Category: innovation

work, technology, society. the change i try to bring about. ? ?

Talk: Worlding a New Philippines

Reading Time: 13 minutes

I’ve been thinking a lot about what principles and values can be learned from fantasy and the culture of makership/creation that has come as a result of fandom all too often cast aside. From that, I’ve been drawing from personal experiences and observations running Developh to reconsider This talk was delivered under the theme of ‘Innovation and Vision’ for Emerge, a webinar for 450+ collegiate-level student leaders of Alangilan. No recording unfortunately, but here’s the script and slide deck for those who might be interested!

View the slide deck on Figma
View the talk script on Google Docs

Worlding a New Philippines

Worlding A New Philippines – Radical Design for Preferable Futures is a little talk about how I’ve altered my views of leadership through a lens I learned in design, and a bit from fantasy and the unexpected.

What does this title even mean?

  • Worlding (or worldmaking) – The ways which we collectively make the spaces we inhabit through collective practices
  • Preferable futures –– Futures that we positively hope for and work to create based on our hopes, aspirations, and dreams – embodying our notions of what a better world might look like.

First, I want to walk through some of my principles as a technologist that can be told through my work. Another thing is that in any org or community you find yourself in, it’s of vital importance to stick to your principles––if not in presence, in the actions and approach you take things in. I’ll talk about this more shortly.

  • Accessibility at Spotify – how Spotify and similar platforms have changed 
  • Filipino Creatorship –– the significance of cultural context, and how to embrace companies putting localities at the forefront of their work
  • Collaboration and co-creation at Figma –– democratization as a core goal, the potential of viewing everyone as a designer
  • Developh Camp –– introducing artists and technologists to each other’s fields, embracing the importance of intentionality, identity, and making

So what does this deal with?

  • Building a vision towards community building
  • Shedding misconceptions on technology
  • Introducing a framework for org development by worlding

In summary, these can be traced to these three core principles:

  • Culture – heritage, history
  • Community – co-creation, identity
  • Creation – technology, platforms

I also want to give a warning. You’ll have to suspend disbelief a bit for the talk; and this oftens frameworks and processes more than one-off quotes. Like everything you consume, take it with a grain of salt and compare it to the reality you love.

I. Worlding

Worlding in the Realm of Fantasy

  • Think about one of your favorite fictional worlds. 
  • We see most of these worlds as objects as fantasy and obsession; at other times we picture ourselves living in them. We imagine alternate endings for shows and movies that we’re disappointed by, think about the additional depth and richness that we could access if our favorite mangas were turned into worlds. …Or disappointment at it.
  • I know how all of these feel. I find myself entranced by the creation of fantasy worlds. At first, i thought these were just hobbies – things that could stay in stan twitter, until i realized the gravity and depth of what they were actually teaching me.

Here’s my personal case study:

  • One of the things I’ve enjoyed most over the pandemic is Genshin Impact. Yes, the gacha game optimized for mobile (for gamers, that’s a telltale sign of a game being a pay-to-win sellout) that makes use of RNG mechanics to see susceptible teenagers like me anime girls.  More specifically, I’ve been interested in it because of its lore.
  • Here’s the gist of its story. No spoilers here. You play as one of two twin travelers arriving in the world of Teyvat, where seven gods each assigned to an element rule over seven nations. In the beginning, you encounter an Unknown God who seals away your twin; you wake up an unknown amount of time later to search for your sibling––searching across the nations.
  • And in writing, Genshin Impact draws a lot from Gnosticism; concepts such as visionhood that link to allogenehood and ascension pop up. But also Jewish Mysticism, parallels to the Tower of Babel, but also Hermeticism in the roots of power. The Unknown God encountered in the beginning is the god that sustains heavenly principles, or Tianli in Confucianism.
  • And by nature of the seven natures paralleling real-world nations, a lot more specific parallels from Norse mythologies, Shinto, Taoism, to Buddhism recur over and over.
  • The point of me nerding out is to hammer how this made me think a lot about how religion and institutions work. Trade-offs and ethics, the world being morally gray. Essentially, a lot of the same questions in our world posed in unreality and fiction.
  • I was so engrossed in the cultures and myths this game drew from that I even started working on archive its work through the Khaenri’ah Lore Project (http://khaenriah.com).

But ‘worlding’ doesn’t necessarily have to exist in completely fictional systems, it can exist in systems like ours that draw extensively from unreality. 

Let’s take a step back from fantasy first. What even is the point of this, you might ask––I exist to solve real problems.

On solving ‘real problems’

  • First, you may be wondering why I’m even talking about Genshin Impact. You are a fantastic set of student leaders (every one, even if you consider yourselves followers) who have went through a pandemic––maybe some of you #relate to the Genshin stuff, but others might even be shocked at the notion of having enough time to consider games or fantasy when the real world is ablaze. This isn’t wrong, and is a view I would share, too.
  • But there’s things we can learn from fantasy. See: a lot of work and discussions revolve around ‘real problems’ and what’s occurring in the ‘real world’. What’s happening in practice rather than theory, what is happening on the ground rather than in the bubbles of social media. 
  • We have this deep obsession with what is happening in the ‘real world’––but what if fantasy can teach us things?
    • I named countless lessons about culture, history, languages, and mythologies that Genshin Impact has taught me––it’s made me grapple with the concept of power in the form of gods, and helped me meet people all over the world. Fiction is a transformative force. 
    • When we believe in something at odds with the worlds around us, it’s so easy to dismiss it and say that the lessons that can be undertaken would never happen here. As a result, we end up dismissing the lessons and values of what it can teach us when there are so many complex systems that can from it.
  • See, we all know that we are meant to solve real problems. Doing thesis papers, you spend a meticulous amount of time reviewing related literature and building upon a former body of work when you might be eager to just jump in and start working on your thing. 
    • I don’t blame you for when this happens, because we work under unimaginable constraints. It’s unrealistic to do complex, intensive research papers when we can’t even get enough survey respondents for the bare minimum of quantitative data –– and in spaces with lack of resources that seemingly have people work to learn process for the sake of process, this will occur.
    • So you have constraints like money, time, groupmates na di naman nagrereply, lack of advisory resources or ones that aren’t suited for you––or maybe you aren’t even in a course you’re truly passionate about and thus don’t do a deepdive.
  • So many careers are hellbent on this drive to “solve the right problem” that I’m not sure if it’s even possible. Maybe you’ve also faced this similar crisis––am I even going to get into something that’s impacting other people’s lives? It’s easy if you’re a doctor

    My role as a designer is to observe people really well so I can build the right solutions, and do this under the constraints of business and product. We elect politicians democratically so they can represent us, yet are still struggling to have them actually enact legislation and perform actions that serve us. Of course there are ways to solve this; something that students and youth are keen on are finding people who can represent their identities and upbringings––and in this, we hope that they’re better able to stand in for us. 
  • So let’s remove the approach. There is no instant approach or way to resolve the deep-rooted injustices in the country; but we can do another thing.
    • Remember how I mentioned the constraints that we might face as students––such as time, money, experience? Let this approach try and persuade us to move another constraint off the table.

On considering unreality

Two of my favorite design theorists and speculators, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, wrote an incredible essay called ‘Design for the Unreal World’ that had influenced a lot of my perspective on design. 

The crux of the essay is this:

  • We can’t be obsessed with reality. 
  • People and designers often divide the world into a very binary view. There are things, objects, and thoughts that are “real” and those that are “not real”.
  • The truth is, this is terrible for our imagination and for uncovering alternatives to the way things are now.
  • Oftentimes, the word ‘unrealistic’ means ‘undesirable’ to those in charge. Whatever is thinkable is possible.

