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Beyond fragility: How to build a resilient web
Fragile is not the first word that comes to mind when describing today’s internet.
Unsafe, centralized, surveillance-driven, and addictive are all words that are far more common when capturing the state of the modern web.
But the internet’s fragility is not to be ignored. In fact, it might be an underlying characteristic that exacerbates many of the problems we explore every week in this newsletter.
Clara Tsao, a Founding Officer of Filecoin Foundation, has been working to make the internet less fragile, more decentralized, and better aligned with the principles of Trust & Safety.
In this week’s newsletter, we learn from Tsao’s work to explore how to create an “antifragile” web.
// Working in the worst parts of the internet
From working in content moderation to taking down terrorist videos from online forums, Tsao started her career “working in the worst parts of the internet.” She saw how digital spaces and content could marginalize communities, threaten democracies and elections, and influence harmful behavior.
Her career has spanned government, civil society, and the private sector:
Tsao was the global lead for Microsoft’s Public Sector initiatives.
She was the CTO of two task forces at the US Department of Homeland Security where she focused on countering foreign influence and violent extremism.
She co-founded the Trust & Safety Professional Association, an organization for industry professionals.
Today, in addition to her role at the Filecoin Foundation, she is an advisor to Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative launched by the United Nations.
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People underestimate how fragile the internet really is.
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// What is internet fragility?
One of Tsao’s central takeaways is that people underestimate “how fragile the internet really is.”
Internet fragility is multidimensional and refers to:
The lack of control that users have over their experience and their data online
The dominant business models that drive harmful but common digital experiences
The lack of digital archives that capture a record of truth
The prevalence of misinformation and other forms of inauthentic media
Centralized systems & network effects that consolidate power instead of distribute it
The internet’s digital fragility is related to, but different from, the fragility of physical infrastructure like fiber optic cables, power lines, satellites, and other physical telecommunications equipment. The internet’s physical infrastructure is not only vulnerable to attack, but also can exacerbate the digital divide.
// Examples of fragility
Losing track of internet history: A study found that of the two million hyperlinks in New York Times articles from 1996 to 2019, 25% of all links were broken (described as link rot). In a conversation with Mark Graham, Director of The Wayback Machine, he said, “The web itself is a living thing. Webpages change. They go away on quite a frequent basis. There's no backup system or version control system for the web.”
Big tech calls the shots: Social media platforms have far more power than social media users, despite those users generating all the content. From Instagram to X, users are often stuck, unable to take their content, followers, and revenue streams from one platform to another. This creates vulnerability for creators who have built livelihoods on specific platforms, like TikTok.
The rise of misinformation: The rise of digital misinformation can threaten a shared sense of truth and contribute to the loss of trust in institutions. Last month, Russia launched a smear campaign against President Biden with a series of fake videos that began to circulate on social media platforms.
// From fragility to antifragility
In his book, Antifragile, author Nassim Taleb defines antifragility not as the absence of fragility, but as the capacity to become more resilient when faced with shocks or stressors.
Removing a specific post containing disinformation might make the internet less fragile, but it’s not developing the internet’s communities, technologies, and systems to become more powerful and more resilient.
The fragility of the internet goes far deeper. It spans everything from the web’s protocols around transmitting data, its data rights and ownership, its business and economic models, to the laws like Section 230 that protect companies from harmful online behavior.
For Tsao, one of the best ways to make the internet more antifragile is by decentralizing the power, data, and ownership into thousands of nodes in a network.
This conviction brought her to Filecoin Foundation, which focuses on supporting the ecosystem of innovators and technologies that use open-source software and open protocols to preserve the internet’s most important information. The Filecoin protocol comprises a global network of decentralized data servers run by individuals and small businesses—designed to preserve humanity’s most important information.
// How decentralization builds a stronger web
How exactly is a decentralized internet a less fragile one?
Participation: In a decentralized web, users have more control over their online experience, more power to shape their online spaces, and more opportunity to own their data (and participate in the economic upside of its use through data unions and data co-ops). Like in a democratic political system, this participatory web creates an internet of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Safety and security: A decentralized web distributes and backs-up where data is stored from centralized hubs to nodes in a network, making critical data less vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Transparency: A decentralized web creates more opportunities for a wide spectrum of policies on data transparency, data archives, and other sources of digital truth that can hold power to account and cultivate a shared sense of reality.
// Solutions
Tsao highlighted three solutions that are addressing fragility:
Filecoin Foundation has partnered with Internet Archive to back up the data of key governments around the world, including information from a project called the “End of Term Crawl,” which captures and saves US government websites at the end of presidential administrations.
Filecoin Foundation successfully deployed the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) in space to reduce latency for networking in space. The demonstration involved sending files from Earth to orbit and back using an implementation of the IPFS protocol designed for space communications.
// Redefining the problem
Building the next generation of the web requires fixing myriad problems with today’s web, but many of them are symptoms of an underlying fragility. By redefining one of the internet’s core flaws as one of fragility, new solutions, new partnerships, and new networks can come into view.
This is what keeps Tsao going. “I'm incredibly hopeful,” she said. “I got into this work because I believe there is a better way to build the internet that is value aligned. More than ever, people who want to work in tech have more options than working in Big Tech. They can build the future of the decentralized web.”
Project Liberty news
// Announcing the Publication of the DSNP Governance Framework v.1
Good governance is critical to the long-term success of decentralized protocols and their ecosystems. Project Liberty Institute is thrilled to announce the release of the draft Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) Governance Framework to drive more community engagement and protocol evolution.
DSNP Governance Framework v.1 strengthens protocol ethics, building upon foundational documents like the Mission and Principles and the Specification Development Process. Comprising the Membership Agreement, DSNP Charter, and Working Group Charter, its core governance choices include a Multistakeholder Governance Structure ensuring diverse representation; Open Membership and Participation without barriers or fees; and Democratic Selection of the Steering Committee via Stakeholder Groups, fostering independence from external influences.
You can find all relevant documents on dsnp.org, section “Governance and Evolution”, and you can be involved directly by providing feedback by email to dsnpfeedback@projectliberty.io or on the DSNP Forum.
// Project Liberty at Consensus
Project Liberty will be at the Consensus conference in Austin, Texas May 29th - 31st.
// 🕵️ An article in The Verge explored how the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld.
// 🪟 An article in WIRED examined the NYC-Dublin portal and how it offers a peek into the future of online community building in the wake of Twitter’s demise.
// 🤖 An article in The Atlantic suggested that the Scarlett Johansson/OpenAI debacle is a microcosm of AI’s raw deal: It’s happening, and you can’t stop it.
// 🖥 The Verge reviewed a new computer company building a computer that is part Kindle, part iPad, and designed around a belief about our relationship with technology.
// 🏛 Maryland recently passed two internet privacy bills, but Congress will still need to act to protect kid’s online privacy, according to an article in The Hill.
// 📱 Pocket-sized AI models could unlock a new era of computing, according to an article in WIRED. Research at Microsoft shows it’s possible to make AI models small enough to run on phones or laptops without major compromises.
Partner news & opportunities
// MetaGov webinar on standards governance
May 29th at 7pm PT
MetaGov is hosting a Q&A session with community members who have served on several of the standards organizations that define the internet. They’ll discuss how standards organizations work, how they don't, and what it takes to run the internet. Register here.
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