net.wars

The horns of a dilemma

It has always been possible to conceive a future for Mastodon and the Fediverse that goes like this: incomers join the biggest servers (“instances”). The growth of those instances, if they can afford it, accelerates. When the sysadmins of smaller instances burn out and withdraw, their users also move to the largest instances. Eventually, the Fediverse landscape is dominated by a handful of very large instances (who enshittify in the traditional way) with a long tail of small and smaller ones. The very large ones begin setting rules – mostly for good reasons like combating abuse, improving security, and offering new features – that the very small ones struggle to keep up with. Eventually, it becomes too hard for most small instances to function.

This is the history of email. In 2003, when I set up my own email server at home, almost every techie had one. By this year, when I decommissioned it in favor of hosted email, almost everyone had long since moved to Gmail or Hotmail. It’s still possible to run an independent server, but the world is increasingly hostile to them.

Another possible Fediverse future: the cultural norms that Mastodon and other users have painstakingly developed over time become swamped by a sudden influx of huge numbers of newcomers when a very large instance joins the federation. The newcomers, who know nothing of the communities they’re joining, overwhelm their history and culture. The newcomers are despised and mocked – but meanwhile, much of the previous organically grown culture is lost, and people wanting intelligent conversation leave to find it elsewhere.

This is the history of Usenet, which in 1994 struggled to absorb 1 million AOLers arriving via a new gateway and software whose design reflected AOL’s internal design rather than Usenet’s history and culture. The result was to greatly exacerbate Usenet’s existing problems of abuse.

A third possible Fediverse future: someone figures out how to make money out of it. Large and small instances continue to exist, but many become commercial enterprises, and small instances increasingly rely on large instances to provide services the small instances need to stay functional. While both profit from that division of labor, the difficulty of discovery means small servers stay small, and the large servers become increasingly monopolistic, exploitative, and unpleasant to use. This is the history of the web, with a few notable exceptions such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

A fourth possible future: the Fediverse remains outside the mainstream, and admins continue to depend on donations to maintain their servers. Over time, the landscape of servers will shift as some burn out or run out of money and are replaced. This is roughly the history of IRC, which continues to serve its niche. Many current Mastodonians would be happy with this; as long as there’s no corporate owner no one can force anyone out of business for being insufficiently profitable.

These forking futures are suddenly topical as Mastodon administrators consider how to respond to this: Facebook will launch a new app that will interoperate with Mastodon and any other network that uses the ActivityPub protocol. Early screenshots suggest a clone of Twitter, Meta’s stated target, and reports say that Facebook is talking to celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama as potential users. The plan is reportedly that users will access the new service via their Instagram IDs and passwords. Top-down and celebrity-driven is the opposite of the Fediverse.

It should not be much comfort to anyone that the competitor the company wants to kill with this initiative is Twitter, not Mastodon, because either way Meta doesn’t care about Mastodon and its culture. Mastodon is a rounding error even for just Instagram. Twitter is also comparatively small (and, like Reddit, too text-based to grow much further) but Meta sees in it the opportunity to capture its influencers and build profits around them.

The Fediverse is a democracy in the sense that email and Usenet were; admins get to decide their server’s policy, and users can only accept or reject by moving their account (which generally loses their history). For admins, how to handle Meta is not an easy choice. Meta has approached for discussions the admins of some of the larger Mastodon instances, who must sign an NDA or give up the chance to influence developments. That decision is for the largest few; but potentially every Mastodon instance operator will have to decide the bigger question: do they federate with Meta or not? Refusal means their users can’t access Meta’s wider world, which will inevitably include many of their friends; acceptance means change and loss of control. As I’ve said here before, something that is “open” only to your concept of “good people” isn’t open at all; it’s closed.

At Chronicles of the Instantly Curious, Carey Lening deplores calls to shun Meta as elitist; the AOL comparison draws itself. Even so, the more imminent bad future for Mastodon is the possibility that this is the fork that could split the Fediverse into two factions. Of course the point of being decentralized is to allow more choice over who you socially network with. But until now, none of those choices took on the religious overtones associated with the most heated cyberworld disputes. Fasten your seatbelts…

Illustrations: A mastodon by Heinrich Harder (public domain, via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon.

