Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences!

This repository hosts Tommi’s bachelor’s thesis, written between February and June 2023.

Note: unfortunately, I was not considerate enough to keep track of my work through git progressively. This repository has been created later, in April 2024. Hence, the commits up to that date do not reflect the actual moment when the content was created. Hopefully, I will be able to create commits step by step in the future.

What’s inside

• 👾 Markdown and LaTeX source files
• 📚 Bibliography
• 📊 Figures
• 📽️ Presentations often linked to Knitting Our Internet
• 🏷️ YAML metadata for Pandoc parsing
• 🖋️ Tim Berners-Lee’s autograph of the front page (yes, I know! 😍)

Workshop: Knitting Our Internet

Since I feel very strongly about the topics of this thesis, I have been thinking hard of ways to inform and involve people. Out of this effort, a workshop came out, and I am thrilled to ne hosting it in many amazing occasions, with diverse crowds of various ages.

The workshop is called Knitting Our Internet.

License

All of the original content inside this repository (therefore excluding the figures and the quotes) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Feedback and corrections

I am keen to discuss about anything related to this thesis! Get in touch if you’d like!

I wrote my thesis as a young undergraduate student. Even if it is highly unlikely, there might be information that is partly or even fully incorrect. I apologise for this, and I invite you to contact me if you spot any kind of mistake!

Obsolescence

The text of the thesis is not being updated. Please, be aware that there might be information that becomes incorrect or wrong because of obsolescence.

Build process

I am technically goofy (actually, not only technically) to say the least, and the build process for this thesis is fragmented and messy. I know the right way to parse the final PDF including citations, markup, frontispiece, etc. would be to use a Makefile. I tried. I failed miserably. Therefore, below are the admittedly weird but effective build steps to get to the final thesis in PDF format.

1. Markdown → HTML conversion, using Pandoc:

   pandoc -s 'Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.md' --wrap=none --resource-path="$PWD" --metadata-file='Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.yml' -C -o 'Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.html'

2. HTML → LaTeX conversion, using Pandoc:

   pandoc -s 'Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.html' --wrap=none --resource-path="$PWD" --metadata-file='Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.yml' -C -o 'Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.tex'

3. Build the final .tex file using pdflatex:

   pdflatex 'Computer Sciences Are Social Sciences.tex'

Please, refer to my technical notes to try to understand more (good luck with that).

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. An Historical Account
   1. Paul Baran’s centrifugal network
   2. Licklider and ARPA
   3. The Web
   4. The Internet’s original sin
3. The spread of Surveillance Capitalism
   1. The Unprecedented
   2. Economy and technology: an inseparable duo
   3. The essence of technology
4. Case study: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
   1. The political context: Hong Kong’s strive for democracy
   2. Puppeting emotions: social media as a political actor
   3. Becoming water: protests’ decentralization and repression
   4. An interpretation in terms Hannah Arendt’s philosophy
5. Where the current Internet fails
   1. Algorithms as Black-Boxes
   2. Proprietary software
   3. Surveillance Capitalism, once again
   4. The case of Truth Social
   5. Turning the origins upside down
6. A better Internet
   1. The method: Philosophy in Science
   2. Using technology to pursue utopias
   3. Adversarial Interoperability
   4. Algorithmic Sovereignty
   5. Decentralized social media: the Fediverse
7. Conclusion
8. Thank you
9. References