With ShootingPeople – the groundbreaking email community Jess Search co-founded with Cath LeCouteur – closing after 27 years, I’m revisiting a piece I wrote after Jess’s death in 2023 which looked back not only at her impact, but that happy era online after the dotcom crash and before smart phones – when the VCs had left. The decisions Jess and Cath made over two decades ago seem more relevant than ever, as the web looks again towards small and human-run communities across the fediverse, grappling with questions of moderation and sustainability, while trying to chart a different course to the web monopolies. This post-crash and pre-2.0 era that Shooting People exploded in, wasn’t so much about a business model, it was a period of post-web/pre-tech-dystopia, open, queer-punk peer-to-peer culture.

Humans over algorithms, the movement building a new web. So we swapped human curators for a profit-seeking algorithm. We replaced the independent record store manager who knows exactly the right tune to play at this moment, the video rental clerk with the knowledge and opinions of Tarantino, the late night cult film shows, the art-house cinemas not just showing shiny Oscar-campaign films, the magazine racks at the giant bookstores where you could spend a day ploughing thru with a coffee. We swapped them for some code owned by a company legally obliged to make as much money for shareholders as possible.

Thinking back to Web 1: there had been a tech giant: AOL and we’d all run away from it into the open web while it was gobbling up Time Warner, and there wasn’t another threat to the web until Microsoft, whose principle crime with Internet Explorer was writing shitty HTML and installing it by default on Windows, which the EU was able to stop. The next threat was Rupert Murdoch buying MySpace which we dodged by running to an Ajaxy site run by some kid from Harvard, which was, um, less successful. But still, compare AOL/Microsoft/Murdoch of the early web to Google’s monopoly with search today. You’re pushed into using the Chrome browser on billions of smart phones, it defaults to Google search, it has Google ad tracking built in, in a way that’s hard to prevent, 66.6% of the world use it (!). And this is the same Google that has 98% of the video player market, 90% of search.

It’s sobering walking down a street 30 minutes from where you live – even in a crowd of 2000, majority women – to cries of ‘shame on you’ and ‘ped~~~~les’ from families stood in their drives with their kids. It’s not that the marchers didn’t have our share of inflammatory chants – from ‘Nazi scum’ and ‘kill yourself like Adolph Hitler’, but this social media-friendly tendency to paint the other side in the extreme worst place, struck me as lose-lose for everyone. Other than, of course, the companies who depend on polarised content to feed to audiences around the world safe at home, screen-stroking. For them it’s not a community crisis it’s a content strategy –it’s the social media equivalent of premium content – violence on British streets, with something for both sides. It’s not politics, its not a community story, it’s two different dramas with two different monetisable audiences, who each can look at it and say how the other side are a sign of how Britain is doomed.

This isn’t how it was meant to be. No-one excited about the web in the late ’90s pictured an attention industry commodifying our consciousness to power a surveillance economy spying on us from birth, trading our data to segment & silo us, target adverts, propaganda and flagging pre-crime potential. That was my first big mistake, but many made that one so it’s not that interesting. And if Clay Shirky’s right, we’re 2/3s of the way thru the web’s chaos; Act 3 is yet to come… But every so often I think of Douglas Adams’ 3 rules of tech and imagine what I might sound like to anyone who’s only known smart phones and social media…

First the ActivityPub universe has gone from tech curiosity to something viable and used daily by millions. Second, mainstream monopoly tech – sacking moderating teams, trying to sway elections, and general indifference to the harms their huge power can cause – has accelerated the urgency to find alternatives: the planet need a media space not exclusively run by a few centi-billionaires trying to rule the world on their terms. Perfection can be the enemy of the good here: it’s mostly ok to move fast and fix things. But most importantly the European Commission announcing in March that they will be funding a project very similar to part of our 2022 project – using the same underlying technology ISCC – means I no longer have first mover anxiety.

It’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication – just as most of the planet is focussed on funnelling their audience onto monopolistic platforms whose algorithms filter content like a dealer cutting attention-crack. If Tom and I were starting out today we’d probably be forced to use Substack, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn – even if we had our own Podcast (one of the few decentralised parts of the old web that’s not yet been monopolised, despite Spotify’s best efforts). 

With Netribution’s 25 years fitting into three 8-ish year acts (publishing, research & development) I’ve applied Syd Field’s screenwriting framework to this year of issues and realised this issue would be the end of Act One. That seems a good time to reflect on the end of Netribution’s Publishing phase in 2008 – and setup what’s next in the rest of our issues this 25th year…

Self-declared ‘geriatric millennial’ Elena Rossini (_elenamastodon.social) isn’t content to just make documentaries, self-distribute and market them thru a web of nicely designed sites – she’s pioneering in her use of tech away, and at home on the ‘Fediverse’ – the decentralised alternative to Big Tech, which her next film looks at.