Inspiring discussion — especially the parts about Woopedia and building our own local internet network. Hearing this episode was validating, because I’ve fantasized about these same ideas, but have lacked the drive, time, and tech know-how to push them forward. This feels like a call to action to get more serious about them.
I love the idea of Woopedia, but I haven’t had the motivation to go beyond glancing at the MediaWiki page. Still, the need is obvious. There’s so much misinformation spreading on social media, and accurate information is hard to access when we have so little journalism to begin with — and so much of what exists is behind paywalls.
During my campaign, I actually thought about building a Wiki for exactly this reason. People would ask about development projects they saw around town — things like 50 Oriol Drive, the Quality Inn being converted into supportive housing off Lincoln Street. Trying to understand the history and narrative around projects like these was incredibly difficult because I hadn’t followed the details closely, and I don’t pay for all the websites that cover them (Worcester Business Journal, MassLive, T&G).
On top of that, trying to use the city’s shitty website to find instances where 50 Oriol Drive came up at City Council or the Planning Board felt almost impossible. We have community meetings where I’m not even sure minutes or notes are captured unless a media outlet happens to cover them. City officials push their narrative about what a project accomplishes and how well it’s going, and then you talk to a resident who has been following closely and their account is totally different from what a City Councilor or a WBJ article might say.
It’s easy to imagine a Wiki page that describes the project; summarizes the information available beyond paywalls; notes when it was discussed at various city meetings and the outcomes; and even includes a section capturing resident criticism or feedback.
Now imagine scaling this up: John Monfredo, Polar Park, Mill St, the Day Resource Center — anything. You could build a real “people’s perspective” on what goes on around here. It would help document the narrative that we’re living in a city run by hardcore crony capitalists who are doing a great job making Worcester unlivable for so many. It’s hard to explain to people how bad things are when they haven’t been paying attention, but if someone could go down a wiki rabbit hole of local corruption, I imagine we’d get a lot more people on our side.
The idea of a local network is something my wife and I, and a few friends, have also fantasized about, mostly in the context of getting our digital history off places like Google. We want to boycott streaming services we've become dependent on, like Spotify. We’ve imagined building a shared repository of media like MP3s or movies for friends, but it’s easy to see how this could grow into a way of sharing information and organizing outside the Metaverse. Simple message boards (like the ones from earlier internet) could replace a lot of discussion that currently happens on Facebook. A local network could even help organize, surface, and scale up the disparate conversations happening across the Go List, Signal, Discord, etc.
Overall, I really share the sentiment that we could use a little more tech optimism — and we could be doing a much better job using the tools available to pull people away from corporations that just want to use us and suck our data and money away from us.
Final thought: Noam Chomsky has said that once advancements in communication technology (like radio, tv, and internet), which come out of public research grants to universities, are determined to be profitable, they are promptly handed over to private industry to control. I think what you guys have hit on is recreating the internet as a public good, by the people, for the people. Thanks for the work you do!
I think what we're getting at is the frightening reality that we have been stripped of all resilience with generation after generation losing skills, and we have become completely dependent on the large complex systems you talk about here.
Sort of in line with that, I just started reading: "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of AdTech" by Lee McGuigan (2023).
The datafication of individuals for the sole purpose of stirring up consumptive motivations through subtle digital manipulation, targeting the masses with hyper-specific ads, and personalizing pricing so as to almost guarantee a purchase (without conscious deliberation getting in the way). To have no ad dollars wasted. This is the goal of Adtech.
That's the saddest part about Chromebooks and iPads in schools. Google and Apple don't give a shit about the education of our children. The tech companies sell desperate administrations on "deep learning," "personalization," and "engagement." We know based on mountains of research that learning on internet-connected distraction machines (these are not actual computers; real technology education can be done effectively without an internet connection) is the very opposite of deep learning, nothing is shallower or less sticky than disembodied, decontextualized "learning" on a Chromebook, not to mention the cognitive off-loading exacerbated by the irresistible presence of Google's AI Gemini. We know personalization that is happening is in the service of surveillance capitalism scraping for data points to sell to Adtech companies. And we know that engagement is a euphemism for hyper-stimulation that is nearly impossible to peel yourself away from (especially kids, I mean they aren't even noticing they have to use the bathroom anymore) and veering on behavioral addiction thanks to the manipulative tactics to keep as many eyeballs on screens for as long as possible.