All change

One of the reasons Silicon Valley technology company leaders sometimes display such indifference to the desires of their users is that they keep getting away with it. At Facebook, now Meta, after each new privacy invasion, the user base just kept getting bigger. At Twitter, despite much outrage at its new owner’s policies, although it feels definitely emptier the exodus toward other sites appears to have dropped off. At Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman has used the term “landed gentry” to denigrate moderators leading protests against a new company policy…well, we’ll see.

In April, Reddit announced it would begin charging third parties for access to its API, the interface that gives computers outside its system access to the site’s data. Charges will apply to everyone except developers building apps and bots that help people use Reddit and academic/non-commercial researchers studying Reddit.

In May, the company announced pricing: $12,000 per 50 million requests. This compares to Twitter’s recently announced $42,000 per 50 million tweets and photo site Imgur‘s $166 per 50 million API calls. Apollo, maker of the popular iOS Reddit app, estimates that it would now cost $20 million a year to keep its app running.

The reasoning behind this could be summed up as, “They cost us real money; why should we help them?” Apollo’s app is popular, it appears, because it offers a cleaner interface. But it also eliminates Reddit’s ads, depriving the site of revenue. Reddit is preparing for an IPO later this year against stiff headwinds.

A key factor in this timing is the new gold rush around large language models, which are being built by scraping huge amounts of text anywhere they can find it. Taking “our content”, Huffman calls it, suggesting Reddit deserves to share in the profits while eliding the fact that said content is all user-created.

This week, thousands of moderators shuttered their forums (subreddits) in protest. At The Verge, Jay Peters reports that more than 8,000 (out of 138,000) subreddits went dark for 48 hours from Monday to Wednesday. Given Huffman’s the-blackout-will-pass refusal to budge, some popular forums have vowed to continue the protest indefinitely.

Some redditors have popped up on other social media to ask about viable alternatives (they’re also discussing this question on Reddit itself). But moving communities is hard, which is why these companies understand their users’ anger is rarely an existential threat.

The most likely outcome is that redditors are about to confront the fate that eventually befalls almost every online community: the people they *thought* cared about them are going to sell them to people who *don’t* care about them. Reddit as they knew it is entering a phase of precarity that history says will likely end with the system’s shutdown or abandonment. Shareholders’ and owners’ desire to cash out and indifference to Twitter’s actual users is how Elon Musk ended up in charge. It’s how NBC Universal shut down Television without Pity, how Yahoo killed GeoCities, and how AOL spitefully dismantled CompuServe.

The lesson from all of these is: shareholders and corporate owners don’t have to care about users.

The bigger issue, however, is that Reddit, like Twitter, is not currently a sustainable business. Founded in 2005, it was a year old when Conde Nast bought it, only to spin it out again into an independent subsidiary in 2011. Since then it has held repeated funding rounds, most recently in 2021, when it raised $700 million. Since its IPO filing in December 2021, its value has dropped by a third. It will not survive in any form without new sources of revenue; it’s also cutting costs with layoffs.

Every Internet service or site, from Flickr to bitcoin, begins with founders and users sharing the same goal: for the service to grow and prosper. Once the service has grown past a certain point, however, their interests diverge. Users generally seek community, entertainment, and information; investors only seek profits. The need to produce revenues led Google’s chiefs, who had previously held that ads would inevitably corrupt search results, hired Sheryl Sandberg to build the company’s ad business. Seven years later, facomg the same problem, Facebook did the same thing – and hired the same person to do it. Reddit has taken much longer than most Internet companies to reach this inevitable fork.

Yet the volunteer human moderators Huffman derided are the key to Reddit’s success; they set the tone in each subreddit community. Reddit’s topic-centered design means much more interaction with strangers than the person-centered design of blogs and 2010-era social media, but it also allows people with niche interests to find both experts and each other. That fact plus human curation means that lately many add “reddit” to search terms in order to get better results. Reddit users’ loss is therefore also our loss as we try to cope with t1he enshittification of the most monopolistic Internet services.

Its board still doesn’t have to care.

None of this is hopeful. Even if redditors win this round and find some compromise to save their favorite apps, once the IPO is past, any power they have will be gone.

“On the Internet your home will always leave you,” someone observed on Twitter a couple of years ago. I fear that moment is now coming for Reddit. Next time, build your community in a home you can own.

Illustration: Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman speaking at the Oxford Union in 2019.

