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Biodiversity and Web Futures

Hi, I’m Jess 👋

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mastodon.social/@jessie

Bluesky: jesslynnrose

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Common Voice

Technology that speaks your language

Παρακαλώ, μην με διδάξετε τίποτα σε σχέση με την γλώσσα σας, με ενδιαφέρουν πολύ οι γλώσσες και δεν έχω καθόλου εγκράτεια

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How all my talks go:

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Look at this cool thing

Oh no

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Maybe we can fix the cool thing, together

Hopeful point about good thing to feel good about

Look at this cool thing:

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The promise of the web

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⌨️🖥️🔌🛜

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⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️⛓️

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Geocities neighborhoods

A popular free web hosting provider created conceptual digital neighborhoods for websites, allowing visitors to browse sites that could be conceptually linked and builders to place their sites near new and future friends

Webrings

Let visitors browse sites that had asked to be conceptually linked via the same theme, language, topic or any other shared ideals to allow for visitors to browse and discover it

Cyberspace

We talked about the web in terms that mirrored digital spaces. Homes, homepages, surfing, we created and cemented language that let us think about building and connecting our own places.

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The Web as Connected Spaces

Habitat

In ecology, habitat refers to the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical manifestation of its ecological niche.

Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a system formed by organisms in interaction with their environment. The biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Ecosystems are controlled by external and internal factors.

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Habitats and ecosystems

Let’s get nostalgic

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Oh no:

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Where we are now

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What’s keeping us from building new weird spaces to thrive in?

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💰🌎⚖️

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Silicon Valley was a mistake

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These platforms are closed, using the web as a platform while breaking some of the fundamental concepts of the early web.

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Links connecting spaces on the open web are discouraged, users are encouraged to remain in-platform.

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Walled Gardens: Closed Platforms and the web

Walled Garden, Temple Newsam (2) by Chris Heaton, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Safety and anonymity are foundational needs for the web and creativity

• User data and what we produce on the web is being tracked and collected from people around the world
• This data is being aggregated, combined and resold in ways that present new and unimagined future threats to those impacted
• Underrepresented and marginalized users are already finding themselves at real and material risk from surveillance on the web

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Surveillance and Privacy

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AI Slop

• Creates massive amounts of low quality web content, crowding out real voices and spaces
• Built on models trained from the real, earnest work scraped from real people
• Your work, but less good, with someone else getting paid for it

Autogenerated websites

• Often sold as website “builders” or “makers”
• Lowers the barrier to entry for building on the web, at the cost of accessibility and web standards

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Generative AI Slop and Autogen Websites

GenAI slop and autogenerated websites are forgetfulness machines

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The state of work, and the world as a constraint for web habitat building

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Overresourcing

Relatively few stakeholders get to dominate and drive web direction with their resources

Surveillance on the web

A handful of companies and intermediaries create and support the weaponization of our data against us

Forgetting machines

A small number of tools and people are profiting from selling knock offs of your work at scale

Work and the world

All this sucks, this is too hard for many of us to build in our own time around

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Maybe we can fix it:

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Habitat restoration

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• Local, national and EU funding for both technical and cultural projects both large and small, allowing people to build habitats with real and meaningful support to get started
• Technical skills development being distributed online and in local communities lets more of us build our own, small, beautiful things where we can
• The English-first focus of the overresourced web means that there remain beautiful opportunities to build habitats in and for your non-English communities with less risk of encroachment

Rebalancing resourcing

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• Distributed and open source versions of the social media and other walled-garden application functionality are being built and adopted, individually, we can leave these walled gardens and bring our friends
• Legislation impacting and fines punishing these big players continues to offer us slow but hopeful flashes of limits on the growth and power of these closed platforms
• Policy in the EU and other markets provides a slow but hopeful chance for us as users to demand more from tech giants

Walled gardens

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• Tooling and training for individual users can provide stopgap approaches to minimizing surveillance risks, but this isn’t enough
• Policy continues to emerge on the collection, sale and aggregation of our data. It’s a slow fix but offers the imperfect promise of a framework of rights to better protect our data and many opportunities for our input into it.
• As individuals working in tech we have a rare choice and duty: we can refuse to build or maintain the platforms and pipelines that make up surveillance on the web

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Surveillance and Privacy

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• Projects like Glaze from MIT offer us the chance to poison scraped datasets, while others work to create tarpit projects to trap and confuse the crawlers scraping AI data
• Policy and legislation are moving slowly and welcome your input
• But right now standards bodies, educational orgs, individuals and hobbyists are working to teach the core skills that underpin the open web, we can teach and support our peers to stave off this forgetting, even if we can’t stop the deluge of AI slop ourselves

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Forgetting machines

Great, we just need to find a fix for work and the state of the world right now to end on the hopeful note.

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You were promised a hopeful end to this talk:

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People are still building beautiful, weird, wonderful things and thriving

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Great, we just need to find a fix for work and the state of the world right now to end on the hopeful note.

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…we just need to find a fix for the state of the world…

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Hope as a banner, a weapon, a tool.

If you find some, share it.

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Hope as a banner, a weapon, a tool.

If you find some, please share it.

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