Power, Protocols & Public Interests in Governing the DWeb | Vogelsang Paulick-Thiel Lawrence Paksoy

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All right, thank you. That bio was from a while ago, but um we'll go with it. Um maybe we start by having everyone introduce themselves, and I think as a initial question in this um sort of framing of looking at power and governance um is describe the the system you're working on and who who holds the power uh and what sort of safeguards from abuse there are against that. So, you know, there's rules in whatever system it is and and who has the the control over those levers and and how do you see sort of the the safeguards and protections um that you're thinking about in your system. Um so, maybe maybe you want to start Bears.

So, hello. My name is uh Barış. I'm building a um digital archive for censored uh journalistic content. Basically, I'm originally coming from Turkey and uh we have an issue that we are not able to read the articles even published today. Like, I'm not talking about articles published 50 years ago, 10 years ago, but just recently.

So, I'm building a system which is archiving the articles as soon as they published uh in real time and uh and trying to get the censorship toolkit from the state and give it back to the community. So, we are trying to build up a community around the archive with uh academicians, journalists, uh professionals, citizens who is uh taking care about the media freedom to have a more proper decision while respecting to the uh privacy laws like rights to be forgotten.

Thank you. My name is Caroline. I work with at the intersection, let's say, of um, public sector, um, politics, um, civil servants, and civil society. And in these systems, you could say, there are clear governance approaches, but, um, the power actually sits in very different pockets. So, I think that will be also interesting to discuss in terms of how to approach power between these systems, because politicians would point at society, society would point at civil service, civil service would point at politics again.

So, this kind of how we shift responsibilities, but also how do we actually create spaces for a shared responsibility, is something that we're working with.

Hi, I'm Rose Regina. Um, I am the uh, digital security manager at Open Archive, and we make a, uh, well, we we do a lot of research, um, but we also make a piece of, um, uh, mobile software called Save, and it is a mobile-first, uh, way of, um, making community archives. So, basically, um, we work with, uh, groups that we we call decentralized archivist, uh, collectives or communities, and there are multiple back-end options on our app, and that is specifically so that each group is able to choose a, um, an archive stewardship and and data control option that is best for them. We can connect with the Internet Archive, which is very public. We can connect with um uh WebDAV servers, mainly Nextcloud for something that is private but still on a server.

Um and uh we have just uh put out a beta of a DWeb backend that is serverless. And with all of these options, we try to put as much control as we can in the hands of the DAC. Uh with the understanding and acknowledgement that these groups often have relatively little power within the larger social structures.

Hi, my name is Sebastian. I'm um with the Modul Foundation, which is a Netherlands-based nonprofit, and um I'm working on a project at that foundation, which is called EuroSky, which um has the goal to establish some sort of um European social media infrastructure. Uh we're doing this together with um Mastodon and with Matrix. We recently um published a memorandum where we defined a European social stack because right now, of course, the power within social media relies um with the big tech US companies and uh TikTok, which is from China. So, um our entire communications infrastructure relies on companies that are held by uh VC-funded companies.

And thus, we saw a necessity to establish an open interoperable communication stack here in Europe. And this is what we're trying to do. Thank you.

Um I think there's a couple uh sort of hot-button issues that we have uh a great set of perspectives on. Um so, the the first one I want to to into is this issue of content ending up on the internet forever or not. And so we have on one side a bunch of value we get out of archiving and preserving content or having content be public for others to archive. And then we have this whole set of interest represented by the right to be forgotten on one side and other forms of censorship on the other that that are in tension with this. So I'm interested in how you think about that.

Um that this problem and the choices that these various things make in about the governance of making content available or how you're going to deal with takedowns as you get sort of requests to remove content.

Well, like So some things about censorship is I think pretty clear. Like if you are talking about corrupted official abusing public power and so on. Like there's nothing to discuss so discuss so much. But of course like in the media environment there are human mistakes done. Like an article might have been written in a wrong way without any editorial oversight and so on.

So these should be differentiated like that was also the main problem for me. Like when I started to work on Kahoot I was thinking I can automate everything. I can just collect script articles and push them as they are on the blockchain. But like once I started to collect the real data what they are really deleting, of course sometimes you feel that um it's very sensitive and it can harm people in the long term. But I don't see myself in the position to decide about it.

Like there are already pretty good advocacy groups Um like Philosophers Academy thinking about it. And I think like it should be handed over to a society which can do it better than state.

