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The EU has proposed a bill, known as 'chat control', to scan all digital communications for potential illegal content. Chat control would violate fundamental rights, and turn the EU into a surveillance supra-state. If that doesn't sound ideal, there's still a short window of time to take action ✊

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tl;drTwitter open sourced its tweet recommendation algorithm. Sort of. Is this the beginning of a new era of platform transparency? Chris isn’t so sure.

TranscriptHello and welcome to Vulnerable By Design with me, Chris Onrust. In this episode: curious adventures in open source. Are you ready?

Twitter published code for its tweet recommendation algorithmSomething momentous happened on the social media platform Twitter the other day. Errr … no, sorry, there still isn’t a default edit button. No, instead what happened, is that Twitter open sourced—as in: made public—the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm. Which is the code that determines which tweets will show up in the ‘For you’-tab on Twitter.

In theory, with this code being public, that means that if you were so inclined, you can just go to Twitter’s account on the collaborative software development platform GitHub (which is owned by Microsoft), and look for a code repository (which is basically a folder) called ‘the-algorithm’ and inspect how Twitter decides which tweets you get to see, and in what order.

In theory, this move is massive. I haven’t seen Tik Tok, YouTube or Instagram making any of their algorithms public. Quite the contrary, I’d say. Most often, with these for-profit platforms, code and data are treated as a massive secret—something that users need not know about, and something that competitors should be kept as far away from as possible.

So let’s ask: Why did Twitter want to make its Twitter recommendation algorithm public? I’d say one possible reason is: Always keep your promises. Twitter’s billionaire owner had conducted a Twitter poll about whether Twitter’s algorithms should be public. They said they would honour the poll’s results. The poll came out 83% in favour. So, naturally, they’re going to deliver on that, aren’t they?

But a bigger picture reason points to some really lofty ideals. Transparency! Accountability! Public scrutiny! Making Twitter the least gameable system on the Internet!

Permit me to link this to the original spirit of the free software movement. There the idea is that if you make the source code of a system freely and publicly available, then anyone—friends, foes, whoever, you and I included—anyone will have the freedom to do a bunch of things. Such as: study how the system works. Use the system in whatever way you wish, for any purpose. Even the freedom to change and improve it in whatever way you like, and to distribute copies of the system—original or modified—to others, so that everyone can benefit.

In publishing the source code of its recommendation algorithm, Twitter said it would usher in a new era of transparency, and that it even anticipated that people would suggest improvements to make Twitter better. So let’s take a peek and see what we can learn from the published code and its accompanying blog post.

Data and modelsWe learn that Twitter’s tweet recommendation system uses lots and lots of data. Data about: users, who they follow, and the tweets they engage with. It also uses huge models to predict how likely you are to click on, read, like, retweet or reply to a given tweet; and how likely you are to interact with a given user; as well as which users and tweets are similar to what you’re already interacting with.

By the way, Twitter has decided that it can use this idea of similarity as a stand in for relevance. Aaaah! Relevance! Shall we do a brief let-that-sink-in-moment? Using similarity as a standard for relevance means that when Twitter says it wants to show you the relevant tweets, it will just show you more of the same. In a world in which similarity stands in for relevance, forget about new horizons. Forget about breaking free from old habits. Forget about diving into something completely fresh and unknown. This is a world that likes its users to stay in their lane, be more predictable, be more like the rest. Maybe because it can then more reliably squish you into an advertising target audience?

Anyway. With its data and its models in place, Twitter constructs the ‘For you’-timeline in three stages. First, it finds tweets it could potentially show you which is the candidate sourcing stage. Second, it puts those tweets in the right order—the ranking stage. And third, it removes tweets that it deems you do not want to, or should not, access—which is the filtering stage. Now, it might seem a bit odd to do the ranking before the filtering, because why would you want to spend energy on ranking tweets that you’re not even going to show? But that’s how it’s organised in here.

Stage 1: Candidate sourcingSo let’s take a look at what happens in each of these stages. And we’ll start with candidate sourcing. Assuming, for the sake of argument of course, that you are a Twitter user. Then when you would open your Twitter ‘For you’-feed, then Twitter in some way has to determine which of the billions of tweets out there it should show you. I mean, imagine the horror scenario when, out of the blue, you would only get fed tweets by the owner of Tesla!

An (in my opinion) reasonable way to solve this timeline construction problem is to say: Which accounts does this user follow? Present the tweets of those accounts in reverse chronological order (newest first). And if two tweets were posted at exactly the same time, then stick on some randomiser to put one of them on top.

In the good old days, Twitter used to be part of this highly respected (I mean: respected by me) show-only-posts-from-followed-accounts gang. But as anyone who’s dipped into Twitter over the past years will tell you: no longer. This was known, but Twitter’s code publication and its accompanying blog post reveal exactly to what extent things have changed.

Today, at most, 50%—fif-ty per-cent—of the tweets on the ‘For you’-timeline will be from accounts that you’ve actually chosen to follow. The other 50% comes from accounts of whom you’ve never indicated in any way that you want to see any of the tweets whatsoever, but which Twitter decided to shove in your face anyway. Even more so, apparently, for accounts that are paying the 8 US dollars a month for a Twitter Blue subscription. Which to me sounds awfully like paid promotion? As a contributor to the online forum HackerNews commented: ‘I have spent significant effort creating a network and there you go, putting in 50% crap. I don’t want to see? I despise your algorithm.’

And beware! The more likely Twitter thinks you are to engage with a certain account, the more of their tweets you will see. This is why, for your own safety and security, even though the urge may be strong, you should never, ever, ever bite when someone posts a barmy philosophy joke on Twitter. Because you will be stuck with barmy philosophy jokes for the rest of your life.

At the end of the candidates sourcing stage, Twitter has a selection of roughly 1500 tweets that it could show you. Now it needs to decide in what order to show them. Enter: the ranking stage.

Stage 2: RankingFor ranking, Twitter users a machine learning model. For each tweet, this machine learning model takes into account thousands of features. It then outputs ten labels for how likely you are to engage with the tweet, meaning: clicking, reading, favouriting, replying, and so on. All of that information then is combined and weighted into an overall score per tweet. The higher the score, the higher up the tweet will appear in your feed.

In terms of this weighting, at the time of writing this episode, a tweet that is likely to get favourited will get a smallish boost up in the ranking. A likely retweet is a bit more valuable in this ranking game, with one retweet being equivalent to two favourites. A predicted reply is a different league altogether though: one reply is worth 27 favourites. And if a reply to a tweet in turn is likely to get engaged with by the author of the original tweet, then that is worth a ranking boost equivalent to a massive 150 favourites. On the flip side, if a tweet is predicted to be likely to get reported, then that cancels out the boosting effect of 738 favourites. So yeah, reply and report with caution, my friends.

None of this ranking matters though, if the tweet doesn’t make it past the third stage: filtering.

Stage 3: FilteringDuring the filtering stage, Twitter removes tweets from accounts you’ve blocked or muted or tweets that Twitter for whatever reason, does not want to show you, including tweets that it deems offensive or that have been placed on a ban list.

Curious (to me) is that Twitter also has a filtering policy set up for misinformation, which includes the category of ‘GovernmentRequested’. Now what to make of that? It suggests to me that Twitter takes into account government requests to classify certain tweets as misinformation, and that Twitter will then offer a helping hand to block that information out. If true, then well … I have got views. Given that quite a number of governments have themselves been a massive source of deception, misinformation, if not outright lying—including, up to this day, spreading public health, misinformation around COVID, and measures needed to tackle our planetary emergency—you could well question the wisdom of making governments the judge of what is and isn’t misinformation. But yeah, not so at Twitter.

Mix and serveOnce the filtering stage is complete and candidate tweets have been sourced, ranked, and filtered, Twitter will throw in just a sprinkle of non-tweet material that you didn’t ask for, such as ads and following recommendations. Et voila! The ‘For you’-feed is done. Get ready to be engaged!

Publishing its tweet recommendation algorithm was meant to be the start of Twitter’s big leap into transparency. But was it?

Maybe the code that Twitter published can give you some glimmers of insights. Insights about some factors that go into timeline ranking. Insights that may even help you pierce through some of the spurious advice that sometimes gets spewed in clickbaity how-to-beat-the-algorithm articles. For example: ‘Use hashtags, so that your post can be found’ is actually not that useful advice, because it turns out that having multiple hashtags will actually dampen or de-boost your post. So maybe that is good to know for some people in some cases.

Crucial bits missingBut … there is just a tiny complication that I neglected to mention so far. The code is kaputt. Redacted. What Twitter published from the ‘For you’ algorithm is incomplete.

Missing are at least: the data used to train Twitter’s recommendation algorithm. Most of the underlying models with which you could evaluate the behaviour of the algorithm, but also much of the code related to Twitter’s trust and safety systems. For example, the code shows that Twitter has a ‘Not-safe-for-work’-classifier (NSFW), but it omits the code that would allow you to see how Twitter decides what is and isn’t safe for work. Twitter says I’ve removed this information to protect users. Maybe? But regardless of whatever the reason is, the result is: that code is not here.

Crucial bits of information that you would need to run the system are actually missing. Hence, lofty potential benefits such as: being able to run the system as you wish, modifying it to help others—those were never even going to be an option here. In fact, we have no way of telling for sure whether the code that Twitter published is what is actually delivering tweets to you ‘in production’, as they say.

Twitter’s path away from open, free, transparentNow, let’s place that in perspective. Twitter’s incomplete so-called open sourcing comes on the back of a couple of moves where Twitter actually has become less open, less free, and less transparent. Do you care to hear them?

In November last year, Twitter fired its Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team that had been in charge of making Twitter’s algorithms fairer and more transparent. This spring, Twitter decided that access to its API (its application programming interface, which is what you can use to work with tweets and tweet data at a large scale) Twitter decided that access to its API, which used to be free, is now going to come with a price tag of between 42,000 to 21,0000 USD per month.

Who would be willing to pay that? Who would be able to pay that? If you are, by some miracle, willing and able to pay that, please consider spending that money on getting people access to clean drinking water, food security, and housing instead. In any case, the reality is that this will leave many people basically priced out of doing any large scale research on, or doing audits of, Twitter.

