Category: networked agency

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Favorited Headless Everything For Personal AI by Matt Webb

I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until generative AI lowered their barrier to entry. Going from 0 to using the command line (which coincidentally is what it was until 30 years ago anyway). Even without AI, CLI tools, like Automator on Mac did before, allow the creation of workflows around a piece of software. Matt mentions the Obsidian CLI, and I’ve been using that to manipulate Tasks in Obsidian without going to the Obsidian UI. For about a decade I’ve treated application UIs as just views on my data, with functionality geared towards the viewing, and interfaces as different queries on that data. Going headless means removing the viewer, and using the output of queries directly programmatically. Combined with how I see the arch of generative AI bending significantly towards deterministic code, I look forward to the type of things people come up with. Not their tools, but what they come up with. Because the path to scale of these things imo is not adopting or buying what someone else made, but adopting what someone else came up with conceptually and creating your own local version. Like we do socially too, contagion spreading through effective behaviour, and culturally, the contextual and local sum of all time greatest hits of our group behaviour. The invisible hand of networks rather than markets. It would be highly ironic if unethical corporate extractive AI not only creates the incentive but also actually paves the way for the masses to Walkaway.

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. […] ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

Matt Webb

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At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them.

While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as a group, in this case by creating your own tools to get there.
The power of finding new agency was felt and expressed by quite a few, and played a role in a good number of sessions too.

When I first encountered computers, in the early 1980s, creating your own stuff was the norm. It was almost the only option. Making the machine work for myself. Like software to keep my ham radio logs and print QSL cards.
These days I run a good many smaller and larger personal pieces of tooling on my laptop. Things like making it easy to search by date in my photos on Flickr, or posting to my website from my internal notes, or from within my feedreader.
Things that reduce friction, speed things up, reduce dependency on external systems.

Vibecoding, and especially the Claude Code style of vibe coding, is bringing people to create their own tools, who weren’t able to do so before. A pool of latent needs they can now tap into on their own.

Some I know are really now learning how a computer works under the hood through their vibe coding. Testing the limits of their machines, finding out how fast local stuff can be. Discovering the power of APIs, the utility of cron jobs, and learning how to run their own VPS or local servers.
Others are creating little tools that work the way they want. An app to present books from their collection in that one specific way just so. A mobile app for public transport built on your own existing commute patterns and nothing else. Apps pulling in data from several sources and presenting them in one interface that likely only makes sense to themselves.

Tools built by people realising they are pretty predictable to themselves, and that such highly localised and specifically contextualised predictability now lends itself to automation by the intended user themself.
Tools, in short, where, access to and control over data lies fully with the user, where applications are views on that data (and multiple apps use the same data), and interfaces queries on the data. Along the lines of Ruben Verborgh’s 2017 article “Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralised Web“ but then way more personal. The decoupling that is possible between data, applications and interfaces is even more powerful when you can do them all three for yourself. And then mash them up in any which way you want.

Vibecoding is allowing people to jump the barriers to entry to that. And judging by the stories they share, it feels like pole vaulting over them, not just clearing the barriers. That energy then propels them on to do more.

Over the past months I’ve also heard regularly how people are cancelling paid subscriptions to various online services, and switching to their personal tools that fit their use case much more precisely.

There are many ethical, political, and societal issues with much of the gen AI world, and how models come about, and how corporate vendors exploit and leverage their power.
Yet, where these things are not just consumed but used locally as a leg-up to a different level of self-reliance, it looks quite different. Something is brewing it feels like.
A shift, and I’d love to see more people explore and extend their own agency with such tools.

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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