View Nicholas Reville
Rapporteur: Karen Gustafson
Social Change Infrastructure: Building Values Into the Way our World Works
Patricia Aufderheide introduces Nick as someone who has made the transition from being an important member of the next generation of activists to being a key member of the current generation of activists, creating an open source video platform, to make, display, and access content.
Coming to media activism
He agrees with Doug Schuler that we are at a crossroads with society and technology, facing some key decision points, and it is only worth working on something if it’s still to be decided. He also agrees with Doug that we are at a point where we need to decide to become activists, not just observers. Nick came to activism while in college, as part of the anti-sweatshop movement, United Students Against Sweatshops. This activism dominated his college experience, and the themes of corporate power and how government is produced have continued to be important issues in his work. United Students Against Sweatshops asked the same questions as Reville’s work asks now:
Will corporations determine how society works, financially driven, with top-down media production and distribution, or is there an alternative? A result of this financially driven, top-down society is seen in our current economic collapse, brought about by a system set up to enrich a small number of corporations, not society as a whole.
So can we build a society of participation and engagement?
We have an increasingly online society, with a new set of spaces, and a new set of social and cultural commons, where real communities are formed, and through this we can look critically at how social infrastructure is composed.
First Strategy: Frame the Conversation.
The music industry and activists have been struggling over the discourse of music production and distribution. The established music industry perceived the Internet as a threat, while the Net created an opportunity for activists to help move the industry from a top-down model and get a foothold, as with Down the Battle’s efforts against corporate record labels’ control. This movement was created through strategies such as a blitz of calling reporters to draw attention to the advocacy organization and the issue, and creating an iTunes parody advertisement, which became the #2 hit on Google for “iTunes.” Activist scholars like Siva Vaidhyanathan and Pat Aufderheide are also shaping this conversation.
Second Strategy: Building social infrastructure
It’s important to recognize that not only corporations and governments can produce media—the scale capabilities and low cost of technology can make it possible for independent media to also be created and achieve wide exposure. One example of this is Wikipedia. a self organized project that became a public resource, wholly devoted to serving the public interest and offering free information. It’s sustainable because its reach is so huge and with a staff of only 15-20 people, it’s become one of the top sites in the world through small donations from many users. It’s not inevitable that this would happen, though—there has to be a deliberate choice to engage in this activity.
Another example: Mozilla and Firefox
Internet Explorer had a massive market share, ignoring open web standards. Mozilla, supporting an alternative, become a sustainable organization earning $80 million a year and getting a partnership with Google. Now it is a permanent defender of online freedom, encouraging the creation of more open technologies. The impact of Mozilla was to change browsers forever but it is also underrepresented in social discourse.
From Advocacy to Tool Building
• Organizations and projects include the Participatory Culture Foundation, focusing on the politics of social interaction
• OpenCongress.org, created as a site to promote transparency in government, and make what’s happening in US Congress accessible. With this site, everyone can be an insider and know as much as lobbyists on the Hill. This can give people a feeling of ownership and defeat political cynicism and alienation from politics
• The Participatory Culture Foundation’s Media Reform Project focuses on video because it’s the most influential, and in online media, it’s the most closed, due to use of technologies like Flash. Miro was produced as an open source video desktop application. This allows the user to be the point of aggregation, instead of YouTube. Because of YouTube’s fiscal pressures as a commercial site, as a primary aggregator, it can pose a threat to free speech and democracy.
• The Miro Community, a video presentation aggregator, is a branch project coming in the summer of 2009, and will allow people to connect at a local level. This can be an alternative to iTunes and YouTube, and will allow any organization, such as a university, to break off and publish its own videos.
• The Open Video Conference, part of the Open Video Alliance, is meant to take the idea of video and turn it into an idea, an organizing point in public discourse, bringing organizations with similar interests in open video together.
The conversation of the Internet revolves around products and companies right now; there is so much technology coverage is from business reporting, and this frame dominates. This frame dominance could cause the old values of the Internet could be lost. Because of this trend, are we headed toward a society run by corporations?
• Example of Kindle, the e-book reader: It has outstanding product design, but it’s totally closed source. You can only put content on the surface and not transfer it to another platform. Furthermore, they can control the device even after users purchase a media work; ironically, Amazon connected with customers’ Kindles and stripped them of an unauthorized version of Orwell, refunding users’ money. This is a danger of vertical content delivery system, demonstrating at a gut level what is wrong with closed technologies.
• Example of the iPhone application store, creating an extremely closed and controlled vertical delivery system—most people must get apps through the online app store. The degree of Apple’s control over this product is unacceptable—they’ve sold consumers a relatively powerful computer and then told them what they are not allowed to do with it, such as prohibiting them from loading objectionable content or a product that competes with Apple (Firefox rather than Safari). iPhone is dangerously seductive, though, to the point that it can beguile people who would normally value open source.
Open systems give more freedom to users online—not just letting users be free to do what they already know they want to do, but also giving them the freedom to inhabit a space where new modes of interaction can emerge, giving space for experiments like Wikipedia.
