Q. Finally, why have you criticised the formula ‘to speak truth to power,’ which was used by the late Edward Said to describe the role of intellectuals?
A. That’s actually a Quaker slogan, and I like the Quakers and I do a lot of things with them, but I don’t agree with the slogan. First of all, you don’t have to speak truth to power, because they know it already. And secondly, you don’t speak truth to anybody, that’s too arrogant. What you do is join with people and try to find the truth, so you listen to them and tell them what you think and so on, and you try to encourage people to think for themselves.
The ones you are concerned with are the victims, not the powerful, so the slogan ought to be to engage with the powerless and help them and help yourself to find the truth. It’s not an easy slogan to formulate in five words, but I think it’s the right one.
Tag: communities
In a previous blog post, I delved into the complexities of decentralization, particularly in the context of setting up and maintaining decentralized social networks.
The passage of time has brought new thoughts to the forefront, igniting a fresh perspective that I’m eager to explore.
I’ve been pondering the concept of smaller, more specialized social networks catering to distinct shared interests. The substantial amount of time invested in crafting content for today’s dominant social platforms comes at a cost – our data is meticulously observed and utilized for targeted advertising, spawning a myriad of issues. This prevailing business model has led tech giants to conduct experiments that manipulate user emotions, as detailed in this article: Link to Forbes article on Facebook’s emotional manipulation.
It’s disconcerting that we’ve become mere data points ripe for experimentation and sale to advertisers. The fundamental flaw lies within the business model of these tech giants, wherein driving ad views reigns supreme, prompting them to resort to various tactics to maximize engagement.
I find myself drawn to the notion of small, interest-centric networks supported by community funding, fostering a deliberate selection process for members and cultivating a culture of responsible conduct. When the focus isn’t fixated on amassing sheer numbers, there’s no incentive for exploitative ‘growth hacking’ strategies or the relentless pursuit of revenue.
This vision evokes the spirit of ‘chamas,’ where like-minded individuals converge to support each other financially, forming tight-knit groups with shared goals and values.
Looking at trying this out soon for a number of small communities.
Categories
decentralization
Decentralization sounds like a great idea. Technically, yes but it brings about a whole lot of issues. Back in the day computing was expensive and communicating meant running your own infrastructure. For communities they had to set up their own forum softwares and have some volunteer run the servers to host the forums.
We got into an era where there hasn’t been a need to run your own servers as infrastructure became cheaper to buy, social media became a thing, hosting platforms and many other developments. The advertisement business model made it easy for folks to connect and communicate as platforms sold their engagement to companies in the form of ads. Ads model means the platform need to understand the users and this obviously brought about a lot of privacy issues.
For some this centralization is the problem. To some extent I agree with this argument since you cannot tell a privately owned company what to do and without regulation they don’t really need to listen to you. The easy solution is to say lets just decentralize. The issue with decentralization is we are heading back to a time when you need to have some technical experience to run social platforms. For a community to keep engaging or do some any over the internet thing they need to buy and maintain infrastructure.
Decentralization would mean a whole lot of non-technical folks will need to find learn or jump onto some server. Apart from inclusion there emerges digital security and surveillance issues. Running a server would mean you need to be technical plus also need to be able to maintain & regularly update it. This opens up a whole lot of people to government surveillance as it’s easy to not properly follow server security measures.
When you come from communities whose first access to the internet was Facebook you would understand how running own servers and asking folks to install apps or only use a browser to communicate would be difficult to sell.
The other issue is that not everyone can afford to get off platforms they have spent a lot of time building engagement and have curved an audience for themselves. For most it’s hard to take time learn something new especially when it’s a little technical.
This post doesn’t mean I don’t support or think decentralization can be a solution to a number of issues but I think we need to think of social issues like inclusion & existing threats like growing government surveillance. Decentralization is a great first step fighting use of personal data to sell ads and censorship that’s becoming common among the big social media platforms.
Image at the top is prototype of datacenter demoed by Ethio telecom during Internet Governance Forum in Ethiopia.
britone mwasaru 