Category: networked agency

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Technology, working in technology, is inherently impacting society, and must concern itself with the democratisation of access and use, and the flow of information. My focus has always been the agency technology can provide, specifically to those who don’t have such agency without it. How it can strengthen community and autonomy. Unintended consequences and externalised effects of creating and using technology do always exist and impact different groups too, and need to be considered in any technology choice. My work in government data is about information and power asymmetries, my work in digital ethics more generally seeks to incorporate a wide range of other values and considerations, my work in tech regulation and standards similarly is to enable agency and confirm and embed values. Ethics is not about saying no to things, it’s about shaping our actions towards each other. Seeing each other as part of every question, not othering others to cut them out of deliberations. Democracy is at its core.
My day to day work in my company is carried by it and my voluntary board work reflects it as well.

My work in technology has always been what I’ve come to call constructive activism. It’s an often less visible way to enable change though than through e.g. overtly campaigning for such change. You can work in relative quiet. There are times however when it becomes needed to more visibly get involved, to be seen to get involved. I increasingly feel we’ve been sliding into such a situation in the past years here in the West.

Defend Democracy is a young civil society organisation, working in Brussels, to strengthen democracy, and defend it against eroding forces from here, elsewhere and from technology. Like my other voluntary board memberships enabling agency is key here. At the Open State Foundation it’s about citizen’s agency based on increased government transparency and better information. At the Open Nederland association of Dutch makers in support of Creative Commons licensing, it’s about makers’ autonomy in what happens to what they make and how it can contribute to society. At the ActivityClub foundation it’s enabling public discourse through a non-toxic common infrastructure (mastodon.nl a.o.). At Defend Democracy it’s about what those other three organisations have in common. Strengthening and defending democracy.

I am joining the board of Defend Democracy as its treasurer.

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In reply to Kann man die Twitter-Uhr zurückstellen? Zum Bluesky-Hype im österreichischen Journalismus by Heinz Wittenbrink

Du hast denke ich recht Heinz das der Umzug von Journalisten in Richtung Bluesky eine verpasste Chance ist. Aber nicht nur für die Journalisten selbst als individuelle Professionals. Ich verstehe nicht warum Zeitungen und Medien nicht selbst eine kleine Fediverse-Instanz ins Leben rufen. Damit kann man direkt und unangreifbar die Authentizität eines Accounts belegen, da sie verbunden ist mit der eigenen Internetdomäne. Sowie zB hier in den Niederlanden der Mastodon Server der Verwaltung auf social.overheid.nl läuft, und overheid.nl die Domäne ist für alle Verwaltungsinformationen. Strategisch ist eine verpasste Chance mMn das Zeitungen das Potential für Handlungsfreiheit im offenen Web nicht beachten, und das den einzelnen Reportern als Wahl überlassen. Obwohl man sich regelmässig darüber beklagt das BigTech ihnen Handlungsfreihet wegnimmt (sowohl bei online Äusserungen wie bei Werbung und Besucherzuleitung über Suchmashinen). Man erinnert sich anscheinend nicht das es Journalisten und Politiker waren die Twitter über die Tech-Szene hinaus groß gemacht haben als Nachrichtenquelle, und verpaßt jetzt diese (vierte?) Macht anzuwenden, und verliert sich aufs neue in einen Silo betreut von Miljardäre, VCs und Crypto-bros. Nur weil freier Zugang und hypothetische Federation (pinky promise) über den Eingang steht. Tech geht immer schneller wie man sagt, und ich nehme an das diese Beschleunigung auch eine schnellere Enshittification (Verscheißifikation?) bedeuten wird. In den Niederlanden gibt’s die Initiative Public Spaces, gestartet durch öffentlichen Medien und in Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Organisationen die ein offenes Web und öffentlicher Diskurs stärken wollen. Mit praktischen Mitteln, eine jährliche Konferenz usw. bringen die das voran. Vielleicht ist es möglich da auch in .at was zu bewegen, so wie du das in 2008 mittels dem Politcamp auch bez. politische online Kommunikation getan hast.

Die Gruppe, die jetzt zu Bluesky gewechselt ist, wäre sicher in der Lage, Einrichtung und Betreuung eines kleinen Mastodon-Servers zu organisieren. Ich weiss aus den Erfahrungen bei graz.social, dass der Aufwand überschaubar ist. Es gibt in Österreich Organisationen wie den Presseclub Concordia, die die Trägerschaft übernehmen könnten.

Heinz Wittenbrink

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On 22 and 23 March, roughly in a month, the first European personal knowledge management (pkm) summit will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Over two days a varied line-up of PKM practitioners will present, show and discuss how they shqpe their personal learning and information strategies.

Personal knowledge management is enjoying a wave of renewed attention due to a new group of note making tools that has emerged in the past few years (such Roam, Logseq, Obsidian, Notion et al). But personal knowledge management is way older. People generally notice things around them, and strive to make sense of the world they live in, wether on a highly practical level or a more abstract one. The urge behind PKM therefore is deeply human. The methods and availability of tools have changed over time, as has the perspective on what constitutes personal knowledge.