Breaking badly

This week, the Online Safety Bill reached the House of Lords, which will consider 300 amendments. There are lots of problems with this bill, but the one that continues to have the most campaigning focus is the age-old threat to require access to end-to-end encrypted messaging services.

At his blog, security consultant Alec Muffett predicts the bill will fail in implementation if it passes. For one thing, he cites the argument made by Richard Allan, Baron of Hallam that the UK government wants the power to order decryption but will likely only ever use it as a threat to force the technology companies to provide other useful data. Meanwhile, the technology companies have pushed back with an open letter saying they will withdraw their encrypted products from the UK market rather than weaken them.

In addition, Muffett believes the legally required secrecy when a service provider is issued with a Technical Capability Notice to provide access to communications, which was devised for the legacy telecommunications world, is impossible in today’s world of computers and smartphones. Secrecy is no longer possible, given the many researchers and hackers who make it their job to study changes to apps, and who would surely notice and publicize new decryption capabilities. The government will be left with the choice of alienating the public or failing to deliver its stated objectives.

At Computer Weekly, Bill Goodwin points out that undermining encryption will affect anyone communicating with anyone in Britain, including the Ukrainian military communicating with the UK’s Ministry of Defence.

Meanwhile, this week Ed Caesar reports at The New Yorker on law enforcement’s successful efforts to penetrate communications networks protected by Encrochat and Sky ECC. It’s a reminder that there are other choices besides opening up an entire nation’s communications to attack.

***

This week also saw the disappointing damp-squib settlement of the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Disappointing, because it leaves Fox and its hosts free to go on wreaking daily havoc across America by selling their audience rage-enhanced lies without even an apology. The payment that Fox has agreed to – $787 million – sounds like a lot, but a) the company can afford it given the size of its cash pile, and b) most of it will likely be covered by insurance.

If Fox’s major source of revenues were advertising, these defamation cases – still to come is a similar case brought by Smartmatic – might make their mark by alienating advertisers, as has been happening with Twitter. But it’s not; instead, Fox is supported by the fees cable companies pay to carry the channel. Even subscribers who never watch it are paying monthly for Fox News to go on fomenting discord and spreading disinformation. And Fox is seeking a raise to $3 per subscriber, which would mean more than $1,8 billion a year just from affiliate revenue.

All of that insulates the company from boycotts, alienated advertisers, and even the next tranche of lawsuits. The only feedback loop in play is ratings – and Fox News remains the most-watched basic cable network.

This system could not be more broken.

***

Meanwhile, an era is ending: Netflix will mail out its last rental DVD in September. As Chris Stokel-Walker writes at Wired, the result will be to shrink the range of content available by tens of thousands of titles because the streaming library is a fraction of the size of the rental library.

This reality seems backwards. Surely streaming services ought to have the most complete libraries. But licensing and lockups mean that Netflix can only host for streaming what content owners decree it may, whereas with the mail rental service once Netflix had paid the commercial rental rate to buy the DVD it could stay in the catalogue until the disk wore out.

The upshot is yet another data point that makes pirate services more attractive: no ads, easy access to the widest range of content, and no licensing deals to get in the way.

***

In all the professions people have been suggesting are threatened by large language model-based text generation – journalism, in particular – no one to date has listed fraudulent spiritualist mediums. And yet…

The family of Michael Schumacher is preparing legal action against the German weekly Die Aktuelle for publishing an interview with the seven-time Formula 1 champion. Schumacher has been out of the public eye since suffering a brain injury while skiing in 2013. The “interview” is wholly fictitious, the quotes created by prompting an “AI” chat bot.

Given my history as a skeptic, my instinctive reaction was to flash on articles in which mediums produced supposed quotes from dead people, all of which tended to be anodyne representations bereft of personality. Dressing this up in the trappings of “AI” makes such fakery no less reprehensible.

An article in the Washington Post examines Google’s C4 data set scraped from 15 million websites and used to train several of the highest profile large language models. The Post has provided a search engine, which tells us that my own pelicancrossing.net, which was first set up in 1996, has contributed 160,000 words or phrases (“tokens”), or 0.0001% of the total. The obvious implication is that LLM-generated fake interviews with famous people can draw on things they’ve actually said in the past, mixing falsity and truth into a wasteland that will be difficult to parse.

Illustrations: The House of Lords in 2011 (via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Twitter.

Gap year

What do Internet users want?

First, they want meaningful access. They want usability. They want not to be scammed, manipulated, lied to, exploited, or cheated.

