If you are interested in hosting this workshop, you are in the right place!
This kit has everything you need to guide a group of people into the depths of the Internet, namely, to be a weaver (the term is inspired from Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web).
All the following information and materials worked well in the past and they reflect a very strong position. Nevertheless, you are completely free to change anything as you wish—as long as you respect the CC-BY-SA licence. If you have any questions, critiques, ideas or suggestions, you are more than welcome to contribute, so that we can make this workshop better, together!
If you are lost, you have some suggestions, or you would just like to say hi, please do get in touch!
⚠️ Spoiler alert ⚠️
If you intend to participate in the lab and not to host it, I suggest you not to read further in order to avoid spoiling your experience. Instead, you can learn more in the homepage, or you can invite me (Tommi, the creator) to host the workshop.
The workshop is flexible and continuously changingby design because it’s modular!
I chose this structure to adapt the workshop to the most diverse publics and situations. As doing all the modules would probably result in a long, overwhelming, and confusing workshop, choose (and rearrange) the modules based on who is participating and the topics you want to focus on.
🤔 Tracks
Modules are colour-labelled according to their general theme.
Core track: the very essence of this workshop.
Main track: complementary to the core track.
History track: the history of the Internet. Note: I am absolutely aware that the history narrated is US-centric, and dominated by male characters. This is because actually the origins of the mainstream Internet do trace back to those roots. Nevertheless, I am open and very interested in studying and sharing decolonial, transfeminist, queer, and critical perspectives. Please do share any critical literature about this!
Environment track: representations and reflections concerning the environmental impact of centralized vs. decentralized networks.
📜 The Internet’s Scroll
The Internet’s Scroll is a collection quotes, pictures and anecdotes from the history of the Internet. Use it to involve the participants in narrating the story interactively.
In practice, the Scroll is a file automatically generated by extracting specific parts of the Weaver kit when you tell your web browser to print this webpage.
🔧 Instructions
Press CTRL/CMD + P or click on the button below to open the printing dialog.
Make sure to print all the pages and enable two-sided printing, because the content is organized and formatted purposefully for this setup. Changing these settings will compromise the impagination!
To get a clean and good looking output, disable Print headers and footers and enable Print backgrounds in the printing settings. If you want to save the file instead of printing it directly, you should see the Save as PDF option somewhere.
The first two pages (therefore the two sides of the first page) are not meant for the host, not to be handed out.
Roll up the remaining pages, one by one, so that the page number is displayed on the outside.
Hand them out to the participants. At every step of the Internet’s story, call out the page number and ask the person who has the page with that number to show/read its content.
🪢 Guide
👋🏼 Introduction
To kick off the workshop, the host and the participants introduce themselves, maybe using some icebreakers to warm up the environment and create a friendly mood.
🤔 Discussion How do we feel about mainstream social media?
Gather everyone’s thoughts and feelings about the current state of mainstream and centralized social media.
Split a whiteboard/poster in two parts: write positive comments on one side, and negative ones on the other.
If needed, the following questions can be helpful to start the debate:
How do you feel about current social media?
What are their effects on your daily life?
How do you believe they influence society?
All arguments are valid! Be them personal or general, facts or impressions, doubts or certainties, take note of the keywords of every point raised.
How do current mainstream centralized social media actually work? This little game transforms the group of participants in a small, simplified centralized network, providing a tangible understanding of what it is and how it behaves.
Constituting the network
The participants stand (or sit) in a circumference. A person (usually the host) stands in the centre, impersonating the social media “platform”. In their hands, they hold the yarn that will be used to establish connections.
The host asks: Who wants to join this new, super cool, super trendy, super popular social network? For the sake of the simulation, let’s assume that many participants want to join.
Every person who signs up to the centralized social network will be handed out a portion of the string from the yarn, but always going back to the person in the middle, so that the only connection among the “members” of the social network is through the centre.
The limits of centralization
To expose the intrinsic problems of centralized networks, enact some common operations that happen on social media. The key of this simulation is to highlight the incredible power held by whoever is in the middle, that is the centralized entity mediating all the exchanges happening within the network. To do so, behave “well” at first, then exploit your power by distorting or creating messages:
Publishing something: one of the participants tells what they want to share in the ear of the host, or they write it on a little piece of paper.
Regular behavior: the host shares the content of the post with everyone, out loud.
Shadow ban: for whatever reason, the host decides not to share the post with some users, demonstrating how they can arbitrarily hide troublesome content from as many timelines as they like.
Direct message: by being the only “messenger” between one user and another, the centralized entity can distort messages.
Advertisements: the centralized entity can produce content itself, if someone pays money to share it with the network. Any content can be shared as an advertisement, and there is no reliable way to know how many people see an ad, and how many ads one person sees.