Schools are such a great cover because who is going to argue with closing the "technology gap" (even though studies now show, of course, that 1:1 Chromebooks are widening achievement gaps, so the equity argument is also a myth). Schools are also convenient because the tech companies don't have to bother with parental consent, even though they supposedly have to legally speaking. The common practice in Worcester and elsewhere is for the schools to circumvent parents altogether and provide consent on behalf of the child and then unilaterally deny any parent/guardian or student from opting out of 1:1 devices of Edtech products.
Corporations are desperate for ever-more customers (and profits). The less those customers are motivated to think for themselves, the better. Convincing school decision-makers to use school-issued Chromebooks for every single subject not only deprives children of meaningful learning, it allows for the nonconsensual surveillance of children to create detailed profiles of their interests, movements, motivations, and actions, to then manipulate their behaviors and mold them into intellectually-crippled and digital-dependent consumers for the rest of their lives. It happened imperceptibly with millennials (me!), swiftly with Gen Z, and has left the Alphas (or whoever they are who are getting iPads in pre-K) completely vulnerable through no fault of their own.
I think this is why intelligence-sharing is such an important place to start. The internet is becomingly an increasingly untrustworthy (AI) and manipulative (Adtech) place for all of us. The antidote might be what humans had done for millenia - knowledge shared human-to-human, skills passed down generation to generation, and hyper-local hands-on action. I fell asleep last night thinking, "I'm so glad I have heat right now" because I don't know if we always will. Time for more knowledge-sharing, skills learning, and building resilience. Thanks for sharing your conversation! Makes me feel less crazy.
As a certified Knausgaard-head (if you haven't taken on the My Struggle series, it's mind-blowing after you get over hating his Holden Caulfjord vibe in the first 200 pages of Book 1), this was a treat. KOK is not everyday subject matter anywhere.
Good episode, and sign me up to help edit Woopedia!
I'm finishing up his "Seasons" series now and loved it. His focus on the mundane often extracts profound insights. "My Struggle" can be a slog--the 6th book is a fuckin' doorstop--yet the payoff is immense.
Finally catching up on this episode. This is like a spiritual successor to the episode with Joanne McNeil and I love it. The unmet needs of local communities and extractive nature of big social platforms is what drives my work at the Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). Bill's anecdote of trying to host a media server and being immediately overwhelmed is a critical problem that we collectively need to figure out. Why does it have to be so difficult? Most web software simply isn't built to empower the average person to run and understand, it's built for professional software people to deploy, and even then a lot of those professionals don't know how to do it and it has become an increasingly specialized skill. The focus of the software industry is to build things that scale up in cloud data centers, not things that scale down for local communities. Tech is increasingly user friendly, but only on the surface because you can't peel back the layers of the onion to learn things work like in the early days of computing. Even the projects that are trying to be deployable (like SecureDrop, something Bill has brought up in the past) can be overwhelmingly complex even for Linux sickos like myself.
I like the term "local internet" a lot. The big platforms throw everyone in the same big soup (context collapse), and since they are silos they have created the "breakdown in shared reality" problem that Bill mentions. The "global town square" concept of Facebook, Twitter, etc. has been great at capturing our attention but hasn't improved society (something Joanne McNeil explained well in an past episode). It's simply not how human community works in the real world. Society is formed by a large collection of overlapping small communities, but our social media doesn't reflect that at all! I think the rising popularity of small Discord communities is an indicator that web 2.0 social media may be starting to wane. There's value in a broadcast medium like Twitter (RIP) and Bluesky, but community needs to happen elsewhere. Unfortunately, Discord is a centrally controlled platform, with all the usual pressures from governments to censor/spy on their users and pressure from capitalism to enshittify. They recently were breached, exposing a ton of PII they are legally required to retain due to age verification laws and this trend is likely to only get worse in the near future. Platforms also have a lock-in effect that makes it hard to take your data and go somewhere else. I'm sure it would be extremely painful to leave Substack, for example. Removing these big central gatekeepers is a focus of my research/development work.