What really stuck to me was the notion of ‘unrealistic’ often meaning ‘undesirable’ to those in power. When I was growing Developh as a community, one of the most common criticisms we received was that we were too ambitious. I want to dive into an example of why only amplifying the existing status quo is such an isolating, if not damaging and disastrous thing.

But before I talk about a community familiar to me, let’s consider a giant.

Case study: Facebook

Facebook’s aim is to connect people. Intrinsically, this means that their key metrics revolve signing up as many people as possible for their services. Like many corporations with a “corporate social responsibility” angle, Facebook also has a social impact division––a place where I almost interned until I withdrew my offer of acceptance for reasons I can elaborate on another time –– but also, might make clear to you when I articulate this anecdote.

  • People’s understanding of the internet was so warped by Facebook, many citizens believed that Facebook itself was the entire internet. Others believe that Facebook was the internet––little exposure to the world outside.
    • Does this sound familiar?
    • While this likely doesn’t apply to many of you, after all, you’ve found your way on Zoom, this is reality for hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Arguments and truth exist in comment sections and posts out of context––images without further citations, lost to compression.
  • The main takeaway of it is this:
    We cannot trust solely on the elite and on people of power to develop the world we want to live in. We cannot trust them to shape our communities, platforms, and spaces. We cannot let anyone but ourselves shape the world we want to live in.
  • The thing about Facebook was that it was shaped by people of incredible power. The world’s billionaires.
  • It’s undeniable how negative of an impact it’s had on our nation. 

So what does it mean to design new realities? 

Case study: Developh

  • If there are any student leaders with backgrounds in technology here, you are obviously fascinated by the technologists like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Francis Plaza of Paymongo, the leaders at companies like Globe and Smart. Not just limited to technology, really––startups are seeking talent from students in innumerable backgrounds––another alternative to working at multinationals.
  • I founded Develop, a community nonprofit, among this same wonder at technology. At first, it started as an organization that brought friends together to teach one another. If one knew designa and the other coding, we would do an exchange. We’d eventually get on to building things together. There were very few spaces that advocated for this type of peer exchange and depth at the high school level, especially in schools with little exposure to the technology industry in general.
    • I was told that Computer Science was ‘computer sayang’… that the field had little potential, and to go into more traditionally successful things like engineering or to just take up bio.
  • But what were the narratives I was looking up to? Mark Zuckerberg in a dorm room. At Harvard. With infinite resources and a vision that can be destructive.
  • Now, we’re inspired by radical community systems that we discovered from systems in other nations and spaces in the Philippines that were previously rarely, if ever, applied to technology.
    • Community bookstores and pantries: The concept of ‘taking what you need’ and giving back to those who are able. This is not that radical of a move honestly, it’s built on a precedence of trust –– and believing that humans are inherently good, it’s not hard of a move to make. Since encouraging students of any background to give back and teach one day, either in the form of writing or through a traditional talk, we’ve had a huge uptick in events – more than we’ve ever. Through setting something as simple up as a Google Form encouraging people to reach out if they’re interested in mentoring or giving talks, students flooded in –– as long as they saw other students who were taking on similar tasks like them.
      • These community practices seem outrageous to others––how dare something operate on the basis of goodness and selflessness? When in truth, it’s ingrained within us, in our culture. 
      • It’s a palpable sign that people feel threatened by humanity banding together to weather through.
    • An approach to technology driven by that of humanities rather than that of technology. This is something we’re honestly still unsure about. We’re a technical organization driven by advertising ourselves to non-technologists. We keep speaking of the importance of the arts, culture, language, etc. in showing our organization’s potentialities and futures––and this is honestly difficult.

      It’s not the most attractive to investors, it’s often alienating. It’s not even a completely new approach, but it’s something we’re trying to work into the Philippine cultural context.
      • Technology, marketed by money––what if we tell people to create art with it instead? That non-technologists should learn how to program and write scripts to automate their work? That everyone in actuality is already a programmer as long as you apply logic in real life––which happens in actions as simple as getting up in the morning, brushing your teeth, or cooking eggs?
      • In a nation where people so desperately want to break free, we play remarkably too safe at times. Safety only maintains the status quo. Along the same principles is the quote that silence means complacency––and there’s nothing but truth in it. 
      • It’s hard to convince people of a vision. But never lose grip of it.
  • I don’t want to talk too much about what Developh is, but this is a single example that I hope you can carry over.

II. On Systems

So, to everyone here, how can we design the systems that form worlds? How should we even consider the lessons from fantasy and worldmaking in practice?

As a designer, I work with this core question:

  • Realities are constructed rather than given. Can they also be designed?

I think this interestingly happens so richly in a lot of organizations I see. I graduated from a high school where everyone went to school locally, so I’m an anomally, but I often live vicariously through their DP blasts and programming and imagine what my life would be like if I was still back home. Here are examples of realities being constructed. 

Many of you are already applying worldmaking to your practice but may not even realize it.

Here are some examples that you may already be applying:

  • Language used to describe membership, events, etc.: This seemingly small thing is ridiculously important –– it’s language, it makes people feel connected. This especially happens if you have org-specific acronyms or words that seem a bit strange and surreal until someone becomes part of an “inner” group. There’s magic in that feeling of belonging.
  • Rituals: If there are certain songs, events, practices, or structures that are continuously incorporated across your organization’s meetings –– you are crafting rituals. More specifically, rituals are loosely defined as a “performing a series of actions according to a prescribed order”; they don’t have to be static and ancient, this is bad, but whenever you enact and document methods and practices that other students after you can follow––you are crafting rituals.
  • The platforms you host your organizations on: A simple example is if your school has an org platform (mine has a custom one, but it’s not very good), versus communicating updates on Facebook groups, email, texts, maybe you’ve even moved to Discord. Platforms and technologies shape the structures and mental models (meaning the internal explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works) you and the people in your community face.
    • A simple example is this: the recent trend (at least, I only saw it popularized in the last year) of sharing Facebook posts with repeated captions and incrementing the number of times it has been said before. Sorry that this is kind of a cringe example, but I hope you get the gist of it.
    • And a broader example is how Zoom was popularized because of the pandemic and spun a lot of memes and jokes. My friend’s class was the ‘get that thirty bro’ class –– and there are lots of traits about the video that are unique to Zoom.
    • These behaviors cascade; the actions your leaders take on, especially, influence what is considered standard and normal. 
  • Themed promotions and marketing blasts: When organizing and constructing promotional scenarios, we already think about alternate worlds. Sure, it’s usually something like ‘generic’ or ‘vintage polaroids’; but when we begin to manipulate languages, construct themed events, etc. –– you are creating history and perspectives to view
  • Recruitment, initiation: I think this is the most obvious org practice where structure and ritual apply where everything I’ve said previously is captured and can happen here. From the way you advertise yourselves to people, the language you use, the designs you create, the rituals you do to induct people to your organization, help them know histories, and empower them to craft the present––you enable something beautiful.

So, my answer to you is that yes – they can be designed, and you’re designing them at every moment. The way you inhabit and occupy space, the way you pass it on and let others stand with you, the way you design the spaces that others join you in.