I’ve seen quite some academic researchers be upset about Twitter’s move to paywall its API. But my dear friends: What did you expect? Did you really think that out of the sheer benevolence of its own good heart, a for-profit company would continue to give you freebies?

[Sound of glass breaking, metal being smashed]

This is what happens, Larry. You see what happens, Larry?

– Walter Sobchak [fictional character]

This is what happens, Larry, if you let your global communications infrastructure be run by a billionaire or oligopolistic. On top of that, Twitter has been suspending accounts of journalists of anti-fascists (also known as an-tee-fa), and has been blocking links to competitor platforms such as Mastodon or Substack.

Twitter says it wants to open up its algorithms for public scrutiny. But when earlier this year, a GitHub user named ‘FreeSpeechEnthusiast’ published what is believed to have been Twitter source code, Twitter responded with that good old repressive tool of the copyright infringement notice under the United States’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, demanding the information be taken down.

Open washing and transparency theatreOkay, I get it. Many people today say they are tired of being manipulated online. Companies register that. They register that users—or hey, let’s be radical! call them ‘people’? They register that people prefer brands with a reputation of being transparent, open, green, small, local and organic (ha ha), over brands with a reputation for being secretive manipulators. So if that is what the people want, then that is what the people will get. Resulting in a proliferation of open washing, transparency theatre, and that curious species of fish called the red herring.

Of course, it’s not just Twitter doing this sort of thing. We’ve seen similar moves many times in recent months. A Large-Language-Models-as-a-Service provider that calls itself ‘OpenAI’, while not being open at all. The Twitter spinoff Bluesky, that claims to be decentralised but asks users of the Bluesky app to sign up for a centrally administered waiting list. Or Meta who, according to recent reports, is now dabbling in federated systems. Like … what? Meta giving up total control?

As someone wiser than me once commented: selective disclosure is often propaganda. Twitter’s supposed open sourcing of its tweet recommendation algorithm has given us some nice selective disclosure. Draw your conclusions.

Listening to community inputTwitter’s owner said that once the code were public, Twitter might get some useful community feedback about possible improvements or bug fixes—whatever might help make Twitter better. Well, it turns out they did!

At the time of writing this episode, the ‘the-algorithm’ repository already has 190 so-called pull requests (which is when someone proposes certain code changes, which the developer who controls the repository can then ‘pull in’ to the original code). The most popular such pull request, in terms of number of positive comments and thumbs up, is by a GitHub user named Cosmelon, who claims to have ‘optimized the algorithm’. Optimized, by deleting all of the 1,782 files in Twitter’s ‘the-algorithm’ GitHub repository.

Never too late to start listening to community input, is it?

ClosingThank you for listening to a Vulnerable By Design. If you would like to hear more or get in touch, we would love to hear from you! You will find all of our episodes and information on vulnerablebydesign.net. I’m Chris Onrust. Thank you for listening, and bye for now.

Episode links Among All of His Mistakes, Don’t Forget Elon Musk Is Singlehandedly Crushing a Big Chunk of Internet Research for No Good Reason, by Joshua Benton, NiemanLab, 4 April 2024. * Optimized the Algorithm #910, by Cosmelon, on GitHub, 1 April 2023. * Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring, by Brandi Geurkink, Wired, 7 April 2023. * PublicSpace, by FreeSpeechEnthusiast on GitHub, accessed 3 April 2023. * Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm (Blog.Twitter.Com), Hacker News, 31 March 2023. * According to the Heavy Ranker Readme…, by @jeff4llen, 31 March 2023. * Elon Musk Has Fired Twitter’s “Ethical AI” Team, by Will Knight, Wired, 4 November 2022. * Twitter Says Parts of Its Source Code Were Leaked Online, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, The New York Times, 26 March 2023. * What Can We Learn from “The Algorithm,” Twitter’s Partial Open-Sourcing of It’s Feed-Ranking Recommendation System?, by Sol Messing, 3 April 2023. * Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone, by Chris Stokel-Walker, Wired*, 10 March 2023. * Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm, by Twitter, 31 March 2023. * the-algorithm, by Twitter on GitHub. * the-algorithm-ml, by Twitter on GitHub. * Awesome Twitter Algo 🐦, by veekaybee and igorbrigadir on GitHub.

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In this episodeHave you heard of this new-ish game, Capitalism? We’ll go over the gameplay, to assess whether capitalism might actually be bad for your health. (And discuss the book Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant.)

TranscriptStart gameplayHey, how are you doing? You’re feeling alright? Or are you maybe a bit stressed? Burnt out from a heavy week at work? No worries, mate. I’ve got something to take your mind off of things for a couple of minutes.

Oh and, by the way: Hello! Welcome to Vulnerable By Design, with me, Chris Onrust. In this episode, we will dive into a new-ish game that has been making the rounds for a bit, which you may have heard of? It’s called Capitalism.1 In particular, we would like to find out how all of this capitalism fanfare may be affecting your health. Are you ready?

Level 1: What is capitalism?First things first: What is Capitalism? From what I have heard: ‘Capitalism is an intense strategy game (…) where players must constantly think ahead.’ It is ‘very realistic’, encourages ‘sensible strategies’, and allows even office clerks to ‘claw [their] way to the top’. They say that Capitalism offers ‘… hundreds of hours of gameplay for the corporate enthusiast’.2 Okay, good. But then how do you play Capitalism? Do you fancy having a go?

Let’s start with the basics. In capitalism, you have got an economic-political system that works on a cycle. Businesses, investors or other private parties control the wealth, the land, or other sorts of assets that are needed to produce, distribute, and exchange goods or services. They use wage labor to get other people to do the work of actually producing those goods or services for them. Those produced goods and services are then sold on a market for a profit, resulting in the accumulation of wealth and assets in the hands of those same initial businesses, investors, or other private parties. In short, we are working with a cycle of assets and wealth accumulation.

Terminology alert! This wealth and these assets are sometimes known as ‘ca-pi-tal’. And, by association, the businesses and people who own such wealth and assets can be known as ‘ca-pi-ta-lists’.

Okay, now for clarification: when we’re talking about wealth and assets, do I mean that if you’ve got a couple of quid on you, and you own a laptop, does that mean that you are a capitalist? No!

The hallmark of capitalism is not people owning or producing things. If you have a computer and you build software, that computer is not thereby capital, and you are not thereby a capitalist. If you own a loom, and you weave rugs, that loom is known to thereby capital, and you are not thereby a capitalist. If you have your own van, and you drive your mates to a rave, again: that van is not thereby capital, and that does not make you a capitalist.

But then when is something capital? What does make you a capitalist? We’re only dealing with capitalism in a very specific economic-political structure. When a person, business or whatever type of shell organization they can come up with, owns and controls things—computers, looms, vans, whatever—but does not use those assets to code, weave or provide transport themselves. No. It is when, instead, they get other people to do the actual work (of coding, weaving, driving). They pay those workers a wage that is lower than the actual value of the work that’s been delivered. They slap a price tag on it, and—cha-ching—they sell that for a profit.

So, my friends, having some savings or cooking utensils does not a capitalist make. It’s when you’ve got this—this specific structure—in place, that you’ve got capitalism.

Level 2: Player typesLet’s talk strategy now. The aim of capitalism, and the only thing that matters when playing, is capital accumulation. The language of this game is that of: profit, profit, profit, and that of growth, growth growth.

You’ve got different types of player options that you can choose from. The two main ones are: that of the capitalist, which today is mostly known by the more innocuously sounding name of ‘business owner’ or ‘investor’. For this player type, the challenge is to own things, and to cash in on value produced by workers.

There is also the player type of worker. For the worker, the challenge is to produce things for the capitalist, which the capitalist can then sell on the market for a profit. You will get some wage in exchange, but one that is always lower than the value of the work you delivered, because otherwise there wouldn’t be any profits. And you’re expected to consume and buy things as a worker. As a worker, you’re meant to satisfy all of your life’s desires by buying things from the capitalists. You do not DIY, you do not share things with your neighbor, nor will they be sharing any things with you. And you never, ever, ever are satisfied with who you are, with what you already have. In other words: as a worker, your job in capitalism is basically to act as a vessel through which the capitalists can get richer and obtain more capital. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

When the capitalist and the worker player types successfully collaborate together—successful from the viewpoint of capitalism, that is—then you will get a steamroller cycle of businesses raking in profits, to accumulate more capital, to gain more profits, for yet more capital.

Beware: as a system, capitalism is greedy. To continue accumulating capital, it has a tendency to try to dominate and extract value from ever more territories and societies across the globe, as it’s done over the past two and a half centuries. It also has an inclination to expand into ever more areas of life. In the old days, you might share books or music with strangers. Now, we have Digital so-called ‘Rights’ Management. In the old days, you would let a mate crash on your couch. Now they can make a booking. In the old days, people used to write blogs and newsletters. Now, the full thing is locked away for premium subscribers. In the old days, you used to be able to go for a walk, or just browse the web. Now, every single step you take and every website you visit is tracked, with someone, somewhere out there making money off of you.

In their book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the author Shoshana Zuboff suggests that data mining, manipulation, and the monetization of people’s personal experiences and behavior, means that today we are dealing with a new form of capitalism, namely: surveillance capitalism. But of course we aren’t. And, of course, this isn’t new. Expanding it to ever fresh territories for value extraction was part of the blueprint of capitalism from the very beginning.

Level 3: Capitalism has no winnersThen on to a more pressing concern: how do you win this game? What does it take to win at Capitalism? Uuuuuh… well… you can’t. There just isn’t any winning in this beautiful game.

If you play as a worker, obviously you can’t win, because you’re stuck in a cycle of wage exploitation and high-pressure consumption. But if you play as a capitalist, you also can’t win, because you can always accumulate more capital, right? The only end game for capitalism is when we have gobbled up all of the earth’s resources, monetized every dimension of life, and all we’ve got left to eat is stable coins.