We're sharing.

[laughter]

Thank you.

I think we've maybe decentralized the possession of this microphone.

I think that's a very good example of um how I also view like the problem that you're posing. Um this session is on public interest. So our work has been very much been busy to also look at what is public interest design. How can we actually look at something that concerns all of us? And then have infrastructure, but also relationships, institutions around a shared interest.

And living in a world where the fragmentation and the volatility is growing and also the degeneration of systems around us, I think this question needs to be renewed in a space where interests are not shared but a kind of public value or a public sourcing is still necessary. And therefore also looking at what is to be protected, what is content to be available, what needs to be legible by public institutions in order to provide a service, to provide health care, to provide education on one hand, but then on the other hand, what is needed to make us as citizens of a system that we're operating within not capturable, not contested, not being let's say extracted of the data that needs to be available of us in order to relate to the system around us. And I feel that this question and also that the tools and the talks um that I heard here today is something that is looking at shared commons. But then for me the the question is how are these commons relating to the public systems that we already have?

So um I think in our work at Open Archive um one of the things that this really touches on is why we do so much research and why we put so much emphasis on the the work that we do in addition to just uh the the app. Um And that I think that often times we who spend a lot of time on the internet and with our devices, we would like to think that we can have technical problems to social solutions and sometimes we can. But I think that some of this comes down to taking the time and effort and also supporting the time and effort by social groups and communities to think through what this means, what our values are around these topics and to um have difficult and sometimes scary reflective conversations about what the risks of data existing really is and um sometimes sometimes the risk is worth it and uh I don't think that I ever want to be in a position where I am telling people who are very differently situated than I am that I know better than they do um when it's not my life, my freedom, um my culture, my community at stake. Um and I think that uh it's important to consider the power differentials not just within groups and between groups and within a society, but also when we assess other people's situations, that we recognize um those differences between our positionality and the positionality of the person we are we are critiquing. Um, and that maybe we can be a little bit kinder to others and to ourselves, um especially considering that data that we would all prefer not be out there will be out there um for any number of reasons, whether by accident or through bad actors, and um uh I think that when we think about like the full data life cycle, uh there there should be a part at the end where we acknowledge that there is um a potential need for reparative or restorative justice or um at least some kind of acknowledgement and reconciliation with what has happened.

Um I'm going to bring a more technical point, I think.

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Um So, when when I talked to Will just an hour ago, I was like, I may not be the right person to be on this panel cuz and like this whole entire event, because the protocol we I work with 80 protocols 100% public. Like there is no privacy per se in that protocol, because it's very young and it was designed to do public social media. So, anything you do on that protocol is public. It's um and that by design is a thing that I had to get used to when I started working with it, because it is kind of weird. You're used to these old platforms that kind of wedged all these privacy features into their apps, like Twitter all of a sudden had direct messages.

So, did Facebook and all these. And these were not added because these platforms cared about the users. They addressed demands by the users that would have otherwise been fulfilled by other applications. So, in order for these users to stay within these apps, these platforms added these features one by one by one. And all of a sudden you had like this whole I don't know, that Facebook app 10 years ago looked all of a sudden like a like a supermarket.

It had like direct messaging, it had a marketplace, it had like everything in there that users could otherwise be um sort of um tempted to leave the app. So, users have gotten used to their stuff being half private, half public. So, when you start establishing a new form of social media that says, "Hey, this is all interoperable. When you move from one app to the other, you can bring all your likes, all your blocks, all of that with you." But, in order to make that happen, everything has to be public.

So, I'm at a stage now where I say, "Okay, I've been I've gotten used to it. And if you want to share something that you don't want to be on the internet, there are other apps out there. There are other protocols out there that you can use to do that." There is a thing on the horizon that is private data for any proto, but so far it is a totally public social network. The benefit of this is that you can watch it in real life in uh uh you can watch it live in real time.

You can see the data. And that gives one benefit because you can analyze all the data streams for bot attacks, for false information campaigns. It is super transparent. It has the transparency that researchers have been asking for for 10 years or 15 years from these big platforms, this is now possible.