There are just some things to remember that I feel may already be givens, but are nice to look back to:

  • You are collectively creating spaces. You as a leader are responsible for the ripple effect and environments that people in your spaces create––you are not the sole inventor of rituals and practice. You are not meant to be an idol or hero; worlds are shaped because of the richness of environments, systems, and histories––worlds are not created by a single person unto themselves; it is a byproduct of what you allow others to bring into you. The worlds you create as a result are richer. This is what i mean by co-creation.
  • Embrace culture. It’s easy to be fascinated at western signals of merit and organizing; to look at news articles of foreigners finding success and wanting to replicate in your own space––but in melting pots and any community worth inhabiting, cultural diversity and richness of experience are what makes it. You are collectively creating spaces, remember? Hear out what the people are you need as opposed to looking outwards––the truest, most meaningful developments will come from your own upbringing because you understand it.
  • This is not mine, but I love it. From Collins: Form follows fantasy. Every good idea comes from a spark of imagination, not pragmatism. Facts are important, but possibility creates futures. Listen to fiction, listen to unimagined needs, get the people around you to voice their hopes and dreams. The most powerful thing you can do is letting the abstract come real; not just manipulating what’s around you.
  • To build the grandest of institutions, you must first build the world around it. Build something that makes obsolete the old, poorer model. Reimagine the world, rituals. Reinvent yourself everyday. This is the rich thing about human experience; because most of this comes from imagination and not physicality––so there is nothing constraining you.

Listen to these things and shape the future. Create people who create with you. Co-authors of a story, leaders just like you. Stand amongst each other. And enjoy a little Genshin Impact when you can.

References, Influences

Also see a similar talk I gave at UX+ 2021, Design is Fantasy

November 6, 2021

Ex-Silicon Valley means nothing.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Blind faith in Western “prestige signals” serves exploiters, not nation-builders.

I write this article not because I want drama and takedowns. I write this in response to the years of witnessing the overglorification of tech saviors bringing their experience from Stanford to the Manila, more often than not inculcating the worst parts of their Paul Graham-infused thought in a colonized nation that needs healing, not speed and recklessness.

Silicon Valley means frontiers and innovation. Google offices on my Facebook feed make Makati towers look like corporate dread; the just as charming and in-reach vision of Richard Hendricks and friends in an overpriced hotspot in somewhere, Palo Alto is far better than the image of being in your parent’s home until your mid-twenties. Silicon Valley is synonymous with the picturesque image of founders in a garage, turning the banal and suffocating into foundations for the next Big Tech giant. ABC is to FAANG, execution is everything, and it’s a time to build. It is everything that the Philippines is not: all the taciturn bureaucrats turned into angel investors and good company always eager to hear the next thing you build. Charm in the right spots of America mirrors the best of Filipino hospitality.

Garage mythologies are all birthed from some semblance of truth, yet is always delivered with the convenient details grayed out. Google was started in a garage, but by Ph.D. students at Stanford University — yes. Facebook’s origins as Facemash, even if covered on the big screen in The Social Network, are now ignored. Note that this was also a product of friends in a Harvard dorm room, one of the world’s most ‘prestigious’ universities. However, Silicon Valley has also paved the way for immigrant founders who look more like us. The best example is perhaps Dado Banatao, son of a rice farmer and housekeeper that had taken on the opportunity to study at Stanford and literally be a part of the logic and chips that Silicon Valley takes its namesake from –– of course, far removed from much of the software-driven hype that now surrounds Silicon Valley sentiment.

Rags to riches stories are classic Filipino breakfast. We are a nation built on gameshows and televised competitions that double as sympathy contests for tragic backstories. We learn to perform our trauma, centering our identities and worth over it until a better laurel can be claimed. Pacquiao had suffered due to poverty, risen to boxing, and with little credentials, the Senate — now eyeing the presidency. He will always be forgiven because of his story, no matter how much his comments endanger the LGBTQ population or enable a fascist dictator to maintain control over his seat. A line on his Wikipedia page is even dedicated to his own vision of angels and God.
This is why it’s understandable that Silicon Valley is a dream to chase. From (almost) nothing come world leaders and visionaries that transform day-to-day life as we know it. Moreover, it’s a palatable, tangible dream that isn’t too removed from our lives today — as it’s no longer a place, but a mindset.

Your next investor is a tweet away. Angkas commutes and marketing have transformed transportation options for the tech-savvy middle-class. The promise of working with high-energy, creative minds beyond a land of outsourcing and the drone of multinational corporate drones is infectious. All of Silicon Valley waits on your computer, presumably.

But it’s not as easy as that. First, you assume that one has the privilege of a functioning laptop, decent wifi in a nation bestowed with one of the world’s worst internet infrastructure, and time at all to immerse yourself in the coded complexities of thinking like the ideal technopreneur. Pandemic aside, most engineers and tech workers have little time for self-growth amidst commutes and workplace chaos that optimizes Filipinos for output and craft over solemnity, space for thought or original movement. Graduates of prestigious universities are given more legroom in the corporate networking game. Balikbayans who huddle back to BGC are given all the benefit of the doubt on their work history — what matters is that they now hold the torch of innovation. They are here to save the Philippines.

I often wonder how much venture capital funding goes to startups founded by Filipinos, of Filipino citizenship and descent.

We have more “quick and easy, get rich”-esque how-tos and guides written for expatriates and white founders seeking to bring out their patriarchal and colonist ideals to the Philippines than we do guides for actual Filipinos. An e27 article points out how most founders get their bachelor’s at local universities before pursuing some form of higher education at Harvard, NYU, the London School of Economics, or even Santa Clara University––where bringing any Western degree (or maybe even a certificate from a one-week Summer conference hosted by the local business club) is virtuous enough and more mighty than the less sexy state school names. Most founders profiled by e27 solving ‘Filipino’ problems tout degrees from abroad. When it comes to the next Ignite or panel discussion, you can expect that they’re introduced by these credentials: ex-Stanford, ex-VC-backed, ex-Silicon Valley––whatever that means. Before solving the issues of the nation, you need the credentials to back it up. In a nation of idolatry and spectacle, this is where degrees (or again, one-week program certifications) come helpful: enter a Harvard conference and drag it over De La Salle University on your LinkedIn’s education section.

One informal stomping ground of the Philippine tech scene is the 38,000 member Startup PH Facebook group. After the launch of Christian San Jose’s UX+ University and Avion School’s 2020 success for software engineers, a new school focused on iOS development popped up. Seemed fine.

Earlier today, I received an email in my inbox from a familiar founder sharing more on what they’re building, and I write this verbatim, “the Apple of EdTech Platforms,” giving me a closer opportunity to understand the up-and-coming platform. They kindly outlined how they were bringing the American dream home, leveraging experience as an ex-Apple (in actuality, Apple’s Developer Academy Program with a curriculum in Swift–not any formal work experience — though they describe it as work experience) and ex-Chief Designer at a “Stanford University-founded startup”. Of the approximately 7,000 undergraduates enrolled at Stanford, I wonder how legitimate this is as a signal of prestige. (I go to Yale, and I can introduce you to several ‘Ivy League-founded startups’ that are shitty Tinder-like clones built off “Create React App” starters that exist solely to help the founders get laid.)

The startup’s domain now leads to a dead link.

Several times in the email did the founder reiterate that the company was ‘American-founded’, because presumably, this is better than being Filipino-founded. From two years of education in an American State School will this twenty-something founder bring to the “3rd world” Philippines world-class Swift education and connections at Apple.

