From symptoms to systems: Diagnosing the harm of social web landscape

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” — Charles F. Kettering

Climate online has grown increasingly commodified, and hostile. The desire to connect and exchange, once held as the emancipatory promise of the World Wide Web, is now met by systems that capture and translate our lives into data, extracting from our relationships, expressions, and attention in ways that mirror colonial patterns of exploitation. For many of us, the internet has become a source of stress, overwhelm, and abuse. These harms fall first and hardest on people who are marginalized by collective structures of oppression, but the systems that produce them reorder life for everyone.

The scale and scope of the harm is difficult to overstate here. From loneliness and declining mental health, to information warfare, political polarization, the erosion of trust in institutions, and democratic instability, the effects of opaque and self-serving social technology corporations' operations increasingly reach far beyond the screen. The move from our own lived experience into a deeper study of how these systems work brought about the realization that these platforms are not accidentally producing these outcomes.

They are working exactly as they were built to work. Once behavioral data was identified as a new frontier of extraction, platforms developed increasingly sophisticated ways to capture, repurpose, and sell it, with consent reduced to an unreadable ritual demanded as the price of participation. In the process, they ceased to be social technologies serving the people who use them and became surveillance machinery built to profit from prediction, attention capture, and ultimately, behavior manipulation.

In this state of disillusionment, we kept peeling back the layers. From seemingly small design decisions to the metrics beneath them, the revenue models they serve, and in effect, the ownership and governance structures that allows for and perpetuate this extractive behavior. We encountered incentives, concentrations of power, and forms of decision-making that remained largely invisible to the people most affected by them.

This brought us to a simple conviction: The problem with the status quo of social technologies is systemic, and so must be the response.

We are therefore not interested in one-off interventions, nor in building a gentler interface on top of the same underlying logic. Our approach here is to surface what is least seen. Who owns the platforms we meet on? What incentives does that ownership create? What kinds of design decisions follow from those incentives? What behaviors do those designs allow for, reward, or distort? Who benefits from the system as it runs now? Who is harmed by it? Who can inspect its workings, contest its decisions, and shape it back?

Looking to previous struggles for liberation, civil rights, and social justice, we find a common lesson. Durable change begins by understanding the forces that produce a problem, and is carried forward through sustained collective action. It is within this long arc that we position our work and our commitment to building social technology in service of community and collective sensemaking, with safeguards embedded in its code and operations through open-source infrastructure, collective ownership, and participatory governance.