The discussion around the empowering aspects of technology, like with the little hardware synth, was so refreshing. It's so easy to fall into tech doomerism and "computers were a mistake" feelings because we have so little agency over the tech we use these days. But little DIY hardware kits and open source projects like MediaWiki show that it doesn't have to be this way. We *can* reclaim some autonomy over the tech we use. Someone should setup Woopedia!
Ultimately, though, I really don't think that the tech we have today is enough to get us out of the hole we're in. We should still make the best out of it, of course, but if anyone reading this has tech skills then I recommend checking out what's happening in the decentralized web (DWeb) movement and consider getting involved. We need people who can help build the foundation for a decentralized, secure, collaborative internet that puts user agency and autonomy first!
A question I have for Bill is: What do you consider to be the essential features of a local journalism "platform" (for lack of a better word)? I like to gather use cases from real people with real needs to inform my own work.
Like Bill, I also was an "observer" for the recount and couldn't help being surprised by voter behavior. My favorite was a ballot for both Cayden Davis and Donna Colorio. It's an extension of the odd yard sign combinations. Worcester Sucks.
#47 was excellent! And I concur with Mr. Linhares' comments below. A detailed diagram of available, local "news" would be helpful. Ownership, ad revenue and other influences would have to be included. Quite a project! But we have Worcester Sucks. And I like you guys. Keep up the quality journalism and hopefully folks will continue to subscribe.
Regarding quality journalism, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Hank Stolz's radio show interview with Tim McGourthy and Peter Dunn about a month ago. I have no personal beefs with these folks, but the interview and companion printed piece, "Worcester Officials Explain Polar Park Shortfall and Long-Term Financial Outlook" are painfully confusing. I still could not explain what's going on here to another person.
But I'll try. We're just short one - (1) mixed use hotel/ office building. No biggie. The "budget estimates" supporting the original pro-forma have not been met so we're somehow obligated to inform the taxpayers. But since this money doesn't exist no one loses.
Inspiring discussion — especially the parts about Woopedia and building our own local internet network. Hearing this episode was validating, because I’ve fantasized about these same ideas, but have lacked the drive, time, and tech know-how to push them forward. This feels like a call to action to get more serious about them.
I love the idea of Woopedia, but I haven’t had the motivation to go beyond glancing at the MediaWiki page. Still, the need is obvious. There’s so much misinformation spreading on social media, and accurate information is hard to access when we have so little journalism to begin with — and so much of what exists is behind paywalls.
During my campaign, I actually thought about building a Wiki for exactly this reason. People would ask about development projects they saw around town — things like 50 Oriol Drive, the Quality Inn being converted into supportive housing off Lincoln Street. Trying to understand the history and narrative around projects like these was incredibly difficult because I hadn’t followed the details closely, and I don’t pay for all the websites that cover them (Worcester Business Journal, MassLive, T&G).
On top of that, trying to use the city’s shitty website to find instances where 50 Oriol Drive came up at City Council or the Planning Board felt almost impossible. We have community meetings where I’m not even sure minutes or notes are captured unless a media outlet happens to cover them. City officials push their narrative about what a project accomplishes and how well it’s going, and then you talk to a resident who has been following closely and their account is totally different from what a City Councilor or a WBJ article might say.
It’s easy to imagine a Wiki page that describes the project; summarizes the information available beyond paywalls; notes when it was discussed at various city meetings and the outcomes; and even includes a section capturing resident criticism or feedback.
Now imagine scaling this up: John Monfredo, Polar Park, Mill St, the Day Resource Center — anything. You could build a real “people’s perspective” on what goes on around here. It would help document the narrative that we’re living in a city run by hardcore crony capitalists who are doing a great job making Worcester unlivable for so many. It’s hard to explain to people how bad things are when they haven’t been paying attention, but if someone could go down a wiki rabbit hole of local corruption, I imagine we’d get a lot more people on our side.
The idea of a local network is something my wife and I, and a few friends, have also fantasized about, mostly in the context of getting our digital history off places like Google. We want to boycott streaming services we've become dependent on, like Spotify. We’ve imagined building a shared repository of media like MP3s or movies for friends, but it’s easy to see how this could grow into a way of sharing information and organizing outside the Metaverse. Simple message boards (like the ones from earlier internet) could replace a lot of discussion that currently happens on Facebook. A local network could even help organize, surface, and scale up the disparate conversations happening across the Go List, Signal, Discord, etc.