Can I make a remark? I think you are the right person to sit on this panel because I'm also coming from a week where we have been hosting our own festival. It's called Creative Bureaucracy Festival and Audrey Tang received a reward an award on on Wednesday for her work and is recognized in a field of, let's say, civil service that hasn't would not have been possible 10 years ago. Um so there is a connection between these communities and also the idea of actually having something that is public is bringing me to a distinction of privacy because I think we have to make a distinction between legibility and reducibility. So public institutions need a certain legibility and I think transparency is necessary in order to have at all data out there that is giving these institutions a possibility to operate.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that we reduce the human to a data track. The human is um an open pathway. Also, I would call it like human becoming. So it's not what I have in at as a as a data set in my public record, but it's the optionality of what we actually can do and become in the future. And I think reducing that and having conversations in these, let's say, very technical environments is necessary.

On the other hand, I would say there's a fly flying around here in this panel, right? Um we are part of a bigger ecosystem. We are actually part of something that is not governable in a sense that we might want to control it. And actually also acknowledging that in digital environments that we're building that become maybe more of a kind of organism rather than a kind of machine or machine-like idea is something where I see a couple of people working towards that shift and it's necessary to take that into account if we want to go back to a kind of public vitality idea. So, this is what we're working on.

How can we strengthen public vitality with um digital means or with infrastructure as such, but also aliveness in the systems that we depend on, which are biophysical?

I think the the sort of second shape of of challenge that I want to pose to all of you is that there there's sort of this argument to be made that the the power and governance in some ways is still held by whoever's paying for the infrastructure. That if you're running a site or you've got one of these services that whoever is behind that is still able to stop being behind it and then the thing goes away. Um and so, how are you sort of grappling or or addressing that that fact that, you know, the that you've got I don't know if it's uh uh I don't know. That that that the the funding still sort of hasn't necessarily changed unless you've also got some new governance or funding model to ensure that stability.

So, um I think that's part of why we're excited about the DWeb back end because that is using the storage space on the DAC members' phones. But, I'd actually like to take your point even further because I think that um it's not just that we're dependent on who pays for the infrastructure, but we're also dependent on like the entire supply chain. And um it's it's [clears throat] very easy to look at like whether or not we can afford server space or whether or not we trust Google or AWS. Um, but ultimately if if something further up in the supply chain breaks, um, and a community is overly dependent on that, it can have really profound effects, um, that really limit their ability to continue moving along, to access whatever data they have previously put into a system. Um, and so I think it's I think the the the power differentials are even greater than your initial description outlines.

Anyone else want to take this?

For me, um, Francesca Bria had a, um, talk looking at the European funding system, pointing out that 90% of European funding is not deployed in Europe. Understanding what that actually means for our technical infrastructure. Understanding how communities like these need to get involved into, you know, systems and voicing these kind of concerns in order also to turn things around, which is not only dependent on big industries, but I think Europe has a very, um, vivid civic tech community, which means, um, these communities need to be able to work with nation states. That's for me like the the the underlying, let's say, tension to actually have a kind of bridging um, approach or agreements to say, "Okay, in order to get somewhere where um certain infrastructure is more decentralized, more freeing, more um community-oriented, there needs to be agreements with cities, with regions, with nation-states to actually first of all, request the funding of the European Union to be deployed in Europe, then having agreements to actually do that in ecosystems that are building this kind of public capacity, and also, you know, having notion and the capacity within the institution to actually be weaned off Microsoft, be weaned off systems that right now are the root of public infrastructure that are not based in Europe.

Yeah, for like when you look at the sovereignty package that was just passed by the European Commission, there was like a lot of stuff in there. There was like nothing on social media, right? So, we're basically still leaving all of our communications channels with US Big Tech and Chinese companies, and what we're trying to do and what I'm like rooting for is to have some sort of social base layer, like a social media infrastructure that is everything but the apps on top. And if you look at X, you have a monolith that has the user accounts, that has the algorithms, that has apps and websites, that has moderation, all under one roof. And what that protocol that we work with does, it breaks that monolith apart.

It gives individuals the opportunity to run these things individually, and plug them into each other. And I learned about that about 2 years ago when I built an app on top of the on the back of of Blue Sky on their stack. And I was able to build that app within like a month or so and it had like 100,000 users within the first week because I could use that infrastructure and that's when it first kicked in for me that infrastructure is really power. So you need to kind of break that power apart and spread it out and give it into different hands. There cannot be one moderation service.

There should be hundreds that you can combine and layer on top of each other. There should be account management not held by one company but thousands. So I think this is the future for anything that can be the next generation of social media.