It’s unlikely that any of the ongoing debates in either the US or UK will deliver any of those.

First and foremost, this week concluded two frustrating years in which the US Senate failed to confirm the appointment of Public Knowledge co-founder and EFF board member Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission. In her withdrawal statement, Sohn blamed a smear campaign by “legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought-and-paid-for surrogates, and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets”.

Whether you agree or not, the result remains that for the last two years and for the foreseeable future the FCC will remain deadlocked and problems such as the US’s lack of competition and patchy broadband provision will remain unsolved.

Meanwhile, US politicians continue obsessing about whether and how to abort-retry-fail Section 230, that pesky 26-word law that relieves Internet hosts of liability for third-party content. This week it was the turn of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In its hearing, the Internet Society’s Andrew Sullivan stood out for trying to get across to lawmakers that S230 wasn’t – couldn’t have been – intended as protectionism for the technology giants because they did not exist when the law was passed. It’s fair to say that S230 helped allow the growth of *some* Internet companies – those that host user-generated content. That means all the social media sites as well as web boards and blogs and Google’s search engine and Amazon’s reviews, but neither Apple nor Netflix makes its living that way. Attacking the technology giants is a popular pasttime just now, but throwing out S230 without due attention to the unexpected collateral damage will just make them bigger.

Also on the US political mind is a proposed ban on TikTok. It’s hard to think of a move that would more quickly alienate young people. Plus, it fails to get at the root problem. If the fear is that TikTok gathers data on Americans and sends it home to China for use in designing manipulative programs…well, why single out TikTok when it lives in a forest of US companies doing the same kind of thing? As Karl Bode writes at TechDirt, if you really want to mitigate that threat, rein in the whole forest. Otherwise, if China really wants that data it can buy it on the open market.

Meanwhile, in the UK, as noted last week, opposition continues to increase to the clauses in the Online Safety bill proposing to undermine end-to-end encryption by requiring platforms to proactively scan private messages. This week, WhatsApp said it would withdraw its app from the UK rather than comply. However important the UK market is, it can’t possibly be big enough for Meta to risk fines of 4% of global revenues and criminal sanctions for executives. The really dumb thing is that everyone within the government uses WhatsApp because of its convenience and security, and we all know it. Or do they think they’ll have special access denied the rest of the population?

Also in the UK this week, the Data Protection and Digital Information bill returned to Parliament for its second reading. This is the UK’s post-Brexit attempt to “take control” by revising the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation; it was delayed during Liz Truss’s brief and destructive outing as prime minister. In its statement, the government talks about reducing the burdens on businesses without any apparent recognition that divergence from GDPR is risky for anyone trading internationally and complying with two regimes must inevitably be more expensive than complying with one.

The Open Rights Group and 25 other civil society organizations have written a letter (PDF) laying out their objections, noting that the proposed bill, in line with other recent legislation that weakens civil rights, weakens oversight and corporate accountability, lessens individuals’ rights, and weakens the independence of the Information Commissioner’s Office. “Co-designed with businesses from the start” is how the government describes the bill. But data protection law was not supposed to be designed for business – or, as Peter Geoghegan says at the London Review of Books, to aid SLAPP suits; it is supposed to protect our human rights in the face of state and corporate power. As the cryptography pioneer Whit Diffie said in 2019, “The problem isn’t privacy; it’s corporate malfeasance.”

The most depressing thing about all of these discussions is that the public interest is the loser in all of them. It makes no sense to focus on TikTok when US companies are just as aggressive in exploiting users’ data. It makes no sense to focus solely on the technology giants when the point of S230 was to protect small businesses, non-profits, and hobbyists. And it makes no sense to undermine the security afforded by end-to-end encryption when it’s essential for protecting the vulnerable people the Online Safety bill is supposed to help. In a survey, EDRi finds that compromising secure messaging is highly unpopular with young people, who clearly understand the risks to political activism and gender identity exploration.

One of the most disturbing aspects of our politics in this century so far is the widening gap between what people want, need, and know and the things politicians obsess about. We’re seeing this reflected in Internet policy, and it’s not helpful.