Overall, I really share the sentiment that we could use a little more tech optimism — and we could be doing a much better job using the tools available to pull people away from corporations that just want to use us and suck our data and money away from us.
We gotta sit down and have a garage session around all this.
Great job guys. Woopedia would be amazing.
Final thought: Noam Chomsky has said that once advancements in communication technology (like radio, tv, and internet), which come out of public research grants to universities, are determined to be profitable, they are promptly handed over to private industry to control. I think what you guys have hit on is recreating the internet as a public good, by the people, for the people. Thanks for the work you do!
I think what we're getting at is the frightening reality that we have been stripped of all resilience with generation after generation losing skills, and we have become completely dependent on the large complex systems you talk about here.
Sort of in line with that, I just started reading: "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of AdTech" by Lee McGuigan (2023).
The datafication of individuals for the sole purpose of stirring up consumptive motivations through subtle digital manipulation, targeting the masses with hyper-specific ads, and personalizing pricing so as to almost guarantee a purchase (without conscious deliberation getting in the way). To have no ad dollars wasted. This is the goal of Adtech.
That's the saddest part about Chromebooks and iPads in schools. Google and Apple don't give a shit about the education of our children. The tech companies sell desperate administrations on "deep learning," "personalization," and "engagement." We know based on mountains of research that learning on internet-connected distraction machines (these are not actual computers; real technology education can be done effectively without an internet connection) is the very opposite of deep learning, nothing is shallower or less sticky than disembodied, decontextualized "learning" on a Chromebook, not to mention the cognitive off-loading exacerbated by the irresistible presence of Google's AI Gemini. We know personalization that is happening is in the service of surveillance capitalism scraping for data points to sell to Adtech companies. And we know that engagement is a euphemism for hyper-stimulation that is nearly impossible to peel yourself away from (especially kids, I mean they aren't even noticing they have to use the bathroom anymore) and veering on behavioral addiction thanks to the manipulative tactics to keep as many eyeballs on screens for as long as possible.
Schools are such a great cover because who is going to argue with closing the "technology gap" (even though studies now show, of course, that 1:1 Chromebooks are widening achievement gaps, so the equity argument is also a myth). Schools are also convenient because the tech companies don't have to bother with parental consent, even though they supposedly have to legally speaking. The common practice in Worcester and elsewhere is for the schools to circumvent parents altogether and provide consent on behalf of the child and then unilaterally deny any parent/guardian or student from opting out of 1:1 devices of Edtech products.
Corporations are desperate for ever-more customers (and profits). The less those customers are motivated to think for themselves, the better. Convincing school decision-makers to use school-issued Chromebooks for every single subject not only deprives children of meaningful learning, it allows for the nonconsensual surveillance of children to create detailed profiles of their interests, movements, motivations, and actions, to then manipulate their behaviors and mold them into intellectually-crippled and digital-dependent consumers for the rest of their lives. It happened imperceptibly with millennials (me!), swiftly with Gen Z, and has left the Alphas (or whoever they are who are getting iPads in pre-K) completely vulnerable through no fault of their own.
I think this is why intelligence-sharing is such an important place to start. The internet is becomingly an increasingly untrustworthy (AI) and manipulative (Adtech) place for all of us. The antidote might be what humans had done for millenia - knowledge shared human-to-human, skills passed down generation to generation, and hyper-local hands-on action. I fell asleep last night thinking, "I'm so glad I have heat right now" because I don't know if we always will. Time for more knowledge-sharing, skills learning, and building resilience. Thanks for sharing your conversation! Makes me feel less crazy.
As a certified Knausgaard-head (if you haven't taken on the My Struggle series, it's mind-blowing after you get over hating his Holden Caulfjord vibe in the first 200 pages of Book 1), this was a treat. KOK is not everyday subject matter anywhere.
Good episode, and sign me up to help edit Woopedia!
I'm gonna get Bill going on My Struggle and also that'll inspire me to finish them. I love reading Knausgaard, I find the mundanity very soothing.
I'm finishing up his "Seasons" series now and loved it. His focus on the mundane often extracts profound insights. "My Struggle" can be a slog--the 6th book is a fuckin' doorstop--yet the payoff is immense.