Showcased on Wix is a curriculum that consists of Coding, <em>Design</em>, and <u>Business</u> is a disorderly curricula that isn’t self-assured in labeling potential career paths. For instance, Zero cost launch is listed under “Design”, and “iOS Engineer” is blacked out while nothing in the <u>Business</u> section is. The school charges Php80,000 upfront so you can learn from this founder’s ex-Apple (again, a free Apple Developer Course) background or pay through an income-sharing agreement. It’s as if we haven’t learned that Lambda-likebootcampsarepredatory (three separate tweets for you to digest here)––especially when they assuage the uncertainty in dropping your entire life to learn from non-existent instructors through the lofty promise of Silicon Valley-style practices and employment. (The founder started validating the idea in March, and the bootcamp opens up in June. Who is going to be teaching aside from them?)

Heading to the founder’s Twitter, I’m not sure if this is some sort of sick, twisted joke to see how much marketing speak and bulleted talking points it takes to get buy-in from a group with no idea on what you’re doing. The screenshot above, begging for Php1,000 so that they can use “pre-seed funding from Angel investors on Twitter” on a press release should say it all. (All likes and retweets are from the founder’s own accounts.)

This isn’t meant as a diss to the Apple of EdTech. Do we want the Philippines to be the home of more Elizabeth Holmes-types, literally mimicking the look and language of Jobs and the giants, deepening her voice to velvet falsehoods outfitted in black high-neck sweaters to buy her way into the seats of funds, scamming their way towards a $9 billion dollar valuation? Is this not just the spectacle of politics that local entrepreneurs claim our ecosystem to be distanced from, only outfitted differently? It’s Jordan Peterson instead of Duterte, Paul Graham instead of Miriam Santiago. As it is now, we’re falling into the same traps of our politics. Everything is personality politics once more. No true Filipino ideals will come out of this.

It’s all a weary sigh at how Filipinos feel the need to reach for international titles, often at the expense of actual work done/to show for, and how Western idolatry is opening up avenues of exploitation. Php80,000/$1,600USD, nearly 4–5 months of income for top university graduates in the Philippines is nothing to scoff at — especially when Filipinos scrounge up the money to pay for this in expectation of connections and job opportunities that don’t really exist. If they’re not there for the founder, less so will they be for any students. Borrowed from the “move fast and break things” culture are the press release-first founders building with confidence before thought, never altering the nation’s broken systems, only reinforcing it with white supremacy and pathways that we are far from reclaiming. Silicon Valley celebrates the technical over the social, and when we bring this into a nation that has long been plagued careful political ploys to transfer power to the already-mighty, we fall victim and never see any true form of change or disruption, contrary to the dream that many of us had foresaw.

In title, Silicon Valley means nothing. What we can learn from, however, are the roots in technology research and education that enabled it to foster the richness of mind, creative thought, and ways of collaboration that have transformed the way we look at the field forever. As the Valley disperses into hundreds of hubs worldwide, we look at the way energy is shared, communicated, and most of all — the faith that placed in founders. Once we treat every engineer, technologist, designer, or entrepreneur with the same kindness (or at the very least, a more balanced sense of criticality), we can enable opportunity not only for the expatriate or exploiter carrying fraudulent titles, but for the genuine founder creating for the Philippines he has long witnessed and been a part of.

https://unsplash.com/photos/r93UZeT3AQE

Full disclosure: Again, I am someone now part of the “American dream” that this founder and many others chase. I go to university in America, and because of it, receive more kindness and good faith than I deserve. Before I even took a leap into the Philippine startup ecosystem in high school, I know that I’ve been making space to help other technologists and designers enter the industry tactfully with ethics and rationality behind the hard skills and craft — and will also continue doing so for the rest of my life. I believe that this kind of thinking is what the Philippines needs. Intentionally ensuring that I absorb as much as what I can of the good, “hard” skills and “soft” skills (debatable, but the latter is far more important in my head) to practices at home, but first trusting myself in founders and students that know the issues that I’ve intentionally chosen to draw myself away from physically. Investment in education instead of blind faith in the saviorism that often permeates founders who have often left America for a reason, causing more harm than good in their rapid pace.

More than just a jab at some kid trying to follow in Austen Allred’s legacy is a larger question about the values and principles we look for in our emerging ecosystem — most of all, how we undervalue and underinvest in local education. Instead of praising extension school graduates or wealthy silver spoon families who can throw thousands of dollars into summer Ivy League Programs, when will we spend time uplifting local founders who have the lived experienced necessary to actually disrupt education? What can international connections bring to our larger society, if not false promise and elitism? Have we studied what bootcamps can look like when connected with local educational institutions and employers instead of entrusting it all into Slack messages exchanged between YC Alumni? When will quick and dirty change actually lead into a systematic upheaval? Will it ever, and has it ever?

The savior of the Philippines will come from the Philippines, and the ‘savior’ not any one person, but result from a participatory revolution that listens to the people before them and now working to better the Philippines in the incremental yet radical ways that have long been enforced. This will not happen when we choose to listen to people who first have to craft persona in the likelihood of Naval or Patrick Collison before we decide that they have ideas worth hearing (often, they don’t). We are already a marginalized and colonized people. Do we want slick and shiny Stanford startups that seem to stand ground more because of the “Stanford” part than the actual issue they’re solving? Must the entrepreneurs tack on useless vocabulary exchanged around Clubhouse to be heard? Will we let Holmes-like founders exploit Filipinos out of hundreds of thousands of pesos, life-changing sums of money in our nation?

Our nation is rife with leaders, educators, thinkers, and students that are far more involved than the girl or boy who has optimized their whole life for the degree. It’s time we carve out space for them.

April 6, 2021

The web in decay is the web by design

Reading Time: 25 minutes

I watched a city burn down before my eyes on a flickering feed. Each video perfectly designed to twist and sicken me, relentless and damning despite the amount of distance between me and Marawi. On an early Sunday evening in 2020, I felt the cries of my country over a cataclysm that covered the sky in black, and every day, see at the sidelines new and resurfaced videos of death and destruction passing through screens and filters. A death ad infinitum, preserved forever as spectacle for the world. Technology preserves these moments, gift and curse of eternity laid in human hands.

The internet revolution had brought us both the curse of permanence and an inevitable brainwashing. With the size of the internet doubling every five years and feeds favoring the most masochistic, soulcrushing content that has given us doomscrolling in our vernacular, we live in an age of despair. The worldwide internet exists only as a promise; a medium that has seemingly rendered distance negligible (a hyperlink theoretically brings you nearly anywhere in a single click, more detailed on the Critical Atlas of the Internet) still has us contained to the closest spectacle if we aren’t gated already. We know so much yet so little.
Somewhere in the western world, the decision-makers dismiss the internet plight, blind, or even untouched, to the media and messages that tell these stories. When Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Shopify, and dozens of other companies followed in taking action to cease domestic terrorism in the United States, it was not only as a result to five (and counting) lost lives. In reality, it was a drawn realization of the millions of lives that have been thrown away by the internet age––many of whom existing only as numbers, names left in scanned lists to decay. Footnotes to life where the living are pummeled around to ignore their being.
The most painful part of this is the forgetting. This may be entirely paradoxical, but this is the internet I breathe in and live in––and if the internet has given me anything, it is the knowing that I am exceedingly unspecial and my experiences never come alone. The most mundane things become permanent on the world wide web: the million dollar webpage and all its decayed pixels and spam redirects, screenshots of a tweet that angered a Kaworu Nagisa profile picture left to follow OP to their next four usernames, an image shared and rehosted over and over. Yet, our links are rotting and information we treasure lost. Little web experiments I made over my high school years purged from s2005016.students.dlszobel.edu.ph without any foreseeable warning, text files and notes on disjointed services that toss away data, overly-cited .edu class pages and death notes.