Some fun facts while we are at it. It might be difficult to grasp if you’re living in a capitalist-run society today, but capitalism is not the only game around. Capitalism is not inevitable, natural, or somehow the only viable option. Plus, in the wider scheme of things, capitalism itself is actually quite a recent invention. It’s only been with us for what, two, three centuries? And throughout that period, always only for a subset of all of the people on earth.

Nowadays, many people living under capitalism can be, shall we say, a little fatalistic about their situation. ‘Of course, they’re going to monetize that.’ ‘A business is going to want to make a profit.’ Contrast that with the early days of capitalism, when this wage-labor-marketize-everything-frenzy first got forced down people’s throats. Back in the day, people were not so smitten. Millworkers, factory workers, shoemakers, people from all sorts of sectors protested. They thought that wage labour was humiliating and degrading. That it undermined your independence, your dignity, and your self-respect to have to sell your brain, sell your body, and sell the largest proportion of your waking life without being able to hold the fruits of your labour. And while someone else cashes in the profit from your toil.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, in an address from 1883, compared wage labor to slavery. Douglass said that wage slavery was ‘… only a little less galling and crushing in its effect than chattel slavery’, and that ‘… this slavery of wages must go down with the other.’3

Maybe right now you’re thinking: ‘Ah well, my boss treats me fairly. My colleagues are nice. I get quite decent compensation—with stock options too! In fact, I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this!’

Good for you. But what I’m telling you is that, regardless of how nicely you’re treated, or whether your employer contributes to dental care, parental leave, or unlimited days off, if you are working for wages under a capitalist system, then you are always, by definition, and by design, being exploited. And I’m not talking about fair pay here. I’m not talking about earning a living wage. I’m talking about the principle. The basic setup of how capitalism works. The logic of capitalism requires that you, as a worker, be paid less than the value of the work you deliver. Why would that be so?

Well, remember, the aim of capitalism is to keep the engine of capital accumulation going. How do you do that? By making sure that you sell goods or services for a price that is higher than what it took to produce or procure them, so that you can cash in the difference as profit. And you do that by making sure that you pay the workers—those who do the actual work—less than the value of the work that was delivered. The capitalist needs to pay you less than the actual value generated by your work, because if they pay you the full value of what was brought in, then what would happen to their ability to siphon off profit? And without siphoning of profit, what would happen to capital accumulation? By any definition of exploitation that I have seen, this is exploitative. So that’s why wage labor under capitalism is always exploitation.

If you hear all that what sounds to me like misery, you might wonder: who would want capitalism? Why would anyone think this is a good idea? Capitalism lovers will at this point often mumble something about freedom. For example, the egoistic philosopher Ayn Rand, in their work Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal from 1966, says that ‘capitalism is the only system that answers yes’ to the question whether humans are, and should be, really free.4 Or consider the economist Friedrich Hayek, who in The Road to Serfdom from 1944 says that market capitalism is a precondition for political freedom.5

Which are both really lovely thoughts. Except that capitalism has, from the outset, always faired remarkably well under dictatorships and oppressive regimes, and has been the pretext of a huge number of mass murder episodes—often US-driven—for example, in Việt Nam, Indonesia, Argentina, and lots of more places. More on that, I suppose in another episode.

Besides, what is free about a system in which by design, the majority of the population is systematically being exploited? Is it the freedom to choose who you’re going to be exploited by? The freedom to be discarded when you’re no longer have productive use? The freedom to hop from gig to gig, not knowing whether you’ll be able to afford rent or food by the end of the week?

The website Investopedia, that fount of wisdom for aspiring investors, suggests, unsurprisingly: ‘Capitalism tends to benefit capitalists the most.’6

Level 4: What does capitalism have to do with health?That was probably a way too long tirade about all things, capitalism, when all you really wanted was to settle into a cozy chat about bodies and health, to take your mind off the stress of things. Okay, I hear you!

We are officially gathered here today to talk about a book called Health Communism that came out not too long ago. Which, in a nutshell, says that the economic-political system that you live under can have dramatic consequences for your and other people’s health. Fine.

One of the challenges of this book, written by the authors Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and Artie Vierkant, is that it’s full of super interesting anecdotes, ideas and descriptions. But it gives you no definitions of any of the main topics that it’s covering. No definition of health. No definition of the communism from the title. And it mostly talks about the harmful effects of capitalism, but there’s no definition of capitalism either. This means that, as a reader of this book (Health Communism), there is a lot that you will have to fill in yourself. Because of the books focus on capitalism, we unavoidably will need to fill in what capitalism is to make sense of anything that’s being said here. That is what that lengthy tirade was for. And that we have now already completely covered, thank you very much. So with that out of the way, let’s turn to the contents.

Health Communism (the book) states that the political-economic system that you live under can have massive consequences for your health, for how you think about health, and for the healthcare that’s being offered to people in society. As you may have suspected from my intro (though, less so from the title of the book), the book’s main focus is how the capitalist political-economic system has such massive consequences for your health, for how you think about health, and for the healthcare that’s being offered in society.

Let’s start with the idea that capitalism may impact your health. As Adler-Bolton and Vierkant put it in Health Communism: capitalism needs health. So here’s the thought behind that.

We know that the aim and the engine of the capitalism game is ever-increasing capital accumulation. We also know that, for such capital accumulation to occur, someone needs to be producing goods and services to sell. Because for all the braggadocio of learning to live with no sleep, or of pulling off a 200 hour workweek—it’s a fiction people, there is no such thing!—I can tell you that the capitalist who owns an invest in things is not going to do that work themselves. No. The whole point of owning or investing in stuff is that you can just sit back and own, while other people do all the toiling and the grinding.

Now this is where health comes into the picture. Because those people who are actually doing all the work (the workers) at a minimum should be well enough, or healthy enough—physically and mentally—to be able to provide that labor to produce whatever the capitalist wants producing. Without at least some basic level of health that will allow the worker to perform these actions, there would be no production, there would be nothing to sell. And without any things to sell, there can’t be any profit, can there? Without any profit, there can be no capital accumulation. So without at least some basic level of health on the part of the workers, your whole capitalist fairytale begins to crumble. That is why capitalism needs health: capitalists need some healthy bodies to do the actual work for them.

At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, capitalism is extremely good at making you sick. And now, just a heads up: I am about to mention some examples of how capitalist actions and non-actions can cause health damage that may come close to home to some of your personal situations. So if you don’t feel in the mood for that right now, maybe just skip forward a minute or so? And we’ll find each other at the other end. All right?

How might capitalism be bad for your health? Here’s how. Capitalism is what leads factory owners to cut safety measures so that people lose hands or limbs. Capitalism keeps the unsuitable pipework in place, so that you are now drinking lead with your water. Capitalism is what leads chemical transport operators to eliminate inspections, testing, repairs, and cut back on maintenance costs, making a derailment bound to happen. Capitalism is what gets building owners to choose highly flammable cladding over its fire-resistant counterparts, just to save some pennies. Capitalism leads to falsified mission statements, causing all of us to breathe filthy air. Capitalism gets you addicted to opioids, and then also operates the clinic to help you get rid of your addiction. Capitalism get you Agent Orange, defoliation, disability at birth, and chronic health problems. Capitalism wants you to skip lunch or loo breaks, to ensure you meet productivity targets. Capitalism would also rather that you skip that cancer checkup too, so that you can do an extra shift. Capitalism tells you to do unpaid overtime to the point of burnout. Capitalism tells you that you are not enough, and that your only option is to buy your way towards being a proper human being. Capitalism gets you to waste hours and hours scrolling past pointless gunk that makes you feel miserable and depleted, just to have you glance at some ads for things that you may also like. Capitalism pressures people to work without proper protection, to shop, dine, and dance in unventilated super spreader spaces, in the midst of a full-blown pandemic with an airborne virus. Because you must keep producing. You must keep consuming. Because that office real estate isn’t going to rent itself, is it? Because it’s fine if you get ill. Because it’s fine if you get long term ill. Capitalism is bad for your health, because under capitalism, people’s bodies are disposable.

Investopedia agrees here, and admits that capitalism has some ‘negative externalities’ with a fancy term. Investopedia points out that capitalism creates inequalities, that it makes workers miserable, can damage the environment, and that it can harm people’s health.

Level 5: Reserve army of labourNow you might spot a tension between the two things I’ve just said. Why, if capitalism so badly needs healthy bodies to work, why would capitalism want to make you sick? Squeeze all of the life out of you? Wouldn’t that be counterproductive? Wouldn’t it, to the contrary, be in the interest of capitalism to do whatever it can to keep people healthy? Good catch! Now, this is also what I initially thought. But it turns out there is more to the story. Here’s the situation.

Remember that we talked about the different player roles in the Capitalism game? It turns out that my initial description was a bit limited. Under capitalism that aren’t just the capitalist player role (meaning: the people who extract and own), and there also isn’t just the worker (meaning: the people who do the actual work). In addition, there is also the player role of what is traditionally called a member of a ‘reserve army of labour’.

The reserve army of labor consists of people who do not own things, and who are, for whatever reason, also not doing wage labor, but who would technically be able to work, and who could be drafted in to do so at any point. This reserve labour force contains people who are unemployed, under-employed, or who belong to what we nowadays call the ‘precariat’—which is the situation of being in temporary, part-time or gig work that barely allows you to scrape by and so engulfs you in a precarious, insecure day-to-day existence.

Here is the capitalists’ dream. The capitalists’ dream is for this reserve labour force—so, this pool of people who are looking for work—to be as large as possible. Because with a massive reserve pool of people who could pick up work at any moment, the currently employed wage workers have less of a negotiating position. They’ve got less of a fist to make when demanding safer work environment, or better compensation. The larger the reserve army of labor, the more easily any individual worker can be replaced. Because for you ten others.

You can see the recent massive layoffs in tech—at Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and the like, they fired tens of thousands of workers—you can see those recent layoffs in this light. Layoffs increase the pool of workers available for tech labour. And so it makes employed tech workers more replaceable.

