August 17, 2021 | Reflections
Dawn Walker is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on values and social transformation in the design of (web) decentralization projects. Her prior research studied how co-design and community mapping increase participation in urban agriculture projects. She is a member of the Technoscience Research Unit and is also currently part of the organizers’ team of the 4S annual meeting.
In this post, we interviewed Dawn Walker about her research on alternative decentralization projects, the place of history in these alternative visions, and the role of bridging scholarship and hands-on activist work. The interview is the first of the newly launched Backchannels interview series Countering Marginalization and Technoscience.
Your research explores different projects and groups building alternative decentralized Internet infrastructure. Can you give us a few examples to start with?
For sure! The alternatives that I research are often referred to as a part of the decentralized web or “Dweb”, which names a loose set of projects and people who want to create a web without centralized services and platforms like Google, Amazon, or Facebook. These projects can look like new protocols to replace existing internet protocols, peer-to-peer (p2p) software, blockchain technologies, and mesh networking hardware.
Some projects aim to offer a direct alternative to existing social media, such as Mastodon, which allows for sharing short posts or “toots” and liking others posted from a federation of self-hosted websites run by a diverse set of communities. The software is freely available and open-source, so anyone can choose to host their own instance and allow users to make accounts there.
Other projects draw from the idiom of internet architecture and see themselves operating at a lower “layer”. For example, IPFS is a new data storage and sharing protocol that allows distributed users to hold copies of data and serve that to others as they search for it based on the content, as opposed to the location of a known server (like BitTorrent).
The idea and value of decentralization are what the Internet is historically built upon. How are these newer alternative developments relating and responding to that? What kind of future is imagined in them?
This is core to what I want to understand about the Dweb and these projects since decentralization has a long history with the Internet and the web. It was identified as a key design principle early in digital communications that would come to be the Internet and web (Baran, 1962; Berners-Lee, 1999) and taken up broadly in the decades since. However “decentralization” has always been an overloaded term that blends technical and political understandings as well as one that operates incompletely. ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, was based out of research institutions in the United States and funded by the US Department of Defense. Further, the early Internet required “centralized” labour around the maintenance and use of the network that at times reified gendered distinctions of that work (Abbate, 1999; Evans, 2018 ). Dweb projects draw from this history. In the case of the SOLID project, which defines a specification for people to store their data on personal services, it also involves early Internet figures again, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee leads it.
I want to understand the degree to which current projects engage with the past, or (re)define and extend decentralization and relate that to their outcomes. While a majority explicitly mention decentralization and assess the separation of technical and political dimensions, the complicated legacy of the concept is not considered in many ways. Often, there is nostalgia in the ways the Internet past is described, with the commercialization of the web understood as a turning point. An additional discursive frame has further been gaining in popularity: Web 3.0. It plays on the earlier “Web 2.0” descriptor to periodize the technologies being used.
I’ve begun to characterize the different futures described in interviews and accounts of Web 3.0 and Dweb projects themselves. These futures vary widely and often are underspecified. Across many, there are currents of the existing technocratic and meritocratic visions from Silicon Valley and early libertarian cyberculture: ideas of future users with more opportunity (without rethinking how systematic oppression leads to different outcomes). Against these visions are more radically optimistic accounts, some infused by the solarpunk aesthetic, which envisions post-scarcity abundance that weaves high- and low-tech together and draws on the ecotopian tradition.
Your work bridges STS, human-computer interaction, information studies, and design research, and you also bring into that a lot of hands-on experience with different organizations and activities such as the annual Our Networks Conference, EDGI, and Data Together. Is there a need for more connected interactions between these fields and with practice in order to respond not just as researchers but as an engaged society to the increasing centralization of ICT infrastructures?
Yes to more bridging! Finding ways to connect parallel conversations between the disciplines and a feminist technoscience-stance of attaching histories and holding accountabilities with these technologies and concepts is important. During my PhD, I’ve been attempting to do translation work with varying success. The work of scholars like Anita Say Chan (Networking Peripheries), Marisa Duarte (Network Sovereignty), and Joy Lisi Rankin (People’s History of Computing) serve as the kinds of research I aspire to. To also then connect scholarly inquiry to pressing societal issues, including how we build most of our technology, is as vital.
So far, I have found that hard. I find myself slipping into a solutionist mode in seeking to engage with tools from a more critical stance (what we need is a tool to do x). On the other hand, when in the crush of actually trying to make and do a thing, I slip into a mindset of operationalizing surface understandings or leveraging shallow conceptual accounts. In the STS community, I have found the discussions at Making and Doing and in engaged STS helpful to reflect on my own practice.
How do you see your work connect with the growing scholarship on design justice (Costanza-Chock), tech injustice (Benjamin, Gebru), but also the materiality of AI-based infrastructures (Crawford) to name a few?
I have learned a lot and drawn inspiration from Design Justice and Sasha Constanza-Chock as a way to approach scaffolding values and design work together. As a member of the Design Justice Network and the Toronto Node, I am constantly inspired by the work of scholars and practitioners doing that bridging mentioned earlier. I have been attending to the broader set of interventions and approaches to specific tech companies and the field more generally that Benjamin, Gebru, and Crawford have made. Their work is necessary, and I hope that my research approach is complementary to the understandings of the current landscape and immediate changes necessary for AI in this case, and technology more broadly. I think the part that I want to understand better, in addition to these attempts to build value-driven alternatives rather than enact reforms, is how to relate all the work to social change and transformation with a more tactical approach to producing those changes.
Last year, you co-organized an interactive workshop for the annual (online) Participatory Design Conference on the values behind the Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility (CSPR) which dissolved in 2013, and what the values should look like for the 21st century. What were some of the main learnings from the workshop? Given the societal issues with tech developments, is there a CSPR 2.0 planned in the future, perhaps even with strong involvement of STS-informed scholars?
At the workshop, 35 participants from different backgrounds and generations spent two half-days discussing critical questions of values, responsibility, and collective action in computing, starting from 16 contributed papers. The workshop ended without a clear call for a CSPR for the 21st century.
We as organizers had a final statement that was shared with the broader PDC community: “All agree there is a need to better connect the voices of those who speak responsibly and critically to the role that computing plays in shaping our lives, within and outside of computing. There was debate around whether a new organization is best to fill this role, or whether the most effective frame would be a venue, a network or a coalition to bring together activists, scholars, professionals, critics, and students of participatory design.”
The hope was to have PDC continue to anchor these conversations, but also understand that we are in a moment with an abundance of groups, campaigns, labour organizing and scholarly networks where these questions are happening. Against this background, we should ask what formation can allow us to amplify each other and coordinate? Does that offer something more than starting a central institution?
Finally, what are you working on at the moment? And what’s planned for the future?
ABD: Always be dissertating. I am trying to finish my dissertation. I am also one of the co-organizers for the 4S annual meeting for 2021, which has been an opportunity to take some themes from my work and put it into hosting an online academic event. Questions ranging from: What care practices and radical hospitality can we enact online? How does that shape the good relations we want to hold with each other and the lands we are on? How is the event and platforms we work with implicated in racial capitalism and how do we address that? How do we make that visible to participants?
Published: 08/17/2021