Blogs are back

I put my first web site together shortly before going on the academic job market in the Fall of 1997. It felt like a gesture of hope. Computer science was going through a difficult time: enrollments were down and academia was skittish about hiring; startups were languishing and big companies were boring, AI was in one of its many winters. But more importantly, there was a sense that science was changing—paywalls were coming down, researchers could build on one another’s work, and inclusive collaboration would replace institutionalized silos. We could finally work towards the creative, happy future we wanted—not just some safe, profitable future approved by the military-industrial complex. By putting my work out there, I was declaring my allegiance to a progressive vision, and backing it up with concrete effort.

In many ways, those efforts succeeded: Academic research has become public and accessible to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. My ninth most-cited work on google scholar is an unpublished technical report; that would never have happened if folks had needed to write to my department to request an official offprint, or if they had wound up circulating mimeographed preprints like in the 1970s. Discussions on twitterx, facebook, or zoom can set the agenda for the field. Even the platforms’ flawed logics of algorithmic gatekeeping and mercenary amplification are an improvement over the pernicious networks of prestige and personal connections that preceded them. Meanwhile, the latest algorithms are up on hugging face: one line in the shell clones the repository.

Open science is an unbelievable advance, but researchers’ success in sharing ideas casts into relief the public’s bigger, unsolved challenges of building community. The 1990s and 2000s left me—and I’m sure I’m not alone—with an enduring vision for technology that could bridge differences and connect people through new, better kinds of relationships, even as it strengthened and deepened our existing bonds. Through this lens, the early hype for platforms like facebook, airbnb, or even grindr, looked like first steps towards a new, worldwide community of rapport and empathy, mutual aid, even sexual connection. It was as if technological development aimed inexorably at Audre Lorde’s politics of radical solidarity, where “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.” 

It didn’t turn out that way. In fact, the few kinds of encounters technology has facilitated have been reduced to rigidly-defined transactions—even as other connections that weren’t so frequent or lucrative have been undermined. Disruptive innovation, in the end, seems just a short step from a Hobbesian state of nature: a war of each against all. Openness is more than sharing ideas, I’ve come to appreciate—it is a commitment to the public interest, to democratic decision making, and to a just future. Openness, in other words, is not just for technologists. Everyone will have to know one another better, maybe even love one another better, to help technologists get our work back on track.

So it’s time, once again, to put myself out there, to spark conversations. The future of technology is up to us, but each of us sees only shadows of the better world we can—and must—build together. We can bridge our perspectives, if we engage one another with M. Scott Peck and bell hooks’s “will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”, and expect to find in our differences Audre Lorde’s “fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.” Join me in this difficult, necessary work. Blogs are back. And comments are open.