The average life expectancy of a webpage is a hundred days. This average is likely to be far lower for materials that live on social media. Now, half of hyperlinks cited in United States Supreme Courts decisions are broken; for scientific journals, this number climbs up to 66% or so. Two decades ago, a website might have been up for two years and seven months.

The Attention Game

For years, startups have recognized this information overload and made many a revelation on the best way to catch up to their existence – a ticking bomb. This is where the “build fast and break things” mentality thrives, right next to the the “execution is everything” mantra. Indeed, we live in a complex age where the richest men are victors because of luck and timing––far more incalculable than anything else with the only consistent constant being persistence.
The idea here is that defeating the beast of link rot inevitably wins on attention and status. (You win against materials that simply no longer exist, of course.) Attention is a zero-sum game. Content has never been so abundant and impossible to dig through––we would sooner die than be able to experience a moment’s worth of media uploaded unto the net. Then, what one wins, another is denied. Humanity’s own limited cognitive capacity has naturally built up constraint and limitation against a once-seemingly infinite world where distance and proximity meant nearly nothing. Delivery of information from one point to another happening instantaneously is near impossible when we exist in digital echo chambers; you assume you could care about the Philippine drug war, the reality faced by Uyghur Muslims, or really––even the worldwide solidarity and outrage towards the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, they appear as passing materials and items that are waved in front of you (if ever) and dissipate as quickly.

It’s a shame that many of the world’s most important problems are also seemingly vapid, and that man is inherently imperfect at the act of prioritization, and absolutely terrible at judging importance.

Or, everything is important and worth fighting for––but nothing is life-changing. And accepting these two seemingly conflicting truisms is key to overcoming the inalienable beast of a web we’ve grown into. Like how prioritization demands internal value alongside urgency in time, we come to accept that even the most mundane, original pieces of content on the internet are worth saving. I don’t mean spam bots (or maybe they still do to understand their behavior?) and what’s lying around in my Akismet filter, but any item that one puts out on the internet should be ours to save. Evermore if they expect it to be. Our data alone is invaluable, far too cheap for how easy we give it away now. Our memories become priceless, and the internet’s promise is the closest thing we have.
Listen to me. I’m twenty and have known nothing before the internet, and people younger than me who grew up even more hyperdigitalized (I came when the emerging world was getting laptops as a thing, younger brother coming in when iPads were an academic expectation and thus, everywhere) have the art of everything we said existing here and now. I’m scraping together photos from senior year of high school––something that barely happened three years ago. I feel like these experiences sometimes exist no more than as a physical vestige. Yes––they happened over Skype, the shitty Facebook Messenger, Xanga, my first website’s cbox.ws––but my personal data on the individual level means nothing. I can’t retrieve that, and I’ve tried. Forum messages wiped, I desperately try to recover the last pieces of writing I made still available on the Wayback machine, the photos I edited and put together of my friends before I deleted it in a flash of fury, deleted accounts wiping away time. The algorithm will never know that the things I most enjoy I refuse to interact with. Human behavior is jagged and cannot be contained.

It might even be a minor form of gaslighting. The attention economy handpicks what survives, and no one remembers how loss comes so easy. It was a mistake when Twitter announced that inactive accounts would be wiped to make their usernames available, product managers behind completely forgetting the existence of accounts of the deceased that no one has any access to. The average user won’t be able to get the assistance needed to enter their sibling’s account, and the security implications of that are still debated anyhow. When I was a rabid teenager, I completed the radical act of clearing off my Facebook friends list because I felt alone and pissed at the world or something like that. The only person I kept on my list was my grandfather who had passed, his account barely at a few hundred friends, years before the company introduced its memorialization feature. My mom used to pass her phone to me, asking me to make some texts for her. I’d see that conversation with her dad still propped up on the list, hundreds upon hundreds of undelivered messages––even after his passing.

Everything saved will be wiped away. We overestimate the importance of our words. The things that matter most to us are likely not what’s preserved by another. Self-preservation in the age of internet decay must then become priority. The average individual like you and I will reach in, nothing coming out. This is the lie of the internet, then.

The Rise of Undead Content

Low resolution, overcompressed images littered with artifacts are almost constant news feed items despite technological evolution begging for us to drop it. “Needs more JPEG” is entering both our standard ironic vocabulary and visual language, so much that a new realm of meta-meme (see: deep fried memes) has spawned using artifacting as another layer of commentary. Many a bored CS kid’s side project spawn tools that compete on who can shittily compress images better than the other.

The low resolution internet will continue to exist and evolve its own language while flatscreen, curved monitors become a regularity in households. This is by design. It’s harder than ever to download and save content we see online, no matter how well-crafted or beautiful it originally is. (It’s even harder to parody things nowadays. Thankfully, YouTube Poop is difficult to miss.) Instead, we resort to third-party or system tools to capture things: asymmetric screenshots, Twitter video downloaders run by bots that store things for 24 hours, Youtube2MP3 compressors passing on the same source code and CSS still identical from a decade ago until they get shut down and revive with a swapped domain name a month later, iPhone screen recordings. If reposting is an option at all, it’s harder to embed information and commentary on things: representing the content without a share changes things completely algorithmically. Sharing menus are complex and the previews look worse. The goal of all content in the internet is to directly correspond with someone. For many, this may be intuitive of a view on the feed as the first-viewer, but for others, this communication best takes effect in messaging platforms and emails––which reposting/resharing content (for networks they may not even be on) is futile. We continue to design platforms that make sharing and consuming content ridiculously difficult to supposedly pull users onto it when we know this will always be met with resistance, and may even be causing friction in the adoption process. Such a natural action becomes a frustrating hurdle by design.

Tumblr post criticizing the stereotypical portrayal of gay men in media. | Download Scientific Diagram

When content takes the form of a repost, reupload, re[something], we’ll of course see more artifacting, and will also likely see no link to the original piece (sometimes unnecessary––unless there’s comments/replies). I’ll commonly see collections of Tumblr posts and threads on my Twitter or Facebook feeds with simple screenshots like this.
Locating the source content is impossible. hetcisphobia as a user is gone (we could potentially do a namesearch and trace their previous usernames, but that’s not likely going to work), and Tumblr search is so broken that it’s going to be impossible to find this even if we have all of the contents. Within at least 21,883 notes, we lose so many more layers of information: notes on Tumblr can mean standard likes and reblogs, but each reblog can also contain their own tags that are generally used for commentary too, and notes themselves can be comments (not threaded to the original text), or reblogs with replies added (threaded to the original text).

A graphic I made on Instagram reposted by a Facebook page, hitting 128,000+ shares

Worse instances of this happen in today’s culture of Instagram activism and social media journalism. Reputable news outlets continue to put up paywalls, and links are discouraged from sharing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. (On Facebook, posting a link with preview makes your accompanying caption unshareable unless the intended sharer enters a specific menu; Instagram only gives you one profile link, links aren’t clickable on posts, and you need at least ten thousand followers to include swipable links in your stories.) In response, graphic designers condense information into swipable squares and story formats, trying to put all key points on the image.
In this example, I failed at adding sufficient context to this call for justice on Fabel Pineda’s case. The second accompany graphic that the Facebook page didn’t share also deals with police brutality numbers in the Philippines compared to the United States. When images are reposted, the essence of materials like this go to waste: there are no calls to justice or action items, it becomes material for anger or desensitization at worst––becoming material for sensationalism on social media at best.

