logic of the tech industry itself - how people are incentivized to build things, how people are treated in the process, and how the relationships and systems we operate with are controlled. How does decentralization redistribute power? That's the fundamental question.

1. Technology for Human Agency

1.1 - We stand for technology that enables the primacy of people as beneficiaries of the technology, by upholding their security, privacy and self-determination.
1.2 - We urge coexistence and interoperability, and discourage walled gardens.
1.3 - We value open source code as a fundamental building block of an open and inclusive Web.
1.4 - We aim for peer-to-peer relationships, rather than hierarchical control and power imbalance.
1.5 - Our technologies must minimize surveillance and manipulation of people's behavior, and optimize for social benefits and empower individuals to determine how and why their data is used.
1.6 - We believe that multiple technical means will be more effective than a single technical solution to achieve ethical and people-centric outcomes.

2. Distributed Benefits

2.1 - We believe that decentralized technologies will be most beneficial to society when the rewards and recognition of their success, monetary or otherwise, are distributed among those who contributed to that success.
2.2 - If that is infeasible, proportionate benefit should flow to the community at large.
2.3 - High concentration of organizational control is antithetical to the decentralized web.

3. Mutual Respect

3.1 - We support and encourage clear codes of conduct to ensure respectful behavior and accountability.
3.2 - We expect participants to remain mindful of, and take responsibility for, their speech and behavior, by acting out of respect for others and respecting physical and emotional boundaries.
3.3 - We stand for open and transparent organizational practices, motivations, and governance, in a manner that actively pursues equity, mutual trust, and respect.

4. Humanity

4.1 - The objective of building a decentralized web is to protect human rights and empower people, especially those who experience systemic inequity and prejudice.
4.2 - We stand for people having agency over their own data and relationships, rights to free expression, privacy, and knowledge, as these are essential to human empowerment and dignity.
4.3 - We condemn the use of distributed tools for activities antithetical to human rights, such as human trafficking; sexual, mental, or physical abuse; and arms trading.
4.4 - We encourage building with harm-reduction in mind, and support the adoption of mechanisms that mitigate the potential for abuse, and consideration of those 'not at the table', not connected, not users, and the disadvantaged.
4.5 - We encourage the development of tools and applications in many languages and forms, with a high degree of accessibility.

5. Ecological Awareness

5.1 - We believe projects should aim to minimize ecological harm and avoid technologies that worsen environmental health.
5.2 - We value systems that work towards reducing energy consumption and device resource requirements, while increasing device lifespan by allowing repair, recycling, and recovery.

The Distributed Web of Care (DWC) is a research initiative on communication infrastructure, exploring the Distributed Web as a peer-to-peer, alternative web which prioritizes collective agency and individual ownership of data and code. Through collaborations with artists, engineers, social scientists and community organizers, DWC imagines distributed networks as a form of interdependence and stewardship, in critical opposition to the networks that dominate the world today.

The project imagines the future of the internet and consider what care means for a technologically-oriented future. The project focuses on personhood in relation to accessibility, identity, and the environment, with the intention of creating a distributed future that's built with trust and care, where diverse communities are prioritized and supported.

The project is composed of collaborations, educational resources, skillshares, an editorial platform, and performance. Announcements and documentation are hosted on this site, as well as essays by select artists, technologists, and activists.

The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of digital technologies, human rights, and global security.

Our mission is to produce evidence-based research on cyber security issues that are associated with human rights concerns.

We use a mixed methods approach to research, combining practices from political science, law, computer science, and area studies.

We are independent of government or corporate interests and publish evidence-based, peer-reviewed research. We evaluate the ethical and legal implications of all of our projects.

Our research includes: investigating digital espionage against civil society; documenting Internet filtering and other practices that impact freedom of expression online; examining transparency and accountability mechanisms relevant to the relationship between corporations and state agencies regarding personal data; and analyzing privacy, security, and information controls of popular applications.

"Interoperability" is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car's cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that's when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

Creativity is First - Most see the ability to design, decorate and graffiti digital spaces as essential and powerful
The Internet is Fun - Most want the Web to be a playground that's free to explore and enjoy
Corporations are Boring - Most are sick of the monetisation, data abuse and endless breaches of trust in corporate culture
The Web is Friendly - All feel that the Web should be friendly and supportive; caring is a radical act
Right to Repair - They value the freedom to make, break and repair their stuff - tinkering is a form of debate and protest
One World Wide Web - They want free open knowledge and global connectivity, without paywalls, bubbles or borders
Chaotic Effort - They believe that value comes from time and effort put into projects they love for no reason other than love
No to Web3 - To most, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, unfairly trained AIs and buzzword tech are unwelcome and uncool

The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.

Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what's possible.

This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and commitment that lead to broad-based change.

But networks aren't the whole story. As networks grow and transform into active, working communities of practice, we discover how life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn't that they were hidden; they simply don't exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.

Countercultural Expansion

The web's freedom (as in freely accessible, freely extendable and freely usable) was a deliberate design choice, one that Berners-Lee built into the very fabric of the technology. The technology itself wasn't all that complicated, though it has grown fairly complex over the years. On top of a layer of simple protocols and markup standards was a much more powerful idea, that information itself should be free...

[...]

Berners-Lee [...] felt immense pride for what he had helped build. As we all well know, it was to soon become a transformative medium that, to this day, has changed industries, democratized access to information, and on its best days, brought global communities together...

[...] The web, he argued, should be a force for good. Every decision made about the technology should be made with the goal of helping people around the world. Whether or not we've accomplished that goal is up for debate. But it was a founding ideal of the web.

Conclusion