Censorship: the centralized network has the power of cutting the connection (in this simulation, cutting the string) with any member, leaving them completely isolated.
An effective way to tangibly represent the environmental impact of centralized networks as opposed to decentralized ones is to play with the concept of vertical and horizontal scaling.
Use some kind of weight, for example a book, to physically represent the amount of storage and (computational) resources every user requires to be connected.
The environmental impact of a centralized network
Therefore, for every new user signing up on the centralized network, a new weight/book is added in the arms of the person acting as the server, demonstrating how resource-intensive it is to have a computer connected to the internet running 24/7 for hundreds of millions of people.
The environmental impact of a decentralized network
The load for every new user does not weight on one single point, that is the centralized server, but it spreads across the network. Symbolically, the weight/book for every new user is held by the new users themselves.
🌅 The origins of the Internet
Introduction
Why do social networks work in this way? Why does the control of the Internet is concentrated in the hands of very few monopolistic and centralized companies?
To truly understand what is destroying the Internet and how to make it better, let’s time-travel to its birth, and learn about the principles and the spirit that made it.
The Internet was born out of the strategic military endeavors of the US, stimulated by the Cold War. The security of the national communication infrastructure was among the country’s most pressing concerns. In particular, the primary worry was the lack of coordination capabilities to launch a counterattack after a potential first strike by the USSR.
This challenge brought him to conceive a game-changing communication system based on the fragmentation and decentralization of packages of information, to prevent having a single point of failure. In his A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, Johnny Ryan highlights the essential principles of Baran’s idea:
Baran’s concept had the same centrifugal character that defines the Internet today. At its most basic, … the “centrifugal” approach is to flatten established hierarchies and put power and responsibility at the nodal level so that each node is equal. Baran’s network focused on what he called user to user rather than … centre-to-centre operation.
What was revolutionary was indeed the counter-intuitive effort to disperse and split up information rather than consolidating and securing it within one single communication channel. Therefore, instead of focusing on making the existing system as fail-proof as possible by attempting to physically and theoretically secure a few core and indispensable communication centers, Baran put in question that very structure, and turned it upside down.
Baran’s sketch of a distributed network.
It does not come as a surprise to know that his idea was so brilliant and courageous to be considered too risky. Baran’s invention was projected to cost 60 millions dollars in order to be implemented in 1964, on the opposite, the existing centralized and radio-based communication system was costing 2 billions per year. Despite the blatant economical advantages and the immense technological potential of this system, AT&T, the major US communication company in the US at the time, refused to invest in the project. Such reluctance is not limited to the embryonic internet of the early 70s, but it is rather a common trait of the initial history of the Internet, up until the early 90s.
Licklider and ARPA
The main reason of such diffused skepticism could be easily traced back to the subversive and literally revolutionary vision the early Internet brought forward. In a century thorn by global wars, astonishing and unsettling discoveries, the last thing politics and the market wanted was to start questioning one of the most essential and reliable tools people could count on: the communication system.
Still, once it entered the play field of technological advancement, the Internet showed a potential too great to be dismissed for good. Even before Baran’s theory, already in February 1958 the ARPA (predecessor of the current widely known DARPA) was born. One of its most prominent figures was the psychologist and computer scientist Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, who soon became one of the protagonists of the history of the Internet.
For him too, Ryan frames perfectly his visionary and ambitious plan:
At the core of Licklider’s thinking was an emphasis on collaboration. Licklider posited a future scenario in which a researcher at one research centre could find a useful computer resource over the network from a research centre elsewhere. This, in a world of incompatible machines and jealously guarded computing resources, was far-sighted talk indeed.
As the Internet was kicking off, breeding Licklider’s ambition was not an elitist ensemble of highly trained engineers or capable government contractors, but rather a quite rambling and undefined bunch of Computer Sciences undergraduates from several US universities.
Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web
In 1990, CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee created the Web. His work started from defining HTML, literally the HyperText Markup Language, a formal language that allowed to insert hyperlinks inside any text. Sir Berners-Lee’s fundamental purpose was to create connections outside the mere content explicitly written in a text by linking keywords to other sources, hence creating a potentially infinite network of resources connected to each other.
Nowadays, the concept of link is so diffused we take it from granted. Nevertheless during the last decade of the XIX century it was a curious novelty casting a completely new perspective, and arguably even a new mentality paradigma. Hence, during its first few years, HTML adoption was so deluding that for a long time the only document written in HTML was CERN’s telephone directory. Slowly but steadily, thanks to great commitment and sacrifices by Berners-Lee, the Web community grew to be world wide
In 1994 the early developers of the World Wide Web met for a www wizards’ workshop. Berners-Lee proposed the idea of a consortium to oversee the future direction of the Web. The www Consortium, known as W3C, was formed to promote interoperability and standardization of web technologies.