Illustrations: Andrew Sullivan, president of the Internet Society, testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A world of lawsuits

In the US this week the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases centered on Section 230, the US law that shields online platforms from liability for third-party content. In Paris, UNESCO convened Internet for Trust to bring together governments and civil society to contemplate global solutions to the persistent problems of Internet regulation. And in the business of cyberspace, in what looks like desperation to stay afloat Twitter began barring non-paying users (that is, the 99.8% of its user base that *doesn’t* subscribe to Twitter Blue) from using two-factor authentication via SMS and Meta announced plans for a Twitter Blue-like subscription service for its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms.

In other words, the above policy discussions are happening exactly at the moment when, for the first time in nearly two decades, two of the platforms whose influence everyone is most worried about may be beginning to implode. Twitter’s issues are well-known. Meta’s revenues are big enough that there’s a long way for them to fall…but the company is spending large fortunes on developing the Metaverse, which no one may want, and watching its ad sales shrink and data protection fines rise.

The SCOTUS hearings – Gonzalez v. Google, experts’ live blog, Twitter v. Taamneh – have been widely covered in detail. In most cases, writers note that trying to discern the court’s eventual ruling from the justices’ questions is about as accurate as reading tea leaves. Nonetheless, Columbia professor Tim Wu predicts that Gonzalez will lose but that Taamneh could be very close.

In Gonzalez, the parents of a 23-year-old student killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris argue that YouTube should be liable for radicalizing individuals via videos found and recommended on its platform. In Taamneh, the family of a Jordanian citizen who died in a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul sued Twitter, Google, and Facebook for failing to control terrorist content on their sites under anti-terrorism laws. A ruling assigning liability in either case could be consequential for S230. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick has an excellent summary of the Gonzalez hearing, as well as a preview of both cases.

Taamneh, on the other hand, asks whether social media sites are “aiding and abetting” terrorism via their recommendations engines under Section 2333 of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996). Under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (2016) any US national who is injured by an act of international terorrism can sue anyone who “aids and abets by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to anyone committing such an act. The case turns on how much Twitter knows about its individual users and what constitutes substantial assistance. There has been some concern, expressed in amicus briefs, that making online intermediaries liable for terrorist content will result in overzealous content moderation. Lawfare has a good summary of the cases and the amicus briefs they’ve attracted.

Contrary to what many people seem to think, while S230 allows content moderation, it’s not a law that disproportionately protects large platforms, which didn’t exist when it was enacted. As Kosseff tells Gizmodo: without liability protection a local newspaper or personal blog could not risk publishing reader comments, and Wikipedia could not function. Justice Elena Kagan has been mocked for saying the justices are “not the nine greatest experts on the Internet”, but she grasped perfectly that undermining S230 could create “a world of lawsuits”.

For the last few years, both Democrats and Republicans have called for S230 reform, but for different reasons. Democrats fret about the proliferation of misinformation; Republicans complain that they (“conservative voices”) are being censored. The global level seen at the UNESCO event took a broader view in trying to draft a framework for self-regulation. While it wouldn’t be binding, there’s some value in having an multi-stakeholder-agreed standard against which individual governmental proposals can be evaluated. One of the big gaps in the UK’s Online Safety bill;, for example, is the failure to tackle misinformation or disinformation campaigns. Neither reforming S230 nor a framework for self-regulation will solve that problem either: over the last few years too much of the most widely-disseminated disinformation has been posted from official accounts belonging to world leaders.

One interesting aspect is how many new types of “content” have been created since S230’s passage in 1996, when the dominant web analogy was print publishing. It’s not just recommendation algorithms; are “likes” third-party content? Are the thumbnails YouTube’s algorithm selects to show each visitor on its front page to entice viewers presentation or publishing?

In his biography of S230, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, Jeff Kosseff notes that although similar provisions exist in other legislation across the world, S230 is unique in that only America privileges freedom of speech to such an extreme extent. Most other countries aim for more of a balance between freedom of expression and privacy. In 1997, it was easy to believe that S230 enabled the Internet to export the US’s First Amendment around the world like a stowaway. Today, it seems more like the first answer to an eternally-recurring debate. Despite its problems, like democracy itself, it may continue to be the least-worst option.

Illustrations: US senator and S230 co-author Ron Wyden (D-OR) in 2011 (by JS Lasica via Wikimedia.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an archive of earlier columns backj to 2001. Follow on Mastodon or Twitter.

Esquivalience

The science fiction author Charles Stross had a moment of excitement on Mastodon this week: WRITER CHALLENGE!.

