Toward a Minor Tech:RRA

“The number one threat to Facebook is not another scaled social network, it is the fracturing of information / death by a thousand small vertical apps which are loosely integrated together.”

Former Vice President of Product Sam Lessin in e-mail correspondence with Mark Zuckerberg oct 2012 (Note by Damian Collins MP, Chair of the DCMS Committee, and Selected Documents Ordered from Six4Three, 2018, p. 31)

While a decade old, the above quote illustrates what Facebook, and arguably Big Tech altogether, saw as one of the core threats to the now dominant platform model. This threat still holds true to this day: real competition for platforms will not come from another platform. That is because these can be bought (ref twitter, mergers). The pattern of large technology corporations purchasing each potential future competitor has become so evident that it spawned new regulatory fervor on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the European Union in 2019 (Directorate-General for Communication (European Commission) & Leyen, 2019) and the U.S. Federal Government in 2020 (Paul, 2021) moved towards comprehensive regulation of Big Tech platforms. Among other things they relied on interoperability as a tool to tackle platform power. The results of these efforts are still in the air in the case of the US Federal Trade Commission. In the case of the EU’s DMA/DSA legislative package, as a consequence of an intense lobbying effort, the interoperability requirements have been softened considerably (Brown, 2022). The softening of the interoperability requirements however go to show, that the threat is interoperability poses to the platform is real. And that the true alternative to the platform comes from networks of loosely integrated applications that know no single owner, rather than from another platform.

The dominant platforms become profitable because of their tendency to silo everything in to their own structure and expand that structure to hyper-scale levels. In turn, technology startups become lucrative ventures by focusing on scalability as a way to first expand rapidly in terms of user base and market share. Afterwards, they find an ‘exit’ for their investors by being bought by one of the larger platforms. As a consequence of this scalability, a business’ ability “to expand without changing the nature of what it does”(Tsing, 2012, p. 8) the focus must remain singular. This singular focus deliberately leaves out of sight, or out of the books, that which complicates the picture and threatens that scalability. What Tsing calls scalability's ruins, and economists call negative externalities(“Externalities,” 2010), become the consequences of scalability that are for others to deal with. In the case of social platforms, for example, many issues around content moderation are a consequence of scale (“Three Imperfect Solutions To The Problem Of Scale,” 2018), singular universal policies governing culturally heterogeneous userships and the inherent contradiction between extreme profit and sociality. Outside of business, Tsing argues that scalability and growth have their limits as research designs as well, because scalability fails to account for the local and diverse in favor of the universal and generalizable. James C. Scott argues that scalable projects make the world legible for institutions of governance, by nature of creating uniformity, countability and simplicity in the place where diversity, mingled-ness and complexity once existed. At the same time, universal scalable designs can be applied regardless of context, which is why they are applicable (in the literal sense) but also why they often fail their purpose (Scott, 2020). Both Scott and Tsing settle on the plantation as prime example of a technology of scalability and legibility, which orders the otherwise non-scalable organic world of interdependent ecosystems. Despite claims by platforms to the contrary, platforms are not best described as digital ecosystems, but rather as digital plantations (Farell, 2022).

As the negative externalities of scaled platforms become more evident, it is not surprising to find an interest in non-scalability or other undoings of scale, such as focusing on the small rather than the large within computational systems. Within HCI literature the notion of scale in computing is problematized: “the taken-for-granted relationship between success and size suggests that making more is what counts. But what about making change, making meaning, or making sense?” (Larsen-Ledet et al., 2022). Rather than focusing on scalability and growth, as criteria to strive for research outcomes, they suggest other metaphors such as proliferation as it makes one attentive to “how local initiatives develop, morph and/or multiply over time, how ideas find their way to new contexts and how digital networks might support growth in learning.” (Lampinen et al., 2022)

Yet, I wonder if we are not too quick to dismiss scalability as a transformative property for progressive ends. In the second half of 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, a platform many (mistakenly) held as a digital public square became yet another ruin of scalability. In response, millions looked to another social network called Mastodon, which is based on ideas that F/LOSS activists and web developers have been working on for decades. These activists attempt to counter platformization from a technical perspective by pursuing network decentralization through open standards (Halpin, 2019), so that the platform is not a singular entity but the network itself.