Maybe one small point. I think there is a important shift to make from funding to an exit economy and I feel that the work that is done in this field should actually not be dependent on funding but should become an economy that is actually being able to resource itself. And in order to understand how to use funding to move into more into independence in that in that sense and also build you know like a like a resourcing economy around that. I feel that's a super important for the next couple of years.

So I will go from very different perspective. Like I'm working on a very recent project. I'm not in the ecosystem for a long time and started as a solo developer. So without having an idea about journalism or the research part of it and so on and trying to find a financial stability like since the beginning but like of course it's it was not so easy because I'm not able to write a grant. I didn't had any institution and so on this kind of stuff.

And then even though I started to work afterwards for one of the biggest investigative journalism networks in Europe Correctiv it became easier but for a long time also with a lot of difficulties depending on global politics due to the like intention of the whole project like that it can bring some legal problems. It's not able to operate in many countries anyway. So we are based on donations basically but and we cannot of course put any kind of financial barrier because we are collecting a public data which should be always publicly accessible. Like I cannot put any kind of any other barrier in front of the already censored article. So I don't know like this funding schemes would most probably change depending on politics but the donation and the community is the base most of time and also decides about how big you can scale up the system.

So as a I think final question I think one of the other tensions that we see in these examples and that is sort of between protocols and this question of public interest is how protocols design how they handle liability. And so on one side you've got you know a journalistic entity that is um holding the liability of you know if if the government gets unhappy the subpoena ends up going to that journalistic organization, and then you've got a set of protocols and projects that push that more to end users, whether it's now they're self-hosting or they hold their own keys. Um and so that that leads to a whole set of questions in this handling of liability and this intersection of uh regulation as it applies into these system designs and that interplay. So, you know, on the one hand, you've got the set of questions of are you ready for you know, the takedown notices and do you have do you feel like you're able to steward that data that you're keeping up there from like the the sort of various legal attacks? On the other, do you feel like you're you know, have are your users ready to handle any potential case?

Um and you feel like you've architected a protocol in a way that's that's able to sort of manage that risk effectively. Um and how do we think about that? Power that the protocol designer has in doing that risk even.

So, like I've designed everything uh not to be taken down again. Uh basically, it's also technically not possible for me once I push it. This is why we are uh reviewing each article uh manually and very carefully, like uh to uh respect to the people's rights, of course. But uh like there is no way back, of course. Uh shouldn't be.

Um I guess uh with great power comes great responsibility. Uh unfortunately, great responsibility does not often equal great power um as much as one might wish. And um I think that some of how we tend to look at it is that um we're supporting activists who are going to take the risks because they're committed to what they're working on. And I hope that we can mitigate those risks as much as possible while still recognizing that um the world is inherently risky. And I wouldn't want a world without risk if it even if it were possible because without risk there's no chance of things getting better.

There's no chance of improvement. There's no chance of a better, brighter, more creative, more diverse, more beautiful future.

Um when it comes to risk, I think um we're with the multi-financial we're taking a huge risk right now because we're uh started working with a protocol that has not been established yet. That is like 2 years old and where no European laws apply currently. They try like we already face a request for account removals or or or post removals and stuff like that where we are trying to make the case that we're not your usual X or meta, but that this is like a super distributed stack where the app user could be in Sweden, the data account could sit in the US, the relay that distributes the content could sit in China, and the the resolver that resolves the identity could sit in freaking Antarctica. And it's which laws apply to which part of this whole tangled web, right? So, what we're facing right now is that the the usual thing I think is that the newer the protocols are, the more advanced they are, the faster that they get worked on and established, the more they lack behind the the current law or the the law lacks behind the protocol development.

And you have to either have a lawyer on your side or money to throw at legal firms that try to make cases make this fit somehow into the current legal form. And this is what we're facing right now. Right now we're just trying to wiggle our way through it, but it's it's it's a lot.

So, what I can build on and also keep it short, my main approach would be to coordinate. We're in Berlin, it's a very rich city. We actually have people in legal design. We have people who are working across these public interest, you know, spheres. And a kind of invitation to the community here to understand what is possible between public interest measures, technologies, building new protocols, but also a kind of window of opportunity because public institutions are overwhelmed in the wave of AI, in the wave of possibility.

So, what is there actually that is not only looking at risk, but also preventative measures that politically are not rewarded, but need to be taken in order to create a kind of, you know, future for all.

All right. Thank you all so much. And with that, I think we've reached our time.

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