Taking Back Collective Data, Part II: The Other Silicon Valley

I wrote in my recent piece about the importance of recapturing collective data from the enemy, aka venture capital. Today in this piece we will discuss the battle that ACTUALLY played out for Silicon Valley, as well as the alternative principles of software development that have consistently been formulated over the years, and fought for, that are NOT under the current model of exploitation, stealing and greed represented by the venture capitalist. 

First though, I want to take a little more time to discuss the BENEFITS of collective data, briefly discussed in the last piece but worthy of more thought. I will emphasize how moving into collective ownership and control of collective data will cause A FLOOD OF DATA and a FLOOD OF INNOVATION AND CHANGE built off of it. Data as is, is profoundly underutilized because of the siloing of it — companies collect and hold on to it forever, only sharing it with corporations and your usual slew of bad actors, weapons companies, surveillance apparatus, etc. This model of software DIVIDES data into silos; there is almost no way available to us, as the People (referred to by venture capital as “users”, they see us as parasites), to obtain this data and do amazing data things with it. As the people, with the data, we are able scale and extend the collective data project, able to create far more innovation on top of it, and at a variety of scales — no longer relying on giant megacorp overgrown startup monopolies that have a very narrow mission statement and very narrow financial interests. 

We can choose to participate or not in a variety of data projects, using our own data, from the personal, to the community, to the world. As being done, this is just a tremendous waste of our technological abilities as society and is honestly, very sad to see. There are all kinds of people, places and collectives of all kinds,  that SHOULD have collective data, because they are important to the human cause and project, in medicine, science, the arts, and so on. But they DON’T because that shit is locked up like a fucking bank safe the robber barons control. There is a need and a thirst for data in the world, and what we are looking at with big data in the current role, is actually data that is being held back, portioned, siloed, that is apart from the world that created it. 

NOT OKAY MARC. 

I believe that taking control of collective data will flood THE PEOPLE with the data they need, want to use, and want to innovate on top of. A whole host of new programs, organizations, groups, research studies, and interpersonal innovation would occur. We have a saying we use a lot in the industry: “let 1000 blossoms bloom”. This relates to the growth and innovation that can be built off of platforms. I think we are surely looking at a 1000 flowers situation if these new models were transitioned to, and collective data can ACTUALLY be a platform for human development, within our own hands. The data now is HIGHLY HIGHLY centralized; there can be absolutely no debate about it. This model, of collective data, is truly distributed, with all the amazing things that brings. 

Something that a lot of people don’t know about the industry is that there has been a fight, a serious fight, by a lot of extremely intelligent, earnest, serious and skilled people, to NOT have the current model of technological development under venture capital. I mentioned Locker in the last post, one serious project that proposed a consent-based, user-owned and controlled model of data management. Another one that really breaks my heart, is Diaspora, from the last bubble. 

“Diaspora (stylized as diaspora*) is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called pods) which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising. According to its developer, "our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora." The project was founded by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received crowdfunding in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on 23 November 2010...”

Unfortunately, this project is a very tragic story. “On November 12, 2011 co-founder Zhitomirskiy committed suicide, at the age of twenty-two. Reports linked pressures related to Diaspora to his death. Zhitomirskiy's mother, Inna Zhitomirskiy, said, "I strongly believe that if Ilya did not start this project and stayed in school, he would be well and alive today.”” 

This is a large matter in the industry, where the pressure and stress of the pace, something that also needs to change and which I have written about extensively, can have tragic outcomes. This points to the other fight, for the work culture of the industry, which has been hard-fought; I wrote about exploitation of tech workers in “Burnout as Workplace Injury” and “Venture Capitalists are Forcing Forever Crunch” and “Tech Workers: They Are Exploiting You Too, Wake Up 10x Moron” (wow, why I am rude like that).  My best friend, Andy Gross, died after years of exploitation stemming from his role as the founding engineer of a tech startup. Projects like Diaspora, forced to function in the worker exploitation model that pervades the industry, have often run into these issues. 

This case has always troubled me because of the tremendous threat that Diapora posed to the major social media companies like Facebook, for which it provided a definitive, production alternative that was highly admired and encouraged by many sectors of the internet. Regarding Diaspora’s CROWD FUNDING, we will note that Diaspora crowdfunded $200,000, and while that might sound like a lot to you, in the software biz, that is next to nothing, particularly for launching an at-scale global system. During this period the web 2.0 bubble is getting started and multi-million deals are being done all the time. There was also an issue where PayPal froze Diaspora’s accounts in the early days, requiring a massive campaign to overturn.  

So then:  

“In June 2012, the development team was scheduled to move to Mountain View, California as part of work with startup accelerator Y Combinator. In August 2012 the developers focus changed to working on creating makr.io, as part of their YCombinator class.”

I hate this utterly because the need of the existence for Diaspora was so clear, and it seems that in this case, the project was effectively sunsetted as soon as it made contact with a venture capital firm. However, I don’t know the inside details, and can only say, that it is extremely sad that the tech industry failed to support and keep alive, a project with such clear relevance, such clear purpose, such a clear use case, and with the obvious moral authority. This is the case with the rest of the fight against venture capital. 

One critical point that I wish more people outside the industry understood: THERE WAS A FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF SILICON VALLEY and that happened on a variety of fronts. It happened through independent software development projects, through open source code and organizations, through serious theory and study, through the creation of media and communities to support these goals. We fought. And we lost.  But, there was a fight. I need to think about that sometimes because, sometimes it feels like we must not have even tried, for the results to be this bad. And I get mad at myself and my community for failing. 

The details of that fight are for another day, and perhaps to be done by someone else. But a few structures emerged over the course of these evolutions, community development, and software projects, that posited a fundamentally different way of doing software development. One is the idea of collective data, as we discussed.  Related, the need for individual control over their own data, and insight into what is done with it. There is also the concept of independent software development, that is funded by THE PEOPLE and that is for the things that we want, that is NOT funded by venture capitalists. Interoperability, and portability, were held as core tenants, of services, data and infrastructure, something that is extremely absent in the existing model. The siloing, the battle for data and control, is what we must live with instead. There has also been the push to have consent be a part of the process, and we lost that too; there is minimal consent with the invasive surveillance mechanism of venture capital. And check out the licensing wars if you really want to go down the rabbit hole of the some of the fights that went down over this. Andreessen Horowitz’s selling Github to Microsoft — literally just sucking up all the industry’s code and handing it over to fucking Microsoft, is a profound insult and a desecration of every value that was held or purported  for open source. There have also been other models of software development organization itself, ranging from crowdfunding/user-supported models, to tech worker co-ops, unions and other collectives. 

There is a serious propaganda effort underway now, to make it look like the fight we fought for our field was some kind of flimsy, superficial woke mind virused craft. But this is not the case. The fight that was fought was done by some of the top computer scientists and minds in our field. It was done by people who were coming up with the models and then coding and shipping them. It was a serious, material resistance that was mounted. And it is a disgrace to our field to suggest otherwise. 

The sad thing is, if you ask around in certain circles about “the other internet”,  a bunch of us will be able to tell you all about it, down to the technical specs. 

There are people in Silicon Valley who know how to do this. They have the plans for it, they have tried it, they have coded it. They are running big systems inside of tech companies now. Their talents can be used for so much more. And we need them. There is a Silicon Valley inside Silicon Valley. A different one. The one we wanted and deserve.

Wake up.