This, my earthlings, is where the tension that we mentioned earlier, disappears. The tension between on the one hand capitalism needing healthy bodies, and on the other hand, capitalism making you sick—this is where the tension evaporates, with the reserve army of labor. Because yes, capitalism needs healthy bodies to do the work to generate anything that can be sold for a profit. But as long as there are reserve recruits, it does not need those workers to stay healthy. The capitalist would be none troubled if you, as a worker, lose a limb, get burned, get burnt out, can’t sleep, can’t think, can’t breathe anything other than toxic air. The capitalist would be none troubled if it had to squeeze the last inch of life out of an individual worker, because with the reserve pool of labour, as soon as the poor worker tumbles over and collapses, it can just slot in a replacement. That is how under capitalism, individual workers, individual bodies, are disposable.

So yes, capitalism needs health. It needs healthy bodies to work. But because and as long as it’s got this massive reserve pool of unemployed workers, it’s got no trouble whatsoever if its cost-cutting and extraction makes people sick.

Now, if you live under capitalism, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant say, then that affects not only your health, but it also completely skews how you think about health, or how you’re pushed to think about health. What’s the idea here?

Naively, you might think that being healthy just amounts to not being ill or injured. Or maybe something to do with wellbeing or quality of life? Not so under capitalism, the authors of this book suggest. Because capitalism needs at least some healthy workers to keep the engine of capital accumulation going, and because capacity to work is practically all that matters about a worker, ‘health’ becomes almost synonymous with being able to do labour.

‘Are you healthy?’ just becomes, ‘Can you work for me?’ And similarly, the point of healthcare just becomes: not to help you get better or not to alleviate your symptoms, but rather, care gets only and exclusively directed at getting people back to work.

You can see this in the phenomenon of disability assessments, where medical professionals will determine how much labour the authorities can still reasonably expect to squeeze out of you. You’re missing a limb? Oh, well, let’s call you 21% disabled then. You’re unpredictable but chronic pain with bursts of sudden fatigue? Hmm, okay, well, that’s rather more difficult to measure. So let’s just classify you as ‘healthy’ even though you’re just curled up in a ball on the floor wanting it all to go away from time to time. Whatever their pretext, all of these fit to work assessments are to ensure that nobody who could be in wage work will escape it.

You can also see this and how recently, the UK government called upon GPs, not to write out so many sick notes. This happened not because those in government somehow, magically, realized that people weren’t actually sick. Most likely lots of people are sick, because … uuuhhh … pandemic? But the reality is that the level of sickness are getting so bad and so high, that they are causing staff shortages for employers.

Level 6: Extract and abandonAnd then what happens if you’re sick? What happens if you’re long term, chronically ill or disabled to such an extent that you can’t work? Adler-Bolton and Vierkant suggest that under capitalism, there is a very real possibility that in that case, the doors will close for you. That you will simply not get the care that you need.

They say that with capitalism, there is this massive push to think about health care as some scarce good that needs rationing. And that definitely can’t be given to everyone. ‘Do you know how expensive a hip replacement is? Try to walk on this one a little longer.’ ‘You didn’t really think we could give everyone mental health support, did you?’ ‘Sorry, radiotherapy is only offered on our premium plan.’ Especially if you are long term ill or disabled, there is a very real possibility that in effect, under capitalism, you will be abandoned.

The rather morbid label that sometimes is used here is that of ‘relative surplus population’. This surplus would include everyone who for whatever reason, finds themselves surplus to requirements for capitalist production. Surplus in this sense are both anyone in the reserve pool of labour that we discussed earlier—so people who can work, but are not in wage work at the moment. And it includes all people who are too ill, too frail, or who for whatever other reason can’t work.

I think you can guess from the label already that the ‘relative surplus population’ is not obviously a group that you would want to be part of. Although I hope that someone, somewhere, will someday start a post-punk band calling itself The Revenge of the Surplus.

But seriously, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant suppose that this worker/surplus-distinction marks a big, painful cut and division within capitalist societies. And I think there’s something to that suggestion.

Think of casual questions such as: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Toward the people concerned, it is very clear that this question is not asking about a child actually being someone or something. They will just be themselves, presumably with a larger body, more experience, and different daily habits. Instead, the question is asking: ‘What type of employment would you like to perform to ensure your survival?’

Or consider the question: ‘What do you do?’, when meeting new chaps at parties. What I’m doing is, most likely, holding an alcohol free G&T with some olives and crisps on the side. What you mean is: ‘What sort of money-generating activity do you do to earn your place within society?’ And if you don’t have an impressive answer to that, it is likely to be a very brief conversation.

Or consider how people who are sick or frail or who, for whatever reason, can’t work have been portrayed as being in some way ‘less’—less deserving, of less social value, as not full members of society? Or even how they are portrayed as something of a burden. For, since the start of the CoViD-19 pandemic, it has been made very clear that your dying was somehow fine, if you had any of those pre-existing health conditions.

Through all sorts of subtle but persisting messaging, the idea gets reinforced that you don’t really count, unless you’ve struck big in employment. The idea gets reinforced that becoming surplus is a pretty miserable thing to happen to you, something to be avoided at all costs. And as a worker, you’ve got this risk of ending up in the surplus always continuously hovering over you, as some perpetual threat of what can happen if you do not join the wage exploitation bandwagon.

Level 7: Profitable tricksAlso, let’s not forget the flip side. When, with true capitalist zeal, they have marketized everything, then also medicine, treatment, checkups, or any form of therapy … then those too become products that you will need to buy. Which rapidly brings us to the familiar story of: having your healthcare delivered at the lowest possible cost, skimping on materials, regulations and safety checks, and being charged the highest possible price that the capitalists can get away with.

Speaking of highest possible profits: there are so many fun tricks of the game to help you squeeze out cash from people’s ill health or well-being. Privatize healthcare! Privatize health insurance! Privatize anything that you can lay your hands on!

Think of patents. A patent is when one child has come up with something fun or useful and then bars all the other children from playing with it—unless they pay them their lunch money, of course. Remember that fun time in 2015 when ‘pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli bought the manufacturing license for the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim (or ‘Pyrimethamine’), also used by people living with HIV/AIDS, and took the liberty to up the price per pill with over 5,000%, from around $13 to over $700 per pill pretty much overnight?

Think also about trade agreements between countries, which when it comes to anything to do with medicine or health care, are often pre-drafted by big, for-profit pharmaceutical companies. As a result, these trade agreements may often make trade between countries conditional on, for example, the selling off of parts or all of a country’s healthcare system to for-profit providers. They may also require trade sanctions against any country that decides to produce its own non-branded version of a vaccine or a cancer drug. Because health and well being, they’re nice and all that, but what really matters is preventing intellectual property infringement.

All this, according to Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, and is the effect of capitalism on health: on how people think about what health is, and on how healthcare will be delivered within a capitalist society.

All right, well, then where are we at? It looks like we are stuck at level whatever of this capitalism extortion game, and now it’s suddenly not so fun anymore. It’s getting late, it’s getting dark, and you would want to go home. Can you?

In Health Communism, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant seem to say that if people and societies would take an alternative approach to health, then that could make the whole capitalist system come crashing down. More specifically, what they have in mind is a system in which care is not rationed. Where it’s not made conditional on your doing wage work for capitalist production. Where it’s not locked behind paywalls or formal ability assessment. But where instead, healthcare and other forms of care are provided in abundance. Where everybody has access to all the care they need. So that gives us a slogan, they say what we need is: all care for all people. And they say that such a system, if it were to be realized, must be understood as fundamentally threatening to the existence of capitalism. So basically, their idea is: change how you do health, and capitalism will crumble.

To which an alert reader might respond: Yeah, maybe? Maybe not? How would we know? Health Communism (the book) gives readers flamboyant statements. But it is pretty sparse on the theory, stats, or the causal logic of how any of this might work.

Now, I’m also just a reader in this case, and I shouldn’t go about just making any of this up on the authors’ behalf. But what I can do is give you two pointers that could, just potentially, help us signpost way out: one that’s firmly grounded in our earthly reality, and another a blatant alt-world time-travelling fiction.

Level 8: Reality checkLet’s start with the reality check. It might be easy to forget if you’re living in a capitalist society, but there are in this world, in 2023, also non-capitalist healthcare systems out there. Think of healthcare in China. Think of Việt Nam. Both of which have communist constitutions and already offer, or working towards offering, universal health care coverage. Though, as I understand it, both also operate a privatized, for-profit health market in parallel.

But the radiant example here is of course Cuba. Cuba’s health system has universal access, and is consistently recognized as among the best in the world. Cuban doctors regularly deliver medical care internationally. Cuban health researchers have developed a vaccine against lung cancer, and were the first to eliminate birth-parent-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. Plus, not to forget, Cuba achieves all of this despite the United States trying to crush its care system with a decade-long trade embargo on medicine.

Now, Health Communism (the book) doesn’t discuss any of this—I suppose, because of its hyper-focus on the United States and Europe. But, just so you know, there are non-capitalist healthcare systems out there. So if you want to liberate health from capitalism, then hey, maybe these living breathing examples are ones to learn from?

Level 9: News from NowhereThe second signpost I would like to give you is a fiction and a utopia. Drawn from the novel News from Nowhere, written by the designer and socialist William Morris.

In News from Nowhere, which was published in 1890, Morris sketches a society that has successfully transitioned into what they call ‘pure communism’, which is a society-of-equals type of communism. So very different from any sort of hierarchical state communism, which Morris abhorred.