The spirit of the early Internet seems pretty far from the one we connect to nowadays, doesn’t it?
Many, many factors and variables contributed to its enshittification. In his research, Tommi embarked on the mission to pinpoint the key moment, the initial sparkle that ignited its degeneration: the original sin of the Internet.
In 1993, the National Science Foundation took steps to privatize the operation of the Internet. NSF published a plan for the change in May 1993: ISPs would operate their own networks and gateways would interconnect them. NSF’s own networking activities would be limited to a high-speed research network. By this time, in 1993, the Internet included ten thousand networks. In accordance with the plan, the prohibition on commercial activity on the NSF backbone was rescinded on 1 January 1995. Finally, on 30 April 1995, Merit closed the NSFNET backbone. US-government ownership of the Internet, which had applied since the first two nodes had communicated across ARPANET in 1969, ended. […] The Internet, funded by government since the beginning, would produce a bear market such as Wall Street had never seen.
At the dawn of the second millennium, the world was experiencing an almost unprecedented technological revolution. Guiding this crusade aimed at claiming control over the future of humanity—thanks to the wonders of the Internet—were a sweeping amount of newborn companies, mainly US-based. The thrill born out of an astounding and appealing opportunity of profit drove virtually everyone to bet on this game-changing technology, which was turning out to be the big next thing. Fouled by the incredible innovations technological research gave birth to, investors went all-in to support this trend, which exploded in what has been labeled as the Dot-com bubble.
As history repeats itself, the run for investments at the beginning of the Internet essentially has no difference with the run for gold of the Wild West, the early speculation on oil extraction between the XIX and the XX century, or the cryptocurrencies and Web3 mania: intercepting the faintest opportunity for profit, an economically-driven society such as the current global one makes its best effort to explore and exploit it. I believe that, since its original sin, the Internet showed to be one of such opportunities and, possibly, the greatest—hence, the worst.
Studying the phenomenon of the degeneration of the Internet because of its fagocitation by Capitalism is Shoshana Zuboff, Stanford emeritus professor of Sociology who has been dedicating the last fifteen years completely on unmasking what she named Surveillance Capitalism.
Her work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2018, constitutes a milestone which is the basis of any analysis of the Web of today, proving that it cannot be investigated if not through the lens of Capitalism.
Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.
A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification;
A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history;
The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.
Surveillance capitalism seems inescapable as much as it is troubling. How can we fight it? How do we restore the open and friendly spirit of the early Internet, while still enjoying the fun and resourcefulness of contemporary social networks?
At this point of our journey, we got that the very essence of the technical infrasctructure on which we base our digital communications has a fundamental sociological, political, and economical relevance.
Let’s envision a network where we hold the power…
…let’s knit Our Internet!
Using the same yarn you used for the centralized network simulation, start connecting the participants of the network, one by one, directly. Connect people at the opposites of the circumference, so that the resulting decentralized network is more scenic.
The final network will be showing the essential structure of the true Internet, a network that is built by ourselves, for ourselves.
Guess what? This is not a crazy, idealistic, far-fetched dream, but such a social network exists! Enter the Fediverse.
Since 60 years ago we have the blueprint for the creation of decentralized and open networks. Technically, we have all the tools we need to make this technology the standard, but we saw that power dynamics and greed hindered such development. The steps forward to be taken are first of all political!
The Internet is ours!
Go back to what was written on the poster/whiteboard at the beginning of the workshop.
If we control Our Internet, together we can reimagine social networks that focus on the pros, and commit to limit or even to eliminate the cons.
⁂ The Fediverse
The concept of a federated network of social media instances is a topic so big and complex that is would deserve a whole workshop just by itself. This module, more than any other, requires the host to be familiar with what the Fediverse is, the main challenges concerning it, and the relational dynamics occurring there. Below there are just some little examples that can be brought up, but I discourage you to put too much on the table: do not confuse the participants by explaining them so many things in one session!
Here are a few possible activities in relation to the Fediverse.
Show, don’t tell! Fire up a device and browse the Fediverse. Explain the basics (user handles, instances, boosts, comments…), then let the participants’ pose their questions and, step by step, dive deeper following the flow.
What are the principles of our ideal online community? With the help of the board filled during the introduction, make people write the code of conduct of their ideal Fediverse instance. Compare it with existing ones.
Managing relationships among users and among instances. Potentially using the yarn again, create subgroups of people and connect everyone as in Baran’s illustration of a decentralized network (B).
Blocking another instance or another user
Migrating to another instance
Closing an instance
Moderating a post
Alt-texts and content warnings
💡 Collect feedback!
Feedback from participants is crucial to the success of this workshop, especially because it is a perpetual work in progress.
Kindly ask the participants to visit ournet.rocks/feedback and write their feedback there. If they need time to think about it, they can visit open the link and fill out the form whenever they want.