Following that logic, Mastodon is not a singular entity but part of a network of thousands of small and loosely integrated social applications known as the Fediverse. This “federated universe”, like the web, is not run by a single entity. In the months after Musk’s purchase of Twitter it has shown itself as a scalable system, but one that scales differently. Thousands of new small and self-sovereign social networks joined this federated universe. Thus, rather than scaling a single platform vertically, the process saw a network scaling horizontally (Zulli et al., 2020). The majority of this network is run on non-extractivist grounds as volunteer or cooperative efforts.

One of the consequences (unforeseen by the developers) is that this scalability design preserved and enhanced the diversity of each of the constituent sites, allowing each to formulate and express their mores. This way of scaling differently, fundamentally challenges the ways content moderation happens on platforms, it no longer is a problem of scale that needs an imperfect solution, but rather the form and shape of online sociality itself. In this network, through content moderation subsidiarity (Rozenshtein, 2022) culturally diverse groups can make content moderation decisions on the level of their community where it is most relevant. Rather than a dynamic of platformization and deplatformization, this allows for culturally distinct and incompatible groups to inhabit the same space and, possibly, co-exist in a state of agonistic pluralism (Mansoux & Roscam Abbing, 2020)

As someone who co-administers one of those small social networks in the federated universe, the months during and after Musk’s takeover made the necessity of scalability as a design property of software acutely felt. Our little space had to grow substantially within a short period of time. It scaled not for growth and profit’s sake, but to be able to invite friends in to social network where their sociality is not a surplus value to be extracted by corporations. Welcoming many in a time of need depended on the software’s scalability and, to paraphrase Tsing, its property to expand without changing the nature of what the software does. In the end, our small networked doubled in size, until we reached the limits what was desirable and sustainable socially. Through a different scalability, but scalability nonetheless, millions managed to explore true alternatives to the platform model by joining a network of thousands of small apps, loosely integrated together. Through scalability, the ideas and the model are starting to proliferate beyond the originary technical communities after more than a decade of being around. As a consequence, the model was covered in the mainstream press which allowed others to learn that other ways are possible. While I remain sympathetic to critiques of scalability, Tsing’s observation that both good and bad things can be non-scalable (Tsing, 2012, p. 9) reminds me the might go for scalability and one should remain attentive to the use of scalable designs for progressive ends. If we are to build fairer systems that “mirror the world we want to see” and build actual prefigurative counter-powers (Keyes et al., 2019) to the computational status-quo of the platform, we need scalability. Through it, we can include others in alternative models. Ignoring or rejecting it as a design property, means we risk others to only know the predatory inclusion (McMillan Cottom, 2020) of platforms.

References

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Directorate-General for Communication (European Commission), & Leyen, U. von der. (2019). A Union that strives for more: My agenda for Europe : political guidelines for the next European Commission 2019 2024. Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2775/018127

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Farell, M. (2022, December 8). Your platform is not an ecosystem. Crooked Timber. https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/

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Lampinen, A., Light, A., Rossitto, C., Fedosov, A., Bassetti, C., Bernat, A., Travlou, P., & Avram, G. (2022). Processes of Proliferation: Impact Beyond Scaling in Sharing and Collaborative Economies. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(GROUP), 41:1-41:22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3492860

Larsen-Ledet, I., Light, A., Lampinen, A., Saad-Sulonen, J., Berns, K., Khojasteh, N., & Rossitto, C. (2022). (Un) scaling computing. Interactions, 29(5), 72–77. https://doi.org/10.1145/3554926

Mansoux, A., & Roscam Abbing, R. (2020). Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS. In K. Gansing & I. Luchs (Eds.), The Eternal Network: The Ends and Becomings of Network Culture (pp. 124–140). Institute for Network Cultures and Transmediale. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-55221

McMillan Cottom, T. (2020). Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the Digital Society. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 6(4), 441–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220949473

Note by Damian Collins MP, Chair of the DCMS Committee, and selected documents ordered from Six4Three (Exhibit 38 / FB-01389033; p. 250). (2018). https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf

Paul, K. (2021, August 15). ‘They should be worried’: Will Lina Khan take down big tech? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/14/lina-khan-big-tech-ftc-antitrust

Rozenshtein, A. Z. (2022). Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 4213674). https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4213674

Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.

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Tsing, A. L. (2012). On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales. Common Knowledge, 18(3), 505–524.

Zulli, D., Liu, M., & Gehl, R. (2020). Rethinking the “social” in “social media”: Insights into topology, abstraction, and scale on the Mastodon social network. New Media & Society, 22(7), 1188–1205. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912533