Stross challenged writers to use the word “esquivalience” in their work. The basic idea: turn this Pinocchio word into a “real” word.

Esquivalience is the linguistic equivalent of a man-made lake. The creator, editor Christine Lindberg, invented it for the 2001 edition of the New American Oxford Dictionary and defined it as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities; the shirking of duties”. It was a trap to catch anyone republishing the dictionary rather than developing their own (a job I have actually done). This is a common tactic for protecting large compilations where it’s hard to prove copying – fake streets are added to maps, for example, and the people who rent out mailing lists add ringers whose use will alert them if the list is used outside the bounds of the contractual agreement.

There is, however, something peculiarly distasteful about fake entries in supposedly authoritative dictionaries, even though I agree with Lindberg that “esquivalience” is a pretty useful addition to the language. It’s perfect – perhaps in the obvious adjectival form “esquivalient” – for numerous contemporary politicians, though here be dragons: “willful” risks libel actions.

Probably most writers have wanted to make up words, and many have, from playwright and drama critic George S. Kaufman, often credited for coining, among other things, “underwhelmed”, to Anthony Burgess, who invented an entire futurist street language for A Clockwork Orange. Some have gone so far as to create enough words to publish dictionaries – such as the humorist Gelett Burgess, whose Burgess Unabridged (free ebook!) compiles “words you’ve always needed”. From that collection, I have always been particularly fond of Burgess’s “wox”, defined as “a state of placid enjoyment; sluggish satisfaction”. It seems particularly apt in the hours immediately following Thanksgiving dinner.

In these cases, though, the context lets you know the language is made up. The dictionary is supposed to be authoritative, admitting words only after they are well-established. The presence of fake words feels damaging in a way that a fake place on a map doesn’t. It’s comparatively easy to check whether a place exists by going there, but at some point down the echoing corridors of time *every* word was used for the first time. Pinpointing exactly when is hard unless someone ‘fesses up. I don’t like the idea that my dictionary is lying to me. Better if NOAD had planted two fake words and had them recursively point at each other for their definitions.

I had been avoiding the ChatGPT hoopla, but it seemed plausible to ask it: Is “esquivalience” a real word?” Its response started well enough: “‘Esquivalience’ is not recognized as a standard word in the English language. It is a made-up word…” And then cuckoo land arrived: “…that was created by a writer named Adam Jacot de Boinod for his book “The Meaning of Tingo”.” Pause to research. The book in question was written in 2006. The word “esquivalience” does not, from a quick text search, appear in it. Huh? I went on to suggest Christine Lindberg’s name to ChatGPT, and after a digression attributing the word to the singer-songwriter Christine Lavin, it appeared to find references to Lindberg’s “claim” in its corpus of data. But, it continued to warn, in every response, “it is still not recognized as a standard word in the English language”. It’s a bot. It’s not being stern. It doesn’t know what it’s saying. Getting it to agree on Christine Lindberg as the original source isn’t winning the argument. It’s just giving it a different prompt.

I ask if it has ever encountered the word “wox”. “As an AI language model, I have certainly come across the word ‘wox’.” A human reads lightly insulted pride into that. Resist. It’s a bot. It has no pride. The bot went on to speculate on possible origins (“it may be a neologism…”). I ask if it’s heard of Gelett Burgess. Oh, yes, followed by a short biography. Then, when told Burgess invented “wox”: “Gelett Burgess did indeed invent the word…” and goes on to cite the correct book…but then continues that Burgess defined it as “to make fun of, to poke fun at” which is absolutely not what Burgess says, and I know this because I have the original 1914 book right here, and the definition I cited above is right there on p112. The bot does “apologize” every time you point out a mistake, though.

This isn’t much of a sample, but based on it, I find ChatGPT quite alarming as an extraordinarily efficient way of undermining factual knowledge. The responses sound authoritative, but every point must be fact-checked. It could not be worse-suited for today’s world, where everyone wants fast answers. Coupled with search, it turns the algorithms that give us answers into even more obscure and less trustworthy black boxes. Wikipedia has many flaws, but its single biggest strength is its sourcing and curation; how every page has been changed and shaped over the years is open for inspection.

So when ChatGPT went on to say that Gelett Burgess is widely credited with coining the term “blurb”, Wikipedia is where I turned. Wikipedia agrees (asked, ChatGPT cites the Oxford English Dictionary). Burgess FTW.

