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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

Erin Kissane on Trying to Save the Internet for the Humans

I attended the XOXO Festival back in August, and video of some of the talks are starting to trickle online. I’m going to highlight a couple of my favorites here on the site; the first one I’d like to share is Erin Kissane’s talk about fixing the social internet.

From her notes:

The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we — the weirdos of internet-making and online life — have to not merely retreat from the big-world social internet, but fix it.

Kissane talked about the work she’s been doing recently: the COVID Tracking Project, the Fediverse Governance project, and the Meta in Myanmar series. It’s a great talk…I recommend setting aside some time to watch it.

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Jason KottkeMOD

Kissane is starting a small one-person studio to figure out how to fix things.

At the final XOXO Festival in late August, I gave my first live talk on a real stage in many years, and it boiled down to this: The networks we use to communicate across fields and distances, to find our friends and learn from people unlike ourselves — and to organize ourselves to respond to acute crises and long, grinding institutional failures — are the same networks that are making so many of us miserable and/or deranged.

We need new networks that genuinely work better, not only for indie-web people or tech people or other outliers, but for all of us working toward collective survival. And I don't think we'll get them by just trying harder — or by swapping in new infrastructure toward the same old ends, or by building reflexively against the cartoon versions of old networks, and definitely not by trying to scold people into make more ethical social networking choices.

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