Re: Technoelitism and the IndieWeb Movement

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen some blog posts of a very similar vein to my recent post Technoelitism and the IndieWeb Movement. It seems I’m not the only one with some critical thoughts about this movement and the goals it both claims to have and actually seems to express. I realized while surveying some of these posts that I actually had some major flaws in my assumptions about what the IndieWeb movement actually is, what it actually cares about, and the correction of these assumptions has only served to further cement my beliefs that the movement leaves something to be desired. Let’s start with my incorrect assumptions.

I believe that we should have better on-ramps to letting people control their own digital presence.

Technoelitism and the IndieWeb Movement

In my discussion of what I think the movement should do better, I hint at my belief that the movement is centered around a simple proposition: “you should have a website that you use to publish things you care about, so that you are not subject to the whims of social media giants when you want to do your speaking online.” Most of my criticism of the movement and the discussion that followed was centered on this premise, and I made some broad suggestions that we should be seeking to help people in this situation. As I would learn from other people writing about IndieWeb, there’s much more to the movement than this small part of it.

When some full-stack developers struggle to have WebMention implemented on their blogs, I learn the answer. It’s not child play for the unenlightened. I didn’t even have the slightest clue or grasp what Microformats and WebMention mean and what they do. Tried, confused, frustrated, and defeated. I gave up.

IndieWeb’s 3 Body Problem

When I read So1o’s blog post about their dissatisfaction with IndieWeb a few months ago, I should have paid more heed to this particular section. This is the heart of their complaint, and the fact that I missed this point is what led to my surprise when I commented on the state of their website “If the person that willed himself to make this site is feeling this way about the community, I shudder to think what someone approaching IndieWeb with less ambitions would come to think.” So1o’s frustration here stems not from the inherent difficulty of creating “a webpage,” they obviously have the ability to do that. The frustration is not “website hard,” it’s “IndieWeb hard.” These are fundamentally different things, and I had wrongly assumed that they were one and the same.

Being part of the IndieWeb is about building a personal web application, not a personal website. It means having on your own website, all of the functionality one might expect from a corporate social network like Facebook. Apparently all of this functionality is necessary in order to integrate with corporate social media platforms using the POSSE approach: publish on your own website, and syndicate elsewhere.

Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant?

This was a very enlightening paragraph to read. Matthew points out that the movement really isn’t about building websites, rather it’s about integrating websites into extant systems of other websites. These systems take the forms both of corporate social media sites and of the IndieWeb network of intermeshed personal sites.

Second, I completely lost interest in the Indieweb. I respect the project, and still prefer it to the current corporate web dystopia. However, my initial skepticism was right. Matthew Graybosch put it in words for me recently: we solved the interconnections between people on the internet years ago. RSS has this specific purpose, email serves the rest. All that time spent making this website compatible with webmentions should have been used communicating directly with people. The tools were already there.

Smaller

Simone here (and Matthew by reference) gets at the conclusion that I myself began to draw after I made this realization about what the IndieWeb actually was. The interconnections that the IndieWeb’s standards promote are largely in service of increasing the ability for syndication on corporate social media, and connections with computers (as opposed to people). I suppose (unsurprisingly) I have built my website in a way that made sense to me - I don’t have a comment box, instead there’s a call-to-action for emailing me at the bottom of every post (more people should email me btw, I’m a delight). I have always had an RSS feed, as that’s something I value a lot in other sites and I’ve been using RSS as a reader since high school.

I’ve thought about adding WebMention or Microformats to my site at times, but I never really saw the need. If someone quotes my post, it would be nice if they emailed me but I don’t really need that to be happy. Matthew emailed me to let me know that he was quoting my post, and I had this to say in response:

I think when I decided that I wanted to get ”involved” in the IndieWeb community, I did assume that I was doing it just by nature of having a personal website. Most of the microformat/WebMention stuff seems like a way to get access to the dopamine hits of vitality/appreciation that you’re likely to miss out on by virtue of de-platforming yourself. I never really put much effort into those types of things. If we want to remove ourselves from the “addiction web,” as I think we should, we should not strive to re-implement their patterns. I only very briefly had comments on my website, I feel like I get better responses via email (though I don’t receive many). To the extent to which that kind of thing is “actually” what IndieWeb is about, I suppose I don’t actually align with the movement.

I do think we should strive to create things that are wholly separate from the “addition web,” not just in control but form. We have been wired to fill time, can we fill the time with genuine connections and human thought rather than the algorithms of big tech? I agree with Jenny Odell, most people would not be satiated by just turning off the attention/addiction machine forever, we need to give them somewhere else to put it, somewhere better.

What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.

How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell

The point that I made in my previous post “the IndieWeb community should be focused on better on-ramps for non-technical people” stands, albiet perhaps “the IndieWeb community should” now becomes “some community should.” If there is a movement to get people (especially non-technical people!) involved in self-publishing on the internet that doesn’t prioritize computer-readible, corporate-social-media-syndication-based publishing over human intrigue and the sharing between real people, I want to know about it. That’s the kind of movement that I think has the power to get us moving away from some of the mess that we’re in, and that’s the kind of movement that I want to be involved in.