Illustrations: Gelett Burgess’s 1914 Burgess Unabridged, a dictionary of made-up words.

Inappt

Recently, it took a flatwoven wool rug cmore than two weeks to travel from Luton, Bedfordshire to southwest London. The rug’s source – an Etsy seller – and I sent back and forth dozens of messages. It would be there tomorrow. Oh, no, the courier now says Wednesday. Um, Friday. Er, next week. I can send you a different rug, if you want to choose one. No.

In the end, the rug arrived into my life. I don’t dare decide it’s the wrong color.

I would dismiss this as a one-off aberration, except that a few weeks ago the intended recipient of a parcel sent at the beginning of November casually mentioned they had never received it. Upon chasing, the courier company replied: “Despite an extensive investigation, we have not been able to locate your parcel.”

I would dismiss those as a two-off aberration except that late last year the post office tracking on yet another item went on showing it stuck in some unidentifiable depot somewhere for two weeks. Eventually, I applied brain and logic and went down to the nearest delivery office and there it was, waiting for me to pay the customs fee specified on the card I never received. It was only a few days away from being sent back.

And I would dismiss those as a three-off aberration except that two weeks ago I was notified to expect a package from a company whose name I didn’t recognize between 7pm and 9pm. I therefore felt perfectly safe to go into the room furthest from the front door, the kitchen, and wash some dishes at 5:30. Nope. They delivered at 5:48, I didn’t hear them, and I had a hard time figuring out whom to contact to persuade them to redeliver.

The point about all this is not to yell at random couriers to get off my lawn but to note that at least this part of the app-based economy has stopped delivering the results it promised. Less than ten years since these companies set out to disrupt delivery services by providing lower prices, accurate information, on-time deliveries, and constant tracking, we’re back to waiting at home for unspecified numbers of hours wondering if they’re going to show and struggling to trace lost packages. Only this time, there’s no customer service, working conditions and pay are much worse for drivers and delivery folk, and the closure of many local outlets has left us all far more dependent on them.

***

Also falling over this week, as widely reported (because: journalists), was Twitter, which for a time on Wednesday barred posting new tweets unless they were posted via the kind of scheduling software that the site is limiting). Many of us have been expecting outages ever since November, when Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic and Chris Stokel-Walker at MIT Technology Review interviewed Twitter engineers past and present. All of them warned that the many staff cuts and shrinking budgets have left the service undersupplied with people who can keep the site running and that outages of increasing impact should be expected.

Nonetheless, the “Apocalypse, Now!” reporting that ensued was about as sensible as the reporting earlier in the week that the Fediverse was failing to keep the Tweeters who flooded there beginning in November. In response, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/08/lazy-reporters-claiming-fediverse-is-slumping-despite-massive-increase-in-usage/ Mike Masnick noted at TechDirt how silly this was. Because: 1) There’s a lot more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon, which is all these reporters looked at; 2) even then, Mastodon had lost a little from its peak but was still vastly more active than before November; 3) it’s hard for people to change their habits, and they will revert to what’s familiar if they don’t see a reason why they can’t; and 4) it’s still early days. So, meh.

However, Zeynep Tufekci reminds that Twitter’s outage is entertainment only for the privileged; for those trying to coordinate rescue and aid efforts for Turkey, Twitter is an essential tool.

***

While we’re sniping at the failings of current journalism, it appears that yet another technology has been overhyped: DoNotPay, “the world’s first robot lawyer”, the bot written by a British university student that has supposedly been helping folks successfully contest traffic tickets. Masnick (again) and Kathryn Tewson have been covering the story for TechDirt. Tewson, a paralegal, has taken advantage of the fact that cities publish their parking ticket data in order to study DoNotPay’s claims in detail.

TechDirt almost ran a skeptical article about the service in 2017. Suffice to say that now Masnick concludes, “I wish that DoNotPay actually could do much of what it claims to do. It sounds like it could be a really useful service…”

***

The pile-up of this sort of thing – apps that disrupt and then degrade service, technology that’s overhyped (see also self-driving cars), flat-out fraud (see cryptocurrencies), breathless media reporting of nothing much – is probably why I have been unable to raise any excitement over the wow-du-jour, ChatGPT. It seems obvious that of course it can’t read, and can’t understand anything it’s typing, and that sober assessment of what it might be good for is some way off. In the New Yorker, Ted Chiang puts it in its place: think of it as a blurred JPEG. Sounds about right.

