Continued from part 2: 16 years later, the indie no-budget web & Activity Pub
Most recently we’ve seen Meta AIs trying to convince children they’re qualified therapists with fake registration IDs, while also selling to advertisers the moment when teenage girls delete selfies, as they’re more likely to be emotionally vulnerable and susceptible to marketing. The web wasn’t meant to be like this, users should be able to chose alternatives without losing their friends: you don’t lose your phone number when you go from iOS to Android, or Vodaphone to Three and the only reason the web isn’t the same is it wasn’t built that way from the start, and now there’s some powerful monopolies who have neither incentive or fiduciary duty to change it (and are lobbying hard to prevent any shifts that would force them to allow competition).
But not all governments are susceptible to this lobbying, and the third, big reason this seems a good time to talk came with the European Commission announcing last month that they will be funding a project very similar to part of our 2022 project – using the same underlying technology ISCC, which since we used it has become ISO certified and is now the first fee-free, user-generatable media identifier, unlike other ISO identifiers like ISBN, ISAN and DOI.
CommonsDB will be a database of public domain works to try to prevent unlawful take-down, and help creators find works to build on, and is a collaboration between Open Europe’s Paul Kellar and Liccium’s Sebastian Posth – two of the few individuals in the world to have demo’d our tool MOVA – alongside former Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda. The European Union’s backing of them isn’t just an endorsement of our designs and goals with MOVA, or my suggestion to Keller he work with the ISCC, but means we’re freed from ‘first mover curse’ – someone else, backed by the EU, is first to normalise mass free, open media fingerprinting with all the risks and possibilities surrounding that. It’s time to share what we built and learned, and – as their system so far appears to be closed source – maybe it’s time to publish our code.
So that’s my goal for Act 2 of this year of issues – to present finally our proposal for independent creators to operate independently of monopolies online (or, more precisely, with the same freedom that lets a micro-brewery or artisan chocolate bar sell its products to both tiny shops and supermarket chains). But to avoid too much tech talk we will keep a balance of more traditional Netribution stuff.
On that note – in this issue I profile two of the most interesting filmmakers who are pioneering in their use of ActivityPub to distribute and market their work, and build their community: Elena Rossini and Dilman Della. Tom has a story from Paros with his dogs (who were popular in the last issue on the ‘#dogs’ hashtag), and there’s a Stephen Applebaum archive interviews from the archive with Rachel Weisz, Lexi Alexander and Nobel-winner Imre Kertesz. Next time there’s a great interview lined up…
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