During the 2020 United States Presidential Elections, Republicans began circulating claims about the fraudulence of absentee ballots that tend to lean left (since you know, sane people would rather not vote in-person in the middle of a pandemic) –– Democrats must be manipulating votes, letting dead voters cast in ballots! Screen recording videos like the above circulated Twitter. It was clearly convincing and without manipulation: there was a census record, address, obituary, and full name of a voter that should have passed long ago; inputting these details on the ballot checker however brings up that they passed something in! The screen recording must have been proof –– but of course, the claims were unsubstantiated, attributed to clerical error, and also ignorant of the fact that if manipulation was going on it would probably be more subtle than this.

We do know however that the screen recording is for now, a window of sincerity and truth in an easily editable internet. The recorded swapping between applications to go to his chat makes it look more genuine, even if you didn’t follow the same steps on the website he shared (and I’d gauge that many believers did not have to replicate the same steps to believe in it). This is the same reason why taking a photo of your computer screen when you’ve done an “Inspect Element” edit adds another realm of believability, even if there’s really no difference in the layers of manipulation done. Touches of human interaction with digital interfaces breathe life and realism into our engagement in the cyberspace: Instagram story pen markers over screenshots and collages make things more engaging, skewed croppings as if we’re slicing and presenting specific parts of content to our friends. Representing material as a more intentional capture than a mere link tells us of new behaviors, a gesture of “you don’t have to leave our conversation” or “see what I want you to see from this article.”

How do digital cameras work? - Explain that Stuff

While there’s a more genuine sense of realism that thrives when humans touch and represent digital content, we also lose context. The issue with digital journalism and the prospect of civic engagement comes to this: the nature of mass-scale reporting, or any type of reporting that deals with facts, is impossible to navigate with the way humans communicate and deal information. We love anecdotes, stories, personal retellings, and encounters. Exaggerations done right are a love language, facts do not move us. The more viral and worthy of telling something is, the more it has been reposted and lost of its original content; someone on the internet will always say it louder, and this retelling is a necessary evil to reach the largest audience. Inherently, this poses problems with reporting that attempts to link to posts and trace public discourse, instead turning very real words and commentary (even if they come under a veil of anonymity) into quotation games and blanket statements.

Technology gives us countless platforms and tools to make our voice heard. Words that surface the earth and are accessible in a click, no publisher needed on the most famous platforms and reels, yet we regress into the same flaws of the broadcast and broadsheet.

Content disappears faster than ever. This is the truer reason as to why reposting is barely viable. We have these traces of information and sayings, but without source links, they remain of questionable authenticity. Tumblr urls and posters die, anonymous names and erratic usernames leave us unknowing of where they were off next. Other platforms are less forgiving: Removeddit can preserve most Reddit threads (including the poster usernames of deleted comments) if they’re not removed immediately, but Chrome Extensions exist to nuke your entire history better. Privacy settings shut off people’s trails completely. Twitter used to show the usernames of private accounts that people were replying to, but now they’re obscured. For others, their existence is nefarious and ghastly as getting quote retweeted by a private account is untraceable; all you see is the little numerical indicator of your tweet rising with nowhere else to look. The Reddit thread that infamously misidentified the Boston Marathon Bomber, a worldwide wreck, was cited endlessly by journalists praising the work of anonymous internet sleuths––until the real suspects were released and their unfortunate target revealed. Edited, manipulated screenshots have the same authenticity as the deleted real unless the investigator looks closely to find traces of human intervention, Photoshopping, or sheer impossibility of origin. While many comments on the /r/WTF thread were deleted, others still remain as a grim marker of how both the internet must be preserved for its wrongs as it is with its truths.

Of the age of no icons and link rot

Link rot is escalating as we move into an internet age that respects the policing and moderation of content, moving to avoid the atrocities that occurred with the 2013 Reddit incident.

John DeFoe took a look into his fourteen-year old abandoned blog, a format any Livejournal, Blogger, or Tumblr kid should be familiar with. A little like our social media feeds today, but blogs have a more tangible, spatial component to them as you occupy your own part of the web. While DeFoe’s domain registration had long expired, Google had been pretty good about preserving Blogger content. He dove into his posts, seeking the fate of his hyperlinks.
He found that only 18% of external hyperlinks still resolve properly. While links to viral videos were generally dead (DeFoe’s blog was a part-time viral-video curation site), he could easily retrieve them and find another copy. Chocolate rain, Rickroll, Nigahiga’s early videos… these are just the tip of the iceberg of the internet’s cultural gifts that stand the test of time and still last, forever.

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For personal content exchanged between friends and family, this is a different issue.

Theoretically, large tech companies have access to everything, really. We’re warned that nothing deleted is really ever deleted. Attempting to delete a social media account is pretty difficult, frequently reversible or padded with weeks of waiting before the deed can be done. These come as no surprises when data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable resource.

Yet even in the case of criminal investigations, state investigators frequently conflict and collide with tech companies that have been designed to track every trail and keystroke, predicting our behaviors, wants, and needs, knowing how often we stay in one location or the other, visualizing our waking hours and desires. Data is “out of jurisdiction”, data is a tremendous problem, data must also be protected from ill-intentioned law enforcement agencies. It’s an enormous, painful grey line that we constantly tread.

When we look at our own personal situations and relationships with technology, we realize our profound unimportance and simplicity. There’s little chance that a tech company will surrender information to us or point us somewhere; all it takes is a copyright strike, a forgotten password, a deleted Photobucket… everything saved will be wiped away, truly. Recovering your childhood Neopets account is a grand heist in itself, articles about recovering your old Myspace account get more attention than present-day Myspace itself, and unless you remember your 38th private Twitter username change –– good luck finding it at all.

When I was twelve, I hosted and administrated a Minecraft server for my friends. It was one of the go-to servers for the school, and I was ridiculously proud; LogMeIn Hamachi presence and all because I couldn’t portforward our IP address. One Saturday, we gathered together to create a server “teaser” video to the entirety of Matchbox Twenty’s “Let’s See How Far We’ve Come”–– a masterpiece, really. It’s gone.

It must have been stricken down due to a copyright issue and navigating my twenty plus or so Google Accounts brought me no luck. It’s the most heartbreaking thing. I remember putting it together painstakingly on a cracked version of Sony Vegas Pro, recorded with a cracked version of Hypercam (Registered, this time), and drowning it out with video effects, gifs, and blending modes. I even timed in subtitles.

It seems minor, but it’s also one of the truest records of memories I have with my friends at age twelve. If it turns up again, I wouldn’t know what to feel.

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No one really expected Twitter and giant tech companies en suite to have deplatformed the President of the United States, signaling a new era on voice, platform, and the limitations of cyberjournalism. However, like Ted Cruz’ Twitter likes, Trump’s words remain as a memory to the general public despite massive documentation and archival done (since they are records of the President’s words). Words that could anger and incite a world in seconds without care for geographic boundaries turn into

Attention and public interest also isn’t enough to save content. The use of embeds as citations are common practice in news articles. Embedding a tweet allows us to witness all the changing variables in its authorship: the growing and shifting number of replies, likes, and retweets on something as its impact spreads; the author’s photograph and name; public response and thought associated with that item. Instead of potentially screengrabbing something without all its associations and full metadata, we’re able to give our audiences power to dig deeper in––a powerful thing that no other piece of media can truly replicate. (What if you could reference a movie scene and directly see the screenplay, surrounding elements, referenced materials? What if music journals had pointers to the exact moments in songs where the hook falls apart and leaves a dissatisfied pit in the critic’s stomach? What if the television was interactive and could show you all the progress updates on a report and let you swap to the weather if you need to give it a quick check? Wait…)
Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump––quite possibly the most dangerous social media user in history so far for the sheer magnitude of his reach––led to ultimate case of link rot across the internet. Even with his rhetoric, it was impossible for me to comprehend that this would have ever been an issue: he’s a public figure, his tweets are safeguarded and archived, and he’s likely one of the if not the most quoted and known figures in the waking world. A single statement impacts hundreds of nations.