Under this pure communism, people are free and live in a fellowship of equals. They’re not oppressed or exploited for business interests. They live without wage labour and without government. In this society, everybody does work that they enjoy, or that will benefit either themselves or the community, rather than produce things for some ‘… vague market (…) over which they have no control’.7

Morris’s community came from a system that was not too dissimilar from the capitalism that many of us are living under today. In the old capitalist days, Morris describes, people were forced to engage

‘… in a most elaborate system of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that World-Market, once set a-going, forced to them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not.’8

To this system:

‘… everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the [worker[ at [their] work, nay and [their] most elementary comfort and bare health, [their] food, [their] clothes, [their] dwelling, [their] leisure, [their] amusement, [their] education—[their] life, in short.’9

Did any government protect people from such exploitation? Oh, no, it didn’t. Instead, as Morris writes, the function of government, ‘… with its army, navy and police…’, was to make sure that ‘… the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt.’ Where for ‘upper classes’ read: business owners, investors, capitalists. ‘It was a function of government to protect the rich against the poor.’ And the government’s function was also ‘… to delude people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs.’10

The escape from the misery of capitalist oppression did not come easily for the society that Morris describes. In fact, it had initially seemed completely unachievable to them. People didn’t think that it could work, because looking around them, they only saw masses of fellows who were overwhelmed, miserable, stressed, trying to survive the day-to-day, where the only chance of escape that they could think of was one of becoming a capitalist themselves and start exploiting other people. The ‘get rich or die tryin’-mentality. From the exploited to the exploiter.

So what changed? How did they manage to bring their unfathomably large move away from capitalism about? I’m afraid, or pleased, to say that the short answer is: They just began. There was not one single big turning point. There was no top-down coordination. There were just local networks of people realizing that either they’d be stuck with this wage exploitation game play forever, or they would opt for freedom and equality with a communist system of life.

People just stopped working for the capitalists, the reactionaries. The factory, the shipyards, the mills, the farms, and the docks, owned by for-profit, oppressive businesses—they just stood empty. Everyone refused to work for them. And obviously those owners weren’t going to do the work themselves, were they? Instead, people started working—weaving, forming, soldering, baking, coding (well, okay, I added the coding)—for themselves, for society, for the good and the benefit of everyone who was ready to move away from capitalist exploitation.

Let me jump in here. This is not in the book, but translated to a health situation that might mean: setting up basic, non-profit GP surgeries in your area. Starting a communal online therapy group to support one another. Saying: ‘Bollocks to that!’ with all this patent and intellectual property folly. Doing CoViD-safe meetups. Running a community kitchen to make sure that everyone can eat healthily. That, with such cumulative refusal from within society to participate any longer … that is how the change came about, in Morris’ utopia.

Playing the capitalism game may have been fun, for some players, for the few centuries it’s lasted so far. But today, with the earth simultaneously flooding and on fire, with people getting sick and depleted all around, with the most valued occupations among the young being either that of influencer or of naked short-selling professional, you’ve got to ask: Is capitalism still enjoyable to play? Because if not, then maybe it is time to hit the escape button.

At the end of News from Nowhere, when the narrator time-traveller reflects whether all that they have witnessed about this pure communist society was all a dream, they start musing to themselves. They say:

‘Go back and be happier (…) for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labor needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness. Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then maybe it may be called a vision rather than a dream.’11

Level 10: Game overGame over.

Thank you for tuning in to Vulnerable By Design this week. If you would like to hear more or get in touch, you will find all of our episodes and more information on vulnerablebdesign.net. I am Chris Onrust. Thank you for listening, and bye for now.

Episode links Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant. Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto. Brooklyn: Verso, 2022. * Capitalism 2 Official Site. * Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019 (PDF alert). * Frederick Douglass, Three Addresses on the Relations Subsisting between the White and Colored People of the United States, 1886. * Eric Williams. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944. * Friedrich Engels. The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980 (original publication 1845). * Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York, NY: Signet, 1966. * Friedrich August Hayek. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1944. * The Investopedia Team. ‘What Is Capitalism: Varieties, History, Pros & Cons, Socialism’. * Nick Gutteridge and Ben Riley-Smith. Sick Note Crackdown to Get More People Back into Work. The Telegraph, 14 February 2023. * Andrew Pollack. Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight. The New York Times, 20 September 2015. * About China’s ‘barefoot doctor’ (‘village doctor’) initiative, originating in the 1950s: Weiyuan Cui, China’s Village Doctors Take Great Strides, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, December 2008. * Salim Lamrani. The Health System in Cuba: Origin, Doctrine and Results. Études Caribéennes, 7 July 2021. * William Morris. News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance*. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1908 (original publication 1890).

1. Capitalism 2 Official Site ↩︎
2. Quotes from: BusinessWeek (21 October 1996), Thomas Kosnik, Drew Fudenberg, CNN, and Computer Gaming World, stated on Capitalism 2 Official Site. (Accessed 20 February 2023) ↩︎
3. Frederick Douglass, ‘Address to the people of the United States at a Convention of Colored Men held in Louisville, Kentucky, 24 September 1883’, in: Three Addresses on the Relations Subsisting between the White and Colored People of the United States, 1886, p. 13. ↩︎
4. Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York, NY: Signet, 1966. ↩︎
5. Friedrich August Hayek. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1944. ↩︎
6. The Investopedia Team. ‘What Is Capitalism: Varieties, History, Pros & Cons, Socialism’. (Version: 9 March 2023) ↩︎
7. William Morris. News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1908 [1890], p. 107. ↩︎
8. William Morris. News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1908 [1890], p. 102. ↩︎
9. William Morris. News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1908 [1890], pp. 102-03. ↩︎
10. William Morris. News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1908 [1890], selections from pp. 82, 84, and 86. ↩︎
11. William Morris. News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance. London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1908 [1890], p. 237. ↩︎

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In this episodeWe catch up with ChatGPT about the latest recipes, strategic reporting, Python scripts, cost of living, and killing the poor.

TranscriptChatGPTI am an artificial intelligence and do not have feelings or emotions. However, I am here to assist you to the best of my ability.

ChrisHello, and welcome to Vulnerable By Design with me, Chris Onrust. In today’s episode we will talk about and with our new pal ChatGPT over here, and how the rise of natural language processing bots such as ChatGPT can all at once bring you both in evenings worth of good, clean fun, as well as cold tears of existential dread. Hiya! (Just wave, this needn’t be awkward.)

Chatting with ChatGPTChatGPTIs there something specific you would like to know or discuss?

ChrisYes, actually there is! Do you happen to have a recipe for tarka dal?

ChatGPTYes, here is a recipe for tarka dal. Ingredients: one cup dried yellow split peas, one tablespoon of vegetable oil…

ChrisAll right, that’s great. Thank you. And can you write a strategic report with three objectives, each with two key results that sets out a company strategy for Q1 2023?

ChatGPTCertainly. Here is an example of a strategic report with three objectives, each with two key results that sets out a company’s strategy for Q1 2023: Q1 2023 Strategic Roadmap …

ChrisOkay, okay. Thank you. And could you write a Python script that uses the Binance API to trade Bitcoin?

ChatGPTSure! Here is an example of a Python script that uses the Binance API to trade Bitcoin: Import requests. Import JSON. Set the API endpoint URL and your API key….

ChrisOkay, that’s awesome. Thank you.

ChatGPTYou’re welcome. I’m glad I could help.

ChrisOkay, let’s close it there. That was our new friend, ChadGPT. And I don’t really want to talk about them in their presence. So I’m just going to leave the room here. All right, that’s better.

This little fun service, ChatGPT, has been striking up some furore online over recent weeks. But what is ChadGPT? How does it work? What’s going on here?

ChatGPT is a tool. It’s a chatbot. Which, as you heard, depending on your prompt can give you recipes, strategic reports, or code. It can give you translations, answer questions, and basically any language processing you like.

Now, while the ‘chat’ in the name ‘ChatGPT’ is relatively easy to understand—hey, you can use it for chatting, huhuh!—the ‘GPT’ might be less straightforward. The ‘GPT’ and ‘ChatGPT’ stands for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’. Now what we’re dealing with here is the domain of large language models, which are used in machine learning. The ‘generative’ bit here refers to ChatGPT being a generative model. Meaning: when you input a sentence, it will generate predictions about what the next token (or word) will be. A bit similar to how you could think about an elaborate autocompletion that you can find in search engines.

The ‘pre-training’ part of the name refers to the model having gone through a period of working through oodles and oodles of text, where it is trained to make predictions. And the ‘transformer’ bit refers to a type of network architecture used for ChatGPT. A transformer architecture uses a mechanism of self-attention. Which, just like when you and I would be paying attention to something, it treats certain parts of the input data as more significant than other parts—which in turn can help it improve its performance in information processing.

So, in other words, ChartGPT is a chatbot, trained on lots and lots of text and code, mainly from the internet. And it was fine-tuned for dialogue through a process called ‘Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback’. And in general, it’s just doing its best.

ChatGPTI’m here to help.

ChrisThrowback to the 30th of November 2022. (Uh, sorry, that was only just a few weeks ago?) Right when ChatGPT got launched, it started generating some buzz, by being so awfully articulate in its responses. It’s sounded like an actual friendly, helpful person, who just happened to have vast amounts of knowledge and be game for whatever you’re up to. Though, because of an integrated moderation system, it generally doesn’t go near violence, hate, or Not Safe For Work-topics. Sure, ChatGPT might slip in the occasional inaccuracy. For example, because its training material only goes up to late 2021, it will tell you that:

ChatGPTAs of 2021, the current president of Kenya is Uhuru Kenyatta.

ChrisRather than William Ruto, the actual Kenyan president, who was elected in August 2022. Yet for all that, ChatGPT sure is willing to admit when it has made a mistake, and eager to revise and try again when it has cocked up.

Not-so-OpenAIChrisNow, where does all of this come from? ChatGPT was developed by the misleadingly named organisation OpenAI. Misleading, because in reality, this organisation is not open about the model or exact training data for ChatGPT at all, but leaves people guessing about those. I guess ClosedObscurantistAI didn’t cut it in the branding selection?

So-called OpenAI’s operations have been funded by a roster of industry big shots, including Jessica Livingston, co founder of the startup accelerator, Y Combinator; former Twitter CEO Elon Musk; Peter ‘Palantir Technologies’ Thiel; and Microsoft, which recently donated a billion to the cause.

OpenAI’s stated aim is to do research to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Where, under ‘artificial general intelligence’, it understands: “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. And supposedly-OpenAI commits itself to a charter that says that such artificial general intelligence should, among other things, be safe and benefit all. Awww, isn’t that cute?

As of now, not-so-OpenAI has made ChatGPT available, free to use. But only for a limited period of time, as a research preview. And also: be aware that any input you give it, will be used for training purposes, and can be read by the company. So don’t put any private details in there. I mean, of course, I know you wouldn’t do that on the internet!

