Deshittfication - Alfea

And this is your session. Okay, we're going to get started. So this is just kind of like an introduction to the deshittification residency and track. I'm going to have the residents come up and kind of introduce their own work in a bit, but I first wanted to just share about some of the kind of themes and goals of what we're doing this month. So de-shertification is a word that I made up and nobody knows what it means.

So I'm going to just start with... If you are talking amongst yourselves, feel free to exit. Thank you. There's a door over there. Okay, so enchantification is a term that Cory Doctorow made up a few years back to describe this sort of cycle that technology tends to go through in which people make things that are user-friendly and seem great to get a bunch of users in and kind of like trap them inside of a platform and then fuck over the users to make money for their real customers, which is someone else.

And then they fuck over their real customers to take that value back for themselves. And then there's kind of nowhere left to go. And so he says, then they die. I'm not sure that we've actually seen that part play out as much as I would like it to work out that way. This way?

Oh, that way. This way? Oh, wrong way. So de-shitification is the opposite of that. Rather than treating your users as sort of crops to be harvested, you treat them as people who are having like lives and experiences and unique, you know, they're all unique beings.

And that creating experiences for people is the goal. You don't create experiences for people so that they will stick around long enough that they can no longer leave so that you can extract as much as possible from them So it's just a very different way of thinking about Like what technology is for and what builders kind of what your function is So This is not strictly speaking a privacy residency But I do think that this is an important topic to just briefly touch on because it's something that a lot of people kind of associate with like why technology is so shitty and I think part of this is that we tend to have this like binary in our brains of things are either private or public. It's like a switch that you turn on and off. But in reality, totally private and totally public are really far ends of a whole spectrum, neither of which most of us really occupy maybe ever. And most of what we do is like the stuff in between.

So privacy is incredibly important because all of the things that you build on top require privacy to be available to you as a default state so that you can have the freedom to exist in this zone in the way that you want at the times that you want, interacting with the people that you want so that you can be an actual individual expressing yourself in all of the nuanced and complicated ways that people do. So privacy is a very important foundation, but it doesn't stop there. If all we have is privacy, then we're all just like alone in the dark, which I don't think is actually what most people want. Wait. There we go.

You left your notifications on. Okay, So, small technical difficulties. All right. And we pretend the last 15 seconds never happened. So, maybe I should stay down here.

Deshittifiers, as I termed our residence, but somebody else has proposed desheets. It's supposed to be in a French accent. I can't do a French accent. So pick whichever one you like best. But what's different about these guys as technologists, first is that they think about people as sort of the subject of their own story and not objects to be manipulated.

They also see technology as like a medium that they can manipulate and use and create with, regardless of how other people have done that before. Not getting boxed into the way things are done, but thinking about what do we want to accomplish, what do we want to give people, and what is the best way to get there, given the materials available to us, not how has somebody else vaguely approximately pretended to do this in the past. They also build things that actively resist capture, extraction, and manipulation. They don't just promise not to do it, they build things in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to do it for themselves or anyone else. They treat centralization as a liability.

If you don't want to extract and manipulate and sell and whatever, like make use of people's information or sort of capture and Spend people's lives as if they're a currency then Having information about people it can only be a problem It's it's just like a treasure trove of stuff that a bunch of people would love to steal and abuse a bunch of people would love to steal and abuse. So if your real intention is to serve users, then you really want to have as little information and as little control as possible. Because all of the information that you have and all of the control that you have can be and probably will eventually be used against you and your users. We've seen that play out a million times. And finally, and maybe most importantly, these guys are trying to build things that are valuable in ways that they can't take back.

That they put value into the world, they put tools into the world, connections, whatever it is, and those things are then just out there. They belong to the people that have them. And if they all change their minds tomorrow and became evil, all of the things would still exist in the same way that they do today, just because of the way that they're being built and distributed. So some of the modes and tools that people are using, not everyone is using every one of these. Everyone is building in kind of different ways, and you will learn a little bit more about that in a second.

But open source is a big one. Obviously this is a community where that is, like, valued a lot. And it's not just, like, a moral thing, we should share everything for free. But it's also a way that developers hold each other accountable for actually doing what they say that they're doing. When you can see the code, you can, like, audit the code, you can run the code yourself.

That makes it a lot harder for people to kind of cut corners or be dishonest about what they're actually up to. Local first, so trying to as much as possible not just throw things on the open Internet, but kind of prioritize things that are like at a smaller scale. If you don't need global, don't do global. And peer-to-peer is kind of in that, like a subset of that, but I think it's important to call out also because this kind of becomes about making spaces and like making circles that are the actual size and scale of the people that you want to be interacting with, spending time with. Programmable cryptography is a really powerful tool for a lot of this stuff also.

Until like, I don't know, within the last decade or so, and especially accelerating within the last few years, cryptography used to just mean encrypt, decrypt. It's encrypted or it's decrypted. We've had forms of cryptography since the dawn of human civilization. Public-key cryptography was a huge step forward. It's kind of like what made blockchains, public blockchains possible.

But more recently, people have been experimenting with forms of cryptography that are a lot more kind of dynamic, where you can have much more nuanced permissions, where you can not just encrypt a blob of stuff and decrypt the blob of stuff, but encrypt a blob of stuff and then selectively decrypt and prove just what you need in a context or what you want in a context. So that opens up a huge number of possibilities for those sort of gray areas where there's not total trust but you want to be able to kind of verify and have the like guarantees that cryptography can offer you while keeping some of that like flexibility and nuance that makes you able to do like actual human things and then interoperability. Not trapping people in ecosystems so that they will continue to make money for you for as long as possible, but actively seeking to structure things in a way that lets people pick up and move. If what you're building isn't working for them, they can take their data, they can take their environment, they can take their friends and family, whatever it is, and go somewhere else. So the reason people stay on your thing is because they like it and not because it's so difficult and painful to leave.

So I'm going to turn it over to our residents in a second, but I just want to call out that we're going to have demo nights every Thursday and the goal here is not to have everybody stand up and give presentations, but for you to be able to really like try stuff out, test things, talk with the teams that are working on them and have much more of a sort of social, experiential, immersive thing rather than you sit in a chair and we all talk at you. So three of these are just normal. 17th, 24th, and November 7th we'll be at two hotel. Come hang out. You don't even have to be on time.

Just anywhere in the range of 8 to 10 p.m. But one of our Thursdays just happens to be Halloween. So we're gonna throw a party and bring some of this tech with us and try to sort of integrate it into real life in a fun way. So that's gonna be at Red Dog on Halloween night.