Illustrations: Drunk parrot (taken by Simon Bisson).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard – or follow on Mastodon or Twitter.

Disequilibrium

“Things like [the Net[ tend to be self-balancing,” (then) IBM security engineer David Chess tells Andrew Leonard at the end of his 1997 book Bots: The Origin of New Spccies. “If some behavior gets so out of control that it really impacts the community, the community responds with whatever it takes to get back to an acceptable equilibrium. Organic systems are like that.”

When Leonard was writing, Usenet was the largest social medium. Quake was the latest hot video game, and text-only multi-player games were still mainstream. CompuServe and AOL were competing to be the biggest commercial information service. In pocket computers, the Palm Pilot was a year old and selling by the million. And: everyone still used modems; broadband trials were two years away.

It was also a period of what Leonard calls “decentralized anarchy”: that is, the web was new and open (and IRC and Usenet were old and open), and it was reasonable to predict that bots would be the newest wave of personal empowerment.

Here in 2023, we’ve spent the last ten years complaining about the increasing centralization of the web, and although bots are in fact all around us, no service provides the kind of tools that would allow the technologically limited to write them and dispatch them to do our bidding. In fact, on the corporately-owned web, bots only exist if some large company agrees they may. Yesterday, Twitter decided it doesn’t agree to their existence any more, at least not for free; as of February 9 developers must pay for access to Twitter’s application programming interface, which was free until now. Pricing is yet to be announced.

APIs are gateways through which computer programs can interoperate. Twitter’s APIs allow developers to build apps that let users analyze their social graph, block abuse, manage ad campaigns, log in to other sites across the web, and, lately, help you find and connect with the people in your Twitter list who are also on Mastodon; they also enable researchers to study online behavior and make possible apps that roll threads into a correctly ordered single page and many more, as Jess Wetherbed explains at The Verge. Many of these uses are not revenue-generating and not intended to be; most will likely shut down. It will be a fascinating chance to discover what bots have actually been doing for us on the service. Their absence will expose Twitter’s bare bones.

However, as Charles Arthur writes at his Social Warming Substack, the move won’t deter the *other* kind of bots – that is, the ones people complain about: paid influencers, scammers, automated accounts, and so on, which can’t be killed at scale and aren’t using the API.

This all follows Twitter’s move two weeks ago to block third-party clients without notice. Granted, Twitter needs money: its change of ownership loaded its balance sheet with debt, its ad revenues have reportedly plummeted, and its efforts to find new revenue streams are not going well. If fears of Twitter’s demise and the return of users previously banned for bad behavior weren’t enough to send users scrambling to other services, this new move, as Mike Masnick quips at TechDirt, seems perfectly designed to send even more users and developers to Mastodon, where openness is a founding principle and therefore where years of effort can’t be undone in a second by owner decree.

The really interesting question is not so much whether Twitter can survive as a closed-garden paywalled channel, which seems to be its direction of travel, but whether its enclosure represents the kind of disruption that Chess was talking about: one that becomes an inflection point. Earlier attempts to swim against the tide of centralization represented by Facebook and the rest of Web 2.0, such as the 2010-founded Diaspora, have never really caught fire.

It’s tempting to make tennis analogies: often, when a new champion becomes dominant a contributing factor is nerves or self-destruction on the part of the top players they have to beat. And right now there’s Twitter destroying its assets to suit the whims of a despotic owner, Facebook panic-spending to try to secure itself a future with technology it hopes will restore the company’s youthful glow, the ad market that supports all these companies shrinking, and governments setting privacy and antitrust laws to stun.

It’s also true that users are different now. The teens who lied about their ages to get onto Facebook in 2010 are in their mid-20s. An increasing number of the 40-something parents of today’s teens have had broadband Internet access their entire adult lives. The users exploding into the combination of smart phones and social media in 2010 needed much more help than they do today, help that slick user design provided. But part of that promise was also keeping users safe – and there the social media companies have failed in all directions and at all scales.

If this really is the moment where the Internet reverts to decentralized anarchy and rediscovers the joys of connecting without the data collection, intrusive advertising, and manipulation, governments will seek to reimpose control. And the laws to help them – for example, Britain’s Online Safety bill – are close to passage. This will be a rough ride.

Illustrations: The Twitter bird flying upside down.