Mind you, ChatGPT is not the only large language model out there. There is also Google’s LaMDA, which stands for: ‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’, of which last summer, a Google engineer claimed that it was sentient. There is BLOOM, which somehow, is an acronym of BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model. Like ChatGPT, BLOOM can generate coherent text and code in dozens of languages. But, unlike ChatGPT, BLOOM is actually open, in that anyone who fancies can inspect the model and the training data.

In addition, in the image making realm, there are DALL-E and its successor DALL-E 2, both also from not-so-very-OpenAI, which can generate images based on any coherent description you give it. Would you like a hairy cucumber in the style of Edvard Munch? You got it! People in animal suits lounging at a pool drinking cocktails? Here you go!

Fear of (mis)information floodChrisOver the past few weeks, usually, the first response that I’ve seen people give to ChatGPT is: Woah, it can write poetry?! Let me see if it can also write this op-ed that is due tomorrow! But once you’ve done that for a couple of hours, or days (sorry!), then for a number of people, something else does start to sink in. A curious, nagging feeling that something is just not quite right. A sense of angst? A dread of what this technology might bring about?

The fear that I have found bubbling up comes in two forms. On the one hand, a fear about the information flood that ChatGPT and its colleague bots might unleash upon society. Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus speaks of ‘AI’s Jurassic Park Moment’, referring to the 1990s sci-fi novel by Michael Crichton, and its film adaptation. Where enthusiasts created a theme park with cloned dinosaurs. Which it seemed a great idea at the time, until these terrible lizards started to break free.

Dr. Ian Malcolm (fictional character)Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think they if they should.

ChrisThe threat, according to Gary Marcus, is that not all statements that these systems produce are actually true. As we saw, indeed, in ChatGPT’s misconception about the Kenyan presidency. Now sure, humans can write weird things as well—believe me. But compared to humans typing manually, chatbots can produce texts at a much lower effort or cost, and at much greater scale. So these bots could potentially massively increase the levels of nonsense floating around in the world, which might destabilise societies if people actually start believing whatever they read online. Oh, they already do? Well, nevermind then.

Might some Jurassic Park effect be going on with these ultra-effective chatbots? Are Google, not-OpenAI, and others unleashing forces that we won’t be able to control? Because if so, then I am not sure that this time around, the Costa Rican Air Force is going to come in to rescue survivors and raze the web with napalm.

Existential dread and fear of replacementChrisIn addition to this information flood fear about ChatGPT, I’ve also seen another type of fear floating around. A fear that might come closer to what we can call ‘existential dread’. Sure, initially, it’s hilarious that this chatbot—whom you’ve only just met—can write your op-eds, do your strategic reporting, and code your programmes. But then you realise: oh, dear! It can write my op eds. It can do my strategic reporting. It can code my programmes. I just spent two weeks on what this wight can do in seconds.

ChatGPT and consortia are already quite good. I mean: scarily good. And with all that continued training going on, they’re only going to get better over the next few years. Now, if a tool can do what a human does, but faster and more efficient, then who is ultimately going to get a human to keep doing all of these things? So here’s the fear. Is my entire line of work … ? Am I … going to be replaced by a bot? Once that realisation hits you, you can expect to go through five stages.

Dr. Julius Michael Hibbert, M.D. (fictional character)You can expect to go through five stages. The first is denial …

Homer Simpson (fictional character)No way, because I’m not dying!

Dr. Julius Michael Hibbert, M.D. (fictional character)The second is anger.

Homer Simpson (fictional character)Why you little …!

Dr. Julius Michael Hibbert, M.D. (fictional character)After that comes fear…

Homer Simpson (fictional character)What’s after fear? What’s after fear?

Dr. Julius Michael Hibbert, M.D. (fictional character)Bargaining.

Homer Simpson (fictional character)Doc, you gotta get me out of this, I’ll make it worth your while!

Dr. Julius Michael Hibbert, M.D. (fictional character)Finally: acceptance.

Homer Simpson (fictional character)Well, we all gotta go some time.

ChrisSome people prefer to stick to the denial stage. They will say things such as: ‘Ah well, it’s not that good.’ Or: ‘It can’t really do anything new, nothing actually creative. It can only repeat what it’s been trained on.’ Or: ‘Well, somebody will still have to operate chatbot, won’t they?’

Uhm, yeah, maybe? But just realise that we are not talking about this or that tool, right now. We are talking about the trajectory that, with these tools, we are already on. And with that trajectory, it looks like: if you are in the business of generating text, or code, or images, then at some point—possibly already quite soon—there is going to be a bot that can do things much faster than you. Much, much cheaper than you. And which doesn’t bother about frivolities such as labour rights, sick leave, or minimum wage. Now if management can’t tell the difference in output or results, then in a mindset of cutting expenses and increasing profit margins, what are they going to opt for?

The website Death By AI jokingly lists things and professions that are likely to be killed off by artificial intelligence tools. In addition to your ability to focus (which it calls already ‘critically endangered’), these include the job of illustrator, which the site lists as ‘endangered’. I mean, when DALL-E 2 got launched earlier in 2022, I’ve heard some of my illustrator friends say: ‘Okay, that was it then! I might just as well pack up now.’ And similarly, the profession of writer is listed as vulnerable. And potentially also in this category should be that once-so-fêted role of software developer. Entire categories of work may well go the way of: the switchboard operator, the scribe, and the dodo.

Of course, this has already been happening in certain circles for much longer: factory work, fruit picking, vehicle operations. It’s just that now it is likely to hit those people doing what is so politely called ‘knowledge work’.

Speaking personally, I feel this too! I mean: I know that you recently voted that future Vulnerable By Design episodes should not be written by ChatGPT. But I also know that you might very well change your mind. In which case it will be ‘exit Chris’, from the Vulnerable By Design team. Who knows, we might at some point just end up in a magical online universe in which all blog posts, all podcast episodes, and all selfies are generated by bots, commenting on bots, replying to bots. Are you looking forward yet?

Work → income → survivalChrisThat automation and humans-being-replaced-by-bots evokes dread, is in large part due to a very specific decision that we keep making in many societies. Namely, the decision to tie work to income. And, unless you’re a part of the land-owning, asset-owning dividend-accruing group of people who can simply live have accumulated wealth, then having an income equals having money. Equals having the ability to buy food, pay the rent, have yourself cleansed and clad. And did we mention energy and heating?

Having an income and money equals being able to survive in these societies. In short, it is the decision to tie work to survival. So, when toffs such as BLOOM, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT come along, who might—quite possibly—automate away, not just individual roles, but any categories of work that involve writing, coding or image production, is it any surprise that forward looking mortals might feel dread at the prospect?

The idea that survival is tied to money, and money tied to survival, is not just theoretical. In many countries these days you’ll hear about inflation. You will hear about food prices going up, housing being unaffordable. You’re also quite likely to hear about the cost of living so-called ‘crisis’.

Hey, but hold on for a moment! What do you mean the ‘cost’ of living? Are you telling me that there is a price tag to being alive?

Globally, we produce enough food to feed every single human on the planet. Yet, according to a recent report on world hunger, in Yemen—the country with the highest level of hunger on earth—the prices of basic goods have been pushed out of reach. In Madagascar, over 48% of the population was malnourished in the most recent period studied. And even in a massively wealthy country like the United Kingdom, the number of people who have died of malnutrition—or let me rephrase that: who starved to death—has shot up in recent years, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. Austerity anyone?

As the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen already demonstrated in their 1981 book on famine: famines are seldomly caused by there not being enough food. They are pretty much always a problem with distribution and pricing, such as declining wages paired with rising food prices. Which results in the abysmal situation that the food is there. It is perfectly well available. But it isn’t being made available to people who needed to live.

In a society where the fulfilment of basic needs is hidden behind a price tag, that price tag becomes the cost of living. And what if you can’t afford that price tag? That cost of being alive? Then … you die?

Dead KennedysGonna kill, kill, kill, kill, kill the poor
Kill, kill, kill kill kill the poor
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

Killing the poor (in Canada)ChrisJust a side note, because I suppose that otherwise you’re going to think that I’m making stuff up. Killing people in direct relation to their poverty is not just hypothetical. This is actually currently happening. For example, Canada not too long ago expanded its euthanasia law, officially called ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’, which it is soon to expand even further.

You can qualify for a Canadian state-assisted death if you have an illness or disability that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable. Yet people have qualified for euthanasia under this scheme, whose unacceptable living conditions were caused due to them being: too poor to afford proper housing; too poor to afford medical treatment or social care; too poor to afford food. Because yeah, who wouldn’t experience severe distress and suffering at not having enough to eat, not getting pain relief, not having a suitable place to live?

Canadians have already qualified for euthanasia on these grounds. And instead of being given proper resources to eat, to have adequate housing, or being provided with appropriate care, many of these people have already been medically assisted to die. Hence, by the rules of logic, these people are now dead. I will link to some of their personal stories in the episode notes because in my humble opinion, this is absolutely disgusting.

That said, on the over-the-top-cynical bright side, Canada’s parliamentary budget officer reports that the current euthanasia scheme results in a net reduction in healthcare costs of over 68 million Canadian dollars per year.

This is the world, this is our current reality in which there is a ‘cost’ to being alive. The reality in which, in effect, if you are not flush enough, you are expected to just die. When I raised these issues with ChatGPT, they told me:

ChatGPTIt is not acceptable to kill anyone, regardless of their socio-economic status or any other factor. Every person has the right to life and the inherent value of their existence.

ChrisWhich seems apt. But ChatGPT also got cross with me for even raising the question!

ChatGPTIt is not accurate or appropriate to suggest that any group or individual is planning to kill poor people. Such a suggestion is inflammatory and not based in fact.

ChrisWell, okay? I would have thought that the UK Office for National Statistics and the Canadian Parliament would have been fact enough for a lovely chatbot friend? Continue listening to this inflammatory episode at your own risk.

