Posts tagged STS

The cozy web is Venkatesh Rao’s term for the private, gatekeeper-bounded spaces of the internet we have all retreated to over the last few years. It’s the “high-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.” The informal, untracked, messily human space that the bots and algorithms haven’t infiltrated yet.

Venkat first proposed the term in one of his Breaking Smart emails on The Extended Internet Universe. He builds off Yancey Strickler’s companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.” The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It’s unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces.

We hide in the cozy web.

The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web

While it’s certainly true that dystopian science fiction has become popular in the last few decades, it doesn’t follow that no one has been putting forward more optimistic pictures of tomorrow. Just because Stephenson and others embraced the dark images of cyberpunk, environmental doom, and whatnot doesn’t mean everyone did. From the 1980s to the early 2010s, the late author Iain Banks (who I have nominated for canonization) spun fantastic visions of a post-scarcity society he dubbed The Culture, which was full of artificially-intelligent robots and ships, giant space colonies, individuals who lived almost forever and regularly swapped genders, and seemingly endless, endless wonder. Similarly, Star Trek went off television from 2005 to 2017, but its vision of post-scarcity goodwill and polite liberalism — what a friend described as the Enlightenment-on-speed — continued all the while on the big screen.

via https://www.fastcompany.com/90247038/sorry-but-we-cant-fantasize-our-way-out-of-this-mess

“STS’s detailed accounts of the construction of knowledge show that it requires infrastructure, effort, ingenuity and validation structures. Our arguments that ‘it could be otherwise’ (e.g. Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013) are very rarely that ‘it could easily be otherwise’; instead, they point to other possible infrastructures, efforts, ingenuity and validation structures.”

– Sergio Sismondo, ‘Post-truth?’ (2017)