The previous episode we referenced several times "with Joanna" was this one.
https://www.worcestersucks.email/p/episode-15-the-enshittification-of
Finally catching up on this episode. This is like a spiritual successor to the episode with Joanne McNeil and I love it. The unmet needs of local communities and extractive nature of big social platforms is what drives my work at the Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). Bill's anecdote of trying to host a media server and being immediately overwhelmed is a critical problem that we collectively need to figure out. Why does it have to be so difficult? Most web software simply isn't built to empower the average person to run and understand, it's built for professional software people to deploy, and even then a lot of those professionals don't know how to do it and it has become an increasingly specialized skill. The focus of the software industry is to build things that scale up in cloud data centers, not things that scale down for local communities. Tech is increasingly user friendly, but only on the surface because you can't peel back the layers of the onion to learn things work like in the early days of computing. Even the projects that are trying to be deployable (like SecureDrop, something Bill has brought up in the past) can be overwhelmingly complex even for Linux sickos like myself.
I like the term "local internet" a lot. The big platforms throw everyone in the same big soup (context collapse), and since they are silos they have created the "breakdown in shared reality" problem that Bill mentions. The "global town square" concept of Facebook, Twitter, etc. has been great at capturing our attention but hasn't improved society (something Joanne McNeil explained well in an past episode). It's simply not how human community works in the real world. Society is formed by a large collection of overlapping small communities, but our social media doesn't reflect that at all! I think the rising popularity of small Discord communities is an indicator that web 2.0 social media may be starting to wane. There's value in a broadcast medium like Twitter (RIP) and Bluesky, but community needs to happen elsewhere. Unfortunately, Discord is a centrally controlled platform, with all the usual pressures from governments to censor/spy on their users and pressure from capitalism to enshittify. They recently were breached, exposing a ton of PII they are legally required to retain due to age verification laws and this trend is likely to only get worse in the near future. Platforms also have a lock-in effect that makes it hard to take your data and go somewhere else. I'm sure it would be extremely painful to leave Substack, for example. Removing these big central gatekeepers is a focus of my research/development work.
The discussion around the empowering aspects of technology, like with the little hardware synth, was so refreshing. It's so easy to fall into tech doomerism and "computers were a mistake" feelings because we have so little agency over the tech we use these days. But little DIY hardware kits and open source projects like MediaWiki show that it doesn't have to be this way. We *can* reclaim some autonomy over the tech we use. Someone should setup Woopedia!
Ultimately, though, I really don't think that the tech we have today is enough to get us out of the hole we're in. We should still make the best out of it, of course, but if anyone reading this has tech skills then I recommend checking out what's happening in the decentralized web (DWeb) movement and consider getting involved. We need people who can help build the foundation for a decentralized, secure, collaborative internet that puts user agency and autonomy first!
A question I have for Bill is: What do you consider to be the essential features of a local journalism "platform" (for lack of a better word)? I like to gather use cases from real people with real needs to inform my own work.
Like Bill, I also was an "observer" for the recount and couldn't help being surprised by voter behavior. My favorite was a ballot for both Cayden Davis and Donna Colorio. It's an extension of the odd yard sign combinations. Worcester Sucks.
#47 was excellent! And I concur with Mr. Linhares' comments below. A detailed diagram of available, local "news" would be helpful. Ownership, ad revenue and other influences would have to be included. Quite a project! But we have Worcester Sucks. And I like you guys. Keep up the quality journalism and hopefully folks will continue to subscribe.
Regarding quality journalism, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Hank Stolz's radio show interview with Tim McGourthy and Peter Dunn about a month ago. I have no personal beefs with these folks, but the interview and companion printed piece, "Worcester Officials Explain Polar Park Shortfall and Long-Term Financial Outlook" are painfully confusing. I still could not explain what's going on here to another person.
But I'll try. We're just short one - (1) mixed use hotel/ office building. No biggie. The "budget estimates" supporting the original pro-forma have not been met so we're somehow obligated to inform the taxpayers. But since this money doesn't exist no one loses.
I heard somewhere that most Massachusetts municipalities automatically require that races within 100 votes must be manually recounted. Is that true?
I'm going by this tbh
https://ballotpedia.org/Recount_laws_in_Massachusetts