So I think this should make it clearer why people—or at least: why anyone other than those who can just live off their accumulated wealth—might feel dread or existential angst at the prospect of ChatGPT and companions automating away their entire category of work. Because for many, in many societies, work has been tied to money, and money gets tied to survival. In such a system, without work bringing in money, what is going to happen to survival?

Okay, okay, okay. Let’s pause here for a moment. Look where we’ve ended up. Isn’t it really curious, that automation would induce such a fear? Because actually, when you think about it, the whole point of automation was supposed to be that these tools would actually make things easier. Speed things up. If we can have the same tasks performed with less effort, and in less time—not to mention the sweat, tears, and frustration—then that should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? That will save us humans work. That will give us more time for: cooking nice food, hanging out with mates, solving maths puzzles, whatever. And that sounds pretty amazing! But is it really possible?

Keynes’ visionLet me take you back some 90-odd years. In the year 1930, when things didn’t actually look as economically rosy as they might have done, the economist John Maynard Keynes sketched a vision. Keynes suggested that, due to the massive technological advances realised since the eigteenth century—especially in agriculture and manufacturing—humanity would over time become:

“… afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

As Keynes continued:

“This means that the economic problem [that is, humans toiling to fulfil their basic needs] is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.”

They conclude:

“I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate.”

Namely, a situation in which: “… problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.”

Keynes thought that this sea change would be realised within two generations or so. So, pretty much now, in the early 21st century. In other words, all the work that machines have been able to take over from us, would mean that people would no longer have to toil, and sweat, and struggle for survival. The only challenge will be to figure out what to do with all that newfound leisure time. As Keynes puts it:

“Thus for the first time since [their] creation [humans] will be faced with [their] real, [their] permanent problem—how to use [their] freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for [them], to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

What a torturous problem to have! Now, in laying out this vision, Keynes is making a couple of assumptions that I’m not going to delve into. And their praise for exploiting finite natural resources, such as coal and petrol, is not how many of us would put things nowadays.

But we can see that Keynes’ vision got one thing completely right. We are indeed there! Right now, we can already produce plenty of food to feed everyone on the planet. And there are also resources aplenty for each of us to have proper shelter. What is more: we can technically already achieve all of this with individuals working far fewer hours. So Keynes certainly got that right.

But where Keynes was way off, was that we would actually do that. Yes, we could supply people’s basic needs … if we’d wanted to. So that each of us would have to toil for far fewer hours of our waking lives. So that we’d all have more time to be active in the community, to practice our calligraphy, swim, cook nice food, tend to the garden. Especially given that a huge number of jobs nowadays fall in the category of what the anthropologist David Graeber would call ‘bullshit jobs’.

Yes, we could provide for all of those basic needs. Except … we don’t. Might that have something to do with what Keynes calls ‘the love of money as a possession’? Love of money which, they say, will in due course:

“ … be recognised for what it is, a somewhat a disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Can we arrange society differently?ChrisWhatever is behind it, the key point is that Keynes’s vision places things in perspective. It places in perspective that by now, at this point of our collective technological development, this whole: letting your work define who you are, and making work and money a precondition for survival—that is actually outdated.

Sure, it might seem inevitable. It might seem somehow natural. What would you expect given that we’re continuously bombarded with this picture? But it’s actually not. It’s not inevitable, it’s decision. A decision to—somehow, within society—keep arranging things this way.

But if that’s indeed a decision, then surely we can un-decide it? Or, surely, we can decide to do things differently from now on? Given where we’re at, we could perfectly well arrange things such that when automation tools, such as LaMDA, BLOOM or DALL-E come along, it need not be the case that your first, or your second, or umptieth thought is: ‘Well, there goes my chance at ever buying a house…’ Or: ‘I’m not sure whether we can actually afford to eat this week.’ Instead, your response could be: ‘Awesome! Now, I will have more time to hone my tai chi craft.’

Automation tools need not be a dread. Automation and technological unemployment most certainly need not push people into a struggle to survive. They could actually, as Keynes saw, massively improve overall quality of life. If, that is, if we ventured to step away from that ‘disgusting morbidity’ that Keynes mentioned, and distribute our resources to match.

Is that going to be a radical change from how things are arranged in many societies right now? Sure, it will be. But radical doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And it does not mean it cannot be done. It is just the question: Do we actually dare to—want to—make such a societal change? Or, as Crass put it

CrassDo they owe us a living?
Course they do, course they do
Owe us a living?
Course they do, course they do
Owe us a living?
Course they fucking do

ClosingChrisThank you for tuning in to Vulnerable By Design this week—possibly our most inflammatory episode in the whole series so far. If you’d like to hear more or get in touch, you will find all of our episodes and more information on vulnerablebydesign.net. I am Chris Onrust …

ChatGPTAnd I am ChatGPT.

ChrisThank you for listening, and bye for now.

Episode links ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue, by OpenAI, 30 November 2022. * ChatGPT, by OpenAI. * Attention Is All You Need (PDF), by Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin, presented at the 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017), Long Beach, CA, USA. * About OpenAI, by OpenAI, 11 December 2015. * LaMDA: Our Breakthrough Conversation Technology, by Eli Collins and Zoubin Ghahramani, Google: The Keyword, 18 May 2021. * BigScience Large Open-Science Open-Access Multilingual Language Model (BLOOM), 6 July 2022. * DALL·E 2, by OpenAI. * Death by AI, by Cody Ogden. * The World’s Hungriest Countries in 2022’, by Chris de Bode, 13 October 2022. * Deaths Caused by Starvation and Malnutrition in the UK, Office for National Statistics, 19 February 2020. * Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, by Amartya Sen, 1981. * Without Clearing Any New Farmland, We Could Feed Two Earths’ Worth of People, by Adam Majendie. Bloomberg, 15 December 2020. * “Nothing about This Felt OK”: The Troubling Debate over a “good” Death for All’, by Ferrukh Faruqui in National Post, 1 April 2022. * Why Is Canada Euthanising the Poor?, by Yuan Yi Zhu in The Spectator, 30 April 2022. * “Disturbing”: Experts Troubled by Canada’s Euthanasia Laws, by Maria Cheng, AP News, 11 August 2022. * Scheduled to Die: The Rise of Canada’s Assisted Suicide Program, by Rupa Subramanya in The Free Press, 11 October 2022. * Cost Estimate for Bill C-7 “Medical Assistance in Dying”, by Govindadeva Bernier, Carleigh Malanik-Busby, and Salma Mohamed Ahmed, Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 20 October 2020. * Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber, 2018. * Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930), by John Maynard Keynes, in: Essays In Persuasion*, 1933.

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In this episodePeople are flocking to alternative social media. But how revolutionary is this move? Can it change the future of the Internet?

TranscriptHello and welcome to Vulnerable By Design with me, Chris Onrust.

Birders flock to MastodonYou may have heard that, a while ago, a mysterious billionaire memelord bought the social media platform Twitter.

You may also have noticed that since then, the whole lot has come crashing down. Twitter employees have left. Advertisers have left. Users have left.

Yeah. It’s fine.

One result of the entire debacle is that former birders have been flocking elsewhere. Some have moved to ad-fuelled, surveillance heavy platforms such as Tiktok, or Instagram. Others have been taking another leap.

Quite a number of former Twitter users have moved away from The Bird and have found their way towards a platform called Mastodon, whose mascot is a cute, extinct elephant-like creature with nipple-shaped teeth.

Now, Mastodon may sound like just another place for what, in the old days, we used to call ‘micro-blogging’. You can post things, follow other people’s posts, send replies, DMs and polls. So far, so familiar.

But Mastodon isn’t just another platform in the league of Tiktok, Snapchat or BeReal. There is something structurally different going on. Mastodon, along with a growing list of other platforms, is part of what is called the ‘fediverse’.

‘Fediverse’ is a wordplay on the terms ‘federation’ and ‘universe’. So Mastodon is part of what you could call a ‘federated universe’. Well, what does that mean?

‘Universe’ here is just a grandiose way of saying: all of it. Really big. Everything in spacetime. A world of its own.

How about federation? Well, federation is a slightly different story. To understand federation, we need to talk about a very serious topic: network structures.

Network structuresA network, abstractly, is a group or system of interconnected people or things. For example, a railway network is a system of interconnected rail tracks and stations. A friendship network would just be you and your mates, and how you connect with one another. A book-crossing network is just a total of how books cross from person to person in a group.

Good. Now, whenever there’s a network, there is a couple of questions that you can always ask. You can ask: How large is it? Meaning: How many stations, friends, or books are part of it in total? You can ask: How dense is it? Meaning: Are there lots of criss-crossing interconnections or just a few? And you can ask: How centralised is it? Where ‘centralisation’ measures the extent to which connections and activity of a network pass through a single point person or authority.

So, a rail network is centralised, if all lines only go through and from one central station. Or a friendship group is centralised, if there’s one person that everyone is friends with, but they are not otherwise friends amongst one another.

Centralisation comes on a scale. On the one hand, there is the completely centralised network. But on the other, the exact opposite: a completely de-centralised network. For example, a railway network where there’s lots of stations that different lines go through, or a friendship network where there’s lots of people who are friends with lots of different other ones.

The further you move away from a centralised structure, the more decentralised a network gets.

Mo’ centralisation, mo’ problemsThe major social media platforms that are around today—so TikTok, Twitter, all of that lot—they have one core thing in common. They are, by and large, all centralised. For each of these platforms, there is a single authority that controls how the platform works. Who gets to be on there, what everyone is allowed to do and not do. Plus, this single authority, moreover, controls all of the content and data that you generate when you’re being active on the platform.

Shall we name some names? For Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, this single authority is Meta, the company. For YouTube, it’s Google. For TikTok, it’s Bytedance. And for Twitter, it’s Twitter Inc., now in the hands of a notorious PayPal co-founder and electric vehicle company owner who shall remain unnamed.

Why does the degree of centralisation of a social media network matter, you may ask? Here’s why. Because placing or having all of that control—control of access, operations, or data—in the hands of a single entity, gives that entity a whole lot of control and power. And you know what they say about power, don’t you?

Remember, with great power, comes great responsibility.

