Fixing Social Media

By Emma Ogiemwanye and Kelly Wagman

Thirty-five years ago, scholar Donna Haraway released a paradigm-shifting text: The Cyborg Manifesto. Within it, she questions the boundaries we have fashioned in the material world–animal and man, man and machine, physical and nonphysical. She explores how our shared imaginary can expand to include femininity in the realm of technology. Radical thinkers, artists, and feminists have rallied around and carried forward these ideas. Our project aims to hold space for them by exploring the following questions through online platform design:

How might we hold space for creativity online?

How might we think about technology outside patriarchal and capitalist frameworks?

How might we build a platform that is antithetical to the dominant logics of extractive design?

With these questions in mind, we propose to erect a Temple to the Cyborg Goddess: a digital sacred space that does not ask visitors and members to endlessly scroll but rather, visit, ambiently explore and intentionally congregate around ephemeral online moments. We wish to provide a balm to the unhealthy practices of design driven by profit. The Temple will have an explicit zero tolerance policy for bigotry and hate speech of any kind that will be strongly enforced to make it a safe space for all.

The Temple will contain a Sanctuary, Gallery and Vision Wall. The Sanctuary will be a space of congregation with events scheduled at a regular weekly interval, much like a Sunday service. The Gallery will be a monthly rotation of artists’ works around a changing theme. The Vision Wall, inspired by the walls and trees of fortune telling paper in Japanese Shinto shrines, is a space to anonymously share hopes, dreams, fears and ideas.

An exciting aspect of this project is that we cannot foretell who our community will include. We are rallying around the imaginary of the Cyborg Goddess and expecting that it will draw a range of people familiar with and inspired by the concept. We plan to gain momentum by working with an initial group of artists to form the Cyborg Goddess Guild.

We envision The Guild it to be a community of artists, thinkers, futurists and dreamers who together hold space to imagine how technology fits into a world that rises above neoliberal capitalist impulses and fights for deep connections, frivolous wandering, ambient appreciation, and far-reaching questions.

We prefer to build a subscription model to sustain the site rather than using advertising. Just like physical sacred space is open to everyone, we will have public programming and open days to visit the Temple site. 

Street protest is a potent form of direct action, used across history and geography as a tool for progress and social justice. Because of its radical nature, it is always at odds with power, and is constantly threatened by repression. It is even more vulnerable in the current state of affairs, as it has been rendered impractical by the COVID-19 pandemic and the global quarantine experienced all over the world. But there are countless causes that still call for protesting, including the treatment of undocumented people, the struggle of women and victims of domestic violence, the labor rights of essential workers, and the protection of ordinary citizens against government surveillance. How do we enable people’s voices to be heard, despite their inability to assemble? In reaction to this crisis, can we take social movements online? What would it mean to occupy virtual space?

I suggest developing a decentralized, ethical platform that enables activists to assemble and occupy the web.

I hope to lower the barrier of entry to political mobilization, and channel housebound people’s energy to connect with their local and online communities. To achieve this, I find inspiration in the work of hacktivist groups like Anonymous, who leveraged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack tools as a way to protest various causes.

While those tools historically allowed few users to generate a lot of fake traffic in order to disrupt targeted websites, I suggest doing the opposite: creating a tool that helps many people to assemble and engage in meaningful ways, while generating organic — yet disruptive — traffic. Below, I describe what a version of this tool could be.

When starting the app, users would be required to fill two pieces of information: the domain name they would like to target, and an emoji that would represent them and their cause as an avatar. Upon submitting this information, the app would load the URL provided by the user, who would then be introduced to the protest space. Being part of a protest would look like browsing a website, where the page would be augmented to become a virtual reality chat room populated with many (thousands?) of free-floating emojis representing other participants. Every participant could move around, chat with their neighbors, write slogans and amplify those written by others. All of this activity would generate traffic against the targeted website. But beyond mere disruption, I aim to create a space where deliberation and a sense of communion is possible.

Challenges for this project come in many forms: ethical, legal, and technical.

First, it can seem totally irresponsible to pour gasoline on the fire given the current context of crisis: a tool that encourages network disruption exposes endangered populations to harmful mob behaviors. Thankfully, the core distinction between this project and existing DDoS interfaces — the reliance on many users to generate some amount of traffic — makes it relatively ineffective as a weapon. Nonetheless, it will be critical to assess risks, provide regulation mechanisms, and ensure accountability.

Second, as this project is rooted in civil disobedience, considering its legal implications will be key. In the US for instance, denial of service attacks fall under CFAA laws, which are to be taken seriously. We will need to be attentive to the risks users might face, so we can provide them with clear, actionable information. Just like in their real life counterparts, participation in online protests carries risks and requires well-informed decisions from all parties involved.

Third, there are inherent challenges attached to the implementation of decentralized technologies. As protests catch fire, we will need to rely on peer-to-peer protocols in order to facilitate communications without flooding our own infrastructure. We will also need to investigate whether we can provide privacy guarantees, in the form of encryption and onion routing.

Please reach out if you would like to team up 🙏 As you can see there are plenty of fun problems to tackle.