Another historical example of popularly adopted closed systems is AOL, the walled garden, or currently Facebook. Facebook is becoming a primary social space and it has a financial responsibility as a private enterprise to monetize users’ social relationships. They would be a poorly performing profit-based company if they didn’t do this, but this focus on profit is likely incompatible with creating an open and democratic social space.
We can decide what shape the world takes and how our common space looks and works. How do we make this change?
• Defining the debate
• Building a new social infrastructure
Academics function as climate scientists in research and advocacy roles, providing the authority of empirical evidence and formal study and urging the greater public to change direction. It’s necessary for the academic community to be concrete, however, and bring these messages of advocacy to a broad audience and contributing to a consensus that free software, open standards, and decentralization can contribute to a healthy media culture and society.
Students can choose to become activists, leveraging their role as students to urge university systems to be more open.
Organizations must align their technology with their values; some nonprofit advocacy organizations are still using closed technologies and haven’t “gotten” this concept, instead supporting large financial interests.
Foundations can take a venture approach to contributing support to social infrastructure. Mozilla and Wikipedia demonstrate that open systems can influence the marketplace, and create a huge social return on investment. Opportunities are currently being missed because foundations don’t think this way.
We can leave the shaping of the world to companies with narrow propriety interests or we can shape the world ourselves with openness on every level, defining debate or building tools.
Questions/comments from audience:
What if a community of users wants to use a closed system? If there are open source alternatives for every application, isn’t it OK to still choose the closed source application?
Are non-profit produced technologies sustainable?
What kind of resources go into this kind of project, what are the long term plans for sustainability?
[It is important to support mission-oriented companies like Mozilla, which can still be financially successful.]
Facebook, Amazon, and iPhone can be seen as threats, but they also created savvier users—one example of this savvy is seen with backlashes against some of Facebook’s design choices. Is it possible to change big, closed organizations like Facebook or Twitter from within?
[The most effective way to bring change is to build a message and be part of a movement.]
Why are we always trying to reproduce products and concepts from the proprietary world—why not create wholly different alternatives?
[An example of this is seen with Miro, which has planned a new resource that allows users to create repositories of translations of videos around world.]
It’s also important to consider that products can be successful because they are better designed or because they are first to market, and this can also contribute to their popular adoption.
In terms of venture financing, companies may have certain closed values endemic to business, so getting capital could require a real cultural shift. Institutional authority in products such as Windows is valued—so what kind of shifts do we need?
[We are not talking about typical VC, instead we’re talking about venture philanthropy, like organizations that already provide support for the arts and culture and public media. Furthermore, products like Wikipedia or Mozilla can create powerful cult followings.]
Rapporteur: Ben Moskowitz
“We’ve hit a critical point in the development of the Internet—a crossroads, where we face some key decisions,” said Nicholas Reville, introducing his work at the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. “I’m here today to convince you to be activists, not just observers, as this process unfolds.”
Nick’s work is grounded in a vision for an online social/cultural commons that’s not managed by corporate interests. As Executive Director of Participatory Culture Foundation, Nick oversees the development of the open source media player Miro. Nick is also involved in the development of OpenCongress, a tool to encourage political participation and government transparency.
The web is a better place for the existence of public-benefit organizations like Wikipedia and the Mozilla Foundation, argued Reville. “The conversation online frequently resolves around products and companies,” he said. “We can leave the shape of the online world to companies with narrow, proprietary interests, or we can build it ourselves—insisting on openness at every levels.”
This thinking has guided the work of PCF and PPF, carrying Reville and company from advocacy projects (framing the conversation around copyright policy with Downhill Battle) to building tools for social infrastructure (Miro and Miro Community Guide) and community-building (efforts like the Open Video Conference).
The challenge, said Reville, is to communicate the threat that vertical and walled systems pose to the open web and online discourse. For example: Apple’s position in digital music sales affords it unreasonable control over that ecosystem. Apple has essentially become a cultural gatekeeper. “My job is to convince people that the degree of control reaches a point that is unacceptable from a values perspective.”
Deliciously poetic example: just last week, Amazon.com was broadsided by the public outcry when digital copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 mysteriously vanished from Kindle owners’ devices. The publisher of the ebooks in question makes its money by digitizing classic works in the public domain and offering ebook editions. As it turns out, the original publishing rights to these Orwell classics have not yet expired in the States, so the independent publisher was in fact selling the works without proper rights clearance. Amazon’s response? Remotely wipe all copies on Kindle devices and credit purchasers’ accounts with refunds.
Never mind the irony—this wouldn’t be nearly as riveting if it were Dan Brown novels being pulled from under readers’ noses. It is remarkable that Amazon can sell you a book, then revoke it. It is remarkable that Amazon can sell you a computer over which you have no control! Imagine if Microsoft retained the right to delete software or files from your computer without your knowledge or consent. Yet this kind of control over devices is becoming more common, with many suspecting that similar “functionality” is built into the iPhone operating system.
“It’s great that this happened, actually,” said Reville. “It’s easy to understand what’s wrong with this story.”