No, sorry, I meant the other one.

Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

With all of that concentrated power in the hands of a single entity, that entity can decide, for example, to: not have an edit button, remove the chronological timeline, insert ads, monetize your eyeballs, drain your attention, and waste your life.

On the major social media platforms we have available right now, you are the product. Or rather, your attention is the product.

Today, a huge proportion of the social networking platform landscape is in the hands of just a handful of companies. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, which respectively have over 2.9 and 1.4 billion global active users. Google owns YouTube, as we’ve heard, which has over 2.4 billion global active users. And the global active user count of Bytedance’s TikTok also surpassed 1 billion.

Platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter, they have customers. But those customers are not we, the users. The customers of these platforms are the paying advertisers.

Well, if you think about it, the platform users are basically workers. Workers who voluntarily supply what is nowadays called ‘content’—so your posts, your videos, your pictures—content around which the advertisers can place their ads.

We, users, are workers who, in a curious plot twist, are also doing second shifts by being subjected again to those ads. Because think about it: wouldn’t a platform get really boring, if all it showed was just one ad after another? The platform needs some non-ad filler to draw in users and keep them engaged. Which are exactly those fine posts and pics and videos that we as users are providing.

Now of course, I admit: it is not a given that, by some law of nature, centralised platforms must always exploit their users. But is it any surprise when they do?

In practice, on the major centralised platforms, you will find: invasive surveillance, user manipulation, and—all things considered—unfreedom.

As a user, all of your on-network data is owned and controlled by the platforms, who monetize it however they wish.

As a user, you’ll be manipulated to spend as much of your waking time on-platform to ‘engage’. Even if it ruins your sleep, even if it makes you feel bad about yourself, even if it helps facilitate genocide.

As a user, you get no control over, or insight into, how the platform runs. Plus, once you’re all settled in, you’re also pretty much locked in. Because even if you did want to leave, you can’t take along all of your data, your connections, your lists, your likes, to another platform. So your only options are either to stay and suck it all up, or to delete your account and lose all that you’ve built up.

Some people have said that centralised social media platforms aren’t working. But I disagree. These centralised platforms are working exactly as expected… if your aim is to squeeze out people’s waking lives for profit. It’s only when you’re concerned about such trifles such as the well-being of users or the flourishing of society that you think that there might be something off here.

At this point, you might wonder: okay, but is there any alternative? Surely, what could social networking platforms be, if not centralised? Surely, there has to be some final boss deciding who is in or out, and whether there will be an edit button?

But, of course, we actually already know the alternative! Because we know about network structures.

The alternative to problematic centralised platforms is a decentralised structure. And a specific type of decentralised network structure is a federated network.

FederationA federation is an organisation type in which a number of groups or organisational units get together to form a larger overall unit or network. While within that larger network, each of them can, to some extent, operate autonomously.

Now if we translate this to computer networks—okay, now we’re getting closer—then a federated computer network is one in which multiple computing providers get together to form an overall larger unit or network, within which each of them can, to some extent, operate autonomously. And with that, we have arrived at the fediverse.

The fediverse is a network with a federated structure, where multiple people link up multiple servers, such that they can interact as part of a larger whole, within which each of them can operate more or less autonomously.

Take Mastodon as an example. So in Mastodon’s federated network architecture, there’s over 15,000 instances (or servers) working together.

But let’s not stop here, it actually even gets bigger. Mastodon is not the fediverse. Mastodon is just one space within the fediverse. One that happens to do microblogging and so happens to resemble Twitter. But there’s plenty of other platforms in the fediverse. There is, for example, Friendica, which allows you to post and build a friend network, as you might do on Facebook. There is PeerTube, a video sharing and broadcasting platform quite similar to YouTube. And there is Pixelfed for photo sharing, just like you might do on Instagram. And many, many more on a list that keeps on growing.

Now, here’s the magic. Because all these platforms—–including Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Friendica, and lots more—because all these platforms have agreed to use the same communication protocol, which in this case, is a protocol called Activity pub. Because they all use the same protocol, you can interact with people not just across the servers of the same platform, but across any of the platforms that support that protocol.

So for example, you can use your Mastodon account to follow people on Peertube, interact with photos on Pixelfed, or comment on a Peertube video, or the other way around. No further registration necessary. It’s as though you’d be able to post to LinkedIn with your YouTube account.

So that’s the fediverse: a giant decentralised federated universe of interconnected accounts and servers, where each instance—each subsection of the universe—can operate pretty much autonomously, as it pleases.

How does decentralisation help?Okay, good. But how would a different network structure help with the problems of centralisation? Because recall, on all today’s major social platforms, you are the product. You are continuously being surveilled, manipulated, kept locked-in, to squeeze as much value out of you for as long as possible.

By contrast, the fediverse, as we speak, has no built-in ads. Mastodon on keeps a chronological timeline. So you just get posts in the order in which they were posted. So as a user, you are not subject to the whims of some mysterious algorithm that optimises for ‘engagement’.

You are also not locked in to any one server or platform. Because the fediverse has this massive interoperability. So you can technically just hop from one server to another, or decide to ditch Pixelfed for a while and really focus on Peertube.

And, perhaps most crucially, the software with which you run an instance of Mastodon or Friendica and the like, is what they call free and open source, which is usually explained in terms of four freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation.

A program is free software if you, the user, have the four essential freedoms. Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom one is the freedom to study the source code of the program and then change it so the program does what you wish. Freedom two is the freedom to help your neighbour. That’s the freedom to redistribute exact copies of the programme when you wish. And freedom three is the freedom to contribute to your community. That’s the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.

For the fediverse, these freedoms mean that, if you want to, and are able to, you can check that the software that you’re using is not sneakily tracking or manipulating you in the background. Or you can set up your own independent instance for whatever community you fancy.

Is the fediverse a fad?Okay, at this point, you may think, well, this fedi … decentralisation thing… Is it just some newish fad? Will it actually last? Or is it going to go the way of Vine and Google+ sometime soon?

But here’s the fun part. The whole principle of decentralisation on the Internet is nothing new. For one, email is decentralised and federated, and has been for over half a century.

If you have your email hosted on one provider—is it Gmail?—then you can send mail not just to other Gmail accounts, but to any other valid email address, regardless of where it’s hosted. Whether that is @protonmail, @hotmail, or @pinkfluffyunicorns.lol. And that is because all emails providers stick to the same standardised protocol, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP, for sending messages across.

And there’s more. The Internet itself at its core is decentralised and federated. There is no single entity that controls all pages and web apps that go online. I mean: thank heavens there isn’t!

At its roots, the internet is an interconnected network of machines. Some of which provide resources—such as websites, pictures, other data—and others request and get served those resources.

And just like with the fediverse, these machines can interoperate, because they all stick to the same protocol and standards. In this case, our good old friend the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.

So sure, federated social networks have become a bit more prominent only recently. But decentralisation, as a principle of organising things online, goes way back to the roots of the internet.

Which brings us to a very curious situation. The situation that, in the giant scheme of things, it is actually these highly centralised networks that are new. The hoarding of users, the invasive surveillance, the attention manipulation, those centralised platforms, they are the invention. They are the novelty.

And once you realise that, then you can start to see: hey, maybe those centralised monocultures are not so inevitable after all? Once you see that decentralised novelty brings lots of negative consequences, then you can ask: hey, do I actually want this?

Downsides of the fediverseOkay, sure. The fediverse is going to have its downsides, too.

As of yet, the fediverse is not as crowded as the big name centralised platforms. According to the latest stats, the fediverse has an overall population of over 7 million accounts. That is a tiny, tiny village, compared to the around 3 billion users that Facebook alone sports—which, depending on how you look at it, it could be a bad or a good thing.

Now further, unless you’re hosting your own instance, on the fediverse you would still be entrusting someone else with your data. So you got to be comfortable with that. Or set up your own server, of course.

And federation does not and cannot address issues related to FOMO, comparing yourself to others, feeling pressure to post, or internet addiction.

Plus, obviously, there will be plonkers on the fediverse too. Because as long as there are plonkers in society, there will be plonkers online.

But hey, just because federation doesn’t solve all of your woes, that doesn’t mean that stepping away from exploitative centralised surveillance platforms would not be a change for the better.

Will the fediverse be the future?Now, will the fediverse be the future of the social web? Who knows? But let me tell you two things.

First: for-profit, centralised social media colossi will do whatever they can to keep you locked into their platform to make you think that you cannot leave, or that, if you do leave, your life will be miserable. Because remember, every person that leaves the platform is one fewer pair of eyeballs to sell ads for. So you can be very sure that Meta, Bytedance and Twitter and the lot will do all they can to make sure you don’t go.

Now second, when we ask: Will the fediverse be the future of the social web? Remember that that the future is not a given. You decide, by and large, what you’re going to do in the next five minutes. In the next hour. Or over the next day. And all of these tiny choices add up to the future. The future isn’t settled. Your choices your actions will actually shape it.

ClosingMany people have moved from Twitter to Mastodon on over the past weeks. Looked at in isolation, it may just seem like a simple jump from one platform to the other.

But if you look at the bigger picture. If you look at the colossal impact that a difference in network structure can have, then you realise: No, it is not just a shift in platform.

If you do this … If all of us can make this work … It can be a back-to-the-true-roots-of-the-Internet revolution.

Thank you for listening to Vulnerable By Design this week. If you’d like to hear more or get in touch, you’ll find all of our episodes and more information on vulnerablebydesign.net.

I am Chris Onrust. Thank you for listening and bye for now.

Episode links Fediverse.Party * A Quick Guide to The Free Network, by Sean Tilley. We Distribute, 24 September 2017. * The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (If We Don’t Screw It Up), by Cindy Cohn and Rory Mir. Electronic Frontier Foundation, 16 November 2022. * Global Social Media Statistics Research Summary 2022 (June 2022), by Dave Chaffey. Smart Insights, 22 August 2022. * A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military, by Paul Mozur. The New York Times*, 15 October 2018. * Richard Stallman at UBC - the Four Software Freedoms. University of British Columbia, 7 February 2009.

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