Over two days a long list of well known and less well known practitioners of personal knowledge management is lined up. I had the pleasure of finding and approaching people to participate as speaker or as workshop host. This includes experienced voices like Harold Jarche. Next to invited speakers and hosts, there will be ample time on the schedule to do your own impromptu session, unconference style. The program will be shaped and finalised in the coming week or so.

The event is organised by the Dutch community ‘Digital Fitness’, and a non-profit effort. There is space for at most 200 people, and there are still tickets available. Tickets are 200 Euro for the two day event. The venue is a short walk from Utrecht Central Station, at Seats2Meet.

I hope to see you there!

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Bookmarked Disinformation and its effects on social capital networks (Google Doc) by Dave Troy

This document by US journalist Dave Troy positions resistance against disinformation not as a matter of factchecking and technology but as one of reshaping social capital and cultural network topologies. I plan to read this, especially the premises part looks interesting. Some upfront associations are with Valdis Krebs’ work on the US democratic / conservative party divide where he visualised it based on cultural artefacts, i.e. books people bought (2003-2008), to show spheres and overlaps, and with the Finnish work on increasing civic skills which to me seems a mix of critical crap detection skills woven into a social/societal framework. Networks around a belief or a piece of disinformation for me also point back to what I mentioned earlier about generated (and thus fake) texts, how attempts to detect such fakes usually center on the artefact not on the richer tapestry of information connections (last 2 bullet points and final paragraph) around it (I called it provenance and entanglement as indicators of authenticity recently, entanglement being the multiple ways it is part of a wider network fabric). And there’s the more general notion of Connectivism where learning and knowledge are situated in networks too.

The related problems of disinformation, misinformation, and radicalization have been popularly misunderstood as technology or fact-checking problems, but this ignores the mechanism of action, which is the reconfiguration of social capital. By recasting these problems as one problem rooted in the reconfiguration of social capital and network topology, we can consider solutions that might maximize public health and favor democracy over fascism …

Dave Troy

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With the release of various interesting text generation tools, I’m starting an experiment this and next month.

I will be posting computer generated text, prompted by my own current interests, to a separate blog and Mastodon account. For two months I will explore how such generated texts may create interaction or not with and between people, and how that feels.

There are several things that interest me.

I currently experience generated texts as often bland, as flat planes of text not hinting at any richness of experience of the author lying behind it. The texts are fully self contained, don’t acknowledge a world outside of it, let alone incorporate facets of that world within itself. In a previous posting I dubbed it an absence of ‘proof of work’.

Looking at human agency and social media dynamics, asymmetries often take agency away. It is many orders of magnitude easier to (auto)post disinformation or troll than it is for individuals to guard and defend against. Generated texts seem to introduce new asymmetries: it is much cheaper to generate reams of text and share them, than it is in terms of attention and reading for an individual person to determine if they are actually engaging with someone and intentionally expressed meaning, or are confronted with a type of output where only the prompt that created it held human intention.

If we interact with a generated text by ourselves, does that convey meaning or learning? If annotation is conversation, what does annotating generated texts mean to us? If multiple annotators interact with eachother, does new meaning emerge, does meaning shift?

Can computer generated texts be useful or meaningful objects of sociality?

Right after I came up with this, my Mastodon timeline passed me this post by Jeff Jarvis, which seems to be a good example of things to explore:


I posted this imperfect answer from GPTchat and now folks are arguing with it.

Jeff Jarvis

My computer generated counterpart in this experiment is Artslyz Not (which is me and my name, having stepped through the looking glass). Artslyz Not has a blog, and a Mastodon account. Two computer generated images show us working together and posing together for an avatar.


The generated image of a person and a humanoid robot writing texts


The generated avatar image for the Mastodon account

Bookmarked Agency Made Me Do It by Mike Travers

This looks like an interesting site to explore and follow (though there is no feed). First in terms of the topic, agency. I’m very interested myself in the role of technology in agency, specifically networked agency which is located in the same spot where a lot of our everyday complexity lives. Second in terms of set-up. Mike Travers left his old blog behind to create this new site, generated from his Logseq notes, which is “more like an open notebook project. Parts of it are essay-like but other parts are collections of rough notes or pointers to content that doesn’t exist yet. The two parts are somewhat intertwingled”. I’m interested in that intertwingling to shape this space here differently in similar ways, although unlike Travers with existing content maintained. Something that shows the trees and the forest at the same time, as I said about it earlier.

Agency Made Me Do It, an evolving hypertext document which is trying to be some combination of personal wiki and replacement for my old blog. … I’ve been circling around the topic of agency for a few decades now. I wrote a dissertation on how metaphors of agency are baked into computers, programming languages, and the technical language engineers use to talk about them. … I’m using “agency” as kind of a magic word to open up the contested terrain where physical causality and the mental intersect. … We are all forced to be practitioners of agency, forced to construct ourselves as agents…

Mike Travers