Even if something survives the internet’s decay, the loss of context may as well render it useless. We can pass down knowledge with anecdotes like it were tribal or salvage screenshots, either end putting us at odds with the constant dichotomy presented by technology. In Are We Human?, Beatriz Colomina articulates this perfectly: we face both the magnificence of technology as the most human thing as we are the only species that creates tools to make tools––reinventing ourselves with artifacts, and also the wrath and dangers of technology in its wiping of us, and perhaps, in its existence and our misjudgment. Tools will remain as tools.

Undead content exists at the precipice of being erased, manipulated, forgotten, or untraceable. To the online citizen, it could very well be any of them. This doesn’t stop it from dominating the web. As the internet mimics the real world, content is more meaningful when we turn them into abstractions, ideas, and passive remarks. We only scrutinize content that doesn’t serve our our agenda or interests. Humans simply don’t have time to wade through what the internet has given us, but we encounter the web and its conversations with an unparalleled amount of trust. Even if links and stories are long dead, we retell them in even more comments, paraphrase them terribly on blog posts that will be dissected for SEO farms, and find them once again in its JPEG glory somewhere in our emails. They are inescapable: a matter of the internet shaped by us, for us, glorified by us.

Beyond content

My biggest frustration with today’s internet is that its design and structure innately awards sensationalism, maintaining no standards for preservation The movement towards curation over present-day’s influencer domination reflects a necessary need to both free us from information overload to the historical model of putting the work of the digest into the hands of select curators, and the larger community at once.

  • Many review websites aggregate the tastes of individuals into larger lists, letting you traverse collections to individual taste. A Letterboxd account serves as a user’s complete diary and review collection, be it casual watcher or IndieWire critic. Both collective ratings and individual reviews tell the story: when purchasing something on Amazon, you need to look into both numerical ratings and individual reviews.
  • Superorganizers writes of Robert Cottrell, the world’s “most read” person who writes a newsletter that seeks out the five best articles of the day. To accomplish this, Cottrell readies his iPad and pulls in hundreds of publications in his personal RSS feed (a practice that in itself is dying), article strippers, and the usual front page readers like Reddit and Hacker News. As he admits, he skims, speeds, and digests content to pull this feat off, missing out on materials that don’t immediately hook you in the first few lines. Many of the greatest pieces of writing will be missed by acts like this, but it at the very least handpicks more effectively than slow, conscious reading––though as he produces selections of five of the “best” reads each day, are these really the ones that instigate, question, and provoke?

Like any curative act, there will always be extremes, and averages are called that for a reason––they’re not very interesting. Ideally, a balance should be stricken somewhere between the individual voice and the collective’s want; we must live in a world of no idols, while also grasping the entire spectrum. How do we resist turning the internet in all its magnitude and grandiosity from falling into the same pitfalls of the printed word?

Headlines accompanied with pretty illustrative pieces offer us little about what truly matters: the links and networks intertwined with our content. Social media feeds are even worse: before Twitter introduced its quote tweets panel (which we were still suggesting as late as 2019) — the only option to investigate any ensuing conversation from a tweet was to copy its URL, manually strip the UTM code tacked on, and paste it into the Twitter search bar. It took years for Twitter to implement this functional move when billions of tweets had long been making use of this feature. Today, we see the company experimenting with people to forcibly encounter the Quote Tweet panel (where the original source is viewable and highlighted) before retweeting any item, and any option to disable replies (such as the most constricting: only letting mentioned users reply, usually done on tweets with no @s) still allows for the quote tweets. Today, we see chains of Trump’s deleted tweets as bygone records. Alt tweets and mistakes slip by and become material for the rumor mill. Historians will be digging into the age of society that lived in these moments, thinking that they would be preserved and documented––until they weren’t. The whiplash we experience when realizing that all our online records that were supposedly digital and near-eternal is jarring, decentering us from conversation; when we exist in real life, we at least have physical manifestations and signals that let us latch onto memories better, have interactions that confirm vivid encounters, and intuitively turn to paper or the net to write things down. Yet, the internet doesn’t have this. We’re navigating a lull of the web where environments are both ephemeral until they aren’t, where we have no control of the ever-changing conditions of the cyberspace. This is the internet of the dead, of false memories, and gaslighting. I live my youth in pixels and lose it as quickly as it happened.

Preserving the web

Envisioning the future of recordkeeping is terrifying in the internet’s current state. Millions of tweets, posts, and comments are defunct. World-changing broadcasts wither, unrestored. We were promised that the move from analog to digital would allow us to preserve moments, but it seems like this is further from the truth when we struggle to follow a day’s conversation in an expanse of broken links.

There are many efforts in academia that currently exist to better preserve the web for historicity. You may be familiar with some of them.

  • Perma.cc focuses on helping scholars, journals, courts, and others create permanent records of the web sources they cite. It’s

Tools and initiatives remain at that. Independent efforts and initiatives to preserve the web are only so effective. It will require massive cultural and practice-based efforts to reform the web into a joint effort of preservation––a responsibility that designers, journalists, and humans alike must share. We use the web in detached, disjointed phases where our communication methods do not match up with our tools, designers have a long way to go in balancing security, product delight, and archival. Mindfulness from several parties is the only way to go to bring back the eternal side of the internet.

By design

Like how the web is currently architected to make sharing content difficult while simultaneously producing tools that make creating original content easier than ever, we need to better investigate both our human relationship with communication along with design’s role in constraining us from free, information sharing. Because humanity has never been able to communicate and exchange thought at such a rapid pace, we may need a radical rethinking of the standards and practices we employ when referencing ideals to better use tools to their maximum potential: to archive, restore, remark, and preserve––respecting both provenance and posterity––using full use of the tools we have developed, with intentional awareness of what these materials could mean.

The goal of the human user (all of us) and of the designer and all the historians, journalists, and communicators within must converge in the name of preservation and longevity––of reanimation of the web for the space it can fully be. Our tools must work towards inching us closer towards enabling a future that respects the content that we can so easily craft, and man must take extra steps to propel this treatment of content to the mainstream.

The role of designers

On Reddit, text posts follow a very standard format. A 300-character limit title, a markdown text body. Different communities spin this format around: /r/askreddit limits the larger text body and restricts the questioner to the very title box, people with questionable moral compasses in /r/AmItheAsshole start off each thread with the characteristic “AITA” before writing biased paragraphs on real-life messes. Each subreddit has its own unique cultures, norms, memes, reposts, and drama, carried on by tens of thousands of visitors each day who absorb and partake in their favorite niches.

To better serve each subreddit’s purpose, moderators impose bots, tagging systems, and titling standards that play on this raw text post format. /r/tipofmytongue that features people struggling to name something they do their utmost best to describe is an excellent example of how subreddit moderators, under reddit’s constraints, play on new ways to make their communities work. The interesting part is not only the raw text post format, but how they’ve changed the comments system to make it easier to reward contributors and solvers, and easily get people to the correct answer.

a /r/tipofmytongue post
  • Each post begins with [TOMT] and the format of the ask, in this case a [MOVIE]. Narrows it down pretty quickly, and subreddit frequenters who have established expertise in specific areas (be it web games or early 80s romcoms) can easily track things down.
  • When the ask is solved, OP responds with a “Solved!” and a bot promptly changes the post tag and comments a direct link to the comment with the answer.
  • Point is given to the solver. User flairs (the gray box next to usernames) contain TOMT points, indicating how many times the user how solved someone else’s ask. It becomes sort of a gamification system.
  • Additionally, in response to a flood of questions being asked and abandoned, OPs need to comment on their own post before it’s visible on the subreddit.

It’s not a perfect system (what if several people respond with the right answer and OP awards the latest commenter instead of the first?), but it shows how these communities have designed systems under their constraints.

Other communities like /r/AmItheAsshole to gaming communities mashing together megathreads of questions, leaks, and official announcements do all they can, constantly exchanging practices and bending the limits of subreddit CSS to establish these customs in their community.

  • Doing updates on posts that garner a lot of attention is a pain, there’s no standard for backtracking on links. As accounts disappear and moderators scramble to verify questionable users, offering any sort of progression on subreddits is a nightmare. (It’s a common joke that Reddit search is flaming garbage, and it is.)

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To make content more accessible, we need to encourage an era of design that prioritizes longevity and cross-functionalism.

  • It’s too hard to link to content we see on apps, and the amount of websites that gate users–requiring them to download or create an account before they can see material–is ridiculous. Look at Pinterest’s obnoxious home gate, or the amount of mobile websites that prompt you to download the app to look at one piece of content. Content will thrive on the internet when material can be cross-linked and referenced easily either on web or mobile. A counterexample: TikTok and Vine thrive because they’re spread everywhere, still maintaining their brand identity with their characteristic format and logo on the original material. It’s still easy to share and view them; the word of mouth spread and subsequent cultural significance makes up for pushes to optimize downloads.
  • Reject platforms that destroy the basic building block of the internet: hyperlinks. To reject hyperlinks is to reject coherent thought, discovery, and exploration. Platforms that restrict us to linking to only other social media sites are the bane of today’s existence. Today, entire companies are founded on monetizing the one-link slot we’re given on platforms like Instagram. Beacons.ai, Linktree, Carrd, and other ridiculously simple site builders are beginning to see use by content creators, corporations, and mass organizations alike. Why did we base the web around hyperlinks then decide to do away with them?
  • A conversation is multi-directional, but social platforms aren’t designed to reflect this. We backtrack, stumble, stutter. (See how Honk treats real-time messaging – with no “Send” button at all.) We navigate several threads of linear conversation at once on different platforms with a friend, with the acquired context of all that bystanders won’t comprehend.
    When these types of conversations are elevated and become reference material, things get complicated. We need new modes of citation and cross-referencing that don’t take away from these natural flows of conversation (e.g. Twitter’s decision to be gentler with links and @s when navigating text limits). Who will be the first publication to set this standard, or offer a first take at it?
  • Bi-directional links come with a facet of social awareness, treating websites not only as linear structures or simple maps––but deep, interconnected structures and graphs. We know that a link can bring us from not only Point A to B or A to C, but A to Z, and a continuous mix of either. Webpages should be treated like nodes, letting conversations and interactions flow between different spaces in the internet. This is more reflective of human thought. Notion, Roam Research, and Obsidian are capitalizing on these modes of navigation and thought for knowledge bases.
  • Webrecorder offers a suite of open source tools dedicated to making web archival more accessible. I haven’t fully checked it out yet, but they have a wonderful list of “academic and memory institutions” (and I will now be holding onto the term ‘memory institutions’) that make use of their tools.
  • To aid humans in the act of preserving more idle moments (see: my Minecraft Server trailer is not important in historicity, but it’s important to me and my friends and unfortunately a very big defining moment of my childhood), we need to elevate content modes and information that we store. Metadata about materials needs human support to be meaningful; materials do not exist in silos and in isolation. If we design interfaces and systems that encourage more mindful, manual input and interaction with metadata, we can inspire better behavior from the humans that nurture and grow these packets of information.

The role of humans

Tools are what we make of them. The web outstretched to what we can contain. When the tools we design make it easier for us to leverage them, it’s up to us to better capture experiences and moments––as they’re ours to consume in the end.

  • We need content standards for linking towards and referencing content. While we see what Perma.cc is doing for academia and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for books and webpages, there’s so much information that archival efforts for day-to-day drivel are simply unsustainable–even if they hold individual meaning. If we care about the life we live on the internet, humanity must take steps to take care of its words. Screenshots and links must be given the same level of importance. We must curate items and name them, nursing the information we save on our hard drives with as much context and metadata as possible.
  • Recognize the gift of context in our interactions. That a response gestated in inquiry, thought, and processing is far more meaningful than an immediate reaction; that trust means questioning and inquiry. When we present an article to a friend, we trust that the entire thing bears material meaning. All its hyperlinks, the publication itself, the overall topic. We delve into it deeper, returning questions and more references. Thinking of someone when encountering something means sharing a snippet, and receiving a world of wealth back.
  • Our culture of creation has never been stronger. Everyone is a producer, everyone has the means to share their talents online. My friends and family are knitters, illustrators, freelancers, writers, bloggers, tweeters, photographers––each craft as valid as the next when they’re all given the same attention span on the high-speed internet. With this, we’ve seen significant movement in the value of giving credit. Everyone is a creator or curator; reddit will mob posters who don’t source content, “OC” is as serious as ever. This is much unlike a decade ago where most people would give original pieces passing glances. Everything is watermarked, defended, sacred; production is a familiar act, and we protect because we know how it feels.

    This move towards giving credit where credit is due says a lot about an interlinked web. We know people who will trace back sources, reverse image searching their way to original creators. Provenance is questioned less. It’s still difficult to navigate with the wealth of information and how rapidly things spread––but we’re better at establishing cultures where content is respected and links are given to find pieces back to home. The easier it gets to give credit, the better we’ll be able to preserve content –– and give voice to where it started from.

    Aided by designers, Twitter makes this easy for video. People can simply hold and tap on any clip and tweet it, no saving needed. When a video is tweeted, the video’s source is present at the bottom. (See: From Xiao Updates, thank you Venti!)

Today’s wealth of information and our inability to properly utilize our technological tools in an age of rapid evolution may be one of our most human challenges. Picturing the information loss we face if we do not immediately set better standards for the preservation of the web is terrifying.

Perhaps there are is also an alternate future that treasures the web as a cursory thing: a mode of communication as brief as idle conversations we have day-to-day, situating the role of preservation to the analog. A passing interface that performs its functional role, then dissipates. Temporality as a product point or feature (disappearing messages, conversations, etc.) will need to come to a conclusion on whether everything is eternal––or if nothing is. Tese two can’t simultaneously exist on the same, centralized web we have today.

The most radical attempts to reshape the human are typically carried out under this guise of reinforcing and protecting the human. Design is a paradoxical gesture that changes the human in order to protect it.

Beatriz Colomina, Are We Human?

It’s unfortunate that the age of disinformation and decay needs a large-scale rethinking of our current engagement with the internet. No prodding or nudges will solve this. We need new tools and media that birth an epoch of mindfulness, permanence, and meaning to our interactions; tools that will reframe our thinking. What is design if not something that forcibly changes our behavior in the act of human preservation?

Parting Questions

  • When will there be a guide to best practices for archiving the web?
  • Will the giants responsible for the platformization of the web make the act of digital archival any easier for us?
  • Is it foolish for platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories to brand themselves as “temporary” when temporariness is impossible on our internet?
  • Should the web exist as something organic, malleable, and destructible –– or as an eternal timekeeper?
  • Is link rot more of a technological issue or a human one?
  • Do humans want to know themselves forever?

Last updated January 23

January 18, 2021